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

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-pathless-path-vol-2-10/

The first question:Osho,Jesus, Buddha and T. D. Suzuki have been my masters for five years now. Whenever I had a problem I would call on Jesus' name for help. Now you are my master. What can I do with the rest of them? Jesus says a man can only serve one master. He will either love one and hate the other, or hate the one and love the other. Please comment.The first thing: to be a disciple does not mean to be monogamous. To be a disciple simply means to be ready to learn. A real disciple becomes connected from one master to every other master possible. Your master becomes a link to you of all the masters of the past, present and future.But the human mind is very narrow. We turn everything into jealousy and possessiveness. At least, don’t do that with a master. It is difficult for you to conceive of how you can love two masters, but the problem arises because you consider two masters as two. If you really love me you have loved Jesus through me, you have loved Buddha through me, you have loved Zarathustra through me. If you have really loved me and you have seen me, you have seen all the masters. If you have not loved and have not seen me, then problems will arise. Then there will appear to be a choice – whether to choose Jesus or Buddha or me.If the question arises, that means you are not yet a disciple; you are not related to me at all. If you are related to me, then there is no problem. Then suddenly you will feel that you are related to all known and unknown masters for the first time. They will all become alive through me. That is the meaning of a master. If a master closes your mind and makes you narrow, he is not a master at all.Remember, you can still call on Jesus; you can still call on Krishna. There is no competition between me and them. In fact, my whole effort here is to make you able to call on them more intensely. When you call Jesus, you have really called me; when you call me, you have really called Jesus. These are just names. Jesus is an emptiness, the emptiness we were talking about just the other day. His whole heart – all seven holes of his heart – are open. He is a door. So is Buddha, so is Krishna. How can you make a distinction between two emptinesses? Can you?I have heard…A small boy was playing in the garden when his father came home tired from the office. The boy was very jubilant and he asked his father, “What do you do in the office the whole day?”The father was so tired that he was not interested in the kid’s question, so he said, “Nothing.”The boy stood there, puzzled for a moment, and then asked, “But how do you know when you are finished doing it?”If you do nothing, how do you know when it is over? If you do something, you know when it is over because there is a definition. But “nothing” has no definition.If Jesus is nothing and Buddha is nothing and I am nothing, where do you make a definition? How do you mark where your master ends and Jesus begins? There is no fence between me and Jesus, so if you enter me you have entered Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu – you have entered us all. If you enter Jesus, you have entered me. So drop these foolish ideas.Certainly it is easier for you to relate to me. I am here alive, present; Jesus has not been here for two thousand years. Whatsoever you know about Jesus is not about Jesus but about the things said about him. Whatsoever you know about Jesus is not direct, is not immediate. Two thousand years of corruption, two thousand years of distraction, two thousand years of interpretation have changed a lot. The meaning of choosing a living master is that you can know the dead masters too. Jesus cannot be known directly – two thousand years are standing between you and him, millions of screens, much smoke. Whatsoever you know about Jesus is doubtful; it is not certain. It cannot be certain. Even while you are facing me whatsoever you know about me is doubtful, so what can you say about Jesus, and what about Krishna after five thousand years?Krishna has naturally been corrupted more than Jesus because Hindus are great scholars. Jesus’ followers were very simple people – a fisherman, a farmer, a woodcutter. Even if they had wanted to corrupt Jesus they couldn’t have. They were not efficient enough. They were not knowledgeable people. But with Hindus there are the brahmins and the pundits. Krishna’s lot was far worse because of all these brahmins and commentators and interpreters – two thousand years of commentaries.The Bible doesn’t have a single commentary, but the Gita has one thousand commentaries. Now if you want to know what Krishna said, it is almost impossible. You will go mad if you go through all the one thousand commentaries. And those are just the famous ones; I am not talking about all the commentaries. If all the commentaries were counted, there would be thousands and thousands. If you went through all these commentaries, you would simply go crazy because they say such diverse things which are diametrically opposite to each other. How can you connect with Krishna?The only way to connect is to find a living master to whom you can surrender: a living master who is still in the body, whose emptiness is still shrouded and enshrined in a body and a mind, whose inner space is still in flesh. Through him you will have a taste of emptiness; through that taste you will know all such people who have ever existed on the earth – because the taste of emptiness is the same.Just think of it in this way. When you enter a poor man’s cottage, a hut, the walls are one thing, but when you go into a palace the walls are of marble. When you go into a poor man’s hut the walls may consist only of bricks, or maybe just of leaves and bamboo. But the inner space of the palace and the hut are the same. The walls differ – the palace has marble walls, very costly, and the poor man’s hut has bamboo walls – but the emptiness that is surrounded by the palace walls and by the hut’s walls is the same.The space is the same. Krishna speaks one language, Buddha another, Jesus another still, but this is language. The meditation, the inner experience, is the same.If you have chosen – let me say this – if you have chosen me you have chosen them all. Through me you will be able to understand all those who have lived before and all who are going to live after. I can even promise about the future because the taste of emptiness is never going to be different. Many more enlightened people will walk on the earth – tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, centuries after centuries. We don’t know their names but that doesn’t matter. Whenever there is an enlightened man on the earth the taste will be the same. Try to taste me. The taste is so clear – it is the taste of hot chilies – you cannot miss it!“Jesus, Buddha and T. D. Suzuki have been my masters for five years now.” Good, they prepared you to come to me; otherwise you would not be here. Feel grateful, feel thankful. Always remain thankful to them; otherwise you would not have gotten here. They have prepared the path. Sometimes it happens that if you had come to me five years earlier, you may not have understood a word. Suzuki must have prepared you; Krishnamurti must have helped you. They have given you a direction; now you can understand me better.Let me tell you one very beautiful story:Master Tennen Tanka, a great Zen master, once visited a temple and stayed there for the night. The abbot of the temple was very happy because Tennen Tanka was a very famous master; it was a great blessing to the temple that he had come.During the night Tennen did something which was unbelievable to the abbot. It was a cold night and Tennen burned a wooden Buddha to create a fire. The abbot of the temple was shocked. When he saw the fire in the temple he rushed in and found that a great Buddha statue was missing and the head was there, half burned. He cried, “What have you done? Are you mad? You have burned my Buddha!”Tennen laughed and poked the ashes with his staff. The abbot asked, “What are you doing now, you mad man?”Tennen said, “I’m trying to find the relics of the Buddha” – the bones, or what the Hindus call flowers.It was the abbot’s turn to laugh. He said, “You are certainly mad. A wooden Buddha has no relics.”Tennen asked, “Are you certain?”The abbot said, “Yes, I am certain. How can a wooden Buddha have relics?”Then Tennen said, “Bring other Buddhas too. Your temple has many, and you need not have so many. The night is cold and I am shivering. Look, the living buddha is shivering and the wooden Buddhas are sitting on their pedestals. Bring them.”The abbot could not do it, but Tennen brought another two Buddhas and threw them in the fire. At that moment the abbot became a little doubtful about his having said that a wooden Buddha has no relics. Then he started feeling guilty. Had he not said that, at least two Buddhas would have been saved. Then he felt guilty. This man was mad but what was he doing here and why didn’t the abbot stop him? But he couldn’t. He himself had said that a wooden Buddha had no relics so what would be the point in stopping Tennen?A great doubt arose in him and, the story says, therefore the abbot fell into hell.But not Tennen. He had burned the Buddha yet he never fell into any hell – he reached nirvana. And the priest, the abbot, is suffering in hell.A strange story, very illogical. If Tennen had gone to the seventh hell, we would have understood. It serves him right. But Tennen is in nirvana, sitting with Buddha himself, maybe taking a cup of tea, gossiping. And the abbot is suffering in the seventh hell. These Zen people are strange. What type of stories do they make?But there is logic in it, great logic in it. The logic is that when Tennen burned the Buddha there was no doubt in his mind, not a single doubt. In fact, it was not a Buddha at all, it was just wood. What nonsense to call wood Buddha. Just because you have carved a form in it does not make it a Buddha. Because he was so certain, he could bring two more statues and enjoy the fire – and the night was certainly cold.I am all in favor of what Tennen did. He did well. Buddha must have enjoyed it in nirvana! Sitting there in his moksha he must have enjoyed it. This man was doing well, perfectly well. That’s what he had been teaching his whole life: don’t look for the formless in the form, don’t look for the message in the word. Go deeper. Enter into the formless. Don’t look for the soul in the body. Go deeper. Reach the inner emptiness.And that’s what Tennen had done. When he poked his staff in the ashes, what was he saying? He was saying that this was simply a wooden body; there were not even bones in it. So what can be said about the soul? This is just wood, dead wood. He was absolutely certain; his certainty was utterly absolute.But the abbot doubted. He became a little doubtful. “What have I said? Have I committed a crime?” He must have shivered deep in his bones. He must have trembled. That fear, that doubt, that trembling, threw him into hell.If you have really come to me, the problem of what to do with Jesus and what to do with Krishnamurti and what to do with Suzuki will never arise. If the doubt arises, it simply shows that you are still on the way – you have not yet arrived. You are just in the middle, hanging in limbo, between the past and the present.If you come close to me, you will see all the faces that you have ever loved. Sometimes my face will be that of Krishnamurti. Those who are close, they know. Sometimes my face will be that of Krishna. Those who love me, they know. Sometimes my face is that of Buddha. Those who have really surrendered have seen it.You are still a little far away, you are still wavering. The past pulls you back. You cannot go headlong. If you come really close, the question will dissolve on its own and you will not need to do anything with Jesus or Buddha or Suzuki or Krishnamurti. And remember, they have prepared you.In this story of Tennen there is another part. I would like to share that too.It is said that when Tennen himself was a seeker he went to a great master whose name was Ma Tzu. Ma Tzu looked into his eyes, shook his head and said, “No, no, I am not your master – at least, not now. Go to Sekito.” Sekito was a master who was an opponent of Ma Tzu. His monastery was on the opposite hill and he was an opposing master. Ma Tzu said, “No, no, I am not your master – not yet. Go to Sekito. He is your master.” He didn’t say, “He will be,” he said, “He is.”So Tennen went to Sekito.Now get the delicate and subtle taste of it. Because Tennen had accepted Ma Tzu as his master, he had to follow his advice. He couldn’t say, “I will not go. You are my master.” That would have been foolish, disobedient. He said, “Okay, master, if you say so, I can go anywhere. Sekito is my master.”The others who were present thought, “Poor chap, where is he going? He should have insisted on staying. He should have forced himself. He should have waited at the door and fasted and insisted that Ma Tzu was his master and that he would stay with him. Poor chap. Where is he going?” But Tennen was really innocent. He said, “Okay, if you say so I can go anywhere. If you send me to hell, I will go there.”He went to Sekito. For three years he served the master – meditated, served, meditated, served. After three years Sekito said, “Now you are ready. I am going to initiate you into sannyas.”Tennen came, bowed down at his feet, and said, “Yes, master, you initiate me.” Not a single doubt arose in his mind, “What is happening now? If he initiates me, what about my master, Ma Tzu? In fact, I am his disciple. He has sent me here and now I am getting into trouble. This man says he will initiate me.” Sekito shaved his head. All Buddhist bhikkus have to be shaved and Sekito told him to repeat the vow of a Buddhist bhikku.He said, “Whatsoever I say, you repeat it.” But when Tennen heard the first sentence, he closed both his ears and ran away laughing.Buddhist monks have to take a vow, a traditional vow: “I will never commit any crime, I will never commit anything illegal, I will not steal, I will not murder, I will not do this and that” – a thousand and one things; it is a long list. The moment Sekito told him, “You take this vow,” Tennen put his hands over his ears so he wouldn’t hear, laughed, and escaped.And Sekito’s disciples said, “We had always thought that he was a little mad.”Somebody followed him, caught hold of him outside the ashram and asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “I have never committed any sin. How can a man commit a sin? The whole teaching of the Buddha is that all doing is false, illusory. I have never committed anything wrong and how can I commit it in the future? What type of nonsense is this vow? I am going to my master and I am going to hit him hard. Why did he send me to such a fool?”He rushed to his old master’s monastery but the master was not there. When he went into the temple only the Buddha statue was sitting there. He jumped onto Buddha’s shoulders and he sat there mounted on them. And he was so mad that a few disciples of Ma Tzu came and looked in from outside and said, “He looks mad. Sitting on Buddha!” They rushed to the master and they said to him, “A queer monk has come and has mounted the shoulders of the wooden Buddha. What shall we do?”Ma Tzu himself came to see. He recognized the young seeker and he recognized his awakening too. He said, “You are so innocent. You are nature itself, Tao itself. Tennen means nature, Tao, innocence. And now I am your master and you are my disciple.”Tennen came down from the wooden statue, fell at the master Ma Tzu’s feet and said, “I am grateful to you for giving me my monk’s name.”The master said, “Now I am your master and you are my disciple. Those three years were needed with Sekito. Those three years were a must.”So, being with me should make you feel grateful to whomsoever you have been with before. I am not saying this only about Krishnamurti, Jesus, Suzuki and people like that, I am saying it about even the ordinary people you have lived with – the parents you were born to and the friends and enemies that you had and the teachers under which you studied in school, college, university. They were all part of your growth. If a single one had been missing, you would not be here.So feel grateful to your parents, to your friends, to your enemies, to your masters, to your teachers; feel grateful to all your relationships that have existed in the past – because this is the culmination of them all.So don’t ask such a question: “Now you are my master. What do I do with the rest of them?” No, that is in bad taste. Worship them. Continue to worship them; continue to be grateful to them.“Jesus says a man can only serve one master.” You have misunderstood Jesus. When he said that, he was not saying that you cannot serve two enlightened masters. He was not comparing two enlightened masters; he was not saying you can serve only Jesus or Buddha or Krishna – he was not saying that. Christians have interpreted it in that way; that you can serve only one master, and if you believe in Jesus you have to believe in Jesus absolutely, you have to believe that Jesus is the only door, the only begotten son. Others may be good, saintly people but not real enlightened masters.This is absolutely a misinterpretation of Jesus’ saying. When Jesus said you can serve only one master, look at the context. He was talking about either serving money or serving God. That was the context. Either serve the world, the worldly desires of greed, ambition, politics; or serve God – meditation, desirelessness, peace, silence. You cannot serve two masters. That was his reference. You cannot serve both mammon and God together.A person cannot be religious and political together, not even a person like Mahatma Gandhi. Nobody can be religious and political together. If you are really political, religion will be a pretension; if you are really religious, you will not bother about politics. Who bothers? Or at the most, politics will be a pretension. A person cannot be both together because politics needs ambition, desire, competition, jealousy. All the poisons are needed. Religion says drop all the poisons; purification is needed.When Jesus said you cannot serve two masters, he meant you cannot serve the outer and inner together. He was not comparing Buddha and Krishna and himself.Beware of misinterpretations. Whenever you are reading the words of Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, be very careful. Your mind can play tricks with you. Your mind can color them with your own prejudice.Now I understand why this problem arises. This problem arises because our minds are very narrow, monogamous. You can love only one woman; you can love only one man. Even mothers think that they cannot love all their children in the same way. If you insist, they will say yes, that one is a favorite. This is because of the narrowness of the mind. You think love must be directed. Love need not have any direction, love need not be a relationship, love can be just a state of your being. In fact, one is satisfied only when one becomes love, not loving – when one becomes love.The greatest, the deepest longing inside your heart is not to become more loving; the deepest desire is to become love. What is the difference? When you are loving, of course you will be loving to somebody – and when you are loving to somebody, others will be in the shadow. When you focus your mind on one thing, everything else goes out of focus. When you are looking exclusively at one thing, everything else is excluded, bracketed out. Love can be a concentration, then it is monogamous; but love can be meditative, then it is not monogamous. When love is not monogamous, then it is religious, spiritual.You are listening to me. You can listen with concentration, as it is taught in the universities. Concentrate! Out of fear and greed you concentrate; otherwise you will fail the examination, you will not come first, you will not get good grades, you will lose the possibilities of a good job and money and a car and a good house – this and that. So you concentrate because of fear. That’s why the closer the examination comes, the more the students are able to concentrate; the fear and the greed are becoming more actual, they are becoming solid realities. Concentration is from fear and greed.Meditation is totally different. When you concentrate you close your mind to everything else. Meditation just means openness, relaxed openness. It is not concentration. While listening to me, you are listening to the birds singing in the trees too. The wind passing through the trees singing its song – you are open to it too. The airplane passing by, or the train – you are open to it too. This is meditation: you are simply open, available, conscious, available, all doors are open.Not that you are only listening to me, that would be very poor; these birds singing in the trees are background music to what I am saying. They enrich it, they are not distractions. They don’t distract your mind. They distract your mind only if you are concentrating – remember it. Distraction is only a by-product of concentration. If you are concentrating, the bird disturbs you because it distracts you. The bird will not distract you if you are not concentrating. If you are simply available here, whatsoever happens, you are available, open, with all the doors open. If it starts raining, you are open; if a storm begins, you are open; if the clouds thunder, you are open – whatsoever happens you are open. Then your openness is total.Yes, you are open to me too because I am also happening here. I would like to tell you that if you are open in this way, your understanding will grow. But if you are concentrating on me, your knowledge will grow. If you are concentrating on me, on what I am saying, then you will cling to the words. That’s why one concentrates – so that not a single word is missed. You go on holding onto the words. You don’t want to miss a single word. But you are missing all of life.If you are simply open here, meditatively open, you will listen to what I am saying in just the same way as you listen to the birds as they sing. Then both will enter you together and you will have no choice – you are choicelessly silent.Then your understanding will grow. You may not remember what I have said, but you will understand what I have said. Then you may not be able to go and reproduce what I have said – you may say that you have completely forgotten it – but you have absorbed it, you have digested it. It will show in your life though it may not show in your knowledge. It may not be possible for you to give a discourse on me, but it will transform your life in a subtle way. The next time you are angry you will suddenly find the quality is different. The next time you are making love to your woman or your man you will find the quality is more meditative; it is less sexual. The next time somebody insults you, suddenly you will find that nothing is disturbed, you are not hit by it, it has not touched any wound. The next time you are standing before the mirror you will start laughing at yourself.You have laughed at others but that is violent. When a man starts laughing at himself he is becoming a little wiser. Then he knows the whole ridiculousness, one’s own stupidities. And when a man starts laughing at himself he is becoming less ridiculous, he is becoming more and more aware, alert – that’s why he can laugh. He can see his own foolishness. And when you can see your own foolishness you have become wise. Only fools are not aware that they are fools; wise people are always aware that there are a thousand and one stupidities. The wiser you become, the more aware – aware about everything.Listen to me in a meditative way and love me in a meditative way, then my love will not distract you from Jesus, Krishna, Buddha. Then my love will make all your loves enriched, my love will enrich your life. I am here to enrich you, not to impoverish you. Without Jesus you will be a little poorer, certainly a little poorer. Such a beautiful person as Jesus should not be forgotten, should not be thrown into oblivion. Such a beautiful man as Buddha…Humanity has suffered very much because of this monogamous mind. The Buddhists will not think of Jesus at all. The Christians will not think of Buddha. What a calamity! What a curse! If a Christian can love Buddha too, his Christianity will go very deep; if a Buddhist can also understand Jesus, he will understand Buddha far more, far better. If you can understand Mahavira and Mohammed and Zarathustra and Lao Tzu all together, and you can love them all together as different expressions of the same divinity, certainly your life will be the life of an emperor. Right now it is just the life of a beggar. A Christian is a beggar, a Hindu is a beggar, a Mohammedan is a beggar – I want you to become kings, kings of kings.All these people have sung the same song, the song of all songs. Languages differ, expressions differ, gestures differ, but the content is the same.The second question:Osho,Isn't there a possibility, sir, that people will misunderstand you?You say a possibility? Every possibility, sir! At the best they will not understand me; at the worst they will misunderstand me. It is happening every day.Just the other day I talked about being natural and authentic in your relationship. So one sannyasin outside the camp jumped on another sannyasin and they beat each other. They thought that I had said it – I said be natural. They must have been feeling angry, they must have been feeling antagonistic to each other – they must have been carrying it.Now I have said be natural, and I have said don’t worry about the consequences – so they were fighting about a woman and they were at each other’s throats. The woman was sitting and looking at the whole affair. She seems to have understood better.There is every possibility that I will be misunderstood. These words are dangerous. Whatsoever I am saying is like a sharp sword. If you are not very alert, aware, you will cut off your own head or somebody else’s. It has always been so. Jesus or Lin Chi or Bodhidharma have all been misunderstood.In fact, Zen has become so appealing in the West, not because people understand it, but because it has the greatest possibility of being misunderstood. No other religion has that much possibility. It has the most potential. You can misunderstand Zen so easily; it does not take much intelligence to misunderstand it. To misunderstand Hinduism a little intelligence is needed; to misunderstand Buddha a little more understanding is needed; to misunderstand Jainism you will really have to be very intelligent. But to misunderstand Zen, no, nothing is needed. Anybody is capable of misunderstanding it.Listen to Lin Chi, the founder of Rinzai Zen in Japan: “No effort is necessary, do nothing special. Just move your bowels, urinate, put your clothes on, eat your meals, and when you are tired go and lie down. The stupid may laugh at you but a wise man will understand. He who exerts himself is surely a fool.” Now the beat generation has understood it perfectly well – the hippies and the yuppies and all of them. They say that they are doing their thing, and Lin Chi says that this is the way.You have not heard another saying of Lin Chi. It is fortunate that hippies don’t know about it, otherwise there would be great danger. The other saying is: “On the way, kill anything you meet, kill the buddha, kill your master, kill your parents and relatives. Only then can you be liberated.” Now this is certainly an open license to murder! It is very fortunate hippies have not heard about it because it is very easy to misunderstand such a great statement.“Kill everything that you meet on the way.” “The way” means the way of meditation. When you go in and you are meditating, whatsoever comes in on the way, kill it. Don’t shirk it. Because whatsoever you allow on the way will become a hindrance. You are seeking emptiness, you are seeking no-mind – then anything that is allowed will be part of your mind, even if Buddha is there. When a Buddhist sits, the Buddha is there – Lin Chi was a Buddhist so he knows about Buddha. When you are a Buddhist and you sit in meditation, then everything disappears except Buddha. All is gone. He remains in tremendous glory, with great luminosity. But that must be thrown out also, out of the way. Otherwise that will hinder your path.A Hindu knows. When everything else has gone, then Krishna is still standing there with his flute, playing.Ramakrishna knew it well. When everything went and his mind was becoming almost – I say almost – empty, Kali would be standing there. He had loved the idea of Kali so much that it was difficult for him to push Kali aside, impossible. Push Kali aside? No. Even to think of it seemed sacrilegious. But that was the barrier. When he was learning the last meditative step from Totapuri, Totapuri said, “You have to kill this Kali. This won’t do. This woman is too much of a hindrance. Gather courage.”Ramakrishna closed his eyes. He wanted to kill her because he knew well that only this barrier remained. But when he closed his eyes he forgot. The woman was so beautiful – the mother of the whole universe – she was so enchanting. He completely forgot about Totapuri and all the nonsense he had been talking about.Totapuri was sitting in front of Ramakrishna and he knew that he had forgotten because his eyes started swelling with tears and tears and he started swaying and dancing. Totapuri said, “Stop! Again! Again you are doing the same thing!”And Ramakrishna opened his eyes and he said, “It is difficult, master. It is very difficult, it is impossible. I can kill my mother, I can kill my father, I can kill my wife, I can kill myself, I can kill you – but Mother Kali? The very idea simply disappears when I close my eyes and she is there, luminous, in all her glory. The very idea is not there. I forget again and again, I am sorry.”Then Totapuri said, “This is the last time because I cannot stay any longer. Enough of your stupidity and your Kali.” He rushed out. In the street he found a piece of glass which he brought in. And he said, “Now close your eyes. The moment I feel that your tears are coming and the Kali has come I will cut your forehead with this piece of glass, hard. Blood will start coming. When I cut your forehead, remember that you have to cut the Kali in two.”Ramakrishna said, “But how will I cut and with what?” Totapuri said, “How will you cut and with what? How did you create the Kali? By imagination. If you can create Kali by your imagination, create a sword by your imagination. Or take the sword that Kali carries in her hand. Borrow it and kill her!”The master was harsh and he threatened to leave immediately if his instructions were not followed. So Ramakrishna closed his eyes and started swaying. Totapuri cut his forehead so hard that the mark remained for the rest of his life. When his forehead was cut he remembered. In a single moment of courage he took the sword from Kali’s hand and cut her in two. She fell, one part on one side, another on the other side, and the emptiness between the two opened.For six days Ramakrishna was in samadhi. After six days, when he opened his eyes, the first words that he uttered were, “The last barrier has fallen.”Now this is what Lin Chi is talking about – the last barrier. So he says, “On the way kill anything you meet. Kill the Buddha, kill your master, kill your parents and relatives. Only then can you be liberated.”You could become murderers. But please don’t kill anybody at the gate. You may be carrying this idea for many days.What I am saying here must be understood very, very delicately, softly. Don’t bring your foolishness into it. Otherwise, rather than being helped by it, you will be destroyed by it. Truth is dangerous. If you can’t take help from it, it will destroy you. Truth is dangerous because it is potential, it is powerful, it is fire. You are playing with fire when you come close to truth. If you are not alert, you will be burned. A little mistake and you will be burned.When Moses saw God on Mount Sinai he committed a little mistake. When he saw God he naturally rushed toward him. But God shouted, “Wait! Take your shoes off. This is holy ground.” Moses had forgotten to take his shoes off.Now this is simply symbolic. The Jews have never been able to understand the meaning of this. Shoes protect the feet. Your mind is the shoes of your soul. As shoes protect the body, the mind protects the soul. The Jews have always thought that God was worried about their shoes. What nonsense! The whole earth is holy ground because everything is full of God. No, he was not talking about the shoes; in fact, even he is wearing shoes. That’s why we cannot show where God is – where will we show him? He is everywhere. Even if I point with my finger – “there is God” – he is in the finger too.You cannot point out where God is, no. The shoes are a symbol. Just as shoes protect the body, the soul is protected by the mind. “Throw your shoes away,” means, “Throw your mind away, Moses. Don’t rush at me through your mind, otherwise you will be burnt.” If you rush to God through your mind, it means that you will interpret. You will bring in your prejudices, your ideas, your thoughts. Naturally you will miss.Then God said, “Go back and tell your people that nobody is to come onto the mountain while I am here. And tell the priests particularly because they may try to come.”Moses asked, “But why?”God replied, “If they come, they will be burnt. They will be burnt utterly. Go down and tell your people that nobody is to come. And tell the priests particularly that they are not allowed because they are the most irreligious people. They are pretenders. They may think that because they are priests they are needed, that when God is here they should come, but they cannot see me.”In old Tibet there is a saying that if you see God and you are not prepared, you will die. Truth is dangerous. And what I am giving to you here is truth, bare truth, naked truth. I am not even dressing it up in any way. So you have to be very, very careful. Your responsibility is great. If you cannot understand what I am saying, then please know that you don’t understand; but don’t interpret it in your own way. Keep your shoes off, otherwise there is every possibility that you will misunderstand, that you will misinterpret. Then your whole life will go in a wrong direction.Walk very carefully and cautiously. You are on holy ground.The third question:Osho,I would like you to answer me, to tell me something, but I don't know the question.Even if you know the question, the answer cannot be told. And when you don’t even know the question, then it becomes even more impossible.What question can be answered? If answers were enough to answer questions, all questions would have disappeared long ago. But not a single question has disappeared. In fact, each answer creates more questions. No answer has been able to dissipate questions; each answer has created ten more questions. Humanity has more questions now than ever; five thousand years of thinking have created millions of questions, and not a single problem is solved. That’s the whole story of philosophy.Bertrand Russell has written in his memoirs: “When I was young and I went to university, I went to study philosophy with the idea that it would answer my questions. But when I came out of university I started laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it because my old questions remained the same. They became more sophisticated, that is true, but they remained the same. From university I got a million more questions. Not a single question was answered and millions more were created.”No answer is possible because really the question is not a question. When a question is there, you may be able to feel it correctly or not correctly. When a question is there, it simply shows that there is some block in your consciousness. The question is not the thing, it is the block. It shows that you are not flowing as you should flow, that something is going wrong. It is not only the question; it is a question of the energy going wrong. Something is missing in your life, something that is needed, very much needed, and you are groping for it but you cannot say what it is.That is the situation. You say, “I would like you to answer me, to tell me something, but I don’t know the question.” In fact, even those who ask so many questions don’t know what they are asking. That’s why you go on asking again and again and again but still you feel you have not asked the real question yet.A great, sensitive soul, Gertrude Stein, was on her deathbed. Suddenly she opened her eyes. Her friends were all around and she asked, “What is the answer?” They were puzzled because she had not asked any question.Somebody asked, “But what is the question? You have not asked a question.”She opened her eyes again and she said, “So, okay. What is the question?” And then she died.We don’t know what was in her heart.Yes, that is the situation with man: you don’t know the question, you don’t know the answer; you don’t know exactly what you want to ask. You go on asking many things and you get many answers, but no answer fits because, in fact, the question has not yet been asked.Unless you ask the real question, how can any answer help? But that real question is not an intellectual thing; let me tell you, that real question is, “Who am I?” All other questions are just formulations of this basic question.Somebody asks, “What is God?” but that is not a real question. Since you don t know yourself, how are you supposed to know God? Somebody asks, “Who created the world?” but that is meaningless. You don’t even know how you came into existence, so what can you say about the world? First try to solve your own mystery. Encounter it.So the basic question of all questions is, “Who am I?” How can you answer that? Can somebody else answer it for you? That is not possible. How can I say who you are? If you cannot say it yourself, how can I say who you are? Whatsoever I say will just become information in your head.I can say that you are God and you will carry this idea that you are God, but again and again you will feel that this is not right – because somebody insults you and the God becomes very angry. And then you feel, “What type of God am I?” Somebody takes your woman and you want to murder him and then you think, “What type of God am I?” You see a beautiful woman going by and lust arises in you and you say, “What type of God am I?” Then you see a car and you want to have that car and you think, “What type of God am I? Hankering for a car?” There are so many small things, very small things, so small that you even feel embarrassed if you have to talk about them. They are very small things – there is not enough salt in your dhal and God is furious; the tea is cold and God throws the tea, the kettle and everything on the floor and becomes mad.Now trouble arises because Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, me all go on saying, “You are God.” The answer is right but you are not at the point where you can get it. You are not ready for it.The more you look into yourself, you feel yourself more like a dog than like God. You simply become puzzled about all the great things that have been said about you. Have they been said about you? These Upanishadic seers, they say that you are Brahma. You? Are these people just mad, saying things and not knowing what they were talking about? You and Brahma? Not possible. You don’t accept it, you cannot; it is impossible. Hence you have created God in your own image. The Bible says God created man in his own image, but the truth is just the reverse. You cannot trust this idea that God has created you in his image because that will create many difficulties in your life. You have created God in your own image.If you look at your Gods – look at the Jewish God. The Jewish God said, “I am very jealous.” How beautiful. This seems to be a man-created God. The Jewish God said, “I am a very Jewish, jealous God. If you don’t follow me, I will destroy you, I will throw you into hell. And don’t worship any other God. I am the only God.” The Mohammedan God and the Christian God are very jealous. “Destroy all other gods. I am the only God.” This seems to be very human; it doesn’t look very godly. God seems to be very political, he doesn’t seem to be very religious. He cannot tolerate other gods? God should be more nonserious, more playful.Hindus have playful Gods, but when you see the Hindu Gods play, you will find human faces. Brahma created the world and created the first woman and fell in love with her – his own daughter – and started chasing her. A very Hindu God! More like Hindus than like God. Chasing his own daughter! And the daughter became very afraid – naturally. She started rushing about, hiding herself in different forms. She became a cow, and the God became a bull – definitely a Hindu God! When the woman became a cow, the God became a bull; she tried all the animal forms. That is how all the animals were created. She became a bitch so the God became a dog. This seems to be a more human idea. Rather than you thinking that you are God, you would like to think that God is human.If you look at Hindu Gods, they are very afraid. Sitting in heaven, Indira is always afraid. If some poor rishi starts meditating deeply, his throne starts trembling. Indira becomes very afraid. He sends beautiful girls to corrupt the rishi. Now the rishi has not done anything, he was just meditating, but Indira sends beautiful girls to corrupt him. He is afraid for his own status. If this rishi attains to the ultimate, he may become the next Indira, or he may claim Indirahood. These Gods are very jealous, very ordinary.If you read the Hindu Puranas you will be surprised. The stories seem to be about man, not about God at all.Brahma and Vishnu once went to see Shiva because there was some trouble. In the first place, trouble should not exist in the world of the gods – but there existed some trouble. Some political party must have been creating some trouble and they could not figure out what to do. The asuras, the devils, the opposition political party, have always been creating trouble for the gods.So Brahma and Vishnu went to Shiva because he may be able to help. Shiva is a dangerous fellow. This is just like politicians who go to hooligans when they cannot manage! Shiva is the god of death. He is dangerous. And he has very dangerous company – ghosts and all sorts of Beelzebubs and devils and shaitans around him. They are all his disciples. So he may be needed. Whenever there is some real problem he is needed.They went to see him. Shiva’s guard, Krishna, tried to stop them but nobody felt good about the guard. You don’t; nobody does. They pushed the guard aside. They said, “Krishna, you keep away. This is urgent, it is an emergency.” They pushed the guard aside and rushed in. Shiva was making love to Parvati. Now that was not very polite of them, to rush in, but the problem was such that they didn’t bother about courtesies. They stood there but Shiva is Shiva; he didn’t bother about them at all. They were standing and he said, “Okay, stand.” Hours passed and he went on making love and making love and they got fed up, and they said, “Stop!” But Shiva wouldn’t listen. Parvati was very embarrassed. She closed her eyes. Since then all women have made love with closed eyes. Shiva was so involved that he was not really aware that somebody was standing there.Vishnu and Brahma felt very offended. This was a great insult. So they cursed Shiva: forever and ever he would be remembered by his sexuality – hence the lingam and yoni, the symbol of Shiva. The lingam and yoni are male and female sexual organs. That became symbolic of Shiva.These are very human stories. Can you improve upon them? It is impossible. They are very human stories; too human, all too human. Rather than thinking that you are a god, you create God in your own image. No, if I say that you are God, that answer won’t help – you will have to find your own answer.The question is existential; you will need an existential answer. The question arises out of your being; only out of your being can the real answer come. You will have to go deep inside yourself. First ask: “Who am I?” Ask: “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” Let this question penetrate every fiber and cell of your body and your mind. Let your whole bodymind vibrate with the question: “Who am I?” It will take months, sometimes years, but it pays off. Let your whole being vibrate with one question: “Who am I?” Let this question sink so deep that whatsoever you are doing the question remains vibrating deep down: “Who am I?” Walking, eating, talking, listening, the question goes on pulsating deep, deep down: “Who am I? Who am I?” By and by the question will no longer be verbal, it will be just a feeling – “Who am I?” – not verbal, not the words: “Who am I?” It will be just a question mark in your being, just a questioning, a quest.And then one day, when your total being is so full of the question that your whole being has become a question mark, the answer will come. It will not be verbal, it will not be somebody saying, “Listen, Tushita” – the question is from Tushita – “Listen, Tushita.” Nobody will say that. Suddenly something explodes, as a seed explodes, as a bud opens. And you will be full of the fragrance. You open your eyes and all questioning will have disappeared, all problems will have disappeared. Then you will live the life of no problems. Only then will you live, only then will you fully be. Then everything will be a benediction. Each breath will be a blessing – and all, all will be nirvana, all will be God.That is what is needed deep down in you, Tushita. You ask: “I would like you to answer me, to tell me something, but I don’t know the question.” It is good that you don’t know because if you know the question, it is bound to be the wrong one. This is the question. But don’t use it as a question because the answer is not going to come from the outside; the answer is hidden in the question itself. The question is a seed, the outermost core of the answer, and the answer is the hidden tree in the seed. Take the question as a seed and become the soil for this seed. A “skullful soil” will do, your head becomes the soil – that is what I call “skullful soil.” Only one question, only one question, only one question – you become pregnant with the question. And the pregnancy becomes so deep that you cannot forget it in any moment. Even while you are sleeping it will be there. Even in your sleep, the question will continue in your dreams: “Who am I?” Not so much in words, remember – again I repeat, not so much in words – but the question will be there: “Who am I?” pulsating, streaming, moving, moving deeper and deeper and deeper. And one day it reaches to your very core. It hits your heart, the inner space, the heart space. And then something opens.If you can ask rightly within your own being, you will come to the right answer. That is the only answer – the one you come to yourself.The fourth question:Osho,Having been touched, can I pass through the whirlpool of you very fast? Since nothing pleases or displeases, will I cease to be in contact with you and your love by no longer wearing orange and the mala?First, you ask: “Having been touched, can I pass through the whirlpool of you very fast?” That shows you have not been touched. I have touched you but you have not been touched because those who have been touched don’t want to pass through it at all. You can ask Taru. She will say she does not want any nirvana.If it is a question of choosing between enlightenment and me, those who have been touched will choose me. Because of this choice they will become enlightened. If you are still choosing enlightenment against me, you will not achieve it, at least not through me. You will not achieve it. You are in such a hurry you have not been touched. You are simply greedy.This person took sannyas only one week ago. You are in too much of a hurry. You don’t understand what you are saying. You don’t understand what you are seeking. You don’t understand where you are. You don’t understand to whom you are talking.You say: “Having been touched, can I pass through the whirlpool of you very fast?” If you have been touched, you will want to reside in this very whirlpool forever and forever. You will not want to get out of it. If you have been touched, you have fallen in love. Who wants to get out of love? If you want to get out of it, it simply means you are not in love at all. You just want to go through it; maybe you can gain something. You are not a sannyasin. You have taken sannyas but you are not a sannyasin. You have orange clothes and the mala and nothing else. Your heart has remained uncolored. When the heart is uncolored, whether you keep the mala and the orange or you don’t, doesn’t matter. Even if you keep them you are not in contact with me. So dropping them doesn’t matter. You can drop them.I will not say this so easily to others when I see that their heart is getting colored, dyed in my color. I will not easily say to them, “Drop your mala and clothes.” I will not say it at all. But to you I can say it because you only have the mala and the clothes and nothing else. The “plus” is missing – hence the question.You ask: “Since nothing pleases or displeases, will I cease to be in contact with your love…” You are already out of contact with me. Do you think you are in contact just by being here? Do you think you are in contact just by listening to me for four or five days? Do you think you are in contact just by breathing in the meditation and jumping a little? Then you don’t understand at all. Contact takes time. Contact takes your commitment, needs your commitment. If you are not committed to me, how is the contact possible?When I say, “Nothing pleases or displeases me,” I am saying it about me. It will not displease me at all if you all drop orange – it will not displease me at all. It has not pleased me that you have taken orange.That is not a problem. If nobody comes here, I will be as happy as I am now. If the whole world comes here, I will be as happy as I am now. My happiness is my inner quality. It does not depend on you; I am not dependent on you. My happiness is mine. That sometimes hurts you too. You would like me to be dependent on you. You would like me to go after you and say, “Don’t do it. It will hurt me very much.” You would like me to persuade you because it will help your ego to feel more inflated. But my happiness is an independent phenomenon. I am simply happy – not for any reason at all. You or no you doesn’t make any difference.But it will make a great difference to you. You can drop the clothes – it will not make much difference to me at all, but it will make a difference to you.You ask: “Will I cease to be in contact with your love by no longer wearing orange and the mala?” As far as my love is concerned, it will go on showering on you because it is unconcerned with you. Please try to understand it. When I am showering my love on you it is not a concern of mine. It is not that I don’t shower my love on you, or I do shower my love on you – as if it were a choice. It is not a choice. I am not showering love on you – I am love. When you are not here, then too it is showering; when I look at the trees, then too it is showering; when I look at the rock, then too it is showering.You are not special. I am not doing anything special to you. It is just the way I am. It is very ordinary. It is simple. I am alive in front of you; not because of you. If you go away, I will not die. You are not the cause of my breathing. You will go away, I will breathe – breathe with the trees, breathe with the stars. Even if stars go away and trees go away, that will not change anything because I am not causally related that way. My love is the same way. I am not showering it on you. Yes, it is being showered but nobody is showering. There is nobody to shower it. I am love.But it will make a great deal of difference to you. If you drop the mala and the orange, you will become closed. You will not be able to receive it. It can be raining but if you turn the pot upside down, the clouds will go on raining. They don’t depend on the pot being right side up, they don’t wait for it; they will go on raining. It is irrelevant whether the pot is right side up or upside down. Whether or not it is upside down doesn’t matter, the rains will go on falling. But if the pot is upside down it will not collect any rainwater. Or, if it is right side up and closed, then too it will not gather water. Or, if it is not closed and gathers water but has leakages, then too it will miss. The clouds will go on showering. They are not particularly addressing their water to a particular pot.I am not addressing my love particularly to you. It depends on you. If you want it to get into your heart, you will have to remain open.These clothes and the mala are just gestures, symbols that you are open to me, that you show from your side that you are related. From my side there is no relationship possible. All relationship is from your side. There is no master here, there are only disciples. The master is dead. A master is a master only when he is not. The day I came to know, that same day I disappeared. It is an absence; it is an emptiness, a nothingness here.If you want to receive this nothingness, you will have to be causally related to me, you will have to be open to me. These orange clothes and mala are nothing. They are just gestures, but very significant as far as you are concerned.Does it matter to me whether you wear orange or not? How is it related? To you it matters a lot because you live in these small things. You are still your clothes because you are still your body. The mala and the locket mean much to you because you still think of yourself as the picture. When you look in the mirror you think that this is you. To me it makes no difference. It is not my picture because there is no possibility of getting a photograph of me. All that you will get will be only of the form, and I am not the form. That is the whole message.So, if it pleases you, drop wearing orange and the mala – but think before you do that, meditate over it. The first foolish thing you did was to become a sannyasin – you must have become a sannyasin without thinking about it. Now this will be a second foolish thing – to get out of it without thinking. So please, at least, when you are going to do the second foolishness be a little more alert.I have heard about Mulla Nasruddin. He took his pay one month and there was a ten-rupee note extra. The accountant must have made a mistake. But he was happy.Next month there was a ten-rupee note missing so he immediately complained. The accountant said, “Mulla, what about the other time when I gave you a ten-rupee note more? Then you didn’t complain.”Mulla said, “Listen. When a mistake is committed once, it is okay. But when it is committed twice, I complain.”So remember it. You have committed a mistake once; now don’t be so foolish again.The last question:Osho,When I feel compassionate it is my holier-than-thou attitude; when loving, too sad and serious; when playful, it irritates. Should I kill myself and lessen other people's misery?Good idea! Really good! But again with a wrong basis. You ask: “Should I kill myself and lessen other people’s misery?” Again you will feel holier than thou. Even after you have killed yourself you will roam like a ghost and haunt people, and you will say, “Listen, I killed myself for you.”Live for yourself, and if you want to kill yourself, kill for yourself. A man can be allowed to kill himself for himself if he has lived for himself – never before it. Because if you cannot live, if you cannot even live for yourself, how can you kill yourself for yourself? It would be impossible.Life is the first step, death is the second. Death is a higher phenomenon. Those who are not able to live rightly cannot die rightly. How can you die rightly when you were not even able to live rightly? You missed primary school and you are trying to enter university. You will not pass there. Life is simple, death is very complex. First, live.But your life seems to be wrong. You say: “When I feel compassionate it is my holier-than-thou attitude.” Compassion must not to be directed toward others. Real compassion always feels happy when somebody accepts your compassion, your love. He has made you grateful. You have to thank him. When somebody accepts your love, you have to thank him. He could have rejected it – then what? He could have said, “No, I don’t need your compassion” – then what? But he gave you a chance to show your love. He helped you to flower. You have to be grateful.Ordinarily we think he must be grateful that we showed him so much love. Nonsense. By showing your love to him he may not have flowered, he may even have been crushed. But you have flowered. The real gain is yours. The real gain is for the one who loves. It may be the other’s, it may not be the other’s; it depends – but the real gain is always for the one who loves. The loved one may not gain anything, may even be harmed. Love can become suffocation. Love can kill the other. So many children are killed by their mother’s and father’s love, and so many husbands are killed by their wife’s love, and so many wives are killed by their husband’s love. People suffocate each other and they say, “We love you.” And the more they love, the more they suffocate you; they don’t allow you any freedom.Love is not necessarily a blessing to the other, but it is always a blessing to the one who loves. So the lover should feel grateful. Drop this attitude of being holier than thou. You are not obliging anybody else. When the flower flowers and the perfume is released to the winds, the flower does not feel that he has obliged anybody. When the sun rises and millions of flowers open and millions of birds sing and the whole earth becomes awake, the sun does not feel that he has obliged anybody. It is his nature. He is happy in being himself.Your compassion seems to be wrong-rooted. You are thinking in terms of serving people. You are a dangerous person, you are a do-gooder. And these are the most mischievous people on the earth. You can become a mahatma. Avoid it. Enjoy that you love, that you have compassion, that you serve somebody – enjoy it. It is an opportunity to flower, to bloom.You say: “When loving, I feel too sad and serious.” Yes, because when you are loving and somebody loves you, being compassionate is simple. When you are compassionate you don’t take anything from the other. In love you have to take something from the other. That hurts you. You? How can you take anything from the other? It is difficult enough to give, it is far more difficult to take because in giving, the ego is fulfilled, but in taking, the ego is hurt.Hence Patanjali says in his Yoga Sutras: “Neither give nor take.” He does not mean don’t give and don’t take because then life would not be possible. He has given the Yoga Sutras. No, he doesn’t mean that. He means this: in giving, don’t think, “I am giving,” and in taking, don’t think, “I am taking.”You will be surprised that in Hindi we don’t have any equivalent word for “Thank you.” Dhanyavad is the word used but it is artificial, it has been created. It has been created to translate thank you. Otherwise in Hindi we don’t have any word for thank you. This is something. The society which has existed for thousands of years – the oldest society in the world – has no word for thank you. Why? Because it is always God who gives and God who takes, so who are we to take or give a thank you? That is the meaning of it. Who are we? We are just instrumental. In Hindi, if you say thank you to somebody, dhanyavad, it sounds a little awkward, it sounds a little out of place.Can you think of thanking your mother? I have never said “Dhanyavad” to my mother. I have everything to thank her for but I have never said thank you and I cannot say it. That word simply seems meaningless. She has not thanked me, she cannot. The word seems meaningless.When you say thank you to somebody it means he has done something to you, he is the doer. Then when you do something to somebody, you wait for the thank you. You are waiting silently: “Give the thank you.” Otherwise you will get angry.In Western society, thank you is very common. People are very false. Even a son can say thank you to his father and to his mother. In the West it seems cultured; in the East it seems uncultured. Just to think of saying thank you to your mother is impossible. It cannot even be thought of.It is always God who takes, God who gives. Sometimes he takes from my side, sometimes he gives from my side. Sometimes he becomes a giver and sometimes he becomes a taker but it is always he. So who is there to thank and to be thanked? Nobody. It is one reality. That is the meaning when Patanjali says: “Don’t take, don’t give.” He is saying: “Let God be the giver, let God be the taker – you don’t come into it.”It is difficult to give because of the holding mind, but it is not as difficult as to take. Because when you take, it hurts. It hurts very much. You have to take something from somebody. It makes you sad. You are on an ego trip.“When loving I feel sad and serious, when playful, it irritates.” Yes, an egoistic person cannot play. How can you fall so low as to be playful? Playfulness is for children, un-grownups. Playfulness is for foolish people. A serious person like you – how can you be playful?It happened during one camp…Two sannyasins were found playing cards. A great political leader, one of the oldest MPs in India, was also in the camp and those two sannyasins were sitting near him. He could not believe it. Sannyasins playing cards? He rushed to me. He was a very old man, seventy-five, renowned all over the country. It was late in the night, eleven o’clock. He knocked on my door and he said, “What is happening? What type of sannyasins have you created?”I said, “What has gone wrong that you have to come in the middle of the night?”He said, “Two sannyasins are playing cards.” Now what is wrong with it? Who else can play cards if not sannyasins? But he said, “I thought the whole idea was that they should be serious seekers.”They are seekers, but why should they be serious? Have you ever heard of any person who has been serious attaining to God? God is very playful. Can’t you see that all of existence is playful, celebrating? If your mahatmas go to God, they will not like him very much. They will say, “What do you go on doing? Why do you go on creating butterflies? Why in the first place are there so many flowers? Why so many trees? Why so many stars? Why?” God is excess. You exceed all limits only when you are playful. God is extravagant. God is very luxurious. That’s why in India we call him Ishwar. Ishwar means the ultimate in luxury. It comes from the word aishvarya, which means the ultimate in luxury. Play is ultimate luxury. Poor people work, rich people play.When a person becomes such a total player that he plays at whatsoever he is doing – his whole life is play – then he is the richest man in the world. He may not have a single paisa; that is not the point.Just look at me. What I am saying to you is not a serious phenomenon. I enjoy it. It is play. I play with these words. I play with you. And I would like you also to be playful here. It is not a serious place. This ashram is not a serious ashram – in fact, the very word ashram means where you rest and play. The very word ashram means rest, relaxation. I can understand; you are on a big ego trip. So the playfulness irritates you.“Should I kill myself and lessen other people’s misery?” Please don’t do that, otherwise you will haunt other people. Right now you are in the body so you cannot do much harm. If you become a ghost… You will become a ghost because such people have never been heard to go to heaven, and I have heard that recently even the Devil has started rejecting them. Hell is too full of these people.Just a few days ago a politician died. Naturally he knocked first at heaven’s door. He was thinking that he would be received there. But the gatekeeper said, “Sir, this is not the place for you.”He said, “I am a great politician, a great leader.”The gatekeeper said, “I know that, but leaders and politicians are never allowed in this place. You go to the other place.”He was reluctant; this was not VIP treatment but what was to be done? Now he was alone and a nobody. Very reluctantly he went to the other place. The Devil looked at him and said, “No, enough! We have enough of them, these politicians.”So the politician said, “What do you mean? Do I have to go back to New Delhi? No place in heaven, no place in hell, so have I to go back to New Delhi again?”Nowadays a ghost is not allowed anywhere. You will haunt these people. If you live, live for yourself; if you die, die for yourself. Never let your life be the life of a martyr. Always let your life be the life of a lover, not a martyr. Let your life always be a celebration, not a sacrifice.Enough for today.

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

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lieh Tzu was studying archery, and hit the target.He sought advice from Kuan-yin who asked him,“Do you know why you hit the target?”“No.”“It won’t do yet.”He went away to practice and after three years again reported to Kuan-yin.“Do you know why you hit the target?”“ I know.”“It will do. Hold onto this awareness and do not lose it.”This applies not only to archery but to ruling oneself. Therefore the sage scrutinizes not the fact of survival or ruin, but its reasons.One of the most fundamental questions that has always faced humanity, and that will always be encountered by every human being that is ever going to be born, is the nature of knowledge. What is real knowing? One attains liberation only through knowing, one comes to know oneself only through knowing, only through knowing is the truth revealed.Man is born in ignorance. The darkness is tremendous. Naturally, the first question that any intelligent being will ask is how to find light. What is light? We are born in darkness not knowing who we are. What greater darkness can there be? We are not even aware of who we are, where we come from, or where we are going. We are just groping somehow, drifting. We are accidental. We don’t have a destiny yet. We are unconscious. We have not yet attained to the light of inner being which can enlighten our path. In this darkness, if failure happens, it is natural. In this darkness, if frustration happens, what more could you expect? In this darkness, if you only die and never live, it seems logical.So the fundamental question is: What is the nature of knowledge? What is real knowledge? Man knows many things and yet remains ignorant. You know many things but the fundamental knowing is missing. It is as if you have made a big building and the foundation is missing. Man knows much; knowledge has grown every day and yet deep down man remains as ignorant as ever. We must have misunderstood the very nature of knowledge.Before we enter this very symbolic and very significant parable, a few things have to be understood.First, unless you know yourself, all knowing is useless; unless you know yourself all knowing is only pseudo-knowing – you appear to know but you don’t really know. It is a deception. You know science, you know things, you know the world, but you don’t know yourself. If the knower himself is in deep darkness all his knowledge is just superficial, it cannot even be skin deep. Scratch the man of knowledge and soon you will find ignorance coming out of him. Just scratch a little and his knowledge will not be of any help. You will find him as ordinary and ignorant a person as any other.If you insult an Albert Einstein, he becomes as angry as anybody else. If Albert Einstein fails, he feels as frustrated as anybody else. If Bertrand Russell succeeds, he is as happy as anybody else. There is no basic difference because the innermost core remains the same. Bertrand Russell of course knows more than you but the knowledge is quantitative. He is not more of a knower than you; the knowledge is not yet qualitative. As far as the being is concerned, he is the same as you. He has more information but not more knowing. More information is not more knowing – more knowing does not necessarily mean more information.A buddha may not know as much as Bertrand Russell knows. Buddha certainly never knew as much as Bertrand Russell knows – but Buddha is a knower and Bertrand Russell is not. Buddha’s knowledge is not about things; his knowledge is about his own being. His knowledge is not an accumulation of information; his knowledge is an explosion, an inner explosion of light. That’s why we call it enlightenment. He has become more aware – that is his knowing.He no longer walks unalert and inattentive. If you hit him, he will not react the way an unconscious man will react. He will respond, but he will not react at all. And his response will not be because you have insulted him; his response will be out of his awareness. His response will not be mechanical – that’s why I say it will not be a reaction.A reaction is a mechanical thing; anybody can push your buttons and you react mechanically. You don’t have any control over your own mechanism. If somebody insults you, you are insulted. The other person is the master – he pushed a button and you are under his control. If somebody appreciates you, you are flowing and happy – he pushed another button and you are under his control.You can praise Buddha or you can condemn Buddha, it will not make any difference. You can go on pushing buttons. You can go on trying to push his buttons but Buddha will not react. He is not a machine any longer.Once Buddha was insulted. He was passing through a village and many people gathered, insulting and condemning him very much. Their anger was almost righteous because Buddha was destroying the very foundation of their rotten culture. He was destroying the very laws that Manu had prescribed for the Hindus. He was destroying the very foundation of this class-divided society – a society divided into castes, varnas. He was destroying the very foundation of the ancient sannyas, because in the ancient days a sannyasin meant a very old man. After seventy-five years of age, one had to become a sannyasin – when life had already ebbed one was supposed to be a sannyasin. And Buddha was initiating young people, even young children.He was destroying two basic fundamentals of the Hindu society, of the ashram: the four stages of life – sannyas is the fourth stage, the last – and the four-caste system, varna. In this system the brahmin is the highest caste and the sudra is the lowest. In between is the vaishya and the kshatriya.Buddha was destroying this system too because he said that one who knows Brahma is a brahmin – not by birth but by knowing, by being. He said that everybody is born as a sudra, as an untouchable, the lowest – brahmins included. Nobody is higher and nobody is lower by birth. By birth, everybody is born like an animal. Then, by and by, if you work, grow, seek and search and refine your consciousness, slowly, you move higher – from the sudra you become a vaishya.A vaishya is a businessman. He is a little higher, has a few more values in life, thinks sometimes about music, sometimes about poetry. The sudra is one who thinks only of survival, of the body; he eats, sleeps – finished. Eat, drink and be merry – that is his whole circle of life. If you are doing only that you are a sudra, the lowest human being.Everybody is born that way. You cannot expect a small child to be interested in music and poetry and philosophy and religion. A child is born a hedonist, a Charvaka, an Epicurean. He sleeps for eighteen to twenty hours – what more can you expect? Whenever he feels hungry he awakes and cries and weeps – and finds food and nourishment. Then again he falls asleep. He eats, drinks and sleeps. Every child is a sudra.By and by, when you start growing, new dimensions open in your being. You start becoming interested in things which are not only about your body. A little of the mind, a little psychology enters your being. You are no longer just a physical being. Then you are a vaishya. Then you are moving into the bigger business of life, you are a businessman. Not a very high state, but better than the sudra.Then comes the kshatriya, the warrior. He becomes a little more interested in higher things. He starts searching for truth, for beauty, for love. His interest is higher than the businessman’s. He is ready to stake his life, he’s ready to lose his life for these higher values. He’s ready to gamble, he’s courageous. Courage enters him. The businessman is not courageous; if everything goes well he may enjoy music, he may enjoy poetry, he may sit in his home – centered, secure – and think about God too. But he will not undergo much danger, he will not take risks.The warrior, the kshatriya, takes risks. He puts his life at stake. He becomes a gambler. The businessman is never a gambler. He thinks first about the profits and he goes only so far. He takes risks but only so far. It is a limited risk and he always thinks about what the profit and loss will be. He is always worried about profit and loss. The warrior risks all. He goes deep into life. That is the third stage.The brahmin is the highest, the one who goes deepest into the mystery of life, reality, existence. He is never satisfied unless he comes to know what ultimate truth is. That is what brahmin means – one who comes face to face with the ultimate truth, the absolute truth.Buddha said that these are not divisions conferred by birth; these are divisions of qualities that one has to evolve. Everybody has to evolve from the sudra and everybody has to go to the brahmin. Buddha destroyed the whole structure.He said that becoming a sannyasin has nothing to do with age, has nothing to do with how old you are. Age has nothing to do with sannyas; it is not a chronological thing. Since sannyas is not concerned with time, how can it be concerned with age? Sannyas is a movement into the timeless. So anybody who is ready… Sometimes a child will enter sannyas. Shankara entered sannyas when he was only nine years of age. If he had waited for the old Hindu concept, he would never have become a sannyasin because by the age of thirty-three he was dead. Humanity would have missed his wisdom.Buddha said that sannyas can be entered whenever somebody is ready. And there are different qualities of people, different intensities, different passions. At the age of nine, somebody may be more alert than most people ever are, even at the age of ninety. So you cannot decide outright by age; you have to look into the inner intensity of a person. And it is your life. If you want to risk it, it is your freedom – you have to be allowed. Buddha allowed young people.These two systems were the foundations of the Hindu society, and both were destroyed. And people were against him, naturally. He was always in danger. But he created a great revolution in human consciousness.Buddha was passing through a village of brahmins. They gathered together and they insulted him very much. He listened silently. They pushed and pushed on the usual buttons but nothing happened. They were a little worried, embarrassed – when you insult somebody and he stands there unperturbed, you become embarrassed. He seems to be beyond you. In fact, you cannot reach him because he is at such a height.They asked, “Are you listening? Why are you standing silently? We are insulting and condemning you. Have you gone dumb? Have you gone deaf? Can’t you speak? Can’t you hear what we are saying?”Buddha said, “I can feel, I can see your worries, your embarrassment, but I am sorry. You should have come ten years ago if you wanted me to react. Now it is too late. Now these buttons don’t work. I have gone beyond.”It was as if a child were playing with his toy and you snatched the toy away and he cried and wept. One day he will not be a child and then, if you snatch his toy away, he will not cry and weep. In fact, he will give it to you, he will present it to you and he will say, “You can take it, you can have it. I am finished with it.”That’s what Buddha said. He said, “It is too late. I am finished with it. I have gone beyond.”This is knowing, real knowing. Knowing is a qualitative change in your being. It is a transformation of your being, it is a metanoia: you move higher, the altitude changes. With knowledge, so-called knowledge, you remain the same except that you go on holding more information. You know more but you remain the same.So-called knowledge is almost like money – you go on hoarding money. That doesn’t change you. How can it change you? Your bank balance goes on growing but that doesn’t mean you are growing with it. How can you grow with the bank balance? You may start collecting lots of money, you may hoard millions of rupees, but how is that going to help your growth? You remain the same. That’s why you will see that even rich people remain beggars. Their money is there but their inner poverty remains the same. They remain the same miserly way. Sometimes they become even more miserly, because when you don’t have it you are not so worried about losing it. When you have it, you become worried about losing it. Rich people become poorer, their poverty is tremendous. They cannot share. They are always afraid. Their inner poverty does not change at all, it remains the same.It must be so. If you are aggressive, just by changing your clothes you will not become non-aggressive. If you are an angry person, just by changing the style of your hair, you will not become non-angry. So the amount of money you have does not make any difference to your inner being – you remain the same.In the same way, how much knowledge you have makes no difference. You can go to the university; you can have all the degrees possible, you can have a PhD or a DLitt. You can visit the libraries and you can go on reading and reading and reading and studying and you can collect much knowledge, but it will be just on the outside, on the periphery of your mind. It will be just in your memory; it will not change the quality of your consciousness. Unless your quality changes, nothing is attained.So the first thing to be understood is that knowledge and knowing are different. Knowledge is information; knowing is understanding. Knowledge is gathered from outside, knowing is growth from inside. Knowledge is borrowed, knowing is yours, authentically yours. Knowledge is learned; knowing is not learned from anybody.You have to become more alert so that you can see more, so that you can feel more, so that you can be more. Knowing is being, knowledge is just a peripheral accumulation.Another thing: when you are a man of knowledge, when you have hoarded too much knowledge, your ego will be strengthened. You will think, “I know so much.” The ego is one of the barriers to seeing reality; it is not a bridge, it disconnects, it does not connect. When you are a man of knowing, ego disappears; a man of knowing comes to know that there is nothing you can know. How can you know? Life is so mysterious, so tremendously mysterious; there is no way to really know it.If you can know only yourself, that is more than enough, more than one can expect. If a small light starts burning in your heart and your inner being becomes lighted, that is more than enough. That is what is needed. In that light you become aware that reality is an ultimate mystery – that’s what we mean when we use the word God. God means exactly what nature means, with only one difference. In the concept of nature it is implied that if it is not known up to now, it will be known later on – but it can be known. It is knowable. That is the intrinsic meaning of the word nature.Just a few days ago an atheist was talking to me and he said, “Why use the word God? Why not use nature? The word God creates trouble.” I said, “It can be used but then you will have to become more alert about what meaning you put on it.” Nature means that which is known, or, if not known, that which can be known, is theoretically knowable. Science says nature because science says that we have known something of it, we know something of it, we will know something of it. But, basically, one thing is certain – that one day everything will be known. By using God we bring another dimension into it. We say that something is known and more will be known – more will always be known – but still something will always remain unknowable, something will go on being elusive. The mystery is vast, the mystery is infinite. Since we are part of it, how can the part know the whole totality? It is impossible. The part cannot know the whole totally, the part can only know so far.A man of knowing understands the mystery of life. That’s why Buddha is silent about life. He does not say a single word about it.Lao Tzu kept quiet for his whole life until he was forced, really forced, to write his experiences. He was getting old and he was traveling to the Himalayas; he wanted to disappear into the Himalayas. He was stopped at the last border post of China. The guards wouldn’t allow him to pass because they said they had received a message from the emperor not to allow him to escape out of the country unless he wrote a book about his experiences. So for three days, at that outer border post, he stayed in a tent and wrote the book. He wanted to get out of the country; he wanted to go to the Himalayas and disappear.A beautiful place to die – the Himalayas are really a beautiful place to die. Where can you find a better place to die and disappear into godliness? Nowhere is there such a godly phenomenon. Watching those Himalayan peaks, that virgin snow with the sun shining on it, it is as if the whole world has become golden. Watching that, in that cold, in that purified air, at that high altitude, what better space to die? You cannot find a better graveyard. It’s tremendously beautiful.Lao Tzu was very old and he was in a hurry so he said, “Okay. If you insist, I will write.” But the first sentence he wrote in the Tao te Ching is: “The Tao, the truth, that can be said is not the real Tao. The Tao that can be uttered or expressed is already false.”The truth cannot be said because you can say only things which have been really known, known totally, known perfectly. Once known, you can express it. Truth is never known totally. You feel it, you live it, you have great experiences of it, great visions; great mysteries open. But each mystery brings you to another mystery. As each door opens you see that a thousand and one doors are still there unopened. Each door brings you to new doors. So how can you express it?A man of knowing will say, “I don’t know,” or, “I don’t know all of it, I know only a little bit. I know only myself.” But that is enough – that is more than enough. That is the highest one can aspire to.The man of knowledge goes on claiming that he knows everything – hence he proves his ignorance. Only an ignorant person says that he knows; the knower always says that he does not know. That is the sign, the indication, of real knowing.One thing more: when you know something you divide reality into the knower, the known and the knowledge. Reality immediately becomes divided into three things. That’s the meaning of the symbol of the trinity in Christianity. If you know, God becomes three. The moment you know, God becomes three. The one is no longer one. Knowledge divides. That is the meaning of the concept of the Hindi trimurti – God has three faces. The moment you know, he has three faces. Knowledge divides.Now physicists say that they have come to know the foundation of life, the fundamental of existence – electricity. Again they find it is divided into three: the electron, the neutron and the proton. It seems that three is very basic. It seems that if you dissolve into reality there is one but the moment you turn it over and look at it, it immediately turns into three. Certainly, because then you are separate, that which you know is separate from you, and between the two is knowledge – the knower, the known and the knowledge.So knowledge divides – and that which divides cannot lead you to ultimate truth. Knowing unites. In knowing, one does not know who the knower is, who the known is and what knowledge is. That’s why knowing, a man becomes a mystic; knowing, a man becomes one with reality; knowing, one loses all distinctions, differences, boundaries, definitions; knowing, one becomes undefined – as undefined as reality itself.Now this parable.Lieh Tzu was studying archery, and hit the target.He sought advice from Kuan-yin who asked him,“Do you know why you hit the target?”Each word must be understood. Have the taste of each single word because each single word is significant. These parables are not just to be read in one stroke and forgotten; these parables were written to meditate upon. These are meditative devices.Lieh Tzu was studying archery… Tao is the only religion which makes no difference between the sacred and the profane. All other religions make a distinction between the sacred and the profane.Archery is a profane art – or swordsmanship, or cooking, or carpentry, or painting, or poetry. You cannot think of Buddha painting and you cannot think of Buddha as an archer. You cannot even think of Buddha composing poetry. These are mundane activities; Buddha is transcendental. Can you imagine Mahavira doing any ordinary day-to-day activity? No, he simply meditates. He remains in the purest sky. He walks on the earth but he does not belong to the earth. He walks on the earth but he never touches the earth. He is not an earthly being.But Tao is something very rare and extraordinary. Tao says that any activity can be turned into a sacred activity – any activity whatsoever, even archery, even swordsmanship. In China and Japan there are schools of archery and swordsmanship but you will be puzzled to know that in the hall where the archer learns archery you will find a sign: Meditation Hall. People learn archery or sometimes wrestling, but the hall is known as the Meditation Hall. What type of meditation is this? People are fighting, wrestling, learning archery – murderous arts. What type of meditation is this? Why do they call them meditation halls?Tao says that any activity done with full awareness becomes a meditation. The activity is not the real thing – how you do it, what consciousness you bring to it, is. You can pray in a very earthly way and then it becomes mundane – you know it. If you go to the temples and listen to people’s prayers, you will hear it. Their prayers are not real. Somebody is asking for a lottery ticket; somebody is asking that his sick wife be made well again; somebody is saying that his son has failed, next time God should please take care; somebody is saying that his daughter has become very grown-up and it is difficult to find a boy for her, so please help. These are the prayers. They are very mundane activities – very ordinary. Why do you call them prayers? What is sacred about them? Nothing seems to be sacred about them. You may be sitting in a temple but that doesn’t make much difference.If your prayer can be profane, then ordinary activities can also be sacred. That is a Taoist contribution to the world. They say that the activity is not the real thing, but what consciousness you bring to it.For example, you may be wrestling. The Taoist wrestler first bows down to the opponent. The Taoist wrestler first has to bow down to his opponent and meditate on the opponent as being God, as being divine, not as the enemy. If he cannot meditate on the enemy as being God, as being a friend, then he is no Taoist. Then it is ordinary wrestling. But if he can see the same God in his opponent as he feels in himself, then wrestling is wrestling only on the surface; deep down it has become prayer.Now, if you watch from the outside, you will be very puzzled. Two swordsmen fighting with their swords first have to look into the other’s eyes, into the window of the other’s soul to get the feel of the other’s being. It is exactly like his own being. Then they fight, but the fight is totally different. The fight is not aggressive, the fight is not egoistic. The fight is play. And the wrestlers or the swordsmen are not interested in killing one another. They are not even interested in protecting themselves. They simply relax and go into a let-go. Then two energies are there, dancing. It is wrestling to you if you look from the outside, but from the innermost it is just a dance of two energies. It is almost a love affair; it is a meeting of two energies.You will be surprised to know that the one who is defeated is thought to be the one who is not yet in a let-go. He is still an egoist, that’s why he is defeated.Sometimes it happens that two Taoist wrestlers have been wrestling again and again for years and neither has been defeated – because both were non-egoists. How can you defeat a non-egoist? Both were non-aggressive. Both were in such tremendous love that neither could defeat the other.Two swordsmen may fight for hours and neither gets hurt. This is the art. The whole art is to be so empty that the sword cannot cut you. Now, if somebody hits you, you shrink; if somebody hits you, you resist. The Taoist art is that when somebody hits you, you expand. You take the attack in – you absorb it.If somebody is throwing energy at you, don’t fight with that energy, absorb it. He is giving you energy and you are fighting with it. Absorb it instead. Try it sometime. If somebody hits you or punches you, try one day to absorb it. Just go with it. Don’t become hard, don’t become stiff, let it be absorbed. You will be surprised. You will be surprised because there will be a totally new experience. If there are two fighters and one fighter goes on absorbing the other’s energy, whatsoever the one is throwing out, he will be defeated. It is not that the other has defeated him, but he has defeated himself. He will become weaker and weaker and weaker and he will be defeated. The other one will come out of it very radiant.Each activity can be turned into meditation. Even these murderous arts of archery can be turned into nonviolent arts. This is a great revolution.The ego is hard and masculine. Tao believes in the feminine. The ego is aggressive; the feminine is receptive. Tao believes in the receptive. Tao believes in becoming a womb. The ego, the masculine ego is determined to penetrate rather than to be penetrated. The masculine ego is always trying to penetrate the other – just as in sex. In everything the male ego does there is a penetration, an effort to violate the other. And the feminine is absorbing – just as in sex. As in sex, so in everything, it is absorbing.Haven’t you seen it happening every day? You may not have thought about it in that way. Women are always the winners. Napoleon may be a great man outside his house, but when he comes back home he is nothing. The woman may be a tiny wisp of a woman, but she dominates. Every husband is henpecked. And I am saying every husband. If you can find a husband who is not henpecked, then know well he is a Taoist. Then he is not masculine, that’s why he is not henpecked. He is already feminine. Each husband must be henpecked because the egoistic energy cannot win against the non-egoistic energy.Haven’t you seen it? A woman crying is very powerful. You may have all the muscles in the world, you may be the great Mohammed Ali, but even Mohammed Ali, when his girlfriend is crying, just does not know what to do. Those tears seem to be more powerful. What is the power of the tears of a woman? She is so fragile, she is so vulnerable, she is so soft – where does the power of the woman come from? Why does she dominate? How does she manage it? She manages it without managing. In fact, she says that she is just dust under your feet. That’s how she manages. She massages your feet. That’s how she manages. She takes care of you. She serves you in a thousand and one ways. And that’s how she becomes the conqueror. She never tries to penetrate you, she never tries to conquer you – that is her victory. She is defenseless. But still some great strength comes from some unknown source.Taoists say that this is the strength of the water element. Man is like rock and woman is like water. When the water falls on the rocks, the rock disappears, sooner or later it becomes sand. It is only a question of time. On the first contact of the water with the rock, the rock is so strong and the water is so soft that you cannot ever logically imagine that one day the water will destroy the rock, that it will disappear as sand and the water will still be there.This is what Lao Tzu calls “the water-course way” – the strength of the feminine.The energy of the masculine is that of the chopper, the woodcutter. Have you watched a woodcutter chopping wood? That is the energy of the masculine – destructive, aggressive, violent. Feminine energy is that of the surfer. The male wrestles with life rather than swimming with it; the feminine goes with it, swims with it, does not wrestle with it. The feminine is pliant and has suppleness, is more liquid.If somebody is studying archery, he can study it as a masculine energy. Then he will become technically expert but he will miss the deeper art of it.Lieh Tzu was studying archery, and hit the target. Now this is the man’s understanding. If you hit the target you have learned the art. What more is needed? If out of a hundred you can hit the target all hundred times, a hundred percent correctly, what more is needed?A German professor, Herrigel, was learning archery with a Zen master in Japan. He became perfect; one-hundred percent perfect, not a single target was ever missed. Naturally he said to the master, “Now what more is there? Now what more do I have to learn here? Can I go now?”The master said, “You can go but you have not learned even the ABC of my art.”Herrigel said, “The ABC of your art? My target shot is one-hundred percent perfect now.”The master said, “Who is talking about the target? Any fool can do that just by practicing. That is nothing much. Now the real thing starts.”Listen. When the archer takes his bow and arrow and aims at the target there are three things. The archer is the most fundamental and basic thing, the source, the innermost. Then there is the arrow which will pass from the archer to the target. And then there is the bull’s eye, the target, the thing farthest away. If you hit the target you have touched the farthest, you have touched the periphery. You have to touch the source as well. You can become technically expert in hitting the target but that is not much – not much if you are trying to get into deeper waters. You are an expert; you are a man of knowledge, but not a man of knowing.The arrow goes from you but you don’t know what source the arrow goes from, with what energy. How does it go? Who is moving it? You don’t know that. You don’t know the archer. You have studied archery, you have achieved the target, your aim is a hundred percent perfect, you have become efficient at one-hundred percent perfection level, but this is all about the target. Now what about you? What about the archer? Has anything happened in the archer? Has your consciousness changed a little bit? No, nothing has changed. You are a technician; you are not a real artist.Taoists say that the real thing is to see the source, where this aim comes from, where this arrow gets its energy. Who is it who has succeeded? What is the energy? What kind of being is hidden behind you? That is the real target. If that is the real target and sometimes you even miss the outer target, nothing is wrong.It is said about a great archer in Japan that he always used to miss his target. He was the greatest master but he was never able to aim correctly.He must have been a man like me. Just a few days ago Priya put in a question which I have not answered yet. She asked: “Osho, can’t you walk straight?” I never tried!That master must have been a man like me – one who cannot walk straight. He must have been a drunkard. So he used to miss. He never succeeded, not for a single time in his whole life. But he was known all over Japan as the greatest master.What was his mastery? His mastery was of a totally different kind. He had penetrated the source; he had made the target his center.The periphery is not the point. You may succeed or you may fail, but that is not the point at all. The real thing is this: have you succeeded in getting centered in your being? Has that target been achieved?To succeed with the outer target is masculine energy; to succeed with your inner source is feminine energy. To succeed with the outer source you have to be aggressive, ambitious, concentrated, attentive, outgoing, extrovert – the arrow will be going out, will be going farther away from you. It will be moving away from your being. The arrow will be going into the world.To move into your center one needs to be feminine, passive, inactive, non-doing, noninterfering, wu-wei, meditative. Relaxation is needed, meditation, not concentration. One has to relax oneself completely and utterly. When you are not doing anything then you are at your center; when you are doing something you have gone away. When you do too much you are too far away. Coming closer means that you are dropping your activities, you are learning how to be inactive, you are learning how to be a non-doer.Herrigel’s master said to him, “You had become a doer, a perfect doer, but that is not the point. You could have learned that in Germany; there was no need to come to Japan. Masculine arts are available in the West, there is no problem. You can learn shooting. But you have come to Japan, to the East, so please, now learn the real thing. Now you have to take your bow without being a doer; you have to pull your arrow without being a puller; you have to aim at the target without aiming. There should be no tension, no effort, no doing on your part. You just have to be passive. You have to let it happen rather than doing it. Then you will be centered.”Do you know the difference between when you do a thing and when you let it happen? If you know the difference, then you can understand this parable; otherwise it will be difficult.Let me remind you, because you may not have noted it that sometimes, making love to your woman, you were a doer. Then you missed. Yes, there was a sexual release but it was not a true orgasm. Then sometimes it was not a doing, you allowed it to happen. Then it was a release, certainly, but with a plus. It was an orgasm. You had a feeling of expansion. You became enormous and huge; you touched the very boundaries of existence. In that moment you disappeared as an ego. You were not. You pulsated from one core to another core, you pulsated in all your layers, but you were not the doer. Bring the doer in and the pulsation stops. Drop the doer and the pulsation starts again.Sometimes, swimming in a river, you started floating. Swimming is beautiful but nothing compared with floating. Sometimes, just lying in the river, not even making any effort, you started floating with the river. Then you will know a totally different quality of experience. The river takes you in her arms, the river supports you, the river and you are no longer enemies – there is a sort of inner connectedness. You have fallen en rapport with the river energy; your energy and the energy of the river are making love. There is an orgasm.Sometimes, sitting silently, doing nothing, you have become aware of a let-go. And there is a benediction. Sometimes looking at the stars or at the trees suddenly it is there. You were not doing anything.These moments come to everybody’s life. They come, unasked for. They come only when you were not expecting them, they come only when you are not – they steal in when your doors are open and you are relaxed. Sometimes out of nothingness and from nowhere a great benediction comes. These moments come to everybody but you have not observed them, you have not noticed them. These are gifts from God. They are reminders that you are in a strange land – come back home. These are reminders. God goes on knocking on your heart again and again – whenever an opportunity is there, whenever you allow him to.On a Sunday you can lie in bed and you are not in any hurry to go to the office and the children are awake and rushing around in the room and your wife is preparing the tea and there is the sound of the samovar. And the milkman and the traffic slowly moving outside, and you turn in your bed and you pull your blanket up again and there is no hurry and there is nowhere to go – it is Sunday. Christianity has given only one beautiful thing to the world – Sunday. Hinduism has no Sunday. Sunday is the greatest contribution of Christianity. You can dream a little more, you can still float into sleep again. There are vapors from the kitchen, the smells from the kitchen, the breakfast is getting ready and you are just in a state of relaxation, not tense, tensionless – and suddenly you feel tremendously beautiful. Life has meaning. Something flowers in you. Something unknown enters you. These are moments when you are feminine.Rushing to the office you become male. You may go for a walk along the street where you go to the office every day, but when you are going for a walk you are a female. When you are going for a walk you are not going anywhere in particular, you are just enjoying the birds in the trees and the wind and the morning sun and children laughing and children going to school. You are enjoying and you are not going anywhere in particular, at any point you can return home; there is no target, there is no goal, you are simply enjoying a morning walk – and suddenly it is there that moment of let-go.Watch these moments of let-go because they are messages from existence. Watch these moments of let-go, cherish them, savor them. Welcome them so that they become more and more available to you. Receive the guest gratefully so that the guest starts coming more and more often.Tao says that the real happens only when you are in such a state of diffused relaxedness that you cannot say, “I am.” “I am” means you are tense.Lieh Tzu was studying archery, and hit the target. He sought advice from Kuan-yin who asked him, “Do you know why you hit the target?” This Kuan-yin is a Taoist master and an archer. Lieh Tzu asked him about his archery and he said, “I have become an expert; technically, technologically, I have attained my goal. I have hit the target.”The master asked, “Do you know why you hit the target? From where? Who are you? Who is this one who has hit the target? Have you looked deep into the source of your energies?” Forget the target and look at the archer. You have learned archery, what about the archer? Now you have to learn the archer. And the processes are very different. You have to learn archery but if you want to learn the archer you will have to unlearn archery.By learning, you know the world; by unlearning, you know yourself. By learning, you accumulate knowledge; by unlearning, you become a knower. By learning, you hoard; by unlearning, you become nude, empty.The master asked, “Do you know why you hit the target?” Why? That’s what Socrates means when he says to his disciples, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” You may succeed, but it is not worth living if it has not been examined so deeply that you know the very source of it, the very foundation of it.You see the flowers of a tree but that is not real knowledge unless you go deep and you know the roots. The flowers depend on the roots. The flowers are nothing but the expression of the innermost core of the roots. The roots are carrying the poetry, the source, the juice, which will become flowers, which will become fruits, which will become leaves. If you continually go on counting the leaves and the flowers and the fruits and never go deep into the darkness of the earth, you will never understand the tree because the tree is in the roots.Where are the roots of the archer? You have succeeded in hitting the target – that is a flowering – but where are your roots? Do you know why you hit the target? Do you know why these flowers have bloomed? Do you know from where, from what source? The flower is the last activity, the most peripheral. The roots are the seed, the first primary activity, the most basic. The roots can exist without flowers, but the flowers cannot exist without the roots. You can cut the flowers off and another flower will come; in fact, a far better flower will come. If you cut the flower, the roots will take up the challenge immediately and they will send a bigger flower. They will say, “Let us see who wins.”I once had a gardener, a very rare man, a master-gardener, who used to win all the competitions in the city. Nobody was ever able to produce such big flowers as he – all sorts of flowers. And I asked him, “What is your secret?”He said, “This is not my secret: I challenge the roots.”I said, “What do you mean?”He said, “I go on cutting the flowers. I don’t allow ordinary flowers to happen to the tree at all. If the tree can give a hundred flowers I allow only one. I cut ninety-nine; I cut them off immediately because that is a waste. And the roots get madder and madder and madder and angrier and angrier. And then the biggest flower comes – as if all hundred flowers are made into one. Finally the roots win. That is my secret I make them mad.”You can go on cutting the flower and it will come again, cut another and it will be replaced. But cut the roots and the tree is gone.The master asked, “Do you know why you hit the target?” The disciple said, without any hesitation, without waiting for a single moment,“No.”This is honesty. The disciple is really a disciple. It is Lieh Tzu himself, the man we have been talking about all these days. He said: “No.” This is honesty.If I ask you, “Do you know who you are?” only the very, very honest will say “No.” The dishonest person will start thinking, brooding. He will say, “Let me think.” What are you going to think? If you know, you know; if you don’t know, you don’t know. What are you going to think about? Thinking means you will try to manage an answer; you will try to manufacture an answer. If somebody asks you, “Do you know God?” have you ever said no? No, it is very difficult to find a man who can say no. That is the man who can become a real disciple, that is the man who can one day know.You will not say no. Somebody will say, “Yes, God is. I know.” And somebody else will say, “There is no God. I know.” But both know. Nobody is able to say no.The disciple said no – he is a real disciple, a true disciple, authentic. The disciple has to open his heart before the master – the disciple must be nude. He must not hide anything – because if you hide from the master you will never grow.Lieh Tzu said: “No.” Then the master said,“It won’t do yet.”“It is good, you have progressed. And your no is a good indication, but it won’t do yet. You have to go further; you have to go still further.”He went away to practice and after three years again reported to Kuan-yin.What did he do for three years? He had attained his target, so what was he doing for three years? The parable does not say because this is a parable to be meditated upon. A parable is one which says only a few things and leaves many things unsaid. So you have to meditate and fill in the gaps. You have to find where the intervals are. And the real thing is in those intervals.What did he do for three years? When you have hit the target then what more can you do? Now he was unlearning. Learning was finished, he had hit the target, learning was complete – so what else can you do? He was unlearning, or he was turning his eyes inward.Watch. When an archer takes the bow and arrow in his hand his eyes are on the target, naturally. So what was Lieh Tzu doing for three years? When he took up his bow and arrow he would look at the target, but deep down he would look at himself. The target became secondary. The arrow of his consciousness became double-headed – that’s what Gurdjieff calls self-remembering.When you see me, you are seeing me; your consciousness is one-arrowed – arrowed toward me. If you change… This you can do right now and it will be good to do it to understand that you are looking at me; how your eyes are arrowed at me. If you are really arrowed at me, you will forget yourself. This is forgetfulness. Now make your consciousness double-arrowed. Look at me and at the same time, simultaneously, look at yourself. Look at the looked-at, and then look at the looker-on – the viewed and the viewer.When you are listening to me, listen, and always become aware of the listener too. The speaker must be listened to, and the listener must be listened to also. Then your consciousness has double arrows. Right now it is one-way traffic: you look at me and you are not looking at yourself. This is a sort of self-forgetfulness. If you look at me and simultaneously become capable of looking at yourself, in that moment self-awareness happens. Buddha calls it samyak smriti; Kabir calls it surati; Gurdjieff calls it self-remembering. But it is the same.What Lieh Tzu did for three years in the forest was a harder task. Learning was simple. He was male. But then he had to become female. First he had been trying to penetrate the target outside, now he started moving inside into the womb of his own being. He became feminine.Knowledge is aggression; knowing is passivity.There are two types of minds discussed in Tao: one they call mui and the other they call ui. Mui means natural, relaxed, and ui means unnatural, tense. When you are fighting with life you exist as ui; when you are flowing with life you exist as mui. Swimming, you function as ui; floating, you function as mui.When you are in a let-go it is the natural mind in tune with the whole, in tune with Tao. Then these birds singing here are not a distraction; on the contrary, they enrich. Then everything is allowed. All the doors are open. You are not resisting, you are not struggling – you simply are. That is the state of mui.First Lieh Tzu learned and created the state of ui; he became very, very aggressive, extroverted, pointed toward the outside. He succeeded; he fulfilled his target. It was ambition. Then the master said it was nothing, he had to go further. What did he do for three years? He became mui – he relaxed. He would sit silently and feel the let-go. By and by he would take his arrow and bow and shoot the arrow in a state of let-go. He would not shoot it – he would allow it to be shot. That is difficult. He would not shoot it – he would wait for it to shoot itself.Herrigel tried with the master but could not succeed. Then one day, desperate, he said, “I don’t think I will be ever able to succeed. I cannot understand what you call this mui, it is all nonsense. How can the arrow shoot itself if I don’t shoot it? If I don’t pull the bow, how can things happen on their own? It is impossible.”We can understand Herrigel. That is the whole Western attitude: it is impossible.The master said, “Then you can go.”Herrigel said, “Will you give me a certificate?”The master said, “Impossible, because you have not learned anything. Whatsoever you have learned you could have learned anywhere else, so it is of no credit here. You can go.”Herrigel booked a flight, made the arrangements to leave, forgot all about everything. He had been there for three years – it was too long.Then he went to say goodbye to the master, but the master was teaching other disciples so he had to wait. He sat on a bench while the master was teaching and for the first time he was in a relaxed state because now he was no longer worried – he was leaving, finished – and he was no longer greedy. There was no effort. He just looked and he could see that the master was not shooting. The master took the bow in his hand; he pulled the bow with his hand – but the bow shot itself. He could see it. It was a vision. He could not believe how he had missed it. For three years he had been watching his master again and again, but his own logical mind was interfering. It would not allow him to see. He said, “How can it be? He may be more expert, but how can it be that the arrow goes by itself?” That morning he saw it. Then he relaxed; then he stopped worrying about attaining anything. When you are no longer in effort, in greed, in desire, you are relaxed.He rushed to the master and touched his feet. Then without saying anything, Herrigel took the bow from the master’s hand and shot the target. The master put his hand on Herrigel’s head and said, “You have done it. You can have the certificate. And you can still go because now there is no need to wait. Finished. You have known it, you have tasted it.”Things can happen on their own. You were born – you did not manage it. You fell in love – you did not do it. Hunger comes, you eat – you feel satisfied. Thirst arises, you drink, you feel quenched. You are young, you will become old. One day you will die. Everything is happening. The doer is a false illusion. Be in the state of mui.The society creates the state of ui. It makes you unnatural, tense, knowledgeable; it makes you cultivated, cultured. But it creates a hard crust around your heart and you lose your real nature, Tao.He went away to practice and after three years again reported to Kuan-yin.“Do you know why you hit the target?”Again the same question, and Lieh Tzu said:“I know.”Again it is simple, as simple as the first: “No.” It is not a pretension. Again, when a person pretends, he thinks before he says, “I know.” He tries to rehearse in his mind; that’s what you call thinking. This answer is without any thinking on Lieh Tzu’s part. It is as it is. First he said simply: “No.” Now, in exactly the same humble way – with no claim, remember – he says: “I know.”Many times you get too involved in words. The Upanishads say that one who says “I know” does not know. Right, but there can be a person who says “I know” and does know. If you can say “I know” in a simple, humble way, with no claim, then there is no problem. When the Upanishads say that if a person says “I know,” he does not know, the emphasis of the Upanishadic seer is on the “I.” When somebody says “I know,” the emphasis is on the “I” – “I” is underlined. When a person really knows and says “I know,” “I” is not underlined. The “know” is just a fact.How can Lieh Tzu say something untrue? If he knows, he knows. He has to say it. But it is not a claim.So don’t get too burdened with words. People sometimes get too burdened with words. For example, if a Vedantin reads this he will say, “He says, ‘I know,’ so he cannot know because of what the Upanishads say.” Words are words and one has to feel the innermost core of the words, the heart of the words.I say to you that when Lieh Tzu says “I know” he knows. And his “I know” means exactly the same as when the Upanishads say “I don’t know.” His “I know” means exactly the same. It means exactly the same as when Socrates says “I don’t know a thing.”By saying, “I don’t know a thing,” Socrates is denying the “I.” But by saying, “I know,” as a simple fact, as an ordinary fact, with no claim, Lieh Tzu is doing a far greater miracle. Listen to it – sometimes a pretender can pretend and say, “I don’t know,” in the hope that you will think that he knows. Because the Upanishads say so and Socrates says so, a pretender can say, “I don’t know,” and hope that you will think that he is a knower, that he is another Socrates. Mind is very cunning. So remember one thing: if a mind is simple, humble, and simply states the fact, then that is the truth – whatsoever the fact.“It will do,”…said the master. Very easily he said: “It will do.” It is not a question of what Lieh Tzu is saying, it is a question of what Lieh Tzu is – the simplicity, the humbleness, the meekness of the person, the innocence of the person.When you say “I know,” a subtle ego arises. Just say the words “I know” and you will feel a subtle ego strengthening in you.The master must have been looking into Lieh Tzu. Masters don’t look at you, they look into you. They don’t watch your face, they watch your heart. He must have looked into his heart when Lieh Tzu said “I know.” Did something arise there? Did something integrate, become an ego? Nothing. The space remained untouched, virgin. He said “I know” and nothing happened inside him. The master said,“It will do. Hold on to this awareness and do not lose it.”It is difficult to gain a glimpse of this let-go and it is very easy to lose it – because for centuries, for many lives, we have practiced doing. So when those moments of non-doing come, our whole practice of many lives goes against them, our whole habit goes against them, our whole mechanism goes against them. Their happening is a breakthrough and your past will struggle to close your doors again.That’s why the master says: “Hold on to this awareness and do not lose it.” This is the treasure, the kingdom of God within you. This is the treasure – to be in a relaxed state and allow God to function.Now Lieh Tzu was not doing anything. Yes, he took the bow, he took the arrow, he aimed at the target, but he was not: it was God in him. This is the state which Krishna, in the Gita, wanted Arjuna to be in – this is the state. Krishna wanted Arjuna to become empty like Lieh Tzu so that God could function. He wanted Arjuna to take his bow and fight the fight. If it had to be so, it had to be so.Arjuna was bringing his mind in. He was saying, “How can I do it? It doesn’t seem right.” And Krishna was saying, “Who are you to think about what is right and what is wrong? Leave it to God. You don’t come in. Just put yourself aside. Don’t stand in the way.” Arjuna said, “How can I kill these people? It is violence.” And Krishna said to him, “If you don’t kill them, somebody else will kill them; I can see that they are already dead. Somebody must be instrumental in putting them into their graves – they are dead. If you are not going to become the instrument, somebody else will, and you will miss an opportunity of becoming an instrument.”This applies not only to archery but to ruling oneself. Therefore the sage scrutinizes not the fact of survival or ruin, but its reasons.This applies not only to archery but to ruling oneself. In fact, in Tao and Zen, archery is just a way to learn something about life. When somebody insults you, remember that the person who has insulted you is outside you, on the periphery, like the target; you are deep within yourself, the source. And between you and the insulter stands the mind – like the arrow.If your mind is arrowed on the person who has insulted you, you will miss. Let it be arrowed toward the source. Rather than thinking that he has insulted you, look into your own being: you must be carrying some wound, that’s why you feel insulted. Otherwise how can anybody insult you? If somebody calls you a fool and you feel insulted that simply means you think that you are very wise – nothing else. If you yourself think you are a fool, you will hug the person. You will say, “Right! Exactly right! That’s how I feel!” Then where is the insult?If somebody says you are a thief and you feel humiliated, that simply means that you have always been thinking that you are a great moralist – virtuous, this and that – and deep down you know also that you are a thief. He has hit the soft point in your being, the fragile point.So now there are two possibilities: either you jump on him and prove that you are not a thief, or you look inside yourself. Always go to the source. In Yoga, going to the source is called pratyahar. Mahavira calls this going to the source pratikraman. Jesus says “Repent.”Christians have misunderstood. Repent has nothing to do with repentance. Repent originally meant return, go back, go inside yourself. The Greeks have the right word for it: metanoia – turn into yourself, make a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. You must have seen in some old ancient mystery books the symbol of a snake eating its own tail – that is metanoia.Go back to yourself. Rather than going to the other, go to yourself, turn back. Let your arrow move in a circle and come back to the source from where it started. Somebody has insulted you and turmoil arises. This is the beginning of the arrow. The arrow starts moving toward the other person. It wants to hit the other person, to insult the other person. Don’t be deceived by it. Let it move in a circle. Let it come one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees back to you – to where it started, to where you felt the turmoil. Let it come back there; look there. This can become the key of an inner transformation. A new being is possible.Archery is just a device. Taoists have devised many devices. But in all the devices the basic thing, the essential thing, is to turn to one’s own nature.Meditate on this parable and start using it in your life. First, look for moments of let-go, wait for them, receive them with great welcome and rejoicing, invite them again and again, become more feminine.Second, if any opportunity arises when your arrow starts flying outward, remember immediately and turn it inward. Turn it in. Rather than turning on, turn in. If somebody insults and you are turned on, if a beautiful woman passes by and you are turned on, sex arises – turn in rather than turning on. A beautiful woman passing by is not the real target; you have some sexuality in you. Go to the source. Let it be a great opportunity for meditation. Transform each ordinary opportunity into meditation and the payoff will be great. Each moment will start becoming luminous.There is no mundane or profane activity. All activities can be turned into meditation – they have to be. This is my message. Meditation must not be something apart from life; it must become the innermost core of life. Each activity, small and big, must be luminous with meditative awareness. Then you will see that each activity brings you to godliness, each activity brings you home, each activity becomes liberation.Each activity has to fall back into the original source. The anger that arises from your being has to fall back into your being; the sex that arises from your being has to fall back into the source itself. There where the alpha and the omega meet, where the beginning and the end meet, where the snake turns to its own tail and starts eating it, you become complete, a whole circle. That’s the stage of the sage. That’s what sannyas is all about.Enough for today.

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

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Once you said that Krishna was a brahmin, but really he was a kshatriya. Nobody is ready to accept him as a brahmin. Which is correct?When I say something there is no need to ask anybody about it. Meditate over it.When I said that Krishna was a brahmin, I mean that he knew the ultimate truth – brahma is the ultimate truth. By knowing it one becomes a brahmin. When I say Krishna was a brahmin, I mean Mahavira was a brahmin, Buddha was a brahmin – so was Moses, so was Jesus, so was Lao Tzu. I don’t mean the caste brahmin. By birth nobody is a brahmin, nobody can be. I also know that he was a kshatriya by birth. That is meaningless. That is formal, accidental. I don’t talk about accidents.By accident I was born in India, but I am not an Indian. By accident you may have been born in Germany, but you are not a German. By accident you may be black or white, but you are neither. The accident can only decide the form, not your being. Your being is beyond accident, beyond caste, beyond religion, beyond nation, beyond color. When I am talking I am talking about the innermost core.So I repeat: Krishna was a brahmin. Even if the whole world says he is not, I don’t care a bit. That knowledge is of no significance at all.“It is surprising,” said the professor to his wife, “how ignorant we all are. Nearly every man is a specialist in his own particular line and consequently he is as narrow-minded as it is possible to be. He knows nothing of what other men are doing.”“Yes, dear,” said his wife.“I, for instance,” he continued, “am ashamed of my failure to keep abreast of modern science. Take electric light, for example. I have not the least idea how it works.”His wife gave him a patronizing look and smiled, “Why, Herbert, I am ashamed of you too. It is simple. You press a switch, that’s all!”This wife thinks that by pressing a switch you know all about electricity. That’s all. Simple. And she says she is ashamed of her husband – that he does not even know how electricity works.You also know how electricity works. You press the switch, that’s all. So simple. But has anybody really any idea of how electricity works? I am not talking about you and I am not talking about this professor. Even the man who worked miracles with electricity, Thomas Alva Edison, had no idea how it worked.It happened once that Edison went to a summer resort where people did not know anything about him; at least nobody recognized his face. He was very happy: famous people get tired of being recognized all day long, they can never be at ease. So he was very happy, running on the beach, collecting pebbles. He had become a child again.Somebody invited him to come to a high school exhibition. Looking at his childlikeness on the beach, at how he was running and playing with the foam and the pebbles and the sea-shells, somebody said, “Come to our high school. We are having an exhibition. The children have done many beautiful things.” So he went.They had made an electric fan and a small boy was explaining how it worked. Edison became interested and he asked, “Do you know how electricity works? What is electricity?”And the boy said, “That I don’t know. I will call my teacher.”So the teacher was called to explain – of course, he did not know who was asking the question. He was a graduate in science and he tried to explain the mechanism of the fan. But electricity itself? Electricity in itself is inexpressible. Nobody knows.And Edison insisted, “Tell me, what is electricity? You are explaining how the fan moves, how the switch works, how the motor works, but I am not asking about the motor and the fan and the switch. I am asking about electricity, the power behind it. What is it?” And the man said, “You are asking a difficult question. I am just a graduate. I will ask my principal to come – he is a DSc, a doctor of science. He will explain!”The principal came and he tried hard to explain but Edison insisted. The DSc principal was very puzzled about this man asking such a significant question, and he became very embarrassed because he could not explain. So he said, “Sorry, I will ask some higher people who are more in the know.”Then Edison said, “I don’t think anybody is going to help.”The principal asked, “What do you mean?”Edison replied, “I am Thomas Alva Edison and I myself don’t know what electricity is, so who are you going to ask?” He had invented a thousand things which worked through electricity – the radio, the gramophone, the fan and a thousand and one things – he was one of the greatest inventors of the world. But he said, “I myself don’t know what electricity is. I play with it, I manage it; it works. That’s all we know – it works. But what it is, nobody knows. So don’t be puzzled and don’t feel embarrassed.”You must have asked somebody who had the mind of this wife who says, “Why, Herbert, I am ashamed of you. It is simple. You press a switch. That’s all.” I also know that Krishna is a kshatriya, but that is not what I am saying to you. I am not interested in the accident of his birth, in whose womb he was carried for nine months. I am talking about his innermost experience – that experience makes him a brahman because he has known the brahma. One who knows is a brahman; one who does not know is not a brahman.The second question:Osho,“Don't do unto others what you don't want others to do unto you.” Osho, I was meditating about it, but I feel stuck, I can't reach the bottom. Please can you tell me something about it?The first thing: never meditate on anything negative. “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you.” This is a negative message “Don’t do…”If you don’t want to get stuck, then meditate on something positive. The same thing can be made positive: “Do unto others what you would like others to do unto you.” Then you will not get stuck.When you go into a negative commandment you cannot move much. How can you function in a negative commandment? A negative commandment is like death. How can you meditate about death? You start and you are stuck from the very start. You can meditate about life, certainly. Life has so many things to meditate about: flowers, birds, rivers, stars, love, people, the beauty of it, the song of it. You can meditate about life infinitely and you will never get stuck because life is vast. Life is infinite because life is the entire universe.In fact, when you meditate on life – meditating, meditating – one day you will come across death too because death is just a part of life. As other things are part of life – love, birth, joy, sadness, happiness – so is death. Death is not something against life, death is not something beyond life. Death happens in life, death is an intrinsic part of life.So if you meditate on life you will come to know death too, but if you meditate on death nothing will happen. What will you meditate on? You will simply feel darkness, and get stuck. How can you go into nonbeing? How can you think about nothing? You will go round and round, and sooner or later you will wonder what you are doing. Chasing your own tail? Where are you going? There is nothing much to meditate on.Meditation must be about the positive. You can ride on the positive; you can go to the very source of existence, but on the positive, with the positive, in the positive. Of course, as you go with the positive, one day you will come across the negative too – but as part of the positive. And then you will know the negative too.Listen, I would like it this way: “Do unto others what you would like others to do unto you.” Make it that way. Then you have a thousand and one things to think about.When you do unto others what you would like them to do unto you, naturally the negative part of it – don’t do unto others – follows like a shadow. Remember, the negative is the shadow of the positive. The positive is the figure, the negative is the shadow. If you run, your shadow will run behind you. If you stop, the shadow will stop. But don’t get too involved with the shadow or you will get stuck. If you try to make the shadow run and then you want to follow it, it is impossible. Then you will feel very impotent. You will create a very crazy situation for yourself.The Ten Commandments are stated in a negative way. If you go deep into Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, you will not find a single negative commandment. Everything is positive. With the positive there is growth. Judaism has not grown at all. It remains stuck. In fact, it has not added anything to Moses. It is where Moses left it.Hinduism has grown tremendously. It goes on growing. It is not a dead stone. What is the reason; what is the secret of it? The secret is: it works through the positive. If you get stuck with the negative, then from the very beginning you are moving in a wrong direction and that will not allow you much movement. You are heading for trouble.Judaism has not evolved any subtle religion. The Jews have remained the most irreligious people on the earth, the most worldly – money-minded, prestige-oriented. They have not developed anything deep in meditation or prayer; religion to them is just a formality. Religion is not something tremendous; it is not something that shatters you, uproots you, gives you wings. It is not something that destroys you and recreates you; it is not something that you become possessed with; it is not something that manages you – it is something that you manage.The Jews did not like Jesus because he became too possessed by religion. The Jews did not like Jesus because he was too otherworldly. The Jews have not liked anyone born to Jewish families who became too possessed by religion. They have always denied and rejected them. They deny and reject all the messiahs because a messiah is a person who is in a passion. Religion is his love, it is not formality; he can stake his life on it. If crucifixion comes through it, he is ready to go to the cross.The day that Jesus was ready to die on the cross, he said that he was not a Jew in the ordinary sense. The Jews were puzzled. Why was this man so mad? Life is so beautiful, why be worried about things higher than life? Life is enough. Jews have lived in the merry-go-round of eat, drink and be merry – and, of course, sometimes go to the synagogue too. That is part of the social formalities.Remember, if you start your meditations with a negative you will be stuck. And, another thing, if you think too much on the negative, you will become desert-like, you will not flower, you will become dry, your juice won’t flow. Juice cannot flow in the negative – for that you need some positive passion, something alive, so that it can flower.If you want to meditate, contemplate – good. But choose something positive. Meditate on a roseflower, it is positive. Meditate on the rising sun, it is positive. Meditate on the moon. Meditate on a child playing, laughing, jumping, dancing. Meditate on something which is flowering, opening, unfolding, which is alive. Meditating on the negative is meditating on the desert – and you become that on which you meditate. You will become that on which you meditate, so meditate on love, meditate on life, meditate on God.If something sounds very beautiful to you but it is a negative statement, turn it into a positive statement. Each statement can be turned into a positive statement. The change is great. When you want to say no, try to say it in such a way that it has the form of yes. Don’t say no. You can always find a way to say something in such a way that even if it is a no, it comes in the form of yes. And that will be helpful to you.You must have come across people who are so addicted to the no that even sometimes when they want to say yes they find a negative way of expressing it.The third question:Osho,Will you marry me?Again? The day you became a sannyasin you got married to me. This question is from Dharma Chetna. To ask again means you have forgotten!Somebody asked Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, when he was very old, “Why didn’t you ever get married? Didn’t you ever propose to somebody?”Kant brooded over it and said, “To think of it, yes, once I did propose to a girl.”The inquirer became very interested. He said, “Then what happened?”Kant said, “Something went wrong. I proposed a second time. I proposed one day and the next day I proposed again. And the girl got very mad.”Kant’s memory was not very good – the girl had accepted him the previous night. Can you marry a person who proposes a second time? This man is not reliable. After marriage he will come one day and he will say, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”Sannyas is a marriage – deeper than any marriage, deeper than the marriage that you know about. In an ordinary marriage two bodies meet. At the most, if you are very fortunate, two minds meet – which is rare. The marriage that is sannyas is not of the body, not of the mind, but of the souls. Two beings meet. To be with a master is to be in deep love with the master, to be surrendered, to be open, to go with him wherever he is going with gratitude, with trust.You are married, Chetna. Keep alert. Don’t go on forgetting.The fourth question:Osho,My son has run away from home and is here in the ashram. He is free to have any sort of thought, but first he should complete his graduate studies so that he can understand the world in a better way and make the right decisions.I can understand the difficulties of a parent. Trying to persuade your son – I am all in favor of it. Try to persuade him but don’t force him, don’t threaten him. Avoid subtle or gross threats. Just open your mind to your son, put your heart before him, tell him how you feel. What you are saying is not very meaningful, so leave the decision to him.For example, you say: “My son has run away from home and is here in the ashram.” There must have been something wrong in the home, otherwise why should one escape from home and come to this ashram? This ashram is another home again. Think about your home. What is wrong there? Something must be missing – love, aliveness. Something must be missing. Think about it. Your son has given you a signal that something is wrong.Maybe the father and the mother are not in deep harmony and the house is a chaos. Maybe the children are neglected or maybe given too much care. Either way the child must be feeling suffocated – either by indifference or by too much love and too much care. Balance is missing.Put your home right. Just taking the child back home will not help much because he will escape again. So think about it. Your child has given you an indication that something is basically wrong. That is the first thing.The second thing – you say: “He is free to have any sort of thought but first…” That is just talk; you are not giving him freedom. What do you mean by “but”? Parents have that trick of talking. They say, “You are completely free, absolutely free, but…” That “but” is too big. It destroys all freedom.Parents have an old habit of saying, “First grow up and then you will understand.” Excuse me, I would like to ask: have you grown up? Have you ever seen any grown-up person? Maybe the person is well educated, has graduated from university, was on the merit list, has a good job, is married, has children – everything is going fine. But if you look deep – is he grown-up? Has he really understood what life is? Has he any awareness? Or is he as ignorant of life as any child? Sometimes it happens that children are more alert than grown-ups because children have a fresher consciousness. Less dust has gathered on their mirrors. They have not as yet been poisoned by society.What do you call your university? It is an institution in the service of society. It poisons. It manipulates people. It forces people into the service of society. It destroys people’s individuality. Out of beautiful people it makes clerks, collectors, commissioners, tahsildari, stationmasters, things like that. Out of beautiful people, out of beautiful children it creates ugly things, dead things. The whole educational system is a way to destroy a person, his freedom; to destroy his consciousness; to destroy his aliveness; to make him usable; to reduce him to a means so that the society can use him in profitable ways, so that he becomes an instrument. Then he becomes a soldier in the army – kills and is killed. Or he becomes a clerk in an office or a collector or a commissioner, and wastes his whole life for something he cares nothing at all about. He goes on doing things which he never wanted to do in the first place.The closer death comes, the more afraid you become – and fear cripples. Then you cannot change. It is very difficult for a person at the age of forty or forty-five to change, because by then everything has somehow settled. It has been a long struggle, things have settled, and now to change seems very difficult. One simply goes on waiting for death to relieve you.You say: “But first he should complete his graduate studies so that he can understand the world in a better way.” Do you think educated people understand the world in a better way? I have never come across it. Educated people are the worst because they have such a screen on their eyes. They may understand what is written in books, but they don’t understand what is there in life. An educated person has such a cultivated mind that he does not allow anything from the real to enter him. He looks in books but he never looks in the faces of people, in the eyes of people. He never looks around. Even if God comes he will go on reading his Bible and he may even say to God, “Wait, wait outside, I am doing my religious meditation,” or something like that.There is a Hindu story about a very great scholar who used to chant every morning for three, four, five hours. For years together, from three o’clock in the morning, he would start chanting and praying. And he was a great scholar, a great Sanskrit scholar, a very learned man.Finally Krishna had compassion on him and one day he came. He stood behind the man and put his hand on his shoulder. The man looked up and he said, “What are you doing? Can’t you see I am praying? Is this the time to disturb me?”Krishna shrank back and disappeared.Now this story looks very absurd. The man had been chanting, “Hare Krishna, hare Krishna, hare Krishna…” for years, but when Krishna came he could not recognize him. He thought some intruder had come – some very foolish man who couldn’t see that the scholar was meditating. This man may not even have taken his morning bath and here he was touching the scholar’s body and spoiling the whole meditation. The scholar had to go and take a bath again in the Ganges and again start his prayer. So he was very happy to get rid of this foolish man. Who was this?If Jesus comes to a Christian who is pondering his Bible, will the Christian recognize him? If Mahavira comes to a Jaina who is on his fast and doing his mantra namokar, will he be able to recognize him? Impossible. To recognize truth you need naked, nude eyes – uncultured, uncultivated, uneducated.I can feel you care for your child, that’s true, but what you are saying is not true. I can understand and I would like your boy to go back home, I am all for it. But the reason you are giving is not right. I can feel your love for your child. You are worried about his future. You are worried about what he will do, how he will earn his bread. I can understand, I am in total sympathy with you, but the reason that you are proposing is absolutely false.You say: “…first he should complete his graduate studies so that he can understand…” Understanding never comes that way. For understanding to come one has to unlearn all that one has learned. For understanding to come one must become a child again, one has to wash off all that society has done, one has to make his heart clean.Once a man came to Buddha, a very cultured, educated man, a pundit. And he asked a question. Buddha said, “Please. Right now I cannot answer.”The man asked, “Why can you not answer? Are you busy or something?” He was an important man, well-known all over the country, and, of course, he felt offended that Buddha was so busy that he couldn’t give him a little time.He said, “I have walked thousands of miles.” In those days there were no trains, nothing, it was really difficult. It was dangerous to travel. He had walked far; he had come from the deep south.Buddha said, “No, that is not the question. I have enough time, but right now you will not be able to receive the answer.”The pundit asked, “What do you mean?”Buddha said, “There are three types of listeners. The first type is like a pot turned upside down. You can go on answering, nothing will enter him. He is not available. The second type of listener is like a pot with holes in the bottom. It is not upside down, it is exactly in the right position, it is as it should be, but it has holes in the bottom. So it looks like it is being filled but that is only momentary. Sooner or later the water flows out and it is empty again. On the surface, only on the surface it looks like something is entering – nothing really enters because the pot cannot hold anything. And then there is a third type of listener who has no holes in the bottom and who is not turned upside down but is full of filth. Water can come into it but the moment water enters it, it becomes poisoned.“And you are all three together, sir. So it is very difficult right now. You are filthy – filthy because you are so knowledgeable. Knowledge is filth. That which you have not known is filth; only that which you have known purifies, transforms, liberates. All that borrowed knowledge is filth. You have stolen it, how can it purify you? Without knowing it you think you know. You are a pretender. You deceive. You are a hypocrite.”So when a man’s head is like a pot which is full of filth, even if God comes and says something to him, the moment it enters him it will become poisoned. It will not be heard the way it was said. It will be misinterpreted. It is very difficult to change a learned man because he has already got fixed ideas. He is hiding behind those ideas.I have heard about a very shy man – a young man, very shy – who had never asked a girl for a date. His mother was naturally very worried. One day the mother and father were both surprised because the boy said, “I am going on a date tonight.” They were very happy.They helped him. They gave him money and they said, “Go and enjoy yourself.”He went out but came back within half an hour. They were again surprised and said, “So soon? Did you see the girl?”He said, “Yes, I did see her. And if I had not been hiding behind the hedge, she would have seen me.”A man of knowledge is hiding behind hedges and more hedges. His understanding is less than it ever was even if his knowledge is more.Now what type of date is this? Hiding behind the hedge! He says, “I have seen the girl and if I had not been hiding behind the hedge, she would have seen me.”What do you mean, sir, when you say: “He will understand more?” He will be more knowledgeable, true, but he will not understand more. Right now he can already understand more, although even now it may be too late. Had he come a little earlier he would have understood even more.Society can be transformed totally if small children start meditating. They are not serious so they are very ready for meditation. They are joyful, playful. They take everything in fun. Sometimes it happens that when a small child comes to take sannyas and I tell him, “Close your eyes,” he closes his eyes and he enjoys it as nobody else enjoys it. The very idea that he has been taken so seriously rejoices him. He sits silently. Sometimes I have seen grown-up people looking, just opening their eyes a little to see what is happening.But small children, when they close their eyes, they really close them. They close them very hard because they are afraid they will open them if they don’t do it hard. They really do it hard. They bring their total energy to it because they know that if they are not doing it totally then their eyes will open and they will start looking to see what the matter is, what is going on. I have seen them really closing their eyes. And to see a child sitting silently is one of the most beautiful things you can come across.Children can be taught meditation more easily because they are not spoiled yet. When you have been spoiled the hard work is to help you to unlearn.I have heard about Mozart, the great composer and musician:Whenever anybody came to him he would ask, “Have you learned music anywhere else before?” If the man had, then he would ask double fees. If he had not learned music at all, then he would say, “That is okay. Half the fee will do.”People were very puzzled because this was illogical: “When a fresh man comes, who has not known anything about music, you say half the fee, and when somebody who has been working for ten years comes, you say double the fee!”Mozart said, “There is a reason. First I have to clean the slate. That is the harder work. To destroy all that the person is carrying is harder than to teach.”Teaching is very easy if you are available. With a virgin heart, teaching is very simple – and a child is a virgin heart.So I will not agree that your child will become more understanding of the world. He may simply become worldlier, as worldly as you are. Right now he is not so worldly, that’s why he has come to the ashram and has become a sannyasin. He is otherworldly. He does not care a bit about money, power, prestige – all those trips. He is very otherworldly. You can see.You can see many young people here – ninety-nine percent of my sannyasins are young people. Why? Why should young people be so interested in sannyas, and not the old people? Old people become cunning, calculating. Old people become clever. They think in terms of profit and loss. They think of what is going to give them more profit, and they think of a thousand and one things. They think about everything but life; they think about everything but love. They take care of all that is nonessential; they don’t take care of the essential. They are worldly. What do I mean by worldly? I mean a man who thinks about the nonessential.Mulla Nasruddin went to his boss one day and said, “Sir, can I have your car on the twenty-fifth of this month?”The boss asked, “For what? Why do you need the car, Nasruddin? You have never asked for it before.”He said, “I am going to get married on that day.”The boss said, “Certainly you can have it. One does not get married every day. You can have not only one car. You can have all three of my cars.”Nasruddin was very happy. And then the boss asked, “Please tell me. Who is the fortunate girl?”Nasruddin answered, “I have not decided that yet. I thought I should first inquire about the car. If I can have the car, I can find a girl. That is not a big problem.”This is the worldly man. He thinks first about the nonessentials: money, power, prestige, influence, car, house, bank, insurance. He thinks about these things first; security comes first. He is not worried at all about who you are. Who is this security for? Who is this bank balance for? Who is this house and this car for? For whom? You are disappearing, your life is slipping out of your hands – and you are worried about the nonessentials!The otherworldly man is one who thinks about the essentials first. Your child is still other-worldly, nonworldly, hence he is here. Whatsoever you are saying is not very relevant, it is just an argument. If you have become more understanding, then give proof of it. Then tell your son, “Go home and study and I am going to become a sannyasin.” That will be proof. And then, I think, your son will have to go because now he knows his father means it. That will be something.I am ready to exchange. You stay here and let your son go – and he will go happily because then his father really cares and understands. Then whatsoever you say is meaningful.One day an old Indian man came to me…The man was seventy-five years old. Of course, in India, people are very much against me – bound to be, naturally – because they think that giving sannyas to young people is destroying their lives. This man’s young son had taken sannyas and he was very worried. He said, “What are you doing? This is against the scriptures. Only after seventy-five years of age can a person become a sannyasin. Give my son back. This is not the right time. First he has to get married.” Just as you say your son has first to graduate, he said that first his son had to get married, experience life, have children, do the work of the householder and then one day he could become a sannyasin.The son was sitting beside me. “Okay, I can understand,” I said to the old man. “Your son can go back but you come sit in his place!”He asked, “Why?”I said, “You are seventy-five, now the time has come. You have lived in the world. The scriptures say that after seventy-five one must become a sannyasin. What do you say?”He said, “This is difficult.”So I said, “Then what is the guarantee that your boy, if he ever becomes seventy-five – and who knows, he may never become seventy-five – will be able to take sannyas if you cannot take it? Give me some proof. You take sannyas and I will release your son. I will say, ‘Go and get married.’” Since then that old man has never turned up and I don’t think he will ever come again.Just look at life. So many people are educated, particularly in the West. Everybody is educated now. Education is no longer a value. In fact, the great thinkers of the West are thinking about how to de-school society. Ivan Illich has proposed a whole program of how to de-school society. D. H. Lawrence used to say again and again that if mankind is to be saved, all universities should be closed for one hundred years.All those dreams and ideas that when humanity becomes educated, when everybody is educated, there will be paradise. That paradise has not happened. In fact, paradise has disappeared because of education. Uneducated people are far more innocent, far more loving, far more beautiful than the educated.The man of education becomes cunning, clever, exploitive. That’s all that education is about – how to make you more efficient in exploiting people, how to make you capable of doing less and getting more. That is the whole point of education. What else is it? What else is education but how to do nothing and get everything? Then you are the most educated person. The higher the education, the less the work and the more profit. The real man of education does not work at all. He simply exploits, he simply robs people.No, education is not going to give him understanding or anything. Don’t force anything on him; just speak your mind to him and tell him that this is how you feel. Certainly tell him how you feel; it is your responsibility to tell him, but then your responsibility is finished. You told him, you made him aware of the situation, but if he decides to remain a beggar, let it be so. If he decides to remain a sannyasin and wants to live a dangerous life, let it be so. You have lived a very sheltered life; what have you gained?When I came back from my university graduation, my parents were very worried about my marriage. That is one of the most worrying problems in India – particularly for a person like me. My parents were very worried. It was time to get married and they were worried that I might say no.One night when I was going to sleep, my mother came to me. She sat on my bed and told me that they were very worried. I said, “There is no need to worry. Tell me, what is the problem?”She said, “We are afraid you may say no.”I said, “I can say yes without asking what it is. Just tell me.”She became very happy. She said, “We would like you to get married. Choose any girl. You choose, we are not concerned about that – but get married.”I said, “Okay, I have said yes so I will follow it. There is just one thing – I will give you two weeks to think about it. Have you gained anything by marriage? After two weeks you simply tell me. You are my mother and I hope that you will not deceive me. Mediate over the matter for two weeks: if the chance were given to you again, would you marry or would you remain unmarried?”My mother is a simple woman. Those two weeks were really hard on her. I saw her sitting and crying and weeping because the truth was coming to her again and again that it was simply meaningless. She had suffered her whole life. Marriage, twelve children, continuously taking care, this child is ill, that child is ill, a poor family, twelve children, and all worries and worries.After two weeks I asked, “What do you say?”She said, “You have given me so such trouble. No, I will not suggest that you get married but don’t tell your father that I have said so.”I told her, “I will take care of him separately, don’t be worried. He is my father; he will also feel for me. What has he gained?”He never asked me, never. He simply avoided the subject because he knew what had happened.You have lived in the world, you are educated, you have lived a sheltered family life – what have you gained? Anything really? Anything really substantial? Can you really show that substance to your child? Can you say that you have lived wisely? Can you say that you are happy and that if God gave you another life you would like to live the same way you have lived? Just think, ponder over these things.I can understand your love for your child. It is perfectly good. I am happy that you have come so far to take your child back. You must be in deep love with him. But become a little more alert. Speak your heart. Say what you have experienced in your life. Doesn’t your heart desire that, if you were born again and life was again given to you, you would like to start it as a sannyasin? Wouldn’t it be good for a change, at least? Just think it over. If you convince your boy, take him with all my blessings. But if he is not convinced, don’t leave in anger. Go on loving him. Let him do what he wants to do. Let him have his own life experience in his own way. Who knows?When Buddha left his palace his father was worried. Twelve years later, when he became enlightened and came back, his father was naturally very angry. This was his only son, born when the father was very old. He was God’s gift. He was the only heir to the kingdom and he had left the old man. To whom was this kingdom going to belong? There was nobody to look after it – and the old man was eighty years old.When Buddha went back, of course the father was angry. He went to the door and said, “I am your father. I still feel for you although I know you have done a foolish thing. But you are not meant to be a beggar, a sannyasin, you are an emperor’s son and you are meant to be an emperor. Come back. I am angry, but I am your father, I can forgive you. Come back. Drop all this nonsense and disperse all these sannyasins, these mad people, who are following you. Their mothers and fathers must be suffering like me. I have not slept for twelve years. I could not sleep. It has been a nightmare. You have hurt me very deeply.”Buddha was standing there. The father was very angry and went on shouting at him until finally he cooled down a little. Then Buddha said, “Sir, you don’t see that I am not the same person who left the palace. Look at me. I am a totally new being. I am not the same person who left the palace, who used to be your son. My body may look the same but look deep into me. Something has happened. I have come just to show my gratitude to you, to show I am happy that I was born to you, that you gave me birth. I have attained and I have come to share my experience with you. In your old age I would like you also to attain because death is coming. I can see your legs are shaking, you cannot stand up straight. Death is coming. Before death comes, know what truth is, know what life is. Before death comes, realize yourself.”The father looked at his son. Certainly he was not the same man although he looked the same. This figure was luminous, a great light had happened to him. The father cooled down, he meditated over it, he thought about it again and again and he found that his son was right. His reaction was just a reaction, an unconscious reaction. Finally he himself became a meditator. Eventually, before he died, he became a bhikku, he became a sannyasin.Your responsibility is great, but don’t just react out of unawareness. Give the boy a chance also. He may be right. See his side too. Always remember that truth is nobody’s monopoly and truth has nothing to do with age. Sometimes a small child has it, and sometimes an old man has it not. Whenever you say something, remember not to judge.Just a few days ago, something happened. Old Paritosh had written a journal, a beautiful journal. I have looked at it and many other sannyasins have looked at it – we have many talented people around here, authors, poets, published novelists. They have all looked at it and they liked it. So he sent it to a friend who is a publisher in England.A few days ago he received the journal back. By mistake, by some unconscious mistake, the letter that he had written to the publisher came back with the manuscript. The publisher must have given the manuscript to a reader – and on the letter the reader had written: “This man is boring.”First this letter should not have come with the manuscript. People go on doing things in a very deep sleep. Secondly, you cannot say, “This man is very boring,” because the reader is supposed to talk about the book not about the author. The book may be boring, but what do you know about the man? Thirdly, the reader was supposed to show his reaction, not to judge it. He should have said, “I am bored with this book,” not, “the book is boring.” These are two different things. “I am bored with this book” – this is perfectly okay. This is his response – if I feel I am bored, I am bored.But somebody else may be intrigued. When Vivek was reading the journal she was so interested she could not put it down until she finished it, she had to finish it. She became very involved.It depends on you. The person may be saying something about the journal but really he is saying something about himself. He may have felt bored. He may have no understanding of meditation, he may never have heard about sannyas. He may not know what is going on here. He may have felt completely disconnected. That is his response. But people work in deep sleep.When I was looking at this letter and the reader’s comment, I remembered when Bertrand Russell was traveling in America…He could not sleep the whole night because the train compartment had so many mosquitoes in it. In the morning he was very angry. You pay for a first class carriage, air-conditioned, but what is the point if there are so many mosquitoes in it?So he wrote a very angry letter to the director of the company. Promptly the reply came by the next post. Bertrand Russell was very happy because the reply was very gratifying. The director said: “Sir, nobody has ever complained so we never knew about this. We are tremendously grateful to you that you took the trouble to inform us. Things will be put right. Next time you travel in our train this will not happen.” He was very happy. Again and again the director had said: “We are grateful, grateful, very grateful, blah, blah, blah…”Then suddenly Bertrand Russell became aware of a small slip in the envelope. He took the slip out. On the slip was a hand-written message: “Send this fool the bug letter.” The director must have written that message to the clerk concerned: “Send this fool the bug letter.” He was very shocked. Then he became aware that the letter was printed. It was being sent to everybody.This is how things go. People are very unaware. You don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know why you are doing it, you don’t know what will be the consequence, you don’t know what the source of it is.This is my suggestion to this father. Please meditate here; be here for a few days, see what your son is doing, try to understand from his side. Stand in his shoes for a little while. Then explain your heart to him. But you can explain only if you have understood him, understand what he is doing. Otherwise your understanding will be prejudiced, you will be a stranger. You will say something which may not fit. Try to see his viewpoint, what he is doing.Who knows, you may be convinced this is right rather than trying to take him back. You may start thinking about becoming a sannyasin or you may at least start thinking about meditating. Your son may have opened a door for you. Sometimes it happens that when old people have no courage, young people open the door. Young people are certainly daredevils. They can do things old people can’t do.In the whole history of humanity it has always been because of young people that new things have happened – never because of old people. They cannot do new things because they are too efficient with the old.Have you heard the beautiful parable about the clothes of the emperor?It happened once that a cheat convinced an emperor that he could bring clothing for him from heaven. Of course, the king became greedy. He said, “I am ready to pay. Whatsoever the cost, bring them but don’t try to deceive me!”The man said, “I won’t leave the palace because the way to heaven is not outside, it is an inner way. I have to go into my consciousness – from there I enter heaven. I know the key so I will bring the clothes for you. And remember, never before have God’s clothes ever come to earth. This is the first time. You will be the first and unique person to have them. Only million rupees will be needed.”The king said, “Everything will be supplied.”The king increased the guards in the palace and the man was given a big room. Every day he asked for more money, more money, more money. The king became a little troubled: “What are you doing with so much money?”He said, “Bribery. The guards there in heaven and the ministers and the court people – it is a difficult thing to gain access to God’s clothes. But I am coming closer, so just go on supplying the money.”He took millions of rupees. Then the date, the cherished date came, and the man came out with a very beautiful box. He said, “These clothes should be received in a celebration.” So a great celebration was arranged. The whole capital gathered. The court, the palace, everything was decorated. It was a rare thing. Never before had it happened. It was historical.Then the cheat came to the king and said, “Come here, close to the box.” He opened the box and he said, “There is one condition. These are invisible clothes.”Certainly – God is invisible so his clothes cannot be visible, otherwise it would look very awkward, just shirts walking, coats walking. The clothes are invisible.“But,” said the cheat, “one thing I inquired about when I was getting these clothes. They said that they are invisible, but that people who are born, really born, from their own fathers, will be able to see them. Those whose birth is suspicious, doubtful, they will not be able to see them.” He opened the box and he showed the king, “Look! How beautiful they are!”Now the king thought, “If I say that there is nothing there, people will think that I am not born of my own father. This is tricky.” And he called his court people and said, “Look, come here! See these beautiful clothes.”They all looked and they all said, “We have never seen such beautiful clothes.” And they started praising the clothes like anything; they started competing with each other in praise.And the king thought, “It was good I didn’t say anything because everybody can see them.”But everybody was thinking, “Everybody else sees the clothes, only I am suspicious, but it is better to keep the secret. What is the point?”The cheat took up an invisible cap, gave it to the king and took the cap of the king and put it in the box. By and by the king’s clothes started disappearing. He became afraid. When the last piece was going there was a moment when he started thinking, “Should I say the truth?” But now it was too late. All his prestige was at stake – not only his, his father’s, his mother’s, his whole heritage. And everybody saw and the crowd was shouting and became very excited. Nobody saw and yet everybody saw the clothes. So the king said to himself, “It is better this way. When everybody can see the clothes, why be worried? Only I see myself as naked, everybody else sees me as dressed.”So he took the last jump – his underwear also went. He was standing nude. And people were shouting and clapping and everybody saw that he was nude.Then a small child, who had come with his father and was sitting on his shoulders, said to his father, “But the king is naked.”The father said, “Stupid! Keep quiet. You are not grown up yet. When you are grown up you will also see the clothes. Can’t you see? Everybody sees the clothes.”Only that small child had seen the truth and was able to tell it. It has always been so. Only young people have been able to see the truth first because they don’t worry, they don’t have anything to be worried about, they have nothing at stake. They can be courageous and daring.So who knows? Your son may have seen the truth. Don’t drag him back. Put your heart before him, talk to him, but in no way, subtle or gross, enforce anything. Just show how you are feeling, and feel what he is feeling here. Don’t say, “When you are grown up and well educated you will be able to understand more.”The same thing was said by the father to the young child and the boy was the only one in that big crowd who was man enough to see the truth, to recognize the truth and to say it. But the father immediately hushed him. That’s what fathers have been doing down the ages.The fifth question:Osho,Why don't you hit me? I feel ready.I don’t accept your recommendation. If you feel ready that means you are not ready. This is your ego assertion that you are ready. One who is ready will never assert because readiness comes through non-ego. One who is ready will be humble and meek; one who is ready will stand at the back of the queue. He will not try to come first. Remember, those who are the last will be the first and those who are trying hard to be the first will be the last.There is no need to come and propagate that you are ready. If you are ready, I will know first, you will not know first. So leave it to me.In fact, this is greed – and a very strange human mind. When I hit people, they don’t feel good. Ananda Prem felt terrible, so did fat Veena – so-called fat Veena – she is not so fat. She cried the whole morning. And so did Amida. When I was talking here she was feeling terrible. When I hit you, you feel terrible.When I don’t hit you, you ask for it because sometimes the mind is so cunning that it starts thinking that by being hit you will become special. That will be proof that you are ready, ripe. That will be proof that now you deserve to be hit.This is ego. And ego is the only barrier. It is the ego that doesn’t allow you to change. I am not interested in little changes here; I am not interested in reforming you. I am interested in destroying you utterly so that something utterly new is born. Less than that won’t do.What you want is for your ego to be decorated with a few medals so that you can go out and say, “See, Osho has hit me harder than anybody has ever been hit before. I am special.”This desire to be special is a disease. Sometimes it happens that this desire to be special can lead you to become humble too. I say that those who are the last will be the first, then you can start competing for the last place. Again you are competing for the first. Watch out. Mind is really cunning. It can play game upon game upon game. It is like a Chinese box: you open one, there is another; you open that, there is still another. And they fit into each other so perfectly. There is just a slightly smaller box inside and again a smaller one, and again a smaller one. Ego is a Chinese box. Watch it carefully, otherwise you will never get rid of it.Let me repeat again: I am not here to reform you. Reform is an ugly word. Reform means that you remain the same with a few touches here and there – I paint you here and there. You remain the same, basically the same structure, the same gestalt, although made a little more beautiful. No, I am not interested in that, I am interested in your utter disappearance – so you are no more.When you are not, for the first time you will be virgin, innocent, as fresh as the dewdrop in the morning. That’s what godliness is. That freshness is godliness. That original happening is godliness. That entry of the new into the old is godliness. When that new enters, the old simply disappears, or, when the old disappears, only then the new enters. Then entry of the new and the disappearance of the old are simultaneous. In a single moment they happen.But I understand your trouble.In a New England resort town there was a man so homely that he was the butt of every practical joke that his townsfolk could think up. A plastic surgeon who visited the resort on vacation was so touched by his ugliness that he offered to change the man’s face without charge. “In fact,” he said, “just for the heck of it, I will do some plastic surgery that will make you the handsomest man in New England.”Just before he put the man under the knife, the surgeon asked, “Do you want me to change your face completely, totally?”“No,” answered the man, “not too much. I want the fellows to know who it is who is so handsome.”This is how the ego functions. You want the fellows to know who it is who is so handsome. You want the fellows to know who it is who is so meek, so humble, who it is standing at the back of the queue. If even that much desire is there, the ego is completely alive, thriving. Nothing has changed. Only a total change is a change.You need not suggest to me what I should do. Leave it to me. When the time is ripe and I feel you need a hit on the head I will do it. I will never do it because you ask; I will do it when it is needed.You cannot understand what is needed. Again and again you misunderstand your want for your need. Your want is not a need. I understand that you want it, but you want it for the wrong reasons. I will give the hit when you need it, not because you want it. When all your wanting has disappeared you will need it – when you are not at all aware of it, then it comes suddenly, it comes abruptly. Only then is it meaningful.You have asked a question. If you are waiting and I come there and hit you on your head, it will be meaningless. You were waiting for it, you were expecting it, you will be thrilled, your ego will become a big balloon. You will go around with a big chest saying, “See what happened? I am ready.”God comes to you only when you are not expecting him at all. He comes in moments when you are completely oblivious of desire. He comes only in moments when there is no desire, when there is desirelessness. He comes abruptly, suddenly. When you expect it is exactly when you remain closed. When you don’t expect it, you open.Haven’t you seen it again and again in life? All that is beautiful happens only when you are not expecting it. When you expect it, things don’t happen. Even if they happen, you don’t get any blissfulness through them. All bliss is abrupt, unconnected with the past, discontinuous with the past.So please wait. Wait without expecting. Wait oblivious of all desires. Whenever anything is needed, it is my business to do it – that is my responsibility. When you become a sannyasin, it is your commitment and my responsibility.The last question:Osho,It seems to me that I am becoming really mad.You have always been mad; it is not that you are becoming mad. You are simply becoming a little bit more alert about it.Mind is madness. That’s why you don’t look within. If you look within, you will find a mad rush. Not only one mad person is there, there is a mad crowd. And the whole crowd is at each other’s throats. That’s why I go on saying, “Look within.” So says Socrates, so says Buddha, so says Jesus: “Look within. The Kingdom of God is within.”Nobody is willing to look within. They listen, they say, “Okay, sometime we will look.” But nobody is ready to look. Why? Because when you look within, you don’t see the kingdom of God, you see a madhouse. When you look within, you don’t see the blissfulness of Buddha, you just see neurosis. You see the same thoughts repeating, repeating, as if a gramophone record has got stuck and goes on repeating the same, the same, the same. When you meditate you start becoming aware. When you become aware, you feel that you are going mad. No! If you are becoming aware that you are going mad, you are getting away from it, you are going beyond it.A person who is aware that he is mad is already on the threshold of sanity. A mad person is never aware that he is mad. You can go to the madhouse and ask mad people. They will laugh. Nobody will be ready to say that he is mad. They think the whole world is mad except themselves. This is a criterion of a mad person – he thinks the whole world is mad except himself.What about a sane person? Lao Tzu says, “The whole world seems to be very intelligent except me. The whole world seems to be very clear except me – I am confused. The world seems to have clarity, transparency of mind, I am muddle-headed. The whole world is clever and wise, I am an idiot.” Look what Lao Tzu is saying. This is the indication of a sane man – the sanest ever.So, Satisha – this is a question from Satisha – you are coming closer to sanity because you are becoming aware of your madness. Watch it. Don’t get scared and don’t rush out. Go into it. Look into it. Go into it and look into it. Persistent perseverance is needed.Just remember one thing: the one who is aware is not the one you are aware of. The observer is separate from the observed. If you see a mad thought running, humming inside, you are not that thought. You are the witness who knows that it is there.You say: “It seems to me that I am becoming really mad.” Then there are two things: something is going mad and something is watching. That watcher is you. Mind is always mad, that’s why we don’t watch the mind. Watch the mind and you will start feeling what is happening. You never thought that you were mad, now you feel as if you are. It is a good sign, a good indication. You are coming closer to home.An anecdote…A man in a double-decker bus was charged with striking a woman, a fellow passenger. The magistrate asked him what excuse he could offer.“Well, sir, it was like this,” replied the culprit. “She sat on the seat beside me on the lower deck of the bus. Then she opened her bag, took out her purse, closed her bag, opened her purse, took out a tuppence, closed her purse, opened her bag, put back the purse and closed her bag. Then she noticed the conductor was going upstairs, so she opened her bag, took out her purse, closed her bag, opened her purse, put in her tuppence, closed her purse, opened her bag, put in her purse and closed her bag. Then she saw the conductor coming down the stairs so she opened her bag, took out her purse, closed her bag, opened her purse, took out a tuppence and closed her…”The magistrate could not bear it any longer. “Stop!” he cried. “You will drive me crazy.”“That’s just what happened to me, sir,” said the man.That is what is continuously happening to your mind. If you watch, it feels as if it will drive you crazy, but watching is the only way to go beyond it. Otherwise whether you know it or not, you are crazy. You don’t become a sane person just by not knowing it.Watch it, go into it, Satisha. I know Satisha must be getting crazy. Today she asked almost three dozen questions. She must be going crazy! But it is good. You are blessed that you are becoming alert. Hold on to this alertness. Get more centered in this alertness. The more alert you become, the farther away the noise of the mind will go. When you are really centered the mind disappears – because it is the same energy that is involved in thoughts that is used in centering. When the energy becomes centering, thoughts simply flop dead. They don’t have any energy. They disappear.Enough for today.

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

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

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-pathless-path-vol-2-13/

Duke Mu of Ch’en said to Po-lo:“You are getting on in years. Is there anyone in your family whom I can send to find me horses?”“A good horse can be identified by its shape and look, its bone and muscle, but the great horses of the world might be extinct, vanished, perished, lost. Such horses raise no dust and leave no tracks. All my sons have lesser talent – they can pick a good horse, but not a great one. But there is a man I know who carries and hauls and collects firewood for me, Chiu-fang Kao. As a judge of horses he is my equal. I suggest that you see him.”Duke Mu saw the man and sent him away to find horses. After three months he returned and reported to the duke,“I have got one, it is in Sha-ch’ui.”“What kind of horse?”“A mare, yellow.”The duke sent someone to fetch it. It turned out to be a stallion, and black.The duke, displeased, summoned Po-lo.“He’s no good, the fellow you sent to find me horses. He cannot even tell one color from another or a mare from a stallion. What can he know about horses?”Po-lo breathed a sigh of wonder.“So now he has risen to this! It is just this that shows he is worth a thousand, ten thousand, any number of people like me. What such a man as Kao observes is the innermost native impulse behind the horse’s movements. He grasps the essence and forgets the dross, goes right inside it and forgets the outside. He looks for and sees what he needs to see, ignores what he does not need to see. In the judgment of horses of a man like Kao there is something more important than horses.”When the horse arrived it did prove to be a great horse.Tao is the vision of the total, the vision of the whole. Parts don’t matter, parts don’t have any meaning in themselves. The meaning belongs to the whole, to the unity, to the organic unity – if you look for meaning in the parts you will look in vain. Not only that, if you insist on looking for the meaning in the parts, you will destroy meaning rather than find it. That will be a destructive attitude.For example, a poem does not exist in the words that constitute it, it exists somewhere beyond the words. It is transcendental. If you dissect the words, the sentences, the linguistic form, what are you going to gain? If you dissect a poem, if you dismember a poem, you are killing an alive unity. It is as if you are dissecting the body of a man – by the time you have succeeded in dissecting the body of the man the spirit is gone. Whatsoever you find will be a dead corpse. And you were searching for the man, not for the dead corpse. The man is in the unity, so is the poem.If you dismember poetry, you will find sentences; if you dismember the sentences you will find clauses; if you dismember the clauses you will find words; if you dismember the words, then the alphabet is left. But where is the poetry – the poetry that has thrilled your heart? Where is that beauty that touched your being, which gave you wings? Where is that vision? In the alphabet there is nothing.How did it disappear? Your approach was basically wrong. Your approach was basically destructive, violent. You dissected it. Poetry must be seen in its totality. It must be grasped as a whole. If you can grasp it as a whole, then each word contributes to it; if you cannot grasp it as a whole, then words don’t constitute it. Words constitute only the body of a poem, not the heart of it. Yes, the heart cannot exist without the body but the heart is not the body.Man cannot exist without the body, certainly, but man is not just the body. Man is far more. Man is far superior. Man is far higher. He is tethered to the body, living in the body, but not the body itself. The body is the temple and man is the god in it. Yes, if you destroy the temple the god will not have any abode; it will disappear, evaporate.Just so does a poem disappear. The poem is the god that resides in the words, the rhythm, the meaning, the beauty.Listen to a small haiku of Basho, the greatest master of haikus. It is a really small haiku, a few words.The ancient pond.When I say it, visualize it because a haiku must be visualized. It is a picture poem. Only in visualization will you understand it.The ancient pond.A frog jumps in.Plop.Finished. You can visualize it; you can visualize it with your inner eye – the ancient pond with moss on the rocks. You can almost touch it. You can feel the texture of it. It is a very ancient pond. Dry leaves are on the surface, dry leaves are on the banks. Old pine trees are standing guard. You can visualize it. You can smell the pine trees, the fragrance, the coolness. Maybe the morning sun…And the frog. You can see the frog alive. The frog jumps in. In Japanese the actual translation will be: a frog-jump-in – not jumps in. A frog-jump-in. The frog and the jump are not two things, you cannot dissect the frog from his jump. He is the jump. He is in the jump. The Japanese and Chinese languages are far deeper than other languages. But to put it rightly, in good English, we will say: “A frog jumps in” – as if he is doing something. To jump in is not doing anything for a frog, it is not an act. It is spontaneous. “A frog jumps in. Plop.” The sound, the ripples on the surface of the old lake – and the silence.Now, if you dissect this small poem – there are only nine syllables in it – what are you going to get? You will get a few words. Then dissect the words and you get the alphabet – linguistic elements. All meaning is lost. It is as if you go to see a beautiful painting and you dissect it into its colors. The painting is lost. Or, if I give you a beautiful lotus and you dissect it into its chemical constituents then the lotus is lost.That’s how science has destroyed all meaning in life. If people in the West are feeling that life is meaningless, it is a by-product of their scientific endeavor. Science is trying to make life more intelligible; it has made life more intelligible, but all meaning has been lost.The people who had not much knowledge about life were far happier. Life had more meaning then. They had not dissected the lotus, they were enjoying it. They were not worried about the constituents, the chemicals, they were not worrying about what beauty was – they were enjoying it, they were in it, they were swallowing it, they were swallowed by it. They were in tune with beauty, life, existence, and there was meaning.Now science has made things much more intelligible; it has explained almost everything, and through explanations the beauty is destroyed. Explanation is in your hands but where is the mystery of life? If you go to a biologist and ask him what love is, he will explain it to you. It is nothing but a hormonal thing. Some chemicals running in your veins, in your arteries, in your blood, some hormones released by your glands – that’s what love is. Now tell a mother that the love that she has for her child is nothing but hormonal; tell a woman who has fallen in love with a man and is ready to sacrifice her whole life, is ready to die, will be happy to die for this man, tell her that it is just hormonal.You are not saying something wrong, you are perfectly accurate, you are perfectly right – but something is missing in your truth. Your truth is dead. Your truth is concerned with the lowest denominator. It is as if somebody asks you about the lotus and you say it is nothing but the mud. What is a lotus? Nothing but the mud because it comes out of the mud. What is love? Hormonal because it comes out of the hormones.That’s why Freud reduced all love to sexuality. Then he reduced prayer, then God too. Everything became sexual. The moment prayer, love and God all became sexual something was lost.Tao’s approach is just the opposite. Tao says rather than explaining the thing by the part, rather than explaining the whole by the part, try to explain the part by the whole.For example, this haiku I told you: “The ancient pond. A frog jumps in. Plop.” Now, the word frog or the word plop, the sound plop, can exist in a thousand and one contexts. In every context it will have a different meaning because the meaning will depend on the context. Plop itself does not carry the meaning. It depends. In Basho’s haiku you suddenly know what it is because of the frog. The frog gives meaning to it; the ancient pond gives meaning to it. In a different context will mean a different thing. The context, the whole, gives the meaning to the part.“The ancient pond.” The word ancient can be used in a thousand and one ways. You will find it used in many ways. In every context it will have a different meaning. So the meaning is not contained in the word ancient, the meaning is contained in the whole in which the word is used.You can see it in your whole life. Everything has meaning only because it is part of an organic unity which is higher than it is, bigger than it is. The meaning comes from the higher; the meaning comes from the bigger. The meaning certainly comes to the lowest, but the lowest is not the determining factor. Look at the different approach. If you ask the scientist, he will say the lotus is nothing but the mud; if you ask the Taoist, he will say the mud is nothing but the lotus.The difference is tremendous. When you say that the lotus is nothing but the mud, the dirty mud, you have destroyed all beauty. Then only dirty mud is left in your hands and in your soul. Then you are left with a filthy life. Taoists say that if a lotus can come out of the mud then the mud cannot be just mud, it must be carrying the lotus, the possibility of the lotus. The fragrance, the color, the beauty of the lotus must be hidden somewhere in the mud. So don’t call it just mud – it carries the lotus, it is the womb for the lotus. Even mud becomes beautiful. And you start looking for the meaning in the mud. It is there somewhere – you may be able to see it, you may not be able to see it, it depends on your clarity, your eyes. But condemnation disappears.Freud says that all of love is nothing but sex: even the love of God, even the love of Meera for Krishna, the love of Ananda for Buddha, the love of Mary Magdalene for Jesus is nothing but sexuality. Can’t you see how much beauty is destroyed immediately with a stroke? If you ask the Taoist, he will say that even when a man goes to make love to a prostitute there is something of prayer in it, there is something of the divine in it.Just a few days ago I saw an article written by the Yogi Dattabal. He has put me with Freud, has said that we both say the same thing. There cannot be any greater misunderstanding. I say sex is love, Freud says love is sex – and the difference is tremendous. I say that in sex there is also a glimpse of samadhi; I also make sex sacred. Freud says that in samadhi, in Ramakrishna’s samadhi, there is nothing but repressed sexuality. He makes samadhi profane.Those who have no understanding can put me in a bracket with Freud. It is very easy, simple. They will say, “What is the difference whether you call love sex or you call sex love? There is no difference.” Not much if you only think of the words. Then there is only the difference that I put sex in one place and love in another and Freud puts them just in the opposite places. So there is not much difference.Can’t you see the difference? The difference is tremendous, vital, and of great value. And much will depend on that difference.The Taoist vision is to look at the part through the whole so that the whole can give a meaning to the part, can make it meaningful. Not otherwise. Your eyes are beautiful but taken out of your body they won’t be.It happened in the life of Vincent Van Gogh… He was an ugly man, very ugly – a great painter and a beautiful soul, but a very ugly body. No woman ever fell in love with him. He was repulsive, he was horrible. And he suffered very much. At the age of thirty-three he committed suicide. If there is nobody to love you, what is there to live for?Once visiting a prostitute he said, “Nobody has ever said anything to me lovingly. Nobody has said that I am beautiful or I am nice or I am this or that. I hanker for it.”The woman took pity on him; she must have had a very compassionate heart. She looked to find something that she could appreciate but she could not find anything. The face was ugly, the nose was ugly, the eyes were ugly, and everything was topsy-turvy – except the ears. So she said, “But you have beautiful ears.” And she played with his ear.He went home, cut off his ear and presented it to the woman. She could not believe it! He brought the ear with the blood flowing and he said, “You like it, so now it belongs to you.”But an ear cut from the body is no longer beautiful – even the most beautiful ear will become ugly.Take things out of their context and they lose all meaning, they lose all beauty, they lose all truth. Truth is with the whole, so it is beauty, so it is goodness. This is the first thing to be understood about Tao – it is a vision of the whole.And the whole must not be put together from dissected, constituent parts. This is the second thing to remember. There have been people who try to put the whole together. For example, Freud’s psychoanalysis tried to dissect human mind, human psyche, into fragments – that’s why it is called analysis, psychoanalysis. First he dissected the human mind into its constituent parts and destroyed much. Then came Assagioli and he created psychosynthesis. What Freud has done, Assagioli tries to undo. He puts the parts together again. Freud has destroyed, but Assagioli has not been able to revive anything – he cannot.This will be difficult, but it must be understood because it will help you to understand the Taoist attitude. Freud does analysis. First he cuts off the limbs of the body and then he spreads all the limbs on the table and examines them. Then comes Assagioli. He puts all the limbs together again, binds them together, glues them together and thinks that now the man is whole. Both are wrong. Once you have killed something you cannot put it together. Life is so precious that once gone, it is gone forever. You cannot put it together.If somebody takes all the petals of a rose apart and then Assagioli comes and puts all the petals together, pins them together and says “Now it is a real flower”… No, it is not the real flower. It only gives a false idea of unity. The unity is not there because the pins that are holding it were never part of it; the glue that is holding it was never a part of an alive rose. The alive rose was holding itself together, remember. It was not being held together by something else, it was not dependent for its unity on something else; it was holding itself together. It is the spirit that keeps you together, that holds you together. It is not that your hands and your legs and your eyes are put together, no. Something in you exists which is keeping them together. Once that unity is destroyed, even if you put things back, it will not be real unity.So I am not in favor of Freud’s analysis, nor am I in favor of Assagioli’s synthesis. My attitude is exactly that of Tao.What does Tao say? Tao says look for the unity that existed before analysis began. Go to the primordial, the primitive unity, the original. Go to the original. Synthesis comes after analysis, it follows analysis, it succeeds analysis. And the wholeness? The wholeness preceded analysis. It was before analysis destroyed it. The vision must be total and you have to see things in their totality. You are not to put them together. If you put them together, it will be a false unity, it will be synthetic, it will be artificial, plastic. It will not be true.Is it clear to you? Look at the tree. The tree is together. Look deep into the tree. The tree is together with the earth because it is joined together. If you look deeply, the earth exists together with the sun. Without the sun, the earth cannot exist; without the sun, the tree will not be green, will not be alive; without the air surrounding it, it will not be able to breathe. So it is joined together with the air, with the earth, with the sun, and with the stars – with everything. All of existence is intertwined; we are intertwined with each other. I am in you, you are in me; we are in the tree, the trees are in us; we are in the earth and the earth is in us and we are intertwined. We are members of each other, we don’t exist separately.To look from this high standpoint of ultimate unity is what Tao is. And then things have a totally different color. Then your vision reveals things which cannot be revealed on lower planes. It is not a question of putting them together.One day a Christian missionary came to me and said, “I am happy that you are trying to put all the religions together.” I said, “You have not understood me. I am not putting them together. I see them as one.”I am not putting them together; I am not making a synthesis. I am not in agreement with Mahatma Gandhi who was trying to create a synthesis by putting together Islam, Hinduism, Christianity – a few parts from the Bible and a few from the Koran and a few from the Gita – and making something out of it. This is a hodgepodge, a kedgeree, it is not unity; it is not the total vision. I am not putting Christ and Mohammed and Mahavira and Krishna and Lao Tzu together. No, as I see them they are one. It is not a question of putting them together, I am not making any effort to put them together; I am not trying to find some synthesis in them. They are one – that is my experience. They are one. They have never been separate. The separation is not possible. They join together into truth. They know the same truth, they live the same life, they enjoy the same bliss. Their samadhi is one. I am not putting anything together; I am simply saying it is so.The second thing: Tao is not interested in understanding anything in separation because that understanding will be false, rooted in falsity. You cannot understand a thing separately because in that very separation, in that very definition, you have taken it out of its total context, out of its organic unity. Then you may have an explanation but no understanding.Science explains; religion understands. Explanations are concerned with the parts; understanding is concerned with the total. Understanding is a very vague thing, liquid, cloudy. Explanation is very clear-cut and because it is clear-cut it is wrong. In life nothing is clear-cut. Boundaries merge and meet.For example, you see a woman. In the morning she may be a woman. In the evening she may become a man. You see a man, he is very angry. And within a moment he could become soft and may become a woman.It happened last night. I hit Yatri hard on the head and he shouted and screamed and said, “I will cut off your head, Osho!” I know him; he is a very feminine person. But he became very, very aggressive. Then he cooled down and fell at my feet. Now what was happening? Rather than cutting off my head he fell at my feet. No, this is not the same person who was going to cut off my head. He touched his head to my feet. And the interval was not very long; it happened within a few minutes. In one moment he was male, yang; then he became female, yin.Boundaries meet and merge. The person who loves you can be angry; the person who is angry can love you.In reality nothing is very clear-cut, and it is good that it is not very clear-cut. Look: the higher the being, the more vagueness there is; the lower the being, the more it is clear-cut. A rock has far more clear-cut definitions than a man. The rock remains a rock. In the morning, in the evening, in the night, the rock remains the rock. But a man goes on changing, changing, changing. The higher the unity, the more delicate the balance; the lower the unity, the more fixed the balance.When a person has really attained to the ultimate, he is very fluid, riverlike. He is no longer like an ice cube. He has melted. An ice cube has definite boundaries, an ice cube can be defined, but when you have melted it, all definitions disappear.Tao does not give any explanation but it understands; science gives explanations but it doesn’t understand. And the very explanations become barriers to understanding. The moment you have explained a thing you have destroyed its mystery. Never say that something is completely explained – that means that it is completely meaningless. Explain a thing and you have explained it away.When a husband says that he understands his wife totally, love has disappeared. Now love cannot exist. Love can exist only when still there is mystery – when the husband still does not understand, when the wife still does not understand, when there is still a possibility that the husband may do something and the wife will be surprised, when surprise is still possible. This means that not everything is explained; something remains unexplained, something remains elusive, something remains mercury-like. You go on grasping it and it continues to slip away – that’s the beauty of life.Tao says that the whole of life is mercury-like. The total is so alive that no fixed explanation is possible. You cannot label anything because things change so fast. By the time you have labeled something your label is already false – the thing has changed. The moment you have said something the utterance is already meaningless because the reality is no longer the same. Explanations, Tao has none of. Understanding, it has tremendously. And this is one of the basic ingredients of understanding: that life is a mystery.The third thing: science tries to explain things by their causes and Tao tries to understand things by their ends. The difference is of tremendous value and must be understood. Science goes into the causes, the how of things. Tao goes into the end, the ultimate flowering, the why of things. For example, if you fall in love with a woman or a man, science will ask “How” – how did you fall in love? It will go into the causes of it. Tao will ask “Why.” It will go into the end of it. Science moves toward the seeds for its explanation and Tao moves toward the flower or the fruit for its understanding. Science goes into the past, Tao goes into the future. Science looks into the dead, Tao looks into the possibility and potentiality.It is said that a Sufi mystic was sent to India by a great Iranian king as a messenger to the Indian emperor. There was some conflict and the Iranian emperor was a little worried. So he sent this Sufi mystic to put things right, to create some understanding between the two countries.The mystic came to the Indian emperor, presented his credentials, and showed his appreciation of the Indian emperor by saying, “You are a full moon.”The news reached Iran that he had said to the emperor, “You are a full moon.” When he had departed from Iran he had said to the Iranian king, “You are a new moon.” The Iranian king was very angry. New moon? That means just the beginning, the first-day moon – you cannot even see it. Only on the second day does it become a little visible – on the third day a little more. Meanwhile he had said to the Indian emperor that he was the full moon. This was insulting. Let him come!The king waited in anger. When the mystic came back he was immediately caught, brought to the court and asked for an explanation. He laughed. He said, “It is simple. A full moon is finished. It is already dead. A full moon is on its deathbed. It is ready to decline. It has a past but no future. Hence I said to the Indian king, ‘You are a full moon.’ You, I have called the first-day moon, the new moon. You have a future, you have potentiality, you are growing. Maybe the Indian emperor’s empire is great, but it is dead.”Look: when something has a past it is already old. Science goes into the past. If you go to a psychoanalyst, he will go into your past. He will say, “Relate your whole past. What happened in the past? Start at your early childhood and go on from there.” He goes into the past. If a man is mad and is brought to a psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst goes into the cause – why did he become mad in the first place? He has to go there. He has to look into the past to find the cause.If you are brought to a Taoist, he will not go into the past. He will look into the future. He will think of what purpose your madness serves. Look at the approach. What purpose can your madness serve? If you are mad, can your madness be put to dancing, to meditating, to singing? Certainly a madman has more energy available – maybe that’s why he is mad. His madness can be used in a creative way. There is no need to think of how to destroy it, the need is how to use it, how to be creative with it.If you go to a Taoist, he will look into your madness, he will try to figure out your future, your higher possibilities, and he will consider how to use your madness for that future, how to make your madness serve your destiny.That’s what I am doing here. When you come to me you are mad, you are neurotic. I am not worried about it. My whole function here is how to make it creative. Madness is great energy. If you look into the past it is a problem, if you look into the future it can be used and can become a stepping stone. Everything can be used.Tao believes in the same way as a gardener does in using manure. You can hoard manure and it will simply stink and it will make your life impossible. But you can spread the manure on the flower beds and the same stinking manure will become tremendously valuable perfume in the flowers. It has been used rightly. Manure is not to be collected; it must be spread on flower beds. Then the flowers grow bigger, with more color, with more life, with more fragrance, with more stability, with more zest and enthusiasm. And it is the same manure that may have become stinking, may have made life impossible.What is madness? It is manure. What is anger? What is hatred? What is jealousy? They are manure. If you go on hoarding them, you will certainly go mad. It will be impossible to live with it. The Taoist approach is to spread it on the flower beds. It can serve meditation, it can serve love, it can serve joy, it can serve happiness, it can serve God.A madman can reach God faster than the so-called sane people because the sane people move very cautiously. They don’t run, they don’t rush. Sane people move only so far, and always think, doubt, hesitate, linger, wait. They have many, many things that hold them back. A madman simply rushes. Nothing holds him. He is certainly mad. There is nothing to hold him. If he wants to do something, he will do it.If a madman becomes interested in God, then it is sure that he is going to attain. If a madman becomes a painter, his painting will have a certain quality. No sane person could ever paint like a madman because a madman will not only paint, he will put his whole life into it. Van Gogh was a madman, so was Picasso. In fact, all the great painters were mad people and all the great poets were mad people. In fact, all the great people who have existed on the earth were thought by someone or other to be mad. Madness has tremendous potentiality.Everything is potential – see how it can be used. Look at the future. Never think in terms of being a full moon, always remain a new moon.So the Tao approach is never for the cause but for the end. It is eschatological, it is not causal. And it is tremendously beautiful because God is the end of the whole existence. That is the ultimate – where are we moving to, where are we going? What are we going to be? Everything can be put in a right way so that we can reach that goal more easily more softly, more joyously.The last thing before we enter into the parable: philosophy divides knowledge into two – the subject and the object. With the object you cannot have any dialogue. A rock is an object – you cannot have any dialogue with it. You can watch, you can dissect, you can observe, you can find a few clues about it, but you cannot have any dialogue because you don’t believe that the rock is a person. It is an object.The word object is beautiful. It comes from objectum – that which stands in your way, that which prevents you from moving, that which hinders your path. An object means that which stands in the way like a barrier, like a wall. If you believe that the whole world is objective – as science believes – then the whole world is a China Wall. There is no dialogue possible.If you look at your wife as an object to be used sexually or financially or in some other way; if you look at your husband as an object, a security, or something like that, somebody to lean upon, somebody you can use, somebody you can depend upon, but as an object, then there is no dialogue. Between a husband and a wife the dialogue never happens because both think of the other as an object, as a means. They don’t think of the other as a person.Tao says everything is subjective; even that which stands in your way has its own subjectivity. You can even provoke a dialogue with a rock; you can provoke a dialogue with a tree. So why not human beings? You can provoke a dialogue with anything – with the universe itself, with the sky, with the wind – and then there is a relationship, you relate. When you think about things as things and not as persons, when you think about the world as objective – as science teaches you to do – then you can hammer out a few facts but truth remains unrevealed. Truth is revealed only when you persuade existence, when you seduce existence through deep love and sympathy, when you are en rapport with existence, when you touch the rock as you would like to touch a person – you feel the texture of it, you close your eyes, you create a sort of relationship with it. And, if you are ready, if you understand Tao, you will be able to create a relationship with the rock. It will start talking to you sooner or later; it will respond.All of existence is full of godliness. There is nothing that is dead, there cannot be. How can anything be dead? All is alive, thriving, throbbing. Listen silently and you will feel the heartbeat everywhere – in the rock too. And then a dialogue is possible.In the old Indian scriptures it is said that the great science of ayurveda was found not by objective research but by subjective dialogue. The ayurvedic physicians would go to the trees, meditate with the trees, sit silently with the trees, and when they had fallen en rapport with the being of the tree they would ask, “Sir” or “Madam” – whatsoever the case may be – “Would you like to say something to us? I am searching for a medicine. Can you tell me if your leaves can be of any help, or your fruit, or your roots, or your bark? Or else, for what use can they be? How can you help humanity? In what way?” And it is said – it is a beautiful story – that this is how ayurvedic herbal medicines were discovered. Not by objective research, not by dissecting a tree, not by chemical analysis, but by dialogue.The same is said about unani medicine. The greatest unani physician, Lukman, did the same thing. He went to herbs. He would put his ear to the roots of a tree and listen silently. He would fall in deep rapport, would become thoughtless, would silently be there, would listen to the heartbeat of the tree. When the right moment came and the tree was ready to reveal its secret, he would take the secret.It seems that the stories cannot be just stories because they had no instruments of discovery at that time. Instruments had not been found at all. Whatsoever they said about trees has been proven to be true, so the stories seem to be literally true. Just one man, Lukman, talked to about half a million herbs. There could have been no other way because no lab existed for such chemical analysis. Just one man? How could he find out all that? The way was not by analysis, the way was not by synthesis, the way was not through the mind; the way was through the heart, a dialogue. When you are in dialogue the tree becomes the “thou.” You are “I,” the tree is the “thou,” and there is a possibility.Explore this possibility. It will take time because your mind has been too conditioned by the objective. It will take time but it happens. You can develop this sensibility. And when this sensibility has grown you have become a Taoist.No object is just an object. Every object is full of subjectivity because every object has a soul to it. Nothing is soulless. As you are full of soul, interiority, so is everything else.Now this tremendously beautiful parable:Duke Mu of Ch’en said to Po-lo:“You are getting on in years. Is there anyone in your family whom I can send to find me horses?”In the ancient world horses were very important – just as nowadays fighter planes are. The horse was the very hub of war and it was the fastest vehicle. Horses were very highly valued. It was the main power available, that’s why we still say that a car has a four-hundred horsepower engine. That was once the major measure of power. We still say, “How much horsepower does this machine have? Three-hundred horsepower? Four-hundred horsepower?” The measurement still remains in the language of before. The horses have disappeared; they are no longer needed, their old utility is gone.In those days the people who could find a great horse were great masters. They were respected. Emperors would keep them, would pay them, would revere them because everything depended on a great horse – a great horse. We don’t know what they meant by a “great horse” because that language has become almost useless to us. A horse is just an animal to us; to them it was not so. The horse is a very intelligent animal and sometimes the intelligence of the horse would be of tremendous value to the king. It could save a life.This man, Po-lo, must have been an expert, a master expert, in knowing what horse is good, what horse is bad and what horse is really great.“A good horse can be identified by its shape and look, its bone and muscle, but the great horses of the world might be extinct, vanished, perished, lost. Such horses raise no dust and leave no tracks. All my sons have lesser talent – they can pick a good horse, but not a great one. But there is a man I know who carries and hauls and collects firewood for me, Chiu-fang Kao. As a judge of horses he is my equal. I suggest that you see him.”This man, Po-lo, had become very old and now he could not go in search of horses. The Duke asked him if he could suggest somebody else.First, his definition: “A good horse can be identified by its shape and look…” by its characteristics. A good horse is a trained horse. Training never goes deep; it remains on the surface. A man of character is like a good horse. A moral man is like a good horse. He has been cultivated; he has been well brought-up, conditioned rightly for right values. Wrong values have been repressed and right values have been superimposed. A good horse has a character like a good man, but it is not a great horse.Then what is a great horse? A great horse is one who has intrinsic qualities – qualities which are not imposed from the outside. A great horse is one who has inborn potentialities; he is not trained. A great horse is a natural power, is a born power. A good horse is a talented horse; a great horse is a genius.Somebody went to Mozart, the great composer and musician, and asked him, “I would like to learn music and become as great a musician as you are. How should I start?”The man was very young, not more than twenty years of age. Mozart said, “You seek a master.”But the young man said, “I have heard that you never learned from any master, so why should I seek one? And I have heard that when you were just a kid, seven years old, you started composing great music. I am twenty. Why should I go to a master?”Mozart said, “Then it is up to you. But when I was seven – even when I was seven – I never went to ask anybody what to do about it. I just did it. You have come to ask me. That simply shows that at the most you have only talent, you don’t have genius.”Talents have to be learned. A talented man is imitative – he is imitating the genius. The genius is not imitative, the genius is original. A good horse is a horse that has been trained to look like a great horse. He does not have the soul of the great horse, he has just the character.That’s how it is in human life. A good man is a man who has been cultivated to look like a great man. A Christian saint is a good horse, Jesus is a great horse. The Christian saint has simply cultivated his character to look like Jesus. He is a carbon copy. So is a Buddhist monk – he is a good horse, certainly good, and it is better to be good than to be bad, I am not against the good. Relatively it is good. It is better to be a saint than a criminal – but it is nothing compared to being a sage, nothing compared to being a buddha. A buddha has not imitated anybody. It is his original face, uncultivated. It is how he is.Then what is the difference? If somebody can cultivate a buddha and become a buddha by cultivation, why should we be against him? In ordinary situations he will be able to pretend, but in extraordinary situations he will not be able to pretend. In ordinary situations he will look like a buddha but whenever there will be extraordinary pressure he will give in.That is the difference between a good horse and a great horse. A good horse will look, pretend, jump, show that he is a great horse, but when the right moment comes, when the danger arises, when there is a challenge, he will give in. The carbon copy cannot go very far; the original is needed. Only the original can be depended upon. One can trust only the original.When you are seeking a master always seek an original man. Don’t seek a cultivated man. It is difficult to live with an original man; that is certainly true. It is very difficult because it is difficult to grow. And with an original man growth happens. It is very easy to be with an imitator.You must have read Thomas à Kempis’ very well-known book, The Imitation of Christ. Now that can create only a good horse. You can look almost like Christ but you cannot be Christ. The only way to be Christ is to be yourself. Buddha is a christ, Christ is a buddha. A Buddhist monk trying to be Buddha is not a buddha – and Jesus never tried to be a buddha and he was a buddha. When you are yourself, true to your being, you are a great soul – whatsoever you are. If you just are a woodchopper, there is nothing to be worried about – be an original woodchopper, be a real carpenter. That will do. You will attain to buddhahood through it. That will be your door. There is no need to become a great poet, you can be a cook – but be original. Imitation is the greatest calamity.The old man said, “A good horse can be identified by its shape and look, its bone and muscle, but the great horses of the world might be extinct, vanished, perished, lost. Such horses raise no dust and leave no tracks.” Look at the beauty of this sentence. These parables are not just stories. They have great insight. “Such horses raise no dust and leave no tracks.” A great horse is one who has no past and no future, who lives in the moment. That is the meaning of the sentence, “Such horses raise no dust…” When a great horse is coming you will not be able to see that he is coming because he will not raise any dust; you will not see a cloud of dust being raised. Only when he has come right in front of you will you be able to see him, but then it is too late. Then you cannot make arrangements. And a great horse leaves no tracks. You cannot follow a great horse, he leaves no tracks. No footprints are left.This is the quality of a Buddha, of a Christ. This is the quality of the great man. He is in the present. He’s unpredictable. You cannot say what he is going to do or say or be. Nobody knows. He is always a surprise. And he leaves no track behind. He is like a bird flying in the sky: the bird flies and no track, no trace, is left behind – no footprints.There is a book, a very famous one, The Footprints of Buddha. The title is ugly because a buddha leaves no footprint. There are many books like that which show misunderstanding. Buddha leaves no footprints. He walks so carefully and so alertly that he leaves no footprints. You cannot follow him. He leaves no signs, no indications, no maps – otherwise you will become imitators.There is a story of a great Zen monk, Bokuju. When he was dying he called his disciples to bring all his books and all that he had said and all that he had written. Everything was piled up but for a while they couldn’t see what he was doing. And then he made a fire out of it.They started screaming and shrieking and they said, “What are you doing?” Because in those days there were no printing presses, there were only handwritten books. So they were lost, lost forever.Bokuju said, “I am going and I want to leave no trace behind. I shall not leave any footprints. Now whosoever wants to follow me will have to follow himself. Whosoever wants to understand me will have to understand himself. I am throwing you, all my disciples, to yourself. That’s why I am destroying these books.”Another story of a Zen monk:A Zen master, when he was dying on his deathbed, called his chief disciple to him and took a book from under his pillow. Everybody was curious about the book because he had never allowed anybody to see it. During the night people had sometimes peeped through the keyhole and he was reading it.“What book is that? Why does he protect it so much?” The master never left his room unlocked and he would never allow anybody in his room alone. So nobody had seen what the book contained.Then he called his chief disciple and said, “Keep this book. In this book there is everything that I have taught. Preserve it as you have seen me preserve it. This was given to me by my master, now I give it to you. It is a heritage.” And the disciple threw the book into the fire.All the others could not believe it. They were aghast. But the master put his hand on the head of the disciple and blessed him. He said, “You have understood. If you had preserved the book, you would not have been my disciple at all. In fact, there was nothing in the book. It was empty. You have thrown it away – good. You have understood, you have understood my teaching that nobody is to follow anybody; everybody has to go into his own soul.”“Such horses raise no dust and leave no tracks. All my sons have lesser talent – they can pick a good horse but not a great one.” So he said, “I suggest a man, Chiu-fang Kao, he is a judge of horses, as competent as myself, equal to me.”Duke Mu saw the man and sent him away to find horses. After three months he returned and reported to the duke,“I have got one. It is in Sha-ch’iu.”“What kind of horse?”“A mare, yellow.”The duke sent someone to fetch it. It turned out to be a stallion, and black.Now this is absurd! The man cannot be a judge of horses at all. He cannot even judge whether it is a stallion or a mare. And not only that – he cannot even judge whether it is black or yellow. This man is blind; he does not know anything about horses. These are simple things. Anybody knows. No master is needed to judge whether a horse is yellow or black. Naturally the Duke was very displeased.The duke, displeased, summoned Po-lo.“He’s no good, the fellow you sent to find me horses. He cannot even tell one color from another or a mare from a stallion. What can he know about horses?”Now something must be understood. This is the Taoist approach to things. A mare means the feminine, a mare means yin quality. The Duke could not understand the man. The man was not talking about the body, the man was talking about the soul; the man was talking about the whole. The whole quality of the horse was that of yin – passive, receptive, womb-like. The whole quality of the horse was round, shapely, soft, with no corners. The whole quality of the horse was that of a beautiful woman – non-aggressive, nonviolent, loving, compassionate. That’s what he was saying when he said that the horse was a mare. He is not talking about the body, he was not talking about the physical, he is not talking about the part – he is talking about the whole. The totality of the horse is feminine.Haven’t you seen it many times? You see a man and he looks very feminine and sometimes you see a woman and she looks very masculine. These are qualities. A buddha is so feminine; a buddha is a mare, not a stallion. That’s how Nietzsche criticized him – he called him feminine. Nietzsche also criticized Jesus, calling him feminine. He criticized these two men saying that they had destroyed the masculinity of the world, the manliness. His criticism was true in a way. These two persons brought the feminine into the world, feminine grace.That’s why you will never see a mustache on Buddha’s statue. Not that he did not have one, but those who know the quality of great horses know how to paint a buddha. The body should not be painted – the innermost core has to come out.Haven’t you noticed it? Mahavira has no mustache, no beard; Rama has no mustache, no beard; Krishna has no mustache, no beard; Buddha has no mustache, no beard. All the great sages of India, all the tirthankaras avatars, have no beards and mustaches. Do you think there was something hormonally wrong with them? Do you think that they were effeminate, that they were sexually missing something, that they were not man enough? No. They were great sages. They had beards, they had mustaches but the people who painted them knew the qualities of a great horse. It must be looked at in its totality.In that way Jesus is not so fortunate. He could not find a real painter. If he had been born in India, he would have been painted without a mustache and beard. The people who painted Jesus must have looked from the outside; they could not see the inner quality, the inner quality of the feminine.By saying that the horse was a mare, this man, Chiu-fang Kao, had said something of tremendous value. The horse is non-aggressive and Taoists say that when a person is non-aggressive he is unconquerable. When a person is aggressive he can be conquered because someone who is aggressive depends on his own energy. All energies are limited and when a person is aggressive he is wasting his energies in aggression. Sooner or later he will be weakened by his own aggression, he will be defeated.How was Adolf Hitler defeated? He was too aggressive. That became his defeat. Don’t you see? All the great aggressive people were always defeated eventually. What happened? They exhausted their energies themselves. Adolf Hitler or Mussolini or Napoleon or Alexander all died frustrated failures. What happened to them? They exhausted their energies by fighting, by being aggressive.A buddha dies a conqueror. Without fighting, he conquers. A Lao Tzu is victorious. Without making any effort, his victory is ultimate. The great horse has the quality of non-aggressiveness. Nobody can defeat him. That is the meaning of mare.And the color yellow is also very symbolic. It stands for a few things. First, yellow is the color of gold, the costliest metal. Gold has always been used as the highest value. Gold became an alchemical symbol. Turning baser metal into gold meant turning the lower into the higher, turning the devil into the divine, turning the gross into the subtle.When he said that the horse was the color yellow, he meant he was gold, not a baser metal. He was not talking about the color of the body, that is irrelevant. What difference can color make? Whether the horse is black or white or yellow, the color of the body cannot make any difference. How can the color make a horse great or not great? Whether a person is a Negro, Indian, Chinese or American – black, white yellow – how does it matter? The color of the skin is just irrelevant to the being. It is just a very cheap pigment.If you ask the scientist, he will say that between the blackest Negro and the whitest white man the difference is only about one rupee’s worth of pigment. Nothing much. It is just that a certain pigment exists in the Negro which does not exist in the white man. So in fact the white man is missing something. The Negro has something more. The Negro needs the black pigment to protect him from infection and heat. Naturally he is more powerful. He can tolerate more heat and remain cool. He does not need to go to the cool hill station. Wherever he is, he is cool. The white man is in trouble. He cannot tolerate heat. His tolerance is very low; his body is not so resistant.But there is not much of a difference. And how is this difference going to make any difference as far as greatness is concerned? Does it make any difference whether Jesus is a Negro or a white man? It is irrelevant.That is why the old man did not talk about the body color. He was using the alchemical symbol, gold. It means the highest quality, the purest quality.Secondly, yellow is symbolic of the sun – vitality, radiance, aliveness, youth, life. So he is saying that the great horse is very much alive: as yellow as the sun, as vital as the sun.And thirdly, yellow is the color of death. That is why Buddha has chosen yellow as the color for his bhikkus. Their robes are yellow. Why? Why the color of death? When a leaf dies it becomes yellow, when anything dies it becomes yellow. Yellow is death approaching close by. Yellow is the shadow of death.So why was the Duke told that the horse was yellow? Because only if somebody accepts death totally is he fearless, otherwise not. The Buddhist monk has accepted death, has accepted yellow, the color of death, with great gratitude, with reverence. He is ready to die any moment, hence there is no fear. All fear is of death; behind all your fears there is death. Sooner or later, if you go on looking, you will find death standing behind all fears. So unless one is completely in deep acceptance of death, in harmony with death, one cannot be fearless.The old man said that the color of the horse was yellow. He said that he was just like a Buddhist monk – he did not worry about death, hence he was fearless.The duke sent someone to fetch it. It turned out to be a stallion and black.The duke, displeased, summoned Po-lo.“He’s no good, the fellow you sent to find me horses. He cannot even tell one color from another, or a mare from a stallion. What can he know about horses?”Po-lo breathed a sigh of wonder.“So now he has risen to this!”This is the beauty of Tao. They are absurd people, very paradoxical people, but if you start loving them you will know that they have a certain quality which is missing everywhere else.Po-lo breathed a sigh of wonder. He could not believe it; it was incredible – because this means the ultimate in Tao. “So now he has risen to this?” He did not even make a judgment about whether the horse was a mare or a stallion – these distinctions were only on the surface – and he had seen to the deepest core.Are you a man or a woman in your deepest being? If I see you as a man then I don’t see you. If I see you as a woman then I don’t see you. The day I see you neither as man nor woman but as your innermost quality reveals you to me, then I see you.“So now he has risen to this! It is just this that shows that he is worth a thousand, ten thousand, any number of people like me.”Now it is a qualitative jump. No quantity can be compared: “He is worth a thousand, ten thousand, any number of people like me.” First this old man had said that he was equal to him but now he says, “I am nothing. I am just zero compared to him.”So he has risen to this insight. He cannot see that the horse is black; he just sees the yellowness of the horse. And he cannot see that the horse is a stallion, he just sees the hidden mare in it. He has become able to see the bodiless qualities, the spiritual qualities. Now he is incomparable.“What such a man as Kao observes is the innermost native impulse behind the horse’s movements.”The body is just a surface, a moving surface – just as when you watch a lake and see the ripples on the surface. Those ripples are not the real lake. To know the real lake you will have to dive deep. The body is just a surface – moving, changing. You have to look into the innermost core, into the unchanging, the constant, the unmoving. That is what truth is.“What such a man as Kao observes is the innermost native impulses behind the horse’s movements. He grasps the essence and forgets the dross, goes right inside it and forgets the outside. He looks for and sees what he needs to see, ignores what he does not need to see. In the judgment of horses of a man like Kao there is something more important than horses.”So he is not just a man who knows horses, now he knows something more. He knows real Tao. He has the insight to see the whole and not to be worried about the parts. He can see the gestalt, the very pattern, the innermost pattern, of the horse – now he is not worried about the body, the color, male, female, height. He is not worried at all. These are accidental things, nonessential. He looks only for that which is essential because only the essential is meaningful. The meaning comes from the essential but we always go looking for the accidental.When you see a very rich man you say, “How rich he is.” Now, can a person be rich just by having money? You cannot be rich just by having money. If that is how a man is rich, then Buddha was not rich. And if Buddha was not rich, then who is? Was Alexander rich? Alexander was a poor man, a beggar. Hence in the East we have worshipped beggars and forgotten about emperors. We have not cared much about the emperors. They come and go – that is the surface of existence, nonessential.Did you know that in the East we have not written history at all? The West is very surprised that in the East people have not written any history. History is so important.No, we don’t write history – or, we started writing it only because of the impact of the West. We write myths, we write mythology, we write puranas, beautiful parables. We don’t bother about history because history is concerned with the nonessential; history is concerned with politics, day-to-day events, politicians, generals, wars, famines. History is concerned with the very nonessential, the moving, the flux. Myth, mythology, a purana, is concerned with the essential.So there is a problem when a Western person starts reading the Ramayana. He becomes concerned about when Rama was born. When? That is not told at all. We have never worried about it. What does it matter? Any day will do, any year will do. That is not essential. We look into the innermost; we look into the essential quality of Rama. What type of man was he? What greatness did he carry in his being, what fragrance? What song was his song – authentically his? We are not worried about the chronological; we are worried about the spiritual. Time is irrelevant. We look into the timeless.That’s why Po-lo says, “In the judgment of horses of a man like Kao there is something more important than horses.” He has become a sage himself.What did he look for first? He grasped the essence and ignored the gross. Remember it. When you look at a man or you look at a tree or you look at a rock, always look for the essential, forget the gross. The gross is not the thing. But in the modern world we forget the essence and look at the gross. If a man has a lot of money, we look. If he has a big car, we look; if he has a big house, we look. We forget the essential. We don’t look directly into his heart. We don’t have the eyes. In fact we don’t believe that he has a heart, we don’t believe that man has a soul. Man is just a body, a physical thing, and so is everything else.So it is not a wonder that our life has become so dull. It has become a drag. There is no joy, no celebration. How can celebration exist without a soul? Celebration arises out of the soul, out of the spiritual, out of the essential. Joy arises out of your innermost core and we have denied that.You don’t look into yourself and you don’t look into others. Only surfaces meet. In fact, it is not right to say, “meet” – they clash, because there is no dialogue. There is discussion but there is no dialogue. There is argument but there is no meeting, there is no love – because love can exist only between two souls. When two essential beings look into each other’s essentialness, love arises. When you look through your essential core into the essential core of existence, God arises.Don’t ask where God is. God is a dialogue with existence. God is not a being; God is not a person. When you know how to be in a dialogue with existence, you know what God is. God is the meaning of existence, the meaning that permeates the whole. But it can be known only by moving through the essential. The essential is the door.In the parable, Kao looks and grasps the essence and forgets the gross. He looks into the innermost native impulses; he looks into the spontaneity of the horse, not at what has been cultivated in him.He does not look into the character – a man may be a saint or he may be a sinner. Don’t look into the sainthood of a man, and don t look into the sinner-hood of a man: look into the potentiality of his being. Then you will come to see that nobody is a sinner, nobody is a saint; everybody is a sage. Everybody is divine – sinners and saints, all. Then whatsoever a person is doing is not of much importance. Being is important. What you do is very irrelevant, what you are is relevant. Your acts are superficial, your being is fundamental.“He looks for and sees what he needs to see…” You don’t look for that which you need to see. Whatsoever object comes in front of you, you look at it. You are not searching. Whatsoever accidentally comes in front of you, you look at it. You don’t go deep, you don’t explore any potential, you don’t dive. You just stand outside. At the most you are a spectator.Life can be known only through participation. Don’t be a spectator. The whole modern world has become just a spectator, a crowd of onlookers. Somebody dances, you look . What are you doing? How can you look at a dance? A dance must be felt; a dance must be danced. Somebody is singing and you look and you listen. To know the song and the beauty of it you have to sing, you have to participate. This calamity has taken epidemic proportions. You go on looking at everything.You rush to the movies – what for? Can’t you live a beautiful life? Why do you have to go to see a movie? People are glued to their chairs in front of their TV’s just looking at other people’s lives. And they are not even living, they are acting for you. They are acting for you and you are seeing those actors – and nobody is living. The dancer is not a true dancer, he is a professional and you are the audience. All is false.Surfaces clash and the essentials are not meeting. Look for the essential. When you start looking for the essential you will become a participant. You will know. A dance must be known in only one way – that is to dance. How can you know what swimming is if you just stand on the bank and watch somebody swimming? You will see the strokes and you will see the man doing something in the water but how will you know the thrill that is happening to him, the kick that is happening to him, the sensation, the buoyancy, the joy? The feeling of the river, flowing with the river, dancing with the river – how will you know it by standing on the bank? Jump into the river; that is the only way to know life. Jump into the river. Never be a spectator. The spectator is the poorest man in the world. Participate. Through participation comes love, through participation comes truth, through participation comes beauty, through participation ultimately comes God.“In the judgment of horses of a man like Kao there is something more important than horses.” Yes, in this parable horses are not being discussed, horses are just an excuse to talk about something tremendously important and significant.When the horse arrived it did prove to be a great horse.You can also become great horses and you can also become knowers of great horses. But remember, this parable is not about horses; horses are just an excuse. The parable is about the sage, the Taoist sage, the great sage.Meditate over it. Let it sink deep into you. It will give you many insights, many more than I have talked about. You will get many more insights because there are many which cannot be talked about at all. They will be revealed only when you meditate on it. You will get many more because when you meditate you will certainly meditate in a different way – from your angle, from your vision.I have just given you a few indications. These are not fixed rules. I am not an interpreter – remember always, I am not an interpreter. I love these stories and I try to share my love with you. It is not an interpretation. I am not a commentator. Commentary is an ugly job – why should I comment? I am not commenting. I love these stories, I feel the fragrance of these stories and I like to share that fragrance with you.Maybe through that fragrance you also become interested. Maybe while listening to me a great desire arises in you to go deeper into the waters. If that is done then my effort has been fruitful.So don’t take my interpretations as rigid interpretations, and don’t think that I have done the job for you. I cannot chew for you; you have to chew for yourself. I can simply seduce you. These are seductions, not commentaries – just seductions so you become interested in a different dimension. Each Taoist parable opens a dimension, opens a new door. If you go into them, more doors will open and if you go through those doors, even more will open. It is a never-ending mystery.Enough for today.

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

Tao The Pathless Path Vol 2 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You say, “You can also become a great horse.” Even though I am twenty-six I am seeking. Am I not trying to become a good horse? Can one become a great horse by seeking?Never! One can never become a great horse by seeking. Seeking is the only barrier to realizing your greatness. The very idea of seeking sends you away from yourself. Seeking means seeking somewhere else. Seeking means seeking outside yourself. Seeking means you are looking everywhere else except in your own being. Non-seeking means not looking anywhere, just being centered in your being, just being there. When you are not seeking you are in your own being. In that very moment you are a great horse.Everybody is a great horse – the good ones and the bad ones too. The bad ones have gone seeking along the bad lines and the good ones have gone seeking along the good lines. The bad ones have become criminals, immoral, and the good ones have become moral, saintly – but both are seeking. Both are always on the way. There is a goal in their life. And they are rushing away from themselves.Everybody is born a great horse. When you are tired and frustrated with your seeking, you drop all seeking to be good or to be bad. Then you just close your eyes and it is there, the great horse is there. It has been there always, it is your nature.Nobody is born who is not great. Nothing else ever happens in this existence except greatness. You are from God, so how can you not be great? You are great. Greatness is not something that you have to cultivate. That greatness would not be real – deep down you would know that you are not great, deep down you would know that you have practiced it, deep down you would know that it is just on the surface, a mask. You are pretending that you are Alexander, pretending that you are Christ, pretending that you are a Buddha, pretending this and that.You can pretend, you can deceive the whole world, but how can you deceive yourself? You will always know who you are. You may be pretending bravery but deep down there is the coward. You have hidden your cowardice by painting bravery on top of it. You may be smiling but hidden behind that are your tears. How can you deceive yourself?So the first thing to remember is that nobody has ever come home by seeking. Seeking means going astray. Only non-seekers come home. But to become a non-seeker one has first to become a seeker. Seeking is a part, a part of attaining non-seeking. Even a buddha has to seek and go astray and suffer. That pain is a must. That is the price we pay. Then one day, when you have sought in every direction, in every dimension, and you have found nothing that you wanted, when your frustration is utterly total, in that very moment of frustration all seeking drops. Suddenly you are back home. But to come home one has to knock on many doors.So I am not saying you should drop your seeking if you are not yet utterly confused, utterly frustrated. If you are still hankering, if there is still hope lurking somewhere in your mind that you can find by seeking, then seek, seek by all means – even though nobody has ever attained by seeking. Seek, I say. Seek by all means so that you can be frustrated, so that you can recognize the hopelessness of the very effort. In that hopelessness is hope, in that frustration dances a totally new existence – the world of being. Seeking is the world of becoming.To me you are already great horses. I have never come across anybody who is not a great horse. He may think he is not – that is his problem. He may think or even believe that he is not. People behave according to their beliefs. If you believe you are not a great horse, you will behave in a way that suits one who is not a great horse. If you believe you are bad, you will behave that way. If you believe you are good, you will behave that way.Your pretensions are your pretensions, your acting. I see your original face; I see you as you are. The day I saw my own great horse, that very day all other horses disappeared for me. I look into every face, into every eye, and the great horse is there. It is the same horse that exists in me that exists in you, there are not two horses – it is the same greatness. It is the same ocean that waves in you and that waves in me, that waves in a Buddha, in a Christ, in a Krishna.But when you are seeking, you cannot look inside yourself. Seeking means that you have moved into the future; seeking means that you have already gone to the goal; seeking means that you have already reached where you believe you have to be. It is a projection, it is a fantasy trip, it is a mind journey. Non-seeking means that mind has stopped; non-seeking means that there is no movement inside you, you are not going anywhere.Sitting silently,doing nothing.The spring comesand the grass grows by itself.The second question:Osho,If groups are a safer and more stimulating place to begin to expand any conceivable, personal boundaries, why have you not encouraged the creation of Indian groups with Indian leaders?This foolish question comes again and again so it is better to be finished with it.The first thing: the East has developed a totally different kind of psychology from the West. Their needs are different. They need different medicines.In the West, the psychology that has grown down the ages is extrovert; it is outgoing. The psychology that has been developed in the East is introvert; it is in-going. For a real Eastern person, growth groups are not needed. He needs meditations like vipassana or zazen – in which he can forget all of the outside world and just drown in his own being. He does not need any relationship. Relating is not needed. He needs only to un-relate himself from the world, to be in a state of total, utter aloneness. Deep solitude is needed.Down the centuries the East has developed introversion; it is very natural for the real Eastern person to be introverted. I am saying the real Eastern person because it is now very difficult to find a real Eastern person. The West has contaminated everybody. Western education, the Western victory over nature, the Western domination of the East, has contaminated everybody. The real Eastern mind does not have any need to do any growth groups.The growth group is needed because you have a tremendous need to relate, to love, to communicate. In the West, the basic problem is how to communicate, how to relate. Many Westerners are here. When they come to me in darshan their problems are a hundred percent about relationships and how to relate.Not a single Indian has come who has asked, “How to relate?” That is not the problem at all. He asks, “How to be silent? How to be into one’s own being?” His question is how to drop out of relationship. He wants to be nonattached, he wants to break all the bridges that exist. He wants to know how to live in the world and yet live in such a way that he does not live there; how to be far away in the Himalayas. Even if one has to live in the world, one wants to live in the world of the Himalayas – at least spiritually, inwardly.Not a single Indian comes who says, “My problem is how to relate with my wife, how with relate to my son, how to relate with my mother, how to relate with my friend.” Relationship is a question of group dynamics. The Indian asks, “How to not relate? How to forget my wife, how to forget my children, how to forget my job, how to be just alone in my inner being – crystal pure, clean, not reflecting anybody, with not even a shadow moving there?”This is a different psychology. Both are ways to reach the ultimate: one is meditation, another is love. The East has developed the mind for meditation; the West has developed the mind for love. Love means relationship, meditation means non-relationship.That’s why I do not send Easterners to groups – except the Japanese. I have sent a few Japanese to groups because Japan is the most Western part of the East. I have sent Indians only once or twice and they were only namesake Indians. They were born in the East but their minds have not been developed by the Eastern concept, their minds are Western. They have been taught by Christian missionaries in Christian schools. Their whole education and upbringing is Western.This is the first thing to understand. The West will work through love easily and one will come to know oneself through love. It is a longer way. Meditation is a shortcut. Love means: “I go into the other, see my face in the eyes of the other, encounter the other – and in encountering the other, I come to know about myself. And then I come back. It is via the other but I come back to myself.” Love also comes to inner solitude but it is a long way. It goes through the other. It is a big circle.Meditation is a short way; it reduces everything to the minimum. You don’t go to the other; you simply close your eyes and you drown yourself in yourself. You drop into your own being.Both are perfectly right. It depends on the person and what he needs. To a few Westerners I also don’t suggest groups. When I see a Westerner who has no need to relate, then I don’t suggest groups, then I say there is no need.At least five thousand years of different psychological conditioning exists. That must be taken note of. I cannot say the Easterner and the Westerner are just the same – they are not. At the innermost core they are, in their being they are, but in their minds they are not the same. Their approach is different. They need different methodologies.If a Westerner comes and I put him directly into vipassana-like methods, he is simply at a loss, he cannot understand what is happening. It is a torture. He feels as if he is simply a masochist – why is he torturing himself? Why is he sitting in a siddhasana in a Buddha posture, with closed eyes? For what? The Western mind wants to move, relate, dance, sing, celebrate. The Western mind is dynamic. It wants a process so that it can go step by step into things. One day the Western mind has to come to a silent, meditative state but one has first to go through growth groups. Then it becomes easier.The Eastern person, if he is sent to a growth group, will simply be at a loss. Even the Japanese are at a loss. There have been questions from Japanese such as: “Osho, why do you send us to growth groups? You don’t send Indians, why do you send us?” They don’t feel good, they feel very worried. It is very difficult for them to relate the way a Western person relates. They are not open that way. And they don’t see the point of it. Why go into it? When you know a shortcut then why go the long way? The East has always known the shortcut but in the West it has been different.Here is a question: “What is the difference between an enlightened person, a master, and a messiah?” This is relevant to this question too. An enlightened person is one who has come home, for whom all problems have disappeared, who has no problems to solve, who has to just live, whose life is no longer burdened by any question, whose life is absolutely weightless. But not every enlightened person is necessarily a master. Out of a hundred enlightened persons, at the most one or two will become masters. An enlightened person is one who has come home and a master is one who has compassion for others and would like to help them. But a master is one who is interested only in individuals, he relates to individuals – one here, one there – he has no idea about society. This is a master.A messiah is one who has compassion for all of society. He is not worried about individuals but takes all of society as one unit. In the East, enlightened people have existed and masters have existed but never a messiah. The messiah is not an Eastern concept at all. Buddha was not a messiah, neither was Mahavira, nor was Krishna. They were masters, perfect masters; their approach was to the individual, direct, personal. Jesus was a messiah, so was Moses, so was Mohammed. Their approach was not individual; their approach was social, communal. They were interested in changing the whole of humanity. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, are all messianic; Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, are non-messianic.All the basic Eastern religions say that the society does not exist – only the individual exists. And all the Western religions say that in fact the individual is just a part of society; the real thing is the society, the group. The group exists, not the individual. The individual only exists in the group. Both are right in a way because both are half right. The individual and society both exist – the individual cannot exist without a society nor can the society exist without the individual. Can you conceive of a society where no individual exists? There would be no society at all. Can you conceive of an individual who exists without a society? There would be no individual at all.Even an individual who exists in the Himalayas, alone, exists in a society. He was born to a mother, he was brought up by a father, he lived in a society. Even the idea that one has to renounce all and go to the Himalayas was given by a particular society. Now sitting there in the Himalayas what is he doing? He must be meditating. That meditation was given by Patanjali or Buddha. What will he be doing?He will be thinking of God, contemplating. That God comes from the society. And in the deepest core of his being he knows that the society exists. If he suddenly comes to know one day that the society he had left has disappeared completely from the earth, he will be shocked, he will be shaken, he will start trembling, perspiring. He will run back to the place to see what has happened to the society. Although he was living alone, in a subtle way he was still part of a society.No individual can exist without society; no society can exist without individuals. So both are true. But the approaches are different.Jesus says that the whole society can attain to salvation. If people want to move in groups, in communes, they can attain to salvation. Buddha will say that is not possible. Each has to move alone, each has to work on his own, each has to reach God in solitude. No group can change. Hence all sorts of social philosophies have come out of Christianity but in the East no social philosophy has been given birth yet.Communism comes out of Christianity. It is the same messianic idea. Although communism says there is no God and religion is the opiate of the people, it still grows out of the same idea: that the society is important and can attain to a higher state. The individual is irrelevant. Fascism, socialism, democracy, or other ideologies, are all born in the West; they are all part of the same messianic ideal. The messiah is a Western idea – that the society can have salvation, that the group can become enlightened as a group.In the East, masters have existed but no messiah. Jesus had a little tinge of politics in his utterances; maybe that’s why he was crucified. Buddha was never crucified because he was never in much trouble with the society. He was not talking about the society at all, he was talking about individuals. If you go on changing individuals the society can rest; there is nothing to be worried about. But when a person says he is going to change the whole society then there is fear.Maybe that is the reason Socrates was poisoned, Mansoor was killed, Jesus was crucified. No Buddha, no Mahavira, no Krishna was killed or crucified or poisoned. Why? There must be some reason. They were very dangerous people – more dangerous than Jesus, or at least as dangerous as Jesus, but their approach was individual. The society does not bother about individuals. If one individual becomes a meditator it doesn’t change a whole society. It is as if a drop of water is changed in the whole ocean – who bothers? But Jesus had a program to color the whole ocean. Then the priest and the politicians all became afraid; their investment was at stake and they were being overthrown. They were being dethroned, they were being uprooted.The messiah naturally has something to do with politics; the master has nothing to do with politics. That becomes a problem. Christian missionaries used to come to me and say, “It is good to help people to meditate, but what about society? What are you doing for the society? People are hungry, starving, ill. Why don’t you think about making more hospitals, schools? Why don’t you help people to help others? Just meditating? Yes, it is good: a person becomes silent, but is it enough?” I can understand why they are asking the question. The question comes from the messianic ideal, the messiah. A master must be a messiah.In the East, no. In the East, a master is simply a master. His approach is individual, his approach is meditative rather than political, personal rather than social. The East has one psychology, the West has a different psychology. This must be understood once and for all.“If groups are a safer, more stimulating place to begin to expand any conceivable personal boundaries, why have you not encouraged the creation of Indian groups with Indian leaders?” That would not be possible. Even if I created a group for Indians the leaders would have to be Western. First: it would be difficult to find Indian participants. And if I can manage that – because there are a few people who are no longer Eastern or only so-so – then, too, the group leader must be Western. It will be very difficult to find an Eastern group leader because he will not understand the idea of it, he will not know the nuances of it, he will not have the real spirit of it. Yes, he could run a group but it would be mechanical. He would not be a Teertha, he would not be a Somendra, he would not be a Divya – he would not have that insight. He would not be Amitabh, he would not be Anam – no, he would lack the insight. Those insights take centuries to develop.It is happening in other fields also. The scientist is basically a Western product. There are Indian scientists – one or two have even gotten Nobel prizes – but still I have never come across a real scientist in the East, never. Their minds are not scientific. They learn, they put their intelligence to it, they learn all that can be learned, but the spirit is lacking. If you look into their personal life, you will not find them being scientific. Their approach will be unscientific. When they are in their lab they may become scientific but when you go into their house you will find them doing puja, worshipping a statue, or saying a mantra and crying.In the lab they may be objective but when they are in their home they are no longer objective. There they will be as superstitious as any ordinary person. They may even go and follow Satya Sai Baba, and think that miracles are possible. There are such people!Now this is very unscientific. A scientist cannot believe that miracles are possible. No miracles are possible – that is a fundamental law of science. Everything is according to natural law and a miracle is something which is not according to natural law. So how is a miracle possible? A miracle means something is happening which should not happen. Science cannot trust it. If it is happening, then it must be according to a law which has not been discovered yet. Then it is not a miracle. Or maybe there is some magic, some trick, some sleight of hand – it is simple, for the scientific mind it is simple. But you can find Indian scientists following Satya Sai Baba and believing that things are appearing out of nothingness.Their minds are not scientific, their minds are centuries old – and the scientific layer is very thin. They have gone to the West, they have been to Oxford, to Cambridge, they have learned everything. They are intelligent people – but they are not scientific. They may have even discovered something, they may have been given a Nobel Prize, but still they are not scientific. At the most they are technical – they know the technique. But if you look deep into them you will find the Eastern religious person who can believe in anything – a believer, gullible – you will not find real logic. All logic will be just superficial.As far as their work is concerned they will be logical, but as far as their life is concerned you will see them going to the palmist or to the astrologer. If their son is getting married, they will not bother about any scientific approach toward it, they will go to the astrologer to inquire whether the marriage will succeed or not, whether the couple will be happy or not.Now a scientific person, asking whether the couple will be happy or not, should go to a scientist to inquire whether their blood specimens match, whether their hormones go together. He should ask a computer. A computer should be fed with all the information about both people and it would show what is going to be the outcome of these two persons meeting. Will they be suited to each other? That will be more scientific than going to an astrologer who will look at their birth chart and who will think about stars and who will decide according to the stars. This scientific person will never look at what is happening with the astrologer himself – just look at him and his wife. They are killing each other!The Eastern mind is basically unscientific. One can learn science but to be a scientist one needs a totally different spirit.What happens in the West: the Western person can become religious, can learn, can come to the East, can become religious, but deep down the scientific approach persists. He goes on being logical. Books are written about Zen which is an illogical approach, an absurd approach, fundamentally Eastern. In the West, books are written about Zen explaining the illogic in a logical way, trying to find out what the logic of this illogicality is! There must be some logic in it. They are trying to find explanations, and they do find them – when you insist you can always find explanations. You can fill in the gaps; you can see things which are not there. Zen is simply illogical; there is no logic to it.If you read Western books written about Zen there is logic. They may say that Zen is illogical but then immediately they will explain why. They will always try to bring things to reason. Rationalization is the Western approach; the East is irrational.So it is possible that we could train some Indian to be a group leader but he would be just a phony group leader, he would not be able to go deep into it. He would not be able to be there authentically. Something would be missing.Moreover there are many who would like to go out of curiosity; they go on asking again and again why Indians are not allowed. I can allow you but you would simply be disturbed. You would come out of it shaken, completely shaken, and there is every possibility that you would escape from me and you would never come back again because you would never be able to figure out what it is. You could not relate it to religion at all.Somebody is being angry and beating the pillow or beating the wall and going mad. The Indian would sit there and he would say, “What is going on? What is the point of it all? How is this man going to become meditative by being angry? These things have to be dropped. And for these things one must come to a group and pay for it? One can do these things at home. How is this man going to be helped by being so angry, so aggressive, so violent?” The Indian cannot understand it because the Indian has not suffered two thousand years of Christianity. He does not know what Christianity has done to the West. Two thousand years of repression. That repression has gathered in the pit of the stomach; it is heavy there, it has not been allowed out. Everything has been forced.When Vivek came here for the first time she was not even able to burp! Repressed, absolutely repressed. Burping is a beautiful thing but in the West you don’t burp. From childhood a child must be taught, “Don’t burp.” What nonsense! In the East, we have a totally different concept. If you are invited to a feast at somebody’s house and you don’t burp, it is insulting. That means you are not satisfied.In my childhood I used to go with my father. He is a great burper. Whenever he went to somebody else’s house he would burp loudly. So I asked him, “Why do you do it that much? You never do it that much at home?” He said, “It must be done, otherwise the people will think that we are not satisfied.” The burp is a satisfaction expression. It says the stomach is full and it is perfectly satisfied and it is happy. It is a physical expression.I was reading one of Janov’s books in which he gives a few testimonials from his patients who have been helped by primal therapy. In one statement the patient says, “I am very, very thankful to you because after primal therapy I began to burp for the first time in my life.” He said that it was amazing. I also say it is amazing. Primal therapy is needed to help you to burp! Such a repression!You don’t know what a calamity has happened to the Western mind. Everything has been forced. You have to be loving and love has disappeared. You must not be angry, so anger has gone deep in the pit of the stomach; it is there, solid like a rock. You have to go on smiling, you have to show a face to everybody – this is good etiquette. Falsity, phoniness has been taught. That phoniness must be dropped before one can enter into meditation.For the Eastern mind there is not such a problem. Phoniness has never been taught. So it is very difficult…If I send an Indian to the group he may even start being phony by trying to be angry. He will say, “Everybody is doing that so it must be done.” He will move to the other extreme – it must be done because everybody is doing it and they are being helped and they are growing and they are enjoying it and they are feeling so ecstatic. “I will miss something if I don’t do it” – and he will start doing it. He will be simply tired, exhausted. He will come out of it simply feeling spent, not expanded. That’s why I have not allowed it.Then he will go and start creating rumors all around – that is one of the basic curiosities. Again and again Indians ask why I am not allowing them to do the groups. Their curiosity is because they want to see what is happening there. If somebody becomes nude that will be something! The Indian will enjoy that nudity more than anything else. And he will go and spread the news all over and exaggerate as much as he can – in that, Indians are perfect masters! And that will create trouble for the groups, that’s all.The last thing: the West is how-oriented, the East is why-oriented. “How” means methodology, technique; “why” means no method, no technique, no effort. The West is effort-oriented, the East is effortlessness. The whole approach of the East is how to relax to know; the Western approach is how to strain, to concentrate to know, how to be more attentive to know. The Eastern approach is how to be so relaxed that there is nothing – a sort of euphoria, no concentration, a sort of vagueness, a cloudiness where boundaries disappear and distinctions are no longer valid, where things meet and merge into each other. When all boundaries are blurred in that vague void, that distinction-less cloud, one comes to know. Methods are for clarification. The West has no vision of the why, and the East has no provision for the how.Now things are getting mixed up. The East is no longer the East; the West is no longer the West. People are traveling, people are being educated here and there, people are coming to the East to learn religion; people are going to the West to learn science – everything is meeting and merging.You must have heard the famous lines of Rudyard Kipling: “West is West, East is East, and never the twain shall meet.” They are meeting. In the days of Kipling it was almost certain that they would never meet. Now they are meeting. Things change. That which cannot be conceived becomes conceivable: East and West are meeting.There is only one problem and only one fear – that Rudyard Kipling may prove right from the other side. The problem is the West can become so Eastern and the East so Western that again they may not meet. That’s the only problem. The East may become the West, the West may become the East, and the twain shall never meet. That is possible. That’s why you don’t see many Eastern people here. I am saying something that the East is no longer interested in. You will find many Eastern students at Harvard, you will find many Eastern students at Oxford, sitting at the feet of a scientist, learning from a scientist, but you will not find very many Eastern people sitting at the feet of a mystic and learning about meditation. And you will find Western people rushing there – a great pilgrimage has started.You are coming from the West, dropping out of the Oxfords and the Cambridges and the Harvards in search of an inner space, and the Eastern young man is rushing toward the West to know more about technology, engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics. There is a danger.It happened once that in a small town there was a great atheist and a great theist. Both were great. The whole town was disturbed and puzzled.The atheist would prove to everyone that there was no God, and his arguments were superb. Then the theist would prove that there was a God, and his arguments were also superb. So the village was in a very difficult situation. What to decide? The whole village was confused. For twenty-four hours, day in, day out, these two people were contradicting each other and the whole village came to a point where they started feeling they would go mad. Both the arguments were so superb that it was difficult to decide. They were almost equal. They negated each other. But then the people were left with a vacuum.Just to save their sanity the village decided to ask these two persons to have a great debate and convince each other. Either the atheist must become a theist or the theist must become an atheist – whatsoever they decide the village will follow. But it had to be decided. They had had enough of indecision.So a great debate was arranged and the atheist proved that there was no God and the theist proved that there was a God and by the morning a strange thing had happened. The theist became convinced that there was no God and the atheist became convinced that there was a God. The problem remained the same and the village was still in confusion.It is possible that the West may become the East and the East may become the West and again there will be the same polarity.This must be avoided. For the first time it has become feasible to create one world, for the first time it is practically possible to create one earth. For the first time it is possible to drop the concepts of East and West and create a new third psychology – I call it the psychology of the buddhas. I am trying that.But I have to look to your past. The whole goal here is to create a meditative space. How it is created is irrelevant. If you need group processes, I will give you group processes, but the meditative space must be created. If you don’t need group processes, if you need simple meditations, I will give you simple meditations, but the meditative space must be created. Only in that meditative space will the East and West disappear, will Eastern and Western psychology disappear, will the division disappear.A great experiment is afoot. You may not be aware how fortunate you are. You may not be aware that something of tremendous import is happening here, something which can become the door to a great synthesis. A great Tao can arise. We can attain to the primordial unity.The groups are meant to destroy Western psychology and the simple meditative techniques are meant to destroy Eastern psychology. When both are dropped then you are human, neither Eastern nor Western. In fact, then you are just existential, with no mind. That no-mind is the goal.The third question:Osho,I have decided to take sannyas although I don't know for what reason I am doing it. Can you throw some light on it?If you have decided, then what is the point of knowing the reason? If you have already decided to take sannyas, why this hankering to know the reason? Must there always to be a reason for everything you do? Is it really needed? Have you done everything in your life because of certain reasons?This is again the Western mind, Western psychology. There must be a reason, otherwise why, why should you take it? Can’t you take any step without a reason? If you cannot, you will not be able to live, because life is irrational it has no reason. Why are you here at all? Can you show any reason why you are here? Why were you born? Why do you breathe? Why do you love? Why are you happy? Why are you sad? What for?Because of this why, this constant hankering to know the reason, the West has become very suicidal. The problem arises of why to live at all. What is the reason? When you feel that there is no reason to live then why not commit suicide?I must tell you…There was a great Greek philosopher named Xenocrates. He used to teach his people that there was no reason to live. But he lived to a very old age – eighty-three years. He lived long. And it is said that many people committed suicide because of his teaching. He was saying, “There is no reason why you should go on living. Every morning getting up, again going to bed, again getting up… For what?” He puzzled many people.If you really ask why deeply, there is no why. You will be left with only a very uneasy space within you – why? And Xenocrates was a great scholar and a great logician. He proved to people that there is no reason to live. Somebody asked him, “But why do you go on living?” He said, “I have to live to teach people, but there is no reason to live. This is my reason.”When he was dying – at eighty-three – somebody asked him on his deathbed, “It is very puzzling and confusing that you lived so long because for at least fifty years you have been teaching that there is no reason to live.” He said, “That’s true, but I could not find the reason to commit suicide either. For what?”Now look at this man. His life must have been a tremendous misery. You have no reason to live and you have no reason to die.I have heard…A young man approached an old Jew. He was in love with the old Jew’s daughter. He said to the old man, “Sir, I want to get married to your daughter.”The old man looked at him and, as Jews are prone to ask, he asked, “But, young man, what are your reasons? Why do you want to get married to my daughter?”The young man shrugged his shoulders and said, “No reasons at all, sir. I am in love.”“No reasons at all. I am in love.” Love needs no reason.Sannyas should be a love affair. You should not ask for reasons, otherwise sannyas will become very mundane.When you go to the market and you purchase something, certainly there must be a reason for it. It is a commodity. You go to the market to purchase a car. There is some reason for it. You need it. It is a utility. But if you fall in love with a woman or a man, there is no utility. What utility does love have? What use does love have? You look at a roseflower and you are thrilled. What is the reason for being thrilled? What is there? You look at the moon and something in you simply gets connected with it, something starts changing in your being, you feel a coolness. What is the reason? If you look for the reason, you will destroy all beauty, love, truth, God, meditation – everything.Please leave a few things in life which have no reasons. Let sannyas be one of those few things.But I understand. The Western urge is to make everything rational, to find a reason for every act – otherwise you will feel uneasy. So you try to find some kind of rationalization. There is no reason, but you can find a rationalization. You can invent it. Why bother asking me? You can invent some rationalization: because you want to search for truth, because you want to go in search of God, because you want to attain to self-realization or you want to become enlightened. These are all excuses, all rationalizations.A stranger stopped at Mulla Nasruddin’s store for cigarettes. On the wall was a sign: “This store will be closed on August 28th on account of the weather.” As it was only August 15th, the man asked the Mulla how he could know what the weather would be like so far in advance.“Well,” said Nasruddin, “if it rains lightly, I am going fishing. If it rains heavily, I am going to stay home and work on my tackle.”“But how do you know it’s going to rain?” asked the man.“Don’t care if it rains or not,” explained Nasruddin. “If it’s sunny, I will go fishing or work on my tackle anyway. All depends on the weather.”You can find something. “All depends on the weather.” You can find a rationalization, an excuse.If you have decided, let this decision be pure – uncorrupted by any reason. Look at the beauty of what I am saying. If you can do something without any reason, it means you can do something without the mind coming in. If you can do something without reason, that means you have done something out of no-mind. If you can do something without reason, that means something has happened, you have not done it. Let sannyas be a happening. Why bother about reasons?You must have fallen in love with my orange people. You must have fallen in love with me; you must have fallen in love with the space that is being created here. Let it be a love affair, don’t bring reason in. And then your sannyas will go deeper. It can go very deep. It can transform you. With a reason it will be superficial. It is for you to choose.If you want some reason you can find one, but my feeling is: be courageous, sometimes do something which has no reason at all. You could have avoided it, you could have managed not to do it, but still you allowed it to happen. Let something bigger than you happen to you. You cannot figure out what it is. Going into the unknown is sannyas. Going into the unfamiliar, the uncharted, is sannyas. Going into that without making arrangements about where you are going, for what, just going, as if pulled in by some greater power than you, is sannyas.The fourth question:Osho,Does the man of Tao like to taste many women or does he stay with one until he is able to eat the master?The first thing: for the man of Tao there is not many and one. For the man of Tao, all women are one woman because he looks at the energy and not at the form. For the man of Tao, one woman is different from another woman only because of the frame – the sky is the same. For the man of Tao there is feminine energy and masculine energy, yin and yang – whether you stand at one window and look at the sky or you stand at another window and look at the same sky makes no difference. So the first thing is that all women are one woman because there is only one feminine energy. It is one sky framed in different windows.The second thing: for the man of Tao, one woman is all women because when you look from a window into the sky if you are not too obsessed with the frame it is the same sky, it is one sky. So one woman is all women and all women are one woman for the man of Tao – because a man of Tao contemplates in terms of energies, not of forms. He thinks in terms of the formless. When I look into you I am not bothered at all by the frame you exist in, I look at the painting. I don’t look at the frame. The frames differ but the painting is the same. It is one God, the same one sky.And for the man of Tao, in fact, the man and the woman also start disappearing by and by. There is only one energy – call it xyz. Taoists call it Tao. It means nothing. It means x. There is only one energy, Tao. It functions in two ways, man and woman. It is the same energy. It has to create a polarity to function; otherwise it will not be able to function at all.These two hands of mine are the same energy. I am in both. But if I want to clap them I can clap them, I can put them against each other. I can hit my right hand with my left, or I can love my left hand with my right. Still I am flowing in both hands. I am Tao. The right hand is yang, the left hand is yin. You are Tao. The masculine is your right hand; the feminine is your left hand. Now you can create either a clash between the two or you can create a harmony between the two. But whether it is a clash or a harmony, the energy remains the same.The man who has attained to Tao has gone beyond man and woman. He is no longer man and he is no longer woman. He is Tao.The fifth question – and now for the bombshell!Osho,Lieh Tzu never existed, right?Whether Lieh Tzu existed or not does not matter. Right or wrong, it does not matter at all. Western scholars have been very puzzled about whether Lieh Tzu ever existed or not. They wrote great treatises. They worked hard for years to find out whether he ever really existed. To the Eastern mind this whole scholarship looks stupid because it does not matter whether he existed or not. If you ask me whether he existed or not, I say it is all the same. Whosoever wrote these beautiful stories was Lieh Tzu – whosoever. One thing is certain: somebody wrote these beautiful stories. That much is certain because these stories exist.Now, whether somebody of the name of Lieh Tzu really wrote these stories or somebody of some other name wrote them, how does it make any difference? It will not add anything to the stories, they are perfect. It will not take anything away from the stories, nothing can be taken away. How is whether Lieh Tzu was a historical person or not going to affect these stories? They are so beautiful, they have intrinsic value. One thing is certain: somebody wrote them. Why be bothered about what his name was, whether it was Lieh Tzu or somebody else?It is possible that they were written by many people. Then too there is no problem. Whosoever wrote a story must have touched the consciousness of Tao, otherwise it could not have been written. One man may have written them or many men, but whenever these stories were written somebody penetrated into Tao consciousness, somebody understood what life is, somebody had a vision.In the West, this is very significant. People go on writing books and books about whether Shakespeare existed or not. As if it makes any difference. The plays that Shakespeare wrote are so beautiful – why not look into the plays and love and enjoy them? It seems to be going astray to ask whether Shakespeare existed or not. The problem arises because it is thought that Shakespeare was an uneducated man, so how could he write such beautiful things? Have you ever known very educated men to write beautiful things?It is thought that it was not Shakespeare but Sir Francis Bacon who was the real author. But I cannot trust this because I have read Sir Francis Bacon’s other books; they are nothing compared with Shakespeare’s. Francis Bacon was just ordinary. He may have been a very learned man; he may have been a great scholar, but his books are ordinary, rubbish. Just because he is Sir Francis Bacon and a very famous name, who is deceived? Have you ever heard the name of any book by him? Who bothers with him? How could Francis Bacon write these Shakespearean plays? Under his own name he has not written a single masterpiece, so how could he write one under a pseudonym? If he could write such beautiful plays as the Shakespearean plays under a pseudonym, then what was he doing when he was writing under his own name? It doesn’t seem right.So, whether Shakespeare was known as Shakespeare or not is not the point. Some consciousness certainly existed which gave birth to these beautiful plays. What is wrong in calling that consciousness Shakespeare?The same is true about Lieh Tzu: there is suspicion. There is no suspicion in the East; we have never questioned it. In India we have many books written by one man, Vyasa. The Mahabharata is enough. To write a book like The Mahabharata is enough for one author. It is an Encyclopaedia Britannica. It will make one man famous for ages to come. And that is only one of the books that he has written – there are hundreds of books in his name.Now Western scholars cannot believe that one man could write so many books. I can understand. It seems impossible. Then, too, these books were not written in one age: one book was written five thousand years ago, another book three thousand years ago, another book two thousand years ago. So this man existed for thousands of years?But in the East we have never worried about it. Don’t we see the problem? We can also see the problem but our approach is different. We say, “What does it matter who wrote them?” The books are beautiful, very beautiful, tremendously significant. We have enjoyed them down the centuries, we have loved them, we have contemplated over them. The authorship is irrelevant.Why one man? In fact, the case is this: once Vyasa’s name became famous, other authors simply did not bother to write their own name. They said, “It will do. Vyasa’s name is good and it is a well-known name, it will do.” So down the centuries anybody who wrote a beautiful book and thought that it was worthy of a Vyasa, signed it “Vyasa.” It was worthy of the man who wrote The Mahabharata, so how could he sign his own name? That would not look right. In fact, it was so beautiful that only Vyasa could write it – so the author signed with the name of Vyasa.These people were beautiful; they had no egos of their own. They were just vehicles. In fact, later on the name Vyasa became synonymous with “the author.” Vyasa means “the author” – written by the author. It does not mean anything else. In the East, we know that when a book is written by Vyasa it means “written by the author.” Naturally, every book must be written by the author. Vyasa has become synonymous with “the author.”Lieh Tzu is suspicious. He does not seem to be a historical person at all; he has not left any trace. Either he was not a historical person or he was a great horse. My preference is for the second. He was a great horse who never raised any dust and who never left any track behind. He effaced himself completely. Only this small book exists – the book of Lieh Tzu – with these small parables. It says nothing about Lieh Tzu.But why should one bother? This is going into the nonessential; this is looking at the color of the horse. The color of the horse was black and the man of Tao reported it as being yellow. And the horse was a stallion and the man reported it as being a mare. Lieh Tzu may have been a woman, he may not have been a man. Who knows? He may not have been a Chinese, he may have been a Tibetan. Who knows? He may not have been at all. It does not matter. But these parables matter. These parables are doors.So please don’t go into the nonessential. Look into the spirit of the essential. Don’t be bothered by the gross, go into the subtle.The sixth question:Osho,The earth seems to be shaking beneath our feet and our faces reflect some imminent cataclysmic event. What is happening?Don’t be worried. It has always been so. Every age and every generation has thought that something great is happening to them, because every generation has a great ego. How is it possible that something great is not happening while you are here? No, something cataclysmic, something great, something really final is going to happen.This has been so from the very beginning.I have heard that when Adam and Eve were thrown out, expelled from the Garden of Eden, the first thing that Adam said to Eve was, “Darling, we are passing through a great revolution.”Since then man has always felt the same – again and again and again down the ages. It is nothing new. A six-thousand-year-old stone has been found in Babylon with four or five sentences inscribed on it. When those sentences were deciphered people were puzzled. If you read those sentences, you will not believe that they are six thousand years old, they look as if they are part of the editorial of today’s Pune Herald. The first thing that inscription says is: “Where are those old golden days? The new generation has become very corrupted. Children don’t respect their parents…” Six thousand years old! It did not use the word hippie, right, but what is the difference? “Children don’t obey their parents. There is no respect left. Love has disappeared. Wives don’t love their husbands, husbands don’t love their wives. It is the most immoral age ever.” These are the sentences. “The most immoral age…”But the ego feels satisfied. Our age is the most immoral age. Nobody else can compete, nobody else can compare. And every age has always felt that it is passing through a very critical moment. Sir, it has been always so. Don’t be worried. Rest and go to sleep. Let the earth shake, it has always been shaking. It is nothing new.On the earth almost everything is old and ancient. There is a saying in India that there is nothing new under the sun. And in a way it is very significant. Only forms differ, everything is the same – the same anger, the same hatred the same war, the same violence, the same inhumanity, the same madness, the same neurosis. Nothing is new under the sun.You shouldn’t waste your time with it. Just go within yourself and find that which is eternal, find that which is your reality. These outer things have remained the same, changing a little bit here and there but basically repeating the same gestalt: the politics, the politicians, the war among nations, and the religions and the churches and their violent struggle to survive and crush each other, the greed of man and the aggressiveness of man, and the inhumanity of man toward other human beings.The last question:Osho,Please summarize what the ego is.An egotistical lover met a girl in a drugstore and asked her, “How would you like to sleep with me tonight, baby?” The girl, insulted and angry, used her knowledge of judo and flung him out the door.Jolted and jilted, the egotistical lover returned. “But, Baby,” he said, “You haven’t answered my question!”That’s what ego is – the greatest stupidity. You can’t see it because you are it. You can always see it in others; you cannot see it in yourself.A Jew suddenly became very rich and he wanted to show it off to everybody. So he and his wife went to the costliest restaurant dressed in the costliest clothing. The wife was wearing diamonds and emeralds and all that money could purchase – they had really become very rich.She was looking very ugly with all those diamonds and emeralds because she had no taste. You can become rich suddenly, but you cannot gain taste suddenly. You can become rich suddenly, but you cannot become cultured suddenly. And sometimes, when you suddenly become rich, all your ugliness comes to the surface. You purchase all that ugliness with your richness – you can afford it now. Up to now it had been hidden but then it comes to the surface.They sat down in the restaurant and looked at the menu. But as the menu was in French they could not read it – they did not know anything about French and they did not want to admit it to the waiter. So the wife asked, “What are you going to order now?”He told her not to be worried and said to the waiter, “Bring me one hundred dollars’ worth of salami sandwiches – one hundred dollars’ worth.” The ego is just absurd. Asking for one hundred dollars’ worth of salami sandwiches!The waiter could not believe it. He said, “You two are going to eat them all?”It is difficult to look at your own ego. The ego is something that everybody is aware of except you. Whenever others say something about you, ponder over it, meditate over it. There is every possibility that they will be right. When others say anything about your ego, don’t deny it, don’t reject it. There is every possibility that they are right. There is a ninety-nine percent possibility that they are right because others can very easily see your ego even if you cannot. And you can see other’s egos very easily; it is right there on the tip of their nose. In everything they do – walking, talking, sitting, listening – it is there. It is so apparent, so obvious to everybody except to the person himself. He hides behind it.Two actors were out of work when they met in Lindy’s one day. “Say, I got an idea,” said one. “Why don’t we team up? Do an act together.”“Sounds good,” said the other. “What kind of an act you got in mind?”“Well, I come out and sing. The curtain comes down. Then it goes up and I come out and dance. Then it comes down. Then it goes up again and I come out and juggle. Then…”“Hey, where do I come in?”“The curtain don’t go up and down by itself!”That’s what ego is. You are the emperor and everybody is a servant. You are the end and everybody is a means. This is the basic ingredient of the ego, the very center: you are the center of all existence and everybody is here to serve you, to be used by you. If you are using people, you are an egoist. If you think of yourself as the center and everybody else as your periphery, then you are an egoist.If you think that everybody is an end unto himself, then the ego starts disappearing. If you don’t put yourself higher than others or lower than others, then the ego disappears. Remember, you know that to put yourself higher than others is to be egotistical, but I am saying that to put yourself lower than others is also egotistical. It is ego standing on its head but it is ego all the same. So don’t put anybody higher than you and don’t put anybody lower than you. We are one. We are one existence. Nobody is lower; nobody is higher. Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior. There are not two existences so how can there be inferiority or superiority? It is one unity. Ego makes you feel separate; non-ego joins you with existence. To feel one with the cosmos is to get out of your ego; to feel separate is to be in your ego.Ego is what Tao is not; and Tao is what ego is not. If you are in the ego, you will never taste Tao. If you want to taste Tao, you will have to drop the ego. Dropping it, you come home; dropping it is the benediction.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On the pursuit of knowledge, Lao Tzu says:Without stepping outside one’s doorsone can know what is happening in the world.Without looking out of one’s windowsone can see the Tao of heaven.The further one pursues knowledgethe less one knows.Therefore the sage knows without running about,understands without seeing,accomplishes without doing.Religion is not knowledge, it is knowing. Knowledge is of the mind, knowing is of the being – and the difference and the distance is tremendously vast. The difference is not only quantitative, it is also qualitative.Knowledge and knowing – they are as different as heaven and hell, earth and the sky, so the first thing to understand is the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is never of the present, it is always of the past. The moment you say you know, it is already a dead thing. It has already left its marks on the memory; it is like dust clinging to you. You have already moved away from it.Knowing is always immediate, knowing is here and now. You cannot say anything about it, you can only be. The moment you speak of it, even knowing becomes knowledge; that’s why all those who have known say it cannot be said. The moment you speak of it, its very nature changes; it has become knowledge. It is no longer the beautiful alive phenomenon of knowing.Knowing has no past, it has no future, it has only the present. And remember, the present is not part of time. People ordinarily think that time is divided between the past, the future, and the present. They are absolutely wrong. Time is divided between the past and the future; the present is not a part of time at all. You cannot catch hold of it in time. Pursue it and you will miss. Try to grasp it and it will always be out of your reach, because it is part of eternity not part of time.The present is eternity crossing time. It is a meeting point where eternity and the temporal meet.In the present is knowing, in the past is knowledge – and knowledge creates the future. The past creates the future: the future is a by-product of the past. Whenever you know, you start planning. The more you know, the more you plan. Knowing means the past, planning means the future – then you don’t allow the future freedom, you try to fix it into the pigeonholes of the past. You would like it to be just a repetition of the past – however modified, decorated, but just a repetition of the past.A man of knowledge is a man of planning, and life is an unplanned flow. Life is freedom. You cannot pigeonhole it, you cannot categorize it. That’s why a man of knowledge misses life. He knows much, and he knows nothing. He knows too much and he is just empty and hollow. You cannot find a shallower person than a man of knowledge. He is just surface and surface; he has no depth because depth comes through eternity.Time is horizontal, it moves in a line on the horizon. Eternity is vertical, it moves into depth and height. That is the meaning of Jesus’ cross: time crossing eternity, or eternity crossing time. Jesus’ hands are time, they move into the past and the future, crucified in time, resurrected into eternity. His being is vertical – everybody’s being is vertical, only the body, the hands, the material part of you, is horizontal.Knowledge creates the future, and the future creates worry. The more you know, the more worried, the more uneasy. You are never at ease, at home – a deep trembling inside. It is a pathology. A man of knowing is totally different – he lives here. This moment is all, as if tomorrow exists not – and really it exists not, it has never existed. It is part of the game of the mind. It is a dream of the man of knowledge.This moment is all, and the total. Knowing moves into this moment vertically, goes deeper and deeper and deeper. A man of knowing has depth; even his surface is nothing but part of depth. He has no superficial surface, his surface is also part of depth. And a man of knowledge? – he has no depth, his depth is also part of his surface.This is the paradox: that a man of knowing knows and a man of knowledge does not know, cannot know, because knowledge cannot meet life. That is the barrier – on the contrary, the only barrier, the hindrance. It is just like this: a mother knows that the child is hers; the father has knowledge that the child is his. The father has only a belief. Deep down, he does not know. Only a mother knows!It happened…Mulla Nasruddin was working as a vizier to a small kingdom. The king was very generous – not very rich, the kingdom was small, but still very generous. Every year, Nasruddin would come and tell him, “My wife has given birth to a child,” and the king would give valuable presents to him, to the child, to the mother – but then it became too much because it was every year.When the twelfth child was born and Nasruddin came, the king said, “Now Mulla, it is too much – and the world is suffering so much from overpopulation. What are you doing? If you go at this speed you will create a small nation. You go on, every year – stop it! Let this child be the last. And if you cannot stop, if you are unable to stop, then it is better to commit suicide rather than to overburden the earth.”Nasruddin was very depressed. Then the thirteenth child was born – what to do? So he thought, it is better now not to go to the king – go to the forest and commit suicide, as the king has said. So he went to the forest and prepared everything to hang himself. Just a split second and he would have been hanging under the tree, dead – and then suddenly he said to himself, “Nasruddin! Beware! You may be hanging the wrong man!”A father simply believes, a mother knows. Knowing is like a mother, knowledge is like a father.All knowledge is belief. Knowing is not belief, it is knowing. It is your perception, it is your vision, it is your growth. It is just like the mother – the child grows in her womb, she knows the child is her part, her own extension, her own being, blood and bone. A father is extrinsic, he is not intrinsic. He simply believes that the child is his.A man of knowledge believes that he knows. A man of knowing knows.Knowing is a transformation in your being, it is like a pregnancy – you have to carry it. You have to give birth to yourself. A resurrection into eternity, a turning away from time and a moving into no time, a conversion from mind to no-mind, but something so tremendous that you know it is happening in you.A man of knowledge goes on collecting dust from the buddhas. Those who have known, he believes in them. Whatever he believes in is dead. He has not given birth to himself. He has collected knowledge from others, everything is borrowed – and how can knowledge be borrowed? How can being be borrowed? If knowledge is going to be true, it is going to be of the nature of being.George Gurdjieff used to ask people – seekers who would come to him – the first thing he used to ask is, “Are you interested in knowledge or being? Because here we give being and we are not concerned about knowledge, so decide well. If you are concerned with knowledge, go somewhere else. If you are concerned with being, remain here. But make a very, very clear decision.”What is the difference between being and knowledge? The same as the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowing is being.It is not something that is being added to you, it is something you grow into. Knowledge is something which is added to you. You don’t grow through it; rather you carry it as a burden. So you will always find a man of knowledge burdened, heavily burdened. He is carrying mountains of knowledge on his shoulders. You will see his face very serious, deadly serious, and his heart completely crushed under the burden.A man of knowing is weightless. He has nothing to carry, he can fly into the sky. The gravitation of the earth does not affect him. He is not pulled toward the earth because the earth can pull only that which is heavy. He remains on the earth but he is not of the earth. That is the meaning of Jesus’ saying – he says again and again, “My kingdom is not of this world.” It is of some other world, the world of being, of eternity.If you understand the distinction well, then remember never to move on the path of knowledge. Move on the path of knowing, being, because only then do you gain something: not that you have more information, but that you become more. And that is the crucial point to be understood – you have to become more.Your poverty is not of information, your poverty is of being. You are poor, and you go on hiding that poverty through accumulating things. And knowledge is also a thing. Words, theories, philosophies, systems, theologies – all things. Subtle, abstract – but still things. You are not growing, you remain the same, and you create a delusion around you that you have come to know.These sutras of Lao Tzu have to be understood in this light.Without stepping outside one’s doorsone can know what is happening in the world.Because deep down you are the world. The world is nothing but you writ large. In fact there is no need to go anywhere to know anything; if you know yourself you have known the whole humanity. If you know your anger you have known all anger. If you know your violence you have known all wars. There is no need to go to Vietnam, no need to go to Korea, no need to go to Palestine, or anywhere. If you know your violence you have known all violence. If you know your love you have known all – the whole history of love; never-written, never-known, even that you have known because you are the seed.It is just like taking a drop of water from the ocean; you analyze that drop. You have known the whole ocean if you know the drop. Because in the small drop the whole ocean is condensed, it is a miniature ocean. If you analyze the drop and come to know that it consists of H2O, you know that the whole ocean consists of H2O. Now there is no need to go on and on and on; one drop is enough. If you know the taste of one drop, that it is salty, you know that the whole ocean is salty – and that drop is you.Without stepping outside one’s doors one can know what is happening in the world. Because you are the world, an atomic world, and everything is happening in you. It may be happening on a vaster scale in the world, the quantity may be more, but the quality is the same.Understanding oneself one understands all.There is a beautiful story in the Upanishads. A young man, Shvetketu, came back from his guru’s house – from his gurukul, the family of his guru – learned, and of course, as young men are bound to be, very proud of his learning. Haughty. Egoistic.His father, the seer Uddalak, watched him coming, entering the village. The father watched him from the window and became sad: “This is not learning! He has become a man of knowledge. This is not knowing.” Uddalak said to his own heart, “I never sent him for this. He missed the point. He wasted his time!” Because knowing is humble. Not humble in the sense that it is opposite to ego, it is not related to ego at all, not even as an opposite – because even the opposite carries something of it.Not feeling that his son was humble, the father became very, very sad. He is getting old, and here comes this boy having wasted many years of his life – why does he look so proud? Knowing always makes you humble.This word humble is beautiful. It comes from the root humus; the root really means earthy, of the earth, unpretentious. And the same root is the base of the words human and humanity. You become human only when you become humble, you become humble only when you are of the earth. Of the earth in the sense: unpretentious, simple, unconditioned, earthy.Here comes the son so proud and haughty, he must have become a man of knowledge – and he had become one. He came, he touched his father’s feet, but it was just a formality. How can a man who has become so egoistic bow down?The father said, “Shvetketu, I see your body bent, but not you. And what misfortune has happened to you? Why do you look so haughty? A man of knowing becomes humble, Shvetketu. Have you heard anything about that one, knowing which, one knows all?”Shvetketu said, “What are you talking about? How can one know all by knowing one? Absurd! I have known all that could be known in the university, I have become as profound as one can become in all the subjects that are taught there. I have exhausted the whole possibility of learning. When my master said to me, ‘Now you know all and you can go back home,’ only then did I come back. But of what you are speaking, that ‘one’ – never heard of it. Nobody talked about it in the university. We learned grammar, language, history, myth, philosophy, theology, religion, poetry. Everything that is known to man I have learned. I have become proficient, and I have attained the highest degree that the university can confer. But we never heard about that ‘one’ – what are you talking about? Have you gone mad? How can one know all by knowing one?”Uddalak said, “Yes, that one is you. Shvetketu, tattvamasi – that art thou. If you know this one you will know all. All that you have known is just rot. You have wasted your energy. Go back! Never come again unless you know that one by knowing which all is known.“Because,” said Uddalak to his son, “in our family no one has been a brahmin just by name. We have called ourselves brahmins because we have known the brahman. You don’t belong to our family if you don’t know that one, go back!”You are that one: that art thou. A very small seed, almost invisible to yourself. Unless you search deep, and search long, with perseverance and patience, you will not encounter it.That seed is within you; it is your withinness. And the whole vast world is nothing but you written on a large canvas. Man is humanity. You are the world.Says Lao Tzu:Without stepping outside one’s doorsone can know what is happening in the world.Without looking out of one’s windowsone can see the Tao of heaven.There is no need to look out of the windows – the windows are your senses. Eyes, ears, nose – these are the windows, there is no need to look from these windows. Without looking out of one’s windows one can see the Tao of heaven. You can see the ultimate within.Have you seen Buddha images, sitting silently with closed eyes, unmoving? There are stories in India about people remaining in meditation for so long that birds settled on their bodies, they made their nests in their hair, and ants crawled for so long on them that they forgot – the ants forgot completely that here sits a man. They started living there.What were these men doing? Creepers crawled on their body thinking it was a good support. So unmoving, what were they doing there? They were not doing anything. Closing all their windows they were looking at the splendor of splendors, they were looking at themselves. It is such a tremendous mystery and such a beautiful phenomenon that nothing like it can ever be encountered anywhere else – because wherever you go and whatever you see, the report will be secondhand.I can see your face but my eyes will be the mediators, they will report: I will never be able to see your face directly, it will be always indirect. I can go to a rosebush and look at the beautiful flowers, but that beauty is secondhand because my eyes will report. There is an agency. I cannot come in direct contact with the rose; the eyes will always be there. The smell will come through the nose. I can listen to the singing birds but that song will always be secondhand, and unless you know firsthand, how can you know: …the Tao of heaven?How can you know the ultimate? The very ground of being? There is only one possibility of coming in contact with the ultimate – directly, immediately, without any mediators – and that is, inside yourself. Close all the doors and windows and move within.It happened…One of the wisest women ever born was Rabiya al-Adabiya. She was a Sufi, a great mystic, incomparable. She was sitting inside her hut with closed eyes doing something – nobody knows what.Another mystic of the name of Hassan was staying with her, and it was morning, and the sun started coming up, and it was tremendously beautiful. The birds singing and the trees happy again to see the light, and the whole world celebrating the morn. Hassan stood there, then he called Rabiya saying, “Rabiya, come out! See the glory of God! What a beautiful morning.”Rabiya said, “Hassan, rather on the contrary, you come in and see God himself. Out there I know is beauty, the beauty of creation, but it is nothing compared to the beauty of the creator. So rather, you come in!”I don’t know whether Hassan understood or not, but this is the whole thing. Knowledge goes out. When you go out you can know many things but it will be secondhand information.That’s what science is: science is always secondhand, it can never be firsthand. It can never have that freshness which religion can have. However deep an Einstein goes, the depth will be of the outside. He cannot come out of it fresh.And Albert Einstein felt it in his last days – somebody asked him just two or three days before he died, “What would you like to be, if there is another opportunity given by God to you to come to the earth, what would you like to become?”He said, “Next time rather than becoming a scientist, I would prefer to become a plumber. I would like to live a simple and ordinary life. I would like to live absolutely unknown to the outer world. I would like to live anonymously, nobody knowing about me, so that nobody disturbs me.”He is groping in the right direction. He is groping in the same direction where he can become a buddha any day.When one gets fed up with the outside one turns in. Then one would like to close all the doors and all the windows and just rest within. Without looking out of one’s windows one can see the Tao of heaven.Science goes on discovering laws and laws and laws but it will never discover the law, and the law is the meaning of the word Tao. Science will go on discovering gods and gods and gods but will never discover the god, and the god is the meaning of the word Tao: the very ultimate, beyond which nothing exists, beyond which nothing is possible.Science goes on discovering – and every day the more science discovers, the more old theories are discarded and thrown into the rubbish bin. And this is going to happen to every scientific theory one day or other. All scientific theories are doomed to be thrown onto the rubbish heap because they don’t know the law. They are only reflections in the lake not the real moon. The real moon is within and the whole world functions as a mirror.When you see beauty in a roseflower, have you ever pondered over whether the beauty is there in the roseflower or the beauty is poured by you? Because there are moments when you pass the same rosebush but nothing happens: the rose then is not a rose, nothing special, nothing extraordinary, just an ordinary rose. But in another moment – in another mood, in another state of mind – suddenly it takes on a beauty, a flavor. It becomes a new dimension. Doors open, mysteries are revealed. What is happening is that the rose is just a mirror. Whatever you pour into it, you see.You come before a mirror, you look in the mirror, the mirror simply mirrors you: it is you. If you are ugly the mirror reports an ugly figure, if you are beautiful the mirror reports beauty.There are moments when you are ugly then all roses become ugly; there are moments when you are sad then all moons become sad; there are moments when you are in hell then the earth becomes hell. You create reality around you, you project reality around you. You have within you the creator, the one by knowing which all is known.That’s why in aesthetics, thinkers for centuries have been trying to define what beauty is, and have not been able to define it. They cannot because it does not exist there outside. It is a pouring from within. The roseflower is not beautiful; you create the beauty around it. It is just like a peg: you hang beauty on it, it becomes beautiful. That’s why when a poet passes by, the roseflower is so beautiful you cannot conceive! And then a scientist passes absolutely oblivious of the fact that the rose has bloomed, the rose is blooming, that the rose exists. Then a businessman passes; he looks at the rose and thinks how much he can earn out of it if he sells it. Then comes a child, plucks the rose, plays for a few moments, forgets about it, goes on his way. The rose is nothing. It is you who brings the meaning to it.People come to me every day and they ask again and again in a thousand and one ways, “What is the meaning of life?” It has no meaning. You bring meaning to it. You create meaning. Meaning is not an objective fact, so don’t look for meaning and don’t search for meaning. If you go on searching you are bound to come to the truth that life is meaningless.That’s how existentialists in the West have come to discover that life is meaningless – and they have stopped there, which is very unfortunate. In the East we have come to know it but we never stopped there. Buddha also came to know that life is meaningless but he never stopped there. This is stopping halfway! Life is meaningless, but that doesn’t mean that your life needs to be meaningless, no. Life is meaningless if you don’t bring meaning to it. There is no meaning in it, the meaning has to be given to it. You pour down your being into life, it becomes vibrant with meaning. Then it sings, it dances, it becomes divine.People ask me, “Where is God? Can you show us?” I cannot show you God. Nobody can show you because God has to be found within. Then you can see him anywhere. Then in a rose you will see him – the rose will become the mirror and you will see God. Then a bird is singing in the morning, and suddenly the note takes on a flavor which was never there – you contributed it, it becomes divine.Once godliness is discovered within, everything becomes divine. If you have not discovered it within and you go on asking, “Where is God?” and you go on asking for his address, you will never reach. All addresses are false because he lives within you, he needs no address.There is a beautiful story, very ancient…It is said that God created the world and everything was beautiful, then he created man and everything became horrible. With man entered hell. And man started complaining and it became almost impossible for God to sleep or to do anything – so many people, and they went on knocking at his door day and night, and it became a nightmare. He must have thought many times to destroy man so that the peace of the world could be regained.But then a wise counselor said, “There is no need to destroy man, simply change your abode. Don’t live here on this earth” – God used to live here, and because of you he had to leave his abode.So God asked, “Where should I go?”Another counselor said, “It is good that you go to Everest.”God said, “You don’t know – sooner or later there will come a man named Hillary; he will reach there and the whole thing will start again.”Then somebody said, “Go to the moon.”God said, “You don’t know; these things won’t help much. Sooner or later man is going to reach everywhere. Suggest to me somewhere he will not even suspect I am.”Then the old counselor came near to him, said something into his ear, and God nodded. He said, “Yes, you are right.”The old man had suggested, “Then hide within man. He will never suspect that. He will search and seek everywhere except in his own inner world.”The story is beautiful. Almost factual. Not a story but a truth.Without looking out of one’s windowsone can see the Tao of heaven.The further one pursues knowledgethe less one knows.Looks paradoxical, but only looks paradoxical. It is not. It is a simple fact. The more one pursues knowledge the less one knows. Go to the pundits: they know so much, but look into their eyes – not even a glimmer. Watch them – not even a gesture of knowing. Be with them, and there is nothing, they are hollow, absolutely false. Nothing inside, just a painted hollowness, a decorated hollowness, decorated by many scriptures: the words of those who have known, but all borrowed, all dead. And surrounded by these dead words they have almost become dead themselves.Go to a man of knowledge and you will taste dust around him. He may look very, very old, ancient, almost in the grave, but you will not find the freshness that is part of life. You will not see a living river in him, flowing, moving always into the unknown. Knowledge is a limitation, however vast, but a limitation still. That’s why Socrates says, “When I was young I thought I knew all. When I became a little mature I started suspecting, and then I came to realize that I don’t know that much. When I really became old I realized that I don’t know at all.”It happened…The oracle at Delphi declared, “Socrates is the wisest man on earth today.”The people who heard this went to Socrates and they said, “This is a paradox! We are puzzled. Then who is right? If the oracle is right then you are wrong, if you are right then the oracle is wrong – and neither can be wrong. We believe in you, we have known you, we have been around you, we have felt you – that you must be true. Whatever you say, it cannot be a lie. But the oracle, the divine oracle, has never been found telling lies.“All that has been predicted by the Delphic oracle has always been found true, so we are in a fix. Help us. You say you don’t know anything, in fact you say that you know only one thing – that you know nothing. And then comes this oracle and says, ‘Socrates is the wisest man on earth.’”Socrates said, “There must have been some misunderstanding because I know more about myself than anybody can know about me, and I tell you again that I know nothing. At the most this much I can permit – that I know that I know nothing. Nothing more. Go and ask the oracle again, there has been some misunderstanding. Either you have not interpreted it rightly or something else – go again!”They went again and asked the oracle and she laughed and said, “That’s why we say he is the wisest man on earth, because he knows only that he knows nothing.”There is no paradox. This is the indication of a wise man: that he has come to realize that knowledge is futile, that knowledge knows nothing, that knowledge is rubbish, that knowledge is nonsense. However logical it pretends to be – those are all pretensions.The further one pursues knowledge the less one knows. Why does it happen? Because the further you pursue knowledge, the further you are going away from yourself. The more you try to find the truth somewhere outside of you, the further away you are moving: the further away from the whole in search of the whole, the further away from yourself in search of your authentic being, the further away from consciousness in your search.What are you searching for? That which you are searching is already within you. Religion is the search for that which is already the case. Religion is the search for that which is already the reality.If you go further away from yourself, you will know less and less and you will think you know more and more. Scriptures you will know, words you will know, theories – and you can go on spinning and you can go on weaving more and more out of these words and you can make palaces in the air. But they cannot be more than airy, abstract. They don’t exist, they are made of the same stuff as dreams. Thoughts and dreams are made of the same stuff – they are ripples on the surface of the ocean; they have nothing substantial in them. If you want to know the truth, come back home.I always say: seek and you will miss, don’t seek – and find. Because the very effort to seek means that you have taken it for granted that it is not with you already. From the very beginning your search is doomed. One day, seeking, searching, accumulating knowledge, the fact will strike home that you are a fool, that it would have been better – before going into the vast world to seek – to have looked inside.Again a small parable of Rabiya al-Adabiya…One evening, the sun was setting and the neighborhood found her searching for something on the street. An old woman, everybody loved her; of course everybody thought her a little crazy, but she was a beautiful person. So they all rushed to help her and they asked, “What has been lost? What are you searching for?”She said, “My needle. I was doing some needlework and I have lost my needle. Help me! You are so kind.” So they all engaged in the search.Then one man, seeing the fact that the street was so big and the needle was such a small tiny thing and that unless they exactly knew where it had been dropped, it would be almost impossible to find, came to Rabiya and said, “Tell us exactly the spot.”Rabiya said, “Don’t ask that because in fact I did not lose it outside my house, I lost it inside.”They all stopped searching and said, “Crazy woman! Then why are you searching here outside in the street when you have lost it inside the house?”Rabiya said, “There is much darkness, here is a little light. How can you seek when there is darkness? And you know I am poor, not even a lamp with me. How can you seek when there is darkness? So I am seeking here because still a little sunlight is left, and still something can be done to search.”The people started laughing. They said, “You are really crazy! We know that in darkness it is difficult to search, but then the only way is to borrow a lamp from somebody, and search for it there.”Rabiya said, “I never thought you people were so wise. Then why do you always seek outside? I was just following your ways. If you understand so well, why don’t you borrow a lamp from me and search inside? I know there is darkness.”This parable is meaningful. You search outside, there is a reason: because inside everything is so dark. You close your eyes and there is dark night, you cannot see anything. Even if something is seen it is nothing but a part of the outside reflected in the inner lake – thoughts floating that you have gathered in the marketplace, faces coming and going, but they belong to the outside world. Just reflections of the outside, and vast darkness. One becomes afraid. Then one thinks it is better to seek outside; there at least there is light.But that is not the point. Where have you lost your truth? Where have you lost your being? Where have you lost your godliness? Where have you lost your happiness, your bliss? Before you go to the infinite ways of the outside world, it will be better to first look within. If you cannot find there, then it is all right – go and search outside. But that has never happened. Whoever has looked within has always found because it is already there. Only a look is needed, a conversion, a returning of consciousness. Just a deep look.The further one pursues knowledgethe less one knows. Therefore the sage knows without running about…In the running you are missing: wasting life, energy, opportunity. Don’t go on running about and about and about. Stop running: that’s all that meditation is about. Stop running, sit quietly with closed windows and doors, settle inside, rest inside, relax inside. Let the turmoil settle a little – then start looking.It will be like groping in the beginning; in the beginning the darkness will be too much, but as you become accustomed to it, the darkness starts changing its quality.It is just like when you come from the outside and it has been a hot day and the sun has been too cruel. You come inside your house and you cannot see – everything looks dark – because the eyes are focused with the sun, the eyes are accustomed to too much light. A sudden change – the eyes will take a little time to settle, that’s all. Patience is needed. When you move inward, nothing will be seen. Don’t be impatient, don’t say just after a minute that “All the buddhas are false – they say inside is bliss, I don’t see anything.”It happened to one of the most penetrating thinkers the West has ever produced, it happened to David Hume. Again and again coming across the Eastern teachings: “Go within. Close your eyes, see.” One day he thought, “Let us try,” knowing well that there is nothing – these Eastern people are mad, illogical, irrational, introverts, fooling themselves and nobody else. But he said, “Better at least to try.” He closed his eyes just a single minute. Then he opened them and wrote down in his diary, “There is nothing except darkness, a few thoughts floating, a few sensations, and nothing else.”Don’t be so impatient. Wait. Let things settle inside, it takes time. You have been unsettling them for so many lives, settling will take a little time, a little patience. And nothing else is needed. You need not try to settle them because that will disturb them again, you will stir them up more. Simply don’t do anything. That is the meaning of Lao Tzu’s beautiful phrase wu-wei: do by not doing. You simply don’t do anything and it happens; that is doing by not doing. Just close your eyes and wait and wait and wait and you see layers of disturbance falling, settling, things falling into their places – and silence. By and by darkness becomes light, and “the one” is known, by knowing which all is known. Because that one is the seed. That art thou, Shvetketu.Therefore the sage knows without running about,understands without seeing,accomplishes without doing.And that is the greatest accomplishment: that which is accomplished without doing anything at all. Remember, whatever you can do cannot go beyond you. How can it? If you do it, it will remain lower than you, it cannot go higher than you. Whatever you do will be part of your mind, it cannot be transcendental. Whatever you do will be done by the ego, it cannot be your being. So non-doing is the only way to do it.Sitting still, sitting quietly, not doing anything – and the grass grows by itself. Then the effort, the doing, is still. Such a tremendous and vast silence descends on you.I was reading a Japanese poem just a few days ago. A line of it penetrated me very deeply, became part of my heart. It says:When the bird is not singing the mountain is yet more silent.When there is no doing, even the bird is no longer singing, nothing is there, everything calm and quiet. Suddenly you become aware that nothing has been lacking from the very beginning: that which you are seeking, you have always been that. Suddenly you realize that the master of masters is sitting there on the throne. And you start laughing.Bokuju became enlightened. Enlightened? Don’t take the word very seriously, it is nothing serious. It is the ultimate in fun, it is the last joke. Bokuju became enlightened and he started laughing, a belly laugh, he became crazy.People gathered and they started asking, “What is the matter? Please tell us, what has happened?”He said, “Nothing has happened. Just I was mad, searching and seeking that which is already there in me.”Whenever people used to ask Bokuju, “What did you do when you became enlightened?” he would say, “I laughed, and I laughed loudly.” And he said, “I have still not stopped laughing. Whether you hear it or not is not the point – I have still not stopped laughing.” What a joke! You have it already and you have been searching and seeking. And you could not find it, not because it was not there but because it was so much there, and so close to you that you could not see it.The eyes can see that which is far away, the eyes can see that which is distant – because the eyes need a perspective. The hands can touch that which is different and distant; the ears can hear that which is outside. That’s why Lao Tzu says the sage: …understands without seeing. Because how can you see yourself? Who will see whom? The seer and the seen are one, no eyes are needed. Who will do it? Who will make the effort? It will be just like a dog chasing its own tail, it will be simply foolish.And this is what you are doing, chasing your own tail. Stop and see it is your own tail, there is no need to chase it – and by chasing it you are not going to get it, ever. By chasing it you miss, by non-chasing you accomplish: …accomplishes without doing.And then time disappears. Then the mind disappears, because the mind is there to know something, the mind is the faculty of knowing. When you have known, there is no point for the faculty to remain, it simply disappears.Time disappears; time was there because you were frustrated, it is created out of frustration – so that you can hope for the future, and somehow bear the frustration, and tolerate it, and console yourself.The mind and time are not two things but aspects of one thing. When both disappear for the first time, you are in your absolute glory. Say it this way: you have become a god, a buddha.And ask the awakened: they all say the same thing, that it has to be accomplished without any effort on your part. It is the effort that has created the whole mess. Dropping all effort, just sitting silently looking within – wu-wei.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Isn't the search for enlightenment a selfish search?Yes, it is – and the most selfish. There is nothing like it, it is incomparably selfish. And one has to be selfish; there is no other way to be. All the teachings that go on telling you not to be selfish have not helped. Rather, they have distracted your being, they have made you unnatural.The self is your center, and to be selfish is the only way there is to be. The more you try to be not selfish, the more you become eccentric. The word eccentric is beautiful; it simply means off-center. Then you are no longer rooted in yourself, then you are no longer grounded in your being – and a man who is not grounded in his being lives a false life, lives an artificial life. His whole life is more like a dream than like a reality.And deep down you cannot help it, deep down you remain selfish. At the most you become hypocrites. You try to be unselfish, but that is an impossibility. Even in your effort to be unselfish you will remain selfish. So you create a duality, a conflict, and whatever you say on the surface, deep down you go on denying it – and you know it well because how can you deceive yourself? The surface says one thing, the depth goes on broadcasting just the opposite.It happened…There was a case against Mulla Nasruddin in the court and the judge asked, “Did you sleep with this woman, Nasruddin?Nasruddin said, “No, your honor, not at all, your honor, not even a wink!”This is the situation. You say something and immediately your inner depth contradicts it. You become a contradiction. You become tense. Your life becomes a deep anguish, a suffering. I teach you to be totally selfish because I teach you that which is natural. But if you understand me well – which is difficult, you may misunderstand me – if you are really selfish then much flows out of your life which is absolutely unselfish. Because when a man is grounded in his own being he has so much to share, so much to give, there is no need to be altruistic.If you are centered you are altruistic because you have overflowing love, overflowing being – you have to share. You are just like a flower, so full of fragrance it goes on sharing it with the winds. You are like a pregnant being, you carry so much within you that you have to give, to share, and by sharing it grows more. But you share it from your center.So I am not saying that when you become selfish, then you are not unselfish – no, just the opposite. When you try to be unselfish you remain, deep down, selfish. When you become totally selfish a tremendously beautiful unselfishness happens in your life. But you are not even conscious about it, because if you are conscious it is false.Things which are natural and healthy need no consciousness. Are you conscious of your breathing? Yes, sometimes, when something goes wrong, when something is ill, when the breathing is not as it should be. Then you become alert. You are alarmed, then you become conscious. Otherwise the breathing goes on day and night, twenty-four hours, whether you are asleep or awake, whether you are in love or in hate, whether you move or you sit, whatever you do the breathing continues. It does not depend on your being conscious of it – and it is fortunate that it doesn’t depend on your consciousness, otherwise you would be already dead. If you had to be careful about it, if you had to do it, it would have stopped long before.Unselfishness should be like breathing. You should be centered, then it happens. Unselfishness is not the opposite of selfishness, unselfishness is the by-product of being totally selfish. This is what I teach you. And all the churches and all the religions and all the priests and preachers, they have been teaching you just the opposite. They have corrupted humanity, they have poisoned your minds.You cannot be centered and you are trying to help others, to be of service to them. The only help that you can give, the first and the very basic thing, is to be centered and rooted within yourself.Yes, enlightenment is a selfish search.This is half of the answer I would like to give you. Now the other half: because enlightenment is a selfish search, the most selfish, incomparably selfish, you cannot attain enlightenment through search. The search will make you a beautiful person – wise, compassionate, in a thousand and one ways – but not enlightened.So, for me there exist three types of persons. One, the so-called religious person, the moral, the puritan, the so-called good, who goes on trying to be unselfish and remains selfish. Second, the person who knows there is no other way to be, knows that to be selfish is the only way there is, who becomes centered and becomes unselfish – who through selfishness attains unselfishness as a by-product, he makes no effort to attain it. And the third person: who is neither selfish nor unselfish. He is the enlightened person who goes beyond duality, who goes even beyond the self.Hidden in yourself is the no-self. Hidden behind you is emptiness, nothingness, what Buddha has called sunyata, absolute nothingness.So the second part of the answer: you cannot attain enlightenment through searching. All search fails there because until the seeker is lost, enlightenment is not possible – and how can the seeker be lost if there is search? How can the seeker be lost if there is a self?It is not possible. So what happens? How does a man become enlightened? He searches and searches, and there comes a moment when he realizes the total absurdity of searching for it. Because you can search for something that is not already within you, you can search for something that is in the future – but how can you search for that which is already the case? Through searching you will miss it.How can you search for the seeker himself? The seeker can search for everything except himself. Trying to search for himself is absurd. How can the seeker seek himself? For searching, a distance is needed between the seeker and the sought.When the distance is not there – and it is not there – the seeker is the sought. When this is realized, and it is realized after much search, remember. Don’t drop searching. I am not saying that; it is realized after many failures, when all hope is lost. It is realized only when you have searched in all ways possible, when you have done all that you could, no stone has been left unturned, not even a single corner has been left unsearched, you have done all that can be done, nothing is left – you simply sit. The search drops from you: no hope, no possibility of ever gaining this goal. In a moment of absolute frustration you drop the search – this is how it happened to Buddha, this is how it happened to me, this is how it always happens.You make tremendous effort, and that is needed! I’m not saying that right now you can drop the search: How can you drop it if you have not got it? Search hard. Make all the effort you can, bring your total energy to it, but I am not saying that through it you will attain. Without it you will never attain, through it no one has ever attained. You will have to pass through it.Go in, and then a moment comes when you come out, freed from all search and seeking. Then suddenly you turn inward, because a search is always outward. Seeking, you always look somewhere else, seeking you run all over the space, seeking you go in all directions – and there is something within you that is beyond all directions. You may call it the eleventh direction.There is something within you which need not be searched for but only realized. It happens in a single moment, not even in a single moment, in a split second – not even that – it doesn’t happen in time.Search stopped, seeker gone, suddenly it is there. It has always been there.The second question:Osho,What is the difference between knowledge, and wisdom, and understanding?There is a lot of difference, and the difference is not quantitative, it is qualitative. Knowledge is belief. Knowledge is others’ experience, not your own. They say there is a God and you believe in it. This is knowledge.A young man can become very knowledgeable. There is no trouble in it: you need a good memory, you need to make a little effort. The same thing can be done someday by a computer: you can carry a computer in your pocket, no need to make your head too heavy with the libraries, the computer can carry all the knowledge.Remember, soon computers will replace all your knowledge. The pundit is going to disappear from the world; the computer will take its place. And I say “its” place knowingly, consideredly, because a pundit is a mechanism, he is not a man. That’s all you have been doing with the brain – you go on feeding it information.Knowledge is borrowed. Others know it; you believe they must be true. Wisdom comes through your own experience. Knowledge is an accumulation, wisdom is also an accumulation. But knowledge is an accumulation of others’ experiences; wisdom is an accumulation of your own experience. A young man can never be wise; he can be knowledgeable – because for wisdom, time is needed. Old people are wise because you have to pass through experiences.You can read many books on love and you can know much about love, what others have said about it, but to know love itself you will have to pass through experience – which is time-absorbing. By the time you know something about love, the youth, your young age, will have gone. You will be old, but wise.Old age is wise, youth can be knowledgeable. Wisdom is one’s own experience accumulated; knowledge is others’ experience accumulated by you.Then what is understanding? Understanding is non-accumulative. What difference does it make whether somebody else experienced and you believed, or you experienced and then you believed? That experience is of the past. It is no longer there, and you have changed so much – and everybody is changing every moment – that an old man who says, “In my youth I experienced this,” is talking about somebody else because he is no longer the same.Wisdom is a little closer than knowledge, but not very close. Understanding is non-accumulative; you don’t accumulate either others’ experiences or your own. You need not accumulate, you grow. Understanding is always fresh; wisdom is a little dusty and old, wisdom is always of the past, your own past. Knowledge is also of the past – of others’ pasts. But what difference does it make finally? Because your own past is as far away from you as others’ pasts; you are no longer the same. Every moment the river is flowing: says old Heraclitus, you cannot step in the same river twice.Your own youth – you cannot step in it twice. You have learned something from your experience, you carry it. Knowledge can be washed away, wisdom also. They can be brainwashed, completely wiped from your mind. Understanding can never be brainwashed, it is not part of the brain, it is non-accumulative. All that is accumulative is accumulated in the brain.Understanding is of your being, it cannot be washed away – you cannot brainwash a buddha. In fact he has brainwashed himself completely, he has cleaned his slate himself, how can you clean him? He is non-accumulative, he lives moment to moment. Through living his being grows. If through living your knowledge grows, it is wisdom; if through living your being grows, it is understanding – and if without living your accumulation grows, it is knowledge.Understanding is the real flowering of being. A man of understanding is mirrorlike. A mirror carries nothing. A mirror always lives in the immediate present: whoever comes before it, it reflects.You ask me a question. The question can be answered through knowledge, that is, the experience of others. The question can be answered through wisdom, experience of my own. The question can be answered through understanding – then I am just a mirror, I simply respond.You ask, you come before my mirror, I simply respond. That’s why a man of understanding will always be felt contradictory, inconsistent, because what can he do? He does not carry the past, his answers are not coming from the past; his answers are coming right now this very moment from his being. And every moment the world is changing, it is a flux, so how can an old answer be given again? Even if the words appear to be old the answer cannot be old.Understanding is non-repetitive and non-accumulative. Wisdom is accumulative, repetitive; knowledge is accumulative, repetitive. Knowledge is sheer belief, wisdom has a little experience in it, understanding is totally different. It is your presence, your mirrorlike presence. It is a response.Old people can be wise, young people can be knowledgeable, only children can be understanding. That is the meaning when Jesus says, “Only those who are like children will be able to enter my Kingdom of God.”When you again become childlike, fresh, carrying no past, carrying no ready-made answers within you – carrying no answers, just a deep emptiness – then something echoes in you. Somebody asks a question… No answer comes from the memory, no answer comes from experience, but the answer is a response this very moment.Understanding is always of the now and the here. Understanding is the most beautiful thing that can happen to a person. Drop knowledge, and then drop wisdom also. Don’t believe in others’ experiences and don’t believe in your own experiences either, because they are of the past. You have passed from there, they are no longer a part of existence – things have flowed on. The river has passed under a thousand and one bridges, and it is not the same river even if you see it flowing. It is not the same river, it is constantly changing.Except for change, everything is changing. Change is the only permanent factor in existence – so how can you rely on the past? If you rely, you will always miss the present.Old people, wise, are always ready with great advice to give to anybody – full of advice, nobody listens to them. It is good, never listen, because you will never live the same experiences as they have lived. The river will never be the same again. If you follow them you will become false, inauthentic, untrue – you will be a lie.And never listen to your own experience either, because you are also getting old every day and yesterday will always be giving advice. A new situation arises and yesterday is ready there, and yesterday – the old man within you – says, “This is the advice, do this because we did this yesterday and it was good and it worked, and you succeeded.”Don’t listen to your own inner old man. Be alert, aware of the total situation. And don’t react: respond. If everything is new let your answer also be new. Only the new can meet the new, only the new can solve the new. Only with the constantly fresh and new do you remain alive and true to life.The third question:Osho,When meditating with no set time limit I become aware of my great anxiety about time. You said that time-consciousness is frustration. Could you please speak about this fear of time?That is the only fear there is: the fear of time. The fear of death is also the fear of time because death stops all time. Nobody is afraid of death. How can you be afraid of something that you have not known? How can you be afraid of the absolutely unknown, unfamiliar, strange? Fear can exist only with something that is known. No, when you say “I am afraid of death,” you are not afraid of death – you don’t know! Who knows, death may be better than life. The fear is not of death, the fear is of time.In India we have the same term for both. Time we call kal and death also we call kal. We have one term for both death and time. It is meaningful, the word kal is meaningful, very significant, because time is death, and death is nothing but time.Time passing means life passing. Fear arises. In the West the fear is more acute; it has almost become chronic. In the East the fear is not so much, and the reason is that the East believes that life continues for ever and ever. Death is not the end, this life is not the only life; there have been thousands and thousands of lives in the past and there will be thousands and thousands in the future. There is no hurry. That’s why the East is lazy: there is no hurry! That’s why in the East there is no time-consciousness. Somebody says, “I will come at five o’clock sharp” and he never turns up. He does not feel any responsibility toward time, and you are waiting and waiting, and he comes after four or five hours and he says, “What is wrong in it? So what?”In the West, time is very short because Christianity, Judaism, both believe in only one life. That has created anxiety. There is only one life, seventy years at the most, one third lost in sleep. If you live sixty years, twenty years are lost in sleep, twenty of the remaining years are lost in education, this and that. The remaining twenty years – the job, the occupation, the family, marriage and divorce and… If you really calculate you will find there is no time to live!When will I live? Fear grips the heart, and life is passing, time is flowing out of your hands and death is reaching every moment with such a constant pace – any moment it can knock at the door. And time is irrecoverable, you cannot get it back: gone – gone forever.Fear, anxiety, a time neurosis – it is becoming chronic, it has almost become as if second nature to Western man, continuously alert that time is going, and afraid.The fear is basically: I have not yet been able to live, and time is moving, and it cannot be recovered, I cannot undo it; gone – gone forever. And every day, life is shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller.The fear is not of death, the fear is of time, and if you look deeply into it then you find that the fear is of unlived life – you have not been able to live. If you live, then there is no fear. If life comes to a fulfillment, there is no fear. If you have enjoyed, attained the peaks that life can give – if your life has been an orgasmic experience, a deep poetry vibrating within you, a song, a festival, a ceremony, and you lived each moment of it to its totality – then there is no fear of time, then the fear disappears.You are ready; even if death comes today, you are ready. You have known life. In fact you will welcome death because now a new opportunity opens, a new door, a new mystery is revealed. I have lived life, now death is knocking at the door. I will jump to open the door, “Come in! I have known life, I would like to know you also.”That’s what happened to Socrates when he was dying. His disciples started crying and weeping – and it was natural. Socrates opened his eyes and said, “Stop! What are you doing? Why are you crying and weeping? I have lived my life and I have lived it totally. Now death is coming and I’m very, very enthusiastic about it. I am waiting with such great love and longing; with hope.” A new door opens, life reveals a new mystery.Somebody asked, “Are you not afraid?”Socrates said, “I don’t see the point. Why should one be afraid of death? Because in the first place I don’t know what is going to be, and secondly, there are only two possibilities: either I will survive and then there is no problem of fear, or I will not survive and then too there is no problem of fear. If I don’t survive there is no problem – when I am not, there cannot be any problem. And if I survive as I am here, if my consciousness survives, there is no problem because I am still there.“There were problems in life also, I solved them. So if I am there and there are problems I will solve them – and it is always a joy to solve a problem, it gives a challenge. You take the challenge and you move into it, and when you solve it a great release of happiness happens.”The fear of death is the fear of time, and the fear of time is, deeply, the fear of unlived moments, unlived life.So what to do? Live more, and live more intensely. Live dangerously. It is your life, don’t sacrifice it for any sort of foolishness that has been taught to you. It is your life, live it. Don’t sacrifice it for words, theories, countries, politics. Don’t sacrifice it for anybody.There are many who are ready like butchers – they can get hold of you, and they have implanted conditioning within you. Your nation is in danger – die for it! Absolute foolishness. Your religion is in danger – die for it! Nonsense. It is your life, live it! Don’t die for anything else, die only for life.That’s the message. And then there will be no fear.But there are people who are ready to exploit you. They go on saying: Die for this, die for that. They are ready for only one thing, that you should become a martyr – and then there will be fear.Live it! And don’t think that it is courage to die. The only courage is to live life totally, there is no other courage. Dying is very simple and easy. You can go and jump off a cliff, you can hang yourself – it is such an easy thing. You can become a martyr to a country, to a god, to a religion, to a church – all butchers! All murderers!Don’t sacrifice yourself. You are here for yourself, for nobody else. And then live. And live in total freedom, so intensely that every moment is transformed into eternity. If you live a moment intensely it is transformed into eternity. If you live a moment intensely you move into the vertical, you drop out of the horizontal.There are two ways of being related with time: one is just to swim on the surface of the ocean, another is to dive deep, to go to the depths.If you are just swimming on the ocean of time you will always be afraid because the surface is not the reality. The surface is not really the ocean, it is just the boundary, it is just the periphery. Go to the depth, move toward the depth. When you live a moment deeply, you are no longer part of time.If you have been in love, and deeply in love, time disappears. When you are with your beloved or your lover or your friend, suddenly there is no time. You are moving in depth. If you have loved music, if you have a musical heart, you know time stops. If you have a sense of beauty, aesthetic sensibility and sensitiveness, look at a rose and time disappears, look at the moon and where is time? The clock immediately stops. The hands go on moving but time stops.If you have loved anything deeply you know that you transcend time. The secret has been revealed to you many times. Life itself reveals it to you.Life would like you to enjoy. Life would like you to celebrate. Life would like you to participate so deeply that there is no repentance for the past, that you don’t remember the past. Every moment you go deeper and deeper, every moment life becomes more and more beautiful, more orgasmic, a peak experience – and by and by, when you become attuned to the peak, that becomes your abode.That’s how an enlightened man lives; he lives totally and moment to moment.Somebody asked a Zen master, “Since enlightenment what have you been doing?”He said, “I carry water from the well, I cut wood in the forest, when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel sleepy I sleep, that’s all.”But remember well, when a man who has come to a deep understanding of his own being cuts wood, he simply cuts wood. There is nobody else there. In fact the cutter is not there, only the cutting of the wood, the chopping. The chopper is not there because the chopper is the past. When he eats, he simply eats.One great Zen master has said, “When sitting sit, when walking walk. Above all, don’t wobble.”Time is a problem because you have not been living rightly – it is symbolic, it is symptomatic. If you live rightly, the problem of time disappears, the fear of time disappears.So, what to do? Each moment, whatever you are doing, do it totally. Simple things – taking a bath, take it totally. Forget the whole world. Sitting, sit; walking, walk. Above all, don’t wobble. Sit under the shower and let the whole of existence fall on you. Be merged with those beautiful drops of water falling on you. Small things: cleaning the house, preparing food, washing clothes, going for a morning walk. Do them totally, then there is no need for any meditation.Meditation is nothing but a way to learn how to do a thing totally – once you have learned, make your whole life a meditation. Forget all about meditations, let the life be the only law, let the life be the only meditation. And then time disappears.And remember, when time disappears, death disappears. Then you are not afraid of death. In fact you wait. Just think of the phenomenon. When you wait for death, how can death exist? This waiting is not suicidal. This waiting is not pathological. You lived your life. If you have lived your life, death becomes the very peak of it all. Death is the climax of life, the pinnacle, the crescendo.You lived all the small waves of eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, making love. You lived small waves, great waves – then comes the greatest wave. You die! You have to live that too in its totality. And then one is ready to die. That very readiness is the death of death itself.That’s how people have come to know that nothing dies. Death is impotent if you are ready to live it; death is very powerful if you are afraid. Unlived life gives power to death. A totally lived life takes all power from death. Death is not.The fourth question:Osho,Do you agree with the view that history repeats itself?Nothing repeats itself except stupidity and history is stupidity – it repeats.The fifth question:Osho,How can one come to know that neither he nor anybody else dies?There is no other way except to die.A Zen master was asked – a great emperor came to inquire, he was afraid of death, as everybody is. And of course an emperor has more to lose than a beggar, so an emperor is bound to be more afraid of death than a beggar. Death will take more from an emperor than from a beggar and so of course obviously he was more afraid. He became old and he went to the Zen master and he asked, “Tell me something about death, master.”The master asked, “How am I to know about it?”The emperor replied, “But you are an enlightened master.”He said, “Yes, but – an alive one, not dead. How am I to know about death?”This moment life is there – live it. That is the training for death. Otherwise when you are dead you will ask, “What is life?” Now you are asking “What is death?” And whether the soul continues after death or not. Now you are alive missing the possibility, the opportunity, to know what life is.I will tell you one secret, don’t tell it to anybody – and if you do tell, please tell them not to tell anybody else. People who are alive come to me and ask, “What is death?” And ghosts come to me also and they ask, “What is life?”Please, while you are alive live it well, so that when you become a ghost you need not go to a master and ask, “What is life?” And if you can know life you will be able to know death, because knowing is the thing. If you have the capacity to know life, you will have the capacity to know death.Knowing should be developed, that’s what Lao Tzu goes on saying – not knowledge but knowing. And remember, if you ask me and if I say, “Yes, you will survive death,” that will be knowledge for you, not knowing. And I am not here to help you become more knowledgeable. That would be a sin and I would suffer for it. I am here to make you more knowing – not to give you information but just to give you a situation in which you grow and your being flowers.Don’t bother about death. Right now you are alive, so alive. Live it, so that you can know life. If you can know life you have already known death, because death is the innermost core of life.A child is born. You think he will die after seventy years? Then you are wrong. A child is born; he brings his death within him at the innermost core of his being. It takes seventy years for him to discover that core. It takes seventy years for that core to spread all over him; then one day suddenly he disappears.Death is nothingness within you; nothing else, just nothingness within you. A beautiful phenomenon! Life is beautiful, but it is nothing compared to death. Death is tremendously beautiful. Thousands and thousands of lives are nothing before death because death is the very crescendo. It is nothingness.In deep meditation you will realize what nothingness is. You will come across death, and that is the only way to know it – come across it. So if when meditating deeply one day suddenly you feel that you are going to die – don’t get scared. Die! Let go. Let it happen. And death would have happened, and you would have remained a witness. Death will be all around and you will be hovering over it, and knowing it. But let it be a knowing not a knowledge.The sixth question:Osho,Why is it that even though one often gains a deep awareness and understanding into one's blocks, problems, and dreamy existence, still the explosion out of this state into samadhi does not come? Isn't awareness enough to bring this about?Awareness is enough to bring this about, but that awareness is not enough in you. Awareness is enough to bring it about. If it is not coming that means that awareness is not enough in you, and what you call awareness may be nothing but thinking about it, otherwise the explosion will come.You go on thinking about things, and when you think, you think it is the real thing. There are people who think they love, there are people who think they are aware, there are people who think that they are in meditation – but these are all thinking, not lived experiences. Then the explosion will not happen. Otherwise it has to happen.If it is not happening know well you are not aware – you are simply thinking you are aware. And why be so anxious about the explosion? You have moved into the future. Only thinking moves into the future, awareness never. Awareness is always herenow. I use the word herenow as one word, they are one. Awareness is herenow. The moment you have started thinking about the future, are anxious about the future, worried about the result, you are not aware. Only thinking is worried about the result. Life is totally unworried about the result. The result is not the point at all.You love a person and you think about the result, what is going to happen out of it? If you think, you have not loved; if you love, you never think of the result. It is enough unto itself, there is no going anywhere.If you meditate, meditation is so beautiful, who bothers about the result? And if you bother about the result, meditation is not possible. This result-oriented mind is the only barrier, the only block. There are not many blocks; the only block is that of the result-oriented mind. Never herenow, always somewhere else thinking of the result: while making love, thinking about the result.In the West, they have destroyed even the beautiful phenomenon of love, because now there are books that are giving you clues and concepts about results. While making love, people are thinking whether an orgasm is going to happen or not. You have stopped it, it cannot happen now because with this mind, orgasm is impossible. Orgasm is a no-mind state. It happens when the mind is not there, it happens when you are totally in the moment.Because of so many people in the West thinking about orgasm, more and more books are published on how to attain it. The more books are published, the less possible it becomes to attain. Then more books are needed. This is how supply and demand go on in a vicious circle. It seems within twenty-five years, this century – we will all be there to see it. When this century ends, the West will have become completely incapable of orgasm because when you think, thinking functions as a barrier. And then you start manipulating.I have come across books titled, How to Make Love. Can you think of anything more foolish? Love is being transformed into a technique; then love also becomes a know-how. Love or God are not techniques. They are not things to do; they are ways of being, not ways of doing. And the way of being insists on only one condition to be fulfilled, and that is that you be totally there.Why think about the results? What is wrong in the present moment? Right now what is lacking? I am here, you are there, the trees are happy, the sky is beautiful, what is lacking? How can there be more perfection than there is right this moment? Everything is perfect as it is.But your mind says no, many things have to be done, then you can become perfect. This is the disease, the cancerous growth in the mind about the result, about improving things, about doing better. Everything is perfect, you need not be perfectionists. You will only mess things up more, you cannot improve upon them. Just try to be in the present, relax in the present and let the future take its own course.Don’t be end-oriented. Let the means be the end. Let the way be the goal.The seventh question:Osho,On this side of the fence it does not look like a joke but a nasty trick.It is because of you, otherwise it is a beautiful joke. But it is your interpretation, this “nasty,” this “trick” – it is your interpretation. Drop your interpretation and look again. Give it a fresh look: it is a joke, and beautiful, and God is a joker.There is a beautiful Jewish parable…It happened in a certain village that whenever there was some difficulty the rabbi would go to the forest, perform a certain ritual magic and pray to God, and then the village was always helped.Then the rabbi died. He was succeeded by another rabbi. There was some difficulty, so the next rabbi went to the forest. But he didn’t know the exact place so he said to God, “I don’t know the exact place where that old man used to do the trick, so I will do it anywhere. You are everywhere so that is not the point, you can listen from everywhere.” He performed the ritual and the village was helped.Then he died and another young man followed. Again there was some difficulty. The man went to the forest and he said to God, “I don’t know the place, I don’t know the ritual, but you know all, so what is the point of doing it? I simply say to you, ‘Save my village from this difficulty.’” And the village was helped.Then that man died. Then it was another young man, and the village was again in difficulty. The young man never went to the forest; he sat in his chair and he said, “Listen! I don’t know the place where those old people used to go, I don’t know the ritual, I don’t know the prayer that they used to say, but I will tell you a story – and I know you love stories. Please help my village.” And he told a story, and the village was helped.I love this parable. God is a storyteller, he loves jokes, but if it looks like a nasty trick it is your interpretation. Drop your interpretation and just look again with a fresh mind, with no interpretations, with no hangover from the past, and you will start giggling. The world is so beautiful, the joke is perfect.The eighth question:Osho,How much patience is needed? Is there really nothing we can do?The moment you ask how much, you miss the point. You cannot ask how much patience is needed. The very question says that the patience is not there, you are impatient. Patience never asks how much, patience always knows that whatever you do, it is always less than needed. That’s why those who have attained always say, “When we attained it was not because of our efforts, it was because of his grace.”Don’t ask how much patience. The very question comes out of impatience. And “Is there really nothing we can do?” Yes, there is really nothing that you can do. The doer is the barrier. You are the hindrance. Drop this you and the doer. Life is a happening, it is not an act, and all that is great and beautiful is a happening. You cannot do it, you can only allow it to happen – please allow it. All that you need to do is to allow it.It happened…A man went to the rabbi of the village, very harassed he was, very puzzled, worried. He said, “Now you will have to help me, Rabbi. I am in great trouble. My twelfth child was born today – I am a poor man, I cannot support myself, my wife, and twelve children. You can understand my plight. Help me, what should I do?”The rabbi jumped. He said, “Do? Take my advice – don’t do nothing!”And you also please take my advice – don’t do nothing.Allow, let it happen; it is always around the corner. You are so closed! It is always ready to happen any moment, but you don’t allow it, you go on pushing the river. Float with it, flow with it.The ninth question:Osho,Do all beings eventually find their way to enlightenment?I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not! I know only one thing, that everybody is already enlightened. Whether you will eventually come to know it or not depends on you. How can I answer for you? If you go on doing the things you have been doing, you can go on doing for eternity.This much I know: that everybody is already enlightened. Whether he will come to know it eventually or not depends, depends on himself.That’s all for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lao Tzu says, on conquering the world by inaction:The student of knowledge aims at learning day by day;the student of Tao aims at losing day by day.By continual losingone reaches doing nothing.By doing nothing everything is done.He who conquers the world often does so by doing nothing.When one is compelled to do something,the world is already beyond his conquering.What is knowledge? And why are all those who have become awakened deeply against it? Knowledge is a device to fight with existence. Knowledge is a tool in the hands of the ego. Knowledge is a conflict: the part is trying to conquer the whole by knowing the secrets of the whole. Knowledge is the basic ego trip.Just as money is, power is, knowledge is also – and more dangerous than money, more dangerous than power, because knowledge is more subtle.I must tell you the old biblical story of Adam’s expulsion from paradise. That parable has multidimensional meanings. One of the meanings is Lao Tzuan: God created the world, and he told Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge – but why particularly the Tree of Knowledge? In fact it seems absurd. Had he prohibited Adam from murder, we could have understood; had he prohibited Adam from moving into sex, then all the world religions would have understood. But God prohibited neither sex nor violence, but knowledge. Knowledge seems to be the original sin.But why should God prohibit it? Why is knowledge dangerous? – because the very effort to know the secrets is aggression. The deepest aggression. The very effort to unveil mysteries is violence. And the very effort to know means you are getting ready to fight. Otherwise what will you do with knowledge?Knowledge is a device of aggression, fight, and conflict. The part is trying to rebel; the part is trying to have its own center of being, separate from the whole. The part is trying to become the center of the world.Not that there is a God who prohibited. Yesterday I told you that God loves stories. Now I must tell you that God himself is part of a beautiful story. God is the most beautiful parable. There is nothing like God anywhere. Don’t search for him otherwise you will search for him in vain. You will never come across him. God is a parable – but beautiful. It says many things, and you will miss if you think that God is a person. God is not a person.It happened…Once I heard a great philosophical dialogue. I was sitting in a rich man’s house, in his beautiful drawing-room; he was chattering constantly, but then the phone rang in the other room and he had to leave me. It was good that he left, otherwise I would have missed this great dialogue.Just by my side there was a big bowl, and two goldfish were swimming in it. The younger one suddenly stopped and asked the other, “Do you believe in God?” The younger fish looked very philosophic – a seeker.The old one said in a guru-like way, “Yes, otherwise who do you suppose changes our water every day? If there is no God, who do you suppose changes our water every day?”All concepts of God are like this: Who do you suppose created the world? Who do you suppose goes on controlling the world, managing the world? Just small minds, small concepts. God is not a concept, it is a parable.So remember, when I say “God prohibited,” I don’t mean that there is somebody who prohibited. I simply mean that this is a way of saying something. Existence prohibits knowledge. Existence allows innocence and prohibits knowledge because in innocence the part merges with the whole, remains with the whole, remains one with the whole – and the moment the part starts knowing, the ego arises, the ego crystallizes. Now the part is no longer flowing with the whole; now it has its own mind – to do certain things, not to do certain things. Now it has its own choices; now it has its own likes and dislikes.This is the meaning of the story: suddenly Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise. You must have wondered where that paradise is. It is not a geographical place, it is a psychological state of mind. Innocence is paradise, knowledge is expulsion.Every child is born as Adam and Eve, and remains in paradise. But we start teaching him, we start conditioning him. All the teachers and people who condition, all the people who try to make the child knowledgeable, are the serpent who convinced Eve: “If you eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge you will become like God, you will have your own center as God has his center. If you know, you will become something other than you are.”The whole of knowledge is a seduction to become something which you are not. All knowledge is creating a future, all knowledge is creating a desire to become something that you are not.Innocence is enjoying that which you are; knowledge is making an effort for that which you are not.That serpent was the first teacher of the world. That serpent created a rift, and the rift was between being and becoming. All knowledge creates this rift between your being and your becoming. It creates a dream. It creates an allurement, an illusion that you can become like gods. But – you are not gods, you can become like gods. Innocence says you are, there is no need to become. Otherwise is not possible – you are part of the whole, you have the same quality as the whole has, you are holy. Innocence says you are already that. Nothing is to be done. You have simply to enjoy it and celebrate it and delight in it. Knowledge says as you are, you are condemned, you are nothing; you will have to become like gods. Try! Make an effort! Do things! Discipline yourself!Remember, the day a child starts thinking of the future he loses innocence. Only up to that moment, while he goes on enjoying the present, is he a child. Innocent, uncorrupted is his being. Becoming has not entered, he is still in paradise.Paradise is nothing, paradise is a capacity to enjoy yourself right here and now. You are in paradise, but still you have lost it because you cannot enjoy here and now. You are thinking, planning for the future: somewhere when you become like gods, then you will enjoy it.Knowledge creates a future. Knowledge creates desire. Knowledge creates becoming. Knowledge is samsara, the wheel. When you are in the wheel you go on round and round and round reaching nowhere. Knowledge is the world. When Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world,” he means the world of becoming. He does not mean this world of the trees and the birds singing and the rain falling, and the sky and the clouds, no – he does not mean by “this world,” this world that surrounds you. He means the world that surrounds your mind and your being, the world of becoming, desire – what Buddha calls tanha. The desire to be something other than you are already.And that is impossible. You are going to be in a constant hell. You can be only that which you are already, nothing else is possible. You are simply trying to do something impossible.You cannot be anything else. How can you be? A roseflower trying to become a lotus flower, a lotus flower trying to become something else – but they are not so stupid, they are still part of paradise. The rosebush just by your side is still in paradise, but you are not. The child sitting by your side may be still in paradise, but you are not. I am just here before you, I am in paradise, but you are not. So paradise is not a question of geography, it is a question of inner space.Knowledge creates the rift, it corrupts innocence, it makes you old. Otherwise you would remain always like children. And when Jesus says, and he says perfectly rightly, “Unless you become like children you will not enter my Kingdom of God,” that is the secret key to open the closed doors of paradise again.Knowledge expels you, not God. There is no God; that is just a way of saying the same thing. To say it in easier ways we make parables, so that you can understand. The moment you become knowledgeable you are expelled automatically, nobody expels you. And the moment you drop knowledge and become innocent again you are accepted back, nobody accepts you.Knowledge is a device to fight with the whole, and how can you fight with the whole? It is just like a drop of ocean fighting with the ocean; it is going to be a miserable, very, very miserable, hellish phenomenon. How can the drop fight with the ocean? It can go on fighting, but there is no possibility of it ever conquering the whole. It will be always in defeat, and that is the hell – always defeated, always defeated, always a failure.Lao Tzu says knowledge is the only sin. And all those who have awakened to their inner innocence say the same. Drop knowledge, and become innocent, childlike again. Regain your lost childhood, and suddenly you have become a sage, a saint. Nothing is lacking. Except for this desire to become something else, nothing is barring your way.The student of knowledge aims at learning day by day;the student of Tao aims at losing day by day.Those who are interested in knowledge, their whole effort is to know more and more and more. They go on accumulating and the more they accumulate, the more they are burdened. You can look around – everybody looks to be carrying such a heavy load, crushed under his own accumulation; suffering, but still clinging to it because he thinks it is something precious.If you watch yourself you will be surprised that you go on clinging to your agony; you go on desiring that one day, somewhere, ecstasy will happen – but you go on clinging to your agony, you never drop it. Remember, it is not clinging to you; it cannot cling to you, knowledge cannot cling to you, you cling to it. Not only do you cling, you go on growing it, you go on helping it to grow more and more.Says Lao Tzu: The student of knowledge aims at learning day by day… His whole effort is to learn more, to accumulate more, to know more. And the more he knows, the less he becomes inside because then the being is more lost. Then he becomes a heap of information, a junkyard, and he cannot find himself, find where he is. He is lost in the jungle of his own knowledge.…the student of Tao aims at losing day by day. Just the opposite is the student of Tao – the student of truth, not of knowledge; the student of being, not of becoming. He is just the opposite. He goes on losing day by day, he unburdens himself, he unlearns. His only learning is how to unlearn. The only thing he is interested in is how to be totally unburdened.A German philosopher went to see Ramana Maharishi. Of course he had traveled long, and he must have thought much about what he was going to ask. When he reached Ramana he said, “I have come to sit near you, to learn much.”Ramana looked at him with deep compassion and said, “Then you have come to the wrong person because here I teach only unlearning. If you have come to learn you have come to the wrong place, go somewhere else. But if you are ready to unlearn, mature enough to unlearn, then you can stay here.”He was right. Near a sage you go to unlearn. When you are fed up with your learning, when you have learned much and gained nothing, when you know much and you are lost in your own knowledge, when you know much but you have completely forgotten who you are, when you know much about unnecessary things, nonessential things and the essential knowledge about your own being is lost – then you come to a sage to unlearn.And that is the greatest surrender. It is easy to surrender your wealth because it is outside you. Robbers can take it, it can be stolen; it is nothing that is part of you, it is outside! You can drop it easily. But knowledge becomes an inner phenomenon, it gets inside you, it runs in your blood, it becomes part of your bones, it becomes your very marrow. It is difficult to surrender it.It is easy to learn something, it is very, very difficult to unlearn it. How to unlearn when you know a certain thing? It becomes very, very difficult not to know it. How to drop it? It is so deep in you. Unless you move beyond your mind – for you are identified with the mind – you cannot drop it because you think “It is me.” You think your knowledge is your being.Move! All meditations are techniques to move from the mind, to gain a little distance from the mind, to become a little aloof and unidentified; to transcend the mind, to become a watcher on the hills so you can see what is happening in the mind. When you are separate from the mind, only then is there a possibility to drop something, to drop knowledge, to unlearn.…the student of Tao aims at losing day by day. That is his gain. He gains by: …losing day by day. That is his learning, he learns by unlearning day by day. A moment comes when he is again a child, not knowing anything. A moment comes when he enters paradise again. He tasted the bitter fruit of knowledge, but he found out it was stupid. Knowledge is deep stupidity. He found it out, now he comes into paradise again. Now no serpent can seduce him. He comes mature – a child but mature. A child, innocent – but alert, aware, conscious.Now he attains a greater purity because a purity that has no awareness is bound to be lost. Somebody is going to seduce, somebody is going to corrupt, and if there is nobody, you will corrupt yourself, because you are not alert.Adam had to be thrown out of the Garden of Paradise. He was simply innocent. He was Buddha-like in one part, he was innocent, he was like Jesus in one part, he was innocent – but the other part was lacking, he was not aware.Adam is the beginning, Jesus is the end. Adam is half, Jesus is complete – the other half has become aware. Now Jesus is incorruptible. He is not only pure, he is also incorruptible; his innocence is now absolute.The student of Tao aims at losing day by day.By continual losingone reaches doing nothing.This is very subtle. Pay as much attention as you can pay to it. Be as meditative about it as possible.You may not know that the word meditation comes from the same root as medicine, medical, and the original meaning of the word was – a technique to become whole, a technique to become healthy. Medicine is medicinal; just like that, meditation is also medicinal. It makes you whole, integrated, healthy.Pay attention, listen as meditatively as possible. When you listen meditatively you understand, when you listen concentratedly you learn. If you listen with concentration, you will gain knowledge, if you listen meditatively, you will lose knowledge. And the difference is very subtle.When you listen attentively, attention means “a tension” – it means you are tense, too eager to learn, to absorb, to know. You are interested in knowledge. Concentration is the way toward knowledge; a mind focused on one thing of course learns more.Meditation is an unfocused mind. You simply listen silently, not with a tension in the mind, not with an urge to know and learn, no; with total relaxation, in a let-go, in an opening of your being.You listen, not to know, you simply listen to understand. These are different ways of listening. If you are trying to know, then you are trying to memorize what I am saying; deep down you are repeating it, you are taking notes inside the mind, you are writing it in the world of your memories. You are interested in letting it become deeply rooted in you so you don’t forget. Then it will become knowledge.And the same seed could have become unlearning, understanding. Then you simply listen, you are not interested in accumulating it, you are not interested in writing it in your memory, in your mind. You simply listen, open – as you listen to music, as you listen to the birds singing in the trees, as you listen to the wind passing through ancient pines, as you listen to the sound of water in a waterfall. There is nothing to remember, nothing to memorize. You don’t listen with a parrot mind, you simply listen without any mind – the listening is beautiful, it is ecstatic. There is no goal in it, in itself it is ecstatic, it is blissful.Listen meditatively, not with concentration. All schools, colleges, universities, teach concentration because the goal is to memorize. Here the goal is not to memorize, the goal is not to learn at all, the goal is to unlearn.Listen silently and don’t think that you will forget. There is no need to remember; only that which is rubbish has to be remembered because you go on forgetting it. Whenever you hear the truth there is no need to remember it because it cannot be forgotten. You may not be able to remember the words but you will remember the essence – and that will not be part of your memory, it will be part of your being.I am saying something here; Lao Tzu is saying something here, through me, to reveal a part of your hidden being. He is not feeding you with new information; he is just uncovering you, rediscovering you, just giving you a glimpse of your own being.By continual losing one reaches doing nothing. Knowledge is a doing, it is a conflict, struggle, what Darwin calls “the survival of the fittest.” It is fighting with nature, it is a constant war of man against the whole. Foolish – but it is there.When you want to learn something you are in fact trying to learn to do something. All knowledge is pragmatic, practical, you will transform it into your practice, you will do something with it. Otherwise you will say, “Why learn? What is the point?” You learn it as a utility. That’s why in a pragmatic, empirical world, arts by and by disappear. Nobody wants to listen to poetry, nobody wants to listen to music, because the question is: What can you do with it? Can you make money out of it? Can you become powerful out of it? What can you do? Can you repair a car by listening to music? Can you make a house? No, it cannot be used, music is nonutilitarian, it has no utility – and that’s the beauty of it.The whole of life is nonutilitarian; it has no purpose, it is not going anywhere. It is simply being here, it is not going anywhere. It has no goal to achieve, it has no destiny. It is a cosmic play, what Hindus call leela, play, just children playing with no goal in view. Playing itself is the goal, they are enjoying it, they are delighting in it, they are happy – finished!Learning is always with a view to do something. It is a technique toward becoming a great doer. If you know more, you can do more. Then what will unlearning do? It will make you a non-doer.By and by you will not know anything, you will not be able to do. By and by as knowledge disappears from you, doing will also disappear. You will become being, you will be, but you will not be a doer. I don’t mean that you will not do anything – even a Buddha has to beg, even Lao Tzu must have tried ways and means to find bread and butter and things like that. When it was raining he must have found a shelter – he lived a long life, and he lived a very healthy life. No, I don’t mean that you don’t do, I mean you become a non-doer. Things start happening. You don’t do them, they happen. The doer, the manipulator, goes, dissolves, disappears – and with the doer gone, the ego is no longer found.People come to me and they ask, “How can we surrender the ego?” You cannot surrender the ego. If the ego is there, who will surrender? This is the ego asking, the ego asking how to surrender. You can bow down your head, you can put your head at my feet and you can say “I surrender,” but this “I” that is saying it is the thing to be surrendered. Now it will survive and get nourishment through the surrender itself. It will go and tell people, “I have surrendered totally to my master, I am no more.” But the “I” goes on. It makes no difference what it broadcasts. It broadcasts itself through everything – through surrender, through renunciation.No, the ego cannot be surrendered. But if you start unlearning, one day you suddenly find that the ego has never existed. In the first place it was not there and you were asking a foolish question, how to surrender it. It was not there from the very beginning, it has never existed. Suddenly you start looking within yourself and it is not found there, not even a trace of it. It has never been there. It is a false notion which comes through doing.So there is a system: knowledge, to help you become a doer, then when you become a doer you become a center. A false center of course: you cannot be a true center because you are not separate from existence. A true center is possible only if you can exist separate from existence – can you exist separately? Can you exist without the air surrounding you? Can you exist without breathing? Can you exist without the sun there, continuously giving you life and energy? Can you exist without trees continuously giving fruit to you? And the earth giving crops? Can you exist without the rains and the sands and the sea? Can you exist without the stars and the moons? You cannot. Separate, you cannot exist.Then how can you say that you have a center? Only the whole can have a center. In fact only the whole can be allowed to say “I,” nobody else.By losing knowledge, by and by you dismantle the whole house. But start from the foundation. The foundation is knowledge. Lose the foundation, drop the foundation, and the house starts falling. The house is of doing. The foundation is of knowledge, the house is of doing, and inside the house an imaginary ghostlike thing lives which is the ego.When the foundation disappears the house falls. When the house falls you suddenly become aware that nobody lives there. The house has always been empty. It was just an idea, a whim. Just a dream in the mind, a nightmare.By continual losingone reaches doing nothing.By doing nothing everything is done.That is the secret. By doing nothing everything is done. Everything is already being done, you unnecessarily come in, you unnecessarily make much fuss. Without you everything is going as beautifully as it can ever go.Once you know it you drop the doer, you become part of the flow: you float with the river, you don’t even swim. Right now you are trying to go upstream and then of course you feel tired, and then of course you feel you are being defeated. Nobody is trying to defeat you, the river is not trying to defeat you; in fact, the river is completely oblivious of the fact that you exist. And this is fortunate for the river, otherwise the river will go mad if she comes to know about you, that you exist – so many mad people. No, the river is completely oblivious of the fact, blissfully unaware that you exist, that you are trying to fight upstream.It happened…It must have been a day like this – it was raining, and the river by the side of the village was in flood. Suddenly people came running toward Mulla Nasruddin’s house and they said, “Nasruddin, what are you doing here? Have you not heard? Your wife has fallen in the stream – go and save her!” Nasruddin ran fast.Nobody had expected that he would run so fast because every husband somehow wants the wife to be drowned by some river. It is perfect. And everybody knew in the village that they were never going well, things were always wrong and they were fighting continuously. So it was a bliss, a blessing from heaven – but Mulla Nasruddin ran so fast, they couldn’t believe that he loved her so much.He jumped into the river and started trying – fighting the river, he started swimming upstream. People asked, “What are you doing? Are you a fool? The river has taken your wife downstream! Where are you going?”Nasruddin said, “Keep quiet! I know my wife well. She will always go upstream. She cannot go downstream, it is not her nature.”Everybody is going upstream, trying to fight with the river. Why? – because in the fight you can create the notion of the ego. In the challenge, in resistance, you can create the notion of the ego; if you drop fighting and you float with the stream, by and by you will come to know that you are not. That’s why people love challenge, people love danger, people want to fight. If there is nobody to fight they will create something or other to fight, because only in fight can their ego be maintained – and it has to be maintained continuously. It is just like a bicycle – you pedal it, and you have to go on pedaling otherwise it will fall. You have to continuously pedal it.The ego needs continuous pedaling. Every moment you have to go on fighting with something or other. Once you stop fighting, suddenly you find the cycle has fallen. The ego cannot exist without the fight.Learning helps doing, doing helps fighting, fighting creates the ego – this is the science. And this is all that religion is about. Drop knowledge, forget about it, become innocent like a child, and suddenly you see things are changing. Now you are not a doer. When you are not a doer – not that things stop happening, they continue – you are irrelevant. When you were not on this earth things were happening; the sun was rising as it is rising now.Have you heard about an old woman who lived in a small village and who believed that it was because of her that the sun rose in the village? She had many chickens and just before the sun rose they would start crowing, and she believed that it was because of those chickens the sun rose.It was a logical thing. Always, they made their noise – and immediately the sun started rising, it had never been otherwise. She told the villagers, “It is because of me the sun rises. Once I leave this village you will live in darkness.” They laughed. Angry, she left the village with all her chickens.She reached another village and of course, in the morning the sun rose. She laughed and said, “Now they will understand! Now the sun is rising in this village! Now they will weep and cry and repent, but I am not going back.”Things have been happening without you. Everything has been perfect without you. When you will not be here, everything will be as perfect as ever. But you cannot believe in it because if you believe in it your ego disappears.Things will go on when the doer disappears. By doing nothing everything is done. Everything happens because the whole is functioning. And when you are not fighting you also become a vehicle of the whole – a passage, a flute, hollow within, and the whole goes on singing through you. Better songs will go on coming through you.Even now in spite of you sometimes they come. Sometimes you feel a sudden moment of silence coming; you don’t know where it comes from – just out of the blue. It comes because somehow in that moment you forgot to fight. You forgot; you may have been tired – you forgot to fight and suddenly everything is beautiful.But the sky does not always remain so open. Again clouds gather because you start again. Just at the moment you feel everything is beautiful, suddenly you start doing something – the mind starts thinking, “How long is this moment going to last? I may lose it so I must do something to protect it, to make it secure.”Now you have come in. The flute is no longer hollow, it is filled with you; the music is not flowing, it is lost. And when it is lost you think, “Look, I should have tried harder.” It is because of your effort that it is lost, but your mind goes on saying you should have tried harder, then it would have continued.Sometimes, sitting under the stars, you feel bliss arising within your heart. It seems not of this world. You are surprised; you cannot believe it. I have come across simple people who have known many moments in their life which are buddhalike, which belong to christ consciousness – but they have never talked about them to anybody because they themselves don’t believe that this is possible. They have in fact suppressed them. They have been thinking that they must have imagined: How can it happen without any effort of my own? How is it possible that suddenly one becomes blissful?You can remember these moments in your own life – and in such moments when you can never expect them: just going to the office, the daily routine, the sun is high and you are perspiring, and suddenly something strikes home and for a moment you are not the old you. Paradise is regained.And then it is lost again. You forget about it because it is not part of your style of life. You don’t even talk about it. You think, “I must have imagined it. How are these things possible? And I have not done anything so how can it happen? It must have been hallucinatory, an illusion or a dream.” You don’t talk about it.As I have observed thousands of people deeply, I have not come across many people who have not found such certain moments in their life. But they have never talked of them to anybody. Even if they tried to, people laughed and they thought, “You are foolish, stupid.” They don’t believe, they repress.Not only has humanity repressed sex, humanity has repressed death, humanity has repressed all that is beautiful in life. Man has been forced to become like an automaton, a robot. All clues, all doors, have been closed toward the unknown.But Lao Tzu is true, and what he says he knows – I know it. Things go on happening on their own. For many years I have not done anything, not even thought about them. They go on happening on their own. It is a sheer delight to see how things go on happening on their own.Much happens without your doing. And when it happens without your doing it has a beauty of its own. It has no violence in it. It has a grace. It is lovely. When you do it you force it. The grace is lost, it becomes ugly. Violence cannot be graceful. This is the only way to be nonviolent, as Lao Tzu says. You simply drop knowledge, the doer. Just be and let things be. And everything starts flowering, and everything starts flowing. Knowledge has made you frozen.By continual losingone reaches doing nothing.By doing nothing everything is done.He who conquers the world often does so by doing nothing.When one is compelled to do something,the world is already beyond his conquering.Those who have done tremendous things are the non-doers. The doers may appear to do something, but it is not lasting.Alexanders, Napoleons, Hitlers, Mussolinis, they tried hard to do things, but they created only nightmares around themselves and in themselves. Their own doing cost thousands, millions, of people, and themselves also. Their own doing became suicidal. They killed millions and finally they killed themselves. That’s all that has happened. They existed as a nightmare: mad people, lunatics, murderers. Those people are not conquerors. They have not conquered the world.Then look at a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Jesus: a different type of flowering. Centuries pass, ages come and go, Lao Tzu remains flowering, his fragrance remains as fresh as ever. It has not lost a bit of its newness – it has not become old. It has not become dusty. It is as fresh as a dewdrop of this morning.People who have lived in the now always remain in the now. They are never of the past.Lao Tzu is more a contemporary than any Hitler or Mussolini. A Lao Tzu will remain a contemporary for thousands of years to come. He will always be a contemporary. A Jesus is never part of past history, he is always part of the present. He dies, but he never dies. He goes on living – that is the meaning of the Christian parable of resurrection: he died on the cross but he was found another day walking on the road. Don’t take it literally. This is a beautiful parable with deep significance. You killed him on the cross, but you couldn’t kill him. In a few days he was walking, moving again.You cannot kill a Jesus. One who has known non-doing cannot be killed because only the ego can be killed. The ego can be destroyed, the being never. He is resurrected.And in Christianity just the opposite happened – the cross became the most significant thing. Resurrection should have become the most significant thing, not the cross, because many people have died on the cross, that is not very significant. The most significant thing is the resurrection. The whole of Christianity should depend on that – that Jesus could not be killed. We killed him, crucified him, but he could not be killed. He remains fresh, he is always fresh. You can meet him on the crossroads now. You can find him anywhere.In India, we have never depicted any avatar – Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Mahavira – as old. Not that they never became old; they became old, the body has to follow the same laws. Nature never believes in exceptions, the rule is absolute. Rama and Krishna and Buddha and Mahavira – they also became old but we have never depicted them as old, always as young. All the images that exist in India are of the young Mahavira, the young Buddha, the young Krishna, the young Rama, never old – what is the matter? – because we have known their youngness, and we have felt that they never became old. The body comes and goes but their youth remains. Their fragrance, their innocence, has a quality of eternity in it.These are the real conquerors and they have not done anything. One never knows what Lao Tzu has done – nothing. You cannot find more uneventful a life than Lao Tzu’s. Nothing happens. Only one thing has happened – he has happened. That’s all. Nothing else happens.That’s why these people are not regarded in history. At the most they become small footnotes, because they don’t have a biography. They have nothing. Hitler has a big biography. So much happened around him, only nothing happened within him. Only one thing never happened, and that is his being. Much else happened: you can go on writing and writing thousands of pages and still much will be left. But Lao Tzu? – just a footnote.You can even drop that footnote. He is not a part of history, not eventful at all. But these are the real conquerors – they go on conquering. Still Lao Tzu goes on throwing his net, and still people are caught, still people are converted, transformed, resurrected out of their graves. The miracle goes on continuing.He who conquers the world often does so by doing nothing. When one is compelled to do something, the world is already beyond his conquering. Never compel anybody to do something, never compel yourself to do something. Let things happen – then existence will be doing them through you. There are two ways of doing things: one, you do; another, existence does them through you. If you do them, you create anxiety for yourself – anguish, misery, because then you become result-oriented. You think, “Am I going to succeed or not?” You become more concerned with the end result than with the process. And then you are constantly worried and whatever happens you will be frustrated.If you succeed, you will be frustrated because the success will not deliver the goods that you were thinking were going to be delivered by it. If you fail, of course you will be in misery.People who fail are in misery, people who have succeeded are in misery. In fact, those who have succeeded are more in misery than those who have failed because a failure can still hope. A man who has really succeeded cannot hope. He becomes absolutely hopeless. Now he has nowhere to go, he has succeeded – ask the very rich people why they are in such misery. A poor man we can understand, but why are rich people in so much misery? They have succeeded and now, being successful, they have come to realize that it has been useless, that success has not given them anything. It has simply wasted their whole life.Now the lost time cannot be regained, and there seems to be no future and no hope because they may have millions of dollars and if they continue on the same lines they will have many more millions. But what of that? If these so many millions have not given any satisfaction, many more millions will not give it.This word satisfaction has to be understood. This word is very strange: it comes from the root satir. Satisfaction, satisfy, satisfied, come from satir, and this word satir comes from a Sanskrit root sat. Sat means the real, the absolutely real. From the same word sat comes the Japanese word satori – one who has realized the truth.Sat means the truth, one who has realized the truth, has attained satori. But to sate and satisfy have lost contact with their original root. Nothing else can satisfy except truth. So when you succeed in the world there is no satisfaction. Only sat can satisfy.You can accumulate millions of dollars and pounds, but suddenly you find nothing satisfies, your thirst remains the same, it is not quenched. And there is no hope now. You have learned a trick – how to succeed. Now you have succeeded, and you have wasted your whole life in this success, and there comes no satisfaction, but a deep frustration, a hopeless state. And if you fail? Of course then how can there be satisfaction? In the world, if you fail you fail, if you succeed, you also fail.You have a proverb: you say, “Nothing succeeds like success.” I have changed it a little bit and I say: Nothing fails like success.Failure fails, success fails. There is only one possibility: that you know your being, sat. Only that can satisfy, only that never fails. But that is not part of becoming. That has nothing to do with time. Right now, this very moment, it is available. It is already there in its total glory. The king is on the throne within you but you never look there. You are in search of money, knowledge, prestige, power, and you go out. And to all those who go out – come in!Drop learning, learn unlearning. Come in. Drop the doer, learn how to do things without doing them. And there is a secret. It is the greatest secret, the greatest miracle that can happen to anybody, and it is: you simply become a passage, a vehicle, a hollow flute, and divine songs start flowing through you.Don’t come between you and yourself. That is the whole of all Yoga, Tantra, religion. Please, put yourself aside, don’t come in the way. Just stand by the side and let the chariot of God pass. If you can learn only one thing – how to stand aside – you have learned all.And then you become aware that everything is going on by itself. The whole is working. The part is not needed to work, it only needs to participate. It only needs not to create trouble and conflict. It only needs to be with the whole.To be with the whole is to be religious. To be against the whole is to be worldly.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,It is my understanding that you see innocence as the opposite of knowledge – but what about ignorance? People without knowledge are so often misused by the ones with the knowledge. Please say something about this.Ignorance is the state which exists before knowledge; innocence is the state which exists after knowledge. Ignorance is pre-knowledge; innocence, post-knowledge. They appear similar – they are in a way – and yet totally different.A child is ignorant. When you call a child innocent you are misunderstanding the whole thing. Ignorance looks like innocence because the child does not know. He looks innocent, but he will know – he will taste the bitter fruit of knowledge, he will have to. He is just like Adam in the Garden of Paradise – he will have to be thrown out. He will pass through that, he will sin, he will become corrupted. His innocence is not powerful, it is impotent. It cannot avoid being in knowledge, knowledge will enter: the serpent will seduce him, the world will corrupt him, he will move into the ways of knowledge, into the ways of the mind. He is ready like a seed to move into knowledge. Innocence is not there, he is ignorant.But then, a sage like Lao Tzu who has known the world and come back home – who was corrupted, who was in the ways of sin and knowledge, who tasted the bitter fruit, and now has become mature, has dropped knowledge, has become again childlike – is innocent. Only a sage is innocent.Jesus says, “Only those who are like children will be able to enter my Kingdom of God.” Remember he says like children, not children. Children won’t be able to enter the Kingdom of God but those who are like children. What does it mean: who are like children and not children? – those who have passed through the world, who have known all corruption and who have regained their virginity.Knowledge has two opposites: innocence, the innocence of the sage; and ignorance, the ignorance of the child. And don’t misunderstand me when I insist on innocence, I am not insisting on ignorance. I am not saying to be ignorant. If you are ignorant you are simply postponing knowledge. One day or the other, sooner or later, you will be in the trap of knowledge.Go through it. Live it, know it. Taste the bitter fruit. Be thrown out of paradise so that you can come back and reclaim it – and then the quality is totally different. When you were thrown out, you were just ignorant. When Adam was thrown out of paradise he was simply ignorant. When Jesus entered again he was not the same Adam but an innocent sage, knowing well what the world means. And by knowing well what the world means, understanding it well, has transcended.The second question:Osho,What is the relationship between meditation and the unlearning process?There is no relationship because meditation is unlearning. They are not two things that can be related; they are one thing, one process. Meditation is unlearning, unlearning is meditation.What in fact do you do when you meditate? You simply unlearn the mind; by and by, you drop the layers and layers of mind. You are like an onion, you go on peeling yourself. One layer, the most superficial, is thrown out; another layer comes up, you throw that, you drop that also. Another one comes up – and it goes on and on.But one day the last layer is peeled off and there is nothingness in your hands. The whole onion has disappeared. You look around and you cannot find yourself. This is the point where meditation is achieved. Now it is no longer meditation, it has become samadhi.It has become what in the West you call ecstasy, but rather should be called instasy than ecstasy. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis, which means “to stand outside of.” To stand outside your personality so totally that you are no longer part of it – that is ecstasy.But samadhi is more like instasy – to stand within yourself so deeply that the within and without have disappeared. You have become the withinness, the very withinness; not that you are standing within, you are the withinness. This is samadhi.The word samadhi comes from two roots, one is sam; sam means together, absolutely together. Another is adha; adha means going, reaching, being. Being together, reaching into togetherness, becoming togetherness. Samadhi means you become so together, so one, so crystallized, that there is nothing opposite to you within you. You have become one unity, a unison, a harmony of all the opposites.The mind is opposites. You think one thing, and suddenly another part of the mind denies it. You want to meditate? One part of the mind says yes, another immediately says no. You want to become a sannyasin? One part of the mind says, “Right,” another part of the mind says, “Beware, what are you doing? Don’t do it. Wait.” For small things also: what clothes to wear today. You stand before the mirror and the mind cannot decide. The mind is a crowd.Unlearning means to drop this crowd, to let these people go, and become so one that you cannot even say that it is one, because one is meaningful only in a crowd. One is meaningful only if two is meaningful.That is why Hindus have never called it one – they call it nondual, they simply say “not two,” just to show that if we say “one” the two enters from the back door. Because what will one mean if there is no two? If we say God is one, if we say in samadhi you are one, then two is just at the corner; and then three – and then the whole world.Hindus have insisted that the God is non-two, nondual, advaita; in samadhi you are not two, that’s all. Nothing more is said, just a negative – so that numbers should not enter again from the back door. By unlearning you become not-two. By learning you become many. By learning you become legion, a crowd, and the crowd goes on increasing. The more you learn, the more the crowd goes on and on. The ultimate result of learning can be madness and nothing else.So it is not just an accident that great thinkers in the West have almost all gone mad some time or other. In fact if some thinker in the West has not been mad that simply shows that he is not a very, very deep thinker, nothing else. Nietzsche went mad – he was really a thinker. Bertrand Russell? He never went mad, he remained superficial: a popularizer, but not very deep.In the East just a totally different thing has happened. We cannot conceive of Buddha going mad. That would be the most impossible thing in the world – Buddha going mad. Nietzsche goes mad because Nietzsche is a thinker, Buddha cannot go mad because he is a no-thinker. He drops thinking, how can he go mad? One day the whole crowd is gone and he is sitting alone, nobody to even disturb, so much alone that he is not even one – because who is there to say that you are one? If somebody is there to say that you are one, the other is still present.Meditation is unlearning. Peel your onion: it is difficult because you have become identified with the onion; you think these layers are you, so to peel them is difficult. It is painful also because it is not like just throwing off your clothes. Rather it is like peeling your skin; you have become too attached to it.But once you know, once you drop one layer, you feel freshness arising. You become new. Then courage increases. Then hope. Then you feel more confident. Then you can peel another layer. The more you peel, the more silent, the more happy, the more blissful you become. Now you are on the right track. Now it is not very far away when you will throw away the whole onion.But it is good to peel layer by layer, because it may not be possible for you to throw away the whole onion. That too is a possibility, it has happened sometimes, but it happens in such an intense understanding which is not ordinarily available.There are two ways to attain enlightenment – one sudden, the other gradual. The sudden way happens very rarely, but it happens. The gradual way is easier because then I am not asking you to throw away the whole onion; that will be too much. I will have to persuade you. Just peel off the first layer which has already become dirty – and you also feel it is dirty. So much dust has gathered on it, and it has become so dry, and you are so encased in it that it goes on shrinking and shrinking and it has become a prison. So you listen to me, you peel it off.The second layer will be more difficult to peel. It will be fresh, you would like to cling to it. The third layer will be still more difficult – the nearer you reach, the more difficult it is because beautiful things start happening. You have not reached the center yet but you are moving nearer – just as if you are moving toward the river, and the air is cool and you start feeling good. Now the marketplace is left behind, the dirty air is no longer there, the stale atmosphere is not there. The sky is more open, the river is closer. The river is sending messages through the air: I am close, come on!The nearer you come, the more you may start clinging to the layers because you will feel, “This is happening because of this layer.” It is not happening because of the layer, it is happening because you are now nearer to the center.So there are people who cling to worldly things, and then I come across so many people who start clinging to spiritual things – these are part of the layers.Somebody says, “Such beautiful light happens to me!” He comes and says, “Osho, help me so I can always experience this light.” What will you do with it? Light is an experience, it is not you. It is something different from you. You are the experiencer, the witness. Once before, you were experiencing money, now you are experiencing light, but it remains the same – it is an object. Now you want to cling. If I had said, “Drop your money, all worldly things,” you would have understood. But if I say, “Drop all this nonsense, this light. And your kundalini arising. And visions. And the lotus flowering within you – drop all this nonsense,” you wonder what type of spiritual man I am. I should help you so that more lotuses blossom within you.But they will remain “of the layers,” they have to be peeled off. And I have to help you to peel the whole onion. I am not going to help you stop anywhere before nothingness happens. Nothingness is the goal, sunyata. All layers gone and emptiness in the hand. You are left alone, with no experience.Spirituality is not an experience. It is to come to, fall back on, the experiencer itself. It is not an experience – all experiences are of the world because they belong to the layers. They don’t belong to you.Meditation is an unlearning process. Don’t ask for the relationship, there is none – they are not two, they cannot be related.The third question:Osho,It is my understanding that when all is one, human beings are one. So to me, ignoring the misery on the streets is denying the oneness. Please say something about this.When all is one there is no question of ignoring or not ignoring. If all is not one, then the question arises whether to ignore or not to ignore; then there is a choice. But when you feel all is one, there is no choice. I am not saying that you will ignore, I am not saying that you will not ignore; you are no longer there, so whatever happens, happens.If you start serving those people on the streets, perfectly beautiful. If it doesn’t happen, nothing can be done. Try to follow me: because you think that when you come to realize oneness, you will serve those people. It may be so. It may not be so. Because when oneness is felt, who is the server and who is the served? Then who are you who is feeling the misery and sympathy and compassion, and who are they? They have disappeared. Then nothing can be said about what will happen. Something will happen. But nobody can predict.The question arises because oneness has not been felt; it is just an idea in the mind. You have been thinking. It is a logical conclusion, it is not existential.A beggar is on the street, you pass by; you feel hurt. This too is the ego which feels hurt. You feel compassion – or you don’t feel compassion, you just ignore. Ignoring is the ego, feeling compassion is also the ego; you are there in both cases. Of course compassion is a better ego, more polished, golden in a way, but it is also the ego. The man who is ignoring may have a very, very ordinary ego – not pious, not religious, uncultured – but he has an ego, and to me both egos are the same. Whether you feel compassion or you ignore, you are there.My whole effort here is just totally different; the effort is that you should not be there, then let whatever happens happen. If you feel compassion arising, then you will not be there, only compassion will be there. Then you will not say, “I feel compassion for this beggar,” because that “I” cannot feel compassion. I – how can it feel compassion? And a compassion that flows through the I is already corrupted. It has not the innocence, the beauty, that should be there. It is already a part of the ego, it will strengthen the ego, it will create barriers for you to achieve oneness. You will be the compassionate, you will become a great man, or a great woman, a great servant of the people – and great servants of the people have been doing such mischief over all the centuries. They are not needed anymore. They are mischievous people.In fact, if you enjoy your ego through compassion, deep down you would like beggars to be there on the street – otherwise how will you feel compassion? Deep down you would like lepers, beggars, crippled people, blind people, all around, so that you can have a good time being compassionate and of service. If all misery disappears from the world, the great servants of the people will be most miserable. Because then they will have nothing to do. God seems to be compassionate to them – he continues the misery.No, I am not here to tell you to become servants of the people. That has not helped. That creates a subtle, pious ego, and when the ego is pious it is more poisonous because it looks so beautiful and you can cling to it more.I am here to help you to drop the ego: pious, impious; of the sinner, of the saint. The ego has to be dropped – then whatever happens is beautiful. You go and you sit by the side of the beggar, you help, but you are no longer there. Then existence flows through you, the whole works through you. Then you are not expecting any result out of it, not even a simple thank-you from the beggar. And you are not looking for the photographer and for the newspaper man to reach you in time; and you are not looking for governments to take notice, and the Nobel awarding committee to think about you.No, you are not there. And you will not carry it in your mind that you served, that you helped, that you were of such great service to somebody in misery. No, you will not carry it. You have not done it, existence has been there working through you. You were possessed. When you are empty you are possessed by the divine force. Then whatever happens is beautiful.Sometimes it is possible that you will serve, will be of help, and sometimes it may happen that you will just pass by. One never knows. Sometimes you may just pass by. If the whole is not willing, if the whole has its own plans, you will not interfere.If that man needs misery, if that misery is going to become a growing pain within him, if that misery is going to give him a new birth, then God is not going to help him. He is going to mature through it – help will be harmful. So don’t force yourself upon him, leave him aside. If God – and when I say God I mean the whole, not any person, just the whole – if the whole wants to take him out of his misery it will start working through your hands, but you, please, don’t come in.You don’t know what is happening, what is going to happen. Why is this man in misery? There must be something in it. He may be suffering for something which he has done, it may be a karma to him; or he may be passing through a birth pain out of which he will be renewed.It is just like coming across a woman who is going to give birth to a child, and she is crying and weeping and screaming, and you feel compassion, and you help in such a way that the child is not born. Then you are an enemy not a friend. Because then this child is going to die within the womb and the woman is going to die because of it.Sometimes surgery is needed, sometimes indifference is needed, sometimes compassion is needed – but you should not be the decider. The decision should not be made by you. So what you can do is one thing only, and that is to drop yourself, unlearn, decondition yourself – and then you are a vehicle. But then the choice is not yours. Then you can say simply with your totality: thy will should be done. And then whatever happens is beautiful.The fourth question:Osho,Please explain man's free will and its relation to being and non-doing.There is nothing like that, like free will. It is just an ego concept; there cannot be anything like that.I am not saying the opposite, that you are dependent and slaves. The mind moves into opposites very easily. It creates dichotomies: either you are a free agent, free will, or you are a slave. Both are untrue, both are false concepts. Because you are not, so you cannot be a slave and you cannot be a free agent, because for both, you will be needed.Life is a vast interdependence. You are just an organic part of the whole, you are not separate, so how can you be free? But I am not saying that you are not free, remember that. How can you be not free, or free? You are not, you don’t exist at all. It is a vast interdependence, and this interdependence is the totality, God. But the ego goes on finding its ways.I have heard, once it happened…A great elephant was passing across a bridge. The bridge was very old, it shook tremendously. A fly was sitting on the elephant’s head, just near his ears and when they had passed – they had almost destroyed the bridge – the fly said to the elephant, “Boy! Did we shake that thing!”But the elephant didn’t hear. So the fly said, “What is the matter? Are you stupid or something! Can’t you hear me?”But the elephant didn’t hear.The whole is vast. We are not even flies. The proportion is very, very, tremendously great. It is not the proportion of a fly to an elephant – that’s nothing. We are almost nothing and the whole is so vast.But you go on insisting that the bridge is shaking because of you. The fly was very considerate in a way. She said, “Boy! Did we shake that bridge!” We – that is so much consideration.If the fly had the mind of a man, she would have said “I.” Flies are more considerate. She at least included the elephant. But man says free will, he does not even include the whole, it is completely discarded. He says “I.”So two philosophies have existed in the world – one that says free will… But because this whole notion is wrong, absolutely false, it can be argued against, it has been argued against. There is another side that says nobody is free. We are just puppets and the threads are in some unknown hands; whatever he determines happens. We are just slaves, nothing else.Both parties are wrong. You are neither slaves nor free agents. This is a little difficult to understand: it is because you are not that you are part of the whole. If you think yourself separate, you will feel like a slave. If you understand yourself as part of the whole, you become the master, but you become master with the whole not against the whole. If you are against the whole, you become the slave. If you flow with the river, you become the master. You become the river. If you try to go upstream you become the slave.Free will is not there, and neither is slavery. Dependence and independence are both false words. They should be dropped completely, they should not be used. It is interdependence. I exist in you, you exist in me. That is the way life is: we exist into each other, we people each other. The breath that was in me just a moment before has now moved and has gone into you. Just a moment before I could have said, “This is my breath” – but where is it now? Somebody else’s heart is beating through it.In your body the blood is flowing; just a few days ago it was flowing as juice in a tree. It became a fruit, now it is flowing in your body. Again you will fall to the earth – dust unto dust, and again a tree will arise; you will become fertilizer. And again a tree will become alive, and a fruit will come and your children’s children will eat it. You have eaten your grandparents – you are eating them.And this goes on and on. The whole past is eaten by the present. And the whole present will be eaten by the future. Life is interrelated, deeply interrelated. It is just like a net. You are just the crossing point of two threads. You are not; you are just a tie between two passing threads. When you understand that, you laugh, you really laugh! You have been carrying such burden.That’s why Jesus says, “Come follow me, my burden is light.” Your burden is very heavy. Your burden is you. Jesus says, “My burden is light, it is weightless” – because when you are not, there is no weight, gravitation doesn’t function then. You start to levitate. Wings grow out of you. You can fly.Drop dichotomies: independence, dependence, they are interrelated. If you try to be independent, you will feel you are dependent. If you try to be independent, you will fail and you will be frustrated and you will feel that you are dependent. And both are wrong.Just look within. You are not; just cosmic rays passing, creating a web, a pattern. A few days you are here and then you disappear, and then again you will be here – and disappear. Where do you come from? Where do you go again? Into the whole. You disappear to rest. Then again you are here.Spring comes and trees start blooming, and birds start singing – a new life – and then it has gone, and everything is restful. Again it will come. Many, many times you have been here; many, many times you will be here. But once you understand that you are not, that the whole goes on playing through you, once you understand – then there is no need to be thrown again and again back into the body. There is no need. You have become alert, conscious. Now there is no need for any manifestation; you rest in the whole – this we have called moksha, nirvana. This we have called the ultimate freedom.In the West, it is very difficult to understand this because whenever you talk about freedom you think of free will; and whenever the East talks about freedom it talks of being free of all free will. Freedom means to be free from you. In the West it means freedom from every barrier, limitation – but you remain, it is your freedom.In the East when we talk about freedom you don’t remain in it – you are part and parcel of the bondage, you go with the bondage. Freedom remains, not you: that is moksha. It is not that you become free, on the contrary you become free of yourself. There is no self.The self simply disappears – it was a false concept, an arbitrary concept. Useful, but not true.The fifth question:Osho,Has civilization done man any good?Yes, it makes you sin so hard that one has to become a saint by and by. It throws you into such deep misery that you have to start looking for clues to get out of the imprisonment. Civilization helps tremendously. It helps you to grow, it helps you to understand the misery of life.Just look here – many more people from the West come to me than from India. The West is more civilized, more cultured – of course more miserable. Everybody is just on the verge of going berserk, just on the verge, a little push is needed.Out of four persons, they say nearly three are on the boundary line of becoming mad. Almost one out of four persons, one day or other, is going to become a victim of cancer. Out of four persons alive – alive on this day – out of those four, one is going to have cancer. Civilization gives cancer. It is a great gift because it shows the absurdity of the mind. Civilization brings the whole absurdity of the mind to the surface.A culture starts becoming religious only when it is really civilized, rich, affluent. A poor country cannot be religious, cannot afford to be religious. A poor country thinks of communism; a rich country thinks about meditation, sannyas. A poor country thinks about bread and butter; a rich country is almost fed up with all that civilization, science, technology, can give. It wants something else.When the needs of the body are fulfilled, the needs of the mind arise; when the needs of the mind are fulfilled, then the spiritual needs arise – they have a hierarchy. If the needs of the body are not fulfilled, you will not think about the needs of the mind; when you are hungry you don’t think of poetry, you can’t, it’s simply impossible. When you are hungry you can’t think of music; that would be suicidal. Beethoven doesn’t mean a thing when you are hungry. When you are hungry, beauty is a meaningless word. You see a beautiful face – and some bread appears!I have heard that once a poet was lost in a jungle; for three days he couldn’t find the way. He was a great poet and he had written many, many songs, beautiful love songs, about the moon, and beautiful women, and the rivers and mountains and sea.After three days of hunger and starvation, the full-moon night came: he looked and he was surprised – no beautiful face appeared in the moon, but a floating bread, a chapati.With the needs of the body fulfilled, suddenly poetry, art, music, dance, literature, philosophy – all that becomes very, very alluring. New calls are heard in the heart. When the needs of the mind are also fulfilled, then for the first time, God, religion, meditation, ecstasy, become meaningful. And the search starts. This is the difference between these three words: if all the needs of the body are fulfilled, it is a civilized country; if all the needs of the mind are fulfilled, it is a cultured country; and if all the spiritual needs are fulfilled, it is a religious country.Religious countries have not existed up to now. At the most a few civilizations have reached the point of culture, that’s all. Up to now a religious country has not existed in the world. People think of India as religious, but no country has yet been religious. India once reached a peak of culture, in the days of Krishna five thousand years ago – and then the need arose, the search for godliness. Now America is in almost the same situation: a deep inner search has started.Civilization helps, helps tremendously, because it brings all the hidden miseries of the mind to the surface. And you have to know them, only then can you transcend them – there is no other way. Only the experience that nothing here on this earth is fulfilling, that nothing that can help the body and the mind can be of much help… It is okay, the needs of the body are fulfilled – then what? It is good, you enjoy music and poetry, then suddenly one day you feel frustrated – what? You are playing with words and waves in the air. It does not deeply satisfy.Only religiousness can satisfy. Only religiousness can become contentment; it touches your very innermost core. But civilization creates the situation in which religiousness becomes possible.The sixth question:Osho,Is the whole conscious of itself?No, neither conscious or unconscious. That is the meaning of supraconscious. Unconsciousness is a sleep state: you are not aware of yourself. Consciousness is self-awareness – you are aware of the self. But that creates a division: the self and the awareness of it. You become two. The whole is neither conscious nor unconscious, the whole is supraconscious, because there is no division between the self and awareness.And when you become one with the whole you also are neither conscious nor unconscious. Or, you are both together. Unconscious in a way because there is no self to be conscious about, and conscious in a way because you are so alert.If you can conceive a state – it is difficult to conceive – if you can conceive a state where there is no self but only awareness, nobody to be aware but only awareness, then there is rest, rest just like sleep, and there is alertness, alertness just like when you are awake. Either you can say it is both or you can say it is neither.But one thing has to be remembered: all that you know is irrelevant when you talk about the whole. All that you know. You know two things: unconsciousness and consciousness, and both are irrelevant. Either join them together, or drop them together.The whole is totally different. All that you have known up to now cannot become a category for it. And nothing much can be said about it. Because for whatever I say, I will have to use your words. And then there is bound to be misunderstanding.So it is better to move into the whole and know it, rather than ask questions about it. Ask questions about yourself because there is the problem, and that problem has to be solved. With the whole there is no problem – forget about it. Just ask questions about yourself so that they can be solved.One day, when you move into the whole, you will know. And there is no other way to know it. This much I am giving – and this is not information, it is just a hint, don’t take it too literally – the whole is supraconscious. It is both and it is neither.The seventh question:Osho,An artist is an artist in so far as he creates. Isn't creating doing? And aren't most forms of art the result of doing, of achieving, of not being? If an artist was just being he would have no art. Is a world without art what you intend? Is this the end of creation?The question has to be divided in parts. The first part: “An artist is an artist in so far as he creates.” Then you don’t understand rightly. An artist is an artist only in so far as he allows creation to happen. It is not that he creates. If he creates he is not a creator. He may be composing things but he is not a creator. He may be a technician but he is not an artist.For example if you create poetry, you can create absolutely according to the rules of the poetics, there may not be a single error in it – but it will not be poetry. The grammar may be perfect, the language absolutely right, the rhythm, the meter and everything okay, but it will be just like a dead body; everything perfect, but the body dead. No soul in it. You are not a poet, you may be a technician. You can compose your poetry, you cannot create it.Because when you create, you have to disappear from the scene completely. When you create, the creator creates through you, it is not you. All great poets know it, all great scientists know it – that when they are not, something starts flowing through them. They are taken possession of. Something greater than themselves flows through, filters through; they are no more than a passage.An artist is an artist in so far as he allows creation – not that he does it, it is not an act. That’s why all old poetry is anonymous. Nobody knows who created the Upanishads – so beautiful, so tremendously sublime. Nobody knows who created the caves of Ajanta and Ellora – anonymous. Nobody knows who created the poetry of Khajuraho in stone. Anonymous. The old artists understood it well – it was not their creation, their names should not be there. They did not sign it.Existence is the creator, they were just vehicles it used, and they were grateful that they were chosen as vehicles to be used. First-rate poets, artists, painters, musicians, scientists, all know; only the second-rate don’t know it. The second-rate is an imitator. He imitates the first-rate people. Then he is the ego: “I am creating.” No artist worth the name has ever claimed that he is the creator.“Isn’t creating doing?” No. Creating is non-doing. Much happens, but there is nobody who does it. “And aren’t most forms of art the results of doing, of achieving…?” No. The moment the achieving mind comes in, ugliness happens – not art, not beauty. The more the achieving mind is there, the more ugliness. When there is no mind, then beauty flowers; then there is a grace to it that is not of this earth.“If an artist was just being he would have no art.” No, only then would he have art. “Is a world without art what you intend?” No, the world is already without art. I intend a world which is totally fulfilled in art. But there are two types of art: the art of the technician – which is a pseudo art – and the art of the artist.The pseudo art is too much in the world. The real authentic art has disappeared. It has to disappear because authentic art can happen only with authentic beings. How can you think that inauthentic beings can create authentic art? It flows through you. The poetry comes from the deepest center of the poet. If the center is not there, if the poet is not centered; if the poet himself is not rooted, lives on the surface, how can the poetry move into the deeper realms of his being? The poetry will always be less than the poet.You may be deceived by it because you are also inauthentic. In a false world, where masks have become realities and original faces are completely forgotten, where real things have disappeared, where roses no longer bloom in the bushes but are manufactured in plastic factories, where man himself is no longer natural but a manufactured thing, authentic art certainly disappears.I would like the whole world to be full of authentic art, throbbing with it, living with it, because that is the only way. Through authentic art, real art, you transcend it. If the music is real, soon you will move into meditation, because the music will only give you a little glimpse of meditation, nothing more.If it is real it will give you a glimpse. If it is not real – as all pop music has become in the world: not real, just superficial – it may give you a little catharsis. It may give you a certain state of mind where you can forget yourself, it may give you a little intoxication. It is alcoholic. That’s why all pop music is so loud, it drowns you. You have to forget yourself, it is so loud. How can you remember yourself with such a loud phenomenon around you? You forget yourself. It is like a drug.Real music will make you more and more refined. It will become more and more silent. In fact, real music will help you to listen to silence, where all notes disappear, where only gaps remain. One note comes, disappears, and another has not come, and there is a gap. In that gap, meditation flows in you.Real music will help you move toward meditation: beyond the needs of the mind, toward the spiritual needs. Real poetry will give you a glimpse of the minds of the sages – a glimpse of course. It will open a window so you can see the faraway distant Himalayas. And then an urge arises in you, and you start traveling.Art is not the goal. It is a need of the mind. It has to be fulfilled. Through the window of art the urge will arise – you will see the distant horizon, and the beauty of it will become a tremendous pull on you, you will be pulled.Civilization is needed to create art, poetry, music, painting – but they are not the goals; at most resting places for the night. In the morning you are again on your feet moving toward the distant goal. The goal is always godliness, nothing less will do.The eighth question:Osho,I am new to your teaching, but if I have understood you so far you say – approximately anyway – that knowledge obtained from books is mere information, and as such is useless and sterile. What matters is an inner knowing derived from experience, and feeling rather than intellect. Why then do you publish books for sale?I speak to seduce you into silence. I use words so that you can be persuaded toward the wordless existence. The books are there to lead you beyond, so don’t cling to them. At the most they are bridges. But if you make your house on a bridge you are a fool. Pass through it!Right now, you cannot understand silence, you can understand only words. I have to use words to give you the message of silence. Between the words, between the lines, sometimes – if you hang around me long enough – you may one day start hearing silence. Then there is no need, then burn those books with other Vedas, Bibles, and scriptures. My books also have to be burned.Everything has to be left behind. But right now you are not ready. When you are ready there is no need for any books. Those books are not published for those who understand. Those books are published for those who have a desire to understand – but don’t yet understand. Their desire is beautiful. They have to be helped. And if I am to help you I have to come close to you. Before you can come close to me I will have to come close to you – that is the only way. Before I can take you to the place where I am, I will have to come down to the place where you are.Those books are not necessary. Their need is because of you. If you can jump over them, avoid them, bypass them – beautiful. But you will not be able to bypass them; otherwise you would not be here. You are here to listen to me. You are still hoping that by listening you may gain. I am not thinking that by listening you may gain. I am thinking that by listening you will become able to listen to that which is not said, and through that you will gain. Nobody gains through books, but books can help you to go beyond. All the scriptures say the same thing.In the Upanishads it is said, “Nayamatma pravachanen labhyo – this soul cannot be got from sermons. Na medhaya na bahuna shruten – neither can it be got from intelligence.” Somewhere else in the Upanishads they say, “The goal is where?” Where is the goal? Go beyond the words, only then you will know.The point from where words turn back and cannot go beyond – that is the point, the door. The Bible, the Koran, they exist to help you to go beyond them. If you have been carrying them on your head it is your stupidity; you have not looked into them. Because they say, “Don’t cling to words, don’t cling to theories, to concepts, philosophies. All is rubbish!”My books are there to be transcended. Enjoy them on the way but don’t cling to them. And get ready to go beyond.The ninth question:Osho,You told us yesterday that only through undoing and through unlearning can we find our true being. What are we to do when our profession requires a lot of knowledge?Fulfill it! But let it be a profession, don’t allow it to become your soul. Of course information is needed. A doctor has to know about 707 arteries, dozens of muscles, glands, and thousands of things in the body – and above it all, about ten thousand drugs. Otherwise he cannot be a doctor.But this is not a problem. He should know it, but this is not knowledge, this is information – useful, utilitarian, but this is not a growth in his being. Keep it separate. It should remain part of the memory; you are not to be burdened by it.And the memory has tremendous capacity; no computer yet invented has that much capacity. One man’s memory, given enough time, can memorize all the books that exist in the world today. One man’s memory can contain the whole world of books. It has tremendous capacity. The only thing is, you should keep a distance; information is information, knowledge is knowledge.Knowing is a totally different thing. Knowing is concerned with the being, it is the shadow of the being. Through information you will be useful to others. Through knowing you will be enlightened. It is not a utility.In the world, in the market, information is needed. And there is nothing wrong in it. It becomes wrong when you think your information has become your knowing. Then you are confused. Be a doctor when you are in your hospital, and when you come home forget everything about it.I was staying in a High Court judge’s house. He was one of my devotees. When the husband was not in the house his wife told me, “My husband loves you and believes in you so tremendously; you can help me a little. If you say something to him he will do it.”I said, “Tell me, what is the matter? What do you want?”She said, “Just tell him one thing: that he should not be a judge in the house. Even in bed he remains a magistrate. Only this much. We are being tortured by him like anything. He is never a man, he is never a father, a husband, never a friend; twenty-four hours a day he is a High Court judge. And we are all afraid and the children tremble before him because he looks at us as if we are all criminals standing in his court, waiting for his judgment.“Please bring him down. If he can forget for a few hours that he is a High Court judge it will be a blessing to us.”If you are a doctor, good, be a doctor in the hospital. But don’t look at your wife with the eyes of a doctor. Because as far as I know it rarely happens that doctors are good lovers, no; because they go on looking in the same way. They know so much about the body, how can they love a woman? Filth inside – they know…arteries and mucus and excreta…and they know. And the whole day diseases and diseases, and when they look at their woman, of course their information comes in between.Doctors are not good lovers. Difficult to forget your knowledge and information. What I am saying is, in the hospital it is needed – use it, but don’t be used by it. When you come home, drop it! Just as you change your clothes. You don’t wear the same apron that you wear in the hospital, you change, you put on a nightgown – just like that.Put the information aside, be a man – and then two things can go parallel. Information can function as a utility, and you grow as a being. That being grows through knowing, not through knowledge. If you can keep this much distance and alertness, then there is nothing wrong at all.Just the other day a friend came and he brought many books for me. And before he gave them to me, in the morning he listened to me and he was a little puzzled: I am so much against knowledge. So in the evening he said, “I have brought so many books for you, and you are so much against knowledge, so what to do?” I said, “You can give those books to me and you can bring as many as you can. Knowledge cannot destroy me.” I can use it, but I am not used by it. That’s the whole point to be understood.And now the tenth and the last question:Osho,Why are you wearing all those fancy hats lately?Ask the hats! They suddenly came. Somebody sent them to me, they came across my path. You have to ask them, not me. And they wanted to be welcomed and respected.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On beyond honor and disgrace, Lao Tzu says:He who knows does not speak;he who speaks does not know.Fill up its apertures,close its doors,dull its edges,untie its tangles,soften its light,submerge its turmoil– this is the mystic unity.Then love and hatred cannot touch him.Profit and loss cannot reach him.Honor and disgrace cannot affect him.Therefore is he always the honored one of the world.Language is human. Obviously it has to be very limited. It is good for objective things; it is completely useless for the inner, the inside.Language can say something, but it cannot say the all. If you are sitting at the dinner table, language is useful for saying, “Please pass me the salt.” It is utilitarian. It has a use, but it cannot say the truth because truth is not a utility, and truth is not something objective. It is not there outside you, it happens somewhere at the deepest core of your being.Something is between you and me: we can decide what we are going to call it – it is a contract. If both parties are willing, language is perfectly okay. But when something has happened within me, it is not something between me and you, I cannot indicate what it is. Even if I indicate, you cannot see what it is. So no contract is possible.Religion is beyond language. At the most, language can say what it is not. It cannot say what truth is, but it can say what it is not. At the most it can be a negation. We cannot say what God is because that will be limiting him through our limited words, concepts; at the most we can say what he is not. And all the scriptures only say what he is not. They eliminate the error, but they never show the truth. But if you can go on eliminating the error, one day suddenly the truth is revealed to you. It is not revealed through language, it is revealed through silence.So the first thing to be understood very deeply – because it becomes a great pitfall if you don’t understand it – is that language can be dangerous, one can be deluded by it.You know the word God, but the word God is not God. In the word God there is nothing godly. The word God is absolutely hollow and empty. It has nothing in it. You can go on repeating it millions of times, nothing will happen to you. It is an empty shell, inside it is hollow. Words cannot carry the inner experience.It may have been true when Jesus used the word, it may have meant something to him – but not to those who heard him. This has to be understood. If I say samadhi I mean something, I know it. But when you hear the word samadhi it is just a noise in your ears; at the most you can understand the meaning that is given in the dictionary. But a dictionary is not existence. It is not a substitute for existence. Samadhi can be known only when you go in it, when you become it; there is no other way to know it.That’s why Lao Tzu goes on insisting that truth cannot be spoken, and that which is spoken cannot be true. But he speaks because this much can be said. This is a negation.He says:He who knows does not speak;he who speaks does not know.This much can be said. Lao Tzu speaks – whether he knows or not. According to his own principle, if he knows he should not speak. If he speaks then he is not in the know, then he does not know. Then you will fall into a riddle which cannot be solved. If he does not know, then how can he say such a great truth?He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know. If he knows, then why is he speaking? If he does not know, then he cannot even hint at such a profundity. Try to understand this paradox. He is simply eliminating one thing. All that he is saying in these two sentences – which are deeply pregnant with meaning, very significant – he is saying: Don’t be deluded by words. They are not truth. They may appear like truth, but they are not. A lived moment cannot be expressed. A live thing can be known only by living it.You fall in love – then you know what it is. You may go on reading a thousand and one books about love, and they may be beautiful books, they may even have been written by those who have loved and who have known what love is, but by reading them you will never come to know what love is.Love is not a concept to be understood. It is an experience to be possessed by. When love takes over, you are thrown off center. You are no longer there: love exists and you are not. You cannot manipulate love. A concept can be manipulated, you can interpret a concept, you can put this meaning or that into it – but love? Love cannot be manipulated.It is not that you love, it is nothing that you do, it is something that happens to you. Suddenly you are in a whirlwind. A greater force than you has taken possession. You are no longer yourself, you are possessed.That’s why people think that lovers are mad – they are. Love is a beautiful madness. It is like madness, it has a quality like madness, because one becomes possessed by it. People say, “Love is blind.” They are right, love is blind, because love has its own eyes. These ordinary eyes don’t work. Love has its own ways of seeing and feeling and being. All ordinary ways are thrown off track. Love has its own sort of world: a new world is created around the lover. He looks blind to everybody else, but he is not blind in himself; in fact for the first time he has attained eyes, vision, insight.Love can be known only by falling in love; by becoming, not even a lover, but by becoming love itself. If you are a lover, love has not happened yet. You still remain in control. If you want, you can change. If you want, you can move away. There is still a choice, love has not happened; you are still not possessed by it. You will not know.You may be moving according to some pattern, theory, of how to love and how not to love. You must be moving through some conditioning – but love has not become your heart, it does not beat within you, it still remains part of your mind. Language is of the mind and experience is of the heart. And the heart has its own world, has its own dimension. So love cannot be expressed – and truth is even deeper than love.Three layers have to be remembered. The first layer is of the head, which is the most superficial: the world of language, concepts, theories. You can manipulate it very easily, you are the master there.Then there is a second layer, deeper than the head: that is of the heart. There your mastery is not at all. You become a slave. You cannot control it; love becomes the master, you become the slave. It possesses you completely.But still the mind can say something about love, because the heart is not very far away from the head, the distance is not very far. The mind can have a few glimpses. It can look back, it can look within, and have a few glimpses. That’s why poetry is possible, painting is possible, music is possible. These are all glimpses, from the head, of the heart.But then there is a third layer of your being which is the last layer, the very substratum, the very ground. That is your being. The head is thinking, the heart is feeling, the being is simply being.Godliness, truth, ecstasy, nirvana, enlightenment – they belong to being. The head has not even heard about it. It can have a little glimpse of the second layer, of the heart, of love. It has not even heard that there exists another layer deeper than the heart. The heart can have a little glimpse of the being, because it is nearer to it. So people who are in love can have a little understanding – I say a little – of prayer. Because prayer is just like love.When Jesus says “God is love,” he is talking to the people of the heart. He was talking to his disciples. If he had been talking in a university to university professors and academicians, he would not have said such a foolish thing, that God is love. He would have said God is mathematics, God is logic, or something else.But he was talking to his very intimate disciples, very close, who were in deep love with him. That is why he could say, “God is love.” He was talking to the heart in the language of the heart. He was indicating to the people of the heart that there is a further goal: that further goal is godliness, and where you are standing is love. Jesus is trying to create a bridge between God and love; that’s why he says God is love, or love is God.He was not talking to popes, theologians, people well-versed in religious matters, no. He was talking to fishermen, farmers, carpenters – people who are not heady, people who are still of the feeling world, belong to feeling. That’s why he could say God is love. The heart can have a little glimpse.So the first step is from the head toward the heart. And the second step is from the heart toward the being. Nothing can be said about the being, because even to say something about the heart is impossible. Nothing can be said about the being. You have to move, you have to know to know. There is no shortcut to it.Says Lao Tzu: He who knows does not speak… All those who have known have not spoken. You will not believe it, because Buddha spoke for forty years continuously. Every day for forty years he was speaking and speaking and speaking. And still, those who have known Buddha, they say he never spoke a single word. I go on speaking continuously every day, but those amidst you who know me will know that I have not spoken a single word.Because all that is spoken is just a hint. Nothing is spoken in it. It is just a net, a fisherman’s net, so that those who live in their heads can be caught. Once they are caught, the use of language is finished. Then their hearts start throbbing. Then a communion – not communication but communion – happens between the master and the disciple; then their hearts start beating in the same rhythm. Then they breathe in the same rhythm. No need to say anything then. Then everything is understood without being said.All talk is to prepare you for silence, and only in silence can truth be given.Bodhidharma went to China many centuries ago to search for a disciple. He had something within him and his days were numbered; soon he would have to disappear from the body. And he was searching for somebody with whom communion would be possible. India was full of great scholars, but he had to go to China to find somebody who could understand the language of heart, the language of silence – which is no language at all.He waited for nine years. Then came his disciple. Nobody knows what happened between these two people, nobody can know. But a transfer happened. Bodhidharma gave all that he had to Hui Neng and the tradition of Zen was born.Now people go on saying that Bodhidharma gave Zen to Hui Neng: a transfer without scriptures, a communication without words. Even if you had been present there you would not have known what had transpired. It was a jump of being, from being to another being. Hui Neng was open, Bodhidharma jumped in. Something that cannot be said was said – not in words but in being. Existentially it was transferred, and that has been the way. Since then, Zen masters go on giving their final word wordlessly.It happened to another Zen master who was dying… He called his most beloved disciple and said, “Now the moment has come, and I must give you the scripture that I have been carrying for long. It was given to me by my master when he was dying; now I am dying.”He pulled out a book, a book he had been hiding under his pillow. Everybody knew about it but nobody had ever been allowed to look into it. He was very secretive about it. When he went to his bath he would carry the book with him. Nobody had ever been allowed to see what was in the book – and everybody of course was curious, tremendously curious.And now he had called this disciple and said, “The last moment has come and I have to give you the scripture that was given to me by my master. Keep it. Preserve it as carefully as possible – protect it so that it should not be destroyed. It is a valuable treasure. Once lost – lost for centuries.”The disciple laughed and said, “But whatever has to be attained I have attained without this scripture, so what is the need? You can take it with you.”The master insisted. The disciple said, “Okay, if you insist then it’s okay.” The book was given to him. It was a winter evening, very cold, and a fire was burning in the room – the disciple took the book and without even looking at it, he threw it into the fire.The master jumped and said, “What are you doing!”And the disciple shouted even more loudly, “What are you saying! To preserve a scripture?”The master started laughing. He said, “You passed the examination. Had you preserved it, you would have missed! And there was nothing in it; to tell you the truth, it is completely empty. It was just to see whether you have become capable of understanding silence, or if you still cling deep down to words, concepts, theories, philosophies.”All philosophies, all that can be said, are just like the porch of a palace. I see you every evening in darshan in the porch – because all questions can be solved only in the porch. Once you are ready, there is no question; then you can enter the palace. Have you ever heard the name of a Greek wise man, Zeno? He was the founder of the Stoic philosophy. Just like me, he used to teach in the porch. The word stoic comes from a Greek word stoikas, from stoa, which means porch. His whole life he was teaching in the porch and people would say, “You have such a beautiful house, why do you teach in the porch?” He said, “All teaching is just like the porch. When you are ready to listen to the silence you enter the temple – then there is no talk.” From the word stoa, porch, his whole philosophy is known as Stoicism.All words can at the most become porches; they lead you toward the inner temple; but if you cling to them you remain in the porch – the porch is not the palace. Lao Tzu is saying something which is just like a porch, a door. If you understand it, you will drop all words, language – in fact the whole mind. Where you leave your shoes in the porch, you should leave your mind also. Only then do you enter the innermost shrine of being.He who knows does not speak… Even if he speaks, he speaks only to say this much. Even if he speaks, he speaks only against speaking. He does not want to say something in it, he simply wants to destroy all the words within you – his speech is destructive. He simply wants to create a vacuum within you, and of course words can be destroyed only by words. Poison can be destroyed only by poison. You have a thorn in your foot – another thorn is needed to pull it out. All that I am saying is like another thorn to pull out the thorns that are already in your being. Once the first thorn is out, the second is also useless – you throw both of them away. All words are used by knowers to pull out other words which have already settled within you. Once you are empty – finished.There has been a great man in India, a very rare being: men like him you can count on your fingers. His name was Nagarjuna. He has contradicted everything. He has debated against everything. He has criticized all theories. And people were puzzled. They would ask, “Okay, whatever you say is okay, but what is your standpoint?”And Nagarjuna would say, “I don’t have any standpoint. I am here just to destroy theories. I don’t have a theory to replace them with. Whatever is your theory – come! I will criticize it and destroy it. But don’t ask for a substitute because I have none. You become empty, that’s perfect, there is no need to do anything.”If you believe in God, Nagarjuna will criticize God. If you don’t believe in God and you are an atheist, he will criticize atheism. If you believe in the soul, he is the enemy of the soul. If you don’t believe in the soul, then he is also your enemy. If you ask, “What is your philosophy?” he will simply shrug his shoulders. He will say, “None. I am here to destroy.”Those who know, they have spoken just to destroy, so that emptiness is left behind. In that emptiness is communion.The word communion means: come to union. There is a deep unity then. In that unity, that which cannot be said can be said. No words are needed, not even gestures are needed. It is simply transferred without any scripture.He who knows does not speak;he who speaks does not know.Fill up its apertures…Now he is saying what to do: how to attain that silence which knows truth; how to attain that emptiness in which truth descends in you, in which you become a vehicle and godliness takes possession. You become a temple, and godliness comes and settles within you.Fill up its apertures… The mind has many apertures through which it is constantly refilled and refueled. You go on looking – what are you looking at? You are not looking for something in particular, you are just looking; anything that passes by, you look. The mind is hankering, through the eyes, to collect whatever information it can collect. The mind is curious – you even read advertisements written on walls, and you pass by the same wall every day, and you read it again and again and again. And you know what is written there, you have read it so many times, but again when you pass, unconsciously like a robot you read it again. You go on collecting information for the mind: the mind needs to be fed by information. It is a computer, it is asking constantly, “I am hungry, bring me more knowledge.” Knowledge is the mind’s food, it thrives on it.The ears go on listening to what is happening; all the senses are apertures from where the mind goes on seeking and searching for knowledge. Even absolutely useless knowledge. You cannot even imagine of what use this knowledge is going to be. But the mind goes on collecting in the hope that someday, maybe, it can use it. That day never comes.Says Lao Tzu: Fill up its apertures… If you want to attain silence, fill up its apertures. Open your eyes only when it is absolutely necessary. Look only when it is absolutely needed; otherwise there is no need. Bypass things without looking at them. Keep your eyes empty. Look at the world with empty eyes so that you are not looking at it, you are not looking at anything.You may have that feeling when you encounter an enlightened man. He looks at you, but he is not looking at you. He looks and looks not. His eyes are like empty mirrors. He is not indifferent; he is not interested either. He hears, and hears not. If you say something he hears, but if you stop in the middle he is not curious for the remaining half sentence. Even if you stop in the middle of the sentence, there comes the full point for him: it’s finished! He is not curious. Then the mind stops accumulating.In Tibetan monasteries, whenever a new disciple wants to enter the monastery, he has to sit at the door for twenty-four hours, sometimes even for forty-eight hours, sometimes even more – hungry, with closed eyes. The master will pass many times by the door, disciples will pass, other people will come and go, and he has to sit there with closed eyes.That is the first examination: whether he is capable of becoming non-curious. Otherwise he would like to look at who is going out, he would like to open the eyes just a little bit: who has come, who has gone. He will be curious. If a person is so restless and curious that he cannot keep his eyes closed for twenty-four hours, then he will be rejected by the monastery. Even small children when they want to enter a monastery have to pass this.But if you can keep your eyes closed for twenty-four hours, it is a feat, because the mind is so restless and continuously asking for information that if you don’t give it information, it starts suffocating. In fact it starts dying.That’s why sense deprivation can become the death of the mind. Many experiments have been done, are being carried out, all over the world on sensory deprivation. When all your senses are deprived of their usual food, time seems to be unending. One hour has passed – you think eternity.You may be totally comfortable, resting in a tank which is made like the womb of a mother, in lukewarm water, floating; no anxiety, darkness surrounds you. Beautiful – no worry, you simply relax in the womb again. But within minutes you start feeling such deep restlessness. The mind asks for the constant supply of food.Sense deprivation has been one of the most used methods in the East. One who wants to reach ecstasy, samadhi, has to learn to be without this constant hankering of the mind to be fed.You are doing two things together. People come to me, they say, “We would like to get rid of this mind, it is just anguish and nothing else – a hell.” But if I say to them, “Then close your apertures more and more” – because on one hand you want to drop the mind and on another hand you go on feeding it – that seems difficult.I send people on twenty-one days silence. It becomes really a hell after four, five days. They are not doing: they are allowed just to sit with closed eyes, with closed ears, to move, walk – but not to look around, just to look on the path that they are following, four feet ahead at the most. To eat, rest – nothing in particular – but just to relax the senses, close the apertures. After the fourth, fifth day the mind starts rebelling.If they can continue, near the fourteenth or fifteenth day the mind starts accepting the fact – just like a person who is dying in hospital; when you say, “You are dying,” he wants to deny, reject the fact. But by and by what can he do? Helplessly he accepts and once he accepts, then there is no worry. Then he relaxes.On the fourteenth, fifteenth day, if you continue, and remain indifferent to the constant hammering of the mind to seek more…more food for itself…the mind relaxes. And once the mind relaxes within you, your being starts flowering. The mind is the bondage on the being.So try to live in the senses as minimally as possible.Mulla Nasruddin came to me once. Hearing about meditations, he became interested. So I told him first just to sit for a year with closed eyes. Knowing him well, I thought even that was going to be impossible. He said, “But I won’t close my eyes.”I said to him, “Have you understood me? Do you understand me or not? Close your eyes!”So he closed them a little bit – half, fifty-fifty – and he said, “More than this I cannot do.”I asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “I am strictly a middle-of-the-road man. At the most I can half close my eyes. I cannot close them completely. Who knows what is going to happen? I may miss something beautiful, so that I cannot do. I can close half and I will keep half open, alert to what is going on.”He said to me, “I absolutely agree with the old lady who used to go to church: whenever the name of God was mentioned, she would bow down – that was okay. But the priest there became a little worried because whenever the name of the Devil was mentioned, then too she would bow down. One day the priest could not contain his curiosity. After the congregation left, he went to the old lady, caught her outside the church, and asked, ‘What is the matter? Why do you do this? I can understand that when the name of God is mentioned you bow down, but why do you bow down when the name of the Devil is mentioned?’ She said, ‘You never know, it may come in handy any time.’”Mulla Nasruddin told me, “I am strictly a middle-of-the-way man. I bow down to God and to the Devil also; one never knows, it may come in handy.”People go on trying to create a compromise with the mind. You cannot win. If you compromise, the mind is going to win. All compromise is a defeat in the inner world. If you decide that you would like to know your innermost core of being, then this is the way:Fill up its apertures,close its doors,dull its edges,untie its tangles,soften its light,submerge its turmoil– this is the mystic unity.Then you come to know that which is one. This is the mystic unity, the communion.I will repeat again: Fill up its apertures… Use the senses as minimally as possible. And if you look, you will find that you are using them absolutely unnecessarily. Ninety-nine percent of their usage can be stopped; one percent will be enough. And you will be surprised, when you use your senses as minimally as possible they become very, very sharp. Because the whole energy becomes concentrated.When you don’t go on looking at anybody and everybody, then suddenly you look at a roseflower – your eyes are so clear, without any clouds. Otherwise you go on seeing things, so many things – in those many things, the roseflower is just one of the things; your eyes are dusty, the rose cannot flower for you.You come and look at your child but you don’t look; you have a screen of so many experiences on the eyes, your eyes are already filled. How can you see the face of your child? Otherwise you would have seen the face of God there. How can you see the roseflower? Otherwise the rose would have disappeared and you would have seen the flowering of the divine.Your eyes will become fresh, clean and you will become very perceptive – if you don’t use your senses unnecessarily. The more you use them the more your senses are bored, tired. They lose sharpness, they lose sensitivity; they become very, very dull.Fill up its apertures, close its doors… Wherever you find the mind has made a door to go into the world, close it. The mind has very cunning ways to go into the world. Just watch from where it escapes into the world.Freud discovered that the whole functioning of the mind is associative – that is, a door. You look at a dog. In fact you should contain yourself to this dog; there is no need to move on. But suddenly you remember a dog that you used to know in your childhood, and that dog belonged to a girl and you had fallen in love with that girl. Now you go on and on. Now this dog – the fact, the factual – is no longer there. It simply worked as a key. Now you are moving: you loved that girl but you couldn’t manage to possess her, then all the other possessions, then all the other girls – a long queue is there.Then you go on jumping, hopping from one thing to another. The mind moves into a mad world from anywhere, and then there is no end to it. Freud used this door for his whole psychoanalytic method: thought association. That’s why psychoanalysis goes on for years and years – and with no result, in fact. You can go on forever and forever. One thought leads to another, another thought leads to another, and there are millions and millions of thoughts.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin was in love with a woman. He brought her home and when they were going to bed, resting on the bed, relaxing on the bed, the woman asked, “Nasruddin, how many women have been here before me, in your bed?”Nasruddin kept silent, minutes passed. Almost half an hour had passed, then the woman said, “I am still waiting!”Nasruddin said, “And what do you think I am doing? I am still counting!”That’s how things are related. If you start counting, if you start on the associative journey, there is no end to it. Association is a door. You will have to find them – there are many doors.And you always go through the same doors, and get into the same troubles, and you never become aware that it has become a repetitive thing, a vicious circle. You go on moving in circles. Close all the doors. It will be difficult in the beginning because you will feel it is just like suicide. Samadhi is like suicide. The only difference is that no suicide is as complete as samadhi. But it is not only suicide, it is a resurrection also. It is a cross and a resurrection. The old dies and the new is born.And then there is no problem, you can go back to the world, but you come back totally different. Then the world doesn’t disturb you. Then there is no problem. Then you can use your eyes and ears and do whatever you want to do; nothing disturbs you once you are settled and rooted and centered in your being, nothing disturbs. You remain in the world and the world is not there. You move in the darkest night and the inner light never leaves you. You live in that inner light; now there is no problem with the outer darkness.…close its doors, dull its edges… The mind is very cunning, clever, logical. It is a great rationalizer. Whatever the mind wants to do, it gives you reasons. All reasons are false. If you look deep down you will find they are not reasons but rationalizations. You want to be angry – you find an excuse. The excuse is not the cause, but you deceive yourself and others that because of this you became angry. That excuse was just an excuse, you rationalized it.You come home, you are angry with the boss – and then you jump on your wife. You were feeling jittery, you were feeling angry, a rage was boiling within you, but it was difficult to throw it on the boss, it would have cost too much. It was not going to pay. You thought, “Better to be economical.” You contained your anger there, you continued smiling, you went on wagging your tail. Then you come home. You have to throw it on somebody; you have to find a weaker link in your life where you can throw it without any loss to you. You throw it on your wife or on your child.Or, if you are a henpecked husband, as almost all husbands are, then the wife is also a boss and you cannot throw it on her, so you have to do something with your dog, with your cat, or with something you can destroy – your radio. Or you can go mad when driving your car: you can bring the all the anger to your feet and you can go on pressing the accelerator more and more.Now psychologists say that almost fifty percent of car accidents happen because of anger. They have nothing to do with the traffic; they have something to do with the inner traffic of the mind. Fifty percent! It is too much.Angry? The car goes on gathering more and more speed; you are throwing out your anger through speed. But you may be thinking, “The wind is beautiful and the morning is good, and I would like to have a good drive.” That is just an excuse. The morning is good every day, it is not only that it is good today. When somebody passes or tries to overtake your car…Once it happened I was traveling with a friend – he was driving. Suddenly I became aware that he was driving too fast, and not only that, I looked at the milestones and we were going in the wrong direction. So I asked him, “What is the matter?”He said, “Keep quiet. Just half an hour more.”So I waited. I saw what he was doing – he was trying to overtake a car which had overtaken our car. When he had overtaken that car, he stopped the car and said, “Now we can go in our own direction.”What did this man think himself to be? I never traveled again with him – the man was mad!But he rationalized it. He said, “If you give in to small things, you start giving in to big things.” So he told me, “Never give in to anything. Give a good fight, whatever the cost! Because life is a struggle. It is a survival of the fittest.”We were late, people were waiting for me in another town and we reached two hours late. But he had to give a good fight – to the unknown man who may not even have been aware of what was happening. And he may have killed me, and himself, because he was mad.The mind goes on finding rationalizations; it calls them reasons – they are not reasons. …dull its edges… Try to find out, and the more you try to find out, the more the edge will be dulled. Then you will suddenly see the whole irrationality of the mind – and it goes on trying, “I am rational!” It is one of the greatest discoveries of this century that man is not rational.Aristotle defined man as a rational animal. It took twenty centuries to find the truth. The credit goes to Freud; he discovered that man is not rational at all. He is a rationalizing animal, not rational. In fact there are no reasons, he just goes on finding reasons. There are unconscious instincts and he goes on creating a facade of reasons around it, which are all false.Watch and soon you will see. And once you see, the edges of the mind will be dulled. Then it won’t look so sharp, so clever, so intelligent. It is not, no mind is intelligent. The mind cannot be intelligent, the mind is mediocre. The very quality of the mind is mediocre.People you call genius, talented, very intelligent – just watch them! A great genius, he may have got a Nobel Prize, gets up in the morning and finds that his slippers are not there in the right place, and he goes mad – great genius! Because the slippers were not found in the right place in the morning, his whole day is destroyed. He is angry at the whole world. And from that, many things will happen – because the slippers were not in the right place. And you call this man a genius. Many things will happen which will have faraway consequences.Angry, he will go to the office. Angry, he will talk to people, he will create chains of anger. And one anger leads to another, deeper layer of anger. He may do something of which he will repent later on. And the whole cause was that his slippers were not found in the right place.And you call this man a genius? You call this man very intelligent? He may be clever, but he is not wise. He may be clever, but he is not intelligent. He may be knowledgeable, but he has no capacity of knowing. And what does it matter if the slippers are not found in the right place?No, that may be again just an excuse. It may be connected with other things – in the night he had a nightmare and he was afraid, and when he got up, trembling, then he found that his slippers were not in the right place. Now the whole anger is focused on this fact. He may throw the servant out, fire him, or this may become a cause for a divorce. You may think that I am going too far – I am not. I have watched many divorces and I have never found any better reasons for them – just like this, small things. In life there are no big things, only small things.…dull its edges, untie its tangles… The mind is very entangled: chains and chains, associations. It is a net, a mad net. Everything goes into the mind and becomes more and more confusing. The more you know, the more the mind is confused – because all that you add to it adds to its confusion.…untie its tangles… Try to see things more clearly. Try to see the confusion. Watch the confusion. Become a watcher and don’t get identified with it; create a little distance between you and your mind. To create this distance is to become a sannyasin. To create this distance is to create the possibility of an inner evolution.…untie its tangles… How will you untie them? If you try to untie them you will never be able to untie them. The only way to untie them is to create a distance. You have observed many times – you may not be alert to it – that when someone else is in difficulty you always give good advice. If the same difficulty happens to you, you may not be so wise. Why? Why does it happen? Why does your intelligence function so well when somebody else is in difficulty? Because there is a distance.I was reading the biography of a great actress, Sarah Bernhardt. Once it happened, she was watching a drama. A new actress was working, and the new actress got so identified with her acting in the role and the play that she completely forgot that she was an actress. She started crying and weeping with tears streaming down. She created a mess of herself: in the middle of the play she had to be suddenly pulled away from the stage, because she had completely forgotten that she was just playing a role, was just an actress. She became confused – as if this was her life.When Sarah went out, she called that new actress to her and told her, “When you cry, the audience does not. You should act, but you should keep a distance. You should not become identified with it.”And this should be the key for your whole life because the whole of life is a big drama. The stage is vast, but it is a drama. You should keep a distance. Whatever happens, happens in the play, in the drama. You are a witness, you should not become one with it. If you become one with it, you are entangled. If you remain aloof, and you can look at it from a distance, your mind never gets in confusion. If you are away, the mind remains crystal clear. The whole entanglement is of identification.…soften its light… Don’t look at everything in the light of the mind, in the glare of the mind. Soften its light. Look at things sometimes from the heart also. Bring the soft light of the heart to things, look with the light of love also.Don’t go on looking at things only from a logical standpoint. Don’t be too logical. Sometimes you need to be illogical also; only then can the balance be kept. Rational and irrational too, because you are both. You have to keep a balance. There are sane moments, and you need some insane moments also. Do mathematics – but sometimes become mad in music also. Calculate – but sometimes dance also. Work – but play also, so that the balance is not lost.If the mind becomes your only way of seeing things, then the light is too much. It is destructive. Then the very glare will not allow you to see things as they are. It is just as when you look at the sun and then you look at other things – everything looks dark, not in its right proportion.…submerge its turmoil… The mind is constantly in a turmoil within. A continuous chaos; a storm goes on and on and on. Submerge it, otherwise it won’t allow you to listen to the softer music of life. It won’t allow you to see the delicate things in life. It won’t allow you to feel.How to submerge that turmoil within? What to do? – three things. One: if you look inside and you feel turmoil there, just sit on the bank – don’t jump into it. The river is moving, you sit on the bank, let it flow. Don’t do anything. Learn the art of doing things by non-doing. Just sit and watch. It is really a great secret. If you can see and watch the turmoil of the mind, it settles by itself by and by. It is just as you come into a house, the dust is stirred up; you sit again, the dust settles. If you start trying to settle the dust, you will unsettle it more. So don’t jump in, and don’t try to submerge the turmoil. Who will try? And how will you try? You will stir even deeper layers of it. Don’t do anything, just sit. And this sitting is meditation.In Japan they call meditation zazen. Zazen simply means sitting and doing nothing. A Zen monk sits for six to eight hours every day, doing nothing. And just sitting like that for a few days, a few months, the mind settles by itself. Mad people are brought to Zen monasteries. There, the monks don’t do anything to them, no treatment is given. They simply help the people to sit. They feed them, they don’t disturb them, they don’t force any discipline on them. They are left in faraway huts, their needs are taken care of, and they are told just to sit or lie or just to stand – and don’t bother! Within twenty-one days, the madness subsides; their turmoil disappears.Now Western psychiatrists have become interested in this fact because they cannot do this in years. They give electric shocks, and insulin shocks, and this and that – they create more turmoil. And even if they help in some way, the man loses his consciousness. Madness may be suppressed but the man has lost his aliveness also. After the electric shock you are not the same man again. And if the shock has gone very deep, you will lose some intelligence also. The madness will go, but your character will be affected permanently. It is not a gain really – or a gain at a very great loss. You may become normal, forced to be normal, but you will become a little stupid also.In Zen monasteries they don’t do anything. They know a great secret of Lao Tzu’s. They don’t do, they just sit, just watch. Things settle by themselves. Why? – because to remain unsettled is unnatural. This is the law. If you don’t do anything, everything is going to settle by itself. How can something remain unsettled forever?You are angry. Just sit with closed eyes – watch. How long can you remain angry – try! Suddenly after a few minutes you will feel it is no longer there, or the acuteness of it has gone, or suddenly half an hour afterward you may recognize and remember that you had completely forgotten that you were angry, and you were thinking of something else.If the anger had been followed, you may have killed somebody; or killed yourself; or killed a relationship; or killed a love – and this is more dangerous than killing a beloved. You may have destroyed something beautiful and delicate. And just by sitting, it settles.It settles because there is a deep law working. Life does not allow turmoil to be permanent – it cannot be permanent, only rest can be permanent. Everything settles, just give it time. Only time is needed.…submerge its turmoil– this is the mystic way.Then love and hatred cannot touch him.Profit and loss cannot reach him.Honor and disgrace cannot affect him.Therefore is he always the honored one of the world.Then duality disappears. When you have reached your innermost core, the one, duality disappears. Love and hate, honor and disgrace, failure and success, all disappear. And the greatest duality also disappears: that duality is of the soul and the body, God and the world.Then everything is one, a vast ocean of oneness. An oceanic feeling pervades. It is ecstatic. It is a benediction. It is the greatest blessing that can happen to a man – and when this blessing happens, this blessing of oneness: Therefore is he always the honored one of the world.Only such beings are honored forever and forever. Centuries pass, kings come and go, empires are built and destroyed, but a Buddha, or a Jesus, or a Krishna – they remain. They are no longer a part of the temporal changing world. They remain like eternal stars, unmoving, unchanging, guiding those who are ready to be guided, ready to pour down all they have to those whose hearts are open, who are not closed.Enough for today.

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

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-three-treasures-vol-3-06/

The first question:Osho,Why don't you ever answer my questions!If I don’t answer, then that is the answer. Try to understand; there are reasons. If your questions are just asked for the sake of asking, I don’t answer them, but that is the answer!If your questions are too full of your ego – the questions are less important, that they are yours is more important – then I don’t answer them. But that is the answer.You should ask a question if it is a real need. I am not here to impart information to you – that you can gather from anywhere. If it is really a need, I always answer. Even if I feel that the ego is too much in the question – then too I answer, but then never directly. I answer in some others’ questions, and that I have been doing. But when the ego is too much you are not worried about the answer, you are simply worried about one thing: whether my question has been answered or not. I have been answering – but through others’ questions.And why so much attachment even to a question, that this is mine and this is not mine? A question belongs to nobody. And human problems are not very different. All humanity is in the same trap. The whole of humanity is in the same plight, just degrees may differ. And I have been answering so many questions; can’t you hear that your questions have been answered so many times? But your ears are closed by the ego. You are waiting intently for when your question is to be answered – and then you will miss.I have not answered in a way, yet I have answered in many ways.Now, whenever you ask a question, don’t bother, and don’t wait for its answer – somewhere, indirectly, I must be answering it. I pay attention to your need, to your real authentic need, not to your pseudo ego needs. Drop the ego and then ask. Don’t ask for asking’s sake. Let the question be really authentic. And then don’t wait for your question to be answered. Questions are questions. They are not yours or somebody else’s.The second question:Osho,You said one reaches when one is totally frustrated. Can one also reach in total ecstasy?That is impossible! Because total ecstasy is not possible unless you have reached. When you reach, only then does total ecstasy flower. Otherwise, what will be the need to reach, if you are already totally ecstatic? Then there is no point in going anywhere, you have already achieved the goal!In total ecstasy the goal is already left behind. Who wants to reach then? Where will you reach then? There is no more. The path has come to the very end.In total frustration the ecstasy happens. And why do I say in total frustration? Because if you are still hoping that happiness is possible in this world – and when I say this world always remember I don’t mean the world of the trees and the birds and the sky, when I say this world I mean your mind, this mind, this ego-centered mind. If you are still hoping that maybe there have been many frustrations, but still there is a lurking hope that one day or other, somewhere in the future, with this mind that you have got, with this ego, happiness is possible, then ecstasy will not happen.Ecstasy happens only when you have come to realize that with this mind no happiness is possible, an absolute realization of the fact that this mind is moving in circles. It is never going to be what you are seeking; it is never going to be a bliss, a benediction. When you realize this totally, suddenly the mind drops. Because how can you cling to it without hopes? And remember, the mind is not clinging to you, you are clinging to it. How can a dead thing like mind cling to you? You are clinging to it because there is hope. Total frustration destroys all hope, one becomes hopeless.A distinction has to be made. You also become hopeless many times but it is not total. Even in your hopelessness somewhere the seed of hope is hidden. Again it starts sprouting. You are finished with one woman or with one man; you are frustrated, but you are not finished with woman as such, or man as such. With one particular woman you are finished, or with a particular man – but not with womankind, not with the phenomenon of the feminine. A desire lurks somewhere deep in your frustration also, that there must be a woman who is made just for you. And you can be happy with her. You are frustrated with particulars but not with the universal.Frustration is total when you are frustrated with the universal. Then the energy moves inward. It turns in. Then it is not moving out.You may be frustrated with this house where you are living but not with that palace someone else is living in. Then you will try to bridge the gap, to convert the hut into a palace. You may be frustrated with the money that you have got, but not with money as such; with the power that you have got, but not with the lust for power as such. Total frustration means you are really frustrated. You are suddenly in such a situation that there is nowhere to go, absolutely nowhere to go – only then does the energy turn in, and that turning in is ecstasy.That’s why I called it instasy not ecstasy, because it is a turning in, moving in, going to one’s own being. Now you are not other-directed. You are not future-oriented. You are simply trying to know who you are. The whole world has disappeared. The whole nightmare of it is no longer there. An awakening is happening. This awakening will become the goal and then you will be totally ecstatic.When I say totally ecstatic you can misunderstand me, because you have lived in misery and whatever I say, you will understand from the standpoint of a miserable man. When I say ecstatic you think of something opposite to misery, something like happiness. Then you misunderstand. It is neither like misery nor like happiness. It is different, absolutely different, categorically different, diametrically different: it is a totally different phenomenon. Bliss is neither happiness nor unhappiness. Both have disappeared, the duality gone; you are at home.And you don’t feel that you are ecstatic, remember. If you feel you are ecstatic there is still a possibility of misery coming back, because you are not one with ecstasy, you are still separate. You are still experiencing it. It is something other than you, it is not you.If you ask Buddha, “Are you ecstatic?” he will shrug his shoulders. The very question is meaningless, irrelevant. That’s why Buddha remained silent about many questions, because he found that whatever he said would be misunderstood. If you ask me, “Are you happy?” what should I say to you? If you ask me, “Are you unhappy?” what should I say to you? Somebody has asked, “You say that you are in paradise; is there pain in paradise or not?” There is no pain, but immediately I would like to add – there is no pleasure either. Because pleasure and pain are two aspects of the same coin. Pleasure converts into pain, pain converts into pleasure. They are not two things.There is a story that I would like to tell you…In Japan they think that a white mouse is a good omen. If somebody suddenly sees a white mouse he feels very happy – something good is going to happen to him.One day it happened, a father and son were sitting, taking their dinner, when suddenly the son saw that behind the father there was a white mouse. He told his father, “Don’t turn suddenly, there is a guest behind you, a very good omen. Move slowly and look.”The father slowly moved and saw a white mouse, and they were both happy because it was really a good omen, something beautiful was going to happen. The white mouse started moving around them and because they were not disturbing him, he started dancing and shaking. But when he shook, suddenly he became an ordinary grey mouse. Because in fact he had fallen in a tin of flour, white flour, that’s why he looked white; when he started dancing he became an ordinary grey mouse. Both father and son closed their eyes, because the good omen had disappeared – but even if you close your eyes the grey mouse is there.This is a beautiful story. This is how it happens. Don’t look at happiness too long, otherwise the white flour will drop and suddenly you will say, “There is a grey mouse!” Avoid! Let the white mouse dance behind you. Don’t look too hard and don’t look too long. Because in life, good and bad are not two things. The day turns into night, the night turns into day again. It is a circle, moving like a wheel of a cart: the same spokes come again and again to the top, and go down.If you ask me whether I am happy or unhappy, I cannot answer you in those terms. Those terms are irrelevant. At the most I can only say: I am. And that “I amness” is totally ecstatic. But there is no ecstasy as such. It is not an experience. It is my way of being at this moment. It is not something happening to me, it is the very nature. When you come to yourself, when you return back home – when you enter your own innermost core of being – it is not that something new happens to you. It has been happening always; for the first time you realize it.The realization may be new but the fact is very, very ancient, as ancient as the world, as ancient as the gods. It has been there from the very beginning. But you are too much concerned with pain and pleasure in the outer world, your whole consciousness is moving outward.Close the doors, close the windows, settle within – and suddenly one day you start laughing, one day you start smiling at the fact that you were seeking something that was already there.I was reading about a Christian missionary’s life. He had just arrived at an Eastern town. The bungalow and the church were outside the town. There were only two bungalows; he occupied one – and from the very first day, in the morning when he looked around, just to be acquainted with the territory and the place, he became interested in the other neighboring bungalow. It looked beautiful. The trees were very green and there were many flowers. He went around it, he wanted to know to whom the bungalow belonged, and he wanted to become acquainted, to be introduced, but he found no one there. He controlled his curiosity, but every day the curiosity grew more and more.One day he could not contain himself – it must have been after he had been there a month. He entered the garden, went to the main door, but it was locked. He went around the house, he couldn’t see any sign of anybody there. It was absolutely empty and silent. He became a little apprehensive: What was the matter?He came out again. On the gate he had just missed something: just on the gate there was a small notice: “Key next door.” But he was surprised because next door was his own home! There was no other house, only the two houses.He went back to his house, he inquired, and his wife said, “Yes, the key is here, why didn’t you ask me? The day we came somebody came and said, ‘Keep this key. I am going away for a few months. I will be coming back soon, but my son has gone to war and he may return meanwhile. He may like to stay for a few days and rest, so keep the key.’” The key was in the house.The missionary started laughing. He said, “It was really a joke. For a month the house haunted me like anything, and I wanted to go in but I contained myself – it’s not good to enter, interfere, trespass. But today I couldn’t contain my curiosity, I said, ‘It’s okay, I must go and see what the matter is.’ And the key had always been in my own house!”The key is with you. The treasure is with you. You have forgotten both. When the energy returns inward, that is the key. The energy returning inward is the key. It opens the door and suddenly the treasure of all treasures is there.The third question:Osho,You said that when two beings are in love they are in communion with each other. Then why does the world call it “falling” in love when it is such an ecstatic happening and not a fall to a lower plane?The world calls it falling in love because the world is ruled by the head, and the heart is lower than the head. When somebody falls in love, he falls from the head toward the heart. And the heart is there in childhood, the head grows later on. The head is a later growth. You are born with a heart; you are not born with a head. You are born only with the possibility of a head, not with the head.Reason has to be taught, love cannot be taught. Reason has to be forced on you, your mind has to be conditioned. Schools, colleges, universities exist for reason; there exists no school, no college, no university for love – there is no need. One is born with a heart already functioning perfectly. The head is just a possibility. If it is taught, conditioned, it will function; if not, it won’t function at all.So when in your youth you move again into a love relationship, you feel it also like a fall, because the mind feels that you are moving backward, falling toward childhood, moving toward the heart again. And the head has a condemnation for the heart; that condemnation is also involved in that term falling. The head is saying, “What foolish thing are you going to do? Are you mad? It is a fall! Avoid it!”For the head, love is the greatest enemy; because once you are in love you become irrational. Look at two lovers – they talk foolishly, they behave foolishly, they are almost mad. And the head goes on condemning and judging: “What are you doing?”You are falling back. That’s why the world calls love a falling. But it is good to fall. In another sense also, not in a condemnatory sense, it is a fall, because it leads you toward depth. Reason is superficial. The heart is a deeper phenomenon within you, it leads toward depth, it is diving into your being. Don’t condemn it. The society condemns because the society looks at love as an anarchic phenomenon. We teach a boy or a girl, we waste so much money on them, and then suddenly one day they fall in love, and the whole structure is disturbed.It is said that the mother prepares the child for years to become wise; then he meets another woman and within minutes he is a fool again. One woman prepares for years to help him become a little wise, and another woman comes in and within a moment, he is a fool again. Don’t condemn it, because foolishness has its own beauty. In fact a man who cannot be a fool sometimes is not wise enough. To be constantly wise, to be wise twenty-fours a day and seven days a week is foolish. Sometimes you need to take a holiday from your wisdom and act like a fool. Only then is there balance. The fool is also part of life.In old days, every king used to have a great fool in his court. It was a balancing factor because in the court there were too many wise men, and sometimes too many wise men prove to be too many cooks in the kitchen. They spoil. They are just reason; they don’t have the roots of heart. A fool was needed – in every great court there was a fool. And he brought humor to the court, he brought a sense of humor; otherwise wise men bring long faces, sadness, seriousness. Of course seriousness is good, but only sometimes. It has its moments, and there are moments one should be a little foolish. To me, a really wise man is spontaneous – when wisdom is needed he is wise, when foolishness is needed he is a perfect fool.If you cannot move to the polarities, you are a fixed and dead phenomenon. One should be capable of moving, flexible. You should be able to reason deeply and you should be able to fall into irrationalities also. Calculate and love. Arithmetic and poetry. Wise and old, foolish and young. When the child and the old man meet, when the wise man and the fool have become one unity, you attain the greatest growth. Remember this. Always retain the capacity to fall in love, to be foolish, to behave foolishly.To me the only fool is the man who is always wise.Life needs polarities and proportions. Foolishness is very refreshing. It cleanses your eyes, gives you perspective. It brings the innocence of the child again. It gives you spontaneity again. Then you are not fixed in a pattern, you are flowing.But don’t try to be a fool continuously – that too is foolish. And it is easy for the mind to cling to one extreme. The most difficult thing for the mind is to change polarities because it disturbs your style. You would like to be fixed in a pattern – that is the way of least resistance. You have learned a trick and then you remain fixed in it. You remain closed in the known. You don’t want to move to the unknown. You don’t want to learn, you don’t want to be open to new facts.The mind always wants either to be a leftist or to be a rightist, either to be this or that – but to be something. And life is in the flow – to be nothing. The capacity to be everything and to be nothing; the capacity to move in any role and not get fixed in it. No role should become your lifestyle. You should be capable of moving, of dropping it, just as you drop your clothes.Roles are just to be used, and if you don’t get fixed and imprisoned in them, you retain the freedom and the flow and you retain the capacity to enjoy life in its totality. Wisdom is good, foolishness also. Arithmetic beautiful, poetry also. This is the paradox.Use the head, use the heart, and if you can use both a tremendous revolution will happen. If you can use both, you will become aware that you are the third force – neither. You are neither the head nor the heart. Because if you can move so easily from one to another you cannot be either; you must be separate from both. Then the witnessing arises, then the identification is broken. And that witnessing is what meditation is all about.The fourth question:Osho,You often say “I am with you,” but in suffering I only encounter solitude. Is that because I'm not in tune with you or because the way to the center is a solitary one?When I say I am with you, I mean it. I am with you. But you will realize me only when you are in a celebrating mood. When you are unhappy and miserable, you are blind. I am with you but you cannot see. Your eyes are filled with tears. And if you don’t see, what can I do? I can just wait.There is an old proverb: When you weep you weep alone, when you laugh the whole world laughs with you. Laughter has something religious in it. Maybe that’s why it has been banned from all the churches – there’s something religious in it.If you want to feel me, that I am with you, laugh more, enjoy more; take life as fun, don’t be serious.I know – this question is from Yoga Lalita, she is serious. A little too serious. Seriousness becomes gloomy; seriousness becomes like a disease. Seriousness is pathological – it is ill. Laughter is health. I’m not saying don’t be sincere. Sincerity is totally different from seriousness. One has to be sincere and authentic; only then will life reveal deeper mysteries. But there is no reason to be serious and sad. Otherwise you will miss me – and that only means you will miss life.Whenever you are sad you are closed, you cave in, you are not related to the world. The rosebush goes on flowering but you are not related – it doesn’t in fact exist for you. The moon goes on traveling in the sky, but it doesn’t exist for you. The birds go on singing, their song will appear only like a disturbance, annoying. You are sad, you are cut off. Sadness breaks all the bridges with life.When I say I am with you I mean it, but you will realize it only when you are happy and dancing. When I say happy and dancing I don’t mean that in life you will not have sad moments. But if you know how to be happy you can enjoy a sad moment also. It is worth enjoying. It has something in it – because there is nothing in life which is not precious. The only thing is to know how to enjoy it.Laughter is beautiful, but shallow. Sadness looks ugly but is very deep. If you know how to enjoy laughter, you will know how to enjoy sadness also. Then, if you are enjoying, sadness does not become a destructive force; then you are not disconnected from existence. Rather, in your sadness also you are deeply related.You will look at the flower – and you had looked at the flower when you were laughing and dancing and celebrating, the flower was beautiful; but now the flower has a depth which it never had before. Now look at the moon: the moon is not now a two-dimensional thing, it has become three-dimensional. Laughter is two-dimensional, sadness is three-dimensional. But one has to learn from laughter, and then you can enjoy everything, even sadness. You can enjoy everything. You can enjoy it even when you are unhealthy; it has its own beauty.Sometimes it has happened that people have become enlightened when they are ill. In a great fever, and lying on their beds doing nothing, suddenly they awake in a totally different dimension. Lying on their beds, not doing anything, unoccupied, nothing to do – the mind is silent; a deep rest. And they must be enjoying it.Life changes its colors with your interpretations. Illness looks like an enemy. If you are acquainted only with allopathic attitudes, then illness is an enemy. But if you are acquainted with homeopathic attitudes then illness is not an enemy but a friend. It cleanses the body of the toxins, poisons. A fever is a friend not a foe. It has come to help you to cleanse the body – and the work is so tremendous, that’s why you are feeling so hot.If you can enjoy, you can enjoy everything. You have the key. And with that key you can open millions of locks; it is a master key. Try it! You have a headache – just try to enjoy and watch it. Suddenly you will feel a distance arising between you and the headache. The hammering continues in the head, but now the head is far away. If you go on, by and by you will feel the headache is still there but not part of you. Somewhere on the very periphery of the world there is still a little hammering in the head but it doesn’t belong to you. Your consciousness is totally different, totally separate from it. No identification exists.But start by enjoying, celebrating. First try to find me with you when you are in a good, pleasant mood – it will be easier. If you can find me then, by and by whenever you are unhappy, also look around; try to find me. It will be a little difficult. Wash your eyes, clean your eyes of the tears and look again. By and by you will see the shadow. Soon you will start feeling me.And everything is good. Everything is good as it is. This should be the very basic attitude. How can anything be wrong? If it is, there it must have some purpose. You may not be aware – that is another thing. But allow it. And watch. Watch should be the keyword.The fifth question:Osho,What is the difference between prayer and meditation?A lot of difference. A great difference. In fact they are absolutely different things. Their movement is in different directions.There are two types of religions in the world: prayer-oriented religions and meditation-oriented religions. Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism – these are prayer-oriented religions. Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism – these are meditation-oriented religions.For a prayer-oriented religion the concept of a personal God is needed to relate to. For meditation-oriented religions God is a useless hypothesis; it can be discarded easily into the dustbin. It is not needed.Buddha could attain without any belief in God. Lao Tzu never mentions the word God – never! There must be a very great difference; try to understand it. Prayer is a dialogue between two persons: God and you. You are talking to God, it is a dialogue; it is not silence. Words continue. You are not talking to another man but you are talking to another being; but that being is imagined also in the image of man.It is said in the Bible that God created man in his own image. The reality seems to be just the opposite: man created God in his own image. You have an imaginary conception of a person there, somewhere. You talk. You confess your sins, you ask his forgiveness. You pray. Good, good for the heart. It helps a little bit. You feel more unburdened, you feel light. Maybe there is a God, maybe not – that’s not the point. But believing there is a God, you can unburden yourself, you can surrender yourself, it becomes easier for you. The hypothesis is helpful. But in Christianity, in Judaism, in Mohammedanism, nothing exists like moksha. There is a heaven and a hell. Hell for those who have never been related to God in any way, but rather were working against him, against his wishes, committing sins; and heaven for those who prayed, who worked for him according to his wishes.But there is nothing like moksha – absolute freedom. Because even in heaven God will be the ruler; and he is not a democrat, he is absolutely dictatorial. There is nobody on top of him and he is the creator: he can uncreate, he can create. He can do whatever he wants to do. And he seems to be a little whimsical. He forgives sinners. Then the opposite must be happening also – that people who are virtuous but never prayed must be suffering in hell, because people who were not virtuous but prayed are enjoying beautiful women and wine and good things in heaven. Seems to be a little whimsical.It seems that man has created the hypothesis as a consolation. It seems the whole phenomenon of God is out of fear, not out of knowing; out of guilt, out of the misery man is, not out of understanding.Meditation is not a dialogue, it is silence. There is nobody to relate to, to talk to. For a meditator prayer is foolish: What are you doing? To whom are you talking?Just the other day I was reading a book – a woman writing letters to God. Vivek looked at it and started laughing. She said, “What foolishness! Letters written to God!” But that is the mind of prayer.I told you there are three layers of your being. First: where you are just reason. In reason, dialogue is not possible; it is a debate, always a fight. Then the second layer: of love. Dialogue is possible. And then the third layer of being: dialogue again is impossible because there is nobody else. You alone exist in your crystal purity. In absolute silence.The Bible says, “In the beginning there was the Word.” It starts from the word. Buddha cannot say that, he cannot agree with that. In the beginning was silence. And in the end also there will be silence. Meditation is silence, it is not a dialogue.People who are reason-oriented, head-oriented, they become – if they are interested in religion – they become theologians. They write theories about God, they talk about God. If they are not religious, they become anti-religious, they become philosophers, atheists, agnostics.Then the second layer of your being: love, the heart. If a man is religious, love becomes prayer. If the man is not religious then love becomes poetry, art, painting, music.Then the third layer, the deepest core, beyond which nothing exists, is being. Absolute silence, absolute aloneness. There is no difference now between religious and nonreligious. At the center everything becomes one. In that silence, one is neither religious nor anti-religious because those are the terms of reason. In that silence, one’s love is neither prayer nor art. Everything has become one. That silence is meditation.When people come to me, if I see that they are in their heads then I help them to be related – to move, to fall in love, to become a little foolish, so that they come down from their heads, so that they get down from the throne of the ego a little bit. Because one has to surrender in love. One cannot carry the ego. If one carries it, love is not possible. If I see that they have lived, they have loved, they have experienced what love is, then I tell them to fall still deeper into meditation. It is the last fall because there is no abyss deeper than meditation.If you are head-oriented – move into prayer, love. But don’t make it a goal, it is not a goal. That’s why Christianity and Mohammedanism don’t reach the height of Buddhism. No, they remain with the second layer. For the third layer something like Buddha, something like Lao Tzu, is needed. They remain better than ordinary worldly people, but still not absolutely otherworldly, they remain in the middle. Good as far as it goes, but not enough. If you cannot love, pray. If you have loved and know what it is, then move into aloneness.There are two sorts of aloneness: one is loneliness, another is aloneness. If you have not loved, and you move into solitariness, it will be loneliness; you will feel a deep hunger for the other. It will not be aloneness. The other will be there as an absence. You will continuously feel the absence of the other, you will hanker. Maybe that’s why people who have not loved well start talking to God, to an imaginary phenomenon – to fill their loneliness, to be occupied with someone.It is a fantasy, it is a dream – good, religious, but still a dream. One has to go beyond all dreaming. One has to go to the point when one is sure enough that the other is not needed. I am not saying that that type of person will not love. In fact only that type of person can love. But then he loves out of abundance. Then it is not a need. On the contrary he is so full, flooded, that he would like to share. Then he is in search of people who would like to unburden him, who would help him unburden his heart. The greatest lover is one whose need for love has disappeared.Otherwise, there are small lovers, for whom love is a need just like food. They cannot be without food and they cannot be without a woman or without a man. But when you can be without, and you can be as beautiful without as you are with, then the greatest phenomenon happens: if a dialogue starts out of silence, it is the greatest dialogue.So these are the two things to remember. If you feel that there is a deep hankering for love, then prayer is the way for you. Let the other be there, talk to him, be with him. The question just before this question was on my saying to you “I am with you” – that is for the second-layer people, those who are in need of love.If you become the third type of person then I will not say “I am with you,” I will say “I am you.” Then there is no point in being with. Then simply I am you, you are me. Then there is no duality.The sixth question:Osho,What are you doing with your hands? I find myself more emotionally moved by watching them than by listening to the words you speak.It is natural because when I am speaking, I am speaking to your heads. Emotion cannot be involved, emotion cannot be there. I am talking to your reason to persuade it. And what am I doing with my hands? When I am talking to your heads I am continuously playing with your hearts also.I have to work on two layers. For your head to be convinced that the time has come to drop itself, to commit suicide; that the time has come to convince your head to commit a suicide of reason – I go on talking to your heads. But that alone won’t be enough. Because if suddenly your head is cut off and the heart has not started functioning, you will be in a very, very deep confusion.With my hands I go on working with your heart – that’s why in India we have called gestures “mudras”; when a buddha makes a gesture it is meaningful, significant. The hands are very, very deep sources of energy. By the movements of the hands, patterns of energy are made, invisible energy; but if you can feel, you can feel – and you will feel that something is continuously going on in the heart.It is just like – have you seen a potter making an earthen pot? He works with both hands, one inside the pot, another outside. From the inside he goes on supporting, from the outside he goes on giving the shape. And the wheel is moving. With my talking I go on destroying your head. With my hands I go on supporting your heart, encouraging it to function more, encouraging it to beat naturally.It is natural if you feel that way. But don’t pay much attention to my hands because if you pay too much attention to my hands, you will be related to my hands with your head. Just forget about my hands – let them work! Because the heart functions in darkness. The functioning and the changing of the heart is indirect. It is just like the roots of a tree; hidden underneath the earth in deep darkness they function. If you bring them to the light they start dying.So don’t pay much attention to my hands because if you pay too much attention to my hands – it is the head that is paying attention to the hands. Then you miss the point. You may enjoy it, you may feel a certain emotion arising in you, but the real thing has been missed.Pay attention to my words. Be so completely absorbed with my words that my hands and your heart are left alone, you are not in between. Otherwise you can create trouble, you can become a barrier.And I am working on the third layer also – which you cannot see at all. The movements of the hands can be seen – look! I use words, you can understand the meaning of them. I use hands, you can only see the movement, not the meaning. The words for the head, the hands for the heart – and then there is my being continuously overwhelming you. You cannot even see the movement of it. My being – just like a cloud surrounding you.But don’t pay attention to the hands. Let them be indirect.The seventh question:Osho,When one is distant from the mind, one is in a state of meditation, but suddenly or gradually one is identified with the mind again – one has fallen asleep again. This is very frustrating. Can you say something about this?It is frustrating, but don’t get frustrated. Rather, whenever you see that you are getting identified with the mind, remember again, make yourself alert, shake yourself a little bit. Rather than putting energy into frustration, put energy into remembrance. Remember again. Again you will be alert and the mind will be far away.It is going to happen again and again: you will fall asleep again and again and again, and you will have to bring yourself out of it. Don’t start getting frustrated. It is natural. Take it for granted, it is natural. You have lived with the mind for so long and you have lived identified with the mind for so long that it is natural that you forget again and again. But even if you become alert, aware, mindful for moments, feel fortunate because there are millions of people who live their whole lives and not for a single moment do they become mindful, not for a single moment are they aware of what is happening, not for a single moment have they known who they are.Feel fortunate. Don’t feel frustrated. Always interpret things positively, don’t interpret them negatively. Because one negativity leads into another negativity; one positivity leads into another positivity. If you feel frustrated, then self-remembering will be coming less and less to you because it never comes in a frustrated mind, in a miserable mind, in an angry mind – it never comes!Then it will come less and less and you will feel more and more frustrated; as you feel more and more frustrated it will be coming less and less – it will disappear completely.Feel positive; if even for a single moment it happened, thank existence, feel grateful. Something superb has happened to you – even for a single moment, so what? If it can happen for a single moment it can happen for the whole life. In fact you never have more than one single moment with you, you never have two moments together. If it can happen for a single moment you have the key. One moment is the whole of life, one moment is all eternity – because you will never get two moments together, only one moment always.And if you can remember in one moment you can remember for ever and ever. Feel positive, feel thankful and grateful, and suddenly you will see more remembrances happening. A day comes when you never fall asleep. It comes, it has come to human beings like you – it has come to me. I am just like you.There is nothing special about it. You are as capable as anybody else. Just be a little more positive toward this happening, that will do.The eighth question:Osho,What is the difference, if any, between one's center and one's ego-center?One’s center is not one’s center, it is the center of the whole. And the ego-center is one’s center. That is the only difference, but that is a vast difference. When you are not there, the center is there but that is not your center, it is the center of the whole.When you are there you have a center – a false, pseudo center, that is not the center of the whole, and until it is the center of the whole don’t be contented with it. Because you are in a dream, you are not in reality. And we have become so accustomed to dreams that we have completely forgotten what is reality and what is a dream.In Eastern psychology we treat reality as a dream. In Western psychology they treat dreams as reality. That’s why Freud, Jung, Adler and the whole company all go on interpreting, analyzing dreams to understand your reality. Dreams – so significant! In the East we have never interpreted dreams, we have never bothered about it. Rather, we say the whole of reality is a dream, a maya, an illusion. But there is a temptation to take dreams as real.It happened…Mulla Nasruddin once dreamed in his sleep that he was frying cow dung. He was very disturbed. Of course anybody would be.In the morning he went to a soothsayer, an interpreter of dreams, and he said, “I am very worried! Tell me the meaning of it.”But the soothsayer said, “My fee is one rupee. Give me one rupee and I will interpret it.”Mulla Nasruddin jumped and said, “You fool! If I had one rupee would I fry dung? I would go to the market, buy fish, and fry that!”There is a tendency to take dreams as part of reality; then your whole reality becomes a dream. Western psychology and the Western mind itself thinks dreams are real. It is a very childish attitude. I call it childish because children do the same. Children never make any distinction between dreams and reality. A child wakes up in the morning crying and weeping. You ask him, “What is the matter?” and he says, “I had a toy just now, where has it gone?” He was dreaming about a toy, now he is awake and the dream toy has disappeared and he is crying and weeping – he wants that toy back. He cannot make the distinction. The dream seems to be real.Western psychology is too dominated by the childish mind. Eastern psychology is dominated by the old, the mature, the wise mind. A child thinks a dream is real, a wise old man thinks of reality as a dream. The whole of reality is a dream. One has to wake up. If you can wake up for a single moment, feel grateful; more moments will be coming and following. Don’t get frustrated.And always remember that if you feel the center as yourself, then you also are a part of the dream – that’s the difference between the ego and the atman, the self. The ego is a dream center, the center of the dream personality. With the personality disappearing, the center will disappear. The self or atman is the real center. When everything disappears, it is still there. But it is not yours.You ask me, “What is the difference, if any, between one’s center and one’s ego-center” – there is a difference. “One’s center” is not one’s, it is of the whole. And one’s “ego-center” is one’s, it is not of the whole. And whatever belongs to you is a dream, nothing else belongs to you. Reality belongs to the whole; it cannot belong to the part.The ninth question:Osho,So far, in being a witness, it feels as though it is part of my mind that is watching the other part of my mind. Could you speak on this please?This is good, a good omen. When one watches, one comes to realize that this is one part of the mind watching another part of the mind. Now you have to realize who is realizing these two parts, who is realizing that this is part one, this is part two. Naturally you cannot be either, you have transcended both. And if again you feel this is a third part of the mind watching, then you become the fourth. If again you feel this is a fourth part of mind, then you again become the fifth. You are the transcendental, which always transcends. Whatever you can watch, you are never: that should be the law, the criterion. Whatever you can watch, you are never. You are the watcher, the watcher on the hills.The last question:Osho,When one feels happy and ecstatic, and wants to share with others, but finds people around are not in a mood to celebrate, what should one do?You should celebrate their sadness. You should enjoy their sadness. Don’t move against people. Be with them. Being with has a beauty of its own. If people are sad, be sad – but enjoy it. There is no reason for you to be sad, you can enjoy it easily. Celebrate it deep down, but be sad if they are crying, cry, tears streaming down. But enjoy the whole thing, it is so beautiful.Have you ever cried and enjoyed it? Try it, nothing like it. It beats all experiences. Suddenly you see that you can cry and enjoy. Tears can come but they are not of sadness, something beautiful is flowing through them. And whenever you are with people, in a subtle way, drop the ego.Try to be with. Make it a point as far as possible never to be against. Being with is to be religious, being against is to be political. So wherever people are going, just be with them.I will tell you one story…It happened, one of the greatest Greek sannyasins was Diogenes. He was a beautiful person because when one is not attached to anything, one attains a certain grace. When you are attached to things you become ugly, you become thing-like. He was absolutely a free man. He used to move around naked.He was caught by some people who were slave merchants. They wanted to sell him. When it was really very difficult to catch him they pondered over it. They surrounded him, but he was a very strong healthy man; he could have defeated at least eight persons, and there were only four slave merchants, so they were a little apprehensive.Diogenes said, “Don’t be afraid, I am always with you. What is the matter? Tell me, I will solve the problem.”They said, “This is a problem you won’t like to solve!”He said, “There is nothing that I don’t like to solve, simply say it!”They said, “This is our idea – we are thinking to catch you and make you a prisoner.”And Diogenese said, “Perfectly good! So why are you waiting? For whom? Start – here are my hands.”They couldn’t believe it. They looked at each other, it was suspicious; this man giving them… He said, “Don’t be worried! I never fight, I flow with. That has been my whole lifestyle. So take me! Make me a prisoner. If the whole wants it to be so, let it be so.”They were afraid, but still they tried. Then they regained their confidence, he was not going to fight.Chained, he started walking with them – but he was such a man, you cannot make a slave of such a man. Those four persons looked stupid with him.Diogenes said, “Don’t be afraid, you need not carry these chains because I always flow with. I will come with you wherever you go. I will never leave you.” They became still more afraid. What type of man was this, what manner of man?But they started following whatever he said – a master is a master, you cannot make… A master remains a master even in a prison. By and by they started asking him about their problems – because he looked so happy, so tremendously ecstatic, not of this world.They became friendly – not only friendly, they became disciples; by the time they reached the market they were already disciples and he was the master and they were saying, “Master tell us this!”And he said, “Don’t forget that you have come here to sell me. You are losing your consciousness. Don’t be so forgetful, remember why you have caught me.”They said, “We cannot do that now.”But he said, “You need not worry. Stick to your original idea. I will do it for you.” They couldn’t believe it – what will he do?Then they came to the market. Everybody was interested – the whole market became interested in this slave because never before had such a beautiful slave come. When Diogenes stood there and the auctioneer started saying, “This man is beautiful and very healthy and very strong,” Diogenes said, “Stop! Let me come there. You don’t know how to introduce someone.”Afraid, the auctioneer came down – because this man was so strong and so powerful. Diogenes stood there – and it has never happened before in any slave market – and he said, “All the slaves, come here! A master has come here to be sold.”This is how one should flow with people, with life, with trees, with rivers.Don’t fight. Fighting is the only sin. Don’t resist. If people are crying – cry. If people are laughing – laugh. And if you can do this, suddenly you will feel that you are just a witness, not a doer. And that is the secret of it all.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On difficult and easy, Lao Tzu says:Accomplish do-nothing.Attend to no-affairs.Taste the flavorless.Whether it is big or small, many or few,requite hatred with virtue.Deal with the difficult while yet it is easy;deal with the big while yet it is small.The difficult problems of the worldmust be dealt with while they are yet easy;the great problems of the worldmust be dealt with while they are yet small.Therefore the sage by never dealing with great problemsaccomplishes greatness.He who lightly makes a promisewill find it often hard to keep his faith.He who makes light of many thingswill encounter many difficulties.Hence even the sage regards things as difficult,and for that reason never meets with difficulties.Life is not a problem. Rather, it is a mystery to be lived: not a problem to be solved. But it becomes a problem; and it becomes a problem because you go on postponing things, postponing them for tomorrow. That which can be done today, that which should be done today, cannot be done tomorrow. That which would have been a beautiful phenomenon today – a mystery to be lived – tomorrow will become a very, very hard and cold problem to be solved.Life in itself, if lived here and now, is not a problem. Postponement creates problems and then you go on piling up. Then so much gathers around you that it becomes almost impossible to live – you are paralyzed, crippled, in a straitjacket, imprisoned. First try to understand this, then it will be easy to enter the sutra.I was saying just a few days ago that even a genius, a very talented person may be a Nobel Prize winner, a great intellectual, world-known but behave in a childish way. If in the morning when he wakes he finds that his slippers are not in the right place, he is angry, irritated. If he could pay attention to his anger that very moment, he would laugh because it is so foolish. Ridiculous! But he does not pay attention to it.He goes to the bathroom, irritated, in a bad mood, starts shaving his beard, but he is almost unconscious that a problem has not been dealt with, that a problem is there, poking its nose again and again into his being. And it is growing all the time, because in life nothing is nongrowing. Everything alive is growing, and when you are alive, your anger is alive, it grows. It never remains the same. Moment to moment it is gathering more momentum and force.He goes on shaving, but irritated; he is not enjoying the act, the freshness of it, the beautiful moment when one feels unburdened, no, he is not in an enjoying mood. Unconscious, the razor slips from his hand, fall to the floor. Now he is even angrier. If he can deal with it right now he will laugh. It is foolish to be angry because a razor is not a being. A razor is never responsible for anything – how can you be angry at a razor? But now he is more irritated. Now his hands are moving more foolishly, unconsciously; it again slips, strikes the old antique mirror which he loves very much and the mirror is broken.Now he is no longer sane. He comes out, bumps against the furniture, slams the door, slaps the child because he has not done his homework, starts arguing, becomes quarrelsome with his wife – and only for a small thing that was nothing! Because his slippers were not found in the right place.Now our so-called genius takes his car and goes toward the office, but never reaches it because there is an accident. It was always going to be so. And just because of the slippers, because they were not found in the right place. Now he drives like a maniac, all his anger moves to his feet: he goes on pressing the accelerator, he is a drunkard! Drunk with his anger. There is an accident. After twelve hours or fifteen hours, when he opens his eyes, he is in hospital. And he will never be able to connect the whole thing.And the story can go on and on – he falls in love with the nurse – and you can go on! Just because his slippers were not found in the right place. The whole family disturbed, then divorce. And the whole world will not be the same again – just because his slippers were not found in the right place.Deal with things moment to moment, don’t let them pile up within you. Don’t accumulate. Life is really beautiful. It becomes ugly. Life is not a problem: every problem is so small that it is foolish to call life a problem. It is not a problem for the trees, it is not a problem for the birds, it is not a problem for the earth, for the sky. It is only a problem for man, because only man has learned a trick – the trick of postponement. Then small things become bigger. Then a moment comes when you cannot cope with them. Then you become so small and the problem is so big, it is almost impossible to cope with it. And then you always carry its burden on your head. And with that much burden, how can you enjoy? How can you delight? How can you celebrate? How can you dance?And then somebody says, “There is a God” and you hear the words but you cannot believe. Maybe there is a Devil who is running the whole world, but not a God. Your whole life has become so crippled, so paralyzed, so burdensome, you would like to commit suicide. It is rare to find a man who has not contemplated committing suicide some time or other.Psychoanalysts say that each man, each woman, in the long run of life thinks almost ten times of committing suicide. You don’t commit it because you are cowards. There is nothing in not committing it to take credit for. You contemplate it – that’s enough! That means life has become so unlivable that rather than being dragged more and more into it, you would like to drop it; you would like to become a dropout.How can you love God? How can you pray? Because prayer comes out of great gratitude; prayer comes out of gratefulness. A life lived well becomes a life of prayer. It has nothing to do with churches and temples and mosques, it has something to do with the quality of your life. A life lived well, moment to moment, aware, alert, not postponed, becomes a prayerful life – and prayer by and by turns into meditation. Then you don’t even pray because the words disturb. Then your prayer becomes silent. When prayer is silent it is meditation.So to understand that existence is beautiful, sacred, that existence is a benediction, a blessing, you will have to live a different type of life: a life which is not of postponement. This is the meaning of living moment to moment.Unburden yourself from the past. It is no longer there, it has already flown away. It exists not. You are unnecessarily burdened by ghosts – they are no more. And don’t burden yourself with the future – it is not yet. When it comes, you will be there to meet it. Why plan about it right now? Because the way you are going to plan it, is never going to happen. Your planning is bound to be a greater problem, because when you plan beforehand, you want to impose your plan on existence.Existence is not to follow you; you can follow existence and feel graceful. But existence cannot follow you. You don’t know the whole. You don’t know the desire of the whole, the destiny of the whole. And you make private plans – they are bound to be against the whole and they are bound to be broken. Then your heart is broken.Drop the past. And don’t bring the future in. This moment is all. If you live this moment alert, then things, small things, will be dealt with. And, with those small things dealt with, you will grow and there will be no great problems.Lao Tzu says that for a great man there are no great problems. Ordinarily you must be thinking the other way round, that great men exist because they tackle great problems. And Lao Tzu says there are no great problems for a great man because he never allows the problems to become great. He always deals with them when they are small, within his hands; then something can be done. And when you deal with problems moment to moment you are always fresh, unburdened; dust never collects on your being. Fresh, young, virgin, you slip into the next moment as a snake slips out of its old skin, the old left behind. The fresher and younger skin comes. Then life is a mystery, it is not a problem to be solved. It has to be lived and lived totally. Then you feel grateful. Then it has been a blessing.Remember this, and then try to understand Lao Tzu’s sutras.Accomplish do-nothing.Attend to no affairs.Taste the flavorless.In action, do nothing – this is the very deepest secret of Lao Tzu. He says when things can be done by non-doing, why do you bother to do? When things can be done by non-doing, if you do, if you try to do, you will only create troubles for yourself.Let me give you a few examples.You must have heard the name of Archimedes; his story is famous. He was trying to solve a scientific problem. He tried hard, tried his best, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything else. The king had given him a problem to be solved and it had to be solved immediately. And he was the first man to tackle that problem – so there was no precedent, no history, nothing in the past which could be of any help. The problem had never before been raised, this was the first time.He worked hard, became tense, as tense as one can be. Then what can you do? If you cannot solve you cannot solve! One feels helpless – he felt the helplessness.One day, while he was taking his bath, lying in the bath, relaxed… He had dropped the idea of solving the problem, it could not be solved – and suddenly, it was solved! He became so ecstatic that he forgot that he was naked in the bath, he ran into the streets crying loud, “Eureka! Eureka!” – eureka means “I have found it! I have found it!”The king thought that he had gone mad; the whole town thought that he had gone mad. He had not gone mad, he had found the solution. And when the king asked, “How?” he said, “By non-doing. I was not doing anything, I was not even trying to solve it. In fact I had dropped it. I had completely stopped all activity about it, I was relaxing.”What happened then? When you relax you become one with the whole. When you relax you are no longer an ego. When you relax you are no longer an individual. When you relax you become the whole. When you are tense you become individual. The more you are tense, the more you are a concentrated ego.The ego is very small, how can it solve anything? It can fuss around, but it cannot solve anything. When the ego is not there, you are relaxing in a bathtub – suddenly the problem is solved!It happened to Buddha…For six years he was doing – and really doing too much; nobody has been in search of the innermost meaning of life as deeply as Gautam Buddha. For six years he did whatever could be done, whatever was humanly possible. He went to teachers, all the known teachers of those days, and the teachers became helpless because whatever they said, Buddha did. And did it so perfectly that they couldn’t say, “You are not doing enough, that’s why you are not achieving.” He was doing so well – better than his own masters – that they said, “Now, forgive us, go somewhere else. It is not happening, and we cannot help you in any way anymore. Find some other teacher.”Then he became fed up with all the teachers, fed up with all the systems, philosophies, fed up with all the techniques, methods. He started doing things on his own – but then too nothing happened. Six years passed, six years of a nightmarish existence; he lived in deepest anguish.Then one day, while crossing the river Niranjana near Bodhgaya, he had become so weak because of a long fast – somebody had suggested that he go on a long fast, that it would help – he had become so weak he couldn’t cross the river. The river Niranjana is not a very big river, but he was really weak. He remained clinging to the roots of a tree, otherwise the current would have taken him.There, clinging to the roots of a tree, he started thinking, “What have I been doing? I have simply destroyed myself. I have reached nowhere. The world is finished, that I have left behind, and now this moksha, salvation, God, truth, whatever you call it – that too is finished, I don’t care. I drop that too.” That moment he became unburdened.When you search and seek there is a tension. That very tension becomes the barrier. When there was no search, no seeking, everything relaxed – the same happened to Buddha in the river Niranjana as had happened to Archimedes in his bathtub. He was relaxed, and when he was relaxed he felt an upsurge of energy.Now this energy is not his, this energy is of the whole. He is no longer there. You exist because of your seeking, greed, desire. When there is no greed, no desire, nothing to be attained – this moment is enough, an end unto itself – then you are not. The ego disappears.Then Buddha got out, relaxed under the bodhi tree. For years he had not relaxed. That night he slept perfectly well. For the first time he really slept, without dreams – because dreams are part of desires. In the day you dream, the daydreaming continues inside in your thinking, desires continue – a thousand and one desires, unfulfilled.And dreams create some consolation for the mind: that which has not been fulfilled in the day is fulfilled in the dream. Dreams are consolations. But when you do not desire, dreams disappear. And when dreams disappear, for the first time you sleep. For the first time you are so relaxed, you disappear into the whole.He slept well; for the first time he really slept. Early in the morning, when the last star was going to disappear, he opened his eyes: fresh, as fresh as a newly-born child, with no attitude, no mind to look through, no desire – what Buddha calls no trishna, no desire.That moment was eternity, because when you desire you are always moving into the future. That moment was eternity, no movement in the future, that moment was all. At that time Buddha became like a flower. A flower flowers here and now. A bird sings here and now. A man always thinks somewhere else, goes moving in the mind somewhere else. A man is never where he is. You can find him anywhere else, but you cannot find him where he is. Never!That time, Buddha was really in that moment under the bodhi tree. Physically he was there, mentally he was there, spiritually he was there. That’s why that tree became the tree of enlightenment.Not a single thought, not a ripple in the lake of his consciousness, everything silent, no desire disturbing, no turmoil. He looked at the last star disappearing and he became enlightened. And when later on people used to ask, “How did you attain?” he would say, “When I stopped searching, seeking. When I stopped being active, then, in deep inaction it happened.” It always happens so.Sometimes you also may have observed – not Buddha-like, not like Archimedes – but sometimes you try to remember a name, it is just on the tip of the tongue. You say, “It is just on the tip of my tongue,” and it is not coming. You feel very suffocated and very tense, but what can you do? If it is not coming it is not coming! The more you try, the more impossible it seems. Then you drop it. You take a cigarette and you smoke, or you go outside in the garden for a small walk. You just engage yourself somewhere else. You put on the radio, or you sip tea, or do something else and forget about it – and suddenly it pops up, it is there. A very small enlightenment, but it is of the same quality. A very, very small satori, very tiny, nothing much to brag about, but of the same nature.If you can understand the process you have understood what Lao Tzu means by inaction. There are things you cannot attain by action. This is the criterion: if there is something which you can attain by action, that belongs to this world. Anything that can be attained by action belongs to the world of matter, and anything that belongs to the world of spirit cannot be attained by action. That can be attained only through inaction, relaxation, total let-go.Accomplish do-nothing – accomplish total let-go, accomplish relaxation. Relax in your search for truth. When you come to seek truth you come with the worldly mind. There, ambition is needed, effort is needed, because the competition is very hard. There, you are not alone: millions of people struggling, fighting with each other, a constant war goes on.The world is a constant war and everybody is fighting with everybody else. The son fighting with the father – he may not be aware. The father fighting with the son – he may not be aware. The mother fighting with the child, the child fighting with the mother, brothers fighting brothers, nations fighting nations, families fighting other families, everybody is in a deep conflict and fight.There, if you relax, you cannot become a prime minister. There, if you relax, you cannot become a president of a country. There, if you relax, you cannot become a Rockefeller or a Ford. No, that’s not possible. If you relax there, you will be a beggar like Buddha or Lao Tzu. There, fight is needed. The world belongs to violence, and the world belongs to the ego, and the world belongs to those who are more aggressive than others.You come from the world completely trained for violence, action: do something! People come to me and they say, “Tell us to do and we can do, but you say – just relax, don’t do. That is impossible.” Not to do anything even for a single moment seems impossible because of an old habit, an old deep-rooted pattern: “Do something!” Lao Tzu says, “Do nothing.”In the world of being, doing is not needed. That is the meaning of being – where doing is not needed. There you flower in your profoundest depth; there you flower in your greatest height.But no effort is needed. Says a Zen master: Sitting quietly, doing nothing, the grass grows by itself. He is talking about the innermost core of your being where doing nothing, sitting quietly, is the only way to do something. The grass grows by itself. There is no need to pull at the grass, there is no need to pull the plants up, they grow by themselves. You simply wait by the side. While you are waiting the grass is growing.Once you understand that no effort is needed for the innermost being, suddenly, a new dimension has opened for you. There is no strain. A religious man is without strain. In fact a religious man is not trying to achieve anything. If you see that a religious man is trying to achieve something he is not religious, he is as worldly as others. He has only changed the name of his god, that’s all. Before he used to call it money, now he calls it meditation. Before he used to call it matter, now he calls it something else – God. But, the achieving mind is there, and an achieving mind is the hindrance, the only barrier.Accomplish do-nothing. Enjoy not doing anything. Simple – but it looks difficult. It looks difficult because of you, otherwise it is simple. Find time to do nothing. Whenever you can find some time just close your eyes and do nothing. Soon you will have the taste of: …the flavorless. Soon you will enter a different kind of existence, where Jesus lives, Krishna lives, Lao Tzu lives.Accomplish do-nothing. Attend to no-affairs. Constantly attending to affairs creates anxiety. Sometimes attend to no-affairs; not doing anything.In my childhood my grandfather was very worried about me. He was a very loving man and very clever, old and wise. Whenever he would see me sitting – because that’s how I was my whole childhood, doing nothing, just sitting silently – he would say, “Get up! Do something! Otherwise you will not accomplish anything in life. You will be a failure.”And he was right! Perfectly right. Out of deep compassion he was saying that. He would say, “At least go and play! Don’t sit like that, you create anxiety for me.”So I would move from that room to another, and sit there. Because once you …taste the flavorless, there is nothing to compare with it, it is incomparable. Once you know that attending to no-affairs is the greatest affair in the world, then all things seem to be so small, so juvenile, childish, foolish.But in the West particularly, there has never been a teacher who has said, “Do nothing.” Jesus tried, but they killed him – and Jesus also tried very guardedly because he would not have been understood at all. If he had talked like Lao Tzu nobody would have understood him.Jews are great doers. They accomplish many things. It is difficult to defeat the Jews in anything; never compete with a Jew, he will defeat you. They are great doers. The whole world has been against them. Many Hitlers come and go; they try to destroy the Jews but – nothing: they are standing again stronger than before. Jews are the most worldly race in the world. They believe in doing. They would not have understood Jesus, but still he was saying something like Lao Tzu in a guarded way, in a masked language – but no other teacher has even tried. On the contrary the proverb goes: “When you do nothing you become a workshop for the Devil.” And Lao Tzu says when you do nothing, only then do you become the workshop for God, not for the Devil.The Devil takes possession of you when you want to do something. Then you are in the hands of the Devil; then he can possess you, he can tempt you, he can force you, he can make you run toward things, toward achievements. But a man who does not want to do anything, who pays attention to no affairs – the Devil simply cannot come near him. It is impossible, because the Devil is the doer.I would like to tell you again, from a different standpoint, the story of why Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden, from paradise.Adam lived a life like the animals, trees, and birds, doing nothing. It was sheer delight, enjoying as children do. Doing nothing, they enjoy, playing. And God had said, “Don’t go and eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge” – because the moment you eat the fruit of knowledge, immediately you become a doer. Knowledge is useless unless it functions as a means to do something. Knowledge means know-how. Knowledge is a technical help to do things more skillfully. Knowledge makes you more efficient doers.But the serpent, the Devil, seduced them. First he seduced Eve. That too is meaningful because wherever you go, you will always find Eves pushing their husbands toward doing something: “Go and do something! We have to build a bigger house, and purchase a bigger car. And more diamonds are needed. Go and do something, don’t sit in the house!” Women go on pushing their husbands.The parable is meaningful. If man is allowed, he will relax, he will become a bum. He will just relax. He will just play on the flute under a tree, have a flask of wine with him, and that will do! He will not bother about the world.The parable says the serpent first convinced Eve: “This tree, the Tree of Knowledge, has been prohibited because God does not want you to become like God. If you eat the fruit of knowledge you will be like gods!” All advertisers appeal to women, not to men. The serpent was the first advertising agency. He was the pioneer. He approached the right source. If you want to catch the husband, catch the wife. Once a new car enters her mind, then it will be difficult – she is going to put the new car in the husband’s mind.And once Eve tasted the fruit of knowledge, she seduced poor Adam also. They were expelled. They were thrown out of paradise. The meaning is: after that they became such cunning, knowing, doers that they lost the innocence of being that they used to delight in. There was no time before.The parable says that God, when he was expelling them, said, “Now there will be death for you.” There was no time before, so death could not exist. Not that Adam was not going to die, but death could not exist. Birds die, but they don’t know anything about death; they simply live and they simply die. Not for a single moment are they worried about death. Animals live and die, but death is not a problem for them. They don’t sit and brood about what death is and whether one survives after death or not. Death is not a problem. When time enters, death enters. Knowledge enters, time comes in, then death – and all the problems.Man has to become innocent again. He has to drop knowledge. But you can drop knowledge only when you come to know that all that is beautiful, true, and good can happen without doing; otherwise you will not be able to drop knowledge.Lao Tzu is trying to make you understand. He is trying to give you a vision that knowledge has to be dropped. But then you will immediately ask, “If knowledge is dropped, how will we be able to do so many things?” He says those “so many things” are not needed. The innermost being can flower in non-doing.Accomplish do-nothing. Attend to no-affairs. Taste the flavorless. Lao Tzu never uses the name God. He consistently remains with indications; he never uses any direct expressions: …the flavorless. God has no flavor because flavor can exist only in duality. If something is sweet, then something has to be bitter. If something is good, then something else has to be bad. If something is divine, then something has to be evil. Flavorless means the nondual, what Hindus call advaita: not two. Flavorless is a poetic expression, it just gives a hint, not a direct instruction.Whether it is big or small, many or few,requite hatred with virtue.This is a very revolutionary concept. It has to be understood very, very delicately.You have heard the famous dictum of Jesus: Love your enemies. Lao Tzu goes deeper than that. He says: …requite hatred with virtue, not with love. It would have been easier to say: Respond with love when somebody hates you. Love the enemy. But why is he not saying love?There are very profound reasons. First: when Jesus says “Love your enemy,” he is accepting the duality of love and hate, he accepts the dual phenomenon. Deep down you already love your enemy, otherwise how can you hate? Unless you have loved the enemy you cannot hate him. You love the enemy already in your deep unconscious, that’s why you hate. Love and hate exist together. When you love a person, you forget that you hate him also.If you become aware, you will become aware of the fact that if you love a person, then you hate him also; and if you hate a person, then you love him also. Enemies and friends are not very different. You love the friend consciously, you hate him unconsciously; you hate the enemy consciously, you love him unconsciously – because they cannot exist separately, they are two aspects of the same coin: love–hate.Sometimes you become worried: “Why do I want to kill?” Sometimes you start thinking of killing your wife or your husband, or of murdering your mother or your father, and you feel much guilt: “Why?” Don’t feel guilty. It is natural. In each love, hate is hidden. And think about your enemy, go deeper into your hatred. You will find that you love him. Maybe it is a negative way of loving; hate is a negative way of loving.It happened that Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, two great politicians of India, were long-standing enemies. And of course when you are enemies for so long, you become too attached to each other. When Gandhi was murdered and Jinnah heard the news, the man who brought the news to Jinnah was thinking that he would be happy, but he became sad – because without Gandhi where would Jinnah be? The enemy is dead, you are almost dead. You don’t miss only your friends; you miss your enemies also. They have become part of your being.When Jesus says “Love your enemies,” he is not saying a very, very revolutionary thing. It appears revolutionary. You already love them in fact; the love is hidden and he wants to bring it up, that’s all.Lao Tzu says: …requite hatred with virtue. What is virtue? Virtue is balance. Virtue is compassion not love. The distinction is subtle, but great. When you love a person the emotion is hot. When you hate a person then too the emotion is hot. One thing is the same: that you are in a hot relationship. If you are indifferent to a person you are cold, no heat in you either way. You are simply unrelated. You don’t love, you don’t hate; you don’t bother, you don’t care. You are indifferent. You go on your own way. That’s why nothing hurts people more than indifference.If you hate a person it is not so much of a problem to him. He knows you are paying him attention – maybe negative, but you are paying attention. But if you are indifferent it hurts very deeply. If people simply do not bother about you – you pass by and they don’t pay any attention this way or that – then you feel that you are almost dead.Indifference kills, not hate. Hate brings energy. Love brings energy. Love is a pleasant feeling, hate is unpleasant – but if you have to choose between hate and indifference, you will certainly choose hate. You will never choose indifference. Indifference is absolutely cold, killing.Compassion is not cold, compassion is cool. Cold means dead; cool means balanced. Let me tell you in another way. Compassion is cool, indifference is cold. If you compare compassion with love and hate, it is cool; if you compare compassion with indifference, it is warm. It is warm in comparison to indifference and its coldness. It is cool in comparison to love and hate and their heat.Virtue is compassion. It is not love, it is not hate, it is a balance between the two. It is not indifference either. It is life-giving. But if you don’t know, compassion will look like indifference. The distinction is very subtle. Coolness will look like coldness, but coolness is alive, fresh. Coldness is simply dead. Virtue is compassion.Requite hatred with compassion.Deal with the difficult while it is easy…Everything difficult has a phase when it is easy, if you are alert you will know it. It is so easy to destroy a seed, it is very difficult to destroy a big tree. And everything has a seed form. When anger arises it is just like a seed. If you want to drop it at that moment there is no problem, but if you allow it to take root within you, to spread within your being, to overwhelm you, then destroying anger will be very, very difficult. It will look like destroying yourself; it will have become such a deep part of you.Whether it is big or small, many or few,requite hatred with virtue.Deal with the difficult while yet it is easy;deal with the big while yet it is small.And everything is small and easy in the present. If you don’t postpone, everything is easy and small. You are powerful enough to change it, to transform it. But if you say, “I will see to it tomorrow,” if you say, “There is no hurry,” if you take it easy and you say, “Someday when I have enough time I will see to the problem.” Meanwhile the problem is growing and taking root.Don’t postpone it because then you will not be able to do much about it. That’s what you have been doing up to now. You have been postponing for lives. And then you come to me and you say, “We would like to be silent. We would like to be peaceful” – and for many lives you have been postponing problems which are boiling within you. They have to be tackled. A great surgery is needed.But you are in such a hurry again. People meditate a few days, four or five days, and they come to me and they say, “Nothing is happening yet.” Can’t you see the ridiculousness of it? What are you asking?For many lives you postpone. Then your being becomes like a ruin. Your garden is no longer there: everything destroyed, only weeds subsist. And suddenly one day you want to have a beautiful lawn. It will take time. The weeds have to be thrown out. Their roots and seeds have to be thrown out. The soil has to be changed. Now it is not easy.But you can do at least one thing: start living moment to moment, so at least you are not gathering more nonsense around you, more rubbish around you. At least you can clean one part of the garden and start working moment to moment. And once you know how problems have become difficult, and once you come to understand that they are easy if you tackle them in the beginning, everything will become easy again. But that feeling, that nuance, that knack, has to be learned.The difficult problems of the worldmust be dealt with while they are yet easy;the great problems of the worldmust be dealt with while they are yet small.Therefore the sage by never dealing with great problemsaccomplishes greatness.These things look like paradoxes – they are not. They are simple statements with no contradiction in them.Therefore the sage by never dealing with great problems… Because he has no great problems. He never deals with great problems, that’s why he is great.In your understanding just the opposite is the case. You think a man is so great because he has dealt with such great problems. Such great challenges, and he has conquered them. This is foolish. A great man has nothing to conquer. The greater he is, the less to conquer. If he is really great there is nothing to conquer. The greatest man has no problems to solve, either great or small, because he never allows them to accumulate. They become problems only when postponed. Right now, lived, they are not problems; they are part of life, and beautiful.Just start being alert. Whenever you see a problem is arising, drop all activity. Look at it, pay attention to it. Just look within at what it is. Sometimes a smile will be enough to change it; laughter will do, and you will be out of the vicious circle. Sometimes nothing will be needed, not even a smile and a laugh – just the very attention, that you looked into it, and it will disappear as dewdrops disappear in the morning when the sun rises.Just look. Bring the sun of consciousness to it, it will disappear – it is so small and you are so big and so vast. Just the very encounter, that you look at it, and it changes its quality. It is no longer a problem. You can delight in it, you can enjoy it. Then life becomes a play.He who lightly makes a promisewill find it often hard to keep his faith.If you understand life you will never make promises because a promise is a postponement. You must either do it now or you will say, “I don’t know, I will see tomorrow.”In Mahabharata there is a beautiful anecdote…Pandavas, the five brothers, are hiding in the forest. One day a beggar comes. Yudhishthira is sitting outside the hut and the beggar asks for nothing much, just some bread, a few chapattis.Yudhishthira is brooding – and as happens always whenever there is a beggar, you would like to postpone. You say, “Come tomorrow,” just to avoid. He may not come again tomorrow. You don’t want to be so rude as to say, “I will not give anything.” Also you want to protect your image that you are a great giver. So you say, “Come tomorrow. Don’t disturb me now.” Yudhishthira did the same; he said, “Come tomorrow.”Bhim, another brother – who is not known much for his wisdom or intelligence, but sometimes it happens that people who are not very intelligent flare up – suddenly started laughing and he ran out of the house laughing, going toward the town.Yudhishthira asked, “Where are you going?”He said, “I am going to tell the people in the town that my brother has conquered time! He has promised something to a beggar if he comes tomorrow.”Suddenly Yudhishthira became aware. Because how can you say, “Come tomorrow?” You may not be here tomorrow. The beggar may not be here tomorrow. Yudhishthira ran off, caught hold of the beggar, gave him whatever he could give him, and dropped the habit of promising.Because a promise is possible only if tomorrow is certain. But who knows anything about tomorrow?There is a great old Chinese story…A king was very angry with his prime minister. He had done something, so the king ordered him to be sentenced to death. It was the tradition that if somebody was to be executed by the king’s order, the king had to visit him one day before, to ask if he had some desire to be fulfilled. And the last desire of the condemned man had to be fulfilled. This man was no ordinary man – he had served the king for many years as his prime minister; he had been an intimate. But something went wrong, he did something and the king was angry, so the next morning he was to be executed, hanged. The king came to see him twenty-four hours before.The prime minister was a brave man. He had been to many wars as a general. When the king came, the prime minister started weeping and crying, tears rolling down. The king said, “I would never have imagined that you, a man of such bravery, would be weeping and crying because you are going to be hanged tomorrow. Are you afraid of death?”The prime minister said, “That is not the point. Death I have never been afraid of. It is something else but – leave it aside, now there is no time to do it.”The king became curious. He said, “What is the matter? Tell me. I am here to fulfill your last desire. I promise to fulfill it. Tell me. You have served the kingdom long and I would like to fulfill it, whatever it is. Just tell me.”The prime minister said, “If you insist, then I will tell you. This is a long story. When I was young I was with a great master. He was an enlightened being and he had many secrets with him. One secret I learned, and that secret was that there is a rare type of horse that can be taught to fly. My whole life I have been searching for that type of horse that can be taught to fly, but I couldn’t find one – and look at the irony of fate: the horse that you have come on is the right horse, and tomorrow morning I will be dead! The whole science will die with me. The secret will be lost to humanity – that’s why I am crying.”The king said, “The horse can fly? How much time will you take to teach it?” The king became interested. If this horse could fly in the sky it would be something superb, incomparable, that no other king in the world could claim. He said, “Forget about your sentence; tell me how much time you will take.”The man said, “It will take one year.”The king said, “Okay. There is no harm in it. Try for one year. If the horse flies, then not only will you not be hanged, but you will share my kingdom, half-half. But if the horse cannot fly, then you will be executed. So there is no harm in it. Come, take the horse.”The man took the horse and went home. There his wife and children were crying and weeping because this was the last day, the next morning their husband, father, would be dead. They could not believe their eyes – that he was coming back riding on a horse. They thought they must be dreaming. They wiped their eyes and asked, “What is the matter? How could you manage to come home?”He told them the whole story. The wife again started crying and said, “You are a fool! I know very well you don’t know anything like that. You created a lie. If you were going to lie, why say one year? You should have asked for fifty years, twenty years at least! The one year will pass so soon, and it will be a nightmare because the whole year we will be trembling that again soon you have to die.The man said, “Don’t be afraid, one year is so long. The king can die, I can die, even the horse can die – don’t be worried! Don’t be worried, a year is so long.”Lao Tzu says:He who lightly makes a promisewill find it often hard to keep his faith.He who makes light of many thingswill encounter many difficulties.Hence even the sage regards things as difficult,and for that reason never meets with difficulties.Lao Tzu is saying: Don’t promise, otherwise you will lose faith – because time goes on changing. Don’t say anything certain about the future because the future itself is not certain. At the most you can be certain for this moment, that’s all. And one who lives in this moment without promising, postponing, thinking, planning about the future lives such a simple life, such an innocent life, that his faith grows, his trust grows, his gratefulness grows. He becomes a vehicle for the ultimate grace to flow from him. He becomes a passage for the divine, for Tao.But one who lightly gives promises, who lightly postpones things, who never thinks that things are difficult… Try to understand this. Lao Tzu says: Everything is simple if you take it rightly in the beginning. But don’t think that it is simple, and don’t think that it is easy, because if you think that it is easy there will be a tendency to postpone – “Such an easy thing, why bother now? It can be done tomorrow.” Things are easy, but think that they are very difficult. Tackle them immediately otherwise they will become difficult.Hence even the sage regards things as difficult… Knowing well that they are easy. But he regards them as difficult so that the inner tendency to postponement is curbed. Small things, very ordinary – they can be done very easily, but the sage regards them as difficult: …and for that reason never meets with difficulties, because then he goes on solving everything. Things never accumulate, they are never too much. He moves from moment to moment, completely unburdened from the past, completely unburdened for the future. He moves like a mirror, empty.“The empty mirror” is the right term for the sage. You come before it, he mirrors you. When you move away, the reflection has gone. The mirror is again empty, again ready to reflect something if it comes. The mirror never says, “I will reflect tomorrow.” If the mirror could say, “I will reflect tomorrow,” there would be such a crowd, nothing would be reflected. That is the state of your mind.You have been postponing. Now stop postponing. Look into your problems. By that very look they are almost all solved. And the small things that remain? – they can be tackled. Everybody is capable of solving his problems. Everybody has to be capable. When you are capable of creating problems, who else is going to be capable of solving them? You create, you can solve.These sutras of Lao Tzu are very significant. Pay attention to them. Meditate over them. Let your being be soaked with them.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I feel so self-confident that I will be enlightened very soon; but then I feel that it would be nice if my enlightenment is a little delayed because there seems to be greater joy in delaying enlightenment than in being enlightened. Why?Don’t feel so confident otherwise it will be delayed forever. Self-confidence is not a quality for the inner journey, it is a barrier. In the outer world self-confidence is a help, is a must. Without it you cannot go anywhere in the outside world because the ego is needed, a struggle is needed, a sort of madness is needed. But when you move to the inner, all the qualities that are helpful in the outer journey become obstacles. The self is not needed, self-confidence is not needed.One should completely lose the self, only then is there a possibility of enlightenment. You never become enlightened. When you are not, there is enlightenment. That is the first thing to remember.And the second – how can you compare that which is better, enlightenment or waiting for it? The comparison is possible only when you have become enlightened. When you know both, then you can compare.Don’t befool yourself. Don’t try to rationalize. Because you have to wait, you are now trying to rationalize: there is much beauty, much happiness, bliss, in waiting. If in waiting there is much bliss, more bliss than in enlightenment, then those who attained it were fools. Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Jesus – stupid, all stupid! Then what is the point in trying to attain it?No, you are trying to befool yourself. Nowhere does it seem to be coming nearer – and the mind is very cunning and very tricky. It says, “Who is in a hurry? If it is not coming it is very beautiful. To wait is good, and very blissful!”Now you are trying to hide an impotency. This way, you can go on in circles. First, it is being delayed – and it will be delayed, it can be delayed forever if too much self is there. It is delayed because of you. Not that there is any bliss in waiting – waiting is always a misery, waiting is always hanging in the middle, it is to be in limbo. Waiting is always tense, a suffering – otherwise who would want to reach? For what are you waiting? Waiting to reach! Waiting cannot be beautiful – but you can try to console yourself.Drop the self and drop false consolations because nobody else is fooled by it except yourself. You are not deceiving anybody, but you can deceive yourself for eternity.Drop the self, drop that “so much confidence,” it is egoistic. And suddenly there is enlightenment, there is no need to wait. Waiting is there because of the obstacles you are creating. Enlightenment is not creating any obstacles on your path. God is not pushing you away from himself. Nobody is creating any difficulty for you. If you are not reaching, it is only because of you.So drop self-confidence, drop the self, and then suddenly you will find that enlightenment is not something that happens to you; enlightenment is your very nature, your very being. When the self is not – it is. Then it is yourself. And forget all consolations.You must have heard, I have told it many times myself, the famous story of the fox and the grapes. One of the very extraordinary men, Aesop, wrote it.A fox comes near a tree, and the tree is full of grapes, bunches of grapes. She jumps, she tries hard, but cannot reach the grapes. They are too far away, her jump is not high enough. Then she looks all around – is somebody watching?A small hare is watching from a bush and he asks, “Aunty, what is the matter? Couldn’t you reach the grapes?”She says, “No son, that is not the thing. The grapes are sour.”This is consolation.I tell you the grapes are never sour – at least the grapes of enlightenment. Never sour; they are always ripe and sweet. And if you cannot reach, don’t try to console yourself that you love waiting. Just try to understand why you are forced to wait. Who is forcing you to wait? You will not find anybody else, just you yourself, that self-confidence and the self.The second question:Osho,Is the chaos that is occurring today in our age any different from that of other times? It feels as though it is a special time. Or is it that all time is special?Yes, all time is special, every moment is special. But every age feels that this age is special. That is the ego of the age. Every age has always felt that there has never been such a time, such a revolutionary time, such chaos, such wars, such knowledge, such wisdom – but something is special.I have heard – I don’t know how far it is correct, but it must be, knowing human mind it has to be – when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, it is said that the first words that were uttered, going out of the gate, was Adam saying to Eve, “My dear, this is the greatest revolutionary time we are passing through.”The first day of the world, the first moment rather, the first step in the world – and the revolution! “This is the greatest revolutionary time we are passing through.” And since then every Adam has felt that, and every Adam has said to every Eve, “My dear, this is the greatest age we are living through, very special.”Why does this happen? The age is special, the religion you are born into is special, the master you follow is special – the greatest in the world. The book you believe in is written by God himself, not by ordinary human beings. Everything that belongs to you is special – this is how the ego is helped, supported; these are the props.The country you are born in is special. If you are an Indian, then the country is sacred. If you are English then you know well that you are the best in the world. If you are French, the same.This happens. And it is such a cunning method that you will not be aware of what you are doing to yourself: making your religion special, you become special. It is not that Christianity is special, in fact it is you who is so special! Because of you, Christianity appears to be special. It is not India that is a sacred land, it is because of you; you are so religious. So sacred is your being! Because of you the whole of India becomes a religious country, special. Wherever you were born, the same would have happened. If you had been born in Holland, or in China, the same would have happened.Try to look into it. The world is always either ordinary or extraordinary. Because there is no point in saying that it is always extraordinary. It doesn’t make any difference… If there are ordinary moments, only then can some moments be extraordinary. So you can either say that the world is always ordinary, the time ordinary, the country, the religion, everything – or you can say it is always extraordinary, it is the same. Because then there is nothing to compare with, to contrast with. And by and by, if you drop these props, suddenly you will disappear. Your country ordinary? Then you cannot walk so heartily as you used to walk. Your language ordinary? Then you will hesitate a little. If everything is ordinary: your birth, your family, this and that, then how can you help the ego to be strong? All props withdrawn, the ego falls to the ground.These are very subtle tricks.I have heard about a professor, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. One day he suddenly told his students, “I am the greatest man in the world!” They could not believe it. This ordinary professor – and at that too, not a professor of physics, but of philosophy. Nobody comes to study even, rarely, some mad people come; and nobody bothers about his department, the most neglected in the university. And he is the greatest man in the world? They laughed.They said, “We have always heard that philosophers are a little eccentric, but now you prove it. You are the greatest man in the world? Then what about Richard Nixon? And Mao Zedong? And Indira Gandhi? What about these people?”He said, “Wait! Whenever I say something I prove it, I am a logician. I will prove it. I have proof; unless I had proof I would never make such a statement.”The next day, he brought a map of the world. He fixed it on the wall and he said, “Come here, now I will prove it. Which is the greatest country in the world?” Of course, it was France because all were French. So the whole world was dropped, only France remained.And then he said, “Which is the greatest town, city, in France?” Of course it was Paris, all were Parisians.Then he said, “And which is the greatest place in Paris?” Of course it was the university, the citadel of wisdom. Now the students started feeling a little restless because he was coming to the point, and it would be difficult now to disprove.And then he said, “Which is the best and the greatest department in the university?” Of course it had to be philosophy: the most ancient, with the secret-most knowledge.“And who is the head of the Department of Philosophy? He is the greatest man in the world.”This is how you all function. This is the logic, this is the proof.Please don’t be foolish. Let philosophers be foolish, you need not be. Drop all such nonsense. It is all garbage. And once you drop it, you will feel so clean, as if you have taken a bath in eternity. You will feel so unburdened, so young, because all this rot in your head is making you rotten. You are ill because of it. You cannot be healthy unless you throw all this garbage.Be simple, ordinary. Everything is ordinary – or you can call it extraordinary, that makes no difference. This morning is as extraordinary as any morning.And people have always thought like that. Whenever you fall in love you feel – this woman, this is the queen, Cleopatra. There has never been such a woman. But every lover has felt like that. And not only that, you will fall again and again in love, and again and again you will feel, “Now this is the real Cleopatra; that was nothing.” And you will forget that you have been saying the same thing to many women.Every lover feels an ego-enhancement. And this has been the cause of much misery in the world. Christians think they are special, the very chosen of God. Jews think they are very special, God has made them the chosen race. And that has created much misery in the world. If you are the chosen race then you are forgiven all sins, you can do whatever you like. Nobody is chosen or everybody is chosen! The dog on the street is also a chosen dog, and an ordinary grass leaf is also chosen, and stars are also chosen, you are also chosen – either all are chosen or nobody is chosen, it is for you to decide.But never say, “I am the chosen” because then what about others? Mad people like Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin, they all feel they are chosen people: they are made to govern, and others are made to be governed. These people create trouble. But you also have the same seed within you. If you allow it to grow you can become an Adolf Hitler.Nobody is special. Life is so beautiful in its ordinariness, so extraordinary in its ordinariness, why bring these nonsense concepts into it and disturb it?The third question:Osho,Does a sinner deserve to be enlightened?Otherwise who else? A saint is already enlightened, only sinners are left to be enlightened. But religions have taught you something which is creating the problem. They have condemned you as sinners – how can you become enlightened?Sin is nothing but error. There is no condemnation in the word – it is just error. And those who err, learn. All saints have been sinners. There has never been a saint who has not been a sinner, otherwise how will he come to be a saint? He traveled, he erred, he went astray. He fell a million times and rose up again. He has reached. The whole journey he has been a sinner. Now he has learned, and now no error happens. He has become wise through sinning, through errors. He knows. He has become enlightened. Out of the darkness of the night the morn is born.Every saint has been a sinner, and every sinner will become a saint. The past of the saint is bound to be of sin, and the future of every sinner is bound to be of saintlihood. So between a saint and a sinner there is only a difference of past and future, that’s all. Don’t feel condemned. Sin in itself is enough, why burden yourself even more with condemnation? Be alert, that’s all. You will have to commit mistakes, but don’t commit the same mistake again, that’s all. Be alert, watch – and learn. In fact if you ask me, then I will tell you that the world of sin is the world of learning. One cannot learn without it. One has to go deep into sin.It is just like the roots of a tree: the deeper the roots go, the higher go the branches. A tree grows to a great height, but it depends, is based, on the roots which go deeper and deeper and deeper.If you come across a great saint you must know that he must have sinned greatly. The roots must go deep. Otherwise how can he know so much? If he has never sinned he will be not innocent but stupid.There are stupid saints also – to me they are not saints, they are simply afraid people, cowards. They have never sinned, they never went astray: they have always clung to the right path, to the well-trodden path, to the ideology the society has given to them, to the concepts the religion has enforced on their minds, to the conditioning that they have been born into – they have clung to it. They have never moved astray, they are cowards, they have learned nothing. To me, their value is zero. They may be good people, but their goodness is saltless. It has no flavor. It is a little dull and dead.You will find two types of saints in the world. One, who is saintly out of fear – fear of hell, fear of the consequences – and has never sinned. He is almost a clay saint, not real, he has not achieved anything. And you will not find him wise, because from where will he get wisdom? He never went astray, how will he become mature? He will be a child, ignorant, foolish and stupid; not harmful, but you cannot learn anything through him. At the most he can teach you his stupidity, his cowardliness.There is another type of saint – you are fortunate if you can find a saint of the other type, because if a hundred saints exist, ninety-nine are stupid. It has to be so. That is the proportion between stupidity and intelligence, so it has to be always the same proportion everywhere. In the world, in the marketplace, the same proportion exists: ninety-nine stupid persons, one intelligent person, wise, aware. The same proportion has to be reflected in the saints also – in all directions.If you can find the one who has lived, and lived dangerously, and moved in all directions without any fear, and learned through experience to transcend sin – not that he never committed sin, he committed it, and he committed it totally and intensely, that’s why he could transcend it. He could see it through and through; he could see the very absurdity of it, that’s why he has become transcendental to it. If you can find such a saint – only through him goes the path, the way.Jesus could say to people, “I am the way.” Jesus is not an ordinary stupid saint. That was the reason he was crucified. If he had been an ordinary stupid saint he would have been worshipped. Jews would have proclaimed, “Here is the son of God!” But the trouble was that his ways were not exactly right – as Jews used to think right was; they were not exactly moral.Sometimes he stayed with a prostitute. This is not saintlike. Sometimes he stayed with drunkards, and he himself used to drink wine – he loved it. And he moved with all sorts of people – he was not respectable in any way, he didn’t care a bit for respectability. Immoral people, condemned by the society, were his friends. He moved in all sorts of company.That was the reason, the basic reason why all the priests and all the stupid so-called saints were against him: because deep down he was cutting the roots of the old morality. This man is dangerous, he has to be destroyed, because he is bringing something into the world which will be a chaos for the ordinary morality – because ordinary morality lives by rules, and a saint lives by awareness, not by rules.Rules are for those who are cowards. A saint lives by his inner discipline, he believes in no other discipline. His own consciousness is the only law. He follows it. Wherever it leads he is ready to go – if it goes to hell he will go to hell. Because that is his way to know the truth. He follows his own being. He does not allow anybody to enforce anything on him. He rebels.Ordinary saints are harmless but saints like Jesus are dangerous – to the society, to the culture, to the fixed mode of life, to the status quo, to the establishment. Jesus must have looked like a hippie – rebellious, breaking all the rules.That’s how one should live! Because unless you live totally free, unless you suffer through your own choice, you will not transcend anything. You will remain a clay saint.You ask, “Does a sinner deserve to be enlightened?” And I say: Who else? He has earned it. Through sin he has suffered. Through sin he has become mature. But I am not saying that just by sinning you will attain it. Otherwise all would have attained. Sin plus awareness – that should be the formula. Sin plus awareness. Then go wherever you want, and do whatever you like – that awareness will bring you back, that awareness will always be the ladder by which you can transcend any experience.If Jesus had been born in India he would not have been crucified, no. That has never been our practice here, because we have known even more dangerous people – Jesus is nothing. We have known Krishna. In fact, there is every possibility that Christ is a deformed form of Krishna. Jesus must have had something of the quality of Krishna. In Bengali, Krishna is Christo; in many European languages Christ is Cristo. Christ seems to be a form of Krishna; Christ is not Jesus’ name. Jesus Christ means Jesus the Krishna – something of Krishna was in him. Being in love with Mary Magdalene, something like Krishna in love with Radha.The Jews could not believe it. They are very moralistic people: mathematical, calculating. And here comes this man and he will disturb the whole structure!We allowed Krishna sixteen thousand girlfriends. We call them gopis. Gopi is a better word than girlfriend, deeper and more lovely. We allowed him sixteen thousand and we never crucified him. And not all were married to him, a few of them were others’ wives. Radha herself was not his wife, but somebody else’s.Just a few days ago there was a case in Uttar Pradesh, in a court, about a certain piece of land. A certain piece of land has been in Radha Krishna’s name for centuries. Now new rules have come in, and that much land cannot be in one person’s name. But the judge has given his judgment and it is beautiful. He said, “Because it is in the name of Radha Krishna it is not in one person’s name, and because Radha was never a legal wife to Krishna, these are two persons. So the land can remain as it is, because it is in two persons’ names, and for two persons, that much land can be allowed. They were never a family because he was never married to her.”People have completely forgotten Krishna’s wife’s name. Her name was Rukmini. It is completely a forgotten name. Radha was not his wife, Radha was his mistress.And India never bothered to kill this man. Rather on the contrary we have said that he is the absolute avatar, the total coming of God on the earth. Why have we called him the total God? Because he can sin like a sinner, the greatest sinner, and he remains like a saint – the greatest ever known. Two polarities meet in him. He is total.If a saint is simply a saint and has never sinned he is one-polar. Something is missing. When a man is two-polar, both the polarities are there, the man is total and alive. He is both night and day, life and death, chaos and cosmos.So, you ask, “Does a sinner deserve to be enlightened?” I tell you, Yes. Only a sinner deserves. But awareness has to be brought in. So I don’t condemn sin. I only indicate to you: sin, but sin with a conscious, alert, aware mind.Do whatever you like. If you want to drink wine, drink it, but remain alert. Soon you will find that this is impossible. When you take wine you lose awareness, and when you lose awareness it is simply sin. Then there is no possibility of saintliness happening in it. If you can drink and remain alert, drink as much as you want – it is water, nothing else.It is said that Jesus turned water into wine. I teach you the other trick – how to turn wine into water: be aware. Then you will do a greater miracle than Jesus ever did. Be aware, and wine becomes water. Be aware – sex becomes love. Be aware – love becomes prayer. Be aware – prayer becomes meditation. Simply one thing has to be remembered: do whatever you like, but do it with full consciousness, and then you will not go astray.The fourth question:Osho,Can one get over-addicted to catharsis?Yes. The mind has a very deep-rooted disease I call the disease of OD – overdose, overdoing. Remain alert about this disease of OD. You can do anything too much and then that which was going to be beneficial will become harmful.Food is good, it is vitality, but you can eat too much – then it becomes poisonous. You can die by overeating. In fact, medical researchers say that more people die of overeating than of starvation. Newspapers go on reporting that a few people have died somewhere because of starvation, they never report how many people are dying by overeating – that should be reported first. More people are always dying by overeating.A man can live for three months without eating anything at all. But overeat for even three weeks and you cannot survive. Try. For three days, eat as much as you can.It happened…Mulla Nasruddin and a disciple went for a visit to Mecca, hajj. Whenever they ate, Nasruddin would eat as much as he could, then lie down to sleep, but the disciple had a curious habit: whenever they would eat, he would eat something and then shake his body, then eat again, and again shake his body.One day Nasruddin asked, “What are you doing? You never tell me the secret. And I am your master. You are my disciple and you go on hiding this secret, tell me, what is the secret to it?”The disciple said, “Well master, if you shake your body, things settle, then you feel hungry again. You can eat more, then you shake your body again. It is just like a box – you settle, things settle.”Nasruddin hit him hard on the head and said, “You fool, you never told me – I always suspected that there is more to eating. And more can be done, but I never knew this trick. I know that the very last limit of eating is bursting, but you should have told me! And you are my friend and my disciple, and you have been hiding such a great secret. Now I feel so miserable about how much food I have missed!”Remember the disease of OD. It kills in many ways. Overeating, over-loving, can kill you. Many people come to me – they are overdoing sex. They are killing themselves. Or overeating, they are killing themselves.Yes, and you can do over-meditation also. The mind always likes to do something to the extreme. The mind is an extremist, it never wants to be in the middle because to be in the middle is to be without the mind. Be exactly in the middle and there is no mind. When you move to the extreme, the mind enters. The further away you go from the center, the more the mind comes in and takes possession of you. Either eat too much or fast too much, and the mind will be there; that’s why I am neither in favor of eating too much nor in favor of fasting. Just be in the middle. Right eating, exactly balanced – and always remember to be balanced in everything.You can overdo meditation and then you will be exhausted rather than being resurrected through it, revived and revitalized and rejuvenated. You will feel exhausted. And then you will go to the other extreme and you will say, “It is nothing, this meditation is nothing. I must stop, I am dying because of it.” You are not dying because of it, you are dying because of overdoing.So, how to know “This is the middle”? Difficult, very difficult, one needs to be very, very conscious, only then does one know.When you eat, where is the middle? The middle is when you are still feeling a little hungry, just a little hungry, and you know that now if you eat you will feel heavy. Just there – stop. If you eat four chapattis and then you feel heavy, then three chapattis – the right thing is to stop there. Three-fourths of your stomach should be full, one-fourth empty. That is the right thing – give a little space for the food to move, to be transformed, to be changed into blood. Give a little space! Food needs a little space in the stomach.If you are meditating and you feel you are doing too much catharsis, catharsis will become a very, very exhausting phenomenon. You are crying in meditation: cry up to the moment when you start feeling that now you are losing energy, you are feeling weaker. If you cry more, you will be simply exhausted and nothing else. Stop. Always stop when you feel that the energy is being lost, not regained.If catharsis is real, necessary, then through catharsis you will feel unburdened, you will feel light, you will feel as if you can fly. But if you go on doing it more and more, thinking that more will be more helpful, then soon you will find that you are simply exhausted, dead, you cannot move. One has to watch it. There cannot be a fixed rule for everybody because everybody’s body has a different quality, different energy, different quantity of energy; one has to watch oneself.If you are sleeping less than necessary then the whole day you will feel sleepy. If you are sleeping more than necessary, then too, the whole day you will feel dull – not sleepy but dull. There is an exact moment; if you get up at that moment you will feel fresh the whole day – neither sleepy nor dull. And you have to search out that moment for yourself because nobody else’s moment will do.That’s how all the scriptures become useless. If somewhere it is said, “Get up early in the morning, at five o’clock,” it may have suited the man who has written this, it may not suit you. And then you can get up at five and suffer. And then you will think, “I am a sinner. This is happening because of past karmas – my master said five – the exact time to get up.”In Vinoba’s ashram they get up at three o’clock. Many suffer. Then they sleep the whole day – or if they are not allowed to sleep they feel sleepy. They cannot be conscious, they move as if fast asleep, somnambulists. It suits Vinoba; it does not mean it is going to suit everybody. It suits him because his food is such that more sleep is not needed. He takes only curd, he almost lives on curd. Even milk needs to be digested, but curd is almost digested. Because first milk goes into the body and becomes curd, and then… Curd is almost a digested food.And he eats very little because he has ulcers, chronic ulcers, so it suits him. But his followers also take curd; if they don’t have ulcers, they will have. Foolish. They will simply create more acidity in their stomachs. And then he gets up at three o’clock because he cannot sleep more than that. They all get up at three o’clock. Then the whole ashram feels sleepy the whole day. I have been there; I have seen those people’s faces – somnambulists, as if in hypnosis.How can they become more alert and aware and how can they meditate? Find out your own rhythm – everybody has his own rhythm, and your rhythm is as different as your fingerprints. Just as your thumbprint is different from everyone else’s in the world, in exactly the same way everything is unique with every individual. You have your own rhythm about everything.I have worked on many people and this has been my understanding: everyone is so different that no fixed rule can be applied. Only flexible understanding, that’s all.You have to find your own rhythm. About catharsis also, try to find your own rhythm. This should be the criterion: if catharsis is exhausting, then you are overdoing it. If it is not overdone you will feel very, very beautiful, light, after it – as if gravitation is no longer functioning. You will walk as if you are dancing, your step will have a dance to it – and that is a feeling you have to find out. If you work well, alert, within three months you can find out every rhythm about yourself: when you should go to sleep, when you should get up – you have to create your own Yoga.Don’t follow anybody else’s rhythm, otherwise you will be in difficulty. And you will never be healthy.The fifth question:Osho,What is the relationship between love and responsibility? Does loving another person mean trying to solve their problems as well as your own?If you can solve your own, that is already too much. Please never try to solve anybody else’s problem; you will create a mess. You have not solved your own. Never do that. The mind has a tendency and a temptation to do it.You ask, “What is the relationship between love and responsibility?” No relationship, because love is responsibility. But the word has to be understood well – what it means. I insist on the root meaning of the word. Responsibility means “ability to respond.” It does not mean duty.Responsibility – go to the root meaning of the word: it means responding. Love is a response. When the other calls, you are ready. When the other invites, you enter the other. When the other is not inviting, you don’t interfere, you don’t trespass. When the other sings, you sing in response. When the other gives you her or his hand, you take it with deep response.Responsibility means openness, readiness, to respond. Somebody is calling and you don’t respond, you remain closed. Somebody wants to love you but you don’t help, you don’t cooperate. Rather, you create barriers. If this is what you are doing – and the majority of lovers go on doing this. When the other calls, you don’t respond; then when you call, the other does not respond. When the other calls, you see that it will be a good ego-enhancing thing not to respond. Then you feel your own master: nobody can push you, and nobody can pull you into something which you were not going into already. You don’t follow anybody.Comes your beloved – and she is happy, and she would like to be in a deep silence with you, but you remain closed. Then when you call, there is no answer. Have you seen birds calling each other? That is responsibility. A cuckoo calls; there is silence and then another cuckoo responds. By their sounds, by their song, they answer. They may be far away in farther away trees, then they start flying closer. They have responded. By and by they come to the same tree, then they are sitting together, loving.When the other’s being calls “Ready!” be ready. Respond with your totality. Don’t be a miser – that is the meaning of responsibility.But, in your sense, love has no responsibility. The word has been corrupted, destroyed, poisoned. A mother says to the child, “I am your mother, you have to be responsible to me.” A husband says, “I am your husband and I work hard for you. You have to be responsible to me.” A father says to the son, “Don’t be irresponsible! Whenever you do something, always think of me.” This is not responsibility; you have corrupted a beautiful word. It has become ugly. Responsibility has become almost synonymous with duty. And duty is an ugly word.Love is beautiful; if you love your mother, you love – but it cannot be a duty. If it is duty, it is better not to love because duty is not going to satisfy her. And if you are doing your duty because she is your mother and she has given birth to you, what can you do? You have to take care, when she is ill you have to sit by her side – but all the time, because it is a duty, your mind is against her, you are feeling suffocated. You are feeling burdened, in a bondage. You would like to rebel and revolt. And if this mother dies, you may not say so to anybody, but you will feel relief.What type of responsibility is this – that the mother dies and the son feels a deep relief? Of course he cries and weeps, of course; and it is not that he is showing others that he is crying and weeping – in fact, if you had loved your mother there may have been no tears, but you have not loved your mother, now the opportunity is lost. You never loved your mother and now she is gone. Hence the tears, so much weeping and crying – it is pathological, it is not healthy. If you had really loved your mother, what is there to weep and cry about?She is gone. A deep silence surrounds you. In that deep silence you start understanding death; you become aware of your own death. When your mother dies – or your father dies – it is an indication that you will have to die. Then you become involved with death. You try to understand it. While she was alive she helped you to understand life. Now she is gone, she has opened another door – the door of death, to look into: because she has gone and you will have to follow.If you have loved a person, when the person is gone you don’t feel relief – and you don’t cry, and you don’t weep. In deep silence you accept the fact, the helplessness of it – and the love continues because love does not end with the body, love does not end with the mind, love goes on flowing.No, don’t ask what the relationship between love and responsibility is – there is none. When there is no love, the question of responsibility comes in. When there is no love, you start talking about duty. When there is love, love itself is responsibility.And, “Does loving another person mean trying to solve their problems as well as your own?” No. Never try. That is trespassing. Accept the person as he is with all his problems – that is love.If he asks you, share your understanding, but don’t try to change him. Very difficult, because the mind is a manipulator. In the name of good, in the name of doing good, it tries to manipulate; it is a politician. A wife says, “Because you are smoking I will have to fight with you. You have to change your smoking, this is not good, you are destroying your health” – and I have seen that a nagging wife destroys the health more than any smoking. And the wife goes on nagging and she says, “It is because of your health. I love you.” And for thirty years she has been nagging.Now they have been experimenting on nagging, and a very rare phenomenon has been revealed. They have tried it on the food that you eat: bread, butter, vegetables, fruit juice. They have put the fruit juice and the other food on a tray and the wife is nagging and screaming… It destroys the juice on the tray! The juice becomes toxic, poisonous. So just think what will be happening in the stomach, because on the tray everything is still nonorganic, dead in a way. The juice in a glass is destroyed, then what will be happening to the juice in the stomach? Because then it has become part of your life-stream, it is more alive.Nagging destroys life, health – and your wife is nagging for your health because you are smoking. If she really loves you, how can she nag? Impossible. How can she scream? She will simply love you, and she will love you so much and so deeply that the need for smoking will disappear.In fact, people smoke because they have not been deeply kissed. If they are deeply kissed, with tremendous love flowing, smoking will disappear. People are smoking because their mothers have not given them their breast as totally as it should be given. Reluctantly the breast was given to them, very reluctantly. An unfulfilled desire has remained in the mind and now they are fulfilling that desire by smoking.Smoking is very symbolic. The cigarette functions as a nipple. And the hot smoke flowing within functions as the hot milk flowing from the mother’s nipple. If all over the world mothers love their children, there will be no need for smoking. It will simply disappear. It is a symptom, it is not a disease. Mothers should learn… And nothing else can stop it!Now in America they have decided, Congress has decided, on every packet of cigarettes should be written: “The surgeon general has decided that smoking is harmful to health.” Nothing has happened. Now it is written on the packet, it makes no difference. On the contrary, the sale of cigarettes has gone higher. Because people are suicidal, they want to destroy themselves: “So cigarettes can destroy? Okay, let them destroy.” Their lives have nothing worth preserving. So what are you saying, that it is harmful? People are suicidal. They are seeking something harmful to do to themselves. Because nobody accepts them and they also don’t accept themselves.If you love a person you accept the total person, with all the defects, because those defects are a part of the person. But your love will change them – remember this: love never tries to change, but it changes tremendously. If you can love, that will bring a revolution, and it brings the revolution so silently that even the footsteps are not heard. Nobody ever becomes alert to what is happening – everything happens so silently, as buds open and flower and no noise is heard. Just like that.And never try to change a person you love because the very effort to change them says that you love half, and the other half of the person is not accepted – that is the meaning of trying to change them, that you say, “I love you, but I don’t love your nose. I love you, but I don’t love your face.” One very fat girl said to me that only one boy loves her, and he says, “I love your soul but not your body.”But all lovers go on saying such things: “I love you, but I don’t – I can’t – love your smoking. I hate it!” But that seems like a rejection. And for the lover, smoking is part of his being. He cannot help it. It is the way he is. Suddenly he shrinks, he is not accepted. You have poisoned a very beautiful thing like love for a very nonessential thing like smoking. If you love, you simply love. If love brings change, it is okay. If it doesn’t bring change, that is also okay.The sixth question:Osho,Why does love feel more illusory than hate?Yes it feels so. Love feels more illusory than hate because in love you have to drop the ego, and in hate the ego is strengthened. That’s why people love less and hate more. Even the person they love, they find something to hate in him.You hate ninety-nine percent, and one percent you love. And even that one percent looks dreamlike because when the ego disappears in certain moments, you are not there. When the ego comes back, the ego cannot remember exactly what happened because it was not there. It looks like a dream, as if it never happened, you simply dreamed about it.The ego has no memory of love experiences. If you are really in love, for that single moment ecstasy happens; the ego is not there. Boundaries merge, mingle, meet, disappear into each other. After the experience when the ego is back, the boundaries have come again. You are separate from the lover, the experience seems to be as if you have seen it in a film, read it in a novel. Did it really happen? The ego was not a witness to it.It is just as in the morning you feel the night was good, you slept well, but if somebody insists, “How do you know because you were so fast asleep?” you shrug your shoulders and you yourself become a little hesitant. You say, “Yes you are right, just a feeling has remained.” Because in sleep, deep sleep, the ego disappears.That is why Patanjali says in his Yoga Sutras that samadhi and sleep have one thing in common, and that is the disappearance of the ego. Love and samadhi also have one thing in common – the disappearance of the ego. The ego is so identified with you that without it you cannot function, so whenever the ego disappears, then everything seems to be illusory. Hate seems to be more real, fighting seems to be more of a challenge. This is my observation: that many people love just in order to fight. And people get interested in love affairs if there is some challenge, otherwise not.There are women who will fall in love only with somebody else’s husband, never with a bachelor because then there is no fight. No challenge. There are men who are always looking at others’ wives but are not interested in unmarried women, not interested. Because unless the triangle is there, the story seems to be meaningless. You cannot make a film without a triangle, you cannot write a novel without a triangle. Just two, and the whole thing seems to be a little boring. The third gives challenge, energy, and then you are alert and fighting.Even in love you are seeking hate and fight and war and conflict, because the ego feeds on conflict. So hate seems to be more real.That’s why wherever there is a war in the world, see people’s faces – they look more radiant, their walk has a different quality, they move fast, they look very interested. In the morning, just at brahmamuhurt, they get up and inquire for a newspaper, and everywhere people are talking – it’s as if something is happening. When there is no war they become dull. Life becomes routine.Hate seems to be more real. And this should not be so. If you are alert, just otherwise will be the case – hate will become unreal, love will become real, because reality can be known only when the ego disappears. Through the ego, reality cannot be known: it is the barrier to reality.The seventh question:Osho,What is the best way to coexist with the little judge who resides in my head banging his gavel: bad, bad; good, good?Don’t judge the judge.The eighth question:Osho,What is the best? Take a bath or do meditations?This has been asked by Dominique, a French visitor. As far as I know about Westerners, it is better to take a bath. After the bath you can do the meditation also. But first take a bath, the body comes first. Clean the body because meditation is also a cleaning, a deeper cleaning of being. And if you are not cleaning the body, you will not be interested in cleaning the soul. Clean the body; that is the beginning. Clean the temple, only then can you give a bath to the god inside the shrine.The ninth question:Osho,Do I deserve to be enlightened?No, not at all. But don’t be afraid and worried. Nobody needs to deserve it. It is a gift of the divine, it is prasad, a grace. In fact, the more you think you deserve, the less is the possibility of it happening. The more you feel you don’t deserve it, the greater is the possibility for it to happen.Allow it to happen, there is no question of deserving it. Only allow it to happen.The tenth question:Osho,When listening to your lectures should we follow the intellectual meaning also?Is there any intellectual meaning also? There is none. I am speaking as a heart to the heart, a being to the being. Don’t lose your path in the forest of intellectuality; otherwise you will listen to something but that will not be what I am saying. If you want to listen to me, listen from the heart – in fact from the navel, from the belly. Forget the head, so that the being can commune with the being. Only then will the meaning be mine. If you listen through the intellect, the meaning will be given by you: you will have heard it, but I will not have said it.The last question is from Bodhidharma:Osho,I feel I have come to so much emptiness, void, that enlightenment can happen any moment. Only one step remains to be taken but I feel that one step should come from the side of the guru.First thing: it is good to feel that the last step should come from the guru. But the last step never comes from the guru. The last step, one has to travel alone without the guru. Because if in the last step the guru also remains with you, it is impossible for godliness to happen. You should be left alone, totally alone.So in the last step, the guru by and by disappears. You are left alone. You have to take that courage and jump. Or, you have to be courageous to remain open so that God can jump. But in the last moment the guru is not there. Up to the last moment he can help you. He prepares you for the last step, but in the last step he cannot be there because then his own presence will be a disturbance.And when you achieve the last, from your very heart you will thank your guru, you will bow in gratefulness because he withdrew himself in the last moment.The guru helps you so that everything else drops – only the guru remains. Then, the guru withdraws himself. Then you are alone. In that total aloneness, godliness happens. There is no other way.The guru would like to help you but it cannot be done. It is simply not the way things happen.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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On beginning and end, Lao Tzu says:That which lies still is easy to hold;that which is not yet manifest is easy to forestall;that which is brittle (like ice) easily melts;that which is minute easily scatters.Deal with a thing before it is there;check disorder before it is rife.A tree with a full span’s girth begins from a tiny sprout.A nine-story terrace begins with a clod of earth.A journey of a thousand li begins at one’s feet.He who acts, spoils;he who grasps, lets slip.Because the sage does not act, he does not spoil;because he does not grasp, he does not let slip.The affairs of men are often spoiled within an ace of completion,by being careful at the end as at the beginningfailure is averted.Therefore the sage desires to have no desire,and values not objects difficult to obtain.Learns that which is unlearned,and restores what the multitude have lost.That he may assist in the course of natureand not presume to interfere.A Chinese allegory tells about a monk who was in search of Buddha. He traveled for years and years and then finally he arrived in the country where Buddha lived. Just a river had to be crossed and he would be face-to-face with Buddha. He was ecstatic.He inquired whether he could get a ferry or boat to go to the other shore, for the river was very wide. But people on the shore informed him, “Nobody will be able to take you there because there is a legend that whoever goes to the other shore never comes back. So nobody will dare to take you there. You will have to swim.”Afraid of course, because the river was very wide, but still finding no other way, the monk started swimming. Just in the middle of the river he saw a corpse floating, coming closer and closer toward him. He became afraid; he wanted to avoid the corpse. He tried in many ways to dodge it, but he couldn’t; the corpse proved very tricky. However he tried, the corpse was coming closer and closer.Then finding no way to escape from it – and, moreover, curiosity also possessed him because the corpse seemed to be the corpse of a Buddhist monk: the ochre robe, the clean-shaved head – taking courage he allowed the corpse to come near; in fact rather on the contrary he himself swam toward the corpse.He looked at the face and started laughing madly, because it was his own corpse. He could not believe his eyes, but it was so. He looked again and again, but it was his own corpse.And then the corpse floated by down the river, and he looked at all his past going with it – all that he has learned, all that he has possessed, all that he has been, the ego, the center of his mind, the self – everything floated off with the corpse. He was totally empty.Now there was no need to go to the other shore. No need to go to the other shore because once his past had been taken by the river he himself was Buddha. He started laughing because he had been searching for the Buddha without and the buddha was within.He came back laughing to the same shore he had left just a few minutes before, but nobody could recognize him. He even told people, “I am the same man!” but they laughed. He was not the same man.He was not really. And that was the reason for the legend that whoever goes to the other shore, nobody comes back. Everybody had come back, but they were not the same: the old was dead and the absolutely new had come in its place.I would like this allegory to be as deeply implanted in your being as possible. This is going to be your future. If you really go on and on journeying toward the buddhaland to become the ultimate, to know the ultimate, one day or other you will come to the wide river where all that you have done, all that you can do, all that you have possessed, all that you can possess, all that you have been, all that you can be – all is taken by the wide river. It moves with the flow, slowly toward the ocean and you are left totally alone, with no possessions, with no body, with no mind. In that aloneness flowers the flower of Buddha. You have come to the buddhaland. You have come to know the Tao.These sutras of Lao Tzu are methods to attain the inner buddhaland. Now, try to understand the sutras.That which lies still is easy to hold…You have been trying, in a thousand and one ways, to hold yourself, to control yourself, but you have not been able to because the mind is not still. When the mind is not still you cannot hold it. When it is still it is no more, it is not there – and that is the only way to hold it.You cannot control the mind. In fact, people who control the mind are the people who don’t have the mind. It is a misnomer to say that they control the mind. People who have the mind never control it, cannot control it. If the mind is there, the mind will control you. If the mind is not there, only then can you control it, and the mind is not there when it is still.So when people say, “I would like to have a still mind, a silent mind, a peaceful mind,” they don’t know what they are saying, because the mind exists only when it is not still. There is nothing like a still mind. A still mind is a no-mind.Have you seen anything like a still storm? Have you seen anything like that? When the storm is still, it is not there. The mind is a storm, a turmoil. When it is still it is not there at all, all the waves have disappeared. If the waves are there the turmoil is there. So, if you still the mind, knowingly or unknowingly you will move in toward a state of no-mind.That which lies still is easy to hold… In fact there is no effort to hold it, it is so easy. To say it is easy is not good because easy also suggests a little difficulty in it, it is a category of difficulty. Difficult and easy have the same quality; they differ in degree, in quantity, but not in quality. No, it is not good, that’s why Lao Tzu says again and again that the truth cannot be said. When it is said it is no longer the truth.He has to use language as I have to use language, and all language is irrelevant to the innermost phenomena, to the innermost experience. All language is irrelevant, remember that. Just use the language; the language is used as a pointer.I show you the moon and the sky with my finger. My finger is not the moon, it is a pointer; don’t cling to it, forget all about it. When I was showing you my finger I was not showing you my finger, I was showing you the moon. The finger is irrelevant. The same thing can be done with a stick or something else, any pointer can do it, and the pointer has no relationship with the moon. All language works as a pointer. Lao Tzu has to say something which is not exactly so: That which lies still is easy to hold… but he is pointing in the right direction.If you want to hold yourself, if you want to control yourself, if you want to become a master of your own being… If you don’t want to be a slave, and a slave of so many masters – everybody manipulating you, maneuvering you, controlling you, oppressing you, exploiting you – enemies, friends, those who are close kith and kin and those who are foes are all maneuvering, trying to control you. If you want to be a master of yourself the only way is to still the mind, to slow down its process, to slow down its madness.As the mind is; it is running madly. Slow down the process. Persuade it to walk fast but not run. Then persuade it to walk slowly, not to walk fast. Then persuade it not to walk at all but to stand still. By and by persuade it toward a slower process.The slower the mind will be, you will be able to see the gaps between two thoughts – and in those gaps you will find yourself. In those intervals one thought has gone, another has not yet come. One cloud moves, another has not come, but in the interval, the space, between the two you can see the blue sky. That blue sky is you. And once you have a glimpse of who you are, you slow down the mind more and more because it’s so blissful.Activity of the mind is hell, inactivity of the mind is heaven – and complete disappearance of the mind is moksha. There is no word in English for moksha so I am using the same word. It means: beyond all dualities, both heaven and hell, where there is neither pain nor pleasure; simply you in your absolute purity, aloneness.That which lies still is easy to hold;that which is not yet manifest is easy to forestall…And always remember, when a disease has taken you it is difficult. It can be cured but it will take time. It could have been prevented if you had become aware before it became manifest.In Soviet Russia, a new type of photography is developing every day, photography of very, very great potential. They call it Kirlian photography. Kirlian has developed very sensitive films which can take photos of your aura, of your electric body. Through those photographs it has become possible to see if you are going to be ill within six months. The photograph will show, right now today, that after six months you are going to become a victim of T.B. or something else. You are not aware of it at all, no physician could say that you are going to be ill, you may appear perfectly healthy. The disease is not yet manifest. It has not come to the physical body, it has not even come to the mind, it is still in the electric body – which is the subtlest thing in you, what religions have been calling the astral body.The word astral comes from the word for star; astral means the star body, made of the light of the stars. It means the electric body. That’s why the science of stars is called astrology.Now Kirlian has developed a very scientific device to predict disease, and he predicts a hundred percent correct. When he says, “This disease is coming,” nobody can believe it. No physician can check it anywhere, it is nowhere – because the physician can at the most check the body, and no psychoanalyst can check it anywhere because he can check only the mind; it is still deeper, unmanifest, in the astral. And Kirlian says it can be treated there, and then it will never come.This seems to have a very, very great potential for the future. Some day or other, every hospital is going to be experimenting with the astral body. Only then can diseases disappear completely, because they will be treated before they ever come to you, before you ever become aware that they are there.This is what Lao Tzu is saying about the innermost phenomena of your being. There too, the same thing is happening. If you slow down the process you can see: anger is coming, you can see it. Anger has three stages: anger is there first in the seed, in the astral. If you are very, very alert you can feel the coming of the storm – it has not come, it is knocking at the doors. The knock is very subtle, but it can be heard. You don’t hear it because you are such a crowd within – such noise, chattering, that the subtle knock cannot be heard. But if you become a little silent you will know of anger before it reaches you. Then it can be treated very easily.The second stage is when the anger has taken possession. Then it is almost impossible to push the force back. In fact you are so possessed that you are not there to control it. When you are angry you are not, only anger is; your total being is taken possession of. It may be only for a single moment but you lose yourself in it, it envelops you. You do something for which you will repent, but you are helpless, you are a maniac, a madman.And then the third stage, when the anger has gone: then everybody becomes aware. When the anger has gone then even the most stupid person becomes aware. Then he repents, tries to find excuses for why he became angry, rationalizes it, tries to go to the other party on whom he has thrown his anger and rubbish, to be pardoned, forgiven – this is the third stage. And people in this third stage always take vows that never again will they be angry. Their vows are absolutely impotent; they are not going to help because they are taken in the third stage when the anger has gone. Then everybody is wise.You have to be aware when the anger is there. It is difficult to force it back but if you become aware when the anger is there, you will not prove harmful to anybody, you will just watch it, it will evaporate. It is impossible to push it back – it has taken possession – it will harm you, but it will not harm anybody else. You will not be angry with anybody else; you will just boil with the anger and let it be released into the vacuum, into the sky.If you become aware at the second stage, only you will be harmed, nobody else. But if you become aware at the first stage before it becomes manifest, even you will not be harmed.…that which is not yet manifest is easy to forestall… It can be stopped immediately. But then you will need a very, very deep sensitivity – and you have become almost dull, you are not sensitive. As I see it, people have lost their sensitivity completely, they are almost totally insensitive. They drag as if in sleep. They do things not knowing why they are doing them. When they have done something then they suddenly become aware: “What have I done?” Then they try and find excuses because it looks so foolish. Without any excuse, without any cause, why have you done it? And you have done the same thing many times in the past, and you are repeating it again and again. Ordinarily a man is a robot, an automaton, he repeats the same mistakes again and again. But he is unconscious.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples that if you can remain conscious for one single minute, that will do. He would give them watches and tell them to watch: Look at the watch, watch the hand which shows the seconds, and remain alert that you are watching – and whenever you feel that you have missed the awareness, immediately report it.It was almost impossible to find a man who could be alert for sixty seconds; that is, one minute. After three, four seconds – the gap, you have forgotten, your mind has moved somewhere else. Then suddenly you remember again, then again you start watching – but three, four seconds and again you forget.Gurdjieff used to say that as you are, you have no soul. He is right. How can it be said that you have soul when you don’t have consciousness at all?As you are, nothing is possible for you because all possibilities open only when you become conscious: to become conscious, to become more alert, intensely alert, so that whatever crosses your mind crosses it with perfect awareness – you know it. Buddha used to say to his disciples that even if you breathe in and out you should be aware, that now the breath is going in, now the breath has turned, is going out. Coming in, going out, coming in, going out… Not that you have to repeat it, if you repeat you will forget the breath. You have to watch it, not with words, with awareness. And Buddha made it the only meditation.He called it Anapanasati Yoga: the Yoga of watching the incoming and outgoing of breath. He said, “Nothing else is needed, this will do.” And this has done for millions of people who followed Buddha. They became more and more alert by watching the breath.If you can watch the breath you can watch anything, because the breath is a very subtle phenomenon. You become alive with the first breath – this is life. Hindus call it prana because it is the most foundational life; without it you cannot exist. First comes breathing – it is the first act that happens. Then many things follow. And then the last act is also with the breath – when the breath leaves the body.Birth begins with breath, life ends with breath – the circle is complete. If you can watch the breath you will become transcendental to both birth and death. The watcher will see: I am not the breath that started life; I am not death, the breath that stopped life; I am beyond.…that which is not yet manifest is easy to forestall… So whatever you want to change in your life and transform, rather than waiting for the third stage, be alert in the first stage. When you feel the first tremor of anger, be alert. When you feel the first tremor of sexuality, be alert. When you feel the first tremor of greed, be alert. If you miss at that point, it will be more and more difficult to tackle it.At the first moment everything is so easy – it is just like a seed. You can throw it out; you need not bother about it. But when it becomes a big tree, then it is difficult. And outer trees are one thing – you can cut them down. But this anger, greed, sex are inner trees, they become entangled with your being. When you cut them, you bleed; when you cut them, you suffer.People ask me again and again, “When we understand the source of misery, why do we go on clinging to it?” This is the reason. The misery has become part of your being; if you cut it, you bleed. It is not like a robe that you can simply slip out of, it is like your skin: if you peel your skin you will suffer. Maybe your skin is diseased. Maybe you have got eczema. But still it is your skin. You suffer, but you cannot peel it because that will be even greater suffering.People cling to misery because at least there is something to cling to. When the misery is gone there will be nothing to cling to. And at least the misery is known and familiar, an old friend; you have become attuned to it, you know it is there – an old disease. The person becomes accustomed to it. You cling to misery because to cut it is to cut your own being.Always remember to catch things while they are in the unmanifest state. Right now you catch them when they are gone. So you simply befool yourself – how can you catch a thing when it is gone? You become very wise when the anger is gone, but what is the point? You become very, very wise when you have done some nonsense thing and the act is completed; then you are wise. This wisdom is useless, this wisdom is stupid. Anybody and everybody can be wise that way.If you start a real transforming process you should become aware when something is there. Then something can be done. And if you can become aware when the thing has not yet come, then everything can be done.That which is not yet manifest is easy to forestall;that which is brittle (like ice) easily melts;that which is minute easily scatters.Deal with a thing before it is there…Looks absurd. You also deal with a thing when it is not there; and Lao Tzu also says: Deal with a thing before it is there… The difference is of after and before. You deal with the anger when it is not there but gone; and Lao Tzu says deal with it when it is not yet there, has not yet come. Deal with a thing before it is there and you will have a totally different quality to your being. You will have virginity, innocence, an uncorrupted being.…check disorder before it is rife.Don’t wait and don’t postpone. Don’t say, “We will do it tomorrow” – tomorrow never comes. Tomorrow has never been there, will never be there. It is just an image in the mind. It is always today. That which exists is always now. Only this moment exists.If you want to do something, do it here and now. Don’t postpone and don’t say, “It is such a small thing we can take care of it tomorrow.” Nothing is so small. If you are not alert, by the time tomorrow comes this thing will be great and big – and then you will be in difficulty. It may not be possible tomorrow for you to tackle it.Never leave problems incomplete, that is how you become burdened. Always live a life which is moment-to-moment complete. Whatever you have to do, do it now. Whatever you have to say, say it now. Whatever you have to be, be it now. Don’t say “Tomorrow,” tomorrow is a fool’s land. That is the way stupidity goes on – postponing. If you can complete everything this moment you are always fresh for the next moment, there is no hangover. And if death comes to such a person he is always ready and happy, because he has never left anything incomplete. He is always ready because he is always complete.If death comes to you, you will be in trouble because a thousand and one things are incomplete and you would like to have a little more time. Because you always wanted to do some things and you have never done them.In fact, you have completed useless things and useful things you have been postponing. If you postpone anger for tomorrow, that may be good, but you never postpone anger for tomorrow. Anger you do right now, love you postpone for tomorrow. Greed you do now, sharing you postpone for tomorrow. Violence you do now, compassion – you say, “We will see tomorrow.” All nonsense you do right now, you don’t wait for tomorrow – and all that is beautiful you go on pushing it away for some other day.Misery you never postpone, bliss you always postpone. So when death comes you have led a miserable life; blessings, benedictions, you have been postponing. And now comes death and you cry and you weep and you say, “A little more time, because I have never really lived.” Do just the opposite: bliss this moment. Misery can be postponed – there is no hurry. And if you are blissful this moment, misery will never happen because this moment is the total, all that is there. The next moment comes, and that moment will be coming out of this moment. If you are blissful this moment, the next moment will come more blissful out of it.And when death comes you will say, “I am perfectly ready because I have been postponing only miseries, so it is good you have come.” Now there is no need, now tomorrow disappears completely.This is what a wise man goes on doing. He tackles every problem this moment. He tackles every situation this moment.Great energy is released if you complete things. Have you watched it in yourself? If you don’t complete something it remains on your head, knocking, to be completed. Until you complete it, it goes on hovering around you, haunting you. It may be a small thing but it goes on hovering. Finish it!If you can complete everything each moment – and I say it can be done because I do it, so I am not saying something theoretical, I am saying something absolutely practical. It can be done, it has been done, but by very few people. Once you know the knack of it you will laugh at yourself. It is so simple – just like a key you turn and the lock opens. If you observe, you will see that if you have completed everything, in the night the dreams will disappear, because dreams are incomplete experiences of the day which are trying to complete themselves.And if dreams disappear then thoughts will disappear because dreams and thoughts are the same thing. Dreams are in the primitive language of visualization – picture language – and thoughts are nothing but sophisticated dreams, daydreams. Dreaming and thinking are two aspects of the same process.You are going to have an interview. You rehearse in the mind what you are going to say, what those people there will ask you – you rehearse many things. Then you go there and then suddenly your rehearsal doesn’t fit.It cannot because those people don’t know about your rehearsal. They ask you something, and you are not in the present because you are too filled with your own rehearsal, your own preparation. They ask you something, you understand something else. You answer with your ready-made answer and they have not been asking for it. You miss the point. When you miss the point, when you are out of the room again you start thinking what you should have answered. Again the process starts. Rehearsal, then retrospective thinking. And at the moment, exactly at the moment when you were needed, you were not present. That’s how you are missing the whole of life.There is a Zen story. There were two temples in a town – rivals, as temples are. Each one didn’t allow their devotees to go to the other temple. They were fiercely antagonistic. And each of the priests, old priests, had a boy for odds and ends – to bring things from the market, this and that. Each one had ordered their boy not to talk to the other, in the market or on the road: “No! Those people of the other temple are so corrupted, don’t talk to them!”But boys are boys, and when you forbid a boy, tell him not to do something, he is bound to do it, it is natural. They became interested – what was the matter?So one day they met on the road while they were going to the market to fetch something. The boy from temple one asked the other boy, “Where are you going?”The other boy said, “Wherever my legs will take me” – listening to great metaphysical things he had also become a metaphysician. He was just going to the market to fetch vegetables but he said, “Wherever my feet will take me – I live in spontaneity!” The other boy was puzzled because he was defeated, he couldn’t prove his metaphysics.He came back and he asked his master what to do: “You have prohibited me, but I am foolish. They are really bad people – I asked the boy a simple question, ‘Where are you going?’ and he started talking nonsense, but he defeated me. I feel hurt.”The master said, “You should not be. Ask again tomorrow. He will say, ‘Wherever my feet will take me,’ and then you ask him a Zen koan: ‘If you had no feet then where would you go?’ Then he will be put right.”The next day the boy waited for the other boy to come. The other boy came; the first boy was ready, he asked, “Where are you going?”The other boy said, “I live spontaneously. Wherever the wind will take me.” He didn’t talk about feet.The first boy was at a loss what to do: “These people are really very cunning, and not reliable either. He has changed!”He went back very angry and said to the master, “You are right, these people are very contradictory, inconsistent, not reliable at all. I was ready but the boy had changed his mind. He said, ‘Wherever the wind takes me. I am like a white cloud.’ So what to say? Because clouds don’t have any feet, legs, so how to…?”The master said, “I know them well. These people are very inconsistent. Tomorrow again ask him, ‘Where are you going?’ He will say, ‘Wherever the wind takes me. I am a white cloud.’ Ask him, ‘If the wind is not blowing, where will you be going?’”Next day the boy was ready again.This boy is your mind. You prepare it again and again to face life, and again and again it fails because no ready-made answer can be of any use. Life is inconsistent, life is not reliable at all. The boy asked, “Where are you going now?” The other boy said, “I am going to the market to fetch vegetables.” Now what to do?Never move in life with a ready-made answer; otherwise you will never meet life. You waste time in preparing, getting ready – and then you have missed life.It happened…Mark Twain was going back home with his wife after delivering a lecture at a university. His wife said – because she was not there to hear him, she had come just to take him home – she asked, “How was the lecture?”Mark Twain looked at her and asked, “Which lecture are you talking about? The one that I prepared or the one that I delivered or the one that I would have liked to deliver – which lecture?”You prepare something, something else you deliver, something else you would have liked to deliver, and the time is wasted – and meanwhile life is flowing by. And you go on collecting garbage.Then you are afraid of death – otherwise death would be a beautiful rest. One would be ready to relax; you lived your day, you loved, you lived, you delighted, you celebrated. Now the moment has come, the evening has come and you would like to rest. And if the whole wills, you will be back again in the morning: fresh, young, capable of living again – but that is not your worry.A tree with a full span’s girth begins from a tiny sprout.A nine-storied terrace begins with a clod of earth.A journey of a thousand li begins at one’s feet.So don’t be bothered about the goal. The first step is the last also. The beginning is the end. This moment is all. A journey of a thousand miles begins at one’s feet.Don’t be worried about the goal – just enjoy, delight in taking the first step; and the second step will come out of the first, and the third will follow. You need not worry about it. Let the morrow take care of itself. Don’t think of the morrow. Enjoy! This step is beautiful. And enjoy it so much that the means itself becomes the end.This has to be understood, otherwise you will be always missing, because you will be tired on the journey and you will be dreaming about the goal; and how can a tired journey reach a celebrating goal?Can you see the simple mathematics? How can a tired journey reach a celebrating goal? Because the goal will come out of the journey. It will really be the total of the whole journey. If I have lived the goal in each step, if I have celebrated the goal in each step, only then will I reach the goal where I can celebrate it in totality.But if you somehow drag yourself – you are not bothered what is happening right now, you are looking for tomorrow, the goal – then you may reach, but the goal will be as dusty as the journey. The goal is not out there, it depends on you. You have to change your quality of experiencing. So remember, says Lao Tzu: A tree with a full span’s girth begins from a tiny sprout. If you want it, pour your whole being on it. If you don’t want it, it is better to cut it now than wait for tomorrow.A nine-storied terrace begins with a clod of earth. If you want it, it’s okay; if you don’t want it then don’t wait until the whole nine-storied terrace is ready and then decide you would like to destroy it. Destroy it right now. Each moment has its ultimacy, and each moment is urgent. You have to act in this moment.A journey of a thousand li begins at one’s feet. If you want to go on the journey – then go dancing. If you don’t want to go on the journey, then don’t go. But don’t drag yourself.But this is how things go on happening. People come to me and they say, “We don’t know, we are not even certain whether we want to meditate or not. But we have come all the same.” If you are not certain whether you want to meditate or not, then the first thing is to be certain. Otherwise you will do something which is not going to be wholehearted. Otherwise you will do something and you will repent. And later on you may want to destroy it and then it will be very, very difficult.To learn something is difficult, but not as difficult as to unlearn a thing. Be certain. If you don’t want to do meditation, drop the idea. Nothing is wrong in it: the right moment has not come for you. Wait. Do other things that you really want to do right now. Let that be your meditation.If you want to earn money – let that be your meditation. Earn money. Someday when you are frustrated, then the right moment will come. If you want to move in power politics – move! Eternity is not in a hurry. Existence is not in a hurry. It can wait. Do whatever you want to do, and there is enough time. That is the meaning of the Eastern concept of rebirth: there is enough time. Millions of lives have been there and millions of lives will be there. Take your time – and take it easy. Whatever you want to do, do it, because only through doing does one grow and become mature.If it is not the moment for your meditation – let it be so. And don’t feel guilty. If it is the moment for your meditation, then move totally. How can you go on a long journey with a halfhearted mind? How can you go on a journey with only a part of your being? The other part will be pulling you back, pulling you in other directions, and you will become a mess. That’s what has happened.The modern mind is schizophrenic, split, because so many directions are calling, pulling, and you are moving in all directions simultaneously. One hand going to the north, another hand going to the south, legs moving to the east and the eyes are fixed on the west – this is the situation. If you fall apart, it is natural, it is not an accident. If you feel that you are not together – obviously it has to be so. How can you be together?Decide. Be certain. And decide on the first step so not a single moment is wasted unnecessarily.A journey of a thousand li begins at one’s feet.He who acts, spoils;he who grasps, lets slip.Because the sage does not act, he does not spoil;because he does not grasp, he does not let slip.Lao Tzu continuously comes to the same thing again and again, it is his basic note: doing without doing, wu-wei. Action without action. Effortless effort. Difficult to understand, not difficult to do. Because if you try to understand intellectually, it is patent nonsense: you are talking gibberish.That’s what Arthur Koestler reported to the West. He went to study Zen in the East – and Zen is Buddha and Lao Tzu together. The highest peak of Indian understanding, Buddha, and the highest peak of Chinese understanding, Lao Tzu – and Zen is a cross between these two. A child of both. So there is nothing like Zen, it is the rarest flower in the world. Nothing reaches to the depth as Zen reaches. Nothing touches the climax as Zen touches.Arthur Koestler, one of the very, very keen intellectuals of the West, went to the East to understand what Zen was all about, and he tried hard to understand. That’s why he missed. He reported, “This is all nonsense.” It is nonsense. If you try to understand intellectually, it is nonsense – because the intellect knows only one thing: if you do something, only then is it done. If you don’t do, it is not done.But being knows a greater secret, that there are things…if you do them you will undo, if you don’t do them they happen.For example: love. Can you do it? If you do it, at the most you can act. It will not be true, it will not be authentic. It will not come from your being, it will be just from your head. And love from the head is as dead as anything can be. There will be gestures, but impotent, empty; there will be no content in them. You will kiss a woman you don’t love; the kiss will be there, but only the physiology of the kiss. If you go to a physician he will say, “Yes, this woman has been kissed” – because it can be detected. When you kiss a person you transfer thousands of very small germs. It can be detected who has kissed the woman; your germs will be found on her lips. But it will be difficult, impossible, for the physician to decide whether the man really loved her or not because love leaves no germs. Love is absolutely undetectable.Somebody can embrace you, somebody can kiss you, somebody can even make love to you, without love – all these gestures can be done. They will be hollow and empty. They will be dead and your heart will know that the man is doing the movements, or the woman is doing the movements, but she or he is not in it.You cannot do love. Either it happens or it doesn’t happen. You have to wait for it. You cannot manage and maneuver, you cannot manipulate: love is greater than you, how can you manipulate it? You can at the most allow it. Or you can hinder it, but you cannot force it.It is just like when the sun has risen; you can close your doors – then the rays will not enter your house. You can live in darkness, and the sun will not knock at your doors and he will not try to force his way in. He will not in any way interfere with you. If you are happy with your closed doors and darkness, it is okay with the sun; he is not worried. You can open the doors – and the sun enters – but you cannot bring the sun in. You cannot force the sun in, the sun is there: you can hinder or you can allow, but you cannot force. You cannot catch hold of the rays, fill a bucket with the rays and carry it into your house. That won’t do. The bucket will come in, the rays will be left behind.Love is greater than you. If you want to love, you have to be a non-doer; this is wu-wei, action in inaction.But forget love because love is a rare phenomenon. So many people think they love but it is as rare as any other great art. Many people – bathroom singers – think they are singers, they are just like bathroom lovers. There are very, very few singers whose song carries their inner silence, who sing that which cannot be sung, who try to convey that which is inexpressible, ineffable – it happens rarely.You can write poetry, but poets are rare in the world. Poetry can be written by anybody; in fact everybody tries some day or other to write poetry. There is an age when everybody is foolish enough to try poetry. But then one drops it. You can have the rhythm, the meter, the grammar – everything right, and still the poetry is not there. Because it is not something that you can do, a poet is born not made. A lover is also born not made. It is as rare as a great poet, as rare as a great musician, as rare as a great painter. But at least about love people can console themselves that they also are lovers.Everybody thinks that he loves, but the experience is very, very rare because to love is to know the greatest secret of wu-wei. You will become enlightened if you love. If you love you have already reached, because you know the secret – the same secret will do for your enlightenment also.So, leave that example aside, that won’t do. Something more basic that everybody knows: for example, sleep. If you try to sleep you will not be able to sleep. The more you try, the more impossible it becomes to sleep. That is the problem for those people who suffer from insomnia. There are advisers who give them advice, do this and that: count from one to a hundred, and then come back from a hundred to one. But the more you count, the more alert the mind is. And to count backward: hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight…you have to be more alert than ever. You can count millions and in the end you will find that sleep is not coming.Mulla Nasruddin was suffering from insomnia. He went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said, “There is nothing to it.” Not that psychiatry knows what to do but experts have to pretend. He said, “Do one thing. You deal in wool, you know sheep – count sheep, go on counting, from one go on and on and on, finally you will fall asleep.”The next day Nasruddin came running, almost mad. He entered the office of the psychiatrist and he was so angry and so violent the psychiatrist became afraid. He asked, “What is the matter, Nasruddin?”Nasruddin said, “Before your method I used to sleep at least two, three hours, but last night I couldn’t sleep even that because I went on and on, thousands of sheep… And then I thought, ‘This won’t do,’ so I started cutting their wool: piles and piles of wool… Then I thought, ‘This won’t do,’ so I started making blankets, which is my business… Ten thousand blankets! Now who’s going to purchase? You drove me completely mad. Now these ten thousand blankets are on my head. And then the market is low, and things are not going good, and it is difficult to find purchasers…”This happens. There is no way to help a person who is having difficulty in falling asleep. The only way is to say to him, “Don’t do anything. Just wait, don’t do anything.” Whatever you do, doing is against sleep because sleep is a non-doing phenomenon. Sleep comes, you don’t bring it. Suddenly you find it is there, you are enveloped, lost. Ask good sleepers will say, “We don’t do anything, we just put our heads on the pillow, put the light off – and there we go.” There is nothing to do.And the same is true about enlightenment – there is nothing to do. You put the light off, rest on the pillow, and there you go!Enlightenment is a deep rest. The ego is activity, egolessness is inactivity; it is passive, it is not a male attitude. It is not aggressive, it is a feminine phenomenon. And Lao Tzu goes on insisting that all those who attain the ultimate attain only when they attain a feminine attitude.What is a feminine attitude? It is passivity. A woman is never aggressive in love and if she is, she is not a woman, she must have more male hormones in her body than are necessary for her.A woman waits. Even if she falls in love with someone she never says so. She never takes the initiative; she never goes and says, “I love you.” She waits. When the person says, “I love you,” even then she will not be too eager to say yes because that is not feminine. That’s why poets say, “When a woman says no, don’t believe her, because almost always when she wants to say yes she says no.”That is the feminine way of being passive and receptive, of inviting, but no aggression. The world needs aggression, your innermost being needs no aggression. You cannot attack existence. You cannot conquer existence. You have to surrender. The very word conquering is foolish in that reference, but in the world you have to conquer. The world is male-oriented.All true religion is feminine, has to be, and all worldliness is male-oriented; the male ego – to conquer. The feminine wants to be conquered – and this is wu-wei. It is just like sleep, it comes, you simply wait. You don’t do anything. It is like love: you invite and just wait. It comes when the time is ripe.He who acts, spoils;he who grasps, lets slip.Because the sage does not act, he does not spoil;because he does not grasp, he does not let slip.The affairs of men are often spoiled within an ace of completion,by being careful at the end as at the beginningfailure is averted.And be careful, as careful in the beginning as at the end, and be careful at the end as you were careful in the beginning. Don’t treat the beginning and end separately, they are the same.There are people who are very enthusiastic in the beginning, their type is always enthusiastic in the beginning; when they fall in love with a woman they are really mad, happy, but sooner or later they settle down and then all the happiness, the delight, the celebration is gone. In the beginning anybody can be very, very excited because something…Just the other day Samarpan came back from the States and said that he had been half-half, thinking about whether to come back or not. He had been here just a few months before and his mind said, “Now the honeymoon is over” – the honeymoon with me. But I told him, “With me the honeymoon is never over, it always is. And greater honeymoons are awaiting.”A honeymoon that comes to a point when it is over was not a honeymoon at all. Real lovers love to the very end. On the last day they are as deeply in love as they were on the first day. Their love is not an excitement. Excitement is feverish, you cannot remain in fever forever, you have to settle and become normal. But real love is not like a fever. It is like breathing, it goes on and on. A honeymoon that ends was not a honeymoon at all. If there is love, the whole of life becomes a honeymoon: each moment of it is new, each moment brings new revelations. So I told Samarpan, “Just wait, a greater honeymoon is ahead.” And it is always so. But remember to treat the end as you treat the beginning.…by being careful at the end as at the beginningfailure is averted.Therefore the sage desires to have no desire,and values not objects difficult to obtain.Learns that which is unlearned,and restores what the multitude have lost.That he may assist in the course of natureand not presume to interfere.…the sage desires to have no desire… The only desire worth desiring is that you should have no desires. Because all desires create misery. Desire means you have moved to tomorrow. Life is here, desire is always somewhere else. Living is in this moment, desire is always somewhere in the future. Desire is postponement, desire is dreams and hopes. Desire is not reality.In the East we call the world illusory, maya. Not because these trees there are illusory, no; they are as real as you are. Not that the mountains are unreal and the Himalayas are not real, they are as real as you are – more so. Then why do we call the world illusory? By the world we mean the world of the desires, not the world of things. The world of your desires that surrounds you – that is illusory, maya, a dream. And because of that world, you cannot live this world which is real.If you drop all desires you are face-to-face with reality. You encounter reality. You start living it. And that is a benediction; that’s a beautiful moment. If you miss that, you miss all. If you attain that, you have attained all. …the sage desires to have no desire…It is reported of Junnaid, a Sufi mystic, that he became very high in his purity, in his attainment, in his renunciation. Then one day a messenger from God came to him – remember, these are parables, don’t take them literally – the messenger from God said, “God is very happy with you. You have earned much, now you can ask for whatever you desire.”Junnaid started laughing. He said, “This is foolish because my master has told me to leave and drop all desire. So I have dropped all desire – and you come when I have dropped all desire. You should have come a little earlier! This is absolutely foolish. Now I have no desires and you are there and you say, ‘Ask, whatever you ask for will be fulfilled.’ Now your coming is useless.”But the messenger insisted, he said, “This will be an insult to the divine. You have to ask for something because when God wants to give, you cannot say no. It is a gift. Take it – whatever! Anything, but you have to ask.”So Junnaid closed his eyes – what to do? He was in a fix because all desires had dropped, and now there was no desire. Then he opened his eyes and he said, “Then tell God that my only desire is that I should have no desires ever. Fulfill my desire – the desire to be desireless.”It is not a desire really, it is a dropping of all desire. If it is a desire – if it really is a desire, that there should be no desire – then this desire is enough to become a barrier. No, it is not a desire, it is just a way of speaking.…the sage desires to have no desire, and values not objects difficult to obtain. He values things which are easy to obtain. You value things which are difficult to obtain; the more difficult, the more you value them. The value of a Kohinoor is not the value of the Kohinoor, it has this value because it is difficult to obtain. If there were Kohinoors all around on every street, nobody would bother about them. Who would think about them? But it is difficult to obtain: the rarity of it is the only cause of its value. Otherwise you cannot eat it, you cannot drink it. If you are alone, the whole of humanity has disappeared and you have the Kohinoor, what will you do? You will throw it away because what is the point in carrying it?A sage: …values not objects difficult to obtain. Simple things, he values. If he can get food for his hunger, he is so happy that even Alexander was not so happy when he became the great emperor of almost the whole of the world. When the sage is thirsty, if he can get a little water to quench his thirst, he is so happy that you cannot believe it. Little things that are not difficult to obtain, he values – that’s why he lives in peace.You value difficult things. You will live always in a turmoil, your life will be a nightmare, and when you have obtained those difficult things there are things still more difficult to attain. And it goes on ad infinitum. There is no end to it.Learns that which is unlearned…When you were born you did not know anything, you carried no information with you, no knowledge – but you carried consciousness, awareness, alertness. You carried being, not knowledge. A sage tries to become a child again. He tries to know that which cannot be learned, that which is already within you: there is no need to go to any school to learn about it. In fact, you can learn other things only because that unlearned being is there already inside you. That’s why you can learn other things.Learns that which is unlearned, and restores what the multitude have lost. What have you lost? – the innocence of a child. He attains it again, he restores it. Sainthood is not something new, it is just restoring the innocence of a child.That he may assist in the course of nature and not presume to interfere. He wants only one thing – that he becomes a part of nature and not an interfering ego; that he flows with nature and does not fight with it; that he goes with the river and there is no fight and resistance in him.If you can flow with the river of life, suddenly you will see your own corpse flowing down the river – all past gone, all that you have learned gone, all that you possessed gone. Pure simple being is there, and that is what it is to be a buddha.The word buddha means: one who is awake, not asleep. You become a buddha by seeing your ego, your possessions, your learning, knowledge, everything – your corpse, the dead past – being taken by the river.If you float with the river, sooner or later you will come to encounter your corpse. If you fight with the river, then you will never come to encounter your own corpse. And blessed is the man who has seen his own corpse flowing down the river of life.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01-10Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You have said that there are no goals in life, no purpose. And yet we are all here with enlightenment as our goal. Please speak on this.If you are here with enlightenment as your goal you cannot be here. Physically you may appear to be here, but you cannot be with me. The goal is in the future, I am here! And a mind which is goal-oriented is bound to be in the future – we will never meet.I know you are here to attain something – that’s why you are missing it. I am here to persuade you to drop the very idea of attaining anything whatever: enlightenment, moksha, nirvana, God, included. If you drop this goal-oriented mind – and there are none but goal-oriented minds, there is no other mind – if you drop it, you are enlightened.Enlightenment is not a search, it is a realization. It is not a goal. It is the very nature of life itself. As life is, it is enlightened. It needs nothing to be added to it, to improve it. Life is perfect. It is not moving from imperfection to perfection, it is moving from perfection to perfection.You are here to attain something. That is functioning as a barrier. Drop that barrier. Just be here! Forget about a purpose; life cannot have any purpose. Life is the purpose, how can it have any other purpose? Otherwise you will be in an infinite regress: then that purpose will have another purpose, then that other purpose will have another purpose… Life has no purpose and that’s why it is so beautiful.Hindus have called it leela, play. It is not even a game. Now in the West the word game has become very, very important. Hundreds of books have been published within two, three years with game in the title: The Master Game, The Ultimate Game, Games People Play, and so on and so forth. But there is a difference between a game and play. Hindus have called life “play,” not a game. Because even a game has something as a purpose: a result to be attained, victory to be achieved, the opponent has to be conquered. Then play becomes a game; then it becomes serious.Grown-ups play games, children only play. Just the very activity is enough unto itself. It has an intrinsic end, there is no goal added to it. Life is a leela, it is a play, and the moment you are ready to play, you are enlightened.Try to understand from some other dimension. You are already that which you are trying to be. The more you try, the more you will miss. Leave all effort, simply accept yourself, just be that – and suddenly it is there. It has always been there but you were seeking so seriously, and that was the only cause of missing it.You are here to attain something: enlightenment, samadhi, satori – or something. To me all those words are nonsense because they give you again a new line of desiring. They again open the door of desire. In the world you desire money, power, prestige. Then you get fed up with it, then you see the whole thing is just rubbish – even if you get it you are defeated, if you don’t get it you are defeated. Then you come to feel that this whole thing is nonsense. Now suddenly you start playing new games: enlightenment, meditation, Yoga, God, the other world, the other shore. Again the mind is at ease. A new world of desire has opened; now you will be after those goals.And money is not as elusive as meditation. This world at least is solid; that shore, that world, the other world, is absolutely fantasy. Now you are in a deeper ditch than before. With the first you could realize that it is useless, with the second it will take millions of lives to realize that this too is useless.When a person comes to discover that all goals are useless – with no exception all goals are useless – then there is nothing to do, one just has to be. One relaxes, one relaxes so totally because there is nothing to do; there is no tension. Suddenly your boundaries melt like snow melting in the morning sun. With nothing to do, you disappear; the ego disappears. With nothing to do, nothing to be, nothing to achieve, who will you be? The whole identity evaporates. This is enlightenment.Then you start a totally different way of life. You start being playful, you start being alive moment to moment with nowhere to go – whatever life gives, you accept it with deep gratitude. Grace happens to you. This is what I call becoming a god. The moment you start playing, living in the moment, you have become a god.I am here to persuade you that you are already gods. You may be here to become gods – that’s your trip. I’m not concerned with it. I know what I am here for: just to persuade you to look at your own face once again; to search within and not to go without, searching for something which doesn’t exist.Life is a purposeless play, a play of infinite forces – beautiful if you don’t have an achiever’s mind, ugly if you have ambition to become something, to be something, to do something. Relax. Drop the future completely. Only this moment exists, and this moment is eternity. And this life is all that is there, don’t think of the other shore.Just the other day I was telling you the Chinese allegory of the man who returned from the middle of the river. Why did he return from the middle of the river? – because there is no other shore, this is the only shore. And why did he start laughing? – because he suddenly realized he himself is the Buddha whom he has been seeking.Zen masters teach their disciples that if while meditating someday you come across Buddha – kill him immediately. Don’t spare a single moment – kill him immediately! Otherwise he will lead you astray. They are right. While you are meditating, Krishna comes with his flute; it is so beautiful. Again you are dreaming, again you are caught in dreams and desires. And Jesus comes, and you are caught in the web of the mind; it is a spider’s web. And then Buddha comes, and you forget yourself.So Zen masters say, “Kill the Buddha immediately.” Clear the way. Don’t allow anybody else to be there; that is, don’t allow any goal to be there. Just be total, alone – in your absolute purity. This is enlightenment.I should repeat because I know you will forget and forget and forget: you are already that which you are seeking. Let this be the basic mantra. If you can understand this mantra, you have understood all.Give it a try. To goals you have been giving – too many lives you have already given to them. Now try to live moment to moment, as if there is no future. In the beginning it will be only as if, but by and by you will become aware that that as if is the only reality. In the beginning it may be just like acting. Soon you will realize that this acting is the only reality.You have come with a goal, but I won’t allow you to remain with a goal. If you don’t escape me the goal is bound to drop. Just hang around a little more and the goal is bound to drop. Either I can be here with you or the goal can: you have to choose.The second question:Osho,What is the difference between reaction and response?There is much, a lot of difference, not only in quantity but quality. A reaction is out of the past, a response is out of the present. You react out of the past old patterns.Somebody insults you: suddenly the old mechanism starts functioning. In the past, people have insulted you and you have behaved in a certain way; you behave in the same way again. You are not responding to this insult and this man, you are simply repeating an old habit. You have not looked at this man and this new insult – it has a different flavor – you are just functioning like a robot. You have a certain mechanism inside you and you push the button. You say, “This man has insulted me” and you react. The reaction is not to the real situation, it is something projected. You have seen the past in this man.It happened…Buddha was sitting under a tree talking to his disciples. A man came and spat on his face. Buddha wiped it off and he asked the man, “What next? What do you want to say next?”The man was a little puzzled because he never expected that when you spit on somebody’s face he will ask, “Now, what next?” He had had no such experience in his past. He had insulted people and they had become angry, and they had reacted; or if they were cowards and weaklings they had smiled, trying to bribe the man. But Buddha was like neither. He was not angry, nor in any way offended, nor in any way cowardly, but just matter of fact. He said, “What next?” There was no reaction on his part.His disciples became angry – they reacted. Buddha’s closest disciple, Ananda, said, “This is too much, we cannot tolerate it. You keep your teaching and we will just show this man that he cannot do what he has done. He has to be punished for it. Otherwise everybody will start doing things like this.”Buddha said, “Keep silent. He has not offended me, but you are offending me. He is new, a stranger, and he may have heard something about me from somebody – has formed some idea, a notion of me. He has not spat on me; he has spat on his notion, his idea of me. He does not know me at all, so how can he spit on me? He must have heard from people something about me – that this man is an atheist, a dangerous man who is throwing people off their track, a revolutionary, a corrupter. He must have heard something about me. He has a notion, an idea and he has spat on his own idea.“If you think on it deeply,” Buddha said, “he has spat on his own mind. I am not part of it, and I can see that this poor man must have something else to say – because this is a way of saying something; spitting is a way of saying something.”There are moments when you feel that language is impotent: in deep love, in intense anger, in hate, in prayer. There are intense moments when language is impotent. Then you have to do something – when you are in deep love you kiss the person or embrace the person. What are you doing? You are saying something. When you are angry, intensely angry, you hit the person, you spit on him – you are saying something.“I can understand him. He must have something more to say, that’s why I’m asking, ‘What next?’”The man was even more puzzled.And Buddha said to his disciples, “I am more offended by you because you know me, and you have lived for years with me, and still you react.”Puzzled, confused, the man returned home. He could not sleep the whole night. It is difficult, when you see a buddha, it is difficult to sleep again the way you used to sleep before. Impossible. Again and again he was haunted by the experience; he could not explain it to himself, what had happened. He was trembling all over and perspiring, he had never come across such a man. Buddha had shattered his whole mind and his whole pattern, his whole past.The next morning he was back there. He threw himself at Buddha’s feet and Buddha asked him again, “What next?”This too is a way of saying something that cannot be said in language. When you come and touch my feet you are saying something which cannot be said ordinarily, for which all words are a little narrow, it cannot be contained in them.Buddha said, “Look, Ananda. This man is here again, he is saying something. This man is a man of deep emotions.”The man looked at Buddha and said, “Forgive me for what I have done yesterday.”Buddha said, “Forgive? But I am not the same man to whom you did it. The Ganges goes on flowing. It is never the same Ganges again. Every man is a river. The man you spat upon is no longer here. I look just like him but I am not the same; much has happened in these twenty-four hours! The river has flowed so much. Only in appearance I look the same. So I cannot forgive you because I have no grudge against you. And you also are new. I can see you are not the same man who came yesterday, because that man was angry. He was anger, he spat – and you are bowing at my feet, touching my feet, how can you be the same man? You are not the same man. So let us forget about it. Those two – the man who spat and the man on whom he spat – are no more. Come closer. Let us talk of something else.”This is response. Reaction is out of the past. If you react, out of old habits, out of the mind, then you are not responding. To be responsive is to be totally alive in this moment, herenow.Response is a beautiful phenomenon, it is life; reaction is dead, ugly, rotten, it is a corpse. Ninety-nine percent of the time you react, and you call it a response. Rarely does it happen in your life that you respond. But whenever it happens, you have a glimpse; whenever it happens, the door to the unknown opens.Go back to your home and look at your wife with response not with reaction. I see people, they may have lived with a woman for thirty years, forty years – they have stopped looking at her. They know she is the old wife, the old woman; they think they know her, but the river has been flowing all the time. This woman is not the same one to whom they got married; that is a past phenomenon, that woman exists nowhere now. This is totally a new woman.Every moment you are being born anew. Every moment you die and every moment you are born. But have you looked lately at your wife, your mother, your father, your friend? You have stopped looking because you think they are all old, so what is the point of looking at them? Go back and look again with fresh eyes, as you would look at a stranger – and you will be surprised at how much this old woman has changed.Tremendous changes happen every day. It is a flux, everything goes on flowing, nothing is frozen. But the mind is a dead thing. It is a frozen phenomenon. If you act from the frozen mind you live a dead life – you don’t live really, you are already in the grave.Drop reactions. And allow more and more responses. To be responsive is to be responsible. To be responsive, to be responding, is to be sensitive – but sensitive to here and now.The third question:Osho,If one has no desire for one's own enlightenment, but only for that of others, does one have a problem?No, you won’t have a problem but you will create problems for others – and many problems for others. There are many do-gooders; they only do harm. Never be a do-gooder because good cannot be done. You can be good, but then it flows; it is not an act on your part, you don’t do it. When you do good, harm results.So all the people who go on trying to do good to others are the most mischievous people – they may call themselves servants of the people, servants of God. All sorts of bombastic words they may use about themselves, but they are hiding a fact, a totally different fact, under these words: they are mischief makers.If you do not desire your own enlightenment, how can you desire it for others? If it is really something of worth you will first desire it for yourself; if it is worthless, then you can desire it for others.Once it happened…Mulla Nasruddin was working with his boss. The man gave him a bottle of brandy. He was surprised because he had never given anything. He could not believe it.The next day the boss asked how it was. Mulla said, “It was perfectly right.”The boss could not understand what he meant by “Perfectly right,” so he asked, “What do you mean by saying that it was perfectly right?”Mulla said, “Had it been better you would not have given it to me. Had it been worse I would have given it to somebody else.”You give things only when they are worthless.You desire enlightenment for others? How can you desire it for others if you have not desired it for yourself? If you have not tasted it yourself how can you help others to be enlightened? Please don’t do such a foolish thing. There are many who are doing it and because of them, man lives in much unnecessary confusion. First desire for yourself – and know well that by desiring you will not attain it, but by desiring you will come to understand that desiring has to be dropped.But remember, you cannot drop something that you don’t have. Enlightenment is attained by dropping the desire for it, but you have to have desire to drop – otherwise everybody would become enlightened; whoever does not desire enlightenment would become enlightened. So don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that those who don’t desire enlightenment will become enlightened, no, I am saying those who drop desiring enlightenment will become enlightened; but to drop a thing you have to have it first.Desire – and desire intensely, go completely mad desiring it and then you become capable of dropping it. When you feel the frustration… A great frustration happens before enlightenment, just exactly one minute – one second before somebody becomes enlightened the deepest frustration happens. One falls to the greatest hell. And enlightenment happens only then.Christian mystics have called that moment the dark night of the soul. It is a dark night of the soul; before the morn the night goes on getting darker and darker, and the darker and blacker the night becomes, the nearer comes the morning.But remember, I’m not saying don’t desire. I am saying desire, and desire hard, and desire totally, so that that beautiful moment comes in your life where you can drop desire. And become enlightened.When you are enlightened there will be no need to desire for others, you will simply be in such a way – your very voice will be such that people will be helped, your whole being will become a door to those who are seeking. Then it is nothing on your part, you don’t do anything. I am not doing anything here, I am just being here. That just being here is enough; it is a magnetic force. The just being here is enough.I allow you to be with me, something will happen out of it. A master is nothing more than a catalytic agent. He never does anything; it is just his presence. A master is not a doer. He lives an absolute passivity, not doing anything, because he knows the art of how to do without doing. Things simply happen on their own.The disciple thinks the master has helped, the master knows that he has done nothing. The disciple thinks much has been done to him – and he is right also because much has happened to him, but his understanding is not clear because he thinks, “How can something happen if it has not been done?” That is the problem for the disciple. He thinks, “The master is doing so much for me.” Because the disciple cannot understand how things can happen, such great things, without anybody doing them: I am not doing them so the master must be doing them to me.The master is also not doing. The disciple is opening himself to the master and the master is available, that’s all. He is a catalytic agent – his presence does, not he. And the disciple feels tremendously grateful, “This man has done so much” – and his gratefulness has meaning because alone he could not achieve. But when he will become enlightened, he will laugh; then he will join the master in the laughter.In Zen there is a tradition, it has happened many times: when a disciple becomes enlightened he hits the master. The master has been hitting him for many, many years, but when he becomes enlightened he hits the master – just to show that the whole thing has been such a game. You were not doing anything, and I was thinking you were doing and so many things were happening – and nothing was needed in fact because I was already that which I was seeking.But it is a very beautiful gesture, hitting the master. It shows the disciple himself has now become part of the master. He himself has become a master in his own right.And the master laughs because the disciple has arrived.The fourth question:Osho,Why is it that the habits I judge bad for me – smoking, overeating etc, are the most persistent?That will be. If you judge them bad they will be persistent, because you are creating a relationship with them. To call anything bad is to create a relationship with it. To judge a thing is to be related with it.And whenever you call a thing bad, why do you call it bad? You call it bad because it defeats you. It is powerful. You call it bad because you are impotent before it; and by name-calling, nobody is helped.So the first thing to do is: stop judging. If you want to smoke – smoke! Smoke meditatively – forget what others say about it. Smoking can be such a beautiful meditation. Don’t fight with it, smoke meditatively, create perfect rings, and enjoy the whole thing. And suddenly one day you will find the need has disappeared. The whole thing looks so foolish.Not that you judge, because when you judge then it is either good or bad. When you don’t judge something simply drops if it is useless. If you meditate while smoking you will find that meditation can be done without smoking, and better. So why unnecessarily bring this smoke in between? One day you will put the cigarette back on the table, on the ashtray, and you will never take one again – but it is not a judgment.Whenever you say something is bad you are giving roots to it. And it is always the case that good is not as powerful as bad, because good is that which others tell you to do and bad is that which you want to do. Of course the good can never be as powerful as the bad because the bad is that which you would like to do, and the good is that which others are trying to force on you to do. You resist the good. It looks like a slavery, a bondage, and bad looks like freedom.If you are forced into heaven you will run away from it and fall into hell because you will say, “At least here is freedom.” The saints, the so-called saints and the religious people, have done such terrible harm to human consciousness by forcing good things on people that it is incalculable. Rather force bad things on people so that bad becomes associated with bondage, with others’ egos, and good becomes associated with one’s own ego. Then people will be better.It happened…I used to live with a friend. He became worried one day because he had seen his son smoking. His son was very small, not more than ten years of age, and the father was very worried – he was a very good and religious man – so he asked, “What to do?”I told him, “Bring me a packet, and send your son.”I forced the boy to smoke twenty cigarettes and I threatened, if he did not finish the whole packet, I would beat him. Crying and weeping and smoking and coughing and with me standing there with a stick to beat him – finished!He told me, “Now nobody can ever force me to smoke again!”It is better if bad is associated with bondage – but it is not so associated. Your father doesn’t want you to smoke, your mother doesn’t want you to smoke, the surgeon general doesn’t want you to smoke; nobody wants you to smoke. Suddenly an urge arises to be free of all this. And you would like to smoke: that gives you a feeling of freedom, of independence, that gives you a feeling that you are now on your own, you don’t care what all these people say. They are really forcing you to smoke.Prohibit something, and you are forcing people to do it. Prohibit anything, and it will become more and more prevalent. Allow, and it falls out of use.So what to do? Smoke with meditation, don’t worry. Enjoy it. If you can enjoy it, the whole power from it will be gone. The power is very symbolic – you are rebelling against your parents, against the society – these are simple gestures of rebellion. You don’t like things as they are. But in rebelling against them you are harming yourself – that’s your foolishness.Smoking is not bad, simply harmful. It is not sin, it is simply ignorance. So there is nothing bad about it – if you want to enjoy ignorance, enjoy. How does it matter if you live one year less? You would have lived seventy years, now you will live sixty-nine if you go on smoking two packets of cigarettes every day. You will lose a year, but what does it matter? You are going to waste sixty-nine, you would have wasted seventy. One year less means one less year of your nonsense doings in the world. In a way it is good: you are gone, the earth is less burdened.Don’t be worried about these things and don’t create judgments. Don’t judge. If you enjoy, enjoy. If you don’t enjoy, stop. No judgment is needed, no morality should be brought in to change these things, otherwise you will never be able to change them. The more you push them, negate them, the more powerful they will become – because whenever you try to push something away from you, you are showing an interest. Whenever you say, “I am not going to do this,” you know your unconsciousness is saying, “Do it, it is beautiful.” So don’t create such vicious circles.The other day, I was telling you a Zen monk’s saying: “When walking, walk; when sleeping, sleep; when eating, eat – above all, don’t wobble.” I would add: when smoking, smoke – above all, don’t wobble. Just take it simply. If you take it simply what will you see? You will see the whole nonsense behind it.Smoking is not the thing. You are denying something through it, rebelling against something. Your father is standing there: you were such a small child and your father was so powerful and he said, “Never smoke.” And you wanted to deny his authority. You started smoking. The mother was there, the priest in the church, the Sunday school in the church saying, “Don’t smoke otherwise you will be thrown into hell.” You never liked that priest, you never liked that sermon, you were forced to go to Sunday school – in fact it looked like hell. You wanted to rebel from it, to put your ego right. Everybody was suppressing you, everybody was pushing and forcing and pulling, and everybody was trying to manipulate you, so you went into the bathroom and you smoked – and everything was put right. You had rebelled. You felt good!Smoking helped you to feel good, to feel that you are not so impotent – you can rebel. This father may be very, very powerful but you can deceive even him. And this mother may be very, very all-knowing, intuitive, but she does not know a bit that you are smoking.When you smoke silently, meditatively, all these things will be revealed to you, how it has happened. And once you come to know the cause – it is not the cigarette that is the cause, the cigarette is just a symptom, the cause is very deep and hidden – once you know the cause, then it is up to you.The father may be dead and gone, and you are still taking revenge. And now you can understand that he never meant ill to you. He may not have done you any good, he may have tried to do good in such a wrong way that the ultimate result has been bad; but his intention was good, he wanted to help you. He may not have known how to help you – in fact he harmed you – but you cannot doubt his good intentions. Suddenly you are reconciled with your father, reconciled with your mother, and the cigarette drops from your hands – without any act on your part. You are reconciled. It was a rebellion. Now there is no point: you understand, and the thing is finished.And do the same for other things. Then by and by you will see things change. The more you understand them, the more there is a possibility of their changing, and that change has a grace to it because it is not forced.I am not against anything. I am only against inattentiveness, unawareness. Smoke with a fully alert mind and there will be revealed to you, you will discover, many things associated with it. It will become a primal therapy, you will go deeper and deeper and deeper into your childhood, and you will come to the facts from where it started.How does it have such a grip on you? From where does this grip come? There must be much emotion involved! Just smoking in and out cannot have such a grip. So many millions of people smoking, doing such a stupid thing; wasting money on it, life on it, suffering a thousand types of diseases – but still continuing. There must be more behind it than appears to the naked eye. It is not simply a cigarette, it is very symbolic: it is a symptom. Deep down, many layers of many things are associated.If you simply drop the cigarette and those causes are still within you, they will force you to pick up the cigarette again. Understand. And without understanding, never make an effort to change anything. Understanding changes; only understanding changes and transforms. Let understanding be the only law.The fifth question:Osho,If I don't do anything, I find that I start feeling invisible instead of feeling rooted in the earth. Is it possible to be both?Yes, it is not only possible, it is absolutely necessary. Whenever it is happening it will happen in both these ways, they will happen together. When you are not doing anything, the ego feels uprooted because the ego is the doer. The more you do, the better the ego feels; it feels rooted, feels on the earth, has a foothold. When you are not doing anything the ego is invisible, it loses its force – and you are identified with the ego so you feel you are becoming invisible, you are becoming vaporous, evaporating, you are losing solidness. This is one part.The other part: you will soon become aware that if you allow this invisibleness to happen, this evaporation to happen, and you don’t fall again on the ego and start doing something, then you will see that you are rooted. That rootedness is of the being. And the disappearance is of the ego. Before the ego disappears completely and you come to realize the rootedness of your being, there is going to be a gap. And that gap is the dark night. In that gap you will be very apprehensive, afraid – what is happening? Are you going mad? Are you losing everything? Because all that you have now is ego-identity; if it slips out of your hand you will feel that everything is gone. There will be a temptation to cling to old things so that you feel rooted. Don’t be worried. Let the ego go and evaporate into the sky.If you can remain in that blank state for a few days – the more you accept it, the less will be the interval. If you can accept it totally, in the next second you will feel the rootedness, but it is difficult to accept it totally. You are doubtful. The mind says, “What is happening? The old house has fallen and where is the new? The old being is gone and where is the new?”But time is needed, a gap is needed, in which the old house has disappeared, and all the turmoil and chaos that was created by the disappearance of the old house has cleared, and your eyes are clear and there is no smoke and dust in them – then you suddenly become able to see the new house, the being. It happens together, so don’t be afraid; allow it to happen, help it to happen.The sixth question:Osho,When I become aware of my thoughts or my breathing, they immediately change. Is this natural, or an ingrained habit of subtly not accepting what is?It is natural. Whenever you become aware of anything you bring a new quality to it, it changes. If you become aware of your breathing, the breathing will change its rhythm. Don’t try to change it, there is no need to make any effort; you simply become alert that you are breathing in and out and there will be a change felt. The rhythm will not be the same because now you are consciously breathing. First you were unconsciously breathing, now something new has come into it – consciousness.You walk: ordinarily you walk unconsciously, there is no need, the body works as a mechanism. But then you walk consciously, bring consciousness to it and suddenly you will see that your walk has taken a different quality: it is more graceful, more aesthetic, more beautiful, and you are not dragging. Rather, deep down you have started dancing.When the breathing changes with consciousness you will feel a subtle silence surrounding you suddenly. With the change of breath your whole vital body changes: you feel more alive, more intensely alive. Whatever you do, there will be more totality in doing it. If you eat, you will eat more totally, there will be fewer thoughts in the mind roaming about. If you walk with conscious breathing, you will see that the mind is more centered, there is no inner chattering. And then you will be able to see more clearly. With your breathing conscious, you will see the beauty of flowers more intensely; they will have more colors than they ordinarily have, as if something like LSD has been released within your being. You will see trees as more green, and you will see each tree as a different green. There are thousands of shades of green: you simply see one green because you don’t see at all. Otherwise each tree has its own green, and each leaf has its own being.The more you become aware, the more beautiful life will be. It is a cosmic dance, it is a cosmic symphony. But only when your being is in a symphony do you come to be in tune with it. It is natural. But remember, become very, very slowly aware, don’t force concentration on breathing – these are two different things. You can force concentration, then whatever I have said will not happen; then on the contrary you will feel drained. If you concentrate on breathing that means you force yourself on breathing, you narrow down your consciousness and look at your breathing. You will be in a tense mood. Then you will not be able to see the flowers, the sun, the sky, the sands and the sea – no, because when you see them you will forget your concentration.Concentration is not awareness. Awareness is totally different: you are simply aware without any effort in it. If you forget, that too is okay. Forget, don’t feel guilty about it. When you remember again, look again. A relaxed awareness is needed, otherwise there can be such a strain on the breathing it can be fatal; it can be dangerous to the body, and you can create many illnesses out of it.So – not concentration, but simple alertness. It gives really a totally different quality. You will feel very, very graceful, in tune, at home.The seventh question:Osho,You said recently that to reach enlightenment you first have to go through a total frustration where you completely lose hope. But it seems impossible to lose hope when you know that a master is helping you by his presence.Don’t you be worried about that. I will see to it that you become completely frustrated.The eighth question:Osho,Lao Tzu seems to be the most truthful man, but George Gurdjieff used to paint sparrows and sell them as canaries. Lao Tzu says to do nothing and realize, Gurdjieff says only a superhuman effort will do. Is Gurdjieff's realization as great as Lao Tzu's? How do you explain the difference?Yes, there are no degrees of enlightenment; either it is or it is not. Lao Tzu and Gurdjieff are both enlightened, and there are no degrees, so nobody is more enlightened and nobody is less enlightened. But their working is different, their time is different, the age they live in is different; the people they have to tackle and the disciples they get are different.Lao Tzu lived in a very primitive world. People were very simple, humble, not tense, not in a hurry – in fact they had no time sense, they were more natural. Gurdjieff lived in a totally opposite time. Lao Tzu lived in the East and Gurdjieff lived in the West – and in the twentieth century, the maddest century ever, almost everybody is neurotic.Gurdjieff had to devise different things for this different type of person. This type of man had not existed in Lao Tzu’s time. He may sometimes have come across such a man as an exception, but now it is the rule; and the man who was the rule at Lao Tzu’s time is now the exception. So everything has changed.“Lao Tzu seems to be the most truthful man…” He is. And Gurdjieff does not seem to you to be so truthful – he is also as truthful as Lao Tzu, but he has compassion for you, and if he needs to lie to help you, he lies. And you are such a liar that Lao Tzu won’t be of much help to you. Even a Gurdjieff finds it difficult to help you. He is just the right type of person for the West.Lao Tzu, in the first place, will not appeal to you because he is so simple and so innocent. In fact if he had been born in the twentieth century he would have been called an idiot. Even in those old days there were many people who thought that he was an idiot. He himself says, “Everybody else seems to be very clever, only I am stupid” – and that too twenty-five centuries before. Now everybody would think him an idiot. Not only that, if he had been born in the West they may even have psychoanalyzed and treated him, to bring him back to normal.They have done that same thing to many other people. In Western mental asylums there are many people who are not mad, who are simply very innocent people. But they cannot be liars and they cannot be in tune with this lying century; that’s their difficulty. Gurdjieff was exactly the right person. He lied very easily. But those lies were meant to help you. You need lies.Gurdjieff says superhuman effort is needed – and Lao Tzu says: no effort. Both are superhuman. When you make a superhuman effort you come to a point where Lao Tzu becomes immediately meaningful to you. Only after passing through Gurdjieff will you be able to drop all effort.An immediate approach toward Lao Tzu is not possible now. In fact, you are so cunning and clever that if you listen to Lao Tzu and read Lao Tzu, it is not possible that you will drop all effort; it is more possible that you will cling to laziness. I see people here, when I start talking about Lao Tzu they start asking questions, the “right” questions: “Then what about in the ashram where we have to work? Shouldn’t we stop working?” They want to stop working.Not that they have understood, because if they had understood they would not ask that. Lao Tzu is not saying to stop working; he is saying to stop making an effort. Do without making an effort, do naturally. He is not helping you to become lazy, saying, “Don’t do anything, just lie down” – and that too is good if you don’t expect others to come and feed you, that too is perfectly good. But then you are looking all around: are people coming or not to respect you as a great paramahansa, as one who has realized? You will become lazy.Gurdjieff is perfectly right: he says make a superhuman effort. He forces people to make an effort. He brings them, he drives them, to such a point that beyond which there is nowhere to go. Then the effort drops by itself – you cannot drop it, you have been clinging to it so much.I was reading once in somebody’s memoirs: Gurdjieff was making an ashram near Paris, in Fontainebleau. The structure was being built, and he told one man to work continuously – the carpenter, a disciple: “Don’t go to sleep. Go on working.” Eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hours, and still he was working. After thirty-six hours Gurdjieff suddenly rushed to where he was. The carpenter was sitting on top of the roof completely asleep, with his tools in his hand. If a little noise had been made he would have fallen from there – and it was dangerous, so Gurdjieff told everybody to keep quiet.Just like a cat he moved to the roof, got hold of the man, and shook him. The man opened his eyes – he could not believe where he was, what had happened. Thirty-six hours of continuous work… That day Gurdjieff told him, “Now you need not work.” It dropped itself.If the man had dropped it, he would have come down to sleep; if the man himself had dropped the effort, then he would have come down because sitting on the roof was dangerous, you can fall. But it was not a question of his conscious decision; he did whatever he could do consciously, then a moment came and he simply slipped into sleep. He did nothing on his part. Everything stopped. Even the tools were still in his hand. On his part he was still ready to work. He may even have been working in his dream. But that day Gurdjieff released him; he said, “Now start meditating.”Sometimes he used to force people to do such purposeless things that it would drive you crazy. He would tell them to dig a ditch one day and another day to refill it, and a third day to dig it again and a fourth day to refill it. And it would continue for months. People who were too rationalistic would say, “This is absurd.” They would leave. Only people who were really surrendered would continue without raising questions.If you can follow a master to such an extent, that you don’t ask, you don’t raise a question – you simply think that there must be something in it. When he says, “Dig the ditch the whole day” – that was ten hours work – and then “Fill it again,” and then “Dig it again,” and “Fill it again,” what is he doing? He is trying to pull you out of your reasoning.Superhuman effort. For three months somebody would be doing the same thing every day – you can understand that after three months that man will be totally different; now he is ready for meditation.Gurdjieff would not give you meditations just in the beginning. First he would test you from every point, from every corner of your being he will see whether you can surrender – surrender to some absurdity also? He helped many people. He was the right person for this age, particularly in the West.Don’t try to see any contradiction between the two – there is none. All awakened people have been showing the same thing, saying the same thing. Their words differ, they may appear contradictory to you. They cannot be contradictory. If they appear contradictory to you then something is wrong with your reasoning. Go deeper. One day you will come to the stratum where you will see that they are saying the same thing.Gurdjieff says do as much as you can, and Lao Tzu says don’t do, let things happen – and both are saying the same thing. Because only after doing too much will you able to understand Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu would have understood Gurdjieff perfectly. If they had both worked in collaboration, that would have been perfect.That’s what I am trying to do: Gurdjieff and Lao Tzu both. That’s why you will see many contradictions in me. In Lao Tzu there is no contradiction in himself. In Gurdjieff there is no contradiction in himself. If you bring them together, then you see the contradiction. But in me you will see contradiction every moment. There is no need to bring any other enlightened man to find my contradictions. I am contradictory. Because I see that life is polar.You have to be forced to the utmost of doing – only then does surrender happen, let-go becomes possible.The ninth question:Osho,How can man best reach the stars?There is no need, you are already on the star, Earth. There is no need to go anywhere. And wherever you go, you will be the same. Move within.Earth itself is a star. Because it is too close to you, you don’t see it. When you go to another star you will not see that star, it will be too close – then the Earth will look like a star from that faraway space. Man cannot see that which is close. Man can see only that which is far away and distant.Try to see that which is close. In fact, try to see that which is you. You already are on a star, you already belong to the stars; there is no need to go anywhere. And all this search of going to the moon and to Mars is in a subtle sense foolish. The real thing is to change yourself, not to go somewhere else – because you will remain the same. Wherever you go you will create the same world, the same miserable world there. Stars won’t help, only an inner transformation can.The tenth question:Osho,I feel so much freedom and love to hear you say: if you do not like to meditate, until the time you feel like doing so, there is no harm in doing something else that interests you. But regretfully, how and why is it that some of your disciples who do not meditate expect others to do so, at times through indirect criticism, as if it is a must!Because they have much compassion for you. What I say may look good to you, but what they say – please follow them, it will do something good to you. And what I am saying you will be able to understand only when you have done what my disciples are saying to do.It always looks good if I say, “Be free,” if I say, “Don’t do anything,” if I say “You are already that which is to be achieved” – it feels very good, ego enhancing. And when my disciples say to meditate, do something – it becomes difficult. Because you don’t want to do anything; you want to be lazy. And if this is the situation you will not be able to understand me – what I am saying. When I am saying, “Nothing is to be done,” I am saying the absolute truth. But you can misunderstand it.When my disciples are saying something, they are saying something that is practical, which you cannot misunderstand. Either you do it or you don’t do it. And when they are saying to do it, it has some meaning. It is not they who are saying it to you, it is again I who is saying through them to you, to do it. And don’t be bothered whether they are doing meditations or not; that is for me to think about – you need not bother. If you can do something for yourself, that is enough. And what I am saying will be possible for you to understand only when you have done deep meditations, otherwise not.This is a question not from a sannyasin but a visitor. In fact I am not very interested in visitors because there is every possibility that they will misunderstand me. Unless you are closely working with me, ready to move into deeper depths of your being, whatever I am saying can be even harmful to you because I am saying it for those who are working, who are making every effort to change their being. They will be able to understand me rightly, what I am saying.But visitors come – listening is good because you don’t have to do anything. I talk here – you simply sit there and listen. You become knowledgeable, you go home, you know more. Your ego is enhanced. But if somebody says to you “Meditate” then there is trouble, and particularly with Indians. They think that they know all about meditation just because they are born in India. You don’t know!And remain alert – soon the West will know more than you because you are too egoistic about it, believing that you know already, so what is the need to do it? The West is more humble to learn and to seek and to practice, and to move into a discipline. You are at the most ready to listen – and with that too, you will listen only when it suits. If it doesn’t suit you, then, “He is wrong.” You are always right.If it suits you, then it is right. If it doesn’t suit you, then he must be wrong because the truth is already with you.This smug-mindedness has been the fall of the Eastern world. The Eastern consciousness has been falling every day lower and lower, and soon the unfortunate moment will come when you will have to go to the West to learn meditation. But before that happens, a few possibilities are still here. Don’t waste them.Listening is beautiful because nothing is to be done, you simply sit there. You can even sleep and listen, you can rest. But to do meditation is to move into an inner turmoil, chaos. Of that you are afraid – what will people say? Others will laugh: you and jumping and dancing and catharting? No, it is for foolish people, not for you; you are already too knowledgeable.Drop all this knowledge, otherwise listening to me won’t help much. What I am saying is true, but first you have to do much, only then can you understand what it is that Lao Tzu calls “doing by non-doing.”The last question:Osho,How is progress, whether in civilization, culture or religion, possible if we accept life as it is and do not seek to change it in any way?There is no need for any progress. Progress is the most false god created by man. There is no need. What does progress mean? Progress means deep down to sacrifice the present for the future. You sacrifice today to live tomorrow. Then tomorrow, again it is not tomorrow, it is today; again you sacrifice it for tomorrow. The father sacrifices for the children, the children sacrifice for their children, and nobody ever lives life.One generation sacrifices for another because there has to be progress – and then nobody ever lives it. There is no need for progress. The very word progress moves you into the future. And there can never be an end to it. You cannot come to a state when you can say, “Now progress has been achieved,” because progress is not a thing to be achieved, it is a process. “Now everybody can enjoy, progress has been achieved” will never come. Progress will remain always a process.This is how up to now humanity has tried to live. In the name of progress, all bliss has been sacrificed. There is no need to sacrifice anymore. Forget about the future. Live for yourself. While the time is there, live totally. Your children will live their own life – don’t sacrifice yourself because sacrificing fathers are very dangerous. They never forgive their children, and then those children are always against their fathers because they cannot forgive this attitude that they have sacrificed. Everybody has been taught to become a martyr for somebody else.This is foolish, simple, sheer stupidity, but it goes in the name of progress. Don’t bother about progress. The birds have not bothered – what is wrong with them? What have they been missing? The trees have not bothered, the Himalayas have not bothered – what are they missing? They enjoyed a thousand years before, they enjoyed always, they are enjoying now, they will be enjoying in the future forever and ever – only man has a disease called progress. It is a cancerous thing.Then you go on sacrificing. You say, “How can I enjoy? Today I have to work hard so that tomorrow there is money, and then I will enjoy,” but that tomorrow never comes. Then how can you enjoy? You have children, you have to work hard so that your children can enjoy, and they will have their own children, and their own children will have their own children – when does it come to the point where anybody can enjoy? Your mother sacrificed for you, she was a martyr, she never had a single moment of delight because she was working for you and sacrificing for you. Now are you enjoying? Because your mother sacrificed herself for you? You are not enjoying because she has taught you the trick to sacrifice yourself for somebody else: for the country, for the religion, for humanity – but sacrifice. The gods have been different, but the sacrifice has remained the same. Sometimes it is for the nation, sometimes it is humanity, sometimes it is Christianity, sometimes it is Islam…but sacrifice.One secret has always remained with man and it has been killing him, poisoning him. No, no more talk about sacrificing. No more talk about progress. Live your life and if something happens out of it, it is okay. If nothing happens, you are not responsible. You are not running the world.And all that you call progress: big houses, technology, big cars, have they added in any way to human bliss? In fact on the contrary they have killed all possibility. You may be living in a palace, but a palace is not happiness; you may be moving in a Rolls Royce, but to move in a Rolls Royce is not to be blissful. You can be as miserable there as anywhere.The whole question is how to make man happier – and if this progress goes on poisoning you, man can never be happy. It is a trick, a conspiracy, to force you to commit suicide – for others – and then force others to commit suicide for others. The whole world has become hell. Drop this continuous madness about progress. Everything is good as it is today, and you are here for just now – live it. And if out of your living something happens, it is beautiful – and I say it will happen out of living. But I don’t call it progress, because the very word is ugly. It is future-oriented. I call it rather growth, not progress.You live this moment, out of that life grows another moment – of course it is going to be finer and richer than the first. Then you live it more deeply because you have learned how to live deeply, you are learning constantly – and each moment becomes more and more intense. Out of each moment another moment is born; out of today is born tomorrow – richer, more blissful, more ecstatic. And out of you are born your children, and you give them birth in ecstasy. You were not in fact trying to give them birth, you were enjoying your love. In fact you were not concerned directly for them. Out of your ecstasy, out of your orgasmic experience, they are born.You share your ecstasy with them, they grow with you, they learn how to be ecstatic, how to be blissful. Their children will grow with them. This is growth, not progress.In progress, nonessential things grow and the essential dies. In growth, the nonessentials are nonessential: if they are there, good; if they are not there, even better. But the essential grows. What is essential? Bliss is essential, inner happiness is essential, orgasmic experiences, peak experiences, are essential.You don’t have big palaces but you have peak experiences. That’s perfect. You may be living in a hut – that will do. You may not have very expensive clothes, but they are not needed – you have a rich being. A different, totally different dimension opens with growth.Up to the last generation, progress has been dominating the human mind, but for the new generation, growth has become a more meaningful word. All growth groups: encounter, growth trainings, therapies – they are not worried about progress, they are worried about growth. And to me that word is meaningful.Growth is present-based. Progress is future-oriented. Growth comes out of living and progress comes out of sacrificing. Growth is life, progress is suicide.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lao Tzu’s Three TreasuresAll the world says: my teaching, Tao, greatly resembles folly.Because it is great, therefore it resembles folly.If it did not resemble folly,it would have long ago become petty indeed!I have three treasures;guard them and keep them safe.The first is love.The second is, never too much.The third is, never be the first in the world.Through love, one has no fear;through not doing too much one has amplitude of reserve power;through not presuming to be the first in the worldone can develop one’s talent and let it mature.If one forsakes love and fearlessness,forsakes restraint and reserve power,forsakes following behind and rushes in front,he is doomed!The greatest miracle in life is love, and it is the greatest mystery also; greater than life itself, because love is the very essence for which life exists.Love is the source, and love is the end also. So one who misses love misses all.But don’t misunderstand love as an emotion – it is not. Love is not an emotion, is not a feeling. Love is the subtlest energy; subtler than electricity. The very substratum of all energies is love.It manifests in many ways. First try to understand love, then the other treasures will be easy to understand.If you ask me what are my three treasures I will say: First, love; second, love, third also, love. And in fact that is what Lao Tzu is saying – but we will understand.Man is a trinity, as Christians have called God a trinity. God may be, may not be, but man is a trinity: body, mind, soul. In fact because of his deep understanding of human beings Christ came to say that God is a trinity.If there is any God he has to be a trinity, because everything that exists has three layers. Hindus call them three gunas, three qualities: satva, rajas, tamas. Christ called them the trinity.When love expresses through you it first expresses as the body. It becomes sex. If it expresses through the mind, which is higher, deeper, subtler, then it is called love. If it expresses through the spirit, it becomes prayer.And there is something in you which is beyond the trinity also. Hindus have called that “the fourth,” turiya. They have not named it, because it cannot be named.The three can be named; they belong to the manifest world. The fourth cannot be named; it belongs to the unmanifest. But it is the substratum of all. They simply called it “the fourth,” turiya.In the fourth, love becomes samadhi, nirvana, enlightenment.First, when love – the same energy – expresses through body, it becomes sex. If everything goes well and sex is natural and flowing it is a beautiful experience because you can have a glimpse of the second through it. If sex goes really very deep, so that you forget yourself completely in it, you can even have a glimpse of the third through it. And if sex becomes a total orgasmic experience, there are rare moments when you can even have a glimpse of the fourth, the turiya, the beyond, through it.But if sex fails, then many perversions happen to the mind. These perversions are expressed in hatred. Hatred is a failure of sex, a failure of love energy. Violence, lust for money, the continuous conflicting attitudes of egos: war, politics – these are all sex perversions.A man whose sex is not perverted cannot become a politician. It is impossible. All politicians as such need deep sexual therapy, otherwise their whole energy will be moving to gain more and more power. When sex is natural, you feel power, you are not seeking it. Sex is potentiality, power. You feel it showering on you, you don’t seek and search for it. But when you miss it there, then a great urge arises to seek power: politics is born. Then wars, continuous violence, are born; hatred, anger, and a thousand and one types of perversions.People become attached too much to things when sex fails, because then they cannot be attached to persons. Because to be related to a person you have to flow, you have to be open.With things there is no need to flow or to be open. Things can be possessed, persons cannot be possessed. Things are dead, persons are not dead. Persons are freedom in essence: you can love them, you can delight in them, but you cannot possess them.People whose natural function of sex has failed become much too possessive about money, things of the world.Science is also part of sexuality, the bodily phenomenon. That’s why science goes on insisting that only the body exists: because sex knows nothing other than the body. Science cannot believe that even the mind exists, there is no question of the spirit; and of course “the beyond” is completely beyond it. Science insists that man is only the body – that shows its inclination.And the whole inquiry of science is based on sexual curiosity. And that too is a perversion.If science is creative then it is not a perversion. Then the sex is functioning well, then the energy has a flow, it is not stagnant and rotten. But science as it is today – and it has been in the past the same – is destructive.It is simply unbelievable that man can reach the moon – and soon they will be reaching other planets, and later on the stars – and half humanity is starving. It is unbelievable that man can develop such complex technology that the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb can become possible, and they cannot even find a cure for the common cold – I was suffering for two days!Simply, everything looks foolish. The whole of science is war-oriented, violence-oriented, destructive. If everything goes well with sex – which is very difficult because all religions are against it, they poison your mind. It is difficult because the whole civilization, all cultures, are against it – because they have come to know a trick: if you want to exploit a man, pervert his sex; then he can never become a master of his own being. Just pervert his sex and he will remain an automaton. Then you can send him to the wars, and you can sacrifice him for foolish ends.A man who has known love cannot be forced to hate. A man who has even come to glimpses of love will be so loving, it will be very difficult for him to be destructive. But all nations need destructive people who are boiling within with destructiveness, who are in a way insane; otherwise what will happen to the armies of the world? A certain insanity is needed for a man to become a soldier.If life is beautiful and love is showering who bothers to go to the war? And who wants to become a soldier? You are here not to destroy but to fulfill. So every culture, every religion, every nation, without any exception tries to pervert your sexuality, they don’t allow you to enjoy yourself. They don’t allow you to be natural. Once you are natural then you are beyond their control. You can be controlled only when you are ill.That’s why I say: If everything goes well, and if sex remains natural, then – the second: through deeper sex, love arises.Love is not sexual but it arises out of sexuality, that has to be understood.It is just like a lotus flower coming out of dirt and mud. But it is not dirt, and it is not mud. It is a total transformation of them. Between sex and love there is as much distance as there is between muddy water, mud, and a lotus flower. If you had not known it already you could not have imagined that this lotus has come out of ordinary mud. Impossible to conceive, to comprehend, because the lotus is such a transformed phenomenon. So different. Of some other world. It does not seem to be part of this earth. But it comes out of this earth.Love arises as a lotus.As science – particularly destructive science – politics, money and money-oriented search, possessiveness, belong to the body and belong to sex, so, art, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, belong to the second layer of love. When your love is flowing, when you have come to know a certain en rapportness with a person, a certain oneness with a person, although only for moments – that too is enough to change the whole life. If even for a single moment you have come to feel that two persons have dissolved and become one – in sex two bodies dissolve and become one; in love two minds dissolve and become one – if for a single moment you have known that oneness, your life will become a poetry, your life will have a dance to it, your life will have a deep harmony and music in it.The third is prayer. When you have looked into existence through one person – your beloved, your husband, your wife, your friend, your child, your master, if you have looked into one person and you have seen infinity, if you looked into one person’s window and the whole sky of infinity opened, now you know that love can move higher – it can become prayer.Prayer is meeting of spirit with spirit. Sex is very confined to the material body, very limited. Love is vaster, but still limited to a person. Prayer is unlimited. Then you know that you can move from every person to the infinite. Then every person becomes a jumping-board. You look into the eyes of your child – and God is there. You look into the eyes of your beloved, and suddenly the beloved has disappeared, she is no more there, he is no more there – God is smiling. You look into the flower and the whole has entered there. This is prayer.These are the three layers of man.Christianity, Judaism – they could reach only to the third. They have no conception of the fourth; but in the East, Buddha, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao Tzu – they have looked into the fourth, the beyond that goes beyond all. That fourth, the turiya, is ecstasy, exultation, samadhi, nirvana, Tao. In that fourth even the other disappears.First in sex the body disappears but the mind remains. In love the mind disappears but the spirit remains. In prayer the spirit also disappear but the other, the Tao, the God, remains. In the fourth even God disappears. Nothing remains – or only nothing remains.In that total emptiness where all dualities dissolve, love is absolutely fulfilled. Love is the key to all treasures. Love is not an emotion. Love is not a feeling. Love is energy, and the energy can express on four layers. And always remember that the energy has to be transcended, transformed, led into a higher rhythm, a higher state. But nothing is wrong; only if you are stuck somewhere, then it is wrong.Sex is beautiful, nothing is wrong in it, but if you are stuck there, something has gone wrong. It is as if you are stuck at the door and could not enter the palace. Nothing is wrong in the door itself, it is a door, and you should be thankful for it; it is not a wall. But if you are stuck at the door it has become a wall.It is because of you that the door has become a wall. Now you cannot enter.Sex is beautiful. Use that energy to flow within. Move ahead, allow it to change into love. But don’t get stuck at love, allow it to become prayer. But don’t get stuck at prayer. Unless nothingness is achieved one should go on moving and moving. When everything is dissolved you have come to the ultimate flowering of the lotus.That’s why Hindus, who are the deepest searchers of the inner world, have said that when the energy comes to its highest peak it is a flowering of the lotus, sahasrar, the thousand-petalled lotus. It is the last chakra in your body. The first is sex, the last is the lotus, the sahasrar.Don’t get stuck anywhere! That should be remembered always. If you can remember that then nothing can become a barrier to you.It depends on you whether you use it as a barrier or as a ladder. A stone is there – a rock is there on the way. You can think of it as a hindrance; but you can step over it, and then it becomes a step and you move higher. That’s why I accept everything. I don’t condemn anything.Whatsoever you are and whatsoever you are doing, don’t get stuck there. Move on. Unless you reach to total absolute silence where you have disappeared, the other has disappeared, and only love flows, without there being a lover or a beloved – only then has it become the ultimate flowering of the lotus: love flowering, with no lover, no beloved; both the shores have disappeared, only the river remains. And when the shores disappear – the river becomes the ocean.Now, try to follow the very potent, pregnant sutra of Lao Tzu.All the world says: my teaching, Tao, greatly resembles folly.Love always looks foolish: foolish to those who are stuck somewhere, foolish to those who have not known anything higher than their body, foolish to those who have not known anything valuable other than money, foolish to those who have not known anything paradoxical, who, in fact, have not known anything mysterious, who have lived with logic, who are Aristotelian.It is said that Aristotle’s master, Plato, used to call Aristotle “The Mind.” That was his name for Aristotle – The Mind. Whenever he wanted to ask, Where is Aristotle? he would ask, Where is The Mind?Those who are just minds – heart is a folly to them because heart has its own reasons which the mind cannot understand. The heart has its own dimension of being, which is completely dark for the mind. Heart is higher and deeper than the mind, beyond the reach of it. It looks foolish. Love always looks foolish because love is not utilitarian. Mind is utilitarian. It uses everything for something else – that is the meaning of being utilitarian. Mind is purposive, end-oriented. it turns everything into a means; and love cannot be turned into a means – that is the problem. Love in itself is the goal.If you love a person you don’t say why you love them. You can’t answer the question, Why do you love? You simply shrug your shoulders. If you are really honest you will say, I don’t know. If you are dishonest you can find a thousand and one reasons. But no lover worth the name has ever been able to show any reason. He simply says, It happened. I just fell into love, I don’t know why! That’s why the mind says it is foolish. If you can’t answer the why you must be moving in some foolish way: Stop! Come back! Be reasonable!And I must tell you one thing: If you try always to be reasonable you can never be happy because happiness has something unreasonable in it. The very ingredient of being happy is to be unreasonable. If you can be unreasonably happy, only then can you be happy, otherwise not. If you try to find out the reason then you will simply be miserable. Misery has reasons, happiness has none. You can answer: Why are you miserable? but you cannot answer: Why are you happy? Always you are miserable because of you. And always you are happy in spite of you. It has no reason to it. The “why” cannot be answered. And heart is not arithmetic, it is poetry, paradoxical! It moves from one extreme to another. It comprehends all extremes. It is so vast, it contains all the contradictions in it.Says Lao Tzu:All the world says: my teaching, Tao, greatly resembles folly.Because whatsoever Lao Tzu is saying he is saying: Live here and now! This is folly! Because a reasonable man always sacrifices today for tomorrow. He says, I will live tomorrow. When things are put right, when the time is right and I have leisure, enough money, a big palace to live in, then I will live – right now how can I live?Every parent is teaching to every child: Sacrifice the present for the future. Sacrifice this moment for the next. Sacrifice yourself for something else.This is reasonableness – to postpone life. Heart says: Live now. That’s what Lao Tzu says – Live now. In fact there is no other way of living. Either you live now, or you just pretend to live. You never live, you just postpone. You only die, you never live. Because to live there is no other time than the present. Existence is always in the present. But the reason always thinks and plans for the future.Of course if somebody says – Live now, you will say, How is it possible? I have to make arrangements first. I have to plan. When the right time comes I will live.It never comes. Millions and millions of people have died; it never came for them, it will never come to you.My teaching greatly resembles folly, people say.It has to resemble folly. All great wisdom resembles folly. Only fools look reasonable in this world. Only fools are rational. All wise people look a little eccentric. They don’t belong to the crowd. They don’t belong to the notions of the crowd. They live their being. They look like idiots – this word idiot is beautiful. It comes from a Greek word idioti. And idiotiki in Greek means private. This is something! An idiot is somebody who is living his private life! Not a life of the crowd. Not part of a collective mass. He who is living his own life in his own way is an idiot.Dostoevsky has written a beautiful novel, The Idiot. Had Lao Tzu read it he would have appreciated it. The idiot in Dostoevsky’s novel is exactly the man who will be called foolish, but who is wise. The world has gone so foolish that if you want to be wise you have to be foolish according to the people around you.All the world says: my teaching greatly resembles folly. Because it is great, therefore it resembles folly.All greatness is so beyond the mediocre mind! And mind is mediocre! Remember it; mind itself is mediocre. The mind can never be great; there have never been great minds. If you have heard about great minds you have heard wrongly. If you ask all the great minds they will say that whatsoever they have attained has come from beyond the mind, not from the mind; something that filters through the mind but is not part of the mind.Ask Madame Curie how she solved her problem and became a Nobel laureate. She tried for years, for three years almost, to solve a single mathematical problem upon which her whole research depended; she failed and failed and failed. Frustrated one night, she dropped the whole project, went to sleep; and in the night, in a dream, the problem was solved. She got up, wrote it down at the desk, went back to sleep; in the morning she completely forgot about it.When she came to work at the desk she was surprised – there was the answer, miraculously there! For three years she had been working at it – where had it come from? And there was nobody else, she was alone in the room, and nobody else could have solved it even if there had been somebody there. Nobody, no servant, could have done that trick, she herself had been working on it for three years. Then she remembered a dream. In the dream she had seen the whole answer written. Then she remembered that she had got up in the night; and then she looked at the handwriting – it was her own.Now, the Nobel Prize should not go to the mind – but it has gone to the mind. Now Madame Curie is a great mind – and the answer has come from beyond the mind.Always it has been so. Always it will be so. Mind is mediocre. It is good at small things, petty things of the market – you can run a small business, you can earn a little money, you can have a bank balance, there it is okay. But not beyond that.Because it is great, that’s why it looks like folly.Deep down, if you search within yourself, you will also see that if suddenly Mahavira comes and stands here naked you will think that he is a fool, what is he doing here? If Lao Tzu comes here you will not be able to recognize him, it will be impossible for you to recognize him. He will look like a perfect fool!Bodhidharma reached China. The whole country was waiting for him. The king himself had come to the border of the country to receive him. A million people had gathered, because a great master was coming. And when the master appeared, people started giggling. It was impossible to believe their own eyes. Even the emperor felt very uneasy because this man Bodhidharma had one shoe on one foot and the other he was carrying on his head. What manner of man was this?The king said, Excuse me, sir, but what are you doing? We had come to receive a sane man; are you insane?Bodhidharma laughed and said: So you have failed in the examination. If you can understand this only then can you understand other things that I have to say. If you cannot tolerate such a small contradiction, it’s not much, just carrying a shoe on the head, if you cannot tolerate and understand this much it will be useless for me to stay here. He turned back. He left the town, went into the forest; he said: There is no need to stay, nobody will be able to understand me; now I will wait. Those who can understand me, they should come to me.He never entered into the capital again.Contradictions are very difficult for the mind. Mind lives in a routine. The shoe must be on the foot, that’s the accepted thing. It should not be carried on the head. Such an innocent thing – he was not doing any harm to anybody. But no, impossible.We have a leveling of everything.I was just reading a man’s memoirs. He was a great scientist, and once a friend played a joke. The friend invited many people for a party: great doctors, scientists, engineers, poets, artists, musicians, and when they had all gathered the host said: I am not going to introduce you to each other, and please don’t introduce yourselves to each other, because I don’t like labels. So you meet each other man to man – forget that you are an engineer, a doctor – I have not invited doctors and engineers and lawyers and advocates, just people, friends.This scientist who was there says: We were so puzzled. What to do? How to approach each other? Because we cannot approach man as man. If he is a doctor, of course; engineer – then there is something to proceed by; but just a man? You cannot hook yourself with him. From where, how? Just a man or a woman! And he said it was such an uneasy affair that people became completely silent. How to start? Without labels the mind simply doesn’t function.He writes: I have never seen such a silent party. People somehow finished and escaped, because if you cannot say that you are a great writer and you have written this and that, then who are you? The identity disappears. And without identity you are a nobody.All the world says: my teaching greatly resembles folly.Because Lao Tzu’s whole teaching is how to lose the identity, how to forget the labels that the world has given to you, how not to be labels, but to be authentically beings.Because it is great – it is vast – therefore it resembles folly.Life is a circle. A child is a fool, innocently foolish, and that is the beauty of a child. All children are beautiful. You cannot come across an ugly child. But then where does all that beauty disappear to? Behind the labels, all that beauty disappears. Then masks are there, not faces. Behind the dishonesties, the reality disappears.But each child is beautiful, beautiful and foolish! And innocent! Then you learn much, and you lose much in your learning. Then you move into the world. You become knowledgeable, you become worldly wise, but then you are losing your innocence. Then layers and layers of worldly knowledge, of the so-called worldly wisdom, gather around you. You are encaged.If you can understand Lao Tzu you suddenly drop out of this imprisonment – which you yourself are carrying around you. Nobody is insisting, nobody is forcing it on you – you simply drop all the identities and all the deadness that has accumulated around you. This is renunciation. If you ask me, this is sannyas. You simply drop all that you have gathered, you simply become completely unburdened, and again become a child.Of course the whole world will say you have become a fool, because the world now cannot account for you.In Jesus’ life there are many parables. Once he came to a house – he was invited there; the hosts were two sisters, Mary and Martha. Mary was sitting just near Jesus, not doing anything, just happy being near him, massaging his feet and crying, in deep benediction, tears of happiness flowing; and the other sister Martha was working in the house, Preparing food for Jesus – and other guests were coming, and she became jealous. She came to Jesus and said, Look, I am working alone and she is just sitting here not doing anything. Tell her to come and help me.Jesus said: You are end-oriented, she is not. You are preparing for the guest and the guest is here. She is enjoying the guest. You do things in your own way and let her be herself. Of course, ordinarily you cannot think why Jesus should say such a thing. He is in favor of the lazy. If Mahatma Gandhi had been there he would have said, Yes, you go and help in the kitchen. Service is prayer. Go and serve! But Jesus said: You do things in your own way, leave her alone. One is reason, the other is unreasonable heart.In another house that he was invited to a woman came and she poured costly perfume on his feet, the whole bottle of it – it was very rare. And Judas was there, who became later on the traitor – which he had to become; he was the businessman around there, he was the perfect Jew. Looking at this, Judas said: What is this? And you are allowing it? (He must have been the first communist, that Judas.) Stop her! She is wasting valuable perfume! The perfume can be sold, and many poor people can be fed.Of course, absolutely reasonable. Who can find a fault with Judas? He said: People are poor, and you are allowing her to waste money like that!Jesus said: Poor people will always be there, you can serve them, I will not always be here.Difficult to understand. Unreasonable. Absolutely unreasonable! This man Jesus was not a socialist at all. It was simple mathematics. Mahatma Gandhi would have supported Judas not Jesus. Jesus is allowing people to waste while people are hungry! Looks foolish.Christians don’t talk much about these stories because they themselves feel a little guilty. It looks guilty when people are poor. He should have stopped it. Nothing should happen around him like that. But what Jesus said is really something. He said: I will not be here again. And I’ll not be here for long, Judas. Poor people will always be there – you can serve them. There is no hurry. But let her do whatsoever she wants to do.Reason is not the question, love is the question.If it did not resemble folly, it would have long ago become petty indeed!And, says Lao Tzu, if it didn’t resemble folly it would have become mediocre, petty. But my teaching will never become mediocre because the mind will never be able to comprehend it and convert it into a petty thing. It will always remain beyond the mind.Even a Buddha can be understood through the mind. Krishna can be understood through the mind. With Lao Tzu it is impossible.Many times people ask me why in the name of Lao Tzu there has not been a great organized religion. It was not possible. The man is impossible. The man is so wisely foolish that it is difficult to create an establishment around him. He remains a lonely rebel, beautiful in his aloneness, but incomprehensible, very very far away, distant, like Everest – you can look at it, but to create a mass organization around him, and to lead the mass towards the Everest is not possible.I have three treasures; guard them and keep them safe. The first is love. The second is, never too much. The third is, never be the first in the world.In fact the first is enough, the other two are nothing but elaborations of the first – try to understandThe first is love. What is love in fact? What happens? What is this phenomenon, love? First thing: With love you function as a heart and you don’t function as a mind. You don’t function as reason, you function as feeling. You don’t think, you feel. This is the first thing to be understood about love; that you become a feeling phenomenon not a thinking entity. Your center of being falls from the head to the heart. You become headless. You don’t identify with the head, you become identified with the heart – and the heart is absolutely foolish; foolish in the eyes of the world, wise in its own ways. You start feeling.It has become very difficult because whenever you feel, you in fact only think that you feel. It is not direct.Sometimes people come to me and they say that they have fallen in love, and I ask, Are you certain? They say, We think that we have fallen in love. Even feeling has to pass through thinking first, then it comes to you. Your heart has to beg the mind to be allowed a little freedom.This is absurd. Because thinking is a device. It is useful, but it is not your whole being. It is like a radar, it helps you to look around, to have a little peep into the future so that you can move well, but it is not you.And howsoever you train your mind you will never be happy with it because happiness is not a quality which is felt by the mind. It is just as if you are trying to smell something through the eyes. The eyes are not meant to smell, they are meant to see. Or it is as if you are trying to see something through the ears; those ears are not meant to see, they are meant to hear.Mind is a bio-computer. The very mechanism exists there to help you to move safely in an unknown world, in a strange world. It is just a safety guard. It is not meant that you should be happy through it – and that is what you have been trying to do! And that is how you have created hell around you: you are trying to be happy through the mind, which is not possible!Mind people are the most unhappy in the world, and this is as it should be. Mind is to look around as a watchdog, to feel the way. Whenever it is needed it should be used. Whenever it is not needed it should be put aside.But you have become so dependent on the slave that the slave has become the master. And the master has become completely lost. You are not even able to feel where the master is. Lao Tzu says: Drop down towards the heart. Love things, don’t think things. Love people, don’t think people. Feel more, think less, and you will be more and more happy. The trees are more happy than man, the birds are more happy than man, the animals are more happy than man – this is unbelievable! What has happened to man? He has got hooked into the mechanism of mind.It is good that the mind is there! It is beautiful if you can use it. But you should not be a head, rather you should be a head master. You should use it as one uses a mechanism – just as you drive a car. Don’t become identified with the car. Be the driver, remain the driver. And when you don’t want to drive, don’t allow the car to force you. If you need it, you use it. If you don’t need it, you don’t use it.Head is a subtle mechanism around you. You are just like a driver, hidden behind the mechanism.Drop the identity with the mind, then only will you know what love is – because once you drop the identity with the mind suddenly you fall towards the heart.The heart is the driver. But how is it to be done? – because just by saying that the first treasure is love makes nothing clear, nothing is attained by repeating it.You start slowly to move in that direction. Sit by the side of a rock, close your eyes and feel the rock. Don’t think, and don’t say it is beautiful – these are all mind trips. Just lie down on the rock, spread your hands and body on the rock as if you are on the breast of your mother, feel the rock, close your eyes, touch the rock with your tongue, kiss the rock, and let it give you a feeling.In the beginning it may not be so easy because rocks have become afraid of man, they won’t believe it: What are you doing? Because you have never done such a foolish thing! In the beginning they may be apprehensive: There must be something wrong with this man, has he gone mad? Because men are not meant to do such beautiful things and he is doing this; only mad people do such things – or sometimes people like Lao Tzu.But allow the rock to get accustomed to you and soon you will find an upsurge of energy from the rock hitting directly to your heart.Go and embrace a tree. Just put your head on a tree and rest there, and feel how the energy of the tree starts flowing in you, and how it rejuvenates you, how it makes you absolutely fresh and clean, how suddenly deep down in you some flowers start opening and flowering. Listen to the sound of a bird, just listen, because the bird is not saying anything, he is simply singing.Listen to the poetry of the waters.Just listen to the poetry of the trees and their color, and feel.In the beginning it will be hard; again and again you will start thinking. Remember – drop thinking, again feel. By and by you will come to have the knack of it.Once you have the knack of feeling you will laugh! How you were missing! You were hiding behind the mechanism. The driver was lost and the car had become the totality. Now the driver is separate, now you can come. You can put the car off, or you can put the car on, it is for you to decide. Mind is a mechanism, it can be put off and on.When I talk to you I have to put it on, when you are gone I take the key out of it. It is non-functioning. It stops. Your car is continuously on, your motors are continuously functioning. They create such noise within you. The inner chatter.The first is love.The first step towards love is to feel more. And the second step towards love is: Be more. Don’t pay much attention to that which you do, pay attention to that which you are.You always think in terms of doing: you are an engineer, you are a doctor, you have done this and that…. Forget all this doing! Just try to be more. Have the feeling of being; just sitting, feel you are. Isness, being, should be the mantra. Just feel you are, and let this feeling get deeply rooted within you.Never get identified with what you have done. That is nothing. That is just dirt. Get clean out of it and just feel who you are – that’s why in the East the greatest mantra is Who am I?Not that you start thinking about yourself, because that is how it is happening in the West. Coming to know that in the East the teaching has been: Know who you are, there are many people who sit silently and repeat inside: Who am I? Who am I? If you do this then you are making a fool of yourself. It is stupid. Don’t say, Who am I? otherwise you are thinking again. Just feel, be. Just close your eyes and grope in the dark for the being. Grope!The new generation has a beautiful word for it; that is “to groove.” Groove for it, focus on it. In darkness, try to grope. There is nothing like it. Once you can groove on it, once you can focus on it, it is the most groovy thing possible.First drop thinking and come nearer and closer to feeling; and then drop doing and come closer and nearer to being.If these two things can be done you will be able to gain the first glimpse of what love is.And then your life will be filled more and more by love and love’s light. Then you can enter into a relationship which will not be sexual. Sex may be part of it, but if it is part of love sex itself becomes beautiful. And if love is part of prayer then love becomes religious and sacred. And if prayer is part of meditation it becomes the ultimate, beyond which there is no goal.The last fulfillment.The first is love. The second is, never too much.Why does Lao Tzu say, Never too much – the disease I called OD: overdose, or overdoing? Because mind is fed by overdoing, and heart is always fed by balance.A loving person is always balanced, he is always in the middle; never too much to the left, never too much to the right. Even if sometimes he has to lean towards the right he leans only to gain balance. That’s all. Otherwise he remains exactly in the middle: still, tranquil, silent. He is always in equilibrium.Mind is always after the extreme. It exists because of the extreme. Mind is the extremist. The disease I call OD is the mind. It is always overdoing – either on the left or on the right, but it is always overdoing. Whenever you are overdoing a thing you are becoming a slave to the mind. Whenever you are balanced, non-extremist, you are going deeper than the mind, you are moving in the heart.That’s why I say: Don’t renounce the world. People have renounced it and that became their mind trip. That’s why I don’t say: Just indulge in the world and forget about religion, because that too has been done by mind people, and that too has been destructive. I say: Renounce in the world. Don’t renounce the world, renounce in the world. Be in the world but don’t be of it.Be in the world but don’t allow the world to be in you, then an equilibrium is attained. That’s why my sannyas looks contradictory, paradoxical, because I am giving sannyas to people who are going to live in the world, I am not telling anybody to move to the monasteries. I am insisting – Remain in the market. If the market and the meditation can both go together there will be an equilibrium attained – which is what Lao Tzu says: The second is, never too much.Even too much of God is bad. Too much of meditation is a disease. Too much of anything is wrong. It has happened in the East, we have done too much meditation. In Zen monasteries they are doing eight hours, ten hours, per day. It seems they are born here only to meditate, nothing else. Their whole life seems to be just sitting. They don’t enrich life. They don’t enrich themselves by life experiences. They don’t move in the world – they are afraid; fear-ridden. And all their meditation is nothing but deep suppression. Meditate, but go to the market, because there is the test – whether you have been meditating rightly or not.The third is, never be the first in the world.That’s very beautiful – and that too is a part of love. Whenever you love you don’t want to be first in the world; that’s why I said: When love goes wrong, politics is born. Politics is the effort to be first in the world – to be the president, to be the prime minister, to be the richest person in the world, to be the most famous in the world, to be first in the world.Have you watched? If you love somebody you would like him to be the first in the world, not yourself. Suddenly a change of inner being happens. If you love somebody you would like him to be the first. And if you love the whole world – then you would like to be the last.That’s what Jesus says: Those who are first in this world will be the last in the kingdom of my God. And vice versa.Lao Tzu says: The third is, never be the first in the world. The very ambition of being first shows that you missed life. You are not blessed. You are not exalted. You are not fulfilled.Ambition is insanity. Ambition shows that you are not at ease with yourself, that you are not at home. Ambition shows that now you want that others should know you are very great. That is just to hide your smallness. You would like the whole world to know that “I am the greatest man in the world.” This is just the opposite of what you feel inside – you feel inferior. Only an inferior mind is ambitious. A superior mind need not be ambitious; there is no point in being ambitious. He is so fulfilled, if you put him last he will be happy there. He knows how to be happy! So wherever he is he is happy. If you throw him in hell he will be happy there.I have heard: There was an English thinker, Edmund Burke. He used to go to church on Sundays – he was not a believer but he liked the preacher and the way he talked about things.Somebody asked him: You are not a believer and you are not a religious man, so why do you go every Sunday, and so regularly? He said: Once in a while I like to see a person who really believes. Just to see a person who has faith is beautiful in itself. I don’t have any faith, but this preacher is a man of faith. He may be wrong – I know that he is wrong, but that doesn’t matter. He is beautiful in his faith. It seems that he has attained. Maybe he is in a delusion, but that is not the point. I am continuously trying to achieve something and he has attained. So just to look at him, I go there.One day he asked the priest – because the priest had preached that evening that people who are good, virtuous, and believe in God will go to heaven – after the sermon Burke asked the priest: What about people who are good and virtuous but don’t believe in God? Where will they go? Will they go to heaven? If you say yes, then to believe in God is not necessary. Then the belief, the whole hypothesis is useless! If a person can go to heaven just by being virtuous then what is the point of belief? And if you say that people who are virtuous and good and don’t believe in God will have to go to hell, then what is the point of being virtuous and good? Just believing in God will do.This Burke was a logician, and the priest was puzzled. He said: Give me a few days, I will have to inquire. I don’t know exactly what happens.He tried for seven days to think from every nook and comer, but he couldn’t get it, because the puzzle was there. If he says yes, then there is a problem. If he says no, then too there is a problem.On the seventh day he came to the church one hour before his sermon; he went to the terrace, was brooding there, closed his eyes – the whole of the previous night he could not sleep because he was thinking and thinking and thinking – and again he fell into sleep, and he had a dream.In dream he saw himself going in a train somewhere. He asked: Where is this train going? and people said: We are going to heaven. He said: This is good. This is the right thing. I will ask where those people are who are virtuous, for example Socrates – good, virtuous, but he never believed in God; where are they? So he went into heaven. But he didn’t like the look of the place. It looked a little ruinous, no happiness, a little boring, no excitement – of course, silent – but it looked dead. He could not believe that this was heaven.Then he asked: When does the train leave for hell? The train was ready, so he entered. He went to hell. He could not believe his eyes again because things were really beautiful. Beautiful trees, greenery, flowers, birds singing, and everybody was happy. He said, There is something wrong! This seems to be like heaven.He went into the town. He asked people: Is Socrates here? They said, Yes, he is working in the fields. So he went to Socrates and he said: Are you here? You, good and virtuous, but you didn’t believe in God? So you have been thrown in hell? He said: I don’t know about hell at all, but since we came here we have turned it into heaven.Shocked, his eyes opened.Edmund Burke was waiting downstairs. He came there and he said: I don’t know now exactly, but a dream I had I will tell you. In the dream I came to realize that people who are good and virtuous, wherever they go – that place becomes heaven. People who are not virtuous and good, even if they believe in God, wherever they go – that place becomes a hell. This is how it has been revealed to me in my dream.The world has become a hell because nobody trusts himself. Nobody is fulfilled. Nobody is happy with himself. Everybody is ambitious. Ambition creates hell.If you ask me who is the non-religious person I will say: the ambitious mind. If you ask me who is the religious person I will say: the non-ambitious mind. A non-ambitious mind is religion incarnated. He has the quality, because he is so fulfilled. Around him you will find an aura of fulfillment. He is not competing with anybody else. There is no need. He feels enough! More than enough. He feels grateful. Whatsoever he has got is ecstatic. More is not possible. And he is not competing with anybody else because there is no need. And the inner riches are such – there is no need to compete. That is the meaning of inner treasures. If you go for outer treasures you will be in competition. If you go for inner treasures there is no competition, no need for it. There is an infinite sky; you can have the whole sky for yourself, there is nobody else to compete with you.That’s the difference between religion and politics. Politics attracts inferior people, people who are filled with inferiority complexes. To be religious is to drop the inferiority complex. That’s why I go on insisting that you are not to achieve anything. It is already there within you. You are not to become gods, you are gods.And you are not to postpone it for tomorrow. There is no need. You can enjoy it right now. The question is not to achieve something, the question is to delight in it – it is already there! You lack nothing! If you want to be happy you can be happy this very moment. Not for a single moment has it to be delayed, there is no need because all that is needed for being happy is there. You have just to become alert, aware. You have just to open your eyes and find. Everything is there, all guests have come, the food is ready, the celebration is on. You have just to open your eyes and participate.I don’t say: Become gods, because that is politics, then you are running to achieve something. You become ambitious. I say: You are gods. Realize it, it is not to be attained. You have just to pay a little attention to it. You have become oblivious of the fact that you are gods.The third is, never be the first in the world.And then who bothers to be the first in the world? You are already the first. Everybody is the first in the world, that is the meaning of it. Nobody is comparable to you, has never been, will never be; you are incomparable, unique. You are already the first.Through love, one has no fear;Unless you attain to love you will always be afraid. A deep turmoil and fear will be there in your being. You will go on trembling, because unless you attain to love you cannot know that you are deathless. Fear will be there.One who loves deeply becomes deathless. One who loves deeply goes beyond death. One who knows love knows also that death does not exist. Because in deep love you come to know death. You die! And you resurrect.The cross and resurrection both happen in love, that’s why people are afraid of love. They come to me and they say, We would like to love but we are afraid. Man is afraid of woman, women are afraid of men. Even if you are in love you are not wholeheartedly in it. You move with very safe secured steps. And you move always to that point from where withdrawal is easy, you never move to that point where withdrawal will be impossible. You never move to that depth from where return is not possible. You stretch out your hand, but you are always ready to take it back any moment if danger comes. That’s why your love remains superficial.Love is a death, death of the ego. And when you die only then you know that you cannot die, that something in you transcends death.Through love, one has no fear; through not doing too much, one has amplitude of reserve power;When you are not a doer you have so much energy you become a reservoir, a great lake, full of energy; and that lake becomes a mirror in which the whole is mirrored and reflected.Ordinarily if you are a doer – and all are doers – you are always frustrated, always your energy is less, lower, than your need. You are always on the low – down; you are never high and up. Rarely does it happen that your energy is so much it is overflowing, and if it does happen you immediately move into activity to destroy it, to dissipate it – and then you always feel as if you are being sucked. Nobody else is responsible.A doer will always remain on a low level of energy. And how can you reach the ultimate on such a low level of energy? Energy should be preserved. It should become a deep lake within you so that you can reflect the whole.Through not doing too much, one has amplitude of reserve power; through not presuming to be first in the world, one can develop one’s talent and let it mature.If you are in competition, trying to be first in the world, you will miss your being totally because there will be no time to allow it to grow and mature. If you are not competitive and ambitious, then the whole energy is available for your own being to grow, to mature, to bloom; otherwise the whole energy moves in so many directions…Somebody has got a beautiful car. Now you cannot tolerate this. You have to have a better car than your neighbor, you have to waste your energy for a better car. Then somebody has got a better bungalow. Now you have to get a better bungalow, because how can you be defeated by ordinary neighbors? The whole life is wasted. And finally you find that in competing with your neighbors you have committed suicide.Remember, you are here to be yourself. Live in the world as if you are alone. Live in the world as if there is nobody who lives by your side; there is no neighbor – just you alone. And then choose your path.There will be no competition. There will be only inner growth and maturity.And if you can become that which you are already, only then there is fulfillment. You can become somebody else, but there will be no fulfillment. You can become a Rockefeller, a Ford, you can become anything; but when you have achieved it you will simply come to realize that this was not your destiny. You have achieved somebody else’s destiny – how can it fulfill you? Your destiny may have been a small one, a simple one – that you were going to become a flute player. Now you have become President Ford of America. Now what to do with this? The whole life wasted.And now if you start playing a flute people will think you are absolutely foolish. The time is wrong. And now you will be so confused you won’t know. All sense of direction will be lost. Remember you are here to be only you and nobody else. Don’t allow anybody else to manipulate you, and don’t try to manipulate anybody else. You are not here to fulfill anybody else’s expectations, nor is anybody else here to fulfill your expectations. Each individual is unique, sacred, divine. And each individual has his own destiny, and he has to fulfill his own destiny. His own destiny fulfilled – he fulfills the whole. Unfulfilled – he remains like a wound in the heart of the whole.There is only one sin if you ask me, and that sin is: not to fulfill your destiny. And there is only one virtue: to become that which you are meant to be, non-competitively.Just think if the whole world disappears and you are alone on the earth – what will you do? Just think – what will you do if the whole of humanity disappears. leaving only you on the earth; what will you do? Just close your eyes sometimes and see what you will do. If it comes to you that you will dance, then that is your destiny. Dance! Or if you think that you will just relax under a tree and go to sleep – go under a tree and go to sleep! That is your destiny. Just think of yourself alone – and you are alone really – and then you will feel fulfilled.Small things fulfill if they are in tune with your being. Even great things cannot fulfill if they are not in tune with you.…through not presuming to be the first in the world, one can develop one’s talent and let it mature.If one forsakes love and fearlessness, forsakes restraint and reserve power, forsakes following behind and rushes in front, he is doomed.So these are the two paths: if you follow your own inner being, the still small voice within, you will be fulfilled. If you don’t follow it, you are doomed.And if you feel that you are already doomed, don’t be miserable – there is always enough time to drop out. Even in the last moment one can drop out. In a single moment one’s destiny can be fulfilled.But don’t go on playing roles which others have imposed on you. Others are trying to say, Be this; Be that. Just be yourself.That’s why when many people come to me and they say: Why don’t you ask your sannyasins to be a little more disciplined? I say, I cannot. If the discipline comes from their own understanding it is okay. If it is not coming, that too is okay. Who am I to force any discipline on you? I am here to make you free.If out of freedom a discipline is born, and you become mature, understanding, responsible, it is good. If not, that too is good.But, I am not here to impose any discipline on you. An imposed discipline is a slavery, and when it comes from your innermost core it is freedom, freedom fulfilled, freedom come to its ultimate blossoming.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is it possible to be inside with you?Whenever you are with yourself you are with me, and there is no other way to be with me. So don’t create a duality between you and me. Just try to be with yourself, just try to be your withinness, and you are with me!Language is not capable of saying anything about a non-dual reality. Whatsoever is said in language is bound to be dual. And when you are with me neither you are nor I am. Whenever you are really your being you are a nobody, a vast emptiness, a whole sky with no boundaries. And then you are not only with yourself you are with the trees, with the clouds, with the mountains, with the sands and with the seas…when you are with yourself you become the whole.That is the meaning of the Socratic insistence: Know thyself. If you can know yourself you have known all that can be known – or that which is worth knowing. If you miss yourself you can know much, but all that knowledge is just rubbish. It may hide your ignorance, it cannot dispel it. It may make you knowledgeable but it will not make you understanding, it will not open the inner eye of knowing. You will remain a head person, top heavy, in deep anguish and anxiety.If you want to be with me, to be with me is not the way. If you want to be with me, to be with yourself is the way. And that is the insistence of all the buddhas: Know thyself and you will know me, because in knowing yourself you have known all.But if you try to be with me you will create a duality, and a conflict. Then being with me will become a new sort of attachment. That won’t help you, that will really harm you and hinder you. Then I will not be helping you towards transcendence. Rather, on the contrary I will become a rock hanging around your neck. You will not achieve through me then, you will be drowned.But I will not be at fault; that will be your own fault. That has happened to millions of people all over the earth in all the centuries. A Jesus comes and people start being attached to him. The whole point is lost. A buddha comes and people start their journey to know the buddha and they become so much obsessed with it that they forget that their own buddha is just inside themselves. He is not outside.And the way to know the outside Buddha is to know the inside buddha. When you are completely within yourself you have known all Christs, all Buddhas, all the masters that have ever existed, and also all those which will ever exist, because you become one with the whole. Knowing oneself one knows the whole.The temptation is strong to be attached to a master, to cling to a master, to become a shadow; but that won’t help, that will be suicidal.Don’t cling to me, I am here to make you free. I am here to help you to be completely, authentically yourself.If you have accepted me as your master then you have to understand what I am saying. If you have accepted me as your master then the only way for you is to know yourself.Forget about me, move withinwards. One day when you will be standing in your own total glory, in the magnificence of your inner being, in the inner light – there you will find me. Not as a separate being, not as an object, but as the very innermost core of your own self.It is reported: Buddha was dying, and Ananda started weeping and crying – his oldest disciple, and the most clinging one; for forty years he had been with Buddha and he had not attained, he had not realized himself yet; he loved Buddha too much. If you love too much…remember always, anything that is too much becomes part of the mind; only balance is transcending mind; anything that is too much becomes part of the mind. He loved Buddha too much, the love was not a freedom, it had become a bondage – anything of the too much is a bondage – and now that Buddha is dying his whole life is ruined. Ananda cries and weeps like a small child whose mother is dying.And Buddha stops him and says: What, Ananda, are you doing? He looks at Buddha with tear-filled eyes and says: Now where will I see you? Where will I seek you? And Buddha laughed and he said: That has been my whole teaching! For forty years that is what I have been telling you, that whenever you want to see me, look within! Appa deepo bhava; be a light unto yourself. There, inside you, you will find me.If you cling to the outside, it may be a Buddha, a Jesus, but you cling to the world, because the outside is the world. You own innermost interior is the transcendental.Move withinwards and you come closer to me. Come closer to me and you go far from yourself. Try to understand this paradox: If you try to come closer to me you will go further from yourself, and how can you come close to me if you are going further from yourself? Come closer to yourself and you come closer to me, because how is the otherwise possible?When you come closer to yourself you come closer to me because in the innermost being the center is one. On the periphery we differ; on the periphery I am an individual, you are an individual; the move withinwards brings these peripheral points closer and closer and closer – and when you exactly reach to the center of your being there is no duality. The two have disappeared. The twoness has disappeared.The second question:Osho,Baul Panchuchand sings: Strike your master hard and worship in faith. You wish to be devoted to God, live unattached, homeless, in spite of a homestead and your life with a girl. Do not listen to your head that forever misleads. Do not only think but chain your master hand and foot. Cut out a cane of love and flog him till he is blue…the master must eternally bow at the feet of the disciple…Will you please explain this in Lao Tzuan terms?Bauls have been very extraordinary people. The word baul means mad, Bauls were mad mystics. They have talked in all sorts of paradoxes; but very beautiful. They are not philosophers, they are mad poets. They are not proposing any logical thing, rather on the contrary they are trying to show you something through paradox.This Baul, Panchuchand, is one of the greatest Bauls. He says: “Strike your master hard and worship in faith.” This is what I was saying just now. If you want to come closer to me move closer to yourself. Forget me completely. Just remember your own being – and you will be moving towards me.This Baul says: “Strike your master hard” – destroy the duality of the master and the disciple. Drop the master completely. Forget about him. Strike your master hard and worship in faith. This is the paradox.And you can strike your master hard only when you have really worshipped him in faith. If you really understand me only then will you drop your clinging to me. If you have really loved me you will not cling. Then whenever I come in your way – strike me hard.That’s what Zen masters have been saying to their disciples: If you meet Buddha on the way – kill him immediately! And they loved Buddha tremendously.It happened. A Zen master, Ikkyu, was staying in a temple. The night was very cold and he had no blankets – he was a beggar, and the whole temple was so cold, it was made of stones: stone coldness. In the night he couldn’t sleep, so he went in, into the shrine, found a buddha, a wooden buddha; burnt a fire with the buddha; and enjoyed and delighted in the fire.The sound of fire, the movement of this Ikkyu – and the priest became awake. Seeing the fire inside the temple, he came running, and when he saw that one of the buddhas was missing – there were three buddhas in the shrine – and he looked at the fire, it was almost burnt, of course he was mad. He said to Ikkyu: What are you doing? Are you mad? You have burnt my buddha! You have committed the greatest sin that a man can commit, and we were thinking that you are an enlightened man!The fire was going down now; Ikkyu started to poke in the ashes.The priest asked: What are you doing? He said: I am trying to find the bones of the buddha so that they can be preserved. The priest started laughing, seeing the whole stupidity. He said: This is a wooden buddha, there are no bones. You are really mad! Ikkyu said: Then bring the other two buddhas also; the night is long and very cold.And in the morning – of course he was thrown out in the night, out of the temple, because he would burn the whole temple – in the morning when the priest came out of the temple Ikkyu was sitting just near the milestone on the road, and worshipping it.The priest could not contain his curiosity. He asked: Now what are you doing, madman? Ikkyu said: I am worshipping the Buddha and every day in the morning that is my first thing to do.This is the contradiction. But if you can see it is not a contradiction at all, it is a simple fact. A fact, the deepest fact of all mysticism.“Strike your master hard and worship in faith.” Love your master so deeply that there is no clinging – you can kill, you can drop, the other disappears, the other is absorbed, only you in your crystal purity remain. But this is possible only if total faith is possible.Of course this Ikkyu must have loved Buddha tremendously, otherwise how is it possible to burn Buddha? How is it conceivable? He must have loved so totally that there was no problem. He could burn the wooden buddha.Buddha died. Mahakashyapa, one of his greatest disciples, did not utter a single word: as if nothing had happened. He remained sitting under his tree. People were running here and there, there was much turmoil – Buddha has said he is leaving today! But this Mahakashyapa never moved from his tree.Many people said: Mahakashyapa, what are you doing? This is the last day! Buddha is leaving the body! It is said that he laughed and said: But who told you that he ever had a body? I know him. He has never been in the body. So what is the point of all this fuss? Let him leave it! He has never been in it. It is said that Mahakashyapa told his disciples that Buddha was never born, never died, he never walked on the earth, he never uttered a single word; and every day in the morning Mahakashyapa was worshipping the feet of Buddha.Difficult to understand, because you can understand hate which becomes destructive, you can understand love which becomes attachment, you cannot understand total love which is both, which destroys the non-essential and creates the essential.“If you wish to be devoted to God, live unattached….” Very beautiful. But remember, to be unattached is not to renounce the world. If you renounce the world you are attached to the world; otherwise why should you renounce it? What is the point in renouncing it if you are not attached to it? Only attachment renounces. If you are really non-attached there is no question of any renunciation.“If you wish to be devoted to God, live unattached, homeless, in spite of a homestead and your life with a girl.” Live in the house, be a householder: with your woman, your children – but remain unattached; because when you leave woman and children and house and you escape to the forest, you simply show that you were too much attached to all these things – otherwise why should you bother? And if you were attached how can attachment disappear by just going to the forest? It may become even greater because whenever things are not there you feel their need more.When you are hungry, you become food-obsessed. When you are on a fast you think only of food and nothing else. When you try to escape from your woman you will be sex-obsessed; you will think only of sex and nothing else.If you wish to be devoted to God, if you really want to know the truth – live unattached, but live. Unattachment should be a way of life, not a renunciation. Live unattached, but emphasis is on being in the world – live!Don’t try to commit a slow suicide – live it through and through! Live unattached, homeless, in spite of the home; live in the home but homeless. Live with the family but as if alone. Move with the crowd but never become part of the crowd. Be in the marketplace but never lose your inner meditativeness.“Do not listen to your head that forever misleads.” Why does the head mislead forever? In fact the head is not yours, that’s why it misleads. The head is a trick played by the society upon you. The head is like a mechanism attached to you by the society, imposed on you by the society.You bring a heart with you, you don’t bring the head with you – it is conditioned and trained by the society.Have you ever thought that there is any possibility of a heart being a Mohammedan or being a Christian or a Parsee or a Hindu? The heart is simply the heart, but the head is a Hindu, head is Christian, head is a Mohammedan. The heart is not Indian nor Chinese nor American, it is simply human. But the head is Indian, Chinese, American…The head belongs to the world, the heart belongs to you. The head is trained by the world, it is the world put within you. That’s why it misleads. It always says things which go against the innermost flow. It goes on diverting your energies, diverting your energies according to the society in which you have been brought up. The heart is natural, the head is social. The head comes from the crowd, the heart comes from the universe.“Do not listen to your head that forever misleads. Do not only think but chain your master hand and foot. Cut out a cane of love and flog him until he is blue – but it is a cane of love – and flog him until he is blue. The master must eternally bow at the feet of the disciple…”Absurd sayings, but very beautiful. I have told you many times: it happened that Buddha, in a past life, when he was not a buddha, heard about a man who had become enlightened. He went to see him. He touched his feet. Then suddenly he was surprised because that enlightened man, that buddha, touched Buddha’s feet. Buddha said: What are you doing? I am an unenlightened ignorant man, a sinner – and you, touching my feet? I should touch your feet – that’s okay, but why are you touching my feet?That enlightened man started laughing and he said: You may not be knowing it but you are also a buddha. Sooner or later you will become a buddha. You may not be able to see it but I can see it. Once you have become a buddha you know the buddhahood of the whole of existence. Then you never meet anything which is not part of buddhahood, enlightenment. You look at a stone and you see a buddha hidden there. In the greatest sinner you see the fulfillment of the greatest sainthood. In the greatest of evil you see the good sprouting. Once you are alert, aware, enlightened, the quality of the whole existence changes for you.“The master must eternally bow at the feet of the disciple….” Ordinarily the disciple bows at the feet of the master – but that is in the visible world which can be seen by the eyes; in the invisible the master is bowing at the feet of the disciple.When Jesus was leaving his disciples, the last night, when he was caught – and the next day he was murdered – he bowed down and touched the feet of all his apostles; even the feet of Judas he washed and kissed. And they were all surprised: This has never happened, what is he doing? He is bowing down to the future buddhas. Even a Judas some day or other will become a Buddha, a Christ.And time does not matter much. Time matters only to the mind, but to a man who has gone beyond mind, time matters nothing. Somebody has become enlightened today, somebody will become enlightened tomorrow, somebody else the day after tomorrow – but it doesn’t matter to one who has attained to a no-mindness. It is eternity.Somebody asked Jesus: Why are you touching our feet? What are you doing? And Jesus is reported to have said: So that you remember that the master had touched the feet of the disciples, so that you don’t become haughty, so that you don’t become proud, so that you don’t force people to touch your feet, so that you remember that finally the master has to just touch the feet of the disciple and has to bow down. Because in the disciple also the morning is hidden.It may be a dark night still, but the darker the night the brighter the morning is going to be. It is just coming, it is just by the comer, you cannot see but the master can see and he bows down to you – to the morning that is going to happen within you.This Baul Panchuchand is really beautiful. Lao Tzu would have accepted him as a friend.The third question:Osho,Will you comment on the nature of fear?Fear is a negativity, an absence. This has to be understood very deeply. If you miss there you will never be able to understand the nature of fear. It is like darkness. Darkness does not exist, it only appears to be. In fact it is just an absence of light. Light exists; remove the light – there is darkness.Darkness does not exist, you cannot remove darkness. Do whatsoever you want to do, you cannot remove darkness. You cannot bring it, you cannot throw it. If you have to do something with darkness, you will have to do something with light, because only something which has an existence can be related to. Put the light off, darkness is there; put the light on, darkness is not there – but you do something with light. You cannot do anything with darkness.Fear is darkness. It is absence of love. You cannot do anything about it, and the more you do, the more you will become fearful because then the more you will find it impossible.The problem will become more and more complicated. If you fight with darkness you will be defeated. You can bring a sword and try to kill the darkness: you will only be exhausted. And, finally, the mind will think: Darkness is so powerful, that’s why I am defeated.This is where logic goes wrong. It is absolutely logical that if you have been struggling with darkness and you could not defeat it, could not destroy it; it is absolutely logical to come then to the conclusion that darkness is very powerful: I am impotent before it. But the reality is just the opposite. You are not impotent, darkness is impotent. In fact darkness is not there – that’s why you could not defeat it. How can you defeat something which is not?Don’t fight with the fear otherwise you will become more and more afraid: and a new fear will enter into your being, that is: fear of fear, which is very dangerous. In the first place, fear is absence and in the second place, the fear of fear is the fear of the absence of absence. Then you go into a madness.You have taken a wrong step. Fear is nothing but absence of love. Do something with love, forget about fear. If you love well, fear disappears. If you love deeply, fear is not found.Whenever you have been in love with someone, even for a single moment, was there any fear? It has never been found in any relationship – if even for a single moment two persons are in deep love and a meeting happens, they are tuned to each other, in that moment fear has never been found. Just as if the light is on and darkness has not been found. There is the secret key: Love more.If you feel there is fear in your being – love more. Be courageous in love, take courage. Be adventurous in love, love more, and love unconditionally, because the more you love the less will be the fear.And when I say love I mean all the four layers of love: from sex to samadhi.Love deeply.If you love deeply in a sexual relationship much fear will disappear from the body. If your body trembles in fear, it is the fear of sex; you have not been in a deep sexual relationship. Your body trembles, your body is not at ease, at home.Love deeply – a sexual orgasm will dispel all fear out of the body. When I say it will dispel all fear I don’t mean that you will become brave because brave people are nothing but cowards upside down. When I say all fear will disappear I mean there will be no cowardice and no bravery. Those are two aspects of fear.Look at your brave people: you will find that deep inside they are afraid, they have created just an armor around them. Bravery is not fearlessness, it is fear well-protected, well-defended, armored.When fear disappears you become fearless. And a fearless person is one who never creates fear in anybody, and who never allows anybody to create fear in him.Deep sexual orgasm gives body at-homeness. A very deep health happens in the body because the body feels whole.Then the second step is love. Love people – unconditionally. If you have some conditions in the mind then you will never be able to love – those conditions will become barriers. Because love is beneficial to you why bother about conditions? It is so beneficial, it is such a deep well-being that – love unconditionally; don’t ask anything in return. If you can come to understand that just by loving people you grow in fearlessness, you will love! For the sheer joy of it!Ordinarily people love only when their conditions are fulfilled. They say: You should be like this – only then will I love. A mother says to the child: I’ll love you only if you behave. A wife says to the husband: You have to be this way, only then can I love you. Everybody creates conditions; love disappears.Love is an infinite sky! You cannot force it into narrow spaces: conditioned, limited.If you bring fresh air into your house and close it from everywhere – all the windows closed, all the doors closed – soon it becomes stale. Whenever love happens it is a part of freedom; then soon you bring that fresh air into your house – and everything goes stale, dirty.This is a deep problem for the whole humanity. It has been a problem. When you fall in love everything looks beautiful, because in those moments you don’t put conditions. Two persons move near each other unconditionally. Once they have settled, once they have started taking each other for granted, then conditions are being imposed: You should be like this, you should behave like that – only then will I love: as if love is a bargain.You don’t love out of your fullness of heart, you are bargaining. You want to force the other person to do something for you, only then will you love. Otherwise you will betray your love. Now you are using your love as a punishment, or as an enforcement. But you are not loving. Either you are trying to withhold your love or you are giving your love, but in both cases love in itself is not the end; something else is.If you are a husband then you bring ornaments to the wife – she is happy, she clings to you, kisses you; but when you don’t bring anything to the house there is a distance; she does not cling, she does not come near to you.When you do such things you are forgetting that when you love it is beneficial to you, not only to others. In the first place love helps those who love, in the second place it helps those who are being loved.And as I see it, people come to me, they always say: The other is not loving me. Nobody comes and says: I am not loving the other. Love has become a demand – the other is not loving me! Forget about the other! Love is such a beautiful phenomenon, if you love you will enjoy.And the more you love, the more you become loveable. The less you love and the more you demand that others should love you, the less and less you are loveable, the more and more you become closed, confined to your ego. And you become touchy. Even if somebody approaches you to love you, you become afraid, because in every love there is a possibility of rejection, withdrawal.Nobody loves you – this has become an ingrained thought within you: how is this man trying to change your mind? He is trying to love you? – Must be something false; isn’t he trying to deceive you? Must be a cunning man, tricky. You protect yourself. You don’t allow anybody to love you and you don’t love others. Then there is fear. Then you are alone in the world, so alone, so lonely, not connected.What is fear then? Fear is a feeling of no contact with existence. Let this be the definition of fear: a state of no contact with existence is fear. You are left alone, a child crying in the house, the mother and father and the whole family gone to the theater. The child cries and weeps in his cradle. Left alone with no contact, nobody to protect, nobody to give solace, nobody to love; a loneliness, a vast loneliness all around. This is the state of fear.This comes up because you are brought up in such a way that you don’t allow love to happen. Whole of humanity has been trained for other things, not for love.To kill, we have been trained: and armies exist. Years of training to kill! To calculate, we have been trained: colleges, universities exist. Years of training just to calculate so that nobody can deceive you and you can deceive others. But nowhere is there any opportunity available where you are allowed to love – and love in freedom.In fact, not only that, the society hinders every effort to love. Parents don’t like their children to fall in love. No father likes it, no mother likes it; whatsoever their pretensions no father, no mother likes their children to fall in love. They like arranged marriage.Why? Because once a young man falls in love with a woman or a girl, he is moving away from the family, he is creating a new unit of family, his own family. He is against the old family of course, he is rebellious, he is saying: Now I am going away, I will create my own home. And he chooses his own woman; the father has nothing to do with it, the mother has nothing to do with it; they seem completely cut off.No, they would like to arrange it: You create a home, but let us arrange it. So we have some say in it. And don’t fall in love – because when you fall in love the love becomes the whole world. If it is an arranged marriage it is just a social affair, you are not in love, your wife is not your whole world, your husband is not your whole world.So wherever arranged marriage continues the family continues. And wherever love-marriage has come into being the family is disappearing.In the West the family is disappearing. Now you can see the whole logic of why there is arranged marriage: the family wants to exist. If you are destroyed, if your very possibility of love is destroyed that is not the point; you have to be sacrificed for the family. If a marriage is arranged then a joint family exists. Then in a family a hundred persons can live – if marriage is arranged.But if some boy falls in love or some girl falls in love then they become a world unto themselves. They want to move alone, they want their privacy They don’t want a hundred persons around: uncles and uncles’ uncles and cousins’ cousins and…they don’t want this whole market around; they would like to have their own private world. This whole thing seems to be disturbing.Family is against love. You must have heard that family is the source of love, but I tell you family is against love. Family has existed by killing love, it has not allowed love to happen.The society does not allow love because if a person is really in deep love he cannot be manipulated. You cannot send him to war; he will say: I am so happy! Where are you sending me? And why should I go and kill strangers who may be happy in their home? And we have no conflict, no clash of interests…If the young generation moves deeper and deeper in love, wars will disappear because you will not be able to find enough mad people to go to the war. If you love, you have tasted something of life; you would not like death and killing people. When you don’t love you have not tasted something of life; you love death.Fear kills, wants to kill. Fear is destructive, love is a creative energy. When you love you would like to create – you may like to sing a song, or paint, or create poetry, but you would not take a bayonet, or an atom bomb, and go rushing off madly to kill people who are absolutely unknown to you, who have done nothing; who are as unknown to you as you are unknown to them.The world will drop wars only when love enters into the world again. Politicians don’t want you to love, the society does not want you to love, the family doesn’t allow you to love: they all want to control your love energy because that is the only energy there is. That’s why there is fear.If you understand me well, drop all fears and love more and love unconditionally – and don’t think that you are doing something for the other when you love, you are doing something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to you. So don’t wait; don’t say that when others love, you will love – that is not the point at all.Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people – you will be fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more blessedness through it.And when love goes deeper fear disappears; love is the light, fear is darkness.And then there is the third stage of love – prayer. Churches, religions, organized sects – they teach you to pray. But in fact they hinder you from praying because prayer is a spontaneous phenomenon, it cannot be taught. If you have been taught a prayer in your childhood you have been debarred from a beautiful experience that may have happened. Prayer is a spontaneous phenomenon.I must tell you one story I love. Leo Tolstoy has written a small story: In a certain part of old Russia there was a lake, and it became famous because of three saints. The whole country became interested. Thousands of people were going and journeying to the lake to see those three saints.The arch-priest of the country became afraid: What is happening? He had not heard these “saints” and they had not been certified by the church; who has made them saints?This Christianity has been doing one of the most foolish things; they give certificates: This man is a saint. As if you can make a man a saint by certifying him!But the people were mad, and much news was coming that miracles were happening, so the priest had to go and see what the matter was.He went in a boat to the island where those three poor people lived; they were simply poor people, but very happy – because there is only one poverty, and that poverty is a heart which cannot love. They were poor, but they were rich: the richest you could ever find; they were happy sitting under a tree laughing, enjoying, delighting.Seeing the priest they bowed down, and the priest said: What are you doing here? There are rumors that you are great saints. Do you know how to pray? – because seeing these three persons the priest could immediately sense that they were completely uneducated; a little idiotic, Lao Tzuan. Happy but foolish.So they looked at each other and they said: Sorry sir, we don’t know the right prayer authorized by the church because we are ignorant. But we have created one prayer of our own – it is homemade. If you won’t feel offended we can show it to you.So the priest said: Yes, show it to me, what prayer you are doing. So they said: We tried and thought and thought – but we are not great thinkers, we are foolish people, ignorant villagers; then we decided upon a simple prayer. In Christianity God is thought of as a trinity, three: God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And we are also three. So we decided on a prayer: You are three, we are three, have mercy upon us. This is our prayer. We are three, you are also three, have mercy on us.The priest was very angry, almost enraged. He said: What nonsense! We have never heard any prayer like this. Stop it! This way you cannot be saints. You are simply stupid. They fell at his feet and they said: You teach us the real, the authentic prayer.So he told them the authorized version of the prayer of the Russian Church. It was long, complicated; big words, bombastic, those three persons looked at each other – it seemed impossible, the door of heaven was closed for them.They said: You please tell us once more, because it is long, and we are uneducated. He said it again. They said: Once more sir, because we will forget, and something will go wrong. So again he told it. They thanked him heartily and he felt very good that he had done a good deed: brought three foolish people back to the church.He sailed off in his boat – just in the middle of the lake he could not believe his eyes: those three persons, those foolish people, were coming running on the water. They said: Wait! Once more! We have forgotten! Now this was impossible to believe!The priest fell at their feet and he said: Forgive me. You continue your prayer.The third love energy is prayer. Religions, organized churches, have destroyed it. They have given you ready-made prayers. Prayer is a spontaneous feeling.Remember this story when you pray. Let your prayer be a spontaneous phenomenon. If even your prayer cannot be spontaneous, then what will be? If even with God you have to be ready-made then where will you be authentic and true and natural?Say things that you would like to say. Talk to him as you would talk to a wise friend. But don’t bring formalities in. A formal relationship is not a relationship at all. And you have become formal with God also. You miss all spontaneousness.Bring love into prayer. Then you can talk! It is a beautiful thing – a dialogue with the universe.But have you watched? If you are really spontaneous, people will think you arc mad. If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, a rose, people will think you are mad. If you go to the church and talk to the cross or to the image, nobody will think you are mad, they will think you are religious. You are talking to a stone in the temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form.If you talk to a rose – which is more alive than any stone image, which is more divine than any stone image; if you talk to a tree – which is more deeply rooted in God than any cross, because no cross has roots, it is a dead thing that’s why it kills; a tree is alive, with roots deep into the earth, branches high into the sky, connected with the whole, with the rays of the sun, with the stars – talk to the trees! That can be a contact point with the divine, but if you talk that way people will think you are mad.Spontaneousness is thought to be madness. Formalities are thought to be sanity. Just the opposite is the reality. When you go into a temple and you simply repeat some crammed prayer you are simply foolish. Have a heart-to-heart talk! And prayer is beautiful. You will start flowering through it. Prayer is to be in love – to be in love with the whole. And sometimes you get angry with the whole and you don’t talk; that’s beautiful. And you say: I will not talk, enough is enough, and you have not been listening to me! A beautiful gesture. Not dead. And sometimes you drop praying completely, because you go on praying and God is not listening.It is a relationship with deep involvement in it. You get angry. Sometimes you feel very good, feel thankful, grateful; sometimes you feel put off; but let it be a living relationship; then prayer is true.If you just go on like a gramophone and repeat the same thing every day, you are not doing any prayer, it is not prayer.I have heard about an advocate who was a very calculating man. Every night he would go to bed, look at the sky and say: Ditto. Just like the other days. And go to sleep. Only once he prayed – the first time in his life – and then: Ditto. It was like a legal thing; what was the point in saying the same prayer again?Whether you say ditto or you repeat the whole thing it is the same. Prayer should be a lived experience, a heart-to-heart dialogue. And soon, if it is hearty, you will feel that not only are you talking, but the response is there. Then prayer has come into its own, come of age. When you feel the response, that not only you are talking – if it is a monologue it is still not prayer – it becomes a dialogue, you not only speak, you listen.And I tell you the whole existence is ready to respond. Once your heart is open the whole responds.There is nothing like prayer. No love can be as beautiful as prayer. Just as no sex can be as beautiful as love, no love can be as beautiful as prayer.But then there is the fourth stage which I call meditation. There dialogue also ceases. Then you have a dialogue in silence. Words drop, because when the heart is really full you cannot speak. When the heart is too overflowing only silence can be the medium. Then there is no other. You are one with the universe. You neither say anything nor listen to anything. You are with the one, with the universe, with the whole. A oneness. This is meditation.These are the four stages of love, and on each stage there will be a disappearance of fear. If sex happens beautifully the body fear will disappear. The body will not be neurotic. Ordinarily – I have observed thousands of bodies – they are neurotic. Bodies gone mad. Not fulfilled. Not at home.If love happens, fear will disappear from the mind. You will have a life of freedom, at ease, at-homeness. No fear will come, no nightmares.If the prayer happens then fear completely disappears, because with prayer you become one – you start feeling a deep relationship with the whole. From the spirit, fear disappears; the fear of death disappears when you pray – never before it.And when you meditate even fearlessness disappears. Fear disappears, fearlessness disappears. Nothing remains. Or. only the nothing remains. A vast purity; virginity; innocence.The fourth question:Osho,If I am to be my brother's keeper, how far does my responsibility go?No, you are not. Nobody is. Nobody is meant to be anybody’s keeper. You are here to be yourself. Your only responsibility is towards yourself.I would like you to be totally selfish because only in that is there a possibility that you may be helpful to others. Unless you are deeply self-centered, unless you are so selfish in your being that you are happy, celebrating, you will not be able to share it.Humanity has been put on the wrong track by altruists, by people who say: Serve others, you are responsible for others. Nobody is responsible for anybody. The only responsibility is towards yourself. And if you are fulfilled in that responsibility you respond beautifully.A really fulfilled husband will love his wife, because out of his fulfillment love flows. But if he thinks he has to fulfill responsibilities, he has a duty to care because he has got married to this woman, then he will be killing his woman, poisoning the woman, because this very attitude is poisonous. He will be dragging the weight, and with his every gesture he will be showing that he is not satisfied. With every gesture he will go on hinting to the woman: You are a heavy weight on me.Your mother is old; if you have really a deep-rooted centering within you you will love and serve her – not because this is your responsibility, no, but because this is how it happens to be. You enjoy serving the old woman. You love it! It is simple. You are not being a martyr, you are not trying to sacrifice yourself – remember always whenever you are a martyr you can never forgive the person for whom you have been a martyr. You will carry the wound, and you would like to take revenge. But the whole world has been trained: the father has to fulfill his duties to the children, then those children never forget and never forgive the father.Now one of the greatest insights that has come to Western psychology is that children never forgive their parents. This seems to be ridiculous because parents have been doing so much; but the very idea that “I am doing so much” is a crippling thing, heavy. The father goes on saying: I am sacrificing for you. This is simply stupid. Nobody is sacrificing for anybody else.If you love the children – you work, if you don’t love – you don’t work. It is better that the children should die than they should live a burdened life. If you love your wife – you love, and there is no question of any responsibility. If you don’t love, be frank and be true. Don’t love her. Somebody else may love her, why waste her life and your life?Now in the West out of four marriages one marriage is absolutely broken in divorce. That means twenty-five percent of marriages break up in divorce. Now psychoanalysts have been trying to do some research: what happens to the other three? They have come to feel that out of four, one breaks up in divorce, and out of four, two are unlived marriages: living together yet not together. Out of four, one breaks, two are continued; divorce is not given but the situation is of divorce – they live in divorce, not separate, not together. Only one they suspect is a marriage, only one out of four – and that too is suspected only, certainty is not there.Why is this happening? The basic point has been missed. The basic point is a man can love others only when he loves himself. A man can share his feelings with others only when he has something to share.First be selfish, only then can you be unselfish. Be rooted and centered in your being, so overflowing that out of your overflowingness you share. Not that you are a martyr. Never become a sacrifice, otherwise you will never be able to forgive those people who forced you to become a sacrifice.No, nobody is anybody’s keeper. The only responsibility is towards yourself. This will look as if I am teaching selfishness. Yes, I am teaching it. If everybody in the world was selfish the world would be beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Just think – everybody trying to be happy, everybody trying to be celebrating, everybody trying to be silent, meditative, prayerful, loving – because these are the things which will make you happy; the world will be happy.But here, nobody is trying to be happy himself. People are trying to make others happy. And if you are not happy how can you make others happy? You make them more unhappy. Public servants who are trying to change others’ lives so that they can become happy, are the most mischievous people in the world. Who are you to make anybody happy? If they want to be unhappy please let them be unhappy. At least that is their right! To be happy or unhappy is one’s right. You keep to yourself.You become unhappy if you want, you become happy if you want. Nobody wants to be unhappy and nobody will be unhappy if he looks to his own affairs, pays attention to his own affairs. A world absolutely selfish will be the best world possible.That’s why I am against communism and all socialistic tendencies. Because they kill the individual. They sacrifice the individual for the society, for the state. They say: For the country you have to die. For the religion you have to die. For the good of all you have to die – and they go on saying this to everybody, and everybody is dying – and for nobody!And everybody is unhappy trying to make everybody else happy. It is not possible – you cannot make anybody happy. In fact you cannot make anybody unhappy either. The most that can be done, that which is humanly possible, is to be happy or unhappy. Decide that. That’s all. And out of that, beautiful things start happening.When your house is lighted, when you have a fragrance of happiness, suddenly your fragrance enters into others’ lives, changes them, transforms them, without any mind on your part to transform them.The fifth question:Osho,Do we have missions to fulfill?No, nobody has any mission to fulfill. Missionaries are dangerous people. They have done enough harm. You have to fulfill yourself. No mission.Let God take care of others. You just fulfill your own being. Don’t try to convert anybody. Don’t try to be a do-gooder, and don’t think that you have a mission and everybody else has to follow it.That’s how the whole world has been suffering for so many centuries. So many missionaries creating so much conflict; pushing and pulling people from here and there. Leave them in peace!Nobody has any mission to fulfill – but ego always wants such things: that you have a mission to fulfill. People come to me and they say: Why has God given birth to me? Very important people. God has given special work to them. And I ask them: Just go and ask the trees and the dogs and the cats: they must also be asking – why has God given birth to us? Millions and millions of animals are there with no mission.In your body there are millions of germs – with no mission. If you put twenty-seven zeros on the figure five – that is the calculation of living cells in your body; and they are completely oblivious of you – that you exist. They live their own life, they move in the bloodstream, they enjoy, they love, they fall in love, they get married, they give birth to children, they fulfill their duties – they must be thinking they have some mission to fulfillWhat are you in this vast universe? Not even a small cell.But man is very egoistic. He cannot feel at ease just to be himself, he wants some great mission to be attached to his ego. No, I don’t see any mission. The whole may have something but no individual has.So the only thing you can do is to be yourself, blissfully yourself, and through that blissfulness you fulfill something. But it is not that you fulfill it, it is fulfilled through you; you become a vehicle to the whole. But it is not a mission. You should not look at it and you should not bother about it.Be ordinary. Just the effort to be extraordinary is a sort of madness. Just be ordinary and you are divine. Try to become extraordinary and you are mad.The sixth question:Osho,Do you believe mankind will some day evolve into a higher plane – a world free from war, injustice, etc.?I don’t think of the morrow at all, of what will happen tomorrow. People who will be here tomorrow – they will think about it. This moment is enough for me. And this is the only moment we can live, you cannot live in the future. Don’t waste your time on it.And don’t be worried about mankind: you will never meet anywhere any mankind or humanity; all that you will meet will be human beings. Humanity is an abstraction; non-existential; just a word. Don’t be bothered about it.You have a small life span; you will be living with human beings; just see how you can live so you can be fulfilled. Whether in the future there will be wars or not, who are we to decide? And why should we bother?But there are utopians who go on thinking about the future. They miss their lives in thinking about the future. And that future never comes. The word utopia means: that which never comes.Go on thinking about it: a world without wars, without famine, without poverty, but what is the point? – you are dreaming! Rather, be more realistic. Create a human being inside you who has no warring tendencies, no conflicting tendencies, no violence, no aggression; that’s all that can be done. That is feasible.Create a human being within, don’t think about human kind. How can you manage that? That is not possible. Leave all that to foolish politicians. They will think about it.You can do something for the human being that you are. Drop all conflicting tendencies: violence, aggression, fear – be loving, prayerful, meditative. Create at least one human being as you would like the whole humanity to be. At least create a model within you so that your fragrance spreads and gives a vision to people that this too is possible, that man is divine.Love more. Delight more, celebrate more, dance more, sing more: that’s all that you can do. Leave a dream around you – actualized. If somebody loves it, he may follow. I cannot say that the whole humanity will follow – it is such a vast thing.And there is no need of that because your happiness may not be others’ happiness. Your singing may be just noise for somebody else. Your dance may be nothing but a nuisance. So who is to decide? Don’t take the responsibility that you will decide for the whole – no.You drop out of these roles of decider. You are not the decider. You simply live your life in the small corner that you have got. Whatsoever you can do for yourself, do it. And if somebody feels good, attracted, magnetized – help him, but out of love, not out of any missionary spirit. That is poison.The last question:Osho,”If you meet a buddha on the road, kill him immediately!” What about you? How do I both love you and kill you.Do the same to me. First try to find me and then when you have found me – kill me immediately. Because that’s how you will attain to your own perfection.Even if I am there the duality will remain. An object in the mind is a disturbance. Drop that object also. When you have killed me you have completely followed me. When I have disappeared only then will you be grateful to me. Only then will you understand that the work of the master is very contradictory.First he has to create a situation in which you fall in love with him. He has to create a situation in which you start allowing him to guide you. This is the first part. When it starts functioning he has to create a situation in which you have to drop him.It is just like a ladder: you go on the ladder – first you have to move on the ladder, cling to the ladder, and then you have to leave the ladder. If you go on clinging to the ladder then the whole point is missed.The ladder is not the goal. You only want it to reach some other plane of being. The ladder helped from one plane to another, but if you cling to the ladder, at the last moment you say: I cannot leave this ladder because it has helped me so much, and I am so grateful, how can I leave it? Then the whole point is missed.The ladder is not the goal.Buddha used to say that once it happened: Five idiots were traveling. They came to a big river. They purchased a small boat. They crossed the river. Then they thought: This boat is wonderful. It has helped us to come across the river, otherwise it would not have been possible for us to cross it. So we should be grateful to it.So they carried the boat on their heads into the marketplace.People inquired: What is the matter? Why are you carrying this boat? They said: We are very grateful. This boat helped us to cross the river otherwise we would still have been on the other shore. Now we can never leave it!Buddha said: Always remember that the master is a boat. Cross the river, but don’t carry the boat on the head otherwise one who was going to free you will become your bondage.That’s how when a boat is carried, the boat of Christ is carried, you become a Christian, not a Christ. If you drop the boat you become a Christ; if you carry the boat you become a Christian. If you drop the boat of Buddha you become a buddha yourself; if you carry the boat you become a Buddhist. Which is foolishness.So don’t be one of those five idiots.Love me only to drop me one day. And love me so deeply that you can drop without any grudge, without any clinging, without any complaint.It looks difficult because you can understand love only in terms of attachment. You don’t know that love is deep unattachment. You can understand love only as possessiveness. You don’t know that love is the greatest freedom, non-possessiveness.If you allow me to create the situation and you don’t create resistance, first you will start clinging to me – that’s how the journey starts, one has to enter the boat. But when the other shore is reached I will be the first to tell you to leave the boat completely and forget about it. The purpose is fulfilled. You move ahead.The last step has to be taken in the divine, in God, and the master has to be dropped. The master is naught but a door.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lao Tzu says: They know me not.My teachings are very easy to understand and very easy to practice, but no one can understand them and no one can practice them. In my words there is a principle. In the affairs of men there is a system. Because they know not these, they also know me not. Since there are few that know me, therefore I am distinguished.Therefore the sage wears a coarse cloth on top and carries jade within his bosom.The easy is not always easy, and the obvious not obvious.This happens because of you. You are very difficult and puzzled, complicated, complex. Your whole being is topsy-turvy, fragmentary, divided in compartments.To understand an easy thing as easy you have to be undivided, and to understand a thing which is obvious is to bring the mind to a certain quality of awareness. Otherwise the distant seems near and the near is forgotten.Lao Tzu’s teachings are very easy, you cannot find more easy teachings than them. Buddha is a little complex, Jesus also, Krishna, very much, but Lao Tzu is absolutely simple, and because of that simplicity he is the most elusive.People have not been able to comprehend him, not because he is difficult, but because he is so easy. There is nothing to comprehend in fact, there is nothing to solve. If the mind has something to solve, the mind tries to solve it. In the effort to solve it, it comes to a certain understanding. But if the thing is absolutely easy, the mind has no challenge. There is no question of solving it, it is already solved. The mind simply forgets about it. It is not a problem, so it is not of interest to the mind, not a curiosity for the mind. There is no challenge in it, the mind cannot overcome it, conquer it, there is no point – the victory is so easy that the mind thinks victory is useless.That’s why Lao Tzu has been missed, and he is the most profound. But his teaching is very easy. This has to be understood.Right now your mind can comprehend many complex things. You can understand Hegel: not very profound, but very complicated. You can understand Kant: not very deep, but very puzzling. You can understand philosophers, philosophies, systems, because they don’t require any different awareness than you have. As you are, a little effort is needed and you will be able to understand Hegel: just a little more effort on your part – but no transformation in your being. They are just ahead of you, you have to walk a few miles more. Their quality is not different. But to understand Lao Tzu you have to pass through a deep mutation, a total revolution. You have to become like children – innocent.It is not a question of a very intelligent mind, it is a question of a very innocent mind. Innocence is needed to understand the easy, intelligence is needed to understand the complicated – intelligent you are, and that’s what is proving to be your whole stupidity. You cannot understand innocent things, you have lost that capacity completely, that mirror-like clarity of a child. He may not be able to say that he understands because he lacks vocabulary, logic; but just look into his eyes – everything is reflected, uncorrupted.A childlike consciousness is needed then. Lao Tzu is so simple – and there is no one like Lao Tzu; he does not create any problems, he is not a philosopher, not a system-maker, he is someone who has fallen back to the original source of innocence, and from there he looks at life, and he simply cannot understand why you are so puzzled. I also cannot understand where the problem lies, why you are chasing continuously and reaching nowhere! Why you are continuously trying to solve, and nothing is solved. Just on the contrary, the more you try to solve things the more they fall into bad shape, the more disturbance, the more tensions, the more anguish, the more anxiety.You try to solve one problem and a hundred and one problems arise out of your efforts. Something very basic is missing.This mind that you already have is not the mind which can solve. So, whatsoever you do with this mind, it complicates it more. It is a vicious circle. When it complicates a thing more you try to solve it more, then it complicates it even more, and this goes on and on.If this mind is allowed to go to the very logical extreme of its capacity, you will become mad. Insanity is going to be the logical outcome of it. You don’t become mad because you don’t go to the very extreme, that’s all. Between mad people and you there is a difference of degree, nothing else. One step more and you will become mad.You don’t go to the extreme, that’s all. You cling to the middle, so somehow you manage your normalness. Otherwise, everybody seems to be pathological.Life in itself is not a problem, so any effort to solve it is foolish. Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. Let this be a very fundamental understanding within you. It is not a problem at all. Enjoy it! Delight in it! Love it! Live it! Do whatsoever you like, but please, don’t try to solve it. It is not a problem at all!I have heard a joke. A professor of logic went to a toy shop with his small child aged five years and his wife, who was also very educated, very cultured, and they were looking for a new toy for the child for his birthday. They came across a very puzzling jigsaw puzzle. The father, himself a logician, tried to solve it. He did everything that he could but there seemed to be no possibility of solving it. He started perspiring, because people had gathered in the shop – and a professor of logic cannot solve a simple jigsaw puzzle which is meant to be solved by children! The wife also helped. Only the child enjoyed the whole game because he was not interested in solving it. He was suggesting: Do this and that – and he was the only one who was not troubled.And then the logician asked the shop owner: What is the matter? If I cannot fit this puzzle together how do you expect that a child of five years will be able to fix it?The shop owner started laughing, a mad laugh, he said: It is not meant to be solved, this toy is not meant to be solved. This is just to introduce the child to the modern world, to modern life: whatsoever you do, you cannot solve it. It has been made with a specific purpose – that it cannot be solved!Life has been made with a specific purpose: that it is purposeless, that it is not something to be solved but something to be lived, enjoyed. You can celebrate it. You can dance it. You can sing it. Millions of possibilities of what to do with life are there, but please, never try to solve it, otherwise you have taken a wrong step. And then never in your life will you again be in step with life.Who told you that this is a problem – these trees, this sky, the clouds, the sand, the sea – who told you that these are problems to be solved? But, the mind wants challenges, something to fight with. Even if there is no problem it creates ghost-problems to solve. By solving them it feels good; ego is enhanced, fulfilled, you have conquered something.This is the basic standpoint of religion – that life has to be lived. It needs, not a knowledgeable mind, but a wondering heart. Wonder as much as you can. In the West they say that philosophy was born out of wonder, but that seems to be wrong, because a philosophy is born only when the wonder is murdered. On the death of wonder philosophy erects its structure.If wonder remains then there can be no philosophy. Wonder is a state of being: open, allowing, a let-go. You enjoy but you don’t ask questions. You love life but you are not bothered why it is there. The why of it does not become an obsession. The what of it does not become an illness in you, that you first have to know it, why it is, what it is. You simply accept it as it is, and you wonder!And wonder is not a mental thing, it is of the heart. You are surprised by everything that you come across – a bud opening and becoming a flower. Again the whole creation is being created and you in your foolishness are asking: How did God create the world? Why did God create the world? – and he is creating right now! In front of your eyes!Watch it! Let that bud open there and become a flower and don’t bring in your mind full of questions. Just look with a wondering heart – and you will know! You will come to know through wonder, not through inquiry. And if wonder is attained, then Lao Tzu is absolutely simple – so obvious! As obvious as life itself.Truth is simple. Nothing has to be said about it. And, you will understand it because you are part of it. You have never gone out of it. You remain in the ocean, you are born out of it, you dissolve into it. The ocean lives through you, moment to moment. In every heartbeat of yours, the whole beats. In you the whole walks, in you the whole feels hunger, in you the whole feels satiety, in you the whole loves! and is loved! In you the whole is born every moment!This is the difference between philosophy and religion. Philosophy thinks life has problems to be solved, that is its basic assumption. Religion thinks life has nothing to be solved. Life is there in all its openness – jump into it, dance with it, dive deep into it, become one with it.And this is the beauty – that those who start with problems never end up with solutions, and those who never start with problems always have the solution. Those who try to solve are never capable of solving, and those who were never interested in solving, they have solved. In fact, nothing has been hidden from the very beginning. Everything is open, it is an open secret! It looks like a secret because you are closed. So the whole thing is how to bring a different quality of being to life; not this mental inquiry, but a wondering heart.Have you watched sometimes how a thing can be boring, and the same thing can be very deeply interesting? There are moments when, as for the first time, you listen to a Beethoven symphony, and it is so absorbing, so fulfilling, you become almost pregnant with it, you throb with it, you forget yourself completely, you are lost in it, it takes possession of you, you move in another world.Then next time you hear the same symphony it is not so beautiful. And the third time it is already getting a boring phenomenon. And the fourth time…and the fifth time, and you are completely bored…Now, is boring a quality of the symphony? Is boredom part of the symphony, or is it something you bring to it? Because if the symphony itself is boring, then the first time also it must have been boring. The quality cannot belong to the symphony. It belongs to you. The first time you were excited. The first time you were wondering where you were going, what was going to happen. The first time you had a child’s heart – excited!Have you seen children going for a journey? How excited they are! And you are simply bored. They jump up at the windows and want to look out and you are simply bored because the same scenery is being repeated again and again – the trees, the hills, and nothing new.But why are children so excited? They don’t know yet how to get bored – they have not learnt it. It takes time to learn the art of being bored. It takes experiences, a long life, and much effort – only then can you become bored. A child is fresh!When you come to a symphony for the first time you are fresh like a child, you enjoy it. Next time you already know it. That knowledge creates boredom. There is nothing like knowledge for that – if you want to create boredom, become more knowledgeable, and you will be completely bored, dead bored. Know more, and you will be more bored. Know less, and you will be always filled with wonder. Don’t know at all – that is the innocence. Not knowing anything, how can you be bored?Have you watched children? Have you told them stories? You tell them a story and the next day they are again asking: Tell us the same one again. You feel bored, but they are asking for the same story again. If you tell it to them, and if they are not feeling sleepy, they say: Once more! Tell us the story again! Because the number of times you tell it does not make much difference. They don’t become knowledgeable. They don’t gather dust. They remain clean, their mirror remains fresh.Again, some day it can happen that you are sitting with a man who is very boring. You are perfectly bored; then you turn on the music and that same symphony starts filling the room. You have heard it many times but suddenly now again it is enchanting. It has a magic. What has happened?That boring man was creating so much boredom, you were so fed up with him that even a symphony that you have heard many times again looks new – relatively.Do one experiment. You pass along the same road every day, you look at the same trees every day – just look more intensely, as if you have become the eyes; look at a tree very intensely, as if your whole life depends on it – suddenly you will see a transfiguration. The tree is not the same, its color is changing. The more you become intense inside, the greener becomes the color, fresher, more alive. The flower is the same, but the fragrance is not the same. The tree is the same, but the beauty is not the same. The more intense you become, the more the tree becomes beautiful – and there is no problem to be solved. The tree is so beautiful, only foolish people will try to solve it. Only fools are in search of solutions. Wise people have always lived and enjoyed and delighted. That’s why drugs have become so important in the West.Man lives just like the horses you have seen moving on the street yoked to carts, tongas; they have blinkers, they are not allowed to see, because if they see too much they will get confused. And if they can see too much they will not move in the direction you want them to go. So they are blinkered.The whole society has fixed blinkers on your eyes, on your senses, because the society is afraid that if you remain a child you will remain dangerous. The society tries to make the child mature as soon as possible, and the “maturity” is nothing but deadness.We force knowledge on the child so he loses his wondering heart, otherwise there is danger. A child is dangerous. You cannot predict a child, he is unpredictable. What will he do? Nobody knows. You cannot force laws and regulations on him because he lives moment to moment. He has to be made knowledgeable, so – schools, colleges, universities exist. These create blinkers.The whole effort of the whole of education is to fix blinkers on your senses so you become dull. Then there is no danger.When you are bored you become a perfectly good citizen. A bored man is perfectly good, he always follows the rules, the law. He is dead. He cannot rebel. But an alive man is always rebellious; life is rebellion – rebellion against death, rebellion against matter, rebellion against fixed frozenness. Life is a flow.The society fixes blinkers on your senses. You see, but you don’t see really. Hence in the West, and in the East in the old days, drugs take on great importance – society says drugs should not be used but it is societies which force people to use drugs. First you make people insensitive, then when they become insensitive only drugs can give them a little sensitivity. So when under LSD your eyes open, blinkers are removed – it is a chemical change, the chemical removes the blinkers – you look at trees, and they have a tremendous beauty they never had before. Ordinary objects of life – an ordinary chair, or a pair of old shoes, suddenly have a quality of divineness in them.Have you seen Vincent van Gogh’s painting “The Shoes”? He must have seen something, otherwise who wants to paint an old pair of shoes? And they are really beautiful. He worked hard on them. Just a pair of old shoes, but you can see that they are old, you can see that they are very experienced, you can see that they have lived much, struggled far, walked much on many roads, known and unknown, suffered. Their whole life is there.It is suspected that painters must have some sort of inbuilt LSD in them, that’s why they see things so beautifully in ways ordinary people don’t see. Van Gogh has painted a chair. Nobody can see any beauty in that chair, but he must have seen it.When Aldous Huxley for the first time tried LSD 25 he was sitting before a chair. That day he realized what van Gogh must have seen in a chair. Suddenly, his blinkers removed, forced off by the chemicals, his eyes clean and innocent, he saw the chair radiating thousands of colors – the chair became a rainbow, so beautiful no Kohinoor could compete with it.After a few hours, when the effect of LSD had gone, the chair was again the same. What happened? Did the chair change? He took the LSD, the chair had not taken LSD. His blinkers were removed.And I say to you that drugs cannot be avoided unless a society is created which drops blinkers. Otherwise they will persist. Names differ – and this is really beautiful people who drink alcohol, they are against LSD. Alcohol is a drug! It may be old, ancient, traditional, but it is a drug. The magistrate will be an alcoholic and he will send a person to jail because he has taken LSD! Nothing is wrong with LSD if something is not wrong with alcohol. LSD is just a newcomer – better, more developed, more scientific.I am not saying: Take LSD. I am not saying: Move into drugs. I am saying: Drop blinkers. If you drop blinkers there will be no need for any drugs. Then you live each twenty-four hours in such deep wonder that no drug can add to it. On the contrary, if a person who is living a life, a real life like Lao Tzu, is given LSD, or alcohol, or anything, he will feel that he has been pulled down from his high state. He will not be ready to accept it.If Buddha and Mahavira and Krishna and Lao Tzu are against drugs, they are against drugs because they live on such a high peak of consciousness that if you drug that consciousness it falls low, it comes down.Unless man comes to a higher state of understanding and innocence, which no drug can give, drugs will continue. Laws will continue, drugs will continue. Nothing changes because blinkers are there. You don’t hear! You are just like – you are like an airplane which was made to fly, but a few primitive people got hold of it. They could not even imagine that this mechanism could fly so they used it like a bullock-cart, with horses or bullocks yoked to it. By and by some people became interested in the fact that there seemed to be some sort of mechanism inside. These curious people starting working on it, discovering – just groping in the dark, and one day one person started the engine. So they removed the bullocks and they used the airplane as a car.Then some dangerous people tried to give it as much speed as possible. Suddenly one day accidentally it took off. Then they came to know that it was meant to fly, it was not a bullock-cart.This is the situation with you. You were meant to fly and you have become a bullock-cart, burdened, and you cannot be happy unless you attain to the total functioning of your being. This is what we mean by “God”: a man who has attained to the total functioning of his being. If he is meant to be an airplane, he has become an airplane. That man is divine.You live below, that is why you are always low. When you are low you have to force yourself to pull up somehow. But you cannot be up long enough. You can jump, but then again you fall.Discover your sensitivity. Your ears can hear the music that is the innermost core of existence. Your eyes can see the invisible which is hidden behind all visibles. Your hands can touch that which cannot be touched. You can fall in love with that which is the whole. Then life is simple.If you are functioning perfectly, if your inner being hums with perfect functioning, everything is simple and easy. Otherwise everything is difficult, very difficult, and you go on trying. And the more you try, the more it becomes difficult. That is the plight of modern man.In ancient days people were better off because they never tried so much. The modern man is really in trouble because he is trying too hard to live that which can be lived easily. You are unnecessarily trying hard and making it impossible.Now the sutras of Lao Tzu:My teachings are very easy to understand…But if you have understanding, only then. The thing that you now call understanding is not understanding. It may be intelligence but it is not understanding.What is the difference between intelligence and understanding? Intellect understands words, concepts, logic, proof, argument. Understanding goes deeper. Intelligence is just on the surface, wide but not deep. Intelligence can be very wide – a man can know thousands and thousands of things, a man can become a living encyclopedia, but that doesn’t mean that he has become understanding. Wider is his knowledge, and the wider it is, the less is the possibility of depth. If you force him to move into depth he will start suffocating.Understanding is intelligence moving in depth. Knowledge is intelligence moving wider and wider. Intelligence is quantitative, that’s why intelligence can be measured – it is quantitative. Psychologists have a measure for it: IQ, intelligence quotient. How much intelligence you have can be measured. But nobody can measure how much understanding you have. It is not a quantity at all so how can you measure it? It is a quality, in depth. And understanding is not in any way dependent on knowledgeability, it is dependent on awareness – this is the difference.You can go on reading many things – no need to be aware, just go on cramming, the memory goes on absorbing things. If you want understanding you have to be alert, watchful. It is not a question of memory, it is a question of seeing the truth of it.You can hear me in two ways. You can hear me with intelligence, and your intelligence can say: Yes, this man looks logical or, he looks illogical. Your intelligence can say: Yes, I agree with this man, or, I disagree. But this is all on the surface. If you listen to what I am saying with alertness, without a mind continuously judging but just penetrating it, looking into the truth of it, of what this man is saying, penetrating it deeply, looking at it through and through, you will come to understanding. And understanding is neither for nor against it is simply understanding – intelligence is for and against.If you understand me you will not be for me, you will not be against me, you will simply delight in me and go your way. Understanding is a totally different dimension. Intelligence moves horizontally, understanding moves vertically.If you want to accumulate knowledge, then intelligence is needed. If you want to become knowledge, then understanding is needed.It may be that if you come across Lao Tzu somewhere on the earth you may not find him very intelligent. If you ask him questions he may not be able to answer. But if you watch him you will be able to see his understanding. He may not be a man of knowledge, but he has to be a man of knowing.If you just listen to his words he may look uneducated, uncultured, but if you look into his being then you will see what he is hiding within: the purest heart possible. And that is the thing that ultimately counts, finally counts, because nobody lives through knowledge, you have to live through being.Gurdjieff used to ask his disciples, whenever somebody wanted to be initiated he would ask: In what are you interested, in knowledge or in being? It was difficult for a person who had not been searching deeply; what was the difference? Knowledge or being? Gurdjieff used to say: Do you want to know more or do you want to be more? That to be more is the way of understanding. One gathers being, not words and concepts and philosophies.My teachings are very easy to understand and very easy to practice…In fact no practice is needed. that is the meaning of very easy to practice. If you understand, the very understanding becomes the practice. That’s the meaning of Socrates’ famous dictum: Knowledge is virtue. He used a wrong word – he was a Greek, we can forgive him – he should have used knowing or understanding. He said: Knowledge is virtue. He meant really: Understanding is virtue.If you understand a thing how can you do anything against it? If I know well that this is the door, how can I try to pass through the wall? If I know it, is there any need to practice it? Practice comes only as a substitute for knowing.If you really know a thing it simply happens to be practiced, there is no need to do anything for it. That is the meaning of: understanding them is very easy and their practice is very easy. In fact understanding is practice.Have you watched it in your own life? If you understand a thing do you ask how to practice it? If you don’t understand it, if you only accumulate it as knowledge, then of course the question arises: How to practice it? Knowledge needs practice. Understanding is practice itself. Once you understand a thing, it transforms you immediately. The understanding is not gradual, it is sudden. In a split second you are totally a different man.I have heard an old story. A great jeweler died. He had left many valuable stones to his wife, and she was in troubles so she called another jeweler, a friend of her late husband, to sell these stones.He looked into the stones and he said: Keep them. Right now the market is not running well, and they will not fetch much. Keep them, whenever I see that the right time has come we will sell them. But, send your son to my shop every day so that I can teach him the art.Years passed. And then the woman again said: Those stones are lying there, and we are poor and we are in difficulty, now sell them. The jeweler said: I will come today.The jeweler came. He brought the woman’s son who had been learning the art of jewelry with him and he told the boy: Now bring those stones. The boy opened the box, looked at the stones. They were useless. The boy laughed, went out, threw the whole box into the road.The mother started crying: What are you doing? The boy said: They are all useless. They are not valuable at all, not even semi-precious.But for years the woman had been keeping them as a great treasure, protecting them, so she asked the friend of her dead husband: Why didn’t you say this before? He said: Then you may not have believed me. They were useless, but you may not have believed me because that would have been just a knowledge to you. It would have been difficult to trust me. Hence I asked your son to be trained. Now he knows. Now I am not in between.Did the son wait for a single moment? Once he knew that they were ordinary stones he simply went out and threw them into the street. Not a single moment was lost. It was not a treasure – finished!The same happens in life. If you understand a thing, you understand. You never ask, How to do it? The “how” comes only to a knowledgeable person, not to a man of understanding. That’s why J. Krishnamurti goes on teaching his disciples: Don’t ask the how! Just listen to what I am saying and try to understand. Be aware! And there is no “how” to it. And they listen to him – of course with blinkers. And when he has finished and he asks: Now are there any questions? somebody is bound to come and say: Whatsoever you say is right, but how to do it? The whole point is missed. Even a man of Krishnamurti’s compassion feels irritated because for forty years he has been saying only one thing: that understanding is enough unto itself. No effort is needed to practice it. If effort is needed it is not an understanding. And through effort no one reaches the truth, only through understanding.My teachings are very easy to understand and very easy to practice. But no one can understand them and no one can practice them.Why? Why can no one understand them and no one practice them? Because you are in such a mess that the easy looks difficult, the simple looks complex. And you are in such a mess that whatsoever you see becomes distorted. And then you start creating problems and solving them.Unless you raise your awareness to a different plane, problems will not change. It has been my observation, working with thousands of seekers, that no problem can be solved if your plane of consciousness remains the same.A man came to me a few years before, he had been suffering from constipation for a long time. A very rich man, he had tried every medicine, tried every cure, from allopathy to naturopathy – he did everything. He had enough money to waste, enough time, so there was no problem there. He had moved all over the world to get rid of the constipation, but the more he had tried the worse the constipation had become deep-rooted. He had come to me and he said: What to do?I told him: Constipation can only be a symptom, it cannot be the cause. The cause must be somewhere else in your consciousness. So I told him to do a very simple thing. He could not believe it; he said: How can it be possible? Doing this simple thing you think will help me? Are you fooling me? Because I have done everything, and can such a simple thing help? I cannot believe it. But I said: You simply try.I told him just to do one thing: to remember continuously that “I am not the body.” Nothing else. Of course he could not believe it because how was this going to help?Man is identified with his body. Too much identification with the body will give you constipation. You cling! You shrink! You don’t allow the body to have its way. You don’t allow it to flow. That is the meaning of constipation. Constipation is a spiritual disease. Get disidentified with the body. Continuously remember that “I am not the body, I am a witness.”For three weeks he tried and said: It is working. Something is loosening within me.It is bound to happen. If you are not the body, the body starts functioning, you don’t interfere, you don’t come in the way, the body goes on working.Have you seen any animal constipated? No animal in nature is constipated. In zoos you can find animals constipated. Or pet animals, dogs and cats, which live with man and are infected with humanity, which are corrupted by human beings, they may get constipation. Otherwise in nature there is no constipation. The body has its own way. It flows. It is not frozen, it doesn’t have blocks. Blocks come with identification.I told the man: Just do not be identified with the body. Keep an awareness that you are a witness. And never say “I am constipated,” just say “The body is constipated, I am a witness to it.”The body became loose. The stomach started functioning, because nothing disturbs the stomach like the mind. If you are worried, the stomach cannot function well. If you are identified with the body, the body cannot flow well. That’s why deep sleep is needed whenever you are very ill, because only in deep sleep do you forget the body, and things start flowing.It changed. But he came and told me that a new thing was happening: I have always been a miser, and now I don’t feel so miserly.It has to be so. Because miserliness is deeply connected with constipation. It works both ways: if you are a miser you will be constipated, if you are constipated you will be a miser. Constipation is really a deep miserliness of the body – not to leave go of anything, not to allow anything to go out of the body. Keep everything closed!Change the plane of your consciousness, and problems start changing.A woman came to me – very fat, and she of course had become ugly. She also had tried every way: dieting, gymnastics, yoga, all sorts of nonsense she had tried. Nothing helped, she went on gathering more and more fat. I said to her: This does not seem to be the real cause. Somewhere deep down something else is hidden. This is just a symptom.I talked to her – many times she came, and by and by she revealed, unknowingly she revealed her heart. From her very childhood she has been enclosed. She feels nobody loves her.Now if a woman feels that nobody loves her she will have to find somebody responsible, something responsible – nobody can think: I am unlovable. So she has found an excuse in the body – nobody loves me because my body is ugly. I am not ugly, my body is ugly, that’s why nobody loves me. So the whole responsibility goes to the body.She goes on trying to reduce the weight of the body but nothing can help, it can’t happen. She goes on feeding herself more and more because a deep-rooted cause is functioning there. That is her only protection.If the body remains ugly she is at ease. Nobody loves her because of the body. Once the body becomes okay and if nobody loves her then, then the responsibility will have come unto herself. Then she will feel that she is unlovable – and that is too much to encounter, to face.Once this thing surfaced in her being things started changing. She ate the same, but the weight went down: no dieting, just surfacing of a cause. Understanding it had become a transformation. She became lean and thin. And of course, beautiful! And of course people started feeling her charm.Everybody has a charm. There is not a single human being who has not a magic of his own. You may not allow it to spread around you – otherwise everybody has a beautiful aura around him.And once people started loving her, feeling for her, she started loving her own body. Now the body was at ease. And whenever a body it at ease it is beautiful. All bodies are beautiful. But something had to be brought to her understanding.That is the whole effort of psychoanalysis in the West: to help facts surface so that you understand them; the very understanding changes you.But no one can understand them and no one can practice them.Right nor as you are it will be very difficult to understand Lao Tzu. If he had said: Do something, you could have understood. If he had made a very high target – to reach the moon, you could have tried.But he says there is no goal, no purpose, no effort is needed to be, you are already there. All that you need is to participate in the celebration that is going on – and it is an ongoing affair, continuous, whether you participate or not makes no difference; birds go on singing, trees go on blossoming, clouds go on moving, seas go on rolling and singing, the celebration is an ongoing phenomenon. You can cut yourself off and stand aside and suffer, otherwise you can move in, lose yourself and celebrate.In my words there is a principle.In the affairs of men there is a system.These two things have to be understood – In my words there is a principle. Lao Tzu is saying there is only one principle. Tao is the principle. Tao means to be natural and flowing, to be in a deep let-go, not fighting with life but allowing it, accepting it, not pushing the river but floating with the river wherever it leads. This is the only principle of Lao Tzu. Don’t fight with life otherwise you will be defeated. Surrender, and your victory is certain. In surrender is victory, in fight is defeat. If you are frustrated, that simply shows you have been fighting hard.If you find someone who is happy and victorious, know well that he has understood the principle. He is not fighting. He is floating with life, he is riding on the waves.In my words there is a principle.In the affairs of men there is a system.But in the affairs of men there is not a principle but a system. Lao Tzu says: If you ask me I have got only one principle, and that principle can be called a deep let-go, surrender. But in the affairs of men there is not one principle, there is a system, a very complicated thing.People are not simple but very complicated, puzzles. They don’t even know themselves, how much complexity they go on carrying within them. And that complexity will not allow them to understand a simple phenomenon, a simple principle – that you are a part of life, a wave in the ocean.Don’t fight with the ocean, that is foolish. Just enjoy the ocean – while it lasts. Rise with the ocean, fall with the ocean. Don’t create any separation between you and the ocean. This is a simple principle.Zen masters have said that a single word solves everything. In fact only a single word can solve everything. The more complicated a philosophy you have, the more you will be in trouble, because all philosophies are a type of armoring, defense.People come to me, they are so much burdened with thoughts and they come to me to gather more thoughts. I am their enemy if I burden them more. They need unburdening. They come and they say: We have come to learn something. And I say to them: You have already learned too much. You please forget it, unlearn it! drop it! Your head is too heavy, you are top-heavy. You are being killed by your own burden.Forget all that you know! Knowledge is complicated. And knowledge becomes a barrier between you and life.Philosophers miss life as nobody else misses. They pass by the side of life, they move parallel to it but they never meet it, because a great philosophy always surrounds them like a cloud. They cannot look beyond it. Their eyes are filled with smoke.Because they know not these, they also know me not…And because people can’t understand a simple principle, and they are always interested in complicated systems, that’s why “they know me not…”Since there are few that know me, therefore I am distinguished.Lao Tzu is simply paradoxical, but his paradoxes are beautiful and indicate many things. He says: Since there are few that know me – only a few can know him; not that he is difficult, but because he is so simple that only simple-hearted people can know him. Very few! All are corrupted. Only uncorrupted minds can know him. Very few people know me, …therefore I am distinguished. And he says that’s why he is distinguished.Ordinarily, when many people know you, you think you are distinguished. When the whole world knows about you, you feel you are extraordinary, superb, something superior.In fact Lao Tzu is true. When many people understand you that simply shows that you are very ordinary, otherwise so many people cannot understand – people are so mad, you must have some insanity in you, otherwise so many people could not understand you. You must be of the same level, of the same plane.That’s why political leaders are so distinguished. They come from the lowest strata of human mind. They belong to the most inferior quality of human consciousness. But of course, then the majority can understand them, because the majority belongs to the same level. They speak a language that can be understood by all.A Lao Tzu is rarely understood. In a century, if you can find three persons to understand Lao Tzu, that’s too much to expect. But he says, …therefore I am distinguished.Always remember this: if many people recognize you, that you are something superior, remember you must be inferior. Otherwise how can so many people recognize you? You must be worthless. If so many people appreciate you, know well you must be on wrong grounds, otherwise so many people cannot appreciate you.I have heard about a madhouse. A new doctor had taken over. The old had gone into retirement and a new doctor came. The whole madhouse, the five hundred mad people, celebrated the day, they danced the whole night, and they were very happy. It had never happened so; the doctor had been to other madhouses attached to other hospitals, but nowhere had he been so welcomed.He asked the madmen in the morning: Why are you celebrating so much? I am just an ordinary doctor, why are you going so mad with happiness? They said: You look so like us. The other doctor was not one of us. Whenever so many people appreciate you, remember this: you must be looking like them. There must be something inferior in you, something base. You cannot be very valuable. Otherwise only a very few jewelers will be able to understand who you are.You can pass Lao Tzu, you may not be able to recognize him. You cannot pass Alexander without recognizing him. How can you recognize so easily an Alexander? Adolf Hitler? Mao Zedong? Why is it so easy?Something in you responds. You also have a little Alexander in you. You would also like to become a conqueror of the whole world. You are of the same type, the same madness. That madness helps to give you a glimpse that here is a man who is the image of what you would like to be. You appreciate only those people who are your images, your goals, your ideals. Lao Tzu will pass, you may not even be aware that somebody has passed.We have a beautiful word for Buddha; one of his names is tathagata. The word means: who came like wind and passed like wind; thus came, thus gone. Nobody could recognize when he came, when he went away. When he has gone, then suddenly people recognize that somebody was there, a presence.A Buddha is not felt, he comes like a breeze, not like a storm. Alexander comes like a storm, Buddha has such soft music, you will not be able to hear it; you have become attuned to the marketplace, to the loud music, to the mad music. Only when something goes completely mad, then it enters into your consciousness. Otherwise not.That’s why people are interested in politics. Politics is madness, the game of the very inferior consciousness in you. You can recognize it. But Lao Tzu says:Since there are few that know me, therefore I am distinguished. Therefore the sage wears a coarse cloth on top and carries jade within his bosom.A sage should not be understood by his appearance, because by appearance you understand fools. A sage should not be understood by his outer garments because those are the garments used by emperors, politicians generals, conquerors. A sage wears a coarse garment, and carries a diamond within.If you have eyes, only then will you be able to see it. If you have ears, only then will you be able to hear it. If you are really alive, functioning to your total capacity, only then will you be able to recognize that a sage exists. And in that very recognition, you have also become a sage. If you can recognize a sage in that very recognition you have taken a great step, because that very recognition shows that something has responded within you. An ego has been hurt.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is it inside people that makes them react to what you say and what you are with such antagonism? Why can't people who disagree with you just live their own lives the way they feel, and leave you to yourself?The responsibility is not with the people, the responsibility is with me.They are not doing anything. They can leave me to myself, it is me who is not leaving them to themselves. They are simply reacting, and their reaction is natural. It has been always so, and it will be always so.I am a rebel. Whatsoever I say goes absolutely against their conditioning. They have been conditioned to look at life in a certain way, to think in a certain way, to live in a certain way. What I say disturbs them.And I do it knowingly, I have to disturb them, otherwise there can be no transformation in their lives.And whenever you say something which unsettles the old mind, the old mind becomes defensive. Nothing is wrong in it – it is natural, because the old mind is accustomed to a certain pattern of living which is easy; the path which is of least resistance, is easy. The mind knows a certain way to live, then suddenly you say something which disturbs the mind because now a problem arises: whether that which they believe is true or not. I create a doubt.Of course I create a doubt to make them aware of a higher trust, but that higher trust is not visible to them; they only become wavering, hesitant; whatsoever they have been doing becomes suspicious.For example, if I say: You go to the temple, and it is useless because those temples are made by man, and how can man make a temple of God? All that is man-manufactured will be at the most human, not more than that. If you really are in search of the temple of God then you have to find something which is uncreated, uncreated by man.But you have been going to a church, to a temple, and you were complacent, you were consoled by it, you had a fixed routine, and you were thinking that everything is going well, then I come suddenly in your way and I say: This temple is manmade! And you have been worshipping before your own creations! God created man, man cannot create God! So if you want to really search for the temple of God, move towards the vaster horizons of existence. The whole existence is the temple, and unless the whole becomes the temple you will never reach to the innermost shrine of it, you will never be able to find what is the center of the all.So your temples are deceptions, toys to play with – of course it disturbs you.A man who has been going to the temple for fifty years suddenly becomes suspicious – what will he do? He will react with anger. He will become antagonistic to me, because I have been a disturbance in his life.My disturbance was well meant, but that is not the point. If he comes nearer to me I will help him to see the real temple – but that is a second thing. First he has to be convinced that his temple is wrong and pseudo. That is painful.When you live in a dream and somebody wakes you suddenly, you feel angry. And if the dream was beautiful, nice, sweet, the waking is going to be painful and a suffering. That’s why they crucified Jesus. The people who crucified Jesus were not bad people – never think like that – they were not bad people. They were good, moral – very good people; but they crucified Jesus because he disturbed their whole way of thinking. He was a great destroyer! A great destructive force! He forced them out of their sleep, and they wanted to dream, and their dreams were sweet. Jesus had to be crucified.They poisoned Socrates. The people who poisoned Socrates were good people, they were not evil forces but moralists, judges of those days, politicians, social servants – they were all together in poisoning a simple man like Socrates, who had not done anything except talk to people.But that talking was very dangerous, very potential, because he had many people come out of their dreams, saved many people from their consolations, shocked many people out of their dead beliefs – it was necessary, if people are to be helped you have to break their dreams and shatter their beliefs. Of course they react. One should not feel bad about it. That reaction is simple and natural. They become antagonistic, that antagonism is nothing but a defense measure. They defend themselves.It is not the people who don’t allow me to live my way. They cannot do anything – I go on living my way; whatsoever they do, that makes no difference. They crucified Jesus but they could not disturb his way of life. They poisoned Socrates but they could not disturb his way of life.The judges had given an ultimatum to Socrates; the court felt that this man had not done anything wrong; maybe his ideas were dangerous, rebellious, but he had not acted in any unjust way; so the court gave him a last alternative: If you promise the court that never again will you teach to people what you call truth, then you can be pardoned.Socrates said: It is better that you kill me. Because that is my whole profession – to talk about truth, my whole habit, I cannot drop that, it is better I should die.He was not ready to drop his style of life, his way of thinking; he was ready to drop his body – that’s not much. No, nobody can disturb my way of life, because it is not an outer thing, it is something deep inside me where nobody can enter except me. In fact just the reverse is the case: I disturb people’s lives and it is natural that they react with antagonism.I have no complaint against them, no grudge, I know it is natural. And I cannot do otherwise. When I see something is wrong, I have to say that it is wrong. When I see that something is deeply false, I have to say that it is false. Helping you is not something that I am doing for you; I cannot help doing it.This has to be understood. Just as a light cannot help spreading light, a flower cannot help spreading fragrance, whatsoever the cost, and whatsoever the result – what I see I will have to say.It is not a question of my decision to say or not to say. It is just like a flower opening and the fragrance spreading; whether people like it or not, that is not the point. If they like it, they will be helped soon; if they dislike it, they will be helped a little later, that’s all.The second question:Osho,When all I know of love is its attachments, how can I drop them? All I can see is the ego clinging to what it believes is love.When you say “When all I know of love is its attachments, how can I drop them?” you are not rightly understanding your mind. If you really know that they are attachments, they drop. Then there is no question of how to drop them. The how comes only when the understanding is not ripe.If you simply see that something is rubbish, you throw it! You are asking me: I know that these diamonds are not real diamonds, they are just false, imitations, how can I drop them? – you are asking this.If you have seen to the fact, if you have realized the truth that they are false, is there any need to drop them? Is there any question possible of how to drop them? You simply drop them! That dropping is not even an effort on your part – it happens. Knowing well that this is useless, it drops. I would like to say: it drops itself, not that you drop it. When a falsity is known as falsity, it drops. When untruth is known as untruth, it drops.How do you drop your dreams? You know they are dreams – they disappear. The moment you know that this is a dream it has already started disappearing.You say: “When all I know of love is its attachments….” No, you don’t know, you are confused; you have been hearing me too long. I go on saying that what you call love is attachment, and I have put the idea in your mind that what you call love is attachment – this is not your understanding, this is my understanding. For you this is just information. Somebody else has told you. You may love me, you may trust me, so you take it for granted it must be true. But truth cannot be taken for granted, one has to grow into it.Truth is not information. It is not something that can be transferred from one hand to another. Even if I try to transfer my truth to you the moment it reaches your hands it will be a falsehood. That is the very nature of truth: nontransferable. You have to grow into it. It is your own maturity, it is your own realization.So remember: listening to me, always remain alert.There are many pitfalls; and the greatest is, that listening to me continuously you may start thinking that whatsoever I am saying is truth for you. It is truth for me, otherwise I would not have said it, but it is not truth for you. Remain alert – it is knowledge. It is not yet knowing and understanding.Knowledge is borrowed, knowing is your own flowering, blossoming. Knowing is yours authentically, knowledge is always from some source: Vedas, Bible, Koran, me. It is always from somewhere else.And this is the intrinsic nature of knowledge: borrowed, it burdens. It never makes you free. Only knowing frees you, liberates you. Jesus has said: Truth liberates. But not another’s truth. Otherwise all Christians would be liberated already.A Christian is not liberated. In fact the truth of Jesus has become his bondage. A Christ is a liberated soul but a Christian? He lives in a prison; of course, decorated in a Christian way. A Hindu lives in another prison, decorated with Hindu deities, and pictures and images and mantras. A Jaina lives in a Jaina prison. Their prisons differ, but the bondage? The bondage is the same. Your fetters can be different. It is even possible your fetters may be more valuable than others’ fetters – you may have golden ones, but that doesn’t make any difference – you are not yet liberated.Truth liberates. Whose truth? How can my truth liberate you? Your bondage is yours, how can my truth cut your bondage? You have created your bondage out of your ignorance, you have to create your own liberty out of your realization of truth. Nobody else can liberate you. Only you, and only you.And never cling to the hope that somebody else can liberate you. If that was possible then a Buddha would have been enough, a Jesus would have been enough, a Krishna would have done the whole thing. There would have been no need.This is the difference between scientific knowledge and religious knowing. When some Einstein discovers a scientific truth, once discovered it is discovered for all. Then there is no need to discover it again and again – that would be foolish! Then even a small child in school can learn the truth of the theory of relativity. But the Buddha’s truth? My truth? – No, it cannot be learnt that way.That’s why there is no possibility of religious teaching. Awakening is possible, teaching is not possible. And all great religious teachers were not teachers at all – they were masters. They were trying to create devices in which you awaken. They were not trying to give you some information.Buddha discovered his truth. That truth disappears with Buddha. Nothing is left of it. Only words in the air. Those words you can collect, you can become very knowledgeable, a great pundit, a great scholar. But Jesus did not say that scholarship liberates. It decorates your prison in a beautiful way. You can live more comfortably in it. But it does not liberate.Truth has to be individual. It has to be basically your own, only then it cuts the knot, otherwise not.So you must have got confused. I go on talking to you. While I am talking I am not really giving you some information. In fact I am just creating a device around you so that in that device, in that situation, you can become more alert.For example, this question – why am I answering this? I am not giving you an answer, I am creating an answering situation. And that has a qualitatively different dimension. I am simply creating an answering situation in which you can see the fact that: Yes, your own truth can liberate you, nobody else’s; in which you come to realize, become aware, that: Right! How can anybody else’s truth liberate me? Nobody has created your bondage, nobody can create your freedom. You create your bondage, only you create your freedom.“When all I know of love is its attachments” – no, you don’t know what love is, you know only attachments; and those attachments you don’t know as attachments, you know them as love, that is where the whole thing goes wrong. If attachment is known as attachment it drops. And I would insist again, it drops – you never drop it.Just seeing the fact that this is an attachment, that attachment is a bondage – a beautiful word for bondage – that attachment is not love…just seeing the ugliness of attachment, it drops; then arises love. The same energy that was becoming attachment, released from attachment, becomes a totally different energy; it becomes love.But this has to be your understanding. So watch. When you are attached to a person, or you feel you love – just watch: Are you possessive? If you are possessive you are trying to kill the person, because no person can ever be possessed, only things can be possessed, not persons. How can you possess an alive person? You can possess a house, you can possess a car, you cannot possess a human being. How can you possess a child or a husband or a wife or a beloved? No. The very effort to possess says that you are trying to kill the person and change the person into a commodity, change the person into a belonging, a possession.And all lovers go on doing this. That’s why there is so much conflict. Love is always – the so-called love of course – always a continuous fight between the lovers: both are trying to possess the other.Through possession jealousy arises, the fear that the other may move, move to somebody else, the woman may not love you, or the man may start loving another woman. Then jealousy arises. Jealousy is the shadow of possessiveness. And when jealousy arises, fear arises. All the beauty of love is lost, the whole thing has become a disease, an illness.Love never possesses, because love knows that love is possible only in total freedom. When the other is totally free, only then love is possible. Love is a happening of total freedom. When the other is not in any way in bondage, but free to give, free not to give, totally free – only then giving is beautiful.When somebody comes and gives his or her love to you without asking, without demanding anything in return for it, it has a beauty, it is not of this world, it has an unearthly quality to it, it is sacred.That’s why every love in the beginning is beautiful: because in the beginning there is no expectation, in the beginning there is no possessiveness. You meet somebody, a stranger in the train – how can you possess? How can you bind the other to you? How can you become attached? How can you be jealous? No, the thing is so new. In the beginning every love gives a beautiful fragrance, a benediction, but the more you know the person the more the cunning mind starts creating politics. Attachment is politics, love is religion.To possess another person is political. To possess a whole country is the effort of the politicians. To possess another being is the effort, on a small scale, of being political, to dominate, to dictate, to control, to manipulate; your ego is enhanced. You start killing.The more love settles, the more love dies. Something else arises. Then there is only a corpse, a dead memory. Something was beautiful – every lover thinks: What happens? What goes wrong? Something is beautiful in the beginning, then where does everything go wrong? The moment the mind enters in – the mind is the greatest politician there is.In the first moments of love the mind is not functioning, it is stunned. The heart functions. Not knowing the ground, not knowing the other – exactly who he is, how he is, what he is, how can you manipulate? No, manipulation has not entered yet. You are moving in an uncharted territory, with no map; you are moving into the unknown.The beginning is innocent, it is virgin. Then, the more you feel at ease, settled – things have settled, now you know the other is there, and you are there, and you are committed to each other – now the mind enters from the back door. It tries to possess the heart; now love becomes attachment, possessiveness, jealousy, fear – everything goes ugly. When love goes ugly it goes the ugliest.When you fall from a peak you fall to the very bottom of the well. The higher the peak, the greater will be the valley. Because of this, social thinkers settled for marriage. All old cultures settled for marriage – don’t give the first glimpse at all, because that first glimpse will give always a comparison.Marriage means living together with a person without the initial glory and the initial innocence of the experience. There is no peak in marriage, it is an arranged affair. You never fall to the valley. Marriage is secure. Love is dangerous.But I am in favor of love because I am in favor of danger. Life is dangerous, death is secure. Marriage is like death, absolutely secure – no problems will arise. But it is death, even if no problems arise. It is not alive! With love, millions of problems will arise, but that’s how life grows – facing, encountering, suffering, growing, moving through the dangerous valley, falling many times and getting up, and trying to reach the peak again and again and again. Through this whole effort one grows.Love has disappeared from the world because of the mind. People became aware that if you fall in love, allow people to fall in love, soon they become miserable. A married person is never miserable; never happy of course, but never miserable either. He has settled for the plain ground, he moves on the super highway – everything clean, settled. No danger. He never moves in the forest, in the unknown. He is always moving with a map, and on every crossroad there is a milestone showing the way, where to go and what to do. He lives like a channel, not like a river – flowing and moving and searching, and not knowing where the ocean is.Remember, when you are in love be very alert, nothing else needs more alertness. If you want the purity of love to grow don’t allow the mind to interfere; live in the unknown, don’t try in any way to secure the future. This moment should be the only moment. Here-now should be the only space. This moment you are in love – perfectly beautiful; be in love. Don’t think of the next moment, what will happen. Nobody knows. And nobody can plan it. And all planning goes wrong.Life remains an unknown affair – and that’s why it is so beautiful. The next moment always comes as an unknown surprise. Don’t try to make it predictable. A beloved is unpredictable, a wife predictable. The moment a person becomes predictable he is dead. When humanity becomes more aware, marriage will disappear. Not that people will not be together, really only then people will be together; now they live together but they are not together. They live in the same house but they don’t live in the same home. They are physically together, spiritually far apart.Vast distances exist between people. No communication, no communion. They may be making love to each other – that too is a physical thing. And when love is only physical it is as if you have an airplane with four engines and one engine only is functioning. Lopsided it goes, and always in danger of falling. When all the four engines function – this is what I have told you again and again: one engine is sex, another engine is love, third engine is prayer, fourth engine is meditation. When all the four function in tune, in a deep harmony, then you know what it is to be here, what it is to be!Then you become religious – not that you go to a temple or a gurudwara or to church; suddenly, when you are functioning in deep harmony, your whole being a musical concert, an orchestra, all notes falling together, meeting and merging into one whole, when you are a unison – this is what we have called in India samadhi, to attain to the absolute at-homeness, togetherness, of your being – then you feel grateful, then you simply bow down. Not that there is a God and you are bowing down to him no, you simply bow down out of gratitude – not that there is a God, but because there is gratitude.Remember the emphasis I give to gratitude, not to God. All concepts of God are childish, anthropomorphic. Man has created God in his own image.Not that there is God, but suddenly when you function beautifully, and you feel so good, and a deep well-being surrounds you, a deep gratitude arises like a pillar of light within you. It penetrates all the skies; it goes to the highest, it goes to the deepest; suddenly you bow down – not before anybody, remember, you simply bow down in deep gratitude because you don’t know now what to do – such benediction! such blessedness! such ecstasy – what to do? You simply bow down in deep gratitude before the whole. You become a godly person.H. G. Wells has said about Buddha, and I love to quote it again and again, that there has never been a man more godless and more godly. He has said about Buddha that Buddha is the most godless and the most godly man in the whole of human history. He is. He does not believe in any God, but you cannot find a more divine being.Absolute gratitude. A deep thankfulness.Remain alert, because if love becomes attachment you will never function in your totality. The energy has moved in a wrong way. Don’t allow love to become attachment, remain alert! Allow love absolute freedom, even if sometimes it is painful – it is. But that pain is also beautiful.When you suffer for freedom, that suffering is good. When you are comfortable because of bondage, that comfortableness is bad.I have heard one story, that one man, a great priest, dreamed one night that he was in a beautiful place, sleeping under a tree, a cool breeze passing, subtle fragrance of flowers, birds singing; he couldn’t imagine a more heavenly moment. He looked around – it was really peaceful, beautiful. He thought in his mind he must be in paradise! But he was feeling hungry, so he thought: But where to get food? I am feeling hungry. Suddenly an angel appeared, with delicious food, and he was so hungry that he didn’t bother to ask: Where is this food coming from, and who are you? He ate. Then he wanted water, the water appeared from another angel; then he was feeling like sleeping again, very tired, so he said: But where to sleep? There is no bed. A bed appeared out of nothingness, out the blue. He slept. When he awoke again he became a little afraid. What was happening?Now he wanted to do something. He was feeling full of energy; so he again said in his mind: Please send some angel, I would like to do something. An angel appeared. He said: I would like to do something, now I am full of energy, rested. The angel said: That is difficult. All you ask for we can provide, but doing is not allowed here. You cannot do anything – you can rest! You can be comfortable, as comfortable as you like. Whatsoever you need, you just ask, and it will be supplied.A few days passed, then the man was feeling very bored: not able to do anything and everything supplied – on order, immediately, with no time gap. One day he said: What type of heaven is this? It would have been better had I thrown into hell. The angel appeared and said: Where do you think you are? This is hell.I like this story. Hell must be very comfortable. must be absolutely comfortable, so that no life is needed. Everything is supplied and you become dead, you vegetate; you don’t live.Don’t try to make your life just comfortable. That’s how love becomes attachment – you are afraid of changes. The beloved may leave. Tomorrow it may not be the same, so you make arrangements. You go to the court to get registered, so that when tomorrow the beloved wants to leave, or the husband wants to leave, the court will force them not to leave.In every country marriage is very easy, divorce difficult. It should be just otherwise. Marriage should be very difficult. People should be put on a probation period, so that you wait for three years, then get married – there is no hurry. And divorce should be immediate.But no, marriage is absolutely easy; if you want to get married you just go to the court, say so, and you are married. Nobody bothers, because it is for you to enter hell – if you want to, you go; but if you want to get out of it, then the whole law and the force of law will prevent you.Society lives for comfort. Only rare individuals choose suffering – to grow. Society is a collective death; dragging somehow.Don’t allow your love to become an attachment – but what will you do? Remain alert, nothing else can be done. Just be intensely alert; that intenseness of consciousness is a fire; in that fire, love remains pure; it does not become a bondage, and it doesn’t try to manipulate the other. Then love becomes the door of prayer.If it falls, it becomes hell and becomes attachment, possessiveness, jealousy, and then you suffer, then it is a nightmare. Then it is better not to fall in love. Remain alone and suffer alone. Why create suffering for anybody else?When you bring the other in, when you move in a relationship, remember, the relationship can grow only in freedom. Never become a slave and never try to make anybody a slave. This should be the credo.And you say:“All I can see is the ego clinging to what it believes is love” – that too is not your understanding. If you can see the ego, you have transcended it. Who is seeing the ego? Who is seeing the ego clinging? You must have transcended, you must have become a witness. And when one becomes a witness the ego disappears just like a dewdrop disappears in the morning sun.It simply disappears. It cannot remain in the light and the fire and the heat of witnessing – it simply disappears. It is a night phenomenon. It can live only in darkness.No, it is the ego who is seeing, nothing else has happened.It is very difficult to see the ego, because it is very subtle. The most subtle thing in the world is the ego, subtler than atoms, electrons, subtler than any energy, because it is so elusive you cannot get hold of it. In fact it is non-existential, that’s why you cannot get hold of it. But if you become alert – the more alert you are, the less ego is there to see – a moment comes when you are perfectly alert, the whole energy is transformed, there is no ego.So don’t go on gathering knowledge from me. That won’t help; rather it will hinder you. Because you will think that now you know, and you don’t know. Always remain alert of your ignorance, because ignorance has possibilities, knowledge none. If you are ignorant you can become one day a knowing one, but if you become knowledgeable – all doors are closed.The third question:Osho,I feel it is easier to be loose and natural around you than in the world. But not in your ashram. Why is that?The ashram is also part of the world, the ashram is not part of me – cannot be.With me it is totally different. The ashram is part of the world, the marketplace. The ashram cannot be part of me. I will be gone some day, the ashram will be there, even more established than it is now. I will disappear from this world sooner or later, the ashram can continue for centuries – it is part of the world. Christianity is part of the world, not Christ.So with me you can feel loose and natural, because I am not forcing anything on you. If I am trying to force anything you will not feel loose and natural. I give you freedom because I love freedom, but the ashram cannot give you freedom, the ashram is part of the world, the mundane world. That distinction you have to keep in mind. Don’t identify me with the ashram.I may be a guest here, as you are, but I am also an outsider. This ashram is not mine – no ashram can be. The ashram exists for some other functions. It is an organization! An organization has to be an organization. Rules and regulations. How can you be loose and free in it? You cannot be. But you have to suffer the ashram for me. So just feel pity for it and don’t get disturbed.The fourth question:Osho,I am not feeling sincere towards you. I don't do what you tell me to. Why?There is no need to feel sincere towards me. Who has told you to feel sincere towards me? I have never told you. But you are a great guilt creator. You go on creating guilty feelings. Now this is a new guilt, as if you are committing a sin. You are not feeling sincere towards me. I never feel sincere towards you so why should you bother? I feel sincere for myself, you feel sincere for yourself. And if you want to do a certain thing – you do it! If you don’t want to do a certain thing, you don’t do it!I am not here to impose my will on you because that will create a bondage, a slavery. That’s what all religions have done. I am just helping you so that you can see the whole game, and then if you want to play it, play it; if you don’t want to play it, drop out of it.But you need not feel sincere towards me – who am I? Why should you feel sincere towards me? Be sincere towards yourself.I teach you to be yourself. I am not teaching you to become imitators. You are not to follow me! You have to follow your own being, your own inner urge.At the most a master can indicate the way; at the most a master can be a pointer. But you have to walk. And if you want to walk – only then you walk.Even if sometimes you feel like surrendering to me and you come and surrender, in fact it is your idea, that you want to surrender to me, so what can I do? Surrender! If you don’t want to surrender, what can I do? Don’t surrender. When you surrender to me you may be thinking that you are following me – no, you are following your own urge to surrender. Any day you can leave me. How will I prevent you from leaving me?But mind is a guilt-creating force. And you have been trained to create nothing but guilt. For all the past centuries, priests, politicians – they have been dominating humanity by creating guilt. They say “This is wrong,” and once they convince you this is wrong, if you do it you feel guilty, and, if it is something natural and you don’t do it, then you feel in a difficulty.For example, somebody says that to eat food with taste is bad. Mahatma Gandhi used to say to his disciples: One should go beyond taste. In his ashram, taste was not allowed. You had to eat, but not to feel the taste. He used to destroy his own taste with chutney made of neem leaves – very bitter, the bitterest leaves you can find in India. And he would eat the chutney with his food, to destroy taste, because it is so bitter, the whole mouth goes so bitter, that then you cannot taste anything.People who would taste something – and this is natural, the tongue is made to taste – they would feel guilty, they would feel guilty of committing some sin.Religions have taught and preached that sex is bad – a sin. Now sex is a natural desire! A very natural phenomenon. You have nothing to do with it. But they have been conditioning the mind that sex is bad, and every child is taught this, so when the sex urge arises he feels guilty. And then both ways are difficult: If you don’t move into sex the natural urge becomes a nightmare. If you move into sex the cultivated mind feels, makes you guilty. So, either guilt or falling into wrong things, sin, this is the choice that has been given to you.Things go on changing, ideas change, but still the original guilt-creating force remains the same.Now you are here. I am here to make you guilt-free, to make you natural, flowing, because that’s how I have known the ultimate: by being natural and flowing, by accepting not by denying, not by saying no but by saying a total yes to life, by affirming it not negating it – that’s how I have come to know the ultimate.I would also like you to be guilt-free. Do whatsoever you want to do. Do it totally. Don’t create guilt – if it is wrong to do, do it totally; if it is wrong to do, you will come to understand that it is wrong! It drops. If it is not wrong to do, and by doing it you realize that it is beautiful – it will grow. There is no other way.Don’t create ideals. Once you create ideals you will always be in difficulty because you will always be thinking in terms of should, ought: This has to be done; that ought to be done; that should be done…and you will always feel crippled, guilty, a sinner. You will always feel ill. You will never be able to accept yourself. You will never be able to love yourself, and a person who cannot love himself in spite of all the mistakes that a human being is prone to make, if you cannot love yourself in spite of all things, you will miss the whole point of being here in life. To love oneself in spite of everything that is there, that gives you a base. Only on that base you love others, only on that base the edifice of higher loves is erected.Remember, experience is always good; I say always unconditionally. Even if it is bad it is good, because you know that it is bad, and you know this only through experience. Once you know it, it drops, nothing to worry about.Don’t be afraid of mistakes – and all sins are just mistakes – there is nothing much to them, just small mistakes. Don’t be afraid to commit them. Commit them! But remember only to commit them once, because when you have known them, and they are futile and useless, let them drop. They drop by themselves.So you need not be worried about being sincere towards me. If you are really sincere towards yourself you are sincere towards me. If you become yourself, you have followed me. By not following me, by attaining to your individual center, you follow me. By following me, you will miss your center. And that’s how you would be insincere to yourself and to me also. Do you get the point?It is simple, it may look paradoxical. By attaining to yourself, you have been sincere to me. If you create guilt, and you feel worried about it, that you are not following me, you will become more and more depressed. And a sad and a depressed person, and a guilt-ridden person, cannot celebrate, cannot become religious.To become religious one needs a dancing heart. To become religious one needs to be celebrating. To become religious one needs to enjoy and delight in small things. If you learn how to be delighted in small things: eating food, taking a bath, going for a morning walk; if you can delight in small things – and there are no big things in life, only small things are there – if you delight in small things then small things become great. And the total accumulated effect of small things lived, celebrated, transforms you. You become religious. That is the magic key to open the door of religion.Don’t become sad – there are enough churches for sad people, I am not to create any other church for sad and long faces. Don’t feel guilty, there are enough hells already. Man is too much burdened.If I can help you to dance a, little, sing a little, enjoy a little, feel grateful and thankful a little, that’s enough.The fifth question:Osho,I have seen many women having strong catharsis in meditation, but never men. Why? Don't they need it?They need it more than any woman. But they have been conditioned not to weep, not to cry; from the very childhood a boy is taught not to be sissy, not to be like a girl. If he cries they say: Stop! You are a man; a boy never cries, this is only for girls.Men have been taught and conditioned not to cry, not to weep. They have become stones. And remember, if a person cannot weep heartily, he cannot laugh either. And God makes no difference between woman and man, he has given the same tear glands to both. If there was going to be a distinction – that man is not to cry – there would have been no tear glands in his eyes, or there would have been less than with women. But they are exactly the same. So nature has not made it that way. It is human society creating an ego that man has to be haughty and proud.This is male chauvinism. A woman can cry – she is such a low being, no need to worry about her, she can weep. Weaklings. Man is powerful.But in a way it has been good for women – they are more natural than man. That’s why they are more beautiful than man; more relaxed than man.Have you observed the data? More men commit suicide than women. You may have just the opposite notion, because more women talk about committing suicide – but they never commit it: they go on talking. Even if they take sleeping pills they always take them in such a quantity that they never die. Men commit suicide more than women – have to commit, life becomes such a burden.Crying and weeping is a natural way, a safety valve, to allow accumulated emotions, sadness, to be thrown out of the system: it is a deep cleansing. Every man and every woman should learn how to cry perfectly. And how to enjoy it! It is such an unburdening and refreshing process; not only do your eyes become fresh when tears have flowed, your whole being becomes pure, simple, innocent. You attain again to a virginity that belonged once to you, but is lost, you again become uncorrupted. After a good crying and weeping you feel bathed, the very soul has taken a shower. You are again ready and younger.Women look younger than men, healthier than men. All over the world women fall ill less than men, live longer than men – five years longer. If a man is going to live seventy-five years, the woman on an average is going to live eighty. That’s why if you go into the West you will find many old women, but not so many old men. They get ready every day, they allow, they are not so egoistic.Women go mad less than men because they have their daily quota of madness, they never go wholesale mad. Women almost every day, once in a while, they go mad – but just for a few minutes; it is beautiful, nothing is wrong in it: they scream and jump and throw a plate – it is not costly either, but man goes on accumulating madness. He cannot cry, he cannot throw a plate – that is not manly. He has to be always on guard, then the madness goes on accumulating within his heart – one day it explodes.More men are in madhouses. And if you look at the society, men are interested in politics, not women. Sometimes a few women are interested, but they must have male hormones in their body. Some scientific research is needed.And the women who are interested in politics, and reach to the top, have never been very womanly, they have never loved their husbands, their children; never; they have been more politics-oriented, ego-oriented.And of course when a woman goes into politics she will force all men out of it. It is natural, because when she goes, she really goes mad into it. A man may have some manners, but she has none. Because a man has been forced to cultivate manners; even if he fights he fights in a mannerly way, he follows certain rules – but a woman is wild; when she fights she follows no rules, she simply fights. That’s why whenever you are arguing with a woman you will always be defeated, because she follows no rules of the game, there is no logic in it; she jumps from one point to another with no visible link!Men have created all the wars because man is madder. After every ten years a great world war is needed. It relaxes. When man can kill others, only then he feels a little release.Unless man is allowed to weep and cry and be natural, and every child is taught to cry and weep, and is told: That is beautiful; when you feel hurt – cry! When you feel bad, let tears come out of your eyes…. You may not believe me, because the thing may seem to be too far-fetched but I tell you that if men can start crying and weeping as women do, wars will be less in the world, madness will be less in the world, suicides will be less in the world, accidents on the road will be less in the world.Fifty percent of car accidents are because a man was angry. He couldn’t scream so he screamed through the accelerator. He went beyond the speed limit, he went mad with the car, and he enjoyed the exhilaration that comes with this speed.Women drivers are not good drivers, but they never cause so many accidents. I have been collecting data. Women drivers are not good drivers because they are not good mechanical minds, they are not technological; but if a woman driver knows driving she is always safe to travel with. I myself have Laxmi as my driver; always safe, because she will never transcend the limit.Man has been wrongly conditioned, that is why catharsis becomes difficult. But catharsis is very necessary. If you cannot move into deep catharsis you cannot move into meditation. Before you take wings into the sky you have to unburden yourself. That is the whole point of catharsis.The sixth question:Osho,When moments of fear come, what to do?Why should you ask to do anything? When there is fear – be afraid! Why create a duality? When moments of fear come – be fearful, tremble with fear, allow fear to take possession. Why this constant inquiry: What to do? Can’t you allow life in any way to take possession of you?When love takes possession, what to do? Be loving! Don’t do anything, allow love to take possession of you. When fear comes – tremble, like a leaf in a strong wind. And it will be beautiful. When it has gone you will feel so serene and calm, as when a strong storm passes by everything is left calm and quiet after it. Why be always fighting something? Fear comes – it is natural, absolutely natural. To think of a man who is without fear is impossible, because he will be dead. Then somebody will be honking the horn on the road and a man without fear will go on, he will not bother. Then a snake will be on the path and a man without fear will not bother, he will go on. A man without fear will be absolutely foolish, stupid.Fear is part of your intelligence, nothing is wrong in it. Fear simply shows there is death; and we human beings are here only for a few moments. That trembling says that we are not going to be permanently here, we are not eternally here, a few days more and you will be gone.In fact because of fear man has been in deep search of religion – otherwise there would have been no point. No animal is religious, because no animal is in fear. No animal can be religious because no animals can be aware of death. Man is aware of death, every moment death is there, surrounds you from everywhere, any moment you will be gone; that gives you a trembling. Why be afraid – tremble! But again the ego says: No, you – afraid? No, this is not for you, this is for cowards. You are a brave man.It is not for cowards. Allow fear. Only one thing is to be understood: when you allow fear and you tremble – watch it, enjoy it; and in that watching you will transcend it, you will see the body is trembling, you will see the mind is trembling, but you will come to feel a point within you, a deep center, which remains unaffected.The storm passes by, but somewhere deep within you is a center which is untouched: the center of the cyclone.Allow fear, don’t fight with it. Watch what is happening. Go on watching. As your watching eye becomes more penetrating and intense – the body will be trembling, the mind will be trembling – deep within you will be consciousness, which simply is a witness, which only watches.It remains untouched, like a lotus flower in water.Only when you attain to that will you attain to fearlessness.But that fearlessness is not being unafraid. That fearlessness is not bravery. That fearlessness is a realization that you are two – a part of you will die, and a part of you is eternal. That part which is going to die is going to remain always afraid. And the part that is not going to die, which is immortal, for it, there is no point in being afraid. Then a deep harmony exists.You can use fear for meditation. Use all that you have for meditation, so that you go beyond.The last question:Osho,The more I seem to grow, the more ugly I seem to become. Why is this?There is a Zen saying, that when a seeker comes to a master, rivers are rivers, mountains are mountains, but once in contact with the master, soon rivers are no more rivers, mountains are no more mountains, everything is disturbed.But if he continues, and does not escape in the middle – again a moment comes: mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers.This is the process. When you start meditating you have a false personality, a painted face, which you have made beautiful according to the social needs. It is false, but you are identified with it. Then you start meditating; that face starts becoming loose, sometimes it slips, you come to feel your real face – you become afraid, it looks ugly.That’s why you had painted it. That’s why you were hiding it under a mask. But meditation will drop all the masks. It is a search for the original face.So a moment will come, you will grow and you will feel you are getting more ugly, because now you start seeing yourself rightly. Up to now you were seeing ugliness in others, now you have started to watch yourself. You have been seeing mistakes, ugliness, wrong things, in others, now you start to see them in yourself. For the first time you start mirroring your own being. Everything seems to be topsy-turvy, chaos – afraid, you can escape, and put your face on again. Go to the market, hide behind the mask, and forget about the meditation.But if you are really in search, this is a good sign, a beautiful indication, that something is happening. Continue. Soon this ugliness will also disappear, because that ugliness belongs to your mind. That beauty that you are thinking was there never belonged to you, it was just a mask. It has to be taken away. Now you come face to face with the mind.If you go on, sooner or later the mind will also fall – that too is a mask. Then you will come face to face with your being. And that’s tremendously beautiful. In fact that is the only beauty there is.When one comes face to face with his own being it is as if two mirrors are facing each other. When two mirrors face each other, what happens, do you know? They reflect eternity. Infinite vastness. When you come to yourself, you mirror yourself. Eternity is reflected. That is the glory of God. You have come to the God.In the Upanishads, those who have known, they have said – at this moment: aham brahmasmi: I am the absolute. That is the goal.But to reach that goal you will have to pass through an interim period where everything will become a chaos. You will always be like a mad maniac. That has to be passed.Before you become absolutely normal you will feel that you have become absolutely abnormal. Because that which you call normality today is nothing but a social face.Society has to be dropped. Then you have to drop your past samskaras, past conditionings of the mind. Then only you come to the purest source, the very source, the very ground of being. We call that ground of being “God.” God is not a person. God is an experience of absolute virgin purity, innocence – and that is hidden behind you.So don’t be afraid of ugliness if you feel it now, it is a good sign – feel happy about it. You are growing. It shows growth. You are on the right track. Rivers will not be rivers, mountains will not be mountains. Again: rivers will be rivers, mountains will be mountains.That’s why Buddha moves to the forest, Mahavira goes to the mountains, Jesus and Mohammed, they retire into the mountains – to face their ugliness.But once that ugliness has disappeared, the illness gone, the leprosy evaporated, they come back into the marketplace, they come back again into the world beautiful; supremely beautiful.You will also come back. But this passage has to be passed. This much cost has to be paid.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is it possible to have an original thought?It is impossible, absolutely impossible to have an original thought. Because mind is memory, mind is the past, mind is that which you have already known, it is a borrowed thing, and whatsoever the mind can do can only be a repetition; new combinations of words, notions, concepts; but deep down all will be borrowed. Mind can never be original. The very nature of the mind is such – it is a bio-computer. Before it can give you something you have to feed it. And that which you feed in comes out of it. Sometimes you can have some combinations of thoughts which appear to be original but are not – for example, you can imagine a golden horse flying in the sky. Looks original. It is not. There are no golden horses of course, and no horse flies, but you have seen a horse, you have seen flying birds, you have seen gold; now this is a new combination. But everything is old, of the past, of the known.Originality is not possible, only fictitious originality is possible. Mind remains dead, it is memory. Then, am I saying that there is no possibility to be original? No, I am not saying that. Thought cannot be original, no thought can be, originality in thinking is not possible. Originality in being is possible.You can be original, but you cannot think originally. A Bertrand Russell is not original, cannot be – a very profound thinker, but not original. A buddha can be original – not in his thinking, in his being; the way he is, absolutely virgin ground. No one has traveled there before. He is absolutely fresh, just born, moment to moment changing, alive, never allowing deadness to settle on him. Being can be original, thought cannot be original. Thinkers are never original, only no-thinkers are – if you will allow me the term. Deep inside if you attain to emptiness you will be original. Out of that emptiness whatsoever arises is always new. But the distinction has to be remembered.Even a buddha when he talks becomes unoriginal. His being is original, but when he uses language, again, the mind has to be used, the memory has to be used. The language belongs to others, not to you; you have not brought a language into the world, you have brought a fresh being, of course, but the language has been given by the society, by others, so even a buddha has to use a borrowed language.The moment Buddha says something originality is lost. And, if you listen to Buddha, not to his words, but if you can have a glimpse through the words of his being, then you will feel originality, then there is the lotus flower, every petal fresh, just like a morning’s dewdrops – but then you have to penetrate the language, the words.When Buddha communicates he is also communing. He is saying something and he is also being something. If you listen to his words you can find them in the Upanishads, in the Vedas, somewhere, but if you listen to his being, not to his words, if you listen to his heart, the beat, the rhythm of his being, if you listen to his breathing, the way he is, just now this moment, the miracle that he is, the magic that he is – if you listen to that, then no Upanishad can report anything about it. This man has never been there! For the first time he is there; he is original.I am talking to you, I have to use language. If you listen only to that which I am saying and not also to that which I am being you will miss my originality. Listen to the gaps between the words. Listen to the emptiness between the lines. Listen to me, not to what I say. Then an understanding will arise, and suddenly, like a flash of lightning, you will be able to see me – and the original that is right now happening before you.But it is not part of mind. Mind is a mechanism. It cannot be original; it is not even alive – how can it be original? It is social. Hence the insistence of all the awakened ones that unless you drop the mind you will not be able to know the truth, because truth is always original. Mind: always borrowed; truth: always original. Mind and truth cannot meet.Meditation is to attain to a no-mindness, to a state of no-thought. In that opening of no-thought, in that kind of space, suddenly you become pure, innocent, uncorrupted. You have never been like that before nobody has ever been like that before nobody is going to be like that again. Unique.And to know that is to realize one’s self. To know that is to know all. If you have not known that, whatsoever else you know is just rubbish, garbage.If you know that one, the original within you – the nameless, because the original cannot have any name; the formless, because the original cannot have any form; unknown, because the original cannot be known; uncharted, unpenetrated, virgin, only then you come to feel the ecstasy of existence, the beauty of it.It happened once, in a police station; a Sufi mystic entered; he was naked, and a crowd was following him. To the police officer he said: I have been robbed. All that I had has been stolen, and as you can see, I am standing naked; my coat, my clothes, my bed, my quilt, my cushion, my pillow, my umbrella – everything has been stolen; but he was very calm and quiet. The police officer wrote down the whole list – it was very long.And then suddenly there appeared a man who was following the crowd, and he threw an old blanket before the police officer, and he said: This is all, a wretched old blanket, that I have stolen from this man, and he is saying it was his whole world!The Sufi took the blanket, covered his body, started moving out of the police station – the police officer stopped him, he said: First you will have to give an explanation because you have given such a big list, it is false!The man said: No? because this is all that I have. When it is raining I use it as an umbrella. Sometimes I use it as a bed. And this is my only clothing. In the cold this is my coat. In the day I use it as a cushion. In the night, sometimes as a pillow. These are the functions of my blanket, but this is the whole world I have and the list is not false.This is a deep message. The Sufi is saying that if you attain to one you attain to the whole. It is a parable. Then that one blanket covers all. It becomes your umbrella, it becomes your bed, it becomes your clothing, it serves you in millions of ways. Just to know that one which is hidden behind you is to know all. To know that, to be that, is to be all. And if you miss that you have been robbed of the whole world. You have nothing, you are standing naked.That one is original. You must try to penetrate the word original, what it means. It means – that which comes from the source. It does not mean new, it does not mean novel, it means that which comes from the source, from the very origin; that which comes from the very beginning, which belongs to the very base of existence – that is original.Thoughts cannot be original, only you, because you belong to the very source. You were there in the beginning, and you will be there in the end, because you are existence.Thinking is a learnt thing. You can learn it, you can unlearn it. It is acquired. You can drop it any day you want to drop it. But your nature, what Lao Tzu calls Tao, your original nature, is not acquired, it has always been there, it is the source.No thought can be original, but no-thought can be original. Remember that.The second question:Osho,What is the difference between maturity and aging?A great difference, a vast difference, and people always remain confused about it. People think to age is to become mature, but aging belongs to the body.Everybody is aging, everybody will become old, but not necessarily mature. Maturity is an inner growth.Aging is nothing that you do, aging is something that happens physically. Every child born, when time passes, becomes old. Maturity is something that you bring to your life – it comes out of awareness. When a person ages with full awareness he becomes mature. Aging plus awareness, experiencing plus awareness, is maturity.You can experience a thing in two ways. You can simply experience it as if you are hypnotized, unaware, not attentive to what is happening; the thing happened but you were not there. It didn’t happen in your presence, you were absent. You just passed by. It never struck any note in you. It never left any mark on you. You never learnt anything from it. It may even have become a part of your memory because in a way you were present, but it never became your wisdom. You never grew through it.Then you are aging.But if you bring the quality of awareness to an experience the same experience becomes maturity.There are two ways to live: one, to live in a deep sleep. Then you age, every moment you become old, every moment you go on dying, that’s all, your whole life consists of a long slow death. But if you bring awareness to your experiences – whatsoever you do, whatsoever happens to you, you are alert, watchful, mindful, you are savoring the experience from all the corners, you are trying to understand the meaning of it, you are trying to penetrate the very depth of it, what has happened to you, you are trying to live it intensely and totally – then, it is not just a surface phenomenon. Deep down within you something is changing with it. You are becoming more alert. If this is a mistake, this experience – you will never commit it again.A mature person never commits the same mistake again. But just an old person goes on committing the same mistakes again and again. He lives in a circle. He never learns anything.You will be angry today, you were angry yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and tomorrow also you are going to be angry, and the day after tomorrow also. Again and again you get angry, again and again you repent, again and again you take a deep decision that you are not going to do it again, but that decision makes no change. Whenever you are disturbed the rage takes over, you are possessed. The same mistake is committed. You are aging.If you live an experience of anger totally, never again will you be angry. One experience will be enough to teach that it is foolish, that it is absurd, that it is simply stupid – not that it is a sin, it is simply stupid. You are harming yourself, and harming others, for nothing. The thing is not worth it. Then you are getting mature. Tomorrow the situation will be repeated, but anger will not be repeated. And a man who is gaining in maturity never decides that he will not be angry again, no, that is the sign of a man who is not getting mature. A man of maturity never decides for the future. The maturity itself takes care. You live today. That very living will decide how the tomorrow is going to be – it will come out of it.If the anger was painful, poisonous, you suffered hell through it, what is the point of deciding, or taking a vow and going to the temple and saying before the master: Now I take a vow that I will never be angry again? All this is childish. There is no point! If you have known that anger is poisonous – finished! That way is closed. That door no more exists for you. The situation will be repeated tomorrow but you will not be possessed by the situation. You have learnt something – that understanding will be there. You may even laugh, you may even enjoy the whole thing of how people get so foolish. Your understanding is growing through every experience.You can live life as if you are in a hypnosis – that’s how ninety-nine percent of people live – or you can live with intensity, awareness. If you live with awareness you mature, otherwise you simply become old. And to become old is not to become wise. If you have been a fool when you were young and now you have become old, you will be just an old fool, that’s all. Nothing. Just becoming old, you cannot become wise. You may be even more foolish, because you may have attained to mechanical habits, robot-like.Life can be lived in two ways. If you live unconsciously you simply die; if you live consciously you attain to more and more life. Death will come, but it never comes to a mature man, it comes only to a man who has been aging and getting old. A mature one never dies, because he will learn even through death. Even death is going to be an experience to be intensely lived, and watched, allowed.A mature man never dies. In fact before a mature man, on the rock of maturity, death struggles and shatters itself, commits suicide. Death dies, but never a mature man – that is the message of all the awakened ones: that you are deathless. They have known it, they have lived their death. They have watched, and they have found that it can surround you but you remain aloof, you remain far away. Death happens near you but it never happens to you.Deathless is your being, blissful is your being, divine is your being, but those experiences you cannot cram in the mind and in the memory. You have to pass through life and attain them.Much suffering is there, much pain is there. And because of pain and suffering people like to live stupidly – it has to be understood why so many people insist that they should live in a hypnosis; why Buddhas and Christs go on telling people to be awake, and nobody listens. There must be some deep involvement in hypnosis, there must be some deep investment. What is the investment?The mechanism has to be understood, otherwise you will listen to me and you will never become aware You will listen and you will make it a part of your knowledge that: Yes, this man says be aware and it is good to be aware. And those who attain to awareness become mature…. But you yourself will not attain to it, it will remain a knowledge. You may communicate your knowledge to others, but nobody is helped that way.Why? Have you asked this question ever? Why don’t you attain to awareness? If it leads to the infinite bliss, to the attainment of satchitananda, to absolute truth – then why not be aware? Why do you insist on being sleepy?There is some investment – and this is the investment: if you become aware, there is suffering. If you become aware, you become aware of pain, and the pain is so much that you would like to take a tranquilizer and be asleep.This sleepiness in life works as a protection against pain. But this is the trouble – if you are asleep against pain, you are asleep against pleasure also.Think of it as if there are two faucets: on one is written “pain” and on another is written “pleasure.” You would like to close the faucet on which pain is written, and you would like to open the faucet on which pleasure is written. But this is the game – if you close the faucet “pain,” the pleasure immediately closes, because behind both there is only one faucet on which “awareness” is written. Either both remain open or both remain closed, because both are two faces of the same phenomenon, two aspects.And this is the whole contradiction of mind: mind wants to be more and more happy; happiness is possible if you are aware. And then mind wants to be less and less in pain, but less and less pain is possible only if you are unaware.Now you are in a dilemma. If you want no pain – immediately pleasure disappears from your life, happiness disappears. If you want happiness, you open the faucet – immediately there is pain also flowing. If you have to be aware, you have to be aware of both. Life is pain, pleasure. Life is happiness, unhappiness. Life is day and night. Life is life and death. You have to be aware of both.So remember it. If you are afraid of pain you will remain in hypnosis, you will age, become old and die. You missed an opportunity. If you want to be aware, then you have to be aware of both, pain and pleasure. They are not separate phenomena. And a man who becomes aware becomes very happy, but also becomes capable of deep unhappiness, of which you are not capable.It happened, a Zen master died, and his chief disciple – who was a famous man on his own, even more famous than the master, in fact the master had become famous because of the disciple – the chief disciple started crying; sitting on the steps of the temple he started crying with tears flowing down. A million people had gathered; they could not believe it because you never see any awakened man crying and weeping, with tears rolling down. They said: We cannot believe it. What is happening? You are crying, and you yourself have been saying to us that the innermost being never dies. Death does not exist. We have heard you say millions of times that death does not exist – so why are you crying? Your master is still alive in his being.The disciple opened his eyes and he said: Don’t disturb me. Let me cry and weep. I’m not crying for the master and his being. I am crying for his body. His body was also beautiful. Never again will that body exist.And then somebody tried to persuade him that this would create a bad name for him: So many people have gathered, and they will think that you are not enlightened. The disciple said: Let them think whatsoever they want to think. But since the day I became enlightened I have become infinitely blissful, but I have also become infinitely sensitive to pain and suffering.It seems to be as it should be. If you hit Buddha, Buddha will suffer more than you will if somebody hits you because he has become infinitely sensitive. His sensitivity is very delicate. He is just like a lotus petal. Your stone will hit him very deeply. It will give him deep suffering.Of course he will be aware of it. Of course he will be aloof from it. Of course he will be transcendental to it, he will be knowing it, that it is happening, and he will not be a part of it, he will be a cloud-like phenomenon surrounding it – but it is happening.You cannot be so sensitive to pain, you are so fast asleep. You move like a drunkard – the drunkard falls on the street, hits his leg, his head in the gutter – nothing happens. If he was aware there would have been pain.A Buddha suffers infinitely, Buddha enjoys infinitely. Always remember, whenever you reach to a high peak, simultaneously near the high peak a deep valley is being created. If you want to reach to the heavens, your roots will have to go to the very hell.Because you are afraid of pain you cannot become aware – and then you cannot learn anything.It is just like – you are afraid so much of enemies that you have closed the doors of your house. Now even the friend cannot enter, even the lover is left out. The lover goes on knocking on the door but you are afraid, maybe it is the enemy. So you are closed – that’s how I see you all: closed, afraid of the enemy, and the friend cannot enter. So the friend you have turned into an enemy. Now nobody can enter, you are so afraid.Open the door. When the fresh air enters the house there is every possibility of dangers also entering. When the friend comes, the enemy comes also because day and night enter together, pain and pleasure enter together, life and death enter together.So don’t be afraid of pain otherwise you will live in anesthesia. Afraid of pain, you take anesthetics. The surgeon gives an anesthetic before he operates on you, because there is going to be much pain, you will not be able to tolerate it. Your consciousness has to be dimmed, darkened. Then he can cut your whole body and you will not suffer.Because of the fear of pain you have forced yourself to live in a dim consciousness, in a very dimmed existence, almost not alive. This is the fear – you have to drop that fear, you have to face pain, you have to move through suffering, only then the possibility opens for the friend to enter.And when you know both you immediately become the third. When you know both, pain and pleasure, the duality, the day and night – suddenly you have become transcendental. This is what I was talking about yesterday. “The sixth” which transcends all.Maturity is awareness. Aging is just wasting yourself.The third question:Osho,I know I am sitting in front of a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, yet I feel like returning to the West. Can you tell me what is going on?You may be sitting before a Buddha or a Lao Tzu, but just by sitting before a Buddha or a Lao Tzu you cannot become a Buddha or a Lao Tzu. Even just the opposite can happen. Looking into a Lao Tzu you can get so afraid – because he is an abyss. You can get such a shock that you can turn about, and escape.This is my observation with many people. They come to me with strong desire, with a longing heart, and when they come to me and they look into the abyss. they become afraid.They had come to achieve something, and suddenly they realize that they have to lose everything. They had come here to attain something and suddenly they realize that the only way to attain themselves is to lose all, to be nothing. A fear grips their heart. They start thinking of escaping, or they escape.This is exactly what has happened. This question is from Deva Ninad. This is exactly what has happened. As I have been studying him, he is a result-oriented mind, not in the present, but in the future. A very subtle ego in search to attain something. Intelligent, knowledgeable, with many possibilities, but if this ego goes on functioning he will miss.He had come to attain something. And here he finds that he has to lose all.The fear has taken possession, now he wants to escape. He will rationalize why he is going to the West, he will find a way to rationalize the whole thing, but it is a sheer escape.But it is natural. And it happens to many people, and the more intelligent they are, the more it happens, because the intelligence immediately shows them that they have come to a wrong place. But this is going to happen to everybody when he comes to me. When you start coming towards me of course you come to achieve something: enlightenment, moksha, God, and all sorts of nonsense. The ego is always a seeker, out to find something. The ego is always in search of gratification. The ego is greedy. It desires God. And the ego itself is the barrier. But the ego says: I desire God, I don’t desire anything of this world. The ego condemns the worldly; but the ego is very tricky. Be alert to the trap, because the ego is the barrier, otherwise who has told you that you have ever missed God? Who told you that you are not already enlightened? You are!That’s the problem. When you come to me you come to seek something. When you listen to me, when you become aware of my reality, you start feeling that there is nothing to be achieved, there is no future. This moment is all. And my insistence is this – that you are already that which you are searching for.The ego cannot concede to it, because if it concedes to it, it is going to commit suicide. The ego will disappear. Nothing to achieve in the future – the ego cannot exist. No goal in the future – the ego drops: flat, dead. The ego needs props to achieve something. The ego is the achiever, the result-oriented, goal-oriented thing. It creates illusions in the future to achieve, and through those illusions it is fulfilled.When I say you are already that which you are trying to find, are asking for, I’m cutting the very root of the ego. If the ego disappears – and it disappears only when you drop future – you are God.But I am not saying God is to be achieved. I am not saying there is any goal to be achieved. I am not saying life is purposive. I am saying life is a play. Enjoy this moment because there is no other moment, there is no tomorrow. Future is illusory. Only the present is real.Listening to me, being with me, your ego feels afraid. The ego starts creating rationalizations. It says: Go! Go home! At least there were some possibilities there to achieve, and this man is dropping the whole future, and you have not yet become the most famous man in the world, you have not yet become the greatest in the world, you have not yet become anything, and this man is saying “Drop all search” and this man is saying “Seek and you will lose, don’t seek and it is already there.” The ego feels that the ground, the very ground underneath is being pulled away. It will create new rationalizations in the mind. It will say: Go West. Go home. Do something else. Go to some other master who can help you to attain something, who can help you to be something. Here I teach only being nothing. That is the problem.And remember, Ninad has asked another question He has asked: If I go to the West I would like to have the mala, I would like – to continue with the name you have given me, but I would like to drop orange. What is the use of orange? – it is an outward thing. Sannyas should be an inner thing.Then why the mala? Mala is not outward? Then why the sannyas name? Is not the name also outward? Why do you want to cling to name and mala and just drop the orange? Is the mala something inner? Is name something inner? No, these are the tricks of the mind; that’s what I say – rationalizations.Now, orange will create trouble. The mala you can hide. The name is not going to be great trouble, but in the West moving in orange you will look mad.And if you are to be with me you have to be mad, less than that won’t do.If you want to drop sannyas, that is nothing – you can drop it, but don’t create rationalizations. Then simply say: I am afraid. Why create so much philosophy around it? In and out! – and who knows what is out and what is in? Is there a demarcation? From where does the inside start and the outside stop? Can you demarcate the line where your inside is?What is inside? What is outside? They are one! The outside is part of your inside and the inside is part of your outside. The outside is nothing but the outermost layer of the inside. The inside is nothing but the innermost layer of the outside. They are not two things.When you are hungry do you say – hunger is inside, why should I eat food which is outside? Hunger is inside, food is outside. But there is a miracle – you eat outside food and inside hunger is satisfied. Somewhere the food enters into the inside, it becomes your blood and your bone.You breathe in, the air is outside, why do you breathe? Drop it! What is the point of breathing something which is outside? You remain inside, then you will know within seconds that it is foolish, it cannot be done. The breath goes in, becomes inside; the same breath goes out, becomes outside. Inside and outside are two polarities of your being, just like two banks of a river – you flow between. You are neither inside nor outside, you are either both or neither.So please if you want to drop sannyas, simply drop it; at least be simple, don’t try to be cunning and clever. All rationalizations are cunning. Don’t try to satisfy yourself that you are doing something great which others are not doing because you have understood what is inside and what is outside.And Ninad is in orange here. Is there any difference between East and West about inside and outside? If it is outside it is outside here also. You should drop it here!But here there is no problem for a Westerner. Nobody bothers, nobody knows you. Here it is a problem for Indians. They think much before they take sannyas. They try to escape.A Westerner can take sannyas easily, because here you are nobody. Your family is not here, your acquaintances, the people who know you, nobody is here. You are a stranger. Whether you are in orange or black or green makes no difference.Back home you have a prestige, a certain name around you, an identity, you have to protect that. But I am not saying don’t protect it. If you want to protect it, protect it. But be simple. At least don’t try, to be cunning because cunningness will be very destructive for you. Simply say: I am afraid. I can understand. It is natural to be afraid. But don’t bring big words and philosophies in, that this is outward.You may be in front of a Lao Tzu or a Buddha, and you may not be ready for him. Lao Tzu says that he is ready. If you want to enter me I am ready. But to enter me is to dissolve. To be with me is to lose boundaries. To be with me is by and by to become faceless, nameless. To be with me is by and by to become a nobody – I am a nobody, and I am infectious.If you want to be nobody, be here. If you want to be somebody – escape, as fast as possible, and never look back, because even that looking back will create trouble for it will show that a desire is still clinging around you, that you would like to come near to me. Escape and forget about me. Whenever again you want to die I will be awaiting here for you. If you are not ready – remain alert, move away. If you are ready – then don’t waste time, move in. One should be very clear what one is doing otherwise you will create confusion for yourself.If you don’t want to become a nobody and you remain with me, you will become confused. If you want to become nobody then don’t go away – forget that anywhere else exists, then just be here.One should be clear what one is doing. If you are not clear you become divided, confused, a chaos.The fourth question:Osho,In moments of deep love and merging with the surrounding existence, a fragrance, your fragrance, comes to me, and gratitude arises in my heart. Is love the only communion possible with a master?There is no other communion, not only with a master – there is no other communion with anybody except love.There are three ways to be related. One we call communication. It is mind to mind. You talk. Words meet, not you. Intellects grope, try to understand each other, but you remain far away. It is a very guarded relationship. Not really a relationship, just a groping, trying to find whether you would like to come closer or not.Intellect is very suspicious, non-trusting. In ordinary life ninety-nine percent of your relationships remain intellectual. You talk to judge. You talk to protect. You talk to avoid. In fact when you are talking to people you are not saying much, in fact you are trying not to say much.Words create an illusion that you are saying many things. It may be just otherwise, you may be hiding. Have you watched? When you don’t want to say something to somebody you talk much. Not about that thing, about many other things. Because if you don’t talk, the silence may be revealing.A husband comes home, he does not really want to talk with his wife but he talks about many trivial things, this and that – he is avoiding some fact. If he remains silent the wife may start feeling something. the wife may be able to penetrate the silence, she is intuitive; he has to create a smoke around him of words so his real face is hidden.People talk not to communicate but to avoid communication.This is your ordinary relationship with people. Only rarely in this relationship are there contacts, otherwise there is no contact.Everybody is suffering, starving for human contact, but cannot come out of his armor, and cannot spread his hands. Everybody is waiting under his shell for somebody to come and break the shell. But the others are also afraid. Everybody is hiding in his cocoon, deep in need of love, deep in need to be related – because man is not an island; you cannot exist alone. A relationship is nourishment, you need to be related.If you move into aloneness for a few days, it will be good. Then you will start feeling starved. A subtle energy is missing. When you come in contact with people, you become again alive.Now researchers say that the mother is not only feeding the child with the breast, she is feeding it with her love – and love now is a nourishment; a subtle quality of her warmth, of her love, acceptance, is being transferred to the body of the child.It is very subtle energy, but if a child is not given that…food can be given, milk can be given, care can be given, and if a child is not given love he shrinks in himself, dies.If love is given, just the feeling of love – now they have been experimenting on plants: you can take two plants of the same size, of the same age, and for one you sit every day for thirty minutes, forty minutes, with a deep feeling of love – touch the plant, feel for it, have a little talk, say something to the plant, talk about the weather, the clouds, say that: Today the sun has not arisen but don’t be afraid, it will be coming soon – just spread your warmth around the plant. And the other plant – you give exact nourishment to the other plant, but no love. You give fertilizers, water, sun, everything – the same of these to both – but no love; and suddenly you will see – the first plant is going higher; within weeks it has doubled; and the other plant is shrinking, struggling hard to grow – but something is missing. You can do it with three plants; the third plant every day you curse, say bad things, discouraging things, such as: Don’t think that this cloud is going to leave, it is going to remain for ever, you are doomed…. And these are now scientific facts – the cursed plant will die. With every care you cannot revive it. And the loved plant will grow, and bigger flowers will come to the loved plant. It will be almost double the size of the other plant which has not been loved.A subtle aroma surrounds love. It is a food. Go into isolation. For a few days you will feel good. Then suddenly an urge arises to move and to go to the people, because there are your roots. That’s why I am not in favor of total renunciation, I am not in favor of renouncing life, because you have been born here, you are part of this continent, you cannot be islands.For a few days it is beautiful because sometimes to be in the crowd is too much, too tiring – because you don’t have the space. And everybody needs a certain space around him, a certain territory, where he is totally free.These are the two needs: love, which is not possible when you are alone, and space, which is not possible when you are in a crowd – and both are needs.You need space, otherwise you feel suffocated. Look at people going in a train – crowded, everybody is standing in a shrunk state, suffocated, even if others are touching you you are not feeling the touch. You have to become insensitive, you have to become hard, closed.If you are too much in the crowd you will need space. If you go to the Himalayas, move to the desert, you will have infinite space, but then suddenly, after a few days, when the need is fulfilled for space and freedom, you will want to come back to the world.Life should be a rhythm between opposites. That’s why I say – remain in the house, remain in the market, and become a sannyasin. Move sometimes to the lonely world, again come back to the market. Between meditation and market there should be a rhythm. Then you will be nourished by both. You will thrive more. You will attain to abundance of life.The second type of relationship is communion. Communication is of the head. Communion is of the heart. You don’t say much, you mean much. Two lovers sitting by each other’s side holding hands – they don’t say much, they mean much. Ordinarily you say much but you don’t mean much. Two lovers, just sitting, nothing to say in fact, what is there to say? Love is enough when it is there; nothing else needs to be said – deeply merging into each other, losing their boundaries, becoming part and members of each other, just being silent, feeling, sensitive, alert, merging, in that moment, to talk will be a disturbance, to say something will not be a communication, it will be a hindrance, an obstacle. Silence is enough, it encompasses them both, they both become part of a deeper silence, a higher silence. That silence takes possession. This is communion, from heart to heart. This is love.And then there is a third for which no name exists because it is so rare: being to being.Communication: head to head; communion: heart to heart; and then there is a third phenomenon for which no word exists, because it is so rare – after centuries sometimes one or two persons attain to it – being to being. Even silence is a disturbance.In that moment the music of silence is a noise. Absolute emptiness is needed.That must have happened when Buddha gave the flower to Mahakashyapa.Buddha came one day with a flower in his hand. People were waiting and he wouldn’t speak – he looked at the flower, and he continued looking at the flower. Minutes passed, it became heavy, hard. The time looked like infinity – and it had never happened before. Half an hour passed, the whole hour passed. People were feeling restless now. What has happened to Buddha? Then one unknown monk – not known up to that time, a certain Mahakashyapa, started laughing.Buddha called him, gave him the flower, and told the audience: All that can be said I have given to you, and that which cannot be said I give to Mahakashyapa.That day, that morning, two beings met. It was not head to head, not heart to heart, it was being to being.The master can transfer his keys only from a contact which is being and being. Now for centuries Buddhists have been asking: What was given to Mahakashyapa? It has become a koan in Japan: What was transferred? What did Buddha give to Mahakashyapa that Mahakashyapa gave to somebody else and it then passed on? And then Bodhidharma went to China in search of somebody to give the same thing to. It was given to Hui-neng. It has continued – a chain, being to being.That happens in a state of samadhi.So – ordinary communication; then the communion of love, and then the union of being. These are the three phenomena. When you become a disciple you have to attain to the second – heart to heart; if you are a student – to the first. A few are students here, who listen from head to head. A few are disciples who listen from heart to heart. And I hope some day somebody will listen from being to being, will be a Mahakashyapa to whom I can give my flower, so that it can be carried from century to century.The last question:Osho,Many say that your meditation techniques are dangerous because they can release more energy than we can deal with. And you have often said that madness and enlightenment are equally possible on the spiritual path. Can you say some more about madness and how we can avoid it?If you try to avoid it you will be in danger, because anything avoided always remains like a hangover. Madness has to be lived through, not avoided. If you avoid it it will remain a part of your unconscious. If you avoid it you will not be able to encounter your total being, a part will always be suppressed.Madness has to be passed through and through. You have to move through it. Fear is there – the fear is not of madness, remember, the fear is of getting identified. Madness cannot do anything. If you remain unidentified, alert, you can enjoy it, it is a beautiful experience. It happens around you, it never happens to you. But if you get identified, then there is danger.That’s what I was saying yesterday. On the third layer, the chaos layer, the possibility of madness is there – if you get identified. So before you get identified you have to learn awareness. And all my meditation techniques are such that they teach you two things: one: to be aware, and another: to be chaotic. They create chaos in you, and simultaneously they create awareness in you, they have an inbuilt safety. So don’t be afraid. And anyway, I am here!You go through the madness, remaining alert. Never say: I am mad. If madness happens just say: Madness is there, I am a witness. That will do. Soon everything will subside, you have passed the layer – how can you avoid it? It is there, just on the way. If you try to avoid, you will cling to the second layer, the layer of games and roles. And, afraid of the third, chaos, you will cling more and more to it. No need to be afraid! Learn how to be aware, that’s all; how to be mindful.Start with small things – eat, but eat with alertness. Walk, but walk with awareness. Talk to people, but talk with awareness. Listen to me, but always remain alert that you are listening. Don’t get lost in it. Just learn to be aware, and then the madness can be released. And you will enjoy it – nothing like it! It is a storm, but a great phenomenon.When everything goes into chaos within you that means everything moves to the original source – manmade rules, regulations are lost. The games of the society disappear; all definitions are meaningless. You move into the undefined, with no map. It is a beautiful experience, an experience of the unknown. But dangerous! If you become lost you become mad.That’s why I insist before one enters into the third layer one should choose a master. Never enter alone. There must be somebody who can shock you out of your identification; who, if you get lost, can pull you out of the mess. But one has to go through it.And my meditation techniques are dangerous. In fact there cannot be any meditation techniques which are not dangerous. If they are not dangerous, they are not meditation techniques, they are tricks. Just like Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They are mental tricks. Just consolatory. No danger. At the most they can give you good sleep, that’s all. If you miss, you don’t miss anything, you remain the same. If you attain, you attain to good sleep, that’s all. No danger involved. That’s why TM has had such a universal impact; people are so much attracted to it because it is so impotent, it does nothing, it is just like homeopathic medicine. Homeopaths say that their medicines are such that if they help, they help – otherwise they never harm. TM is homeopathic.But what I am saying is allopathic. It is poison. Play carefully. It helps tremendously, it can harm also. And this is the criterion: Whatsoever helps can also harm. If something cannot harm it cannot help either. The possibility is always of both. It is dangerous because it is powerful. If something is not dangerous, it means it is powerless, it has no potency.Yes, they are dangerous. Before you decide to enter, think twice. And don’t enter into my meditations as students – that can be dangerous. Enter as disciples. Don’t enter into my meditations curiously. No, curiosity can lead you to dangers. If you are really ready, ready to face madness, only then you are welcome. Otherwise – remain normal. Cling to the second layer and the first layer. At least you are not in danger. You will not attain to anything but you will also not lose anything. You can waste your life easily, with comfort. You can live comfortably, and you can die comfortably.With me, there is danger. If you succeed with me, you can live tremendously. If you fail, you go mad.But you can fail only if you don’t listen to me. If you listen to me there is no question of it.I am not talking of anything theoretically. Whatsoever I am saying, I have done, I have passed through it, I know what is possible, what is not possible, what can happen, what can go wrong. Every inch of the territory is known to me, so if something goes wrong that means only that you have not been listening to me.If you listen to me, trust me, nothing can go wrong; that is how trust, a deep trust and surrender are needed.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lao Tzu says:When man is born, he is tender and weak; at death, he is hard and stiff. When things and plants are alive, they are soft and supple; when they are dead, they are brittle and dry. Therefore hardness and stiffness are the companions of death, and softness and gentleness are the companions of life.Therefore when an army is headstrong, it will lose in battle. When a tree is hard, it will be cut down. The big and strong belong underneath. The gentle and weak belong at the top.Life is a river, a flow, a continuum, with no beginning and no end. It is not going somewhere, it is always here. It is not going from somewhere to somewhere else, it is always coming from here to here. The only time for life is now, and the only place is here.There is no struggle to reach, there is nothing to reach. There is no struggle to conquer, there is nothing to conquer. There is no effort to protect, because there is nothing to be protected from. Only life exists, alone, absolutely alone, beautiful in its aloneness, majestic in its aloneness.You can live life in two ways: you can flow with it – then you are also majestic, you have a grace, grace of non-violence, no conflict, no struggle, then you have a beauty, childlike, flower-like, soft, delicate, uncorrupted. If you flow with life you are religious. That’s what religion means to Lao Tzu – or to me.Ordinarily religion means a fight with life – for God. Ordinarily it means: God is the goal, life has to be denied – and fought; life has to be sacrificed and God has to be achieved. This ordinary religion is no religion. This ordinary religion is just part of the ordinary violent aggressive mind.There is no God beyond life; life is God. If you deny life you deny God, if you sacrifice life you sacrifice God. In all the sacrifices, only God is sacrificed.Gurdjieff used to say – it looks paradoxical but it is true – that all religions are against God.If life is God, then to deny, to renounce, to sacrifice, is to go against God.But it seems Gurdjieff did not know much about Lao Tzu. Or even if he had known about Lao Tzu he would have said the same thing, because Lao Tzu does not seem to be ordinarily religious. He is more like a poet, a musician, an artist, a creator, rather than like a theologian, a priest, a preacher, philosopher. He is so ordinary that you cannot think that he is religious. But really to be religious is to be so extraordinarily ordinary in life that the part is not against the whole, but the part is flowing with the whole.To be religious is not to be separate from the flow. To be irreligious is to have your own mind, in an effort to win, to conquer, to reach somewhere. If you have a goal you are irreligious. If you are thinking of the tomorrow you have already missed religion. Religion has no tomorrow to it. That’s why Jesus says: Think not of the morrow; look at the lilies in the field, they are blossoming now. Everything that is, is now, everything that is alive is now alive. Now is the only time, the only eternity.Two possibilities are there. You can fight with life, you can have your private goals against life – and all goals are private, all goals are personal, you are trying to impose a pattern on life, something of your own; you are trying to drag the life to follow you, and you are just a tiny part, infinitesimal, so small, so atomic, and you are trying to drag the whole universe with you. Of course you are bound to be defeated. You are bound to lose your grace, you are bound to become hard.Fighting creates hardness. Just think of fight, and a subtle hardness comes around you; just think of resisting, and a crust arises around you which covers you like a cocoon.The very idea that you have a certain goal makes you an island, you are no more part of the vast continent of life. And when you are separated from life you are like a tree which is separated from the earth. It may live a little on the past nourishment, but really it is dying. The tree needs roots, the tree needs to be in the earth, joined together, part of it.You need to be joined with the continent of life, part of it, rooted in it. When you are rooted in life you are soft – because you are not afraid.Fear creates hardness. Fear creates the idea of security, fear creates the idea to protect yourself. And nothing kills like fear because in the very idea of fear you are separated from the earth, uprooted.Then you live on the past – that is why you think so much of the past. It is not coincidental. The mind continuously thinks either of past or of the future. Why think so much of the past? The gone is gone! It cannot be recovered. The past is dead! Why do you go on thinking about the past which is no more and about which nothing can be done? You cannot live it, You cannot be in it. But it can destroy your present moment.But there must be some deep-rooted cause for it – the deep-rooted cause is that you are fighting the whole. Fighting the whole, fighting the river of life, you are uprooted. You have become tiny, a capsule-like phenomenon, closed in yourself. You have become an individual, you are no more part of the brahman, the expanding universe, the vast. No, you are no more part of it, you have to live like a miser on your past nourishment, that’s why mind goes on thinking about the past.And you have to pull yourself somehow to be ready to fight – that’s why you go on thinking about the future: future gives you hope, past gives you nourishment, and just between the two is eternity, the very life, which you are missing. Between the past and the future you are dying, not living.There is another way to be – really, the only way to be because this way is not the way to be, the way of fight is not to be the way to be.The other way is to flow with the river, flow so together with it that you don’t feel even the separation – that you are separate and flowing with it. No you become part, not only part, you are immersed in it, you have become the river, there exists no separation. When you are not fighting, you become life. When you are not fighting you have become the vast, the infinite. When you are not fighting, that state in the East has been known as surrender; trust, what we have called shraddha; trusting life, not trusting your individual mind, but trusting the whole. Not trusting the part, but the whole. Not trusting the mind, but trusting existence.Surrendered, suddenly you become soft, because then there is no need to be hard, you are not fighting, there is no enmity, there is no need to protect, there is no urge to be secure, you are already merged with life.And life is secure, only individual egos are insecure, they need protection, they need safety, they need armors around them; afraid, continuously trembling. Then how can you live? You live in anguish and anxiety. You don’t live. You lose all delight, the sheer joy of being here – and it is a sheer joy. It has no cause to it. It simply arises because you are. It simply bubbles up within you just because you are. Once you are open, flowing with life, you are bubbling with joy continuously. For no reason at all! You simply start feeling that to be is to be happy.That’s why Hindus have called the ultimate: satchitananda. That means to be is to be blissful. To be true is to be blissful. There is no other way of being. If you are miserable that only shows that you have lost contact with being. To be miserable means somehow you are uprooted from the earth, you have become separate from the river, you have become a frozen block, an ice cube, floating in the river, but not with it; fighting, even trying to go upstream – the ego always wants to go upstream, because wherever there is challenge the ego feels good. The ego is always in search of fight. If you cannot find anybody to fight you will feel very miserable. Somebody is needed to fight. In fighting you feel good, you are.But that is a very ill way to be. A pathological way, a neurotic way to be. Neurosis is fighting with the river. If you fight, you become hard. If you fight, you surround yourself with a dead wall. Of course, your own being is dead. You lose softness, lucidity, grace, gentleness. Then you are just dragging, not alive.Lao Tzu is for surrender. He says: Surrender to life. Allow life to lead you, don’t try to lead life. Don’t try to manipulate and control life, let life manipulate and control you. Let life possess you. You simply surrender! You simply say: I am not. You give total power to life, and be with it. Difficult, because the ego says: Then what am I? Surrendered, I am no more.But when the ego is not, in fact for the first time you are. For the first time you are not the finite, you are the infinite. For the first time you are not the body, the embodied, you are the unembodied, the vast, which goes on expanding; beginningless, endless.But the ego does not know about it. The ego is afraid. It says: What are you doing, losing yourself? Then you will be lost, you will be a nobody. If you listen to the ego, the ego will put you again and again on a neurotic path, the path of Being Somebody. And the more you become somebody the more life has disappeared from you.Look at people who have succeeded in the world, who have become somebody, whose names are found in Who’s Who? Look at them, watch them, you will find that they are living a fake life! They are only masks, nothing inside, hollow men, stuffed maybe, but not alive. Empty.Watch people who have become successful in the world, and have become somebodies: presidents, prime ministers, rich people, the very rich, who have attained all that can be attained in the world. Watch them, touch them, look at them; you will feel death. You will not find throbbing hearts there. Maybe the heart is still beating but the beat is mechanical. The beat has lost the poetry. They look at you, but their eyes are dull. The luster of being alive is not there. They will shake hands with you but in their hands you will not feel anything flowing, you will not feel any exchange of energy, you will not see warmth welcoming you. A dead hand. Weight you will find there, love you will not find.Look around them: they live in hell. They have succeeded, they have become somebodies, and now only hell surrounds them. You are on the same way if you are trying to be somebody.Lao Tzu says: Be a nobody, and then you will have infinite life flowing in you.For the flow of life, to be a somebody becomes a block; to be a nobody – vast emptiness; it allows all. Clouds can move, stars can move in it. And nothing disturbs it. And you have nothing to lose, because all that can be lost you have surrendered already.In such a state of being one is ever young. The body of course will become old, but the innermost core of your being remains young, fresh. It never becomes old, it is never dead.And Lao Tzu says: This is the way to be really religious. Float with Tao, move with Tao, don’t create any private goals and ends, the whole knows better, you be simply with it. The whole has created you, the whole breathes within you, the whole lives in you, why do you bother? Let the responsibility be with the whole. You simply go wherever it leads.You don’t try to force and plan, and you don’t ask for any certain goals because then there will be frustration, and you will become hard, and you will miss an opportunity of being alive. And this is the point – that if you allow life, more life happens, then if you allow yourself to be alive still more life happens.Jesus goes on saying: Come to me, and I will show you the way of infinite life. Life abundant. Life overflowing, flooding.But we live like beggars, we could have been like emperors. Nobody else is responsible. Your cleverness to be yourself, to be clinging to the ego, is the whole cause of your misery.Now the sutras.When man is born, he is tender and weak…Watch a small baby, just born. He has no crust around him: vulnerable, open, soft. Life in its purity. It will not be so for long, soon personalities will start growing around him, he will be encaged, imprisoned by the society, parents, schools, universities; soon the life will become a distant phenomenon. He will be more like a prisoner. Life will go on beating somewhere deep inside him, but even he will not be able to hear the beat of it.But when a child is born – watch it. Again and again the miracle happens. Again and again life goes on showing you the way, how to be, again and again life goes on saying that life is renewed every day.Old men die. New small babes are born. What is the point in it? It is very clear that life does not believe in oldness. In fact, if life was run by economists, this would seem to be very uneconomical, a wastage. An old man trained, experienced in the ways of life and world, then when he is ready and when he thinks he has become wise, death takes over – and replaces the old man with a small baby with no knowledge, no wisdom at all, absolutely fresh, a tabula rasa – everything has to be written again. If you ask the economists they will say: This is foolish! God must consult economists first – what is he doing? Wastage, sheer wastage! A trained man of eighty dies and an untrained babe is replacing him, this should be just the otherwise, then it will be more economical.But life does not believe in economics – and it is good that it doesn’t believe, otherwise the whole world would have become a big cemetery. It believes in life, not in economics. It goes on replacing old people by new, dead people by young, hard people by soft – the indication is clear: life loves softness. Because through a soft being life can flow easily.When man is born he is tender and weak…And Lao Tzu insists on the second point also; that life does not believe in strength. Weakness has a beauty in it, because it is tender and soft. A storm comes, big trees will fall – strong; and small plants – they will simply bend; and then the storm goes by and they are again smiling and flowering. In fact the storm has made them just fresh, it has taken their dust, that’s all. They are more alive, younger, fresher, and, the storm has given them a good bath. And the old trees – very strong, they have fallen, because they resisted, they would not bend, they were very egoistic.Lao Tzu says: Life loves the weak. And that is the meaning of Jesus’ sayings: Blessed are the meek, because they shall inherit the earth; Blessed are the poor, the poor in spirit; Blessed are those who weep, because they shall be comforted.Christianity goes on missing the meaning of Jesus’ sayings, because those sayings are Lao Tzuan. Unless they are related to Lao Tzu they cannot be interpreted rightly. The whole teaching of Jesus is: Be alive and be weak. That’s why he says if somebody hits you on the face give him the other side also. If somebody takes your coat, give him your shirt also. And if somebody forces you to walk with him for one mile, go for two miles. He is saying be weak – Blessed are the meek.What is there in weakness which is blessed? Because ordinarily the so-called leaders of the world, teachers of the world, they go on saying: Be strong. And this Lao Tzu and Jesus, they say: Be weak.Weakness has something in it – because it is not hard. To be strong one needs to be hard. To be hard one needs to flow against life. If you want to be strong, you will have to fight the flow, only then will you become strong, there is no other way to become strong. If you want to become strong move upcurrent. The more the river forces you against it the more you become stronger.To be weak, flow with the river; wherever it is going, go with it. To flow with the river…if the river says go with me for one mile, go for two miles, if the river takes your coat, give your shirt also, and if the river slaps you on one cheek, give the other.Weakness has a certain beauty in it. That beauty is that of grace, the beauty is that of non-violence, ahimsa, that beauty is that of love, forgiveness, the beauty is that of no conflict. And unless Lao Tzu is understood well, and humanity starts feeling for Lao Tzu, humanity cannot live in peace.If you are taught to be strong you are bound to fight, wars will continue. All political leaders in the world go on saying that they love peace – and they all prepare for war. They say they stand for peace – and they all go on accumulating armaments. They talk about peace – and they prepare for war. And they all say they have to prepare for war because they are afraid of the other; and the other says the same thing. The whole thing looks so foolish and stupid.China is afraid of India, India is afraid of China. Why can’t you see the point! Russia is afraid of America, America is afraid of Russia. They both talk about peace and they both go on preparing for war. And of course, that which you prepare for happens.Your talk about peace looks just rubbish. Your talk about peace is nothing but cold war. In fact politicians need time to prepare: in that time they talk about peace so that they can have enough time to prepare. Humanity for centuries has lived in only two periods: the war, the period of war, and the period of preparation for war – these are the only two periods; the whole history seems to be just neurotic.But this is going to be so because strength is praised, ego praised. If two persons are fighting on the road, one is stronger, another is weak, the weaker has fallen and the stronger is sitting on his chest, whom do you appreciate? You appreciate the one who has become a conqueror? Then you are violent. Then you are for war. Then you are a war-monger. Then you are very dangerous and neurotic. Or do you appreciate the one who is weak?But nobody appreciates the weak, nobody wants to be associated with the weak, because deep down you would also like to be strong. When you appreciate the strong you say: Yes, this is my ideal, I would also like to be like him. If strength is praised, then violence is praised. If strength is praised, then death is praised, because all strength kills – kills the other and kills you also. Strength is murderous and suicidal both.Weakness, the very word seems to be condemnatory. But what is weakness? A flower is weak. A rock by the side of the flower is very strong. Would you like to be like a rock? Or would you like to be like a flower? A flower is weak, remember, very weak. Just a small strong wind, and the flower will be gone. The petals will fall to the earth. A flower is a miracle; it is a miracle how the flower exists – so weak, so soft! Seems to be impossible. How is it possible? Rocks seem to be okay, they exist, they have their arithmetic to exist, but the flower? It seems to be completely unsupported, but still a flower exists. That’s the miracle.Would you like to be like a flower? If you ask deep down your ego will say: Be like a rock. And even if you insist, because a rock looks ugly, then the ego will say even if you want to be a flower be a plastic flower. Be at least strong! Winds won’t disturb you, rains won’t destroy you, and you can remain for ever and ever.A real flower comes in the morning, laughs for a moment, spreads its fragrance – and is gone. An unreal flower, a plastic flower, can remain for ever and ever.But it is unreal, and it is strong because it is unreal. Reality is soft and weak. And the higher the reality is, the softer.You cannot understand God because your minds understand the logic of rocks. You don’t understand the logic of a flower. Your mind can understand mathematics, you don’t have that aesthetic sense to feel for flowers.Only a poetic mind can understand the possibility of God, because God is the weakest, the softest. That’s why it is the highest. It is the ultimate flower. It flowers, but it flowers only in a split second. That split second is known as the present.If you miss that moment – and it is such a small moment that you need to be very intensely attentive, only then will you be able to see it, otherwise you will miss it. It is always flowering, every moment it flowers, but you cannot see, your mind is cluttered with the past and the future – and the present is such a narrow phenomenon. Just a flicker of the eyelids and it is gone.In that narrow moment God flowers – it is the highest, the ultimate.But very weak, very soft, it has to be. It is the pinnacle, the last crescendo, beyond which nothing exists.You will be able to understand God only when you understand the logic of softness and weakness. If you are trying to be strong: conquerors, fighters, warriors, then you will live in the world surrounded by rocks, not by flowers, and God will be a faraway phenomenon. It will not be possible for you to detect God anywhere in life.When man is born he is tender and weak; at death, he is hard and stiff.So this should become your part of life: remain soft, tender and weak, don’t try to be hard and stiff because that is how you are bringing your own death closer and closer.Death will come some day – that is not the point. Death is not the fear, death is not the problem, but if you are alive in a deathlike personality – that is the problem. Death in itself is very soft, softer than life, very tender; you can hear the sounds of life, but you cannot hear the sounds of death. When death comes it is so soft, you cannot know even a second before that it is coming. And it is so weak, so tender. That death is not the problem. The death that you are living right now, that is the problem. Death before death is the problem, living a dead life, that is the problem. Hard. Closed. Leibnitz has a term for it, he calls it “monad.” Monad means: closed in such a prison, in such a capsule, that there are no windows even to look out of, or for the outside to look in. A monad is an absolutely closed windowless cell.Monad comes from the same root as monopoly, monastery, monk and monogamy; it means to be totally alone. A monk is one who lives alone. A monastery is a place where people live alone.When you are completely closed, in a dead cell, you are in a monastery. You live in a cave by yourself, you cannot reach others, others cannot reach you. You are completely closed. This is the death which is stiff.And then you are miserable, and then you try to find ways and means of how not to be miserable. You go on creating misery by being stiff, hard, and then you go on seeking methods of how not to be miserable.In fact if you understand the phenomenon of how you have become miserable, you can drop it immediately. Just be soft, flowing. Be like a child, and always retain the purity and the softness of childhood. Don’t lose contact with it and you will be surprised one day when you discover that the child that you had been fifty years before is still alive within you.If you know how to make contacts with it, suddenly you are again a child; the child is never lost because that is your life. It remains there; it is not that the child dies and then you become young, and then the youth dies, then you become old, no! Layers upon layers accumulate but the innermost core remains the same, the babe that you were born is still there within you; many layers have accumulated around it – if you penetrate those layers, suddenly the child explodes in you; this explosion I have called ecstasy.Jesus says: Unless you become like children you will not enter the kingdom of God. This is what he means: this is all of what I am talking about. If you penetrate your hard shell, the hard coat, the walls around you, the many layers, suddenly the child will explode within you, again you will look at the world with those innocent eyes of a child. Then there is God.God is not a very philosophical concept: it is this world looked at through the eyes of a child. The same world – these flowers, these trees, this sky – and you, the same world suddenly takes a new quality of being divine when you look at it through the eyes of a child. Only a pure soft tender heart is needed. God is not missing, you are missing. God is not absent, you are absent.When man is born he is tender and weak: at death, he is hard and stiff.When things and plants are alive, they are soft and supple; when they are dead, they are brittle and dry.Learn. Life is teaching through many ways. Life is indicating the path how one should be.Therefore hardness and stiffness are the companions of death, and softness and gentleness are the companions of life.If you want to be more alive, abundantly alive, then seek companions of life: gentleness, softness.All that clutters you makes you hard. Live in such a way that each moment you are free from the past moment.Your situation right now is like this: you have a big house with many rooms; in all the rooms there are jigsaw puzzles, the whole house is filled with jigsaw puzzles – on the tables, on the chairs, on the beds, on the floors, hanging from the ceilings – everywhere, jigsaw puzzles; and you have not been able to solve any. You try to solve one; feeling that to solve it is difficult you move to another puzzle; but the first one is hanging on your head; not only that, a few parts of it you carry with you to work on later on. Then you try to solve another puzzle, but you cannot solve it because you are yourself puzzled. Then you move to another room, and this way you go on and on and on – in circles. You are cluttered with unsolved puzzles, and by and by you are completely neurotic; not a single point of life solved and thousands of puzzles hanging around you. They take their toll, they kill you.Never carry things on from the past – it is gone! Every moment be rid of it! Solved or not solved. Now nothing can be done about it. Drop it. And don’t carry parts because those parts won’t allow you to solve new problems which will be coming. Live this moment, live this moment as totally as possible, and suddenly you will come to realize if you live it totally it is solved. There is no need to solve it. Life is not a problem, it is a mystery to be lived.If you live it totally it is solved, and you come out of it beautiful, enriched, with new treasures of your being opened, but nothing hanging around you. Then you move in another moment with that freshness, with this totalness, intensity, so that another moment is lived – and solved.Never go on accumulating unlived moments around you, otherwise you will become hard.You can remain soft only if you don’t carry anything from the past. Why are children soft? They don’t carry. Their way is the way of the sage. If a child is angry he is angry. In that moment he does not bother what Buddha says about anger, he does not bother what Mahavira has taught about anger: Don’t be angry – he becomes really angry. He is so intensely angry that the very intensity becomes beautiful. Look at a child when he is really angry: the whole body – such a small body, so soft, so tender – throbbing with such anger, eyes red, face red, jumping, screaming, as if he will destroy the whole world. An explosion of energy.And the next moment the anger is gone, and he is playing, and look at his face – you cannot believe that this face was angry a moment before. All smiles! So beautiful, so happy.This is the way to live. One moment be in it, but be in it so totally that nothing is left to be in another moment. The child lives the moment of anger, then he moves. When better education will be possible in the world we will not teach children not to be angry, we will teach them to be angry, but totally angry, and not to carry it. Anger in itself is not bad, to carry it, to accumulate it, is dangerous.Flashes of anger are beautiful, in fact necessary, they give a tone to life. They make life more salty. Otherwise you will feel more flaccid, you won’t have a tone. It is good exercise in itself, and if one can be in it totally and come out of it totally, unscratched, nothing is wrong in it. And a person who can be angry totally can be happy totally, can be loving totally, because it is not a question of whether you are angry or happy or loving; the one thing you learn from all experiences is being total.If you are not allowed to be angry you become incomplete. You live the moment partially, the other parts hang on the mind. Then you are smiling but your smile is not pure, it is corrupted, because that anger is hanging in it. Your lips are smiling but they are poisonous, the anger has not left, the past has not gone, you are not completely free to be here and now, the past has a shadow on you.And this goes on and on. You become puzzled. The whole life becomes a hangover. Then you cannot live anything: you cannot love, you cannot pray, you cannot meditate. People come to me and they say: When we meditate suddenly millions of thoughts arise; ordinarily those thoughts are not arising, but when we meditate then they arise.Why does it happen? Incomplete experiences; when you meditate you are unoccupied; they all jump upon you: You are unoccupied – at least solve us! complete us! fulfill us! You are not doing anything, meditation is not doing anything, just sitting here. Do something! This anger is there – fulfill it! This love is there – fulfill it! This desire is there – do something!When you are occupied, you are so much occupied that they all surround you but never become the focus of your attention. But when you are meditating they all try to attract your attention: We are incomplete. They are ghosts of your past.Live every moment totally. And live with awareness so that the past is not carried. And this is easy, just a little awareness is needed. Nothing else is needed. Don’t live in sleep, robot-like. Be a little more conscious, and you will be able to see.And then you will become soft like a child, supple like a new sprouting plant, and this quality can be carried to the very moment of to the last moment of death you remain supple. If you remain supple, young, fresh – death happens, but it does not happen to you. Because you carry life in you, death cannot happen. Only people who have been already dead, die. People who have remained alive, they watch death happening; the body dies, the mind dies, but not they, they remain out of it, transcendental.Therefore when an army is headstrong, it will lose in battle.Lao Tzu looks absurd. He says when an army is headstrong it will lose in battle, and you think whenever you are headstrong you will win.When a tree is hard, it will be cut down.The big and strong belong underneath.The gentle and weak belong at the top.The roots are hard, they belong underneath. The flowers are soft, they belong at the top.And this will be the right structure of society – if the people who are strong belong to the roots and the people who are soft belong to the top. Poets and painters should belong to the top. Saints and sages should belong to the highest peak. Soldiers, politicians, businessmen should belong underneath, they should not belong to the top. The whole world is topsy-turvy, because hard people are trying to be on the top.It is as if roots have become politicians and they are trying to come to the top of the tree and they are trying to force the flowers to go to the roots, to the underground.When the world was more in equilibrium – for example in India brahmins belonged to the top. We had placed them at the top – brahmins means sages: those who have known the brahman. It is not a caste. It has nothing to do with birth, it has something to do with the inner resurrection. Those who have known the ultimate, they are the brahmins, they belong to the top, they were the flowers. Even kings, very strong emperors, had to come and bow down at their feet. That was the right way! A king, howsoever strong, and howsoever great, is still a king. A man of the world is still neurotic, is still after ambition and ego – he has to bow down.It happened that Buddha was coming to a town, and the king of the town was a little hesitant to go and receive him.The prime minister of the king told him: You have to go. The prime minister was a very old wise man. The king said: This looks unnecessary. He is a beggar. Let him come! What is the point in me going to the boundary of my kingdom to receive him? I am a king, and he is a beggar.The old prime minister of the king wrote his resignation immediately. He said: Take my resignation, because if you have fallen so low then I cannot remain here. You must remember that you are still a king, and he has renounced kingdoms. He has nothing. You have a great empire, and he has only nothing. He belongs to the top. And you have to go and bow down, otherwise take my resignation. I cannot be here in this palace with you. That is impossible for me. The king had to go.When he bowed down to Buddha, Buddha is reported to have said to him: There was no need. I have heard that you were reluctant to come – there was no need, because when one is reluctant, even if one comes, one does not come. And respect cannot be forced. Either you understand or you don’t understand. There was no need! I was coming myself and I am a beggar. And you are an emperor.But now the king started crying and weeping. He understood the point.In the East, brahmins were on the top. That should be the right way to structure a society. Now all over the world politicians have reached to the top. Hence the misery and the chaos, it has to be so. The top has become too heavy. Only flowers should be on the top: sages, poets, mystics, not politicians.The big and strong belong underneath.The gentle and weak belong at the top.Lao Tzu is saying that if you want to belong to the top be gentle and weak. Be so weak and gentle, so soft, like the grass, not strong like big trees.Lao Tzu has a deep interest in all that is useless. He says to be useless is to be protected. To be useful is dangerous, because if you are useful then somebody is going to use you, you will be exploited. If you are strong then you will be forced into the army.Lao Tzu was moving from a village, passing through a village with his disciples. He saw a man with a hunchback. He told his disciples: Go to that hunchback and ask how he is feeling, because I have heard the town has been in trouble. The king has forced all young men and strong men into the army.They went to the hunchback and they asked him. The hunchback said: I am happy! Because of my back they didn’t force me. I am useless. That’s how I am saved. They reported back. Lao Tzu said to them: Now remember. Be useless. Otherwise you will become fodder in the war.Once passing through a forest they came under a big tree: one thousand bullock carts could have rested underneath it. The whole forest was being cut down, thousands of carpenters were working there. Lao Tzu said: Inquire what has happened. Why have they not cut this big tree?The disciples went, they inquired; the carpenter said: That tree is absolutely useless. The branches are not straight, you cannot make furniture out of them; and when you bum it, so much smoke comes out of it that it cannot be used as a fuel. And the leaves are so bitter that not even animals are ready to eat them. So it is useless. That is why we have not cut it down.It is said Lao Tzu started laughing and said to his disciples: Be like that tree, useless. Then nobody will cut you down. And look at this tree, how big it has become, just by being useless!Life can be looked at in two ways. Either you look at it as utilitarian – one thing has to be used for something else; life then becomes a means, and some end has to be fulfilled. Or life can be taken as enjoyment, not as a utility. Then this moment is all, there is no goal, no purpose.I was reading a poem just the other day. One line of it struck me deeply. One line in that poem says: A poem should not mean, but be.I loved it. Life should not mean, life should be. An end in itself. Going nowhere. Enjoying here and now. Celebrating. Only then you can be soft. If you are trying to be of use, you will become hard. If you are trying to achieve something, you will become hard. If you are trying to fight you will becomes hard. Surrender. Be soft and tender. And allow the flow of life to take you wherever it takes you. Let the goal of the whole be your goal. Don’t seek any private goal. You just be a part, and an infinite beauty and grace happens.Try to feel it – what I am saying; it is not a question of understanding, it is not a question of intellectual capacity. Feel it, what I am saying. Imbibe it, what I am saying. Let it be there with you. Allow it to settle deep in your being: Life should not mean, life should be.And then suddenly you are soft. All hardness goes, disappears, melts. The baby is rediscovered, you have again become a child, those transparent eyes of childhood are available again.You can look and then this greenery is totally different, and the songs of the birds are totally different. Then the whole has a totally different significance. It has no meaning, it has significance. Meaning is concerned with utility, significance with delight.Delight in it and you will be soft. Flow with the river. Become the river.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You tell us again and again not to desire enlightenment and yet you also remind us again and again how impoverished and what rubbish our lives are, and tell us how blissful and rich enlightenment is. How can one avoid preferring bliss to rubbish?Preference is the greatest problem. If you prefer, you miss. If you prefer bliss to rubbish your concept of bliss is already rubbish. If you don’t prefer, if you remain alert and non-preferring, in a deep choiceless awareness, even rubbish itself becomes blissful. Rubbish and bliss are not two things. If you prefer – everything is rubbish. If you don’t prefer – everything becomes blissful.This world and nirvana are not two things. This world exists because of your choice. If choice disappears, the world disappears. Suddenly there is enlightenment and nothing else.It is just in front of your eyes. Prefer, and you will miss it, because preference means the mind has entered. Choice is mind. When you say: I choose this and I don’t choose that, you have already divided the world into two; the duality has entered. Now the non-dual is lost, the one is lost, the unity is no more there. If you don’t choose the duality disappears because it is because of your choice; you support it by your choice, that’s why it exists. If you don’t support it by your choice it has disappeared. Already there is nothing to choose and no one to choose.Enlightenment is not something that you have to choose. When there is no choice that which remains is enlightenment.I understand your difficulty, because the choice comes again and again. You may even choose not to choose; if I insist that choicelessness is the door you may start choosing it – but then you missed, you could not understand me. Nothing is to be done, just a tacit understanding is needed.Just by listening to me, if you understand it, it has already happened. There is nothing else to do.Don’t ask how. Just try to understand what I am saying: Don’t bring the desire in. Let the understanding be clear.When you say: This is wrong, you have denied a part of existence as wrong. Now you can never be the whole – and enlightenment belongs to the whole! It is a flowering of the whole. A part cannot be enlightened, only the whole. If you say: This is good and that is bad, and this I choose and that I reject, who is making these rejections, choices? The I, the ego, is dividing existence like a sword, cutting it in two. If you understand it, you don’t divide. In a non-divided existence, nothing is lacking. You suddenly start dancing. It has happened.“You tell us again and again not to desire enlightenment” – Yes. Because desire is the bondage. The so-called religions have been teaching people to desire enlightenment. They have created much confusion. I am doing nothing, just clearing the whole confusion that has been put into your mind. They say: Don’t desire the world, don’t desire worldly objects, don’t desire money, don’t desire power, prestige – desire God, desire enlightenment, desire heaven, desire virtue. But when you desire virtue, when you desire God, nothing has changed in you. Only the object of desire has changed. Desiring has remained the same. First you were desiring money, now you desire God. The object has changed, now you have an other-worldly object, but have you gone through any transformation? You still desire.The nature of desire is the same, it doesn’t depend on the object. God or money makes no difference. You desire – that is the thing. Because in desire, you have moved into the future. In desire you have already missed the present moment. Desire means you are not here-now. Now the mind has gone somewhere else. And how can you enjoy that which is happening now, when the mind is somewhere else? How can you delight in that which is already showering on you when the mind is not here? Life goes on showering, God goes on surrounding you, but your mind is somewhere else – in the future, in some result, in desire. That’s how you miss!Desire allows you space to move into nowhere; and you are always here, your concrete existence is always in the present. But the desire helps to create other worlds which are not.Look at a man desiring money. He has ten thousand rupees – he cannot enjoy them because he is desiring ten lakhs of rupees. He is miserable. Those ten thousand don’t make him rich. He is miserable. Those ten lakhs that he is desiring make him poor. He will enjoy only when ten lakhs are there.But, do you think he will enjoy? When ten lakhs are there the mind must have moved again, because the mind has learned the trick of how to move: from ten thousand to ten lakhs, from ten lakhs to ten crore! The proportion, the distance, will remain the same. By the time he attains ten lakhs the mind is already desiring ten crore.He cannot enjoy ten lakhs, he is not rich because of them, he is poor because of ten crore.You start meditating, you cannot enjoy that which is happening to you, your mind thinks of enlightenment. And I tell you, even if it was possible for enlightenment to happen – which is not possible – you would not be able to enjoy it. Your mind would move to some other great enlightenment. That is the nature of desire – to go on moving. If God was there just standing in front of you, you would have already moved to some other great God – this God won’t do. Not enough. Not fulfilling.One has to understand how the mind functions, that’s all. A tacit understanding of the functioning of the mind – and suddenly you start laughing; the whole trick is understood.Then, it is not a question of changing objects but of simply dropping the desire – and when I say “dropping the desire” please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that you drop it. When the tacit understanding is there, it drops. Suddenly you see the point: that life is here, and desire is there. You see the point – and desire disappears. It is just a line of smoke around you, nothing substantial. You need not even push it. You understand – it has disappeared.Not that you drop desire, because I know, how can you drop it? You can drop it only if some other desire is substituted. If I say: Drop the desire of money because then you can attain to God! – you can drop it, because I am giving you another object to desire. You can drop the old – because with the old you yourself have already become frustrated and fed up. Now this new object will help the desire for a few days; then you can drop it again.Objects can be dropped if desire is allowed. Mind is not worried about objects. When you drop the desire, the mind disappears. Mind is desiring, mind is not an entity. Mind is not something there, mind is just a process – of desiring. You desire? – mind is there. You don’t desire? – mind is not there. And when mind is not, enlightenment is.So I am not saying do something for it, no. I am saying simply: Have a look, a relaxed look at it. And that will do.But listening to me you start being greedy. You start feeling: How beautiful to be enlightened! How beautiful to know the truth! How beautiful to realize God! You start feeling greedy – watch the greediness, otherwise God will become an object, and all objects belong to the world. There is no other-worldly object. All objects belong to the market. There are no other objects which are not commodities in the market; because whatsoever helps your desire, helps you to be in this rubbish, to be in this nightmare.So don’t try to do something. I am not saying drop desiring, I am saying simply understand the process of desire. The moment you have understood you will see it has dropped.“…And yet you also remind us again and again how impoverished and what rubbish our lives are.” I have to remind you because that is how it is. Your lives are rubbish. And there is a way of being which is tremendously blissful. I have to remind you again and again that the way you are living is not a way of life, it is a way of dying. You are simply killing yourself. And I have to remind you; there is a way where nothing else but infinite bliss exists.But I am not saying this to create a preference. I am not saying this to create a choice, I am not saying leave this and choose that, drop this and try to achieve that – no, I am not saying that. I am simply saying that the achieving mind creates rubbish, and the non-achieving mind is blissful. So if you start making efforts to attain to that blissful state you will show that you have not understood me.This has always happened: Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu – were never understood; people never understood them. They were deeply misunderstood. Whatsoever they said was taken in a totally different way. They were saying something else, absolutely different; from a different dimension they were talking.And then people create followings, people create organizations, people create methods, and people go on doing a thousand and one things – and missing the whole point.And the point is very simple. Not knowledge, not much intelligence is needed, just a purity, an innocent look.So watch me; and what I am saying – listen to it, as you listen to music. Music does not mean much, in fact it doesn’t mean at all – it just sounds. But music gives you something of the unknown. Listen to me as if you are listening to music, to a different dimension; don’t try to interpret me, don’t translate me in your mind, just listen. Try to be more alert, not to be more intelligent. Try to be more conscious, so you don’t miss anything. And some day – and that day is unpredictable, nobody can say when – you will be tuned in. And suddenly, the night disappears. It has never been there. It was just illusory.When Buddha attained, he was asked: What have you attained? He said: Nothing. I have not attained anything. I have come to understand only that that which I was seeking had always been within me. The seeker was the sought. I have not attained to anything. I have only recognized. I have only come to an awareness, to an awakening. I have looked into myself, and nothing was lacking. Everything has been perfect from the very beginning.In this existence nothing is imperfect. The imperfection is not possible because the whole is so perfect, incomparably perfect. Only the perfect can come out of the perfect, so how is imperfection possible? It must be that you are deluded.Somewhere, you have created the notion of imperfection, otherwise nobody is imperfect. You are buddhas! You may be knowing, not knowing, that is for you to choose: to know or not to know. But your reality is the reality of a buddha. Gods Anonymous. Not knowing, not acquainted with themselves, but all gods. Fast asleep maybe, but still a god is a god, asleep or awake. So when I tell you, and I have to tell you, and insist again and again, that there is a way of being where every moment is infinite bliss, where every moment is ecstatic, and you are living in rubbish – please, don’t create a desire, because desire creates rubbish.Understand the thing, and let desire slip out of your hands.Suddenly – and it is always sudden, without any gradual process – one is awake. The morning has come. You are back home.You ask how one can avoid preferring bliss to rubbish. You have to avoid, otherwise you will create rubbish.Difficult, I know. I understand your difficulty, because my difficulty was once the same. But as I understand your difficulty, please try to understand what I am saying. The same difficulty has been my difficulty; and I know how impossible it is not to create a desire for God, how impossible it is when you understand something is beautiful, blissful, not to long for it. But by and by you will come to feel the knack of it. Because whenever you desire it, you will miss it. Then you will have to understand that by desiring you miss.This comes only by experience. Many times you will fall. But don’t be discouraged. Get up again, and be going. Many times you will fall and you will start desiring. It is so subtle that you may even be thinking you have not chosen, you have not preferred, and you have preferred.But the more alert you are, one day or other it will happen. It has happened to me, and I was in the same plight, and the same was the difficulty for me – how not to desire that which is blissful. How simply not to desire, and remain desireless, not preferring anything to anything else, just being, without any preference. I know, it is almost impossible – but it happens. Impossibles happen. They are the real miracles.It has happened. And so I know it is going to happen to you. Just persist. Don’t get discouraged by mistakes and errors. Get up again, have another try. It is a groping in the dark. But the door is there, so if you go on groping enough, you will stumble upon the door.That’s why religion can never become a science – never! It will always remain a groping. At the most it can be an art and that so subtle that it cannot be taught. So I insist to you: go on groping.One day it happens. How it happens, why it happens, remains a mystery. In fact nobody has ever been able to exactly say how it happens. If somebody can say how it happens, a science can be created. Then you know the technique. Then you can do a certain act, and it happens.It has happened millions of times, but there is no causality in it, so you cannot determine how it happens. It can be caused. Each time it happens it happens uniquely! Each time it happens it happens in such a new way that it has never happened before like that. And it will not happen again like that. Because each individual is so different, so unique, so individual, that the happening is going to be different. From my continuous reminding you, don’t start longing for it. Allow it to happen – don’t desire it. In desire you become active, aggressive. In allowing you simply wait, in deep receptivity. Waiting for the guest, standing by your door…. Nothing can be done! When the guest will come, he will come! You be ready to receive, that’s all.Not desiring creates receptivity. Desiring makes you aggressive. Desire makes you active, non-desiring makes you inactive – that’s what Lao Tzu says by wu-wei, action by inaction, doing things by not doing them.Don’t desire – and it happens. Desire – and you have missed. Don’t prefer, and it is there. Seek – and you go infinitely seeking, and you never attain to it.Deep receptivity.This is the mechanism of desire: if you desire, your whole energy becomes active, aggressive – it moves, it becomes male. If you don’t desire, the same energy becomes receptivity, it does not move out, it does not go anywhere, it simply waits, awaits deeply, it becomes feminine. Hence the insistence of Lao Tzu on feminine energy.The world is the manifestation of male energy. And enlightenment, the other world, the other shore, is the manifestation of feminine energy.Wait like a beloved. And any moment it can happen – you will be surprised! Whenever it happens, everybody to whom it happens is surprised – surprised by the fact that he was not doing anything and it has happened. Taken aback! Cannot believe it! Unbelievably true! Absurd! Because when he was doing everything it never happened, it didn’t happen, and now he was not doing anything – and suddenly it is there!In non-doing your energy is in a deep rest. It becomes pure, tranquil.God has always been in front of you – just in front of your eyes. But your eyes are wavering with desire. Let the desire go, eyes waver no more, you are tranquil, calm, quiet – suddenly it is there, revealed.The second question:Osho,It is reported that St. Francis of Assisi could talk with birds and they would listen. Is this prayer? I would love to hear you talk a bit more about prayer.I told you about four planes: sex, love, prayer, meditation.Sex is a meeting of two bodies – the most superficial meeting. Love is the meeting of minds – deeper than sex, but yet not very deep. Prayer is the meeting of beings, but still, two remain two: very deep meeting, in depth, meeting to the depth, but still two remain two. Meditation is the ultimate meeting – the two disappear. Only one remains.St. Francis talking to the birds is in prayer. Heart to heart. The birds cannot understand the mind, mind is human; but heart they have. If you can talk with the heart they can understand. The understanding will be of the heart, remember, not of the mind. If you are trying with the mind there will be no communication with the birds, with animals – no communication, because they don’t have the human mind, mind is a human phenomenon. But they have a deep heart, a feeling phenomenon. If you feel for them you can talk. You can talk to the trees, and they will listen. You can talk to the rocks, and they will listen. And if you are really a heart-oriented man – they will answer, because then you can also listen.If you go and talk to the trees and you don’t know whether they are listening or not, that shows that you have been talking from the head. You will look foolish to yourself, talking to them. You will watch to see if somebody is listening or not. If somebody passes by, you will stop. You know that this is foolish – how can birds understand? How can trees understand? But if you are talking from the heart they not only understand, they answer. Heart has a different way of communication, it is an energy communication which, it is said, many saints in the world – St. Francis of Assisi is the most famous – have.Now it has become a scientific truth; now many researchers all over the world are working and many facts have come up: now they say that plants have very deep sensitivity, deeper than humanity, because human sensitivity is disturbed by the mind, intellect. Man has completely forgotten how to feel; even when he says “I feel,” in fact he thinks that he feels.People come to me and they say: We are in love. And if I insist: Really, are you in love? They shrug their shoulders and they say: Well, we think we are in love. Now feeling is not direct, it comes through the head; and when it comes through the head it is confused. It is not bubbling from the heart.But now scientific researchers have come to know that not only birds but plants, and not only plants, even metals, have a sensitivity, and they feel – and they feel tremendously. And they give messages which you may not be able to catch but now scientists have created instruments which can detect the messages given by them. If they are in fear they start trembling. You may not be able to see the trembling, it is very subtle. With no wind blowing, the detectors show that the plant inside is trembling very much. When they are happy, they are ecstatic, the instruments show that the plants are ecstatic. When they are in pain, afraid, filled with anger, rage – all sorts of feelings can now be detected.Something very deep has happened to man; a wound, an accident – he has lost the touch of feelings.If you talk to trees, to birds, to animals, long enough, and you don’t feel foolish, because the mind will interfere and say that this is foolish; if you don’t listen to the mind and by and by you bypass it and connect directly, a tremendous energy of feeling will be released in you. You will become totally a new sort of being. You had never known these ways were possible to be.You will become sensitive – sensitive to pain and pleasure. That’s why humanity has stopped the functioning of feeling: because when you become sensitive to pleasure, you also become sensitive to pain. The more you can feel happy the more you can feel unhappy also.That fear, that one can become very unhappy, has closed you, has helped human mind to create barriers so that you cannot feel. When you cannot feel – both ways are closed: you cannot become unhappy, you cannot become happy.But try! It is a prayer. Because it is heart to heart. First try with human beings – just with your own child, sit silently with the child. Allow feeling. Don’t bring the mind in. Sit with your wife, or with your friend, or your husband, holding hands together in a dark room, not doing anything, just trying to feel each other. In the beginning it will be difficult, but by and by you will have a different mechanism functioning within you, you will start feeling.Almost one third of persons, that is thirty-three percent of persons, can revive their heart very easily. It is not dead in them. For the remaining others it may be difficult.One third of all people are body-oriented, one third are heart-oriented, one third are head-oriented. Those who are heart-oriented, thirty-three percent, they can revive prayer very easily. Those who are head-oriented, it will be difficult for them to have any feeling. For them prayer does not exist.Buddha himself, and Mahavira, are head-oriented people. That’s why prayer was not a part of their religions. They have not taught about prayer. They were intelligent people, well-trained intellectually, logically. They developed meditation but they have not talked about prayer.Nothing like prayer exists in Jainism, cannot exist. It exists in Islam – Mohammed is a heart-oriented person, he has a different quality. It exists in Christianity – Jesus is a heart-oriented person. It exists in Hinduism, but not in Buddhism or Jainism, nothing like prayer there.And one third of people are body-oriented. They are the potential Charvakas. For them no prayer, no meditation – only indulgence, only indulgence in the body, that is their only way of being happy, their only way of being.So if you are a heart-oriented person, if you feel more than you think, if music gives you deep stirrings, if poetry touches you, if beauty surrounds you, and you can feel, then prayer is for you – you have to go through prayer.Then start talking to birds and trees – and the sky, it will be helpful. But don’t make it a mind talk, let it be heart to heart. Be related.That’s why people of the heart think about God as father or as beloved; some relation. The head-oriented people are always laughing – what nonsense you are talking! God, the father? Then where is the mother? They always make a joke out of it because they cannot understand. For them God is truth. For the people of the heart God is love. And for the people of the body, the world is God: their money, their house, their car, their power, their prestige.A man who is body-oriented needs a different type of religion. In fact only just now in the West, particularly in America, a new sort of work has started which is for the body-oriented man. That work is towards body sensitivity. Many sensitivity training groups are working. A new sort of religion is being born – for the first time.In the past there have been two types of religion: meditation-oriented – Buddha and Mahavira; prayer-oriented – Mohammed, Jesus, Krishna and Ram but there has never been a body-oriented religion. There have been body-oriented people but they have always said that there is no religion, because they denied prayer, they denied meditation. These are the Epicureans, Charvakas, the atheists who say there is no God, only this body and this life is all. But they never created a religion.For the first time in America, now a new approach towards entering into the innermost core of life is gaining hold, and that is body-sensitivity training. It is good, it is beautiful, because there are body-oriented people, they need a different type of religion. They need a religion which allows their body to function in a religious way. For these people tantra can be very helpful. For these people prayer and meditation will not be helpful. But there must be a way from the body also towards God, has to be, because God has come to the body; the body must have a way to reach to God.These are the three types of religions. You have to find out what type you belong to. And this is not very difficult; if you watch for three weeks continuously in different ways, you can have the feel of it.If you are body-oriented, don’t be discouraged, there are ways you can reach towards God through the body, because the body also belongs to God, you can reach through it. If you feel you are heart-oriented – then prayer. If you feel you are intellect-oriented – then meditation.But my meditations are different in a way. I have tried to devise methods which can be used by all three types. Much of the body is used in them. Much of the heart. And much intelligence. All the three are joined together, and they work on different people in a different way.If a body-oriented person comes to me he immediately loves the methods – but he loves the active parts, and he comes to see me and he says: Wonderful, active parts are wonderful, but when I have to stand silently – then there is nothing. He feels very healthy through them; he feels more rooted in the body.If a heart-oriented person comes to me the cathartic part becomes more important for him; the heart is released, relieved of burdens, and it starts functioning in a new way.And when a third type, the type who belongs to intelligence comes, he loves the last parts when he is just sitting or standing silently, when it becomes meditation.Body, heart, mind – all my meditations move in the same way: they start from the body, they move through the heart, they reach to the mind – and then they go beyond.Through body you can relate to existence. You can go to the sea and enjoy swimming in it – but just become the body; without feeling, no thinking, just being “of the body.” Lie down on the sands and let the body feel the sands, the coolness, the texture. Run – just now I was reading a very beautiful book Zen of Running – that is for body-oriented people.One man has discovered that by running there is no need to meditate, just by running meditation happens. He must be absolutely body-oriented. Nobody has ever thought that by running meditation is possible – but I know, I used to love running myself. It happens.If you go on running, if you run fast, thinking stops, because thinking cannot possibly continue when you are running very fast.For thinking an easy chair is needed, that’s why we call thinkers armchair philosophers; they sit and relax in a chair, the body completely relaxed, then the whole energy moves into the mind.If you are running then the whole energy moves into the body, then there is no possibility for the mind to think. And when you run fast, you breathe deep, you exhale deep, you become just the body. A moment comes when you are the body, nothing else. In that moment you become one with the universe because there is no division. The air running past you and your body become one. A deep rhythm happens.That’s why games have always been so attractive to people. And athletics. And that’s why children love so much dancing, running, jumping, they are bodies! The mind has not yet developed.If you feel you are the body type, then running can be very beautiful for you: a four, five-mile run every day. And make it a meditation. It will transform you completely.But if you feel you are a heart-oriented person then prayer will be needed. Talk to birds, try to have a communion. Watch! Just wait, sit silently with a deep prayer that they should come to you, and they will start coming by and by. By and by they will be sitting on your shoulders.Accept them. Talk to trees, to rocks, but let it be a heart talk, emotional. Cry and weep and laugh. Tears can be more prayerful than words, and laughter can be more prayerful than words, because they come deep down from the heart.No need to verbalize – just feel. Embrace the tree and feel, as if you are becoming one with it. And soon you will feel that the sap is not running only in the tree, it has started to run in you. And your heart is not beating only in you; deep down in the tree there is a response. One has to do it to feel it.But if you feel that you are a third type, then meditation is for you. Running won’t help. Then you will have to sit like Buddha, silently, just sitting doing nothing. Sitting so deeply that even thinking looks like a doing. And you drop it. For a few days the thoughts will continue, but if you go on sitting, just watching them, without any judgment for or against, they stop visiting you. They stop by and by, gaps come, intervals happen. In those intervals you will have the glimpses of your being.Those glimpses can be had from the body, they can be had from the heart, they can be had from the head. All the possibilities are there because your being is in all the three and yet beyond the three. It is the same distance from all the three points – and it is the fourth point; that’s why in the East we call it turiya, the fourth.You can approach it from anywhere. So when somebody comes to me and says: I don’t believe in God, I say: Don’t worry. Do you believe in your body? That will do. Because the body belongs to God.And I cannot see that there is any possibility of the fourth type. There is not.Religion becomes universal, available to everybody. Wherever you are the door is open; and no door is closed. In the past the tendency has been to deny the other – if Buddha thinks that by meditation, a no-thought state of mind, one reaches, then he will deny the possibility of heart. The possibility of the body has always been denied.I don’t deny anything. I look at you – wherever you are you are related to God. Some possibility is there, some door opens exactly where you stand. Nobody can be out of the possibility. Everybody can start working in himself. No belief is needed; as you are you are accepted.That’s why it becomes a little difficult for people to understand me, because I go on accepting. I have no condemnation and no rejection. Because I see that God accepts you, then who am I to reject you? He goes on breathing in you, he goes on living in you; you may be an alcoholic or a drug taker and he has not left you yet, so whom am I to tell you that you are not accepted?You may be a thief, you may be immortal, but as I see it God has become a thief in you, that’s all. Between the thief and the God there must be a bridge, otherwise how can you exist? And you have been existing beautifully. So there must be a way – it has to be found, that’s all.Nobody is rejected, and for everybody there is every possibility to grow. You have to find out your type; and if you cannot find out your type, that too is not to be made into a worry. That means you can do a synthetic technique of meditation, in which body, heart and mind are all involved.But start feeling, being. Start on the way. Don’t go on just listening because that can be an addiction; you can enjoy it, and forget about it. Then words which would have become a transformation will only become a little information.The third question:Osho,You have said that we should surrender to you. Is this a device to keep us from “pushing the river”? Could we surrender to a rock, a tree or a flower and get the same result? Or is there something different in surrendering to an enlightened one?There is none. Surrender is the key, not to whom or what you surrender. That is irrelevant. Surrender to a rock. Of course it will be difficult. If you cannot surrender to a buddha it will be very difficult to surrender to a rock.So don’t try to deceive yourself, that’s all. If you can surrender to a rock – absolutely perfect. Because wherever you surrender, suddenly by your surrender you discover the buddha there. The rock becomes a buddha. That’s how rocks have been worshipped for centuries.Stone images have been worshipped for centuries. In Mecca they have worshipped a rock; no other rock has been kissed so much. Millions and millions of people with deep love have touched the Kaaba, the rock in Mecca.This is one of the greatest temples on earth; no temple can compete. But that rock is rock only to you, not to a Mohammedan. To a Mohammedan in that rock is represented all that is divine.When you surrender to something, that something becomes a buddha.But it will be difficult to surrender to a rock. In a way it will seem easy to surrender because a rock is just a rock, you can play with it, whenever you want you can surrender, and whenever you don’t want you can throw it out. Or your ego may not be hurt by surrendering to a rock, because a rock is just dead, you can do whatsoever you like to do with the rock. If you surrender to an enlightened being it is going to be very difficult because – what is happening? One of the greatest and the most impossible things is happening – the ego is surrendering to a non-ego. Very difficult. The ego can even surrender to another ego; it is not very difficult because they belong to the same plane and to the same dimension, and their arithmetic is the same. But to surrender to a non-ego – very difficult.But as far as I am concerned, surrender is the key. Surrender wherever you can. And if you surrender, in that surrendering your ego disappears. And that is the point!It is only a device; when I say to you: Surrender to me, it is not a question of surrendering to me. In fact there is nobody who can be really pointed to and said to be me. When I tell you: Surrender to me, I am simply telling you to surrender.Do it wherever you can, and the same will be the result; because the result is not related to the object, the result is related to your surrendering. The quality of surrendering changes you.The fourth question:Osho,Do you enjoy the birds during the discourse? Do the birds enjoy you?Of course I enjoy them, and they also enjoy me – but not the discourse. Because they are not so foolish. To enjoy a discourse human stupidity is needed. They enjoy me, I enjoy them. But discourse is irrelevant to them. Just a noise. And that too not very musical. They know better. They do better.Only human beings are addicted to words. If I become silent the birds won’t leave me – you will leave me. In fact if I become silent and you leave me, more birds will be coming. Because of you, the place is so crowded.The fifth question:Osho,I used to come out of the morning discourses feeling inspired and invigorated. Now I am usually drained. I want to be alone and I go home and sleep for a couple of hours. Why is this?You must have been using the discourses as drugs. Otherwise why should you feel inspired and invigorated? You must have used them as props, drugs, activizers.I am not trying to inspire you here, because all inspiration, if it is really inspiration, should come from your innermost core. How can it from the outside? How can you say that you are inspired by somebody? The whole thing looks contradictory. Inspiration cannot come from outside, otherwise it won’t be inspiration. Inspiration has to bubble in your being.If it comes from the outside then it is a drug. Then it is not happening to you, but as it happens with all drugs, soon you will get addicted to it – then it won’t affect you. Then more doses will be needed. And then the same drug which used to inspire you in the beginning and give energy to you, will prove a drainage on your energy.Don’t use my talks as drugs. There is no need to get inspired, all that is needed is to become more alert. Listening to me you should become more and more alert, aware.If you don’t become alert and aware, then in the beginning, for a few days, everything will be beautiful – the honeymoon period: and then, then you know it. Then by and by you start feeling drained.You go to look at a movie. Next day, see the same movie; again the third day – and you will be drained. The first day you were so inspired and you had felt so good, so full of energy, next day you know it is the same; the third day – now it has become a boredom. Whatsoever I say, though the words differ, I go on saying the same thing every day.If you are not becoming alert, soon you will be drained of your energy. My energy is the same. Use it as a jumping board, don’t use it as an intoxicant. Use me to become yourself. Don’t become dependent on me, otherwise this will happen.This has always been happening to Buddha, to Mahavira, to Lao Tzu; this has always been a problem. When people come, in the beginning their desire is burning, their ambition is high. They think: Now something is going to happen. Then they listen, and then they become greedy, but then they feel, by and by, that nothing is happening; they go on listening and nothing is happening; they go on listening and accumulating information and nothing is happening. Then they become dull. Then the honeymoon period is over.Now, the dull marriage life settles; the same wife, the same husband, the same master, the same disciple – things settle. But remember, when things settle only then real things start.Honeymoon is not a true picture of a relationship. Too exaggerated. Don’t believe in it. Let a few weeks pass, and then if there is love, real relationship will start – with the humdrum life, with ordinary things, and with the same person every day. If love is there then intimacy will grow; if love is not there – excitement gone; honeymoon over; marriage finished.In fact, the honeymoon is not even over and people start thinking of divorcing. They may not divorce – that is another thing, but deep inside, when the newness is lost, excitement is gone, you start feeling: Now what is there?Real love is known only after the honeymoon. When you come to me, in the beginning you are enchanted – with the new; inspired excited – something is going to happen. And when you remain there for a long period, every day listening to me, and things settle, then only real disciplehood starts. Then there is no excitement, and then only, intimacy grows.But that intimacy will grow only if you become aware.Between you and me, awareness has to flow. Otherwise soon you will start feeling sleepy, drained, you will start leaving, going to somebody else, to another guru, to some other ashram – and there again the same cycle will start: you will be excited in the beginning, then dull.I know, many of you have been to many other gurus before, I am not the first. There are people who have been to at least ten gurus. They have roamed all over the world. They have been with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, they have been with Prabhupada, they have been with Gurdjieff groups, they have been in Arica, with Oscar, they have been in many encounter groups, growth groups, EST, and thousands of things – they have tried everything. Now they have come to me. You can repeat the same cycle again. You can move in a vicious circle. Now when you come to me, drop out of the old pattern; otherwise you can go on and on – and for many lives you must have been going on this way.Drop it! Excitement is not the thing, intimacy is. Honeymoon is useless. The real thing is to settle.Grow in awareness! I am not trying to inspire you, because all inspiration is foolish. People who inspire others are trying to force them towards some ideals. I am not trying to force you towards any ideal. I am not trying to make you into something else that you are not. What is this question of inspiration? And I am not going to sacrifice you to anything. I am not going to make you martyrs. I am not a politician! You are the goal to me. You have to discover yourself, that’s all, you are not to be something else! You have just to become more alert.So if you are related to me by excitement, this relationship is not going to be very long. Sooner or later you will drop out of it.“I used to come out of the morning discourses feeling inspired and invigorated. Now I am usually drained.”It is good that now you are drained. You were doing something wrong. I am not a drug, you were using me like a drug. Now don’t use me like a drug and soon you will see that the feeling of being drained has disappeared.Use me as a jumping board towards a higher and higher awareness. I am not saying something to you, I am being something to you. Don’t listen to my words, they are just playthings. Listen to me in deep silence, in deep awareness.Be related to me. And let this relationship not be an ordinary master-disciple relationship, because that you have done many times. This time let it be really authentic, not of excitement, but of intimacy, of deep love.Soon the feeling of being drained will disappear. And you will not be inspired, you will not feel invigorated, you will feel just yourself. Exactly as you are. You should not feel more than life size, because how can one go on feeling that? Some day one has to come back to life size. You should feel just like you are.The sixth question:Osho,I often fantasize about you. I imagine talking with you, going for a walk, having tea, and other situations. It gives me a feeling of closeness to you and it is comforting. But sometimes I worry: maybe I'm just strengthening another dream and shouldn't indulge. Should I view these images as just more idle dreams or can they be helpful in feeling my connection to you?No, they cannot be helpful. In fact they will never allow you to be related to me. Because your dream will always be between me and you.Drop all these fantasies. Don’t indulge in them. Because imagination can become very dangerous. I come across it every day.One sannyasin from the Himalayas was here in the ashram. She told me that I have told her in her dreams that she has to stay here and not to go home. I tried to explain to her that I have not told anything to her in her dream, but she won’t listen to me. He dreams are more real than me. She won’t listen! She said: No. I know that you have told me. I say to her that I have not told her, but I am far away – her own dream is nearer to her. She was here for three, four months, then one day she came and she said: Now you have told me to go – back home. I said again, I have not told anything to you, there is no need to go, now be here! But she wouldn’t listen. She left.She came again; now this time she is completely mad, there is no possibility of communication with her. Impossible, because her own dreams have become so real that I am very far away – she cannot listen to me. And she goes on saying that whatsoever she is doing she is doing according to me.So don’t allow such fantasies from the very beginning, they are dangerous. If you go for a walk with me, the danger is that when you come to see me the dream also will be coming with you. And if you have been too much with me in your dreams, by and by that dream will be between me and you will become a hindrance, an obstacle. It will be impossible to relate, you can go mad.Drop it immediately. Don’t indulge in it, that is dangerous. While I am here there is no need to indulge in such dreams. Why not look at me?But mind is very tricky, because if you look at me you will have to change. But in your dream whatsoever you want me to tell you, only that I can tell you, not anything else. I am not free in your dream.Remember always, that whether a dream is in the night or in the day, in your dream you are the dreamer, you are the dream. If you dream in your dream that you are moving in a car, fast; another car is coming; there are hills and mountains; and there is an accident; remember, you are the dreamer, you are the man sitting in the car, you are the car, you are the road, you are the hills, you are the other car coming, and you are the accident, because there is nobody else except you. Your whole dream is you.Don’t indulge in dreams. I am here to help you come out of your sleep. And if you create dreams you will move deeper into sleep, because every dream needs sleep. Dream cannot happen without the quality of sleep around you. So the more you live in dreams the more a sleepiness will surround you. It will become your aura. You will be moving on the road with open eyes but deep down you are completely asleep, utterly asleep in your dream. That has to be broken. The dream has to be shattered. The quality of sleep has to be changed. You have to become alert and aware.The seventh question:Osho,Would you tell us about the name you give to us? Does it mean our becoming? Or our inner nature? Should we be identified with it? Or is it just a joke?It is just a joke. Don’t get identified with it, because you are the nameless. You have no name. You don’t have any identity. I give you a new name so that the old is broken, but remember the new name is also a name, and soon it will become old. So don’t get identified with it. Use it as label – it is needed, it has some utility, but don’t become too much identified with it. You are not the name. The name is needed, it has a social function, but no inner reality. Remain nameless.The last question:Osho,How can I differentiate between the whole moving through me as a part and me moving separately as a part?There will be no difficulty. When the whole moves through you, you will not be there. There will be no need to make any distinction – you will not be there. You will be a vast emptiness.But when you are there, then you are moving as a separate unit. When the whole moves in you, you are not there. If you are there, remember that the whole is not moving in you, you are moving against the whole. You are fighting the whole, resisting.You can feel yourself only when you are moving upcurrent. If you move with the river you cannot feel yourself. You will feel the river, but not yourself. And sooner or later you will become the river.Enough for today.

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Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 01-09Category: TAO

Tao The Three Treasures Vol 4 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Lao Tzu says:There is nothing weaker than water but none is superior to it in overcoming the hard, for which there is no substitute. That weakness overcomes strength and gentleness overcomes rigidity, no one does not know; no one can put into practice.Therefore the sage says: “Who receives unto himself the calumny of the world is the preserver of the state. Who bears himself the sins of the world is the king of the world.“Straight words seem crooked.It is said that God created Adam but Adam was dead. Then God breathed in him and he became alive.The same story is told in many creation myths all over the world: Christian, Hindu, Jewish and many others.The story seems to be very significant. The meaning is that when you breathe you don’t breathe, God breathes in you. The whole breathes in you. This has to be understood very deeply because the whole method of Tao, the whole science of Yoga, depends on breath.Because this is going to be the last lecture on Lao Tzu I would like to tell you everything about the system so that if you want you can move into it; not only think about it but become one with it.The breath is the most important thing. With it life starts and with it life ends. It is the most mysterious thing; without it there is no possibility of life.Life seems just a shadow of breath. When breath disappears life disappears. So this phenomenon of breathing has to be understood.Every child born is not really alive until he breathes. He has very few moments left. If he breathes after the birth, in those few moments life enters. If he does not breathe he will remain dead.Those first few moments of life are the most important. The doctors, the parents, all become concerned when a child is born. will he breathe? Will he cry, and the breathing start? Or will he remain dead? Again, as in all the myths created, in every man Adam is born again.The child cannot breathe on his own. To expect that is impossible because the child does not know how to breathe, nobody has taught him. This is going to be his first act, so this cannot be his act.Let me repeat it: This is going to be his first and the most significant act – that’s why it cannot be his act. If God does it – okay; if God is not willing – finished.The whole has to breathe in him, that’s why those few moments are full with suspense, doubt, apprehension, fear – because both possibilities are still open. The child can remain dead. Then nothing can be done. The child cannot do anything, the parents cannot do anything, the doctors cannot do anything; humanity is helpless. It is up to the whole.Only prayer can be done. We can only wait in deep prayer. If the whole moves into the child the child becomes alive, otherwise not.This first breath is taken by the whole. And if the first breath is taken by the whole then everything else which depends on breathing cannot be your act. If you think you are breathing then you have taken a very wrong step. And because of this wrong step ego will be created. Ego is accumulated ignorance.You missed. You have not been breathing, the whole has breathed into you, but you have taken it as if you are breathing.The first act of breath bridges you with the whole, makes you one with the whole, and all that follows will not be your activity; all that is going to happen after this first breath till you die, till the last breath, is going to be the activity of the whole. The whole will live within you.You can think that you are doing all those things – then you live in ignorance. If you become aware that the whole is doing everything, you are being possessed by the whole, breathed by it, you are just a hollow bamboo, a flute, the sound comes from the whole, the whole life comes from it – then you live a life of enlightenment.This is the only difference between ignorance and enlightenment. One step in error, that: I have done it – and the whole journey goes wrong. One step right, that: the whole has been doing it in me, I am not the doer, I am just the field of his play, a flute of his songs, a reed, nothing more, an emptiness in which he flows, moves, lives – then you live a totally different life, a life of light and bliss.This is the first act, this breath. Many more things have to be understood about it.If life starts with breath, and death also, and everything is between these two, then yoga, Tao, tantra, and all sciences of inner alchemy, cannot neglect breathing.Yoga calls it prana. That word is beautiful. Yoga calls breathing prana. Prana means the elan vital, the very vitality of your being.It is not just air coming and going through your lungs. Yoga says the air is just the outer layer of it. Hidden deep in that layer is vitality.So breathing has two parts. One: the body of breathing, made up of oxygen, nitrogen and so on, and, two, the spirit of breathing, made up of vitality, God himself.It is just like – your body is there, and you, your consciousness, is hidden deep down in your body. The body is a protection, a vehicle. The body is the visible vehicle for the non-visible you. And the same is the case with every breath. The breath itself is just the outer layer; hidden deep in it is life itself.Once you discover that in breath there is hidden God himself you have come to know yourself. That’s why there is so much insistence and so much search in yoga, Tao and tantra about breathing. If you simply go on breathing and thinking that this is just air coming in and going out you will never be able to penetrate the mystery of it. And you will remain completely oblivious of yourself. Then you will remain rooted in the body. You will never be able to know that which goes beyond the body, that which is within but yet beyond, that which is hidden in the body but not obstructed by the body, not limited by the body. A beyond within.In each breath that life has to be discovered.Yoga calls those methods pranayama. The word pranayama means expansion of life. One has to expand life to infinity in each breath.Buddha has called his own methods of discovering the innermost core of breath anapanasati yoga: the yoga, the science, of incoming and outgoing breath; and Buddha has said no other yoga is needed. If you can deeply watch your own breathing, and watch so meditatively that anything that is hidden in the breath does not remain hidden but becomes revealed, you will come to know all.Looks simple, is difficult.Buddha said to his monks: Sitting, walking, standing, whatsoever you are doing, go on doing these things, but let your consciousness be aware of the breath coming in, going out. Go on looking at your own breath – one day with the very continuous hammering on the breath, the temple opens.The God is hidden in the temple of the breath. Suddenly one day you become aware that it is not just air. If for you it is just air, you have a scientific mind but you don’t have the awareness which can reveal the innermost core of it. Then you can analyze and come to know how much oxygen is needed, how much hydrogen, how much nitrogen, how much carbon dioxide, and you can go on playing with the body of the breath – but you missed the innermost real phenomenon.That’s why, if a man is dead, you can give him, pump into him, the right proportion of oxygen, but he will not be alive.Unless God breathes in it, unless it contains the innermost consciousness of the whole, it is a dead breath. Oxygen will pass through the lungs – nothing will happen.Breath is the first action – and it is not your action.The second action is thirst. That too is not your action. What do you do to feel thirsty? If it happens, it happens; if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Can you try to feel thirsty? That is impossible! It happens deep inside you. God breathes in you, God feels thirsty in you – or the whole does; when I say God I mean the whole. The part is just a part.After the child has taken his first breath the second phenomenon will arise in him – and now there is going to be a chain, and the whole chain has to be understood.Thirst will arise. Then hunger will arise. Then there will be a need for physical activity. Then sex will arise. Then there will be a need for mental activity. Then love will arise. Then there will be a need for aesthetic activity: poetry, painting, music…. These are eight activities. And then the ninth, the last, arises: the need for spiritual activity – meditation, samadhi.And this is the beauty of the whole phenomenon – that the ninth is again the first, because the ninth again pays attention to breath. The circle is complete. First is breath, ninth is again breath; that’s why no spiritual science can neglect breathing. Even God can be neglected – Buddhism does not believe in God, does not believe in soul – that can be neglected; but breathing cannot be neglected.Mohammedans and Christians may be having different conceptions of God, Hindus again different, Jainas…but nobody can neglect breathing. Breathing is first and breathing is going to be last. Spiritual activity is coming back again to the first breath, to the original purity.Now I would like to discuss all these phenomena, because that is your whole life.First is breath, second thirst, third hunger. There are people who finish at the third, who think: eat, drink, be merry is all and all. Their life is not complete; they cannot feel fulfillment because the circle is not complete. Fulfillment means that you have completed the circle, the last has joined with the first – then there is fulfillment.People who you find fulfilled are a circle, not a line. A line is always incomplete. All desires move in a line, that’s why no desire can ever be complete, because no desire moves in a circle. It is linear. It always moves, but is always incomplete.Wherever you stop – ten thousand rupees or ten million rupees, it makes no difference; wherever you stop, you are hanging. The thing is not complete; something is missing. You can become rich, you can become very powerful, but it will not be contentment. Contentment is only when your life energy becomes a circle.Have you watched how the whole existence moves in a circle? The seasons move in a circle, the stars move in a circle, suns and planets move in a circle, the whole moves circularly, as a wheel? In life, in existence, nothing is linear. Everything is circular. And if you want to live a life of the whole you have to follow the ways of the whole: move like seasons, move like stars. Become a circle. When I say become a circle I mean come back to the original source.Breath, thirst, hunger – these are the first three steps. If you move only up to the third you have not entered the temple, you will be on the steps.The fourth is physical activity. There are people who go up to the fourth. To them, physical activity becomes a sort of meditation.In fact everything can become a sort of meditation, because in everything there are two dimensions – just as there are in the first breath: the outer and the inner.That’s why fasting has been used. To fast is to try to discover in hunger the other dimension. Fasting means an effort to move into the desire of hunger and to come to know that; the divine. That’s why fasting became so important in so many religions. It can give you a glimpse.If you fast long, the glimpse is possible. But I am not in support of it because you are not making the whole circle. You are jumping, not moving gracefully. From the third, hunger, you are trying to reach the first. It will be a small circle, not the whole compass of life. It will not be very comprehensive. It will not be very rich.That’s why you will always find people who have attained to any spirituality by fasting a little stupid. Moving among Jaina monks for many years I was suddenly surprised: I had never come across a really intelligent man. They all looked stupid.The reason is deep. The reason is: they have been depending on fasting. They are trying to find a shortcut. Beware of shortcuts. Life doesn’t like shortcuts because then you can move to the source without growing. You bribe, you don’t grow. From hunger you can jump – that means without knowing the whole complexity of life, the life of sex, love, aesthetic activity. You remain impoverished.What I am saying is a fact – you can go and look at Jaina monks; they are pure people, but stupid. Nobody can say anything against their purity. Pure they are, sincere they are, serious they are, but they have chosen a shortcut. They have been trying to bribe existence and reach home before their time. One can reach, but one will reach without growing, without maturity. A certain type of childishness you will find in them. Purity, but not enlightenment.The fourth is physical activity. You can move from the fourth again – from any point you can move to the source, you can drop out of the journey of the total circle.Physical activity has been used by hatha yoga. Hatha yoga developed a total science out of it: how to move just by physical activity, by sheer physical force, to the source.Hatha yogis are powerful people, they have control over their bodies – nobody can claim that much control. They can lie down underneath the earth for months, even for years.One fakir in Egypt remained underground for forty years. The people who had buried him all died. And he had told them: After forty years you should open my tomb, break the seal and open the door of my underground chamber. And after forty years I’ll be coming back – alive.People who knew about him by and by died. In fact he was forgotten. It was just a coincidence that somebody was doing some research work and was looking in old newspapers and there he found the news.In 1880 he was buried. And in 1920 he was discovered. The tomb was opened – he was alive. And he lived three years more after it; and he was perfectly healthy.Many cases with fakirs and hatha yogis are known: they can take any sort of poison and it will not mix in their system. It will go in their stomach and they will throw it in the urine, but it will not mix anywhere. X-ray photographs have been taken and it seems miraculous that the poison passes through not mixing with anything in the body. There seems to be a subtle protection around the blood.By sheer willpower, by sheer physical force, hatha yogis have attained many things. But nothing of spirituality, nothing of real growth. If you look in their faces you will find them almost dead. If you look in their eyes you will not find the glimmer of intelligence, understanding.Physical activity can sometimes also give you a feeling, a glimpse. Running fast, completely absorbed in running so that the whole energy has become running, suddenly you can have glimpses of the original being. Beautiful. That’s why so many people become attracted to athletics. It gives glimpses.There are reports that people on the front in war sometimes attain to glimpses of the origin. That may be one of the causes of the attraction of war, because in violence, in deep violence, your physical capacity is used to the utmost. And when the physical capacity is used to the utmost suddenly you relax – back to the first state. You become like a child.This has been my experience with many soldiers. I have many followers in the army. They are innocent people – more innocent than people who are in the market, more innocent than business men, a childlike quality is in them because they are doing so much physical activity the whole energy is absorbed, they cannot be cunning. Even generals are childish, simple. That’s why soldiers can follow any type of order – even foolish orders. If you tell them to jump and die, they will die, because they have been trained to follow; they will not give a second thought to it. They are just like children.But again the circle is not complete. You have jumped from the middle.After the fourth is the fifth, sex. If you really move deep in sex you will have glimpses of satori, of samadhi. Just between physical activity and sex the half circle is complete – that’s why sex is so important. Between the physical activity and sex the circle is half complete.And there is more danger now because one can take sex as the total, as the all, as the goal. It can give you a few glimpses. If sex really happens, if you allow it to happen, if you become possessed by it so you are not doing it, you are possessed by it, the energy is doing something, you are just a spectator at the most, then there happens an orgasm, a deep, blissful state. That is dangerous because you can mistake it as the goal. Many people have mistaken it for the goal.Very few people are clinging to the second stage – thirst, very few people; there have been a few sects in the world who have tried to remain thirsty for long periods, particularly in deserts. There have been a few sects of monks who have tried to remain thirsty, just like fasting, to bridge a direct line with the original source, to fall back.Hunger has been used more often than that,. In all the religions of the world there are trends, sects which use fasting.Physical activity is also used even more than hunger.Just a few days before I was reading about a new training which every day is becoming more and more attractive in America: EST. This man, the founder of EST, Erhardt, forces people for four, five days to sit for hours together – twelve hours, fourteen hours, sixteen hours, you are not even allowed to just go to the bathroom; you have to sit; you are only allowed to go to the bathroom at particular times – six hours you will have been accumulating urine in the bladder. It is sheer willpower, it is painful but you have been holding it – it is a sort of hatha yoga – for up to ten hours, twelve hours, and then suddenly you are allowed to go. The bladder relaxes, and you have a beautiful pleasant feeling all around the body inside and out. This is an old trick. Hatha yogis have been doing many sorts of tricks like that. You can attain a glimpse.If you fast you have to use will. With too much physical activity you have to use will. Gurdjieff used physical activity very much. He would say to people: Go on working for twelve hours until you fall – not that you stop, you fall down, you cannot do anything more, you see yourself falling; you cannot do anything, the legs won’t move, they wobble, and you are just a watcher and you cannot do anything because you have done whatsoever could be done and you fall to the ground. That falling would give a beautiful glimpse.Whenever – this is the rule – whenever you are taken possession of by the whole and your ego is no longer functioning, the whole functions – you have a beautiful feeling; but these beautiful feelings are not the goals. They are toys to play with, chocolates – nothing more; chocolates on the path of spirituality. Enjoy them but don’t cling to them, they cannot be food, they are not nourishing.The fifth is the most dangerous because the most potential. Tantra has used the fifth to bridge the gap. From sex to samadhi the gap can be bridged very easily, but still it is not complete.If you move beyond sex then a different type of activity arises in you. Intelligence. A sort of genius is released. You can observe this. People who are deeply intelligent you will always find are bachelors. The reason is their whole energy has been absorbed by their mental activity. They attain to their orgasms through their minds. That’s why all over history people who have attained to great mental activity you will always find are bachelors. Or even if they are not bachelors they are not much interested in sex.But that too is lopsided. No need to drop sex. Use all that God has given to you. But go on. Make it a step to move further.If you go beyond sex only then for the first time your intelligence starts functioning well. You have great insight into things. Many people cling to that state. They become theologians, philosophers, thinkers, scientists, and they think the goal is achieved. The goal is not yet achieved.If you go beyond the sixth – mental activity – then love is born. Then your heart starts functioning. The same energy is moving. The same energy that took the first breath, was hungry, thirsty, became sexual, became mental, now becomes the energy of the heart. Love arises. But love also is not the goal.You can remain in love, it is a beautiful phenomenon, and you have gone far enough – it is the seventh step. Just a little more and the circle will be complete.People who are of the heart will look to you to be very evolved: St. Francis of Assisi, and others – they will look to you very evolved, you will have a different feeling of their being, their quality will be different. If you come near them you will feel a magnetic force; they will have a field of energy, they can pull you in. Near them your own heart starts functioning. Very evolved people – but still the evolution is not complete.If you go beyond love then real aesthetic activity starts. Then poetry arises in your being. Then you have for the first time the capacity to feel music. Then for the first time you look around and the beauty of nature is revealed. Then you listen to the harmony of the universe, the symphony of the stars. Then everything starts to become more and more beautiful. Layers and layers of beauty are revealed. Your eyes have a penetrating force. Wherever you look you go deep. Even in rocks you feel flowers blossoming. But this too is not the end. Many cling to this, and there is much temptation because this is just the last step. The goal is just in front of you. And it always happens when the goal is just in front of you one relaxes, feeling that one has arrived. But unless you become the goal you have not arrived. The temple may be just in front of you but unless you have become one with the god of the temple you have not arrived.These people, aesthetic people, become great mystics. They talk of the beauty of God, they have become Bauls, madmen of God, Sufis…. That is the last. One step more – and that step is the spiritual.This ninth step is again the first, the circle is complete. Again you start breathing but not like a child, like a sage.A child breathes unconsciously. He does not know what is happening. God has entered in him but he does not know, he has not heard the footsteps; he was so fast asleep in the womb, so deep in darkness, he has not seen anything. How could he see? He was not even alive, he was unconscious.A child breathes in unconsciousness. A sage breathes consciously. He is again a child, a rebirth has happened. Now he breathes but he is aware. This is the anapanasati yoga of Buddha. This is the way of Tao: how to breathe consciously.One observes. One relaxes into oneself and looks, looks at the breathing, follows it, moment to moment: incoming, outgoing; and there are beautiful happenings. When you follow the breathing you immediately become calm and quiet. The tranquillity is such that you have never known before. Just watch. If even for a few seconds you watch the breathing you will feel you are settling somewhere. A centering happens.The breathing goes down. Then there is a gap, the breathing stops – a very small interval. In that gap there is no breathing, only you are, only the watcher is – nothing to be watched. In that moment suddenly you know yourself.These are the techniques of Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, The Book of the Secrets. They were told to Parvati.Then when the breathing goes out you follow again; when the breathing moves out of you then again there is a gap, a very subtle gap – breathing stops. The object has disappeared. Only consciousness. Only you. Only the seer, the witness. Again suddenly you are elated. This goes on. By and by breathing becomes an outer phenomenon. You know that you are, whether breathing goes on or stops makes no difference. Then you come to know that you are eternal, deathless.Such a man while dying will see his breath has left him and will be aware, watching it. He will die watchfully, and one who dies watching, never dies. He has come to know the deathless. Through breathing he has discovered the vital principle of life. Breathing was just the outer layer of it, the outer shell, now he has come to know the content. Breathing was just the container. The circle is complete. And I am for the whole circle.That’s why many times I appear to be against many religious people. Because they cling somewhere. Good as far as they go, but one should go the whole way. One should go to the last point from where no more going is possible.Jesus says: Unless you become like children you will not enter my kingdom of God – I go on repeating it again and again in different meanings. People like Jesus have multi-meanings in their words. Unless you become like a child again, unless you breathe again in a totally different way, you will not be resurrected, you will not be reborn. And this rebirth is the goal; the very meaning, significance of life. Unless you attain to it you are missing something tremendous – and it is just by the corner.And I am for the circle. Move to the very end. Let the circle have a natural ending. Don’t try to find any shortcut. Then you will be rich – rich like Lao Tzu, rich like Krishna, rich like Buddha. Otherwise you can move somewhere from the middle – but then you will not be rich.Don’t be clever with life. You cannot be cunning with life: all shortcuts are cunning. Let life have its own natural course. You follow it, you don’t force it.And always remember that whatsoever is done is done by the whole, you are not the doer. If you can remember that, then breath is his, thirst is his, hunger is his, sex is his, love is his, whatsoever happens is his, death is his. And you remain completely pure and innocent out of it.The whole goes on doing, you are not the doer. This is the surrender, surrendering the ego: I am not the doer. This is the whole message of the Gita: Let the whole do, don’t you come in because you are the only barrier. If you come in you commit sin. This is my definition of sin: If you say I breathe, this is a sin. If you say I love, this is a sin. If you say he breathes, this is virtue. If you say he loves, this is virtue. And this is not only a saying, you have to feel it in its totality. Then you are unburdened. Then wings grow on you, you can fly. Then the gravitation cannot affect you. The gravitation can affect only the ego.If he is the doer then why be worried? Then you are not in any hurry to reach anywhere, then you have no private goal, then his goal is yours, and wherever he is going he is always right because there cannot be any wrong for the whole. The whole alone is.This is the circle of Tao: from breath, unconscious breath, to conscious breath.And the emphasis of Lao Tzu is continuously that you can relax. That’s why he praises the weak not the strong, because the strong cannot relax. That’s why he goes on praising water not rocks, because water is flowing, and water has no shape of its own.Whatsoever shape is given by the whole, the water takes it. It does not carry its own mind. If you put it in a glass it becomes of that shape. If you put it in a bottle it takes that shape. It does not resist, it does not say: I have my own shape, what are you doing to me? Don’t force me in this bottle! Wherever you put the water, it moves, takes the shape. It is non-resistant. It is non-violent, non-aggressive. It has no mind of its own.But a rock? A rock has a mind of its own. If you want to force it, it will resist. You will have to fight, you will have to cut it, fight it, much fight will be needed – only then will you be able to give it shape. It has its own mind. Water is mindless. These are symbols.Lao Tzu says: Be like water, don’t be like a rock, so that you can complete the circle. Move! If God is hungry within you – eat! If God feels sleepy within you – sleep! If God feels like loving – love! Move with the God, you don’t come in the way. Let things, the whole, have its own course. You simply follow it. Even to say follow it is not good because even a follower has some resistance. That’s why he says I am for the lower. You simply be one with it.Now the sutra.There is nothing weaker than water but none is superior to it in overcoming the hard, for which there is no substitute.He is tremendously in love with water. All the qualities of water have very symbolic meanings for Lao Tzu; one: it is soft, has no form of its own.A man should be like water, with no form, no mind, no ideology. If you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan you are like a rock. If I ask you: Who are you? and you shrug your shoulders and say: I don’t know, I don’t know how I can be a Hindu or how I can be a Mohammedan – beautiful. That shrugging of the shoulders is beautiful. You don’t have any ideology, you are like water. If you are a communist or a socialist or a fascist you are like a rock. People with ideologies are dead. They have a certain belief – a form. And they are resistant. A person who has no belief, no ideology, no form, belongs to no church, is flowing – like water. Wherever he moves, whatsoever situation comes, he responds. He responds always in the present. A man of ideology is never in the present: he has to look to the ideology – how to react? He reacts, he does not respond. He has already a mind.If you ask a communist any question the answer is ready-made. It is already there. He has not to think about it. In fact he is not answering you at all. The answer was already there before you talked to him. He is just giving a ready-made answer, a cliché. He has learnt it by heart. It is not a conscious phenomenon. He is not in this moment. He repeats like a parrot. He may be repeating Kapital or Koran – it makes no difference.A man who is really alive is responsive. He has no answers. When the question arises he responds to the question – and the answer is created. In fact he is as much surprised by the answer as you will be surprised. He never knew it! Because there was no situation like this before. He is like water. Water is soft.The second thing: Water is always flowing low, “low-wards,” finding, seeking low places, valleys. That too is very important for Lao Tzu. He says: Never try to go upwards, because then there is fight, because all are going upwards. Never try to go to New Delhi because everybody is going there; there is going to be competition, jealousy, fight, struggle. Move to the valley where nobody is going. Don’t be like fire, be like water.Fire moves upwards, water moves “low-wards,” it always goes towards the ocean, the lowest place in the world. It seeks the low. If it can find a still lower place immediately it starts moving. It is always for the lowest place – why? Because the lower you move, the less competition, the less violence, the less aggression – and you are not fighting with anybody; and if you fight with anybody one thing is certain: you cannot live yourself. The whole energy becomes fight.Politicians never live their lives. They don’t have any time, They don’t have any space, they don’t have any energy to live their life. They are always fighting others. They end fighting.A man who wants to live, should never be a politician. Water is very non-political.Be like water. Move find the lowest place where nobody is to compete, because nobody wants to go there. Then you can relax. Then you can be yourself. And that is the glory. If you can be yourself you will become a god.Because you are a god, it just has to be discovered. You already have it within you, you just need time, space, relaxation, leisure so you can relax on a beach, lie down naked under the sun on the sands – and not a worry in the world. Because you are not a fighter, you are not in any competition. This is renunciation.Not that you go to the Himalayas – because those who go to the Himalayas, they are seeking the peaks. And even in the Himalayas there is much competition. Gurus are in much competition: because somebody has more followers than you there is trouble; or someone has made a bigger ashram than you – then there is trouble. Even in the Himalayas there is politics.The sannyasins, the old sannyasins, are really politicians of the spiritual. They are moving higher. Their heaven is there, high in the skies! And Lao Tzu says: My heaven is there – low, the lowest place in the world, where I can be myself, nobody bothers me and I don’t bother anybody.This is renunciation. You can live in the world, then there is no problem, if you just know not to be a competitor, because competition is for the ego. For the being, for your real being, no competition is needed; you are already that, the highest, so why bother for height?Lao Tzu says this: Only inferior persons, people with inferiority complexes, try to reach the heights.All politicians suffer from an inferiority complex. They need treatment, psychological treatment. They need much cleansing. They are inferior people – deep down they suffer from inferiority. To hide that inferiority they fight to go high. When they reach, they become prime ministers and presidents, then they can say to the world: Who says that I am inferior Look! If I was inferior then how could I have attained to such heights? I am superior.The longing for superiority belongs to the inferior man. A superior man doesn’t bother. A superior man can afford to be inferior – remember this. A superior man can afford to be inferior because it makes no difference, he is so superior; he is superior, there is no point in becoming a president of a country. That will not add anything to his stature; rather, it may degrade him.Water has that quality of going low. And Lao Tzu says:There is nothing weaker than water and yet none is superior to it in overcoming the hard.Water overcomes. Go and see a waterfall. The rocks are so hard and the water so soft but rocks have been disappearing by and by. They have become sands already.Scientists say that within seven thousand years the fall of Niagara will disappear, because all the rocks will disappear. The water is cutting the rocks continuously. Within seven thousand years there will be no fall because there will be no rocks. The whole hilly track will disappear. Rocks could not believe it – how it happens! Water, so weak – and still it cuts deep.Weakness also has a subtle strength in it. And you also know this if you are a little observant, you can see in life how it happens.Woman is weak, man is hard, but always the woman wins and the man is defeated. Always. And even a great man like Napoleon, and people like that, they become like children before their women.Josephine, the wife of Napoleon, could not believe how this man could win so many battles. She has written in a letter: It is simply unbelievable because this Napoleon is nothing! The last battle in which Napoleon was defeated, he was defeated because of Josephine, because the moment he was leaving the house she said: No! Just to see what he would do. And when the woman had said no, how could Napoleon go? So he had to stay. He reached the front one hour late. Because he always used to plan the whole war of the day, that day he couldn’t plan it, somebody else had to plan it – and he was defeated on that day. He was late – he was never late in his life, this was for the first time. In fact it was not Napoleon who was defeated, it was a woman who had a victory that day. She said: No, I say, No!Why do women become so powerful? Weakness is their secret, they are weak like water. In the beginning you say: What can they do? You are like rocks. But in the end you know, you have become like sands. All husbands by and by are converted to henpecked husbands. It is natural! If it has not happened to you something is wrong. And nothing is wrong in it.It is said, it is an old story, once Akbar asked his wise man, Birbal: What do you think? Sometimes I become worried. All the people in my court look henpecked. Is there not even a single brave man? Birbal said: Difficult, but we will try to find one.They were all brave men, they could put down their life in a single moment if it was ordered. Their bravery was not in any way suspected. Birbal made arrangements; he said: Tomorrow come decided that you will assert the truth. Anybody who tells a lie is going to the gallows. Think over it: the king wants to know the truth, whether you are afraid of your wife or not.They all came. The king asked: Those who are afraid of their wives should come to the right, and those who are not afraid, only they should remain on the left. All moved except a single tiny man. Even Akbar could not believe that this man whom he had never thought could be a brave man…. But at least seeing that one was there he said: I am happy because I was thinking that not even a single man would be there. That man said: Wait! Don’t be happy so soon. When I was coming my wife said: Don’t stand in the crowd! That’s why I am standing here.It is natural – the feminine principle wins. And Lao Tzu is all for the feminine principle. Why does the woman win? She is so soft. In fact she never fights, she persuades. She does not fight directly, her fight is very indirect and subtle. If she wants to say no, she will not say no directly, but in a thousand and one ways her whole being will say no. In the way she puts the plate down she will say no, in the way she moves – her sari will make a sound and say no. She will not say no, she will say yes, but her whole being will assert the no. And when it is so subtle how to defeat it? If you love the woman you are defeated.And it is good that the hard is defeated and the soft wins because that is the only possibility for God to win in the world.The devil must be like rock. Hard. God must be soft. In fact in the East we have never thought of God as father, we have been thinking of God as mother. That insight is beautiful: God should not be thought of as father because then – the male principle is hard. He should be thought of as mother, feminine. God the mother seems better than God the father because his ways are also very subtle.He persuades you to come towards him, he never forces you. _ You never meet him anywhere and still you go on searching for him. You never encounter him because that too will be too hard. To be just before your eyes like a rock, a Himalayan rock, no, that won’t be good. He follows you as a subtle aroma. You never encounter him. You would never come face to face with him. You will find him deep in the stirrings of your heart. You will not find him like a storm, he comes like a subtle breeze. Only those who are very subtle will be able to feel it. He comes like a flower.In India we made the image of God in stone. That should not be done. To compensate we go and put flowers before it. A flower is more godlike than the stone. In fact stone images should disappear from the world. A flower is enough! Put the flower – and that becomes god. God is like a fragrance, not like a French perfume, so strong and aggressive, no, but very subtle, silent, non-aggressive. Only sometimes when you are tuned you feel it; you miss it again and again. It is the music of the silence.There is nothing weaker than water but none is superior to it in overcoming the hard, for which there is no substitute.That weakness overcomes strength and gentleness overcomes rigidity, no one does not know; no one can put into practice.It is very difficult to know it. To understand it is possible; to know it, difficult. Knowledge is too gross. If you go to know it, you will miss it. But you can understand it – what I call a tacit understanding is possible. If you watch life not in any way trying to know it….There is a difference. If a scientist comes to this garden he will move aggressively, not that he will be aggressive, but he will move aggressively. His eyes will have aggression, he will look at the flowers, at the trees, to penetrate their secret, to know their nakedness, to know what they are. Science is like rape. It is not like love. He will cut, dissect, he will try to penetrate forcibly. to the secret.Then comes a poet or a painter or a musician. He moves, but his movement is totally different. He moves watchfully of course – it is holy ground, to be near a flower is to be near a temple, to be near an alive tree is to be near God. It is holy ground – he moves very cautiously, he is watchful, alert, but he does not rape, he does not jump and be aggressive on the plants, he waits, waits with deep receptivity. If the plant has to give something he is ready, he will receive it with deep gratitude; but if the plant is not willing, let it be so. Then nothing can be done. A musician, a painter, a dancer, a poet, waits in receptivity: If you have something to give to me, if you feel that I am worthy of it, then I will receive it in deep gratitude; but if you feel I am not worthy, that’s okay. Nothing can be done, I am helpless. He waits like a beggar. Not like Indian beggars, because they are very aggressive, their begging is very violent. No, he begs like a beggar if you call Buddha a beggar – yes, we have called him bhikkhu, a beggar, Mahavira too, they were beggars of a totally different quality, of a totally different grandeur.They were not aggressive – they would come to your house, they would stand before your house, if you give it is okay, they are grateful; if you don’t give, then too they are grateful. Their gratefulness does not differ by your giving or not giving. They thank you, they pray for you, they move!Like that, like a bhikkhu, his hands spread, his heart open, ready to receive – but not to take, Then nature reveals its mystery.It is not knowledge, knowledge is too gross a word. It is a tacit understanding. It is more like love than like knowledge. You love a person, then you know a person. Loving becomes a sort of knowing. Remember – a sort of; not exactly. It cannot be scientific, it cannot be mathematical, it cannot be logical: a sort of, a kind of. You know deeply, heart to heart, but you cannot say this is knowledge. That will be too imprudent a word. You know because you love.Says Lao Tzu: No one does not know; no one can put into practice.No one knows it, no one can practice it, because to practice such a deep tacit understanding is impossible. Practice is gross. You can live it, you cannot practice it. You can know it as an understanding, you can live it, you cannot practice it. A real man of understanding simply lives his understanding, he is not practicing.People ask me: When do you meditate? I don’t meditate. I cannot be so foolish! To meditate means to practice. How can you practice it? You can be it but you cannot practice it. People ask me: How do you pray? I never pray. I live my prayers, I don’t pray. Prayer is my way of living, my way of living is my prayer. It is not separate.If you understand, you live it. If you know, then you have to practice it, because knowledge does not transform. You know something? – then the mind asks: How to do it now?All knowledge finally becomes technology, that’s why science has become technology in the West. All knowledge finally becomes technology because just by knowing, nothing happens. First you know, then you ask: How to do it?For example, Einstein discovered the theory of atomic energy somewhere in 1905. The theory was complete. But then scientists started asking: How to do it? In abstraction it was complete, the theory was absolutely logical and proved as a theory, but how to practice it? Forty years it took to create an atom bomb and to destroy Nagasaki; then it became technology. Forty years knowledge took to become technology. Many more things are known but they will take time to become technology.All science by and by is reduced to technology. Religion never becomes a technology, cannot become one, because it is not knowledge. You understand…. the very understanding is transforming; you are transfigured, transmuted, you are no more the same! You see, you watch, you understand a certain thing – the very thing has changed your quality of being. Now you live differently. No practice is possible. Practice of little things is possible, great things cannot be practiced. Prayer is a great thing. Love is a great thing – there can be no “know how” about it. Meditation is the last, the pinnacle. God. How can you practice God? You can become, but you cannot practice. And you can become because you already are – just a little understanding…. You are standing in the dark; just a little light, a little illumination, and everything changes.Lao Tzu says you cannot know it, you cannot practice it, but, the sage says:“Who receives unto himself the calumny of the world is the preserver of the state.”Who moves lowest is the sage, and who takes on himself the whole responsibility of the whole darkness of the world, who becomes like a Jesus – he preserves the world. The world is not preserved by politicians, they are pretenders; the world is preserved by very few people who may not even be known to you, because even to know them is difficult, they live so ordinarily; they are lost deep in the woods of the world, you may not be knowing them.There is a story in the Bible, a beautiful parable. There was a town called Sodom. From that town comes the word sodomy. The people had become very corrupt. All sorts of sexual perversion were prevalent. People were homosexual, people were making love to animals – the whole town was perverted. God decided to destroy the town. But there was one difficulty: there was one good man in the town. Unless the good man could be persuaded to leave the town, the town could not be destroyed.Angels were sent to persuade the good man: Please, leave the town. Because of you the town cannot be destroyed. But the good man was difficult to persuade. He said: I am needed here! Where should I go? These people are ill, these people are perverted, their lives are miserable, they live in hell – I am needed here. And I am responsible for these people! Because they don’t know and I know – that’s why I am responsible. Look! he said. Because they don’t know, how can you tell them they are responsible? They are doing all sorts of things unknowingly. They are completely oblivious, ignorant, not remembering what they are doing. They are as if drunkards. I am the only one who knows what is happening, and if I go, then who will save them? I am responsible for them.So it is said the good man was persuaded in a very cunning way. He was told: There is another town, Gomorra, where people are even more corrupt. You please go there. So when the man was going to Gomorra, Gomorra and Sodom were both destroyed. Because he was just in the middle.The world is preserved by very few people, a few people of crystal purity, of childlike innocence – but they feel responsible. Because they are aware.It is said that when Buddha reached nirvana, the last ultimate home, the doors were opened, there was great celebration, because centuries and centuries pass then only one person comes and enters in those gates. But Buddha would not enter. He stood at the gate, his back towards the gate. They were worried, they asked: Why are you standing there? The door is open and we have been waiting for you and there is much celebration and much jubilation – Come in! Be a guest!The Buddha is reported to have said: How can I come in? The whole world is suffering. I will stand here until the last man passes by, enters into the ultimate. I will have to wait – I will be the last, I feel responsible. I am aware, and they are not aware so they cannot be responsible, but I am responsible.The more aware you become the more responsible you become, the more you feel, the more you become a help – not that you start serving people, but your whole life becomes a service. Not that you are doing something for them out of any obligation. No, you are simply fulfilling your own awareness.“Who bears himself the sins of the world is the king of the world.”Those are the real kings, who are not known to history. History goes on talking about mock kings, false kings. History has not yet become a really authentic phenomenon otherwise it would talk about Buddha, Lao Tzu, it would talk about Kabir and Krishna and Christ, it would talk about Mohammed and Mahavira, it wouldn’t talk about Napoleon, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Stalin, it wouldn’t talk about these people.These people are just mischievous, they are the mischief-makers. They are like diseases, they have to be eliminated. Because of them, the earth is a hell.But history goes on talking about them, and every child is corrupted by history: talking about foolish, stupid people, mad, neurotic, perverted, and not talking about those who have attained to themselves. They are the real kings of the world.Strange words seem crooked.And Lao Tzu says these words are very strange. But they will look crooked to people because they are crooked.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Thou Trinity beyond being…direct us to the height of mystical revelation, sublime beyond all thought and light; wherein the simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine truth are hidden in the translucent darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear, and, though beyond touch and sight, it overfills our unseeing minds with splendors of transcendent beauty.This is my prayer. As for you, beloved Timothy, exerting yourself sincerely in mystical contemplation, quit the senses, the workings of the intellect, and all that may be sensed and known, and all that is not and is. For by this you may unknowingly attain, in as far as it is possible, to the oneness of him who is beyond all being and knowledge. Thus through indomitable, absolute and pure detachment of yourself from all things, you will be lifted up to that radiance of the divine darkness which is beyond being, surpassing all and free from all.Up to now man has lived in a very schizophrenic way. The reason he has become divided is not very difficult to understand. For centuries he has been told that the world consists not of one world but of two worlds: the world of matter and the world of the spirit. This is absolute nonsense.The world consists only of one truth. Of course, that truth has two aspects to it, but those aspects are indivisible. The outer aspect appears as matter and the inner as spirit. It is like a center and its circumference. This division has penetrated human mind in a thousand and one ways. It has become the separation between the body and the soul. It has become the separation between the lower and the higher. It has become the separation between sin and virtue. It has become the separation between the sinner and the saint, and it has also become the separation between the East and the West.Man today stands so fragmented, so divided, that it is almost a miracle that we are managing to keep ourselves together. The whole energy is exhausted in just keeping ourselves together because we are constantly falling apart.The greatest need of the day is to get beyond this schizophrenia, to get beyond all divisions, to reach the one which is neither this nor that, which is neither East nor West, which is neither man nor woman. That “one” has been called by the mystics: God, truth, moksha, nirvana, the absolute, dhamma, Logos, Tao – different names but pointing to the same one reality. It was possible up to now somehow to go on living in a schizophrenic way, but now it is no longer possible.We have come to a point where the decision has to be made. If we want to exist we have to create a synthesis, or rather a transcendence of all dualities. If we don’t want to exist then there is no problem. If we want to commit a global suicide, then of course all problems are solved – but I don’t think anybody wants or desires a global suicide.Man has achieved much in spite of all kinds of madness. Man has reached many peaks: religious, aesthetic, poetic, musical. And all this has happened in spite of all kinds of madness that we go on supporting, nourishing, because the vested interests don’t want you to be united and one; the vested interests want you to remain divided.When Rudyard Kipling said, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” he was giving expression to all the vested interests. They want the world to remain divided, they want man to remain divided – into many religions, philosophies, political ideologies. In every possible way they would like you not to become one. Why? – because the man who is integrated and one is impossible to enslave. He cannot be exploited by the priests or by the politicians. In fact, he becomes absolutely free from all possibilities of exploitation and oppression. He becomes an individual, he becomes rebellious, he becomes intelligent. He becomes so sharp and clear that he can see through all superstitions, howsoever old and ancient. He can see the stupidity in which humanity has lived – and not only lived in, but glorified. He can see the foolishness of nationalities, the utter nonsense of so many religions in the world.There are three hundred religions in the world and at least three thousand sects. He can see clearly that to divide matter from spirit is to create a division in the very being of man – because the body, matter, is nothing but spirit manifest, and the spirit is nothing but matter, body, unmanifest.God and the world are not two things. God is not the creator and the world is not the created; God and the world are one. It is a process of creativity. You can divide creativity in two parts, the creator and the created, but in fact that division is arbitrary. It is one flow of creativity. God is not the creator, let me remind you again and again, and the world is not the created. This whole existence is a riverlike creative energy.My sannyasins have to understand this oneness in as many ways as possible, so that no nook and corner of your being remains divided. The West is very proud of its materialism, science, technology. That pride hinders it from getting into a deep communion with the East, but that pride is nothing compared to the Eastern ego.The Eastern ego is far more subtle and far more dangerous, far more poisonous. The Eastern ego pretends, projects, brags about its spirituality. Of course, the people who think they are spiritual can condemn the people who are materialists more easily than vice versa because even the materialist feels somehow that matter is a lower reality. He may not even consciously believe in any higher reality, but the conditioning is so old – it has penetrated the blood, the bones, the very marrow – that a man can become consciously a materialist but deep down he remains part of the whole heritage of humanity. Hence the Western ego is not much of a danger, but the Eastern ego is very dangerous, for the simple reason that it is more subtle, more hidden, not on the surface, more unconscious.The East goes on proclaiming itself as the source of all spirituality, the source of all mysticism, which is patent nonsense. It depends only on ignorance. If you ask any Eastern so-called mahatma, you will be surprised that he knows nothing about other spiritual masters who have existed in other parts of the world. He has not heard about Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Ko Hsuan. He has not heard about Lin Chi, Basho, Bokuju. He has not heard anything about Pythagoras, Heraclitus or Dionysius.We are going to discuss Dionysius in this series. Dionysius is one of the greatest buddhas ever. And whenever the Eastern scholar by any chance, if at all, comes across a person like Dionysius, he starts thinking that he must have borrowed from the East. That seems to be a tacit assumption, that the East has some monopoly over spiritualism. Nobody has any monopoly. East or West cannot make any difference in man’s spiritual growth. Jesus could become a buddha in Jerusalem, Lao Tzu could become a buddha in China, Dionysius could become a buddha in Athens. There is no need to borrow from anybody.Yes, in scientific experimentation we have discovered very recently a strange phenomenon that whenever one scientist discovers something, almost simultaneously many people all around the earth discover the same thing in different ways. Albert Einstein is reported to have said, “If I had not discovered the Theory of Relativity, then within two years somebody else was bound to discover it.”Why does it happen that some scientist working somewhere far away in Soviet Russia discovers something almost simultaneously with some other scientist who is working in England or in America or in India or in Japan – not knowing anything of the other, not even being aware of the existence of the other, not knowing that somebody else is also working on the same problem?Now it is becoming more and more clear that with all the great discoveries, although the initial effort is made by the conscious mind, the ultimate result always comes through the unconscious. And the deepest layer of the unconscious mind is collective. I am different from you as a person, you are different from me as persons – as far as conscious mind is concerned. If you go a little deeper we are not so different in the unconscious mind. If you go a little deeper still, we come even closer in the collective unconscious.The mystics say there is even a little more than the collective unconscious; they call it the universal unconscious, or God. That is the very center. At that center we all meet and we are all one. All the great insights come from that center. It is only a question of who is looking in that direction – he will get the insight first. Otherwise the insight starts happening to many people; they may not be looking at it and therefore they will miss it.Alan Watts, writing on this small treatise of tremendous beauty, the Theologia Mystica of St. Dionysius, says that one is tempted, greatly tempted, to think that Dionysius must have visited the East; if not, then some Eastern mystic must have traveled to Athens.When Dionysius lived, in those days, many Western travelers had started coming to India. With the coming of Alexander the Great many barriers were broken, many bridges were made. And it was not one sided; Eastern mystics also started traveling toward the West. Even Jaina monks, who live totally naked, for whom the Western climate is bound to be far more harmful than Pune is for you, they went to Alexandria, to Athens, to the farthest corners of the known world. The Jainas are referred to in ancient Athenian treatises as gymnosophists. Sophist means one who is searching for the truth and gymno comes from Jainu. Gymnosophist is the name for the Jaina mystics who had penetrated Athens. And there was great business going on between India and Greece. And, of course, with the businessmen, the traders coming and going, there was a great exchange of thoughts.Alan Watts thinks either Dionysius visited India because the way he speaks is so Eastern, the insight that he reveals is so Eastern. Even his words remind one of the Upanishads and nothing else. So Watts thinks either he visited the East, or somebody from the East or many influences from the East somehow became available to him. But I am not tempted that way at all.My own experience and understanding is this: that great truths erupt in many places in almost similar ways. Lao Tzu never came to India and nobody from India ever visited Lao Tzu. China and India were divided by the great Himalayan mountains. There was no business going on between India and China, no communication of any kind. Still, what Lao Tzu says is so similar to the Upanishads, is so synonymous with the teachings of Buddha, that there is a great temptation to believe that there must have been some communication – either Buddha has borrowed from Lao Tzu or Lao Tzu has borrowed from Buddha.But I say to you, nobody has borrowed from anybody else, they have all drunk from the same source. And when you taste the ocean, whether you taste it on an Indian shore or on the Chinese shore, it makes no difference; it always tastes the same, the same salty taste. So is truth: it has the same taste, the same flavor, the same fragrance. Maybe in expressing it there is a possibility of a few differences of language, but that does not matter much. Sometimes even those differences are not there.Dionysius is a Christian, and one of the real Christians. It seems Friedrich Nietzsche was not aware of Dionysius and his Mystica; otherwise he would not have said that the first and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years ago. In fact, there have been a few more christs in the tradition of Christ. Dionysius is one of the most beautiful of them all. Then there is Meister Eckhart, St. Francis, Jacob Boehme and a few more – not many of course because Christianity became such an organized religion that it became impossible for mystics to exist, or even if they existed they went underground. They had to; there was no other way.It is just like today in Russia you cannot be a mystic without hiding yourself. Because to be a mystic in Russia means you are insane, you have to be hospitalized, you have to be given insulin shocks or electric shocks.It is fortunate that Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mahavira were not born in today’s Soviet Russia. Jesus would not have been crucified in Soviet Russia, that is true, but he would have gone through far more sophisticated tortures. Crucifixion is a very primitive phenomenon, and not so dangerous either; it kills you, that’s all. Electric shocks will not kill you, but they will destroy all your splendor, all your glory, all your intelligence. They will force you to vegetate. Your life will become as lifeless as possible. You will continue to exist but it will be a mere existence, mere survival. Your dignity will be gone.Jesus died a dignified man. He died with tremendous joy. He died fulfilled. But if he is born in Russia today he will have to die a very undignified death, or if he lives he will have to live a very undignified life.In Russia now, a really religious person has to go underground. There are my sannyasins who have to go underground. They are working underground – they meet in basements in the darkness of the night. What an ugly world we have created, where you cannot meditate openly, when you cannot discuss about truth, about love openly. To meditate as if you are committing some crime does not show that humanity has progressed; in many ways it has regressed.Christianity did the same for two thousand years in the West. Communism is an offshoot of Christianity. Whatever communists are doing now they have learned from the Christian popes. Christianity destroyed all possibilities of mysticism.There were only two ways to avoid being persecuted. One was to go underground or escape to some desert, to some mountains. And the second possibility was to exist as a formal Christian on the surface, use the Christian language, and go on doing your inner work privately. That’s what Dionysius did.You will be surprised to know he was the first Bishop of Athens. He must have been a man of rare intelligence. To remain a Bishop of Athens and yet to penetrate the deepest mysteries of life like Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, he must have been a man of rare intelligence. He managed a facade. He deceived the Christian organization.His treatise was not published while he was alive. He must have arranged it in such a way that it was published only when he was dead. If the treatise had been published while he was alive he would have been expelled from the Church, persecuted, tortured. And a man of understanding, a man who is not suicidal in some way, would not like to be persecuted unnecessarily. If it becomes a necessity he accepts the challenge. But he is not looking for it; he is not in some way hankering to be a martyr. He is not suicidal, he is not violent toward himself.Dionysius is a rare man living with stupid Christianity and its rigid organization. Being a bishop and still being able to reach the ultimate peaks of consciousness is something worthy of praise.Before we enter into these beautiful sutras of Dionysius, a few things have to be understood. One: these sutras were written as letters to one of his disciples, Timothy. All that is really great, all that is really of the ultimate, of the transcendental, can only be communicated to disciples. It has to be addressed to those who love you, to those who have a deep attunement with your heart. It cannot be addressed to the mass, to the crowd, to the indifferent, to the antagonistic. Great truths are communed only when there is love. It is possible only between a master and a disciple that a truth can be transferred.The disciple means one who is open to receive. The disciple means one who trusts so totally that there is no question of arguing because these profound mysteries cannot be argued about. Either you know or you don’t know – you cannot argue. There are no proofs for them, except your trust in the master. Of course, if you trust the master, the master can take you to the window from where you can see the vast sky with all its splendor…millions of stars. But you will have to trust him at least this much to allow him to hold your hand, to allow him to take you to the window. If you start arguing about the window and its existence and about the sky and its existence then there is no way to convince you.There are no proofs for God; there have never been, there will never be. Those who have known have known only because of deep intimacy, because of a love affair with the master. It is not a question of convincing somebody, it is not conversion about a certain ideology; it is simply a mad love affair. You come across a man like Dionysius and the very presence of the man is enough, the very presence becomes a proof that there are many more things in life than you have ever dreamed of. The presence of the man penetrates your very heart. The presence of the man transpires something in you, triggers something in you of which you were never aware before. You start hearing a song, you start seeing a beauty, you start feeling a new mood of elation, ecstasy – for no visible reason. Then it becomes possible to surrender your ego to such a person.When you surrender your ego to the master, the master is only an excuse. You are really surrendering to existence, not to the master. In fact you are simply surrendering. It is not of any importance to whom – the question is not to whom, the question is that you are surrendering the ego. The moment the ego is surrendered there is a possibility of communion.These are letters from Dionysius to his most beloved disciple, Timothy.The second thing to remember is Christianity, in becoming the religion about Jesus, missed something of tremendous importance. Because it tried to become the religion about Jesus, it could not become the religion of Jesus. A religion about Jesus is not a religion of Jesus. In fact, the religion about Jesus is against the religion of Jesus because when a religion becomes about a person, you lose contact with his inner reality; you become concerned with his outer expressions.Christianity became too concerned about following Jesus as an example. Now, that is going in a wrong direction. Nobody can follow Jesus as an example, his life cannot be an example to anybody else because a certain life exists in a certain context. To be exactly like Jesus you will need the whole situation, the whole context in which Jesus existed. Where can you find the same context again? Life goes on changing; it is never the same even for two consecutive moments. You cannot be Jesus of Nazareth, impossible; there is no Nazareth anymore. You cannot be Jesus because that Jewish mind which crucified Jesus no longer exists.Among my sannyasins there are thousands of Jews. Jesus would not have believed his eyes if he had seen this. He was a Jew: he was born a Jew, he spoke the language of the Jews, he believed in all the fundamentals of the Judaic religion. Still he could not find many followers. I am not a Jew: I don’t speak the language of the Jews, I don’t believe in the Judaic fundamentals. Still I have been able to find thousands of Jews. The context has changed, it is a totally different world. Twenty centuries have passed.Also, whenever you start trying to follow a certain person as an example you become imitative, you become false, you lose authenticity, you are no longer yourself. And to make the point very emphatic, Christianity has insisted for two thousand years on a very absurd thing. The absurdity is that on the one hand Christianity says, “Follow Jesus, imitate Jesus! Let Jesus be your example,” and on the other hand the same Christianity goes on telling you that “Jesus is God, God’s only begotten Son, and you cannot be related to God in the same way.” Can you see the absurdity? On the one hand you say, “Follow Jesus, be like Jesus,” and on the other hand you make it absolutely impossible for yourself to be like Jesus because Jesus has a special relationship with God and you cannot have that relationship; that is not possible.Hence Christianity has created an impossible religion on the earth, telling people such nonsense. Such an absurd approach is bound to create guilt. People try to follow Jesus, but they cannot be Jesuslike; hence guilt arises, they feel guilty. No other religion has created so much guilt on the earth as Christianity. Christianity has proved the greatest calamity for the simple reason that religion is not supposed to create guilt. If religion creates guilt then it makes you depressed, then it makes you frustrated with yourself, then it creates a subtle suicidal instinct in you.A true religion elates you, enhances, enriches your being, makes your life more festive, creates more possibilities for you to celebrate and rejoice. Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, “Rejoice! Rejoice! I say unto you rejoice!” And what has Christianity done? It has done just the opposite. Dionysius was aware of this fact.The third thing: the experience of truth is like music – yes, more like music than like anything else because you cannot describe music to anybody else. You can say it was beautiful, but that is an evaluation, your judgment. You are not describing music, you are describing your mood that happened through the music. There is no way to describe the beauty of music.The same is true about religious experience. That’s why authentic religion is always mystic. By mystic I mean something that can be felt, experienced, but can never be described. Even though you know it, you are incapable of making it known to others; you are almost dumb. The more you know, the dumber you are. When you have known it absolutely you become almost an absolutely ignorant man.Dionysius has a special word for it; he calls it agnosia. You must have heard the word agnostic; Bertrand Russell used the word for himself. An atheist says there is no God, but he says it as if he knows – that “as if” is always there – as if he has explored the whole reality and has come to know that there is no God. In declaring there is no God he is declaring his knowledge. He is a gnostic, he knows. Gnosis means knowledge. The theist says there is a God – as if he knows, as if he has attained, arrived. He is also a gnostic; he has gnosis, knowledge.An agnostic means one who says, “I don’t know, neither this way nor that. I don’t know whether God is or God is not. I am utterly ignorant.” Hence Bertrand Russell says, “I am agnostic.” He must have discovered the word in Dionysius: agnosia. But Dionysius’s use of the word is far more potential, far more pregnant than Bertrand Russell’s; Bertrand Russell’s cannot be more than a logical statement. He is a logician, a mathematician; he has never meditated, he has never gone within himself. He says he is an agnostic, but he has never tried to go beyond it, as if agnosticism is the ultimate and there is nothing more to do about it.My feeling is that he is not a true agnostic. The atheist says, “I know there is no God,” the theist says, “I know that there is a God,” and the Bertrand Russellian agnosticism says, “I know there is no way of knowing” – but that knowledge, that tacit knowledge is there.Dionysius says that one can know God only when one comes to the moment when one knows nothing. The state of not-knowing is the opening of the door. By agnosia he means exactly the same as the Upanishads mean. One of the most famous Upanishads, the Kena Upanishad, says:It is conceived by him who conceives it not.Who conceives it, knows it not.It is not understood by those who understand it.It is understood by those who understand it not.Or it reminds one of the Zen Master Yung-chia. In his Song of Enlightenment he says:You cannot grasp it;You cannot get rid of it.In not being able to get it, you get it.When you are silent, it speaks;When you speak, it is silent.Or it reminds one of the great Socratic statement: “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.”Agnosia means the state of not knowing. That’s what samadhi is, that’s what meditation is all about: the state of not knowing.Meditation creates that state, agnosia. When meditation has helped you to burn all your knowledge, to unburden you of mountainous loads of conditioning, when it has left you utterly silent, like a small child full of wonder and awe, in India that state is called samadhi. Samadhi means all is solved, there is no longer any question and there is no longer any answer, one is utterly silent. There is no longer any belief and no longer any doubt. Dionysius calls it agnosia. It is through agnosia that one comes to know.This is the ultimate paradox of mysticism: that by not knowing one comes to know it and by knowing one misses it. Not knowing is far higher than all knowledge. The universities give you knowledge, but when you enter the buddhafield of a master you are entering an anti-university. In the university you learn more and more knowledge, information; you accumulate. In the anti-university of a master you unlearn more and more. A moment comes when you know nothing.It is a very strange moment, hence it has been described by Dionysius with tremendous beauty. He calls it “translucent darkness.” Many mystics have called it different names, but Dionysius seems to surpass them all. Translucent darkness, darkness which is pure light. He also calls it Doctrina Ignorantia, the doctrine of ignorance. He also calls it “knowing ignorance.” You can compare it with the knowledge of the knowledgeable people. The knowledgeable people are called by Dionysius, people who have “ignorant knowledge.” So he divides people in two categories: those who belong to the world of ignorant knowledge – they know much, knowing nothing; and the second category, the people who belong to the world of knowing ignorance – they know nothing, hence they know all.Now the sutras:Thou Trinity beyond being…direct us to the height of mystical revelation, sublime beyond all thought and light; wherein the simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine truth are hidden in the translucent darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear, and, though beyond touch and sight, it overfills our unseeing minds with splendors of transcendent beauty.You can immediately see that the way he writes is to hide his mystical revelation in Christian terms. He begins: Thou Trinity beyond being…Now, there was no need to use the word trinity. That is just to befool the whole Christian organization because these people live in words. Just utter a single word, trinity, and everything is okay – if you are a Christian and you believe in the Christian doctrine, then there is no danger. Hence he begins: Though Trinity beyond being…But immediately the condition that he puts on Trinity destroys the whole idea of the Christian doctrine: …beyond being… No mystic has been so courageous, saying that God is beyond being. Many have said that God is beyond knowledge, but Dionysius seems to be the only one who says that God is beyond knowledge and beyond being. You cannot say, “God is,” you cannot say, “I know.” How can you know when there is no God?But you see the sharpness of his intelligence, his clarity? He uses the word trinity. He starts with: Thou trinity beyond being… If something is beyond being, how can you call it “thou”? That is just a facade to befool the fools who live only in words. Those who want to go beyond words will be able to sort it out.Thou Trinity beyond being…direct us to the height of mystical revelation… This sutra is something to be deeply understood: …direct us to the height of mystical revelation…All the Upanishads in the East begin with this prayer: Direct us, lead us, guide us, from darkness to light. Tamso ma jyotirgamaya. We are in darkness; O Lord, lead us, guide us, direct us, so that we can move into the world of light. Guide us, lead us, direct us, from the world of untruth to the world of truth: asto ma sadgamay. We are living in death, we are surrounded by death – death surrounds us like an ocean surrounding a small island – O Lord, lead us from death to deathlessness, from time to timelessness: mrityor ma amritamgamay.All the Upanishads start with this prayer; there is something very significant in it. Dionysius also says: …direct us to the height of mystical revelation…Although there is no God as a person, as a being, still the prayer is significant. You will have to understand something very subtle. People think a prayer is significant only if there is somebody to listen to the prayer; that is not right. The prayer is significant because you pray. It doesn’t matter whether there is anybody to hear it or not. The prayer does not change God, the prayer changes you. The prayer changes the one who is praying, not the one prayed to.When you pray you become humble. When you pray you become surrendered. When you pray you accept your agnosia. You say, “I don’t know where to go, how to find you. I don’t know from where to start. Please guide me.” Not that there is a God to guide you, not that somebody is going to come and guide you, not that somebody is going to fulfill your prayer, but just the capacity to pray is enough; it will help you. The capacity to bow down to existence is enough: you lose the egoistic stiffness. The prayer helps you to relax. The prayer gives you an opportunity to let go.In that let-go, you start moving toward the right direction without anybody guiding you. It is the state of let-go that helps you to find the right direction, because when you are not tense you are always moving toward the right direction. Whenever you are tense, even if you are moving in the right direction, the direction is not going to prove right because you are not right. The question is not of direction; the question is of your being right or wrong.When you are relaxed, at ease, at home, trusting existence, loving existence, nothing can ever go wrong. That’s the purpose of prayer. It is not a demand. It is not that you have to shout it so that God can hear it.A great Indian mystic, Kabir, was passing by the side of a mosque, and the maulvi, the priest of the mosque, was doing his morning prayer, shouting.Kabir went in, shook the man and told him, “What are you doing? Do you think your God has gone deaf? Why are you shouting? Just whisper, that will do! In fact, there is no need even to whisper – just the attitude is enough.”Prayer is an attitude. Prayer is not something to be done; rather, it is a quality. Call it prayerfulness and you will be closer to the truth. Prayer means prayerfulness.…direct us to the height of mystical revelation, sublime beyond all thought and light… Mystics have always said that God is beyond all thought; there is no way to think about God. To think about God is to go on missing him. Think, and you will miss because thinking means you are using your mind, and the mind contains only that which you already know. If you already know God there is no need to think. If you don’t already know God there is no point in thinking because the mind moves in the small world of knowledge. It goes on repeating what it knows again and again and again. It cannot move toward the unknown.The mind has no capacity to rise toward the unknown, hence no thinking ever helps. It hinders, certainly, and hinders greatly, but it has never helped anybody. One has to put aside all thinking. One has to come to a moment of no-thought.But Dionysius is something really unique. He says …beyond all thought and light… because those who have said that God is beyond thought have always said that he is light. In fact, the English word divine comes from a Sanskrit root div. From the same root comes the English word day. From the same root come the Sanskrit words devata, deva. They all mean light: divine means light, day means light, div means light, devata means light. Light has always been thought synonymous with God.Dionysius says that too is a projection of thought because you are afraid of darkness, and out of your fear of darkness you conceive God as light. But light is also a thought, a mind projection. When you go beyond all thought you also go beyond light.Then what is God? Is God darkness? That will not be right – God is not darkness either. Then what is God? God is: translucent darkness, darkness which is luminous.In this way, Dionysius is trying to help you to go beyond the duality of words. God is both death and life together, both light and darkness together, both matter and consciousness together, both man and woman together. So don’t ask the question again whether God is a he or a she; he is both and neither. That’s why the Upanishads never call him he or she but “It” – of course It with a capital I so that you don’t misunderstand him as a thing, as a commodity. But God is It.Now in the West, Women’s Liberation is raising great dust insisting that God should be called she, not he – to call God he is nothing but the male chauvinist pig’s idea. But to call him she will be the female chauvinist’s idea. It won’t make any difference; it will be the same. Any part of the duality is insufficient; he has to be called both together.…wherein the simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine truth are hidden in the translucent darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. God is known only in absolute silence. But that silence does not mean a dead silence – not the silence of the cemetery, but the silence of a garden where birds are singing and bees are humming and flowers are opening, where all is alive.The silence that one comes to know through meditation, through agnosia, is a living silence. It is full of song, full of music, full of melody, full of joy, full of love, empty of all thoughts. Even the thought of love, the thought of joy, the thought of silence is absent. But joy is present, love is present. The thought of love is not present; in fact, the thought of love is present only when love is absent. You think of joy only when you are not joyful. When you are really joyous you never think of joy.The mind gives you substitutes. Because you are joyless, the mind gives you the idea of joy. Because you don’t know what love is, the mind gives you a thousand and one definitions of love. When you know love, the mind has nothing to do, the mind simply ceases. One’s real silence is not empty, it is not a kind of absence of everything. On the contrary, it is full – too full, abundantly full, overflowing – not with thoughts but with real experiences. And that is the revelation of the secret.For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity… Obscurity in the sense that you cannot figure out what it is and what it is not. Obscurity in the sense that you cannot define it and you cannot describe it. But it: …is yet radiantly clear, and, though beyond touch and sight, it overfills our unseeing mind with splendors of transcendent beauty. Beauty is there, but the idea of beauty is not there. You hear the music, but you cannot describe it – not even to yourself.Dionysius uses two kinds of language. One he calls cataphatic. Cataphatic means a positive language which speaks of God as Father, light, spirit, power, and being; it tells us what God is like. But remember, it is only a finger pointing to the moon – the finger is not the moon. The cataphatic language is useful, at least useful for those who are very childish in their approach toward life. A child can understand God only as the father, hence all childish religions talk about God as the father. When religion reaches maturity it drops that idea completely.Jainism does not talk about God as the father; in fact, it does not talk about God at all. Buddhism emphatically denies talking about God because to talk about God you have to use cataphatic language and a cataphatic language is at the most approximate. But as far as truth is concerned you cannot be approximately true: either you are true or you are not true.Can you say to somebody, “I almost love you,” or, “I love you approximately?” That will look very stupid, silly! Either you love or you don’t love. You cannot say, “I love you fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy percent.” The idea of percentage won’t work; it is either a hundred percent or nothing at all.Truth cannot be approximately described. Hence to call God “light” is helpful for children to understand, but is not the right way because then darkness is denied. If you call God “consciousness,” then where are you going to put matter? If you call God “spirit,” then the body becomes something ungodly, undivine, evil.It is because of this cataphatic language that millions of people are misguided. They become anti-body, anti-life, anti-love, anti-joy, anti-pleasure – anti- everything – for the simple reason that they have become accustomed to a cataphatic language.Dionysius says, remember that cataphatic language is just like music. You cannot describe music, but you can give instructions about music, you can give notations for music. And the person who understands the language of notation, one who can decode it, will be able to produce music: the indescribable will be heard. But it is a very indirect way. If the person does not know anything about the notations he may start worshipping the notations as music. He may try to hear it by bringing the notation close to his ears and he will be surprised: “There is no music! And that fool was saying that great music is contained in this notation, and I don’t hear anything at all!”In the middle of a busy street, a madman is kneeling down, his ear to the tar. A passerby sees him and becomes very puzzled by the scene. Not being able to contain his curiosity he also kneels down and puts his ear to the ground.He does not hear anything so he says to the madman, “What are you listening to? I can’t hear anything.”The madman replies, “Yes, it has been like that since this morning.”You cannot hear music from musical notations – that will be mad – but you can produce it. Those notations are not descriptive; they are instructive. These two words are significant, descriptive and instructive.All great masters are instructive; they are not descriptive. They are not describing God, they are simply instructing you how to create agnosia, the state of not knowing, so that knowing can happen.The second kind of language Dionysius calls apophatic. It is negative language which speaks of God in terms of what he is not. This brings you closer to the truth because it does not say anything about God; it does not affirm anything. It is not via positiva, it is via negativa. It simply says, “God is not this, God is not this.” It simply denies.Dionysius says it is like a man who is trying to make a statue out of a marble rock. He goes on chipping, cutting pieces of rock, goes on throwing away pieces of rock, chunk by chunk. Slowly, slowly the statue emerges.When you are with a master who knows the art of apophatic language – and a master cannot be a master without knowing the use of apophatic language. All masters are via negativa, neti-neti, neither this nor that. If they sometimes speak in descriptive language, that is only for the newcomers, for the initiates, but not for the adepts not for those who are getting a little more mature, a little more centered. For them they always speak the language of negation. They always say, “This is not, this is not, this is not…” They go on eliminating the unnecessary. And finally, when they have eliminated all, they say, “Now this is it!” But still they will not describe it, they will only say, “This is it! Now, here, this silence, this agnosia, this is it!”Dionysius says:This is my prayer. As for you, beloved Timothy, exerting yourself sincerely in mystical contemplation, quit the senses, the workings of the intellect, and all that may be sensed and known, and all that is not and is. For by this you may unknowingly attain, in as far as it is possible, to the oneness of him who is beyond all being and knowledge. Thus through indomitable, absolute and pure detachment of yourself from all things, you will be lifted up to that radiance of the divine darkness which is beyond being, surpassing all and free from all.This is something tremendously beautiful. Dionysius writing to his disciple, Timothy, says: This is my prayer.A real master cannot say more than that. He cannot order you. He cannot say, “Do it – you have to do it!” He does not talk in terms of shoulds and should-nots. He is not in any way trying to lay his trip on you. He is simply praying for you. Dionysius says: This is my prayer.“This is what I would like to see happening in you. This is my wish, my prayer. So don’t take it as an order; it is not that you have to do it. It is not that if you don’t do it you will be punished, thrown into hell for eternity. There is no need to listen to me, there is no need to follow me. This is only my prayer because I have experienced such transcendent beauty through agnosia that I would like you, beloved Timothy, to also share it. I would like to share it with you. If you are ready, the sharing can happen.”This is the way to be ready: exert yourself sincerely – not seriously but sincerely. There are people who are always doing things halfheartedly; their life is lukewarm. They never achieve anything because they are always holding back. They never move into anything totally, intensely. They are always standing on the bank and thinking of the farther shore. Or even if sometimes they try, they are riding on two horses; in case one fails, the other will always be there. They are riding in two boats. Their life is so divided that whatever they do, they always do with dividedness. And any flowering of consciousness is possible only when there is an organic unity in you. Hence, be sincere: …in mystical contemplation, quit the senses…Dionysius says: Watch your senses. You are not the eye but the consciousness standing behind the eye. The eye is only a window – don’t get identified with it. And so are all other senses: they are only windows. You are standing behind the window – don’t become the window! Don’t start thinking, “I am the frame of the window.”That’s what everybody is doing. You become identified with your senses, you become identified with your mind, you become identified with a thousand and one things.And you completely forget that you are only one thing and that is witnessing, consciousness, awareness.…quit the senses, the workings of the intellect… Don’t get involved in the mind. Watch the mind pass by. Slowly, slowly the functioning of the mind ceases: …and all that may be sensed and known…Go on dropping that which can be known and sensed so that you can fall into agnosia: …and all that is not and is. And don’t become attached to the positive or the negative, to the theist or the atheist.Dionysius is a rare man. He is saying these things behind the cover of Christianity, hiding this great mystic approach – as great as Lao Tzu’s or Buddha’s, behind the covers of the Bible. Hence he has survived – he managed well. Christians have never condemned him, otherwise he might have been burned alive; at least his letters would have been destroyed.Thousands of great treatises have been burned and destroyed, and if they are not burned and destroyed they are lying in the basement of the Vatican. Thousands of manuscripts never read, never allowed the light of the day. Nobody can approach them.In fact, it should be one of the duties of the U.N. to free all the manuscripts which are imprisoned in the Vatican. And there are millions, not few. This is a great crime! Centuries of understanding of enlightenment are hidden, not allowed. Catholics have a special category for such books. Once they are put on the black list, no Christian is allowed to read them; to read them is to commit a sin.Dionysius must have been a very intelligent man; he managed well. He deceived the Vatican, he deceived the popes. After all, he himself was a bishop – he knew all the inside tricks! His treatise is thought to be Christian; it is not Christian at all. It has nothing to do with Christianity. Jesus would have agreed with it, but not the Christian organization.For by this you may unknowingly attain… You see his words? – unknowingly attain. God is never attained knowingly because before God is attained, the knower disappears. So how can you attain him knowingly? God always comes unawares. When you are not he comes. When you are not he suddenly fills you. When you are absent he is present.…in as far as it is possible, to the oneness of him who is beyond all being and knowledge. Thus through indomitable, absolute and pure detachment of yourself from all things, you will be lifted up to that radiance of the divine darkness which is beyond being, surpassing all and free from all. What Buddha calls nirvana, the absolute freedom, what Mahavira calls moksha, the ultimate freedom, that’s what Dionysius is talking about, but putting it into Christian terminology, into a Christian packet. But the inner reality is the same.Nobody from the East has ever commented on Dionysius – I may be the first person – because the East lives with the ego that says they are the only spiritual people, only they have reached the Everest of consciousness. That is not true. I have come across many people who have reached the same peak. Dionysius is one of them. He is a Buddha, he is a Jaina, of the same height, of the same quality, of the same depth – and sometimes even transcending them all because no Buddha has said: “Unknowingly you attain him.”There are a few precious statements, rare, unique, never spoken before. No other buddha has said that that experience is of translucent darkness, agnosia.Dionysius has to be meditated upon. Listen to these sutras. Sit silently. Meditate on each single word. If you can have even a small glimpse of agnosia, of not knowing, you will have stumbled into a door of the divine. The door is not far away; that which keeps you away from the door is your knowledge. Be knowledgeable and you will remain irreligious, unmystical. Attain ignorance, total ignorance, and then all the mysteries are yours: …surpassing all and free from all.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,The other night after darshan I dreamed that you sang “I'm a Stranger in Paradise” to me. It was incredible, and you were really good at it! Do you ever sing and dance, beyond the metaphorical use of the words? You are so full of grace. Would you do it now?I am doing it every moment. Yes even now, and not in a metaphorical sense, but in as realistic a sense as possible. Singing or dancing to me mean much more than you understand by those words. Your meaning is very limited; my meaning is vast. It is not metaphorical but certainly vast, unbounded.In fact, once you become aware of your own being, you cannot do anything else but sing, dance, celebrate. Before that your singing is not much of a singing, your laughter is not much of a laughter; in fact, it is just the opposite.Once Friedrich Nietzsche was asked, “Why do you go on smiling and laughing about very small things which do not seem worth laughing at?”Nietzsche became very serious and said, “I laugh just out of fear. I laugh because if I don’t laugh I am afraid I may start crying and weeping.”He is saying something tremendously important. It is true about you – about everyone who has not become a Buddha, a Christ, a Krishna. You laugh just to cover up your wounds, you sing so that you can forget your tears, and you celebrate because your life is so miserable. The more miserable you are, the more occasions you seek to celebrate because that is the only distraction from your misery.My laughter, my song, my dance are bound to be basically different from yours. I laugh because there is only laughter in my heart – my laughter is not a cover-up. And I sing because there is nothing else to do – my breathing is my singing. It is not something that I am doing, it is something that is happening of its own accord. Even if I want to stop, it cannot be stopped. In fact, there is nobody to do it and nobody to stop it either.But I will tell you a joke…Every day a man came into the bar with a box tucked underneath his arm, asked for a shot of whiskey, drank it, and went away.One day the barman, after observing this customer for some time, decided to ask him what he had inside his box in exchange for a free drink.The man opened the box and inside appeared a little flea, singing, accompanied by a little roach playing the piano. The bartender was amazed.So the next day when the man came in, the bartender offered him another free drink to listen to the flea singing and the roach playing the piano.As time went on the bartender became more and more intrigued with this show and insisted on seeing it every day in exchange for a free drink.One day, not being able to contain his curiosity any longer, the bartender offered the man a full case of his best whiskey in exchange for the secret behind the little performers.The customer, after giving it a little thought, agreed. Once again he opened the box and the flea came out singing and the roach playing the piano. And he said. “The trick is this: it is not really the flea who sings, but the roach is a ventriloquist!”It is not in fact me who is singing and dancing and doing all kinds of tricks, the secret is that God is a ventriloquist!The second question:Osho,I have dropped all my attachments; but still subtle attachments remain. I am even attached to nonattachment, to no-mind, to no no-mind. I am aware of the subtle ego. How should we go beyond this vicious circle?It is a great blessing that you are aware of it, of the vicious circle. To be aware of it is one of the most significant things. Only after that can something be done – or undone. But there are many people who are not aware of it, even people who have risen to great heights of spirituality, who are almost enlightened – just one more step and they will be buddhas. But the last step is certainly, and obviously too, the most subtle one.It is easy to drop the mind; it is difficult to drop no-mind; and it is very, very difficult to drop no no-mind because the mind is a very cunning fellow – it goes on creating itself again and again. It goes on receding: you drop the mind, it becomes the no-mind; you drop the no-mind, it becomes the no no-mind, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. You drop your attachments, it becomes attached to the very idea of nonattachment. You drop out of the world, you renounce the world, now it clings to the very idea of renunciation. But the clinging remains. It goes on changing its object of clinging, but it continues to exist.Just the other day, I received a long letter from Holland from one of our most beautiful sannyasins, Amrito. He went to see J. Krishnamurti, and J. Krishnamurti behaves almost like a bull when he sees my sannyasins. The red color…and he simply loses all his enlightenment! That’s why in Spain I have so few sannyasins: the bulls don’t like it!The moment he saw Amrito attired in his sannyasin clothes he became furious. For one and a half hours continuously he spoke against clinging to the master. Amrito was laughing at the whole thing – why was he so disturbed? He could see his love, his compassion, his effort to help him, but he could also feel that there was something more to it; he couldn’t figure out what it was. What he could not figure out was J. Krishnamurti’s clinging to the idea of nonclinging. He was still very serious about it.My sannyas is a nonserious phenomenon; it is really very lighthearted. It is given in love and laughter and it is received in love and laughter. It is not the old idea of sannyas – of serious people, anti-life, anti-love, trying to escape from the world. It is not escapist at all. On the contrary, I teach my people to be in the world – as totally as possible, as passionately as possible and as intensely as possible.But Krishnamurti has carried a wound throughout his long life. He was brought up by Theosophists and from his very childhood he was taught a thousand and one rules because they were bringing him up with a certain idea: that he is going to be the World Teacher, that he is going to be the new Christ, the Messiah, that it is through him that the world is going to be redeemed – he is no ordinary person. They were preparing him as a vehicle so that God could descend in him and he could become a mouthpiece for God. Of course, tremendous discipline was needed and he was almost tortured.There were two brothers: Krishnamurti and Nityananda. Both were being prepared. Nityananda died – and my own feeling is that he died because of too much discipline: fasting, yoga, and so many occult and esoteric processes they had to pass through. They were very young, very tender. Krishnamurti was only nine years old. They had to get up early, three o’clock in the morning, and the training would start.The man who was in charge, Leadbeater, was a hard taskmaster. Not only was he a hard taskmaster, he was also a homosexual person. And it is a well-known fact that his interest in small children was basically sexual. He was found in very compromising postures with Krishnamurti too!Those wounds have remained. Krishnamurti cannot forgive Leadbeater. Half a century has passed, or more: Leadbeater is dead, the whole Theosophical movement is dead, but those scars of master and disciplehood, of training, surrender, obedience, have not left Krishnamurti yet. They have become very subtle as time has passed. For almost fifty years he has been fighting against ghosts that are no longer in existence. He goes on boxing in the air with ghosts that are nonexistential.My sannyas and my existence are so new to him he cannot understand it – he has not made any effort to understand it. For one and a half hours he was hammering on Amrito: “This is the most dangerous thing that you have done. Never become a disciple to anybody! Don’t cling to a master!”Politely, many times Amrito reminded him, “I am not clinging to anybody. And my master is not in favor of clinging, he gives us total freedom. It is out of freedom that we are with him. And any moment we decide not to be with him, he does not create any guilt because of it.”But he won’t listen. He cannot understand this new phenomenon: a new kind of relationship between the master and the disciple, a relationship that is not a relationship of dependence of any kind.You are not clingers to me, you are not enslaved by me. My effort here is to help you to be free, to be totally free. I am included in that freedom. You have to be free of all, and I am included in that all. And if you are still with me it is not because you are dependent on me; it is because you are grateful for such a freedom. Who will not love a relationship that is basically rooted in freedom?A relationship becomes ugly when it is not allowing you to be free, when it encages you, when it cuts your wings, when it chains your soul, when it does not allow you to be yourself. I am not imposing any rule on you, I am not forcing any discipline on you. My only message is of love, freedom, and awareness.But Krishnamurti was utterly deaf.Amrito writes to me, “I came out with a headache.” That is natural – Krishnamurti himself suffers from headaches. For fifty years continuously he has suffered from headaches, severe headaches, not ordinary; for days they continue. Sometimes they become so serious that he wants to hit his head against the wall!And the reason is that he has dropped everything – as you say – but now a new attachment has arisen in him, the attachment to nonattachment, clinging to nonclinging. He has attained the state of no-mind, but he has not been able to drop that idea of no-mind.It is not going to help if you drop the idea of no-mind and then you become attached to no no-mind. It is the same game. It goes on becoming more and more subtle; and the more subtle it is, the more dangerous because you will not be able to see it. It will become so deep inside you that your consciousness will not be able to reach it. It will poison your very source.You tell me, “I have dropped all my attachments…” Who has told you to drop all your attachments? The vicious circle starts there, in the dropping. Then you become attached to the idea of dropping. Then a new ego arises: “I have dropped all attachments.” And suddenly you can see, and it is good that you can see, “Now I am becoming attached to this idea. What to do now?” You can drop even this idea, and then you will feel even more happy, more proud. “Look!” You will thank yourself: “See! You have done the miracle. You have dropped even the idea of nonattachment.” But now again it has come from the back door.You ask me, “How should we go beyond this vicious circle?” Why start it in the first place? I am not telling you to drop attachments, I am telling you to just understand them. That’s enough. Just see what your attachments are, with no effort to drop them, with no judgment, no evaluation. Just see what they are. Whatever they are, they are there. What can you do? Just as you have eyes and hands and legs and a certain color of hair and skin, so your attachments are there. Accept them! In that acceptance the revolution begins.The moment you accept your attachments and you start understanding them, with no idea to drop them… Remember, if there is the idea to drop them behind your understanding, your understanding cannot be profound and total; that idea will be a hindrance. Why drop attachments? God has not dropped the attachment to his world – why should you drop your attachments to the world?I have never dropped a single attachment in my life. I have seen them through and through, and by seeing through and through the miracle happens – suddenly you find the attachments are no longer binding. They are there, but as far away as the horizon, and as nonexistential as the horizon. They are no longer binding on you. You can live in the world and yet you are not of the world.And that’s my whole vision of sannyas. Be a lotus leaf in the lake and yet untouched by the water. Then there is no vicious circle. You create the vicious circle, and then you ask how to transcend it. And every effort to transcend it will be creating it again and again.My humble suggestion is, please don’t start the stupid thing! It is better not to start it. Once you start it, it is almost impossible to get rid of it.The third question:Osho,What does it mean to be religious? After awareness, what is the first quality of a religious being?Religion in the past has created nothing but ego in people. It has given people ideas of superiority, of greatness, of extraordinariness. In fact, only the very egoistic people in the past became interested in religion. And religion gives you a chance to fulfill your ego more easily than any other dimension of life.If you want to be the richest man in the world, it is not going to be easy; but if you want to renounce the world it is simple. To be the richest man in the world will need many things. It will need a certain intelligence; it will require a constant effort, an unwavering, strong, staunch mind to remain attached to the goal that you have decided upon in order not to change it, not to drop it. Even if all the circumstances change you have to go on dogmatically, blindly following it. It needs a certain willpower; it needs cunningness, cleverness, a certain quality of being political, competitive, ambitious, unscrupulous, not bothering about any moral values, reminding yourself again and again that the end justifies the means, so whatever means you are using is good if it fulfills the end. Be violent, be deceptive, be dishonest – if it pays.They say, “Honesty is the best policy.” But remember, it is a policy, it is not a value – it is not something intrinsically valuable. It is a good policy because it pays; if it does not pay, then dishonesty is the best policy.You have to be very mindful of what you are doing, of what you are saying because you will have to tell many lies. You will need a good memory, otherwise you will forget what you have said yesterday and what you are saying today.A politician needs a good memory. He may not be very intelligent, but he needs a good memory – and they are two different things. A good memory is a mechanical thing; a good intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. There have been people of great intelligence and very low-grade memory: Albert Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison – the highest intelligence with the lowest memory. And there have been people of great memory with no intelligence at all.I was visiting the Hindi University in Varanasi. A man was brought to me and introduced as someone who holds two dozen MA’s – two dozen! So once in a while you come across a person who has double MA’s, but two dozen MA’s! He has set a world record. No other human being has ever possessed twenty-four MA’s in twenty-four subjects.But the man was utterly stupid. In fact, even without seeing him I would have said that he must be stupid. He wasted his whole life just collecting certificates. And when I told him, “You look stupid,” he was very angry.He said, “You are the first person – everybody has praised me!”But I said, “I can see in your eyes there is no quality which can say that some intelligence is inside. I don’t see any sharpness in you. You have collected degrees, but you have lost something while you were collecting all this nonsense. Your memory is good, but your intelligence is poor.”It is not necessary that both should exist together.In the past, religion was the easiest approach to fulfill your ego. No intelligence is needed, no memory is needed, no will is needed, no struggle is needed. All that is needed is a weak, impotent personality. All that is needed is a cowardly man who is incapable of fighting in the world. He can escape to the monastery, and just by escaping to the monastery he becomes a great saint. In the monastery his whole day is uncreative; he is not doing anything, he is not enriching the world. And if he is doing anything at all, that is a kind of self-torture. He may be fasting, praying five times a day, doing many yoga postures, standing on his head for hours, standing naked in the cold or in the heat – all kinds of self-violence. And these qualities have been praised, highly praised.We have praised stupid people as saints and we have praised uncreative people as religious, as spiritual. They have not contributed anything to the world; it is because of them the world is suffering so much.In India, religion has been very predominant, more predominant than anywhere else. And you can see the consequences! India has almost become the hell of the earth. People are starving. People are hungry, dying, ill, no energy, lethargic, no desire to do anything – in every possible way immoral, but still thinking themselves spiritual because once a month they go on a fast, or once a week, or because they go every day to the temple, or because they read the Gita every day, or because every day they go on chanting some stupid mantra thinking that they are doing Transcendental Meditation. And you don’t see any meditativeness anywhere. You don’t see any peace, silence, joy. You don’t see anything that can be said to be the outcome of centuries of religiousness.My vision of religion is totally different.You ask, “What does it mean to be religious?” To me, to be religious means many things because religion is a multidimensional phenomenon. First it means an egoless state – first and foremost it means a deep acceptance of one’s nobodiness. Religion is not a ladder that leads you higher than others. It is not trying to achieve some superiority but, on the contrary, it is relaxing into your ordinariness. A religious person neither feels inferior nor superior; in fact, he never compares himself with anybody else. He cannot compare – his understanding makes it clear to him that comparison is not possible because there are no two persons similar. How can you compare people who are so dissimilar? You cannot compare Buddha to Krishna, Krishna to Christ, Christ to Mohammed, Mohammed to Kabir, Kabir to Nanak – no, that is not possible. You cannot compare anybody with anybody else; everybody is unique.But when I say everybody is unique, remember the word everybody. I am not using the word unique in a comparative sense – more unique than others, more unique than somebody else. Everybody is unique! Uniqueness is an ordinary quality, the most ordinary quality. A religious person is utterly ordinary.In India there is a tremendously beautiful treatise which contains only the names of God and nothing else: Vishnu Sahasranam, the One Thousand Names of God – just names and nothing else. But those names are something unbelievably beautiful, showing different aspects of God. In those one thousand names there are two names: one is “God is the most ordinary” and the other is “God is the most extraordinary.” Ordinary and extraordinary, both – two names of God.The religious person is ordinary, very ordinary. He lives a very simple, unpretentious life with no claim to extraordinariness. But that’s what makes him extraordinary, so there is no contradiction in those two names.To be extraordinary is a very ordinary desire. To be ordinary is not an ordinary desire; it is extraordinary. And to relax into one’s ordinariness is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the world. The moment you relax into your ordinariness and you start enjoying the ordinary small things of life: in the early morning a cup of tea, a walk in the woods, a swim in the river, listening to the birds or just sitting under a tree – “doing nothing, sitting silently, spring comes and the grass grows by itself” – or cooking food or cleaning your house…Religion is not concerned with what you do, it is concerned with the quality that you bring to your work. You may be praying in a church and there may be no religion in it because the way you are doing it is irreligious.I have heard…A king and the high priest of the country were both praying early in the morning. It was still dark and they could not see in the temple. The king was saying, “My God, I am just dust under your feet. I am nobody. Have mercy on me!”And the priest said almost the same, maybe in different words but the same thing, “I am nobody. Have mercy on us!”And then they both heard with surprise, a third voice. By that time it was becoming a little light and they could see – the poorest beggar of the town was also praying and he was saying, “God, I am dust under your feet. I am nobody. Have mercy on us!”The king blinked his eyes, turned toward the priest and said, “Look who is saying that he is just ordinary, that he is nobody. Just look! Who is saying, ‘I am nobody’? Just a beggar! The king can say, ‘I am nobody,’ the high priest can say, ‘I am nobody,’ but a beggar? How egoistic. How pretentious!”They both laughed at the idea of the beggar trying to be just like the king or the high priest. He was also bragging about being nobody. The king and the priest thought it insulting.Of course, they can say they are nobody, because everybody knows they are not. Even God knows they are not! They are just being humble. But this poor beggar – what humility is there? He is certainly nobody, and he is saying, “I am nobody.” What is the point of saying it?Remember, your so-called saints have tried to be humble before God, but just in order that they can be higher in the eyes of people. But my idea of a religious man is that he does not even claim ordinariness – he claims not. He is simply ordinary, whatever he is.A Zen master, Rinzai, was asked, “What did you use to do before you were enlightened?”He said, “I used to chop wood and carry water from the well.”And the man asked, “Now, now that you are enlightened, what do you do?”He said, “The same thing – chopping wood and carrying water from the well.”The man was puzzled. He said, “I cannot understand. Then what is the difference? Then what is the point of becoming enlightened? Before you used to chop wood and carry water, now you continue the same thing. Then what is the difference?”Rinzai laughed. He said, “The difference is that before I was doing it because I had to do it, it was a duty; now it is a joy. The quality has changed – the work is the same!”You eat, the religious person eats, but the quality is different. In the Upanishads it is said: “Annam brahman, Food is God.” The religious person eats as if he is eating God because all is God. He drinks as if he is drinking God because all is God. To you he is just sipping tea – he is sipping God.Hence the Zen tea temple and the tea ceremony. The Zen master gathers his disciples, prepares tea, and they sit silently listening to the samovar and its humming sound, and the aroma of the tea fills the small room. The room is made in the garden by a pond. Birds are singing outside, the air is fragrant, and they are all sitting silently. The master pours the tea; they receive it with great gratitude, with deep love. It is a gift from the master – it is no longer ordinary tea, it is not tea at all – as if the master has poured his own being into their cups. Then silently, meditatively, prayerfully, they drink the tea.When Christian missionaries came to know about it, they could not believe how tea drinking could be called meditative. In a Christian church if you start drinking tea and coffee or smoking cigarettes you will be thrown out. “What are you doing?” Even in a Hindu temple you will not be allowed to drink tea. “This is a temple,” they will say, “a sacred place, and you are doing such a mundane activity! Go to some hotel – this is not a hotel.”But I agree with the Zen people: the small things of life have to be transformed by your inner transformation. This I call the religious quality; everything becomes sacred. Taking a bath, making love, eating food, going to sleep – everything becomes sacred because wherever you look is God and whatever you do, you do with God.To experience life as divine is the most fundamental quality of a religious person. For him, God is not a person but the whole energy of existence. God is godliness, not a person but a quality; he breathes godliness, he lives surrounded by godliness.And you ask, “After awareness, what is the first quality of a religious being?” That is very difficult to say because it happens to different people in different ways. After awareness – awareness of course is the method that transforms you, makes you religious. But then one never knows. Meera started dancing and singing. Buddha never danced and never sang in the same way as Meera. Meera never sat under a tree silently like a Buddha. Jesus speaks in words of fire. The words of Buddha are like lotus flowers falling from the beyond; there is no fire in them. Jesus is fire. He could drive away the money changers from the temple almost violently, with a whip in his hand. He turned their boards upside down and single-handedly drove them out of the temple. You cannot conceive such an act from Buddha. Jesus is pure rebellion; Buddha is just silence.It is said the first thing that Zarathustra did in his life was to laugh the moment he was born. Now, children are not supposed to laugh when they are born, they are supposed to cry! Zarathustra laughed, and that laughter remained like an undercurrent his whole life. He is the most life-affirmative buddha ever. He loved life so deeply that for him there was no God other than life.Mahavira renounced life, renounced the marketplace. But he was not an escapist, he was not a coward – not at all. He lived with ferocious wild animals in the jungle, naked, in total insecurity, with no possessions. And he worked hard; in fact, nobody else in the whole history of humanity has worked so hard to achieve the ultimate state of no-mind. Buddha achieved it through relaxation and Mahavira achieved it through effort.Now, individuals differ and one never knows. If you are carrying a talent hidden inside you for being a poet, the moment awareness happens to you, you will suddenly start on a new pilgrimage: you will become a poet, you will explode like a poet. Or you may be a Vincent van Gogh or a Picasso, unaware of it. Once awareness happens you may start painting. One never knows because each person is such a mystery, unpredictable.So I cannot say what will be the first quality of a religious being after awareness. Awareness certainly has to be the most fundamental background – without it nobody can be religious – but after that nothing can be said. People have behaved differently, and I accept them all as religious: the Zen masters who painted, Krishna who played on his flute, Buddha who sat silently under the tree, Meera who danced all over the country from village to village, Jesus with all his rebellion, Zarathustra with his laughter. There is no way of saying, and it is better that there is no way of saying what will be the first thing because the danger is that if it can be said you may imitate.If I say that after awareness has happened you will dance, there is every possibility that at least you will try. Howsoever awkward it looks, howsoever embarrassing to others, but you will try – you have to prove that you have attained awareness, you have become a buddha. Now, unless you dance…I don’t think Mahavira dancing would look very good! Meera looks beautiful while she is dancing. In fact, it would have been unfortunate if she had not danced and simply sat under a tree; we would have missed the beautiful songs she sang. Nobody in the whole world has sung such beautiful songs. They come directly from the innermost core of her being. They are not ordinary poetry, they are divine. It is not that she is composing them, they are simply flowing through her naturally. She never learned to dance; it exploded! It was an explosion.So it is good that it cannot be said, although all the religions have said something, and that’s where they have created difficulties for people. Christians say what the qualities will be, Jainas say what the qualities will be, Buddhists say what the qualities will be. And then Buddhists and Jainas and Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans have all tried to imitate. People are imitators. Even if Charles Darwin had not discovered that man was born of the monkeys, sooner or later we would have had to accept it – because of his imitativeness. Man simply imitates.My own approach is to leave you free. Awareness certainly has to be there because without awareness nothing will happen, but then you have to be left absolutely free. Then you have to wait, then you have to see what happens. Not only will others be surprised, you are also in for a great surprise after awareness because your innermost genius will surface and for the first time you will know what you really are. A rose will become a rose, a marigold will become a marigold, a lotus will become a lotus. And nobody knows because man’s intrinsic nature is freedom.It is good that different people will express their religiousness differently. It makes the world more beautiful, more ecstatic, more wondrous. It makes the world something worth living; otherwise it will be a monotonous world, it will be a boring world, it will lack variety.The fourth question:Osho,At Kennedy Space Center, Florida, we saw the ultimate in science to explore outer space and create “a better man,” and at Osho Space Center, Pune, is the effort to experience the inner space and create “a new man.” The former is the launching pad for the new century backed by the world's richest and most powerful nation. This one is the flying saucer for the new consciousness and yet decried by one of the world's poorest nations. One is matter and the other spirit. What is happening?The idea of a better man is an old idea, very old, as old as man himself. Everybody is willing to be a better man because it needs no radical change. A better man means something is added to you: you remain the same, you remain continuous; there is no discontinuity and you become richer, better.The idea of a better man is rooted in greed, hence everybody will support it. The rich countries will support it, the poor countries will support it. India was totally in favor of Mahatma Gandhi because he was trying to bring a better man.The idea of a better man is reformatory; it is not revolutionary. But the idea of a new man is dangerous because it requires guts. Its basic requirement is that you have to die to the old and you have to be born anew – it is a rebirth. Hence I am opposed. And it is not only here that I am opposed and decried, I will be opposed and decried anywhere else in the world; even if I am in Florida the same will happen.In fact, there is more possibility of opposition in a richer and powerful country than there is in a poor and starving country, for the simple reason that millions of Indians have no idea of what is going on here: they have no time, they have no interest. The birth of a new man is not a vital issue for them. Their vital problem is how to survive, and you are talking of the birth of a new man! They are not even able to survive. Their problems are totally different. They are ill, they are hungry, their children are uneducated, they are unemployed, they don’t have any land, no food, no shelter – and you are talking about a new man? They are not interested; it is not their problem.But if I talk about the new man in America I will be killed immediately, imprisoned. I will not be tolerated at all because that means a danger to the whole American way of life.The American way of life depends on ambition, and my new man has to be utterly ambitionless. America’s whole approach is things should be bettered, everything should be made better. It does not matter where it is going to lead, but things have to be better, better and better. They are obsessed with the idea of bettering things. You have to have more speed, better machines, better technology, better railroads, better roads – everything better! Of course, in the same way, you need a better man. It fits with the whole American style of life.Man is also thought to be a commodity. Just as you need better cows and better dogs and better cars and better airplanes, you need a better man. There is no difference; it is the same logic.I am talking about a new man. The new man is not necessarily the better man. He will be livelier, he will be more joyous, he will be more alert, but who knows whether he will be better or not? As far as politicians are concerned, he will not be better because he will not be a better soldier – he will not be ready to be a soldier at all. He will not be competitive, and the whole competitive economy will collapse. He will not be interested just in accumulating junk, and the whole economy depends on that. All your advertising agencies are just bringing to your mind the idea of collecting more and more junk.The new man will have a totally different vision of life. He will live in a more loving way because to him love is richness. He will know that money cannot buy love or joy. He will know that money is utilitarian; it is not the goal of life.The whole American system depends on doing better. “Do it better!” What you are doing is not the point. “If you are murdering people, do it better!” You can see what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – America really did it in a better way than anybody else has ever done it. “Reach the moon!” Nobody asks why. If you ask why, you are crazy. Such questions are not to be asked. The only question worth asking is, “How to reach the moon in a better way than anybody else? Defeat Russia. It should be an American who is first to walk on the moon.” For what? That is not the point. As far as I am concerned, I can’t see the point. The American standing on the moon looks so silly! But that is their way of thinking, their philosophy: “Even if you are looking silly, look silly in a better way. Defeat everybody else!”My new man means the end of the old world. So it is not only a question of my being decried and opposed in India – I will be decried and opposed anywhere else. In fact, I have chosen India for a particular reason; here people are so lethargic. Even if they want to kill me they will take twenty, thirty years! By that time I will have done my work – I will have done the harm. It is not for no reason that I have chosen India: people are lethargic.Just a few days ago a man threw a knife at me to kill me. Now, such a knife can be thrown only in India! When it fell just in front of me I thought it was a stone. My eyes are not bad, I don’t need glasses yet, I can see very clearly. I thought it was just a stone – it looked so dirty. And when I saw the pictures of it I was very puzzled – you could not even cut vegetables with it! This is the beauty of being in India. Now, in America or in Germany they would have done it with more sophisticated means. India is the best place at the moment to do my work, my kind of work.And why is the new man decried? He has always been decried. Jesus was killed because he was talking about the new man, not about the better man. Mahavira was not killed, Buddha was not killed, because they were talking about the better man. You should see the difference.Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born again you shall not enter my kingdom of God.” Now you cannot find any parallel in Mahavira, in Patanjali, in Moses, in Mohammed; no, nowhere can you find a parallel. Jesus insisted that first you have to die to the past, only then can a new consciousness arise in you. He was crucified.Socrates was talking about a new man. Remember, these are the differences. Why was Socrates killed? Athens was one of the most cultured cities of those days; in fact, not only of those days, but even today no city compares with Athens. Twenty-five centuries have passed, but neither New York nor London nor Paris nor Mumbai nor Kolkata nor Beijing nor Moscow – no city has been able to achieve that peak of culture, sophistication, civilization, that Athens did.But why did such cultured people become so animalistic, so barbarous as to kill a man like Socrates? He was talking about the new man. If he had talked about the better man he would have been worshipped.Those who have talked about the better man have always been worshipped because they are telling you that the past is beautiful but it can be more beautified. They are not against the past, they are not against conventions, they are not against traditions; they are all for them. The tradition has to be the foundation and on that foundation you can raise a better temple, a better house.To talk about the new man is dangerous. A new man means cutting away from the past totally, disrupting, uprooting yourself completely from the past, dying to the past and living in the present. And old habits die very hard. We have become accustomed to hearing about a better man; it has gone into the very circulation of our blood. Every saint, every mahatma talks about the better man; that’s his business, we know. But about a new man? Then we become afraid. He is bringing something absolutely new; he is taking us into the territory of the unknown, he is trying to uproot us from the familiar. And we have lived for thousands of years in a particular way; we are conditioned by it, we are part of it. Only very few people can manage to get out of it. Hence my message is going to remain only for the chosen few.Remember, old habits die hard – and our religions, our philosophies are very old, our styles of life are very old. And I am all for the new. We think the old is gold – and I say the old is just junk! I agree with Henry Ford that history is bunk. It is all bullshit! We have to free man from all that has gone before, and we have to free man totally, absolutely, categorically.“Mummy, why did you marry daddy?”“Ah!” replies the mother. “So you are wondering too!”“Didn’t I meet you in Texas?”“I’ve never been to Texas.”“Neither have I. Guess it must have been two other fellows.”These drunkards, these unconscious people have been dominating the whole of humanity.It is a very rainy day. Two madmen are sitting on a bus. When the bus stops at the traffic lights, one madman looks out of the window and says, “Hey, Charlie, look at all that water! I am going to take a bath!”So he opens the window and jumps out. After a few seconds his friend hears a shout, “Dive a little further away, Charlie, the water here is too shallow!”Mad people and drunkards – they have been our deciding factors in the past. We have never listened to the awakened ones. The awakened ones cannot talk about bettering man. It is like telling an ill person, “I will give you medicine to better your illness.” The ill person does not want to better his illness; he wants to get rid of it, he wants to be healthy.It is Saturday night; the circus is packed. The owner enters the ring, stands in front of the audience and says, “Dingling Brothers Circus offers five thousand dollars, the contents of this envelope, to any man courageous enough to perform three daring feats: make Zorba the elephant sit down; comb the hair of Leo, our lion; and thirdly, make love to this old lady over here.”As he is saying this, an attendant is bringing into the ring an enormous gray elephant, a ferocious-looking lion and a poor, stooped-over old lady.“Who is gonna go for it? Five thousand dollars, five thousand just for laying out this old elephant, combing this cat’s hair, and loving this old lady.”From the back of the crowd comes a yell, and a drunkard, a strongly built man, comes stumbling into the center ring and says, “I will do it!”So they open the door to the cage. The drunk enters, walks over to the elephant and kicks him in the balls. The elephant sits down with a thump. The audience claps.Next he goes into the lion’s cage and they get into a fight, struggling, rolling over each other, the lion roaring, the man screaming – total chaos.After thirty minutes he comes out of the cage all bruised and battered. The lion is inside, stretched out and panting exhaustedly. The drunk staggers over to the Master of Ceremonies and asks, “Well, where is that old lady whose hair I gotta comb?”Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Can you please sing us a song on this? Lately I have seen that I am totally vicious: suddenly my heart then carries me into a very insecure but beautiful place. I love this whenever it comes, but why the insecurity and muddledness, yet so much grace?Life is basically insecure. That is its intrinsic quality; it cannot be changed. Death is secure, absolutely secure. The moment you choose security, unknowingly you have chosen death. The moment you choose life, unawares you have chosen insecurity: aes dhammo sanantano – such is the law of life, something which is inevitable. Try to understand.The moment things are secure you will feel bored because there is no possibility of any exploration. That’s why marriages create so much boredom. It is the same love affair that was such an adventure; once it becomes institutionalized as marriage it loses all joy, all dance, all poetry. It becomes very mundane, it becomes very routine – but it is secure.Love is insecure. One never knows the ways of love. When it happens it happens, when it disappears it disappears. You cannot do anything about it. Marriage is manageable. The law, the society, the public opinion, the morality, the religion, the fear of hell, the greed for heaven – these are all props which keep marriage somehow alive. But it is not true life.True life is always moving from the known into the unknown. And the crossing point from the known to the unknown is what insecurity is all about. The moment you cross the boundary you feel insecure. With the secure, with the familiar, you are bored; you start becoming dull. With the insecure, with the unknown, the uncharted, you feel ecstatic, beautiful, again a child – again those eyes of wonder, again that heart which can feel the awe of things is there.You would like to know these beautiful spaces with security, but in the very nature of things that is not possible. Nothing can be done about it. If you want beautiful spaces you have to start loving insecurity. And then a miracle happens: if you can love insecurity, its insecureness disappears. If you know insecurity contains love, beauty, ecstasy, truth, God, then where is the insecurity?Insecurity exists in your fear of the unknown, of the true, because you have lived in lies for so long – you have lived in lies for centuries. Your collective unconscious is full of lies, and it goes on projecting those lies on the screen of the mind. Everybody has lived in fear because all the religions have exploited the natural instinct of fear in man.Hence, the invention of hell. Hell exists nowhere; it is the invention of the cunning priests, Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist. They may differ in their philosophical systems but they don’t differ in the basic exploitation – the exploitation of man’s fear and greed. Fear and greed are two aspects of the same coin. And once you have become afraid, once a trembling has become part of your being, you start looking for it. Even if it is not there you will have to invent it, to satisfy your collective unconscious.David, a young apprentice barber, goes to his boss and says, “Mr. Snippet, I am not going to work here anymore. All your employees are anti-Semites!”“Anti-Semites? Where did you get a silly idea like that from?”“I have good proof. I made a test,” the young man answered. “I asked everybody the same question. The conclusion could not be more clear, boss – all anti-Semites!”“But what was the question?”“I asked them how they would react if there was a mass extermination of all Jews and all barbers.”“Barbers? Why barbers?” asked the boss.“See, even you, boss!”You go on carrying your ideas and you go on projecting them. You will find ways to invent. You cannot remain with a vague fear; you want it to be solid, tangible.The insecurity is there because you have not been brought up with the right approach toward life, you have not been given any insight into the truth of insecurity. You have simply been made afraid. You have not been trained, disciplined for adventure. You have been told to remain within the boundaries and never to go beyond the boundaries.A person who lives within the boundaries defined by others – of course they are defined by others because a child cannot define his own boundaries. Parents define boundaries out of their fear. Their parents have done the same to them; now they are doing the same to their children. This is how diseases go on being transferred from one generation to another.Each child hates the parents but pretends to love them. I can understand why he hates them because the parents are poisoning him. He feels it in his guts that they are destroying something tremendously significant. They are destroying his very life, but they are destroying it for his own sake. He cannot even revolt because he is so helpless.It was thought in the past that the proletariat is the most exploited class; that was not true. Later on we found it is not the proletariat but the world of women that is the most exploited world. But now we are discovering even that is not true. The most exploited class and the most helpless is the class of small children. The child is so dependent on the parents. He has to listen to them. He cannot say no. Inside his being he says no; in his bones, in his blood, in his marrow he says no. But on the surface he has to go on saying yes just to survive. So he accepts the boundaries.When you have accepted certain boundaries for twenty, twenty-five years that is one-third of your life and the most important one-third. You will never be so intelligent again, never so vital again, never so vulnerable again, never so innocent again, never so unconditioned again. These twenty-five years – the first third of life – are managed by people who are afraid, trembling, who are slaves. I am not saying they are doing harm to their children knowingly, intentionally. They are good people; their intentions are good, but their understanding is poor, almost nonexistent. Otherwise every parent would help the child to go beyond the known.That is the true function of a parent, the true function of a master: to help you to go beyond the known, to make you a lover of the unknown, to help you to risk for the unknown, to make you a gambler rather than a businessman, to help you to be more poetic rather than more calculative. Then there will be no problem – the loving space and the insecurity of it, both will be rejoiced by you.The second question:Osho,I am confused. When you speak of Dionysius, is the Dionysius that you speak of: first, the ancient god of Greek theater, of Greek mythology? Second: a bishop who is unrelated to the theater god or to the mythology? Or third: a combination of first and second?I am also unaware of who this St. Timothy is. Could you find a way of shedding light on my confusion and lack of awareness on this subject?Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, writes that Dionysius written through a backward process in roman letters spells Jehovah. And I have been informed that the IHVH tetragrammaton of Jehovah is the fire, air, water and earth of Buddha's paramatma. Could you communicate what you are aware of on this subject? Thank you.The first thing that I would like to say to you is I am not at all concerned whether Dionysius ever existed or not. It does not matter. What matters are those beautiful sutras; whosoever has written them was an enlightened person. It certainly cannot be the Dionysius of Greek mythology because mythological gods are not known to write letters and sutras. In fact, they don’t exist at all! He is not a combination of the mythological Dionysius and the bishop. I had told you in the first lecture that he is the first Bishop of Athens.But it seems you love to be confused. It happens to people who are very interested in rubbish knowledge.You say, “I am confused…” That is absolutely true. But I am not confused, I am absolutely clear. My interest is not history, my interest is not the world of facts, my interest is the revelation of truth. Whosoever this man was, he was a buddha. The proof is intrinsic, it is in his words. Those words cannot be spoken by anybody other than one who has arrived.This is the Eastern approach. The West thinks too much of history. History means time consciousness; whether this man existed or not, then when, then who his father and mother were, on what date he was born and when he died, and where the proofs are for all this.You will be surprised to know that the East has never taken any interest in history, for the simple reason that history means time. Time means mind. When the mind stops, time stops. You may have sometimes felt it. When there is no thought in your mind, is there any time left? The procession of thoughts creates time.This is the most fundamental insight of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: that time is a flexible phenomenon, it depends on your moods. If you are happy time goes by fast, if you are miserable time slows down. If you are sitting by the side of a dying man the night seems to be almost unending – it seems as if the morning is not going to happen at all. And if you are sitting by the side of a woman or a man you love, then it seems time has got wings; it is flying. Hours pass like minutes, days pass like hours, months pass like days.As far as the clock is concerned it makes no difference whether you are joyous or sad, happy or miserable. The clock moves unconcerned with you. So there are two things to be remembered: clock time is one thing, totally separate from psychological time; psychological time is within you.Einstein was not a meditator, otherwise his Theory of Relativity would have reached a higher peak. He only says, “When you are joyous time goes fast, when you are miserable time slows down.” A great insight, but had he been a meditator the world would have been immensely enriched because then he would have said one thing more: if you are absolutely without mind, just pure consciousness, time stops completely, disappears, leaving no trace behind.Bertrand Russell has written a book, Why I Am Not a Christian, and he has said many things, significant things. He has argued well against Christianity. One of his arguments is that Christians say that for your sins you will have to suffer in hell for eternity. Now this is absurd! How many sins can you commit in a single life? And Christians believe only in a single life, a seventy-year life. How many sins can you commit? Can you commit so many sins that it can make the eternal punishment look justified? Forever and ever you will be in hell? There must be a limit because your sins cannot be unlimited.Russell says, “I have counted all my sins. If I confess to one of the most hard-hearted magistrates, he cannot give me more than four and a half years imprisonment. If he also includes my thoughts about committing sins that I have not committed, just thought about, if my dreams and thoughts are also included as if they were acts, then at the most the sentence can be doubled – nine years. But more than that is absolutely absurd.”And I agree with him, but still I will say he has missed the point, totally missed the point. Logically he is right, but he has missed the point of Jesus’ insight. When Jesus says hell is eternal he is really saying what Albert Einstein said twenty centuries later: that hell is so painful, it is such a misery, that it appears as if it is eternal. It is not eternal, but it appears eternal.To balance it you will have to look into Hindu mythology: heaven is momentary. Then you will be able to understand the whole point; then both sides of it are available to you. Hell seems to be eternal and heaven seems to be momentary. All your pleasure seems to be momentary. All the so-called mahatmas and saints go on saying this, that your pleasures are momentary. But pleasures are bound to be momentary; there is nothing wrong in it. If it is a pleasure, it is bound to be momentary. But they go on thinking that there must be a pleasure which is eternal. That is impossible: no pleasure can be eternal and no pain can be momentary. When pain is there it appears eternal, and when pleasure is there it appears momentary.Hence in the East we have a third term which is neither pain nor pleasure; it is bliss. Bliss is timeless; it is neither momentary nor eternal. It simply has no relevance to time. Time means history.Now, what are you going to gain even if you come to know who this man Dionysius is? Will it in any way help your understanding of his statements? Will it help you to become awakened, to become a meditator? No, you will be lost in a jungle of words; you will not be able to come out of the jungle. Scholarship is such a jungle – in fact the only jungle that has remained in the world; all other jungles have disappeared. But once you enter it there is no end to it.Now, you are not only concerned with Dionysius, you are also concerned with St. Timothy. And who told you that he was a saint? I had just told you that Timothy was a disciple of Dionysius and Dionysius was writing letters to him. These are his letters. Now you have imagined, you have invented that he is a saint. If he were a saint there would have been no need to write letters to him; it would have been absolutely futile. What is the point of saying the same things that he already knows?I have heard…An American and an Englishman were walking in a forest. One hour passed. The American was feeling very uneasy because the Englishman was completely silent.Finally the Englishman said, “Spring in the air!”And the American said, “Why should I?”Now there is a possibility of some talk, some dialogue. But between two saints there is no possibility of any communication. Of course, there is a possibility of communion, but communion happens in silence, not through words.I have not said that Timothy was a saint. He may have become one finally, but he was not. He was just a disciple and I don’t know anything more about him.In fact, these are irrelevant things that you have asked; it is not inquiry. You are full of borrowed knowledge. Behind you are so many people like Robert Graves and others. Now, they have filled your mind with esoteric bullshit: “…that written backward it becomes Jehovah…” If you want bullshit I can create it! For example, Dionysius is known by his short name, Dennis, and Timothy must be known by his short name, Tim. And Timbuktu is made from Timothy’s name – St. Timothy. Timothy becomes Tim, Tim becomes Timbuktu. And then you go on… Then you can find your own ways – what to do and what not to do. Esoteric nonsense is so easy.And remember perfectly well that Buddha does not believe in any paramatma; it must be the invention of Robert Graves. Buddha believes in no God. Buddha is the most godly person and yet the most godless. He is one of the most beautiful phenomena that has happened on the earth: godless and godly together.But you are living out of borrowed things, and this happens. When you live out of borrowed things you are bound to be confused.An old man lived with his old woman in a very cold little town in the interior of Brazil. It was a freezing cold morning and the old man came out of his house dressed only in the top of his pajamas.When his neighbor saw him he could not help asking, “Eh, Jose, what are you doing naked outside?”“Well, yesterday I came out without my scarf and when I returned home my neck was stiff from the cold.”“And what has that got to do with now?” inquired the neighbor.“I don’t know, Pablo. It was my wife’s idea!”Avoid others’ ideas, otherwise you will look silly and you will behave stupidly! And don’t be concerned with nonessentials.A young boy and his Jewish grandmother were walking along the shore when a huge wave appeared out of nowhere, sweeping the child out to sea. The horrified woman fell to her knees, raised her eyes to the heavens and begged the Lord to return her beloved grandson. And lo! Another wave reared up and deposited the stunned child on the sand before her.The grandmother looked the boy over carefully; he was fine. But then she glared angrily up toward the heavens. “When we came,” she snapped indignantly, “he had a hat!”Avoid nonessentials. If you have got the child, why be worried about the cap? If the cap is lost, nothing is lost.All your questions are simply stupid. Don’t misunderstand me – when I say stupid I mean stupid!The third question:Osho,Why should there be a difference between moral and legal standards in the matter of holding one guilty?V. D. Sangvai, three words will have to be understood: one is religion or spirituality, the second is morality, and the third is legality. Religiousness or spirituality has no moral ideas; it is beyond moral and immoral, it is beyond right and wrong. It has no conscience; it lives out of pure consciousness. There is a tremendous awareness, and one acts out of that awareness. Whenever some action arises out of awareness it is inevitably good.But man lives in unawareness. Man’s whole life is full of unawareness; he is almost like a robot. He sees and yet he sees not, he hears and yet he hears not. He is, but only in a literal sense, not really, not like a Buddha or a Christ or a Zarathustra or like Dionysius, Pythagoras, Heraclitus. No, he does not exist with that intensity, with that awareness.Hence morality becomes almost a necessity; it is a substitute. When you can’t get the real thing, it is better to have something unreal than not having anything at all because man needs a certain code of behavior. If it flows out of awareness then there is no problem.In England the rain was falling non-stop for days and the Thames was overflowing its banks.The butler of an English lord comes into the library where Milord is enjoying his drink and reading his newspaper in front of the fireplace.“Milord,” he announces, “the Thames is flooding the street!”Milord very calmly answers, “Thank you, Jeeves.”After a few minutes the butler comes in again and announces, “Sir, the Thames has reached the front door!”“Very well, thank you, Jeeves,” replies Milord without raising his eyes from the newspaper.After half an hour Jeeves knocks at the door, opens it and standing aside announces: “Milord, the Thames!”This is the way people are – just living in a thick cloud of unconsciousness. Their life is not that of light but of darkness, and out of this darkness, confusion, smoke, what can you expect? They are bound to do something foolish, something wrong.Unless everyone becomes a buddha there will remain a need for some kind of morality. Morality is not something great; it is a poor substitute for religion. If you can be religious then there is no need for morality.My emphasis here is on religion, not on morality because I have seen the utter failure of morality. It has been in a way utilitarian – it has somehow helped people to live with each other, not violently cutting each other’s throats. They cut, but they cut in indirect ways and they cut by degrees, not suddenly. They cut in sophisticated ways. First they give you tranquilizers or drugs to make you unconscious so you don’t feel much pain.All political ideologies and religious ideologies are nothing but nonmedicinal tranquilizers. The whole purpose is to make you live in sleep so you can be exploited, oppressed, enslaved, and still you will not be aware of what is happening to you.Karl Marx is right in that sense, that “Religion is the opium of the people.” But by religion he means Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism. He was not aware of the religion I am talking about, the religion of the buddhas. He was talking about organized, institutionalized religion. He was not talking about the living experience of the enlightened ones. Because that is not an opium, that is just the opposite of it – it is full awareness.Sangvai, you ask me, “Why should there be a difference between moral and legal standards…” There is a difference between religious and moral standards. Religion means you live out of your consciousness. Morality means you live according to the highest standards the society has imposed upon you; it is not according to your own light. It is the maximum potential, the hope of the society that has been imposed on you. And the legal standard is the minimum.The moral standard is the maximum, the highest expectation of the society, and the legal standard is the minimum expectation. “At least you should fulfill the legal. If you cannot rise up to the moral, then please fulfill the legal.” The legal is the lowest limit and the moral is the highest limit, hence the difference. The difference is there.There are many immoral things which have nothing to do with the law. You may be doing many immoral things, but you cannot be caught legally because legality consists of the minimum, the lowest limit.It is said that a good teacher is one who is able to explain what he is saying to the most stupid student in his class. If the most stupid one can understand him, then of course all the others will understand. The law thinks of the most stupid person, the most inhuman person, the one who is very close to the animal. Morality thinks of the most intelligent, the most human. Hence the difference between the two, and the difference will remain.And I have reminded you of a third thing also: the spiritual standard. That is the highest, the transcendental, beyond which nothing exists. The buddhas live according to the ultimate, the saints live according to the moral, and the so-called citizens live according to the legal. These are the three categories of human beings.It will be the most evolved society when there is only one standard, but that is only a hope. When there is only one standard, the spiritual, then there will be no need for any law, no need for any morality, no need for the state, for the magistrate, for the police, for the military. Almost ninety percent of our energy is wasted in this whole arrangement. If man can live according to his own light – and that is possible only if he reaches his innermost core through meditation – then all this criminal wastage of energy can be stopped. The earth can become paradise itself because if one hundred percent energy can become available to creativity, to art, to science, to music, to painting, to poetry, we can create a real society of human beings for the first time.Right now the human being only looks like a human being; deep down he is nothing but an animal masquerading as a human being. His humanity is not even skin-deep – just scratch him a little and immediately the animal comes out. The human being that we are living with, that we have lived hitherto, is concerned with such trivia that it can only prove his mediocrity; it cannot give us any hint of his intelligence.Man goes on arguing about great things, but goes on living in a totally different way. His thoughts are very great; his life is very immature. In fact, he creates all those great thoughts to cover up his immaturity.Four colleagues from the philosophy department of a university went to play golf. On the first tee they found a foursome of psychologists just about to tee off.One of the philosophers quipped, “You fellows must really have a terrible time trying to play golf while you psych each other out!”“At least we don’t argue,” one of the psychologists replied, “about whether or not the ball is really there!”Our philosophers, our psychologists, our theologians, have remained abstract, talking about great things just to escape from the ugly reality.My effort here is to help you to become aware of the ugly reality because to be aware of it will change its ugliness into beauty. Awareness is a miracle. Otherwise people go on in a long process of hair-splitting and they call it philosophy and they call it religion, metaphysics, spirituality. And they remain concerned with such stupid things.In the Middle Ages in European countries, the great theologians were concerned about a problem you will laugh at. And they worked on it for hundreds of years and thousands of books were written on it. “How many angels can dance on the point of a single needle?” It was a great philosophical problem. You will laugh, but they were very serious about it.You are serious about many things others will laugh at, your children will laugh at. Drop all philosophical, all abstract wastage of your intelligence. Become concerned with the truth.The truth is that man is not even legal, what to say about moral? And if he is not even legal or moral he cannot understand religion. Religion remains still for the chosen few, for the courageous, for the intelligent.And the so-called moralists, the puritans, are not really moral people, remember. H. G. Wells has said, “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” He is right. The so-called moral people are not really moral; they are living a double life – on the surface moral, but in reality as immoral as anybody else or even more. Maybe their morality is there to hide their illegal activities. And everyone seems to be in the same boat. From the lowest laborer to the man who holds the highest post, the prime minister or the president of a country, it seems all are in the same boat.Richard Nixon was a great man until he was caught. Now Jimmy Carter is getting into the same trap. His brother has been caught – he has taken millions of dollars illegally from a country; he was lobbying for that country. And just the other day his son was caught doing the same thing, and also his sister. So now you can wait for the news – any day his wife! And finally you will find that he was at the center of it all. And he must be at the center of it all; without him all this could not happen. So just as Nixon fell down from the world of being a great man through Watergate, Jimmy Carter is falling every day through “Billygate!” His whole smile has gone. In the beginning you could have counted his teeth; now that whole smile has disappeared.It seems a man is moral only until he is caught. So the difference between the moral and the immoral is only that of being caught or not.I had a very beautiful teacher in my high school days. He was a Mohammedan, a very loving person, and he was the most senior teacher in the school, so he used to be the superintendent of all the examinations. And I loved the man for many things. The one thing that I loved him very much for was that before every examination he would come to us and declare, “I am not against copying, stealing from others, bringing books in – I am not against it at all. But if you are caught, then you will be punished! So, mind, you should not be caught. Once you are caught then I cannot forgive you, but if you can manage then with all my blessings you can do it!”And then he would say, “I will give you five minutes to think. If you have brought any notes, any books, anything, and you want to surrender them you can surrender them within five minutes. Or, if you decide otherwise, go ahead. But remember, if you are caught then you will not find a greater enemy than me. But I am not telling you not to do these things. I am simply telling you that I am here to punish you if you are caught.”I loved him. And many people would start taking out their notes and their books and they would surrender them. “This man is dangerous – he is telling a truth!” But from him I learned my first lesson about what is moral and what is immoral. The difference is not much.Sangvai is an additional judge in Pune, so naturally the question has arisen in him: “Why should there be a difference between moral and legal standards in the matter of holding one guilty?”In fact, to hold anybody guilty is wrong in itself. The guilty person is not guilty; he has been brought up in a guilt-ridden society. He is not totally responsible for it. To punish him is criminal.Once, Lao Tzu was made a magistrate. The emperor of China, thinking him the wisest man of the country, persuaded him to become a magistrate, the highest magistrate of the country. But only one case was enough and he had to be dismissed. In the first case it became clear to the emperor and to everybody else that Lao Tzu was dangerous because he gave six months jail to a man who had been caught stealing redhanded – and he also gave six months jail to the person in whose house he had been stealing from! Nobody could understand what the matter was.The emperor called him: “Are you mad or something? Why have you punished the man who has been robbed of his money?”Lao Tzu said, “That man has accumulated so much that it is natural that he will be robbed. He should be thankful that he is not murdered! In fact, I am not fair in giving them both a similar kind of punishment. The rich man needs a harder punishment than the poor man who is a thief because the first crime has been committed by the rich man, not by the poor man. The poor man has done a secondary thing; his crime is secondary, it is not that important.”If in a society people accumulate wealth, then a few people are bound to steal, are bound to become thieves out of necessity. Nobody is really guilty. The whole structure of the society is guilty, and the structure needs to be changed. But we punish individuals and we go on perpetuating the same structure which creates these crimes.A radical change is needed. And even if you want to change the individual, punishment is not the way. He should not be made to feel guilty. In fact, he should be sent for psychological treatment; he needs treatment. He needs a little more awareness, a little more lovingness; he needs a little more meditativeness. Sending him for a few months to jail or for a few years to jail is not going to help – it will simply confirm him as a criminal.In five years of living in jail, what is he going to learn? He will find there master thieves, murderers and all kinds of criminals, and they will teach him the art – in which he must have been lacking, otherwise why would he have been caught? He will come out of the jail more skillful in doing the same crime or maybe even bigger crimes.I am against all punishment. I am against all imprisonment. Prisons should be transformed into hospitals, and people should be sent to centers of meditation where they can gain a little more awareness, a little more lovingness, a little more meditativeness. They should not be changed or punished or beaten – these are ugly ways of taking revenge. This is not justice; this is social revenge! The society is vengeful toward the person because the person has not followed the society.This whole society is rotten and all its systems are rotten. This whole society needs to be changed from the very roots. Its legal system, its political system, its so-called religious system – they are all rotten, they are all wounds full of pus. The society needs a surgical operation.And that’s what we are trying to do here. Naturally, people are going to be against me because what they have been thinking are very important things, what they have thought are great things, I am telling you are just junk, just stupidities.An English lord visits his doctor. He neatly hangs up his umbrella and his bowler. Then he takes off his jacket, his shirt, and his trousers, folding them very neatly and putting them on a chair. He then takes off his shoes and puts them straight under the chair. Then he takes off his underpants, folds them, and puts them on the chair.Standing at attention in front of the doctor he calmly tells him, “Well, as you can see, doctor, my left testicle hangs lower than my right one.”Smiling, the doctor replies, “Oh, but that is perfectly normal. You have nothing to worry about!”“Oh, I’m not worrying, doctor,” replies the man, “but don’t you think it is a bit untidy?”These are the people, completely asleep, snoring. They have to be awakened. They have to be shaken out of their habits. They have to be given a new birth.Hence I say we don’t need a better man, we need a new man. Betterment has gone on for centuries and nothing has happened. Now we don’t need any better man – enough is enough! Now we want a totally new man, discontinuous with the past. We want to begin again as if we are Adam and Eve, just now expelled from the Garden of Eden.I want to start afresh, and it is always easier to make a new house rather than to renovate an old one. This old house has been renovated so many times, and you go on renovating it, supporting it from this side and that, and it goes on collapsing. It goes on and on, again and again. Still you are not fed up with it. You want to go on living in it – even if your life is in danger. And that’s how it is.Humanity has come to a stage where if we continue in the old ways, man is finished. There is only one hope: if we can start a new man from ABC, only then can humanity survive on the earth, otherwise not.The fourth question:Osho,I give an inch, I get a mile. The iceberg is melting bit by bit. But something in me refuses to accept that it can happen to me.We have been brought up with the idea that we are not right, that something is essentially wrong with us, that we are not to be ourselves, that we have to become Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira. One thing certainly has to be avoided, that is becoming ourselves. Nobody has ever told you to just be yourself, hence there is guilt. Everybody is feeling guilty. And whatever you do, you will feel guilty because basically you have been conditioned with the idea, poisoned with the idea, that you are wrong and out of you only wrong things can happen.My approach is totally different. I declare to you that you are perfectly right, that nothing is wrong with you; that you are not to follow somebody else, that you are not to imitate anybody else; that you have to love yourself, trust yourself; that you have to live a life of freedom, a life of rebellion, a life of exploration.And then miracles start happening. When they start happening, of course you cannot believe it because you had always believed that you are a very inferior kind of person, ugly. You have been told thousands of times that whatever you do is wrong. Each child is told every day – and how many times! – “What you are doing is wrong. Don’t do it!”A small child was asked at school, his first day at school, “What is your name?”He said, “My name? Johnny Don’t!”The poor child – because it is always, “Johnny, don’t!” so he thinks that is his name. Whatever he is going to do: he wants to go out, he wants to play, he wants to sing. It is always, “No!” Slowly, slowly he starts thinking of himself as basically wrong.Religions help the idea that man is born in sin. Adam and Eve committed some wrong – and I can’t think what wrong they committed. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge cannot be anything wrong. And if there is anything wrong in it, why did God create that tree in the first place? And we say God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. He should have known before, that if he created this tree then Adam and Eve were bound to eat from it. The Garden of Eden had millions of trees, and God told Adam and Eve not to eat from this tree.In fact, he had forbidden them two trees. One was the Tree of Knowledge and the other was the Tree of Life. It is strange! God should have known a little more psychology – and it is not much psychology either – that if you prevent somebody, if you make it an order, “Don’t do it!” you challenge the person. It is good that Adam and Eve accepted the challenge. I am all for them. If I have to choose between God and Adam and Eve, I will choose Adam and Eve because they did the right thing. They rebelled. They disobeyed. They said, “Who are you to tell us what we should eat and what we should not eat?” They inquired, they adventured, they risked, they gambled – courageous people. They gambled Paradise. They said, “We are ready to lose Paradise, but we cannot lose our freedom.” They respected freedom more than Paradise itself with all its pleasures. They were not hedonists; they were truth seekers.The moment God came to know that they had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, he expelled them immediately because now he was afraid they would eat from the Tree of Life.And it seems the Devil who had come to them in the form of a snake was right. He had told Eve, “God is jealous, very jealous. He is afraid that if you eat from the Trees of Knowledge and Life you will be a god yourself. And he is very jealous, he is afraid of that.” And it seems the Devil was right. Otherwise what was wrong with eating from the Tree of Life?But what God did, the original father, all the parents have been doing to their children since then, “Don’t do this, don’t eat that…” They go on destroying your integrity, they go on destroying your morale, they go on destroying your respect for yourself. They create self-condemnation in you. That’s why you cannot believe.You say, “…something in me refuses to accept that it can happen to me.” You cannot accept it because it goes against your whole training, your whole upbringing. And I say to you, you are entitled to miracles, it is your birthright. And exactly this is the law.You say, “I give an inch, I get a mile.” Yes, exactly that is the law: you move one step toward truth and truth moves one thousand steps toward you. You take just a little risk and thousands of blessings shower on you. Existence is ready to make you enlightened any moment, only you are unwilling. And why are you unwilling? – because you have been told that Jesus can be enlightened because he is the only begotten Son of God, Buddha can be enlightened because he is born in a special way; he is no ordinary human being. He comes from the beyond – he is an avatar, an incarnation of God. How can you be enlightened? Krishna can be enlightened because he is born enlightened. You are born unenlightened and you are going to remain unenlightened. At the most you can hope to follow some enlightened one. But following is not much of a dignity, it is not a glory.I say to you there is no question of following anybody. My sannyasins are not my followers. I am nobody’s leader, nobody’s guide; I am just a friend. I am sharing my insight with you, and I am grateful that you are allowing me to share it with you. You need not be grateful toward me at all. I am too overfull with my bliss, with my peace, with my insight – I want to share it. It is like a cloud full of rainwater which wants to shower. It is like a flower full of perfume which wants to share its perfume with the winds, and is grateful that the wind accepts it, that it is not rejected.It is a question of wrong upbringing. Each child hates his parents, is bound to. Slowly, slowly he forgets it because it becomes repressed, very deeply repressed. And each society teaches you to respect your parents. Why? Why does each and every society teach the children to respect the parents? – for the simple reason that they know that if the child is not taught to respect he will hate. Hate will come naturally, hence it has to be repressed by respect.“Dad,” says the little boy, “would you buy me a real gun?”“Are you crazy, son? Where did you get such a silly idea?”“Oh, come on, dad, I really want a gun!”“Don’t bother me now, son.”“But I want a real gun, a gun that fires real bullets. Please, dad, give me one.”“Look, Johnny, if you don’t stop this I will have to punish you.”“Oh, but please, I gotta get one!”The father is fed up. He stands up and screams at Johnny, “No! I am the boss here!”The small boy interrupts, “Yeah! Now you are, but if you buy me a real gun…”You say, “…something in me refuses to accept that it can happen to me.” It is such a great miracle that it is very natural something in you rejects it. We have been fed with many stories of miracles, but nobody believes in them – not even those who tell them, who teach and preach; even they don’t believe in those miracles.Those miracles that Christians go on thinking Christ did, and Jainas go on thinking happened in Mahavira’s life, and Buddhists go on writing about as far as Buddha is concerned, are all inventions. And they have been invented to prevent the real miracle from happening to you. Let me repeat it: all these stupid miracles have been invented and propagated around the world simply to distract you from the real miracle that can happen to you.Now what is the point of a Satya Sai Baba materializing a Swiss watch? Millions of Swiss watches are available everywhere! How is this going to enrich the world? And in fact, he should be caught by the police because he must have stolen it from somewhere, otherwise how can it be Swiss-made? It would have been Sai Baba-made! It is Swiss-made. Either he has stolen it or he is deceiving you.Once I was staying in Mumbai. A Parsi woman came to me, an old woman, and she said to me, “Satya Sai Baba used to stay at my house, but now I have discovered two things about him. And when I tell people, people think I have gone mad.”Now, he was spreading a rumor that this woman was possessed by evil spirits, and that woman looked perfectly sane.I asked, “What are those two things?”She said, “One is, the last time he came here, just out of curiosity when he was taking his bath I looked in his suitcases – they were full of watches! Secondly, he always makes friends with small boys, so I became a little curious. I looked through the keyhole – and he is a homosexual! Now I am telling people these two things and people think that I am mad. And both things are absolutely true. And he is spreading the news about me that I am possessed by evil spirits.”In fact, homosexuality is an ancient religious tradition. To put nuns separate and monks separate is to create homosexuality. It is natural; it is bound to happen.These watches – and people think miracles are happening. And Jesus walking on water – I don’t think that he was so foolish as to walk on water. But these miracles have been told to you so that you can be distracted from the real miracle, so when the real miracle starts happening you cannot believe it. You can only believe in miracles if they are in stories, and Jesus is nothing but a story to you and Moses is a story.Moses parted the ocean… I have been trying to part the water in my bathtub and I have not been able to yet! It is all nonsense. Every day for twenty-five years…and I close my eyes and I open my eyes, and it is the same!It is silly to believe in such things, but we have been brought up on these silly things.A Brazilian is sitting by the side of the road with his cow. He sees a Porsche in the distance coming toward him. The driver is a big shot from the city. The man stands up as the car draws closer and signals the driver to give him a lift. The Porsche stops.“Give me a lift, senor,” he asks.“But what about the cow?” says the driver.“Not to worry, I will tie her to the back bumper.”“What!” exclaims the city slicker. “She won’t keep up with this car.”“Oh, don’t you worry about her, she’ll be all right,” drawls the Brazilian.So off they go, the cow tied to the rear of the car. The city guy, wanting to have fun, accelerates the car to fifty miles an hour. He looks in the rearview mirror and there is the cow running along at the same speed as the car. He cannot believe his eyes: sixty, seventy-five, ninety, one hundred miles an hour and there is the cow right behind.The driver, both amazed and puzzled, speeds up even more to one hundred and twenty miles an hour, and the cow is still there keeping up with him. When he gets to one hundred and fifty miles an hour he looks through the rearview mirror and notices that the cow is still running but her tongue is hanging out.“Looks like your cow can’t take it for much longer,” he says with relief to the Brazilian. “Her tongue is already hanging out.”“On which side of the mouth is it hanging?” the Brazilian asks casually.“The left side,” says the slicker.“So keep to the right, that means she is signaling to pass you!”Such things happen in stories, in jokes, but not in reality.What is happening to you is something real. You can believe in fictions and you have forgotten how to trust reality. Watch what is happening, respect it, trust it, and it will deepen – it will become vaster, it will become richer, it will gain many more dimensions to it. You are on the right track, but don’t refuse to accept it because if you refuse to accept it then you stop, then you become closed.Remain open and vulnerable to all the winds and the rain and the sun. Remain available to existence as such. To me, existence is God and there is no other God. And existence is each moment a miracle – we have just become blind.There are many kinds of blindness: Christian blindness, Hindu blindness, communist blindness, Buddhist blindness, and so on and so forth. Drop all these blindnesses. Become simple and ordinary. That’s what my sannyas is all about. Listen and watch and see what is happening. And many more miracles are bound to happen, they will be following. If you allow, then you are on an unending journey, a pilgrimage that begins but never ends.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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But take heed lest the profane hear those, I say, who cling to creatures, and imagine in themselves that nothing is beyond being, beyond existences, but suppose themselves to know him “who maketh darkness his hiding place.” If, then, the divine mysteries are beyond such, what shall be said of those yet more profane who conceive that the underlying cause of all in terms of the outward forms of things, and assert that he exceeds not these impious and manifold conceits of their own making? In so far as he is the cause of all things, we must needs impute and affirm of him all their attributes; but in so far as he is beyond and above all, we must needs deny those attributes to him entirely, yet not suppose that this affirmation and denial are contradictory, but that he himself is before and above all denials, and beyond all negating and imputing.After this manner, then, the blessed Bartholomew says that divine truth is both much and very little, and the Gospel both wide and great, and yet brief. This seems to me a marvelous insight, for the excellent cause of all things may be revealed with many words, with few words, and even with no words, inasmuch as he is both unutterable and unknowable, because beyond being he stands above all nature. He is truly revealed without coverings only to those who pass above all things impure and pure, who go beyond all climbing of sacred heights, and leave behind all heavenly lights and sounds, and supernal discourses, and are taken up into that darkness where…he truly is who is beyond all things. For not unmeaningly was the blessed Moses himself first bidden to be purified, and then to be set aside from the unpurified; and after entire purification he heard the many-voiced trumpets, and beheld a multitude of lights giving forth pure and manifold beams. After he was set aside from the manyfolk, he went before the elect priests to the uttermost peak of sacred heights.But thus far he had not yet converse with God himself, nor beheld him, for he is without aspect, but saw only the place where he dwells. This I take to mean that the most heavenly and lofty of things which may be seen and known are no more than certain images of things subordinate to him who transcends all. Through them is shown his presence, exceeding all comprehension, standing on those heights of his holy places which may be known of the mind. And at times he who is set free of things seen and of things seeing, enters into the truly mystical darkness of unknowing, wherefrom he puts out all intellectual knowledge and cleaves to that which is quite beyond touch and sight – the entire essence of him who is beyond all. Thus through the voiding of all knowledge, he is joined with the better part of himself, not with any creature, nor with himself, nor with another, but with him who is inwardly unknowable; and knowing nothing he knows beyond the mind.A philosopher walked into a bakery and ordered a delicious fruitcake to be made with extravagant decorations.“I want a birthday cake,” he said, “with ‘Happy Birthday’ written across the top. When could it be ready?”“I can give it to you in twenty minutes, sir,” answered the attendant.When the philosopher returned twenty minutes later, the cake was ready. He looked long and carefully at it, took a step back to examine it more closely, then said, “Look, I really wanted it to be more decorative. Lots of color and icing sugar swirls. And see here, instead of ‘Happy Birthday’ write ‘One Thousand Happinesses.”“Okay,” said the confectioner, a little disappointed. “Come again in another half an hour and I’ll have it ready.”Half an hour later the philosopher returned. The cake was ready and he examined it very closely. He stopped and thought for a while, then said, “Will you do this for me? Put even more flowers and swirls around the cake, and perhaps you could compose a longer message for the top – something like ‘Congratulations! Lots of Love.’ Would you do all that?”The confectioner agreed and made all the modifications. A little time later the philosopher returned, scrutinized the cake and exclaimed, “Oh! Oh, yes! Now it is beautiful!”“Can I wrap it for you, sir?” asked the confectioner, relieved.“Oh no, thank you, that’s not needed. I’ll eat it here.”The philosophers, the theologians, the logicians are the most stupid people in the world. And it is unfortunate, very unfortunate, that a man like Dionysius has to speak in the words of Christian philosophy, theology, and logic. A Zen master would have said the same thing in a very different way, very clearly, without using so many unnecessary words and without using the name of God at all.Dionysius is in a difficulty. He wants to talk like a Zen master – he knows nothing of Zen but he has the same insight, the same experience – he wants to say things straight, he wants to call a spade a spade, but it is very difficult. If you want to survive in a Christian world, in a Mohammedan world, in a Judaic world, then you have to use their language. So he has to go round and round. He says exactly that which he wants to say but has to use vague words, camouflages, facades, to protect himself. And I think he did well because it was more necessary to survive and give the message that he had found within himself than to be a martyr.Thousands of people have been burned by Christians: the people who talk about love, the people who talk about peace, the people who think that Jesus came into the world to give the message of love, brotherhood; they have killed more people than anybody else. And all their bloodshed was only a question of words – words became so important.With foolish people it always happens, the reality fades away and words take its place. The word god becomes more important than the reality of God; the word love becomes more important than the phenomenon of love. Then they can kill each other for the word.It is unbelievable that for thousands of years people have trusted in words so much – as if the word fire is fire, as if the word water is water. When you are thirsty, the word water is not going to help. Of course, if you are not thirsty then there is no difference between the word water and water itself.But the philosophers are not thirsty – they are not thirsty for truth. They are really on great ego trips. They are not exploring that which is; on the contrary, they are fabricating, manufacturing systems of thought of their own, and trying to impose their thoughts on reality. Hence they never go beyond the mind. And the mind is always mediocre, the mind is never intelligent – it cannot be by its very nature.The mind cannot be made intelligent by any process because mind means memory. The mind means a mechanism that accumulates past experiences. The mind means the known, and intelligence means exploration of the unknown – and not only of the unknown, when the intelligence reaches its ultimate flowering it enters the world of the unknowable.So please forgive Dionysius for his way of expressing himself – that is Christian, but his message is absolutely universal. We will have to sort it out. We will have to put the Christian words aside.Did you hear about the philosopher who went to the local Saturday night dance and noticed a shy girl in the corner? He went over and asked her to dance. They spent the rest of the evening together and when it was time to leave the philosopher said, “How about coming to my place?”“Oh, I can’t,” replied the girl, “I have my menstrual cycle.”“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said the philosopher, “we can take my new Honda 500 and pick up your menstrual cycle in the morning!”The people who live in words are really ridiculous!A large swarthy Mexican sauntered into a Tijuana whorehouse. The madam greeted him cordially and directed him to the first room on the right. The man returned shortly, explaining that he couldn’t do it. The madam asked what the problem was. With some embarrassment the Mexican explained, “Because sheez my seezter.”Understandingly the madam directed him to the second door on the left. Soon he returned. Again he was shaking his head and saying, “I cood not do eet – sheez my seezter.”A little embarrassed too by this time, the madam directed the man to the last room on the right. True to form he returned within a few minutes, eyes downcast, saying, “Theez lady too eez my seezter!”Amazed and perplexed the madam now directed the man to the room of a fair-skinned, blond Swedish girl on the top floor knowing well that this could not possibly be his “seezter.”As soon as the man had disappeared into the room, the madam rushed to a secret peephole in the room’s wall to watch. After a time and with more than a little hesitation the man finally dropped his drawers. Seeing his huge prick unfold to his knees the girl exclaimed, “Oh, brother!”And that was the whole problem – the word brother!You will have to be a little patient with Dionysius. He is using the way of writing and expressing that Christian theologians are accustomed to. Ninety-nine percent of it could have been avoided, but that one percent is so precious that the unnecessary ninety-nine percent can be tolerated.And if you know the history of the Jews and the Christians and the Mohammedans, they all belong to the same root, to the same source. In the world there are only two religious traditions: one is Judaic, the other is Hindu. From the Judaic tradition came Christianity and Mohammedanism, and then their offshoots – Catholics, Protestants, Shiyats, Sunnis, and so on and so forth. And the Hindu religion has two main offshoots: Jainism and Buddhism, and then their many smaller branches.The difference between these two traditions is tremendous. The Judaic tradition is very wordy; it has remained confined to the world of the mind. Only once in a while a courageous soul has taken a jump into the beyond. If he was not careful enough he was immediately murdered, crucified, killed.Dionysius was very cautious because of this fact. Hence he hides his diamonds behind ordinary pebbles and stones and rocks. He says:But take heed lest the profane hear…He is writing to his disciple, Timothy: …take heed lest the profane hear… “Be very careful and cautious. If the profane hear the truth you will be in danger, unnecessary danger.”And who are the profane? He says:…those, I say, who cling to creatures, and imagine in themselves that nothing is beyond being…Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, all three religions that were born outside India, have remained dualistic; they believe in God the creator, and the world, the created. This is their basic dualistic approach. To them God is like a painter or like a sculptor who sculpts or paints. By the time the painting is complete it is an independent thing. Even if the painter dies, the painting will remain. Once the sculptor has worked to his satisfaction he is no longer needed. Then the statue, his art, can persist on its own. Now the existence of the creator is irrelevant.You may have noticed, or you may not have noticed, that God in the Judaic tradition created the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. And nobody asks what he has been doing since then. Still resting? It seems to be such a long holiday, and after only six days work. And now for eternity there is nothing to do!This is not the Eastern approach. God is not thought of as a painter or a sculptor, God is thought of as a dancer, Nataraj. You must have seen the statues of Shiva dancing; that is the Eastern vision of God as a dancer. What is the difference? The difference is great. The difference is immense and of tremendous importance. You cannot divide the dancer and the dance – there is no possibility of division – the dancer is the dance, the dance is the dancer. In fact, at the peak of dancing the dancer completely disappears into his dance; he becomes the dance.In the East, God the creator, and the world, the created, are not two phenomena but two aspects of one reality. The world is the dance and God is the dancer, and if the dancer stops even for a single moment the world will disappear. The dancer cannot go on a holiday.Hence in the East nothing like Sunday has ever existed; it is a Western contribution to the East. There have been festival days, but they were not for resting, they were for dancing, for celebrating, for singing. They were not off days – in fact you were more on, more turned on, on festival days than on any other days.It comes from the original vision of God not as a creator but as creativity. And remember again the difference: God is not the creator but creativity, God is not a person but energy, a presence. The Eastern insight has reached the ultimate peak beyond which there is no possibility of improvement.Dionysius wants to express the same truth; he has somehow stumbled upon it. But he advises his disciple, Timothy: …take heed lest the profane hear…And by profane he means the so-called religious. He calls them profane because they are dualists. Any kind of dualism is part of a profane mind. The sacred consciousness knows no duality, no division; it knows only one organic unity. The whole existence is one organic unity. God and the creatures are not separate.But Christians have condemned this very much – they call it paganism. If you think everything is divine you are a pagan, you are very primitive; you have not yet risen to a sophisticated vision of the world, you are still living in a childish attitude. It is not a childish attitude. It is childlike, but not childish. And it is childlike in the same way as Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter my kingdom of God.” It is not primitive; it is simple, but not primitive. It is clear, very clear, but it is not primitive. It is, in fact, the highest expression of religiousness.Dionysius says those people are profane who think in terms of duality, who divide existence into the creator and the creatures, and who cling to the creatures.Now, Christians cannot believe that you are gods. To declare oneself a god is sacrilege, it is a sin. Even Jesus says it in roundabout ways, not directly, not like the Upanishadic seers: “Aham brahmasmi. I am God” – not so directly. Jesus says, “I am the Son of God, and the Son and the Father are one.” This is a roundabout way. Why not say, “Aham brahmasmi. I am God”? Why go in such a roundabout way: “I am the Son of God” – using a very anthropocentric language, making God a father and yourself a son, creating the idea of a holy family? The family is one of the unholiest things on the earth! Now Jesus is projecting it onto the ultimate reality and then, by the back door, he asserts the truth: “I, the Son, and God, the Father, are not two.” But it has become so diluted. It loses the sharpness of aham brahmasmi or al-Hillaj Mansoor’s ana’l haq. Ana’l haq means “I am the ultimate truth.” These are direct statements.But Christians condemn this directness. They will call these statements egoistic, they will call these statements pagan. The East says that everything is divine. The smallest leaf of grass is as divine as the greatest star because nothing exists other than God. Existence becomes synonymous with God.Dionysius says to Timothy, “Beware of the profane.” In fact, he calls all the Christians profane, all the Jews profane; he does not call them religious. He says these are the people …who cling to creatures…, who go on saying, “We are creatures and we cannot be gods and we cannot be creators.”That is sheer nonsense. You are both creators and you are creatures. And you know it every moment that you can exist either as a creature or as a creator. Whenever you are in a state of noncreativity you are a creature. But you know moments of creativity. In those moments you are not a creature, your hidden aspect surfaces. When you paint and you forget yourself completely in your painting, then are you a creature? When you sing and the song possesses you, are you a creature? When you love and love so totally that you are dissolved into it, are you a creature? You have all known moments when you are a creator. You have known moments when you know you can do miracles. You know there are moments when all the secrets of magic are in your hands – you can transform dust into gold.There is not a single human being so poor that he has never tasted something of it. He may not believe it, he may reject it, he may close himself to the experience, he may even try to forget all about it, he may think he has been imagining, dreaming. But these windows open once in a while.To open these windows deliberately is meditation. When they open of their own accord you are not the master. Yes, watching a beautiful sunset you may feel something of the creator in you, but you are not the master. Seeing a bird on the wing you may become so one with the bird that you forget that you are on the earth, you are in the sky. But you are not the master of it. Meditation makes you a master of it.But these profane people go on claiming that they are religious, and they are not religious. The world is full of pseudo-religious people. If you want to know how many pseudo-religious people there are you can count the Christians, the Mohammedans, the Jainas, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the people who go to the churches and the temples and the mosques and the gurdwaras. These are all pseudo-religious; they have nothing to do with truth. They are not interested in truth – in fact they are afraid of truth. They are believers but not religious.A believer is never a religious person, and a religious person is never a believer. A religious person knows; the believer only believes. And why should one believe at all unless there are some hidden motives? Either people are afraid of hell… They have been made afraid; their fear has been exploited for centuries. Priests became aware of the phenomenon that man lives by two things, either fear or greed. And not only priests; the politicians, the pedagogues, they are all using the same strategy.When a child is not behaving according to you, you punish him. What are you doing? You are exploiting his fear. You are making him afraid that if he is going to do the same thing again he will be punished, maybe more severely. And when he behaves according to you, the way you want him to, you reward him. That is exploiting his greed. The same is the structure of all educational systems in the world: punish and reward.When I passed my post-graduate examinations, it happened accidentally, just accidentally, that I got the medal, the gold medal. It was a pure accident because I had never tried for it – a sheer coincidence. My professors were puzzled, the whole university was puzzled because nobody had ever thought that I would top the list. I myself was puzzled.I went to the head of my department, Dr. Saxena, and asked him, “What is the matter? What has gone wrong? How come I have got the gold medal?”He said, “We are all puzzled because you were never present in the classes. Just because we love you we allowed you to enter the examinations, and we were afraid that you would not do all the papers.”He used to come to pick me up every morning so that he could see with his own eyes that I entered the examination hall. Then he would leave. He was afraid I might not go because my usual routine was to go to sleep at three o’clock in the night and then get up somewhere around nine, ten, eleven. And the examination used to be between seven and ten. By quarter to seven I had to be in the examination hall, and he was naturally afraid.Finally we found out how it happened. One very famous philosopher, Dr. R. D. Renade – he was the head of Allahabad University – always liked very short answers and to the point. And I never used three hours; not on one single day did I use the whole three hours to answer – within one hour I would be finished. I would simply write maxims.In his whole life, Professor Renade had not given anyone one hundred percent marks. He loved, not what I said, but more than that the way I said it. I answered the whole question in a single paragraph, or maybe just a small parable and no answer – he had to understand the parable – or just a joke. He must have laughed and enjoyed and become so happy with me that he gave me marks of one hundred percent. That’s how, accidentally, it happened.When I was given the gold medal, the first thing I did was to go to the university well and throw it in there.A crowd gathered and they asked, “What are you doing?”I said, “I don’t believe in punishment and reward. To carry this gold medal with me is to respect the system, the whole stupid structure.”Reward people or punish people: this has been our whole way of life for centuries. The governments do it, the courts do it, the teachers do it, the parents do it. And the people who go to the mosques and the temples and the churches are the people who are either afraid of hell or are desiring and greedy for heavenly pleasures.One morning, a man goes to the Vatican and inquires about the Pope’s health. The Swiss guards answer that the Pope’s health is very good.The following morning the man is there again to inquire about the Pontiff’s health. The Swiss guards reply that it is excellent.This goes on for so many days that the astonished guards praise the man for his concern, which shows how good a Catholic he is.But the man replies, “You see, I went to the doctor who said that my health is very poor and that I have to be careful – I cannot smoke or drink. And when I asked him about women he said, ‘Oh well, just once each time a pope dies!’”So you never know why people are going to the church or to the temple or to the mosque. Just by seeing them going there and praying, don’t be deceived, don’t think that they are religious. Either they are afraid of hellfire or they are interested in heavenly pleasures.And let me tell you a secret: hell is not so bad. In fact now it is all air-conditioned! It is no longer the same world. Where can you find petrol and kerosene to continue the hellfire? It is all finished! So many scientists have reached there that they have all made it as technological, as sophisticated as possible. In fact, heaven is in a far worse situation than it has ever been because what can these stupid saints do? Things have changed – the wheel has moved. Now if you want to go anywhere, go to hell. And if you follow me you can be certain that you will reach there. I can assure you of only one thing: see you in hell! Heaven is no longer worth it.In heaven one day, Holy Mary and St. Joseph were talking. “It is time, Joseph, for me to go into the world and find out how strong the people’s faith is in Christianity.”“Very well,” said Joseph, “but you must call me on the hot line every evening so I know how you are doing!”Mary agreed and left for earth that night. The first evening the telephone rang in heaven and it was Mary.“Joseph,” she said, “I am in Poland now. The faith is strong here, although it is a little subversive, and the devotion to me is great!”The second evening the phone rang: “Joseph, I am in Italy. It is fantastic, and they say that in Brazil it is even better!”On the third evening: “Hello, Joseph, I am in Holland now. The faith in my son is good, but with so many Protestants the devotion to me is low.”The fourth and fifth evenings there was no call. St. Joseph was puzzled and worried. He asked all the incoming souls whether they had seen the Holy Mary, but nobody had.Finally after three more days the hot line rang. Joseph ran excitedly to answer it, picked up the receiver and cried, “Hello, Mary, hello, is that you?”After a moment of silence a soft, foxy voice on the other end of the line replied, “Hello, Jojo, mon amour, is that you? Mimi calling – I am in Paris!”Avoid heaven, it is very old fashioned! But the people in the religious places are still hankering for it, either out of fear or out of greed, which are two aspects of the same coin. It is good that Dionysius calls them profane. These profane people: …imagine in themselves that nothing is beyond being…Now Dionysius wants to say something like Gautam the Buddha. He wants to say the truth of anatta, nonbeing, but how to say it in a Christian way? It is difficult, very difficult; he has to be very subtle. Buddha could say it directly, that being is our invention, being is nothing but ego projected on higher planes. Existence is egoless, beingless; it is transcendental to being and nonbeing. You cannot say it is this or that; neither this nor that, neti-neti – you can only say that. Or, the best way is not to say anything at all, to be silent because only silence can say something about it. The moment you use a word you falsify the truth because no word can contain the whole truth; every word can contain only one aspect of the truth at the cost of other aspects. And that is not right for those who are enlightened, who know the truth in its totality.But Dionysius finds a way. He says, these people think:…that nothing is beyond being, beyond existences, but suppose themselves to know him “who maketh darkness his hiding-place.”He has to bring in scriptures to support him. He uses those scriptures in his own way – he has to. It is like a Zen monk, a Zen master, writing a Christian treatise. The ancient scriptures say God: …maketh darkness his hiding-place. If that is true, Dionysius says, then how can these stupid people claim to know him? If he is hiding, how can you know him? All your knowledge is pretentious. And you say you know him as if he is a person, as if he is a being.There have been thousands of Christians who believe that they have seen Jesus, who believe they have seen the Holy Ghost, who believe they have seen God the Father – not only seen but talked with him, received messages from them.Just the other day somebody wrote me a question about one of the disciples of Shivananda. He is well-known in America, in Europe – Vishnu Devananda is his name. Up to now he has been claiming that he goes on receiving messages from his late master, Shivananda. Only recently he has confessed that somebody in his own organization was deceiving him, giving him messages as if they were coming from the late master, Shivananda.In the first place Shivananda was not a master at all; he was only a teacher and a very ordinary teacher, a third-rate teacher. He was talking old rubbish. But a man like Vishnu Devananda who is worshipped by thousands of people in Europe and America – particularly in Spanish countries he has a great following – he can be deceived by someone in his own organization. Somebody was playing tricks on him. And these tricks are not new.Madame Blavatsky used to play the same trick upon the Theosophists, and great Theosophists like Colonel Olcott and others were deceived. It was found out only later on that she had managed it through a servant; a servant used to hide on the roof. Just think…the roof of Buddha Hall and a sannyasin hiding there, and in the middle of the discourse a letter drops! And Madame Blavatsky used to claim that these letters had come from divine masters, particularly from Master K. H. – Koot Humi, who is the head of all the masters, who is a direct mediator between God and the earth. Only later on did the servant confess before the court that he was hiding on the roof where there was a small place from which to drop the letters, and those letters were written by Madame Blavatsky herself. And then the experts on writing found out that that was true – all the letters were written by Blavatsky herself.Now, somebody in Vishnu Devananda’s own organization has been deceiving him for years. But these are the foolish people.One of the very famous Americans, Baba Ram Das, was deceived for one year continuously by a woman who said that she was delivering messages from Ram Das’s late master, Neem Karoli Baba. And the messages were not just ordinary messages – tantric messages: “The master has said make love to me!” So Baba Ram Das was making love to the woman, and for one year continuously it went on. It seems people want to be fooled!There are people who want to befool, there are people who are ready to be befooled. This world is full of such people, and they have been thought religious, esoteric, occult – all kinds of beautiful names have been given to these fools.It is good that Vishnu Devananda has confessed that somebody in his own organization was deceiving him, but what does it show? It shows one thing, that Vishnu Devananda is a fool. If somebody in his own organization, his own disciple can deceive him, then what integrity has he got and what consciousness? He should drop being a master. He should stop initiating people. He has lost all right to.In the name of religion so much stupidity has happened in the world that if religion disappears as it is, man will be immensely benefited.Just the other day I was reading that in Arabian countries at least one thousand women are killed every day for small things; just the suspicion is enough. If the husband suspects that the wife is having a relationship with somebody – and can you find a husband who does not suspect, or can you find a wife who does not suspect? – then that is enough reason to kill the woman. And Islamic law allows it; it is not murder. You are killing your own woman, your own wife – it is like destroying your own chair! Who can prevent you? It is your own chair. You can burn your bicycle – so you have burned another menstrual cycle! So what is wrong with it? Thousands of women are killed every day, in the twentieth century, in the name of Islamic law. We have not really evolved; we are still as primitive as we have ever been.Dionysius says:If then, the divine mysteries are beyond such…The divine mysteries are beyond these people who call themselves religious.…what shall be said of those yet more profane who conceive the underlying causes of all in terms of the outward forms of things, and assert that he exceeds not these impious and manifold conceits of their own making?There are two types of people according to Carl Gustav Jung: the extrovert and the introvert. The introverts become religious, the so-called religious. I don’t mean really religious, just the so-called religious – these are the introverts. They believe in the reality of God as a person, in the reality of the self, in being, and they believe in thousands of other things. One can imagine anything and if you imagine it strongly you will experience it. Believe it and you will know it, but it is not a truth; it is your own belief which has autohypnotized you.And the extroverts are the materialists, the atheists, the communists. They believe only in the things that they can see, that they can observe; they believe in the objective reality. Scientists are extroverts; they believe in the objective world, in the material world. And the so-called religious people are introverts; they believe in the self, in God, in angels, in Koot Humi, in archangels, and all kinds of nonsense.The really religious person is neither extrovert nor introvert. He transcends these divisions, and in transcending these divisions he disappears, evaporates. He is, but no longer a self, no longer confined in any ego. The ego was just like an egg – it has broken. The bird has flown into the sky, into the beyond.In so far as he is the cause of all things we must needs impute and affirm of him all their attributes…This is how Dionysius has to go through this tortuous language: In so far as he is the cause of all things we must needs impute and affirm of him all their attributes…Of course, God has to be given all the attributes of the manifested things.…but in so far as he is beyond and above all, we must needs deny those attributes to him entirely, yet not suppose that this affirmation and denial are contradictory, but that he himself is before and above all denials, and beyond all negating and imputing.Just as there are extroverts and introverts, there are people who are positivists and there are people who are negativists: via affirmativa and via negativa. These have been the two paths of people to inquire into reality. But if you accept a certain standpoint from the very beginning, you miss.The real inquirer starts his inquiry without any prejudice, without any a priori; he starts his journey with knowing nothing, believing nothing. He does not believe, he does not disbelieve. He is not negative, he is not positive. He is not extrovert, he is not introvert. He simply says, “I don’t know” – agnosia. He starts from a state of not knowing, and only through that state of not knowing does he come to know. But he cannot claim knowledge, never – because to claim knowledge is to claim ignorance. To say “I know” implies two things: that “I am,” which is not true, and it implies another thing, that “There is something to know which is separate from me.”The moment you say, “I know,” you have accepted three things: the knower, the known, and the knowledge that exists between the two. You have divided the world into a trinity, and the world is one. There is no knower, no known, no knowledge – or, the knower is the knowledge and the known too.Dionysius says: Remember, God is beyond affirmation and negation. He simply is. And all that you have conceived of him is your own imagination. Drop your imagination if you want to know that which is. Truth cannot be known through imagination, it can only be known through meditation.His word for meditation is agnosia a beautiful word: a state of silent not knowing.After this manner, then, the blessed Bartholomew says that divine truth is both much and very little…He has to quote the authorities, the authorities of the Church, to make it clear that he is not trying to say anything individual, that he is simply following the tradition.This has never been expected in the East. Everybody has been given the right to say whatever he feels like saying. There is no need to get affirmation from the past. Buddha never says, “What I am saying is right because it is said in the Vedas too.”I myself say to you that whatever I am saying I am saying on my own authority. If some scriptures agree with it, it is good for those scriptures; if they don’t agree with it, it is unfortunate for them. But I am not producing any evidence. I myself have experienced something, I am an eyewitness, and truth needs no proofs.But this has not been so in the West for centuries; people had to give supports. Individual freedom has not existed in the Church. And this is strange, because Jews killed Jesus because he was speaking on his own authority. And Christians have been doing the same – they have not learned a single thing, they have not understood Jesus at all.Jesus is an individual assertion of truth. He says again and again, “It is said by other prophets, ‘Do this,’ but I say to you something else, totally different.” He was speaking on his own authority. Experience always speaks with that quality. It is not authoritative, remember, but it speaks with authority because it knows, it has experienced. But the Christian Church has not allowed such things, hence, Dionysius quotes authorities.He says: …the blessed Bartholomew says that divine truth is both much and very little… It is true. It is so much that you cannot exhaust it; you can go on talking about it, but you cannot exhaust it. Buddha spoke for forty-two years continuously, still the message was incomplete. Mahavira spoke for forty years, still the message was incomplete. It cannot be complete, no message can be entire because the truth is so vast. And yet it is very little, you can write it on a postcard or even the postcard may be too big. It is so vast that millions of words cannot express it and it is so brief that even silence is capable of speaking it.…and the gospel says it is both wide and great and yet brief. This seems to me a marvelous insight, for the excellent cause of all things may be revealed with many words, with few words, and with even no words…The best is with no words, but where to find people who can understand no words?One of the most significant philosophers of this age, Ludwig Wittgenstein, says, “Do not say that which cannot be said.” He is right, because saying that which cannot be said is dangerous. It is bound to be wrong, it is falsifying. It is exactly what Lao Tzu says, “Truth cannot be said. The moment you say it you falsify it.” But Lao Tzu said it, and Wittgenstein could not control either.The Upanishads say, “Those who know, they are silent, and those who do not know, they speak.” But the Upanishads are saying it, so where to put the Upanishads? Socrates says, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” But that one thing he knows, and that one thing contains all.It is true that if it can be said without words that is the best, but who will understand it?There is a beautiful story about Mahavira. When he became enlightened, for seven days he spoke without words – but who will understand without words? Only a few gods who had come to see this miracle that had happened on the earth, only they could understand. But it was almost useless because they knew it already anyway. What he was saying they could only nod their heads to. They could say, “Yes, it is right.”Then Mahavira had to speak in a language that could be understood by mortal human beings. But his message was so condensed – he was a lover of maxims. He wouldn’t elaborate, he wouldn’t explain; he would simply assert without any explanation. So only very few very evolved human beings could understand him and they became his interpreters, his ganadharas. He would speak to those eleven persons and then those eleven persons would go and speak to others.Finally he decided that that too was not right because the moment he said something it was falsified immediately – it was no longer as beautiful as it was in silence. Then those ganadharas, those eleven interpreters, would hear; something more was lost because what they heard, they heard according to themselves. And when those ganadharas said it to the ordinary masses, something again was lost because they used their language; they could not use Mahavira’s language. And when the masses heard it, it was almost something totally different than what was said by Mahavira. So finally he had to speak directly.All enlightened masters would have liked to speak through silence, but where are the people who will understand it? Then they have to speak the language of the people, and they have to prepare people slowly so that one day they can understand the silence too.That’s what I am trying to do here – I am talking to you continuously only in order to help you one day to sit in silence with me. Nothing will be said, nothing will be heard: all will be said, all will be heard.…inasmuch as he is both unutterable and unknowable, because beyond being he stands above all nature. He is truly revealed without coverings only to those who pass above all things impure and pure…He is inserting tremendously great truths into the Christian jargon. Buddha would have said simply, “Go beyond good and bad.” That’s what I have been telling you, that morality and immorality are very ordinary things. My sannyasins have to transcend both. It is better to be moral than to be immoral, but to go beyond both is just far out!The moral person is a good citizen. He does not harm people or at least he harms only minimally, only when it is absolutely necessary. The immoral person harms others; he will not miss any opportunity to harm others. But both the moral and immoral remain concerned with the other.The religious person is one who forgets the other and dissolves into his own innerness, into his own interiority. When you are alone in your interiority, where is the question of being moral and immoral? The question arises only when you relate with others; the question is of relationship. When you are absolutely alone you are amoral.But Dionysius could not say it directly because the whole Christian attitude is moralistic, puritanistic: “Do good, be good.” Christians have created so many do-gooders that no other religion has been able to do as much mischief as Christians have done. These do-gooders are the most mischievous people in the world. They don’t listen to you, whether you want good to be done to you or not; they go on doing it. They say, “We will do it, we have to do it. This is our duty, our moral duty. This is God’s commandment!” They go on forcing their idea of good on others.When I used to travel in India, for twenty years continuously, I came across many things. In India, people have the idea, particularly the villagers – and eighty percent of India consists of villages – that if you serve a saint you earn tremendous virtue, punya merit. You will be rewarded greatly in heaven, so you have to serve a saint. Now, whether the saint wants to be served or not, that is not the point at all! So many times I had to force people to go out of my room because they wanted to serve me. And service in India means they will massage your feet. I would say, “But I want to sleep!”And they would say, “You can sleep, but you cannot prevent us from serving you. Otherwise how are we going to earn merit?” They would force themselves upon me.It is out of those twenty years of experience that in my ashram you see guards – because the people have served me so much, I am tired of it. They would start massaging my body and I would say, “I don’t like massage at all!” But that is not the point, that is irrelevant, whether you like it or not. In the middle of the night, somebody would enter the train at a station and start serving me. I would be fast asleep – he would wake me up.He would say, “You can rest, but the train is going to stay here for one hour, so I did not want to lose this opportunity.” And for one hour I had to suffer! They would go on doing whatever they wanted to do.In Rajasthan one woman who was worshipped almost like a saint used to come to see me, and of course a saint has to be served. But she had her own ways of serving. She would bring many mangoes – if it was the time for mangoes, a bucketful of mangoes – and she would force those mangoes on me. And I had just tasted one mango when it would be passed on because she had at least fifty followers always following her. It had become prasad, it had become a great gift. Now another mango had to be forced on me, so that became prasad, then the third mango – all my clothes would become wet with mango juice. But who was concerned with me? They were earning their merit.And people ask me why there are guards. You cannot imagine what would happen to me if there were not guards – you cannot imagine! Those twenty years I have suffered so much… In a way that suffering has been good; through that suffering I am finished with all my past karmas. But now there is no more left so I don’t want any more service done to me.Christians live with the idea of right and wrong, shoulds and should-nots, impure and pure. And Dionysius wants to take them beyond it, like Sosan: “Neither this nor that”. He says:He is truly revealed without coverings only to those who pass above all things impure and pure, who go beyond all climbing of sacred heights…Because even if it is a sacred height, it is an ego trip. Those who become absolutely ordinary… That is the Zen standpoint: to be absolutely ordinary, to be a nobody. That’s how I define my sannyas: to be a nobody. But a Christian saint is somebody, he is not a nobody; he has reached the sacred heights. And Dionysius wants to say that too is the subtlest ego, far more dangerous than the gross one. Those who have stopped and gone:…beyond all climbing of sacred heights, and leave behind all heavenly lights and sounds…Remember it because when you enter in you will hear beautiful music, you will see beautiful lights. You have no idea of how much beauty exists in the interiority of your world. But go beyond them.…and supernal discourses…You will hear voices so sweet, so honey-sweet, that you will believe they are from angels, from God. But they are all from your own mind. The last strategy of the mind is to create what you are seeking, to make available imaginary plastic things instead of the real ones you are searching for, to give you toys to play with. Don’t be deceived by them. Go beyond all.…and are taken up into that darkness where…he truly is who is beyond all these things.God is beyond all purity and impurity, right and wrong. God is beyond all that you can conceive. That is the meaning of Dionysian darkness. Darkness has many beautiful things about it. When it is light you can make distinctions: “This is beautiful, that is ugly. This is right, that is wrong. This is a man, that is a woman.” But when it is darkness all distinctions are lost. You don’t know who is who, what is what. Darkness dissolves all distinctions – darkness is a state of non-distinctions. Light is always shallow; darkness has depth. Light is always momentary – it depends on certain fuel.Even the sun is going to die one day – the scientists say that perhaps after four million years because its fuel is being used every day, twenty-four hours a day; one day it is going to be exhausted. Many suns have died before; this sun cannot live forever. It has a life span, just as the candle burns slowly, slowly, and by the morning it is gone.All light is momentary, but darkness is eternal because it needs no fuel. It simply is. It is independent; it has no cause. Hence darkness has some symbolic meaning which comes very close to the existence of God.For not unmeaningfully was the blessed Moses himself first bidden to be purified…Dionysius has to go through all this unnecessarily. I feel sorry for the man. I have a deep love for the man, and many times reading his statements I have wondered… It must have been an accident that he was born in the West; he belonged to the East. In the East he would have flowered fully. There would have been no need to hide the way he is doing here. Now he brings in Moses. He says, first Moses was:…bidden to be purified, and then to be set aside from the unpurified; and after entire purification he heard the many-voiced trumpets, and beheld a multitude of lights giving forth pure and manifold beams. After he was set aside from the manyfolk, he went before the elect priests to the uttermost peak of sacred heights.But thus far he had not yet converse with God himself, nor beheld him, for he is without aspect, but saw only the place where he dwells.He is using Moses to hide something of immense value, so only those who are capable of absorbing it will be able to discover it. He says he: …saw only the place where he dwells. That place is agnosia, a state of not-knowing, a luminous darkness, what Patanjali calls samadhi – a deep dreamless sleep but with full awareness.This I take to mean that the most heavenly and lofty of things which may be seen and known are no more than certain images of things subordinate to him who transcends all. Through them is shown his presence, exceeding all comprehension, standing on those heights of his holy places which may be known of the mind. And at times he who is set free of things seen and of things seeing, enters into the truly mystical darkness of unknowing, wherefrom he puts out all intellectual knowledge and cleaves to that which is quite beyond touch and sight – the entire essence of him who is beyond all. Thus through the voiding of all knowledge, he is joined with the better part of himself, not with any creature, nor with himself, nor with another, but with him who is inwardly unknowable; and knowing nothing he knows beyond the mind.The mind is knowledge, meditation is non-knowledge. The mind knows, meditation experiences. The mind can only give you a certain acquaintance but not the taste. If you want the taste of Tao you have to move to no-mind, to meditation, to agnosia.A tremendous awareness is needed, an awareness that can help you to cut yourself off from the mind, from words, from theories, from philosophy, from theology, from religions, from priests: a tremendous awareness like a sharp sword that cuts all that binds you and makes you free.To indicate that freedom, Dionysius has used the most beautiful word I have ever come across: agnosia. Be so silent, so unknowing, so nonexistential, a deep emptiness, a nothingness, and then mysteries will be revealed to you. Then God can stand naked before you. But if you know something about God then you will never know him as he is.It is said that the word God stands for three words. G stands for that, O stands for which and D stands for is. God is a code word; it means nothing, it simply represents that which is. But to know that which is, you will have to come to a certain state, a state of absolute emptiness. What Buddha calls shunyata, nothingness, Dionysius calls agnosia. I call it meditation, but these are different words for the same phenomenon.If you have attained agnosia you have found the place where he dwells, you have found the temple where he lives, and that temple is not outside, it is within you. It is at the very core of your being.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,To what extent does life have relevance to logic?Logic is a very small thing, life is vast. Logic is utilitarian, it is an invention of man. Life is nonutilitarian, it is not an invention of man; on the contrary, man is life’s invention. Logic is one-dimensional; life is multidimensional. But for thousands of years man has been conditioned as if logic and life are synonymous.This has destroyed the whole joy of the human heart, it has destroyed the most precious thing in existence; it has poisoned man’s capacity to love because logic goes against love, logic goes against bliss, logic goes against meditativeness, logic goes against godliness. But logic is good in a marketplace – it is calculative, mathematical. Logic is good with things, but not good with persons.If you want to live with things, logic is enough, but that is not going to be much of a life. When you live with persons, when you relate with persons, logic is not enough at all; in fact you have to put logic aside.To relate to a person is to relate to infinity. Logic cannot contain infinities. To fall in love means you are moving into the world of the uncalculated, the incalculable, the immeasurable, the uncharted. Logic will tell you, “You are going mad, stop before it is too late!” Logic always creates a prison around you. Of course, it convinces you that it is for your own sake, it is for your safety, security, comfort. And in a certain sense it does give a certain security to you, but that security is the security of death not of life.If you want to be absolutely secure the grave is the best place; then there is no insecurity, no discomfort, no illnesses, no problems, no anxieties, no calamities, no death even. Once you have died you have died; it is all finished. Now you can rest forever. That’s why on graves you will find these words: “Now Rest in Peace.” What else can you do in a grave?A woman made a beautiful marble stone for her husband’s grave: “Rest in Peace,” was written on it in golden letters.After three days the will was opened and the husband had not left anything for her. She was furious. She rushed to the grave and underneath the golden letters “Rest in Peace” she wrote in her own hand “Till I Come!”Life is insecure. There are wives and there are husbands, and there are children and whatnot. Life is insecure but that’s the beauty of life, that’s its adventure, that is its exhilaration, ecstasy. Logic makes everything dull, boring – two plus two is always four.In life it is not so. Two plus two is sometimes three, sometimes five – in fact, it is never four! In life it is never four. And now even mathematicians, geometricians, logicians have started becoming aware of the phenomenon. A new branch of geometry has happened, non-Euclidean geometry; it has changed the whole Euclidean static world. In non-Euclidean geometry nothing is logical. But you will be surprised to know that Albert Einstein found it far more helpful in discovering the Theory of Relativity than Euclidean geometry, which is logical.Just two days before Albert Einstein died, he said, “When I started my adventure into the world of science I was very certain that two plus two is four. Now I cannot say that, I cannot say it with any certainty. All certainty is gone. As I have gone deeper into the mystery of existence, I have found that our logic is applicable only to the most superficial. The deeper you go, the more irrelevant it becomes.” His last words were, “To me life is a mystery now, and I feel that there is something in life which is absolutely unknowable.”Logic believes in two categories: the known and the unknown. That which is unknown today will become known tomorrow. That which is known today was unknown yesterday. So there is not much difference between the known and the unknown, they belong to the same category. Logic does not believe in the unknowable – and the unknowable is the very heart of life, the very heartbeat of the universe.I am not against logic. Use it, it is a beautiful strategy as far as things are concerned, the marketplace is concerned, the superficial world is concerned – but beware that you don’t go on carrying it into deeper layers of life and experience. There it is a hindrance.Logic means the mind. The mind is helpful in understanding the objective world. The mind is a hindrance in understanding the subjective world because the subjective world is beyond the mind, behind the mind. You can use your eyes to see others, but you cannot use your eyes to see yourself. If you want to see yourself through your own eyes you have to use a mirror. To look in a mirror means you are creating a reflection of yourself – which is not you, certainly not you, but you can see the reflection. Logic can see only the reflected glory of existence; it cannot see existence itself because existence is far deeper than logical formulations.Your question is significant, very significant. You ask, “To what extent does life have relevance to logic?” To a very small extent, just skin-deep. Deeper than that, logic loses all relevance; not only that, it becomes ridiculous.A young officer’s extreme keenness in demanding strict adherence to official regulations was causing problems.Eventually the genial general took him aside for a chat on “man management,” suggesting that the regulations should be taken as a guide and were not meant to be strictly applied.“Where in the regulations,” the officer asked briskly, “is that stated?”There are people who live by the word and lose the spirit; we call them pundits, scholars, knowledgeable people. They live according to the literal meaning, they never think in terms of metaphors and poetry. And life is more metaphorical than anything else: it is poetry, it is pure poetry; it is music, it is sheer music.A poor Englishman worked his whole life to educate his only daughter born from a birth that left him a widower. With a very meager salary he saved hard to give the girl a decent education and had her entered in one of the best schools in the country.At the end of the year he went to pick his daughter up at the railway station.“Tell me all your news, darling,” he asked his daughter.“Dad,” said the girl, “you always trusted me so I want to tell you that during this last semester I lost my virginitude.”“Nooo!” says the father desperately. “I can’t believe it. After all the sacrifices that I made to put you in the best school in the country, you can’t even tell me this news in proper English?”“Am I mentioned in the will?” the nephew asked anxiously.“You certainly are,” replied the lawyer. “Right here in the third paragraph your uncle says: ‘To my niece Sarah I bequeath a hundred thousand dollars, to my cousin Janice fifty thousand dollars and to my nephew Charles, who was always curious to know if he was mentioned in my will, I say ‘Hi, Charles.’”One day a creditor knocks on the door of an impoverished English Lord. The butler opens the door and tells him that milord only receives at seven p.m. sharp.That evening at the time appointed the creditor knocks again on the door, but he is told that the time for visits is over.“What do you mean?” exclaims the creditor in anger. “It is seven o’clock!”“Milord receives at seven sharp, sir,” answers the butler, “not one minute before nor a minute after!”Logic can make you very stupid. Of course its stupidity is a very decorated stupidity, polished, cultured, so it is very difficult to see the foolishness of it. But life is far more because logic can only contain one polarity. For example, logic can think of darkness or light but not of both together; logic can think of life or death but never of both together. That becomes inconceivable, but that’s how it is. Life is death too. Light is darkness too.Logic will not be able to comprehend Dionysius’ idea of luminous darkness; it will look simply mad. Luminous darkness? How can darkness be luminous? How can darkness be translucent? Darkness has to be dark, light has to be light. Logic believes in pigeonholes, in categories, and life is one organic unity. Everything penetrates everything else. There are no categories. Life goes on flowing. Light becomes darkness, darkness becomes light. Birth becomes death, death becomes birth. Love becomes hate, hate becomes love. Friendship becomes enmity, enmity becomes friendship.And now we know that a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man. There is no intrinsic impossibility in it. Just as electricity consists of two poles, the negative and the positive, the whole existence consists of polarities. Logically they look opposite, but if you put logic aside then they are not opposites but complementaries. Without the negative the positive cannot exist. Then how can you call them opposites? If the negative is a necessity for the positive to exist, if the positive is a must for the negative to exist, they are not opposites; they are complementaries.Now a totally different vision is slowly arising, the vision that takes opposites as complementaries. Aristotelian logic is dying, it is on its deathbed. In fact, it is dead; it is being kept alive by artificial ventilation. The Theory of Relativity has dealt it the final blow, the death blow. The Theory of Relativity has simply transcended all logic. And that is the beauty of Einsteinian physics – it is for the first time that a physicist has spoken the language of the mystic. It is one of the greatest events that has happened in our lifetime, that physics speaks the same language as mystics have always spoken.Physics has come very close to mysticism; that is the beginning of a meeting, of a synthesis. And the synthesis is not very far away. Soon you will see – those who have clear eyes can see it right now – that logic has no more relevance because physics has gone deeper than the superficial objective world. Now, matter no longer exists. You see matter, it is very logically there; in fact logically you cannot disprove matter.One of the great English philosophers, Berkeley, was going for a morning walk with his friend, Dr. Johnson.In Western philosophy Berkeley is almost the equivalent of Shankaracharya. Shankaracharya has said that the world is an illusion, it is only a dream, it is a thought, it does not consist of things, it consists of thoughts. We have always accepted that mystics talk such nonsense. Berkeley also used to talk the same way: that the world is only a dream.Dr. Johnson was a very pragmatic and practical man, and of course very superficial too. He could not argue with Berkeley, so he took a rock from the side of the road and hit Berkeley’s foot with the rock. Berkeley screamed, and the blood started oozing from his foot.Dr. Johnson laughed and he said, “Now what do you say? Is this rock real or not? And what is this scream all about if the rock is only a thought? How can it hit you? And from where is the blood coming out and why? You are just being hit by a thought?”Berkeley could not say anything.The friendship ended because this is no way to argue. But Berkeley was unaware of the Indian mystics. Had he known anything of Indian mystics he would have answered Dr. Johnson perfectly well. Berkeley was bringing a new idea to Western philosophy. In India it has existed for centuries.It is said about the great Buddhist monk, Nagarjuna, that he was caught hold of by the king of the country because he was saying that nothing exists, nothing at all. Existence is a pure dream.He was far ahead of Berkeley and anybody else because he was saying the world is a dream, and because the dream is false how can the dreamer be true? The world is false, it is a dream, and because the dream is false the dreamer is false. So nothing exists, neither the dreamer nor the dream. Shankaracharya at least accepts that the dreamer is true, and Berkeley also accepts that the subjective is true, the objective is false. But Nagarjuna seems to be far clearer. If the objective is false, how can the subjective be true? If the seen is false, what is the proof of the seer? If the known is false, then how can the knower exist? On what grounds?He was caught hold of by the king. The king was a very pragmatic man. He must have been like Dr. Johnson. Maybe Dr. Johnson was just another incarnation of the same king. He caught hold of Nagarjuna, he listened to his ideas. It was difficult to argue with him, almost impossible. How can you prove that life is true?For example, we are sitting here. I may be just dreaming you, or you may be dreaming me, or we both may be dreaming simultaneously. But what proof is there that you are really there and I am really here, that I am talking to you and you are listening to me? It may be just mind stuff, nothing else. And many times in your dreams you have seen me. Of course, I don’t dream; so I don’t see you in my dreams. I am so fed up seeing you the whole day that it is natural I don’t see you in my dreams. Orange is such a dangerous color!The king could not argue with Nagarjuna, but he had a mad elephant. So he asked for the mad elephant to be brought before the palace. The person who was ordered to bring the mad elephant asked why.The king said, “We have to give proof to Nagarjuna. We have to see what happens when the mad elephant chases him, catches hold of him and throws him a hundred feet away. Then we will see whether it is a thought or a reality!”When the mad elephant came Nagarjuna started running. The mad elephant was chasing him and Nagarjuna was shouting, “Save me! Save me! All that I was saying was nonsense. Forgive me!” And he was crying so desperately that the king had compassion for him. He stopped the mad elephant.He called Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna was trembling, perspiring, breathing hard, could not speak for a few moments. Then the king asked, “What do you think about this elephant? Is this elephant real or just a thought?”Nagarjuna said, “Sir, the elephant is just a dream.”The king said, “What? Then why were you crying and screaming and shouting and asking me to stop the mad elephant?”Nagarjuna said, “Sir, that too was part of the dream. Your stopping the elephant is also part of the dream. You can again put the elephant behind me and I assure you I will again scream and shout. But that doesn’t prove anything; it simply proves that one dream creates another dream. It does not prove the reality of the elephant. It simply proves that one dream can trigger another dream.”That’s how the world continues – one dream triggering another dream.This has always been the language of the mystics. But for the first time in the history of man, physics also is speaking the same language: matter no longer exists. If you ask them, “Then what exists?” they shrug their shoulders. They say, “Something – xyz. We call it ‘electrons, neurons, protons,’ but they are just xyz – names given to certain entities nobody has ever seen. Nobody is ever going to see them – we don’t know whether they exist or not. All that we know is that if we accept them our calculations come right. If we don’t accept them then it becomes difficult to make our calculations. So they are hypothetical realities.”Buddha has said God is a hypothetical reality, the self is a hypothetical reality. Logically they are needed – I and thou are needed – but the need is logical, not existential. Those who have penetrated the subjective reality, they have come to know that all our words, all our logic, all our hypotheses, are only arbitrary. And now even physics agrees. The Theory of Relativity is the beginning of a totally new science, the beginning of the meeting of East and West.You will be surprised to know that Mahavira, the twenty-fourth tirthankara of the Jainas was the first man in the whole world who talked about the Theory of Relativity, twenty-five centuries before Albert Einstein even thought about it. Of course, he was talking about the theory of relativity in relation to the subjective world and Einstein focuses the same vision on the objective world, but both have come to one conclusion: that life is more than logic – far more, immensely more.But unless you are deeply meditative you will not be able to live that tremendously illogical life because it will drive you mad. If you are not meditative, then remain confined to the world of logic, otherwise you will go mad.In English we have two words, very beautiful, of great significance: one is breakdown, the other is breakthrough. Breakdown is when you don’t know any meditation and your logic becomes irrelevant. You don’t know how to reach the heart and your head has become absolutely meaningless to you, then there is a breakdown, you go insane. But if you know meditativeness – meditativeness means the art of transforming the opposites into complementaries – then there is a breakthrough, you enter a new world, a new vision, a new perspective.In a sense you are again mad. That’s why Jesus is known as mad. Francis used to call himself mad – and for all practical purposes he is mad. Buddha and Mahavira…they are all mad in a sense. They are not sane the way you are sane; either they are below you or above you, but one thing is certain, they are somewhere else. If they are below you, it is a breakdown. If they are above you, it is a breakthrough. Meditation is the art of transforming madness into buddhahood. Meditation is the art of taking you beyond logic and yet keeping your sanity intact. Meditation is the greatest discovery ever made, and I don’t think there is ever going to be another discovery which can surpass meditation.The second question:Osho,I have had lots of exhilarating moments of what seemed to me to be real consciousness, but then as soon as I have felt conscious I begin to feel unconscious. It seems more and more to me that being conscious is a state one has to just experience and not recognize.Have you anything to say on this?The state of real awareness is not exhilarating, it has no excitement in it. It is absolutely peaceful. It is neither hot nor cold. You live in a world of coldness, dullness, hence your mind is constantly seeking something exciting, exhilarating, elevating. You always live in dark valleys so you hanker for peaks, sunlit peaks. That is your desire, but that is not the nature of consciousness itself.Consciousness is exactly in the middle. It is neither low nor high, it is neither a valley nor a peak, it is neither cold nor hot. Buddha has called it majjhim nikai – the middle way. It is exactly in the middle, and it is in the middle that transcendence happens. It is neither positive nor negative, neither good nor bad, neti-neti, neither this nor that. You have come to such a delicate point where everything is balanced. You are not leaning toward this or toward that.It is like a tightrope walker who is exactly in the middle. If he leans toward the left he will fall, if he leans toward the right he will fall. He is neither a rightist nor a leftist; both are going to fall. He is exactly in the middle.It is like the pendulum of a clock. The pendulum goes to the left, to the far left, then it goes to the far right. Through its movement between these two extremes it keeps the clock running. You may not have observed it, but it has to be contemplated – when the pendulum is moving toward the right it is gaining momentum to go to the left. Apparently it is going to the right; deep down, hidden inside, it is gaining momentum to go to the left. When it is going to the left it is gaining momentum to go to the right.And this is so in your life. When you love a person you are gaining momentum to hate the person. That’s why it is the same person you both love and hate; they are not two different people. Modern researchers have found the love relationship to be far more complicated than it was ever thought before. They call marriage an “intimate enmity” – intimate enmity! Two persons are quarreling in a very intimate way.If you watch lovers you will see this phenomenon continuously. Like the pendulum they go on moving away from each other – that’s what fight is. Every night the pillow fight! It does not exist so much in the East because Eastern women have not yet learned the art of how to throw pillows; they are still old fashioned. But in the West it is almost a routine scene. Before lovemaking, the pillow fight is a must – it creates energy, it releases energy. First the lovers have to fight. By fighting they go farther and farther away from each other. They go as far as possible, as they were when they met for the first time – it is a mini divorce – and once they are that far away, again the same attraction; a mini honeymoon follows. They start coming close.And this remains a constant phenomenon: coming close, going farther away, again coming close; asking for one’s own space and then feeling lonely, then searching for the other, then being together and feeling bored with each other. The man cannot live without the woman, the woman cannot live without the man – and they cannot live together either. And this is so about all aspects of life.Consciousness means stopping the pendulum in the middle. If you stop the pendulum of a clock in the middle, what will happen? The clock will stop. And it is very symbolic. If you can stop your consciousness in the middle, neither cold nor hot, neither dull nor excited, then your mind stops because the mind is time – the mind is your inner clock. And the moment the mind stops, who is there to recognize, who is there to say, “Now I am conscious.” If you say, “Now I am conscious,” the mind has come back.That’s what has been happening.You say, “I have had lots of exhilarating moments of what seemed to me to be real consciousness…” It is not real consciousness – they were exhilarating moments. But when you are exhilarated, soon you will slow down; you will have to go back to your original state.You say, “…but then as soon as I have felt conscious I begin to feel unconscious…” This is a great revelation if you try to understand it. Why does it happen? The moment you feel conscious, why do you become unconscious? – because to feel conscious means the mind has come in. Otherwise there is nobody to feel, nobody to recognize, nobody to say, “This is this” – there is no labeling process. The mind is back, and the mind is always hankering to come back; any excuse is enough.The moment you say, “Look! It seems this is real consciousness,” the mind is back. The mind is not going to miss this opportunity. The mind will pat you on the back and will say, “This is great! You have done it. You have arrived. You have become enlightened. This is what Dionysius calls agnosia. So now this is the thing, the real thing!” And then the mind goes on and on, and you know that you have become unconscious. All those peaks are lost, that sun has set, that light has disappeared. You are back in your valley, in those dark spaces.When you are really conscious there is no recognition. You don’t label it – there is nobody to label. You are simply conscious and it is finished then and there – the full point. But the mind is not going to leave you so easily; it will come again and again. You have to become aware of the mind’s subtle strategies. You have to see and watch how the mind comes back. And it comes in such ways that unless you are very alert it will deceive you. It is a great politician.The mind can live only when you are unconscious. To be conscious means the death of the mind – and nobody wants to die. The mind exists only when there is deep unconsciousness; the deeper unconsciousness there is, the more nourishment for the mind.A man goes to a doctor. The doctor’s wife leads him into the office and explains that the doctor went out and will be back shortly. Sitting down with the man, the wife starts flirting with him. One thing leads to another, and in no time at all she is giving him a blow-job.Suddenly there is the noise of a car and in great distress the woman exclaims, “Here’s my husband – let me go!”“No, no, please!” pleads the man. “I am just coming – please continue a few seconds more!”Just then they hear the key turning in the front door.“Let me go! Let me go!” cries the woman.“No, no, please! A few seconds more!”But the woman violently tears herself away and manages to escape into the other room.When the doctor enters, the man says, “Good morning, doctor. I heard you coming so I decided to undress in order to avoid wasting your time.”“Good,” says the doctor, “but what are you doing with those two ears in your hands?”Man lives in unconsciousness. He lives without knowing why, without knowing where, without knowing whence. He simply goes on like a robot. And if you watch yourself you will be surprised how you have lived up to now – almost in a dream.Maria and Giovanni are having their breakfast. Giovanni says to Maria, “Amore, I can-a understand-a that you are nervous about having your driving-a examination, but last-a night-a it was-a too much! With your mouth-a you were making the noise-a of the engine and with your hand-a you were changing gears using my prick-a!”But that’s how people are living their whole lives, day and night!It is good that you have realized that “…being conscious is a state one has to just experience and not recognize.” But what will you do? Will you say, “I will not recognize it! No, it is not there. No, it is something else. No, I am not going to be deceived again.” But the mind has come in. Again it is there – from a different door, of course. Don’t try to recognize. Don’t try to not-recognize.And you say it is, “…a state one has to just experience…” Who is going to experience? What is this “just experience”? If you try to experience it, even if you call it “just experience,” you have created a separation between the state and yourself. And any separation between the state and yourself is enough for the mind to come in.Just understand it and forget all about recognizing it, not recognizing it, about just experiencing and not thinking about it. Forget all these things. When it comes, enjoy. When it goes, enjoy. When it comes, live it; when it is not there, live its absence. Don’t make much fuss about it, whether it is there or not. Remain calm and quiet, calm and collected, as if it does not make any difference at all.Whether you are conscious or unconscious you are the same. If you evaluate consciousness, if you say consciousness is better than unconsciousness, then there is bound to be difficulty because whenever there is consciousness, your mind in a subtle way will start clinging to it – and the very clinging brings the mind in. The mind is a clinger.You have to learn one thing, to live each moment as it comes, not asking for its opposite, neither clinging to it nor withdrawing away from it. When you are in a dark mood, live it in totality, don’t be worried about it. What is wrong with darkness? It has its own beauty – it is very velvety, it has its own depth. Live it, love it, enjoy it. Take as much nourishment from it as possible. Roots need darkness; without darkness roots cannot grow. So let your roots be nourished by it. And when you have sunlit peaks, let your flowers bloom. Enjoy that too. Flowers are yours as much as your roots are – both are yours.My own experience is this: that life has to be used in its totality, in all its dimensions. Yes, even the darker ones, they have their own share to contribute to the richness of life.Whenever you make a division, “This is good and this is bad, this should be and this should not be,” you are creating trouble for yourself. Life is one organic unity. When it is night, sleep; when it is day, wake up. Don’t hanker for the night in the day; don’t hanker for the day in the night.Rinzai is right when he says, “Whenever I feel hungry I eat and whenever I feel sleepy I sleep. This is my whole sadhana, this is all that I do.”And this is what I say to my sannyasins. When you are unconscious, nothing is wrong; when you are conscious, nothing is great. Bring them closer to each other to such a point where both weigh equally, then the mind will disappear. There is no need to recognize, there is no need to praise, there is no need to feel egoistic, elated; there is no need to brag about it.And the moment the mind goes totally, all is God, all is godliness, all is bliss, all is benediction.The third question:Osho,I have only one dream in my life, and that is to attain physical immortality. Can you help me to realize my dream? I hate the momentariness of life.Meditate over these three maxims of Murphy.First: If life were a bed of roses, some people would not be happy until they developed an allergy.Now, what is wrong with the momentariness of life? Just think of a kiss with a woman that is eternal – just think about it. Eternal! Now there is no way to escape. What is wrong with a kiss? A kiss has to be momentary, only then is it beautiful.I have heard about a Mohammedan king whose wife fell in love with one of his slaves. The king was so angry that he wanted to punish him, and punish him in such a way no man has ever been punished. He asked his wise advisors…One old man said, “Do this: bind them to a pole and let them make love to each other, and keep them chained to the pole in a state of lovemaking for twenty-four hours.”The king said. “What? Is this a punishment?”The wise man said, “Just do what I say and see what happens.”And really there has never been such a punishment before. They were forced to be naked, they were forced to make love chained to a pillar with thousands of people watching. Then many things happened – twenty-four hours is a long time. They started smelling, they started pissing, they defecated; they had to. It became such an ugly affair, and thousands of people watching… When after twenty-four hours they were freed, it is said they escaped from each other and never saw each other again their whole lives. Enough is enough!Now what is wrong with a momentary life? Your saints have been poisoning you. The flowers have to be momentary otherwise they will be plastic. Life is beautiful only because it is fragile. One moment it is there, the next moment it is gone. That’s its whole beauty.Do you want beautiful men and women made of plastic? They will be immortals. Sooner or later that calamity can happen through science, your whole body can be exchanged slowly, slowly, part by part, with plastic things. You will be alive but in a plastic body – and plastic is the most immortal thing in the world. And then your parts can always be changed. If one of your hands goes wrong, you go to the workshop, you go to the garage, and they immediately change your hand. You want to change your head; you simply go to the market, you look for another head and you change it. It is only a question of taking out a few screws, that’s all, to fix a new head on you. Your heart can be plastic, there is no need for blood, we can have artificial blood. Everything can be artificial.And in many ways it will be good: the bodies will not perspire because nobody has ever heard of plastic perspiring, and you will not need deodorants and soaps, etcetera. And you will never grow old – plastic never grows old. And if something goes wrong – you have a car accident or something – there will be no need to live with a crippled body; parts can always be changed, and they will be available everywhere.Life will be immortal, but will it be beautiful? Will it be blissful? I don’t think so. I love life the way it is, so please don’t ask me such foolish questions. I don’t think there is any need for physical immortality.Your soul is immortal. Search for that rather than trying to search for physical immortality. But there are fools who go on thinking in these ways.Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy became world famous for the simple reason that he was saying to his disciples that physical immortality is possible. And the day he died, the disciples could not believe it. In fact, one of my friends who was in the ashram, told me later on that for three days it was kept secret that Sri Aurobindo had died because it was unbelievable. When the Mother was asked, she said, “He has gone into a deep samadhi, it is not death. How can he die? He is physically immortal.” But after three days when the body started stinking, they had to bury him.Then they started believing that the Mother was immortal. Then one day the Mother died. Now those fools believe that they have both gone to the other world to bring back some more secrets and that they will come soon, they will be back. They are hoping that they will be back with the secrets of physical immortality!The immortality of the soul is enough. There is no need for your body’s immortality. In fact seventy years is enough – enough to enjoy, enough to suffer, enough to understand, enough to misunderstand. In fact whatever you want to do, seventy years is enough. And if you really go on doing things totally, within seventy years you will be capable of seeing the whole absurdity of being in the body. You will not ask for an immortal body, you will ask how to get rid of this whole business of being born and dying again and again and again, how to get rid of the wheel of life and death.The second maxim of Murphy: Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.And you ask me, “Osho, can you help me to realize my dream?”The third saying of Murphy is: The best way to make your dreams come true is wake up.The fourth question:Osho,How was it possible for Dionysius, as an enlightened being, to carry out his duties as bishop in a guilt-promoting organization? How could he present a facade to the world without creating division within himself, without compromising himself – for instance when he had to follow stupid orders from his archbishop?This is one of the most fundamental things to understand, that an enlightened person becomes a perfect actor. He is not a doer; he is only an actor. He does nothing, but he acts perfectly. For him the whole of life is nothing but a drama, so there is no question of compromise, there is no question of being divided, becoming schizophrenic. There is no question of being two – saying one thing, doing another thing. He remains undivided because life becomes playfulness, he is no longer serious.You are taking it very seriously, hence the question. It comes out of your seriousness. You don’t know what playfulness is.The enlightened person can be absolutely playful in any situation; no situation can disturb him. He can be in a guilt-promoting organization, but he will not promote guilt and he will not promote the organization; in fact, he will sabotage it from within. That’s what Dionysius did, and he did it well, he sabotaged the whole Christian stupidity from within.There are two ways: either you fight from the outside or you fight from within. And my feeling is he chose the right course. If Jesus had also chosen the same way he would have destroyed the Jewish religion completely, but because he fought from the outside he could not change the Judaic tradition. Of course he convinced a few people, he helped a few people to come out of the organization.Dionysius is not a serious man. No enlightened person is ever serious – cannot be.It is said about Bodhidharma that the day he became enlightened he started laughing; for days together he laughed. Finally people asked him, “What is going on? Have you gone mad? Now stop laughing!”He said, “It is very difficult to stop laughing because now I see the whole ridiculousness.”People asked, “Ridiculousness of what?”And you will be surprised to know his answer. He said “The ridiculousness of trying to become enlightened – because everyone is born enlightened. We have it already and still we are trying to achieve it. That is the ridiculousness.”Trying to achieve something that you already have is the most absurd thing possible in the world. How can you achieve it? So if you fail to achieve it, it is not because enlightenment is difficult to achieve, but because it is already the case. You are bound to fail. Sooner or later, by failing many times, one day you understand the point. It depends how thick your skull is. If it is very thick it takes many lives; if it is not that thick then it is easier. Then one can see in a single moment that “I am already perfect” and drop the whole effort to become perfect.One starts enjoying life wherever one is, whatever one is. If one is a cobbler one remains a cobbler. Jacob Boehme was a cobbler and he remained a cobbler. And Kabir was a weaver and he remained a weaver. Gora was a potter and he remained a potter. Raidas was a shoemaker and he remained a shoemaker.It so happened that Diogenes was a bishop.Murphy says: Never bow to authority but always tip your hat.That’s what he did his whole life.In Moscow, applicants were being interviewed for a government position. Each was asked, “How much is two and two?”The answer was always: “Four!”One candidate, however, replied, “How much do you want it to be?”He was appointed.Now, I will call this man enlightened! To be in Russia and say that two plus two is four is stupidity, sheer stupidity. The man must have been enlightened. I don’t know his name, but that doesn’t matter. He said, “How much do you want it to be? What does it matter? I am ready to play the game according to the rules. A game is a game. You decide the rules and I will play the game!”You are asking me, “…he had to follow stupid orders from his archbishop?” Of course, he knew that they were stupid orders, but still he followed them.A bunch of cowboys were sitting around a campfire about to eat dinner. The cook, a grimy, stubble-faced little man, was lecturing the boys, spoon in hand: “The first one of you guys to make a fuss about yer supper gits to do the cookin’ tomorra night!”There was a careful silence as the slop was served and the eating began.“God, this tastes like shit!” exclaimed one of the cowboys. Immediately remembering the punishment for his complaint, he added enthusiastically, “But good shit, real good shit!”“Have you ever wavered from the party line?” a party member was asked by an official.The man turned white with fear and protested vehemently, “No, no, no! I have always wavered with the party line!”An enlightened person becomes an actor. I don’t think that Diogenes was in any difficulty, he must have enjoyed the whole show.Two East German guards were standing near the Berlin wall.“What do you think of our regime?” asked the first.“The same as you!” the second replied.“In that case,” said the first guard, “it is my duty to arrest you!”It must have been a little difficult, that I can understand. It is easier to be free like me: free from all religions, free from all political ideologies, free from all philosophies. So I do not have to bother at all to adjust to any a priori idea, I need not be consistent with anybody. It is easier for me.Why have I chosen this way? The reason is I don’t have a good memory, so I don’t know what I told you yesterday and I cannot be consistent – for that one needs a good memory. If you want to lie you need a good memory, and I don’t have a good memory; I go on forgetting things. But I don’t care about it because I am not at all interested in being consistent. In fact, to me, to be contradictory is part of my message because if you want the polarities, the opposites to be complementaries, you have to be contradictory.Diogenius had chosen a difficult job. He had to remember continuously what the Christian ideology is, what the dogmatists say, what the Creed is, what is written in the Bible, what all other saints have said. He certainly chose a difficult line, but he must have liked it because there was nobody forcing him. He could have renounced his job; there was no need to remain a bishop.But one thing is certain, that he was not divided inside, as you are afraid. You ask, “How was it possible for Dionysius, as an enlightened being, to carry out his duties as bishop in a guilt-promoting organization?” He managed well.“How could he present a facade to the world without creating a division within himself…?”If you know you are acting then there is no problem. The moment you start becoming identified with your acting, then the problem arises. If you are acting you are acting – it is just a facade. You are not it; you are just a witness of it. Just as you observe other actors, you observe yourself also.This is my suggestion for everyone: if you are in the world of acting – for example, Vinod is sitting here – if you are an actor, act as if it is real life, then you will be the best of actors. And if you are in life, live as if you are an actor and you will be the best of livers.Once in a while Dionysius may have shouted, once in a while he may have rebelled, but he must have done it in private.A man walks into a pet shop: “I want to buy a female parrot.”“We only have that one over there,” says the owner, pointing to an ordinary looking parrot.“How much does it cost?” asks the customer.“Only fifty dollars, sir.”“What! All the other birds here cost half that price. Why is that small parrot so expensive?”“She is the only female parrot in captivity that lays square eggs,” announced the shop owner.“Square eggs? Well, that really is an unusual phenomenon. But really I am more interested in a parrot that can talk,” says the man.“Well,” ventures the owner, “she also talks – not much, but she does talk.”“What can she say?”“Once in a while,” replies the shop owner, “she says ‘Yowch!’”Once in a while Dionysius must have said “Yowch!” – because he was laying square eggs! But he must have loved it. Nobody was forcing him to be a bishop; it was his choice.So please, don’t be worried about him. He lived a perfectly beautiful life, he died a perfectly beautiful death, he has left a perfectly beautiful message behind. And I don’t think that he would have been any happier in any other situation. He was absolutely adjusted to the role he was playing. Don’t be worried about him, be worried about yourself.A woman visited the psychiatrist with a problem. “You’ve got to help my husband,” she said. “He has delusions and thinks he is an elevator!”“Send him in,” replied the psychiatrist, “and I’ll try to straighten him out.”“Oh, I can’t do that,” said the wife. “He is an express elevator and doesn’t stop at your floor!”Now, the wife needs treatment, not the husband, but she is worried about the husband!Please, don’t be worried about anybody else. Your own worries are enough. But people try to worry about others; that is a way of distracting themselves from their own worries. It is a way of intoxicating themselves with great problems.Now, what have you got to do with Dionysius? – nothing at all, you have no relationship with him. Or do you think that you have some blood relationship with the poor man? He was a Catholic bishop, never married – unless he left a few bastards! I don’t know… Don’t be worried about him, be worried about yourself. Take life easily, lovingly, playfully, nonseriously. Seriousness is a disease, the greatest disease of the soul, and playfulness the greatest health.The last question, or a series of very serious questions from Devaraj:Osho,What do you call an Indian with half a brain?Lucky!How do you keep an Indian busy all day?Give him a piece of paper with PTO written on both sides!Why do Indians hang around in groups of three?One can usually read, one can usually write, and the third likes to hang around with the intellectuals.What has an Indian got inside his skull?A piece of paper with “brain” written on it.What are the three things common to all government programs in India?A beginning, a muddle, and no end.How do you make an Indian laugh on Monday?Tell him a joke on Friday.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the difference between being an individual and just being stubborn?The difference is immense – it is absolutely unbridgeable. Two things will have to be understood: one is personality and the second is individuality.We ordinarily don’t have individuality at all. That’s what Gurdjieff means when he says it is very rare to find a person who has a soul. He is the first enlightened master who has said it so clearly. Otherwise, Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, Christ, they have all given the impression at least that everybody has a soul. Everybody has a self, but not a soul, and the self is a barrier not a bridge to the soul.Personality is your circumference, not your center. The word personality comes from a Latin root persona. In Greek theater the actors used to wear masks; they would speak through the mask. Sona means sound, persona means sound coming through the mask. You cannot see the real person, you cannot see his original face. You only see a facade, something pseudo, something made-up, invented. The word personality comes from persona.When the child is born we start giving him personality – by educating him, by giving him a certain religious attitude, by imparting some philosophy, some political ideology. Slowly, slowly, brick by brick, we create a structure around him in which he becomes imprisoned, so much so that he starts feeling identified with the edifice created by others around him. He does not feel imprisoned.To feel imprisoned is a great insight because from that moment one starts making efforts to be free. Whatever you are, you are a creation of others. You have been pushed and pulled from all directions, you have been given a certain shape. It is not your originality; it is something imposed, painted. But you have known it from your very beginning. You have known it for so long that you don’t remember that you can be anybody else. And you are somebody else – you are not this personality.This confusion prevails all over the world. Just a few days ago, Sarjano wrote to me saying, “Osho, it seems I have a strong individuality and I cannot surrender to the commune. I cannot possibly become part of the commune. I want to cook in my own way.” Now he thinks he has a strong individuality; in fact, he has no individuality at all – not yet.When you come to me you come only with a personality, a persona. And my work is an absolutely thankless job because I have to destroy your personality; that is the only way to help you to discover your individuality. The individuality is your original face, it is the way God wanted you to be, it is the way you were made by him. Your individuality has the signature of God on it, but your personality is a social phenomenon. Hence there are Christian personalities, Hindu personalities, Mohammedan personalities, and so on and so forth.Individuality is simply individuality. It is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, it is neither Catholic nor communist, it is neither Eastern nor Western. In fact, individuality is neither male nor female. It is the personality that has all these divisions, categories, aspects.Sarjano wrote, “I feel I have a strong individuality…” Individuality is never strong; it is very fragile, as fragile as a roseflower. Of course, even in its fragility the roseflower has a certain strength. It can dance in the wind, in the rain, unafraid. It is fearless, but it is not strong in the sense steel is strong.Buddha is not as strong as Joseph Stalin is. The very name Stalin comes from steel. It was not his real name, it was given because he was a man of steel. Buddha is not a man of steel, he is made out of very fragile elements: the rainbow, the lotus, the fragrance of flowers. He is very feminine – feminine not in the sense of being female but in the sense of being very vulnerable, receptive, very available to existence.The strong person is one who is stubborn.Yoga Prem is asking, “What is the difference between being an individual and just being stubborn?” Personality is always stubborn, individuality never. Personality has to be stubborn because it is false. If it is not stubborn it cannot exist at all. It has to be maintained continuously – you have to fight for it. The personality consists of nothing but ego, self, greed, anger, violence, because deep down you are aware of the trembling, of the fear of death. Deep down you know your inferiority. The personality brags about its superiority.Remember always, whatever the personality brags about is exactly the opposite of your reality. If you are feeling unintelligent inside, your personality will project intelligence. If you are feeling unloving inside, your personality will create a very sweet, smiling, loving quality. It is not just to deceive others, it is really basically to deceive oneself. You want to forget your unlovingness. If you are feeling empty inside, your personality will start gathering a thousand and one possessions.Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler – these people have lived only as personalities, very stubborn. They have to be stubborn because they know that if they are not stubborn, if they are not continuously fighting, the personality will disappear because it is a false phenomenon. It is not a reality; it is manufactured by the mind, hence the mind has to go on finding more props for it.But individuality is egoless, selfless, a state of no-mind. It has no ambitions, no desires because it is immensely fulfilled just being itself. It need not fight for its existence; it is existential. It cannot be destroyed; it is indestructible, but not strong – very fragile, very feminine, never aggressive, always receptive. It never brags about itself, there is no need because there is no inferiority complex in it. Not that it feels superior. Those are two aspects of the same coin: the inferior and the superior.The real person, the authentic being, the individual, is neither inferior nor superior; he is simply himself. He never compares himself with others – the idea of comparison does not arise at all; he knows everybody has unique individualities.The word individuality is also significant, it means indivisible, that which cannot be divided. Individuality is organic. Personality is a patchwork – something from here, something from there. You go on collecting and hence you are always afraid it can be taken back.Somebody says to you, “You are so beautiful!” Now you will be dependent on the person because he can withdraw his statement any moment. Not only can he withdraw it, he can say, “I have never seen such an ugly person as you!” Then what? You have to cling to his statement, and to cling to his statement you have to compromise. You have to go on persuading him, buttressing him, so that he goes on continuing to say that you are beautiful.Dale Carnegie in one of his famous books suggests to couples, particularly husbands, that they should go on saying to their wives, whenever there is an opportunity, “I love you. You are the most precious thing in my life. I cannot believe there can be any person more beautiful than you.” Whether you feel it or not, that is not the point, he says; the point is repetition.And the wife has to do the same: “You are the greatest man in the world. There is nobody who even comes close to you. You are divine. You are almost a god to me. I will worship you forever and forever, in this life and afterward too.” Whether you feel it or not is not the point. You may feel, “I have never seen such a man, so stupid, so ugly, so cunning, so mean.” Go on feeling that, but never say it because people live on words – personalities live on words.I asked a woman – I knew her husband, he was always in the library. I asked the woman, “Is your husband a bookworm?”She said, “No, he is just an ordinary worm!”But these things have not to be told to the husband!Dale Carnegie has become the prophet of the American way of life. In America, after the Bible, Dale Carnegie’s book has been the biggest seller: How to Win Friends and Influence People. And this is the secret – simple; just go on feeding their egos and you can win people, they will be your friends. You can persuade them even to die for you because all that they need is support for their personalities, and it has to come from all sources. The priest has to support them, the educational system has to support them, the social system has to support them. And if you cannot find ordinary ways – for example, not everybody can hope to become the prime minister or the president – then you start creating your own small clubs: the Rotary Club, the Lions Club. Now, go to a Lions Club and see how many sheep are gathered there pretending to be lions!Once I went to a Lions Club meeting in Pune – fifteen years must have passed since then – and thinking that they were lions, I shouted and roared. I was staying at Sohan’s house. When we came back she said, “You were the only lion there, and they were all sheep!” Because they became so afraid. They were so shocked because I started destroying all their assumptions.Now there are Rotary Clubs all over the world. The word rotary is because people become president by rotation. So everybody has a chance; you just have to wait for your chance. Sooner or later you will become the vice-president, then the president and then the governor, and so on and so forth. They have a very cunning strategy to fulfill everybody’s ego. And then there are committees and chairmen of the committees. No work is done at all.I have been to Rotary Clubs all over the country, and they have a placard on the president’s table: “We serve.” I have never seen them serving anybody; they must be serving each other. And they do serve each other – they serve each other’s personality. It is a tacit assumption that “I will help your ego, you help my ego.”Then there are churches and religions, but have you seen the phenomenon? No religion has remained undivided. Why? What happened?The day Buddha died, Buddhists were divided into thirty-six sects. Why? These people were one when Buddha was alive, and just after Buddha died they started quarreling, as if they were just waiting for Buddha’s death. There must have been many egoists around who wanted to be the chief, but how to be the chief when the Buddha is alive? So they must have waited for their opportunity.The moment Buddha died, immediately the body was burning on the funeral pyre, and they started playing their political game: “Who is going to be the successor?” Now there were thirty-six pretenders so Buddhism was divided into thirty-six sects.Christianity could not remain one. Since Christ there have been many sects, many sub-sects, and the greatest division was created by Luther. Luther was one of the most egoistic persons ever. He had nothing to do with Christ, he had nothing to do with Christianity, but he was in a constant fight with the Pope. The Pope was just as egoistic, and Luther refused to submit to the Pope’s ego. He created the Protestant section of Christians.The same has happened to Jainism, to Islam, and it has happened more to Hinduism. Hindus have a very quarreling spirit, very quarrelsome. I don’t think any country has such a quarreling spirit. The reason is that Hindus don’t fight physically so their whole fight becomes intellectual; it has to find some way. Now Hindus have so many sects, sub-sects and sub-sub-sects that it is almost too difficult to know how many Hindu religions there are. There are so many, almost unbelievable. And this is not only so about religion; it is so about everything that Hindus have done.India has never been a nation because the Hindu mind is continuously quarreling and fighting. In Buddha’s time there were two thousand Indias, not one India, because two thousand kingdoms existed – just small kingdoms, with each kingdom trying to be the suprememost. And the disease has gone so deep into the Hindu blood that in every sphere, even in politics, it is the same. Now there are so many Congress Parties. Not only are there so many Congress Parties – that can be understood – there are so many Communist Parties in India that you will not believe it. Nowhere in the world are there so many Communist Parties. Even the Communist Party – which is an absolutely non-Indian phenomenon, which is anti-religious, atheistic – even the Communist Party is not one in India. There are many Communist Parties quarreling, continuously quarreling. The old Hindu spirit cannot leave you so easily. You may become a communist, but basically you will go on doing your old tricks.But the whole thing happens because of personality: “My ego has to be supreme.”In India there are so many jagatgurus. Jagatguru means “world teacher.” Now, without asking the world, how can you be the world teacher? And there are so many world teachers! There can be only one world teacher; one is enough because there is only one world. I came across so many world teachers in India while traveling that I was surprised – in one world so many world teachers?In one village they brought a man and they said, “He is a world teacher, jagatguru.”I asked him, “How many followers have you got?”He looked a little embarrassed. The man who had brought him said, “His philosophy is so abstruse, so difficult to understand, that I am his only disciple.”I said, “Don’t feel embarrassed. Do one thing. Jagatguru means the world teacher; jagat means the world, guru means the teacher. So change your name. Simply make your name Jagat, the world. And he is your guru – Jagatguru, the world teacher – so the problem is solved! Then you need not feel embarrassed – he is the guru of Jagat!”Personality is always dependent on others. Because it is dependent on others it is a prisoner, and because it is dependent on others it has to be stubborn. Otherwise others will make you an absolute slave; they will reduce you to the status of a thing. You have to be stubborn, you have to fight, you have to struggle for your survival.Individuality is never stubborn. Individuality is very liquid, very flowing – just like a river it goes on moving toward the ocean. It has no fixed route, it has no a priori ideas as to what direction to go in, it has no plans. It adjusts to situations; it is very adjustable.But the personality is not so adjustable; it has to be on guard. It is not liquid; it is very solid. It is more like ice than like water. But the personality is a false phenomenon. It cannot give you any joy, it cannot make your life a festival, it cannot give you the sense of the divine. It is a human phenomenon, a human structure. It will keep you empty, meaningless; it will keep you miserable.Individuality makes your life significant. It makes your life a beautiful song, but the song is no longer yours, the song is God’s. Individuality is divine. You are simply a hollow bamboo. You become a flute on the lips of God or on the lips of the whole existence. Then whatever the whole wants, you allow it, you remain in a let-go.Sarjano is absolutely wrong if he thinks that he has individuality; he just has a very strong ego. And it happens when people come to me, if I see that they have strong egos, the first thing that I do is to start puffing up their egos, pumping up their egos, making them bigger and bigger like big balloons so that they can see, others can see. And that’s what I was doing with Sarjano.He became very happy. He misunderstood the whole thing – he misunderstood the device. He became very happy; he thought, “This is the place for me!” He started thinking he had found the right man. He started telling people, “Jesus is nothing compared to Osho. Jesus is just a pygmy!” Because I was pumping up his ego and making his balloon bigger and bigger, of course he started paying me in the same coin. He thought, “These things are going to help.”Just old, stupid mind games. But I go on making the balloon bigger and bigger, up to a certain point – when I see the balloon is so thin now that it needs just a pinprick and it will burst.Whenever Devaraj comes to take my blood he always says, “Now comes the prick,” and I start laughing inside. I say, “That’s my whole work!” He is telling me, “Now comes the prick,” and that’s what I go on doing, day in, day out.So when I told Sarjano, “Now comes the prick,” he started packing his luggage. Now he is trying to go to Italy. Go anywhere, the prick is bound to come. My prick is long enough! It can reach Italy – you cannot escape!The second question:Osho,Any message for Kutch?Navin Mehta, I am coming! And I am coming with my whole world of orange people. We are going to change the whole color of Kutch – we are going to make it orange! First ten thousand sannyasins will arrive, then more will be coming. Within five years fifty thousand sannyasins will be there and within ten years one hundred thousand sannyasins will be there.So, tell the people of Kutch: Get ready! We are certainly going to destroy many things – many things which need to be destroyed, which should have been destroyed long ago.The whole of India is suffering from many stupidities, many superstitions. We are not going to leave a single stone unturned. We are going to destroy every nonsense, howsoever ancient and old it may be. We are going to bring a totally new vision to Kutch.I have chosen Kutch for the simple reason that it is one of the most innocent parts of India. They are simple-hearted people, and very poor too because all the cunning people have left it; there was not much possibility for exploitation.Just one hundred and fifty years ago, the great River Sindh changed its course. It used to go by the side of Kutch; then Kutch was very prosperous, really golden. But the whole prosperity was dependent on the great River Sindh. The Sindh is one of the greatest rivers in the world.You will be surprised to know that the name India comes from the River Sindh. When the Greeks came to India with Alexander the Great they called the country Indus because in their language Sindh became Sindhus and from Sindhus it became Indus, from Indus the name India.Kutch was very prosperous, very rich. But once the river changed its course, Kutch became a desert and the people started leaving, particularly the cunning, the ambitious – they all left Kutch. You will find them all over India, particularly concentrated in Mumbai. They are one of the richest peoples in India, but outside Kutch.Kutch is poor, innocent and because these ambitious people have left it, it is the right soil for us to work in. And because the people are still in a way primitive, they have some quality of childlike innocence, and that childlike innocence can be transformed very easily into a spiritual revolution.So Kutch is going to be our great experiment. One hundred thousand sannyasins have never lived together anywhere in the world at any time in history. This will be the first sannyasin city. This is going to be something of a unique experiment.Naturally, there are a few people who are against it, but very few, not more than two percent. But they are very articulate people; particularly the businessmen who have left Kutch, they are afraid of my going to Kutch for the simple reason that Kutch has always been dependent on them. They have not given much to Kutch, but Kutch feels very grateful to them for whatever small amount they give. And they know that once I am there, once my people are there, we are going to transform Kutch – and then they will be nowhere. Their leadership, their great altruistic works, will fade away. They are afraid of losing their grip on Kutch. The business people, the politicians, they are very much afraid.I have been looking at the reports in the Kutch papers, in the Gujarati papers. Every day there is something about me and my people going to Kutch, for and against. I was surprised to know that the names of those who are opposing me that have come to me again and again through these newspapers are only six – six names – not more than that, the same people. The same six people. The same person presides over every meeting, and the same speakers participate. They are moving all over Kutch and Gujarat and Mumbai trying to create a camouflage to make it appear as if the whole of Kutch is against me. But their game is political.These are the defeated politicians, these are the followers of Morarji Desai – Morarji Desai’s hand is behind it. Now they have nothing else to fight for, to create chaos for. They have found this: that my coming and my people’s coming will destroy the culture of Kutch, it will destroy the religion of Kutch. As if Kutch has a different culture than India and a different religion than India. As if Kutch has something special. It shares in the same stupid culture that the whole of India has – and wherever I am, I am going to destroy it. In fact it is going down the drain by itself because it has no future. It has a great past but no future at all. It has become absolutely irrelevant.Two politicians were walking along a beach where they saw some boys catching crabs. The boys were storing all the captured crabs in a bucket.One of the politicians approached the lads and said, “Hey, why don’t you cover the bucket? What if some crabs climb out?”One of the boys replied, “You needn’t worry, mister. These crabs are like politicians, if one of them tries to climb up, the others will pull it down!”Now, because Indira’s Congress Party has come into power in many parts of the country, in Gujarat particularly, the defeated politicians are trying to find some excuse or other. And because Indira is favorable to me and the Gujarat government is favorable to me… The Chief Minister of Gujarat, Solanki, just declared two days ago that he is determined to give the land to me and to invite me to Kutch, and this small opposition cannot deter him.These six people immediately ran to Indira. They went to Delhi, seeing that the Chief Minister was determined. But Indira herself wants me to go to Kutch. She can understand the benefits that will become possible for Kutch. She can understand the transformation that can happen to Kutch.So, tell the people of Kutch that just because of these few people, who can be counted on your fingers, I am not going to be prevented. I am going to come.These stupid politicians, what can they do? It is my birthright to be anywhere in India, nobody can prevent me. In fact, that’s why I have not left India because in any other country they can easily prevent me, but in India they cannot prevent me from going anywhere. This is a freedom guaranteed by the Indian constitution – the freedom of movement. And of course, when I am there, nobody can prevent people from coming to me, to visit me. Wherever I am, my whole world will be there.Hector, being an idiot, decided to have a brain transplant. He went along to the hospital and was given the choice of two brains: an architect’s brain for fifty dollars and a politician’s brain for ten thousand dollars.“Does that mean the politician’s brain is much better than the architect’s?” asked Hector.“Not necessarily,” said the brain transplant salesman, “it’s just that the politician’s brain has never been used!”So these stupid people cannot prevent me, and I am really enjoying the challenge! It is going to be a beautiful journey to Kutch – they are making it almost adventurous. Just a few people, but they are creating so much dust that in the smoke and in the dust they may be thinking there are many people. They are making so much noise that they may be deceived by their own noise. And politicians are drunk with power, with money, with prestige; they can’t see clearly.Navin Mehta is from Kutch. His other friends are here: Mavji Savla is here, Nirmal Vaswani is here, and many people from Kutch have started coming to see the ashram. And they are all feeling sorry because we were going to move two years ago to Kutch but because of Morarji Desai it became impossible. He created such a cunning atmosphere that I thought it was better to wait for a while because I knew perfectly well this man could not stay long. He was just accidentally prime minister of India – he never deserved it, he had no capacity for it. But sometimes just because of some accidental situation it can happen, and it happened.He pretends to be a Gandhian, a lover of truth, but whatever he did was absolutely untrue. He tried to persuade the army to prevent me, to say that my moving to Kutch was dangerous for the security of the country. And once the army says that it is dangerous to the security of the country, then it becomes very difficult to move. Now all those files have been looked into – the army has never raised any objection to it. It was all fabricated. It was false. It was declared in the name of the army without the army saying anything about it. Maybe Morarji simply persuaded them to keep quiet while he created the atmosphere that it is dangerous for the country’s security.And now these four, five people are again raising the same old thing, that it is dangerous for the country’s security. But they are making such a noise that they may themselves be deceived by it.A drunkard leaves a bar late at night. The road is deserted, but in the dark he manages to stagger into a lamppost. He takes a few steps back, then stumbles forward again and bumps his head into the same lamppost. He steps back, reels forward and crashes straight into the same lamppost.“Oh, my God!” he exclaims. “I am lost in an impenetrable forest!”And there are a few pundits, scholars, saints, mahatmas who are also trying to create some antagonism against me. That is natural, expected. They are the people who are afraid; their vested interests are there. They have lost their lives in futile exercises, but that has become their profession. Now they are exploiting others and destroying their lives.My presence there is bound, is certainly bound, to bring many people from their folds to my commune – that is their fear. So Jaina munis, Hindu monks and other priests and scholars, they are creating a little bit of a stir.A professor was taking a sea voyage on a small boat. One night he goes up on deck, meets with an old sailor, and after introducing himself asks him, “Hey, old man, what do you know about oceanography?”The old sailor says he does not know what the word means.The professor, amazed, says to the old salt, “You’ve wasted a quarter of your life! Here you are voyaging across the seas and you don’t even know what oceanography is.”The next night the professor goes up to the old man and says, “Hey, old man, what do you know about meteorology?”The old sailor shakes his head in ignorance.“So you have wasted half of your life!” exclaims the professor.The next night the professor goes up to the old man and asks him, “What do you know about astronomy?”“Nothing,” replies the old sailor.“Here you are out on the ocean needing the stars to navigate, and you don’t know anything about astronomy? You have wasted almost all of your life, old man!”The next night there was a storm at sea and the old sailor comes rushing up to the professor and cries, “Hey, professor, what do you know about swimmingology?”The professor replies, “Well, nothing really. I have never heard about it. What do you mean?”The old sailor says, “I mean, do you know how to swim?”The professor says, “No!”“Pity!” says the sailor. “The boat is leaking! You have wasted your whole life and, mind you, not almost but the whole of your life!”These people have wasted their lives. They have not learned anything about the truth. Hence they are afraid that if I come there and I start telling people the simple truth of life, their whole business will be in danger.Navin Mehta, I don’t own many newspapers. In fact I don’t own any newspapers. Newspaper people have been coming to the Foundation asking for money, saying, “If you give us money we will start writing for you.” I have said, “We cannot give a single cent to anybody. Go and write against us! That’s my way of spreading my word to people.”Journalists are being paid by the priests, by the industrialists, by the rich people, by the munis – they are being paid! Now this is a well-established fact, they have been paid to write against me. But what can newspapers do?Just a few days ago Laxmi went to Kutch and thousands of people gathered around her, and they were asking, “When is Osho coming? We are ready to welcome him.” Not a single person against! But newspapers can create – at least outside Kutch – an impression in people’s minds as if the whole Kutch is against me.The whole Kutch is for me. And you will see – when we go there you will see the whole of Kutch receiving us!Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon were viewing a military parade in Moscow. Alexander could not take his eyes off the tanks.“If I had had chariots like these,” he said, “I could have conquered all of Asia!”Caesar eyed the missiles. “With such arrows I could have ruled the world!”Napoleon glanced up from the copy of Pravda he was reading. “With a newspaper like this,” he exclaimed, “no one would have ever heard of Waterloo!”The third question:Osho,Who was that guy you were talking about while discussing St. Murphy's sutras today? Was it Diogenes or Diogenius or Dionysius?He was neither Diogenes nor Diogenius or Dionysius. He was Diorajneesh!The fourth question:Osho,The many problems of the world ask for new human solutions. Due to this it seems necessary to become not only more conscious on the sensual and mental levels, but also on the levels of spiritual thinking and perception. Your discourses and your inventions in all fields demonstrate that your art of thinking is developed to the highest standard of consciousness. Could you recommend to us spiritual exercises which are helpful to make our hardened minds more mature, more inspired, and universal?It seems you have fallen into wrong company! This is not the right place for you. Get lost as quickly as possible because this is the last place where you can make your “hardened minds more mature.” We destroy minds! We don’t make them more mature.This is the last place where you can get more inspiration. We don’t believe in inspiration. Inspiration is just a beautiful word for imitation. I am against all imitation, against getting inspired. You are not to be inspired by me; you have to understand me. Inspiration is a state of hypnosis; you become hypnotized. It is the impact of a charismatic personality; you become enslaved. It is not a good situation to be in.You want your mind to be universal. The mind can never be universal. It is the mind that is not allowing you to be universal.But, you must have been studying all kinds of occult and esoteric nonsense, that’s why you talk about “levels of sensual and mental and spiritual thinking.”We are against thinking! What levels are you talking about? We are against all levels of thinking. Our effort here is to create a mind which is not a mind at all. To be more correct, we are here to create a state of no-mind – agnosia, as Diorajneesh says!And you are searching for spiritual exercises. We don’t do any exercises here. What to say about the spiritual? Not even physical exercises! People simply sit silently doing nothing, waiting for the spring and for the moment when the grass grows by itself. Why bother? The whole universe is running so beautifully well without your spiritual exercises! Do you think that just by standing on your head you are going to help it run better or in a smoother way?But you are too full of knowledge. You have not heard me. You are just hearing what you can hear; you are not hearing what is being said.A gay guy at a Hollywood party was so excited to meet Burt Reynolds that when Burt asked him his name he didn’t understand and said, “I beg your hard on?”When one is too full of one’s own mind, one goes on hearing things which are not being said. You are too preoccupied.The triplets were talking while waiting inside their mother’s womb. The baby located furthest inside said, “When I grow up I want to be a doctor. I want to care for those people in worse positions than myself.”The baby in the middle said, “I want to be an engineer, a master of balance.”“I want to be a detective,” said the baby closest to the outside world.“A detective?” chorused the other two babies.“Yes, so I can discover who it is that comes and pushes me about every evening!”Preoccupations from your mother’s womb! And then your whole life you are preoccupied with your ideas. You never see what is, you never hear, you never taste, you never sense anything of the reality. Your preoccupations always interfere.If you want to really understand me, you will have to drop your a priori conceptions.You say, “The many problems of the world ask for new human solutions.” Do you think the world has ever had fewer problems than it has today? The problems have always been there. And do you think new human solutions will solve everything? They will only create new problems. Man has been evolving solutions, and each solution creates a new problem. You do one thing and something else goes wrong.Hence I teach non-doing, so nothing can ever go wrong. Or even if it goes wrong, it is perfectly okay. So what? We don’t have any expectations. We are not interested in solving the problems of the world; we are more interested in becoming problem-less ourselves, because to me a problem-less person radiates a certain quality, a certain vibe which helps others to solve their problems.He does not give them instructions for solving their problems, he does not give them commandments – he is not a Moses – he simply lives his life peacefully, lovingly, without any worry and without any hurry. And just because he lives in a certain grace he creates around himself the vibe, the music, the unheard music which starts pulsating many hearts.If you want to be here, be here with your heart, not with your mind.You say, “Your discourses and your inventions in all fields demonstrate…” What nonsense are you saying? What discourses? I am just telling a few jokes! These are not discourses. Discourses are delivered by priests, bishops, popes. I am an ordinary person, just a madman, so utterly mad that there is no cure for it. I simply go on telling a few jokes. These are not discourses, these are not even talks, at the most you can call them chit-chats – gossiping, not gospels!And when you write about my great ideas don’t call them gospels, just call them gossips – divine gossips, if gossips does not satisfy your ego. The disciple always feels hurt: “Gossips? So we are hearing gossip?” So hear divine gossips! But from my side they are just gossips.You may be thinking I use jokes as illustrations – you are wrong. Jokes are the main thing; everything else is just an illustration. First I choose a joke and then I look at the questions. Whichever question fits the joke – that’s how I choose the question, not vice versa.And you say, “…your art of thinking…” I have never learned the art of thinking. I don’t know how to think, I know only how not to think. When you ask me a question I don’t think about it, I simply start talking about it, hoping something will come out. If something comes out, good; if nothing comes out, far out!But you have some investment in thinking, in philosophy, in occultism, in theology, in theosophy. You must be reading Leadbeater, Colonel Olcott, Blavatsky, Annie Besant. You must be reading Rudolf Steiner. And there are so many fools, the whole world is full of them! They are such articulate people and they put their bullshit in such beautiful packages that one tends to buy, one is tempted.You are very greedy. You want some spiritual ambition to be fulfilled. Here we are not trying to help anybody to fulfill any spiritual advancement, any spiritual growth. Any idea of being somebody else somewhere else is a projection of the mind.My simple approach is totally different from ambition, achievement. It is just to be as you are. Enjoy the moment to its fullest. Love the moment with intensity, passion, totality and forget all about spiritual growth. For five thousand years men have been trying for spiritual growth, for spiritual planes, and all that is meaningless. The only spirituality that I know is of the moment, now, here.But your greed knows no bounds. It is greedy for money, and then it is ready to do anything. It is greedy for power, and then it is ready to do anything. If somehow you manage to shift your greed from power and money then it becomes greed for spirituality. Again it is ready to do anything.A rough-looking building worker entered a bank in an expensive part of town and was received at the counter with some distaste by a rather prim and proper female bank clerk.“Good morning, sir. In what way may I be of service to you?”“I want to open an account and get a fucking checkbook with it,” stated the laborer.“I beg your pardon?” answered the lady indignantly.“I said I wanted an account with a fucking checkbook!”“If you insist upon using such language while addressing me,” announced the flustered lady, “I will have to summon the manager who will have you ejected!”Looking impatient the laborer repeated, “Just give me an account with a fucking checkbook. I haven’t got all day!”The distressed lady called the manager and described the man’s behavior. Taking on a commanding air of authority the manager told Miss Hopkins not to worry, he would deal with the matter. He then approached the worker.“I am sorry, my good man, but I am afraid Miss Hopkins finds your manner offensive. I must request you to leave our bank premises immediately.”The laborer replied, “Look, bozo, it is simple! I have just won two hundred and fifty thousand pounds on a National Lottery and I want to open an account with a fucking checkbook!”“Well,” replied the manager, “don’t just sit there like an old cow, Miss Hopkins. Get the gentleman an account with a fucking checkbook!”Greed is ready to do anything, and greed goes on changing its face. And you have to be aware of the ways of greed, ego. The moment the greed and the ego and the ambitiousness of your mind fall through understanding – just through understanding, not through any effort – individuality arises, spirituality arises. It has been there all along, just covered. It has to be discovered. It has not to be achieved, it is not far away somewhere else, it is within you. The solution of solutions is within you. It is in your meditativeness, in your state of no-mind.Please, don’t hope for any miracle. New people who come here come with the idea of fulfilling their greed, their desire, by some miracle. Miracles happen only in stories and nowhere else.I am not a magician and I am not a miracle worker. I am out and out an ordinary person. If you want to be ordinary, be here with me. If you want to have some extraordinary spiritual status, then go somewhere else. The only miracle I know of is to be absolutely ordinary. Not desiring to be anybody else is the greatest miracle. All other miracles are only in stories.A young couple checked into a hotel room for the first night of their honeymoon. The young bride shyly went into the bathroom to change into her nightgown. Catching sight of her skinny body in the mirror she sighed and said sadly, “I wish I had a set of forty-fours!”Zap! Crash! Poof! Suddenly she had tits out to here! Excitedly, she ran into the bedroom to tell her new mate.“It is incredible!” she blurted. “There is a magic mirror in the bathroom that gave me these beautiful boobs!”The husband could not wait to try his luck, so, standing in front of the mirror, he said, “Magic mirror, I want a prick that will touch the floor when I am standing up!”Kabang! Scrunch! Poof! And there he was – standing on four-inch legs!”Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness, and through not seeing and not knowing to see and to know him who is beyond both vision and knowledge – by the very fact of neither seeing him nor knowing him. For this is truly to see and to know, and, through the abandonment of all things, to praise him who is beyond and above all. For this is not unlike the art of those who hew out a life-like image (from stone), removing from around it all which impedes clear vision of the latent form, showing its true and hidden beauty solely by taking away.For it is, as I believe, more fitting to praise him by taking away than by ascription, for we ascribe attributes to him when we start from universals, and come down through the intermediate to particulars. But here we take away all things from him, going up from particulars to universals, that we may know openly the unknowable, which is hidden in and under all things that may be known. And we behold that darkness beyond being, concealed under all natural light.We have praised those things which fitly pertain to the theology of affirmation; how the divine and excellent nature may be spoken of as one, and how as three; how in accord therewith the fatherhood of God may be explained, how the sonship, and in what manner the truth of the spirit may be revealed; how out of the incorporeal and undivided excellence they put forth these three interior lights of goodness, and how in himself and in themselves, and in their mutual and co-eternal propagation they remain together, nowhere going apart; how Jesus, while above all creation, may be in very truth of the substance of human nature…. We have told how he may be called good, being, life, wisdom, and power, and whatever else concerns the spiritual naming of God.Theology is a perverse discipline; it is masochistic. It is a subtle way of torturing yourself, but very subtle. In fact, nobody has ever said that it is a hidden form of masochism, self-torture and perversion, but I would like to make it clear to you that the theology of all the religions is basically stupid. It talks about things it knows not. It talks about things which cannot be talked about. It goes on moving in a vicious circle of contradictions because religion is silence and theology is nothing but words.In the East the division has been very clear, hence we have been saved from a very great curse. In the East, the mystic has never tried to be a theologian and the theologian has never been thought to be a mystic. They have been separate disciplines. In the West, theology has dominated, so much so that either a mystic had to talk in terms of theology or he had to be ready to be burned alive.Dionysius must have felt the utter futility of all that he was saying. I can feel his pain. I can feel compassion and love for him. I can see the man knows. But the people who were in power were utterly ignorant of the truth. And he did not want to be burned alive so he had to talk in a stupid way.Lao Tzu talks directly, Buddha’s statements are absolutely clear; there is nothing airy-fairy about them. Mahavira says whatever he wants to say without creating a great camouflage of big words, theories, ideologies, philosophies. They are very matter of fact people and very precise too, almost mathematically precise.That’s why in the East the statements of all the great enlightened masters are known as sutras. Sutra means a very condensed statement, all that is nonessential has been eliminated, only the very essential has been expressed. They are like seeds. You can sow those seeds in your soul and a big tree will start growing in you with millions of flowers and millions of seeds. But the statements themselves are very small. They don’t go zigzag; they are straightforward, they go like an arrow. They don’t go in a roundabout way because they are not afraid to say whatever they feel like saying.The West has not allowed that freedom. And now even in the East the Western disease is spreading. Now even in the East the freedom is disappearing.I am continuously condemned just because I go on saying the truth as it is, without making any compromise with any kind of theology – of the Hindus, of the Jainas, of the Buddhists, of the Mohammedans, of the Christians. They are all against me. It is a strange phenomenon in the East. It has been the tradition in the West, but the disease has come to the East too. Otherwise in the East nobody has ever been crucified, nobody has ever been killed, poisoned, like Socrates, Jesus, al-Hillaj Mansoor and many others.Buddha’s statements are far more dangerous than whatever Jesus has said. Jesus does not deny the existence of God; Buddha denies the existence of God, Mahavira denies the existence of God. Patanjali says that God is only an arbitrary hypothesis, you can use it if you want, but remember it has no truth about it; it is only a means toward meditation. See the radical revolutionary rebellious spirit of the statement from a man like Patanjali, who has never been surpassed as far as methodologies for the inner journey are concerned, who is the suprememost master of Yoga and meditative methods.All over the world it is thought that meditation is a means to God, God is the end. Patanjali reverses the whole situation. He says, “Meditation is the goal, God is only a hypothesis.” If your mind is very childish and you need the support of a God to meditate, okay, you can take the support. But remember, the moment you have learned how to meditate, drop that support. It was just to help you in the beginning.It is like small children’s books. If you look at them you will see big pictures, colored pictures, with small text. If a child has to be helped to understand things and words and language, that’s the only way. If you want to teach him what the word mango means you have to paint a colorful, very juicy looking mango. He is interested in the mango, he is not interested in the word mango. Children are very, very pragmatic, they are not as stupid as theologians. But through the picture you can help the child to understand the word mango. Slowly, slowly the picture will disappear, but it was only an arbitrary device.Because we are all children as far as the ultimate truth is concerned, Patanjali says there are many supports. One of those supports is the belief in God. If it helps you to surrender the ego, good, if it helps you to drop the mind, good, because the ultimate thing, the essential thing, the important thing is how to drop the ego, how to drop the mind. Any excuse will do. God is just an excuse. Once the mind is dropped, God is also dropped because God was nothing but a thought in the mind. Once the ego is dropped, God is dropped because God was nothing but a projection of the ego. The ego means “I” and God means “thou.” How can the “thou” exist without the “I”? They can either both exist together or both disappear, evaporate together. They are simultaneous phenomena.Mahavira, Patanjali, Buddha – all three deny any existence of God. Buddha goes a step further, he even denies the existence of the self, of the soul because he says the very idea of the self or the soul is in some indirect way protecting the idea of the ego. You can call it “self,” you can call it “soul,” but you have saved the idea of the ego in some subtle way. If the ego has to be dropped, eradicated totally, then all these ideas have also to be dropped. There is no God and no soul.Then what remains? That which remains is without “I” and “thou.” Buddha calls it the truth. It is not an experience because there is no experiencer and no one experienced. It is not knowledge because there is no knower and no known. Buddha would have been killed in the West immediately, Patanjali would have been crucified, Mahavira would have been poisoned. In the East we accepted them.One strange thing I would like to remind you of, in the East there has been freedom of thought, freedom of tremendous value as far as your thinking is concerned, but there has been no freedom of social forms. In the East there has been a deep slavery as far as social relationships are concerned, but absolute freedom for the intelligentsia, for intelligence – no social freedom, but absolute spiritual freedom.In the West, just the opposite has been the case. Social freedom is there: if a couple are hugging each other on the sea beach it is nobody else’s concern in the West; that is their personal affair. They are not doing any harm to anybody, and who are you to interfere? But in the East it is almost inconceivable. You cannot even talk to your married wife in front of others during the day in the old traditional families. You cannot even talk to her, what to say about embracing or kissing her? Your own wife! I am not talking about somebody else’s wife – your own wife! You cannot talk with her in full daylight in front of somebody else. The wife cannot pronounce the name of the husband, that is insulting.I have never heard my mother pronounce my father’s name. I have never even heard my father pronounce my mother’s name. For that I always respected him because that is not the traditional way. They would have to speak in a roundabout way. My father would always call my mother “Osho’s mother” – not direct, no direct relationship. Even when I went to college and to university and for years disappeared from the house, every night he would come home and knock on the door and call, “Osho’s mother.”A father cannot even play with his own child in front of his own father. My mother used to tell me that when I was small my father could not carry me around, play with me because the family was big – the grandparents were there, uncles were there, others were there. It was not thought right that you should play with your own child because that shows you are related to your wife in a sexual way. Otherwise, from where has the child come? – a very indirect indication of it.In the East there has been a social slavery. That’s why you are puzzled and the Pune people are puzzled. In the West there is social freedom – and not only with your own wife. Who cares? It is nobody else’s affair at all. You are totally free to relate with people. Everybody has a girlfriend, and not only young people.Just a few months ago Mukta’s father died. He must have been seventy-five and he had a girlfriend – on the deathbed! He had a wife, children, everything, but also a girlfriend, a young girlfriend. And he was almost dying. He was hanging between death and life for months and he was a very rich man; he has left much money for the children, for the wife, for me via Mukta! But he has left half of the money to the girlfriend. And it is accepted; there is no problem.There has been great social freedom in the West, but there has been no intellectual freedom the way it has existed in the East. Buddha condemned Mahavira’s standpoint vehemently. Buddha was criticized by Shankaracharya with no compassion. Shankaracharya was condemned and criticized by Ramanuja in the same way as Shankara had done to Buddha. And there was no problem. These people were listened to respectfully, with great honor because they were bringing more spiritual insights, different aspects of reality. Nobody ever thought that they were destroying religion – they were enriching it.But today that has disappeared. Social freedom has not appeared in the East as it should appear, but intellectual freedom has disappeared. Now in the East to be a buddha is as dangerous as it was in the West.Hence I can understand Dionysius, I am in the same situation. But I would not like to speak… It will look a little ridiculous, but I can speak very easily the way Hindus would like it or the Jainas would like it or the Buddhists would like it. It is only a game with words, but I don’t want to speak that way.Dionysius must have been absolutely convinced that if he spoke the truth clearly and was caught, then his fate was going to be the same as Socrates or Jesus, and that was not going to serve truth at all. That was his personal decision.In fact, I don’t agree. I would have like him to die like a Jesus, like a Socrates. But nobody can say for another how he should behave, everybody has to decide according to his situation. He decided to speak the language of theology, Christian theology.A man walking across a bridge late one night noticed another on the parapet about to throw himself over. He rushed forward and shouted, “Don’t jump! Come, have a drink and talk things over.” It so happened that the would-be suicide was a great theologian.They went to the nearest pub and spent the next hour discussing the oneness of God and the threeness of God, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, how many angels can dance on a pin-point, what the Holy Ghost is and things like that. Drinks finished, they went back to the bridge – and both jumped.It was one of those universities in the West where attendance was not compulsory. One student of theology attended just one lecture and obtained ninety-six percent.“Surely you could have got the four percent also,” his professor of theology suggested.“Sure I could,” the student replied, “but I attended one of your classes and got confused.”A woman graduate on a return visit to her Alma Mater ran into a professor of theology. “Don’t you remember me?” she asked. “You once asked me to marry you!”“Ah yes!” nodded the professor. “And did you?”It is a kind of insanity. It is a kind of chess with words. You can become very proficient at playing with words, but however proficient you are, anybody who has a little intelligence can see the utter nonsense of it all. And the libraries of the world are full of all these theological treatises, although fortunately nobody reads them; they are written by theologians for other theologians, nobody else reads them.“Don’t you find writing a thankless job?” a great theologian was once asked.He said, “On the contrary, everything I write is returned to me with thanks.”The theologian’s mind works in a very strange way. He can make a mountain out of a molehill. In fact, if he is a great theologian, he can make a mountain even without a molehill! They have created great mountains. Sometimes it is good to look into their books just to see what man has been doing for centuries. And we have thought these people very intelligent!All the religions are concerned with why God created the world. Nobody can really answer it – nobody will ever be able to answer it. In the first place nobody knows whether God ever created the world or not. In the second place, even if he created it, how can you answer why he created it? To know the answer he would have to be psychoanalyzed. He may not know himself.Do you know what things you go on doing? If somebody really asks, “Why? Why have you fallen in love with this woman?” you shrug your shoulders. You say, “It just happened!”A professor of theology to his agitated wife: “And another thing – it was not you I was whistling at twenty years ago, it was a taxi!”Why have you fallen in love with a certain woman? And whatever reason you give will look absurd: her long nose, or the black hair, or the blond hair. When you think about these things you will feel embarrassed even to talk about them, even to say anything about them. So we have found a cover-up. We say, “Love happens, nobody knows why. It is a mysterious phenomenon.” There is nothing mysterious about it – it is just pure chemistry! You put a few chemicals in one bottle and a few chemicals in another bottle and they will fall in love. And of course they will also find reasons: that the neck of the bottle was so beautiful, it was so shapely, and the color inside – fantastic!Once a theologian found it difficult to sleep at the inn he had put up in for the night. Scores of bugs in the bed made it difficult for him to drop off. Disgusted, he summoned the innkeeper and complained to him vehemently about the bugs.“But sir,” the innkeeper protested. “There isn’t a single bug in this room!”“I know, I know,” countered the theologian heatedly. “They aren’t single – they’re all married and have large families. I can see!”People become accustomed to a particular way of thinking, and once you have become accustomed to a particular way of thinking it feels perfectly right to you – but only to you. Anybody else listening to you will find it very difficult to understand what nonsense you are talking about.An arithmetical chap had to manage his children for a single evening when his wife was away. The following is a record of his activities for the evening: Opened door for children 108 times, shouted “Shut up!” 94 times, stopped quarrels 17 times, provided water to them 29 times, answered the phone 11 times, lost temper 45 times, cried and wept 29 times, ran after children 4 1/2 miles.Once you are obsessed with a certain pattern of thinking, then to you it looks perfectly right. Now, this mathematical chap is doing something right – according to him everything has to be on record, written mathematically. To you it will look absurd.These words of Dionysius will look very absurd to you, but there is an undercurrent hidden somewhere, that’s what I would like you to discover. And then you will be surprised, it is the same truth as Lao Tzu’s, as Buddha’s, as Zarathustra’s, as Jesus’. There is nothing different, it is just that out of necessity the language, the jargon he uses is that of a theologian. He must have been surrounded by theologians, he may have come from a family of theologians.To become a bishop, the first bishop of Athens, seems to be a great honor. He must have been respected by the theologians, he must have many friends. Maybe for many generations his family was practicing the profession of the theologian, and he had become accustomed to talking in this way. Even though he became enlightened the old patterns may have continued, or knowingly he may not have dropped them.It is said: Only a friend can become an enemy. A relative is one from the very start!So he must have been surrounded by many enemies – relatives and friends. To satisfy them he speaks in a very tortuous way. Don’t get impatient with him. He says:We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness…We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness… Nobody before him, particularly in the Christian tradition, had ever talked about the darkness of God. God had always been thought of as light. He is the first in the Christian world to introduce a new vision of God as translucent darkness. It was dangerous because God had been thought of as pure light. Darkness is of the Devil, that’s why the Devil is always painted black. And God is just pure light, transparent light, light and nothing else.He says: We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness… But I also feel that his choice is far better. Light is a momentary phenomenon; darkness is eternal – as eternal as God. Light divides. It is light and I can see you all as different persons. If suddenly darkness descends you will all disappear in the darkness, all distinctions will be lost: nobody will be rich, nobody will be poor; nobody will be young, nobody will be old; nobody will be a man, nobody will be a woman. Even if somebody is sitting there totally dead you will not know the distinction – who is dead and who is alive, who is a sannyasin and who is not a sannyasin. All distinctions will dissolve, darkness will overwhelm all distinctions; it will encompass you. Light cannot do that miracle, and in that way God is closer to darkness than to light.Just to satisfy the Christian theological world he calls it translucent darkness, so they don’t feel too offended – translucent darkness, darkness which is full of light. If he had been free to say it he would have said simply darkness, pure darkness, unadulterated darkness. Why adulterate it with light?You can see it in Lao Tzu, whatever he wants to say he says. He says, “I see that everyone in the world seems to be very clear, thoughtful; there is clarity in people’s minds. I am the only one who is muddle-headed because I cannot see distinctions. I am the only one who is unclear about everything. I am the only one for whom everything is vague, everything is melting and merging into everything else. I cannot define – I cannot say this is this and that is that.” He has the courage to call himself muddle-headed – no problem about it.Darkness has depth; light is always shallow. Light is always finite, that’s why it is shallow and darkness is infinite, it is not shallow.The Bible says in the beginning there was darkness – not light because how can there be light in the beginning? Who will bring the light? Who will create the light? Light has to be created; darkness is something uncreated. Darkness is like God because God is also uncreated. In the beginning there was darkness – that is a tremendously significant statement.Dionysius says: We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness… Our only desire is to dwell in this darkness, in this infinity, in this distinctionless, unadulterated, abysmal darkness. We want to lose ourselves in it.…and through not seeing and not knowing to see and to know him…The only way to see God is to stop seeing, and the only way to know God is to drop all knowledge because your knowledge will be an interference. Your seeing will be your seeing; it will be a projection of your ego. You have to forget knowledge, you have to forget seeing. Ordinarily we think we see whatever is there. That is not true, that’s absolutely untrue.Charles Darwin remembers in his memoirs that when he reached near a small island with his big ship, he was puzzled to know that nobody on the island could see the ship. It was really a strange experience. Such a big ship had never come before, so they had no idea about it, they had never heard of one. They knew only small boats, very small boats, fishing boats – only two persons at the most could sit in them. That was their traditional idea of a boat, and the ship was so huge that it simply eluded their vision; they could not see it.You will not believe it. Even Charles Darwin could not believe it. When he inquired of people, they said, “What are you talking about? We don’t see anything.” Their seeing had become fixed, they had become accustomed to seeing certain things, and they would see only those certain things.And this you can experience in many ways. For example, if you go into a primitive aboriginal society – there are many such societies still alive in the world. In India there are…I have been many times to Bastar, to one of the most ancient aboriginal tribes, which is now slowly being destroyed by the Christian missionaries. Of course, with good intentions; they are destroying it thinking they are helping. They are making hospitals, and they have introduced diseases which the tribe had never known before. Of course, when missionaries come they bring many things with them: modern diseases… They have introduced modern education, of course with good intentions, they want to educate people, but as people become educated they become cunning, dishonest.In Bastar it has been on record, government records – British government records say that Bastar is the only place where no divorce has ever happened, and Bastar is the only place where no theft has ever happened, and Bastar is the only place where sometimes murders happen but the murderers come to the police station to report, “I have murdered such and such a man.” And they come walking hundreds of miles to the police station, otherwise the police would never come to know. They cross hundreds of miles of thick jungle and mountains to come to the place where the police are available to inform; otherwise the police would never come to know that any murder has happened. And the murderers themselves come to inform them!Such simplicity, such honesty: no theft, no cunningness, no deception, no exploitation. In Bastar there has never existed anything like taking interest on money; in fact, there exists no money at all, people only exchange things. In Bastar women are almost naked, just as men are almost naked. No man is interested in their breasts, no man at all. But when the missionaries come, their whole interest is in their breasts. And they have beautiful breasts – their womenfolk are very alive, wild and primitive, as alive as animals, and of course they have the same agility and the same flavor of wildness. But the missionary immediately becomes interested in their breasts.If you see a woman, your first interest is in her breasts. Why? Your mind has become somehow focused from your very childhood. In all the civilized countries children are prohibited, as much as possible, by their mothers from feeding from the breast. Their mothers don’t like it because the more children feed from the breast, the more the breasts lose shape; they start hanging, they start looking ugly. So no mother wants the children to breast-feed. Naturally there is a reluctance, even if she has to feed them, it is with reluctance not with love. And that reluctance creates a deep desire in the child to cling to the breast.Now the whole human civilization suffers from that clinging: your whole poetry, great poetry – Byron, Shelley, Keats, Kalidas. Don’t think that it is only in the West, don’t think that Indian culture is very spiritual; in fact, Kalidas, Bhavabhuti, the great Indian poets, talk much more of breasts than any Western poet has ever talked.You can go into Indian temples and see: the breasts seem to be too big. Go to Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri, and the breasts seem to be inventions; such big breasts do not exist. And these are not my creations, remember – I have not made these temples. They are thousands of years old, they are absolutely Indian; they represent Indian culture, Indian religion. And you will be surprised to know that in these sculptures all kinds of perverted sexuality are depicted. From where does this perversion come? Repression brings it. You see that which has been repressed, you see that which has been denied. You don’t see that which is.Now scientists say that your eyes only allow two percent of information to pass through; ninety-eight percent of information is prevented outside. And the same is true about other senses too.If we want to know the truth we will have to learn some new way. That’s what meditation is all about: not seeing, not knowing. That is meditation, agnosia, because that is the only way to see and to know him. If you want to know him, if you want to know the truth, you will have to unlearn all your ways – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist. All your ways of seeing and knowing – you will have to drop all that. You will have to be utterly empty, in a state of not knowing, agnosia. Only then will you be able to see and know who he is:…who is beyond both vision and knowledge…The truth is beyond your vision and your knowledge because your knowledge is your knowledge; it is just ego confined. And when ego itself is a lie, how can it give you the truth?A lie, says Murphy, is a very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one discovered so far.The whole of theology is full of lies. The truth cannot be said, cannot be uttered, and still people go on talking about it. God has been talked about in millions of pages. About and about, around and around they go, in circles, never touching the center of the reality. That center can be touched not by thinking but only by meditation.…he is beyond both vision and knowledge – by the very fact of neither seeing him nor knowing him.So, remember. Many people come to me and say, “We want to see God.” Forget all about it. If you want to see God, you will never see him. You have to disappear.Kabir says, “I longed, and I searched long for God, but I could not find him. Then one day I dropped that longing, that desire, that search, and since that moment he goes on following me. He is always with me. In fact, he has always been with me, but I was so occupied with searching that I never saw him.”I call this the totally relaxed state of your being: when there is no search, no inquiry, no question, when you are so relaxed that you start falling deep within your own being. Soon you touch the rock bottom of it; from that touch great revelations happen. You are not inquiring about God, God starts inquiring about you.That’s actually what Kabir says: “When I stopped searching for him, he started following me. Now he goes on calling me, ‘Kabir, Kabir, where are you going?’ And I don’t care a bit at all about him because I know, the moment I start caring about him he will disappear. Either I can be or he can be; we cannot both exist together.”Jesus says the path, the bridge is straight but very narrow, so narrow that it cannot contain two persons.For this is truly to see and to know, and, through the abandonment of all things, to praise him who is beyond and above all.Now he goes on taking detours. He goes on putting in a little bit of Christian theology, just to befool the fools.…through the abandonment of all things… Now Christians will think he is talking about renouncing things. He is not talking about renouncing things. He is saying that the abandonment of things means that you don’t look at things as things; that is abandonment, not renunciation. When you renounce something you still think about it in the same old way.A man is greedy for money, he thinks money is very valuable, everything can be purchased through it. Then one day he comes to know that his whole effort was futile, that money cannot purchase everything, that money is nothing, that he has wasted his life. Realizing it, he renounces the money, he escapes from the world of money, but still he values money. Now he is thinking that by renouncing money he is going to attain truth. First he was thinking that by having money everything can be purchased; now he thinks that by renouncing money everything can be got, even truth. But the logic is the same. It has not changed a little bit – it is still the money. The focus is the money and the money is valuable. First he was accumulating it, now he is renouncing it, but he has not changed, his approach has not changed; money is still the target.Dionysius says: …abandonment of all things… That is a totally different phenomenon. …the abandonment of things… means don’t look at things as things because all is full of God. Everything is so full, overflowing with God, that to call it a thing is not right. Nothing is dead, all is alive – of course, alive in different ways, but all is alive. Even a rock is alive. The man who has known God knows the aliveness of existence and knows the falsity of death. And if death is false then there is not a single thing in the world.Ordinarily we go on doing just the opposite, we reduce persons to things. When you marry a woman… Before marriage she was a person, an independent person, and you were a person, an independent person; after marriage she becomes a wife, a thing, and you become a husband, a thing. The husband is not a person, the wife is not a person: the wife is a thing that has to be used, the husband is a thing that has to be used; they have become things, commodities. We reduce people to commodities, to things.The man of vision, of meditation, raises things to persons. He even starts talking with things, with trees, with animals; he starts imparting personality to them.St. Francis used to talk with trees. He would go to the trees and say, “Sisters, how are you? You look a little ill today.” When he died, just before dying he thanked all his disciples for all that they had done for him, and the last thing he did was to thank his donkey. He said, “Brother Donkey, you have been such a great servant to me. In what words can I be grateful to you?” To call the donkey a brother is spirituality. It is raising the donkey to a spiritual being. And Francis is calling him brother.This is abandonment of things. Things disappear from the world. The world becomes full of beings.For this is not unlike the art of those who hew out a life-like image (from stone), removing from around it all which impedes clear vision of the latent form, showing its true and hidden beauty solely by taking away.Now, this is what I say – he is going into unnecessary theology. It may have been a necessity for him, but after two thousand years it looks very tortuous, meaningless. All that he wants to say is that God can be described more accurately by negatives. To say this simple thing he has to go in such a roundabout way so that the Christian theologians, the Church, the Pope, cannot catch hold of his idea.All that he wants to say through this whole statement is contained in two words of the Upanishads: neti-neti, neither this nor that, or what Buddha calls via negativa. The truth is more clearly understood via negativa than via affirmativa because when you affirm, whenever you say something, whenever you attribute some quality to God, you give him a finiteness, a boundary. If you say God is beautiful then you have made him limited. Then what about ugliness? Where will ugliness go? If you say God is good, then what about bad? If you say God is this, then what about that? If you say God is man, if you say God is the father, then what about the woman, what about the mother? The moment you affirm something you negate much.So via affirmativa on the surface seems to be affirming, but it affirms less and negates more, while on the contrary via negativa apparently negates but basically affirms. Via negativa means we don’t attribute qualities to God. That’s what Dionysius means by darkness. He is so dark you can’t see any aspects, any qualities in him. He is so dark that there is no distinction between ugliness and beauty. In darkness, what is the difference between a beautiful woman and an ugly woman?That may be one of the reasons why for centuries people have decided to make love in the night, in darkness, because it helps one thing: the woman does not know how ugly you are, you don’t know how ugly she is. It is a good arrangement in a way. If you see the woman and the man naked in the light you will soon be bored with each other. The hidden remains attractive.And women are more intuitive about it. That’s why when embracing you, kissing you, loving you, they will always close their eyes. To look at you in those moments is profane. It is far better to feel you with closed eyes rather than looking because looking is a partial phenomenon, feeling is total. When somebody is kissing a woman, she wants to feel him with all her cells from head to toe, from her guts, in her bones, in her blood, in her marrow – she wants to feel the kiss, to let it sink as deep into her as possible – while the man simply goes on looking.The man is too interested in the superficial; he is an observer. That’s why he is so interested in pornographic magazines: Playboy, etcetera. He is so interested in seeing that he has completely forgotten feeling.Via negativa: the mystic denies all qualities to God. God becomes a pure darkness, emptiness; you have to feel it. And the only way to feel the emptiness of God is to become empty yourself. God is a nothingness, and by nothingness I mean nothingness. So if you want to feel God you will have to become a nothingness. Buddha calls it shunyata, nothingness.These are the two methods. The organized religions believe in via affirmativa, and the individual mystics have always believed in via negativa. Hence there has been a fight, a continuous struggle between the priest and the mystic. The priest is an enemy of the mystic. The priests have tried in every possible way to destroy the mystics because the mystics talk of a totally different process.These two processes have to be understood. Via negativa means you start with the particular and you start moving toward the universal. And the universal means the infinite; the particular means the finite. You start with the particular.For example, you fall in love with a master. That is something particular: a certain quality in the master, a certain presence around him, a certain light in his eyes, a certain gesture, a certain grace, anything, but it is particular. And then from the master you slowly start moving toward the ultimate master, the master of masters. That is universal. You can hold the hands of the master; you cannot hold the hands of God. You can touch the feet of your master, but you cannot touch the feet of God. The master is a visible reality; God is invisible. The master is just in between. You are almost a thing, God is nothing, the master participates in both. He participates with you, he is a human being, and he also participates with God because he has become a nothing.That’s why Jesus says again and again, “I am the Son of God and also I am the Son of Man.” That’s his way of saying this paradox, that from one side he is the Son of Man, from the other side he is the Son of God. From one side he is a particular human being, from the other side he is just universal nothingness.Via negativa starts with the particular and ends in the universal, starts with things and ends in nothings. Via affirmativa is just the reverse process. It starts with the universal: God the infinite, God the indefinable. And then it comes to the particular: the pope, the priest, who represents God. You need not bother about God – for that the pope is enough, he will take care, he is the mediator.The master is not a mediator; the master is only a friend, he only gives you hints. And the master, if he is truly a master, is a master only if he becomes slowly, slowly less and less necessary to the disciple. That’s the definition of the perfect master, one who makes himself less and less needed by the disciple.Buddha says, “If you meet me on the way, kill me immediately” – don’t hesitate for a single moment. The priest says, “I am always absolutely necessary, without me you cannot reach God.” The priest says, “Without me there is no God, I am the bridge, and the only bridge, so don’t go to other priests.” The Hindu priests will prevent you from going to the Christian priest and the Christian will prevent you from going to the Mohammedan priest. In fact, the Catholic will prevent you from going to the Protestant and the Protestant will do the same.The priests and the popes and the imams and the ayatollahs – these people create the organized religions. And the moment a religion becomes organized it becomes dead, it becomes political, it becomes an institution.For it is, as I believe, more fitting to praise him by taking away than by ascription, for we ascribe attributes to him when we start from universals, and come down through the intermediate to particulars. But here we take away all things from him, going up from particulars to universals, that we may know openly the unknowable, which is hidden in and under all things that we may be known. And we behold that darkness beyond being, concealed under all natural light.He simply wants to say that rather than thinking in positive terms about God, think in negative terms. Dionysius here is pure buddha, just his language is Christian.We have praised those things which fitly pertain…But he is aware that this can be caught; what he is saying can be caught by the priests. So immediately he adds:We have praised those things which fitly pertain to the theology of affirmation; how the divine and excellent nature may be spoken of as one, and how as three; how in accord therewith the fatherhood of God may be explained, how the sonship, and in what manner the truth of the spirit may be revealed; how out of the incorporeal and undivided excellence they put forth these three interior lights of goodness, and how in himself and in themselves, and in their mutual and co-eternal propagation they remain together, nowhere going apart; how Jesus, while above all creation, may be in very truth of the substance of human nature…. We have told how he may be called good, being, life, wisdom, and power, and whatever else concerns the spiritual naming of God.He immediately adds, “We are not denying the positive.”He is: …good, being, life, wisdom, and power, and whatever else concerns the spiritual naming of God. All the names of God – we are praising and affirming all those things too. We affirm that God is the Father, we affirm that Jesus is the Son, and we affirm also that Jesus is above all creation.Now this he must be doing just to satisfy the stupid Church, the stupid theologians. Otherwise, how can he say that anybody is above all creation? Even God is not above all creation. God is creativity – how can Jesus be above creation? And if Jesus is above creation, then why not Dionysius, then why not Buddha, then why not Krishna, then why not Lao Tzu? Then every enlightened person is above creation. And then why should the unenlightened ones be under creation, not above creation? Because they also have the potential of becoming enlightened.This he says only to satisfy the fools, but this is not his real approach. He has said clearly that the best way to describe God is that of: …the art of those who hew out a life-like image (from stone), removing from around it all which impedes clear vision of the latent form, showing its true and hidden beauty solely by taking away.Negation, he says, is the way, not attributing positive qualities to God. The moment you attribute positive qualities to God you create belief in people, worship in people. You create churches and temples. You don’t create religiousness; you create only pseudo religion.When you take away all qualities from God, when God is just a pure nothingness, only then will those who are really interested in knowing the truth become interested in him. Those who are ready to lose themselves, those who are ready to drown themselves, to surrender themselves, those who are ready to die and be reborn into that nothingness – only those few people will be interested, and they are the only religious people in the world.My sannyasins have to be religious in this sense.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I understand you said the other day in the lecture that Jesus did not walk on water and there are no miracles as such. But by practicing the samyama on Patanjali's Udana sutra, is not man able to do this?Please comment.I say again that there are no miracles as such because the whole existence is a miracle. What other miracles can there be? Each moment, each event, is miraculous.The religious person is one for whom everything, from the most ordinary to the most extraordinary, has become a miracle. A seed growing green leaves, is it not a miracle far greater than any guy walking on water on the Sea of Galilee? A bird flying in the sky, on the wing, is it not a greater miracle than anybody walking in fire? The roses, the lotuses, the marigolds, the millions of flowers, and you don’t see any miracles in them?You look for stupid things. Somebody materializing a Swiss-made watch, that is a miracle – and a rose is not a miracle? Somebody producing holy ash, that is a miracle, and the man who produces holy ash is nothing but an asshole! A cuckoo calling from the distance is not a miracle? You are blind, utterly blind, and insane. You can only believe in childish things. You are not in search of the real magic of life; that’s why stupid magicians can deceive you.Just to be is more than one can believe: to be able to breathe, to be able to see the rising sun, to be able to hear the chirping of the birds, to be able to feel love, prayer, gratitude, silence. This very moment, this is a miracle: the silence that encompasses you, the love that transpires between me and you, the communion, the satsang, with open hearts like lotuses – you are drinking me with such vulnerability, with such immense trust – what other miracles are needed to prove that existence is a mystery?It happened…A great mahatma, great because he used to walk on water, came to see Ramakrishna Paramahansa. Ramakrishna used to live in Dakshineshwar near Kolkata, on the banks of the Ganges. He was sitting under a banyan tree looking at the beautiful Ganges flowing by and the mahatma came. Of course, such people are on great ego trips. Because he could walk on water, of course he was great. His every vibe was saying “holier than thou.”He stood in front of Ramakrishna and said, “I have heard that people think you are a great mystic – but can you walk on water?”Ramakrishna said, “No, I cannot walk on water. In fact, I cannot even swim! Can you?”And the man said, “Yes, I can walk on water.”Ramakrishna asked, “Sir, please tell me how long it took for you to learn the art?”The man said, “I have devoted eighteen years to learning the art of walking on water.”Ramakrishna started giggling like a small child, and he said, “This is stupid because whenever I want to go to the other shore the ferryman takes me, and he takes only one paisa! Just for one paisa I can go to the other side – and you wasted eighteen years? It is only worth one paisa, not more than that. And you think yourself holy?”The same type of story happened with that mysterious Mohammedan woman, Rabiya.Hassan, a Sufi mystic, came to see Rabiya and he wanted to show her his powers. The very desire to show your powers is ugly; it is political. It is not religious, not at all spiritual. He talked about other things, but he was waiting for the right moment to arrive so that he could show his power.Rabiya said, “It is time now for me to read my Koran. Are you going to participate in reciting the Koran with me?”This was the right moment for which he was waiting. He said, “Let us go on the water.” The lake was just in front of them. “We will walk on the water reciting the Koran!”Rabiya said, “Walking on water, reciting the Koran? That does not appeal to me much. Don’t you see the white cloud in the sky? We should go there, sit on the cloud, and recite the Koran.”Hassan said, “But I don’t know how to fly in the sky. Have you learned the art of flying in the sky?”Rabiya said, “Birds can fly in the sky, it is not much of an art. Fishes can swim in the river, in the lake; it is not much of an art. Hassan, come to your senses! I was just joking: I cannot go to the cloud, I cannot walk on the water; but the real miracle is reciting the Koran. I disappear. Can you do that? Only reciting remains, singing remains – the singer disappears, I am no more.”I agree with Rabiya. There have been very few women who can be called masters; Rabiya is one of them.You ask me, “Osho, I understood you said the other day in the lecture that Jesus did not walk on water…” Yes because I respect Jesus so much, I cannot believe that he was so stupid as to walk on water.And you say, “You also said there are no miracles as such.” Yes, there are no miracles as such because the whole of life is miraculous. Your being here and nowhere else – is it not a miracle?It is said that once Mulla Nasruddin was making love to a friend’s wife and suddenly the friend came in. The wife told Nasruddin, “Hide somewhere – my husband is coming! Be quick!”Finding no other place, he went into the cupboard.The husband came in. He saw the shoes of Nasruddin; he recognized them. He saw his clothes on the table; he recognized them. He saw the wife worried, embarrassed, naked. He asked, “Where is Mulla Nasruddin?”The wife said, “I don’t know. He has not been here!”And the husband was furious – as husbands are supposed to be. He ran all over the house, looked in every nook and corner, under the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen. And finally he opened the cupboard, and Nasruddin, utterly naked, was standing there.The friend asked, “Why are you standing here?”Nasruddin said, “That’s a great metaphysical question! One has to be somewhere. And I am not an expert in philosophical things. Now you are almost asking me, ‘Why do you exist?’ ‘Why are you here?’ you are asking me. This question can be asked anywhere; wherever I am somebody can ask, ‘Why are you here?’”The man agreed. He said, “That’s right, the question is metaphysical.”Why are you here? Why does this whole existence exist? Is it not tremendously mysterious, miraculous? And you are asking for small things. Those small things are all invented; they are small magic tricks, or those things exist only in stories.I have heard a story that Jesus, Luke, John, all three were going to the boat that was in the middle of the lake. Luke walked over the water, then John also walked over the water; they both reached the boat. Then Jesus followed them and started sinking.Luke said to John, “Should we tell him where the rocks are?”And this story…In a small town there was a lake whose waters were known to be miraculous. People came to the lake, dived into its waters, and came out the other side cured.“I have seen it all,” stated an old-timer of the town. “I have seen a blind man jump into the lake and emerge on the other side, yelling, ‘I can see! I can see!’”An old, poor cripple, listening to this story decided to go to the miraculous lake himself. When he got there he saw a man with one leg jump into the lake and come out the other side crying in disbelief, “I can walk! I have two legs!”The cripple could not wait any longer, so he jumped into his old wheelchair and pushed himself into the lake.The townspeople pulled him out the other side, dead. But his wheelchair came out with brand new tires!It seems the wheelchair knew Patanjali’s art and the secrets of doing miracles!Patanjali’s sutras certainly mention miracles, but for a totally different reason, not for the reason that you think. Patanjali has written a separate chapter about siddhis, miracles, for the specific purpose that nobody should get involved in such things. It is to debar, prohibit. It is not his purpose that you should become interested in miracles. His purpose is very clear.He says those who get lost in miracles are lost in a jungle. Certainly there are powers within you, hidden powers within you, which you are not aware of. And when you start going deeper into meditation those hidden powers start manifesting themselves, and there is every possibility you will be tempted by those powers. There is nothing miraculous about them; they are as natural as any other law, we just don’t understand the law underlying them, hence we call them miracles.For example, if you meditate, soon you will realize the fact that you can read other people’s thoughts. Now it will look like a miracle – before the person has asked the question you can answer him. And he will be surprised, and you will be worshipped as a great saint. But you are being very stupid because somehow you have got rid of your own ideas, now you are becoming interested in other people’s ideas. Your ideas were useless; do you think other people’s ideas are very significant? It took a long, arduous journey to somehow get rid of your mind, and now you have got into more trouble. Millions of minds around you, and as each person passes by, you will read his thoughts. You have missed the point!This is not intelligence. It is a very stupid act on your part, very mediocre, to get involved in other people’s ideas and start reading them. Of course, they will be impressed and they will worship you, but all their worship will simply strengthen your ego. And soon you will see that as the ego becomes strong again, your mind comes back and you stop reading other people’s ideas.Then people have to invent strategies so that they can go on claiming the power that once was there and is no longer there. It is very difficult to accept defeat. Then a person becomes a charlatan, a cheater. In the beginning it may have been some inner power that became manifest in him, now he has lost it. But how to say to people, “I have lost it”? The moment he says he has lost it, all the worshippers and the followers will disappear.Patanjali has written a whole chapter just to make you aware that these things are possible. There are possibilities hidden in you, undreamed by you; they can become manifest when you go inward. But don’t get in any way involved with them; remain a witness. Remain untempted and go on moving inward. The temptation will be great. There are no devils or Satans tempting you; it is your own mind and its inner capacities which tempt you.For the same reason I deny miracles. I don’t want you to become interested in any sort of thing that can become a distraction from your real search. I know perfectly well that if the fish can swim in the water and the bird can fly in the sky, there is a possibility that through certain yoga practices your body can start levitating. You can lose gravitation’s grip on you, you can be free of it, through a certain process of breathing. You can become almost weightless, and then you can walk on water or fly in the sky.But I deny all these things for the same reason that Patanjali mentions them because my own experience has been this, that Patanjali’s mentioning them has not been of help. If he had not mentioned them it would have been far better because people are so foolish. In fact, people read that chapter more. Patanjali’s sutras contain only four chapters. Three chapters have to be practiced and the fourth has to be avoided. But people become interested only in the fourth, and if they are interested in the three they are interested in the three only as a means toward the fourth. Patanjali’s purpose is completely lost.After five thousand years of spiritual search and groping in darkness and observing millions of people, this is my conclusion, that if Patanjali had not mentioned those miracles, many more people would have been benefited.It is the same story: God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and they became interested in it. In the Garden of Eden there were millions of trees; they were not interested in any other tree anymore. They were tempted more and more by the Tree of Knowledge: “Why has God forbidden it?” The forbidden fruit becomes more appealing. We all know the forbidden kiss is far sweeter – and the stolen kiss can give you diabetes! It is pure white sugar.The day God told Adam, “Don’t eat from this tree,” from that day Adam must have dreamed of the tree again and again. He must have gone for a morning walk, evening walk, night walk, around the tree – many times a day to see whether the tree still existed or not and how the fruits were growing. You can imagine how much he must have thought about it again and again.This is just nonsense to say that the Devil came in the form of a snake to tempt him – God was enough. His forbidding him was enough to tempt him. There was no need for the Devil, no need for any snake to come in.Say to any child, “Don’t do this,” and there is every possibility that he will do it.My father told me, “Before it is too late I want to tell you, don’t smoke.”And I told him, “Now it will be difficult for me.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I have never thought about it. In fact, the whole idea has always seemed foolish to me. Instead of breathing pure air, taking dirty smoke in and out. And you have to pay for it! You have to suffer for it. I have seen people coughing and still smoking.”My own grandfather suffered his whole life from a cough. And the doctors were saying, “Don’t smoke,” but that was impossible for him. To the very last he continued to smoke.So I said, “Watching my grandfather was enough. Why did you say to me, ‘Don’t smoke’? Now I can assure you that I will smoke!”And that very day I smoked for the first time. Of course it was bad, a bad experience, tears came to my eyes and I started coughing. I could not believe that millions of people are doing this. But I told my father, “I have smoked today and I am finished with it. Had you not told me, I may not have even tried. There are millions of things in the world to be interested in.”With all good intentions, the same mistake has been made by Patanjali. He mentions in detail all the siddhis, all the powers that are possible, just to make the seeker aware, but he himself is completely unaware of the foolish people who are going to read these sutras.In fact, in those days Patanjali’s sutras were not written, so it was safe because they were delivered from the master to the disciple orally; they were delivered only to the person who was intelligent enough, capable enough. But now the danger is widespread.Whosoever reads Patanjali’s Sutras becomes immediately interested in the chapter which is specifically there to prohibit you. But that’s how people are. Not even small people, but people who are very intelligent, great people, they also become interested in things which are prohibited.For example, J. Krishnamurti, one of the most intelligent persons today, still reads detective novels, and for the simple reason that in his childhood, when everybody likes detective stories and novels, he was prohibited. Each thing was watched: what he ate, what he read, where he went. He was brought up like a prisoner. From the age of nine up to the age of twenty-five he was continuously watched – not even a single moment of aloneness.That dirty old man Leadbeater, who was his guardian appointed by Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society, followed him like a shadow. Always somebody was there to keep an eye on him because he was going to be the World Teacher. Now the World Teacher cannot be allowed to smoke cigarettes, to play cards, chess, or to experiment with psychedelic drugs, or to fall in love with a girl.He was not allowed the company of any girl of his own age. When he was thirteen he was only allowed the company of a woman who was forty, and even then there were rumors all around the world that they had fallen in love. The woman was forty and the woman almost thought of him as her son, but the rumor became so widespread that finally they were separated – forced to separate. They had fallen in love in a way; he started loving her as his mother and she started loving him as her son. But even that was not right – any kind of attachment may deter the progress of the World Teacher. And, of course, no detective novels, no stories…Once he became free, once he declared at the age of twenty-five, “I am not going to be the World Teacher. I disband the organization that has been specially made for me.” A great organization had been created to receive the World Teacher, the Order of the Star of the East; he dissolved the Order. He returned all the properties that belonged to the Order; he returned all the donations that had come. At the age of twenty-five he became free from the Theosophists. Since then he has never read the Gita, the Koran, the Bible, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Talmud. Since then he has only been reading detective novels. This is how mind works. That prohibition is still a hangover.It is not that I am not aware that there are many, many hidden powers in man, but I don’t want you to become interested in them. Hence, I simply say they are stupid. There are far more miraculous things happening all around. Become interested in them because my whole effort here is to help your spiritual growth, not to hinder it.The second question:Osho,Is God really dead, as Friedrich Nietzsche says?Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most important beings in the whole history of man, of the same caliber as Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Mahavira, Buddha, Zarathustra. He would have become an enlightened being, but something went wrong. Instead of going through a breakthrough. he went through a breakdown.What really went wrong was the Western atmosphere, the whole Western intellectual climate. The responsibility is that of the Christian Church. The Christian Church is the culprit. It has destroyed the possibility of many, many people like Friedrich Nietzsche becoming enlightened.The Christian Church has destroyed all intellectual freedom in the West. The people who showed any sign of rebellion were burned alive; their books were burned, prohibited. The Christian Church has been one of the most fascist organizations in the history of man. It is not an accident that fascism, Nazism, communism, all the three dangerous dictatorial trends of this century, are outcomes of Christianity.The East cannot be held responsible because in the East intellectual freedom has always existed, has always been respected. No intellectual in the East has been crucified like Jesus; no philosopher has been poisoned like Socrates; no mystic has been murdered like al-Hillaj Mansoor. The East has known more people like Socrates than the West, and the East has produced more people like Jesus than the West. The East is studded with mystics like al-Hillaj Mansoor. But never, not even for a single instant, have we destroyed anybody’s freedom. We have respected freedom as the ultimate value. Hence, when a man becomes enlightened and attains the ultimate truth we say he has attained moksha. The word moksha means absolute freedom, unconditional freedom, a freedom from which no fall is possible.But Christianity has been very dictatorial. The ultimate consequence was that only the mediocre people remained in the Church and the intelligent people left the Church, or even if they remained in the Church they remained only formally; their hearts were not with the Church.Friedrich Nietzsche became so disgusted with Christianity. He knew only Christianity; he never knew anything about Zen, Sufism, otherwise he would have been a totally different man. The breakdown may not have happened, the breakdown may have changed into a breakthrough. He fought against the whole tradition of Christian domination, so much so that finally he became anti-Christ. He was fascinated by the personality of Jesus, but unfortunately because Jesus is at the root – not that he intended to be at the root of the Christian Church, but it happened so that the whole Church is based on Christ’s idea – Friedrich Nietzsche became the Antichrist. In his last days he had started signing his name “Antichrist Friedrich Nietzsche.” He went mad. He risked his sanity, but he saved his freedom.I respect the man. I love the man. I would have liked him to become a buddha, he had all the potential, but he was in a wrong climate. He needed the Eastern freedom and the Eastern soil.His antagonism became so great that not only did he become anti-Christ, he became an archenemy of God himself because as he looked deeper into the phenomenon, he found that Jesus is not the real foundation of the Christian Church – the real foundation rests on God, on the idea of God. Unless you remove that very foundation the Church cannot collapse.Hence his statement that God is dead. You may not have heard the whole statement; this is only a part, and the whole is very significant. The whole statement is: “Rejoice! God is dead and now man is absolutely free.” Then it makes sense. “Rejoice that God is dead. Now there is nobody to dominate you. There is nobody above you, you need not be afraid of any God – you can forget all about God and Jehovah.”The Jewish-Christian-Mohammedan idea of God is not of a very nice fellow; he is not a gentleman. The Jewish God who is at the root of both the Christian and the Mohammedan God says himself, “I am a very jealous God. Those who are against me, I will destroy them. Those who are not with me are against me. Those who are with me will have all the pleasures of heaven, and those who are not with me will suffer eternal hellfire.”Nietzsche says, “Rejoice, God is dead! There is no heaven and no hell. Don’t be afraid of hell and don’t be greedy for heaven because there is no God. God is dead and man is absolutely free.”This has been done in the East in a far more subtle, delicate way. Mahavira says there is no God for the same reason as Nietzsche. Mahavira says if there is a God then man cannot be free. There is a very significant logic in it. If there is a God then man cannot be free. How can man be free? Man is just a created creature. God decided to create you, so he created you. If he decides tomorrow to uncreate you, he will uncreate you. What freedom have you got? It is God’s decision to create you the way you are; you are not responsible for it. How can you be held responsible for all the instincts that have been given to you by God?Mahavira said, “See the futility of the whole argument of the theists. See the ridiculousness of the whole idea of man’s self-condemnation because of sex, because of anger, because of greed. What can man do? If God created man in this way, then God is responsible, not man. And why did he create this type of man and this type of world? If anybody has to suffer, then God has to suffer, not man. Man is only a creature.”It is as if you make toys. Now, if something is wrong with the toy, who is responsible? You cannot condemn the toy. You make machines, if something goes wrong, then you are responsible, not the machine.When atom bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, you cannot condemn the atom bombs or atomic energy; you can only condemn the politicians who used atom bombs there, you can condemn the scientists who created those atom bombs. And Albert Einstein felt it continuously after Hiroshima and Nagasaki – he was sad.The day he died somebody asked him, “If you are going to be born again what would you like to be? Would you like to be a physicist, a mathematician again or not?”Einstein said, “No, never! Rather than being a physicist I would like to be a plumber because I have done so much harm to humanity.” Unconsciously, of course.But you cannot say that about God, that he has created man unconsciously. If even God is unconscious, then what is the possibility of man ever becoming conscious?Mahavira says there is no God because only in the nonexistence of God does man become responsible. And I agree with Mahavira, with Buddha, with Nietzsche. The first and the foremost quality of a religious person is self-responsibility, to feel that “I am responsible for whatever I am. It is my choice. I have been given all the alternatives. I was born open-ended; nothing was predetermined. Whatever I am, it is my responsibility – good or bad. There is no fate, no God.”Mahavira denied God, but he never went mad like Nietzsche. Meditation saved him. Buddha denied God – not only God, Buddha went a step further; in fact, now there is no further to go – Buddha denied God and Buddha denied the self. Buddha said there is no God and no self. Buddha said if there is a self, then again you cannot be totally free. Your self will have certain qualities and those qualities will go on persisting; they will be intrinsic. Your freedom will be conditional. The first thing is to get rid of God; the second thing is to get rid of your self. Then your freedom is total. Then there is only freedom and nothing else. But Buddha never went mad for the simple reason that meditation saved him.Nietzsche would have been a Mahavira or a Buddha, but there was no meditative dimension available to him. Once you deny God, the whole mountainous responsibility of your being falls on your own head. You can be crushed by it. That’s what happened, Nietzsche was crushed under his own freedom, he was not able to cope with the freedom.God, as Christians, Mohammedans, Jews and Hindus have conceived him, does not exist. But I will not say, like Mahavira or Buddha or Nietzsche, that there is no God. I say life is God. In fact, I don’t want to use the word god, my own preference is bhagavata, godliness. Existence is full of godliness, and in deep meditation you become part of that godliness. If God is life, synonymous with life, then there is no question of God dying. Life cannot die; it is eternal.I have heard…There are two tombstones seen on a remote part of the planet. On one is written: “God is dead, signed Friedrich Nietzsche.” On the other is written: “Nietzsche is dead, signed God.”And I think the second is truer – Nietzsche is dead. God is not dead in Nietzsche’s sense because his idea of God was basically wrong. It was a Christian idea: God as a person, and a dominant person.One of the great Indian mystics, a Baul of Bengal… The word baul means a madman. The Bauls are really mad – madly in love with God. This mad Baul, Chandidas says, “Sabar upar manus satya. Tahar upar nahin – Man’s truth is the highest truth. There is no other truth higher than that.” He is saying the same thing as Nietzsche, but in a more positive way. He is declaring man’s godhood, man’s godliness. Nietzsche simply denies, and affirms nothing. His denial brings a negative emptiness. Chandidas denies, but his denial brings a positive emptiness.“Sabar upar manus satya. The highest truth is the truth of man and there is no truth higher than that.” He is also saying there is no God, but he is at the same time declaring that you are God. God is not dead because life is alive. The flowers are still flowering, the birds are still singing, existence continues – how can God be dead?But Nietzsche is dead, and his life was a life of tremendous misery. It was unfortunate that he was born in the West in a Christian climate; he needed the Eastern atmosphere. He needed to be in a Zen monastery or a Sufi commune. He still would have come to know there is no God, but then he would not have gone mad; on the contrary he would have become enlightened.The third question:Osho,You have given me the name of Devadatta, and many people say to me that he was the guy who tried to kill Gautam the Buddha many times. Then why have you given me such a name?Devadatta, the name in itself is very beautiful. It means given by God, by the grace of God, a gift of God. It means exactly what the English name John means. John means a gracious gift of God. Devadatta also means the same. It was just a coincidence that this was also the name of the man who tried to kill Gautam Buddha many times.He was Gautam Buddha’s cousin-brother, and he was very jealous. He became a disciple of Buddha, but because he was a cousin-brother, almost of the same age, and they had studied in the same school and they had played together and they had hunted together, he felt that he was equal to Buddha. And Buddha told him many times, “Not only are you equal to me, everybody is equal to me. The moment I became enlightened, all questions of inferiority or superiority disappeared. Even rocks are equal to me because it is all one existence.”But that was not enough to satisfy him because Buddha was the great master and he was just a disciple among thousands of disciples, just a nobody. Finally he conspired against Buddha. He collected a few disciples and betrayed Buddha, hoping that many more followers would come to him. But nobody came to him, just those few people, and even they slowly started deserting him because he had nothing to give to them. No truth was there in his experience yet; he was as unconscious as they were. So for a few days he could deceive them – he was a great intellectual but not an enlightened person – he could argue well, he could convince people intellectually, but that does not satisfy the deep longing of the heart to attain the truth.People slowly deserted him. Then he became very angry, enraged. Then there was only one possibility for him, to kill Buddha. He tried many times but failed, always failed.The story is told…Devadatta was despairing after his latest attempt to assassinate the Buddha had failed. “It looks like that guy really is divine,” he sighed reluctantly to his chief assassin. “I really can’t get to him!”In desperation at his own failure as a seeker, he decided to end it all.“Oh well,” he said, “I can will the insurance money to his sangha, maybe that will earn me some merit. Tell me, old friend, how much will you charge to bump me off?”His old associate looked at him for a moment and said, “Oh, Devadatta, for you I will do it for free!”Remember one thing, the person who kills and the person who commits suicide are not different people. The person who wants to murder somebody is the same person who can murder himself. Psychologists have still to discover the fact that these two people are not different. It is the same energy, the same violence. Turned on the other it becomes murder; turned on oneself it becomes suicide. Going extrovert it is murderous; going introvert it is suicidal.Devadatta failed to kill Buddha. In that failure he thought of committing suicide. The same happened to Judas. Indians are thinkers not doers, so Devadatta never really committed suicide, he only thought of it. But Judas really committed suicide, the next day, the very next day. One day Jesus was crucified, the next day Judas committed suicide. He was the man responsible for Jesus’ murder; he sold Jesus for only thirty silver coins. But once Jesus was killed the whole scene changed, the whole context changed.In fact, it is something worth understanding: if you lose your friend you don’t lose much, but if you lose your enemy you lose much. The moment your great enemy dies, something in you becomes empty because you were fighting with him, you were engaged with him, you were occupied with the idea. Now there is nothing to do – all is finished.Judas was contemplating for months and years how to finish Jesus, not knowing that the moment Jesus was finished he would feel absolutely empty and meaningless. His whole meaning was around Jesus. And that’s what actually happened. The next day he felt so empty, so futile, that he committed suicide.This happens to everybody in different ways, in different situations, and everybody has to understand it.Just the other day Sheela wrote me a letter saying that since Chinmaya’s death she is feeling very empty and continuously remembering Chinmaya, and that her relationship with Veetrag is almost on the rocks. Some barrier has arisen between them; they are not as attuned to each other as they were when Chinmaya was alive.When Chinmaya was alive, to fall in love with Veetrag was not really falling in love with Veetrag, but just a way of escaping from Chinmaya. Sheela was very happy and the relationship with Veetrag was going great. And I was afraid that the day Chinmaya died the relationship with Veetrag might die also – it depended on Chinmaya’s existence. Once Chinmaya was gone the whole conflict with Chinmaya was gone too. And now the mind remembers all the sweet memories and the beauty of the person.Certainly he was a beautiful person. He lived beautifully. He died beautifully. He suffered much, but he suffered in a graceful way. And I can understand Sheela’s difficulty. To live with a person who was constantly ill, who for years was almost on his deathbed… I knew him for at least eight years and throughout those eight years he was on his deathbed. Now you can love a person who has dengue fever – two, three days, it’s okay; or even hepatitis – three to six weeks, one can conceive the end of it.I have every compassion for Sheela. It was difficult, very difficult to live with a person who was bound to die. The doctors in the West had said that he could not survive more than two years; he survived eight years. Those eight years were a long suffering for Sheela, and certainly she wanted some distraction, some place where she could forget Chinmaya completely. He had to be looked after twenty-four hours a day, round the clock, and Sheela served him as lovingly as it is possible in a human way. The whole night he was suffering, coughing. His breathing was hard, noisy, wheezing continuously; the whole body was in pain. It was a torture. He was witnessing it all and he was growing, but for Sheela it was far more of a torture, and she wanted some distraction.Falling in love with Veetrag had nothing to do with Veetrag. That’s my observation, that Veetrag or anybody else would have been the same. It was an excuse, but while Chinmaya lived, the love affair continued. Now Chinmaya is no more. I was afraid, now some barrier was bound to come between Sheela and Veetrag because the person from whom she was trying to escape for a few moments at least, to forget and to drown herself in somebody – Veetrag was just like an intoxicant, a tranquilizer, an occupation, so she could forget all about Chinmaya and his illness. It was needed, it was good, so I was not against it; I favored it. I said, “It is perfectly good.” But the fear was there that once Chinmaya was gone, then what would happen? The source was in Chinmaya; she was withdrawing from Chinmaya. Now there is nothing to withdraw from.So Veetrag started going farther and farther away, and Sheela is puzzled why it is happening because now she has twenty-four hours a day available for Veetrag. Why is there a barrier coming? It never came while Chinmaya was alive.This is simple psychology, and everybody has to understand it. You go on doing many things for reasons you are not aware of; you become aware only when those reasons disappear.Now this relationship can only be somehow carried on; it cannot have the same flavor. It was a negative relationship, it was not a positive relationship. It is bound to wither away sooner or later. And if they both understand it then they can allow it to wither away joyfully, thankfully because whatever it has given to them was beautiful. Why ask for more? Why be greedy? When the time comes to let go of something, one should be capable of letting it go.I can understand the trouble for Sheela; Chinmaya has gone and this relationship is disappearing. She seems to be left absolutely alone. Don’t be worried at all, Sheela, because out of absolute aloneness something tremendously beautiful will arise which can never arise in your so-called relationships. And if you can become capable of being alone, if you start rejoicing it, if you start dancing it, then there will be a possibility of a totally new kind of relating with people. You may love again, but that love will be out of abundance because you have so much, so you want to share it. Otherwise because we are empty inside we want to stuff ourselves with somebody else’s energy – and he is also empty. Two beggars trying and hoping that “The other is rich and I am going to get something from the other,” are bound to fail, are bound to feel frustrated. They are doomed.I was going to call Sheela and tell her this, but then I thought it was better to tell you all because this is an experience which is significant for everybody because everybody has to pass through such experiences.The last question:Osho,Are Indians really as unintelligent as you say?Sant Maharaj, don’t lose heart! There are even people far worse than the Indians; always think of them and you will feel good and cheerful. There are Polacks!Bhavita has asked me: Osho, why do Polacks open the bedroom door while they are making love?Bhavita, so that nobody can peep through the keyhole. This is intelligence!Bhavita has also asked: Osho, do you know what the Polack answered who was walking home from a fair with a pig under his arm, and a guy who knew him came up to him and asked, “Where did you get him?”Bhavita, before the Polack could answer, the pig replied, “I won him at the fair!”So there are Polacks, Sant, don’t be worried.Bhavita asks: Osho, did you hear about the Polack who tried to take his new car for its first service?Yes, Bhavita, it wouldn’t fit through the church doors.And Bhavita asks: Why is Polack toilet paper five hundred sheets longer than usual?Bhavita – because the first five hundred sheets are instructions.Cheer up! There is no need to be worried.Bhavita asks: Why can’t one put a Polack into a cannon?Bhavita – because according to the Geneva Convention, dum-dum bullets are illegal.And Bhavita also asks: How is a Polack ladder different from an ordinary one?Bhavita, it has a stop sign at the top – otherwise the Polack will never stop, he will go on and on. The ladder will be left behind.You say, “Are Indians really as unintelligent as you say?” Not all Indians. Sant is not unintelligent. I make him sit by my side.Somebody has asked a question. The questioner is Emilio Ducoli. He says, “Osho, if someone said to you, ‘Don’t speak, don’t be silent, but tell me who you are?’ what would be your answer?”For that, Sant is sitting by my side – he will hit him as hard as possible! In the old days, Zen masters used to hit people themselves. I am a lazy person, and Sant is a good boxer. And you know boxing needs no intelligence! Sant will teach him a lesson. That is the special purpose for which he is allowed to sit by my side. I will not answer Ducoli; I will simply look at Sant and Sant will answer.A man came to me once and he said, “Twenty-four avatars were born in India, twenty-four tirthankaras were born in India, Gautam Buddha was born in India and also in his previous lives he was always born in India, as were so many saints and so many mahatmas. And God has said in the Gita, ‘I will always come whenever I am needed’ – and he has always been coming to India. Do you still say that India is a materialist country, do you still say that India is not very intelligent, do you still say that India has no special spirituality, that it is not a religious land?”I said, “Yes, still I say that. In fact, all these things prove what I say.” In the Gita, Krishna says, “Whenever you need me I will come.” It seems India needs gods more than any other country! Twenty-four avatars and where are we? We still need; even forty-eight avatars won’t help us much. Whatever they do we are expert at undoing it. Twenty-four tirthankaras and what has happened?It is like a man who brags about his health: “Because,” he says, “look! All the doctors of this city visit me. I must have the best health in the world!” He must be the most ill person in the world if all the doctors have to visit him continuously.God has been visiting India so much that it seems it is a mess! Yes, Buddha is intelligent, but how many Buddhas are there? Mahavira is intelligent, but how many Mahaviras are there? Yes, once in a while, among millions of people, one person has risen to the ultimate heights – but how many? They can be counted on your fingers. And don’t think that their intelligence is your intelligence. Don’t live in reflected glory; that is utterly foolish. That’s what we have been doing for centuries, living in reflected glory. Krishna, Buddha, Mahavira – and we feel so happy that we completely forget that we have to do something too, that we have to be intelligent too, that we have to create something too.Yes, there have been spiritual people in India, but India is not a spiritual land; there have been intelligent people, but India has not proved intelligent itself. As a country, for two thousand years we have been living in slavery. Is this intelligence?As a country, I think India has the lowest morality in the world. The whole Indian idea of morality is concentrated on sex; anything else has nothing to do with it. You can lie and nobody will think you immoral. You can deceive, you can be insincere, you can promise to come today, and for months you may not come, and nobody will think you are immoral. In India a promise means nothing. If somebody says, “I am coming at five,” he may come at four, he may come at six; he may not come at all today; he may come tomorrow at five. And you cannot say that this is immoral. People are adulterating everything – not only milk, even medicines are adulterated. You cannot rely on Indian medicines. You may be hoping that the injection is going to save you; it may kill you because it may be just ordinary water – not even pure water. Everything is unreliable.The whole morality consists of you clinging to your wife and your wife clinging to you, and you remain like detectives, after each other; that is your whole morality. This is a very silly idea of morality and a very limited idea of morality.In fact, to live with a woman you don’t love is immoral, whether she is your wife or not does not matter. To live with a man, to go to bed with a man you don’t love – he may be your husband – but it is immoral. It is prostitution – of course, approved by the society, but approval cannot make any difference. And how many couples love each other?I have been a guest in hundreds of families all over India and I have never come across more than two or three couples who are really in love. Otherwise they are enemies, fighting each other tooth and nail, always at each other’s necks, but very moral because the wife remains strictly faithful to the man – to the man she does not love. What kind of faith is this? And the man remains faithful to the woman whom he always wants to murder, or hopes that somebody else will do the thing, or hopes that some natural calamity… The house will collapse in the rain or some illness will catch her or something. And in India things are always happening: buses falling in the rivers, airplanes crashing, trains disappearing. So the man goes on hoping that “Someday something is bound to happen and I will get rid of this woman.” But until then he is faithful to the woman whom he has never loved.Without love can there be faith? It is only fear, not faith. It is formality, not faith. It is just cowardliness, not faith. If you are brave, if you are really a man, you will say to the woman, “I don’t love you, hence I cannot go on reproducing children with you.” And the woman will say, “I don’t love you either, so it is better we part company.” But this is our whole morality.Almost the whole of India is against me for the simple reason that they think I am destroying their morality. I am not destroying their morality; I am bringing a real moral sense to you. Now my movement to Kutch is opposed because I will destroy the morality of Kutch. But I cannot go on destroying the morality of Pune only; I have to move, I have to destroy a few other people’s morality!What morality have you got? I am coming to Kutch to destroy your immorality. I call all this that goes in the name of morality immoral. It is utterly immoral.The whole idea of marriage is immoral, and an arranged marriage is basically immoral. Only a love marriage has a morality, and that too only to the extent that the love is alive – the moment love disappears, morality disappears.Yes, in India we have seen great enlightened people, but they are like silver lines around black clouds. Don’t believe that those silver lines are of much help; you cannot even read by their light. When there is lightning you cannot even read, you cannot write. Yes, for a moment you can see, and then all is darkness – even darker than it was before.Whenever a buddha dies, this country falls into a deeper valley of darkness. Yes, when a buddha is alive there is a little glory around him, a little splendor, a little light, but that too is available only to those who are courageous. And India is a country of cowards – otherwise how can you explain two thousand years of slavery?Yes, once in a while, there are people who are intelligent and they invent new things; they need Nobel Prizes.I have heard this story…At the Vatican in Rome, a gathering of missionaries from all over the world met to discuss their experiences in the Third World countries.The priests working in India and in Africa were talking together.“Well, Father, how are things going in India?” asked the African priest.“Very well, thank you, Father,” he replied. “We have been working on ways to ease the food shortage and have found a new way to reduce the population.”“How?” inquired the African priest. “Are you using new methods of birth control?”“No, no. After much experimentation we have seen that that doesn’t work. So we have invented a very simple and effective technique: the ‘Crunch Scrunch Method.’”“What is that?” asked the priest, intrigued.“In the big centers like Mumbai and Kolkata, our organization has begun to construct new hygienic male toilets – but with a unique design. When a patron squats down to shit, his balls hang down through two separate holes and we have one of our workers standing underneath with a brick in each hand – crunch! scrunch! – we smash their balls together!”“Holy Mother of God!” exclaimed the other priest with a gasp. “That must hurt!”“Oh no, not really,” said the Indian priest, “not if you keep your thumbs out of the way!”Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I am deeply convinced that our way is to drop the ego, to come back to our potential of sensuality and emotional sensitivity, and to increase in total awareness. I nevertheless have difficulty in comprehending that spiritual creativity should not be an original part of ourselves. Against this I realize that the creative spirit is happening here and that new forms of life have been created in Pune. Can we consider thoughts, images and spiritual guests, foreign guests, coming to us without our mental activity – just awareness needed? I think this idea is really not easy to understand for the West. It seems the point to jump, but if I did not feel a strong faith in you and readiness for your message I would not be here. Please be patient.I really will have to be patient! The first thing: you say, “I am deeply convinced…” Do you understand the reason why we go on asserting such statements as: I strongly believe, “I am deeply convinced…”? The truth is just the opposite, it is a cover-up. If you know, you know; there is no question of strong belief or deep conviction. Are you convinced that the sun rises in the east, deeply convinced? You simply know it, you don’t have to believe in it. Knowing needs no belief, and all believing is an effort to pretend knowledge which does not exist in the first place. Belief is pseudo knowledge.And because deep down you feel that you don’t know, this not-knowing has to be repressed. By strong beliefs you repress this state of not-knowing. By deep convictions you force your natural state of not-knowing to the unconscious layers of your mind.A man of knowledge has no beliefs at all. He does not believe even in God. He knows, and his knowing is enough. There is no need for it to be strong – against what? Why do you need a strong conviction? – because there is a strong doubt to repress. You are divided. Look into it. I am not talking about any theory, it is a simple fact. Look underneath your convictions and you will always find undercurrents of strong doubts.That’s why believers can change their belief very easily, but they cannot allow the natural doubt to surface. The theist can become an atheist; when he was a theist he was strongly convinced of its truth, and when he becomes an atheist, he is strongly convinced again of the truth of atheism.Kahlil Gibran has a beautiful story about it…In a small village there were two scholars, philosophers. The village was really small and it could not contain two scholars. One was a theist, the other was an atheist – obviously because scholars cannot agree, their only agreement is to disagree. They were constantly quarreling, fighting, arguing – not only that, they were disturbing the peace of the town.People were not concerned at all whether God exists or not. Who is concerned? Except for a few fools, nobody is concerned whether God exists or not; that is not a real concern of life. Real concerns are different. Love may be a real concern, fear may be a real concern. Violence may be a real concern. Death, life – these are real concerns. What has God got to do with you?The villagers were tired, the more so because both were great logicians and the village was continuously wavering. They would become convinced of atheism, and then the theist would come and destroy their conviction. They would become convinced of theism, and then the atheist would follow. It became a nightmarish phenomenon.Finally they decided. They requested both the scholars to argue one full-moon night, and the whole village would listen to their argument. And whatever the conclusion, the whole village would follow the conclusion, “So this arguing can be stopped, so that we can be left in peace. You decide whether God exists or not. You both argue and decide.”Great argument followed. It continued the whole night. It was complex, intricate, but the villagers were really interested because they were giving such beautiful arguments for and against that each moment there was a wave of change. When the atheist spoke, the whole village would feel “Now this is the end.” When the theist spoke they would think, “Now, what more can there be?”In the morning they were in for a great surprise. A great miracle happened: the theist became convinced of atheism and the atheist became convinced of theism. But the problem of the village remained the same. The whole night wasted, and there was nothing in their hands.It is not difficult. In fact, the more strongly you are convinced, the easier it is to change your conviction because the more strongly you are convinced, the more indications you are giving that there is a very strong doubt which needs such a strong conviction to repress it.Russia, before the revolution, was one of the most theistic countries in the world. Even India is not so theistic. It was the orthodox stronghold of Christianity, very orthodox. And then within a few years, within just five to ten years, the whole country changed from a strong conviction of theism to a strong conviction of atheism. What happened?China was one of the most religious countries in the East under Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu – the great heritage; and then the impact, the great impact of Buddha and Bodhidharma. Thousands of monasteries, thousands of monks, Taoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and at least five thousand years of traditional upbringing, yet within ten years after the revolution all that disappeared. Now China is as strongly convinced of atheism as it was convinced of theism.My feeling is that if any day this misfortune happens in India, that India becomes a communist country, it will become the most atheistic country in the world. The same people who look so religious will become anti-religious in the same way, with a vengeance because the doubt is there deep down, waiting for the right moment to assert itself.You cannot make America atheist in the same way that you can India, for the simple reason that in America the conviction is so lukewarm it does not really matter. God is only a formality, religion is nothing but a Sunday affair, the church is not more than a club. A few people go to the Rotary Club, a few people go to the Lions Club, a few people go to the Catholic Club and a few to the Protestant Club. These are clubs where people talk sweet nothings and gossip about the society – good meeting places, nothing is wrong with it, but very lukewarm; there is no question of anything strong. Because there is no strong conviction in America, America can never become a stronghold of atheism.That’s why communism is not succeeding in America, for the simple reason that communism is an atheistic philosophy, fanatically atheistic. In fact, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, the founders of communism, had prophesied that America would be the first communist country. They would have never thought, even in their dreams, that Russia would be the first communist country because both were economists – they knew nothing of psychology and they knew nothing of the inner workings of the human psyche.If they had asked me I would have told them that America is going to be the last country in the world to become communist. I would have suggested India, China, Russia – these three countries have the most potential to turn toward communism. Two have already turned, the third is getting ready – for the simple reason that five thousand years of repressed doubt has become tremendously strong. Remember one thing: the conviction through which you repress the doubt goes on becoming weaker because its energy is being used in repressing. That which is repressed goes on becoming stronger because it is not losing any energy at all; it accumulates energy.You say, alas, “I am deeply convinced that our way is to drop the ego…” Look into your conviction and you will find a very great doubt about what you are saying. Once you find the doubt then something can be done because the doubt is the reality. Nobody teaches you doubt. There are schools of Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians teaching you belief. There is nobody who teaches you doubt, even communists don’t teach doubt. They teach a new kind of belief, the belief in no-God.They have their own religion. Of course Kaaba is not their holy place; it is the Kremlin. They have their own trinity. You may not call it a holy trinity, you can call it an unholy trinity. It is not God the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son. It is Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lenin – the trinity, the same trinity. Karl Marx is the father, Lenin the son, and this Friedrich Engels is certainly a Holy Ghost because his whole purpose was to supply Karl Marx all his needs.You will be surprised to know that Friedrich Engels was one of the richest men, one of the greatest industrialists in Britain. Marx lived on his money his whole life because he never earned any. It is because of Friedrich Engels and his capitalist money that communism has become a philosophy, a way of life for millions of people.Everybody teaches belief, but doubt is natural. Hence the real masters of the world – for example, Gautam Buddha says to his disciples, “Don’t believe just because I say it is so. Don’t believe just because the holy scriptures say it is so. Don’t believe because the masses believe in a certain thing. Unless you experience, never believe in anything. Go on doubting – go on doubting to the very extreme.”Doubt is a natural, intrinsic quality of your being; it is God-given. Use it because it has tremendous power in it. It is an instrument to discover truth.I will not suggest that you become deeply convinced of anything, I will suggest that you doubt and doubt totally so that you can discover truth. Doubt is not against truth, doubt is a methodology to discover truth. Doubt is not an enemy of truth, but the only friend. Belief is the enemy of truth because it is belief that prevents you from discovering, from inquiring.So the first thing I would like to suggest to you is drop this idea of deep convictions.Again in the end you say, “…a strong faith in you.” Forget this language; this is not the right language – at least not in this place. In this context I respect doubt, I don’t respect belief because my own experience is that through doubt people have discovered truth, and through belief people have remained ignorant their whole lives, they have never discovered truth.But priests won’t say this to you. Priests are all for belief. And if you are strongly convinced, the priest is very happy because now you can be used as a fanatic fool, now you are available to the priests to be exploited.I am not a priest. I am just a friend. I am here to explain to you how I have discovered truth. Doubt has been my own process, my own way to reach truth. I would like you to become more and more sharp, intelligent. Doubt more scientifically. Just as in science doubt helps you to discover, it also helps in the inward journey.Drop condemning doubt and praising faith, belief, convictions.You say, “I am deeply convinced that our way is to drop the ego…” Who is this “I am”? Who is convinced? Now this is a contradiction.You say, “I am deeply convinced that our way is to drop the ego…” “I am” is nothing but another name for the ego. Now you will be getting into trouble. If the ego is convinced that the only way is to drop the ego, then who is going to drop whom? And how? It will be like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings. You will just look silly. Watch each word that you use. “I am” is nothing but the ego.The second thing: nobody has ever been able to drop the ego because the ego is not a reality that you can drop; anything to be dropped at least has to be real, substantial. The ego is just a notion, an idea. You cannot drop it, you can only understand it. Can you drop your shadow? You can run as fast as you want, but your shadow will run at the same speed, exactly the same speed.There is a Taoist story about a man who became afraid of his shadow. He was reading a story… He was alone on a farm in a small hut, and in the deep darkness of the night, reading a story that was saying shadows are nothing but ghosts, he became so frightened that he looked at his own shadow and started running. Again he looked and the shadow was there. The natural logic was that he was not running fast enough, so he started running faster and faster. The faster he ran, the faster the shadow followed him. He became utterly exhausted and tired, so much so that he could not run anymore and just sat under the shadow of a tree. The moment he sat under the shadow of the tree, his shadow disappeared.He was very much puzzled – he could not get rid of the shadow while he was running so fast, and now that he was simply sitting under the shade of the tree, the shadow disappeared.This is a beautiful parable, of great significance. You cannot drop the ego. Once you start trying to drop the ego you will get in a very deep mess; you will become more and more worried and puzzled. And this is not the way to get rid of the ego. The only way to get rid of the ego is to look at it.First, try to find out where it is, whether it is there or not in the first place. And one who goes in never finds it; it simply disappears. The ego is just an idea, the idea of those people who have never gone in. And they suffer because of the ego – because it is a false thing, it creates suffering. Remember, reality always creates blessings and falsity always brings misery.Hell is the most false thing in the world – it exists not. Heaven is the only reality. We are in it right now, this very moment. We cannot be anywhere else. If you are in hell that is your creation, your fantasy, you are seeing a dream. If you are in heaven, that is not your fantasy, that is not your dream; that’s how things are. Heaven is the way of things.Just look inside and try to find out, to point out where the ego is, and you will be surprised, you cannot find it anywhere. And when you cannot find it anywhere, it is gone – without dropping it.But if you start dropping it, that will be like running to get rid of the shadow. You will become unnecessarily exhausted, unnecessarily tired, and you will start feeling very guilty because you have not been able to get rid of the ego. You will start feeling that you are a sinner, you will start condemning yourself. Your whole life will be destroyed just because of a simple mistake: that you looked out and started running, you never looked in.Just a single experience of the inner world is enough to reveal the fact that the ego is a falsity, that we are not separate, that we are one, that we are part of one organic universe.That oneness is the goal of all true religion. You can call that oneness moksha, nirvana, God, or whatever you like, but oneness of the whole existence. The trees, the rocks, the stars, the people, the animals, the birds – they are all one. It is one life manifesting in millions of ways, one ocean waving in millions of waves, but one ocean. Each single wave has no separate identity.It is not a question of dropping the ego, it is a question of understanding the ego. The moment you understand it, it is no longer there. If you don’t understand it, it is there, and you can go on doing all kinds of austerities – you can stand on your head, you can go on a long fast, you can go to the mountains, to the monasteries – but remember, your ego will become more and more subtle, more and more strong. That’s why your so-called saints are more egoistic than anybody else. Even politicians cannot defeat them.Your so-called saints are egoists for the simple reason that they are trying the hardest thing in the world, the most impossible thing in the world – going to the moon is not so difficult, going to Mount Everest is not so difficult – they are trying to get rid of the ego. And how much they are sacrificing for it: fasting for months, reading the holy scriptures the whole day, reciting the Koran, the Gita, doing all kinds of stupid rituals, worshipping gods of their own imagination. If you look at people, what they are doing? You will be surprised.Somebody is worshipping Hanuman; a monkey god! Somebody is worshipping Ganesh; an elephant god! Human beings doing such stupid things that I have seen monkeys laughing, elephants giggling because I have never seen a monkey worshipping the statue of a man – no monkey is so foolish, no elephant is so foolish. But man is not only worshipping statues, he worships stones, he worships trees, he worships rivers – anything. He just has to be hypnotized by tradition, by convention, by the mass, by the collective mind; he has to be hypnotized.Millions of people go to Kaaba. Every Mohammedan has the idea deep in his mind that if he does not go to Kaaba his life will be in vain. And what is there in Kaaba? – just a black stone. But more people have kissed that black stone than any other stone. Now, in fact, it is very dangerous to kiss it – it must be carrying so many germs! Millions of people down the ages, for fourteen hundred years, have been kissing the stone.Scientists say that with a single kiss at least one hundred thousand germs are exchanged between a man and a woman; or, if you are gay, then between a man and a man. What about kissing the stone of Kaaba? For fourteen hundred years millions of people, year in, year out, go on kissing it. It must be the most dangerous stone in the world. But every Mohammedan has the desire to go on a hajj, on a holy pilgrimage, so that he can become a hajji, so that he is known as a holy pilgrim – he has been to Kaaba, he has kissed the stone, the holy stone. Either the whole existence is holy or no stone can be holy.Hindus go to the rivers… Now scientists say that the Ganges is the most polluted river in India; it is very dangerous to take a dip in the Ganges. But who listens to the scientists? Hindus think it is the holiest river and once you take a dip in the river all your sins are washed away. And my feeling is that the scientists must be right because so many people have washed their sins in it. It is not only polluted, it is the most sinful river because how many people have been washing their sins in it! Now, even to take a dip in it is dangerous – you may wash away your sin, you may bring back somebody else’s with you. It is always good to have your own, at least you are familiar with them. Now, bringing back somebody else’s sin, you never know what you are in for.The only true religion is the religion of understanding, and understanding comes out of agnosia. Never forget this beautiful word of Dionysius: agnosia, a state of not-knowing.I have to be patient with you only because you are so full of knowledge, so full of words. Your questions are not real inquiries, they are all intellectual, they are not existential.You say, “I am deeply convinced that our way is to drop the ego…” If you are deeply convinced then drop it and be finished! Then why are you carrying it? With such a deep conviction, why are you carrying the ego? Do you need more deep conviction? How much have you been able to drop of the ego with so much deep conviction? If you have not been able to drop any part of your ego then no conviction is going to help.And you say, “…to come back to our potential of sensuality and emotional sensitivity and to increase in total awareness…” You have simply learned words, otherwise there is no going back ever. One cannot go back in time, one always goes forward. One becomes a child again, but that is not going back, that is going forward.That’s why the words of Jesus are not… Remember the words. He says, “Unless you are like small children you shall not enter my Kingdom of God.” He has not said, “Unless you are children,” he says, “Unless you are like small children.” It is very clear that he is saying you should be a grown-up person and yet like small children. It is not children themselves who will be able to enter the Kingdom of God, but people who have passed through all the experiences of life, good and bad, sweet and bitter, who have come to a certain maturity through experience, who have lived life dangerously, who have gone astray many times and who have committed thousands of mistakes – because this is the only way, this is the only fire that crystallizes you. These people can be children again.But this is not going back, it is going forward. It is the ultimate peak, like the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas. It has a purity far more beautiful than children can ever have because children are just ignorant. They are innocent because they are ignorant. Their innocence is not that valuable. It is out of ignorance, that is why they are innocent. All animals are innocent because they are ignorant.If you want to go back, you will be ignorant and innocent. If you go forward, you will be wise and innocent. And the difference is tremendously great. With wisdom, innocence has a totally different flavor, a different beauty. With ignorance, it is nothing; sooner or later it is bound to be lost, it has to be lost. It is like the first set of teeth, they are bound to fall out, the milk teeth – they will fall out. Then the real teeth will come. The child’s innocence is only ignorance – it has to go, and the sooner it goes the better. Don’t protect it and don’t hope that you can go back. Going back is not going to help. That’s where I differ from Primal Therapy.It is good as an experiment to go back in your memories. You only go back in memories, you cannot go back in time. It is good to go back in your memories just to see how it was when you were just a small child. But Primal Therapy cannot help you unless you move forward in meditation. Primal Therapy may become an impetus, an inspiration, a triggering phenomenon – it may give you an insight into the beauty of the innocence that childhood was, but there was something ugly also, ignorance. Now you have to sort it out. Ignorance has to be dropped and innocence has to be increased. Ignorance can be dropped only by wisdom, by awareness. It is going forward, it is not going backward.But you have learned beautiful words from books.You say, “I nevertheless have difficulty in comprehending that spiritual creativity should not be an original part of ourselves.”The original self is not a self at all, the original face is not a face at all; it is pure emptiness. There is no center in it called “self” because that is again ego coming from the back door. And out of that emptiness certainly great creativity is born, but that is not your creativity. You have nothing to do with it, you are no longer there, God starts flowing through you. That’s why in the East we say the Vedas are not written by man – they are apourusheya, they are divine. Man has only recorded them, they have been revealed by God.The same is said about the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament – God gave those Ten Commandments to Moses; Moses is not the creator, he is only a messenger. The same is said about the Koran: the Koran is not Mohammed’s creation, it is not his writing; he is just a vehicle.Yes, when you attain an egoless emptiness great creativity happens. But one never knows what kind of creativity it will be. One cannot predict it because it has nothing to do with you. One never knows for what God is going to choose you. He may sing a song through you, he may become a bhagavadgita, a divine song, or he may paint through you, or he may do something else. Nobody knows – nobody can know – one can only wait and allow the whole to take possession of you.A creator is one who is possessed by the whole. Ninety-nine point nine percent of your so-called creators are not creators, they are all egoistic people. Your painters. your poets, your authors, they are very egoistic people.These three are the most egoistic people: the saints are the first, the second are your so-called intellectuals, the intelligentsia, and the third are the poor politicians. They come third in the race because their power is very gross. The intelligent person thinks his power is more subtle, and the spiritual person thinks, of course, his power is the most supreme power.You say, “Against this, I realize that the creative spirit is happening here, and that new forms of life have been created in Pune.” We are not doing anything creative – we are not the doers, we are meditators. We have come together here not to do anything at all. But then things happen… Out of that nothingness many flowers bloom, blossom. And when something comes out of your nothingness, it has the signature of God on it.You say, “Can we consider thoughts, images and spirits as guests, foreign guests, coming to us without our mental activity – just awareness is needed?” Yes, that’s exactly how it is. But as far as you are concerned, I don’t think you know through experience what awareness is. If you knew it there would have been no question. That too is just guesswork.That’s why you say, “Can we consider thoughts, images and spirits as guests, foreign guests, coming to us without our mental activity – just awareness is needed?” Each thought comes from the outside and goes back to the outside. It is just like breath.Teilhard de Chardin has coined a word, noosphere. Just as there is air surrounding you, atmosphere, he used to say that another subtle atmosphere is surrounding you, the noosphere. Just as you breathe air in and out, that is a must for your body, from the noosphere, the thought sphere, you continuously breathe in and out – that is a must for your psychological existence. All thoughts come from the outside, and just as they come, they go. But you start claiming, “These are my thoughts!” That’s where the problem arises. If you can simply watch…Buddha’s method was first watch your breathing coming in and going out. Start with breathing because that is a gross thing and can be watched more easily. Start with the most gross: watch your breathing coming in, going out.He divided your breathing into four steps. First, the breath comes in. You just watch the breath going in, the subtle touch, your lungs being filled with it. Then there comes a moment of pause – for a split second all stops; the breath is in, nothing is moving. Watch that pause because that is the most important thing. Then another process begins: the breath starts going out. Watch it again. Then your lungs are empty, they shrink; the breath has gone out totally. Again there is a pause – for a split second all stops. Watch that too because these two pauses are the most significant for the meditators. Then the breath starts coming in.So these are four things: the breath coming in, the breath going out, and the two pauses at both ends. Those two pauses, when everything stops, are of tremendous silence. If you can watch those pauses, then comes the second step: start watching your thoughts. Each thought goes through the same process, the same four steps. The thought comes in, stays for a moment, goes out, and the pause. Another thought comes in, pause, the thought goes out. Start watching your thoughts.And the third step is… Because of watching your breath and thoughts you have come to know now that you are neither thoughts nor your breath, you are the watcher, the witness. This is awareness. This is what I call meditation. Once you have known this awareness you are unidentified with your body, with your mind. Now you experience a vastness inside you, in one sense utterly empty and in another sense overflowingly full. Because of its emptiness you will remain calm and quiet. And because of its overflowing fullness you will be creative.But please, don’t go on guessing, thinking. Experiment, experience.You say, “I think this idea is really not easy to understand for the West.” This is not an idea. For you this is an idea, that’s the difficulty. This is not an idea at all, this is a very tangible reality – you can hold it in your hands. That’s what I am here for, to help you to hold it in your hands. This awareness, this nothingness, this fullness is the most potential reality in the world. It is the first experience of God, or godliness.And you think it is difficult to understand for the West? Don’t be worried about the West, you just be worried about yourself. What has it got to do with West and East? It has nothing to do with geography.There have been people in the West who have experienced it. From Moses to Jesus, to Eckhart, there have been many who have experienced it. I think if somebody really counts all the Western enlightened people and all the Eastern enlightened people the number must be the same because there is a subtle balance in existence: the East must balance the West, the West must balance the East; otherwise the balance of nature will be disturbed and nature never allows disturbance. It always keeps a balance.In the West you have not thought much of your enlightened people, that’s why many names have disappeared. In the East we have respected them very much so we have not lost a single name. But according to the law of balance, East and West have both experienced the same quality of consciousness in the same number of people.Don’t be worried about the West. You are here. Experience it!You say, “It seems the point to jump…” So what are you doing? For what are you waiting? Jump! How much longer do you have to wait?And you say, “…but if I did not feel a strong faith in you and readiness for your message I would not be here.” Please remember perfectly well that I don’t expect any faith from you or any belief from you in me. If you are here to believe in me for some strong reasons that you call “faith,” “conviction,” then you are here for wrong reasons. Be here to experiment, to experience.I am not a philosopher – I am not teaching you a certain philosophy, I am not imparting any knowledge or information to you – I am available for a totally different kind of work. You can call it transformation, but not information.The second question:Osho,What was the first thing that you did after you became enlightened?I laughed! A real uproarious laugh, seeing the whole absurdity of trying to be enlightened. The whole thing is ridiculous because we are born enlightened, and to try for something that is already the case is the most absurd thing. If you already have it, you cannot achieve it; only those things can be achieved which you don’t have, which are not intrinsic parts of your being. But enlightenment is your very nature.I had struggled for it for many lives – it had been the only target for many, many lives. And I had done everything that is possible to do to attain it, but I had always failed. It was bound to be so because it cannot be an attainment. It is your nature, so how can it be your attainment? It cannot be made an ambition.The mind is ambitious – ambitious for money, for power, for prestige. And then one day, when it gets fed up with all these extrovert activities, it becomes ambitious for enlightenment, for liberation, for nirvana, for God. But the same ambition has come back; only the object has changed. First the object was outside, now the object is inside. But your attitude, your approach has not changed; you are the same person in the same rut, in the same routine.“The day I became enlightened” simply means the day I realized that there is nothing to achieve, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be done. We are already divine and we are already perfect as we are. No improvement is needed, no improvement at all. God never creates anybody imperfect. Even if you come across an imperfect man, you will see that his imperfection is perfect. God never creates any imperfect thing.I have heard about a Zen Master, Bokuju, who was telling this truth to his disciples: “All is perfect.”A man stood up – very old, a hunchback – and he asked, “What about me? I am a hunchback. What do you say about me?”Bokuju said, “I have never seen such a perfect hunchback in my life.”When I say “the day I achieved enlightenment,” I am using the wrong language – there is no other language because our language is created by us. It consists of the words: achievement, attainment, goals, improvement, progress, evolution. Our languages are not created by the enlightened people; and in fact they cannot create language even if they want to because enlightenment happens in silence. How can you bring that silence into words? And whatever you do, the words are going to destroy something of that silence.Lao Tzu says, “The moment truth is asserted it becomes false.” There is no way to communicate truth. But language has to be used; there is no other way. So we always have to use language with the condition that it cannot be adequate to the experience. Hence I say “the day I achieved my enlightenment.” It is neither an achievement, nor mine.[At this point there was a power failure: no light, no sound.] Yes, it happens like that! Out of nowhere suddenly the darkness, suddenly the light, and you cannot do anything. You can only watch.I laughed that day because of all my stupid ridiculous efforts to attain it. I laughed on that day at myself, and I laughed on that day at the whole of humanity because everybody is trying to achieve, everybody is trying to reach, everybody is trying to improve.It happened to me in a state of total relaxation – it always happens in that state. I had tried everything. And then, seeing the futility of all effort, I dropped… I dropped the whole project, I forgot all about it. For seven days I lived as ordinarily as possible.The people I used to live with were very surprised because this was the first time they had seen me live just an ordinary life. Otherwise my whole life was a perfect discipline.For two years I had lived with that family, and they had known that I would get up at three o’clock in the morning, then I would go for a long four- or five-mile walk or run, and then I would take a bath in the river. Everything was absolutely routine. Even if I had a fever or I was ill, there was no difference, I would simply go on the same way.They had known me to sit in meditation for hours. Up to that day I had not eaten many things. I would not drink tea, coffee, I had a strict discipline about what to eat, what not to eat. And exactly at nine o’clock I would go to bed. Even if somebody was sitting there, I would simply say, “Good-bye,” and I would go to my bed. The family with whom I used to live would inform the person, “Now you can go. He has gone to sleep.” I would not even waste a single moment in saying, “Now it is time for me to go to sleep.”When I relaxed for seven days, when I dropped the whole thing and when on the first day I woke up at nine o’clock in the morning, and drank tea, the family was puzzled. They said, “What has happened? Have you fallen?” They used to think of me as a great yogi.A picture from those days still exists. I used to use only one single piece of cloth and that was all. In the day I would cover my body with it, in the night I would use it as a blanket to cover myself. I slept on a bamboo mat. That was my whole comfort – that blanket, that bamboo mat. I had nothing, no other possessions.They were puzzled when I woke up at nine. They said, “Something is wrong. Are you very ill, seriously ill?”I said, “No, I am not seriously ill. I have been ill for many years, now I am perfectly healthy. Now I will wake up only when sleep leaves me, and I will go to sleep only when sleep comes to me. I am no longer going to be a slave to the clock. I will eat whatever my body feels like eating, and I will drink whatever I feel like drinking.”They could not believe it. They said, “Can you even drink beer?” I said, “Bring it!”That was the first day I tasted beer. They could not believe their eyes. They said, “You have completely gone down. You have become completely unspiritual. What are you doing?”I said, “Enough is enough.” And in seven days I completely forgot the whole project, and I forgot it forever.The seventh day it happened – it happened just out of nowhere. Suddenly all was light; and I was not doing anything, I was just sitting under a tree resting, enjoying. And when I laughed, the gardener heard the laughter. He used to think that I was a little bit crazy, but he had never seen me laugh in that way. He came running. He said, “What is the matter?”I said, “Don’t be worried. You know I am crazy – now I have gone completely crazy! I am laughing at myself. Don’t feel offended. Just go to sleep.”You ask me, “What was the first thing that you did after you became enlightened?” Laughter. And that’s the thing that I have been doing since then. I cannot laugh before you while telling jokes because that destroys the jokes, but I laugh through you.Mario staggers into his favorite bar and asks for a triple scotch.“What happened to you?” the bartender asks.“I am fucking mad!” Mario says. “It all started late last night. We had been working late and my secretary asked me to drive her home. When I turned on the ignition of my car, the key snapped off in my hand!”“Oh, that would sure piss me off,” says the bartender.“No, that didn’t get me mad,” says Mario. “We just took a cab, went up to her apartment, and ate a little snack she prepared. Then she asked me if I would like to lie down with her a while.”“And then?” asks the enthralled bartender.“Well,” continues Mario, “as I unzipped my trousers my bloody fly got jammed and I couldn’t get my pants off!”“Wow! That would really get me mad!” exclaims the bartender.“Naw, that didn’t get me mad. We got into it soon enough, and there we were going at it good and strong when all of a sudden there was a key in the latch. ‘Quick,’ she said, ‘it must be my husband. Hide!’”“Now that’s a real piss-off!” says the bartender.“No,” says Mario, “that’s not what made me mad. I had to hide fast. In the cupboard and under the bed were obvious places, so I hung by my fingers out of the window.”“And then?” says the bartender.“Well, the husband bursts in and yells, ‘Where is that sonofabitch hiding?’ And without waiting for an answer he looks under the bed and in the cupboard and then he looks out of the window and sees me hanging by my fingers there with no clothes on.”“And then?” says the bartender.“Well, he runs to his cupboard and pulls out a nine iron from his golf bag and with a grin on his face jumps onto the window sill and starts teeing off on my fingertips, one by one.”“Jesus Christ! No wonder you are mad!” says the bartender.“No! That’s not why I am mad!” says Mario. “It was only when he got down to the last finger that I looked down and realized that I was only twelve inches off the ground! That’s why I am mad!”Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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I think, too, that you have understood how the discussion of particulars is more lengthy than of universals…. For the more we aspire to higher things, the more our discourse upon things of the intellect is cut short, even as, when we enter that darkness which passes understanding, we shall find not brevity of speech but perfect silence and unknowing. Herein speech descends from the universal to the particular, and as it descends it is increased in proportion to the multiplicity of things. But now, in truth, it ascends from the particular to the universal, and going up is withdrawn as it rises, and after the whole ascent it becomes inwardly silent, entirely united with the ineffable.We say, therefore, that the transcendent maker of all things lacks neither being, nor life, nor reason, nor mind, yet he has no body; neither has he form, nor image, nor quality, nor quantity, nor bulk; he is in no place, nor is he seen, nor has he sensible touch; nor does he feel, nor is he felt, nor has he confusion and tumult, nor disturbance of material passions; neither is he without power, succumbing to the contingencies of sensible things; neither is his light in any deficiency, nor change, nor corruption, nor division, nor lack, nor flux, nor is he nor has he any other sensible thing.An English Lord is playing golf with his wife, Lady Evelyne, who has lost the sight of one eye in an accident. While playing, the Lord hits the good eye of Lady Evelyne with the ball and she goes completely blind.After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “Sorry, darling…good night, darling!”A Swiss guide was taking a group of tourists up a mountain. It was a very tricky climb. Before reaching the summit they passed across an enormous abyss, at which point the guide said to the group, “I advise all of you not to look down, avoid vertigo.” There was a pause, “But if by any chance some of you slip and fall down, if you remember to look to your right there is a breathtaking panorama!”Tired and thirsty, a man had lost his way in a desert. After wandering about for a while he met another rider. Glad to see somebody he hailed the rider with a friendly “Hello.”“Hello,” answered the second.“I’m English,” said the first.“I’m English too,” answered the second.“I’m Oxford,” continued the first proudly.“I’m Cambridge,” came the answer.“Sorry!”It is very difficult to drop old habits, and that must have been the case with Dionysius. He was trained as a theologian; he speaks the language of a theologian, although now he is no longer a theologian, he is a mystic. But the moment he starts expressing himself it is but natural that his whole training, upbringing, will come into his expression. So please forgive him for his expressions. They are not as clear as the statements of the Upanishads because the Upanishads were sung by mad poets, not by theologians; hence the beauty of the Upanishadic statements.It is fortunate, very fortunate, that Jesus was never trained by the rabbis; otherwise we would have missed the immense poetry and the grace of the New Testament, particularly of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are those who are the very last because they shall be the first in my kingdom of God.”These are not the words of a rabbi; these are the words of a simple man – not very articulate, not trained in reasoning. He is simply making statements without giving any reasons for them. He is not argumentative. These are shouts of joy. They are like small children playing, shouting, running, for no reason at all, just the overflowing energy. They are innocent statements.One can see very easily the difference between Jesus and Dionysius, between Lao Tzu and Dionysius, between Zarathustra and Dionysius. It was unfortunate that this tremendously great man had to pass through a theological training. It was just an accident. But his training hangs around him; it is very difficult to get rid of old habits. What he is saying is of immense importance, but the way he is saying it is that of a very ordinary theologian.Just listen to his statement:I think, too, that you have understood how the discussion of particulars is more lengthy than of universals….Now, Lao Tzu has not talked about particulars and universals, neither have Buddha nor Jesus nor Kabir nor Farid. It is a philosophical problem. It has some importance in the world of philosophy, but it is utterly meaningless as far as mystic experience is concerned. But Dionysius cannot find any other way to express himself; you will have to be a little patient with him. What he is saying is significant, but the way he is saying it is not significant at all. You will have to search for the diamonds hidden behind his expression.By “particulars” is meant the manifestations of existence. There are people, animals, birds, trees, rivers. Then among people also there are black people and white people and yellow people and red people. Then among white people also there are men and women, children and old people. And if you go further into the particulars you are moving to the atomic. Ultimately you will have to come to the indivisible unit which cannot be divided anymore.That’s exactly what the meaning of atom was in the beginning. Finally it was found that even the atom can be divided, but the old name has remained. Now the atom is divided into electrons, neutrons, positrons; they have become indivisibles. But who knows? Sooner or later somebody may divide electrons. There may be female electrons and male electrons – there is every possibility. Positive electrons and negative electrons are there, and the attraction between them is the same. You can call them yin and yang, male and female, Shiva and Shakti; it all depends on what expression you have chosen. The “neutron,” the “positron,” that is a scientific way of speaking, but some day somebody is bound to divide them.Science goes on this way toward the particular; hence science can never conceive of God because God is the ultimate universal. God means the whole, the organic whole, and science and its concern is with the part, the ultimate part. You can see the ways of religion and science going in opposite directions. Science moves from the universals to the particulars; religion moves from the particulars to the universals. Hence they cannot agree; it is almost impossible for them to agree. They will not find any common ground where they can agree.Science is bound to believe in analysis because analysis is the methodology for reaching the particular, and religion believes in synthesis because synthesis is the ladder that leads to the whole, to the universal.Sigmund Freud called his psychology “psychoanalysis,” and he was right in calling it psychoanalysis because his whole effort, his whole life was devoted to one thing: how to make psychology a science. It can become a science only if it becomes analysis. His insight was very clear.Assagioli calls his psychology “psychosynthesis.” He is on the right track for making psychology a religion, but he is not as insightful as Sigmund Freud. His synthesis is not much of a synthesis. Sigmund Freud really analyzes, and what Assagioli does is to reassemble the parts divided by Sigmund Freud.It is like the body of a man is divided into parts, cut into parts by a butcher, and then, just by putting those parts together, or gluing them together, you think you will get the whole man back. You are wrong. You will not get the whole man back, you will only get a corpse. That’s why Assagioli has not made much impression, he has got only a corpse. He is trying to undo Sigmund Freud; he is just putting together whatever Sigmund Freud has divided. But he is not himself a mystic, and without being a mystic you cannot reach the alive universal.The particulars are bound to be material, the parts have no life of their own. Life belongs to the whole. Life is the quality that arises in a miraculous way when parts are in a symphony with each other, in harmony with each other.You can dissect a flower, but the moment you dissect it you are killing it too; and once dissected, you cannot put it together again. Yes, you can put it together materially, but the life of the flower will never come back. You cannot bring the original organic unity back to it.Sigmund Freud’s work has left a great impact on humanity because this is the age of science and Sigmund Freud helped psychology to become at least something closer to science. Assagioli’s idea was good, but he was not capable of fulfilling his idea. He promised something which he was not capable of. He was not a Lao Tzu or a Buddha or a Dionysius.Dionysius knows exactly what happens in these two processes. He was not aware of modern science, but in these words he describes it accurately, precisely. From the universal you come to the particular; that is the scientific approach.Just one thousand years ago there was only one science. That’s why in old, ancient universities like Oxford, the department of science is still called the department of natural philosophy. There was only one science, the philosophy of nature; that’s why it is still a hangover. You may get a doctorate in psychology, but you are still called a PhD – PhD means a doctor of philosophy. You may get your doctorate in chemistry and still you are called a PhD – a hangover. You have nothing to do with philosophy, but in those days that was the only science: philosophy.Then in these one thousand years science became divided again and again and again: chemistry became a separate science; physics became a separate science. Then pure physics became a science separate from practical physics; organic chemistry became a science separate from inorganic chemistry. Now there are even more chemistries: biochemistry…and soon there will be more divisions. There are almost three hundred sciences available today. Just within one thousand years, one science has become divided into three hundred sciences.The whole process of science is knowing more and more about less and less. Science is an expertise, and the expert has to know more and more about less and less.Just twenty years ago you used to go to the physician, to the doctor, and that was enough; now it is no longer enough. You go to the physician; he suggests that you consult a few experts because he cannot say anything about your eyes. Twenty years ago he would have done everything for you; your eyes, your nose, your ears. Your whole body was his domain. It is no longer so. If your eyes are hurting he will send you to the eye specialist.I have heard that in the twenty-first century a man goes to an eye expert, and just before the expert is going to examine his eye, he asks, “Which eye is hurting?”And the man says, “The right eye.”He says, “Sorry, then you have to go to another expert because I cannot say anything about it. I only have expertise in left eyes.”Don’t laugh because even a single eye is a universe unto itself. Even to understand a single eye, left or right, is enough work for your whole life. In fact, there is not a single person in the world who can say he has read everything written about the eye. So much research has gone into everything about it that there are experts and experts; you have to go to many experts.A great problem has arisen: there is no one to look at you as an organic unity. Somebody treats your eye; he does not know anything about your heart. Somebody else treats your heart; he knows nothing about your stomach. Somebody else treats your stomach… You are being treated in parts and nobody knows about the whole unity of your body – what to say about the whole unity of existence?Hence, experts are creating great confusion. The eye expert may do something which goes against the heart or goes against the brain. The brain expert may do something which goes against the eye or against the nose. The heart specialist may do something which goes against the stomach or the kidney, and so on and so forth.Now one of the greatest problems before all the scientists of the world is how to unite all these different branches. In the old days, in Aristotle’s time, a single person used to write about the whole of science. Aristotle, a single man, has written about all the sciences. Now nobody can be an Aristotle again; those days are gone. He has not only written about all that was scientifically available, he has also written about God, heaven, hell – the supernatural world.Hence, the word metaphysics. Metaphysics has a very strange origin. Aristotle wrote about mathematics, chemistry, physics, whatever scientific knowledge was available in those days. And then after all these chapters he wrote a chapter about God. It was just a coincidence that after the chapter written on physics he wrote about God; the next chapter was about God. Metaphysics means after the chapter called “Physics.” It became the very name of philosophy – metaphysics, beyond physics. In fact, it refers to Aristotle’s book: the chapter that followed the chapter “Physics.”But a man like Aristotle will not be possible now. Science has become much more divided, and it goes on being divided. Remember the definition: knowing more and more about less and less. Then religion will be just the reverse process: knowing less and less about more and more. Hence in religion nobody can be an expert. It is a movement from the particular to the universal.Mysticism is the ultimate peak of religion. Mysticism can be defined in the same way: knowing nothing about all. That’s how Dionysius defines it: agnosia, knowing nothing. About the all, about the whole, nothing can be known because you are part of it. The knower and the known are no longer different; they are one.This is what he is saying in the language of theology. What he is saying is significant. He is defining science very clearly, not knowing that he is defining science. He is defining religion very clearly and mysticism very accurately. He says: I think, too, that you have understood how the discussion of particulars is more lengthy than of universals….Of course! The description, the discussion of the particulars is bound to be very lengthy. The Encyclopedia Britannica cannot be written on a postcard. But the essence of all the Upanishads, one hundred and eight Upanishads, can be written on a single postcard, or even a single postcard may be too big. It can even be condensed into a single sutra, into a single statement. And exactly that kind of statement is available.The Upanishads say, “Tatvamasi. Thou art that” – and they say all is contained in it. Everything else that is said in the Upanishads is nothing but an explanation of this single statement consisting of three words: “Thou art that.” There is no difference between you and the universe. You are it.But you cannot describe science in this way. Science has to be lengthy – science has to cover millions of things. Even now we don’t know how many species of living beings exist on the earth. After three hundred years of research, every day people go on finding new species of insects, flies – new species which have never been known before. We don’t know how many species of vegetation exist on the earth; millions have been catalogued, but many more are still there.And there is no problem in going into research as far as science is concerned; thousands of unknown territories are still available. Millions of stars have been counted, but still many more are there to be counted. It seems the universe is so infinite that we may never be able to know all the forms. And to be concerned with the particular means to be concerned with all the manifestations.Dionysius says:For the more we aspire to higher things, the more our discourse upon things of the intellect is cut short, even as, when we enter that darkness which passes understanding, we shall find not brevity of speech but perfect silence and unknowing.But as you start moving from particulars to universals – and that is what he means by “higher things” – remember, he is not talking of any moral evaluation, he is simply talking of higher things in the sense of universals. For example, to be a Hindu is lower than to be a human being, to be a Mohammedan is lower than to be a human being. To be a man is lower or to be a woman is lower than to be just a human being. But to be a human being is lower than just to be a being because being covers a far greater territory. Then animals are in it, then insects are in it, then trees are in it. To be is even higher than to be a being because then rocks are in it. Then even things which you think are dead things are included in it because they are. Even dreams are included in it because they are. Howsoever false, howsoever imaginary, but they exist. To be is equivalent to God.This is what he means by going higher: higher means reaching closer and closer to the ultimate universal. The very word universal has to be understood: it means one, uni; uni means one. It is not a multiverse, it is a universe. Coming closer to the one is what he means by going higher; coming closer to the many is what he means by falling lower. His evaluation is not moral, his evaluation is far more significant – it is existential. He says: For the more we aspire to the higher things, the more our discourse upon things of the intellect is cut short…And, in fact, the higher you move the less you will need the intellect because the intellect is nothing but an instrument of analysis.Now you will be able to understand why all the mystics have been against the mind, for the simple reason that the mind means the process of analyzing, and analysis leads to the particular. If you drop the mind, the universe is one, suddenly one. All distinctions disappear because distinctions exist only through the intellect. Intellect says, “This is different from that.” Intellect is a process of labeling: this is man, this is woman; this is Hindu, this is Mohammedan, this is Christian. And not only that: this is a Catholic Christian and this is a Protestant Christian, and so on and so forth. It goes on dividing and labeling.As you move higher, the function of the intellect is less and less. In other words, if you want to move higher you will have to move beyond intellect. That’s what he wants to say, but his way of saying it is theological. If he had been a Zen monk like Bodhidharma he would have said the whole thing in a single word: no-mind.When the Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma, “What is your message for me?” he said, “No-mind” – and that’s all.Lin Chi was sitting on the bank of a river and a philosopher came, bowed down and asked him, “What is your essential message?”Lin Chi looked at the philosopher and did not say a single word. The philosopher thought, “He is very old, maybe he is deaf too. He shouted, “It seems you cannot hear me! I am asking, what is your essential message?”Lin Chi laughed. The philosopher thought, “Something is strange. First he didn’t answer, now he laughs! Maybe he is just trying to pretend that he has heard, but because he has not answered he cannot have heard. That laughter seemed to be just a cover-up.” He shouted even more loudly; he said, “I am asking, what is your essential message?”Lin Chi said, “First I said silence. You could not understand it. I had to come a little lower. I said laughter. You could not understand even that, so I have to come a little lower.” And he wrote on the sand with his finger: Meditation. He said, “This is my message, the essential message.”The philosopher said, “Elaborate a little more. Make it a little clearer.”Lin Chi said, “It cannot be made clearer! All that can be said has been said in it.”But the philosopher insisted, so Lin Chi wrote, in bigger letters, again: MEDITATION.The philosopher was getting a little irritated and angry and he said, “Are you joking or what? You are writing the same word in bigger letters! I want a little more elaboration – I am a professor of philosophy!”Lin Chi said. “Why didn’t you say that before?” So he wrote No-mind.The philosopher hit his head with his hand and left the place without even saying good-bye to Lin Chi. “What kind of man is this? First he writes meditation, then he simply writes No-mind.”But Lin Chi is saying exactly that which is pertinent, to the point. Lin Chi is not a theologian or a philosopher; he is a pure mystic.Lin Chi brought the message of Bodhidharma from China to Japan. He transformed the whole of Japan into a new vision, into a new world. Japan owes more to Lin Chi than to anybody else. Lin Chi is Japan’s first buddha, and then from one light another light…and then many buddhas blossomed. But Lin Chi was the beginning, he brought the seed from China. Just as Bodhidharma took the message of Buddha from India to China, Lin Chi did the same, taking it from China to Japan.But Dionysius is a rare case. Theologians are not known to become mystics, hence he is, in a way, more important.I have heard…One day a great mystic and a great pundit, a great scholar, died – the same day, the same time. And they used to live just opposite each other in the same street.The mystic was surprised to see that the angels of death were also carrying the pundit, the great scholar, to heaven. He had never thought – no mystic has ever thought that pundits can enter heaven. Even sinners can enter, but not scholars, not theologians, not philosophers. They are wordy people. They know nothing, but they go on pretending that they know. They are the most hocus-pocus people around the earth, the most superficial and shallow people, but they use big words, great jargon.But the mystic kept silent. And he was even more surprised when the doors opened: St. Peter received the pundit, the scholar first – in fact, the mystic was almost ignored – and with great singing and alleluias and a big divine band he was taken in. Nobody took any notice of the mystic who was standing outside the gate looking at all that was happening.When the procession of the scholar, of the pundit went inside, St. Peter asked the mystic to come in – without any music, singing, any band – nothing. Just, “Come in.”The mystic said, “I am a little puzzled. I lived my whole life in prayer, in silence, in meditation, and is this the way to receive a mystic? And this man, I know perfectly well, is only knowledgeable; he does not really know anything, he has never experienced anything. And he has been received in such a way?”St. Peter laughed and he said, “You don’t understand. Mystics come here almost every day. This is the first time that a scholar has come. It is a very rare occasion, that’s why the special reception. It may not happen again for millions of years because for millions of years it has not happened before. It may not happen again at all, so this is the only opportunity to receive a scholar.”Dionysius is a rare flower in that sense because theologians, rabbis, pundits, are not known to know. Knowledgeable they are, they have great information, they can quote scriptures, but they have not experienced anything on their own. Dionysius has experienced.But this is to be understood: whatever you are now, when you experience you will have to express it in the old way, the way you were before the experience. For example, if you are a painter and you experience God, what will you do? You will paint – of course with a new quality – the same sunrises, the same sunsets, but with something new added to it, something inner, interior to it, some depth to it.A famous Zen story says…The emperor of China asked a Zen master, “I would like you to paint something on the wall in my palace where I sit for meditation. I have a small temple. I would like you to paint something on the wall.”The master said, “Okay, I will do it, but it will take one year or two or three years. One never knows because I paint only when He paints through me. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it does not happen. I am just a vehicle.”The emperor said, “You take your time.”After three years, the painting was complete. The master had painted all the walls inside the temple with beautiful mountains, rivers, springs, fountains. And he had told the emperor not to enter the temple until the painting was complete, so for three years the emperor had waited, asking again and again, “When? When can I come?”After three years, one day the master said, “Now you can come.”He went in. He was surprised, the temple was so small, but the way the mountains were painted all around gave it such vastness. The feel was as if you were standing in the mountains, not inside a temple. And he started inquiring about everything: “What is this? What river is this? What mountain is this? What is this peak called?”And then they came to the most beautiful peak. There was a small path going behind the peak and the emperor asked, “Where does this path lead to?”The master said, “In fact, I have never gone on it, but I will try. Wait.”And the master entered the painting, and never came back again.Now this is a very strange story, but I love it. It is really beautiful, it shows how the painting was alive. The master must have poured himself totally into it. That is the meaning of him getting lost in it, of him never coming back.When a master painter paints, the painter disappears, only the painting remains. When the master musician plays, the musician disappears, only the music remains. When the master singer sings, there is only song and no singer at all. So whatever your training is before your enlightenment, that will become your expression after enlightenment.Dionysius was a theologian, a bishop. And to be Bishop of Athens means he must have been very sophisticated, very educated, the most important bishop of those days because Athens was one of the most cultured cities that the world has ever known. So he speaks in this language, but don’t get lost in his language. Just try to find the essence of it.He says as our discourse rises upward toward universals: …the intellect is cut short, even as, when we enter that darkness which passes understanding, we shall find not brevity of speech but perfect silence and unknowing.This is a very pregnant statement and, in a way, unique. There have been mystics who have said and talked much about the knowledge that passes understanding. That can be understood, knowledge that passes understanding. You know something, but you cannot understand it. You know the beauty of a roseflower, but do you understand it? If somebody asks you, “What is beauty?” You will be at a loss. And it is not that you don’t know. You have seen it in the sunset, in the stars, in the face of a woman – you have seen it many times. You know it, but you cannot say that you understand it. Knowing is one thing, understanding is totally different. Understanding means comprehending it by the mind. Knowing is existential, understanding is intellectual.Many mystics have said “that knowledge which passes understanding,” but Dionysius is very special in this way. He says: …that darkness which passes understanding. Why even call it knowing? – because knowing somehow carries something of understanding in it. The moment you say “I know,” somewhere there is a lurking idea that you understand.St. Augustine is reported to have said, “I know what time is, but don’t ask me. The moment you ask me what time is, I don’t know.”Everybody knows what time is, but can you explain what time is? In fact, physicists have been working for fifty years on time and have not been able to come to any conclusion about what exactly it is that we call time. We have certain vague notions about time, but they are just vague. The moment you start thinking about them you will find them all faulty.For example we say, “Time passes by,” as if time is a river. But is time a river that passes by? Do you stand on the bank and time passes by? It is not so because with time you go on changing; with the river you don’t change. You can even stand in the river and you will feel the flow of the river, the passing of the water, but you are not changing; you are the same person. But time never leaves you the same person. And in a river you can go backward, you can go upstream, but in time you cannot go backward – except in H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine.H. G. Wells invented a machine in his novel in which you stand and it takes you back. You just turn a dial, you say, “Twenty years back,” and you move twenty years back, and you are a child. H. G. Wells’ idea has arisen out of the ordinary understanding of time, that time passes. If time passes, then why can we not go backward? If we can go forward, why not backward? What is wrong with going backward? But this idea of time cannot be proved. You don’t even feel its passing. You feel the breeze, you feel the water passing by; you don’t feel time passing by at all, not at all.And from where does it come? The river comes from somewhere; the Ganges comes from Gangotri in the Himalayas. From where does time come and to where does it go? From nowhere to nowhere, from nothing to nothing. It exists only for a single moment, the now. And then where does it go? Can something disappear into nothing? Can something come out of nothing? Then a thousand and one questions will arise.St. Augustine is right: “I know what time is, but please don’t ask me the question. If you ask me the question, then I won’t know at all.”He is saying that knowing and understanding are different things. But in knowing there is some vague undercurrent of understanding. To avoid that, Dionysius is the only mystic in the whole world who has not used the word knowledge. Instead he says darkness which passes understanding, unknowing which passes understanding, agnosia which passes understanding.And then he says, “As you go higher it is not only that you find brevity of speech…” Yes, there is a stage, the sutras of Patanjali, the Brahmasutras, the Bhaktisutras… In the East, all the great scriptures are written in sutras. Sutra means the most condensed statement, so thin as if it is just a thread. Sutra literally means a thread, a thin thread. Everything inessential has been cut; only the most essential has been saved. It is the most telegraphic way of expressing things. Hence in the East there are great commentaries. In the West there are no commentaries at all, because in the West no sutras have been written. A sutra needs a commentary.For example, all the great sutras in the East start with one word, athat – now. Athat means now. Every great scripture in the East: Brahmasutras, Bhaktisutras, the Yoga Sutras; they all start with athat. The Brahmasutra, the most important sutras in the East, starts with this statement: “Athato brahman jigyasa. Now the inquiry into God.” What do they mean by now? Thousands of commentaries have been written on the single word now in “Now the inquiry into God.” Why now? Is it not enough to say “The inquiry into God”? Or “We start the inquiry into God”? But “Now”? It has a significance.My own interpretation is unless you have experienced now – the present moment – you cannot inquire into God. “Now the inquiry into God.” In fact, to be in the now is to be in the inquiry for God. The mind is always in the past or in the future. The past is no more, the future is not yet. And God always is, God is always now. To inquire into now is really to inquire into God.But the sutra is so condensed, it does not say a single word about the now – just now, and finished. Sutras means small seeds which contain thousands of flowers. But then you will have to sow them, grow them, protect them, and wait for the spring.As you move upward, first comes brevity – your statements become sutras – and then comes perfect silence. Even to say a single word seems to be doing something wrong.Lao Tzu says, “To say the truth is to falsify it.” Hence he avoided doing so his whole life; he never wrote a single word. He indicated in indirect ways, hinted at but never said any direct thing about God, never mentioned God.When Buddha became enlightened, he remained silent for seven days. And the story is that the gods became very disturbed because it was such a rare opportunity – a man becoming enlightened, “Is he going to speak or not? If he does not speak then the world will lose such a precious treasure.” So they came down from heaven, bowed down to Buddha and asked him to speak. Again and again they said, “Sir, speak because this is a rare experience! Once in a while a man becomes a buddha – he should speak. Be compassionate because there are millions who are searching for truth. Your single word will be like a drop of nectar to them.”But Buddha remained silent. When they insisted, he argued. He said, “For seven days many times I have thought whether to speak or not to speak, and always I have concluded that it is better not to speak. In the first place, no word is adequate enough to contain my experience. In the second place, whatever I say will be misunderstood. I know it because when I was not enlightened, if somebody had said something I would have misunderstood him myself. So what is the point of unnecessarily falsifying the truth and creating misunderstanding and confusion in people?“Thirdly, out of one hundred people, ninety-nine point nine percent will not be benefited at all; they will remain the same. Yes, point one percent may be benefited, but about that point one percent, I have also been thinking that if a person can understand what I am saying, then he is so intelligent that even without my speaking sooner or later he will discover the truth himself. So why not let him discover it himself? Maybe it will take a little longer – so what? There is infinity.”But the gods also discussed among themselves how to persuade him, how to argue with him. This man was saying something right, they could not deny it. But they found something that persuaded Buddha to speak. They said, “We agree with you on all the points, just one doubt remains. We know a few people, very few people – and you also must be aware of those very few people – maybe one in a million, who is intelligent enough to understand you, but is not intelligent enough to discover it by himself, who is just on the boundary line. A little push and he may take the jump. And if there is nobody to push he may not take the jump. He may even turn back, he may lose whatever he has gained. He may go back to the world, into the world of things. What about that man? And they are not many, we agree, but the question is not of many, it is not a question of quantity. The question is, if even a single man can become a master through your speaking that is enough, more than enough, more than one can ask for.”And Buddha had to concede this point. But whatever he has said is very condensed. The Dhammapada, his statements, are just small sutras; they have to be elaborated, they have to be explained. They are seeds; they have to be opened. They contain mysteries, but those mysteries are hidden.The most important thing that Dionysius says is: …we shall find not brevity of speech but perfect silence and unknowing.This and unknowing is his specialty, his unique contribution to the whole history of mysticism. Even Buddha says, “I cannot say that which I have known because no word will contain it.” Dionysius says, “It is a state of unknowing, so how can any word contain it?” If it is a state of knowing then maybe some part of it can be contained or maybe a bigger word can be found or maybe better words can be invented. Why not? If we have been able to invent words to express beauty, love, bliss, why can we not invent words to express truth, nirvana, moksha? The words can be improved upon. But if it is a state of unknowing then nothing can be done. Then it is not a question of language at all; then it can be conveyed only in silence.Do you see what he is saying? He has taken a step ahead of all the buddhas in expressing the fact that because it is a state of unknowing, it is impossible to express it.Herein speech descends from the universal to the particular, and as it descends it is increased in proportion to the multiplicity of things. But now, in truth, it ascends from the particular to the universal, and going up is withdrawn as it rises, and after the whole ascent it becomes inwardly silent, entirely united with the ineffable.The particular can be expressed. Hence science is very precise in its expression; it can express things with absolute clarity. For example, H2O; now nothing more can be added to it, nothing can be misunderstood about it. H2O means simply H2O. Science has found a mathematical language to express itself because its concern is particular.But as you move up from the particular to the universal you become vague. More and more mist surrounds you, more and more mystery. And ultimately you become one with the ineffable, the inexpressible.These are the stages to be remembered. The first stage according to Dionysius – and I agree with him totally – is the state of unknowing. If you descend from it, the second state is a vague knowing. You know that you know something; what it is exactly is not yet clear. It is just like early in the morning the sun has not risen yet and great mist surrounds. You cannot see far away, but you can still see a little bit; it is not dark, it is not light either.In India the language of the mystics is called sandhya bhasha, the evening language. It is neither night nor day; it is in the middle. Something is dark in it and something is luminous in it. Hence Dionysius’ expression: luminous, translucent darkness.The first state is of unknowing; nothing can be said about it. But if you want to approach people, if compassion arises in you…Buddha has said that there are two types of enlightened people: one he calls arhats and the other he calls bodhisattvas. Arhats are those who remain in the state of unknowing; they never bother. That’s what Buddha was thinking for seven days: he was thinking to remain an arhat. Nobody would have heard about him, nobody would have known about him; he would have never conveyed anything to anybody. He would have blossomed like a lonely flower far away in the deep forest. Nobody would have even smelled the perfume of it. Nobody would have known that the blossoming had happened, that a flower, a beautiful flower, had opened up. No bees would have reached it, no butterflies would have flown to it.The second he calls bodhisattvas: the people who, out of compassion for others, speak. The gods helped him to become a bodhisattva. And then his whole life he insisted that all his bhikkus, all his sannyasins, become as loving and compassionate as possible because when you attain truth, if your heart is full of compassion you will become a bodhisattva. If you have not gathered any compassion in your heart, if you have remained dry like a desert, you may attain truth, but nobody will be benefited by it. You will reach the other shore, but alone.The arhat remains in the unknowing state, in agnosia. He disappears into the universal without leaving a single trace behind. Nobody is helped by him. The bodhisattva descends from those heights. He has known the sunlit peaks of Gourishankar, of Everest, and then he remembers all those struggling millions in the dark valley of life and he descends, back to the valley.This is the descent: from unknowing he comes to vague knowing; from vague knowing to articulate knowing, from articulate knowing to expression, language, words; through language and words he reaches the listener’s mind; then the listener’s mind interprets it, then the person who has listened to those who have known starts telling others.These are the seven stages, but much is lost by the time it reaches the seventh; almost all is lost. But nothing can be done, that’s how things are. “Aes dhammo sanantano,” Buddha says: “Such is the law of life.”Dionysius also is trying to be a bodhisattva, but he can use only his old language.A Jew asks his neighbor for a hammer.“You don’t have one?” asks the neighbor, surprised. “Yes, I do,” replies the Jew, “but it’s a new one and I’m afraid of spoiling it!”Two Jews are sipping a drink in the garden of a luxurious villa. One says to the other, “Well, yes, my dear friend, I am a self-made man. I started with nothing, absolutely nothing. Now I have over two million dollars’ worth of debts!”A Jew heard that at a certain gas station they pumped up tires for free. He went there, and in his excitement over the deal he blew all four tires.Old habits die hard. And it is very difficult to find a man without habits. Life naturally becomes patterned, structured. Otherwise, truth could be said more clearly.Now look at these words:We say, therefore, that the transcendent maker of all things lacks neither being, nor life, nor reason, nor mind, yet he has no body; neither has he form, nor image, nor quality, nor quantity, nor bulk; he is in no place, nor is he seen, nor has he sensible touch; nor does he feel, nor is he felt, nor has he confusion and tumult, nor disturbance of material passions; neither is he without power, succumbing to the contingencies of sensible things; neither is his light in any deficiency, nor change, nor corruption, nor division, nor lack, nor flux, nor is he nor has he any other sensible thing.Now, this is just an old habit. The poor fellow cannot forget – a hangover. To express the inexpressible a child will be far more capable, but a child cannot know it, that’s the difficulty. If a child can know the truth he will be very clear, he will be straight. And that’s why I see the beauty in Jesus’ words – he is more like a child. He was very young, only thirty, when he started expressing. Dionysius must have been old by the time he wrote this treatise.The teacher was describing the Last Judgment dramatically: “Thunder will boom! Flames will come from the heavens! There will be earthquakes and floods! The whole world will split and swallow millions!”Right there, Johnny held up his hand and asked, “Will we get the day off from school?”Now children are very clear and straight, “What nonsense are you saying, that is not the point. The point is whether we will be able to get the day off to see the whole scene or not!”While helping her son with his spelling, the mother came to the words conscious and conscience. Did he know their meaning?“Sure, Mom,” he said, “Conscious is when you’re aware of something and conscience is when you wish you weren’t!”So clear!Six year old Jojo approached his neighbor, a beautiful lady, and asked, “Will you marry me?”To which the lady replied, “I don’t like kids!”Answered little Jojo, “Then we won’t have any!”Two babies were talking together in a maternity ward. One says to the other, “So what are you – a boy or a girl?”“I don’t know,” replies the smaller of the two.“Well,” says the first, “let’s wait til the nurse goes out and then we’ll find out.”When the nurse is safely out of the ward, the bigger baby sits up, looks carefully from side to side, then quickly takes a look under the blanket of his little neighbor.“You are a girl,” he announces.“How can you tell?” asks his little friend in awe.“Because I saw your little pink booties!”If children were writing about God, things would be very clear! But theologians write, scholars write, or people who have been scholars in the past and then become mystics. But their old language persists; they go on talking in it.And the problems become more and more difficult because of the continuous fall from the truth. From unknowing to vague knowing much is lost. In unknowing, everything is as it is. In vague knowing, something of your mind has entered. Then in articulate knowing, the third step down, something of your logic has also come in – not only mind but logic too. And then in the fourth, when you express, there is not only logic but language, and language is created by others. And there are things which cannot be translated into any language. The moment you translate, something goes wrong.A firm experimenting with an electronic brain designed to translate English into Russian fed into it the words: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”The machine translated the sentence into Russian, which read: “The whiskey is agreeable but the meat has gone bad.”It is always a problem to translate, the more poetic a phenomenon, the greater the danger in translation. That’s why many beautiful books cannot be translated at all; if you translate them you destroy.The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu has been translated many times, many people have translated it, and each translation has something of its own. But when all the translations are read together you will be surprised, it seems that the real thing is still missing because there is something in one translation, something else is in another translation, and both seem to be right. When you read them they seem logical.The moment you start using language for something which has been experienced in silence, a great distance arises. You know it perfectly well, that now you are moving into the world. And once the words have escaped you, you are no longer master of those words; then the listener’s mind enters. Up to now at least everything was within you and you have known the ultimate, so you knew what faults have entered, what flaws have entered. Now, once the truth is expressed, it enters a mind which knows nothing of the heights. What this person will think about it depends on him; his mind will be the decisive factor.One day an unhappy citizen in New Delhi was wandering around alone in a back street, muttering and talking to himself. “I hate them,” he was saying, “those dirty profiteers, nepotists, squanderers,” and other unprintables. “I hate them, I hate them, I hate them!”At this point a policeman tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You are under arrest for insulting the Government.”“I didn’t even mention the Government!” retorted the citizen.“I admit that, but you described it so perfectly!”The sixth thing is when the listener not only listens but interprets. And the seventh is really very, very far away from the original source, when the listener starts telling others according to his interpretation.That’s what for two thousand years Christian missionaries have been doing, for twenty-five centuries Jaina monks have been doing, Buddhist monks have been doing, and for five thousand years the Hindu pundits have been doing. They have heard… Each Buddhist scripture begins: “I have heard…” this is the beginning of each Buddhist scripture. It is a report by somebody who has heard. Now what he has heard cannot be the same as what was said.Young Vladimir, visiting the big city for the first time, is impressed by its tall buildings and its cultural happenings. While wandering around the city’s museums, Vladimir is suddenly possessed with the urge to shit. When his efforts to locate a toilet fail, he finds a corner and spreads his handkerchief on the marble floor. He grunts and groans for a few minutes and deposits a fairly healthy load. Vladimir leaves the museum, handkerchief in hand, and at that precise moment a thief is making off with four pounds of meat from the neighboring butcher shop.The police arrive on the scene immediately, a crowd gathers, and in the confusion Vladimir is taken into custody. His innocence is proven when a high-ranking police officer, schooled in the latest investigatory techniques, is called in to solve the baffling case. After many hours of fruitless investigation, the officer decides to weigh the handkerchief and finds it weighs only three pounds.Vladimir, again a free man, returns to his home town.He is met at the train station by many friends and townspeople who eagerly inquire about life in the big city.“It is wonderful,” says Vladimir, “really amazing! But let me warn you – if your shit weighs more than three pounds, you can get into a lot of trouble!”This is what has happened to all the religions. That’s why there is so much trouble in the world, a lot of trouble. People have interpreted the great masters according to themselves. Knowing nothing, understanding nothing, never having meditated in their lives; they go on pretending that they know. Just words, and in those words they go on putting their own meanings.The game between Celtic and Rangers was in its twenty-ninth minute when Celtic scored the first goal. One spectator cheered wildly with all the Celtic fans, though he was not wearing the colors of either team.Ten minutes later Rangers equalized. The Rangers fans went wild, so did the lone spectator.The man standing next to him exclaimed, “Just a minute, Jock – you’re yelling for both teams?”“That’s right,” said the spectator. “I am enjoying the whole show and I don’t care who wins.”“Oh, an atheist, eh?” said the second man.If you are enjoying the whole scene then the other immediately interprets that you are an atheist, you don’t belong to a particular religion – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan.And that is the problem with my sannyasins, I am enjoying the whole scene and you are enjoying the whole scene. Otherwise Hindus listening to Dionysius, or Christians listening to Rinzai, or Jainas listening to Mohammed – impossible! It has never happened in the world.Hence, there are many who call me an atheist. They don’t know what theism is, what atheism is, but they go on using words not even knowing their meaning. But this is bound to happen. One should be aware of it – you have to be aware of it.What I am saying, never try to interpret it; listen silently, absorb it, let it become part of your blood, bones, and marrow. And then you will know its meaning far more clearly than through your mind.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,According to what I have been hearing you say, the title of this series, Theologia Mystica, seems to be a contradiction in terms.It is true, but the title was given by Dionysius himself, so at least I am not responsible for it. In a way, mysticism is bound to be a contradiction in terms, whether the word theologia is in it or not. Mysticism itself, by its very nature, is a contradiction because it is not an ism. It is not a creed or dogma in which you can believe. You can be a mystic, but there is nothing like mysticism. And when one is a mystic the paradox deepens, it does not disappear. When one is a mystic there is no one left; there is a mystery, but with no center to it. It is like a cloud: translucent darkness, infinite darkness.One of the most important statements about mysticism in the Western hemisphere is the book called The Cloud of Unknowing. The name of the author is not known. It is good that we don’t know who wrote it. It indicates one thing, that before he wrote it he had disappeared into a cloud of unknowing. It is the only book in the Western world which comes close to the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, The Dhammapada. There is a rare insight in it.First he calls it a cloud. A cloud is vague, with no definable limits. It is constantly changing, it is not static – never, even for two consecutive moments, is it the same; it is a flux, it is pure change. And there is nothing substantial in it. If you hold it in your hand only mist will be left, nothing else. Maybe your hands will become wet, but you will not find any cloud in your fist.That’s what happens to the mystic, he becomes wet, really wet. Those countries where alcohol is prohibited they call dry, and those countries where alcohol is not prohibited they call wet. But the only wet person is the mystic. He is a real alcoholic, he cannot be helped by Alcoholics Anonymous! If a mystic enters there, they will all become alcoholics themselves!But for Dionysius it is even more a contradiction because he was a theologian. His whole book is written with a disguise, as if it is a treatise on theology; mysticism is just something by the side, secondary, not primary. Hence the name Theologia Mystica – as if mysticism is only a consequence of getting deep into the world of theology. Just the reverse is the case.The word theology means logic about God; theo means God. But there can be no logic about God. There is love about God, love for God, but no logic about God. There are no proofs possible. The only proof is the existence of the mystic. The presence of Dionysius, of Ramakrishna, of Bahauddin – the presence of these people is the proof that God exists, otherwise there is no proof. Because buddhas have walked on the earth, there are a few footprints of God left behind on the shores of time.Philosophers have argued for centuries, but all their arguments are utterly futile and impotent; they have not come to a single conclusion.The mystic has to speak in contradictions because he is speaking about the whole, and the whole contains the contradictions. It contains both the day and the night. If you call God the day, then it is only half the truth; if you call him the night, that too is only half the truth.Hence Dionysius calls God translucent darkness – as if the sun has risen in the night.The whole consists of both life and death. If you call God life, only life, then it is a half-statement. And remember a half-truth is far more dangerous than a complete lie because the complete lie is bound to be discovered sooner or later, just a little intelligence is needed. But the half-truth is very dangerous: even intelligent people, very intelligent people, may not be able to find that it is untrue. That is the danger of half-truths: they look like truths and they are not. They can keep you deceived for centuries.Mysticism is the whole truth; it has to be contradictory. Somewhere logic and love have to meet because they both exist. Hence, theologia mystica. Somewhere man and woman have to meet and merge and disappear into each other because they both exist and they are both halves of one whole. Hence the beauty and the bliss of a real meeting between a man and a woman; the orgasmic joy is possible only because two halves of a single whole have come together. Both were suffering, both were missing something. Suddenly, all that feeling of missing has disappeared. Of course, the meeting between a man and a woman can only be momentary. Again they are separate, and again the misery sets in, and again the desire to be united. Because the meeting is physical it cannot be very deep and it cannot be lasting either.But the meeting of the mystic with the whole is absolute; there is no coming back. He has gone beyond the point of no return. He has dissolved himself like a dewdrop slipping out of the lotus leaf into the lake. He has become the lake. Then whatever he says will be contradictory because a part of it will be the vision of the dewdrop and a part of it will be the vision of the total lake. A part will be the standpoint of the part and a part will be the standpoint of the whole. Hence all mystics have spoken in contradictory terms.This is one of the reasons why intellectuals are against them – because the intellectual demands consistency and the mystic cannot be consistent. By the very nature of things that is not possible. He is helpless – he has to be contradictory. He has to say, “I am contradictory because I am vast enough to contain contradictions.”Logic is a small thing, love is infinity.The second question:Osho,These days the papers are filled with reports of communal riots erupting all over India. No real reasons for this violence and destruction of property are being given, just vague references to “antisocial elements,” whatever that phrase means. Can you throw any light on what is happening in this country, on why there is this obvious and angry unrest?The first thing is India is a religious country, and all the religions down the ages have depended upon fear. They have exploited the fear instinct of man, they have made man afraid. Hence the word God-fearing – it exists in almost all the languages of the world, and they say it means religious! It is pure nonsense. A religious person is not God-fearing but God-loving. A God-fearing man is pseudo religious, a person who has not sought religion on his own but has been forced to be religious by others.There are only two ways to force things on people – not in fact two, but two aspects of the same coin – fear and reward, punishment and reward, fear and greed. Hence hell and heaven: heaven is greed, reward; hell is fear, punishment.India is a religious country, full of God-fearing people. And with the existence of fear many problems arise. The first problem is love disappears.Remember, hate is not the real opposite of love; the real opposite of love is fear. You can still love the person you hate. In fact, the latest research says that you always hate the person you love. Hate and love are two polarities of the same energy – they are complementary, they are not opposites.Hence you see the conflict between lovers, continuous conflict. They are always fighting, as if it is a necessary part of love affairs – and it is. A love affair is not possible without conflict; a love affair becomes possible through conflict. You fight with the person you love, you hate the person you love from your very guts, and because of this hate and this fight and this conflict you go on creating a distance between you.There is a certain moment when the distance is so big that a desire to meet the other arises. It arises only at a certain distance. If your woman or your man has been away for a few days and then comes home, then there is great love. Those few days have created a certain appetite. Of course, if you go on eating the whole day you won’t have any appetite. Appetite depends on the fast between two meals. Everybody fasts between two meals; hence the English word breakfast: you have fasted the whole night in your sleep. Of course, when you are awake it is difficult to fast but when you are asleep what can you do?A few people certainly manage to get up in their sleep and go to the kitchen or go to the fridge; they are sleepwalkers. But it is a strange thing, sleepwalkers always go to the fridge! They open the fridge – and they are asleep! – and they eat something and they close the fridge, and they come back in the darkness, and they go to sleep. And they go on gaining weight and they go on dieting in the day. And they are always puzzled: “What is the matter? Why does my weight go on increasing?” Otherwise, normal people have an eight-hour fast. After that eight-hour fast, an appetite arises.The fight between lovers is like fasting: withdrawing from each other, then the desire – because love is a nourishment. Remember, love is food. It is as much food as any other food, but a very subtle food – a food for the soul. So when lovers fight they remain on a fast. Soon the appetite arises and they start moving closer to each other. After each fight they can make love in a far better way than at any other time. It has intensity, it has passion. But after each meal you have an aversion to food.If you have eaten well, the very idea of food will be a little nauseating. One who has eaten enough, if you put all kinds of food around him, he will go crazy. He will hate the food, he will hate you; he would like to escape from the room. There is a certain aversion. That is natural, otherwise how will he stop eating?So when two lovers have made love, a certain aversion arises. These are natural phenomena. Once we understand them, they are not problems. After each lovemaking the husband turns over and goes to sleep, and after each lovemaking the wife cries, weeps because she feels exploited. This same man who is now sleeping, keeping his back toward her, snoring, this same man, this sonofabitch, just a few moments before was talking such beautiful poetry, and now he is not at all concerned. She feels cheated. But that is wrong; that is a misunderstanding. It is a natural phenomenon – love fulfilled, aversion arises. Of course, after a twenty-four hour fast he will again talk poetry. That’s how the wheel moves.Love and hate are not opposites, but love and fear are. The afraid person becomes incapable of love. And all the religions have depended on fear, hence they have made millions of people incapable of love. And the people who are incapable of love are only capable of violence.So, it is nothing new in India. It erupts almost every ten years; ten years seems to be the limit. Within ten years everybody accumulates so much violence within himself that it has to find an outlet, otherwise it will destroy him. He will be burned up by his own violence. So he has to find some excuses; political, religious, social – any kind of excuse will do. And this limit of ten years is not only limited to India; it seems to be universal. Every ten years there is a great war. The whole of humanity gets involved in destruction.Religions are responsible because they have not taught you how to love, they have only taught you how to be afraid. Remember, fear is the same energy as love, but it has been poisoned – your energies have been poisoned for centuries. So it has become a routine phenomenon that after a few months, a few years, after a certain period, one accumulates so much violence, which would not have been there if love had been flowing. Because love has been stopped there is no flow in your life. Your own energies go against you; they become destructive. Then any excuse is enough – such stupid excuses that if you look at them you will laugh; they are ridiculous!In Moradabad, where this whole problem started – and now it has spread almost all over the country – the cause was just ridiculous. Mohammedans had gathered to pray in their idgah, their prayer place. It is an open place; they just face toward Kaaba and pray. A policeman was on duty, and a cow entered the prayer space. Now, the cow is the symbol of Hinduism, and the Mohammedans became enraged. They said, “The policeman is responsible. He was standing there. Why did he allow the cow to enter?” In fact they said that not only did he allow it, he brought the cow in! And killing started.Now one hundred and thirty people have died just because of that holy cow which may have entered innocently. They are roaming all over the country – they don’t know which place is Hindu and which place is Mohammedan. And because one hundred and thirty people have died there – this is an official number and official numbers are never right. Multiply by four and you will find the right number. That has always been my observation, multiply by four. At least five hundred to six hundred people must have died. Now revenge has to be taken in other places.Can you see the cause, the stupidity of human beings? The excuse is not worth calling an excuse! But this is how things begin.The real thing is that people are accumulating great violence, anger. If you cannot release your love you will accumulate anger. Love standing on its head becomes anger. And when anger accumulates you are just looking for some excuse. If you cannot find an excuse you will invent one, but you will have to invent some cause so you can release, cathart. This is a catharsis – on what grounds it happens is immaterial.Hindi-speaking people start killing non-Hindi-speaking people; non-Hindi-speaking people start killing Hindi-speaking people. The Gujaratis start fighting with the Marathis, the Mohammedans with the Hindus, the Jainas with the Hindus, the Sikhs with the non-Sikhs. Anybody is ready to fight with anybody else; just a small excuse, real or invented, is needed. The fight happens first, then later on we discover why it has happened.People are gathering so much poison, anger, that these flare-ups are bound to happen. And the politicians have no understanding, so they simply go on dumping the whole thing on “antisocial elements,” as if these antisocial elements appear only once in a while and then suddenly disappear. They are always there, but the riots are not always there. For years these antisocial elements become very peaceful and very Gandhian, very nonviolent, and then one day suddenly they erupt, and they erupt all over, it is almost like a chain reaction.The politicians have to say something. They don’t understand what is happening at all, and even if some of them do understand they don’t have the courage to say it.The real cause is thousands of years of imposed fear on people, condemnation of love. And you are well aware of it here – if two of my sannyasins are just standing holding each other’s hands in the garden, it is obscene. Two people lovingly holding each other’s hands is obscene or two lovers embracing each other is obscene – and two people killing each other is not obscene!If two people are fighting on the road, a crowd will gather and they will all enjoy the fight. And everybody will go home very satisfied, very contented because in a vicarious way they have also been able to cathart their anger through the fighters. But seeing two lovers, only jealousy arises, great jealousy and great anger.But this is how they have been brought up for centuries, and this they call religion. Because I am against it, they think I am trying to destroy their religion, their morality. What morality have they got? This is the morality – that every day somewhere or other there is violence. This is Indian culture, Indian morality – these Hindus and Mohammedans and Jainas! They will all say beautiful things and they will all do ugly things. Because I am pointing at the naked truth, they are all opposed to me.The politicians cannot say the truth, even if they know it. In the first place they don’t know because they don’t have that much intelligence – otherwise they wouldn’t be politicians in the first place. Secondly, even if they have some idea of what really is happening in the psyche of the country, they cannot say it because they have to ask for votes from the same people. If they say the truth they will lose their votes, so they invent some vague excuses – “antisocial elements.”Now, who is this antisocial element: Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jaina, Buddhist? Who is this antisocial element? Just a word, a label. You can throw all the responsibility on it and you can feel very relieved.You ask me, “These days the papers are filled with reports of communal riots erupting all over India. No real reasons for this violence and destruction of property are being given, just vague references to ‘antisocial elements,’ whatever that phrase means. Can you throw any light on what is happening in this country, on why there is this obvious and angry unrest?”This is going to continue – unless this country drops this stupid idea of being religious, unless this country drops the rotten culture that it has carried for centuries, which is only a corpse. It is stinking, but they go on carrying it because it is so ancient; it is their past, their heritage. This country has to cut itself off from its past totally, abruptly; a discontinuity is needed. Only then will India be reborn.One of my political friends, Seth Govind Das, was a Member of Parliament in India for the longest period. In fact, except Winston Churchill and Seth Govind Das, nobody else in the world has been a Member of the Parliament for so long. He was called the father of the Indian Parliament. He has been a Member for nearabout fifty years.He always used to say, “There have been many civilizations in the world, but they all died.” And with great pride. He was very proud of it. “Where is Babylonia? Where is Syria? Where is Greece? Where is Egypt? All have disappeared from the world. The only ancient civilization alive is the Indian civilization.”And I always used to say to him, “Don’t be proud of it – be ashamed! It is time that this ancient country should learn how to die and be reborn.Unless you die you cannot have a rebirth. This country needs a death – and not a partial death, a total death – so that a new, fresh race can come up. And it is not difficult.But the vested interests are against rebirth. They go on propounding the old tradition. The newly-born country, the newly-born race will not be so easily enslaved by them. They will lose, and they don’t want to lose. Hence they are against me.You can see. The reasons they give against me are worth considering, contemplating. They say that I am destroying their culture, I am destroying their morality, I am destroying their civilization, that I am an enemy. In one way they are right, but in another way they are absolutely wrong. They are right because I am certainly against all that is dead and I want it to be burned – with all due respect, but burn it, say good-bye to it. Don’t look backward. Look forward, look ahead!So in a way they are right that I am against all these things, but in a way they are wrong. I am against these things not because I am against religion, culture, morality, civilization; I am against these things because they are dead.I am absolutely in favor of a new culture arising, a new civilization arising, a new morality arising, a new humanity arising. Otherwise this country is going to remain poor, starved; continuously fighting, quarreling, murdering each other.This country needs to be taught ways of love. This country needs to be told: except love there is no God. Drop all fears! Don’t go to the temples because of fear, and don’t go on worshipping stupid idols and gods because of greed. Drop greed and fear and live out of love. Love people, love trees, love animals, love this existence because God is nowhere else. God is spread all over existence. God is simply another name for life, existence, that which is.That’s my work here. It is dangerous work – dangerous because I am fighting against powerful forces, dangerous because I am fighting against almost all the vested interests. Nobody will be in favor of me; I have to stand alone. Just a few people who will be courageous enough to be with me, ready to risk their lives with me, will be with me; otherwise nobody is going to be with me.But it is a thrilling project. It is very adventurous. It is a great challenge; it is worth accepting. And through it not only can this country’s humanity have a new birth, through it we can show the way to the whole world because the whole world needs more or less a new birth, a new man.The third question:Osho,I cannot decide whether to stay here with you or not, and also whether to become a sannyasin or not. Can you help me to decide?Toss a coin! If it is heads, stay, but don’t become a sannyasin – because the coin coming up heads shows you are a head. So accumulate as much intellectual garbage as you can, and if by chance you are a German, then it will be really good for your head too, good manure.Looking out of my window one day, I saw two sannyasins working outside – two of Deeksha’s handymen, one Italian and one German. They were about to hammer away at a concrete pillar with a sledge hammer and a wrecking bar. The German was holding the wrecking bar and the Italian the sledge hammer.On the first try with the sledge hammer, the Italian missed and hit the German on the head. The German, unaffected, continued to hold the bar, waiting for the next try.The Italian again missed and hit the German on the head once more. Without batting an eye, the German continued to hold the bar. The Italian tried once again and once again missed, hitting the German again on the head.This time the German looked at the Italian with a wary eye and said, “Swami, please be careful. If you hit my fingers you can hurt me!”But if the coin comes up tails, then put your tail between your legs and escape from here as fast as possible!That’s exactly the origin of the word hippie. Hippie comes from hips; one who cannot encounter a challenge and shows his hips and escapes. So if it is tails, then understand the message – escape like a hippie.But by chance – and miracles happen! – if it stands on edge, then become a sannyasin. Then I cannot help it. Then God decides so.The fourth question:Osho,Dionysius is again an enlightened male master. Is it more difficult for a woman to become enlightened than it is for a man?You don’t understand the problem!The fundamental reason women do not achieve as greatly as men do is that women have no wives. Until such a time as science or economics corrects this blunder of nature, we shall remain, I fear, the weaker sex.Man is the weaker sex. And because the wives drive them crazy in every possible way, they start running in all directions, stumbling in all directions, groping in every possible way to escape. And a few of them, by chance, become masters. A few of them become painters, a few of them become poets, a few of them become scientists…Women cannot achieve so greatly for the simple reason that there is nobody to drive them. Of course, man cannot say clearly, “You are driving me mad.” He says, “You are inspiring me! Without you I would be nothing.” And that is true, literally true.So feel compassion for the poor men. They had to become masters, Buddhas, Zarathustras, Dionysiuses. Just think of Socrates and his wife Xanthippe; without the wife there would have been no Socrates at all. It was the wife who drove him into the world of philosophy. What else can you do to protect yourself? You have to philosophize.A young man asked Socrates, “I am thinking of getting married, and because I have always found your advice tremendously significant I have come to ask you. What do you suggest? Should I marry or not?”Socrates said, “You should marry, you ought to marry.”The young man was thinking that Socrates would say, “Don’t marry,” because he knew what Xanthippe was doing to Socrates. One day she had even poured a whole kettle of boiling water on his head – the whole kettle of boiling water! She burned half his face and he remained his whole life with a burned face. She used to beat him – must have been a real woman, an Amazon!And this young man was thinking that Socrates would say, “Never get married. Look at my life!” But Socrates said, “You ought to get married.”The young man said, “I am more puzzled than I was before I came to you. You are saying I ought to get married? For what reasons?”Socrates said, “If you get a beautiful wife you will live a contented life, and if you get a wife like mine you will become a great philosopher!”The woman has not achieved in any direction, in any dimension, for the simple reason that she has no inner tension for achievement. Jokes apart, she has no inner tension for achievement. She is more relaxed than man she is more balanced than man. Man has a deep imbalance in him.Psychologists say that because man cannot produce children – he cannot become a mother, he has no womb – he feels a certain envy deep down. The woman seems to be creative, she brings life to the world, and he seems to be almost barren. To substitute for it he creates great painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture; he goes in search of truth.The woman is at ease, at home. In fact, she cannot understand why a man like Mahavira tortured himself for twelve years. I have heard of no woman in the whole history of man who has tortured herself in such a way even for twelve days the way Mahavira did – in search of truth. What truth? It is not a woman’s concern at all. She is more concerned about what is happening to the neighbor’s wife. What truth? And what will you do even if you get it? Can you eat it? Can you sell it? Will it increase your bank balance? What will you do with the truth? She is simply unable to understand why these people are so crazy about truth, the ultimate truth. And they want to attain eternal life when they don’t know how to live this small life!The concerns of the woman are different. Her concerns are more pragmatic, less metaphysical. She is more concerned with love than with logic. Logic has no appeal for women. I have never seen a really intellectual woman. Today because of the Women’s Liberation Movement, many women try to become intellectuals and to smoke like men and to talk about great things, but you can see it is all shallow; it cannot be deep. It is not her nature. Her nature is totally different, and nothing is wrong in it.Man has his own way. And of course, because all the history books have been written by man, he has written about other men; the women have been neglected, ignored. There have been great women, but of course they were great in a different way: great lovers, great mothers, great wives. They may not have been great poets, but they have been great cooks.Just the other day the manager of the Taj Mahal Hotel was here. Now, the Taj Mahal Hotel is the biggest hotel in India, the costliest, the most world-famous hotel in India. And he even asked Laxmi, “Can you send that Italian mamma, Deeksha, just for one month to teach our people how to cook?”Now, who will write about Deeksha as an enlightened cook? Nobody will write because that is not man’s concern. And, in fact, food is far more important than poetry. If it comes to a choice, then I will choose Deeksha instead of Dionysius! What will I do with Dionysius? Theologia Mystica – I can do it myself, but who is going to give me the food? And unless you have enough spaghetti in you, you cannot write a Theologia Mystica – impossible. It is the subtle working of spaghetti inside you; spaghetti going on and on inside creates great mysteries!I don’t want women to compete with men; they should simply be their own selves. This has never been told, that is true, but the woman should be her own self, and whatever her nature is she should try to meditate according to that nature. Her meditation should be her own natural, spontaneous life. Then there will be enlightened women. They will not be like Buddha – they cannot be, and they need not be, and they need not feel in any way inferior – but they will have their own heights, which no Buddha can ever have. They will have their own experiences, which no Mahavira can ever have. The woman has a different interiority than the man. Man is aggressive.You ask, “Dionysius is again an enlightened male master…” In fact, to be a master you need a little bit of aggression in you, otherwise you cannot be a master. The woman can be a tremendously beautiful disciple but cannot be a master. And remember, nothing is wrong in it, and she is not inferior because she cannot be a master.The disciple needs receptivity; he has to receive. Even the male disciple has to function almost in a feminine way. With the master he is a womb, a receiver, a receptacle. Hence the woman proves to be the perfect disciple.Mary Magdalene is the perfect disciple – no other disciple of Jesus even comes close to her. In fact, one of his disciples, Judas, was the cause of his death, and all the other disciples escaped when he was crucified. Who brought his body down from the cross? – three women. One was his mother, Mary, the others were Magdalene and her sister. Where were the male disciples? They had all escaped. They were afraid they might be caught. But these three women were not afraid – love knows no fear. And their disciplehood was perfect.To be a perfect disciple is equivalent to being a perfect master. But there are different approaches. It is very difficult for the man to be a perfect disciple; he remains somehow imperfect. I have never come across a man who can be a really perfect disciple; ninety-nine percent, maybe even ninety-nine point nine percent, but because he is male, something, his own aggressiveness, somewhere remains. However refined it becomes, somewhere it remains.But he can become a perfect master. This much is enough. If a male disciple is ninety-nine point nine percent a disciple he will become enlightened, he will become a perfect master. But the woman is a perfect disciple – so perfect that the idea to become the master never arises in her. She is so contented in being a perfect disciple, she is so fulfilled, there is no intrinsic necessity for it in her.This is my observation: every male disciple deep down has the desire one day to become the master. Hence many male disciples have betrayed their masters because they could not wait long.One of Mahavira’s greatest disciples was Goshalak, who betrayed him. Because one thing was certain, unless Mahavira died he would not have the same position, the same power. Even if he became enlightened he would be just an enlightened disciple. Mahavira’s death was a must. And Mahavira was very healthy; in fact, Goshalak was not such a healthy man. It was impossible to wait. He betrayed. He declared himself a master although he was not yet even a perfect disciple. His mastership was bogus, and this he realized before he died.His last testament was, “Let it be known to the world that I betrayed my master, that I pretended to be a master myself, but it was false because I have not realized any truth in my life. In fact, something that was happening when I was a disciple of Mahavira stopped the moment I left him.”Buddha’s closest disciple, Devadatta, his own cousin, betrayed him. And Judas was the most intellectual disciple of Jesus, the most intelligent. In fact, he would have been the head once Jesus was gone. Maybe in an unconscious way that was the reason why he conspired with the enemies, helped the enemies to catch hold of Jesus – because I don’t think that he was very interested in thirty silver coins. He was not that kind of man. He was very intellectual, refined, very cultured. He would not have sold Jesus only for thirty silver coins. But there must have been an unconscious desire in him; if Jesus was removed from the scene then he would be able to dominate the whole scene. And of course he was the most intelligent, most intellectual person around Jesus. All the others were farmers, fishermen, carpenters, gardeners – poor people, simple people.The male disciple unconsciously carries the idea that sooner or later he will be the master. And if he remains with the master, sooner or later he will be a master. But there are very impatient people also, who are in such a hurry that they cannot wait. But the woman disciple has no desire to be a master. She has a desire to be a total disciple, an absolute disciple – and she can be, one hundred percent.I have been thinking to choose male mediums also. Many times I have thought about it, many times I decided that now a group of male mediums should exist. But when I look around, I find difficulties: they cannot relax totally. Yes, there are a few people like Teertha – there are a few people who can be mediums without any difficulty. But I have not been able to find at least twenty men who can be mediums, who can be totally relaxed, available.But as far as women are concerned my problem is totally different; whom to choose and whom not to choose because hundreds of women disciples are here who are capable of being mediums. I am sorry that we don’t have that much space right now. In the new commune I will have. So if some woman is not chosen, don’t feel worried about it, don’t feel that you are not worthy of it. It is only that the Chuang Tzu Auditorium is very small; I cannot have more than thirty mediums there. And the problem is not that it is difficult to choose; the difficulty is whom to choose and whom to leave because almost all are ready, totally available.Your question is just like this: if a man asks me why it is always that women become mothers and never a man, what am I going to say? What can I do about it? Their biology is different and so is their psychology. They are different species really, and that is the attraction between them. They live on different planets.The man lives in intellect; intellect is aggressive. The woman lives in instinct, in intuition, which is receptive. The man lives in the head, the woman lives in the heart. The man lives in logic, the woman lives in love. For man, love is only a relaxation from logic. For woman, logic can only be a game; she can play once in a while to show that she also knows it, otherwise it is not her real concern.And when I am saying these things I am not taking account of exceptions, remember it. Exceptions simply prove the rules; I am talking about the rule. There have been a few women masters: Rabiya al-Adabiya, Sahajo, Daya, Lalla, Meera; a few, only a few women masters. They must have had a very male psychology somewhere. And there have been great male disciples. Buddha had many: Sariputta, Manjushree, Moggalayan, Ananda, Maulingaputta, and many more – totally devoted.Manjushree became enlightened; he was his first disciple to become enlightened. And Buddha every day would ask, “Where is Manjushree?” And he would avoid him. Finally, one day, Buddha caught hold of him. He caught hold of him in the night when he was asleep, otherwise he would have escaped.Buddha said. “What is the matter with you? You cannot hide the fact from me – I know it has happened! Then why are you avoiding me? You should have come for confirmation.”Manjushree said, “That’s why I am avoiding you. I know it has happened and I don’t want any confirmation from you because any confirmation from you means you will say, ‘Manjushree, now go away. Spread my word to the people.’ And I don’t want to go anywhere else. I want to remain here.“It is better to be unenlightened.” said Manjushree, “and to be with you, rather than to be enlightened and to go somewhere else. So please don’t recognize me as an enlightened person – I am not! I say to you I am not! And even if you feel that I am, please keep it a secret.”Once you are enlightened the master is bound to say, “Go now, help others.”Now, this Manjushree is an exception, he has no desire to be a master. Sariputta was different. When he became enlightened he immediately asked Buddha himself, “Now that I am enlightened, what should I do? Where should I go? Whom should I teach?”In fact, even before he was enlightened, even before he had ever become a disciple of Buddha, he had pretended for many years that he was a master. He had five hundred disciples when he came to see Buddha. With five hundred disciples he had really come to argue that “I am right and you are wrong.” He had come to convince Buddha to be his disciple. Now, that desire to be the master must have been there.You can find the same examples here. Now Teertha is here – the same type as Manjushree. Even if he becomes enlightened he will not come to me to be recognized. I will have to wake him up in the night. That’s why I have given him the room just above mine, so he cannot escape anywhere!Then there was Somendra. Somendra always wanted to be a master. He was in such a hurry that I told him, “Go to the West. Help people there.” In the beginning he went to the Western centers as a sannyasin because he must have been afraid that if he goes as a non-sannyasin then nobody will support him. But just two days ago the message came that he has dropped sannyas and is declaring that he has become enlightened. That’s what I was expecting, that he would do that. That’s what he wanted to do, but here it would have been really difficult to declare. Now in the West he can declare whatever he wants to declare. But I hope that he will not suffer like Goshalak. I hope that he will soon come back to his senses.When Goshalak died he said, “Let the whole world know that I was deceiving people.” Not only that, he felt so guilty that he told his disciples, “Drag my corpse through the streets of the town, spit on my face and let the whole town know that I have done something very ignoble and I need punishment.”I hope that Somendra will not wait that long, that soon he will recognize. He has the capacity one day to become enlightened, but the hurry is preventing it; the very desire is a barrier.The last question:Osho,My boyfriend wants to pick a fight with me. That confuses me. What can I do about it?It simply means he still loves you. The day he stops picking a fight with you, know well that the love affair is finished. It is simply a sign that the love affair still continues. Now, it is difficult to love a woman or a man twenty-four hours a day. You can love for a few minutes, and the rest of the time it is perfectly good to pick a fight. Just make it a little more sophisticated. Don’t let it be like Astha and Deepak.Astha is continuously picking fights with her boyfriends; she enjoys them. If there is not a fight going on that means there is no excitement. Deepak is a very soft person, but Astha drove him to such a point that he hit her so hard that not only are her lips wounded, her head struck the wall and she had a concussion. Now she is going gaga! This is a love affair, but a little bit primitive.So, there is nothing to be worried about. Why should you be confused? Love is a mad thing in the first place – it is maddening; if it is not maddening it is not worth it. When you are in a love affair you should know that you have accepted some mad part in you; you have given it recognition. You are following some mad element in you. That’s why it is called falling in love; otherwise it should be called rising in love. You don’t rise, you fall.A minister visits the new mental hospital. As the director is leading him around they come to a swimming pool full of people who are obviously enjoying themselves tremendously. Some are even jumping from a three-meter high platform.“Are these your patients?” the astonished minister asks.“Oh yes, for sure,” exclaims the proud director, “but that’s nothing. You should see them when there’s water in the pool!”A love affair is something like a swimming pool without water – jumping and swimming, and there is no water! It is a mad affair. Because you cannot be alone, you are not sane enough to be alone, you are not centered enough to be alone, hence you need the other. And the other is in the same situation. He needs you, or she needs you, because without the other he is just empty. So two emptinesses trying to fill each other – is it not mad, utterly mad? How can it be possible?And then people are different. There are sadists who will torture the woman; unless they torture her they cannot love her. First they will beat her, make her cry, scream; only then they will get excited. Unless they see the woman crying and screaming they don’t get excited. Their excitement comes only when the woman starts going crazy.The word sadist comes from the name of a famous novelist, de Sade. He was really an expert. He used to carry a bag like a doctor’s bag with all kinds of instruments in it that he had invented to torture women – all kinds of instruments. He was a very beautiful man, very rich, and he had some charisma. It was impossible not to fall in love with him. Any woman who came in contact with him would soon end up in his torture chamber – not love chamber. He had a beautiful mansion and his love chamber was a torture chamber. He would lock the door and then he would show all his instruments – he would open his bag. And on the walls also were many kinds of instrument the woman may never have seen.But it is said, although the women were tortured, beaten, and blood would start rushing out of their bodies, many women confessed in the court – because finally he was caught – they confessed, “Although he tortured us, we had never had such a beautiful orgasmic love with anybody else in our lives.” So, there are women also who are masochistic.The best marriage, the perfect marriage, is between a sadist and a masochist. There are men who are masochists; they want their woman to torture them, to nag them. That brings them a little life – they become alive.People are different. When you love a person you should know it. Never try to change the person because nobody has ever been able to change the person. You can change your lover from A to B, but don’t try to change A into something else; that has never been possible. That is a sheer waste of time.Wilma, Martha, and Liza met in the Harlem Laundromat, and as usual, the talk soon got around to sex. They began talking about their lovers and the nicknames they had given them.“I’se calls my man Rolls,” began Wilma, “after Rolls Royce because he starts at the push of a button, never fails to get goin’, and moves just so smooth and silent like, why it’s just soopreem comfort all the way.”“My man is just like a Ford,” said Martha, “maybe one of them old Model T’s. Sometimes I’se gotta crank him to get him started, he coughs and backfires a little, but when he gets right on chuggin’ away, why, he can go all night without stopping.”“Well,” said Liza, “I call my man Drambuie.”“Drambuie?” said Martha. “Why now, ain’t that some kind of fancy likker?”“That’s my man!”Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the difference between a master and a perfect master?First try to understand the difference between a teacher and a master, then the difference between a teacher and a perfect teacher. Only then will you be able to understand the difference between a master and a perfect master.The teacher is one who teaches borrowed knowledge. He knows nothing, he has not experienced anything. It has not happened to him, but he has heard it, read it. He is skillful in transmitting it verbally, intellectually; he is capable of communication.The perfect teacher is one who knows this: he knows that he does not know. The teacher forgets it, tends to forget it. He starts believing in whatever he is teaching others. He is not only a deceiver, he is also deceived. He starts living in a deep autohypnotic sleep. First he convinces others, and when others are convinced, seeing their conviction he becomes convinced himself.Sometimes it happens that even though he is only a teacher he may get a perfect disciple and he will see miracles happening in the disciple. Then the temptation is great to believe that he must be somebody special, extraordinary.It happened in Marpa’s life. Marpa went to a teacher who was well-known for his scholarship – a great pundit. And many followers, many students, many disciples were gathering around him. Marpa was in search. He went to the teacher, he surrendered to the teacher, and from that moment miracles started happening.The other students were very jealous, obviously. They told everything to the teacher. The teacher himself watched Marpa; he could not believe his eyes – Marpa was able to walk on water. He asked Marpa, “What is your secret?”Marpa said, “You are my secret. I just take your name and that’s enough. I say within my heart, ‘My master, take me to the other shore.’” His trust was so total that he was capable of walking on water, walking through fire.Marpa’s teacher tried to test him. He told him to jump from a mountain into a deep abyss. The moment he said, “Jump!” Marpa jumped. It was absolutely certain that he would die, that not even pieces of his body would be found. And when the teacher and the crowd that was watching came down, Marpa was sitting there in deep meditation, unhurt, unscratched.Again the teacher asked, “What is your secret?”Marpa said, “You are my secret. And each time things like this happen my surrender to you goes on deepening, it goes on becoming more perfect than it was before. It was perfect before too, but there are possibilities, dimensions of perfection becoming even more perfect.”Seeing this, the teacher became convinced that he had some tremendous power of which he was not aware. He tried to walk on water. He said to himself, “I am the teacher, the great teacher of Marpa, and I want to go to the other shore!” And he had to be saved because he was drowning. Marpa could not believe his eyes, but from that moment, his own miracles disappeared. Seeing the master drowning in the water, the power that he had created through trust evaporated.It happens many times that many people start experiencing spiritual revelations through teachers. But if the teacher becomes deceived, autohypnotized, then he is only a teacher, a very ordinary person.Vedant and Kamal have just come from the West. They had a great desire to travel to the West, and they have come with many experiences. Particularly in California, California-land. They were thought to be great masters, and things started happening to people. They themselves have not done a single group here, and they became great group leaders there – Tantra masters! And people were worshipping them and begging them to stay there.That’s what has happened to people like Muktananda; it is not different. Kamal and Vedant have far more intelligence than Muktananda. Kamal was surprised when it started happening for the first time. In one of our centers they were leading a group and Kamal just went there and sat. A few people’s kundalini started arising and they started swaying, and of course, the only visible cause was Kamal’s presence. They must have fallen at his feet: “A great master has come from the East!”I have heard that Yogi Bhajan, who is a very famous teacher in America, was just a porter at Delhi Airport. Seeing Muktananda coming with seven hundred American disciples to Delhi Airport and looking at Muktananda, he thought, “Why am I wasting my life here, carrying luggage and people’s bags?” And certainly, Yogi Bhajan has a far more beautiful personality. He is a Sikh: tall, healthy, looking beautiful, impressive, presentable. Muktananda is just ugly, a duckling! Yogi Bhajan resigned from his post immediately and went to America. His name was Sardar Bhajan Singh; there he became Yogi Bhajan. And now he is the suprememost commander of the Sikh religion in the Western hemisphere and he has thousands of followers.When others become convinced… And there are gullible people everywhere who are ready to believe, who are really desperately in need to believe, who cannot stand on their own feet, who want a father figure so that they can throw all their responsibility on his shoulders, so that they can be unburdened – they are ready to believe. Then of course the law of economics works: wherever there is demand there is supply.Now it will be difficult for Kamal and Vedant to start working here again. Vedant will find it difficult going back to Vrindavan, Kamal will find it difficult going back to driving – they have tasted something of the ego. The only thing that can prevent them is that they became tired of the whole speedy life in the West, utterly tired. And the second thing that can keep them here is their deep love for me; otherwise they can be great masters themselves in the West.The teacher becomes autohypnotized. The great teacher is one who teaches, but knows that “It is not my own.” Not only does he know it, he makes it clear to everybody that “I am just an interpreter, a commentator. I have studied, I am a scholar, a professor. I am teaching things about which I have no experience of my own,” and who is capable of so much awareness that he never becomes deceived. Even though others start believing in him, he never believes in himself unless he starts experiencing.The moment a person starts experiencing he becomes a master. Then it is not borrowed; then it is his own authentic knowing, it is his wisdom. But not every master is capable of bringing his wisdom to people, to those who are utterly ignorant, of bringing his light to those who are blind, who are living in darkness. The master is one who has experienced. He is greater than the perfect teacher, but he is an arhat, in Buddhist terminology: he knows, but he cannot make it known to others.If he has been a perfect teacher before, only then is it possible that he may be able to impart something of his revelation. If he has not been a perfect teacher before then it is impossible, and there is no necessity. A person can move into the world of being a master directly; there is no necessity that he should come via being a perfect teacher. But if he has been a perfect teacher, then it will not be long before he becomes a perfect master.Out of a hundred masters only one is a perfect master. Ninety-nine know and in certain ways try to help people, but their ways are haphazard, their devices are primitive; what they teach looks childish. Their skill as far as teaching is concerned is very limited. They know more, far more than they are capable of teaching. The perfect master is one who is capable of communion.The perfect teacher is one who is capable of communication; the perfect master is one who is capable of communion. He can help you through intellectual understanding, but that is not the only way and not the whole way and not necessarily successful. But he is also capable of imparting his energy to you, he is capable of imparting his flame to you. Just being with him, being in his presence, something can transpire in you. Just being close to him is enough, and whatever he does, has a perfection about it. His devices…For example, Gautam Buddha’s device of Vipassana is a perfect device. Twenty-five centuries have passed, but nothing has been added to it. Thousands of enlightened people have passed through it, but nobody has been able to improve upon it. It is absolutely perfect; nothing is missing. Hence Buddha is a perfect master.Patanjali is a perfect master. Whatever he has done as far as Yoga is concerned seems to be the crescendo. Five thousand years have passed, but his sutras are as fresh as this morning’s roseflowers. They don’t become old, they can’t become old. Nothing has been able to supersede his sutras. And thousands of books on Yoga have been written in these five thousand years, but no other book has been able to impart that glow, that aliveness, that perfection. Patanjali is a perfect master; others are only apprentices. No book reaches that perfection.The same is true about Lao Tzu. His Tao, his approach to the ultimate truth seems to be impossible to improve upon. It very rarely happens that a person gives you the total perfection of a thing, but it happens.It happens in other arts: Michelangelo cannot be improved upon, Leonardo da Vinci cannot be improved upon, Shakespeare cannot be improved upon, Kalidas cannot be improved upon; these are perfect masters. There are thousands of painters, but there is something which makes Vincent van Gogh a perfect painter. Nobody comes close to him; they lag far behind. What is it that makes him perfect? It is impossible to improve upon him. Whatever you do will destroy its beauty, it will bring it lower; as if the whole dimension has become exhausted and you have come to a full stop.There have been only a very few perfect masters. Hindus call them avatars, Jainas call them tirthankaras, Buddhists call them buddhas. In the Western world, Jesus is a perfect master, Moses is a perfect master, Eckhart is a perfect master, Francis is a perfect master. Whatever they have done, they have done it so totally that they have reached the very end of that dimension. Now there is nothing more to do about it, everything is complete.The teacher is dangerous because not only can he deceive others, he can become deceived himself.I am tremendously happy that Kamal and Vedant were not deceived. They proved more intelligent than Satprem or Somendra – they are getting deceived. Because something starts happening in other people, you need not presume that it is because of you; it may be just their faith. You may not be a part of it at all; it may be just their own autohypnotic state.The great teacher has a beauty because he himself is aware and makes others always aware that “Nothing can happen through me because nothing has happened to me. Learn as much as you can learn from me as a student, but I am not a master and you are not a disciple.” Great courage is needed to be a great master, and only if a great teacher becomes a master is he capable of helping because he has learned all the techniques to help. Now the experience is there; he can pour out that experience and use all his old techniques.Otherwise there are many enlightened people who simply become masters. That’s the difference between the arhats and the bodhisattvas. Arhats are just masters, enlightened people. Nothing is lacking in them as far as their experience is concerned; it is the same as the experience of the bodhisattva. The only thing that is different is that the bodhisattva is capable of accepting disciples, the arhat is not capable.In Buddhism there are two schools: Hinayana and Mahayana. Hinayana belongs to the world of the arhats. Hinayana means a small boat, so small that only you can go to the farther shore; you cannot accept anybody else, otherwise not only will the other be drowned, you will be drowned with him. The boat is so small…Mahayana means a big ship; that is the way of the bodhisattva. He goes on inviting people. He creates a Noah’s Ark and he goes on inviting all kinds of people to become part of his commune, his sangha because the ship is going to leave soon. He collects thousands of people and then moves toward the farther shore. He is a great master.The second question:Osho,Concerning this morning's insights on science and mysticism, these words of D. H. Lawrence:“It is easy to see why man kills the thing he loves. To know a living thing is to kill it…. One should be sufficiently intelligent and interested to know a good deal about any person one comes in close contact with. About her. About him. But to try to know any living being is to suck the life out of that being. Above all things, with the woman one loves. Every sacred instinct teaches one that one must leave her unknown. You know your woman darkly, in the blood. To try to know her mentally is to kill her. Beware, O woman, of the man who wants to find out what you are. And, O man, beware a thousand times more of the woman who wants to know you, or get you, what you are. Man does so horribly want to master the secret of life and of individuality with his mind. Keep knowledge for the world of matter, force and function. It has got nothing to do with being.”And again:“Love ought not to be perfect. It ought to have perfect moments and wildernesses of thorn bushes – which it has. A perfect relationship ought not to be possible. Every relationship should have its absolute limits…essential…to the soul of each individual. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts of the other unknown…”Isn't that also a description of a poet – a mystic? Ah, Osho, there comes a glimpse of your mysterious, mischievous smile. You never stop your loving embrace with life.I love these two men immensely: Friedrich Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. Both had the capacity to become enlightened masters, but both missed. Still, they had glimpses, glimpses of great insight.D. H. Lawrence is a great poet and has something of the mystic in him too, but the only unfortunate thing is that he never became interested in meditation as such, he never tried to seek and search for his innermost core. And he was very close to it, so close that even not knowing about it, something of it has penetrated his words.Both these insights are tremendously true. To know a thing certainly means to reduce it to something dead. Life as such is intrinsically mysterious, it cannot be known the way physics knows, it can be known only the way poetry knows. The poet also knows about the roseflower, but his knowing is absolutely different from the knowing of a chemist, of a biologist, of a physicist.If the physicist tries to know the roseflower he will think in terms of electrons, neutrons, positrons. If the chemist tries to know about the roseflower, then the roseflower is nothing but chemistry, chemicals. The poet does not look at the roseflower in terms of physics or chemistry; in fact, he does not observe the roseflower the way a scientist observes a thing. The scientist remains aloof, detached. He does not enter the experiment himself – he is just a watcher; he simply takes notes about what is happening. But the poet becomes a participant.In the world of poetry, knowing happens not through detachment but through sympathy – or it will be even better if we use the word empathy. Empathy is the highest peak of sympathy. In sympathy you feel how the other is feeling. The other is in pain, in misery, sad or joyous; you feel it. Your heart gets in tune with the other; that is sympathy. It is a kind of symphony. But in empathy you become one with the other; it is not only a question of getting in tune, it is merging, it is melting.The real poet melts into the rose. The observer and the observed become one; they are no longer separate. There is no poet standing aloof, away from the rose; there is no roseflower separate from the poet. They have merged into a deep dance. The poet is the roseflower, the roseflower has become the poet. There is no distinction left; they have trespassed each other. Then a totally different kind of knowing happens – that knowing cannot be called knowledge.Science is knowledge. The very word science means knowledge. But poetry is not knowledge. Of course, it is a kind of knowing, but so different, so qualitatively different, that even to call it knowing looks a little unjustified. But we don’t have another word.In Sanskrit, we have two words: knowledge is called gyan, and knowing is called pragyan. In English, we can say that knowing is experiencing – not experience, mind you, but experiencing. It is a deep merger. When the poet comes back to himself he has brought a beautiful diamond.Vincent van Gogh has painted trees which reach above the stars. Now nobody has ever seen such trees, such trees don’t exist, but when he was asked he said, “That’s how I feel. Whenever I become one with a tree I feel the ambition of the whole earth to reach beyond the stars in every fiber of the tree. I have felt it, I have experienced it, and not once but always, without any exception. Whenever I see a beautiful tree and I become one with it, I feel the urge of the earth to transcend the stars. My paintings are paintings of that immense urge, that longing, that thirst of the earth.”Of course, scientists cannot know anything about it.Tennyson has said, “If I could understand a single flower in its totality, then I would have known the whole existence” – because a single flower contains the whole universe. The whole universe has joined hands together to create this single flower. This flower does not exist as an independent unit, it exists as an expression of the whole universe.The poet merges with the whole universe, and he reaches the flower in this subjective way. He knows an inner way, a secret path, his approach is intuitive. The scientist observes everything as an object.The word object has to be understood. Object means that which stands as an obstruction. It is like a wall confronting you – it has to be conquered. That’s why science speaks in terms of conquering the world. Even a man like Bertrand Russell wrote about the conquest of nature.The poet can never speak about conquest, there is no question of it because there is no conqueror and nothing to be conquered. All is one, one organic unity. But the poet knows these moments only once in a while.D. H. Lawrence was a poet and had the quality of a mystic, but only once in a while; otherwise he was very intellectual, very argumentative. Even Bertrand Russell was very much irritated by him. Bernard Russell himself was one of the greatest intellectuals of this age, but the way D. H. Lawrence argued made him angry. He was very argumentative, very much in the head, but once in a while he slipped out of the head and then there were great insights.This must have been such an insight:“It is easy, he says, to see why man kills the thing he loves…”Because when you love someone, some deep instinct in you starts hankering to know the person. And remember, knowledge is always an effort to conquer, to possess. Because you want to possess the person you love, you want to know all the secrets because that is the only way to possess. If something of the person remains unknown, that unknown part is not in your possession.That’s why husbands and wives and lovers go on playing detective with each other, they want to know everything. They go on goading each other, “Open your heart. Say it, whatever it is. Bring it out!” That is really ugly because you may be able to know a little more about the person, but at the same time the love is dying because love can exist only between two mysteries – two persons who are mysteries to each other.“It is easy to see why man kills the thing he loves. To know a living thing is to kill it.”If you really want to know, you have to dissect. If the chemist wants to know the rose he has to dissect it, he has to reduce it to the basic elements from which it has arisen: the earth has to be separated, every chemical has to be separated, the water has to be separated. Only then will he be able to know it. He has to decompose it so that he can know how it was composed in the first place. The poet does not even touch the flower. There is no question of dissection, analysis; he simply loves. He can dance around it, he can sing a song to the rose, he can put his cheek close to it. Sometimes he may even close his eyes while looking at the rose; that will be impossible for the scientist to understand. “What is going on? If you want to know the rose you have to keep your eyes open!” But the poet’s way is totally different; it is not the way of knowledge, it is the way of love. And love enhances life just as knowledge kills it.“One should be sufficiently intelligent and interested to know a good deal about any person one comes in close contact with.”It does not mean that you should not be acquainted with the person; if you want to live with a person you have to be acquainted. But acquaintance is totally different. Acquaintance is a must of every relationship.“About her. About him. But to try to know any living being is to suck the life out of that being.”Never try to know. Never try to penetrate the ultimate secret of the person; leave it free. Love gives freedom – it is not a question of conquering. And the more freedom you give, the more knowing happens – but it is not knowledge. It is a feeling, it is intuitive.“Above all things, with the woman one loves…”Because the woman is far more mysterious than the man, in fact the most mysterious phenomenon in the whole existence, and very delicate, very fragile. Love is always very fragile – handle it with care.“Every sacred instinct teaches one that one must leave her unknown.”Never try to know the woman you love because the moment you start the effort to know her, you have already started destroying her. Soon she will be reduced to a wife, but then she is not the woman you had loved in the first place. The mystery has disappeared, and you are the cause of it.“You know your woman darkly, in the blood. In the bones, in the marrow. To try to know her mentally is to kill her. Beware, O woman, of the man who wants to find out what you are. And, O man, beware a thousand times more of the woman who wants to know you, or get you, what you are.”Why a thousand times more? – because the woman’s way of knowing is far deeper than the man’s way of knowing. The man’s way of knowing is scientific and superficial, objective; the woman’s way of knowing is intuitive, subjective. She can penetrate the deeper realms of the man, and that’s why she is capable of killing the love more easily than the man is. Hence a deep fear in every man of the woman he loves – a certain intuitive feeling that the woman represents not only life, but death also.In the East, particularly in India, we have the image of the goddess Kali, the mother goddess, Kali. She is both a great lover and a great destroyer. If you have seen the image or any picture you will be puzzled, particularly people coming from the West are very puzzled, but it has a great psychological insight in it.Kali is dancing on the chest of her lover, Shiva. In Sanskrit, shiva means one aspect of God, and shava – just a little difference in spelling. Shiva means God, shava means corpse. She is dancing on the chest of Shiva, destroying him, making him into a corpse. Shiva is becoming a shava! She has a garland of human skulls around her neck and in one hand she holds a freshly cut head, blood coming out from it.Why this strange image? It is not strange, it is tremendously psychological. The woman has great power because she is intuitive. Hence Lawrence is right when he says:“Beware a thousand times more of the woman who wants to know you, or get you, what you are.”Because you may know or may try to know the woman, but your effort is going to remain superficial; but if she starts penetrating you she can reach the very core. It is not surprising that almost all husbands become henpecked, the woman reduces them to slaves.“Man does so horribly want to master the secret of life and of individuality with his mind. Keep knowledge for the world of matter, force and function. It has got nothing to do with being.”And the second insight is also of tremendous importance:“Love ought not to be perfect…”Because the moment anything is perfect it dies. Perfection means death.“It ought to have perfect moments and wildernesses of thorn bushes, which it has. A perfect relationship ought not to be possible…”Because once a relationship is perfect, nothing is left – nothing is left to explore. All mystery is gone, evaporated.“Every relationship should have its absolute limits…essential…to the soul of each individual. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leave great tracts of the other unknown…”To give freedom is the most essential part of love. To make the other absolutely free is the ultimate of love. Only those who give freedom know what love is, and only those who love know what freedom is.The third question:Osho,Don ‘t you feel sometimes just to take a day off and rest?Not only sometimes but every day! But there is a problem…It was the first day of the term and Mrs. Jones marched into her son’s bedroom determined to get him to school on time. She shook him by the shoulder and said, “Good morning Thomas, time to go to school. Up you get – we don’t want to be late, do we?”Thomas pulled the sheets over his head and refused to get up.“Come on, Tommy, you have to get your books ready. Don’t be silly!”“No, I’m not going! I won’t go there ever again. I hate the place!”“Well, Tommy,” said his mother sternly, “it’s no use arguing about it, you just have to go.”“Give me three good reasons why I should!” muttered Tommy from under the bedcover.“Well, my son, you are the Principal, you know!”And that one reason is enough!Vivek reminds me every morning. She shakes me and says, “Get up! You are the Principal, you know. You have to go!” So here I am!The fourth question:Osho,How can I conquer greed, anger, sex – the three great temptations of the Devil?It has been one of the obsessions of Indians for centuries, and the only result of it all has been that they are the greediest people on the earth, and the most angry, and the most sexual. For centuries they have been fighting against these three – greed, anger, sex – and what is the outcome? Do you see so much greed in anyone else anywhere on earth?Indians go on calling Western people materialists without ever seeing the fact that to possess is not to be a materialist, but that the desire to possess is the foundation of materialism. The West possesses; that does not mean that it is materialist. It simply means it is scientific, it is technological, it knows how to create things. It has penetrated deeply into the world of objects and has come to know its secrets. It has worked hard. It is not materialist, it is simply technologically more developed.But Indians have a great desire to possess. You may not have anything, and still you will be a materialist if the desire to possess is there. You may possess only a small hut or only a begging bowl, but that is enough for your whole possessiveness to be focused on. And you will be a materialist, not a spiritualist.Materialism has nothing to do with greed; materialism is a way of living your life, just as spiritualism is. If you are constantly thinking of things and there is nothing more in your being, no desire for anything more, then you have chosen materialism as your way of life.Here you see people from all countries, and the question is asked again and again by Indians, “Why are there so few Indians?” There are so few Indians because only very few Indians are interested in spiritualism as a way of life. Yes, they can talk about it, they can brag about it – it fulfills their ego – but they are not really ready to live it. Even if they come here they come with the specific purpose that I can help them to go to the West through some Western sannyasins, to be educated at Cambridge, at Oxford, at Harvard, so that they can become capable of earning more.So many letters come to me saying, “You have so many disciples all over the world. Can’t you help us poor Indians to get scholarships, some support from foundations like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation?” Their whole interest is in how to possess more power, more things, more money, more prestige. They are not interested in meditation at all.And what is the reason? What has happened? What has gone wrong? For five thousand years they have been thinking of fighting with greed, anger, sex, and the total result is that the Indian mind is absolutely full of sexuality. They talk about spirituality, but if you look in their minds, if we could make small windows into Indian minds, you would be surprised – in their films even kissing is not allowed. The government even decides how close the lips of the lovers can come: six inches – more than that is obscene. And if you could make small windows into Indian minds you would see such obscene scenes that all your Playboy magazines will be nothing compared to them! And this is proved by the whole history of India.The first book on sexual postures was written by an Indian – Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutras – very obscene, ugly. Then the second book also was written by a Kashmiri brahmin scholar, Pundit Koka, Koka Shastra. I sometimes suspect he may be the discoverer of Coca-Cola too – his name is Koka. His book is one of the dirtiest in the whole world.You can go to see Khajuraho, Konarak, and Puri – and there are many other temples like them. And you cannot even imagine – even your fantasy will fail when you see the sculpture of Khajuraho. What imagination! They must have worked for hundreds of years, thousands of sculptors must have worked to create so many temples. It is a whole city of temples – and only temples because now the city is deserted. Hundreds of temples have disappeared, but hundreds of temples are still intact; a few are absolutely intact.Do you think group sex is something discovered by the Americans? You are wrong! On the Khajuraho temples there are scenes of group sex. You cannot imagine – Khajuraho shocks everybody. The woman is standing on her head and the man is making love to her – headstand love! The man is standing on his head and the woman is making love to him. All kinds of obscene, stupid, silly ideas. And India is a spiritual country!You can see anger every day in communal riots. Everywhere people are ready to kill so easily, and just a moment before they were praying, they were doing their namaz, they were doing their prayer. But it is very strange that people go to do namaz with weapons because immediately after the namaz the killing starts – as if they were ready. And Hindus go to the temples with weapons.All the political leaders of India go on talking of nonviolence, and all these murders, killings, riots: houses are being burned, post offices are being burned, police stations are being burned. People are being burned alive! There are so many rapes all over the country, and still the leaders go on talking about nonviolence.And the miracle of miracles is that all these things are provoked and managed by the opposition parties. All these communal riots are being done, inspired, triggered by the same people who had come to rule with Morarji Desai for three years. The same people, the same communalists, the same Hindu chauvinists are behind the whole scene because once they have tasted the joys of power, now they cannot remain powerless. Now they have to reach power by any means.First, they will create a state of chaos in the whole country. And, of course, if the government cannot control the chaos, the government is impotent. Then there are only two alternatives left for the government. One alternative is to just stand by the side and watch because it is a democracy and everybody has freedom of expression…In India, people have only these repressed things to express: anger, violence, greed, sex. The moment a riot happens, immediately there are rapes, immediately shops are looted – immediately these things start happening, all three things together. This seems to be the innermost trinity in the Indian mind: sex, anger, greed; they all come simultaneously.And the whole thing is managed by the opposition parties, so they have left only two alternatives for Indira Gandhi. One is, don’t do anything, just watch, try to manage somehow – which they will make impossible. The second thing is, be strict, impose something like the Emergency again. Then they will say, “Look, we have been telling you that if you bring this woman back to power she will bring the Emergency back immediately. Democracy will be destroyed. Had we not said that bringing Indira Gandhi back to power would mean the end of democracy? Look!” Now these two alternatives are left for Indira Gandhi; there is no other alternative. And this is how they are hoping to come back to power.If you stand by without doing anything, then the chaos will make it absolutely clear to the country that the government is impotent, that it cannot do anything, it has to be changed. Or if you do something, that means you are destroying democracy, you are taking people’s freedom away, and that is enough cause to pull you down from power.My own suggestion to Indira Gandhi is impose a stricter Emergency than before, and for fifteen years, no elections in this country. For fifteen years this country needs no democracy. This country is not capable of having democracy – it has not that much intelligence. It has lived for two thousand years in slavery; it only knows how to live peacefully in slavery. If it has freedom it does not know how to cope with it. And in those fifteen years try forcibly to teach this country how to live independently. Nobody has taught this country how to live independently.And you are asking me, these are “…the three great temptations of the Devil.” How to conquer them? This is the question Indians have been asking for five thousand years, and the result is total anarchy. I cannot suggest to you any method of conquering because there is none. Understanding is possible, victory is not possible. Through understanding, victory also is possible; but trying to be victorious, even understanding becomes impossible.The more you try to escape from these temptations of the Devil, the more you will be in their grip because every temptation becomes more appealing the farther you escape from it.A beautiful woman went to see an old and experienced doctor. During the examination he noticed two strange green spots on the inside of her thighs and he asked, “Are you married?”“Engaged,” replied the woman.“What is your fiancé’s profession?”“Well, doctor, he doesn’t really have a profession. He is a gypsy.”“A real one?”“Yes, doctor, a real gypsy.”“Look, lady,” said the doctor, “he may be real, but his earrings are not!”For five thousand years you have practiced a religion which is false. The outcome shows this absolutely clearly, and still you are asking the same question.A woman returns from a shopping trip wearing a very chic new dress. Her husband, appalled at the cost of the dress, tells her angrily that they cannot afford to spend money that way.“Well,” says his wife, “I’m afraid the Devil tempted me!”“Don’t you know,” fumes the husband, “that when the Devil tempts you, you are supposed to say, ‘Get thee behind me’?”“Yes,” she replies, “I did that, but then he said, ‘My dear, it fits you so beautifully at the back!’”No old strategies will help anymore. It is better to go through all these experiences of greed, anger, and sex.Don’t be a coward. Your name means courageous, brave, and what you are asking is cowardly. Go through these experiences. Accept them as part of life, as God-given gifts – there must be something in them. There is! If you go through greed, sharing arises. If you go through anger totally, in deep awareness, meditativeness, love arises, compassion arises. If you go through sex consciously, meditatively, you will have the first glimpses of samadhi, you will know the first windows opening into the divine.The old man is showing his son the family album. The boy sees a photograph where his father is sitting in a chair with his legs crossed while his mother is standing by his side with a pained expression on her face.“Hey, dad, what is this?” asks the son.“What, son?”“This photo,” says the boy. “Why are you making mother stand while you are sitting down? That’s not being a gentleman!”“Ah, son,” explains the father, “this photograph was taken on our honeymoon. At that time your mother could not sit down and I could not stand up!”You need experience, you need understanding, and through understanding is transformation.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Going yet higher, we say that he is neither a soul, nor a mind, nor an object of knowledge; neither has he opinion, nor reason, nor intellect; neither is he reason, nor thought, nor is he utterable or knowable; neither is he number, order, greatness, littleness, equality, inequality, likeness or unlikeness; neither does he stand nor move, nor is he quiescent; neither has he power, nor is power, nor light; neither does he live, nor is life; neither is he being, nor eternity, nor time, nor is his touch knowable; neither is he knowledge, nor truth, nor kingship, nor wisdom, nor one, nor oneness, nor divinity, nor goodness; neither is he spirit, as we can understand it, nor sonship, nor fatherhood, nor any other thing known to us, or to any other creature; neither is he of things which are not, nor of things which are; neither do the things which are understand him, as he is in himself, nor does he himself understand them as existing in themselves; neither is there utterance of him, nor name, nor knowledge; neither is he darkness, nor light, nor falsehood, nor truth; neither is there any entire affirmation or negation that may be made concerning him. But on the other hand we make affirmations and denials of those things which are less than him (and follow from him); but of himself we neither affirm nor deny anything, since he who is beyond all attributes is perfect and alone the cause of all – beyond all negation the height of that which is entirely free from all and beyond all.My God, this is pure nonsense! The only good thing about it is that this is the last sutra. This is theology at its best or at its worst – which are the same as far as theology is concerned. It is all sheer bullshit! You will have to take a jump into it and search out if something worthwhile can be found.After a hard morning at his new job on a construction site, the Polack asked his foreman where he could go to have a shit. He was directed to a small tent. Inside was a small pit with a wooden plank set across it.One hour later the Polack had not returned so the foreman went to look for him. He entered the tent and found him wading around in the piss and shit. “What on earth are you doing in here?” cried the astonished foreman.“It’s my jacket, sir. I hung it on that hook and it fell in!”“But you can’t wear it after it has been in there!” said his boss.“Of course not,” replied the Polack, “but my sandwiches were in the pocket!”It is going to be a little bit difficult – Dionysius himself must have felt it, but this is the way theologians have always talked. This is the way, the only way, they can understand. This is their language. It is not poor Dionysius’ fault. He was talking to theologians and, being a theologian himself, he was well equipped with all this jargon.As time changes, language also changes. Modern languages have become very sensible, to the point, mathematical, scientific. They don’t go round and round in circles. They have become more telegraphic, all that is unessential is dropped out.But Dionysius is not contemporary, that you have not to forget. And there are a few gems of tremendous value, genuine gems, which are scattered among all this theological jargon. Avoid the jargon, but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. The temptation is great: one feels like throwing out the bathwater and the baby and all! But the baby has to be saved – it has immense value.Just the other day somebody asked, “Osho, you say the Hindu shastras are full of shit, but then why are there a few gems, beautiful gems?” There is no contradiction, gems can be found in shit. In fact, where else will you find them? That is the best place to hide them. Nobody will steal them – nobody will even think that they can be there.Dionysius had to use this language for two reasons. One, that was the only language he knew, the only language that he was acquainted with. And second, that was the only language in which he could hide his immense insights. He was not in the East where for thousands of years it has become an accepted fact that one can speak directly of the truth, there is no need to go in circles. In the West that has not yet become the accepted thing.The Western theologian still writes the same way, thinks the same way. It is a torture to read these people! Whenever somebody like de Chardin wrote about God, love, truth – clearly, scientifically because he was a scientist – the Catholic Church prohibited him because he was also a priest. The Church ordered that whatever he wanted to write he could write, but he could not publish it. And whatever he wrote he had to surrender to the Vatican.You may not be aware that such a great intelligent man was absolutely unknown while he was alive. He started becoming known to the wider world only when he was dead because his books were only published posthumously by others. He was so obedient to the stupid church that he accepted that he could go on writing, but that he should not publish anything. It is good that his friends were not so stupid; when he died they started publishing his books. Now the same Catholic Church brags about de Chardin because he belonged to them. His only fault was that he was writing in a clear way which any intelligent person can understand.To understand this kind of theological knowledge is really difficult; it has become more and more difficult for the contemporary mind. Theologians are still not contemporary. In their monasteries, in their churches they still go on talking in the same old jargon – they create it. They have become so skillful in these two thousand years, so sophisticated in creating it that whosoever is more sophisticated in creating it starts moving higher in the hierarchy of the priests. They create the language; they don’t bother to know about the truth.A man goes to a prostitute and says he wants a special favor.“All right, ducky,” she says, “but it’ll cost you an extra fiver.”He agrees and explains that he wants to put on a plastic raincoat and have her stand on a table stamping her feet, banging cymbals and pouring buckets of water on him.They begin. The man stands there wearing his plastic raincoat, while the prostitute runs up and down the stairs fetching buckets of water and pouring them over him, while stamping her feet and banging her cymbals. After an hour the exhausted prostitute, gasping, exclaims, “Hey, mister, when are we going to fuck?”“What?” exclaims the man, “In weather like this?”They create the weather first and then they get more and more confused in the weather created by themselves! All these words create a certain kind of climate, very rubbishy, but unfortunately that has been the way of the theologian all along. The Hindu theologian, the Mohammedan, the Christian, the Jew, they all speak in the same way. This is not the expression of the mystics.The problem with Dionysius is that professionally he is a theologian and spiritually, existentially, he is a mystic – which very rarely happens. I have never come across another case like Dionysius, not at least in the Western history of thought. In the East it has happened a few times that the same person was a mystic and a theologian, and whenever it happens in the East the same problem arises. The language is of the theologian, and in the language, in the thick forest of words, the truth is lost.But the truth is valuable and has to be saved. That’s why I decided to speak on Dionysius. I was aware that I cannot like the way he speaks, his expression – I hate it – but I love the truth that he wants to express.I have heard a rumor that he was really an Italian who migrated to Athens and settled there. That may explain many things – too much spaghetti, and it goes round and round!The Italian father and son are traveling on a bus in London.“Dad, what’s that building over there?”“Don’t know, son.”“Dad, what’s that statue over there?”“Don’t know, son.”“Dad, what’s that park over there?”“Don’t know, son.”“Dad, you don’t mind me asking all these questions, do you?”“Of course not, son. How else are you going to learn?”Italians have their own way.They say: How do you sink an Italian ship?Launch it!Did you see the party where all the Italians were on the roof?They had heard that the drinks were on the house.“Why don’t you wipe the mud off your shoes before you enter the lobby?” the hotel clerk asks the Italian.“What shoes?”“Darling,” asks the Italian wife, “why do you always say nasty things about me in your sleep?”“Who’s sleeping?” says the Italian.The Italian couple were playing chess when the wife remarked, “This reminds me of when we were dating!”“We never played chess in those days.”“No, but even then, it took you two hours to make a move!”Going yet higher, we say that he is neither a soul, nor a mind…Gautam the Buddha has said – he was the first man to utter it – that there is no self, no soul. His word was anatta; anatta means no-selfness. Dionysius is saying the same truth: …he is neither a soul…He is not a self. People ordinarily think of God as the supreme self – not only a self but the supreme self. We are all selves and he is the supreme self. Buddha says we are not selves and there is no supreme self at all. Buddha was condemned in India as an atheist. Dionysius was not in any way ready to get caught by the Catholic Church and condemned as an atheist. It was okay for Buddha to say that there is no self because in India, at least in those days, you were not going to be burned alive. Otherwise, maybe Buddha would not have said it so clearly, may have gone round and round to deceive the fools who are always dominant in the organized religions.In fact, no mystic can be a part of any organized religion; it is very difficult – he will have to create so many unnecessary disguises just to protect himself and his teaching. But Dionysius thought otherwise, maybe that was the only course open for him. But he is saying a few tremendously beautiful things. One is that God is not a soul. Here he is absolutely in agreement with Gautam the Buddha. In fact, if God is not a soul, it is another way of saying that there is no God. But he is not saying it as clearly as Buddha says it.He also says: …nor a mind… That is Bodhidharma’s expression. Bodhidharma defines meditation as a state of no-mind. The moment the mind disappears, you know. Knowing happens only when there is no mind; the mind is a barrier to knowing.Dionysius says God is not a mind.…nor an object of knowledge; neither has he opinion, nor reason, nor intellect…He goes on denying everything, but he goes on saying “he.” He is playing a trick on his fellow theologians. He goes on taking apart the Church brick by brick. Ultimately the whole Church is removed, but he removes the bricks and goes on declaring that he is creating the Church. He removes it brick by brick, slowly, and he continues to use the word he, he continues to use the word God.Mahavira says there is no God, and that is that. He is finished with it forever – he will not talk about it again. If he is not, what is there to say about him? But then he is thought to be an atheist, and for hundreds of years Dionysius has been respected by the Christian Church as a great theist, a great theologian. He succeeded in befooling the fools!He says:…neither is he reason, nor thought, nor is he utterable or knowable; neither is he number, order, greatness, littleness, equality, inequality, likeness or unlikeness; neither does he stand nor move, nor is he quiescent; neither has he power, nor is power…The religions, particularly the organized religions, have always given three qualities to God. He is omnipotent: absolutely powerful; omniscient: knowing absolutely everything that is, that has been and that will be; and he is omnipresent: he is everywhere present, there is no place where he is not present. The organized religion depends very much on these qualities. Why? – because people can be enslaved only if God is the suprememost power.In fact, people are always seeking somebody who is more powerful than themselves so that they can throw all the responsibilities on his shoulders. God has to be omnipotent; there is nobody more powerful than him. He is pure power. That is the strategy of the priest to enslave people. If he is power, pure power, the highest power, the omnipotent power, then of course all that you have to do is just be a slave. Trying to escape from him is futile, trying to be independent is futile, trying for freedom is futile. It is better to serve him, to be just a servant.You cannot escape from him because he is omnipresent; wherever you go you will find him. He is always watching, he is always looking at you. It is not only that he watches your acts, he watches even your thoughts, so even in thinking you are not free, you are not left alone; there is no privacy. If God is omnipresent then there is no privacy at all. Then you are never alone, he is always there. This is to create fear. You cannot do anything without him knowing it. In fact, before you have done it he knows it.He is also omniscient. He knows all: past, present, future. So not only does he know your past, not only the present, but also the future. What are you going to do? You are absolutely caught, absolutely imprisoned. You cannot escape from God.This is how Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, Hindus, all have believed. This is a must to create submission in people. And it fits with the upbringing of people because the child is born dependent, helpless. He is dependent on the father, on the mother, and so utterly helpless that he cannot survive on his own. He has to compromise, he has to listen and be obedient, and if he does anything against the parents he starts feeling guilt.Parents create guilt. That is the greatest sin against humanity. To create guilt in a child is criminal because once the guilt is created, the child will never be free of it. Unless he is very intelligent it will be impossible for him to get rid of it; something of it will remain around him like a hangover.But the priests and the politicians both conspire in creating guilt in people. The politician wants to enslave your body and the priest wants to enslave your soul, your mind. Your outer side and your inner side, both are being enslaved by the politician and the priest. They have always been in a deep conspiracy.It is not strange that whenever there are elections, politicians start going to the saints and to the temples and to the holy places. For what? Simply to convince the priests that “We are with you, we will never go against you.” And the priests are always willing to help the politicians – their purpose is the same. One wants to rule man’s interiority and the other wants to rule his exteriority, but both want to rule.And the parents creating guilt in the child are very helpful, tremendously helpful because the guilty person always feels that he has to receive orders from somebody and he has to follow them. Whether it is the politician or the priest does not matter – somebody has to order. He is always at the receiving end. His function is to efficiently fulfill the order. His function is not to think, his function is not to be aware, his function is not to decide.All parents like stupid children because they are obedient. The intelligent child is bound to be rebellious. Intelligence has the flavor of rebellion. Intelligence has to be completely destroyed, and instead of intelligence a mediocre mind has to be created.My own observation is that each child is born very intelligent, but our whole conditioning hitherto has been such that his intelligence starts gathering dust. And we allow it to gather dust, his sharpness is lost, his sword becomes rusty and that’s what we want. We don’t want him to have a sharp intelligence because then he will ask questions – and there are no answers with the parents, with the priests, with the politicians. They don’t have any answers. They have power – they can punish you for asking an embarrassing question. They don’t allow you to ask questions; your function is to fulfill the order, to do and not to ask why. The whole of humanity has been reduced to slavery.This is the real spiritual slavery! Political slavery is nothing compared to it. Regimes change – a capitalist country can become communist, a socialist country can become fascist, a Hindu country can be ruled by the Christians or Mohammedans, a Mohammedan country can be ruled by the Christians – it does not matter at all; the spiritual slavery continues. It depends on the idea that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent; you cannot escape him, you cannot deceive him. It is really ugly, the very idea that he is always watching you, that you are never left alone.What Dionysius is saying is exactly the same as what Nietzsche said in clearer words: “God is dead and man is free.” But he is saying it in such a way that the theologians will not be able to detect it.He says he is not:…power, nor light; neither does he live, nor is life…Nietzsche says God is dead, and Dionysius says: …neither does he live, nor is life… Is there any difference? In fact, Dionysius’ statement is far more profound because to say that God is dead means you have accepted one thing, that he was alive before. At least up to now he was alive, maybe on his deathbed, but he was alive. Nietzsche accepts one thing, that he was alive up to now: now he is dead. But Dionysius says he has never lived, he is not alive, he has never been, nor is he life.…neither is he being, nor eternity, nor time…In many ways, he goes deeper than many other mystics. The Upanishads say God is not time. Jesus was once asked, “What shall be the most unique thing in the Kingdom of God?” And he said, “There shall be time no longer.” This is not recorded in the Christian gospels, this comes from the Sufi tradition, but Gurdjieff loved it very much. All the Upanishads say, “To go beyond time is to know God because he is eternity.”Dionysius says: …nor eternity, nor time… And certainly, his statement is far more profound than all the Upanishadic statements about God being eternity: that he is eternal, that he has no beginning, no end, that he is forever and forever. Why is his statement more profound? Ordinarily time means something momentary, limited; it comes and goes. Eternity means that which never comes and never goes but always is. It is not momentary; it is permanent, absolutely permanent. But from where do you get the idea of permanency? You get the idea from time. What is your eternity? What is the definition of your eternity? Timelessness. But the definition, the very definition, comes from time.If you look at your definitions you will be very much surprised, all your definitions are tautologies. If you look in the dictionary to inquire what matter is, the dictionary will say “not mind.” Then look for what mind is, and the dictionary says “not matter.” Nothing is defined. You don’t know matter, you don’t know mind. When it comes to define matter you simply use “mind,” which is as unknowable as matter itself, as unknown, as undefined as matter itself. You are trying to define one indefinable by another indefinable. But that’s how our whole language is.If somebody asks, “What is light?” you will say, “Not darkness.” “And what is darkness?” “Not light.” And you feel perfectly at ease, and you think you have defined things. But what you have done is just deceived the other person and yourself too. Rather than accepting your agnosia, accepting your ignorance, you have deceived yourself that you know. That’s how we go on defining.Very rarely is there a man who stands, stops, and looks at words. All words are deceptive.D. H. Lawrence was walking with a child in the garden, and the child asked, “Why are the trees green?”Now any knowledgeable person would have answered, “They are green because of chlorophyll.” But D. H. Lawrence stopped, closed his eyes, waited for a few moments, meditated, and then said, “They are green because they are green!”The child said, “That’s right, absolutely right! That’s what I have always been thinking, but whenever I ask others they always give some other answer. You are the first person who has given me the answer that satisfies me totally. They are green because they are green!”In a way, this is not an answer; in a way this is an acceptance of ignorance. D. H. Lawrence is saying, “I don’t know. They are green because they are green!”This is the way of all those who are true seekers. Otherwise we go on from time to eternity, from death to life, from darkness to light. And we go on defining in such a circular way that nothing is ever defined. Still everybody believes that all is defined and clear. We want to believe that all is defined and clear; we are not courageous enough to live in ignorance. It really needs guts to live in ignorance, but tremendous is the joy of the person who is ready to live in ignorance because his silence is infinite, his depth is immeasurable.Knowledge is shallow, ignorance is deep. Knowledge is superficial, not-knowing leads you into the abysmal, to the bottomless. You start falling into the abyss of existence itself. And Dionysius has given one beautiful word, agnosia: not knowing. That is the world of the mystic.…nor is his touch knowable; neither is he knowledge, nor truth…The Upanishads say: God is sat-chit-anand. Sat, chit, anand – they define him with these three words. Sat means truth; chit means consciousness; anand means bliss. Nobody has ever dared to say that God is not truth, except Dionysius. He says: …nor truth… Nothing more can be denied.There is another definition in the Indian scriptures: satyam, shivam, sundaram – God is truth, God is good, God is beautiful. But Dionysius denies all qualities, all possible qualities. Hence this long, long denial:…nor kingship, nor wisdom, nor one, nor one-ness…He does not want to leave a single loophole; otherwise you will say God is wisdom, pragya. That’s what the Upanishads say, the Vedas say: “God is pure wisdom.”…nor one… God is not one. Shankaracharya says God is one, he is non-duality, he is oneness. Dionysius says he is neither one nor oneness.…nor divinity…Otherwise you can say God is nothing but divinity, the quality of divineness. He denies that too. He is taking everything from God, everything conceivable.…nor goodness; neither is he spirit, as we can understand it, nor sonship…Now, after so many denials, he comes to deny the Christian idea. He could not say it directly, but after so many denials, after so much smoke, he can put something in an indirect way that the Christian Church would never have accepted directly. Now, when he has even denied God being truth, wisdom, oneness, order, greatness, power, self, what objection can you have after so many denials, great denials? He says:…nor sonship, nor fatherhood…The whole of Christianity is destroyed because the whole of Christianity depends on the idea that God is the Father, that God is a trinity: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. He has denied all three, God is not the Spirit – holy or unholy is not the question – he is not the Spirit at all; he is not the Son, he is not Jesus Christ. Just see the tremendous rebellion in it! But the language he is using is of convention. He is hiding fire behind subtle words, and he succeeded perfectly.…nor fatherhood… To say that there is no God as Father, as Son, the whole Christian Church collapses. Nothing is left. There is no question of worshipping, there is no question of prayer, there is no question of any ritual, Catholic or Protestant.…nor any other thing known to us…He does not want to leave a single thing that you can conceive of as God, so he says:…nor any other thing known to us or to any other creature; neither is he of things which are not, nor of things which are; neither do the things which are understand him. As he is in himself…But he goes on using the words which can satisfy the theologians. He still says:…as he is in himself nor does he himself understand them as existing in themselves…But he is taking everything away. The he becomes just emptiness: neither is he known nor does he know. This is also something very new. There have been many mystics who have said that God cannot be known, he is unknowable, but Dionysius is the only one who says that God himself does not know. It is not only that we don’t know him, he himself does not know what is the case. Not only are we in ignorance, but he is also in ignorance. He just keeps the word he, but now it becomes more and more empty – all the contents are disappearing. But the word he helps his book; it has survived for centuries. It is being studied in Christian colleges where theologians are prepared and it is respected immensely. Just that empty he.…neither is there utterance of him…Nothing can be said of him.…nor name…There is no name for him. Hindus say he has one thousand names – they have a whole scripture devoted to his names: Vishnu Sahasranam, “The One Thousand Names of God.” Sufis say he has one hundred names; it is better than one thousand – nine hundred have been denied. They say he has one hundred names, but when you ask them to say what those names are they will only tell you ninety-nine. And when you insist, “Where is the hundredth?” they will say, “That is unutterable – that is his true name.”Just two days ago somebody asked, “Osho, the number of the car of the Lord Mayor of Pune is 1, and the number of your Rolls is 99. Is there some esoteric thing about it?” There is! Ninety-nine is a Sufi number – “the ninety-nine names of nothingness,” Sufis say. The real name is the hundredth, but that is unutterable.Jews, particularly the mystics born in the Jewish tradition, have always insisted that to take the name of God is a sacrilege, a sin. In the ancient Judaic tradition only the highest priest of the great temple of Jerusalem was allowed to utter God’s name, and that too only once a year, and one time only. But even that was not to be uttered before the people. He would go into the temple, all the doors would be closed. He would go to the innermost sanctuary, the innermost shrine, where he would go only once, and there behind closed doors he would whisper the name of God – once a year, and nobody should hear it. And it could be given by the highest priest only to his successor; in his ear he had to whisper it. It simply says that there is no name for him.Jews, even today, whenever they write God never write G-O-D because that is a crime; they always write G-D. They drop the O so that we know that whatever we utter is incomplete. The O is missing, the most central part is missing. The O is also the symbol for zero, and zero is the essential core of existence – nothingness, shunya. It is beautiful the way Jews write God, G-D; the O is missing because that is the true God. But when you take the O separately it is nothing but zero. It simply represents nothingness.These are ways of saying that God is absolute nothingness. You cannot worship God. All that you can do is you can become nothing. That is true worship, that is prayer.That is what I teach you here; to be nobodies, to be nothingnesses. Sannyas can be defined as a way of life which believes only in nothingness. To live as a zero, that’s what sannyas is all about. And that’s what Dionysius is doing by denying. I have never come across any list so long only of denials!…neither is there utterance of him, nor name, nor knowledge; neither is he darkness…Up to now he has been saying that God is darkness. That was only to help you move a little further toward the ultimate nothingness. If you have to choose between light and darkness, Dionysius will say God is more darkness than light. In that too he is very unique. Many things are unique in him; that’s why in spite of all his theological nonsense I have chosen to talk on him. He has many unique things.For example, God has been defined by the Koran as light, by the Bible as light, by the Vedas as light. All the religions of the world which believe in God have defined him as light. Why? Christians don’t agree about anything else with the Hindus, Mohammedans don’t agree about anything else with the Hindus. But about one thing, that God is light, they all agree. What is the cause of this agreement? The cause is very simple: everybody is afraid of darkness. Hindu, Christian or Mohammedan – they are all afraid of darkness. The fear of darkness is the cause of defining God as light. They all define death as darkness and life as light. All over the world, even Negroes think of the Devil as dark. Now how dark can he be? If he mixes with the Negroes I don’t think you will be able to find him, where he is!Mulla Nasruddin was sitting with one of his photographer friends on a bench in the park, and a Negro passed by. Mulla Nasruddin said, “Look! Look! A negative!”He is using the language of the photographer – a negative. Somebody has forgotten to make the positive of the poor man!Death is thought of as negative, life as positive, and of course God is positive, affirmative. And there are shallow thinkers, particularly in the West, who go on talking about positive thinking, about the positive qualities of God. It is just out of fear.Each child is afraid of darkness for the simple reason that he cannot see his mother. He starts crying, weeping because he cannot see his mother – the mother who is his very life. If he cannot see the mother he becomes afraid. How long can he survive without the mother? Where is he going to get his nourishment from? He starts feeling uprooted.This fear of darkness has created the idea of God as light and death as dark, the Devil as dark and God as light.Dionysius is unique. He says that if you have to choose between these two words, light and darkness, if it is a must that you have to call God something, then better call him darkness because darkness is uncaused, just as existence is uncaused.Light has to be caused. Light needs fuel, darkness needs no fuel. Light is bound to be temporary; sooner or later the fuel will be finished and with it the light will disappear. Darkness never comes and goes, it always is. If you bring light you cannot see darkness, that’s all. If you take away the light you can see it again. It is just like the stars in the sky: in the day you can’t see the stars, not that they have all disappeared, you cannot see them simply because of the light. In the night you can see them because the light disappears and against the background of tremendous darkness those stars start shining because of the contrast.Darkness is far more timeless than light, far more eternal. And the person who gets rid of fear will be able to feel the beauty of darkness. Its very touch is velvety, its depth is immense. And it leaves you so alone, absolutely alone; the whole world disappears, only your consciousness remains. And there is no object to know, there is only darkness. Nothing to know, you start melting and merging into it.Nobody has thought of darkness as one of the most important meditations, but it is.This is only for the beginners; ultimately that too has to be denied because how will you define darkness without light? And God is not light, hence he cannot be darkness either. These are always two sides of the same coin.…nor falsehood…He has said God is not truth, and our minds immediately jump to the opposite. If he is not truth, then God is falsehood. If somebody says, “I don’t believe in God,” we immediately conclude that he disbelieves. He has not said that. If somebody says God is not true, we immediately conclude that he is saying that God is falsehood. That is an unnecessary conclusion; you are jumping too early to a conclusion. It is not good, it is not logical. But to avoid any misunderstanding he says:…nor falsehood, nor truth; neither is there any entire affirmation or negation that may be made concerning him.Nothing can be said about him in an entire way because whatever you say about him is going to be wrong and something will be missing in it. If you say he is darkness, then what is light? If you say he is light, then what is darkness? This is one of the greatest problems metaphysicians have been continuously discussing.Shankara in India says that God is absolute affirmation: “God is and the world is not.” To affirm God totally he has to deny the world, all existence, because if the world has even a little bit of existence then that much existence will be less in God. To make God entire, a total, perfect affirmation, he says: “Jagat mithya, the world is untrue. Brahman satya, and God is true.”There have been atheists in India, a long tradition of Charvakas; they do the same in an opposite way. The Charvakas are exactly like Epicurus in the West. They say the world is true and God is untrue. God is an invention of the priests to exploit people; the world is the only truth. That’s what Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the communist metaphysicians say; it is the same tradition as that of the Charvakas. But there is no basic difference between the Charvakas and Shankara.You will be surprised at my statement that Shankara and Karl Marx agree on one point: that only one can be affirmed, not both. Now it is your choice which one you affirm. If you affirm God entirely, then the world becomes illusory, it is maya. If you affirm God, then you cannot affirm the world; if you affirm the world, then God disappears. Then God becomes an epiphenomenon; that is Marx’s word for maya. He becomes illusory; he is just the hallucination of a few stupid people.You can create the hallucination easily. Within three weeks you can experience God; all the requirements are simple. The first is you have to believe in a certain personality of God, Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. You can choose any personality – God with a thousand hands, God with three heads or four hands, whatever you want – you have to think in terms of a personality, and then go on a fast in a lonely place. A three-week fast, hungry continuously, your body energy falling low… And remember, as your body energy starts falling low your brain starts losing its efficiency, its clearness. It becomes vague, it becomes smoky, it becomes dreamy; it starts hallucinating. Now, if you have a certain idea of God and you are fasting for three weeks in a lonely place, not with people, so there is a great need for the other…When you are with people, the need for the other is not so great because others are there. Your wife is there, your children are there, your parents are there, the family, the friends. And particularly when you are on a religious fast, relatives will come to see you and friends will come to see you. Many people will appreciate the whole thing, and you will be on an ego trip.Go into the mountains to a cave, alone. Fast for three weeks with a certain idea in your mind of God, and concentrate on that idea. Within three weeks you will be able to hallucinate – God will be standing before you as real as anybody you have ever felt, or even more real. You can talk, and your God will even answer you. In fact, there is nobody to answer; you will be doing both things, questioning and answering. A part of your mind will question, another part of your mind will answer. And the answers will be tremendously satisfying because they will be the answers that you always wanted to hear. It is you and nobody else. It is a monologue.According to Marx, God is only a hallucination; according to Shankara, the world is a hallucination. But both are trying to do one thing which is impossible, they are trying to either affirm entirely or negate entirely.Dionysius has a significant contribution to make. He says: …any entire affirmation or negation that may be made concerning him… is not right.Nothing can be said absolutely about whether he is or he is not. Then what are we supposed to do? We have to drop all intellectualization about God. We have to forget the whole idea of knowing about God. We have to relax into ourselves, into our ignorance, dropping the whole search for knowledge. And in that agnosia, in that state of not-knowing, some miracle happens, and you start feeling. What you feel is not God, what you feel is not life, what you feel is not confined to any word. It is so vast that all words become meaningless, inadequate.Mahavira calls it moksha, freedom, and that is a far more beautiful word than god. Buddha calls it nirvana – cessation of the ego, death of the ego. That is also a far more beautiful word than god because freedom cannot be worshipped – freedom does not need any priests nor does egolessness need any priests. The idea of God as somebody somewhere has created all the temples and the mosques and the churches and the whole business of priesthood, and the great exploitation has continued for centuries.But on the other hand we make affirmations and denials of those things which are less than him (and follow from him); but of himself we neither affirm nor deny anything, since he who is beyond all attributes is perfect and alone the cause of all…You see his problem? He has to satisfy, continuously satisfy, the desires of his colleagues, of his bosses, of the Vatican, of the pope. So after all these denials and after saying such profound things, he falls back. He ends on the same note. He says again:…he is perfect and alone the cause of all – beyond all negation the height of that which is entirely free from all and beyond all.He goes on persisting in using the word he, and finally he says: …he is perfect and alone the cause of all…Beware of his language. He is not trying to say exactly what he feels. He says that, but immediately he camouflages it in the jargon so that he cannot be caught. And he was never caught – he succeeded. In fact, to catch him would have needed another man of the same genius, another Dionysius. Those foolish popes would not have been able to discover it. He creates so much dust of theology around it that you cannot see clearly what his point is.And there are people all over the world who, when they cannot understand something, they think it must be profound.An American theologian is on tour of the city of Rome; his guide is showing him the famous monuments of the ancient city. At the Pantheon the Italian guide proudly announces, “This is our famous Pantheon – a graceful, silent monument to our glorious past!”The theologian takes a quick look, then turns to the guide and asks, “How long did the construction take?”A little surprised at the question, the guide answers, “It took over two hundred years of human effort to build this masterpiece of architecture.”“Oh!” says the American theologian. “In America we would build it in ten years!”The guide feels a little irritated and takes the American on to the Coliseum, where he announces even more proudly, “Signor, the Coliseum!” But before he gets any further the American theologian interrupts, “How long did this one take to build?”“Fifty years,” the Italian replies curtly.“Back home we would do it in five,” says the American.The guide is feeling pissed off and quickly leads the American away to the Capitol. “It took three years to build this,” he announces hotly.“Well, in America we could do it in three months!”The Italian guide, very pissed off, continues the tour. They pass in front of the Vatican; the guide says nothing.“What is this?” asks the American theologian, looking over the Holy City.“What is this?” replies the guide casually. “I have no idea. It wasn’t here yesterday!”Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,When I was a child attending Sunday school there was a Hebrew proverb hanging on the wall. It read: “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.” For many years I was convinced it meant that God was frightened of man gaining any wisdom. After all, didn't he forbid eating of the Tree of Knowledge?And then one day it was explained: “Fearing God is the first step in man's path toward understanding.” Again, it made perfect sense. After all, wasn't Jehovah a fearsome, punitive, omnipotent God? And now I am finding it hard to recover from that idea, and it interferes with my love for you. In spite of “knowing better” I have to see you as all-powerful; I have to be dependent on you for my liberation; and sometimes it follows that then I have to be afraid of you and your “punishment.” If understanding doesn't affect the cure, what does?Anand Nirgrantha, the priest is the most cunning person in the world. They say prostitution is the oldest institution; it is not. Priesthood is the oldest institution in the world because without the priests who will create the prostitutes? The priest is at the root of almost every problem that man is facing today.And one of the greatest problems is because we have been conditioned by the priest for thousands of years, he has become almost part of our blood; he is not there somewhere outside. The outside priests – the imam, the ayatollah, the pope – only represent something which has now become part of our inner world. In fact, whatever is known as conscience is nothing but the priest and his voice echoing in you. But now you think it is your voice; you have become identified with it.That’s why we cannot understand our problems and we cannot find any solutions for them. Otherwise every problem, rightly understood, is immediately solved. To see what it is, is also to see the way out of it. It is not that after understanding something more is needed – understanding is enough unto itself. It melts and dissolves the problems. It is like the sun rising in the morning, and the dew drops start evaporating.Nirgrantha, you say that in your schooldays you read this proverb – and you must have read it again and again because it was hanging on the wall in the school: “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”That is the beginning of ignorance, not the beginning of wisdom. That is the beginning of slavery. That is the beginning of insanity. But the priest wants humanity to be in an insane state; only then can he and his profession prosper.There are professions in the world which are self-contradictory. For example, the profession of the physician, the doctor; it is a self-contradictory profession. If the doctor succeeds finally in eliminating all the illnesses from the world he will have committed suicide. On the one hand, he tries to cure – he tries to find more and more and better methods, techniques, medicines to cure illnesses; on the other hand, deep down, he hopes that he will not succeed. That hope may be unconscious, but it is there because his success will be suicidal. What will the function of a physician be if all illnesses disappear from the world?Confucius was very wise in that way when he said that the physician should be paid not because he cures an illness, he should be paid because he does not allow illness to happen. This is a totally different approach. You should pay your physician because the whole year you have not been ill; he has taken care of you. If you have been ill you should not pay him; in fact, he should pay you.Unless this happens, the profession of the physician will remain self-contradictory. He lives and thrives on your illness. He prays that more and more people should be ill. When there is an epidemic the doctors call it “the season.” And, of course, it is a season for them.The same is true about the priest in an even wider sense, in a deeper sense. The priest can exist only if you are afraid, frightened, scared. Otherwise what need will there be of him? If you are free of fear, if you live in freedom, the priest becomes absolutely useless. Who will go to him? For what? You go to him because you want somebody to console you. You want somebody to give you hope, encouragement, to make you in a certain way secure in a very insecure life.Life is insecurity and nothing is wrong in it. In fact, life cannot be otherwise. Death is secure, life is insecure. Marriage is secure, love is insecure. Marriage is dead, love is alive. The more alive you are the more your life remains in insecurity because the livelier person will be exploring the unknown, he will be adventurous. It is life’s nature, its law, its very intrinsic soul.But the priest has exploited it. He has given you consolations, securities, insurances, not only for this life but for future lives too. He says, “Don’t be worried. If you follow a certain code of conduct, if you cultivate a certain character, if you follow the commandments given in the scriptures, then you need not be afraid. Then God is going to reward you. You will be punished only if you go against the convention, against the tradition.”What he is saying is if you go against him – because he represents the convention, the tradition, the past. But he never says it directly, that “If you go against me you will be punished.” He says, “If you go against the Koran, if you go against the Bible, if you go against the Vedas, you will be punished because these are divine scriptures. God himself has written them. They have to be followed literally, word for word. If you go astray, you are taking a great risk and then I cannot help you.”The priest goes on telling you to remain within the confinement, the imprisonment that he and his predecessors have created for you. It is a prison cell. He makes you very much afraid of the open air and the sun and the stars and the sky.If there were priests in the world of birds, no bird would ever fly, they would all remain imprisoned in their nests. No bird would ever gather the courage, except a few crazy birds: a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. But they would not be the rule, they would only be the exceptions. And the priest will always be against them, remember.The priest was against Jesus, the priest was against Buddha, the priest was against Zarathustra, the priest was against Lao Tzu. What was their fault? Why was the priest against them? The priest was against them because they were cutting the very roots of his profession. They were telling people to be free of fear, they were helping people to be free of fear. They were telling people to live dangerously, to live like rebels, to die to the past and to live in the present.Buddha says, “Be a light unto yourself.” Now, he leaves no place for the priest. The priest says, “I am the light, you need not have any other light. I represent the whole sacred tradition – I have carried the flame down the centuries. This is enough. You don’t need a private light of your own.”But the last words of Buddha were the last words that he uttered on earth: “Be a light unto yourself.” He said it to Ananda, one of his most beloved disciples.The moment Buddha said to his disciples, “Now the last day has come and I have to leave today. My ship has arrived. Do you have any questions to ask me?” there was a great silence. They were shocked. Ananda started crying. He was just sitting by his side.Buddha said, “Ananda, that does not befit you. Why should you cry?”He said, “I could not become enlightened while you were alive. Now what hope is there for me when you are gone? I will have to live in darkness forever and forever! And I don’t think that I will be so fortunate as to meet another buddha again because you will dissolve into the universe and I cannot imagine meeting another buddha in some other life. And even if I meet one I may repeat the same mistake because I will have completely forgotten all about you and what happened, what transpired between me and you.“Forty-two years I have been with you and I have wasted the whole opportunity; hence I am crying. I am ashamed. I am crying for myself, I am feeling pity for myself that I have been a fool.”Buddha laughed and said, “Ananda, you need not depend on me. You can become enlightened without me. And, in fact, it may be that it was because of me and my presence that you could not become enlightened because you were dependent, you were always thinking I would do something for you, although I was continuously telling you ‘Be independent.’”But nobody wants to be independent for the simple reason that independence brings fear, responsibility. Everybody seeks some kind of dependence so that one can throw all the responsibility onto the shoulders of the other.Buddha said, “Maybe my death will help – there will be nobody to depend upon. And one thing is certain, after being with me for forty-two years, now you cannot depend on anybody else. You will not find another buddha, that is certain.”And actually, it happened like that. Ananda became enlightened after Buddha’s death within the small period of twenty-four hours.To Ananda, Buddha said the departing message: “Be a light unto yourself – appa dipo bhava.”How can the priest forgive Buddha? He is destroying his whole profession. The priest is a mediator between you and some unknown God that he talks about. He knows nothing about God – no priest has ever known anything about God, that is not his interest.In fact, I have observed all kinds of priests; they are the most atheistic people in the world. The priest does not believe in God, he cannot believe in God. He knows that it is his creation, how can he believe in God? This is experienced in many spheres of life.I had one friend, a very nice Bengali gentleman, who used to help hundreds of people with homeopathic medicines. But whenever he fell ill he would go to an allopathic doctor. I asked him, “What is the matter? You help so many people and so many are cured.” Almost miraculous cures were known to happen through him. “When you are ill, why do you go to an allopath?”He said, “The truth is I cannot trust those sugar pills. I know everything about them – they work if you believe, but how can I believe? I manufacture all those medicines! Sometimes they are just sugar pills and nothing else. In fact, I am puzzled when I come to see that they have been of great help.”The reason is that ninety percent of people’s diseases are false, that’s why there are so many “pathies.” Otherwise, except allopathy, they are all unscientific. But ninety percent of diseases are false and with a false disease, allopathy is dangerous because allopathy will give you a real medicine and the illness is false, and the real medicine is bound to do something to you. You need a false medicine for a false illness; it cannot harm you. That’s why homeopathy never harms anybody. You will not find “Poison” written in big red capital letters on bottles of homeopathic remedies.Homeopathy never harms anybody, but it helps many for the simple reason that if your disease is false then all that is needed is belief, trust. If you trust the man who is giving you the medicine, that trust helps you.The priest cannot believe in his gods – impossible because he has seen the dog piss on his god, he has seen the rats running over his god. He knows everything about the god, he has created it. In fact, the god needs his care; without him the god is nothing. It is a psychological atmosphere that he creates around the god with worship, with prayer, with fragrance, with lights, with flowers, with chanting ancient scriptures. He creates a certain noosphere, a certain psychology around a false phenomenon to exploit you – and you need somebody to depend upon.Now, God is very vague, you cannot depend on such a vague idea. You need somebody solid, substantial, to represent him. That’s the work of the priest. He stands at the door of the temple and says, “You cannot see God, but I can see him. You can depend on me, you can follow me.”Kahlil Gibran has a beautiful story:A man used to travel around the country talking to people, preaching beautiful sermons to people, telling them that “If you come and follow me, I will lead you to the ultimate home of God.”People would worship him and they would say, “Yes, when the time arrives, when the opportunity is right, when the situation is favorable we will certainly follow you. We are convinced you are right, we know that you know the path.”Nobody ever followed him, hence nobody ever came to know that he knew nothing about the path, about God, about the ultimate. But once it happened, a crazy young man stood up and he said, “Okay, I am coming with you. I will follow you. Until I reach the ultimate home of God I am not going to leave you.”The man was a little afraid, but he thought, “I will give him such stupid things to do that he will become tired and escape.”But the young man was really crazy and whatever the old preacher said, he did. In fact, he did more than the preacher was saying. If he said, “Stand on your head for one hour,” he would stand on his head for two hours. If he said, “Fast one day,” he would fast for three days. If he said, “You have to recite this mantra one hundred times,” he would recite it one thousand times.And the story says in this way seven years passed. Instead of the young man getting fed up with the old fool, the old fool started getting fed up with the young man – because of him his reputation was being destroyed. Now people started asking, “What is the matter? For seven years this young man has been following you and nothing has happened!”And the young man would say, “I have been doing everything, but nothing is happening.” He was destroying his whole profession.It is like a man sitting in the waiting room of a doctor saying to new patients, “Beware! This man has been treating me for seven years and nothing has happened!” Now, how long can the practice go on?People started thinking that this old man knew nothing. The audience became thinner and thinner. Finally, only the young man was left. And one day the old fellow fell at the feet of his disciple and said, “Please leave me. Leave me alone!”But the young man said, “I have not yet reached the ultimate home. I have to experience God!”And the old man said, “In fact I knew the way before I met you. Since you have been with me, because of you, even I have lost the way! I don’t know now where the way is and where the ultimate home is. Please excuse me, forgive me, and leave me alone. You have destroyed my whole profession!”The whole profession was dependent on those people who listened to him but never followed.The priest knows perfectly well that he knows nothing, hence he quotes authorities from the scriptures. He becomes a mediator between an invented God. Maybe it was not invented by him, but by a procession of priests in which he is a link.People need somebody to depend upon because from their very childhood they have been brought up by parents – they have been dependent from their very childhood, dependent on their father, dependent on their mother.It is not an accident that there are only two kinds of God: either God the Father or God the Mother. Have you ever heard of any other God: God the Uncle, God the Brother-in-law? Just two – either God the Father or God the Mother because the child has depended on these two people. He grows only physiologically; psychologically everybody is retarded.The psychological age of the average human being is only twelve years. It is shocking to know – a twelve-year-old child in a body of eighty years, seventy years. Only the body is old, but inside, the mind is very childish. It still wants a hand to hold him, to guide him, to support him; somebody to be a guide, somebody to indicate the way, somebody to take the responsibility. And the priest fulfills that role: he becomes your father, he becomes your mother, or he becomes both together in a certain way. He fathers you, mothers you. Now he cannot allow you to grow psychologically; he does not want you to become an adult psychologically. That will be suicidal to his profession.Hence the persistence of the idea that “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.” He cannot say to you, “Be afraid of me.” That will not be easy because you will see all his human flaws, human limitations. You will see that he is as weak as you are, you will see that he is as greedy as you are, you will see he is as angry as you are, as jealous as you are. It will not be possible for him to pretend that he is higher than you. The only way he can do it is to say that he has been chosen by God as a vehicle. He is a prophet, a messenger, a paigambara. He is nothing in himself, he is nobody, but God speaks through him; God uses him as an instrument, as a vehicle.He goes on imposing the fear of God on you, the fear of hell, the fear of great punishment if you do not listen to him; and also goes on giving you the idea that those who listen to him and follow him will be rewarded. On the one hand he creates fear, on the other hand he creates your greed: greed for heaven, paradise, the beautiful women there. Here he is against the woman – the woman is the door of hell – but in heaven every religion provides beautiful women, always young, stuck at the age of sixteen. Their bodies don’t perspire, they don’t need any deodorants! Their bodies are made of gold. Every religion provides all kinds of pleasures that it condemns here on the earth. This is a strange logic.Wine is prohibited here on the earth, and the saints who have never touched wine in their life will go to firdaus, to paradise, where wine is not sold in wine shops but is simply flowing in streams.In India, the priest has been telling people, “Drop all desires because all desires are sin,” and in the Hindu paradise, svarga, there are kalpavrikshas, wish-fulfilling trees. You sit under the tree, you just wish, and immediately it is fulfilled. But what kind of logic is this? The same thing is condemned here. Then why is the same thing provided as a reward, and more abundantly?If you understand, it is clear. The priest knows your desires – everybody knows your desires, he has to provide for them.In the Mohammedan paradise, not only are beautiful women available, but beautiful boys too because in Mohammedan countries homosexuality has been a long, long tradition; it still exists. So, homosexuals please note it, if after death somebody asks you, “To which heaven do you want to go?” choose the Mohammedan heaven because it is gay.If you look, in all the religions you will find this strange logic, the same thing is provided. The priest knows perfectly well these are the two driving forces in man: fear and greed. And if you can use both you can enslave humanity. And, up to now, Nirgrantha, they have kept humanity in total slavery.You say, “For many years I was convinced of the meaning that God was frightened of man gaining any wisdom.” God is not frightened because there is no God as a person, but the priest is frightened and whatever the priest is he projects it on his God. The priest is very much afraid of you gaining wisdom.Hence the Biblical story. It says nothing about God, it says something about the people who wrote the story. The biblical story says God prohibited man from eating from two trees: one was the Tree of Knowledge and the other was the Tree of Life, eternal life.The priest is afraid of these two things, remember. Forget God because it is not God who created that story, it is the priest. The priest is afraid of two things, and he has made it clear that he is afraid that if people are completely free of fear, they will not be Jews, Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, Buddhists – no, not at all. They will become Buddhas. They will be Christs, not Christians; even the cross will not frighten them. They will not be Mohammedans but Mansoors; even murder will not frighten them.Mansoor laughed when he was killed. Jesus was full of love even on the cross – no fear. Remember, love is the exact opposite of fear. Instead of being afraid he was full of love. He prayed to God, “Forgive these people because they know not what they are doing.” This is tremendous love, unconditional love.It is the priest who creates the story and he makes it clear. If you analyze the story it will give you great insights. First, he is afraid of you becoming wise. Hence all the priests have tried to keep society as ignorant as possible.In India, the woman is not allowed to read the holy scriptures; for her, stupid stories have been invented. She can read the Ramayana, she can read the Puranas – just stupid stories, illogical stories, unbelievable, fanciful, nothing of any importance. She is not allowed to read the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Brahmasutra; they are prohibited. To prohibit the woman means that fifty percent of people are prohibited.Then the sudras, the untouchables, are prohibited. They cannot read the Vedas. The word veda is beautiful; it exactly means wisdom. The very word wisdom comes from vid; vid is the root of veda and also of wisdom. Vid means to know. The person who knows becomes free. Keep him in ignorance. So, the untouchables, the poorest part of the people, are prohibited. That means one fourth again is prohibited.Then the vaishyas, the business people, they need not read the Vedas. Although they are not prohibited, they need not. And they don’t have any time. And the priest says, “We will do whatever is needed. If you want a temple to be made we will make it, if you want worship to be done we will do it. We will read, we will chant – we will do everything for you. You have only to pay.” And the businessman found it easier to hire a priest rather than to bother himself about the Vedas and their subtleties. He is dropped.The warrior, the kshatriya, his work is not to become wise but to be a great warrior. Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita, “This is your religion, to fight.”Arjuna was trying to become a brahmin. He was saying, “I am fed up with all this nonsense! I can see unnecessary violence. Millions of people will be killed for no reason at all. And I am not so interested in being the king by killing so many people. I want to renounce the world and go to the forest and meditate.”That means he was trying to become a brahmin. A man trying to become a brahmin means a man trying to become the ultimate truth or to know the ultimate truth, which are both the same. To know is to be, to be is to know.Krishna says, “This is not for you. Svadharme nidhanam shreyah. It is good to die in your own religion. Per dharmo bavaha baha. Somebody else’s religion is very dangerous. Beware of it! Your religion is to be a warrior, your religion is not to be a sannyasin. You are not supposed to be a meditator, you are supposed to be a fighter. Do your duty!”Even a man like Rama is known to have almost killed a poor untouchable person because he had heard some sutras of the Vedas. It was reported to Rama – he was the king – that “This sudra has been trying to know about the Vedas. When the Vedas were being recited by the brahmin in a certain temple, he was hiding outside and listening.”And even a man like Rama did such an ugly act. He poured melted iron into the ears of that poor man. He must have gone deaf forever; even his brain may have been damaged. Melted iron! His ears were closed forever, and a lesson was taught to the whole country that no person who has been prohibited should even dare to listen. If he reads, his eyes will be destroyed; if he listens, his ears will be destroyed.And Rama is still worshipped as an incarnation of God. In fact, in India, Rama is worshipped more than anybody else for the simple reason that he supports the priests more than anybody else. He is the priest’s favorite god.The priest has been afraid of people becoming wise because if they are wise then they will be competitors. If they are wise, they will see the stupidities of the priests. If they are wise, they will see all the superstitions. If they are wise then they will see through all the strategies that the priests have imposed on people – their whole exploitation, their whole machinery. They will revolt. So, in the biblical story the priests, in the name of God, prohibit Adam and Eve from eating from the Tree of Knowledge.And the second fear is that if somebody becomes eternal – just think, if death disappears from the world, religion, so-called religion, will disappear. Only something that I call religion can still exist; otherwise, Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, will all disappear. They all depend on death. Death gives them the opportunity. They make you afraid: “Death is coming closer. Do something before death destroys you. Before death comes you have to practice certain austerities, create a certain character, a certain morality, fulfill certain commandments. Death is coming! And death may come any moment, so be quick. Don’t waste time, don’t wait for tomorrow. There may be no tomorrow at all, so if you want to do anything, do it now.”And what do they prescribe? Their prescription is donating to the temples; that will give you great punya, great virtue. Donate to the brahmin because that will earn you a great bank balance in the other world. The Buddhists say, “Don’t give to the brahmin, give to the bhikkus.” The Jainas say, “Don’t give to the bhikku or the brahmin, give to the munis, the Jaina monks.” But donate – they all agree on donation. It is another thing whom to donate to. Of course, there will be differences. The Jainas would like every donation to come to the Jaina muni, and the Buddhists would like every donation to come to the Buddhist bhikku, and the Hindus would like every donation to come to the Hindu brahmin. But donation is the greatest religion. Charity, but charity for whom?The same people who are teaching you charity, they have to be given to. They are telling you, “Money is dirt!” and then they are asking you, “Give us money so that you can earn virtue in the other world.” Strange! If money is dirt, then give as much dirt as you can give to your priests. Don’t give money, give dirt! Collect all the dirt every day, early in the morning and go and donate it to the bhikku and to the munis and to the brahmin because money is dirt, so dirt is money! It is a simple logic. Money is dirt, but by donating it, it becomes valuable.“Do good deeds.” And what are good deeds? Obedience to the society, to the established order of things. Never be disobedient. That’s why Adam and Eve were punished, thrown out of paradise because they disobeyed. Disobedience is the greatest irreligious act. Of course, the priest is afraid of disobedience. And he is afraid that if people become eternal…Just think, one day if science manages to postpone death forever, all religions will disappear. They all exploit death. Because death is there, you start thinking about what will be after death; some arrangements have to be made for that great journey. And because nothing is known about that great journey, you have to depend on those people who pretend to know about that great journey. It is all pretension because nobody has ever returned from death and nobody has ever said what exactly happens after death. Nobody knows, but there are pretenders, and the priests are the pretenders.The story is tremendously significant, that two trees were prohibited. But ordinarily you hear only about one tree because once Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge, the gods – that means the priests hidden behind the masks of gods – became so afraid that they expelled him from Paradise because now the next step was absolutely certain to happen: that he would eat from the Tree of Life. And once he ate from the Tree of Life, even the Bible says he would become a god. Wise, eternal; what else is needed? And if he is a god, of course God is jealous. He will not like anybody else to be a god. This is just priesthood in the name of God!Now, for three hundred years the priests have been fighting against science. It is not accidental that the priests were the first, and because science was born in the West it was the Catholic Church that started fighting the scientists. Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo were all tortured in every possible way because the popes became aware of the danger.If science can have its own way the ultimate result will be that Adam and Eve will eat from the second tree too. That will be the ultimate result of science. In fact, that’s what science is searching for: the secret of life. And it is coming closer every day because once the basic cells that constitute your life can be analyzed like the atom, if they can be dissected – they carry the whole program – if they can be dissected and their program can be changed, then your whole life can be changed.For example, when a boy or a girl is born, the child brings in his cells the whole program for his life: that he will live seventy years, that he will have black hair, that he will have a certain kind of nose, that he will have a certain kind of skin, that he will have certain kinds of diseases. He brings almost the whole program and even the details of the program: at what time he will die…Now, if this program can be changed, if it can be reprogrammed, if things can be arranged in a different way, if they can be told, “Live for a hundred years, not for seventy,” then death can be postponed. And once we know how to postpone it, it can be postponed ad infinitum. Then it will only be up to you to decide when you want to die.Just as people right now write their wills, their last testaments, saying what will happen to their property, to their money after their death, in the future when life can be prolonged, people will write their wills saying, “At this time, in this season, on a particular day, in a particular place, I would like to die.”Now there is a movement all around the world, particularly in the West – obviously because in the East the problem is not death, the problem is birth. Here the question is how to stop birth, so we think of birth control. In the West, the problem has moved to the other extreme. Now medicine has become capable of prolonging people’s lives, the question is if the person wants to die, what to do? – because in the ancient law there is no provision for it, for euthanasia.If a man of one hundred years feels that he has lived enough, that he has known whatever life can give, that he has tasted all the bitterness and all the sweetness, that he has seen all that is worth seeing, experienced all that is worth experiencing, now he does not want to hang around unnecessarily, it becomes a drag on him. All his friends have died, all his acquaintances have disappeared. Now his children’s children’s children have no relationship with him at all; they live in a totally different world. He was born one hundred years before, and so much water has gone down the Ganges in these hundred years that the children speak a totally different language which he cannot understand, and what he says they cannot understand. There is no communication. For what to live now?So, the question is, has he the right to tell the doctors, “Kill me”? Has he the right to mercy killing, to euthanasia? Can he take a big dose of sleeping pill and die legally? That has become a problem.There are now societies in the West which are propagating that every man has the right to die. Nobody has heard it before, that every man has the right to die; we have heard that every man has the right to live. And up to now all the religions have condemned suicide; suicide is the greatest sin. Now suicide seems to be one of the greatest freedoms.The priest has always been afraid. If life can be prolonged, then he will be ignored. If life can be prolonged indefinitely then he cannot tell people to make arrangements for the afterlife. And if man can be immortal one day – which in a way does not seem to be impossible, although I don’t think anybody of any intelligence would like to be immortal, but the possibility is there. If the body can live for seventy years, why not seven hundred years? If the body is capable of renewing itself for seventy years it can be taught to renew itself for seven hundred years.Now there are trees in California which are four thousand years old. If a tree can live for four thousand years, why not man? In the Himalayas, there are trees which are seven hundred years old. If these trees can live for seven hundred years, why not man? The secret has to be known.The biblical story is really very strange, as if from the very beginning the priest was aware of two things: wisdom and eternity – these two things have to be kept secret, then man can be exploited.Nirgrantha, God is not frightened of man gaining any wisdom – it is the priest. But he always speaks in the name of God.And, then, you say, one day it was explained: “Fearing God is the first step in man’s path toward understanding.” Of course, the priest would like you to fear God. All over the world religious people are called “God-fearing.” I find the word very self-contradictory. A religious person is God-loving, not God-fearing, and the person who is God-fearing can never be religious. He can be Hindu, he can be Mohammedan, he can be Christian, but not religious because fear is poison; it destroys all possibility of your religiousness.Fearlessness, Buddha has said, is the foundation of all true religion – fearlessness. It is no surprise why the Hindu brahmins uprooted the whole of Buddhism from India, why the Buddhists were killed, why the Buddhists were chased out of the country. In a way, it was a blessing in the form of a curse because Buddhism spread all over Asia. The Buddhist monks had to escape from India to save themselves. They went to China, to Tibet, to Korea, to Japan, to Sri Lanka, to Burma. They spread all over Asia, they had to, otherwise Indians are not very interested in going that far! No Indian would have ever tried to go to Tibet and to go to China, crossing the Himalayan ranges; no Indian would have bothered about that. But they had to because the brahmins were simply burning them alive, roasting them, killing them mercilessly. The whole of Buddhism was uprooted from India, totally uprooted.You will be surprised to know that at the place where Buddha became enlightened, Bodhgaya, the temple that is the memorial to his enlightenment is under the control of a brahmin because not even a single Buddhist was left to be a priest in the temple where he became enlightened. The reason was that Buddha was saying fearlessness is the base of all true religion, and he is absolutely right. But then there will be no possibility for priesthood at all.You say, “After all, wasn’t Jehovah a fearsome, punitive, omnipotent God?” These are all inventions of different kinds of priests; Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu – but the priesthood has the same investment, the same strategy. Their dogmas, their theologies differ, but their weapons are the same. They use different poisons, labeled differently, in different languages, but they kill man’s freedom, man’s love, man’s integrity, sincerity, authenticity. They reduce man to a commodity.And you say, “Now I am finding it hard to recover from that idea…” Naturally. The habits, particularly the old habits, die hard.Nirgrantha, I have given you this name – let me remind you what it means. It means a man without any knots, a man without any complexes. It is the name of Mahavira, one of the greatest awakened souls on the earth. He was called Nirgrantha: one who has dropped all kinds of complexes from his mind, from his being; one who is free of all complexes, all knots, who has become simple, whose life is no longer entangled in problems.But these old habits create complexes. These old habits are there rooted in your unconscious; they go on functioning from there. Hence even though you are here, my sannyasin, you are finding it difficult to get rid of the idea. And I am hitting the idea every day, twenty-four hours a day, year in, year out. What am I doing here? – destroying your complexes, destroying all kinds of seeds that have been sown in you by the priests.But old habits die hard…“Hey, Sol, how did your sister Rena make out on her driver’s license test?”“She flunked. When the car stalled, from force of habit she jumped into the back seat!”People live almost mechanically. And the idea of a jealous God is just an unconscious shadow: it can keep you afraid your whole life, it can destroy all your juice, it can suck you, but it is your own projection.It is midnight and the London streets are empty, clouded in a thick fog. A woman in a mink coat is walking alone, glancing around fearfully. On the dark street only the sound of her footsteps are heard: click, click, click. Suddenly other footsteps are heard: boom, boom, boom. Afraid, the woman starts running: click, click, click. But the heavy footsteps follow behind: boom, boom, boom. Blind with horror, she runs faster: click, click, click. But from right behind comes: boom, boom, boom.The woman, running faster and faster realizes that she has come to a dead-end alley and the footsteps – boom, boom, boom – are right behind her. She turns around and screams, “Ah! Eek! The monster of London!”A black shadow bending slowly over her looks at her and says, “So, who told you that you are so pretty, hmm?” and turns around offended.Now, this ugly woman really desired somebody to follow her; that must have been a long, long-cherished desire. Today, suddenly finding the right opportunity, it blossomed. Nobody is there. It is her own idea, her own desire, a deep, deep wish, but fulfilled today in this darkness, in this lonely street. She has autohypnotized herself.That’s what we go on doing; we go on repeating our old habits again and again. The more we repeat them the deeper they become in us, the more they become ingrained.And you say, “…it interferes with my love for you.” It will interfere with all possibilities of love in you. It will interfere not only with your love for me, it will interfere with all kinds of love: love for your woman, love for your child, love for your mother, love for your father. It will interfere with love as such because fear is a poison that kills love. And fear creates anger. When you cannot love, when your energies cannot flow in love, they become anger. The same energies go sour, bitter; they become poisoned.This is always a problem. All the masters have known it; many have pointed toward it. The master has always to be aware of his disciple’s anger, violence, for the simple reason that the disciple finds it difficult to love. He wants to love but finds it difficult to love because of his whole upbringing. His whole unconscious, even the collective unconscious is against love. And when he cannot love, the same energy turns into anger. And when it is anger he starts becoming negative.This happens every day here. So many sannyasins, thousands of sannyasins are here. Every day I receive so many negative letters. There are ninety percent positive letters, ten percent negative letters. The positive letters are poetic, beautiful, loving. But the strangest thing is the people who write very positive letters, I note down their name and I wait for their negative letter, sooner or later. And it comes, it comes inevitably! Just after a few days they take revenge because they start feeling that they have done something wrong. Such a loving letter? So much trust and surrender? It goes against their ego and the ego starts feeling hurt, wounded. Then they are searching for some excuse – and you can always find whatever you are searching for, you can always find it; if it is not there you will invent it. And then immediately they are against you.One woman used to send me books, money, magazines, presents from America – a very loving woman. Laxmi always used to think that: a very loving woman. She was not even a sannyasin. Then one day, a letter came saying that she wanted to become a sannyasin, and I felt, “Now, things are becoming more and more dangerous.” She became a sannyasin and after just six months she wrote a very angry letter saying, “My real master is Jesus, not you!” But who has been telling her to make me her master? And she was really angry because she started feeling guilty, divided, as if she had betrayed Jesus. So I told Laxmi to write to her saying, “Drop sannyas and be with Jesus and be at ease.”She received the letter. Yesterday the mala and the name came back with a letter. Now she has started feeling guilty again that she is betraying me, that she has betrayed sannyas – is it right or wrong? So she wrote a letter with a note on top of it: “Nobody should read it except the master.” And in the letter the problem is that now she thinks that the first letter must have been written to her asking her to drop sannyas without my knowledge, because how can a man like me, with such compassion and love, ever ask anybody to drop sannyas? “I cannot believe it. It must have been the doing of the office people! Please write directly to me.” Now she is inventing her own game. I am not in it at all.This problem is an everyday problem. One friend has asked, “Somendra was a devotee, Osho. He loved you and you him. Were you maybe a little hard on him?” It is not a question of being hard. He loved me, that is the problem. And you have been brought up in such a way that love is almost impossible. To love means going against your whole past. He certainly loved me, and I was waiting. I had told him even when he was here that he was going to betray me, that he could be a Judas. And he laughed at that moment.When he went to the West he went on writing to other sannyasins here, particularly to those sannyasins that can send a message to me that they have received a letter from Somendra. And he was saying, “Osho is with me and I love him and he loves me.” Continuously those letters were coming. Then suddenly they stopped. I knew it was going to happen. He loved me – that is the problem.When you love you love against your ego, and the ego waits for the right opportunity to take revenge.Judas must have loved Jesus, that’s why he betrayed him because you are not meant to love. Unless you are very alert, very conscious, and drop your ego totally, deliberately, and don’t allow it from the back door again, your love is going to become a danger for the master. You will love and you will hate, and for small excuses.He still loves me and he will love me his whole life; that is the trouble. Because he still loves me, he will go on saying things against me. Because he still loves me, he will have to go to the other extreme to repress that love. He will have to do it just to satisfy his ego.You cannot do both: you cannot satisfy both your love and your ego. And the priest creates the ego. Fear helps the ego. Fear is a food for the ego and love is food for egolessness.Nirgrantha, you have to understand it. Your love for me is there, but your whole past will interfere with it.I still love Somendra and I will always love him. He is a beautiful man of great potential, just as Nirgrantha is, but my love for him also became difficult for him. You don’t know your limits. You cannot accept even love because you have been told again and again from your very childhood that you are worthless, that you are not worth loving.Your mother has said it, your father has said it, your teachers have been telling you, your priests have been telling you – from everywhere you have received the message that you are worthless unless you prove otherwise. You are not accepted as you are.And I accept you as you are, I love you as you are. I don’t expect anything. I don’t want to improve you, I don’t want to better you, I don’t want to make you something great, extraordinary, spiritual. I love you as you are in your ordinariness, and that is difficult for you to accept. You will reject my love. That is what the hard part in it is – not my love but your rejection. You would really like me to punish you!If I had punished Somendra he would have been here. If I had punished him enough, that would have been acceptable because you have been punished from your very beginning. In fact, you have learned that unless somebody punishes you he does not love you. Your mother punished you, your father punished you, your teachers punished you; everybody punished you because they loved you so much that they wanted you to become somebody special. That’s why they were punishing you, you were punished for your own sake.And I don’t punish anybody at all. That is the trouble; that is the hard part. You cannot accept my non-punishment. I don’t create any guilt in you. If you are negative about me I accept that. I don’t say, “Don’t be negative – it is a sin.” I simply say, “Watch it, accept it. That is part of your upbringing. And it will dissolve easily; there is no hurry either. And I love you with all your limitations, with all your flaws.”That’s one of the reasons why in India I am being condemned and opposed, because their idea of a spiritual man is one who tries to improve people. I don’t try to improve anybody. Who am I to improve you? I can shower my love on you, and if that love is accepted you will start growing; that love will nourish you but you reject it.The most difficult thing in life is to accept love. When somebody says, “I love you,” listen. Whether you say it or not, somewhere inside you there is a no because you cannot accept the idea that you are worth loving, that anybody can love you. He must be cheating you, he must be deceiving you; he must have some ends in his mind. He wants to exploit you.No woman believes it when you tell her, “I love you.” She thinks, “This man is trying to exploit my body. He wants to use me as an object.” She is reluctant, she creates every kind of barrier; she rejects, she withdraws. These are her ways to test whether you really love her. She will create every kind of objection to your love and will wait and will see whether your love is still alive. Unless she is convinced totally that you love her, she will not accept your love. And even then that acceptance is only superficial; soon she will start nagging you, soon she will start taking revenge, soon she will be fighting with you.And the same is true about men – even more so. That’s why no woman ever says to any man, “I love you.” She never initiates the process because to tell any man, “I love you,” means danger. He will escape, he will escape immediately! The woman only withdraws, but she does not withdraw totally; she withdraws only so far. She remains in a way available. Even if she says no she says it in such a beautiful way that you feel there is a possibility of yes.One day I saw Nasruddin very happy and I asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “The woman I love has said to me, ‘This is the last time I am saying no!’”The man thinks that a woman’s no means yes. Somewhere, the way she says it, the word is no, but it carries the meaning of yes. She withdraws only so far that she remains within your reach. But man really becomes afraid, very much afraid.Man is the weaker sex. This is my categorical statement: man is the weaker sex. The woman is the far stronger sex. Nature has made her stronger. She has to be stronger to give birth to children, to carry the child for nine months in the womb. She has a more resistant body, she lives longer than man, she is healthier than man. More men commit suicide, almost double the number of women. Although women talk about suicide – sometimes they even take pills, but always in such a way that they can be saved. Out of ten attempted suicides only one succeeds, and that I also think by some mistake! But twice as many men commit suicide in comparison to women, and also double the number of men go mad in comparison to women.Man is a very much weaker sex. He has no resistance, he falls ill more, he lives less – five years less than women. So the moment a woman says, “I love you,” he becomes very much afraid.A sannyasin has asked, “Why is it that whenever a woman approaches me I become frightened and scared?” It is not an individual personal problem. Every man becomes afraid when a woman approaches him. That’s why women all over the world have decided not to approach men, never to initiate anything – wait. The woman functions like a mousetrap: she simply waits for the mouse to come in. And the mouse comes! He will go round and round, make a few circles, look here and there, watch, come a little closer and see whether there is any danger or not; and then, slowly, slowly, he will be caught.And then the woman can always say, “I was never after you!” And she has always been after you. That mousetrap was watching, looking where the mouse is going, what he is doing, how far away he is. But the woman remains very detached, aloof; that is part of her feminine beauty and attraction. If she jumps upon you, you will escape! Just think of a mousetrap running after a mouse – do you think it will ever catch any mouse? Impossible! The mouse will run into its hole and will never come out!You say, Nirgrantha, “In spite of ‘knowing better’ I have to see you as all-powerful…” That is why the priests have been telling you that you are helpless, without God you are powerless; God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. They make God all-powerful so that you can depend on God. And, of course, depending on God means depending on the priest.I am not a priest. And I agree with Dionysius totally that God is not powerful, God is not power at all. There is great insight in that statement. In fact, God is not a person at all, God is only a quality – a beauty that surrounds existence, a fragrance, a dance, a celebration that goes on and on in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in the rocks, in men, in women. God is this organic unity, this organic accord that exists between the smallest grass leaf and the biggest star. There is a communion, there is a love affair. God is a love affair! And it is always going on, it is always a honeymoon – except for man because man has fallen out of this immense harmony.And the priest does not want you to go back to the harmony. If you go back, his whole profession is gone. It is a great investment; millions of people are involved in it.There are thousands of religions on the earth – three hundred big religions, and then there are subsects and sects and sects within sects. It is almost like a Chinese magical box – box within box within box. You go on and go on unwrapping it and you will never come to the end. There are Christians, and then there are Protestants and then there are Catholics. And then among Catholics there will be different churches, and among Protestants different sects, and then small sects.The whole earth is exploited by the priests. If they are counted they will be in millions. It is one of the greatest vested interests.I am not in any way powerful. In fact, I am not. That’s the only way you can commune with me – a nobody, a nothingness. And I live in agnosia, in a state of not-knowing, in a state of silence. You can have a communion with me only if you also come to the same state, the state of not-knowing. That’s why I go on destroying knowledge. I have to destroy all the knowledge that you have gathered. All has to be burned, completely burned. Unless you become a no-mind you will not be able to see me, understand me. Becoming a no-mind you will suddenly have a transformation; your vision will be clear.You say, “…I have to be dependent on you for my liberation…” No dependence can ever lead to any liberation; dependence will lead to more dependence. Liberation means liberation from the very beginning. I am not here to make you dependent on me. I am here to help you to be independent. That is the function of the master: to help the disciple to be totally independent.You say, “…sometimes it follows that then I have to be afraid of you and your ‘punishment.’” That you are unnecessarily waiting for. I never punish anybody; nobody need be afraid of me. You can all go against me, you can all betray me, you can all be enemies to me, but I cannot punish you. The very idea is not possible. I can only pray for you, I can only love you.You say, “Understanding doesn’t affect the cure, what to do?” No, understanding will bring the cure. You have not yet understood, Nirgrantha. Understand the whole process of the priesthood and its investment, see the priest inside you, and become aware of the priest speaking to you. Don’t get identified with your inner conscience, be liberated from it. The moment you are aware of the whole process you will be freed. The problem will disappear as if it never existed.Enough for today.

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Theologia Mystica 01-15Category: WESTERN MYSTICS

Theologia Mystica 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Do you really love Somendra still?My love is not conditional. Love cannot be conditional – either it is or it is not. It is not caused by anything hence nothing can disturb it. But you know something else in the name of love; you know only infatuation, attraction, lust. Your love is nothing but a subtle strategy to exploit the other, hence it is bound to disappear sooner or later – and you will find enough reasons why it disappears.But my love is not a relationship. I love you because I am love. Even if I want to, I cannot unlove you.What Somendra does, what he says, how he behaves does not matter at all as far as my love is concerned – his doings and sayings are absolutely irrelevant. My love continues and will continue. And that is the only hope for him because he is a tremendously intelligent person and he has tasted something of my love, he has known his heart opening up a few times. One time he was very close, very close, but missed only by inches. One can come to the abyss and can turn back. One step more and he would have been what he is now pretending to be.Hence, he will miss me, he will miss me immensely, and sooner or later he will be back. I will invite him back whenever the time is ripe, whenever I feel that it is the time for him to put his ego aside and come back home. But I will have to wait for the right moment. It is difficult to find the right moment, it is very easy to miss it.Gautam the Buddha used to say that life is like a vast palace with thousands of doors. All the doors are closed except one. And a blind man on a dark, dark night has lost his way in the palace. There is nobody who can show him the way out, all the guards are gone, the palace is utterly empty. He stumbles, gropes, he tries to find the way out, and he passes thousands of closed doors. Slowly, slowly, and naturally, he becomes convinced that no door is open.And then, suddenly, he comes to the door which is open. But he has tried and touched and groped and always found ten thousand doors closed. He feels so tired, exhausted, that he thinks, “This door is also going to be closed. Why bother?” And he passes the door without making an effort to see whether it is closed or open. Again, he will have to pass thousands of doors. One never knows when the next opportunity will be when he will come back to this door which is open.And any small excuse – just an itching in the head – and he can miss it. He can start scratching his head and he can miss it. Just a thought in the mind, and he can become distracted and he can miss it. A fly can distract him, a noise, a dog barking somewhere outside is enough.Buddha has repeated this story many times because it is so true about life. Somendra has missed the open door this time. I will have to wait for the next time when he is again close to it. But man remains always unpredictable; nobody can say anything about when the next moment will come – just the next moment may be the moment or it may take years. But love is always open, always ready to take you back.I was aware of certain things which were going wrong in him. That’s why I told him to go to the West because it was becoming difficult for him here. He was boiling with negativity inside and there was no possibility to express it here. I have sent him to the West so he can cathart – this is just part of catharsis. Soon he will realize it because he is not a stupid person, soon he will realize where he has gone wrong. And the moment he realizes it, I will call him back.Another question has been asked about Somendra by Prabhu Maya. She says, “Osho, you keep telling us that we are enlightened and all we need to do is to become aware of it. So what is wrong with Somendra declaring himself enlightened and dropping sannyas?”Maya, I keep telling you that you are enlightened, but you are not to believe me. You have to experience it. And if you experience it you cannot drop sannyas; it is impossible. Because you experienced it through sannyas, so how can you drop it? You will be immensely grateful to it. And if you experience what I am saying to you, you will not be in a hurry to declare it; in fact, you will hide it, you will wait for me to declare it. There is no need for you to declare it. The moment one becomes enlightened there is nobody to declare it; there is no desire to declare it.And that’s what Somendra was trying here in every possible way. He was restless; he was trying and asking me in direct and indirect ways to declare him enlightened. But how can I declare unless you have experienced it? When he experienced satori, I did declare it. But there is a difference between satori and samadhi.Satori means only a glimpse, a faraway glimpse. Satori is a Japanese word, very beautiful, untranslatable, but it can be described. It is like on a clear day, when there are no clouds you can see the Himalayan peaks in the sun, the virgin snow on the peaks shining like silver or gold, from thousands of miles away. You are seeing the truth, but the distance between you and the truth is there – you are not it. This is satori. Seeing the truth but not being it is satori.Then there is the Sanskrit word samadhi which is also untranslatable. Samadhi means being the truth: where the knower and the known become one, where the experienced and the experiencer are one. It is no longer a question of an open, unclouded day, it is no longer a question of the sunlit peaks rising high in the sky. You are it – not even the distance of a single inch.Chuang Tzu says: Even the distance of a hair is enough, and heaven and earth fall apart. Just the distance of a hair – not much at all, almost negligible – but it is enough to separate earth from heaven. When even that much difference is not there, one is enlightened.Somendra has not yet experienced it. He has immense desire to experience it – that desire is becoming a cause of his misery. That desire is the hindrance because to desire anything means you are in the mind. All desires are in the mind, even the desire for God, the desire for enlightenment, the desire for truth, for freedom – all desires. Desire as such is part of the mind. And the mind is the barrier, not the bridge.The last desire to leave is the desire for enlightenment. And, of course because it is the last desire it becomes very intense. All the energies involved in all other desires – for money, power, prestige, etcetera – become concentrated on a single desire, the desire for enlightenment. It imprisons more than any other desire because all other desires are divided; there are many millions of desires, and your energy is fragmented. But the desire for enlightenment, your whole energy pours into it. It is the thickest and the strongest chain that keeps you imprisoned, and it is the last to give way.And that desire is surrounding him very deeply. He has come to the last desire, and that is a great advancement, that is a great achievement. It is no mean achievement, mind you; it is one of the greatest achievements to come to a single desire. In a way, it is very strong; that is its danger. In another way because it is only one desire and you have been able to drop so many desires, you can drop it too. But because of this desire to become enlightened he is getting caught.I feel very much for him because he is one of those few sannyasins who were coming close to the ultimate. I hope that soon he will understand the mistake.Prabhu Maya, your question shows something about you too. It is not really about Somendra – Somendra is just an excuse. The way you have formulated the question shows something about you. You say, “You keep telling us that we are enlightened and all we need to do is to become aware of it. So, what is wrong with Somendra declaring himself enlightened and dropping sannyas?”Both these desires must be in you too: to declare yourself enlightened and to drop sannyas. In the name of Somendra you are trying to defend something unconscious in you. Become aware of it. Nothing is wrong in being enlightened, but Somendra is not yet enlightened – I know him far more deeply than he knows himself. Nothing is wrong in dropping sannyas – many people drop sannyas and I don’t care a bit. But I do care about Somendra because he was so close. Just the last rung of the ladder, and he has dropped the ladder.If the person who has not even started the journey drops, who cares? He is not even on the path and he drops. In fact, he is not dropping anything because he has nothing. But Somendra had something precious. And dropping sannyas is not just dropping sannyas; it is disconnecting yourself from me. And all that has happened to him has happened through the connection. I am still connected, but from his side something has gone wrong.It is like when you phone somebody – from your side everything is clear, you can hear the other person, but from his side something is wrong – he cannot hear you. Communication becomes impossible.That’s what has happened: from my side everything is clear, from my side everything is as it has always been – the same love, even a little more, if a little more is possible. But from his side he has put down the phone. He will realize it soon and he will see that he has harmed himself. But sometimes it happens: unknowingly, unconsciously, one can become a victim of some deep-rooted desire. And the desire for enlightenment is in everybody.Enlightenment simply means becoming full of awareness, and he is not yet full of awareness. Yes, once in a while like a breeze the awareness comes to him, and in those moments one can be befooled and deceived, but it has not become his state. If it had become his state there would have been no restlessness in him for it to be recognized or for declaring it. When I am here to declare your enlightenment, you need not.And it is impossible to drop sannyas after enlightenment – you will feel so grateful that doing such an ungrateful act is inconceivable.The second question:Osho,You say you want to show India love, yet most Indians who come here, when faced with love, see it only as lust. What should be done about it?The mind of India is one of the most ancient minds in the world, hence it has its problems. A child has no problems – they are yet to arrive – but the old man has a long past, and the whole past goes on becoming bigger and bigger every day. It is accumulative. It carries a thousand and one hang-ups, obsessions, nightmares, unlived experiences still hankering to be completed.India has one of the longest histories in the world. Compared to India, America is just a newborn child. Even the orthodox historians believe that India has lived for at least ten thousand years, without a single revolution. Revolution means destroying the old and beginning the new – then it would have been totally different.One day I asked Mulla Nasruddin, “Your umbrella is so new, so beautiful. When did you purchase it?”He said, “It is a miracle, Osho! It is not new, it is at least thirty years old.”I said, “Thirty years old? It looks so new – as if it has not been in the rain even a single time!”He said, “It is thirty years old, but has been exchanged for many other umbrellas at least a hundred times. Just the other day in the temple it happened again!”Now, if just the other day it happened again that you exchanged it for somebody else’s umbrella and you still call it thirty years old, that is another matter. But India has not changed its umbrella for ten thousand years and that is according to the very conventional, orthodox historians. If you listen to the Hindu chauvinists, then India has lived at least ninety thousand years. That was the calculation of Lokmanya Tilak; he also lived in Pune. Ninety thousand years was his calculation. Whether it is ten thousand or ninety thousand it does not matter. All that matters is it has a very long past and that past has never been broken; it still continues.During this long past, India has lived a very repressed life. At least twenty-five centuries are perfectly well-known, historically well-known; before that things are a little vague. But these twenty-five centuries after Gautam Buddha and Mahavira are perfectly well-known. In these twenty-five centuries no other country, no other culture, no other race, has been as life-negative as India. A strange disease entered India’s heart, something like a cancer – incurable. It became obsessed with the idea that if you want to attain God or liberation you have to be life-negative, you have to renounce life – as if God is against life.Now, this is the most stupid thing that can happen to any country. On the one hand people go on saying, “God created life, God created existence, God created us – God created everything that is,” and on the other hand the same people, very illogically, go on insisting that “If you want to come closer to God you will have to renounce the world that he has created.”It is almost saying something like this: that if you want to love Rabindranath Tagore you will have to hate his poetry, or if you want to love Picasso you have to destroy his paintings. If God is the creator, if God is the poet, the musician, the dancer, then this whole existence is his dance, his painting, his music, his poetry, his song. This whole existence is Shrimad Bhagavadgita, God’s song. If you want to come close to God you will have to come closer to this existence.But India has lived with this denial. Why did this denial appeal to India so much? Denial always appeals to the ego. The ego lives surrounded by no’s: no, no, no. It lives in a forest of no’s. The moment you are full of yes, the ego starts dying – a natural death, a very effortless death; you have not to kill it. Yes is the death of the ego.The Indian mind became egoistic about its spirituality, about its religiousness, about its sacredness, about its ancient heritage. And the more egoistic it became, the more it had to live and nourish the ego through denials.In India, a man is thought to be a saint according to the quantity of things around him that he denies: he denies himself food, he denies himself all the comforts of the body, he denies himself shelter, he even denies himself clothes. He denies himself everything that human nature feels comfortable with – then he becomes a great saint, a mahatma.That’s why I appear almost like a sinner; it is a natural conclusion. If denial, saying no to life, is to be a saint, then certainly I am not a saint. I say yes to life, to all its joys and beauties, to all its splendor. I say a total, wholehearted yes. I am ready to accept being called a sinner, but I am not ready to deny life.Love is saying yes to life. Love is nothing but saying yes to life. Hate is saying no to life. And in India the person who hates life, renounces it, denounces it, condemns it, is worshipped as a saint. And because of these people and because of this tradition and because of this conditioning, everybody has become repressed. Everybody’s love energy is in a perverted state. When love becomes perverted it creates lust. Love is beautiful, lust is ugly.When you see a woman, a beautiful woman, or a beautiful man, you can see her or him through loving eyes or lustful eyes – and the difference is tremendous but very delicate. When you see a woman through loving eyes you are seeing a roseflower or a lotus or a sunset. And if you say the sunset is beautiful and if you stop for a moment, nobody will say that it is wrong, that it is immoral. If you say that the roseflower is beautiful and if you go close to the roseflower to smell the perfume of it or even to touch it tenderly, softly, to feel its velvetiness, nobody will call you a sinner. People will think you are a poet, a sensitive man, that you have some aesthetic sensibility.But if you go to a beautiful woman just to touch her, to see her skin, to feel it, and to say to her, “You are beautiful!” suddenly great fear arises. This cannot be done. This is immoral, she is somebody else’s woman. Or even if she is your own woman, this has to be done in privacy, as if you cannot enjoy the sunset openly – you have to hide somewhere, then you can enjoy; you cannot enjoy the starry night.Love simply means sensitivity to beauty, to life. Lust means a desire to exploit, a desire to use the woman as a means. Lust is sexual, love is sensitive. There may be sex in love, but then it has a totally different connotation, a different meaning, a different flavor. Then it is not the center of it.In a loving relationship, sex may happen, may not happen; there is no inevitability about it. If it happens then it is part of love, of sharing energy. If it does not happen, that too is part of love. There is no need to come to the physical level; you are capable of sharing your energies psychologically, spiritually.So love has many dimensions, at least three dimensions: the physical which can become sex, the psychological which becomes friendship, and the spiritual which becomes prayer. And it is possible that in love all three dimensions may be present simultaneously, but they are all part of a loving approach toward life. There is no exploitation; there is no desire to use the other as a means and then throw them away.Lust means sex is the center: you don’t have any sensibility for beauty, you don’t have any aesthetic sense. Can you think of a man of aesthetic sense going to a prostitute? Impossible. Can you think of a man who has some aesthetic sense raping a woman? Impossible. Or even hitting a woman in the crowd or just touching her body in such a way as if he was not meaning to touch her, as if it happened accidentally? This is not love, this is not sensibility, this is not sensitiveness. It is lust.Lust means you don’t respect the other at all. You have a deep, repressed desire, repressed sexuality which comes in many perverted ways. Then your eyes become covered and colored with only sexuality.The most important thing in the Indian mind is sex. Hence every day so many rapes happen, and no woman is safe walking on a street. How many sannyasins have written to me, particularly women sannyasins saying, “Is it not our right to walk alone under the stars in the sky? Are we not human beings? Don’t we have such a simple human right?” But in India it is impossible.Just the other day a young woman sannyasin was attacked by four Indians. Of course she screamed, and some sannyasins reached in time; otherwise they were going to rape her – they had torn her dress apart. And this is not just one accident, it has been happening every once in a while for almost six years.The Indian mind is so sexually repressed that it cannot love, it can only lust. And once the lust is there you start looking at everybody else in the same way; that is your language.When two Western sannyasins are hugging each other and the Indian, any Indian sees them, the only idea in his mind is that of sex and lust; he cannot understand love. Not a single sannyasin from the West in these six years – and thousands have come, at least fifty thousand people come every year – has raped an Indian woman. But hundreds of attempts have been made by the Indians on Western women, and not only by ordinary people but even by police officers. Even to go to the police station is dangerous. Everywhere there are wolves, and these are very spiritual wolves, very religious! But they know only one language: that of lust.Two drunkards were walking home across a bridge, when one suddenly lost his balance and fell into the river.“Help! Help!” echoed from under the bridge.The help took a little while coming. When they found the drunkard, he was already dead.“What happened?” asked his friend.“He drank too much water,” was the reply.“Poor guy,” exclaimed the drunkard, “it was the first time he drank water!”Two little Indian pigs were chatting.“What a boring day! Nothing happening!”“Yeah!” sighed the other.“Got any ideas for an adventure?”“No, have you?”“Well,” said Pinky, “why don’t we go down to the butcher shop and have a look around?”“What for?” asked his friend.“To see if there is any new naked lady!”Sex can be raised to higher levels of love and prayer, and sex can also be reduced to lower levels of lust and animality. Sex can become a conversion or a perversion; it has both the possibilities. And because of twenty-five centuries of continuous condemnation, every Indian is full of perverted ideas.A farmer lived with his young, voluptuous, blonde-haired daughter who was a virgin.One day three young men came and asked to stay the night. The farmer agreed, but to protect his daughter’s virginity he placed a chastity belt with steel claws around her vagina.The next morning the farmer woke the three young men, shouting, “Drop your pants!”One young man dropped his pants, showing his tool all mangled and bloody. The second young man dropped his pants, showing his tool all mangled and bloody, but the third one revealed his manhood still intact.“Ah,” said the farmer, “at least one of you is moral and decent! Thank you, young man!”Shaking his head, the young man opened his mouth, scattering blood and broken teeth in all directions.Life should be lived naturally, life should be lived according to the laws of nature – not according to the laws of Manu, not according to the ascetics, not according to the saints, but according to the dhamma. “Aes dhammo sanantano,” Buddha says: “This is the eternal law.” We have to find the eternal law in things, how the whole universe runs in a harmony, how there is such tremendous order. It is not a chaos, it is a cosmos. Man has also to become a cosmos, and it is possible only through love.You ask me how to help them. The only way to help them is to persuade them to meditate, to be here, to become more sensitive, more aesthetic. It is a great work because to change such a big country with such a nonsense past is not an easy job. But it is a challenge and worth accepting!The third question:Osho,During lecture recently, I sometimes get this almost irresistible urge to jump up and down, wave my arms and sing or make noises. I am scared that one day I won't be able to contain it and I will cause a disturbance. What should I do?You need not worry. That is the responsibility of the guards! That is for them to think what to do. What can you do? If it becomes irresistible, if you cannot contain it anymore, what can you do? What can I do? That’s why we have the guards, just to divide responsibility – that is their responsibility.But why is this happening to you? Just meditate over this story:A man lost his prick in an accident. Quite upset, he went to see a doctor to ask if anything could be done.“Well, you’re lucky,” said the doctor, “I have an elephant’s trunk in my fridge and if you don’t have any objections, we could do some surgery and use it as a replacement.”Happy that there was some solution, the man agreed. After a successful operation the man returned home satisfied. A few weeks later he went to see the doctor for a checkup.“Everything okay?” the doctor asked.“Oh yeah, doc, it’s fine!” he answered. “It’s jolly good, this new instrument.”The doctor turned to the man’s wife and asked if she had any problems with it.“No,” she replied, “but when we visited the movies last time, something strange happened. James really started to get turned on. He started jumping up and down in his chair and snorting all the time. When I asked him what was happening he said, with eyes big and red and sweat dripping from his forehead, “Can’t you see the bag of peanuts on the chair in front of us?”You better go to the Medical Center. You need a total checkup! Do you see a bag of peanuts in front of you? What makes you so excited? So leave it to the Medical Center and to the guards, and don’t bother me about such problems. Once in a while I expect such things to happen!The fourth question:Osho,Why is it that every religion boasts about being the greatest and truest religion in the world?It is strange but it is true that although religions have been teaching people to be egoless, they have only succeeded in making people egoists. Maybe they have helped people to get rid of the gross ego, which is not very difficult because the gross ego is very clearly seen by everybody, but they have created a bigger problem than that. Their solution has been a curse, not a blessing: they have created a very subtle ego in people.The gross ego is direct. The newly rich you can see by his eyes, by his nose, the way he walks, the way he talks – you can see the gross ego, very gross. The politician when he is in power, you can see. It is not difficult; it is very tangible.But the religious person has a very subtle ego; he says, “I am a humble man.” In fact he wants to be recognized as the humblest man in the world, and that is the subtle ego.Once a Sufi fakir was brought to me and his disciples said, “He is a very humble man.” When he came, he really touched my feet, and his disciples looked at me with their eyes saying, “Look, how humble he is!”And he said to me, “I am nothing but dust on your feet!”I said, “I can see you are!” And he was offended.I said, “This is strange. You yourself are saying that you are just dust on my feet and nothing else. I can also see that you are right. You are absolutely right! I don’t deny it, I agree. But why are you becoming so angry with my agreement?”In fact, he wanted something else, he wanted me to say, “You are so great, so humble, so simple! You are a man of God!” Then he would have been happy.Religions have created a very subtle ego in the world. You will see it in the saints, in the mahatmas, in the sages – a very subtle ego. But it is there and it is far more dangerous because nobody can see it unless he has tremendous intelligence. And the person himself may not even be aware of it; he may really think he is a humble man. Because of this humbleness, which is cultivated from the outside and has not arisen from inner vision, the ego goes into a hiding place; it starts moving into the unconscious.That’s what I mean when I say “the subtle ego.” The gross ego functions in the conscious mind; it is available. You can see it, you can pinpoint it. The subtle ego goes into unconscious layers. It goes deeper in you, in such dark spaces where it can work without your being aware of it. Then it finds vicarious ways. It will claim that “My religion is the greatest religion!” It is not concerned with the religion at all; it is an effort of the subtle ego to prove itself great – greater than others. But now it cannot say it directly; it has to say it indirectly, via something. It will say, “My country is the greatest country in the world.” Every race believes that. “My race is the purest in the world.” Every race believes that. “My people are the greatest people on the earth.” Everybody believes that. “My religion, my scripture, my morality, my culture” – but the emphasis is on “my.” Whether it is religion, culture, society civilization – it does not matter what it is – the emphasis is on “my,” and behind “my” is hiding the “I.”And these religions go on boasting, fighting with each other, trying to prove themselves greater. Ask the Hindus: they will say their country is the holiest country in the world. Why? – because the twenty-four avatars of the Hindus were born here; they had chosen India to be their birthplace. Ask the Jainas: they will agree, but for a different reason – not because of the twenty-four avatars of the Hindus. They don’t think them of any value; one of the Hindu avatars, Krishna, has been thrown in hell by the Jainas! India is great and sacred because of the twenty-four tirthankaras, the Jaina masters, the Jaina enlightened ones. It is a different reason on the surface. Ask the Buddhist. He will say, “Yes, India is the greatest country because Buddha was born here” – not Mahavira, not the Jaina tirthankaras.In fact, the Buddhist has never accepted Mahavira as an enlightened person. The Buddhists have always condemned Mahavira as a little perverted because he was moving naked – something is wrong with the man! In contemporary language you can say the Buddhist has always thought of Mahavira as a masochist, torturing himself.And ask the Jaina: he thinks Buddha was not a real ascetic – he lived in a little bit of comfort. He was not a real ascetic like Mahavira, moving naked in the heat, in the rain, in the cold, in every season, and almost starving. There is a record of his twelve years of spiritual exercises in which it is said that he ate only once every week or every month – only once. Sometimes he would eat after one week, sometimes after two weeks, sometimes after three weeks, sometimes after four weeks – only once. In the whole twelve years he ate only three hundred and sixty-five times; that comes to one year. On average, in twelve days he ate only once. Now this is asceticism! Buddha eats at least once every day; he lives in comfort. He is a good man but not enlightened; not yet enlightened according to the Jainas, he will need at least a few more births to become enlightened. But the Buddhist thinks India is the sacred land because of the birth of Buddha. The same is true about others.Jews think they are the chosen race of God because God himself delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses. In fact, I have heard the story that first God asked other races, “Would you like to have Ten Commandments?” He asked the French and they said, “They are so much against adultery, we don’t want them!” He asked the Hindus and they said, “They are so much against greed, we don’t want them.” And so on and so forth. Finally he asked Moses, “Would you like to have the Ten Commandments?” And Moses said, “How much will they cost?” He did not ask at all about what those Ten Commandments were – a Jew is a Jew! He asked, “How much will they cost?” God said, “Nothing.” Then Moses said, “Yes, you can give me ten, twenty, thirty, as many as you want!”But Jews think they were the chosen people. God has given them the Ten Commandments – and they still think they are the chosen people. They have suffered for three thousand years just because of this stupid idea that they are the chosen people, but they insist that they are the chosen people and Jerusalem is the most sacred place on the earth.And the Christians think in the same way because their religion is born out of the only source, the real source, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. And they make it absolutely clear that he is the only begotten Son of God, otherwise others may start claiming for other sons of God. God has only one son: “One God, one son, one religion” – and that is Christianity.And ask the Mohammedans. They say, “Yes, the Bible was sent by God, Moses gave his first version to the world, but then man progressed and a new, more sophisticated edition was needed; that was given by Jesus. Then the world progressed still more; the last edition is the Koran. And God has said in the Koran that now there will be no more books coming from above – this is the last. And the last is bound to be the best.”Remember how the logic works. The Hindus say, “The Vedas are the first, and the first is bound to be the best.” And Mohammedans say, “The last – and the last is bound to be the best.” But the deep desire is simply one, that “We are the highest, the greatest, the best people in the world.” And we go on finding reasons, excuses, rationalizations, but it is nothing but human stupidity and human ego.Four union members were discussing how smart their dogs were. The first was a member of the Vehicle Builders Union and said his dog could do math’s calculations. His dog was named T-Square and could go to the blackboard and draw a square, a circle, and a triangle with consummate ease.The Amalgamated Metal Workers Union member said his dog was much better. He then told his dog, named Slide Rule, to fetch a dozen biscuits and divide them into four piles. Slide Rule did all this without problems.The Liquor Trades Union member admitted that both dogs were quite good, but he felt his dog could do much better. His dog, named Measure, was told to go and get a stubby of beer and pour seven ounces into a ten ounce glass. The dog did this without a flaw.They turned to the Waterside Workers Union member and asked him, “What can your dog do?”The Waterside Workers member called his dog, named Tea Break, and said to him, “Show these bastards what you can do, mate!”Tea Break went over and ate the biscuits, drank the beer, pissed on the blackboard, screwed the other three dogs, claimed he injured his back, filed a workers’ compensation form, and shot through on sick leave.It is the same, whether about dogs or about religions, it is the same ego persisting, trying to prove that “I am better than you, holier than thou.” It can be allowed by dog owners because they are not much better than dogs, otherwise who bothers to own a dog? But to religious people it cannot be allowed, it cannot be forgiven. Their whole message is of egolessness. Hence to brag and boast that “My religion is the best” is sheer nonsense. It is ridiculous, it is absurd.And once the religions stop boasting about their religions’ greatness, all unnecessary conflicts in the world will disappear. Otherwise small things, just small things, are enough to create quarrels. And even among those who belong to the same religion there are sects and sub-sects.Jainas have two sects: the Digambaras and the Svetambaras. The only difference is that the Svetambaras think Mahavira was not naked, although he appeared naked. His clothes were given by the gods and they were invisible, transparent. All the women here would feel jealous – transparent clothes, and given to Mahavira! They should be given to the modern woman, to the contemporary woman. All that she wants is clothes which don’t hide anything but expose. Now, transparent clothes – a great discovery, given by the gods! So it was only to fools that he appeared to be naked, otherwise he was completely clothed.And the Digambaras say that he was naked. Now, according to the Svetambaras, the Digambaras are fools: they could not see that he was not naked, although he appeared naked. And the Digambaras think that the Svetambaras are just destroying the whole religion because Mahavira’s nakedness proves his innocence, that he was like a child, and they are destroying the whole thing. That is the only difference, the uniqueness. Neither Jesus is naked nor Mohammed nor Moses nor Buddha nor Krishna nor Confucius – nobody else among the great founders of religion is naked. Mahavira’s nakedness is his specialty.This is their fight, and they quarrel and continuously argue. For two thousand years they have been writing against each other and trying to prove who is right. And the point upon which they disagree is so stupid, so childish!What is the difference between Protestants and Catholics? Nothing at all, nothing as far as any essential teaching of Jesus is concerned – just ordinary invented theories, dogmas, theologies. This man Luther was an egoist, as all so-called saints are, and he could not tolerate that the Pope should be the only mediator between humanity and God. He claimed himself to be the mediator, direct, not via the Pope. He received messages direct from God. Why should he receive them from the Pope? If the Pope can receive direct messages, why not Luther? That is the only difference between the Catholics and the Protestants, then everything else is just dust raised, smoke created to confuse people.The essential core of all religions is not different, but different egos are in conflict. If you look at the essential core of meditations you will find only two things: one is meditation, the other is love. Meditation makes you capable of being alone and joyous, with no need of the other, and love makes you capable of sharing your joy with others. Meditation is inner, love is outer. Meditation is of the interiority and love is of the exterior.And because these two sides have to be balanced, meditation and love balance each other. These are the two words, two aspects of the same coin, which are essential to every religion. You can call meditation prayer, you can call meditation by some other name, contemplation; that is immaterial. What name you give to love is immaterial: you can call it prayer, you can call it compassion; that is immaterial.A man who is intelligent will be able to see that all the religions are basically one. And in the future that is the only hope, if we can bring all the religions to this understanding, to this realization, that the essential center is one. On the circumference we may differ, but those differences are only of detail and of no real consequence. But the egos won’t allow this to happen.And religious people cannot be forgiven; everybody else can be forgiven. I can forgive a sinner, but I cannot forgive a saint because the saint’s whole life should be a proof of egolessness, but it is not so. And we have to change this whole situation.We have to bring a religiousness into the world which is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Jaina nor Buddhist – just pure religiousness. That will be the greatest revolution, and humanity is waiting for it.The last question:Osho,The other day you said that Pundit Koka, writer of the Koka Shastra, must have been the discoverer of Coca-Cola. That explains “Coca,” but what about “Cola”?Meditate on this small story:Grandma Zottola who has been voting in America for thirty years finally decided to become a citizen. She arrived in court on the appointed day. The first part of the test was on American history. The judge held up a picture of Abraham Lincoln and asked, “Who is this?”“That’s-a Abraham-a Lincoln-a,” replied Mrs. Zottola. His Honor then held up a picture of George Washington. “And who is this?” he inquired.“That’s-a his wife-a!” answered Grandma with pride.So Coca-Cola has both the names. Coca is the name of Pundit Koka, the writer of the Koka Shastra, and Cola must have been his girlfriend!Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Story entitled:To Walk with One’s Own LightA young rabbi complained to the Rabbi of Rizhyn,“During the hours when I devote myself to my studies,I feel life and light,but the moment I stop studying, it is all gone.What shall I do?”The Rabbi of Rizhyn replied,“That is just as when a man walksthrough the woods on a dark night,and for a time another man accompanies himwho has a lamp, but at the crossroads they partand the first must grope his way on alone.But if a man carries his own light with him,he need not be afraid of any darkness.”There are religions – Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and many more – but they are religions, not the religion. They are the reflections of the moon in many kinds of minds, they are not the real moon. The moon is one, it can be reflected in millions of lakes; reflections differ, the reflected is one.Mind is a mirror. When religion is reflected through the mind, Hinduism is born or Mohammedanism or Judaism. When religion is not reflected – when one comes face to face with reality without any mind whatsoever, when there is no mind between you and the truth – then the religion is born.Hasidism is the religion. Sufism is the religion. Zen is the religion. They differ only in names; otherwise they are all the same. Their language is different but not their content. They all have looked at the moon, but they call it different names, obviously. That is natural, but they have not been looking at the reflections. They don’t believe in creeds, ideologies, scriptures, dogmas, doctrines. They know the truth. When you know the truth, there is no need of scriptures. You carry the scripture in your head when the truth is not known.Theories are substitutes, dead. Truth is always alive, eternally alive. It cannot be confined in words; the message is wordless. You cannot come to it through somebody else because whenever there is a medium, it becomes a reflection. When your own mind creates a reflection, what about the other minds through which you come to know it?One has to come in immediate contact – direct, heart to heart. Nothing should be allowed between the two: your heart and the heart of reality. They should respond in a deep resonance. They should meet and mingle and merge, and there should not be a curtain of words, knowledge, concepts. Only then you know what religion is.Hasidism is religion, Judaism is just a reflection. Or you can say the same thing in other words: Judaism is just the periphery and Hasidism is the core – the very core, the living soul, the very center. Buddhism is the periphery, Zen is the core. Islam is the periphery, Sufism is the core. The core is one, peripheries are millions. Around one center you can draw many concentric circles. You can go on drawing them – the center remains one.We will be talking about Hasidism. Before we enter into the spirit of it, a few remarks are needed as an introduction.Whenever the problem arises, “How to talk about the religion,” it becomes very difficult because whatsoever you say about it is always going to be less than the truth. Whatsoever you say about it is always going to be a reflection: it can indicate, it cannot explain; it can show, but it cannot say. From where to begin to indicate, to show?I would like to start with Samuel Beckett’s beautiful play, Waiting for Godot. It is absurd – as absurd as life is – but the very absurdity of life, if understood deeply, becomes an indication toward something which is beyond and meaningful. Only the beyond is meaningful: that which is beyond you is meaningful, that which is beyond mind is meaningful.Waiting for Godot can be a good beginning for Hasidism, Zen, or Sufism – a very indirect indication because to say something direct about such intimate, deep phenomena is to violate them. So be cautious, move slowly. It is holy ground.The curtain rises: two vagabonds are sitting and waiting for Godot. Who is this Godot? They don’t know, nobody knows. Even Samuel Beckett, when once was asked, “Who is this Godot?” said, “If I had known, I would have said so in the play itself.”Nobody knows – this is a Zen gesture. But the word Godot sounds like God; that is significant. Who knows God? Who has ever known? Who can say, who can claim, “I know”? All knowledge is foolish, and one who claims that he knows God is simply stupid.Godot sounds like God, the unknown: it may be all, it may be nothing. They are waiting for Godot. When they don’t know who this God is, why are they waiting? It is because if you don’t wait for something you fall into the inner emptiness. If you are not waiting for something to happen, you have to face your inner vacuum, the inner nothingness. It is scary, it is deathlike. To avoid it, to escape from it, one projects a dream in the future. That’s how future time is created.Future is not part of time; it is part of mind. Time is always present; it is never past, never future. It is always now. Mind creates future because then one can avoid the “now”: one can look ahead into the clouds, wait for something and pretend that something is going to happen – and nothing happens.One of the most basic truths about human life is that nothing ever happens. Millions of things seem to happen and nothing ever happens. One goes on waiting and waiting and waiting: waiting for Godot. Who is this Godot? – nobody knows. But still one has to project. Other than a dream, how to avoid one’s inner emptiness?There is a Hasidic saying: “Man is made of dust and returns to dust – dust unto dust. Between and betwixt, a drink comes in handy.” It’s really beautiful, “…made of dust, falls one day back unto dust. Between and betwixt, a drink comes in handy.”That drink is desire, projection, ambition, the future, imagination. Otherwise, suddenly you will become aware that you are just dust and nothing else. Hoping for the future, waiting for the future, the dust has a dream around it: it partakes of the glory of the dream, it illuminates. Through the dream you feel you are somebody, and dreaming costs nothing – you can dream! Beggars can dream of being emperors; there is no law against it. To avoid being, a dream of becoming is projected. Those two vagabonds are the whole humanity personified.Man is a vagabond. From where do you come? You can’t say. Where are you going? You can’t answer. Where are you right now, this moment? At the most you can shrug your shoulders. Man is a vagabond, a wanderer with no home in the past, with no home in the future – a wanderer on a continuous wandering, endless. Beckett is right; those two vagabonds are the whole humanity.One is not enough to create a dream. Two are needed because one will be less than enough and the other’s help is needed. That’s why those who want to get out of dreams try to remain alone – start becoming silent, meditate, move to the Himalayas. They try to be alone because when you are alone it is difficult to dream. By and by, again and again, they are thrown back to their reality; the prop is not there, the excuse is not there. The other is needed; that’s why whenever somebody falls in love, suddenly dreams explode in their being. The other is there; now they can dream together and they can help each other to avoid themselves. That’s why there is so much need for love; it is a dream need.Alone, it is very difficult to dream; again and again the dream is broken and you are thrown to the bare naked reality, the emptiness. A lover is needed – somebody to cling to, somebody to look to, somebody to share with, somebody who will patch the gaps, who will bring you out of yourself so that you don’t come face to face with your naked reality.The curtain rises: two vagabonds are sitting, they are waiting for Godot. They don’t ask each other, “Who is this Godot anyhow, anyway?” because to ask will be dangerous. They both know deep down that they are waiting for nobody. It is dangerous, risky to ask, “Who is this Godot?” To raise the very question will be dangerous. The dream will be shattered; they are afraid, they don’t ask.The one question they avoid continuously is “Who is this Godot?” It is the basic question, which should be asked the very first moment one becomes aware. You are waiting for Godot – you ask, “Who is this Godot?” They are touchy about it; they talk about many other things.They ask, “When is he coming? Are you certain he will keep his promise this time? Yesterday he deceived, the day before yesterday he never came and today also, the promised time is passing by and he seems to be not coming.”They look again and again at the road. The road is empty – but they never ask the basic question. They never ask, “Who is this Godot?” They never ask, “When did he promise you to come? Where did you meet him? How do you know he exists?” No, they never touch that.This is how all worldly people live: they never ask the basic questions. It is risky, it is absolutely dangerous. One has to hide, one has to pretend that one knows the basic questions. One goes on always asking secondary questions – remember.When people come to me, it rarely happens that anybody asks a primary question – only secondary. If I try to bring you to the primary, you become scared. You ask futile things which can be answered, but even if answered you are not going to gain anything because they are not basic.It is as if your house is on fire and you ask, “Who has planted these trees?” The question may look relevant, it can be answered, but what will be the outcome of it? If the house is on fire, you have to do something and ask the fundamental.But the vagabonds never ask. Again and again they say, “Again the day is passing and he has not come.” And they help each other: “He must be coming, he may be delayed. There are a thousand and one hazards, but he is a man you can rely upon, he is reliable.” This “he” is simply empty.One day more has passed and he is not coming, and they get fed up. They start saying, “Now it is enough. Enough is enough” – and they are going to leave. They cannot wait anymore – but they never leave! Next day again they are there, sitting in the same place, waiting for Godot again. Yesterday they had decided, very vehemently they had decided now they will leave, “It is finished! One cannot wait for one’s whole life. If he is coming, it’s okay; if he is not coming, that too is okay.”Why don’t they leave? They say again and again that they are leaving. The problem is where to go. You can leave, but where to go? Wherever you will go you will again wait for Godot; a change of place won’t help. You can come to India, you can be in England or in America or you can go to Japan, but what will be the outcome? You will be waiting for Godot. Japan, England, India – it is the same. The change of geography won’t help.That’s why whenever humanity is in deep turmoil, people become travelers. They go from one country to another. They are always on the go, they are always going somewhere. They are not reaching anywhere, but they are always going somewhere. In fact they are not going anywhere, they are only escaping the place where they are. If they are in America, they are going to India, if they are in India they are going to Japan, if they are in Japan they are going to Nepal. They are not going anywhere, they are simply trying to escape from the place where they are. Everywhere they remain the same. Nothing happens because geography has nothing to do with it.Those vagabonds, in a way, are truer, honest. They decide in an angry mood. They curse, they swear, and they say, “Now enough! Tomorrow morning we are not going to be here, waiting for Godot. We will leave!”Tomorrow again, the sun rises and they are in the same place and waiting, and again asking when he is coming. They have completely forgotten that last night they had decided to leave. But where to go?Nowhere to go. This is a second basic truth about humanity. First – nothing ever happens; things appear to happen, but you remain the same.Look into your being – has anything ever happened there? You were a child and you dreamed a lot, and then you became young and you still dreamed a lot, then you became old and you are still dreaming. You dreamed about the riches of this world, now maybe you are dreaming about the riches of another world, but has anything ever happened to you? And don’t be scared because if you are scared you start asking secondary questions.Religion is to ask the fundamental question, the very basic question. To ask it courageously is very significant because in the very asking you are coming nearer to the center.The second truth: you have been going and going and going from one place to another, from one mood to another, from one plane to another, from one level to another level, but you are not reaching anywhere. Have you reached any place? Can you say that you have arrived anywhere? It is always a departure, an arrival never happens. Trains are always leaving, planes are always leaving, and people are ready in the waiting rooms: always departure, never arriving anywhere – the whole absurdity of it, but you never ask. Religion is to ask the fundamental question, the very basic question.These two basic questions, and then the third automatically bubbles up: Who are you? This is because it is not really meaningful to ask who Godot is – that is your creation, your gods are your creations. Forget what the Bible says, that God created man in his own image. It is just the reverse: man created God in his own image – he is Godot, he is your creation, he is your dream. Somehow, to feel that you are significant, full, meaningful, you have created a God in the skies. God has not created the world, God has not created man; man has created the whole concept.A real religion, an authentic religion, does not ask who God is. It asks, “Who are you?” “Who am I?” You have to fall upon your basic source; there only, and there only, the revelation. Jesus, Buddha or Baal Shem Tov – they ask the fundamental questions.The second thing to understand about fundamental questioning is that fundamental questions have no answers. The question is itself the answer. If you ask it authentically, in the very asking it is answered. It is not that you ask, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” and one day you come to know that you are a, b, c, d. No, you never come to know a, b, c, d. By and by, the more you ask it the deeper it goes. One day suddenly the question disappears – you are standing face to face with your own being, you are open to your being. The question has disappeared and there is no answer.Take it as a criterion: if a question can be answered, it is not fundamental. If by asking, a question disappears, it is fundamental; and in the very disappearance you have arrived. For the first time something happens, for the first time you are no longer the same. Godot has not come, but waiting disappears. You don’t wait; you have arrived. Once you arrive, the quality of your being is totally different. Then you can celebrate.How can you celebrate when you have not arrived? You are sad, miserable. How can you dance when the goal is very far away, so distant that there seems to be no possibility that you will ever be capable of reaching it? How can you be happy? How can you enjoy? How can joy happen to you? You are still on the way; the seed is still a seed and the flower is far away. No, it is not possible.When the seed becomes the flower, there is joy, there is delight. Once you understand who you are, once you go deep into your emptiness and are not scared, once you accept the inner death and you are not trying to escape through dreams and projections – once you accept that you are dust unto dust and between these two happenings there is nothing, a deep emptiness – you have arrived at what Buddha calls nirvana. This is what Hasids call God. It is not your Godot.Jews have always insisted that the name of God should not be uttered because once you utter it you falsify it. It is not utterable, it is inexpressible. You can contain it in your heart but you cannot say it. You can become it but you cannot express it. Jews are perfectly right in their feeling about it. God is not a being, it is a phenomenon – so vast, so infinite, that no word can contain it. Only the infinite heart can contain it, the infinite inner emptiness can contain it.When you enter within yourself, you will feel you are entering a space where you are going to be lost. Just as a drop of water entering the ocean is lost, you will be lost – that is the fear. That is why you become afraid of death and you start dreaming – future, projections. First, entry into your being is always like death; it is a crucifixion, it is a cross. But if you are courageous enough…Cowards can never become religious. Only very rare courageous souls, who can take the risk of being lost, arrive. You have to pay for it, and nothing less will do. You have to lose yourself to gain it.Once you are ready to enter the emptiness, suddenly the fear disappears. The same energy becomes a celebration; you can dance because that which appeared as emptiness was an interpretation of the mind. It was not empty; it was so full that the mind could not understand the fullness of it.Mind is impotent, mind is negative, mind is empty. It understands the language of emptiness. If something is so full, then mind cannot understand it. It is just as if you have lived in darkness for your whole life, then suddenly you are brought out into the sunlight and your eyes go blind. It is so dazzling, the light is so much, you cannot open your eyes. You see darkness. Standing before the sun, you are standing in darkness.You have lived with the mind up to now. Mind means future, mind means that which is not. Mind means dream, appearance, illusion, maya. Maya means “a magical world.” You create your own world and you live in it. You create your hallucinations and you live in them. Your hell and your heaven – all are mental.Once you enter your inner being, the mind cannot understand. It is totally unaware of the new language, the new territory is absolutely unknown to it. The mind cannot cope with it. It simply becomes empty; the thing is too much. The light is so bright and dazzling, the mind becomes empty and blank. You become afraid and you escape. Then you create a false god, a Godot.A Godot is a false god. It may be wealth, it may be prestige and power, it may be politics, it may be ego, it may be a god in heaven – but it is all Godot. You created it. You don’t know what is; not knowing what is, you create your own dream around it. Authentic religion is an inquiry into what is, inauthentic religion is inventive; authentic religion is a discovery, inauthentic religion is an invention.Mind invents, and mind is the barrier. And once the mind invents, it creates great philosophies – Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism. All the great mystics – Hasids, Zen Masters, Sufis – are rebellious. They have to be. A religious man is a rebellious man; there is no other way. Religion and rebellion are two aspects of the same coin.There are religions of Godots – churches, mosques, temples organized around a creed. Organized because of the fear of man, organized because of the mind escaping from the inner emptiness. Doctrines, dogmas to fill you – these are all barriers.A Jesus, a Buddha, or a Baal Shem Tov is by necessity rebellious. I don’t call them revolutionaries, I call them rebellious – and the difference has to be understood well.A revolutionary is one who wants to change the society, who wants to change the government, who wants to change the structure – economic, political, religious. A revolutionary is not spiritual, he is not concerned with his own change. He thinks that if others change then everything will be perfectly okay. A revolutionary lives in an illusion. All revolutions have failed, and failed utterly and ultimately. Revolution cannot succeed. The very attitude is wrongly oriented – it is an effort to change the other.A rebellious man is not concerned with the structure of the society, state, government – no. He is concerned with his own being, he is individual. Revolutionaries make parties; a rebellious man is alone, he is his own revolution. Wherever he moves, a revolution moves around him. His very being is a transforming force.A Jesus, a Buddha, a Zarathustra – these are rebellious people. They have changed their own being: they have arrived. You can see it; even if you watch them from the outside, you can see the serenity, the calm, the subtle joy – the way they breathe, the way they move. You can watch, you can feel, you can hear the sound that surrounds them. The subtle ripples of their inner calm. If you open yourself, it will be reaching to you.A rebellion has happened, the state of being is totally new. The old is dead and the new is born. This is the meaning of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. It is a metaphor; don’t try to find history in it. Once you take metaphors as history, you are behaving very foolishly. It is a beautiful, poetic metaphor. Christ is crucified and on the third day he is resurrected: a new life – an immortal now, an eternal now.If you move withinward and come across the inner emptiness, you will die and there will be a gap. The three days are symbolic; there will be a gap, you will lie dead for three days just like Jesus in the cave. Just a passage is needed so the old can disappear completely. Remember: completely, totally – not even a single fragment of it should remain because that can poison the new. That’s why a gap is needed: so the old is completely gone and the new enters – there is no continuity in them. There is no continuity at all. This is a discontinuity. Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, died; and then after three days Christ revived – the son of God, the new.Ordinary religion is a pseudo phenomenon: beware of it. You can study, and while you study you may feel good, while you study you may forget yourself. You can get into subtle theories, and there may be a certain intellectual enjoyment, an intellectual delight. You can move into rituals and there may be a certain intoxication in it. If you repeat a mantra continuously, you will feel intoxicated. It is creating an inner alcohol through sound. Or you can move into drugs, then you change your chemistry and for a few moments you attain to a height which is false, which is not a real height because you have not grown toward it. The chemistry has pushed you.This has to be understood well because the chemistry of the body can be changed in many ways. It can be changed by drugs – LSD, marijuana, and others; it can be changed by old methods – by too much oxygen in the body. You can inhale too much oxygen, it can change your chemistry. By fasting – if you fast it changes your chemistry. Even standing on your head changes your chemistry because the blood now circulates more in the brain. You can change your chemistry in many ways. Drugs are the latest, but all these methods are also drugs which change your chemistry – maybe better than the psychedelics, but still the same.By rituals, by study, by belief, by auto-hypnosis, you can attain to a few glimpses which will be false – as if you are fast asleep and in a dream you see the sun rising. In a dream the sun is not real; the whole phenomenon is hallucinatory, and when you awaken it is a dark night.The false religion – the church, the organization – has always been supplying people with intoxicants, drugs. They may be against the modern drugs, but they are not against drugs. They are always for the old, the old is always better for them.I am against all drugs, old and new. I am even against Yoga because that too is a way to change the chemistry. Then what to do? Unless you attend to your own growth, this story will remain true. I will read it:To Walk with One’s Own LightA young rabbi complained to the Rabbi of Rizhyn,“During the hours when I devote myself to my studies,I feel life and light,but the moment I stop studying, it is all gone.What shall I do?”It is possible. If you listen to me, it may happen: listening to me you may sometimes feel light and life because even listening to me changes the chemistry of the body. Listening to my voice, the rhythm – continuously being attentively alert – your body chemistry is being changed. You go on looking at me, a subtle hypnosis happens. You go on listening to me, your own thinking stops. You feel life, you feel light. But don’t depend on it and don’t take it that this is something that you have achieved.I ask people, “Which meditation is suiting you more?” Many of them say, “The morning lecture – when we listen to you, that meditation goes deepest.” But that is a sort of hypnosis. Beware! This may have happened to the young rabbi: During the hours when I devote myself to my studies, I feel life and light, but the moment I stop studying, it is all gone.When you leave this hall and you go off on your own, how long does the deep meditation that you felt with me last? It will be gone. Before you have reached the gate it is no longer with you, and it is good that it is gone. Otherwise you will remain always illusioned. It is good that you cannot carry it home, it is good that you cannot depend on it; otherwise you are such that you will make a treasure of it and you will forget that this is not your own.Unless religion is your own it has not happened. This is one of the greatest things to be continuously remembered; there is every tendency in the mind to forget it because it is so cheap and easy.Listening to me, or reading the Gita, Talmud or the Bible, you are taken out of your mind. But a foreign element has been functioning on you. Maybe the foreign element is Jesus, Buddha, or me – but somebody outside you has been pulling you up. Once he is not there you are thrown back to your reality, and it almost always happens that you fall back even deeper than before.It is just like you are walking on a road: the night is dark and a car passes by – a strong light for a moment, the headlight of the car dazzles your eyes – then the car is gone. The darkness is even darker, it was not so dark before.Listening to me or reading the Gita, Koran, Talmud, a car passes by with strong headlights. You are dazzled for a moment, you are taken out of the vast dark night that is surrounding you. But the car goes by – the Buddha passes, the Jesus passes – suddenly you are in a deeper darkness than before.By the way, I would like you to know that most mystics are born in India. That’s why India is in so much darkness. So many people have dazzled the mind: a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna – thousands of them, a great procession again and again – and they enchanted people. People became hypnotized, and when they passed they fell into a darker night than ever before.Go and watch the Indian mind. You will not find a more rotten thing anywhere in the world. It is completely rotten, to the roots. The reason is so much light – and not that much capacity to absorb it because the capacity to absorb light comes only when you have grown.Don’t look at the sun; it can burn your retina. One has to learn it, and by learning I mean one has to become capable. The eyes have to become stronger and stronger and stronger, and then you can look at the sun and it will be helpful. It can be tremendously helpful.Now even scientists agree that the third eye center – they have their own scientific names, that doesn’t matter; some gland, pineal or something – feeds on light. If you look at a lamp, a flame, your third eye starts functioning: it feeds on light. That’s why it is difficult to sleep in the day because the light is there and the third eye goes on functioning and trembling. That’s why it is difficult to sleep in the night when the light is on; you would like darkness because the third eye goes on functioning. The third eye’s function is consciousness, hence the Hindu methods of tratak, of looking at a flame. If you look at a flame long – for a few months, one hour every day – your third eye starts functioning perfectly. You become more alert, more light-filled.The word tratak comes from a root which means tears. So you have to look at the flame until tears start flowing from the eyes. Go on staring, unblinking: the third eye starts vibrating. But don’t look at the sun! One has to come by and by to the sun. If one can look at the sun for thirty or forty minutes without burning his retina, immediate enlightenment is possible because the third eye feeds on the light.When you look at me, suddenly there is a little light inside. You listen to me, you become attentive; when you become attentive your third eye becomes focused. You look at me, you watch me, or you read a book – not an ordinary book, a book which has come from a man who has attained, a Torah… Thousands of years have passed, but the man who uttered those words or wrote those words, if he had known, still a certain vibration continues. You become attentive, you feel light, and whenever you feel light you feel life. This combination has to be remembered: whenever you feel dead you will feel dark, whenever you feel life you will feel light.There is a saying of Jesus: “Come follow me. My burden is light.” Ordinarily, Christians have been interpreting it “My burden is not heavy.” That’s not true. When Jesus says, “My burden is light,” he simply means light. He does not mean “not heavy.” “Come follow me. My burden is light. That is the only burden I carry – the light.”Light has no weight. That’s why the secondary meaning, not heavy. Light has no weight, it is the most weightless thing in the world, the most immaterial matter. Whenever you feel light within, suddenly you feel an upsurge of life energy.The young rabbi said:“During the hours when I devote myself to my studies,I feel life and light,but the moment I stop studying, it is all gone.What shall I do?”The Rabbi of Rizhyn replied,“That is just as whena man walks through the woods on a dark night,and for a time another man accompanies himwho has a lamp, but at the crossroads they partand the first must grope his way on alone.But if a man carries his own light with him,he need not be afraid of any darkness.”I meet you on the road, I have a lamp; suddenly you are no longer in the dark. But the lamp is mine; soon we will part because your way is your way and mine is mine, and each individual has an individual way to reach to his destiny. For a while you forget all about darkness. My light functions for me as well as for you; but soon the moment comes, we have to part. I follow my way, you go on your own. Now again you will have to grope in the darkness and the darkness will be darker than before.So don’t depend on others’ light. It is even better to grope in darkness – but let the darkness be yours. Somebody else’s light is not good. Even one’s own darkness is better: at least it is one’s own, at least it is your reality. If you live in your own darkness, the darkness will become less and less dark; you will be able to grope, you will learn the art, you will not fall.Blind people don’t fall. Try walking with closed eyes; you will be in difficulty, you cannot walk even a hundred feet. But a blind man can walk the whole way, the blindness is his. With closed eyes you are borrowing blindness; it is not yours.Even one’s own darkness is good; one’s own errors are better than other people’s virtues. Remember this because the mind is always tempted to imitate, to borrow. That which is significant cannot be borrowed. No, you cannot enter the kingdom of God on borrowed money – there is no way. You cannot bribe the guards because there are no guards, and you cannot enter from a thief’s door because there are no doors. You have to walk and through walking create your path. Ready-made paths are not available.That’s what false religion goes on teaching to people: “Come! Here is a superhighway. Be a Christian and you need not worry. We take the whole burden, then we are responsible.” Jesus says, “Be yourself,” but the Pope of the Vatican says, “Follow Christianity.”All Christianity is against Christ, all churches are against religion. They are the citadels of anti-religion and anti-Christs because those who have known have emphasized that you should be yourself. There is no other way of being; all else is false, dishonest, insincere, imitation, ugly. The only beauty possible is to be yourself – to be yourself in such purity and innocence that nothing foreign enters you.Walk in your own darkness because walking, groping, by and by you will find your own light also. When you have your darkness, the light is not very far away. When the night is dark, the morning is close – just reaching.Once you become dependent on borrowed light you are lost. Darkness is never as dangerous as borrowed light. Knowing is good, but knowledge is not good. Knowing is yours, knowledge is others: That is just as when a man walks through the woods on a dark night, and for a time another man accompanies him who has a lamp, but at the crossroads they part and the first must grope his way on alone.Buddha was dying. He walked for forty years with a lamp and thousands followed him. Now he is going to die. One morning he said, “This is my last day. If you have to ask something, you can ask.”The moment has come, the crossroad has come; now he will go on his own way. Suddenly, infinite darkness surrounded everybody. Ananda, Buddha’s chief disciple, started crying like a child, beating his heart, tears coming down – almost mad.Buddha said, “What are you doing, Ananda?”Ananda said, “What will we do now? You were here, we followed in your light; everything was safe and secure. We have completely forgotten that darkness exists: following you, everything was light. Forty years – and now you are leaving?“And you are leaving us in total darkness. We were better before, before we met you, because at least we were attuned to darkness. Now that tuning is also lost. Don’t leave us in darkness. We could not attain to enlightenment while you were here, now what will happen when you are gone? We are lost forever.” He started crying and weeping again.Buddha said, “Listen. For forty years you walked in my light and you could not attain to your own light. Do you think if I am alive for forty years more you will attain to your own light? Even four thousand or four million years – the more you walk in a borrowed light, the more you imitate, the more you will lose. It is better I should go.”The last words on Buddha’s lips were. “Be a light unto yourself.” He died with this uttering, “Be a light unto yourself – Appo deepo bhava.”The story is beautiful: the next day Ananda became enlightened. He could not become enlightened for forty years – and he loved Buddha tremendously. He had almost become a shadow to him and he could not attain. He relied on the borrowed light too much. It was so beautiful and so effortlessly available, who bothers? And within twenty-four hours he became enlightened. What happened?Twenty-four hours of deep crying and facing the darkness and the reality and one’s own helplessness – those twenty-four hours must have been so long for him. It was the darkest period, so painful; in deep anguish and agony. He passed that hell. It is said that for twenty-four hours he was lying down under a tree as if dead, his whole body shaking, tears continuously flowing. People thought that he had gone mad or that he wouldn’t be able to survive without Buddha, but after twenty-four hours he was a totally different man.He opened his eyes and people could not believe – those eyes had the same glimmer as Buddha’s eyes; his body had the same beauty, the same fragrance. He walked like Buddha. He has attained to his own light.The Rabbi of Rizhyn replied… “But if a man carries his own light with him, he need not be afraid of any darkness.” The whole world need not be filled with light for you to walk, just your own heart. A little flame and that is enough because that will light enough path for you to walk; nobody walks more than one step at a time. A small flame in the heart – of awareness, mindfulness, dhyana, meditation – a little flame and that is enough. It lights your path a little. Then you walk, then again the light goes further.Says Lao Tzu, “By taking one step at a time one can walk ten thousand miles.” And God is not that far away!Godot is very far away – you will never reach him. You will have to wait and wait and wait. It is a waiting. Godot is a waiting; infinite because it is just imagination. He is not there, it is just like the horizon: it appears. The sky meeting the earth appears to be just a few miles away: you think a few hours’ journey and you will reach the horizon. You will never reach, the earth never meets the sky anywhere. You can go around the earth again and again, you can encircle it millions of times, and you will never come across the horizon. It will always be there, just ahead of you, waiting for you.Godot is a horizon, it is a waiting: it fills your emptiness, deceives you – that is the only deception. But God is not far away. God is exactly where you are right now.In the Upanishads is a saying, “God is far and God is near also.” If I am to translate this, then I will say, “Godot is far. God is near, always.” He is herenow. Right this moment who surrounds you? Right this moment who throbs within you? Right this moment who is talking to you and who is listening to it?God is life. God is this oceanic energy. Somewhere it is a tree and a flower, and somewhere a stream and a song, somewhere a bird, somewhere a rock, somewhere you and somewhere me.William Blake was asked once, “Who is God?”He said, “Jesus, you and me.”All is God. God is just a name for all. God is not someone sitting there, the suprememost manager or something like that. God is all: you are in it, it is in you. God is near. Only a little flame, a little light inside is needed, then you live for the first time. Otherwise you simply desire, you never live. You simply hope to live somewhere, sometime – when Godot comes.Living is possible only in this moment because there is no other moment. When I am saying these things, don’t start thinking about them because thinking is a process and leads you into the future. Listen to me and realize it. It is not a question of thinking; I am not talking about any hypothesis, I am simply telling you a fact. I am not giving you a doctrine, I am just indicating what is the case. You need not think about it. You can listen to it and if you have listened to it well, attentively, the realization of it is immediate.You will lose track again and again because it will be my light, but once you know that light is possible, you become confident that your light is also possible. If it can happen to this man, why not to you? My bones are just like yours, my blood just like yours, my flesh just like yours. I am as much dust as you, and this dust will fall unto dust as your dust is going to fall. If something of the beyond has become possible for this man, you can be confident, there is no need to hesitate – you can also take the jump.With me, in these days while you will be with me, I will try to walk with you with my light. Remember: delight in it, but don’t depend on it. Read the Torah, read the Bible – delight, they are really beautiful – but don’t depend. Delight so that your own urge, your own desire, takes an urgency, an intensity to arrive, to arrive where you already are. It is not going somewhere else. It is being there, where you are.Religion is not a goal, it is a revelation. Religion is not a desire, it is reality. Just a little turning – and I say just a little – and everything becomes possible, life becomes possible. Otherwise you will live empty and waiting.Don’t be the vagabonds of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. As it is, you have already waited long; now be finished with it. Start living! Why wait? For whom are you waiting? Who is this Godot anyhow?This moment the whole existence crosses you. This moment all that is in this existence culminates in you. This moment you are a crescendo – delight in it.If you can understand that you are the goal, then it will be very simple to understand this small anecdote – very significant and penetrating. You are the goal, you are the way, you are the light, you are the whole. That is the meaning when we say, “You are holy.”If you have come to me, remember: let me be just an encouragement, an encouragement to lead you to yourself. Allow me and help me so that I can throw you back to your own innermost being. That is the meaning of a master: a master helps you to be yourself.I have no pattern to give you, no values, no morality. I have only freedom to give to you so that you can flower and you can become a lotus, a light, and life eternal.Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Even the words of someone as totally against ideology as yourself contain a continuous, if subtle ideology. Is it impossible to talk seriously without it?It is not only impossible to talk seriously about it, it is impossible to talk about it – seriously is not the question. Just to talk about it is impossible because talk implies language.Language has a pattern, language itself is an ideology. To use language is to fall into the trap of it. Language has a logic, a system, a substratum. Once you talk about something, you have entered into the world of ideology. But to talk is a necessary evil, it has to be tolerated.I would like not to talk. I would like to convey and commune directly, without language. But then it will not reach you, the silence will not be understood. So I have to use language, knowing well that this is a necessary evil, knowing well that you have to transcend it, knowing well that which is worth saying cannot be said in it – knowing well that the moment you utter a truth, the very uttering falsifies it. Before you become capable of understanding silence, that communion from heart to heart is not possible. So I talk to help you toward silence.By my talking you will not understand silence, but by my talk you may have a taste, a fragrance. By my talk you may be able to listen to the silence that is bound to be there between two words, the silence that is bound to be there between two sentences. Whatsoever I say is not important. The gap between is important.Don’t pay too much attention to what I say. The words are like two banks of the river. The banks are not the river, don’t get too attached to the banks – they won’t quench your thirst. Forget the banks, just look in between. The gap, the silence between two words is the river. That’s what I am trying to convey to you.I know you listen to the words, you don’t listen to the silence. The gestalt has to be changed. But one day it happens; if you go on listening, one day it happens. Suddenly one day, unaware you are caught. Suddenly, for the first time words are no longer important, but the being that I am touches you. The ears go on listening to the words but the heart is moving in some unknown direction. It cannot be planned, but it happens.That’s why in the East satsang has been praised so much. Satsang means to be with a master. When he speaks, to be with him; when he sits, to be with him; when he looks at you, to be with him; when he does not look at you, then to be with him – just to have a feeling flow between the one who knows and the one who is seeking. One day something tunes in – and that day is unpredictable, nothing can be done about it. The more you do anything about it, the more you will be missing it.So just go on listening to my words, but by and by shift your emphasis to the silent gaps. Sometimes I am not saying anything, sometimes I just look at you. There – exactly, precisely there – is the message, and if you listen to that message it is not ideology. It is not even anti-ideology because if something is anti-ideological, it is again an ideology. To be “anti” is to be in the world of the idea. I am not against ideology. How can I commit that sin? I am beyond, not against.Ideology, anti-ideology – both are left in the valley. I have moved to a different world – a peak which is beyond. I am not teaching you anti-ideology. I am not teaching you anything that belongs to the world of concepts and ideas. I am teaching you me: I am teaching you a way of being, a different quality of existence.Listen to my words, but don’t only listen to my words. Shift – one day you will understand even that which cannot be said through words. Then there may be glimpses even through words. Once you can feel my silence, my words will take another significance. Then they will not be just words, just sounds – no. Then they become a flowering.It is a very difficult job to talk about silence. In Zen they say it is like selling water by the river.The river is flowing, but you are blind and I have to sell water – and of course you pay for it and the river is absolutely free. It is like watering the garden when the rain is falling. Or as in old Indian scriptures it is said, “It is putting legs on a snake to help him walk!” Foolish, stupid, because the snake walks perfectly well without any legs. In fact, legs will hinder. What to do? The snake goes on saying, “Help me!” Or, as it is said in old Taoist scriptures, “To talk about truth is like putting a hat on a man who is already wearing one” – to put another hat on top of the hat, useless.So what am I doing here? I am just giving you patience, the capacity to wait, watch – the capacity for you to be with me. In the beginning it is like an effort, but one day suddenly it happens and it is no longer any effort: you are here effortlessly. Then you understand me whether I say something or not; then you understand me whether I am here in this chair or not, whether I am in this body or not. But before that supreme flowering of your silence happens, I have to go on beating around the bush, around and around.And the second thing about the first question: I am not a serious man. I look like one, but the appearance is deceptive. I’m not a serious man, I’m absolutely nonserious – and that is the only way the enlightened consciousness can be.Seriousness is mundane, it is of the marketplace. You find it in the churches, in fact too much, because your churches are nothing but part of the marketplace, part of the world of commodities.I have heard a Jewish joke…A Jew came to the synagogue with a dead cat and he told the rabbi that he wanted to bury it in the Jewish burial ground.The rabbi was aghast, horrified. He said, “What! You, a good Jew, and asking your rabbi to bury a dirty, dead cat in the holy grounds? No, never! Certainly not! Absolutely not!”The man stood up and said, “Then I will not be able to give you the ten thousand pounds the cat has left in the will.”Suddenly the rabbi jumped and he said, “Wait – don’t try to leave you fool! Why didn’t you tell me before that the cat was a Jew?”Your synagogues, your churches, your temples – they belong to the marketplace. They have to be serious.The world is much too serious, and it has to be because death always hangs over it. You may avoid, you may not look at it, but in the world death is always around – you have to be serious. Even if you laugh, your laughter has tears within it; even if you smile, your smile is not total – it is painted, forced, it is not an inner flow and glow. No, it is not. In the marketplace you have learned seriousness too much and then your churches become serious, your gods cannot smile.Christians say Jesus never laughed. It looks absolutely foolish, the whole idea. Jesus never laughed? Then who will laugh? If even Jesus cannot laugh, then laughter becomes a sheer impossibility. In fact, only he must have laughed. Only he can laugh and enjoy it.In India we don’t take the world seriously. We call it God’s leela, God’s play: a joke at the most, a story, a drama told beautifully – but nothing serious about it.I am not serious and whatsoever I am saying, I am saying in a very nonserious mood. Of course I am sincere, but not serious. Whatsoever I am saying, I really want to convey it to you. But if it is not conveyed I don’t feel frustrated; if it is conveyed I don’t feel proud. If I fail utterly or I succeed absolutely, both are the same. That’s why I say I am not serious.You may be here seriously, but by and by I will persuade you not to be serious because seriousness is the shadow of the ego. Without the ego you can’t be serious. Seriousness simply disappears along with the ego because death disappears with the ego.Only the ego dies, not you.You have never died, you have never been born. You have been eternally here and you will be eternally here. You are part of this whole existence. You cannot be separated from it.Sometimes you may have been in the trees, you may have been a tree. Sometimes in the birds, and you may have been a bird, and sometimes a rock, and sometimes a stream falling from the Himalayas – millions of ways, millions of forms, millions of names. Yes, you have existed in many, many ways. It was never that you were not, it will never be that you will not be; the form changes, the formless goes on and on and on. There is nothing to be serious about. But the ego is afraid, apprehensive: death is coming. The ego is a weight, the ego cannot laugh.My whole effort is to create such a deep laughter in you that the laughter remains. You disappear; the dance remains, the dancer disappears. Then life is tremendously beautiful – and only then is life beautiful.So don’t think about me as you do of other religious people who are very serious. If they are serious, they cannot be religious – that is my criterion. If your saints cannot laugh, they may be suppressed sinners at the most because a suppressed person cannot laugh. He is always afraid; with laughter many other things may escape. He has to suppress everything: the anger, the sex, the greed, the hatred, the love. Now he cannot allow only laughter to escape – this is a deep secret: either you are totally expressive or you are not. You cannot be part-expressive. Your so-called saints have to suppress everything totally. To me a saint is one who has no suppression in his being: When he laughs, he laughs; his whole being is involved – ripples of laughter.Remember this, and this will be very, very meaningful to remember in reference to Hasidism. Hasidism has created the greatest tradition of laughing saints. That is one of the most beautiful contributions of Hasidism.A Hasid sage is not one who has renounced the world. He lives in the world because to renounce looks much too serious. He does not go away from the marketplace, he goes above. He lives where you live but he lives in a different way. He exists by your side, but simultaneously exists somewhere else. He has joined the sansar, the world, and sannyas, the renunciation.When I give sannyas to you, I am doing Hasidic work. I don’t tell you to move to the Himalayas because that will be a choice, and a choice is always serious because you have to leave something. You have to cut off a part of your being, you have to cripple yourself, and you choose and you move in a certain direction – the whole is not accepted. If you live in the world, then you reject renunciation, sannyas; then you reject meditation. You say, “They are not for us. We are worldly people.” Then one day you get fed up with the world, you leave the world. Now you are afraid to come into the world because now you say, “We are unworldly people, we live outside the world.” But in both the ways you remain half-hearted, you are never total.A Hasid sage is total. He lives in the world, lives as ordinarily as everybody else – has no madness, megalomania about his extraordinariness. A Hasid rabbi is absolutely ordinary and that is his extraordinariness. He has no need to show it: he is.There are other saints who have a need to show that they are special. That very need shows that deep down they are very ordinary because this is part of the ordinary mind: to be always in need, always expecting, always wanting people to feel and think about you that you are not ordinary. This is a very ordinary need. Only somebody who is really extraordinary can be ordinary because he has no need, no need to convince others: “I am special. I am!”Once I was traveling in a train. In my compartment three other people were there. They talked about a thousand and one things. The journey was long and they needed to be occupied. Then their talk drifted toward the subject of happiness.One of them was a very rich man and he said, “I am happy because I have attained all the riches that I needed. I have succeeded, I have arrived.”I looked at the man’s face – no sign of any arrival, a sort of nervousness. In fact, the way he was saying with such confidence was nothing but to hide the deep nervousness. I could see he was trembling inside like a leaf in a strong wind – but pretending.He said, “I have attained to happiness,” but his eyes were desert-like: no happiness, no greenery. He was almost a dead person, shrunken, wasted.The other man belonged to a political party and he said, “I am also happy because the party needs me. Without me they cannot win the coming election. I am needed, that’s my happiness.”One thinks because he has accumulated many riches he is happy. What have riches to do with happiness? Riches are outside, happiness is an inner flowering. A poor man can be happy; it has no intrinsic relationship with poverty or riches. A beggar like Buddha can be happy. A man who says that he is happy because he has attained to many riches is just befooling himself, pretending.The other man said, “I am happy because I am needed.”A certain significance comes to you when you are needed; you think you are essential to somebody, to some political organization, to some religious sect. But a man who is happy is not dependent on others because if the political party can find a better man than him, or a worse man than him – which is the same in politics – then he will feel frustrated. Happiness never feels frustrated. The other is not happiness, it is covering the reality by a false notion.Then there was a woman. She said she was also happy. She had five children, beautiful people, all growing – her hopes were fulfilled in them. Her husband loved her deeply and he had always remained faithful to her. The woman must have been beautiful when she was young. Now near about fifty – just a skeleton, a memory, a memory of the past, eyes shrunken, the whole life gone, death approaching – she was clinging to the children; they would fulfill her hopes. She could not fulfill them herself, they would fulfill. Now she would live through their ambitions.Happiness never lives though anybody else. It needs nobody. It is enough unto itself. She insisted that her husband had been faithful to her, but I could see that whatsoever she was saying she didn’t believe it – her eyes were showing something else. In fact, whenever you talk about how your husband is faithful, you are suspicious. Or if you say that your wife is faithful, the doubt has entered: faith does not know about doubt and does not know about faith. Faith is true faith when you don’t know it; otherwise the worm of doubt is somewhere eating it, deep down.Then they all turned toward me. They said, “What about you?”I told them, “I have never tried to be happy and I don’t belong to any organization, religious or otherwise. Nobody needs me; if somebody needs me, that may be his problem – it is not mine. I don’t need to be needed, that’s not my need. And as far as success goes, I am a failure, my hands are absolutely empty, and I don’t think in terms of faith – the very language is alien to me – because to talk about faith is to hide doubt. In fact, I have never been deeply interested in happiness because I am already happy. I just am happy – there is no cause to it!”If there is a cause to happiness, you are ready to be unhappy any moment, you are just on the verge because a cause can disappear and the happiness will disappear. Unless you are just happy for no visible or invisible cause, unless you are just happy – unreasonably, irrationally, illogically, madly – you are not happy.A happy person cannot be serious. An unhappy person is serious because he is missing something. He is seeking and searching, always tense, moving, going somewhere: waiting for Godot. That is the nature of an unhappy person.I have arrived so deeply that I don’t even feel the arrival. In fact I had never departed. I’m not serious. Appearances may be deceptive: you may not find me laughing, but that is only because when you are very serious then you need laughter also. When you are simply happy, seriousness disappears, laughter disappears. Your laughter is medicinal: you are too serious, you need to laugh.It may be that Jesus never laughed, but the way Christians interpret it is wrong. I can conceive that he never laughed – possible because he was laughter! He was laughing so deeply and so continuously, it was not an event, it was a process. It was not something that happens and then dissolves. It was ongoing. If you are really happy, there is no need to laugh and there is no need to weep. Both will disappear.I am not serious, I am just celebrating. When I talk to you, I am not giving you an ideology, a philosophy, a religion – no. I simply want to share my celebration.Shift from the words to silence. Don’t listen to my words, listen to me. There, precisely there, is the message.The second question:Osho,If you help me to find the question, will it help me find the answer?There will be no need then. If you know the question, the answer is found. The problem is not with the answer, the problem is with the question. You don’t know the right question, that’s why you go on and on; and seeking and searching, and the right answer never happens. It cannot happen because you have missed the very beginning – the first step has gone wrong.One needs to find the right question – your question. The question should not be of somebody else, it should not be borrowed. You should not copy others’ questions, you should not repeat. You are so imitative that even with questions you repeat others, you reflect others. How can your search be true and how can you achieve? It is impossible when the search itself is imitative. Ask your question.My whole effort here is to help you to ask the right, the fundamental question of your being, of your innermost core. Questions are not many, remember. The basic question is absolutely one, that’s why the basic answer is absolutely one.You can ask a thousand and one wrong questions, you cannot ask more than one right question because that right question will have all the questions in it. It will be the essence of all your anxiety, of all your anguish. That question is not going to be theological, it is going to be existential. It will not come by reading, it will not come by going to the universities. It will come if you start encountering yourself. If you start looking within your own being, it will come then. It is already there. You have brought it with you. It is you, a seed inside.When you have found the right question… That’s what I help you to find, not the right answer; that I leave to foolish people. Then you can go to the priests, they have right answers; you can go to the professors, they have right answers. I have only right questioning, and once the right question is there, you need not seek the answer because the right question itself carries its answer. They are always together.Once you can ask a true, authentic question that comes from your being and not from the mind, immediately you will be surprised. Following the question comes your answer. It has to be so. If the question is yours, how can anybody else’s answer quench it? The thirst is yours, nobody else’s water is going to quench it; you have to go deep within yourself. Find the question and you have already found the answer.That’s very difficult and arduous because you are in a hurry and you say, “If you have the answer, please give it to us. When you have the answer, why force us to go and inquire for the question first?” You would like it ready-made. That’s not possible. That’s how you have been deceived – and you have been deceiving yourself. That’s how religions are born: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism.Mahavira found his question and he found his answer, then people gathered around. Greedy people – who had not even looked into their questioning, who had not even inquired – seeing the possibility that this man had found the answer, gathered around. They started clinging to the answer. It is absolutely absurd. You can make that answer a part of your memory, but it won’t help.Let me tell you a story…It happened that a certain man was fascinated by the river that flowed by his village. He wanted to go downstream to the very end to see where the river fell into the ocean. Of course, he started studying old scriptures to find if anybody had ever gone down the river. Many people had gone – in many centuries, many people had been fascinated – but he was puzzled because their answers differed. He could not believe that the river is one. Somebody says something – that after five miles the river takes a turn toward the right, and another says after exactly five miles the river takes the opposite turn.Seeing much confusion in the scriptures, he started searching for people. Maybe somebody was alive who had gone down the river. Many people pretended because it feels so good to advise. To become a guru is such a deep desire in everybody and it feels good to the ego. Everybody becomes a wise man whenever it is a question to advise somebody else. In his whole life he may have proved a fool, but whenever somebody else is in difficulty he becomes a wise man with plenty of advice. Of course nobody takes it, and it is good that nobody takes anybody’s advice.Many advisers and many pretenders were in the town and the man visited them. Then he was even more confused because everybody had his own idea. He gathered much material, he drew a map. On paper everything looked perfectly beautiful; on paper it always is. That’s how every scripture is beautiful – the Gita, Koran, Talmud – on paper. The man had dropped all contradictory things; he had made a consistent whole of the whole thing. But now this consistent river was just a mental concept.Then he was very happy. With a plan, with the map, he started moving down the river. Immediately problems started arising because he had planned to turn, after five miles, to the left – but the river didn’t follow the map. He was puzzled and he was afraid and he became scared. Now the whole effort to gather wisdom had been futile, and the river wouldn’t listen! No river listens to your maps.He became worried that now he was moving into the unknown, dangers might be ahead. But he had to move with the river. If the river couldn’t move with the map, what to do? You have to move with the river. He couldn’t sleep the whole night.Next morning he was looking for a village on the bank of the river – it never turned up. He was hungry, now he was at a loss: what to do? Were all those scriptures false? No, they were not false, but a river is a river: it had been changing its course. Once a village may have existed, villages exist and disappear; the river goes on changing its course. Sometimes it may have turned toward the left, now it turns toward the right. Rivers are not logical, not consistent – they are simply alive: one never knows. He was hungry, puzzled. The map looked absolutely absurd. What to do? The river was creating trouble.Alone, silently, floating on the river, he started to meditate. What to do? Scriptures had not helped, advisers had been useless. What to do now? He started to meditate. Suddenly a realization arose: “The river is not creating the trouble. My maps are. The river is not creating any trouble. The river is not even aware that I am here and the river is not inimical to me.”He threw the maps into the river. The trouble stopped. Now he started floating with the river with no expectations. He was never frustrated again.If you float with the river of life, you will come to find your question, you will come to find your answer. But the trouble is you have already found the answer – you have maps, scriptures, advisers and many fakes who go on advising you. They feel good advising; you are just a victim, an excuse. They want to advise. They are not concerned with your need, they don’t look at you; they have a fixed idea.Go to a Christian; he has a fixed idea of God. If even rivers don’t move in a fixed way – how can you have a fixed idea of God? It is the river of consciousness. Maybe somewhere in the past somebody has known the river in a certain way, but it is no longer in the same place. Says old Heraclitus, “You cannot step in the same river twice.” The river is always floating and changing and flowing, moving, and the river doesn’t have a fixed route.Life is free, life is freedom. Existence is absolutely freedom. You cannot have any fixed attitudes, fixed ideas. If you have, then you will be in trouble and you will think existence is putting you in trouble. No. Just throw your scriptures in the river, move with the river and everything is beautiful. Forget the answers if you want to find your question.You are so surrounded by the answers that it is almost impossible in this confusion and crowd to find the right question – and the right question is the key.I don’t give you any answer. If you have come to me for any answer, you have come to the wrong person. I don’t give you any maps of consciousness, no. I don’t give you any concept of God. I simply give you a thirst, an intense thirst; I bring urgency to your thirst to know your authentic question. Then everything takes care of itself – the answer follows the question. There is no doubt about it, it has always been so. That is the very nature of it: first seek the question and the answer will follow.You try to be cunning, you say, “Why bother about the question? Answers are available, and cheap at that. Advisers are always there, so why bother about your own inquiry?” But if the inquiry is not yours the fulfillment is not going to be yours.Answers won’t help; you need a different state of consciousness. Only a different state of consciousness can become the answer. Through questioning you start changing. Question everything and don’t become a prey to easy answers. Go on questioning, go on to the very end, so your whole questioning quest becomes one-pointed, concentrated. It goes like an arrow into the heart, penetrates deep. It is painful, but nothing can be achieved without pain.Suffering is part of growth and you are seeking comfort – then you borrow answers. Then don’t come to me because I will force you, throw you into the abyss of your own being. In the beginning it will look like death, in the beginning it will look like nothingness. But if you are courageous, soon the eternal ground appears; for the first time you are at home. It is just like the pain of birth: a child has to pass from the birth trauma, has to come out of the womb.You are in the womb of the mind right now. Meditation is nothing but coming out of the womb of the mind: from thought to thoughtlessness, from unconsciousness to consciousness, from borrowed, imitative being to authenticity.Yes, I help you to find the question, but there is no need then to find the answer. It happens simultaneously – not even a single second’s gap, the answer is not separate from the question. The question is the answer. The very inquiry is the realization, the very seeking is the goal.The third question:Osho,Everything that is really worthwhile seems to happen out of grace. What is the logic or illogic of grace? When is one most attractive to it?Grace is not something that happens sometimes and does not happen other times. Grace is always happening, it is the very nature of existence. Existence is grace-full but sometimes you get it and sometimes you miss it. The rain is falling: sometimes you are showered, sometimes not, but the rain is continuously falling. So something has to be searched within you; sometimes you are sheltered against it.Grace is the very nature of existence, ego is the shelter. You protect yourself, even against grace. Unknowingly you create defense measures around you, you create armor. Grace is available but you become unavailable. That’s why it rarely seems to happen. Whenever you are not defending…You are sitting, just early morning, the sun has not risen. You look at the sky, the new sun is just coming up, everything is silent, peaceful – a new life arising, a new day is born. You become part of this infinite whole happening around you. You are not a watcher, not an onlooker: you participate in the mystery. It is not that the sun is rising and you are looking at it. No. You and the sun have become one. Then you are unprotected, then the wall disappears, then there is no armor. Then it is not that the sun is rising there, very far away, and you are sitting here. No. The “here” and “there” disappear, it is one whole – you have forgotten yourself.In that forgetfulness you are no longer an island, you have become part of the continent – no barriers. Suddenly you are filled with grace, suddenly you are no longer miserable, suddenly there is no darkness. Everything is beautiful, you can bless everything. In this moment you can have only one feeling arising out of your heart: a deep gratefulness, a deep gratitude – just to be is perfect, just to breathe is great, just to be alive in this moment you are fulfilled.Or sometimes sitting by a person you love – a woman, a man, a child – sitting silently, not doing anything in particular… Doing is always a sort of occupation through which you go on protecting yourself. Not even talking – when you are in deep love you would like to sit in silence.Lovers don’t talk much; they convey, they commune, a subtle communication starts happening. They know each other so deeply that even gestures are understood. Words are not needed. In fact words look jarring, they create a disturbance: the resonance is disturbed by them. The lovers are sitting silently. Suddenly there is grace; something which is bigger than both surrounds them, a cloud of virgin bliss surrounds them – they are encompassed. They are not two, the twoness has disappeared: they are completely oblivious to their separateness. Time stops, there is grace. Then again they start talking, again the egos enter: they are protected, grace is lost.Yes, all that is beautiful, all that is true and good happens though grace. It never happens through effort. All efforts are tiny. What can you do? We are so tiny, so atomic, what can we do? So limited, what can we do? If we try by our own effort to be happy, we will be getting more and more unhappy. That’s what is happening all over the world: everybody trying to be happy, and the more you try, the unhappier you become. Your whole effort seems to be wasted – not only wasted, your whole effort seems to be bringing results that are just the contrary: you want to be happy and you become unhappy.I have heard about an old man…He was one of the unhappiest men in the world. The whole village was tired because he was always grumping and complaining and always in a bad mood, always sour. And the more he advanced in age, the more acidic he became, the more poisonous his words. People avoided him because he was so unhappy that he had become infectious. Not to be unhappy with him would have been offensive to him. He created unhappiness in others also.One day, his eightieth birthday, suddenly the whole village could not believe it – a rumor spread like fire: “That old man is happy today, not complaining, even smiling, and his whole face has changed.”The whole village gathered and they asked, “What is the secret? What has happened to you?”The old man said, “Nothing. I tried to be happy for eighty years and I could not be, so I thought it is better to go without. I tried hard to be happy and I could not be happy, so I said, ‘Now it is enough – eighty years wasted, now I will do without happiness.’ That’s why I’m happy!”This happens. This is what is happening all over the world: try hard and you become unhappy, the more you try the more frustration it brings.Ask the awakened – all those who have known say, “Ask for happiness and you will be unhappy. Accept unhappiness, and suddenly you are happy,” because the effort is no longer there. Grace is always available; through your effort you push it away. Don’t push it.You are the greatest enemy of yourself. You know it well that whenever it has happened that you had a moment of happiness it was not because of you. You know it but your ego won’t concede it. You know it – that suddenly one day a bird started singing in the grove and everything became silent within you. You listened to it and for a moment there was no misery, no hell: the paradise regained. It was nothing on your part. The bird was singing, you simply listened; in that listening you were passive, no effort was there. What did you have to do? The bird was singing, the grove was green, for a moment you became passive, feminine, not doing anything – suddenly it was there. It has always been there; just you have to stop.Says Lao Tzu, “Seek and you will miss. Don’t seek and it is already there.”The treasure that you are seeking is within you. All seeking is futile, just look at the facticity of it. Existence is celebrating; it is a celebration, it is already dancing. In every leaf and in every stream, in every rock, and in every star, it is always dancing. You are invited, otherwise you would not have been here. You are accepted, otherwise you would not have been here. But you resist, you are trying something, you are trying to do the impossible: to become happy. An unhappy man cannot become happy and the unhappy man goes on trying to be happy. Drop the whole nonsense!People come to me and they ask me, “How to be happy?” I say if you ask how, you will never be. Just be. There is no how to it. The “how” is the problem. “How to be happy?” What a nonsense question. Be happy. Why ask how? There is no science of happiness. Notwithstanding what American books say, there is no science of happiness. All Dale Carnegies are just mediocres – but they sell.After the Bible, Dale Carnegie sells the most – he is a good salesman. He knows that everybody wants to be happy, he knows that everybody wants to be successful, he knows that everybody wants to find love. He fulfills the desire, he gives you the “how.” He gives you books like How to Succeed, How to Win Friends, How to Be Rich.I tell you there is no “how.” “How” is the trouble. You already know too many techniques to be happy, that’s what is creating the mess. Drop it. Remember that old man, the eightieth birthday, and he decided now to go without happiness. Can you be unhappy if you decide to go without happiness? Who can make you unhappy then, and how? Suddenly, unhappiness becomes impossible.Unhappiness is a by-product of the desire to be happy. Frustration is a by-product of the desire to succeed. A state of defeated, bored, wearied being is but a by-product of ambition. This has to be simply looked into; there is nothing else to do. Just see the fact of it and the very seeing frees you.Jesus says, “Truth liberates.” I agree, absolutely right – truth liberates.Just see the fact of it, that this is how you have been creating your unhappiness. If you want to create more unhappiness, try to be happier and you will succeed – just see the facticity of it, just watch how you become unhappy. Have you ever been unhappy when you were not expecting anything? When you don’t expect, you are simply happy.Happiness is natural, unhappiness is earned. Unhappiness needs much effort, happiness is simply the case. Yes, everything that is really worthwhile always happens through grace.Grace… When I say “grace,” I don’t mean any theological principle. I don’t mean that there is a God sitting on top of the roof watching you, that those who prove to be “good guys,” will be happy and grace will shower on them, and for “bad guys” there is hell. You even make your God appear foolish because of your foolishness. There is nobody sitting on top of the roof.Grace is just the nature of existence. Nobody is giving it to you or pouring it on you. It is not an award that it is given to saints because they prove to be good guys. Nobody is preventing it from reaching you because you are a sinner and you have never listened to the good counsel of the priests, churches, organized religions – because you proved rebellious, so it has to be prevented from reaching you.Nobody is giving and nobody is preventing. Grace is existential: it is simply there, it is part of life. Nobody gives it but you can get it; nobody prevents it from reaching you, but you can prevent it. It depends on you.It is not a question of praising God and praying to him, “Be grace-full to us.” It is simply a question that if you don’t create armor around you, it reaches. And the armor can be of a sinner and the armor can also be of a saint. This last thing has to be understood because the armor can be of gold and the armor can be of steel. The point is: if you are armored, grace will not reach you.A good man has an ego – of course very pious, holy, sacred. A religious man is a pious egoist. He says, “I have done so many fasts, I have been donating so much money to philanthropic causes – for hospitals, for poor people, for this and that – and I have built so many churches and temples, and I have created so many charitable trusts, this and that. And I pray every day and I have not committed a single sin.” A pride is there, a deep ego – now he will not be available to grace.A sinner also creates his own armor. He says, “I don’t bother about anybody else. I live my own idea. I am against the society.” He is rebellious. He commits sins just to enhance his ego – so that he can say, “I am I; I don’t bother about anybody.” Now he is also creating an ego, a steel ego. The religious man has a golden ego, but steel or gold doesn’t make any difference.Who do I call the true sage? The true sage is one who has no armor, who has no shelter, who is not protected by anything. A true sage is one who is open to existence to flow through him – open to the winds, open to the sun, open to the stars. A true sage is a deep emptiness – everything passes through him, nothing is hindered. Then every moment is grace and every moment is eternity. Every moment is godliness and then godliness is not something separate from you – it is your innermost core.The fourth question:Osho,Do you love me?No, never, because I don’t do anything! If you feel my love, it is not because I love you; it is because I am love. So you can feel it and I have nothing to do with it.It is just like a flower opens and the fragrance spreads – not that the flower is doing anything to spread it, not that there is any effort on the flower’s part to spread it, not that because you were passing by the side the flower jumped and threw its fragrance toward you, no. Even if nobody was passing, the fragrance would be floating on the empty path, it will fill the empty path. It is not directed, there is no effort. It is simply that the flower has bloomed – nothing to do. When the flower blooms, fragrance spreads. When you attain to your innermost being, love spreads. Love is the fragrance.What you call love is not love. What you call love may be many other things, but it is not love. It may be sex, it may be greed, it may be loneliness, it may be dependence, it may be possessiveness. It may be many more things, but it is not love.Love is nonpossessive. Love has nothing to do with somebody else, it is your state of being. Love is not a relationship. A relationship is possible but it is not relationship; a relationship can exist but it is not confined to it. It is beyond it, it is more than that.Love is a state of being. When it is a relationship, it cannot be love because the two exist. When two egos are there, there is bound to be constant conflict. So what you call love is a constant struggle.Rarely it happens that, tired, you don’t fight. But then again you are ready and again you fight. Rarely it happens that love flows. Otherwise almost all the time it is an ego trip: you are trying to manipulate the other, the other is trying to manipulate you. You are trying to possess the other, the other is trying to possess you. It is politics, it is not love. It is a power game, hence so much misery out of love. If it was love, the world would have been a heaven. It is not; in fact, you cannot find any hell which is more hellish than this world. And how has it become such a hell, with good intentions?You talk about love and something else, poisonous, is hidden behind it. You talk about the love of the motherland and just deep imperialism, a deep disease of nationalism is hidden behind it. You talk about the love of the family and nothing but the hate of other families is hidden behind it. You are together in a family because to fight with other families alone will be difficult. You are together as Indians because separately it will be difficult to fight with the Pakistanis. And the same is with Pakistan, and with China, and America, and Russia, and the same is with the whole world: you are in such a state you cannot love.When you come and ask me about love, I always feel it such an impossible thing to talk about because you mean something and I mean something else. We can go on talking for ages and there will be no meeting, no conversation because you have labeled something “love” which is not love. Remove that label, look at what it contains. Look deep – what does it contain? – hatred, anger, greed, jealousy, ambition, lust for power, destructiveness.No, I don’t love you that way and I don’t love you in any other way because love, to me, cannot be a doing – you cannot make an effort toward it. Love cannot be done. You can be love but you cannot do it. Then love has tremendous beauty and a stillness, a silence, and then love becomes prayer. Then there is no need to go to any other temple; the state of love is the temple.The Hasid sages have been in favor of, have been for, this love. They have loved the world, they have loved the ordinary world with an extraordinary love. They have lived in the world, bloomed. They have never escaped. They were husbands, fathers; they lived very ordinarily.Sometimes I see that people who renounce the world are very deep egoists. Their renouncing the world is really a deep failure of their love. They have failed to love and because they failed to love, the world became miserable. They think the world is miserable. They think they are unhappy because of the others. A husband leaves the wife and goes to the Himalayas; he thinks he was in trouble, misery because of the wife. This is absolutely wrong. He was in trouble and misery because he was not in the state of love. In the state of love, nobody can create misery for you – impossible.A man who has known love remains unconditionally blissful. Whatsoever happens is irrelevant to his state of being. You can kill him but you cannot make him miserable. You can throw him in imprisonment but you cannot make him miserable. His freedom remains total; his freedom remains untouched, uncorrupted.The last question:Osho,Through doing your meditations, the body is getting stronger and healthier, and awareness less than ever. The more I jump and dance, the louder I snore. Why is this?Nothing wrong in snoring; it is as holy as anything else. And nothing is wrong in the body.Never think in terms of duality – that you are not the body, that you are separate, that you are different. Never think in terms of duality. The body is also you, your outermost garment. It is through the body that you touch existence. From the outside you touch existence through the body, from the inside you touch the same existence through consciousness – but it is all the same, out or in.The so-called religions have created a division, a split. They have been telling you that you are not the body. They have been against the body because they have been against the world. I am not against the world and I am not against the body.Let the body be healthy, let the body be beautiful, let the body be graceful, because only in a graceful body will a graceful consciousness become possible, only in a healthy body will inner health happen – only in a peaceful, silent, relaxed body a relaxed consciousness.Remember that and there is no division. It is the same wave going out and coming in. It is just like breathing, going out and coming in. It is just like the blinking of the eye, opening and closing. Out and in, opening and closing, in-breathing and out-breathing – they are two aspects of you, two wings. So don’t be worried.The first thing to remember: the body is holy.The second thing to remember: if you feel that in doing meditations your awareness is becoming less and less, only one thing is certain: that whatsoever you have been thinking to be awareness was not awareness. Otherwise it increases – how can it lessen, how can it decrease? Whatsoever you used to think of as awareness, consciousness, must have been self-consciousness, not consciousness. Must have been ego-consciousness. Now it is lessening. It is good, it should be so; it is exactly on the right track.Self-consciousness will be lost, only then consciousness arises. Self-consciousness is ill-consciousness. People are self-conscious – and the difference is very subtle. We are sitting here, you came into the auditorium: you can come with awareness, you can come with self-consciousness.Awareness means you come with an inner light, you move fully alert. Each step is taken in awareness: the walking, the coming, the sitting – everything is done in full awareness. It is beautiful, that’s how a buddha walks.When you are self-conscious, there is no light inside: you are just alert for other people; they are there, so you shrink. You walk with a tense effort because others are there: “What will they say? How will they react to your presence? What will their opinion be?”That’s what happens. You can talk easily, you talk the whole day; but if suddenly you are put near the mike and you have to address a meeting of a thousand people, you start stuttering, perspiring. A nervousness comes, you lose control. What is happening? You are much too self-conscious, you are much too aware of what others will think.Self-consciousness is an ill state of affairs. If you are aware, you speak with awareness, but the awareness comes from the inward being; it flows from the inner being toward others. Self-consciousness comes from others’ eyes toward you. It is fear of others. The two are totally different.So if meditation brings you to the feeling that your awareness is decreasing, it simply shows that you have misunderstood self-consciousness for awareness. It is good, let it go. It will not be a loss. It is just losing a disease. Soon, when it has gone your energy will transform. The same energy will be released from the confines of self-consciousness. It will be available now, you will be more alert. Alert, life becomes graceful; self-conscious, life becomes misery. Alert, you attain to your being. Self-conscious, you go on seeking others’ opinion, their praise.The ego is always afraid of others because it has to depend on their opinions, on what they say. If they say you are beautiful, you are beautiful; if they say you are ugly, your ego is shattered. If they say you are good, saintly, you are good and saintly. If they say you are a sinner, the ego is shattered.Self-awareness or self-consciousness is a very tense thing – always afraid. It depends on others’ opinions. The whole thing is very paradoxical: others are afraid of you, you are afraid of them; they are self-conscious because of you, you are self-conscious because of them. You help each others’ illness.A person who is aware has no self in him – in the light of awareness there is no flame of the self. It is simply light, with no source. He moves, lives gracefully. He does not bother what others say about him. Whether they think him a saint or a sinner are all the same to him. He knows who is. He is – and he knows so absolutely that there is no need to ask for others’ opinions.Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The WatchmanIn Roptchitz, the town where Rabbi Naftali lived,it was the custom for rich peoplewhose houses stood isolated, or at the far end of town,to hire men to watch over their property by night.Late one evening, when Rabbi Naftaliwas skirting the woods which circled the city,he met such a watchman walking up and down.“For whom are you working?” he asked.The man told him, and then inquired in his turn,“And for whom are you working, Rabbi?”The words struck the zaddik like a shaft.“I am not working for anybody just yet,”he barely managed to say.Then he walked up and down beside the man for a long time.“Will you be my servant?” he finally asked.“I should like to,” the man replied,“but what would be my duties?”“To remind me,” said Rabbi Naftali.Once a Hasid mystic, Joseph Jacov, was asked, “What is the difference between a rabbi and a zaddik?”A rabbi is an ordinary priest, belonging to the organized religion – the church, the synagogue, the temple. A zaddik is a rebellious master – he does not belong to any organization, only belongs to himself. The rabbi is a teacher, the zaddik is a master. The teacher teaches, but has not gone through the transformation himself. The zaddik is also a teacher but he teaches by his life, by his very being. What we call in India satguru, the enlightened master, is “zaddik” in Hasidic terms.So somebody asked Joseph Jacov, “What is the difference between a rabbi and a zaddik?”The Hasid said, “The zaddik remembers, and the rabbi knows.”The rabbi knows much but doesn’t remember himself; he is lost in his knowledge. He may be a great scholar, he may be very efficient as far as scriptures are concerned – but a zaddik remembers. He may not know much, or may know, but that is irrelevant. He remembers; he remembers himself, and that remembering is the difference.It was difficult for the inquirer to understand, so he said, “Please explain it to me in a little more detail.” The Hasid told him a story. He said…Once it happened that a prince, by his wrong behavior, enraged his father. The way the prince was behaving was so uncourtly, so unkingly, that the father had to banish him out of the kingdom.But the father was thinking the prince would repent, ask forgiveness and come back, but he simply disappeared. He never tried in any way to contact his father, he never showed any desire to come back to the palace. It appeared as if he had been simply waiting to escape the kingdom and to escape the palace and his father.The prince wandered around the kingdom and found a group of drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes. All sorts of evil-doing were going on; he became part of it. Not only did he become a member, by and by he became the leader. Of course: he was a prince and he had the charisma of becoming a leader.Many years passed. The father was getting older and older, and he was worried – worried for the welfare of his only son. Seeing that death was approaching, he sent one of his cleverest ministers to bring the son back.The minister went in a beautiful golden chariot, with many servants, almost a regiment following him. A great golden tent was fixed outside the village. He sent a messenger to the prince, but the prince didn’t bother to turn up. The minister remained outside the village – it was below him to go inside the village, a poor village, and it was absolutely inconceivable for him to enter the black hole where the prince was living with all those dirty people. He tried but communication was not possible – the distance was vast. He failed, came back.Then another, a more courageous man was sent. He was courageous and he had understood the failure – why the first messenger, the first minister could not communicate. So he didn’t go there like a minister, he went like a peasant, in ordinary clothes, with no servants. He simply went and mixed with the group. He became friendly, but by and by he himself started to love that freedom.The palace was like a prison. There was no freedom, and there everybody was absolutely free, totally free. Nobody was creating any hindrance for anybody, everybody was allowed to be himself. They were drunkards, but they were beautiful people. They were gamblers, but they were beautiful people. The minister really got mixed, but also failed because he himself never turned up to report back to the king.The king was very much worried. Now the thing was becoming unmanageable. He asked a third minister, who was not only courageous, but wise also – and that was going to be the last effort.The third minister asked for a three-month leave to prepare himself, only then could he go.The king asked, “What? What are you going to prepare?”He said, “To remember myself.”Three months leave was granted. He went to a zaddik, to a master, to become more mindful because the way the first minister had behaved was absolutely useless, communication was not possible. The second had done better but he had also failed because he could not remember himself.So he said to the master, “Help me so that I can remember myself and can remember that I come from the palace on a certain duty to be fulfilled.” Three months he meditated with a method of self-remembering, what Buddha calls mindfulness – then he went.He also behaved like the second: he went like a peasant, in ordinary clothes – not only like a peasant, he went like a drunkard. But he was pretending, he was not really drunk. He lived with the group, he enjoyed their company, he pretended to drink, he pretended to gamble. He even pretended to fall in love with a prostitute, but that was all a pretense. He was acting. Continuously, as an undercurrent, he was remembering himself: “Who am I? Why have I come here? For what?” He was watching himself, he was a witness. Of course, he succeeded.The Hasid mystic said to the inquirer, “He was a zaddik.”The first minister was a rabbi, a teacher. You are drowning in the river, he stands on the bank, gives you good advice, but he never jumps in the river to save you. He cannot save himself and he is afraid to come in the river; he does not know the art of swimming, the art of self-remembering. He is not courageous, he clings to the bank from a far-away place – secure, sure of his own state, of his own safety. He talks beautifully, he can tell you everything about swimming but he cannot jump and save you: he himself does not know how to swim. He is a rabbi, a teacher.You can find these types of teachers all over the world – good as far as their advice goes, nothing more. Their advice is borrowed. They have not come to that advice through their own experience. It is not knowing, it is knowledge; they have not gone through it, they have not been transformed by it. It is not their own, it has not arisen out of their consciousness. They are not crystallized beings. Their minds are full of knowledge, their hearts are completely empty.The second minister was courageous, but his courage was more than his wisdom – he was himself drowned. So remember, when you jump into a river to save someone, don’t forget that the first necessity is that you know how to swim.It happened once…I was sitting on a river bank. A man was drowning so I ran to jump, but before I could reach the bank another man was standing on the bank – he jumped, so I stopped myself. I was almost on the brink of jumping, I stopped – somebody else had already jumped. But then I became aware that the other man started drowning. He created more trouble for me. I had to jump and save both.I asked the second man, “What happened? Why did you jump?”He said, “I completely forgot! The man was drowning and I became so attentive to it that just the desire to save him and I completely forgot that I don’t know how to swim.”You can forget. In any intense moment you can be hypnotized. The second man was courageous, but not wise enough. You can find this type of teacher also, so don’t just be impressed by courage because courage alone cannot help.The third type of teacher is a zaddik. He knows from his own experience what the first type knows only as a borrowed knowledge. The third is courageous like the second; he takes the risk, but he is wise also – he remembers himself. To remember oneself is the whole art and science of religion. You can condense all religion into one word: that is self-remembering.Before we start to go deep into what self-remembering is, it is a must, it is an absolute requirement that we should understand the unconsciousness in which you live – the sleep.Ordinarily you think you are perfectly awake; that’s a misconception. Only a Buddha, a Baal Shem, a Moses, a Mahavira, is awake. You are completely asleep. I can hear your snoring right now, you are fast asleep. Just because you can open your eyes, don’t claim that you are awake. Just that is not enough for being awake.For example, a man is in a coma. He breathes, but because he breathes can you say that he is alive? He is almost vegetating. Just by breathing nobody is alive, and just by opening your eyes you are not awake. Even a drunkard walking on the street moves with open eyes. Can you say that he is awake? He is not awake at all because awareness is an inner quality of consciousness. It has nothing to do with closed or open eyes.Krishna in the Gita says, “When the whole world is fast asleep, then too the yogi is awake – Ya nisha sarvabhutayam tasyam jagrati samyami.”When the whole world is under dark sleep, when the whole world has its night, the yogi is still awake. That doesn’t mean that the yogi never sleeps – no. He sleeps, but only his eyes are closed. His body sleeps, he is alert and aware. Deep down a current of self-remembering runs. He is fast asleep as far as the body is concerned, but the witnessing self remains alert – like an inner light it goes on burning.One who remembers is not asleep even when he is fast asleep, and one who does not know how to remember oneself is not awake even while the eyes are open. You are moving in the market, doing your job, your work – coming back home, fighting, loving, hating, eating, sleeping, doing all sorts of things – but the whole thing is happening as if you are a robot. Everything is mechanical; you are not doing it. You are not alert when you are doing it; it is just happening and you are behaving like a mechanism.Watch any mood. Somebody insults and you are angry – is there a gap between the insult and the anger? Is there a gap where you meditate whether to be angry or not, whether it is worth it to be angry or not? Or maybe what the man is saying is right and it is not an insult but simply a statement of fact. Do you give a little time to think about the whole situation or do you simply react? You react – there is not a gap, no interval.Insult, anger – they happen as if somebody turns on the light; switch on, switch off, and the light has no freedom. It is not possible when you switch it on for the bulb to say, “Right now I am not in the mood. I will have a little rest,” or, “You can go on switching on. I don’t feel like being lit now.” No, the light cannot say anything. You switch it on, it has to be on; you switch it off, it has to go off.Is your anger just like that? Somebody smiles and you smile. Is your smile just a reaction? Or is it a response?A response is not a reaction and a reaction is not a response. What is the difference between a reaction and a response? A reaction is automatic, it is built-in: somebody smiles you smile, somebody is angry you become angry. The other creates it, you simply react. Response is conscious: the other may be angry, but you decide whether to be angry or not.Buddha was passing a village. A few people who were against him gathered and they insulted him very deeply. He listened silently, very patiently. In fact because of his patience, the people started becoming restless. They started feeling uncomfortable because when you insult a man and he listens as if it is music, something is wrong. What is happening? They started looking at each other.Then one person asked Buddha, “What is the matter? Don’t you understand what we are saying?”Buddha said, “I am so silent because I can understand. Had you come ten years before, then I would have jumped on you; but then there was no understanding. Now I understand, and for your foolishness I cannot punish myself. It is for you to decide to insult or not, but it is my freedom to take it or not. You cannot force your insults on me, I simply refuse – they are not worth it. You can take them back home. I refuse to take them.”The people were bewildered. They couldn’t understand: “What is the matter?” They said, “Please explain to us.”He said, “Sit down and listen to me. In the village I just passed by, people came with sweets and garlands, but my stomach was full so I told them, ‘I won’t be able to eat anything. Please take your gifts back and give them to other people in the town as prasad – my gift to the people of the town.’ What do you think they did?”Somebody said, “Of course, they went into the village and distributed the sweets.”Buddha said, “Now listen, what will you do? You come with insults and I say, ‘My stomach is full and I’m not going to take these.’ Now, poor people, unfortunate people, what will you do? You will have to go and distribute in the village.”Buddha is responding, you react. He simply laughed. And the thing that he said is very beautiful. He said, “For your foolishness I cannot punish myself. You can be foolish, that is your freedom – but why should I punish myself? Once I take your insult, I start punishing myself.”When you are angry back, you punish yourself for the other’s fault.Reaction is unaware; response is a fully alert phenomenon. But you cannot just move from reaction to response. It is not a decision. Between the two, self-remembering is needed, awareness is needed; otherwise before you have known, you have reacted. Somebody insults; before you have known you are already angry, the anger has entered in. It is such a subtle phenomenon. Very deep awareness is needed, remembering is needed.Buddha used to teach his disciples to walk, but walk with mindfulness; walking, know that you are walking. Not that you have to verbalize and repeat inside, “I am walking,” because if you repeat that you are not aware. Just have the feel of being aware. Walk with awareness, eat with awareness, breathe with awareness.The breath goes in; let it be mirrored in your being that the breath is going in. The breath goes out; let it be mirrored in your being that the breath is going out. You will feel such tremendous silence descending on you if you can see the breath going in and going out, going in and going out. This is the deepest mantra that has ever been invented.There is no need to repeat, “Om, Om,” “Ram, Ram,” because a great natural mantra is continuously going on: breathing in, breathing out – no need to create an artificial mantra. Just watch the breath, and by watching it a great mutation happens. The mutation is: if you walk and watch the walking, you will see: the walking is there, but the walker has disappeared. You eat: eating is there, but the eater has disappeared because the ego is nothing but condensed unawareness.When you become aware, by and by that condensed unawareness we call “ego” disappears, just as you bring a lamp in the room and the darkness disappears. Awareness is the lamp, the lamp we were talking about the first day. Be a lamp unto yourself. In somebody else’s light, for a few moments you can feel happy, alive, but then you have to depart because nobody else’s path can be your path.Kindle your own flame, enlighten your own being. In that light the first thing that disappears is ego because ego is nothing else – remember it: it is just layers and layers of unawareness.Watch; walking, eating, going to bed, lying down, falling into sleep – go on watching. Just the watching, all restlessness disappears and you feel a tranquility surrounding you, a calm, a silence. And the quality of silence is very, very different from ordinary quiet.Sometimes you feel quiet. For example, this morning the trees are silent, no wind blowing, birds silent, resting – a quiet. But this is a quiet. This is not a silence. Silence is something inside, quiet is something outside. Quiet depends on conditions outside, silence is unconditional. So don’t mistake quiet for silence because many millions have done that.People go to the Himalayas to find silence. They can find quiet but not silence: the Himalayas are perfectly quiet. But whenever you come back to the world, again you will find the quiet has disappeared.Silence is something you can rely upon – it is within you. Quiet is something which depends on conditions, which does not depend on you. You can never be a master of quiet. But there is no need; if you know silence, wherever you move your silence fills the space. Now you know the inner secret of it.Quiet is possible through scientific technology; silence, no. Quiet is possible in an air-conditioned room, sound proofed – you can be quieter than in the Himalayas – but that quiet won’t help much. You will feel fed up with it, you will hanker to get out. You will feel very restless.John Cage reports in his book Silence, that in Harvard University they have made an absolutely soundproof room for certain scientific experimentation. It is the greatest soundproof room in the whole world.He entered. It was absolute quiet, but suddenly he started hearing two noises, so he was worried. He had heard that this place was absolutely soundproof. So he asked the technician, “What is the matter?”The technician laughed. He said, “These sounds are within you. The first sound is just your mind functioning inside, the nervous system; and the second sound is nothing but your blood running through the body, the blood circulation.”Cage said, “But I never heard these sounds before.”The technician said, “That was because there were so many sounds outside. Now it is absolute quiet, no sound at all. That’s why you hear the inner mechanism functioning: the brain continuously working, millions of nerves continuously working, and the blood circulation continuously going on just like a stream flowing.”Cage said, “Then I thought, ‘Quiet won’t do. Silence is needed.’”Even in the quietest room your inner turmoil will be there: you will hear your own thoughts, you will hear your own body functioning, you will hear your own heartbeats. Silence is something of the beyond, unconditional. It happens only when you remember.If you can remember yourself while doing millions of things, ordinary things – digging a hole in the garden, watering the trees, talking to somebody, listening to somebody – just go on, watchful, whatsoever happens should be mirrored by you.Remember one thing: you are not to verbalize it because by verbalizing you will miss the beauty. You can say, “I am walking. This is my left foot moving, this is my right foot; the breath is going in, the breath is going out.” If you start verbalizing inside, then you will be filled with your own noise again.Just watch the breath going in. Don’t think about it; just see it, feel it, move with it inward. Then the breath stops for a second; then remain in quiet silence for that second – nothing moving, no movement. In that state of no movement you are the nearest to existence that you ever can be. Then the breath starts moving out. Move out. Then again outside for a single second the breath stops. Then watch. In that stopping, again you are closest to existence. Make it a rhythm; then no other meditation is needed. Just this remembering will bring you to your own treasure.Ordinarily we live in sleep. We are all somnambulists – walking, doing things in sleep. Sometimes catch yourself moving in sleep and then you will know what it means. You are just walking on the road, a thousand and one thoughts coming inside the mind. You are walking like a robot, not aware. Where are you going, what are you doing, why are you going, what is happening in the body, what trees have you passed? The wind is blowing… No, you are not feeling anything. The flower is sending its scent; it has not reached you. The world is beautiful; you are unaware. You are deeply lost in your thoughts – and moving!Give a jerk to yourself, for a moment become aware. Look at the whole situation and suddenly you will see the difference between ordinary sleeping life and the life of a buddha – for a single moment you become a buddha. When you are aware, for a single moment you become a buddha, the whole quality of a buddha comes to you – and the taste of it will create a deep desire to attain to it as an eternal state of your being.Make yourself more and more aware, and use all sorts of situations. There is no need to go beyond the world, no need to go outside the marketplace. Wherever you are, use all the situations to awaken yourself – and every situation can be used.That’s why Hasids are not against the world. They are not in favor of renunciation. They don’t leave the world, they live in the world in an ordinary way and use all sorts of situations to make themselves more and more aware and alert.Use all the situations because all situations can be used.Now listen to this beautiful story…In Roptchitz, the town where Rabbi Naftali lived,it was the custom for rich peoplewhose houses stood isolated, or at the far end of town,to hire men to watch over their property by night.Late one evening, when Rabbi Naftaliwas skirting the woods which circled the city,he met such a watchman walking up and down.“For whom are you working?” he asked.A simple question, but a simple question can become a very deep one. A simple situation, but a simple situation can be used to awaken yourself. The mundane is the sacred also; the ordinary, the extraordinary also. In matter is hidden the immaterial. The only thing is to know the secret: how to use it.“For whom are you working?” he asked. A simple question, a formal question, but it became an insight. Every moment can become a door.The man told him, and then inquired in his turn,“And for whom are you working, Rabbi?”Because the rabbi was also walking on the same road, the watchman thought, “Maybe he is also working as a watchman for somebody.”And for whom are you working, Rabbi? An ordinary question again. But sometimes, if you are in the right mood, in tune, a very ordinary thing can become a message from the divine.The words struck the zaddik like a shaft.“…for whom are you working, Rabbi?”“I am not working for anybody just yet,”he barely managed to say.A very alert man in a way; otherwise he could have said, “I am working for God.” A rabbi, an ordinary teacher would have said it and would not have meant anything by it. A sincere man, a true man…The question became very significant: “And for whom are you working, Rabbi?” “I am not working for anybody just yet,” he barely managed to say. How can you say you are working for God? And he was not working for any other rich man. He is a man of God – a priest, a rabbi, but no ordinary priest: he is alert.“I am not working for anybody just yet.” Very difficult to say, and much more difficult for a rabbi to say because ordinarily a priest in the temple goes on thinking and saying that he works for God without knowing what he is saying, what he is asserting. Ordinarily priests don’t hesitate.Remember, that only a very sincere person hesitates. Fools, stupid people, hypocrites, are all very certain, they never hesitate, they are stubbornly certain. They are always absolutely certain. Only a very, very intelligent being… And by intelligence I don’t mean intellect, by intelligence I mean understanding, I don’t mean a trained intellectual. By intelligence, I mean the radiance of understanding. An intelligent being always hesitates because life is such a tremendous mystery. How can you be certain about anything?Lao Tzu says, “When others are absolutely certain, I am the only confused one.” Lao Tzu, a man absolutely enlightened, says, “While others are sane, I look mad,” says, “I walk but I hesitate, as someone walking in a winter stream. I walk but I am afraid, as someone surrounded by enemies.” But others, they simply don’t bother at all; they look absolutely certain.The quality of hesitating shows a very delicate mind. Lao Tzu cannot assert – even in ordinary talk, formal talk – anything which is not really true. How can a man who has not known God yet say, “I am working for God”? That will be profane, that will be sacrilegious.“I am not working for anybody just yet.” What Naftali is saying is, “I am no longer working for anybody in this world. The goals of this world are lost and the goals of the other world are not yet clear. I am in a transition. Here, nothing seems to be significant, and there, my eyes are yet closed.”He’s saying, “I’m not working for any ambition in this world, and the other world is yet far away. I am on the way. I have left the old and I have not entered the new. I am just in the middle of the bridge; the old bank is lost forever, the new bank is hidden in mist.”“I am not working for anybody just yet.” There comes a moment in every meditator’s life when the world is meaningless and existence has not yet become meaningful. That is the most dangerous point to cross over because the mind tends to fall back: at least something was significant and one was occupied. Now the old occupation is gone and the new does not seem to be happening. One is in a limbo, one hangs in the middle. That is the point where patience is needed, infinite patience is needed, and that’s the point where a master can be helpful to persuade you not to fall back because the mind will tend to.A thousand and one temptations will be there to fall back. “What nonsense you are doing! The old life you left – at least there was some meaning. If not meaning, at least some occupation, some business to do.” At least one did not feel empty. It may be that things were not eternally meaningful – temporary, temporal, momentary – but at least some meaning was there, some content was there. That too is gone. The eternal does not seem to enter anywhere.This gap is an absolute necessity. Unless the mind comes to a state where it is no longer thinking of the past and falling back to the past, the new cannot happen. The temptation of the past shows there is still a deep bondage with the past. When the temptation also goes and you remain in a vacuum – not hurrying, not in any haste, you allow the emptiness to settle – suddenly the eternal enters. You have become the temple.Many are here who have been meditating long, who have come to this state. Then their mind will say, “Go back home. Escape from this man. You have not gained anything. On the contrary, you have lost much. Your old identity is gone, your old name is gone, your old image is no longer anywhere to be found – and the new? The new has not happened. Will it ever happen?” The mind is afraid, scared: “Is it going to happen or not? Or have I come to a dead end?”It happens only when you have settled in the vacuum. The whole comes only when you have settled in emptiness, because for the whole to descend absolute emptiness is needed. Even a slight clinging temptation for the past is a hindrance. “I am not working for anybody just yet,” he barely managed to say. A really sincere man.Then he walked up and down beside the man for a long time.What was he doing? He must have been brooding: “What has happened? This man, an ordinary watchman – he can at least say that he is working for somebody. I’m a religious man, a priest, a rabbi – and I cannot even say that much. At least this watchman is engaged, occupied, doing something significant. It may not be significant, but he believes he is doing some significant work. And I, a religious man, can barely manage to say that ‘I am not working for anybody just yet.’”Then he walked up and down beside the man for a long time. Brooding, contemplating, meditating…“Will you be my servant?” he finally asked.“I should like to,” the man replied,“but what would be my duties?”“To remind me,” said Rabbi Naftali.“To remind me” – that the world is lost, godliness is not yet attained. “To remind me” – the material has disappeared and the immaterial has not materialized yet. “To remind me” – the known is no longer meaningful and the unknown is far away. “To remind me” – that I should not forget this, to make me alert again and again, to strike the note within me so that I don’t fall asleep.A beautiful story, very meaningful, and it can become a part of your inner treasure. Let it become because there are many situations in which you need to be reminded.You fall asleep again and again. It is natural because sleep is the way of least resistance. It is convenient to fall asleep, it is uncomfortable to awaken. Your sleep may have many investments in it. Sometimes in deep sleep you have beautiful dreams, and when you awake all the dreams disappear and the naked reality has to be faced.There is a temptation to remain asleep, not to face the reality. You can create beautiful dreams – that’s all we do in the world: make a beautiful house, a dream in marble, but still a dream. Sooner or later you have to leave it. No house can be a home here; all houses will have to be left behind, at the most, a night’s rest. In the morning we have to go. Don’t cling too much. The world can be at the most a sarai, a dharmshala, a resting place for the night. In the morning we go. Don’t cling to it, don’t get attached to it, don’t think the dream as real. Let it be reminded to you again and again that this is a dream.There is every temptation to think it is reality because when the dream is beautiful, who wants to think that it is a dream? Of course when the dream becomes nightmarish, you start thinking that it must be a dream. That’s why sometimes great anguish and pain triggers spirituality.Your wife has died and you loved her, and you loved her tremendously, and you are left alone. It is not only that your beloved has died, something deep inside you also died with her. She was so involved, you were so involved with her. You had penetrated each other’s being and you had become parts of each other, members of each other. Now she is dead. It is not only that somebody outside you is dead; something of the heart within you is also dead. You will miss many heartbeats. You will never be so alive again. Maybe in this situation the shock can trigger an awakening.So misfortunes are not always misfortunes. Sometimes they prove blessings, great blessings, and the blessings that you think are blessings may be nothing but narcotics, may be nothing but drugs. Beautiful dreams are drugs; they help you to sleep, maybe you can call them tranquilizers. But misery is not always misery: Dukkha, anguish, agony, can become a door to ecstasy.Let me say it: Blessed are those who are unfortunate enough to know anguish, blessed are those who are in anguish because they can be awakened.Use your anguish as a force to awaken yourself because when you are comfortable you tend to sleep, when you are uncomfortable the possibility to awaken is greater. Continuously go on remembering that the world you are in is a momentary phenomenon, it is just a dewdrop on a grass leaf. Any moment a breeze passes by and the drop slips and is gone forever.The world is a dewdrop on a grass leaf. This is what Mahavira said, “A dewdrop on a grass leaf.” Any moment: it is slipping already, you are dying already. It is not that somewhere in the future, one day you will die. Don’t try to deceive yourself; you have been dying from the very day you were born. The first breath was already amidst death. You have been dying continuously. Seventy years, eighty years, or a hundred years you may take to die completely, but every moment you are dying. The dewdrop is slipping, any moment it is gone.Just a few days before, I was talking about a woman saint, Sahajo. She says, “Jagat taraiya bhor ki – the world is just like the last star in the morning.” Go on looking – just a moment before it was there and a moment after it is not there. The last star in the morning, disappearing, disappearing, continuously disappearing.Remember that the world is a dream. What is the definition of a dream? A dream is that which is, but which is not going to be forever. A dream was not before, will not be later on; between two non-existences, a fragment of a moment, and it seems real. “Existence between two non-existences” is the definition of a dream. And what is the definition of a reality? “Existence, existence, existence; past, present, future – existence.” Dream – non-existence in the past, non-existence in the future; just in the present, existence.How can existence be between two non-existences? Impossible! You must be deluded, you must have projected it. It must be a projection, a wish-fulfillment. It is not there, the screen is empty. The story is within you, the projector is hidden in your mind – you go on projecting.You live in a dream and a dream needs sleep. That’s why I say you are fast asleep, I can hear your snoring. When I talk about sleep, I mean metaphysical – not the ordinary sleep where you go to bed at night. That is sleep with closed eyes, and in the day you sleep with open eyes. Only eyes open and closed, that’s the only difference between your day and your night.Have you ever observed the fact that at night you completely forget your day life, absolutely? In fact, in the morning you may remember something of the night dream, but at night you never remember anything of your day life – nothing at all.What does it mean? It means even dreams are a little truer, you can remember them. When you have woken in the morning, you can remember for a few seconds the night dreams, their reality goes deeper in you. But at night when you fall asleep, not even for a few seconds do you remember your day life. Who are you – a president of a country, a prime minister, or a beggar? Nobody? You don’t remember at all, even your name is forgotten. Are you a husband or not, a father or not? Everything is forgotten: rich or poor, everything forgotten.Chuang Tzu says that once he dreamed in his dream that he had become a butterfly. Then in the morning he was very much puzzled because a suspicion arose in his heart: “If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in the night, in a dream, the vice versa is also possible: the butterfly may be dreaming now that she has become Chuang Tzu. If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in a dream, why can’t a butterfly become Chuang Tzu in her dream?”All dreams: whether Chuang Tzu dreams that he has become a butterfly or a butterfly dreams that she has become Chuang Tzu, all are dreams.All becoming is dreaming. Becoming as such is dreaming. When you awake, you come to being and becoming disappears. Then you don’t become anything. Neither Chuang Tzu becomes a butterfly nor the butterfly becomes Chuang Tzu. When you come to being, you suddenly realize that there is no Chuang Tzu and no butterfly, only one God exists and he is neither, he is beyond.Then he walked up and down beside the man for a long time. “Will you be my servant?” he finally asked. “I should like to,” the man replied, “but what would be my duties?” “To remind me,” said Rabbi Naftali. It will be difficult for you to find a man who can constantly remind you, but the story is simply symbolic, it is a parable. You can make your mind the servant to remind you, the mind can become the watchman.Just the other day there was a question: “Can the mind be used in any way for spiritual awakening?” Yes! It has to be used. It can be used and it has to be used: the mind has to be made a servant to remind you.Ordinarily the mind has become the master and you have become the servant. If the mind has become the master and you have become the servant, this is the state of sleep. If the mind becomes the servant and you become the master, you are on the way of awakening. Then the mind reminds you.What is meditation? Meditation is an effort to use the mind to remind yourself. Meditation is also a function of the mind, but the relationship is totally different: you are the master, the mind becomes the servant. Use the mind as the servant and mind is beautiful; let the mind become the master and everything goes ugly.The man of the world lives in the ugly state: the mind is the master and he himself is the servant. The sannyasin, the other-worldly man, just reverses the situation. The same, everything is the same but the order is changed. Now the mind is the servant and he himself becomes the master: then he uses his mind to remind. A moment comes when there will be no need to be reminded. Then awareness has become natural, a flowing phenomenon. Then you can relieve the mind; the mind can be retired.So, three states: mind the master – ninety-nine percent of people are in that state; then mind the servant – very rarely, few people, the seekers, those who are on the path; and then the mind, with no function now, is retired because awakening has become natural – the state of a buddha.Use your mind as the servant and continuously remember that one day the mind has to be retired. When the mind is retired completely, the world disappears. Then there is no coming back to the world. That’s what Hindus call “stopping the cycle of birth and death.” When one is absolutely awakened, that awareness has no birth and no death. It is eternity.Use the mind, step on the mind, let it be a stepping-stone. Just the order has to be changed.I will tell you a story…It happened that a man was in search and he came upon a man on the path who said, “There is a well hidden in the caves. Go there and ask a question; if you sincerely ask, the well replies. It is a miracle only known to great adepts.”The man searched. It was difficult to reach the well, but somehow he reached. Leaning down in the well he asked, “What is life?”No reply came, the well only resounded. The same he repeated, the well repeated the same: “What is life?”The man was really sincere, he continued. It is said for three days, day and night, he asked again and again, “What is life?” And the well only resounded with his own voice. But he was not tired, he continued. If you work with the mind for many, many days, years, the mind will not give you the key. It will simply resound you. But a sincere seeker goes on and on and on, he is not tired.After three days, it is said that the well realized that the man was sincere and he was not going to go, so it said, “Okay, I will tell you what life is. Go to the town nearby, visit the first three shops and come back and report.”The man was puzzled because what type of answer is this? But he thought, “Okay, if the well says, it has to be done.” He went to the town.He visited the first three shops; he was even more puzzled and bewildered – there was nothing. In the first shop there were a few people working with some metal pieces. He went into the next shop, a few other people were there and they were preparing some strings. In the third shop was a carpenter’s shop and people were working with wood. He thought, “This is life?”He came back, he went to the well and said, “What do you mean? I went there, I visited. This is the report, but I don’t see the point.”The well said, “Now I have shown you the path, you travel it. Someday you will see the point. I have indicated the way, now go on it.”The seeker was simply mad and angry, and he said, “This has been a deception. What have I gained by this well, three days continuously asking and putting my heart with such sincerity before the well? This has been a deception. I have not gained anything.” Frustrated, he went away.After many years of wandering he came near a garden one evening. It was a moon night, a full-moon night, and somebody was playing sitar. He was enchanted, magic was there. As if pulled, as if he was pulled by a magnet, he entered the garden without asking permission. He went close to the player, who was deep in his meditation playing on the sitar. He sat there, he listened in the moonlight; he looked at the man, the instrument. He had never seen that instrument before.Suddenly he realized that those carpenters were working with things like this: they were making sitars, as were the people who were working with metal – those pieces were also on the sitar, and the strings.Suddenly, as if clouds disappeared and there was a breakthrough, he started dancing. The man – the player, the musician – became aware and stopped the music. But now nobody could stop the dance of the seeker. The musician asked, “What is the matter? What has happened to you?”The man said, “I have understood. Life has everything, just a new combination. I looked into three shops, everything was there but there was no sitar – everything was separate, an order was needed, everything was in chaos. Everything was there, whatsoever was needed was there: just a synthesis, a unity, and such beautiful music comes out of it!“Life has everything; I have understood! Just a new order…”You have everything that you need. Existence never sends anybody as a beggar in the world. Everybody is born an emperor but lives like a beggar, not knowing how to arrange.Mind should be the servant, consciousness should be the master, and then – then the instrument is ready, and then great music is possible. And there comes a moment when the instrument is not needed at all.It is said that whenever a musician becomes perfect he throws away the sitar. Then it is useless because the inner music has come in. The outer sitar just helped to move withinward. Whenever an archer is perfect, he throws away the bow; there is no need. Whenever there is perfection, it becomes unconditional.First make a sitar of your life, and then be able to retire the mind completely. You have gone beyond the circle of birth and death. That’s what godliness is, that’s what this beautiful story is saying.“To remind me,” so that I don’t fall again and again a victim of the old pattern: mind, the master; myself, the servant.“To remind me” that I am the master!Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why does all that you say seem completely familiar? I have heard it all before in various contexts, and at the same time it sounds full of wonderful revelations.That’s the quality of truth: it is neither old nor new, or it is both.Truth is eternal. In a way, you have heard it millions of times, in many contexts. You may not have understood it but you have heard it, you carry the memory.It is not that you are here on this earth for the first time. In the time of Buddha, in the time of Jesus, in the time of Krishna, certainly you were there, you have heard it. You have not understood it. That’s why you are here again. The day you understand, you disappear. Understanding is a great death – a death from this world of fantasy, dream, illusion.You are right; your feeling is right that you have heard it before. It sounds familiar, and yet it reveals much. It sounds familiar because it is familiar; still it reveals new dimensions because a new understanding is dawning on you.Truth is neither old nor new because it doesn’t belong to time. Anything that belongs to time is bound to be new or old. That which is new today will be old tomorrow. That which is old today was yesterday new. New and old are two aspects of time. Truth is timeless. Truth is timelessness: it is always there – as old as existence and as new as this moment.If you understand, the familiarity carries deep mysteries hidden behind it. So don’t be deceived by the familiarity. You may have heard the words, you have not understood the truth; otherwise you would have been transformed. Transformation is a function of truth. Says Jesus, “Truth liberates.” The moment you understand, you are liberated. There is nothing else to do afterward. The very understanding is enough, is liberation.Listen, but don’t compare; listen, but don’t bring your memory in. Otherwise your memory and your feeling that it is familiar will be a distraction. The moment your mind says it is familiar, the mind is saying there is nothing new to understand. There is much, there is infinite to be understood.Don’t look through the memory and don’t compare. Look directly, look immediately, look without memory. Let there be a clarity of perception. Don’t compare with anything that you have heard before.I tell you: you may have heard it before but you have not understood it. So what is the point of hearing it before? If you are so much in this idea of familiarity, you will miss it again. And again, whenever you hear it, the idea will be there that it sounds familiar.Comparison is a disease: it obstructs, it doesn’t help. So even when you feel it is familiar you also feel, by the side, new flowers of understanding blooming. They bloom in spite of your comparison. If the comparison is completely dropped, you are liberated. If you can rightly listen to me, there is nothing else to do. One moment of total listening will be enough – you will be awake. One moment is enough because that becomes the door to eternity.The second question:Osho,The words introvert and introspection have morbid connotations. How do they differ from healthy self-awareness and turning within?In self-awareness there is no within and no without. You don’t turn within. In self-awareness the within and the without has disappeared, there exists only one. Within and without is the division of the mind, is the division of the analytical mind. What is within and what is without? How do you demark?So when people say, “Turn withinward,” they are just using your language to help you because if they say, “Turn beyond within and without,” it will be almost impossible for you to understand what they mean. But that is exactly what they mean. Self-awareness is a total unity of within and without, the higher and the lower, the valley and the peak. All dualities meet and merge into it.Yes, introvert has a morbid connotation. It is morbidity. A person who is an introvert is a person who is incapable of moving without. He is confined, closed: a flower which cannot open, a song which cannot burst, a river which cannot flow to the open sea. The introvert is morbid; he cannot relate, he cannot love, he cannot move in the world, he cannot spread. He has no expansion. Confined, closed, like a seed, he is not like a tree. But remember, the extrovert is also morbid.In the western psychology the introvert is morbid but the extrovert is thought to be healthy. That simply shows that this type of psychological thinking has been developed by extroverts – nothing else. They think they are healthy and the opposite is unhealthy. There is an opposite school also in the East. The eastern psychology thinks the introvert healthy and the extrovert unhealthy. To me both are unhealthy because both are confined to a certain direction and are incapable of moving to the opposite.To me, health means the capacity to move in all directions. To be healthy is to be whole. The word health comes from the same root as the word whole. To be healthy is to be whole, to be whole is to be all together. So to be healthy means where opposites meet and are no longer opposites but are transformed into complementaries.A healthy person is one: when he wants to move inward, he moves; there is no hindrance. He has no compulsion to be extrovert, and the same vice versa. If you are compulsively introvert, whenever you start moving without there are inner hindrances: you have to fight, you cannot flow, you have to force. Then you are ill. A healthy person, a healthy being, a healthy energy, is always ready to move anywhere. There is no compulsion to be somewhere in particular.A healthy energy is a flowing energy. You go to the market, you move outward; nobody inside condemns, “To move out is worldly, materialistic.” Nobody condemns. When you go to the temple, you move withinward; nobody condemns, “To go within is morbid. This is for foolish people, unworldly, simpletons. This way you will lose all because all the riches are outward – where are you going by closing your eyes and watching your navel? You are becoming a fool.”In the West, when they want to condemn the East they call them “navel-watchers” or “lotus-eaters.” One cannot be alive by just eating lotus – mad people. And when in the East people want to condemn the West they call them “money-oriented, materialistic, worldly.” Both these types of psychologies are ill and morbid. A true psychology is still to be born: a psychology of the whole person: a psychology of flow, of no compulsion, no obsession.You should be as capable of coming out and going in as you are capable of coming out of your house and going in. When the climate is beautiful, you go out, you sit in the garden under the tree. Then the sun rises and it is too hot, you seek shelter, you come in. In the day you go out, in the night you come in. A deep balance is needed, and for a deep balance opposites should not be taken as opposites. And they are not, they are complementaries: yin and yang, man and woman, day and night, summer and winter, sansar and nirvana.Remember, my whole emphasis is on the meeting of the opposites. Then you are not confined, then you have no limitation. Then you are unlimited. No boundary exists, and this is the emphasis of Hasidism also.A Hasidic sage is as worldly as anybody, and a Hasidic sage is as unworldly as anybody. He lives in the world but he is not of the world. He moves in the world, remains untouched by it; he is beyond. This is true religion.The religion that you call religion is not true religion. It is just in opposition to the world. It is a choice. That’s why if you choose that type of religion you may change, but fundamentally you will remain the same. The change will be just on the surface. The change will be just as if one goes from one imprisonment to another. One imprisonment is on this side of the road, another is on that side of the road. You live in one prison and you think of the other as if over there is freedom. It is the opposite: things are different there, but again it is a confinement.Between these two imprisonments there is the open road, the way of the white clouds. Just exactly in the middle, between two opposites, is the way. To me, extrovert is morbid, introvert is also morbid. When you are neither, you are healthy.Remember the word flowing. The more energy flows, the healthier. You can reach the highest peak and you can come down to the lowest world, and there is no problem. You can meditate and you can love. Meditation is going withinward, love is going outward. Meditation is reaching to one’s own being, love is an effort to reach the other’s being.There are religions which say that if you meditate you cannot love. There are religions which say that if you love, how can you meditate?Christianity is an extrovert religion. The emphasis is on serving people, love, compassion. The emphasis is not on meditation because if you meditate that looks selfish. When the world is in such a misery – people are hungry, ill, dying – you are meditating? The whole thing appears to be too cruel. Somebody is dying on the road, a beggar, and you are sitting in your temple and meditating? It is selfish. “Throw this meditation away,” says the extrovert religion. “Go and help people: that is the only way to reach God.”One of the greatest Indian poets, Rabindranath, was very impressed by Christianity. He wrote a poem in which he said, “Don’t seek me in the temple. I am not there. If you really want to seek me, come to the road where the stonecutter is cutting stones or where the farmer is tilling the ground. I am not in the temples. Come to the world where the laborer is working and the beggar is begging. There I am!”This is extrovert religion, a reaction against too much introvertedness.In India, introvert religions have existed. They say, “This world is maya, illusion. Beggars have always been dying and they will always die, and you cannot change anything. Move withinward, close your eyes. In your deepest core of being is godliness. Outside it is just a dream world. Don’t waste your time there, the real is within.”To me, both are morbid. A part is always morbid; the whole is healthy.So I tell you: godliness is everywhere. In the temple, when you close your eyes, there is godliness; and on the road also, where the stonecutter is working hard in the hot sun, there is godliness because only godliness is. Godliness is the whole and mind always tries to choose a part.I have heard…You must know a very famous movie dog, Rin Tin Tin. His trainer was asked about the dog. He tried to describe, but the dog had such marvelous qualities, such indefinable qualities, that he was at a loss to describe and define the qualities. So at last he stumbled upon a definition. He said, “Rin Tin Tin is God in the form of a dog.”God and dog – both words have the same balance. God may be the introversion of energy, dog may be the extroversion of the energy, but the energy is the same because only one energy exists. The world is a unity, the mind creates opposites.One very great Zen monk, Rinzai, was asked once – the questioner must have been a very skeptical mind; he asked, “You go on emphasizing that everything is God and everything is Buddha. Do you mean to say that even a dog is a buddha?” Rinzai laughed, didn’t answer. On the contrary, he jumped and started barking.That’s exactly the right answer: a buddha barking like a dog. He showed the fact rather than talking about it.You are morbid if you are confined to anything, whatsoever the name. You are healthy if you are flowing in all directions together. If opposites meet in you, you become perfect. That’s why a perfect man can never be consistent; he has to be contradictory because opposites will be meeting in him. Only ordinary people can be consistent.The true sage is never consistent, cannot be, because he will have to move in all the directions together.Walt Whitman says, “I’m vast. I contain contradictions.” What to say about existence? Vast – it contains all contradictions. It is in the lowest and it is in the highest. In the lowest it exists as the lowest, in the highest it exists as the highest. It is in sex and it is in samadhi, it is in this world as matter and it is in that world as non-matter. It is the sinner and it is the sage. The true sage is always contradictory – that’s the difficulty: to understand him.It is very easy to understand your mediocre saints. They are plain, no contradictions exist in them. They are always the same: you can rely, you can predict. They are like a simple line, no complexity. They are simple and in a way, simpletons. They don’t have the beauty of complexity.The true sage is very complex. He contains contradictions, and that’s why it has always been very difficult to recognize him. He eludes: you catch hold of him from one direction, he is moving in another. You cannot see because your eyes are morbid; you can see only the part.You can see a man as a sinner, you can see a man as a saint, but it is difficult to understand a man like Gurdjieff who is both. In him the sinner and the sage meet. In him even sin is transformed. In him even the sage is transformed and becomes a worldly being. To understand Gurdjieff you will have to drop all your categories, all your labels of sinners and saints and this and that.The true sage is godly: godliness is contradictory.That’s what Krishna says in the Gita. He says, “Don’t be worried because I am the killer and the killed. Don’t be worried because I am in both: the one who is killed is me, and the one who is going to kill also is me. My two hands, right and left, are in a game of hide and seek.”All your conceptions of God are very poor, and theologians go on trying to explain. They can never explain because the contradiction creates the trouble. If you say, “God is just,” then you cannot say, “God is compassion.” That’s the trouble for the theologian: if God is just, then compassion cannot exist, if God is compassion, then he cannot be just. Both are not possible together.For thousands of years theologians have gone on thinking, “How to manage? God seems to be unmanageable, chaotic.” He is both! He is compassionate in his justice and he is just in his compassion. But then it is absurd because how can a judge be both? If the judge has compassion, then he would like to forgive. If he is just, then the criminal has to be punished – punished according to the law, with no compassion. Then he has to remain indifferent.Justice has to be neutral. Compassion is love, it cannot be neutral. God is both. Let me tell you: God is bondage and God is freedom. That’s why I say don’t be in a hurry. Even in the market he exists. Even in this world, so ungodly, he exists because otherwise is not possible.Once you can see it, such deep silence descends in your being because when you can see the contradictions meeting in existence, contradictions within you immediately meet and dissolve. Then you move; freedom becomes your nature. Then you move freely; then you become freedom. Then there is no goal. The only goal is to delight herenow. Nothing is to be achieved because all achievement is always against something. You have to leave this and attain that, you have to drop this and do that.All achievement, ambition, goal, is choosing something against something else – and existence is both. That’s why Krishnamurti goes on insisting that the only way to attain to truth is to be choiceless. Choose and you have become morbid. Don’t choose, float choicelessly. Don’t be the chooser, just watch and flow, and you are freedom. This is what moksha is: absolute freedom.The third question:Osho,Why am I afraid of other people?If you are afraid of yourself, only then are you afraid of other people. If you love yourself, you love others; if you hate yourself, you hate others because in relationship with others it is only you mirrored. The other is nothing but a mirror. So whatsoever happens in relationship, always know: it must have happened before within you because the relationship can only magnify, it cannot create. It can only show and manifest, it cannot create. If you love yourself, you love others; if you are afraid of yourself, you are afraid of others because coming in contact with others you will start manifesting your being.You have been conditioned – in the East, in the West, everywhere; Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina – you all have been conditioned to hate yourselves. It has been taught to you continuously that to love oneself is bad: “Love others. Hate yourself.” This is asking for absurdities, impossibilities. If you don’t love yourself, the one nearest to yourself, how can you love anybody else? Nobody loves himself and is trying to love others. Then your love is nothing but hatred – masked, hidden.I tell you to love yourself first because if love happens within you, only then can it spread to others. It is just like throwing a stone in a silent lake: the stone falls, ripples arise, and then they go on moving, moving, moving – to the farthest bank they will go on. But the stone must have fallen within you first, the love must have happened to you: you must have loved yourself.That is a basic requirement which is missing all over the world. That’s why the world is in such misery: everybody trying to love, but impossible to love because the basis is not there, the foundation is lacking.Love yourself and then suddenly you will find yourself reflected everywhere. You are a human being and all other human beings are just like you: just forms differ, names differ, but the reality is the same. Then go on moving farther and farther. Then animals are also like you; the form differs a little more, but the being… Then the trees are also like you. Farther and farther go on. The ripples – then even rocks because they also exist and you also exist. Existence is the same, similar.This is the only way to love existence: start by loving yourself and then let the love spread. Then don’t know any boundaries, go on and on to the very infinity. This is what prayer is, this is what devotion is.If you miss the first point – the stone has not been thrown – then you go on waiting and watching and the ripples never arise. It cannot start anywhere else, it can only start in your heart because love is a ripple in the heart, a vibration in the heart, a throbbing of sharing whatsoever you are – a deep intense urge to go and reach the other, to share your being and your delight and your song.But your heart is almost dead, frozen, and you have been taught to condemn yourself: that you are ugly, that you are bad. That this is sin: “Don’t do this – you are guilty.” You cannot accept yourself, how can you accept anybody else?A deep acceptance is needed. Whatsoever and whosoever you are, a deep acceptance – not only acceptance but a delight that “I am.” I, here, now: all the three points, the triangle of being, should be filled with delight. You should not ask something else. There should not be any “ought.” Drop all shoulds and the whole world becomes different. Right now you continuously think, “I should be this and that, then I can love and be loved.”Your God is nothing but the greatest condemner looking at you from the skies: “Behave well.” This gives you a bad feeling about yourself. By and by you become afraid because you are suppressing yourself. If you relate with somebody, the suppression may break, everything may bubble up, surface. Then…? So you are afraid, afraid to come in contact. So you remain hidden within yourself and nobody knows how ugly you are, nobody knows how angry you are, nobody knows how full of hatred you are. Nobody knows your jealousy, possessiveness, envy. Nobody knows: you create armor around, you live within yourself, you never make any contact so that you can manage your image. If you come deep in contact, the image is bound to break; the reality, the real encounter will shatter it. That is the fear.You ask, “Why am I afraid of other people?” You are afraid because you are afraid of yourself. Drop that fear, drop the guilt that has been created in you. Your politicians, priests, parents, are all guilt-creators because that is the only way that you can be controlled and manipulated. They have condemned you: a very simple but very cunning trick to manipulate you because if you are accepted, not condemned – loved, appreciated, and if it is relayed to you from everywhere that you are okay – then it will be difficult to control you. How can you control a person who is absolutely okay? The very problem doesn’t arise.So the priests, the politicians, the parents go on saying that you are not okay. Once they create the feeling that you are not okay, they become the dictators. Now they have to dictate the discipline: “Now this is the way you should behave.” First they create the feeling that you are wrong, then they give you guidelines how to be right.You are here with me, involved in a totally different experiment. I have no condemnation, I don’t create any guilt feeling in you. I don’t say, “This is sin,” I don’t say that I will love you only when you fulfill certain conditions. I love you as you are because that’s the only way a person can be loved. I accept you as you are because I know that is the only way you can be. That’s how the whole has willed you to be, that is what the whole has destined it to be.Relax and accept and delight, and there is transformation. It comes not by effort, it comes by accepting yourself with such deep love and ecstasy that there is no condition – conscious, unconscious, known, unknown. Unconditional acceptance, and suddenly you see you are not afraid of people; rather, you enjoy people, people are beautiful. They are all incarnations of God – maybe Rin Tin Tin, but still incarnations of God.You love them and if you love them, you bring their godliness to the surface. Whenever you love a person, his godliness comes on top. It happens because when somebody loves you, how can you show your ugliness? Simply, your beautiful face comes up, and by and by the ugly face disappears.Love is alchemical. If you love yourself, the ugly part of you disappears, is absorbed, is transformed. The energy is released from that form because everything carries energy. Your anger has much energy involved in it, your fear also has much energy crippled and suffocated in it. If the fear disappears, the form falls down and the energy is released. Anger disappears, more energy is released; jealousy disappears, still more energy. Whatsoever are called sins, when they disappear…I don’t say that you have to change the sins; you have to love your being and they change; change is a by-product, a consequence. So much tremendous energy is released that you start floating higher and higher and higher. You attain to wings.Love yourself! That should be the foundational commandment: love yourself. All else will follow, but this is the foundation.The fourth question:Osho,I am confused about the difference between individuality and personality. What, if anything, is left of the individual after the exit of the ego?Individuality is your essence: you come with it, you are born with it. Personality is borrowed: it is given to you by the society. It is just like clothes, subtle clothes.A child is born naked; then we hide his nakedness, we give him clothes. A child is born with essence, individuality. We hide that too because naked individuality is rebellious, non-conformist.Individuality is exactly what it means: it is individual. Personality is not individual, it is social.Society wants you to have personalities not individualities, because your individualities will create conflict. The society hides your individuality and gives a personality. Personality is a learned thing. The word personality comes from a Greek root which means mask: persona. In Greek drama the actors used to wear masks to hide their real face and to show some other face. From persona comes the word personality; it is a face that you wear, it is not your original face.When the personality disappears, don’t be afraid. For the first time you become authentic, for the first time you become real, for the first time you attain to essence. That essence, in India, has been called atma, the soul.The ego is the center of personality and godliness is the center of essence. That’s why there is so much insistence from every corner that ego has to be dropped: unless you know what you are, not what you are expected to be…Personality is false, it is the greatest lie. And because the whole society depends on personality, the state, the church, organizations, the establishment are all lies. The western psychology goes on thinking about the personality too much, that’s why the whole of western psychology is a psychology based on the basic lie.In the East we think of the essence, not of the personality. That which you have brought, that which is your intrinsic nature, swabhava, that which is your intrinsic essence has to be known and has to be lived.Personality is that which you are not, but try to show that you are. Personality is that which you have to use as a convenience when you move in society.You are walking; you have gone for a morning walk, and then somebody passes by – you smile. The smile can be either from the essence or from the personality. If the smile is really a delight in seeing the person, in seeing the godliness in that person, in seeing the heart, the love, the formless that has become incarnate in that person… That’s why, in India we never use words like “Good morning” – they don’t mean much. We say, “Ram, Ram.” We welcome each other by the name of God. It is a symbolic act that means, “I see the godliness within you.” Ram, Ram means, “I see Ram within you. Welcome. I am happy, blessed, that you passed by.” If it comes from your essence, then the smile spreads all over your being; you feel a deep contentment, you feel blessed that this man passed by. The man is gone but the blessing remains and lingers around you like a subtle perfume.If you say simply a “Good morning” because the man is a banker or a political leader – can be mischievous sometimes, can be dangerous, it is risky not to say “Good morning” – then you say it and you smile, you bring a smile on your face. That is persona, that is personality.In each act you have to watch. It is arduous but it has to be done. There is no other way. In each act you have to watch from where it comes – from personality or from essence? If it comes from essence, the essence will grow because you will give an opportunity for the essence to be manifested, expressed. If it comes from the personality, then the personality will become harder and harder and harder and it will suffocate the essence completely.Watch, remind yourself again and again from where it comes. You come home: you bring ice cream, flowers to your wife. Is the present from the personality or from the essence? If it is from the personality, it is a lie. You may have talked to somebody else’s wife – you were charmed, you felt attracted, a desire arose in you – and then you started feeling guilty, “This is not being faithful, so bring ice cream home.” And remember, your wife will immediately suspect; otherwise, you never bring ice cream. There must be something in it, you must be hiding something. “Why are you so good today, so suddenly unexpectedly good?”You cannot deceive women. They have an instinct; they are lie detectors. They immediately feel because they don’t think. Their feeling is immediate and direct. They function from the center of emotion. You are feeling guilty, then you bring some present to the wife. It is a gift from the personality; it is very dangerous.Suddenly the same can happen, the situation may be the same: you were talking to your friend’s wife, you were charmed – she was graceful and beautiful – and because of her beauty, because of her grace, you remembered your wife because when you love a person every beautiful person reminds you of the person. It has to be so. If the woman was charming, it immediately reminds you of your beloved. Something of the beloved was there – a part, a gesture. Something of your wife was there. You loved the woman in that moment because she reminded you of your wife. Then you are so full of the memory you bring ice cream or flowers or something – or nothing, just a smile. Then it is from the essence. It is totally different: the situation may be the same but you can behave in a totally different way.Personality is an effort to deceive. Essence is an effort to reveal your being. Whatsoever it is, it is – to reveal and to be open and to be vulnerable. Try to live from the essence and you will become religious. Try to live by the personality and you will be the most irreligious possible.To me religion doesn’t mean a ritual, it doesn’t mean going to the church or the temple, it doesn’t mean reading the Bible or the Gita every day – no. Religion means to live from the essence, to be authentic, to be true.Remember, howsoever you lie, you cannot lie because a lie is a lie. Deep down you know it is a lie. You may pretend that you don’t know, but your pretension will be there and that will indicate. You cannot lie to anybody because anybody who has any eyes, who has any awareness, any intelligence will penetrate it.There was a case…A woman was suing Mulla Nasruddin. She claimed that her child was Mulla Nasruddin’s child, and he was denying vehemently in the court.Finally the judge asked, “Say only one thing – did you sleep with this woman, Nasruddin?”Nasruddin said, “No, your honor – not a wink!”Your lies are apparent and the truth has a way of coming up. It finds a way and in the end the truth is known and you have wasted your whole life in lies. Don’t waste a single moment! All time wasted in lies is absolutely wasted, and through lies nobody ever becomes happy – impossible. Lies can give only pretensions of happiness; they cannot give you true happiness. True happiness is part of truth.Hindus have defined God as bliss, sat-chit-anand. Anand, bliss, is the final, the ultimate core. Be true and you will be blissful, be authentic and you will be happy. And that happiness will be uncaused, it will be just a part of your being true. Happiness is a function of truth. Whenever there is truth, happiness functions; whenever there is not truth, happiness stops functioning, unhappiness functions.Don’t be afraid. You ask, “I am confused about the difference between individuality and personality. What, if anything, is left of the individual after the exit of the ego?” In fact nothing of the individual is left because of the ego. When the ego is gone, the whole individuality arises in its crystal purity – transparent, intelligent, radiant, happy, alive, vibrating with an unknown rhythm. That unknown rhythm is godliness. It is a song heard in the deepest core of your being, a dance of the formless – but one can hear the footsteps.Everything real arises only when the ego has gone. Ego is the deceiver, the falsification. When ego is gone, you are there; when ego is there, you simply think you are, but you are not.The fifth question:Osho,I can think of nothing that I wish more clearly than to come closer to your inner temple. Is this possible while I am still doing my own thing? Or is it a prerequisite to drop all activities and interests not connected with you and your work?If you really are doing your own thing, you have come closer to my inner temple. There is no other way.I am here to help you to do your own thing. I am not here to drag you away from your own thing; that’s what the so-called religions have been doing all along. Remember this: I am not to make anything out of you. If you can just be yourself, it is enough, more than enough. If I can help you to be yourself, then the right thing has happened. But if in some way I become an opportunity to distract you from your own being, then I am the enemy not the friend.So never again think it is “…a prerequisite to drop all activities and interests not connected with you and your work.”You are my work, you are my activity. Nothing else is more important than you. You are supreme, there is no higher value than you. So if you are fulfilled, my work is done; if you are blissful, my activity is fulfilled. There is no other work. I have no idea, ideology, that it has to be fulfilled through you – no. I am at the most just an opportunity where you can find yourself.When you reach your innermost home, you have reached my temple – and there is no other way.The sixth question:Osho,You have said that the proper relationship of mind to consciousness is that of the servant. How is the servant to be treated? Is it to be not mistreated? How am I to know when that is happening?Remember, if you are really a master you never mistreat the servant – that is one of the qualities of the master. You mistreat the servant only when you are not certain that you are master. That mistreatment is a deep insecurity. You try to mistreat to know whether you are the master or not. If you are absolutely certain you are the master, you love the servant, you treat him as a friend, you respect him even.So only those who are suspicious of their own mastery treat the servants in a wrong way. A man who is absolutely certain, who knows he is the master – then there is no problem.It is said of a Hasid master, Magid…He went to see another master. He was a little late. The lecture hall was full and the other master was speaking, so he sat just near the door where people had left their shoes.Somebody looked at him; the quality of the man attracted him. He told his neighbor, “Some rare being is here. But why is he sitting there? That is not a place for a master to sit. And he is so radiant!” It is said that by and by the whole audience turned toward him.The master – who was a fake, who was talking – was surprised at the phenomenon. Magid had not uttered a single word; he was just sitting with closed eyes.Later when they were alone, the pseudo-master asked Magid, “Tell me the secret. What happened? I was there as the leader of the congregation and I was to talk there. What happened? Why did people turn toward you?”Magid said, “Since I became a master it almost always happens. It is not something to be done, it simply happens.”A master has a quality. When you are really the master, you have become a watcher and become the master. It is such a simple thing: just say it and it happens. Just say to the mind: “Enough – now be the servant because you are the servant.”I say it is just that simple. You are afraid, that’s why it cannot happen. You know that it will not happen, then you can say it and it will not happen. But it is not happening because you know it will not happen; otherwise it will happen. You have not really treated the mind as a master; otherwise you simply say, “Sit down, listen,” and the mind listens. Otherwise is not possible.Vivekananda was in America. He was talking one morning and he told a story emphasizing the fact that faith can move mountains.One old woman who was very worried by a mountain said, “This is good! I never tried it.”Just near her house, behind it, was a big mountain. Because of the mountain the sun could not reach and because of the mountain air could not reach – and the house was very suffocating. So she said, “This is simple. Now I will go and I will have faith.”She went immediately. She looked the last time, opened the window and looked, because now the mountain will disappear, there will be no chance again to see it. She closed the window, closed her eyes, and said, “I have faith. Now move.” Thrice she said it because she thought, “Maybe once may not work. Twice… But thrice is enough.”Then she opened the window, the mountain was there. She started laughing and said, “All the time I knew it was not going to happen.”If you know all the time, then it will not happen because you have not fulfilled the condition.I also say faith can move mountains – but faith, remember. And faith need not speak thrice. It is doubt which speaks thrice. What is the point? Once you say it, finished! Faith will not open the window and look – it is finished.I have heard…In a town it happened that rains were not coming. It was already getting too late. The priest of the town gathered all the people one morning, called them all to come to the temple so that they would pray and it would rain. The whole town went and the whole town laughed about a child – a small child who came with an umbrella.So everybody talked and laughed and said, “You fool. Why are you carrying your umbrella? You may lose it somewhere. The rains are not coming.”The child said, “But I thought that when you pray, the rains would come.” Only one child was carrying an umbrella – how can the rains come? If that child had prayed, there was a possibility because faith can only be total – otherwise not. The people who were laughing about the child were simply stupid. Then why were they going to pray? When the prayer has not been fulfilled, they will say, “All the time we knew it. It was not going to happen.”Faith is a different quality of inner functioning. If you really say to the mind, “Be the servant from now onward,” be finished, don’t open the window again to see. This is how it happens, and this is how it is going to happen to you because there is no other way.When you are a master, you treat the servant like a friend. You feel grateful to the servant. He serves you – why mistreat him? Mistreatment comes only because when you see that the servant is the master, then you react, then you are angry, then you mistreat. Your mistreatment simply shows that the servant is not the servant and the master is not the master.The seventh question:Osho,Listening to your words: “The sky appears to, but nowhere does it touch the earth,” a deep feeling gathered around me that the sky is touching the earth right through me, that I am the horizon wherever I am. The feeling – like a honeycomb with no substance in it, just the wide open sky penetrating every pore of it – has remained ever since as a constant meditation. It feels light and blissful to be in it. Please comment.There is no need to comment. I bless you. This is what should happen.The eighth question:Osho,Is everything in one's life, particularly the degree of spiritual progress, predestined? Or is one's life a series of challenges and possibilities without anything being known about the outcome?The essence is predestined, the personality is just an accident. That which you are is predestined, that which you appear to be is just an accident. Your being a Hindu, your being a Christian is an accident. Your being a man, your being a woman is an accident. Your being a German or an Indian is an accident. Your being black or white is an accident. But your being, simply your being, is destined.Try to find that which is destined and don’t be too concerned with that which is irrelevant, accidental. Your nose is a little long or a little short – don’t be bothered much about it, it is just accidental. Or your skin has a pigment and you are black, or your skin does not have that pigment, not more than four annas worth, and you are white – don’t be too worried about it. It is just irrelevant. Try to find that which is absolutely destined. That is your nature; that is your essence.But you are lost in the accidents and you pay too much attention to accidents. You are too worried about them, your whole time and energy is wasted in them, and you become so much occupied with the nonessential that the essential is forgotten.This is the state of the man who is asleep: always focused on the nonessential. Thinking of money, thinking of power, thinking of the house, thinking of the car, thinking of this and that, but never looking at that which is your innermost core, which is you, which is absolutely destined.Outside nothing is destined. Inside everything is destined. Pay more attention to it. That’s what sannyas is all about: a turning toward the essential and a turning away from the nonessential.I am not saying don’t eat, don’t live in a house – no, that is not the meaning. Live in a house, but don’t be too concerned. One has to eat to live; eat, but don’t make eating your whole business – there are people who continuously think of eating. Money is needed but don’t make money your God. Use it when you have it; when you don’t have it, also use that non-having because that has its own beauties. When you have money, you can have a palace. Have it. When you don’t have the money, become a vagabond and live under the sky; that has its own beauty. When you have money, use it; don’t be used by the money. When you don’t have it, enjoy poverty. Richness has its own richness, poverty has its own richness also.There are many things which only a poor man can enjoy, never a rich man. There are many things only rich people can enjoy, never a poor man. So, whatsoever opportunity: when you are rich, enjoy that which a rich man can enjoy; whenever you are poor, enjoy that which poor men enjoy.What do you do? You do just the reverse. When you are rich, you suffer for those things which only poor men can enjoy, and when you are poor you suffer for those things which only a rich man can enjoy. You are simply foolish; I don’t see intelligence.I was staying with a friend. He was a vice-chancellor – an old man, a drunkard, almost always drunk – but he was a very good man, as drunkards are: always a very sweet, a very polite man, a very loving man.One night he had taken too much and I was sitting with him and he became suddenly afraid – he became paranoid. So he told me, “Please write a letter immediately to the police station, to send two intelligence officers.”I wrote the letter, but I committed an error. I wrote to the police superintendent “Please, send two intelligent officers.”The old drunkard looked at the letter and started laughing and he said, “Who has ever heard of ‘intelligent officers’? Write ‘intelligence officers,’ not ‘intelligent officers.’”It is almost impossible to find an intelligent officer because it is almost impossible to find an intelligent man.Intelligence is absolutely lacking; otherwise when you have money enjoy it, live like a king when you have it. I see people, they have money and they live like beggars. They are saving it for the future, and when it is lost, then they start thinking about it, “Why? Why did we waste the time? We should have enjoyed.”Poor people always think of living in palaces while they could be enjoying the tree where they are. The singing birds and the sun and the air – the world is more open to a poor man because he can enjoy a beautiful sleep, while for a rich man sleep has become difficult. He has better bedrooms, he has a better, more comfortable mattress, but he is not able to sleep. Then he thinks about beggars and feels envious and jealous: “These poor people are sleeping so well, snoring, and I cannot sleep.”When you can sleep well, sleep well; when you have a beautiful mattress, enjoy it and suffer insomnia. But be intelligent.The last question:Osho,Ancient Jewish mythology places Lilith as the first person on earth, not Adam. Why was this version lost? Would you tell us about it?There is no secret in it, just male chauvinism. It was difficult for man to think that a woman was made first and man followed. No, it is against his pride.The original version was that Lilith was created first. It seems natural that woman should come first because she carries the womb. Woman should come first; that seems natural, biological, true. But it is difficult for man to entertain the idea. He changed the story, he created another myth, that Adam was created; but then there was trouble because then how to produce Eve from Adam? So a rib was taken because there was no womb. Now the whole story is foolish. With a woman it would remain simple. With man it was almost impossible. A rib was taken out and Eve was created.The first story is true. I agree with the first, I reject the second.Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Perfect SwimmerWhen the son of the Rabbi of Lenshno was a boy,he saw Rabbi Vitzhak of Vorki praying.Full of amazement, he came running to his fatherand asked how it was possible for such a zaddikto pray so quietly and simplywithout giving any sign of ecstasy.His father answered, “A poor swimmerhas to thrash around in order to stay up in the water.The perfect swimmer rests on the tide and it carries him.”There is a very ancient tale; if you listen well you will find yourself in it, but if you only hear it you will laugh at it and forget it.Sometimes you simply laugh to forget something, to hide something. Many times I have observed that you laugh just to hide the tears, you laugh because if you don’t laugh it will be too much, too heavy. Laughter is a way of avoiding something. So please, listen to it as deeply as you can.I know hearing is simple. Listening is very difficult. You hear it and you think that you have listened to it. Hearing is just mechanical. When you hear with perfect awareness, then, listening becomes possible. Hearing is just like eating without tasting: you can fill the belly, but deep down the hunger remains. The body may be satisfied, even overloaded, but the subtle hunger remains because it can be satisfied only when you become capable of taste. To taste a thing is to be aware, alert.Listen to it; the story is one of the most wonderful I have ever come across. It is a Hasid story. It says…There was a very great city. It appeared great to those who lived in it. In fact, it was not bigger than a small saucer. The houses of the city were skyscrapers and the people who were the dwellers claimed that their housetops almost touched the sky. But to those who were not deluded, the height of the city looked to be not more than that of an onion.In that city, people of ten cities were assembled: millions of people. But to those who could count, there were only three fools in that city, not a single person more.The first fool was a great thinker. He was a great system-maker, a metaphysician – almost an Aristotle. He could talk about anything; you asked and he had ready-made answers. The rumor was spread in the town that he was the greatest seer. Of course, he was absolutely blind. He could not see the Himalaya just in front of his eyes but he could count the legs of the ants crawling on the moon – and he was absolutely blind. He was a logic-chopper. He saw things which nobody has ever seen: God, angels, heaven and hell. He was very condemnatory of the mundane world which could be seen; he always appreciated the unseen, which only he could see, and nobody else.The second man used to hear the music of the spheres. He used to hear the dancing atoms, the harmony of existence – but he was stone-deaf.The third fool, the third man, was absolutely naked. He had nothing. He was the poorest man who had ever existed, except that he had a sword which he always carried, on guard. He was always afraid, he was paranoid – afraid that somebody was going to rob him someday. Of course, he had nothing.They all conferred because there was a rumor that their city was in a deep crisis. All three fools who were thought to be very wise were asked to go deep into the phenomena: Was it true that the city was in danger – some crisis was coming, some future catastrophe?The blind man looked into the far horizon and said, “Yes, I can see: thousands of soldiers of the enemy country are coming. I cannot only see them, I can count how many there are. I can see to which race and to which religion they belong.”The deaf man listened silently, brooded, and said, “Yes. I can hear what they are saying, and I can also hear what they are not saying and hiding in their hearts.”The beggar jumped, the third beggar jumped, took his sword in his hand and he said, “I am afraid they are going to rob us.”This is your story: think about it, move around and around and penetrate deeper into it. This is the story of man.Man is always pretending to be that which he is not; that’s a way of hiding oneself. The ugly man tries to look beautiful, the man who is in anguish tries to look happy, the man who does not know a thing tries to prove that he knows all. This is how it goes on and on. Unless you become aware of these three fools within you, you will never become a sage. To go beyond the three fools, one becomes the true sage.Try to stick to the fact, don’t try to hide it in a fiction. Fictions are easy, cheap. One need not do anything, one can simply imagine, and imagination is a way of auto-hypnosis. If you go on continuously repeating something, you will start feeling that you have that thing. What have you got in this world? What do you possess? You don’t possess even yourself, then why are you so afraid that somebody is going to rob you?People come to me and they say, “We cannot trust because we are afraid.”I ask them, “What are you afraid of? What have you got?”They say, “If we trust, somebody may deceive us. The third fool…What have you got? Empty-handed you come, empty-handed you go, and just in between – “between and betwixt” – the foolishness that you possess something.That is the meaning of Jesus when he says, “Even camels can pass through the eye of the needle, but rich men will not be able to enter into my kingdom of God.” What does he mean by a rich man? He means one who has nothing and thinks that he has.Everybody is poor. Empty-handed we come, empty-handed we go. All ideas of richness are fictions. By rich men, Jesus doesn’t mean those who have. On this earth nobody has anything: the poor are poor; the rich are also poor – sometimes even poorer than the poor because they are more deluded that they have something.If you have something, Jesus is right: “A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but you will not be able to pass through the kingdom of God.” The doors will be closed, it is not for fools. The very idea that you possess something is foolish, and once the idea settles in, then you try to protect it. Then everybody else becomes the enemy because everybody else is trying to snatch that which you have – and in the first place you don’t have anything.The more you protect, the more others think that you must have something; otherwise why are you protecting so much? They are running after you, thinking that you must have something. Seeing that they are running after you, you think there is danger, protection is needed. This is how the vicious circle goes on.Nobody has anything in this world. Once you realize this, all fear disappears. Once you realize this, you have become a sannyasin. Not that you leave your house and your wife and children and the world, and move to a mountaintop. No, because those who run to the mountaintops still think that they are leaving something that they had. That is the very foolishness: first you were deluded that you have, now you are deluded that you have renounced. But the basic hypnosis still exists. First you continuously counted your money – how much you had; now you will be counting how much you have renounced. Renunciation is nothing but the other side of the bank balance, the other side of the river, of the market.A man who knows has nothing to renounce because a man who knows, and comes to understand his situation, knows he has nothing. How can you renounce, what can you renounce? Your hands are empty and suddenly you are moving in a different space; the possession, the renunciation, both have become irrelevant.There are people who come to me; I can see that I am in front of them and yet they cannot see me. They say they have visions, spiritual visions, beautiful colors float in their minds; kundalini arises – the snake-power, the serpent-power – it rushes toward the last chakra. And I am in front of them and I can see they are blind: they can’t see me and their kundalini is arising and they have tremendous light in their third eye! And they have come so that I can confirm, “Yes, that’s so.”If I say, “Yes, that is so,” they are very happy and fulfilled. If I say “No,” they are very angry, they become my enemies. They cannot see me, but they can count the legs of the ants crawling on the moon. They are stone-blind; to hide their blindness they create many fictions around themselves.A man came to me and said…“Just as happened in Mohammed’s life, it is happening in my life: I receive messages in the night. God himself, Allah – he gives me messages. The trouble is, in the morning I always forget what the message was.” This happened in Ahmedabad.I told him, “Do one thing: keep a pad, a pencil, just near your bed and while you are going into sleep, continuously go on remembering that whenever God reveals anything, your sleep will be immediately broken and you will be able to write. Write it, whatsoever it is.”He said, “They are tremendous truths, they can transform the whole world, but the trouble is I always forget in the morning.”So I said, “Write it and whatsoever it is, bring it.”Next day he came. He was very worried and sad, depressed and frustrated.I said, “What happened?”He said, “I cannot believe what happened. I followed what you said. I went on remembering while I was falling asleep that whenever the message was delivered I would be able to get up immediately and write it down. And it happened as you said.”“But then,” I said, “why are you so sad?”He said, “The message makes me very sad.”“What was the message?”He was feeling a little embarrassed. The message was, “Live a little hot. Sip a Gold Spot.” The billboard was just in front of his house. He must have been passing by it.So he said, “Please don’t say this to anybody because I am very frustrated. How did it happen? Is it some kind of joke God is playing on me?”Your dreams are bound to be your dreams: “Live a little hot. Sip a Gold Spot.” They cannot go beyond them. Your visions are your visions, they cannot be more than you. Your experiences are your experiences; they are bound to be below you, they cannot be beyond you. Your kundalini is going to be your kundalini, it cannot be a buddha’s kundalini. There is a ninety-nine percent possibility that you have been imagining.Man is so poor he imagines in millions of ways to convince himself “I am rich.” If you have not been able to attain to the worldly things, then you start attaining non-worldly things. If you don’t have a bank balance here on the earth, then you have a bank balance there in heaven. But you have a bank balance.Always remember that your mind is stupid. Mind as such is stupidity, mind cannot be intelligence. Intelligence happens only when the mind has gone. Intelligence is not the function of the mind, it is the function of the whole. Mind is stupid, repetitive. It cannot know the unknown, it can only go on repeating the known. “Live a little hot. Sip a Gold Spot” – continuously looking at the advertisement board, it became settled.If you are born a Hindu, your kundalini will rise; if you are born a Jaina, never, because Jaina scriptures don’t advertise kundalini. If you are a Christian, you will see Christ and the cross; but if you are a Hindu, Christ never bothers to come on your path, and the cross – no. You will see Krishna playing on the flute because Krishna is advertised and Christ is not advertised.All your spiritual experiences are nothing but conditioning that the society has given to you. Don’t rely on them too much because death will force you to realize the fact that you have lived a fictitious life – the opportunity lost.Become aware that you have nothing. Once you feel that you have nothing, fear disappears because fear is always part of the feeling that you possess something which can be lost – hence fear.When you realize the fact that you don’t know anything – you are blind, you cannot see – you know all that you have been seeing is your own projection. You create it and you see it; you are the director in the drama that you call your life, and you are the story writer also, and you are the actor. You are all that is happening and you are the audience; there is nobody else. You are looking at it, you are creating it, you are directing it, you are playing a role in it. Once this is seen – and this can be seen in a flash of light, just by listening to me rightly, it can be seen – then the whole drama disappears. This is what Hindus call maya: the world that you have created around yourself which is not real, which is not there – your own creation.When it drops, for the first time you are not blind. Your eyes open, then you see that which is. Don’t go on listening to distant harmonies, the music of the spheres and the dancing steps of the atoms. Don’t befool yourself; as it is, you have already befooled yourself too long. No more, it is enough. Say it is enough because unless you are freed from your wrong notions of eyes and ears and riches, the right cannot become available to you.To be freed from the wrong is to be available to the right, to be freed from the false is to be on the path of that which is real.Remember this trick of the mind, that the mind creates the opposite. If you are angry, you have a polite smile on your face: the mind creates the opposite. If you are afraid, you have fearlessness showing on the face. If you are full of hatred, you go on trying so many love affairs.It is said about Lord Byron that he fell in love with hundreds, thousands, of women; looks like a great lover, a Don Juan, but he was not. He must have been too full of hatred; he could not love anybody. When you cannot love anybody, when the love is not flowing, you go on moving with new partners. Just to create an illusion that you are a great lover, you love so many people.One love is enough. If it is, it can satisfy you so deeply, it can make you so contented. Such infinite tranquility can happen through it, there is no need for more. But when it is not there, then you go on and on.I was reading a drama. The drama belongs to the category that they now call theater of the absurd. The curtain rises…The actors are in a restaurant – a few people, the waiters serving and the people eating, enjoying food, talking, saying how beautiful it is. In fact, nothing is happening. The waiters are only doing the movements, they are not bringing food. The eaters are only doing the movements of eating, they are not eating food. Everybody is afraid, “If I say that there is no food, then the whole restaurant, so many people, will think me mad.”When everybody is eating and you see that there is no food on anybody’s plate… Not only are people putting the food in their mouths, biting, chewing, eating and enjoying, and talking about it, how beautiful it is – you have to follow. Otherwise you will be the only one who is mad, who has gone mad, insane.Everybody is in the same situation, afraid to say that there is no food and that waiters are bringing nothing, empty plates, and people are eating nothing – just empty movements of the hands and the mouth. Not only that, they are describing how tasteful it is, how delicious; you will be thought mad if you say it. It is better not to say. Save your sanity and go home.Everybody goes out of the restaurant talking about the food, but everybody is hungry and everybody seems tired. When you make empty movements, you are bound to be tired. Everybody seems weary of life, almost dead, but still talking about the food.This is the situation about love: you fall in love, you do the movements. Love is not there, real food is not there, you simply do the movements that lovers are expected to do. Not only that, then you say, “How beautiful!” – and you know deep down that there is nothing. Nothing is happening; but to say that nothing is happening, you will be found out, you will be wrong.The whole world lives in dreams; if you want to live in it you have to be a part. You say, “Yes. So beautiful!” But then you are weary and tired, and the whole life seems like a long boredom, non-ending. Again and again, you follow the same routine, and again and again to come to the same frustration. Look – is not this your life?The mind will say, “No, this is not my life. It may be of others.” That’s the way of the mind to protect itself: “Others may be fools. I’m not.” The wise man thinks in a different way. Says Lao Tzu, “Everybody seems to be very, very wise. Only I am the idiot here.” The wise man looks like an idiot.Let me tell you a Hasid tale. It happened a group of Jews was migrating to America from Poland…In old Jewish communities, it was always so: there was always a village sage and there was always a village idiot – to balance things. Jews are very balancing, it has to be balanced that way. If the village has a sage, the village needs an idiot also, otherwise what will balance? The sage may create too much wisdom; it may become indigestible, he may become too heavy with his advice, he may create too much seriousness around. An idiot is needed to bring balance to things.Rarely, but sometimes it also happened that it was the same man: the sage and the idiot. Then the sage flowered perfectly because then the village was not balanced, the man himself was balanced.It was such a case here. The village idiot – or you can call him the village sage, his name was Yosel – was also migrating with the whole community. After the third day there was a great storm: life was in danger, the ship was going to sink any moment. It was chaos: the captain shouting orders, the sailors lowering down the lifeboats, children crying, women screaming, and all the passengers milling around the deck in deep confusion, afraid. It was great pandemonium. Only Yosel was amused; he was watching everybody, smiling. He was entertained by the whole situation.One old man of the village upbraided Yosel, “This is too much. The ship is sinking and what are you doing – amusing yourself!”Yosel said, “Why are you getting so excited, uncle? Does the ship belong to you?”This can be the statement of an idiot, this can be the statement of a sage; it can be both. It is both.There is a point where the sage and the idiot meet, where the sage looks like the idiot, where the idiot looks like the sage because opposites merge and a single synthesis is attained.A sage has nothing to defend; he can afford to be an idiot. You cannot afford to be an idiot because you know you are an idiot and you have to defend it by your so-called wisdom. What I am saying is that you always create the opposite. You are not one; you are a multitude, a crowd. Whatsoever you feel inside, you try to pretend just the opposite so that no one comes to know your inner poverty, your inner stupidity. If you are stupid, you study scripture. You can find many stupid people studying the Torah, Bible, Gita, Koran – hiding their stupidity.It happened…One day a man knocked at Naftali’s house. Naftali opened the door and as was his custom, he asked, “Why have you come?”The man said, “I have come to study with you.”Naftali closed the door and he said, “Go somewhere else. I am not a teacher. You can find somebody else who can teach you scripture.”“Why?” Naftali’s wife asked. “Why have you denied that man? He looked like a sincere seeker.”Naftali said, “People who are interested in studying scriptures are almost always stupid. They want to hide.”Another day, another man knocked. Naftali opened the door and he asked, “Why? Why are you here? What do you want from me?”The man said, “I have come to be near you, to learn how to serve humanity.”Naftali says, “Go away. You have knocked on the wrong door.”The wife was very much puzzled. She said, “Now he was not asking to study scripture. He seems to be a great social reformer or something like that. He wanted to serve humanity – such a purist, pious mind. Why have you refused him?”Naftali said, “Those who don’t know themselves, they cannot serve anybody else. All their service finally becomes mischief.”Social reformers are mischievous people unless they know themselves. How can you serve anybody and how can you serve humanity? You have not served that small being that is within you; light it first, then try to light others’ lives. You are dark within, and you go and start helping others. You will not help. You will harm, because who is there to help?Another day, another man knocked. Naftali opened the door and asked, “Why have you come here?”The man said, “I am very stupid. Can you help me a little to get rid of it?”Naftali kissed the man and said, “Welcome. I was waiting for you.”This is the first step toward wisdom: to realize that you are not wise, to realize that no trick of hiding it is going to help. One who realizes that he is ignorant is already on the path. One who realizes that he is poor is already on the path to the Kingdom of God, the real treasure. One who realizes that he is blind: his eyes are already opening. One who realizes that he is deaf will sooner or later become capable of listening – and then he will know the music, the music of existence.Don’t try to create the opposite. Rather, know the innermost quality of your being. Don’t hide it, open it to the sky. If you hide it, you help it because it grows in darkness, becomes bigger and bigger, takes infinite proportions. Open it to the light and the sky and the air and it dies because it cannot live in light.Ignorance is like the roots of a tree: if you bring them out they die, in the light they cannot survive. They are the dwellers of darkness, in the pure air they cannot survive. But if you hide, then you help – then you help them grow.Remember this: whatsoever you feel inside, don’t try to hide it because it can be hidden only by the opposite. Then you will always be divided and you will never become one, you will never be a harmony. Only the innermost harmony can know the outermost harmony. That’s the meaning: only the soul can know godliness. Soul means inner harmony attained, godliness means you have become available to existence and existence has become available to you.Now, this small anecdote, very significant…When the son of the Rabbi of Lentshno was a boy,he saw Rabbi Vitzhak of Vorki praying.Full of amazement, he came running to his fatherand asked how it was possible for such a zaddikto pray so quietly and simplywithout giving any sign of ecstasy.One of the most delicate and significant points to be remembered: agony becomes ecstasy. If you are in deep agony, then the same energy which was agony will become ecstasy when you meditate. You will dance with ecstasy. But that is not the last point because even in your dance something of your agony will be present. The ultimate dance happens only when even dancing stops.You have seen Meera dancing, Chaitanya dancing. Nobody has seen Buddha dancing, Mahavira dancing. Meera and Chaitanya have almost reached the goal, but one step more is needed. They were unhappy, now they are happy; they have transcended unhappiness, now they are in happiness. But that too has to be transcended because if you continue to be in happiness, unhappiness will follow like a shadow. Dualities go together.If you are dancing, sooner or later you will fall into agony again because the energy is the same. It was anguish within, you were hiding it; it was like a wound. Now you have expressed it: the same energy released and you are dancing, but you have not gone beyond. Dancing is good, but it is only allowed up to the steps of the temple, not inside.Nobody reaches godliness without dancing; nobody reaches godliness with dancing. One has to dance so that the agony is transformed, but agony transformed is still agony. It has become beautiful, has lost its poison, but still it is of the same category.For example, I tell you a joke; you laugh, but your laughter has something of your sadness in it – it is bound to be so. You are sad twenty-four hours a day. You laugh out of your sadness; in fact you laugh because of the sadness: it becomes too much, one has to release. It becomes such a tension, a built-up tension, you have to release. You laugh loudly – good, therapeutic, but nothing spiritual; good, medicinal, but medicine has to be dropped when you are really healthy. If you have to keep your medicine continuously with you, then something of the illness is still lingering on.When the disease has completely gone, you throw the medicine also. When the pain has gone, what is the point of carrying pleasure? When the suffering is no longer, what is the point of celebrating? Then your whole being is a celebration. Then you don’t celebrate, then your whole being is laughter, then you don’t laugh.The perfection of laughter is almost like no laughter, and the perfection of happiness has nothing of happiness in it. This is because if something of happiness is still there – you can watch – just by the corner unhappiness is waiting for you; any moment it can jump and possess you.A happy person can become unhappy. You cannot make a buddha unhappy because he is no longer happy. He is beyond the clutches of duality.The child was worried because a zaddik, a master, was meditating – and not in any ecstasy?Hasid disciples are very ecstatic people. They dance, they sing, they enjoy. Delight is their prayer, and it should be so because there is no other way. How to express your thankfulness, your gratefulness to existence? Delight, dance, tears of joy: that is the only prayer possible.When the son of the Rabbi of Lentshno was a boy, he saw Rabbi Vitzhak of Vorki praying. The boy must have seen many Hasid disciples dancing, full of tears of joy, weeping, crying, embracing each other in deep gratitude, in deep remembrance of God. The boy must have seen that when people meditate, they celebrate.Full of amazement, he came running to his father and asked how it was possible for such a zaddik – such a great master – to pray so quietly and simply, without giving any sign of ecstasy. He does not seem to be happy, he does not seem to be celebrating, not a single expression around him of ecstasy. How is it possible? And he is such a great master. The child must have heard many things about the zaddik, that he has attained.He is asking, “What is he doing? In his silence, ecstasy is not happening. Something is lacking.”This is a childish attitude. If you bring a child to Buddha, he will think something is lacking, but if you bring the child to Chaitanya, he will know that everything is there, nothing is lacking, because Chaitanya is dancing: drums are beating, he is ecstatic, intoxicated. He is not of this world – lost somewhere into the unknown. Any child will be able to recognize that something has happened.To be with a buddha is to be mature. Chaitanya can be followed even by children. That is what is happening to Hare Krishna people – childish, immature. They think that this is how one attains. Nothing is wrong in dancing, remember. But one should remember dancing, ecstasy is just outside the temple; inside everything has to become silent, your very being has to dissolve. Who will dance there? You are no longer.His father answered, “A poor swimmerhas to thrash around in order to stay up in the water.”A poor swimmer has to thrash around in order to stay up in the water.The perfect swimmer rests on the tide and it carries him.Meera dancing, Chaitanya dancing: something still imperfect, not perfect swimmers yet. Learning, reaching, reaching nearer every day – but if you are still swimming you are afraid of the river, you have not accepted it. If you are still swimming, your swing has moved to the other extreme, but has not attained to the middle point where everything stops.Mind moves from one polarity to another. You are angry, then you feel compassion. You are full of hate, then you feel love. Watch it: whenever you are hateful, suddenly in the wake a very loving, caring attitude follows.All lovers know that whenever they fight, are angry, and there has been a conflict, a clash of personalities – in the wake a very deep love follows. The greatest peaks that lovers attain are all always after a fight because when you are fighting you are moving to one direction, just like the pendulum of an old clock. It moves to the left, goes to the very extreme. Apparently it is going to the left but deep down it is earning momentum, gaining momentum to go to the right. Then from that same energy it will go to the right. When it goes to the right, you will see it is going to the right; but it is again gaining momentum to go to the left. When you are angry, you are gaining momentum to love. When you are in love, you are gaining momentum to be angry. This is how the pendulum of the mind goes on.So Meera has moved from the world: the agony of the world has gone. Now the ecstasy of godliness – but this is also movement.Buddha is just standing in the middle: the clock has stopped, the time has stopped, the movement has stopped; the pendulum moves no longer. There is no tick-tock: absolute silence.You will be impressed more by Meera and Chaitanya and you will not be impressed so much by Buddha because Buddha will be too beyond you. You can understand Meera; she may be opposite but the language is the same.You are in agony, she is in ecstasy, but the language is the same. What is ecstasy? – not agony. What is agony? – not ecstasy. The language is the same. You can understand or you can be greedy about it and cherish an idea, a hope, that someday you will also be able to dance like Meera – what beauty, what happiness, what ecstasy. But the language is the same. Remember, you can understand only that for which you have a language, a common language.It happened…A religious man – a very simple, sincere, authentic man – was invited to a town. The man who was arranging for his lectures in the town was a politician. He had always been arranging tours of politicians, presidents, prime ministers, ministers, chief ministers, this and that. He was the best organizer in the town so people persuaded the religious man: “You should do this too.”The religious man was absolutely unknown to the politician, the organizer. He had heard his name, he knew about him, but still he had never been in contact with any religious man. Politics has nothing to do with religion, and if it has something to do with a religion, it is itself politics, it is not religion. They are diametrically opposite goals. A politician cannot be religious, a religious man cannot be political because a religious man cannot be ambitious.The religious man was to come and he was apprehensive because the town was new and he was unknown. So he telegrammed before he came: “Arrange a room in the circuit house: silent, vegetarian food, cow’s milk, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”He arrived, everything was arranged, everything was as he had wanted. He was happy. Then he went into the bathroom to wash his face – he was tired from the journey – but immediately he came back very puzzled because in the bathroom he saw three beautiful women, but still ugly. They looked like prostitutes.He went and he asked the politician, “What is going on? Who are these three women?”The politician said, “Who are these three women? The three etceteras! ‘Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.’”The religious man was aghast, he couldn’t believe: “What do you mean? I have never come to understand that ‘etcetera’ means a woman.”The politician said, “You don’t know the language of the politicians. I have been arranging for them, and this is a code word, etcetera. If they write one etcetera, one woman; if they write two, two; if they write three, three.”You understand a particular language. You can understand Chaitanya and Meera – howsoever far away – but your agony can understand the language of ecstasy. In fact, agony is seeking ecstasy constantly.The child could not understand the zaddik. A great zaddik praying, quietly and simply, without giving any sign of ecstasy – not dancing, not swaying, tears not flowing from his face – you cannot say what he is doing.In fact, when you are really in prayer, you are not doing anything at all. Prayer has nothing to do with doing, it is simply being. Being in the presence of godliness is prayer, feeling the presence of godliness is prayer, dissolving yourself in it is prayer. Agony will take you away, ecstasy will also keep you away – remember this.Ecstasy is better than agony, but both exist around the subtle ego. When you are lost, who can be ecstatic? You are no longer there.The child could not understand. The child can never understand because the child can understand tears, happiness – the language of immaturity.Many times Hare Krishna people come to me and I see such immature minds. They think this is all: jumping on the streets, singing, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama…” Of course, it gives a sort of excitement and a sort of intoxication. It is alcoholic, but it is not the goal. The goal is absolute silence, such tranquility that there is nothing else in it – pure tranquility!The child could not understand, and the child within you will also be unable to understand. His father answered, “A poor swimmer has to thrash around in order to stay up in the water.”So don’t think that that is swimming. It is just a poor swimmer, just the beginner: he thrashes around, throws up his hands. Don’t think that is swimming, that is just learning. When a swimmer has become really perfect, attuned, he knows now there is no need to swim. He can trust the river, he can leave all thrashing because that thrashing is still a fight, a sort of struggle – trying to conquer the river. A perfect swimmer rests on the tide and it carries him. A perfect meditator rests on the tide of existence and it carries him. He does not do anything because with doing the ego remains, with non-doing it disappears. He is not in agony, he is not in ecstasy. All that we can understand, the ordinary language, has become useless.That’s why when you ask a buddha, “What have you attained?” he keeps quiet, he does not answer because whatsoever he says will be misunderstood. “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera” – you have your language, a code language. Whatsoever he says will be misunderstood.If he says, “I am ecstatic,” what will you understand? You will understand that he is not in agony. If he says, “I am happy,” you will understand, “Right, so he is no longer unhappy. That’s what I need to be. That’s my greed also, my hope also.” Your desire will be provoked. And the happiness of a buddha comes only when you become desireless. Whatsoever a buddha says is bound to be misunderstood.Lao Tzu says, “When people don’t understand me, I know well I have said something true. When they understand, then I know well that something has gone wrong.”“Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…” You have your language, buddhahood has its own language. It is neither of agony nor of ecstasy. It is of a deep let-go. Let-go is the language of a buddha. A perfect swimmer rests on the tide and it carries him.I was reading the life of Rabbi Leib…Somebody asked him, “You lived with your master, your zaddik, for twelve years. What were you studying there? What were you observing? Twelve years is a long time, almost a whole life. Were you studying the scriptures?”Rabbi Leib said, “No. I was not there with my zaddik to study the Torah. I was there to watch my zaddik, my master. To watch him: how he unlaces his felt shoes, how he laces them again. It took twelve years of watching simple movements because each movement was meditation: the way he breathes, the way he stands up, the way he sits down, the way he sleeps. It is such a mystery that it took me twelve years – first to forget my own language which was a barrier, to clean my mind completely of all that I know, and then by and by glimpses started coming to me. Then by and by, clouds separated and I could see my master.”If you can see your master, you have seen meditation incarnate. It is not a question of doing; the being has to be watched.The son of the Rabbi of Lentshno was right because he was a child. His father was right because he had attained to maturity.Drop the child in you – become mature, alert. Watch that your language should not distort what I say. Always look to what I mean. You will be the only barrier in it. If you listen through your mind, you hear me – you don’t listen to me. If you put aside your mind and look at me, you listen to me.Right listening is the door. Through right listening, right seeing will become possible. Through right seeing, the right world of riches becomes available.Those three fools are within your minds. By and by drop them. Don’t protect your mind because your mind is the enemy. That’s what you have been doing continuously: you go on protecting it.Surrender it. There is no need to thrash around.A poor swimmer has to thrash around in order to stay up in the water. Here you are with me, with a tide; relax, let go, and allow the tide to carry you. This is what sannyas is: a deep let-go with someone who has arrived.Don’t be a poor swimmer; you have already thrashed around too much, you are so tired. The tide is available. Trust the river and the river will take you to the ocean – and there is no other way to reach to the ocean. Fight and you will lose, surrender and in your surrender is the victory.Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I don't have eyes to see, I don't have ears to hear, and I am absolutely stupid. You promise us liberation some day. How is that possible with such a helpless case as I am? On the other hand, sometimes I am filled with grace which no words can describe. What happens? And where am I in all this?A good beginning. If you can feel that you don’t have eyes to see, sooner or later you will have eyes. To feel that you are ignorant, you have taken the first step toward knowledge. To feel that you are lost is to attain to the path. That’s why sometimes you are filled with grace. The very understanding that you are ignorant suddenly illuminates your being.The problem is with those people who think they know. They are in real trouble; they know not and they think they know, so there is no possibility for their growth. And they insist, and they defend their knowledge. In defending their knowledge they are defending their ignorance. If you are ill, you seek a physician; but if you pretend that you are not ill and you are ill, you avoid the physician. Even if the physician comes to your home you will say, “Why have you come here?”Gurdjieff, working with his disciples, one day told a group, “Unless you know your chief characteristic and become aware of it, you will not be able to enter into your essence and you will remain stuck to your personality.”Somebody asked, “Please give us concrete examples.”Gurdjieff said, “Look at the man who is sitting in front of me: his chief characteristic is that he is never at home.”Everybody could see the absent-mindedness on the man’s face. But the man shrugged and said, “What did you say, sir?” That was his chief characteristic. He was not at home, he was always somewhere else. And he wanted to grow – impossible because you have to be at home to grow.Then Gurdjieff turned to another and said, “Look at this man. His chief characteristic is that he is always arguing with everybody and everything.”The man became very heated and said, “Sir, there you are wrong. I never argue!”Find out what you are defending. That may be the clue to enter within.Just last night, a sannyasin said that from her very childhood she has been feeling she is stupid; and she is afraid, so she goes on defending and she tries not to do anything which is stupid. Now she is in a mess because what can you do? You can avoid, but who will avoid? The stupid mind will avoid. In avoiding, you will do the same stupidity again.A stupid person – and all people are stupid unless they become aware and alert. All people are stupid, so when I say stupid I don’t mean any condemnation, I am simply indicating a state of unawareness. Everybody is born stupid. Fortunate are the few who don’t die stupid. Stupidity is the sleep you live in.How can you avoid it? How can a man who is fast asleep avoid dreaming? If he tries, he will create another dream. In the very avoidance he will do something stupid. Don’t avoid it; accept it because avoidance is trying to defend it. You don’t want anybody to know that you are stupid, but that is not going to help. The trouble is, by continuously avoiding, you may yourself forget that you are stupid. Then you are settled in it, then there is no way out. That’s how you have created your troubles. You have been avoiding them, then you deceive others, then by and by you are deceived yourself.People come to me with problems, but those are not the real problems. Rarely does a person come with an authentic problem; otherwise they don’t know exactly what their problem is. They have a false problem, so they can be engaged in solving it. They will never be able to solve it because a real disease can disappear, an unreal disease cannot disappear. In the first place, it is not there. How to make it disappear? By fighting with the wrong disease, they are defending the right disease. They are engaged in fighting with something which is absolutely pseudo, so they are giving time for the real disease to grow and spread and become a cancerous phenomenon in their being.To look at the right problem is difficult because from the very beginning you have been taught to avoid.Every day in the Pune newspapers I see somebody died – a husband died, a wife died – and in memory a picture is printed with text: “My wife left for the heavenly abode, this very day one year ago.”You don’t say “death.” That word is too real and hits hard: “Left for the heavenly abode…” Who are you deceiving? – not the wife who has already left. You are deceiving yourself. You are afraid of death, you are hiding death in a beautiful terminology, “heavenly abode.” Now there is no fear; in fact, even a little desire to go yourself.The basic problem is death. You have made a code and you may forget completely. And this is how you are working with life: you feel angry but you don’t say that you are angry; you say, “I feel restless.” Restlessness is not a condemnatory thing.I was reading about a Quaker, a very religious Quaker…One night, a thief entered. The Quaker took his gun. He wanted to say, “You son of a bitch,” but he wouldn’t say it – a Quaker, how can he say that? A religious person? So he said, “Dear sir, you are standing in the place where I am going to shoot. Please don’t move, I don’t intend to kill you. This is just accidental; you are standing in the place where I am going to shoot.”How can a Quaker kill? You go on deceiving – your language, your philosophy, your religion – everything!Once it happened…I was talking and I used the word pissing. Ananda Prem wrote a letter to me immediately, a long letter: “Please don’t use this word; urination has to be used.”Urination is clinical. Nobody urinates, it is a textbook thing. Pissing is alive. The very sound of it gives you the idea, but reality has to be hidden. That day I understood why Ananda Prem is so uptight: she has been urinating. You have to be uptight then.Be real, authentic, true – true to life, even in words. I will tell you a story…A woman came to listen to a so-called saint with her small child, a young boy. Just in the middle of the discourse the boy started fidgeting and then he said loudly, “I wanna go piss.”The saint was of course very angry – such a mundane thing in such a sacred atmosphere. He said, “You have to teach him manners, otherwise don’t bring him here. This is not only unmannerly, it is insulting.”The woman said, “Tell me how to teach him.”So he said, “You can make a code word. He can say, ‘I wanna sing.’ Then you will understand.” So the woman taught the boy.After one year it happened that the saint came to visit the woman’s house, he stayed there. One night the woman had to go to another town. Her mother was ill, so the saint was left with the child. Just in the middle of the night, two o’clock, the child awoke the saint and said, “I wanna sing.” But by that time, the saint had forgotten the code; one year had passed.So he said, “Wanna sing? This is no time to sing.”The child said, “But I sing every day, even twice!”“You are a very stupid child,” he said. “In the day you can sing, but not in the night. Don’t disturb me. Keep quiet and go to sleep.”After a few minutes, again the child said, “But I cannot go to sleep. If you don’t allow me, it will come out by itself – I tell you!”The saint said, “What type of singing? Even the neighbors will be disturbed. Go to sleep.”The boy said, “I cannot sleep. First I will have to sing.”So the saint said, “Okay. You come near my ear and sing slowly.”So the boy sang. Then the saint understood the code.Never hide in codes. Be true; life is simple, but because of your pretensions you complicate the whole thing. Don’t complicate it.Ninety-nine percent of your illness is your own working – be alert and watch. If you are stupid, you are stupid. This is the first ray of intelligence that has happened to you, that you feel that you are stupid – perfectly beautiful. To understand that one is stupid is already to be intelligent. To understand that one is blind and cannot see light, one is already on the way. Now something is possible.A blind man goes on imagining that he knows what light is. He dreams about light, dreams about the eyes, and if somebody says, “You are wrong,” is ready to protect himself, defend, rationalize, argue.Look at the bare fact – whatsoever it is. To accept it is good. You are blind, everybody is born blind; nobody comes with eyes. If you have eyes, there is no need to come. You come only to learn how to be able to see, and from the very beginning you start thinking that you have eyes.You come here to be enlightened. Life is a process of enlightenment; if you live it truly, buddhahood is bound to happen. It is not some accident. You carry the seed within you. Just give the right soil and the seed will sprout, and a buddha will flower in you.Buddhahood is not accidental, is not only for the chosen few. It is everybody’s destiny. Delay you can, but when you attain there is nothing to brag about. I repeat: delay you can, but when you attain it there is nothing to brag about. It is very ordinary, it has to be so. It is your intrinsic being, it is your essence – just the personality has to be dropped; personality is the falsification.Watch, and always be true. Whatsoever you say about yourself, be true and you will never be a loser. In the beginning it will seem that if you say that you are stupid everybody will know. But stupidity is not something that you can hide; everybody already knows except you. Everybody already knows, only you are deceived.Drop all deceptions because finally, eventually, you will discover “Nobody was deceived, only me.” And nobody else is a loser for it; you lose. Drop all codes, drop all falsifications. And when I say “drop,” I don’t mean that any effort is needed. Just see, and they drop. Seeing is dropping.That’s why if you feel, “I don’t have eyes to see,” eyes start opening. If you feel, “I don’t have ears to hear you,” you have already heard me. If you say, “I am absolutely stupid,” intelligence has arrived – the first ray has penetrated your being.“You promise us liberation…” I don’t promise you anything. It is already promised by destiny, you are here for it. How can I promise something? Who am I to promise? I can promise only because I know it is already there. I know, whether you know it or not, that it is already there. I can see the flame inside you. You may have forgotten it, but I can penetrate and see. I promise because I know it is already there: it is the facticity of your being right now. Nothing is to be done; just one has to become a little more alert, a little more true, a little more in the essence. Don’t cling to the personality that you have created around you; go to the center.You feel, “How is that possible with such a helpless case as I am?” Anybody who moves on the path feels helpless; only those who never move on the path feel themselves very strong. Anybody who moves on the path feels helpless because on the path one becomes flexible, on the path one becomes aware of how things are. One becomes aware of how small one is. One becomes aware of the tinyness of one’s own existence and the vast reality around.One is just a small drop in an infinite ocean. Of course one feels helpless. But once you feel helpless the ego has been dropped, and for the first time, help from every nook and corner of existence rushes toward you. The whole ocean rushes toward you. In your helplessness the drop drops: you become the ocean. That’s why, “On the other hand, sometimes,” you say, “I am filled with grace.”Yes, it happens. It is part of the whole process. If you feel helplessness, you will feel grace reaching to you. But if you feel that you are already strong, the door is closed; you don’t need grace.There is a very ancient story…Krishna was sitting. His wife, Rukmini, had brought food for him and he was just going to take the first bite. He dropped it and rushed toward the door. Then he stopped at the door for a single moment, came back, and started eating.Rukmini was puzzled. She said, “What is the matter? You rushed toward the door as if there is some great emergency, as if the house was on fire or something, or somebody was going to die. And then you stopped, and then you came back. I’m puzzled. Tell me, what is the secret?”Krishna said, “One of my devotees, a lover, was passing through a big city. He is almost mad in love with me. People were throwing stones at him. They thought he was crazy and when the stones hit him and blood flowed, he just said, ‘Krishna, Krishna’ and danced. He was so helpless, I was needed, so I rushed.”Rukmini asked, “Then what happened? Why did you come back from the door?”Krishna said, “By the time I reached the door, he had taken a stone in his hand. He was throwing stones himself. Now I am not needed. He’s taken the whole situation in his own hand. I am not needed.”Existence comes to you when you are helpless. When you are strong, existence is not needed. The divine reaches to you when you are empty. When you are too full of yourself, there is no need. Helplessness is the capacity to call, to invite grace. Grace is always available, only you have to be helpless.In your ego you feel you are strong, you feel you are the master. You feel nothing can harm you; you feel everybody else dies, not you. You feel very superior, but nothing is there in that superiority. It is just a bubble, a soap bubble – inside, nothing but emptiness. And you know it because anybody can touch the bubble and it is no longer there, it explodes.Feel helpless and you will never be helpless again. Feel empty and you will be full with the divine. That’s the secret.“And on the other hand, sometimes I am filled with grace which no words can describe.” Yes, the grace cannot be described because when it comes the mind is not there which can describe. When it comes, the mind ceases to exist. Who can give and bring a report? The reporter is not present. It comes only when the mind is not – and only mind could have described.“What happens? And where am I in all this?” You are nowhere in this. The moment you come in, the grace has disappeared. When you are not, godliness is; when you are, godliness is not. Your presence is its absence, your absence is its presence. Crucify your ego and you will resurrect in a greater, infinite life.The second question:Osho,Does a buddha also need something as a complementary? Who is complementary to a buddha?Buddha or buddhahood is not a polarity. It is not opposite to anything, it is beyond duality. Night is against the day, life is against death, love is against hate. Buddhahood is not against anything. It is to transcend the duality. When you are neither day nor night, you are a buddha, when you are neither life nor death you are a buddha. When you are neither this nor that, neti neti, you are a buddha. Buddhahood simply means transcendence of duality. So buddhahood is all and nothing. There is nothing as a polar opposite to it and there is no complementary to it.Remember this. You would like to become a buddha because you would like to be happy, but then you misunderstand. Buddhahood is beyond happiness and unhappiness. That was the insistence in yesterday’s talk: it is beyond agony, and beyond ecstasy also.So you will not see any ecstasy in the man who has really attained to ecstasy. Agony has disappeared, ecstasy also; the world has disappeared and nirvana also; the body has disappeared and the soul also, because those are all opposites. They are meaningful only when the other is present.Have you observed? If you ask the scientists, “What is matter?” they say, “Not mind.” “And what is mind?” They say, “Not matter.”Now look at the foolishness. When you want to define matter, you have to bring mind in. Mind itself is undefined yet. To define one thing, you bring another, undefined. How can you define something by another undefined thing?“What is matter?” You answer, “No mind.” And when it is asked, “What is mind?” – now you bring matter in, “No matter.”Dualities depend on each other. You cannot define love without bringing hate in. What type of love is this which needs hate to define it? You cannot define life without bringing death in. This life cannot be much of a life. What type of life is this which needs death to define it?There is a life beyond life and death, and there is a love beyond love and hate. That love, that life, is buddhahood: transcending all the opposites.So don’t choose. If you choose, you will be in a quagmire. Don’t choose, a choiceless awareness is the goal: just remain aloof, don’t choose. The moment you choose, you have fallen into the trap of the world, or into the trap of the mind.It is reported that Rinzai, a great Zen master, was asked by a disciple, “I have left the whole world, renounced all – now why am I still to wait for nirvana? Why is the enlightenment not happening?”Rinzai said, “You have left the world, now leave enlightenment also, otherwise it will not happen because whatsoever you call enlightenment is nothing but the opposite polarity of your world. In your idea of enlightenment your world still exists; maybe exists as negated, but still exists. Drop enlightenment also.”It is said the disciple understood. He laughed, and the master said, “Finished. You attained.”In a single moment it is possible, but if you cling to the duality, then for lives together you can go on and on and on.Try to see the point; it is only a question of vision and clarity. Try to see the point that you cannot choose one without choosing the opposite. If you choose love, you have already chosen hate. That’s why lovers go on fighting. Love is a love–hate relationship. If you choose love, you have already chosen hate. It will lurk just behind your love, and many times it will come up and you will have to relax because nobody can love for twenty-four hours. Where will you relax? You will relax in hate; it is just lurking by the side, you will fight. After a fight, again you are ready to love. Now you are fed-up with hate; you fall in love.This way you go on moving. Happy–unhappy, sad–ecstatic, in anguish–in bliss, you go on moving. These opposites are two aspects of the same coin. When the head is up the tail is hidden, when the tail is up the head is hidden. Just close by, like a shadow, the opposite follows. To understand this is to become a buddha. Then you don’t desire because every desire will be a choice. Then you don’t say, “I would like love and I don’t want hate.” If you want love, you have already wanted hate, you have already fallen into the trap. Once you understand the duality and the trap of it, you simply laugh, you don’t choose. You say, “Enough, I understand. Now I don’t choose.” In that choicelessness a pillar of awareness arises in you, a flame; you are transformed.Choicelessness is the alchemy of transformation, of inner mutation. A new being is born who has nothing to do with the past, is absolutely discontinuous with the past. He has no desire, and when there is no desire, for the first time you live.Desire doesn’t allow you to live. It goes on forcing you toward the future. It doesn’t allow you to be herenow, it doesn’t allow you to let go. It doesn’t allow you to flow, it doesn’t allow you to move with the tide. The desire creates fight. The desire says, “Fight for the goal. You have to reach somewhere.”Life is not reaching anywhere. It is sheer delight, it is just herenow. The desiring mind is always somewhere else.What Gurdjieff said about the first man is true about many: You are never at home, you have made your abode in desires, and life is always here and you are always somewhere else. Except here. You may be anywhere but you are never here.A choiceless consciousness is herenow. It lives – only it lives, only it can live. You only hope, you never live. You think to live, you plan, but you never live. Your whole life goes in planning, thinking of the morrow, thinking how to enjoy tomorrow and missing today – and there is no tomorrow.The third question:Osho,I get bored in the discourse. Then I fear and feel guilty.Boredom is your chief characteristic, so don’t avoid it. Be bored. Know it, watch it, be aware of it. There are many people whose chief characteristic is boredom, who are always bored with everything.Maybe in the beginning… You fall in love with a woman and you are not bored, but the next day, or the next hour, or the next minute, you are bored. The same face, the same eyes, and the topography is known, and the geography traveled. Now nothing is there, finished: you are bored. Every day the same sun rises and every day the same moon, every day things move in a circle and a routine, and you are bored. Every second the breathing comes in and goes out, nothing seems to be new. You are excited sometimes, and you see something new, but soon it will be old. Once it is old, excitement is gone. Then you again search for something new.I have heard…Henry Ford was celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary – golden jubilee – and he was a very happy man. Rarely after fifty years of marriage is one as happy with a wife as he was.Somebody asked, “This seems unbelievable; and particularly in America, it seems unbelievable that you are still happy with a woman you have been married to for fifty years. Fifty years looks almost like fifty centuries. It seems almost from the very beginning of time. Fifty years, the whole of life, and you still feel happy and you still look in love? What is the secret?”Henry Ford said, “The same that I follow in manufacturing cars: I stick to the same model. I have never tried to change the model in my cars, and I have not tried to change the model of my wife. She is new every day; she has never been old and I’m not bored.”So boredom is because you don’t know how to find newness every moment. In a way it is true that the same sun rises every day, but it is not the same. If you have the eyes to see, it has never been the same: the sky is different, the poetry is different, the color is different: it is never the same. The weather is changing every moment. Nothing has ever been the same. In existence nothing repeats, but it feels repetitive because you are not intensely alert.If you are intensely alert, everything is new. If you are absolutely alert, everything is absolutely new, never any dust of oldness settles on it. In a way I go on saying the same thing every day, in another way I have never uttered a single thing twice. It depends on you: if you listen fast asleep, snoring, you will be bored. Don’t blame me; it is your characteristic.I am not bored with your faces, neither am I bored with your problems. Every evening, excitedly I wait for you. Every morning, excitedly I wait for you. You are bored, so something must be wrong with you. Just think of me – and your problems and your faces and all sorts of stupidities you bring. I am always happy listening to them because to me every individual is so unique that you cannot bring anybody else’s problem, you always bring your problem. And you are changing every moment, you are a river: today you come in a different mood and climate, tomorrow you will come in a different mood and climate. I have never seen the same face again; it changes, it is continuously changing. One needs penetrating eyes to see, otherwise dust settles and everything becomes old and everything seems to be repetitive. That is the attitude that decides.Listen more consciously; make yourself alert. Whenever you feel that you are getting bored, give a good jerk to the body – not others’ bodies, your own body. Give a jerk, open your eyes, make yourself alert; listen again.Boredom is one of the greatest problems of human life. No animal is ever bored. Have you seen any animal bored? No animal, no bird, no tree is ever bored. Only human beings are bored. Why? They have missed the natural flow of life, they have moved away from life. The more you move away from your essence and your inner life, the more things will be dead and you will be bored.Come back home. Be part of the existence, of the trees and the rocks and the rivers, of the sky and the sun and the moon, the birds and animals. Come back home and look at everything as a child looks: fresh, young.Jesus says, “Nobody will be able to enter into my kingdom of God unless he is like a child.” What does he mean? What is the quality of a child? – he is fresh and never bored.Have you observed? Tell a story to a child – he listens, he gets excited and he says, “Uncle, tell it again.” The same story, he is saying, “Tell it again.” Now he is even more excited. You tell him and he says, “Now, once more.” You cannot understand what is happening to this child because it is the same story. But for a child it is never the same story. Every night he listens to the same lullaby, but it is never the same. His consciousness is so fresh that dust never settles on it.Your consciousness is so dusty already that you are not in a state to mirror reality. When I am saying something, you are understanding something else – your dust distorts. I say something, you understand something else, and you understand that which you already know; of course, it becomes repetitive, you are bored.I am not saying the same thing. In a very, very deep sense I am saying the same thing, but that same thing is absolutely fresh. It is always fresh. Freshness is its intrinsic quality: truth is never old, it is eternal. It is not part of time where things are new and become old.So if you are bored, catch this characteristic of boredom and make yourself more alive, more aware, and you will feel less bored. Bring your awareness to a deeper clarity, transparency, and boredom will disappear. You have to do something with your being.It is not only a question of listening to me; it is a characteristic. Everywhere you will find it: wherever you go you will carry your boredom around you. Everything will bore you, nothing can give you the sheer excitement of a child running after a butterfly, or gathering colored stones on the sea beach.You think, “What nonsense. Those stones are valueless.” But for a child, those stones are not commodities to be purchased or sold. Those stones have nothing to do with money. Each stone is unique, a Kohinoor; the value is intrinsic, it is not to be decided in any market. It is not a commodity. And you say nevertheless the child goes on collecting, every morning he goes and collects stones, but sooner or later consciousness will be destroyed. His essence will be lost, a crust of personality will arise and he will also think, “These stones are useless. But diamonds – no, they are not useless.” They are also stones but they are not useless. Why? – because they have a market value. Now life itself will not be valuable. The value has to be decided by the fools who run the market; they are the valuators, they will decide it. Now you will always be bored.If you want to attain to a fresh stream of consciousness, drop the personality and the values attached to it. Become a child again. That’s what meditation is all about: to become a child again and look with fresh eyes. Look again with a new consciousness, and trees will be greener and flowers will be redder, and the sun will be every morning new. The stars then become infinitely valuable things. The value is not of the market, it is of the heart. Then you listen to me. Then I am not just talking to you, then these are not mere words that I am saying to you.I will tell you a story. It happened…A great Hasid master had a tome, a big book, always by his side and he would never allow anybody to look into it. When there was nobody around, he would close the windows and doors, and people thought, “Now he is reading.” Whenever somebody was there, he would put the book aside – and it was prohibited, nobody should touch it. Of course it became a great curiosity.When he died, the first thing the disciples did? They forgot about the old master, he was lying dead. Now nobody was going to prohibit them. They jumped on the book; it must carry something tremendously meaningful. But they were very much disappointed. Only one page was written on and the whole book was empty, and on that page also there was not much, only one sentence. The sentence was, “When you can make a distinction between the container and the content, you have become wise.”If you listen to the container, the words, you will get bored. If you listen to the content, you will be exhilarated, you will be in deep ecstasy. I am not speaking for speaking’s sake, I have no message that can be delivered through words, but there is no other way to indicate it. I am not trying to say something, I am trying to show something. These are not words. These words carry my silence. These words are only containers. Don’t bother about the containers, look at the content: these words are alive, they have the throb of my heart, I bring them to you as a gift. They are not doctrines. At the most you can call them poetries. At the most you can call me a good storyteller, that’s all. I am not a philosopher, not a theoretician, not a theologian.I have something within me and I would like to share it with you. I am forced to use words because you cannot understand silence. Once you are ready to understand my silence, I will drop words. Then I will look into you.Right now you are not at home. If I look into you, there is nobody, so I have to knock hard. My words are nothing but knocks on your door, so that you can come home and accept my gift.The fourth question:Osho,How can I be authentic? How can I speak and act the truth when the society and the world on which I have to depend for my worldly needs are based upon lies and untruth?Then be untrue, then don’t create any misery for yourself. But the life for which you are going to be untrue will be taken away from you sooner or later.Death is certain. So if you want to live in an untrue society comfortably – live comfortably. But that comfort is not leading you anywhere except death. Whatsoever you call a comfortable and convenient life, I call only a comfortable way to die. It is a slow suicide. The choice is yours; I am not forcing any goal, any structure on you. I am simply stating bare facts: that if you want to be comfortably, conveniently dying – compromise with the lies that surround you. But you will never feel comfortable deep down. An unease will remain inside your heart.I know well that if you become authentic and true it is going to be arduous. Otherwise, why should so many people be liars? Why should so many people live a life of lies? It is arduous, it is tapashcharya, it is austerity. When you start becoming authentic, you will be in conflict; but that conflict is worth it. It is the cost one has to pay to attain to inner life. One has to pay it, you cannot avoid it.If you want a life of infinite bliss, a life which is beyond death, a life which is eternal, then you have to pass through the austerity. But the austerity is only in the beginning: in the beginning only because you become a stranger.When everybody is a liar and everybody is a hypocrite, and when everybody is trying to show the way he is not, if you become true, you don’t fit. But that is only in the beginning. You don’t fit with the society, but immediately you fit with existence, and one who fits with existence does not bother whether he fits with the society or not. He has entered into a greater harmony.Only in the beginning, while you are not in the greater harmony and you have lost contact with this tiny society and its so-called harmony – in the transition, in the transitory period, in this gap – will there be a little uneasiness. You will feel like a stranger, alien, alienated; but that is only for a small period of time, and it is worth it.Once you enter into the greater harmony of existence, a cosmic harmony with the trees and rivers and the rocks and the sands, who bothers about your stupid society and the establishment and the government? Who bothers? They have nothing to give. The whole structure is false. They only pretend, they only promise; they give you hope, but nothing comes out of it.Once you know the greater harmony you are not bothered. You accept the fact that you will be in a little rebellious conflict with the society. That’s why every religious man is rebellious. If a religious man is not rebellious, know well that he is simply pseudo-religious; he is not religious.A Christ is religious, but not the Vatican pope. The pope is pseudo, false: he fits with the society. Christ is rebellious, Christianity is just against Christ. All religions are pseudo-religious: Buddhists are against Buddha, Jainas are against Mahavira, Christians against Jesus, and Jews against Moses and Baal Shem. They live in a different harmony. Real harmony is of the total.Your society is a tiny thing. Just think of the earth, what it is: a tiny lump in the vast universe, nothing much to brag about. And then on the earth, a human society – even still, a very small part. And then in that human society, even smaller and smaller patterns – Christians, Protestants, even smaller. And it goes on and on. You make smaller wholes against the bigger whole, and then you are suffocated, then you don’t have any freedom to move, you don’t have space around you.Why not look at the sky and have the whole space which is available? You say, “No, I am a Hindu. I cannot move into the whole sky of humanity. I am a man and I cannot move in the whole space of all beings. And I am a soul; I cannot move into the whole space of existence.”Why do you confine yourself? It gives a little comfort, I know. It feels good that you are Indian, you have someone to belong to. It feels good that this country is yours; it gives you a certain solidity, something to stand on. But then it becomes the imprisonment also. To be left in the open sky, one feels afraid, alone. Freedom is always in aloneness.Aloneness is tremendously beautiful, but in the beginning it looks tremendously terrible because you have never known aloneness. You have always lived in the family, in the society, in the establishment, this and that. You have never been alone, and religion is the art of being alone.Religion is what you do with your aloneness. It has nothing to do with the crowd. It is coming to the original source of one’s being, to the very center. So the choice is yours. I am not forcing anything on you.If you want to live comfortably – of course a hypocrite’s life, false, untrue, tasteless, boring but comfortable – live in a prison. Very comfortable, convenient. If you want freedom, then you have to be a little courageous because freedom is only for those who are adventurous. If you want to move into the infinite sky of existence, the cosmos, you have to leave the small holes that you call society, religion, church. You have to come out of them, out of the caves that your mind, in fear, has created.Remember always, rebelliousness is the very substance of religion. There is no other beauty in the world, no other greater ecstasy than to be a rebel.You have to understand the word. I don’t mean by rebellion that you have to be a revolutionary – no. A revolutionary is again in the same trap: he is trying to change the society, he is concerned with the society and the state. A revolutionary may be against this society but is not against society as such. A revolutionary is against this society and wants to create another society of his own imagination, his own utopia; he is not against society.A rebel is a dropout: he does not bother about this society or any other society; he knows all societies will be imprisonments. At the most they can be tolerated, that’s all. There is no possibility of any society which will be really free. A society cannot be free.No revolution is going to succeed, all revolutions have failed. Those who know, know that revolution as such is not possible. To change the crowd is not possible because the crowd has got no heart. To change the structure is not possible because people cling to structure. They can change it if you give them another structure, they can change this structure for another. A capitalist society can become a socialist society, a socialist society can become a communist society, a communist society can become a fascist society – they can change structures, they can change their presence, they can change their slavery, but they cannot be free. A crowd is afraid to be free. It clings. It wants to belong.The inner emptiness forces everybody to belong to somebody: to somebody, to something, to some dogma, to some party, to some nation, to some philosophy, church. Then one feels, “I am not alone.” Freedom is the capacity to be alone. When you are infinitely alone, a purity, an innocence is achieved. That purity is religiousness.A rebel is one who has dropped all hope of social revolution. A rebel is one who knows that society will always remain the same; it will change the outer form but deep down it will remain the same. Only the individual can change, only the individual can become a buddha; the society can never become enlightened. All societies will remain barbarous, crude, primitive; only individuals can reach to that height – the ultimate peak, of being totally alone, totally silent, totally one with existence.Be rebellious, and don’t mistake revolution for rebellion.Revolution is the game of society. Rebellion is the insight that the society is going to follow its own rotten, beaten path: you drop out. I am not saying that you escape from it; dropping out is an inward phenomenon. You remain in it but you are no longer of it. You don’t belong to it. On the surface you go on – you go to the market, you go to the office, to the factory and you fulfill things – but deep down you are no longer part of it. You become a lotus flower; the water of the society does not touch you.This is what I mean by a dropout. I don’t mean a hippie because the hippie will come back, sooner or later. He will have to come back; that’s why there are no old hippies, only young people. By the time they reach thirty they become afraid and go back to the establishment. By the time they reach thirty they get married, they have children – now what to do? They move back to the establishment. Now their children will be hippies, but they become squares. Even when hippies or others drop out of the society, they create their own society. Then they start belonging to that society.If you are a hippie and you don’t have long hair, you will be a stranger among hippies. If you are a hippie and you are not dirty, and you wash your face and you take a shower every day, you will not fit. They have their own rules, they have their own alternate society – small, but they have their own rules, forms, manners, language, ways of relating and they are as traditional as anybody else. They have their own tradition. Maybe it is a tradition against tradition, but it is a tradition. They have their own conformity.A real dropout is one who has dropped out from within. On the surface he goes on moving, lives in the society because there is nowhere else to go, but deep down he has moved. He closes his eyes and he is no longer any part of the society. He comes home, he has forgotten the factory, the market, the office – everything. The society remains an outer thing; he doesn’t allow it to enter inward. That’s what I mean when I say “a dropout.” A dropout is a drop-in. Drop in and you will be a real dropout.The fifth question:Osho,When do we come to know love? For me, the more inside I go, the less love I seem to have. Or I seem to have lost the need to express myself lovingly to others, especially those I have loved in the past, such as a girlfriend, mother, old friends and others.“When do we come to know love?” It is really a very, very difficult thing to understand because it has nothing to do with understanding.George Gurdjieff never talked about love in his whole life, never wrote a single line about love. Once his disciples pressed him too much and they said, “Say at least a few words. You have never said anything about love. Why don’t you say something about love?”Gurdjieff said, “As you are, love is impossible and unless you know love, whatsoever I say you will not understand.” He condensed his whole feeling about love in one sentence. He says, “If you can love, you can be; if you can be, you can do; if you can do, you are.” And he said, “Don’t force me anymore. I won’t say much.”Love is not possible ordinarily. Love is a fallacy. Where you are, love is a fallacy, it is not possible. You cannot love because in the first place you are not; you simply think that you are. You are not one, you are a crowd – how can you love? One mind falls in love, another mind doesn’t know anything about it. One mind says, “I love,” another mind at the same time is thinking how to hate. Another mind is already moving toward hatred.You are a crowd inside, you are not a crystallized whole. You are not one, and only one who is one can love.Love is not a relationship. Love is a state of being. So whatsoever you call love is not love. That’s why it is happening that the more inside you go the less love you seem to have because whatsoever you have called love was not love; it was counterfeit, it was not real. So when you move inward… It belonged to the personality, to the world of lies, falsifications. When you move inward, you go away from the personality, you go away from the love that your personality was thinking was love.Don’t be afraid. It is good to drop the false because only when the false disappears does the real arise. Soon a different quality of love will happen when you have settled within. Then it will not be a need, then it will not be a desire, then it will not be a relationship; you will be simply loving, it will be just a quality of your being. Then it has a totally different flavor, then it never creates a bondage. Then you share unconditionally, then your love is just the way you are. Then you sit lovingly, then you stand lovingly, then you move lovingly, then you look lovingly. Then whatsoever you do has the quality of love.It happened…A Hasid mystic was traveling with his disciples. They came to a serai and rested the whole night. In the morning the keeper of the serai served breakfast. While they were drinking their tea, suddenly the keeper fell at the master’s feet, ecstatic, crying and laughing together.The disciples were puzzled. How could he know that this man is a master? This was a secret thing. And the disciples were told, “Nobody is to be told who the master is. The master is traveling in a hidden way.” Who has told this serai-keeper? The disciples were worried. They inquired but nobody had told, nobody had even talked to that man.The master said, “Don’t be puzzled. Ask this man himself how he recognized me. Nobody told him but he has recognized.”So they said, “We cannot recognize – even we are suspicious whether he is truly enlightened or not, and we have lived with him for many years. Still a suspicion somewhere goes on lurking. How have you recognized?”The man said, “I have been serving food to thousands of people and I have been watching thousands of people. I have never come across such a man who looked with such deep love at the teacup. I could not help because I have known all sorts of people passing through here, millions of people, but I have never seen anybody looking at the teacup with such love, as if somebody is looking at one’s beloved.”The master must have had something of a totally different quality, a being full of love; otherwise who looks at a teacup with such love? A teacup is a teacup, you have to use it, it is a utility – you don’t look with love. In fact you don’t look at your own wife with love. She is also a utility, a teacup to be used and thrown away. You don’t look at your husband with love; the husband is a means. Love is possible only when everything becomes the end. Then even a teacup has the quality of the beloved.Love is not a relationship. Love is a fragrance that arises in you when you have reached home. Before that you can talk about love, you can fantasize about love, you can write beautiful poetry about it, but you will not know what it is.Try to enter within yourself. There will be much difficulty because your love will start disappearing. It has never been there, so it is good that a false thing disappears. In fact it is not disappearing; you are only becoming aware that it is false. It has never been there, you have been deluding yourself.When it has disappeared completely – when your essence is separate from your personality, when that which you have brought into the world is separated from all that the society has given to you, when you are naked in your being and all clothes have been dropped – a new love arises. That is the love Jesus calls God. Jesus says, “Love is God.”Your love has been nothing but a hell, it has never been God. It has not even been a heaven. It may have promised heaven, but it always proved hell, and Jesus says, “Love is God.” That love arises only when you have arrived to your innermost core.You will have to lose the false to gain the true, you will have to lose darkness to attain to light, you will have to lose death to become really, authentically alive. That is the price one has to pay. But you are so egoistic that you cling because you feel, “If this love disappears, then I will be empty,” and your ego creates a problem: “At least something is there; maybe it is false, let it be false,” and the ego can feed on it.It happened once…A king felt thirsty. He told his courtiers, “My throat feels dry.” He could have simply said, “I am thirsty,” but a king is a king, they have their own way. It is too common to say, “I am thirsty.” So he said, “My throat feels dry.”The lackeys ran away to the market immediately; they thought and pondered over what to do when the throat is dry. Of course they couldn’t think of bringing common water because that won’t suit a king, so they brought lubricating oil. The king drank it. The throat was no longer dry, but he was in more difficulty than before because the whole mouth was tasting awful and he was feeling nauseous.He said, “What have you done? Of course, the throat is no longer dry but I am in much more of a mess than before.”So the greatest doctor of the capital was called. He came and he suggested pickles and vinegar. So it was given. It helped a little, but it gave a stomachache. More medicines were given; somehow the stomachache disappeared, but again the throat was dry.Somebody brought scented syrups, wine and other things. He drank the wine, the syrups and everything else that was given. He felt a little relieved, but the digestion was disturbed.An old man, a wise man who was watching this whole nonsense said, “I think, your highness, you need water, common water. You are thirsty.”Of course, the king was very angry and he said, “This is an insult, to suggest common water to a great king. This is for common people, to feel thirsty and be quenched by common water. I am not a common man. You have insulted me. Moreover, it is illogical. Look at the illness. It is so complicated, so many medicines have been given and nothing helps. You are a simpleton to think it can be helped by common water. The greatest doctor has come and even he was not of much help. So what do you think about yourself – are you a physician?”The man said, “No, I am not a physician. I am just a common man. Whenever it happens… But I don’t know about kings – sorry, excuse me, I don’t know about kings, I am not a king, but whenever it happens to me, common water helps. That may be because I am a common man.”The king said, “You are not only a common man, you are an idiot.”Amidst idiots, wise people prove to be idiots.Your disease is very ordinary, common water will do. But that doesn’t suit the ego of the king. People come to me and they bring their complex illnesses. I say, “Don’t be worried, just meditation will do.” They look suspicious.They say, “But why? You go on suggesting and prescribing meditation to everybody, each and everybody, and my problem is different. Maybe it helps others but it won’t help me. Tell me something specific, something special. What should I do? I cannot love. I cannot feel.”Or somebody says, “I am very angry, and the anger continues like an undercurrent. What should I do?” Or somebody says, “I am much too sexual and fantasy continues in my mind. What should I do?” Or somebody is greedy, a miser, and millions of diseases, very complicated, and they have been to psychoanalysts and have failed, and they have been to this saint and that, and everybody has failed. In fact, they feel very good that everybody has failed because they are not ordinary people, their disease is very complex, complicated. If I suggest just common water, meditation, will do, they look suspicious.And I tell you: meditation will do. Your ego has to be put aside, it creates all sorts of problems. Only meditation will do.What is meditation? It is just putting the mind aside. Being without the mind for a few moments is meditation. Once you have known this for a few moments, you have the key. Then whenever you need, you can move withinward. It is just like ingoing breath, outgoing breath: you go out in the world, it is outgoing breath; you come in, it is ingoing breath. Meditation is in-going breath.Forget about love, anger, greed, a thousand and one problems. Problems may be a thousand and one, but the medicine is only one. You may be surprised that the word meditation comes from the same root from where medicine comes. Medicine and meditation come from the same root. Meditation is a medicine, is the only medicine.So forget about your problems, just move into meditation. The deeper you move, the more the false things will disappear. First there will be emptiness, nothingness. You will feel afraid. Don’t be afraid; that’s how it happens to everybody. I have been in that same state of fear. I know it happens, I can understand; but be courageous and move on.If you can move on and on, any day, any moment, suddenly it happens – just a click, something clicks: the old has disappeared and the new has appeared. You are resurrected.Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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A story called:The Light behind the WindowOn a certain Passover before the seder celebration,Rabbi Yisakhar Baer called his guest,the Rabbi of Mogielnica, a grandson of the Maggid of Koznitz,to the window – and pointed to something outside.“Do you see, Rav of Mogielnica?” he said. “Do you see?”After the feast was over, the Rabbi of Mogielnicadanced around the table and sang in a low voice,“The holy old man, our brother, has shown me a light.Great is the light he has shown me.But who knows? – who knows how many years must pass,how long we still must sleep, before it comes to us,before it comes to us?”A king heard that a part of his kingdom was almost in chaos. People were fighting with each other, they were hurting each other in every way possible. He was worried. He sent a special messenger there with a magic glass. The magic glass had the quality that if you looked through it, you could see things as they are – and not as you imagine, and not as you think, and not as you interpret. The magic glass would negate your mind and you would see things directly, immediately. Once you looked at things as they were, the experience became transforming. Then you could not be the same man.The messenger left the magic glass with the people and went back to the capital, knowing well what was going to happen because he had been on such trips before. The magic glass was placed on a crossroads so that everyone could look through it and be transformed, so that it was available to everybody.But this is how people reacted. The great majority gave a name to the glass and worshipped it as if it was a superhuman being, but they never looked through it. They worshipped, but they never looked through it; in fact, their worship was a way of avoiding the magic glass.Another part of the people were skeptical from the very beginning. They said, “This is simply foolish. How can a glass help to see things as they are? It is superstitious.” They never experimented, they never even gave a try to the glass. They were the skeptical people. But the superstitious or skeptical, deep down, were the same because they both avoided; one by worshipping, one by saying that it was superstitious and useless.That’s what has happened in the whole world: both theists and atheists have been avoiding meditation; one by saying that there is no God, one by saying that there is God and only worship is needed. Deep down they are not different.Then there was a third type – practical, pragmatic, empirical. They said, “The magic glass is interesting, but we cannot imagine how it is going to help us in the practical things of the world. It is impractical.” They also never looked through it – the scientists, the empirical mind.Then there was a fourth type who said, “Not only is the glass useless, it is dangerous because whosoever looks through it is distorted.” They were against it and they were planning to destroy it whenever the opportunity arose. They also did not look through it!Then there was another group who avoided it. They stopped walking through those streets where the glass was close by. They never passed through that crossroad because they said, “We are happy as we are.” They were not happy, but they thought, “It may disturb our usual pattern of life.”But a few people were there: simple, innocent. They looked through it and they were transformed, they became totally new beings. Then the rumor spread all around that they had been hypnotized by that stupid glass: “They are fools; otherwise how can a glass transform a human being?” They were thought to be mad.Forget about the story. This is the situation of the whole world.Religion is a magic glass. The secret quality of it is to transform you, but it cannot force transformation; you have to allow it to happen, you have to be in a receptive mood. Worship won’t help; that is very cunning and tricky. Logic won’t help because it is a question of experience, not of logical syllogism. Skepticism is not of much use because just by doubting you cannot come to know anything. One has to pass through the experience. Only the experience can be the criterion of truth or untruth. Thinking is not enough.Avoiding, escaping from seeing life as it is, you remain a coward and you miss the whole point of it, the whole adventure of it. Only those who are innocent, childlike, ready to look through it, ready to be transformed, changed, mutated, they will be helped by religion. So, only very few people have been helped by religion. Christians are millions, Hindus millions, Buddhist millions, Mohammedans millions, but religious people very few; you can count them on your fingers.To belong to an organization is not to be religious. To take the jump in deep trust and innocence is to be religious. To be a Hasid is to be ready to see: to see life as it is. This has to be understood.You also see, but you don’t see as things are. Before they enter your being, you have transformed their color, you have given new shapes, forms, you have already interpreted. Your mind goes on falsifying things, and your mind goes on creating illusions around you. You feel that you see as things are, but you never see because once you see as things are, things disappear, only existence remains.Once you can see as things are, only one remains; millions of forms disappear into one, the formless. Then the tree is no longer there, then the rock is no longer there, then the river is no longer there – but one existence, throbbing everywhere in a thousand and one ways.Until you see the one, you have not seen. If you see the many, you are blind; if you hear many, you are deaf. If you hear the one sound, the soundless sound, then for the first time you have heard. If you love many, your love is false; it comes from the mind and it is not of the heart. If you love one in the many, then for the first time you are in love.Remember, one is the criterion; many is the world, one is existence. A Hasid is one who has attained to the vision of the one.Now look at this beautiful story…On a certain Passover before the sedar celebration,Rabbi Yisakhar Baer called his guest, the Rabbi of Mogielnica,a grandson of the Maggid of Koznitz,to the window – and pointed to something outside.An old man called a young man to the window and pointed to something outside.“Do you see, Rav of Mogielnica?” he said. “Do you see?”What was he showing? You must be wondering what was there outside the window. You must be wondering why it has not been named, that which was shown.There was nothing special outside the window. The window was as ordinary as all windows are, and outside was the ordinary world as it is everywhere. That’s why it has not been named, what he was showing. In fact the whole emphasis is not on the object of seeing; the whole emphasis is on “Do you see?” It is not a question of what you see, it is a question whether you see. This emphasis has to be understood because the whole thing is focused on there, the whole secret key is there: “Do you see?”People come to me and they ask, “We hear you. We would also like to see God. Where is he?” They are asking for an object, and God is not an object. If you can see, he is there; if you can’t see, he is not there. It is not a question of what you see; it is a question “Do you see?” The emphasis is on the capacity to see, to perceive, to receive. The emphasis is on the eye, the capacity to see.“Do you see?” said the old man, “Rav of Mogielnica, Do you see?” There was nothing outside the window. It was just as ordinary a window as any. Nothing was pointed at; on the contrary, the capacity to see was pointed at.In India we have called philosophy darshan. It means the capacity to see. We don’t call it a love of thinking, as the word philosophy means. We call it “the capacity to see.” Philosophy is not the right translation of darshan. The right translation would be philosia, love of seeing. Philosophy means love of thinking; sophia means thinking and philo means love. The Indian philosophy is not philosophy, it is philosia – sia means to see. The emphasis is not on the object, the whole emphasis is on the subject.Subjectivity is religion, objectivity is science. To pay attention to the object is to be scientific, to pay attention to the subject is to be religious.You look at a flower: if you pay attention to the flower then it is scientific, if you pay attention to the witness of the flower it becomes religious. A scientist and a religious man may be standing side by side looking at the same flower, but they are not looking in the same way. The scientist is looking at the flower and has forgotten himself completely, the religious man is witnessing the flower and remembering himself. It is a change of gestalt. Try it sometime: look at a flower, then suddenly change the gestalt; now look at the seer of the flower.You are listening to me right now: you can pay attention to what I am saying – then it is a scientific listening. And you can be aware of the one who is listening to me within you – it becomes religious. The difference is very delicate and subtle. Try it right now: listen to me, forget yourself; then it is scientific.A scientist is absolutely concentrated while working. Science is concentration, religion is meditation, and that is the difference between concentration and meditation. Concentration is not meditation, meditation is not concentration. Concentration is focusing your eyes on the object, meditation is focusing yourself on your self. Meditation has no object in it. It is pure subjectivity.Listen to me, concentrate. Then you forget yourself, then you don’t know who you are; you are simply a listener. Then change the focus – it is a knack, it cannot be taught how to change it; you simply change it, you just become aware that you are listening. Awareness becomes more important than what you listen to. Immediately a change, a deep change has happened in your being. In that moment you become religious.If you go on paying attention to the object too much, you may come to know many secrets of nature, but you will never come across God on any of the paths that you will travel. It will never be a pilgrimage, a teerthyatra. You will wander and wander into the wilderness of the world and matter. That’s why science cannot think that God is – it is impossible: God is not an object. Your very approach is such that God is excluded from it.God is not an object, God is your within-ness. It is not in the object of concentration, it is in the subjectivity of meditation – it is you.I have heard a beautiful story…There was a man, a great devotee of Buddha who had a beautiful statue of Buddha, a wooden statue, a piece of art – very antique, very valuable. He carried it like a great treasure.One night he was staying in a cold hut, and the winter was really ice-cold and he was shivering. It seemed that he was going to die and there was no wood for his fire.In the middle of the night, when he was shivering, it is said the Buddha appeared and said, “Why don’t you burn me?”The wooden statue was there, the man became afraid, “This must be a devil,” he said. “What are you saying? To burn the statue of Buddha? Never!”Buddha laughed and said, “If you look for me in the statue, you will miss me. I am in you, not in the statue. I am not in the worshipped object, I am in the worshipper, and I am shivering within you. Burn this statue!”Godliness is your subjectivity. It is there, withinward. When you focus outside, there is an object; when you become unfocused and look within without any focus, it is there – absolutely alive, throbbing, ticking. “Do you see, Rav of Mogielnica?” he said. “Do you see?” Remember the emphasis. He is saying: “Do you see?” He is saying, “Have you got eyes to see?”After the feast was over, the Rabbi of Mogielnicadanced around the table and sang in a low voice,“The holy old man, our brother, has shown me a light.Great is the light he has shown me.But who knows? – who knows how many years must pass,how long we still must sleep before it comes to us,before it comes to us?”Each word has to be understood: After the feast was over, the Rabbi of Mogielnica danced around the table and sang in a low voice…Something has transpired, something has happened – something from the unknown, something not of this world. The moment the old man said “Do you see…do you see?” something happened. What has happened?For the first time this young rabbi became aware of his witnessing self. He had been seeing many things in his life, but for the first time he had a glimpse of the seer itself. When you are near a person who has become a true sage, who has attained, it is very easy to ride on his tide. Near a buddha, there are moments when you can look through his eyes.That is the meaning – to find a master, a zaddik.Teachers are many, zaddiks rare. If you find a teacher, he will explain many, many, things to you, but he cannot give you his eyes. He has none. He is as blind as you are, the blind leading the blind. He may be more experienced than you, has been groping in the dark longer than you, but still blind. He can give you many explanations but he cannot give you any experience. He himself has none. You can share only that which you have, you cannot share that which you don’t have.A zaddik is a man who has known, who has become centered. Now the search is over and he is overflowing with the attainment: you can ride on his tide. Of course that cannot become your experience, but it can be a glimpse, and the glimpse can be very, very important. It can transform your whole life.It will be only a taste, your hunger will not be satisfied by it. In fact, just the contrary will be the case: for the first time you will become hungry because up to now you have been avoiding the fact that you are hungry. When there is nothing to eat, it is better to forget that you are hungry, it is better to pretend that you are not hungry. When you are thirsty and no water is available, it is better to forget the thirst; otherwise it will be a deep anguish.When you come to a man who has known, who is no longer hungry, his very presence becomes a deep stirring in your being. For the first time you feel the hunger that you have been hiding for centuries, for lives together. You were avoiding facing it.You have been thirsty, you have never known satiety, but it was so difficult to live with the thirst that you suppressed it, suppressed it in the unconscious. You threw it deep inside your being so you wouldn’t come across it in your day-to-day world. It is there.When you come to a man who is in deep satiety, whose whole being is flowering – and there is no thirst and no hunger, he has attained – suddenly your thirst arises. From the depth of your unconscious it surfaces to the conscious. You become for the first time really thirsty and hungry. And if a man has attained, he can allow you a glimpse from his window. That is the meaning of the story: he can call you, “Come near me. Look from this window. Do you see?”So the window is not the ordinary window of a house. It is the window of the heart. When the old man said, “Do you see…do you see?” he was saying, “Are you getting the point? Are you receiving my eyes and my vision?”Of course, it can be borrowed only for a single moment and then it is gone because enlightenment cannot be borrowed. It can be at the most a lightning flash in a dark night. It cannot become a permanent light, but as in a dark night when you are groping, and suddenly lightning… For a single moment everything clear, then the lightning gone. But the lightning has changed everything; now you know the path exists. Maybe you are not on the path yet, a thousand and one barriers may be there, but you know the path exists. Just to know that the path exists is a great achievement because uncertainty dissolves, doubt disappears, hesitation is no longer. Faith arises, trust arises.The path exists; this becomes a deep-rooted phenomenon within you. Now you don’t believe in others, you yourself know. Maybe it has become just a memory now, but the memory will lead you, guide you. Now you will be groping in the right direction. The groping will not be blind anymore. You have seen where the path is. North or south or east, you will be groping in the right direction knowing well that it is there. It is only a question of time: you will reach it.When the old man says, “Do you see…do you see?” he must have become a lightning bolt to this young man. That lightning is the window. He must have flashed. For a single moment he must have burned for this young man, so that he could have a taste, so he could have a look, a small glimpse. Then he will never be the same again.Gurdjieff used to say that there are seven types of men. Let me explain those seven types to you. The first three types are very ordinary. You will find them everywhere, within and without.The first, “number one man” Gurdjieff calls him, is body oriented. He lives in the body, he is ninety-nine percent body. His whole life is body oriented. He eats not to live, he lives to eat. The second type of man, number two, is emotional, the feeling type, sentimental. Number three is the intellectual. These are the three common types. They are almost on the same level. In India we have long known these three.The body oriented we have called the sudra. The feeling oriented, the emotional, we have called the kshatriya, the warrior. The intellect oriented we have called the brahmin, the intellectual, the intelligentsia.The vaishya, the businessman, is in fact not a type but an amalgamation of all the three. Something of the sudra exists in him, something of the warrior also exists in him, something of the intellectual also exists in him. He is not a pure type, he is a mixture. In fact, he is the majority because to find a pure type is very difficult. To find a really perfect sudra is rare, to find a perfect brahmin is also rare, to find a pure warrior, a samurai, is also rare. The world consists of the fourth, which is a mixture, which is not really a type, just a crowd.These are the three types. Unless you go beyond the three you will not be able to see, they are all blind. One is blinded by the body, another is blinded by the feeling, emotion, another is blinded by the intellect, thinking – but they are all blind.Number four, Gurdjieff calls “one who has become aware.” Up to number three they are all unaware, unconscious, fast asleep. They don’t know where they are, they don’t know who they are, they don’t know from where they come, they don’t know where they are going. Number four is the one who has become a little alert, who can see.When this old man called the young rabbi to the window, he must have felt the possibility of the fourth man, number four. Only the number four can be called to the window. Only with the number four the master can share his experience.With the first it is almost impossible to talk. To the first you can give prasad, to the first you can invite for a feast. Religion is nothing for him; rather, it is just a feast. Whenever a religious day comes, he eats better, he dresses well, he enjoys it. To the second you can give emotional food: prayer, flowing tears, sentimentality. To the third, the intelligentsia, the intellectual, you can talk much; He will appear to understand but will never understand.Only with the fourth is sharing possible – to one who is a little alert, or is just on the brink of being alert; somebody asleep but turning in his sleep and you know, “Now he is going to wake up. Now any moment he is going to wake up.” Only in this moment can a master share his vision: when he sees that you are just on the brink of waking up, or you are already awake, just lying down with closed eyes, or just a little shaking and you will open the eyes.It must have been such a moment. The young rabbi must have been of the fourth type or just close to it: “Do you see…do you see?” said the old man.This saying “Do you see?” is a shaking to help him to become alert. Even for a single moment will do because once you have tasted awareness you will long for it; that will become your goal, the very end. Then you cannot be satisfied with this ordinary world and all that it offers. Then a strange discontent will arise which cannot be satisfied with this world.Rabbi Leib has said, “I have such a discontent that it cannot be satisfied with this world. That’s why I know there must be a God because otherwise, who will satisfy my discontent? There must be another world, there must be another way of being.”The very discontent shows because it cannot be satisfied here, nothing can satisfy here. A thirst which cannot be quenched here is an indication that there must be some other type of water, some other type of quenching agent, some other world.Rabbi Leib says, “I don’t know that God is, but I know that in me there is a discontent which indicates that there must be some place, some space of being, where this discontent will disappear.”Godliness is the possibility only for those who can see – the fourth, number four. With the number four, religion enters the world. With number three, up to the number three, the world is materialistic. They may be found in a prayer house – churches, temples, gurdwaras – but that makes no difference. With number four, religion becomes alive – throbs, beats, breathes. This young man must have been of the number four.I am here only for those who belong to the number four. Make haste to become a number four because if you are a little alert I can lend my being, you can have a vision through it. I can bring you to my window and can ask you, “Do you see?” But this is possible only with the number four.Then there is number five, whose awareness has become settled. Now, for the number five there is no need of lightning; he has his own inner light burning.Then there is number six whose entire discontent has disappeared, who is absolutely content. For number six, nothing is there for him to achieve any more. Then you will be surprised – why does number seven exist? For the number six everything is attained, fulfilled; there is nothing to attain. There is no greater height than number six, number six is the highest – then why number seven?With the number seven, even contentment disappears. With the sixth, there is the feeling of fulfillment, deeply contented, arrived; with the number seven even that disappears – no content, no discontent; no emptiness, no fullness. The number seven has become existence itself. The number seven we have called the avatar. A Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna, a Christ, they are number seven.This young man must have been of number four. You should remember this: I can go on talking to you and that talking is just preparing a ground so that one day I can wake you up and bring you to my window.So the whole effort should be how to see, the whole effort should be how to increase the quantity and the quality of seeing, how to become eyes with your whole being. Godliness is not to be searched for, vision has to be created.After the feast was over, the Rabbi of Mongielnico danced around the table and sang in a low voice… Something has happened, something tremendously significant. You can be grateful to it only by singing, and that too, in a very low voice because to be too loud would be vulgar. Something from the unknown has penetrated, something from the beyond has come to the vision – you can only sing in a very low voice. The very thing is so significant, so sacred, that one walks cautiously, as in a winter stream. Or as if afraid of enemies, one hesitates.That is the meaning of …sang in a low voice, “The holy old man, our brother…” The holiest, a Buddha, a Christ, but still “our brother” – that is the beauty. A buddha may have gone beyond, may have become a god, but he remains a brother to us because he was a part once. He traveled on the same path, he groped in the same darkness, he is of our family. He has become holiest: “The holy old man, our brother…”God is too far away, the holiest of the holy. But to call God “our brother” won’t look right. That’s why there is something unbridgeable with God: an abyss exists between you and God. The bridge is not there. Only a Buddha or a Jesus becomes a bridge because the bridge is joined both to this shore and that shore. Jesus is called “son of God” and “son of man.” He is both: son of man, our brother; son of God, the holy old man. The bridge has two sides. One belongs to our shore, the other belongs to the other. That’s why a master is even more significant than a god.Just a few days before I was talking about a woman mystic, Sahajo. She says, “I can leave God but I cannot leave my master because God has only given me this world, the bondage. My master has given me freedom – and God himself. I can leave God but I cannot leave my master. I can renounce God but I cannot renounce my master” – a very significant assertion, a great statement of love and understanding.God is too far away. Jesus is both, near and far. God can be the goal, but Jesus is both the path and the goal. How can you reach to the goal without the path? It will hang in emptiness, there will be no bridge to reach it. Jesus is both the end and the means, son of man and son of God.Beautiful is this assertion: “The holy old man, our brother, has shown me a light.”What is that light he has shown? – the light that comes with the clarity of eyes, the light that comes with the awakening of the seer, the light that happens when you become a witness. Not that he has shown something; he has simply shown you the capacity of your vision, that even godliness is possible with the right eyes.“Do you see?” If you see, everything is possible. If you don’t see, nothing is possible. The possibility opens with your opening eyes.“The holy old man, our brother has shown me a light. Great is the light he has shown me.” He never forgets for a single moment that this light is something the master has shown: “I have not seen it, it is not my attainment yet. He has lent his vision to me, he has been compassionate, he has been loving, he has shared. He called me to his eyes, to his windows; I looked through them.”“He has shown me a light. Great is the light…” “He has shown me a great lightning, but it is his. I am thankful, I am grateful that he has been so loving and kind…”“But who knows? – who knows how many years must pass, how long we still must sleep before it comes to us, before it comes to us?” He is aware that in the lightning he has seen something: “But who knows when the morn will come? When my morning will come, who knows?” In fact, now a thirst arises. That thirst is in the song, a hunger arises.“He has shown me a light. Great is the light he has shown me.” Now, for the first time, a discontent: “The light exists and I have to attain it.” “But who knows? – who knows how many years must pass…” To attain it, to earn it, to make it one’s own maybe a long journey will be needed. But now the trust has arisen; howsoever long it is, one can go on singing. It is there, that much is certain. Then the time is not much of a problem – one can go on singing. Once you know it is there, then you can wait for infinity. You cannot wait because deep down you are not yet certain that it is there.Patience is difficult because you know deep down, “Maybe it is not there, maybe it is just wasting life. Maybe it is just wasting time and energy.” Your impatience is nothing but your doubt. Trust is patient, doubt very impatient.Many times you think it is your trust which is impatience – you are wrong. Many times you think you are impatient because you are such a great lover – you are wrong. Many times you think, “My impatience simply shows my strong desire and longing.” But you are wrong.Impatience simply shows that you are not ready to waste time because deep down you are afraid, suspicious: “Maybe the whole thing is just foolish, godliness doesn’t exist. The truth – who knows whether it exists or not? Life eternal may be just wish fulfillment for something beyond death. It may be just a trick of the human mind to tolerate death, to accept death. It may be just a trick of the mind to live with death.” Then you are impatient.Once you have seen the light – even the light of somebody else which cannot light your path – it can give you trust. From the masters, one doesn’t learn the truth, one only learns trust.Truth has to come to you. Whenever you are ready, it will come. Nobody else can give you the truth. But trust? Trust is infectious in a man who has attained: in his aroma, in his climate you can catch it.If you are near me – not only physically close but really close, open, vulnerable to me – sooner or later only one thing is possible that will happen to you with me, and that will be trust. Trust is enough. I don’t say that trust is the goal, but without trust there is no goal. Trust is the beginning, the seed, but when the seed is in your hand, the tree is not far away; it is already on the way.“Great is the light he has shown me. But who knows…?” A strong longing has arisen. “But who knows? – who knows how many years must pass…” But they can be passed singing, dancing. They can be passed in faith and trust. They can be passed in waiting. And I tell you, it will not be waiting for Godot because the trust has arisen.Now it is not that you don’t know for whom you are waiting. You know exactly for whom you are waiting, you absolutely know for whom you are waiting. You are no longer waiting for Godot, you are waiting for godliness. That’s the difference between Godot and godliness: Godot is just something promised by your mind, godliness is something glimpsed through someone who has known; godliness is trust, Godot is belief; Godot is through scriptures and teachers, godliness is through masters.“Who knows how many years must pass…” But then one can wait, and in fact, the waiting becomes a deep delight. When you know that something is going to happen and shower on you, you wait with such tranquil excitement.Let me use the paradoxical term “tranquil excitement”: excitement is there every moment, but absolutely calm, a deep reservoir of longing with no ripples because even ripples will disturb and divert. One waits, relaxed and tense. Difficult, how to explain it? – both relaxed and tense. Tense because something is going to happen, relaxed because it can happen only when you are relaxed.A German thinker, Herrigel, was learning archery in Japan with a great master. For three years he worked hard and failed; to understand the Eastern mind is very difficult for the Western mind because they function on totally different levels. The Western mind is logical, the Eastern mind is alogical – may not be illogical, but alogical.Herrigel learned the whole art of archery. His scores became a hundred percent correct, but the master was not satisfied and he would say, “You are still not in the right posture.”What is the right posture? The right posture is that when you pull your arrow on the bow your muscles should be relaxed. This is absurd because when you pull the bow the muscle is bound to become tense. The muscles should be relaxed. The difficulty was that Herrigel went many times and touched the master’s muscles when he was pulling the bow and they were relaxed. So you cannot say it cannot happen; they were as relaxed as a child’s, and no tension.The master said, “The arrow moves by itself when you are relaxed. Then it, or existence, moves it, you are not the mover. You simply create the situation and then it happens. You are not the doer.”This is what tense relaxation is: you are pulling the arrow tense, and yet you are totally relaxed.To long for godliness is to be tense. To allow godliness to happen one needs to be absolutely relaxed, a tranquil excitement, a tense relaxation. Waiting as if it is going to happen right now, and ready to wait for eternity. Let me repeat: waiting as if it is going to happen right now – this very moment, alert – and yet ready to wait for eternity because whenever it happens it is never late. Whenever it happens, it is always early because the happening is so great you cannot claim, you cannot say, “I have earned it.” The happening is so great that it is always through grace and not through effort. It happens through effortlessness. Whenever it happens, you know well that it is through the compassion, grace, that it has happened. It has nothing to do with you or your earning.“The holy old man, our brother, has shown me a light. Great is the light he has shown me. But who knows? – who knows how many years must pass, how long we must still sleep, before it comes to us, before it comes to us.” This is the last thing to be understood about this anecdote: when you look through an enlightened man’s vision, godliness doesn’t come to you, you go to godliness. When you yourself become alert and your sleep has gone, you don’t go to godliness, godliness comes to you. That’s the difference.Look at the Himalayas from a window: far away, in their majesty, shining in the sun and the white snow – and even from thousands of miles away you can feel the coolness. You can feel the glory, the silence, the height, the sheer majesty, the magic. But it is your eyes that are traveling far away, not the Himalayas. It is you going to the Himalayas on a visionary trip: your eyes are moving, the Himalayas are not moving.This happens when you look through somebody else’s window. This happened to this young rabbi when he looked through the old man’s window: he traveled far away.When you have become capable, when your own eyes open, it is just the other way around: it is not that you go on a faraway journey, the faraway comes closer; existence comes to you. Whenever you are absolutely ready to receive, it rushes. The rush is natural; just as when it rains in the Himalayas, the peaks cannot hold the water, the water rushes down. It rushes to the valley. Wherever it can find a low ground, a lake, it rushes.Whenever you are awake, you become space because whenever you are awake, you are not filled with the ego. You are an empty space – a valley, a low ground; it rushes, it fills you.I have heard…A very rich man asked a Hasid master to come to his palace. The palace was tremendously valuable. It was unique and it was full of valuable things: paintings, carpets, antiques, furniture of every kind and of every age.The rich man took the Hasid master from one room to another. For hours and hours they had to walk. The palace was vast, and the rich man was bragging too much and was feeling very deeply contented in his ego.When the whole palace was shown to the Hasid master, the rich man said, “Now tell me, what is your impression?”The Hasid said, “The fact that the earth is strong enough to carry the burden of such a massive palace – plus you. This has impressed me tremendously – plus you.”Everybody has made a palace of the ego. Everybody is too full of it. Once you become awake, ego disappears. Ego is the sleep.To feel “I am” is to be sleepy. Suddenly, to be without any feeling of “I am” is to be awake. To be without any feeling of “I am” is to be awake. To be is an opening, to feel “I am” is a closed monad-like phenomenon. It has no windows, no openings; you live in a cocoon, dead inside. Once you are awake you become empty, you become a nothingness, a nobody – existence rushes to you from all directions, it comes and fills you.When the devotee is ready, he does not travel at all. When the meditator is ready, he does not go anywhere, existence comes. It is always existence that comes. When we go to God, it is only a vision. For a moment clouds disperse and the sun is seen. Again the clouds are there, and the sun, and the light, and the experience becomes just a memory. It haunts you, but it doesn’t transform you. “The holy old man, our brother, has shown me a light. Great is the light he has shown me. But who knows? – who knows how many years must pass, how long we still must sleep, before it comes to us, before it comes to us?”Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I seem to be neither totally in the world nor the watcher on the hill. How to be some place? I feel like I am in between everything I do.Then exactly that is the place you should be.You go on creating problems. Wherever you are, be there. There is no need to be a watcher on the hills. There should be no “should.” Once the should enters life you are already poisoned. There should be no goal. There should be no right and wrong. That’s the only sin: to think in terms of division, values, condemnation, appreciation.Wherever you are, nothing is wrong. In between the watcher on the hills and a man in the world, that’s exactly where you should be. And I say wherever you are, if you can accept it immediately, then and there you have become the watcher on the hills. Even in hell, if you accept it, the hell disappears because it can remain only through your rejection. Hell disappears and heaven appears. Whatsoever you accept becomes heavenly and whatsoever you reject becomes hell.It is said that a saint cannot be thrown into hell because he knows the alchemy of how to transform it. You have heard that sinners go to hell and saints to heaven, but you have heard the wrong thing. Just the other way around is the case. Wherever sinners go they create hell and wherever saints go there is heaven. Saints are not sent to heaven; there is nobody to send and manage all this. There is nobody; but wherever they go, this is the way they are: they create their heaven, they carry their heaven with them, within them. And sinners? – you can send them to heaven, they will create hell; they cannot do otherwise.So what is the definition of a saint, or a sinner? My definition is: a saint is one who has come to know the alchemical secret of transforming everything into heaven, and a sinner is one who does not know the secret of transforming things into beautiful existences. Rather, on the contrary he goes on making things ugly. Whatsoever you are will be reflected around you, so don’t try to be anything else and don’t try to be in some other place.That is the disease called man: always to become somebody, to be some place. Always to reject that which is and hanker for that which is not – this is the disease called man.Be alert! Do you see it?It is a simple fact to be seen. I am not theorizing about it, I am not a theoretician. I am simply indicating a bare naked fact, that if you can live in this moment wherever you are and forget about the future – goals, the idea of becoming something else – immediately the whole world around you is transformed. You have become a transforming force.Acceptance, deep, total acceptance, is what religion is all about.A wants to become B, B wants to become C; then the fever of becoming is created. And you are not a becoming, you are a being; you are already that which you can be, which you ever can be. You are already that, nothing more can be done about you. You are a finished product.That is the meaning I give to the story that God created the world: when the perfect creates, the creation is perfect. When God creates, how can you improve upon it? Just think of the whole absurdity, the whole idea is absurd. You are trying to improve upon God. You cannot improve. You can be miserable, that’s all, and you can suffer unnecessarily. You will suffer diseases which are just in your imagination and nowhere else.“God creates” means that out of perfection comes perfection. You are perfect; nothing else is needed.Look right now, this very moment within yourself; have a direct insight. What is needed? Everything is simply perfect and beautiful, not even a cloud. I cannot see – just look within yourself – even a cloud in your inner space. Everything is full of light. But sooner or later the mind will say to be something else, to be somewhere else, to become. The mind doesn’t allow you to be. The mind is becoming and your soul is being.That’s why buddhas go on saying, “Unless you drop all desiring you will not attain.” Desiring means becoming, desiring means to be something else. Desiring means not to accept the case as you are, not to be in a total yes mood, whatsoever the situation is. To say yes to life is to be religious, to say no to life is to be irreligious. Whenever you desire something, you are saying no, you are saying that something better is possible.The trees are happy and the birds are happy and the clouds are happy because they have no becoming. They are simply whatsoever they are. The rosebush is not trying to become a lotus – no. The rosebush is absolutely happy to be a rosebush. You cannot persuade the rosebush; howsoever you advertise about the lotus, you will not be able to corrupt the mind of the rosebush to become a lotus. The rosebush will simply laugh because a rosebush is a rosebush is a rosebush; it is simply settled and centered in its being.That’s why the whole of nature is without any fever: calm and quiet and tranquil and settled. Only the human mind is in chaos because everybody is hankering to be somebody else.This is what you have been doing for a thousand and one lives, and if you don’t awake now, when are you thinking to awake? You are already ripe to awake. Just start from this very moment to live and enjoy and delight, and drop desiring.Whatsoever you are enjoying, delight in your being, and then suddenly time disappears because time exists only with desiring. Future exists because you desire. Then you will be like birds – listen to them. Then you will be like trees – look: the freshness, the greenery, the flowers. Please be where you are.I am not here to create a new desire in you. I am simply here to make you aware of the whole absurdity of desiring. Desiring is sansar. Understanding the futility of desire is to become enlightened. One who has found out: “I am already that which I always wanted to be,” is a buddha. You are all buddhas, howsoever fast asleep and snoring; that makes no difference.Let me be your alarm. Open your eyes; you have slept long enough. It is time to awake, the morning is knocking at the door.The second question:Osho,When I encounter you, you are always total compassion and loving warmth. Why do we never encounter you in total anger like Gurdjieff or the Zen masters. After all, the way we carry on here, we surely deserve it sometimes.Of course you deserve it, but that is not my way of working, that is not the way I am.I don’t function according to you, I function according to me. I don’t do a single thing because of you, because then it will be unnatural, then it will be pretension and then I will be going out of my self-nature.You deserve it, I know, but nothing can be done: I am helpless. You may deserve anger, but I will go on giving my love. This much I know, that the only way to make you alert and aware is to remain in my self-nature, so that it becomes a constant remembrance for you to fall into your self-nature.I would like you to be centered in yourself so nothing disturbs, nothing distracts; whatsoever happens around you remains like a dream and you remain rooted in your being. That can be done in only one way: I should remain absolutely rooted in myself. I should not be distracted by you, whatsoever you do should not be a consideration. Whatsoever my self-nature can do spontaneously is the only consideration.This much I know: if my love cannot transform you, my anger will not be able to because love is a greater force than any anger. If my compassion cannot help you, nothing can help; and the more you become alert, you will feel it so. You can bear my anger easily – you are already conditioned for it – but you cannot bear compassion. It hits you hard, and deeper.So maybe Gurdjieff worked in his own way, it may have been spontaneous to him; people are different and unique. Or he was working in conditions which were very strange. He was working with Western minds, in a Western climate, and he was the first to bring Eastern methods to them. It was difficult: it has to be translated to their understanding.Zen masters hit their students – beat, throw them out of their houses and windows, jump on them sometimes. But one thing you should remember: they are not angry; that too is part of their compassion. They are not angry at all because if they are angry then the whole point is lost. Then how can you transform the other? You are also in the same boat. Then you have come down. No, that will not be helpful.That too is compassion, but it is possible only in Japan. In no other country is it possible because a certain tradition is needed. For almost one thousand years this has been a tradition. So when a Zen master jumps and beats his disciple, the disciple understands the language.If I beat you, you will not understand it. You will be simply angry and you will go away and report to the police. That is not going to help anybody. You won’t understand it.In Japan it is understood: when a Zen master beats the disciple, he accepts it in deep gratitude. In fact, you may be surprised that once a Zen master beats his disciple, that disciple becomes the chief disciple. He has attained to something, that’s why the master was so loving and compassionate toward him, that’s why the master blessed him with a beating.Zen disciples deep down hanker for the day when the master will beat them. They wait, they pray for it, they compete with each other. But that is possible only because a long tradition exists – a strange tradition, but when it goes deep-rooted into the unconscious of a country, race, it functions. But that’s not my way.I know that there is no other medicine than love. Other medicines cannot be so deep-reaching. If love fails, then nothing can succeed.So I know that you deserve – please don’t deserve it!The third question:Osho,Even while repeating your jokes to others, we ourselves burst into loud laughter. But you tell us the funniest of stories, and while the audience roars, not even a faint smile crosses your face. What is the secret?The secret is simple: I know how to tell a joke, and you don’t know.The fourth question:Osho,The closer I feel to you, the more you seem to disappear. It is like coming near a river: the river is there and yet it is not there. Where are you, Osho?“The closer I feel to you, the more you seem to disappear.” Exactly that’s how it will happen because my whole effort is to help you to disappear. The closer you come to me, the more you will find that I am disappearing. That’s just a hint, a guide, that you should follow me in disappearing. So if you want to disappear, only then come closer to me.That’s why there are many who are clever. They don’t come very close, that is dangerous. That is coming close to a fire, that is coming close to death.In the old Indian scriptures the master is called death. The master is a death and also a resurrection. But he is first a death and then a resurrection. You have to die in him and then you are reborn, but the death is the beginning. So when you come close to me, you are bound to feel, “I am disappearing.” Take the hint and follow me in disappearing because you can meet me only when neither I am nor you are, when both are not there: the meeting, the union.“The closer I feel to you, the more you seem to disappear.” You are on the right path, don’t be afraid. Come closer.When Rama Priya comes to see me, she sits far away and I have to tell her, “Come closer.” Two inches she moves, then I say, “Come still closer.” Two inches again, then I say, “Come still closer.”She is certainly aware that to come close is to die. She comes close but it is natural she hesitates. She comes close laughing, enjoying – but also afraid and hesitating.I am calling you to come close and I will not leave you until you disappear. I will go on haunting you in your days, in your nights, in your thoughts, in your dreams. Wherever you are, once you have been in contact with me – only once – then I will haunt you. Then you will never be peaceful until you die.“It is like coming near a river: the river is there and yet it is not there.” Yes! I am there and yet I am not there. If you are far away from me, I am there; if you come close, I am not there. If you come deep within me, you will not find anybody there: just a nobodyness, a nothingness, a deep emptiness.You ask, “Where are you, Osho?” Nowhere. The where has disappeared, the when has disappeared. The time and space are no longer relevant.Remember, if you want to be all, you cannot afford to be somebody. If you want to be everywhere, you have to be nowhere. If you want to become the eternity, then you cannot be in any point of time. If you want to be a god, you have to lose all. That is the greatest gamble ever: one loses one’s self, stakes one’s totality but one is never at a loss. One loses one’s self but the whole is attained.Jesus says to his disciples, “If you cling to yourself, you will lose yourself; if you lose, you will attain. Whosoever clings to life will die and whosoever is ready to die, goes beyond death, becomes deathless.”I am nowhere and I am calling you from my nowhereness to come and become a nowhere yourself. I am nowhen and I am calling you from my nowhenness, timelessness, that you also drop. It is tremendously beautiful to disappear, it is tremendously ecstatic. It is the greatest bliss ever not to be.Shakespeare says, “To be or not to be.” That’s what mind always says. I would like to change it: To be and not to be – not “or”; to be and not to be, together. That’s how I am, right now.If you look at me from far away, it is a form: to be. If you come closer, the form becomes fuzzy: you are entering not to be. To be is only my outside and not to be is my inside; to be is only my body, not to be is my soul. That’s why Buddha says that the soul is a no-soul, anatta. It is a not-self. You cannot say, “It is.” Better to say, “It is not.”To be and not to be, together, is to be the true sage. Don’t choose between to be or not to be. Both are available together – take them both without any choice. Then you will be in the world and you will not be in the world, then you will be in the mind and you will not be in the mind. Then you will be in the body and you will not be in the body. Then you will be in time and space and yet you will not be in any time, in any space – and that’s the only way to be free. To be and not to be, together, is to attain to total freedom – nirvana, moksha or whatsoever name you want to give it, you can give.The fifth question:Osho,If a being is enlightened, how can he die?He never dies because he is already dead. You die because you cling to life. Then the life has to be taken away, then you have to die. An enlightened being never dies because he does not cling to life; he has voluntarily given it up. He’s already dead. It appears to you that he also dies like you. That is only appearance, and don’t be deceived by the appearance. A Buddha dies of course, a Mahavira dies. Baal Shem will die, Moses will die, everybody will die – and they die just like you on the surface. But that is only the surface.Watch an ordinary man dying: he makes every effort not to die, he clings to life to the very last. He cries and weeps, and tears of anguish, and fear and trembling. A horror surrounds him, terror-struck. Then watch an enlightened man dying. It is one of the rarest experiences to watch an enlightened person die. He dies as if he is the bridegroom going to meet his bride. He dies as if he is going on a faraway, beautiful journey for which he has always been waiting and planning. He dies as if the training period in this world is finished: he is accepted, he has become mature. Now he is going home from the school. He dies, but death is not there, God is there.The face of death for an enlightened man is the face of God. The face of God for an unenlightened man is the face of death. When you know what life is, God awaits you near the door you call death. When you don’t know what life is, you are simply afraid, so much afraid that before the door actually opens, you are almost unconscious. You miss.You have missed it many, many times. You have been dying many times and missing it. There is only one way not to miss it, and that is: die before death. That’s what I call meditation: voluntarily dying before death so that you know the flavor of it. It is so beautiful, so blissful, that you will dance when death comes, you will sing when death comes. You will wait in deep silence and gratitude and trust, you will open your heart to it. You will not be taken away, you will ride on the wave – not as a defeated man, but victorious.The enlightened being never dies. He has died already and known that there is no death. Death is a lie. It exists because you cling to life.Feel the difference. A miserly man when he gives even one paise to a beggar, clings to it; he thinks a thousand and one times whether to give or not. He argues not to give. He rationalizes that these beggars are just cheats, he rationalizes that to give anything to a beggar is to help beggary grow – a thousand and one arguments not to give. Even if he has to give, he gives reluctantly. That’s how an ordinary man dies: reluctantly, clinging, trying to find any excuse to linger a little longer, more.Then, a man who loves and brings a gift to give is a totally different thing. The physical part looks the same. It may not be of any value, it may be just a flower plucked by the side of the road, an ordinary flower, a grass flower – but he comes and presents it. Or it may be a Kohinoor, it makes no difference; but when he gives he gives with totality. He is happy that his gift has been accepted, he feels grateful that his gift has not been rejected. He thanks the receiver. He has been dreaming about it, fantasizing about it, for the moment when he will give it. It is totally different.The fact of giving is the same, the physical fact: the same hands, something to be transferred. If you ask a scientist, he will not be able to make any distinction, he will not be able to feel any difference. Whether you give reluctantly or you give lovingly are both physical facts, and similar, but deep down you know they are absolutely different. Not a bit of similarity exists between them.When you give reluctantly, you really don’t give; when you give lovingly, only then do you give. When you give reluctantly, it has been taken away from you, snatched away: you feel robbed. When you give it lovingly, something flowers within you: somebody accepted your sharing, accepted your gift; you have been blessed.Death for an unenlightened man is a struggle: he surrenders, but after fighting in every way possible. That’s why he feels defeated. For an enlightened being, it is a let-go; he was waiting and waiting, waiting for when the ship would come and he would be going. He learned whatsoever this life was to give. Now he is ready; he does not even look backward once – no, not even once. When the ship arrives, he simply enters and forgets everything about the world that he is leaving because he is going to a greater world, a greater beinghood – to existence itself.The sixth question:Osho,Looking at myself and others here, is it possible there have been others like us – Buddha's disciples? Were they amazed and did they find themselves laughing at how greedy, cunning, inept they appeared, at how absolutely unlike what they thought a sannyasin to be – or do we take the cake?Man has always been the same. Buddha’s disciples or Mahavira’s disciples – man has always been the same: the same misery, the same ecstasy; the same greed, the same renunciation; the same clinging to material things, and the same freedom of the sky, of open space. Man has always been the same. Only outer things change.Houses are different, roads are different, transportation is different – bullock carts disappearing, space-buses appearing. Everything on the outside is different, but the inside, the essential man is always the same. The disease is the same, the health is the same.I’m reminded of one hadith, one of Mohammed’s sayings.A man came to Mohammed and asked, “Who was the first to be created in the world?”Mohammed said, “Adam.”The man said, “And before Adam?”Mohammed said again, “Adam.”The man said, “And before that?”Mohammed said, “If you ask me to the very end of time, I will go on repeating, ‘Adam, Adam, Adam,’ so please stop.”The man was puzzled, and Mohammed was not willing to explain more.This has remained a mystery, why Mohammed insisted, “Adam, Adam, Adam.” This is the explanation that I am saying to you: man has always been there; from the very beginning you have been there and there was never a time when you were not. Man is one of the most essential existences in existence. That’s why Mohammed says, “There is no before to it, man has always been there.”It will be difficult for you to understand it because the whole mind, the modern mind, has been taught to believe in evolution. Yes evolution has been there, but not in the deeper core of man. There is something in man which has remained the same. The outside has been changing and changing and changing.Man is like the wheel of a bullock cart: the wheel moves, goes on changing, but the wheel moves on an axle which remains static, which doesn’t change. The wheel can move only because something unmoving supports it. Everything has been changing: the society, the culture, the civilization – but something deep in man remains the same. That depth is what Mohammed calls “Adam.”Man, essential man, is the same, and remember always, the same in both ways. If you go back and look deep into the disciples of Buddha, you will see the same problems. Go and look in Buddhist scriptures, the same problems: the same greed, the same anger, the same hatred, the same possessiveness, the same competition – how to overtake the other, the same ambition, the same ego.Why? I say because if you look at the discipline that Buddha gave to his disciples, then you immediately know. He says, “Don’t be angry, don’t be greedy, don’t be violent.” If the disciples were already nonviolent, then Buddha would look like a fool. “Why are you teaching, ‘Don’t be violent’?” The disciples must have been violent. Buddha says, “Don’t be possessive.” The disciples must have been possessive. “Don’t be greedy.” The disciples must have been greedy.There exists not a single scripture in the world which does not teach the same things, the same ten commandments everywhere. That shows man has remained the same because the same discipline is needed for you, and the same discipline will be needed always.Man can exist only in two ways. There is no evolution. Either you exist as an ignorant man, unaware, in deep sleep – then greed, anger, ambition, ego, will follow you. Or you become awake, and this is a jump. Then the second category of man arises, then love, compassion follow you; then there is no greed, no anger.The ignorant man has the same characteristic today as he has had always, and the enlightened man has the same characteristic as he has had always. These are the only two ways of being: either be sleepy and miss the opportunity that is available, or be awake and delight in it and celebrate.So never think that in past ages, in golden ages, people were different from you. They were not, though your priests go on saying so. That’s why they call it the “Golden Age.”There has never been any Golden Age, there will never be any Golden Age. There have been golden people, but there has never been a Golden Age.Buddha was respected tremendously. That shows that other people were fast asleep because only people who are asleep respect a buddha. If everybody was a buddha, who would have bothered? Buddha has been remembered for twenty-five centuries – that shows that buddhahood was rare in those days also; otherwise, who bothers? If a buddha was available in every village, in every town, in every time, every nook and corner, then who would have bothered to remember Gautam Siddhartha? He would have been forgotten by now. But it was such a rare flower that centuries passed empty, no buddha happening. That’s why we carry on and on in deep reverence: the name, the respect, the gratitude we feel.Man has always been the same. The greatest scriptures of the world always talk about the lowest characteristics of man. They have to.I was reading…There is a Chinese book thought to be the oldest, the ancientmost: almost ten thousand years old. The book is a very small book, only a few pages of it are left, and those few pages are written on human skin. But the teaching is the same: don’t be greedy, don’t steal, don’t be violent. Ten thousand years have passed and the teaching remains relevant because man remains the same.In Babylon, a stone has been discovered with a script on it. It took almost fifty years to decode it. But if you read it, you will not be able to say that it can be seven thousand years old. It looks as if it is this morning’s editorial in some newspaper.It says, “In the golden old days everything was beautiful.” Seven thousand years before, it says, “In the good olden days, everything was beautiful. Now everything has become chaotic and the new generation is completely destroyed, immoral.”Seven thousand years earlier, and the new generation is immoral.“Nobody respects his elders. The father is no longer respected, the mother no longer respected. The family is being destroyed, the very foundation of society is shaking.”Can you think that this is seven thousand years before? This looks just like the editorial of this morning’s Pune Herald.Man is the same. There is no evolution. Man can pass through a transmutation, but there is no evolution. Either you are asleep or you are awake: this is the only transformation. But there is no evolution. A sleepy man has always been the same; those who are awakened have always been the same.So don’t condemn yourself too much. Don’t say, “This age is in deep crisis.” It has always been so. Don’t say, “In the past everything was beautiful.” This has always been the idea of people, “In the past…” That past never existed, and don’t think that in the future everything will be good. That too has always been an idea.If anything is possible, it is herenow. The jump is individual; society remains the same. The jump is absolutely individual. If you want to take the jump, become awake: take the jump and don’t wait for a golden age to come. There has never been a golden age. Of course, a few golden people have existed – they exist still now.The seventh question:Osho,Many people are in silence now. Do you recommend this? What is the purpose? Can it be helpful?I don’t recommend, but they understand. I don’t recommend anything in particular except understanding. If you understand, you will love silence.I don’t say, “Be silent,” because then it will become suppressive. If you understand me, if you look at me, you will see silence there. You will have a deep desire arising in you to be silent because in deep silence all that is beautiful and true becomes available.You are in a constant chattering, inner talk continues. You are talking with people or you are talking with yourself; You are talking the whole day. Even in the night you are talking, in dreams you are talking. This continuous talking functions as a barrier and you cannot see through it. It is like a fog that surrounds you densely. Your intelligence is destroyed because of this constant talk.I don’t recommend anything because then it becomes a discipline, then because I say, “You have to be silent,” you force silence.A forced silence is already ugly, a forced silence will not give you the right taste of it – no. Just understand, try to understand me, feel me – and then you would like to be silent. And when you would like to be silent, only then can it be beautiful. When it arises from your own heart, with a deep understanding, by and by you become silent. In fact, then you don’t become silent, you by and by drop the talk, the inner talk, the outer occupation. Then silence is not the thing. You just understand that all the talking is nonsense. Why go on talking? For what? There is nothing to say and you go on saying.In the Chinese language there is an ideogram which means two things together. Chinese language is really something totally different from any other language because only pictures exist, no alphabet, and each picture means many things.One ideogram, pi, means two things. One meaning is “to explain,” the other meaning is “in vain.” To explain is to explain in vain. Isn’t it marvelous? There is nothing to explain, nothing to say really.Just watch what you go on talking about the whole day. Ninety-nine percent would have been avoided easily. I don’t say a hundred percent because I know a few things, just day-to-day things, one has to – but then talking will become telegraphic: you need not go, round about, round about. Many times “yes” and “no” will do, and many times even that will not be needed, just a nodding of the head will do. And many times even that is not needed because the other is not worried what you think about something – he is simply unloading himself. You can just watch and there is no need to listen.If you become aware, the outer talk, the inner talk, by and by disappears. Not that you start practicing silence – no. Just the outer-inner talk becomes absolutely absurd, futile. You drop it and silence is reclaimed. When the words disappear, silence arises. It is not to be achieved directly; it is an indirect result of understanding.Yes, many people understand. I hope you will also understand. I wish that you will understand. But with me, remember always I don’t recommend anything because too many things have been recommended to you and they have become ugly.I don’t give you a discipline, I don’t give you an outer mode for your life. I only give you an inner light. In that inner light you have to find your discipline. I make you aware of certain things. Take the hint and don’t wait for direct recommendations because then you will be a loser. I am not going to give you any direct discipline because direct discipline is needed only by very stupid minds. I hope that you behave more intelligently, more responsively, become more responsible.Do you see the difference? If I say, “Be silent,” you will have to follow it. It will be forced, as if a flower has been forced and opened, it has not opened by itself. A flower opens by itself. Let your silence become a flower, opening by itself on its own accord.The eighth question:Osho,I feel the need for effort to stay in the present, and this effort makes it hard to relax completely. Letting go often seems to bring back the past or future. Could you explain about being alert without tension?The idea to be in the present will not allow you to relax. In fact, if you relax, you will be in the present.In the beginning, if you relax the past will rush toward you. You have suppressed many things, you have never allowed many things to come up before your consciousness, you have been avoiding facing many things. They will rush; when you relax, the doors are open. They always wanted to come before the consciousness but you never allowed; now you are not forcing them – they will rush. But this is going to be temporary.You have also been suppressing many dreams about the future. They will also come; there will be chaos for the time being, for a while. You have to relax and watch the chaos. There should be no anxiety about it, it is natural.It is as if a room has been closed for many days, then you open it and bad smells escape. If you keep it open, fresh air will be flowing and the bad smells will be gone.Your unconscious has accumulated bad smells. It is like a closed house, and it has become a junkyard: whatsoever is wrong or you think is wrong, or people and priests and politicians say is wrong, you go on throwing into the junkyard. You are sitting on a volcano. When you relax, everything will bubble up, it will surface. Allow it; that has to be so. Don’t be worried.So don’t try to be in the present. Rather, relax. The past and the future are both there, and they will go by themselves; you need not be worried, you simply watch. Don’t do a single thing because if you do something you will again repress. Don’t do a single thing, just watch as if the birds are flying in the sky and you are watching, lying down on the grass, the birds flying in the sky, the clouds moving slowly, lazily. Thoughts are also like clouds, desires are also like birds – be a watcher.The problem arises because you become a doer. You say, “This idea should not be there.” Who are you to say that this cloud should not be there? Who are you? Why are you trying to manipulate? The clouds are moving in the sky, thoughts are moving in the inner sky – let them be. Just relax. Doze away – let them be. Whenever you want to see, see; if you don’t want to see, doze, but don’t do anything. Soon, the sky becomes clear. If you don’t do anything, many things start happening. The first thing is that all repressions that are released float away from you. Soon the day comes when the sky is absolutely clean and clear. Then you will be in the present.You are trying from the wrong side. Don’t try to be in the present. Rather just be in a let-go. When you are in a let-go, don’t make any conditions, what should happen and what should not happen; otherwise you cannot be in a let-go. A let-go can only be unconditional. Simply relax; now whatsoever happens, happens; and if nothing happens, that too is good. A let-go is a let-go! Now you don’t have any idea what should happen. If the past rushes in, it rushes in. If the future comes in, it comes in. You are not even worried about being in the present because that will not allow you to be in a let-go. You simply relax.But relaxation has become really almost impossible because you have so many conditions that this should not be, this should be, this thought is bad, that thought is good, this is from the Devil and this is from God. You are continuously choosing and manipulating and fighting and arranging. You cannot be in a let-go.Drop all morality, drop all evaluation. Nothing is good, nothing is bad; everything is whatsoever it is. Relax. Suddenly one day the present arises in its deep radiance. Then there are no clouds and no thoughts and no desires. To be in the present is to enter the door of existence.The ninth question:Osho,I keep feeling myself authentic. Yet within the hour, I see the way I was as inauthentic, and then within the hour that fresh authenticity again looks false. When I laugh about this whole ridiculous situation, that really feels to be authentic – that laugh. But sooner or later I'm doubting that too. Is the whole concept of authenticity absurd?No. The concept of authenticity is not absurd, but it is not a concept. The problem is not arising by authenticity, it is arising by comparison. In this moment you feel authentic; after an hour you think about it, then comparison arises. After an hour, the authenticity is no longer an authenticity, it is just a memory. The memory looks faint, the memory is already cloudy, hazy, and you compare this memory with the present moment. Of course that looks inauthentic and the present moment looks authentic. Then again after an hour, that present moment is no longer a present moment; again you compare. The problem is arising because of comparison.Each moment is unique and incomparable. You cannot compare it. Forget about it – authentic, inauthentic, it is gone. Forget about it. There is no need to carry it and to compare.The morning was beautiful but the afternoon is not the morning. If you carry the morning, then you become suspicious whether it was so beautiful or not because now it is afternoon and the reality of the morning has disappeared. Now it is only a faint memory, a remembrance of something which was. Was it really there? Now how can you decide? It is no longer real. Then you compare this with this afternoon; the afternoon is real, by the evening that too is gone. Then you compare the afternoon with the evening; now beautiful stars are arising and you think, “Was it real, or I just imagined it?”The present is always real, the past is always a memory. Don’t compare the present with the past; otherwise the past will look inauthentic. The problem is not with authenticity, the problem is with comparison, and mind is a great effort to compare.Mind goes on comparing. It goes on every moment comparing, and that’s how it goes on missing the glory. The absolute glory is missed because the mind goes on comparing.You come across a rosebush and you see a rose – the mind immediately compares: you have seen bigger roses, this is nothing. But this rose is this rose, it has nothing to do with any other rose. There may be bigger roses, there may be more beautiful roses, but this rose has its own beauty, has its own reality, has its own authenticity, herenow. Why are you missing this by bringing a comparison in? Look at it: no other rose can give that which this rose can give. Watch it, delight in it, dance with it, sing a song near it, open your heart to it. Let it spread its fragrance toward your being, let it flow toward your heart and you flow toward it. Why bring in comparison? Once you learn this nonsense of comparison, you will miss all. Then another day there will be another rose and you will miss that too.The ridiculousness is that you missed one rose, you will miss another, and you will think: “That rose was beautiful,” and when you were near that rose, you were thinking of other roses. You never looked at anything. A comparative, comparing, mind misses everything and goes on thinking that others that are no longer present to it were more beautiful.Be true to the moment. When you have lived it, don’t carry it; there is no need. When you have crossed the river, don’t carry the boat on your head. Leave it there, now it is no longer needed; otherwise it will become a burden, and in the marketplace people will laugh at you.The last question:Osho,What is the most stupid thing Mulla Nasruddin ever did?It is difficult because he is still alive!One thing is certain, that he will not die before me. So don’t ask because nobody can predict. He is unpredictable, and he will do more and more stupid things. One grows through experience!He is not going to die before me, I cannot afford. So I cannot say when I am gone, he will also be gone, then you can think about it. Much research will be needed because Mulla Nasruddin is not a person. He is the whole humanity: he is you, he is you all together, and whatsoever you can do, he can do more stupidly. He is perfect; whatsoever any human being can do, he can do – of course, more perfectly.He is your stupidity, and if you can understand it you will laugh and you will weep also. You will laugh at the ridiculousness of it and you will weep. That ridiculousness is yours. When you laugh at Mulla Nasruddin, remember, you are laughing at yourself; he just brings whatsoever you are face to face so that it can be encountered.Mulla Nasruddin is not new. He is an old Sufi device. There are stories which are almost a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years old around Mulla Nasruddin. He’s an old device. There have been many claims to whom Mulla Nasruddin belongs. Russians say he belongs to them. They have a stone on a grave and they prove that he belongs to them. Iranians say he belongs to them, Arabs say he belongs to them. In Bukhara, they have a place dedicated to Nasruddin’s memory.He has been all over the world. In fact wherever there is stupidity, there is Mulla Nasruddin. He belongs to all, nobody can claim him. And I say that he is still alive. He may have died in one country but he has been resurrected in another. Many times I myself have seen him dying and the next day he knocks at my door. It is impossible: it seems he cannot die.He is human stupidity, but if you look deep into the stupidity you will see wisdom also. In all his stupidities there is a germ of hidden wisdom.Just the other day it happened…He was sitting at his grocery store and I was by his side and a small, tiny woman came, fastidious, and she upturned the whole grocery store. For hours she bothered and bored Nasruddin. But somehow after hours of struggle he could satisfy her. She purchased and she was satisfied. And it was the rush hour.Then the woman said, “Mulla, you may not know, but when I had come to your shop I had a very terrible headache, but now it is absolutely gone.”Mulla Nasruddin said, “Dear madam, don’t be worried. Don’t be worried. It has not gone, it has come to me!”He may look stupid but he is wise also. If you understand him, you will laugh and you will weep because you will see yourself and the whole humanity in it.Don’t ask “What is the stupidest thing Mulla Nasruddin ever did?”He is always doing one stupid thing greater than other stupid things. Each act is unique, incomparable. If you look into it, you will find, “This is the best,” but when the next act comes it is something absolutely new, something tremendously great.Read about Mulla Nasruddin and try to understand him. Make it a meditation, it has been a Sufi meditation for centuries. Sufi teachers used to give Mulla Nasruddin jokes to their disciples to think and ponder and meditate over because whatsoever he says has meaning in it, whatsoever he does, he has meaning in it.They are not ordinary jokes, remember. I don’t tell them to you just to make you laugh. No, they are not mere jokes, they are pointers. You should not just laugh and forget them, you should make them a part of your understanding. Then many times you will see within yourself Mulla Nasruddin arising – acting, behaving. Then you will be able to laugh. And if you can laugh at yourself, you have laughed for the first time!Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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A story called:True WisdomOne day the Rabbi of Zanswas standing at the window and looking into the street.Seeing a passerby, he knocked on the windowpaneand signed to the man to come into the house.When the stranger entered the room, Rabbi Hayyim asked him,“Tell me, if you found a purse full of ducats,would you return it to its owner?”“Rabbi,” said the man, “if I knew the ownerI should return the purse without a moment’s delay.”“You are a fool,” said the Rabbi of Zans.Then he resumed his position at the window,called another passerby, and put the same question to him.“I am not such a fool as to give up a purse full of moneythat has come my way,” said the man.“You’re a bad lot,” said the Rabbi of Zans,and called in a third man.He replied, “Rabbi, how can I knowon what rung I shall be when I find the purse,or whether I shall succeed in fending off the evil urge?Perhaps it will get the better of meand I shall appropriate what belongs to another.But perhaps God, blessed be he,will help me to fight it and in that caseI shall return what I have found to its rightful owner.”“These are good words,” cried the zaddik.“You are a true sage.”Man is a machine. He is born, lives, loves, dies, but not as a man. He is born, lives, loves, dies just like a machine: he is not conscious. Everything happens, he is not the doer. He has no will of his own but he believes that he is the doer, he believes that he has willpower, a will of his own. He believes that he is. This is the greatest stupidity possible, the base of all ignorance. He never becomes aware of the true situation because of this belief.Man, ordinarily, is only in two states: asleep with closed eyes and asleep with open eyes, and continuously an undercurrent of dreaming goes on.To say, “I am” is not true in the ordinary state of humanity because there are many “I”s within you. You don’t have a single “I,” you don’t have a single center of reference. One mood comes and goes, another mood comes and goes, and with each mood, a separate “I” dominates you.When you are angry, it is not the same “I” as it was when you were in love. A totally different personality takes possession of you. Many times you suspect it, many times you have been angry and said, “In spite of myself, I was angry.” What do you mean when you say “in spite of myself”? Then who was angry? You have suspected rightly that the “I” that you are ordinarily identified with was not in power. Somebody else, a vagrant “I,” a vagabond “I,” an unusual “I” dominated you.Just a few days before, a sannyasin came to me and she was very happy that she had fallen in love and that she had found a love. She was ecstatic, asked if I would give her a Tantra technique so that she could move into deeper orgasmic states of love.I looked into her and I said, “Wait for seven days. Next time you come, bring your lover with you.”She came after a week, but she said, “We have quarreled and separated.”So I asked, “What about the Tantra technique? I am ready to give it to you.”She said, “But now I have no lover.” And she was so sad and so depressed, and not even suspecting what had happened.When you fall in love, you believe in it, you think something permanent has happened in your being. Then you are sad, then you believe that. You are such a great believer you never suspect for a single moment that these are moods and they pass just as clouds pass in the sky, and they go on flowing just like a river flows. Nothing is permanent in you. How can you say, “I am”? That will be a falsity. To assert, “I am,” is to say a lie; you cannot say it. You are many “I”s, a thousand and one egos within you, a crowd, a multiplicity; you are poly-psychic.You are just like a wheel. Think of a wheel of a bullock cart moving: one spoke comes up, then it goes down, another comes up, then too is on the way down; and the wheel goes on moving and every moment a different spoke comes up. You are like a wheel: you go on moving, and there are many spokes which you call “I”s. When one “I” comes up, you get identified with it. When you are angry, you don’t see that anger is like a cloud surrounding you. You become one with it, the mood takes total possession of you, you are possessed by it. Then it is not good to say, “I am angry.” It would be better if you say, “I am anger.” When love possesses you, you become love. Don’t say, “I am in love.” You are love.You get so identified with the mood that your separate identity, your separate being is no longer there. This goes on continuously from the moment you are born to the moment you die. You become a young man and you think you are young – and you know that the body is changing every moment. Then you become old and then you think, “I am old.” In youth you were jubilant that you were young, full of energy. In old age you are sad and depressed because now the energy has gone. While alive you think you are the body and when death comes, then you say, “I am dying.” Whatsoever happens you become identified with it.This is the state of affairs of a humanity which is fast asleep. That’s why it cannot be said that you are man yet. You are a mechanism. The man will be born within you when you become conscious of the whole mechanism and don’t get identified – when you can see anger coming, you can see anger surrounding you, you can see anger all around you and yet you remain a watcher on the hill.Go on watching: a cloud has come, there is a fog all around, but remain separate. You know well, “I am the knower and not the known.” You know well, “I am the witness and not the witnessed.” You know well that infinite distance exists between you and that which surrounds you. It may be touching you, but infinite distance exists because the known can never touch the knower, the seen can never touch the seer. The seer transcends, the seer is the very transcendence.Just a few days before I was telling you that there are three ordinary types of man. Man number one is identified with his body; man number two is identified with his feelings, emotions; man number three is identified with his mind, thinking, thoughts – and all three are asleep. Their sleep may be different. One sleeps in the body, another sleeps in the emotions, the third sleeps in his thoughts, but the sleep is the same and the quality is of unconscious stupor.Then there is the fourth man, man number four: he becomes alert. He watches his body but is not identified with it, he uses his body but is never lost in it. He remains aloof, detached, distant. He uses his feelings. Many times he is surrounded by his feelings but he is never overpowered. He remains separate; thoughts are there, the mind goes on functioning and creating thoughts, but man number four remains alert. Body, mind, heart – they all function. They function even better than they otherwise function in you because there is no disturbance from the innermost being. But the innermost being remains aloof. This is man number four.Man number four is what I mean by a sannyasin. There is no need to go anywhere. Wherever you are become aware, and then and there sannyas starts functioning. It is not a question of changing places, it is a question of changing the inner attitude. You remain in the body but you know now that you are not the body. And once the number four is there, man is born.You are born only with a potentiality to be a man, you are not born as a man. You are only born with the capacity to become a man. You can become, you may not become; you can miss the whole point, you can go on round and round and never reach and penetrate the center of your being. But if awareness arises and you become watchful, man is born. Hindus have called this state dwij, the state of the twice-born.The first birth is through the parents, mother and father. The second birth is through awareness. That is the real birth because the first birth will culminate in death, the second birth never culminates in death. So the first birth is a birth only in name; in fact it is a way to death.You have been dying since the day you were born. One day the whole process will be completed, so your birth was nothing but entry into death. You may take seventy years, eighty years to reach but you have been walking toward death every moment of your life. Only when you are twice-born, dwij, when the next birth has happened and man is born within you, man number four – suddenly you know there is no death.Death exists only with identification. If you are identified with the body, you will die because the body is not you. It has to be left some day. You cannot remain in it forever and forever, it is a passing phase. It is just a milestone, not the goal: you can rest a little while under the shade of a tree but one has to go.You can get identified with the emotions but then there will be death, and you know it. The body dies once in seventy years, emotions die every day, every moment. You love a person and then there is a death: you don’t love, the mood has gone, you feel a subtle death happening. You were friendly with a person, now the friendliness has disappeared – a death. Every moment you die in your emotions, and thoughts are even faster in dying. You cannot keep a single thought in your mind for a few seconds; it is trying to escape. Try; just try to keep one single thought for a few minutes. It will not be there, it is already gone; it is trying to escape.Mind is dying continuously every moment. The heart is dying continuously every hour, the body is also dying continuously but a continuity remains for seventy, eighty years. These three are the identifications.The fourth consciousness arises when you are not identified. One more thing about this…There are four ways to reach godliness. One is to make an effort through the body to reach; that’s what Hatha yogis have been doing. It is not a true way. Something can be achieved through it because finally the body also belongs to existence, but it is not your totality. Gurdjieff has called this “the way of the fakir.”You can see in India many fakirs and you may also be impressed by their attainments. They attain to certain powers; for example, you can come across a fakir who has been standing for ten, twenty years continuously. He has never allowed his body to rest, to sit down or to sleep. He has been standing. Even if he has to sleep, he sleeps standing. Now his body has become almost rigid, paralyzed. Now it cannot move, the flexibility is lost. But you will see certain powers in him because he has attained to a very lower kind of will.To stand for ten years continuously needs will. Just try for ten days then you will know, just try for ten hours and you will know, just try for ten minutes – not moving, just standing – and you will know that. A thousand and one problems arise and the mind says, “What are you doing? Drop this whole nonsense. Everybody is enjoying and what are you doing just standing like a fool?”Ten years not moving, a certain will – of course, a very lower kind of will concerned with the body, very materialistic – but a will arises. The man attains to a certain crystallization, he can do a few things. He can heal, he can touch your body and a healing power will be possible to flow toward you through his body. He can bless, he can curse, and whatsoever he says will come to pass because a man who has remained ten years standing has attained to an intensity. If he says something, those words become very potential and powerful, atomic; they carry energy.If he curses you, the curse is going to happen, if he blesses you the blessing will be there. But this man himself will remain on a very low rung of being. If you look into his eyes, you will not see intelligence. He will be a stupid type of saint, nothing of the higher, but a crystallization of the lower will be there. You can feel certain vibrations around him, very powerful, but not of intelligence, not of awareness – not of meditation but of concentration.He can live long: a hundred years, two hundred years will not be very difficult for him because his body will follow him; whatsoever he wants to do with the body he can do. But it is nothing of the spiritual, it is nothing of the religious. If you try through the body, you are trying the lowest possibility within you.If a fakir is fortunate, then he may get the guidance of a master who can pull him out of his body; otherwise he will die deep in his body. And next life everything is lost again because unless something is attained in consciousness, it cannot be permanent with you. The body will change; whatsoever you have attained with this body will be lost with the next.You may be a Mohammed Ali but you cannot carry the body to the next birth. This body will be left here. You may be a beautiful man, you may be a beautiful woman, a Cleopatra, but this body has to be left here and all that has been attained through the body and with the body will be lost. Unless the fakir is fortunate enough to come under the guidance of a master, he cannot be pulled out of his body. In India, it has been one of the compassions of the masters.You must have heard…There are ancient stories that in India masters used to travel all around the country. On the surface it looked as if they were great intellectuals: a Shankaracharya, a Ramanuja, a Vallabha, a Nimbark, a Buddha, a Mahavira. On the surface it looked as if they were going to convert people. That was just a superficial thing; deep down they were doing many things. One of the most important things was to look after fakirs, to go from town to town because those fakirs couldn’t come to them. They were so deep-rooted in their bodies and they had lost all intelligence. They were not bad people. They were ignorant but powerful, and if their power could be released they could suddenly jump to a higher rung of their being.Meher Baba, in this age, did such a work. He traveled all around the country for years just looking after fakirs. Wherever he would hear of a fakir – a good man, a very good man, but ignorant – he would go to bring him out of his stupor.Then there is the second. Gurdjieff has called it “the way of the monk.” You can call it the way of the devotee, bhakti marg. The first is Hatha yoga; the second is bhakti marg, the way of the monk.The way of the monk is to move toward the divine through feelings: prayer, crying, weeping, in a deep love, affection, in deep thirst to move toward godliness. This type of man gets involved in the emotions. He achieves a greater stage, a higher stage than the first, the fakir, but still he is caught. Somebody is needed to bring him out of that also.Then there is the third way, the way of the yogi, one who works through the intellect, who works through thinking: the way of the philosopher, intellectual. He attains still a higher stage but then he gets caught. All three get caught.Only the fourth goes beyond and is never caught. That’s why Gurdjieff has called his path “the fourth way.” It is significant to understand because the Hasid path is also the fourth way. Hasidism, the Hasidic approach also belongs to the fourth.Body, feeling, mind all have to be transcended and one has to become just alert, alert to all that happens within and without. The only key for the fourth way is to be mindful, to be aware, to witness, to see into things and not get identified.Now listen to this story. This beautiful story belongs to the fourth way.One day the Rabbi of Zanswas standing at the window and looking into the street.Seeing a passerby, he knocked on the windowpaneand signed to the man to come into the house.When the stranger entered the room, Rabbi Hayyim asked him,“Tell me, if you found a purse full of ducats,would you return it to its owner?”A very simple question, but not so simple. The man was deceived by the simplicity. “Tell me, if you found a purse full of ducats, would you return it to its owner?”The man must have thought that the rabbi is asking a moral question – that’s how he was deceived. The rabbi is not asking a moral question. A really religious man is never bothered about morality because morality is nothing but a game. One has to play the rules of the game because one has to live with many people. The morality is because you have to relate with so many people. It has nothing to do with your essence; it has something to do with your relations.For example, if you alone are on the earth and you find a purse full of ducats and gold and money, will it be immoral to keep it? If you are alone on the earth, then the question of morality–immorality does not arise. If you are alone on the earth, can you be a thief? It is impossible because to steal you need somebody else to be there, to rob you need somebody else to be there. If you are alone on the earth, you cannot be a thief, you cannot be a robber. If you are alone on the earth, can you lie? It is impossible. To whom will you lie? To lie, somebody else is needed.Morality is always in relationship, and religion is something that you do with your aloneness. So the rabbi is not asking a moral question. He is asking a very important, significant question about your inner being.He asked: “Tell me, if you found a purse full of ducats, would you return it to its owner?” The formulation is moralistic. That’s how the man was deceived. He said:“Rabbi,” said the man, “if I knew the owner,I should return the purse without a moment’s delay.”That’s how everybody is: if it is a theoretical question there is no problem, you are always moral. In theory everybody is moral. The question arises only when a thing becomes really real.Sometimes you even become immoral in theory…I used to know a man in my village; he was a doctor but he had failed as a doctor, his practice had not been good at all. He had always been poor. His whole personality was such that nobody would think that he was a doctor. A doctor has to look a doctor, his appearance is significant. He was a very tiny man, ill-looking.Sometimes I would send somebody to him and the people would think, “He is not the doctor, he is the pharmacist.” And they would ask, “Mr. Pharmacist, where is the doctor?” Of course he would get very angry.It was certain that it was difficult for him to succeed as a doctor so he used to waste his time on crossword puzzle contests. He was always enthusiastic that “this time” he was going to get one lakh rupees, two lakh rupees, three lakh rupees… And every month it would be so, and when the date would go by he would forget about it, and again he would start working on new crossword puzzles.One day – I was just joking with him – I said, “Look, you have been working so hard. At least for one year I have been watching you and you have not won any prize. It seems it is not in your fate. Do one thing: join my fate with yours.”He said, “How can it be joined?”I said, “Tell me one thing. How much will you donate to me? If you get one lakh rupees, how much will you donate to me?”He started thinking – a poor man – he closed his eyes and he said, “Okay. Fifty percent.” It was hard to say fifty percent, it was too much – fifty thousand rupees!I said, “Okay, agreed. Now it is certain. You go ahead. Now my fate is also aligned with you. You are going to get it.”In the night, near about twelve o’clock he knocked on my door and he said, “Listen, fifty thousand is too much and I cannot sleep. It seems that this time it is going to happen and you have hooked me. You never said this before; it seems you have some idea that this time it is going to happen. It is not a question of your fate being aligned with mine. It seems you have some suspicion that it is going to happen, and I am also feeling absolutely certain it is going to happen this time. Please, fifty thousand will be too much.”So I said, “Okay. You suggest.”He said, “Ten thousand will do.”I could see even ten thousand was too much – for a poor man who has never had ten thousand rupees for himself it is too much. I said, “Okay. That will do.”Next morning he was back again, very depressed, but now feeling a little ashamed also, and he said, “Please forgive me, excuse me, but I thought and thought and thought, but ten thousand… And I am a poor man, you know; ten thousand is too much.” He had not won anything, it was just a dream.I said, “Then what do you propose?”He said, “This time, let me have it completely. Next time, whenever I will get, whatsoever you say I will give you but this time it seems so certain.”I said, “Okay, you have it. But then don’t complain to me later on because now I am no longer aligned with your fate.”Then he became afraid. By the evening he was back. He said, “Just as a token you can have one rupee so that you are with me. Otherwise I have become afraid: maybe I am not going to get it again.”The mind is so greedy and you don’t know the greed. When you are thinking, just imagining, you become absolutely moralistic; everybody is good. You have been angry and then you repent, and in repentance everybody is perfectly beautiful. You say, “Never again will I do this.” But you don’t know yourself what you are saying. You don’t know that this is what you have been saying your whole life. Every time you have been angry you repented and said, “Never again!” And again and again and again. You have not been even watchful enough to see the whole absurdity of it.If you are really aware, first you will drop repentance because you know the foolishness of it. You have repented many times, nothing happens.A man was here who was a very angry man, he was continuously angry. He told me, “I don’t want God, I don’t want any meditation. Just bring me out of my angry state. I repent and nothing happens. I have taken all sorts of vows but nothing happens. What to do?”I told him, “Do one thing. First renounce repentance, that now, from now onward you will never repent. Be angry but never repent about it.”He said, “How is that going to help? Even repentance has not been of any help and if I don’t repent, I may become even more angry.”I said, “You leave it to me. First leave repentance.”After a week he was back and he said, “It is impossible. I cannot leave repentance. Whenever I become angry, it follows like a shadow. It is automatic.”The whole point to see is that you don’t have any will. The whole point to see is that you have not been alert about yourself; you don’t know who you are. All your promises are going to be false because you don’t know who the one who is promising is. How can you promise? How can you fulfill the promise? One mood promises and by the time fulfillment comes that mood is no longer there, some other mood is prevalent, and the other mood has not even heard about the first mood.In the evening, you decide, “Tomorrow morning, at four o’clock I am going to get up, and this time I am really going to get up!” But you don’t know the mood that will be there at four o’clock in the morning. This is evening. This is not four o’clock in the morning; you can easily believe that you have a will.Next morning, four o’clock, and somebody within you says, “What nonsense – this is the time to get up? It is so cold and it is raining. And it is so beautiful to have a little more sleep.” You are not feeling rested, and you have completely forgotten, and you turn over and you take a good rest.When you are drinking your tea in the morning, you are repenting. Now you are condemning yourself, “What type of man am I? I had decided to get up at four – then why did I change it?”Now that is a third state, a third rung, a third spoke on top. You may decide again because in the morning it is so easy to decide, but in the night again the thing will change. And you have been doing this continuously for your whole life and you have not become aware yet!The Rabbi said, “Tell me, if you found a purse full of ducats would you return it to its owner?” A theoretical question, nothing is at stake. You have not found the purse and you don’t know about yourself at all.The man said, “Rabbi, if I knew the owner I should return the purse without a moment’s delay.”As if the question is only of knowing the owner. The man says, “If I knew the owner, I would return it immediately. But if I don’t know the owner, then it might take a little time to find the owner.”In Mulla Nasruddin’s town there is a tradition that if somebody finds something he has to go into the market and loudly shout three times: “I have found this thing.” If it belongs to somebody, the owner can claim it and it is his.One day he found a diamond. He went to the marketplace, he shouted thrice, then came back home.The wife said, “Where have you been?”He said, “I had found a diamond and the tradition says one has to go to the marketplace. That’s why I have been there.”The wife said, “Is this the time to go – in the middle of the night, when everybody is fast asleep? And you really shouted three times?”Nasruddin said, “Yes, I shouted but very quietly. In fact I could not hear it myself. I mumbled because a beggar was sleeping there and I was afraid he might jump up and claim it. But I have followed the rule. Now there is no trouble. We can have this diamond.”“Rabbi,” said the man, “if I knew the owner I should return the purse without a moment’s delay.” Just think, that’s what you might have said. Nothing is at stake, there is no purse, nothing. You can be moral so cheaply.This man is saying, “If I knew the owner, there would be no trouble. I would go immediately and give it to him. If there was some delay, it would only be because the owner is not known, not because of me.”Just think about it, put yourself in the place of that man: would not the same answer have been yours? Nothing is at stake and the rabbi would feel very good and blessed that you are a moral man.“You are a fool,” said the Rabbi of Zans.Why call such a moralistic man a fool? Why does the rabbi say, “You are a fool”?The rabbi is saying, “You are not aware of what you are saying; you are not aware of yourself. You have passed your whole life and you don’t know anything about your own being, the greed hidden behind, the possessiveness, the ambition, the ego, the lust. You are a fool.”Who is a fool? – whoever is not aware of himself.Then he resumed his position at the window,called another passerby, and put the same question to him.“I am not such a fool,” said the man,”as to give up a purse full of money that has come my way.”The second man says, “I am not a fool," but his definition of foolishness is totally different than the definition of the rabbi. And sometimes words deceive because they are the same.The rabbi said to the first man, “You are a fool because you are unaware of yourself.”The second man says: “I am not such a fool as to give up a purse full of money that has come my way.” Now, for this second man, foolishness has a totally different dimension and meaning. He says, “When you come across money, if you are wise, you will escape with it as immediately as possible so that nobody comes to know about it.”“I am not a fool. I am not a simpleton,” he is saying. “I am not deceived by all this moralistic nonsense: that you give it to the owner, that if it doesn’t belong to you it is not yours, that you will suffer in hell, or if you give it you will be awarded in heaven. I am not a fool.”The second man is an ordinary, worldly man, but in a way better than the first because whatsoever he is, he knows it. At least he has a little glimpse of his own being and he knows, “I am not a fool.” He is a cunning man, clever, calculating. The first was a simpleton, he was just as the other: if the real situation was there, the first would behave just as the second would behave, but the first believes that he is a moral man.This is the difference between your so-called religious and irreligious people. This is the only difference: the religious goes to the temple, to the church, to the mosque, prays, talks about God, carries scriptures, rituals and looks very religious, but whenever there is an actual situation he behaves as irreligiously as anybody else, sometimes even more so.Just look – India is a good example. The whole country thinks it is religious. In fact the country thinks this is the only country which is religious. They go on bragging about it. They think that they are the religious leaders of the world, and the whole world should come and bow down to them, and they should guide the whole world as far as religion, God, spirituality is concerned. But if you look into their lives you will not find more materialistic people anywhere else.This is my observation: people coming from the West are less materialistic than people who live in India. On the surface they may look materialistic; they may not have any pretensions about being religious, but they are less materialistic, they cling to things less.Indians are simply mad. They cling to money, to houses, to things, and at the same time they go on pretending and bragging that they are religious people, they don’t believe in matter, they believe in God. They go on saying that this whole world is illusion but you cannot get a single pai out of them; it is impossible. Why has this happened?These are the two types. The first type is the image of the Indian, the second type is the image of the Westerner. The Westerner knows that he is not a fool; if he gets the money, he will take it; it is simple, like that. The Indian will say no, he will not touch it, and deep down already he has started to plan what to do if he gets the money – on the surface one thing, deep down another thing. That’s the only difference between your so-called moral people and immoral people: the moral people are hypocrites.“I am not such a fool,” said the man, “as to give up a purse full of money that has come my way.” In a way the second man is more sincere because he says the truth, “I am not such a fool. I am not going to give that purse to anybody. If it has come my way it is mine. I am going to have it.” He may look immoral, but is more sincere. And finally sincerity helps, not morality. At least this man knows his cunningness.The first man is absolutely unaware of his cunningness; he believes in his innocence. When you believe in your innocence and you are not innocent, you are in great danger; you are a fool because you are believing in something which is not there. It is better to be a plain, worldly man than to be a hypocrite and religious man. It is good to be sincere even if your sincerity reveals things which are not good, because once you know you can transcend them. If you don’t know, they hide behind you. Your enemies are just in your unconscious and they can grab you any moment. To know the enemy is better than not to know because then something can be done.“You are a bad lot,” said the rabbi, and called in a third man.He said, “You are a bad lot,” but he didn’t say, “You are a fool.” You are not good, that’s true, but you are not a fool. The first man is not good, but he is a fool also because he does not know his own inner cunningness.He called the third man and asked the same question. The third man replied:“Rabbi, how can I knowon what rung I shall be when I find the purse…?”This man is really aware of the whole situation. He says he cannot promise; he knows himself, he knows his own deceiver, he knows his own cunningness, he knows his evil moments. He knows the inner conflict that will arise when the purse will be found. He is really aware. “Rabbi, how can I know on what rung I shall be when I find the purse…?”“I may be in a religious mood, I may not be because moods happen and I am not the master. I have no will of my own. A certain mood possesses me and then I behave accordingly. I am a machine – what can I promise, how can I promise? You are asking me an absurd question.”“…how can I knowon what rung I shall be when I find the purse,or whether I shall succeed in fending off the evil urge?”“I know my evil urge also, and I don’t know if maybe the evil urge will be too much and I will not succeed in fending it off by myself. Maybe it is not too great, but I cannot say what will happen. It is unpredictable. I know my past: many times similar things have happened and the evil urge was too strong and I could not be victorious and I had to give up. Who knows?”“Perhaps it will get the better of meand I shall appropriate what belongs to another.”The question is not about now. It is a theoretical question but this man makes it real. The question is not about the purse, the question is about your own awareness. Are you aware of what you will do? One who is aware will know well that nothing can be said.The first was absolutely unaware, the second was aware but identified with his cunningness, the third is aware but not identified with his evil urge. This is to be understood: the first is in absolute unconsciousness. The second is a little awake but he has not used his awareness to go beyond; rather he has used his awareness to become cunning: he is identified with his evil urge. He says, “I am not a fool.” What he is saying is, “I am clever and cunning, I am not a fool;” he is identified with cunningness. The third man is not identified with either. He says, “I don’t know. Nothing can be said certainly.”“Perhaps it will get the better of meand I shall appropriate what belongs to another.But perhaps…”…and this is the point to be understood, the very center of this story:“But perhaps God, blessed be he,will help me to fight it…”“Because I know myself. Alone I cannot fight, alone I will be defeated. It is possible only through his grace. If I am left alone, there is every possibility I will be defeated by the evil urge. I know myself, I know my strength – it is nothing. It is good if the question is theoretical, but when the practical problem arises I know myself. I have been defeated many times when I was alone.”“But perhaps God, blessed be he,will help me to fight it and in that caseI shall return whatever I have found to its rightful owner.”What is he saying? He is saying, “If existence helps, only then I will return it, otherwise not.” What he is saying is this: if I return it, I have not returned it, but existence has returned it. If it happens at all, it will happen through it, not through me.This is the quality of a religious man: even his virtues are not his, even his virtues he is not identified with, even his virtues are through existence: its grace, its gift – because otherwise your virtues will become your ego. Whenever a virtue becomes an ego, the sin has already been committed; then it is no longer virtuous, it is already corrupted and poisoned.“But perhaps God, blessed be he,will help me to fight it and in that caseI shall return whatever I have found to its rightful owner.”“Those are good words,” cried the zaddik.“You are a true sage.”The fourth state of consciousness: he is not identified anywhere, not even with virtues.Bodhidharma traveled from India to China. The emperor came to see him; he touched Bodhidharma’s feet and the first thing he uttered was this: “I have made so many temples, so many Buddhist ashrams. Millions of bhikkus, Buddhist sannyasins, are fed by me, supported by me. I have changed the whole country into a Buddhist world. All these virtues… What do you think, sir, I am going to gain through them? What will be the benefit? What will be the award?”Bodhidharma looked at this Emperor Wu and said, “You will fall into the seventh hell.”The emperor could not believe it because all other monks, saints – so-called – were saying, “You are earning such virtue, punya, that you are going to be received into the ultimate nirvana,” and this man says “seventh hell”!Emperor Wu said, “Have you gone mad? What are you saying? Are you aware?”Bodhidharma said, “I am aware of what I am saying and you can rely on me: you will go to the seventh hell.”“But why?” the emperor cried. “I have not done anything wrong.”Bodhidharma said, “It is not a question of doing wrong or right. The question is the very ego that you have done something. You should thank God, thank Buddha, blessed be his name; it is through his grace something has happened. Don’t be the doer, please don’t you come in because the ego has to go to hell, and if you are egoistic you will have to follow it. You are not going to hell but the ego has to go to hell, and if you are identified with it you will have to go. Nothing can be done about it, no virtue can save you.”“Those are good words,” said the zaddik. “You are a true sage.” Who is the untrue sage? – he who thinks that he has been doing so many virtuous acts, so many austerities, fasting, chanting: he who thinks that he has been living a religious life and thanks himself: “It is me.” He is the untrue sage.The true sage always feels whatsoever happens, happens through existence’s grace. He does not come in anywhere. The true sage is based in awareness, rooted in awareness. And this is what awareness should bring to you: you will not promise. Who can promise? And you will not say with certainty, “I am going to do this or that.” You will say, “Nothing can be said. I know myself, how fragile my will is, how weak my crystallization is. I am a crowd and I have many “I”s. One “I” may promise but by the time the actual moment to fulfill it comes, another “I” may be dominant.” If you promise, you become a liar.I have seen lovers promising each other that they will love each other forever and forever, and not knowing anything about the next moment – not knowing anything about what they mean by “forever and forever.” If they are a little alert, they will say, “It feels, in this moment, this is a truth of this moment. In this mood it feels as if I will love you forever and forever, but nobody knows about the next moment.” That’s why lovers always prove deceivers to each other and in the end they think that they have been cheated because they both promised things which they cannot deliver.A man asked Buddha, “Sir, give me some guidance. I would like to serve humanity.” Buddha looked deeply into him; the man must have felt very uneasy because Buddha went on looking and looking and the man started perspiring and said, “Sir, what are you doing? If you can, give me some hints; otherwise why are you staring in my eyes?”Buddha said, “I was looking to see whether you are or not – and you are not. Who will serve humanity? You don’t exist at all: you are a momentary bubble, you have just a momentary existence – king for the moment, enthroned for the moment. Next moment you will be gone and somebody else will be the king. Who will serve humanity? It will be good if you first try to find out where you are, who you are.“First be and then there is no need to ask me because whenever one is, compassion flows; if you are, compassion follows. To be is the only thing that has to be done. And how can you be if you go on being deceived by your own ego, desires, moods, thoughts, feelings?”The zaddik is right. He says, “You are a true sage because you have simply stated the truth. You are not trying in any way to deceive me or yourself. You simply stated, ‘I cannot believe in myself. I have believed in the past, and the belief proved wrong. I know my lust: the evil urge can be very strong and I may not be able to fend it off by myself. The only hope is if God, blessed be his name, helps me. I am corruptible; only if the source which is incorruptible helps me… I am cunning; only if the source which is innocent, virgin, helps me, showers on me… Only then.’”It happened…Saint Theresa, one of the greatest women who ever lived, was going to build a church. She was a poor woman. The whole town gathered and she said ecstatically, “A great church has to be built here on this spot.”The people said, “Good. Your dreams are good but where is the money to come from?”Saint Theresa pulled just two small coins from her bag and she said, “Don’t be afraid. I have got money.”Just two small coins. People laughed, they said, “We always knew that you are a little too innocent. These two small coins – you cannot even purchase a brick and you are thinking to make a great church?”Theresa laughed and she said, “Yes, my hands are small, my coins are small, but you don’t see – God is with me! Two small coins plus God – everything is possible.”On that spot stands a great church, one of the most beautiful. Two small coins plus God…God means infinity, God means all.“Blessed be his name,” said the man. “I cannot promise anything on my own but if he wills, then everything is possible. I may be very small and the evil urge may be very great, but if he helps then there is no problem. My small strength – nothing, in fact – plus all, that will do.”Said the zaddik: “You are a true sage.” So, the true sage has to begin from the fourth state of mind, that is consciousness. Then the door opens.Once you attain to the fourth, existence is available to you and you are available to existence. Then the door opens. Up to the third the door is closed and you can do only one thing: become aware. Up to the third you cannot do anything, beyond the fourth you need not. This has to be remembered. Up to the third you are unconscious and you cannot do anything, your life is mechanical. Beyond the fourth you need not; existence is available, it starts doing. Then you ride on its tide, it takes you.So the only thing that can be done and that should be done is to become more and more aware and alert and conscious.Walk, but make walking a meditation; walk knowingly. Breathe, but let your breathing become a constant meditation – breathe knowingly. The breath going in, watch it; the breath going out, watch it. Eat, but eat with full awareness: take a bite, chew it, but go on watching. Let the watcher be there in every moment, whatsoever you are doing. Going to sleep, lie down on the bed and watch. Falling into sleep, go on watching, go on watching.In the beginning, sometimes you will be lost and the watching will disappear and the sleep will take possession. By and by one day you will see sleep taking possession and your awareness is still there. When you can see your sleep, you have seen the whole situation of humanity. Then by and by sleep takes possession but you are still alert. Deep down, somewhere a flame goes on burning. The night may be dark all around but the flame goes on burning: the whole night you sleep, and still you are not asleep.That’s the meaning of Krishna’s saying to Arjuna in the Gita, “Ya nisha sarvabhutayam tasyam jagriti samyami – that which is a night to all, even there the yogi, the samyami, the one who has become a master of oneself, remains alert, awake.” The body sleeps, the heart sleeps, the mind sleeps, but you remain alert because you are nothing else but alertness. Everything else is a false identification.Awareness is your nature, body is your abode. Mind is a computer; awareness is you, is your very being.Sat-chit-anand has been our definition of the ultimate truth. We have used three words: sat, chit, anand. Sat means true, truth, being; chit means consciousness, aware, alert; anand means bliss.Be – and the only way to be is to be aware. Once you are aware, bliss follows. Sat-chit-anand is your innermost core of being, and it is nothing to be attained, it is already there. It has only to be discovered, uncovered. It is your hidden treasure.The zaddik is right because the man is alert. The first ray of alertness has penetrated his being: he has become the true sage. I would like you to become sages. I would not like you to become saints.Saints are virtuous people, good; they belong to the first category that has been trying to be good, moral, virtuous, righteous, pious. I would not like you to be saints. I would like you to be sages. To be a sage has nothing to do with morality, virtue. I am not saying that a sage is not virtuous; I am saying he is not concerned with it; it follows as a consequence. The sage has not been practicing it; a practiced virtue is not virtue at all. A practiced virtue is just on the outside, painted. You may have practiced it hard so it has created a crust around you; but deep down you remain the same.The saint is against the sinner, the sinner is against the saint. The first man can become the saint, the second man can become the sinner. The third man is the sage.The sinner is one who is identified with his bad qualities, with his evil urges. The saint is one who is identified with his good urges: virtuous, pious. A sage is one who is not identified. The sinner thinks himself the Devil incarnate, he thinks of himself in terms of sinning more and more. He thinks that is his cleverness. The saint thinks that his cleverness is to practice virtue: to become innocent, not to do anything that is bad. Then he gets more and more identified with the good.A sage is not identified at all. A sage is a state of non-identification: neither this nor that, neti neti. He says, “I am neither this bank nor that. Rather, I am the river: neither the saint nor the sinner, neither good, nor bad.” The sinners live in a sort of hell and the saints imagine themselves in a sort of heaven. And the sage? – moksha is for him, absolute freedom is for him. He is freed from all duality.The secret key and the only key is awareness. For it you need not go to the Himalayas, you need not go anywhere; your life gives you enough opportunities to be aware.Somebody insults you. Listen to it in full awareness and you will be surprised that the insult is no longer an insult; you may even smile, it does not hurt. It hurts only when received in unawareness. Somebody praises you, appreciates you. Listen with alertness and then nobody can persuade you to do foolish things, nobody can bribe you, nobody can buttress you; flattery becomes impossible, you will smile at the whole nonsense.Listen, watch, be aware, and by and by a different quality of being arises in you which is neither body, nor feelings, nor thought. A different pillar of flame starts gathering within you, becomes more and more crystallized. And as this awareness becomes crystallized you will feel more and more, for the first time, that you are the feeling of being, and then moods will become more and more irrelevant. They will come and go but you will remain unperturbed. The climate will change around you but you will remain unchanged. Whatsoever happens without will not in any way change your within. The within remains absolutely pure and uncorrupted.I will tell you a story…A German thinker, Herrigel, was in Japan. He was sitting for dinner with his friends and his master, whom he had invited. Suddenly, there was an earthquake. They were on the seventh story of the building. The whole building started shaking, everybody started running down the stairs, there was chaos. Herrigel himself ran toward the door. It was automatic. In such situations nobody thinks what to do. Everybody behaves like a robot. That is the meaning of “man is a machine.”But suddenly because there was so much of a crowd and he couldn’t find the way, he remembered at the door, he remembered for a single moment, “What happened to the master, whom I had invited?”He looked back. The master was sitting on his chair, the same way, but now he had closed his eyes – not a ripple of fear on the face, not a ripple of disturbance, as if nothing had happened.It was so magnetic, the presence of the master, the uncorrupted presence – the aroma that surrounded him, the climate that he created around, the space in which he lived that moment – that Herrigel says, “I was magnetized. I don’t know what happened. I simply came back and sat by the side of the master. By his side I felt absolutely secure, as if nothing can happen.”The earthquake came and went. The master opened his eyes and started to speak from the same place where he had to stop because of the earthquake.Herrigel said, “I have completely forgotten what you were saying before. It seems centuries have passed and I am completely disoriented. Please, I am not in a situation now to understand what you are saying. Sometime later; let me get settled. But one thing I would like to ask: When we all were running away, why didn’t you move?”The master said, “I also moved, but I moved in a different direction: withinward. You were running without, I was also running, but within because I know there is no shelter without. The earthquake was all over – where were you running? Just running cannot help. I entered into my being, and there no earthquake has ever penetrated. I moved to a space within myself where no disturbance ever penetrates, where silence is absolute, stillness is ultimate. I also ran, I also sought a shelter – but in the right direction.”If you are trying to be aware, you are moving in the right direction. Sooner or later you will become the true sage.Don’t try to practice virtue. Practice only one thing: awareness. Virtue follows it, just as the shadow follows you. Virtue is a consequence. Once you enter your own being and become rooted there, centered there, all, all happens because all the doors are open: existence is open to you and you are open to existence.Let me repeat again: up to the third stage you cannot do anything because you are not, beyond the fourth you need not do because existence’s grace has become available. You do only the fourth: please be aware and you are entering into the temple.Let me repeat the whole story again:One day the Rabbi of Zanswas standing at the window and looking into the street.Seeing a passerby, he knocked on the windowpaneand signed to the man to come into the house.When the stranger entered the room, Rabbi Hayyim asked him,“Tell me, if you found a purse full of ducats,would you return it to its owner.”“Rabbi,” said the man, “if I knew the ownerI should return the purse without a moment’s delay.”“You are a fool,” said the rabbi.Then he resumed his position at the window,called another passerby, and put the same question to him.“I am not such a fool as to give up a purse full of moneythat has come my way,” said the man.“You are a bad lot,” said the rabbi, and called in a third man.He replied, “Rabbi, how can I knowon what rung I shall be when I find the purse,or whether I shall succeed in fending off the evil urge?Perhaps it will get the better of meand I shall appropriate what belongs to another.But perhaps God, blessed be he,will help me fight it, and in that caseI shall return whatever I have found to its rightful owner.”“Those are good words,” cried the zaddik.“You are a true sage.”Enough for today.

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The True Sage 01-10Category: JESUS

The True Sage 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the difference between being passive and flowing with the river?A lot of difference, and not only of quantity but quality – of direction, of plane, of dimension. It has to be understood very minutely because the difference is subtle.The passive mind can appear as if it is flowing with the river, but the passive mind is not flowing with the river because it has a certain attitude of passivity. The passive mind is also a mind and to flow with the river you need a no-mind. Through the centuries, many have been deceived because of the similarity. To cultivate passivity is easier than to flow with the river. To condition your mind in passivity is very easy. That’s why, in the past and even now, monasteries, monks, sannyasins have existed: people who have renounced the world.What they are really trying to do is to become absolutely passive. But their passivity is negativity. They have already chosen an attitude.First, these people were much too active in the world; running, desiring, ambitious. The mind was active, excited with desire, future, hope. Then they got frustrated because whatsoever you hope for is not going to be fulfilled. All hopes are hopeless and all desiring comes to frustration, and all expectations carry frustration as a seed within. So sooner or later everybody is bound to come to a point in life when the active mind looks simply like a hell: too much activity and no result out of it, running and running and never arriving.If you are intelligent, it happens sooner; if you are stupid it takes a little longer, but it happens all the same. If you are very intelligent, then you will come to see it when you are young; if you are not that intelligent, then in old age. But sooner or later everybody comes to feel that a life with an active mind is frustrating. It leads nowhere; it promises much but it never fulfills anything. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, a discontent in the being. One simply feels tired and wearied, defeated. One simply feels that the whole thing has been futile.Whenever the mind feels this, it immediately suggests, “Try the opposite,” because the mind lives in polarity, in opposition. It says, “You have tried activity, now try passivity.” You longed for the world too much, now you renounce. You were clinging to money, renounce money. You had become too attached to the house, renounce the house. You got too involved with a woman, with children; now leave them and escape from all this. The mind suggests trying the opposite and it seems natural and logical: you have done one thing, failed; do the opposite, maybe the opposite succeeds.Then the old type of sannyasin – the monk, the monastery, the Himalayas – is born. Then you escape from activity, you try just the opposite. Then you try not to desire, but to not desire is still a desire. Then you try to leave the world, but the very effort to leave the world shows your attachment. If you have really become unattached, what is the point of renouncing anything?You can renounce a certain thing only because you are too involved in it. Then you escape from the woman, but that shows simply that your mind is still fantasizing about women. Wherever you go, you may become the opposite but still you will remain the same.This has to be understood: through the opposite you never change; you appear that you have changed, you remain the same. This is one of the most important things to be understood; otherwise again you will be in the trap.Now the trap will be of passivity – of not desiring, renouncement, non-attachment, nonviolence. First the world was your activity, now the world has become a passive thing for you, but you are the same. Now God will become your activity, moksha – a faraway world somewhere in the sky, where everything is beautiful. This world will be ugly, now the beauty is transferred to the other world. Now your object of desire changes but you don’t change. First you were asking for money, now you ask for meditation, but the greed is there. First you were asking for things of this world, now you ask for things of the other world, but the asking is persistent, the same.People who look at you from the outside may be deceived because you will look totally transformed: you don’t touch money, you don’t have much to possess, you live in a cottage or under a tree, you are a naked fakir. People who are in the world will worship you because they think now you have transformed your being, and they are still in the world. When they come to you, they will compare and they will imagine that you must now be very peaceful because you look passive.Passivity can give an appearance of peace. It is not peace, it is just deadness. Peace is alive, passivity is dead.Just for example, think of yourself swimming in the river, trying to go up-current, fighting: you are active. Then think of a dead body floating down the river, not fighting at all, just floating down the river but dead, a corpse: that is passive. First, life was fighting, but death is passive. The man I call “one who is floating with the river” is neither alive in the sense of fight and is not dead like a corpse. He floats with the river, but he floats consciously. He floats with the river, not because he is dead but because he cooperates. He floats with the river; it is not that he cannot fight, but because he has come to know that fighting is futile, and he has not moved to the opposite. He floats, he communes with the river, he has become one with the river. Sometimes you will see him active and sometimes you will see him passive. Now passivity and activity are not two polarities to be chosen; he has accepted both. That’s what I mean when I say “floating with the river.”Sometimes you will find him in the marketplace, very active. Sometimes you will find him in the temple, very passive. Now he has no fixed mode of his being. He can move from passivity to activity, he can move from activity to passivity. There is no barrier, he has not created a fence around himself. He is fluid, liquid, flowing; otherwise passivity itself can become an imprisonment.I have heard of a Hasid story…A man was going to see his friend. The friend was a farmer in a deep, hidden valley in the hills. When the man came nearer to the house of the friend, he saw something which puzzled him very much.He saw a small meadow, not more than one mile long. But one thing was very special and disturbing: in that meadow thousands of birds and animals were standing together – thousands, it was difficult to count, there was no space left. The place was very crowded and the whole beautiful forest around was empty of birds and animals.He could not believe it: “Why are they huddled together? Why are they not moving into the sky, to other trees? The whole vastness is available.”They looked very nervous, tense, worried, not at ease at all, those birds and animals. Of course, everybody needs space. Everybody needs a certain space to live. Whenever that space is encroached, nervousness arises. But nobody was preventing them. There was not even a fence there.So when he reached the friend’s house, the first question he asked was about these birds, “What misfortune has befallen on them?”The friend said, “I don’t know exactly because I have not seen it, but I have heard that in the past, many, many years before, there was a landlord, a very violent and sadistic man, and he enjoyed this whole experiment. He created a high fence around the meadow. He placed guards all around the place and he ordered the guards, ‘If any bird or animal tries to escape, kill him immediately.’ He forced thousands of birds and animals into the meadow, into that prison. And for years this was the routine: whenever any bird or animal tried to escape, it was killed.“By and by, the birds and animals settled, they accepted their prison. They forgot their freedom because freedom became associated with fear and death.“Then the landlord died. The guards disappeared, the fence fell. Now there is nobody there to prevent them. Neither the guards are there nor the fence is there, but the birds and animals have developed a fence mentality: they believe that the fence is there. They actually see the fence: it has become deeply ingrained, it has become a conditioning.”The man said, “But why does not somebody try to make them understand?”The friend said, “Many good people have tried but the birds don’t listen. It is not only now ingrained in them, their children are born with the idea. It is in their blood and bones, it has become a part of their blueprint. The children are born with the idea of the fence, and good people have tried, and they go on trying.“And you will be surprised,” said the friend, “that the birds have been very angry and animals have attacked the good people. They don’t want to be disturbed; in fact they have created a philosophy that they are in freedom and the world beyond is the imprisonment. Still, good people go on trying,” the friend said, “but it seems to be almost impossible to persuade them, ‘You are free and no fence exists, and you can fly into the sky.’”I loved the story. That’s what Jesus, Baal Shem, Moses, Mahavira, Buddha have been doing with you – the birds and the animals – but you have developed a fence mentality. You don’t believe. Either you are active or you become passive but both belong to the fence, the same fence: the mind.Think of a fence made of wood – one plank is white, another is black; then again one is white, another is black. A fence made of wooden planks, colored in two colors: one pillar white, one black. That is the mind: one idea passive, one active; yin–yang, right–wrong, good–bad, the world–nirvana. Both belong to the same fence, and you go on choosing. Sometimes you choose the white, then you get fed up with the white, then you start loving and worshipping the black. But the black is as much part of your imprisonment as the white.Mind is active, mind is passive – both are part of the mind. What I mean when I say “flowing with the river” is to go beyond passivity, negativity – white and black, day and night, love and hate, the world and God. Go beyond it. Just see the whole point that the active becomes the passive, and the passive again becomes the active.This I have watched: people who are very active in the world are always, deep down, thinking to renounce all nonsense. I know monks who have lived their whole life in the monasteries. Whenever they have confessed to me, they have always said that they always think that they have missed life, and are always fantasizing to come back to the world. The active wants to become the passive, the passive wants to become the active.Choice is of the mind. To be choiceless is to flow with the river. That’s why Hasidism insists, and I also insist, on not leaving the world. Renounce it and be in it. That looks difficult, almost impossible for the mind to conceive. The mind can conceive of the world and of renunciation because both belong to the same pattern. When I say, “Be in the world and not be of the world,” the mind becomes uneasy. It cannot understand: “What are you saying?”People come to me and say they would like to become sannyasins but they are in the world, “And how is it possible to be a sannyasin in the world?” Particularly in India, it looks absolutely absurd; the sannyasin is one who leaves the world. I tell them, a sannyasin is one who lives in the world and yet is not of the world. They seem confused. When I say these things to people, they look confused. They say, “Either this or that.” I say, “Both, together.”When you take both active and passive together, they cancel each other, you become neutral. Then you are neither man nor woman, neither yin nor yang, neither body nor soul. You have gone beyond the duality, you have become transcendental. That transcendence is flowing with the river.Flowing with the river is the greatest art. That is being both active and passive, but in deep cooperation with existence. You have to do something: you will have to live, you will have to earn; at least you will have to breathe. You will have to do something. Movement, activity has to be used, and you will have to relax also. Otherwise activity will become impossible.So sometimes be active, sometimes be passive but don’t get identified with either. Remain aloof. Use activity, use passivity but remain the third. Just as you put on clothes, sometimes white and sometimes black; just as in the day you work and in the night you rest; just the same, use both dualities. They are means; don’t get identified with them. Then you will be flowing with the river. This is the message of Hasidism.The greatest people in the world are those who have lived in the world and have not allowed the world to corrupt them. It is very easy to go to the Himalayas and become uncorrupted, very easy because who is there to corrupt you? To live with the mountains you will become innocent, but that innocence may be just an appearance. Come back to the world, the test is in the marketplace. There you will come to know whether you have really become innocent because when the opportunity to become corrupted arises, only then will you be able to know: are you still corruptible or not? The Himalayas, their silence, can deceive you. It has deceived millions of people.Hasids say, “Live in the marketplace. Move with people because people are your environment.”A man asked Socrates, “Why don’t you go to the mountains to study mountains, rivers, trees, birds, animals?” The man said, “We have heard of old, ancient wise men who used to go deep in the mountains, live there and study nature.”Socrates said, “My nature is people. What can trees teach me? Good to look at, but what can they teach me? What can mountains teach me? They are good to relax in. What can rivers teach me? My rivers, my mountains, my trees are people. People are my environment.”He lived his whole life in Athens, lived and died there, among people.He’s right: the true sage will not be an escapist; he will live among people and learn how to remain uncorrupted where everything tempts, tempts to corrupt you. Then you attain to the highest peak. That highest peak uses both the dualities of life. That highest peak is going to be very rich.I have come across a few people who have lived their whole lives in the forest. They are very saintly but a little silly also because with the trees you will become silly. That is natural. You cannot have that intelligence which a Socrates has because you will become a tree. You will vegetate, you will look very pure, but that purity is not of a higher revelation. That purity is of a regression: you have fallen back. You have been trees in your past lives, you have transcended that; now you are falling back.Just think, you are thirty years, thirty-five years of age – you can attain to innocence in two ways. One is somehow to become a child again, but then you will be foolish also. Innocent you will be, but foolish also because a child is a fool. Then there is another possibility: grow and become wise, old, through experience; mature, learn, and at the very end when you have become almost an ancient, attain to your childhood – but not through regression.Go ahead, let the circle be complete. Don’t fall back, go on and on and one day you will see the circle is complete: you are old and yet you are a child. Then you will not be foolish.A wise man is like a child, but also is not like a child. A wise man is both: a grown-up, really grown up – mature, lived the life, experienced it, is enriched by it – and yet has come to understand that innocence is the only way to be, is the only way to be blissful, is the only way to be divine. An old man is again in childhood but the childhood is a second childhood: he is reborn.When I say “flow with the river,” I don’t mean become driftwood. I don’t mean become a corpse and flow with the river. All corpses flow, there is nothing much to say about it. If you are dead, you will float with the river because you cannot fight. First you were engaged in activity, now you are engaged in passivity.Never move to the opposite, always remain in both and yet beyond. Always remember never to go to the extreme because just in the middle is the way. Buddha has called his way the middle path, majjhim nikai – and he is right.One day in the afternoon it happened…A parrot, a beautiful parrot was allowed to air himself every day. So he was allowed – it was hot and the whole house was fast asleep. The servant came and allowed the parrot to move around the room. The dog living in the house was also fast asleep. The parrot came near the dog, near his ear, and said, “Rats!”Of course the dog became alert: “Rats!” He went round and round, looked around every corner. Finding nothing, he again went to sleep.The parrot waited. The trick had succeeded, he had befooled the dog. So again he came near, again he said, “Rats!” Again the dog opened his eyes, looked around, went around the house, was very much frustrated. Then he suspected a trick, that there was nobody – everybody was fast asleep, no rat, nothing – only this parrot, maybe he was doing something. He then pretended that he was asleep, with one cocked eye.The parrot came again, tried the trick a third time. The dog jumped on him. Later on the parrot was heard saying, “The difficulty with me is that I don’t know where to stop.”That is the difficulty with all you parrots – where to stop?From active you will go to passive, from passive you will go to active, and you don’t know where to stop. If you know where to stop, if you know the middle, because the middle transcends both…There is a point you cross every day, again and again, but you don’t know where to stop. There is a point just in the middle from love to hate, where you move, you must be moving – the point where a buddha remains, where love is no longer, hate has not yet appeared. When you move from compassion to anger, you pass the point where a buddha remains. If you watch, in twenty-four hours you must be passing that point at least twenty-four thousand times – where a buddha is sitting, where buddhahood is. But you go fast, you swing fast, you go from one extreme to another. You are not even aware when you pass the point of buddhahood: the middle way, the middle path, absolutely the middle.There suddenly you are neither a man nor a woman, neither alive nor dead, neither active nor passive. To know that point is to know all, to know that point is to know all that religion can give you. It is not in the scriptures; it is crossed by you every day, you come on that crossroad every moment. Whenever you are moving from one polarity to another, you have to pass it; there is no other way to go to the other polarity. But you move so fast that you are not alert when you cross that point.When I say “flowing with the river,” I mean drop out of polarities and just choose the river in between and cooperate with it, commune with it. Be the river. This is what sannyas is all about – at least my sannyas.The second question:Osho,Is it lonely up there?It is not lonely, but it is alone.Whenever you say “lonely,” you show a desire for the other, you are missing the other. The word lonely is indicative that you are not happy with yourself – that this loneliness hurts, that this loneliness is getting a little boring, that you would like to move away from this state of loneliness. When you say “lonely,” you have already condemned it. Loneliness means absence of the other, not your presence. You are missing the other and your eyes are focused on that missing, that absence.Up there, it is absolutely alone. That’s why Mahavira has called it kaivalya. Kaivalya means absolute aloneness. In aloneness, the quality is totally different from loneliness. In the dictionary they may both mean the same. I’m not talking about the dictionary; in life’s experience they are absolutely different.Aloneness means the presence of your being – so full of you, so totally in yourself that the other is not needed. Aloneness is sufficient unto itself. Loneliness is a missing phenomenon, loneliness is a gap where the other was or you would like the other to be. Loneliness is a wound, aloneness is a flowering: you are so happy to be yourself and you are not missing anything. You are totally yourself, settled, content.Yes, up there it is very, very, alone and that is the beauty of it: you alone exist but you exist as a god, you exist as the universe, you exist as existence itself. Stars and suns and moons move within you, trees and the clouds exist within you, rivers and oceans flow within you. You become the whole, that’s why you are alone. Your own ego has disappeared so you cannot be lonely.The ego always feels lonely, that’s why ego always seeks the society, the club, the movie house, this and that. The ego is always seeking the other because without the other it cannot exist, the other is needed as a must.Remember this: I and thou exist together; if the thou disappears the I will disappear – it cannot exist. If you are there, I can be. But if you are not there, how can I exist? I and thou are just two poles of the same phenomenon, two poles of one thing. If the I disappears, the you disappears, if the you disappears, the I disappears.In aloneness neither you are there, nor the I is there. It is absolute. It has no center in it, in fact. The whole is involved. You cannot say where you are in that state. You are not. The whole is and you are not; the ocean is, the drop has disappeared, or you can say the drop has become the ocean, which is the same.“Up there,” the first thing to be understood is that loneliness is impossible. Aloneness exists, and aloneness has nothing of the quality of loneliness. Loneliness is sad, aloneness is blissful; loneliness is always dependent, a slavery, a wound, a thorn in the heart – aloneness, a flowering, a fulfillment, coming to the goal, reaching home. Loneliness is a sort of illness; aloneness is health, aloneness is wholeness. Loneliness is something of the world of disease, tensions, anguish, misery. Aloneness has nothing to do with that world, it is a transcendence. It is absolute blissfulness, sat-chit-anand.The second thing: don’t call it “up there” because it is not up. It is neither down nor it is up. Down and up are meaningless for the whole. The whole is, simply is; there is no up to it, no down to it. Those words become meaningless. In the childish mind of humanity, God has always existed “up there,” and the Devil always “down there,” and man always in between. The earth in between, hell down and heaven up – this is a classification of the mind.Existence is all: neither up, nor down, nor in the middle. Only existence is. In fact to say existence is, is to repeat because existence means isness, isness means existence; to say existence is, is to repeat the same thing. Just existence will do, or isness will do.This boggles the mind because then the mind feels uneasy, it cannot categorize. It cannot categorize that which is impossible to categorize. Existence cannot be defined in any way. All definitions are false, so whatsoever is said about existence is bound to be wrong. Existence can only be showed in deep silence, it cannot be said through words.So please don’t use “up” and don’t use “there” because it is always here. “There” is just a fantasy, the “there” does not exist. Everything is here. This moment, herenow, the whole culminates, joins together. It never moves from here, remember – and it never moves from now. That’s why I use herenow as one word. I don’t use them as two words, herenow – one word. That’s what Einstein came to realize through his whole life’s research work. He stopped using time and space as two words. He created a new word, spaciotime. Time is now, space is here. If spaciotime is true, then herenow should be one word, and I use it as one word: existence is herenow.I have heard a beautiful story – Swami Ram used to tell it again and again…He used to say that he had a friend, a very famous lawyer, a supreme court advocate. The man was an atheist, and he had written on the wall where he used to sit and work in his office, “God is nowhere.”Then a child was born to him, and the child started growing and learning language. One day the child was trying to read the sentence, “God is nowhere.” But “nowhere” was a little too big a word for him so the child divided it in two. He said, “God is now here.”Suddenly the father heard it. He looked at the sentence, “Yes, it can be that too. ‘God is nowhere’ can be read as ‘God is now here.’”It is said that that disturbed the father very much. He pondered over it again and again, it became a constant meditation. After that day he could not read the sentence in the old way, “God is nowhere.” It got stuck, the child had opened a new door, and whenever he would look, he would now read just like the child, “God is now here,” and it became a mantra.It is said the father was transformed by repeating “God is now here” again and again. He started feeling a certain tranquility arising in his heart. So he used it as a mantra. Not saying it to anybody, he would just look again and again and whenever he will have time he would repeat inside, “God is now here.”He became a theist. The vision of a child transformed him, the innocence of a child transformed him.So don’t say “there.” “There” is non-existential. The “there” does not exist, cannot exist. All that exists is here, now here. That’s all there is to life: now–here.Once you move from the now and the here you are in misery. Once you move in your desire you move from now and here and you create a thousand and one miseries for yourself. Be herenow and forget about God. If you are herenow, you are in God and God will reveal himself to you.There is no need to search for him because the very search is basically unsound. You cannot search for him because he is all. He cannot be sought in any direction because all directions are his. You will not find him anywhere because he is everywhere. So all search, from the very beginning, is bound to fail. Don’t seek and search, just be herenow and he will search for you and he will seek you – that’s what Hasidics say.One of the greatest contributions of Hasidism is that you cannot seek him, he seeks you. How can you seek him? You don’t know the address, you don’t know the face, you will not be able to recognize him. If he suddenly meets you on the street, you will not even say, “Hello.” You will not recognize him. He will be so strange, you may get scared. Or you may not be able to see him at all because we tend to see only that which we know; that which we don’t know we tend not to see.Scientists say that only two percent of impressions are delivered to the mind through the eyes and ninety-eight percent are not delivered because if all one hundred percent impressions were delivered you would be in a mess, you would go mad. That would be too much, you would not be able to cope with it. So only selected information is given to the mind, ninety-eight percent is dropped out.I know well if God meets you – and I know that he meets you every day, millions of times, but the mind drops him. Unknown, strange, you cannot fit him anywhere with your mind, and he will be a disturbance. You simply don’t see him. How can you seek him? Where will you seek him?Hasidism says: You cannot seek him, he seeks you. Just be available and ready.I was reading an anecdote yesterday…A medical student failed in his final examination. He was very much afraid of his father so he sent a telegram to his sister at home: “I have failed, prepare father. It may be too shocking to him.”The sister tried but the father became very angry. Then she telegrammed back to the brother: “Father is ready, you prepare yourself.”That is the case: father is always ready – you prepare!God is always ready to meet you, you prepare. Be ready wherever you are: he will seek you, he will rush from everywhere, from all directions. He will penetrate you in a thousand and one ways and reach your heart.The third question:Osho,Do you ever despair of us and your work?You do your level best, but I am not in despair because I cannot be. Despair exists with expectation. Nothing can make me despair. I am not expecting anything from you. If it happens it is beautiful, if it doesn’t happen that too is beautiful. To me it is not a desire that you should become enlightened. If it is a desire and you go on missing, then I will be in despair. But it is not a desire at all.It is my happiness to share whatsoever I have attained. I share it because I have it. If you take it, good; if you don’t take it, that too is good because basically enlightenment cannot be anything else than your freedom. This is part of your freedom: if you want to take you take, if you don’t want to take you don’t take. Whatsoever I say, if you do it that’s your freedom, if you don’t do it that’s your freedom. I am here to free you, so how can I make any expectation? Any expectation becomes a sort of a slavery, a bondage.If I expect that you should be enlightened and you are not becoming, then there will be despair. And how can a man who is himself in despair help you to become enlightened? No, that’s not possible. I can help you only because you cannot force me into any sort of despair; I will remain happy whether you are in heaven or hell, I will remain happy whether you remain ignorant or you become enlightened. To me your misery is your choice. It exists nowhere except in your choice. If you choose, good; if you love it, good! Who am I to distract you? It is your choice.What am I doing here then? I am simply sharing my understanding; it is my happiness to share it, it is your happiness whether you take it or not. That is irrelevant to me. Even if you are not here, nobody is here, I am sitting alone – I will still be sharing my happiness with the trees and the rocks. In fact, to say that I am sharing it is not right – it is being shared. To say that I am sharing it again makes it wrong, as if I am doing something to share it. No, it is being shared.A flower has bloomed and the perfume is spreading – not that the flower is sharing it, the flower cannot help it. The fragrance is on the wings, moving, going far away; whether somebody will be able to fill his being with that fragrance or not is not a question for the flower. It has flowered and that’s all. The flower is happy that it has bloomed, the flower is happy because it is fulfilled, and fulfillment spreads a fragrance all around.It is just like you light a lamp and the light spreads – not that the lamp is trying to share its light. What else can it do? It has to be so. Not that the light is waiting for somebody to come and enjoy it. If nobody comes, it is all the same; if many come, that too is the same. I am not sharing; in a way, rather, I am being shared.Ordinarily you think you breathe. When someday you become awake, you will see that you are breathed, you are not breathing. Ordinarily you think that you are. When you become aware, you will say, “Existence is.”Don’t call it work – I’m not doing anything. At the most you can call it play, but don’t call it work – playing. If it is work, it will be serious; if it is work, there will be a desire to attain to certain results. If it is work, it will have the burdensome quality of a duty to be performed. If it is work, there will be a reluctance, and if you don’t follow me there will be frustration. It is just a play. I don’t even call it a game because “game” starts moving in the direction of work. It is just like children playing: there is no end to it, it itself is the end.I love to tell you stories. I am a storyteller, and the result is not there anywhere in my consciousness. I have told you a beautiful story, finished. It was beautiful, I loved it, I enjoyed it! Whether you enjoyed it or not is for you to decide.One of my teachers was a very rare being – he was a little eccentric, as philosophers tend to be. He was one of the greatest philosophers of this century in India, but very rare, not much known – a real philosopher, not simply a professor of philosophy. He was very eccentric.Students had dropped going to his classes long before I came across him. For many years nobody had entered his class because the first thing was that sometimes he would talk three, four, five, six hours continuously. And he used to say, “The university can decide when the period starts but the university cannot decide when it stops because that depends on my flow. If something is incomplete, I cannot leave it; I have to complete it.”So it was very disturbing. Sometimes he would take all the time, and sometimes for weeks he will not say a single thing. He would say, “Nothing is coming – go home.”When I entered his class, he looked at me and he said, “Yes, you may fit with me – you also look a little eccentric. But remember that when I start talking, whenever it stops, it stops. I never manipulate. Sometimes for weeks I will not be talking – you will have to come and go. Sometimes I will talk for hours. Then if you feel uneasy, you want to go to the bathroom or something, you can go but don’t disturb me and I will continue. You can come back – silently sit again – I will continue because I cannot break it in between.”It was a rare experience to listen to him. He was completely oblivious of me, the only student. Rarely would he look at me. Sometimes he would look at the walls and talk. He was saying profound things, and with such deep heart that it was not a question of addressing. He was enjoying. Sometimes he would chuckle and enjoy his own speaking. Many times I would go out – I would go and talk to people and come after a few minutes or even sometimes after hours and he was there, and he had been talking.A play, not even a game…I am talking to you; it is not work. It may be work for you, it is not work for me. The day will be blissful when it is not work even for you and it has become play and you delight with me: whatsoever I have to share, you delight, you participate. You become in those moments, rare moments of participation, one with me – and the work is done. That is the way, how to do it.Gurdjieff’s people called their discipline “the work.” I call my discipline “the play.” Gurdjieff’s disciples are very serious, doing great work. Please don’t be serious here around me. Seriousness is a more dangerous disease than cancer because someday cancer will be curable but seriousness is incurable.Be light, weightless, happy in this moment to be here with me. Participate, enjoy, and the work will take its own care. The work happens by the side. You play and the work happens by the side.My whole emphasis is to be playful. If you can be playful, everything will come on its own accord. So it is not work to me.I love you, I enjoy you. I am simply delighted in your being. I am happy that you are here. This moment is the end: in this moment everything is fulfilled. I don’t look beyond it because to me this moment is eternal – it always remains there, no other moment is coming. This is the moment, it is eternity.Once you understand how to play, how to be playful with me, around me, you will have opened the door. That door opens automatically, you never open it; you simply play and it opens. That is the secret formula to open it. Life’s door, love’s door, existence’s door, they all open when you are playful. They all become closed when you become serious. When you become work oriented, you miss godliness.Godliness is love, a song, a dance. Godliness is not a commodity. Absolutely useless – what can you use, what use can you put godliness to? – non-utilitarian. I am here, absolutely useless – to what use can you put me? You can enjoy me, just like you enjoy flowers in the morning or you enjoy clouds in the sky or you enjoy the songs of the birds. They cannot be sold in the market, they are not commodities, but they have tremendous beauty in them.Anything that you transform into a commodity becomes profane. Anything that you love for its own sake immediately becomes holy, sacred.The fourth question:Osho,Recently, sitting before you, I become bathed in sweat. What is happening?By jove, love is happening! And whenever love happens you feel very nervous because you are moving into the unknown. You are moving into something which you cannot manipulate, something which is beyond you, in which you can be lost – lost forever.Maybe it may be a point of no return and you never come back. That’s what is happening: the whole personality shivering, afraid, sweating, nervous – a death is happening. That’s what I mean when I say “love is happening.” Love and death are two names of the same phenomenon.On the edge of love, one feels so scared that one can be absorbed into it and there may be no possibility to come back. It is death yawning before you.Love is death. If you have known love as death, you have opened a secret chamber of life. Then you will know death also as love, then death becomes godliness.The fifth question:Osho,Before I know it, my watcher turns into my judger. What to do?Don’t judge it.If your watcher becomes a judger, okay. Don’t judge the judger, watch it; if again the judger comes, watch it. Always go on falling back to the watcher. Don’t be defeated by the judger and don’t be disturbed; it is not a question that you must not judge, because if you force it you will not be happy, you will be suppressed. Whatsoever you do, the judger will be there. You can force, suppress – no. Release it.If a thought comes and another thought follows and becomes a judgment, watch the judgment also. Always go on falling into the watcher. That’s the whole thing. If again the judger comes, let it come, don’t be afraid. You are always free to become a watcher again.The whole method of watching is not to be deceived and not to be distracted by the judger. Let it be there, there is no condemnation about it. What can you do if the judger comes? What can you do? There is nothing to do. You can again become a watcher, let it go on and on. The judger is going to be lost somewhere and the watcher will be centered.It is going to be a long process because you have always been helping the judger to come in. For many lives, for thousands of years, you have always been getting identified with the judger, so the judger does not know that you have changed your mind. So it may still be coming for a few years. It depends on you.If you go on falling to the watcher, sooner or later the judger will understand that it is no longer needed, an unwelcome guest. It will knock at your door a few times but the knock will become feebler and feebler and feebler. One day, seeing that you are no longer interested in it, the judger disappears. You cannot suppress it.The sixth question:Osho,How is it possible that you always and always, without exception, talk about those things I have just thought about, or that came into my mind a day or a minute before?When I am talking, you are part of me. You are not just the audience, you are also talking through me to yourself. I am also not only the talker, I am also a part of the audience. I am also listening, it is a deep participation. That is what the meaning of communion is. It is not only communication, it is a communion. If you are really listening to me, I am talking, you are also talking through me; you create many things that I would not have talked about if you were not there.Somebody enters, a stranger – the audience changes: I will have to talk about something else. I may not know the man – that is not the point – but when the audience changes, the talker changes, if it is a communion. If it is a ready-made talk, then nothing matters, whoever you are doesn’t matter.I am not saying anything which is ready-made. I am just herenow, responding to you and your being. So if you have a certain thought it is bound to be reflected in my talk. If you have a certain question, somehow or other it will synchronize, it will bring its own answer. That’s how it happens. There is no miracle; it is simply the miracle of communion.If you are in deep love, then you reflect in me, I reflect in you; then you are a mirror to me and I am a mirror to you, and my mirror reflects in you and your mirror reflects in me, and this goes on and on. Two mirrors facing each other can reflect infinitely, again and again.The more you come close to me, there will be no need to ask: there the question arises, and here is the answer. The question has to be asked because you are not yet certain of the communion.So don’t be puzzled; it is simply the miracle of communion. It has nothing to do with me. I am not trying to read your mind. Remember, I am not a mind-reader, I never do such foolish things. I never read your mind, but I am here just like a mirror and you are reflected.If you love me, your questions will be answered. If you deeply participate with my being, you will hear your own being revealed through me. You are also talking through me, I am also listening through you; the talker and the listener disappear, a circle of energy is created.That is the difference between communication and communion: in communication you may be a student, I may be a teacher; in communion I become the master, you become the disciple.One needs only a little trust and everything will be answered – not only answered, eventually solved.The seventh question:Osho,By the time I see my moods, I am knee-deep in them. Then it is not so much a question of watching but of riding on the wave until it subsides.So ride on it – but still watch.You can ride on the wave, so how does it come into the way of the watcher? In fact, when you are riding on the wave you can watch the wave perfectly. The only thing to remember is don’t allow the wave to ride on you. Ride on the wave, there is no problem. Ride on the wave of anger and watch it. The problem arises when anger rides on you and the watcher is lost and you get identified.Nothing is wrong in anger; just don’t get identified, watch it. It is a beautiful experience, an energy experience. Anger is pure energy. I call it “white petrol” – the purest form of energy. It becomes destructive because you get identified with it. It is inflammable because it is pure.A man who cannot be angry will be impotent because he has no energy. A man who can be angry has a potentiality, a great energy in him. But it has to be used rightly now because the more energy you have, the more dangerous. With the more energy there is more possibility of exploding, so you need to be more alert and aware.Once you are aware, the energy is there but it never becomes destructive. And to have energy is to have a depth, to have energy is to have a height, to have energy is to have a reservoir.You can see two types of people who are not angry. One who has no energy. They are empty shells. You can see – shrunken beings. They will not be angry but they will also not be able to love because one who has no energy to be angry will not have energy to love – shrunken beings, already dead, only a part of them lives. They are ninety percent gone, only a little part is still throbbing, partially alive.Then you will find another type of being who is so full of energy that he is a reservoir. He is also not angry because he knows how to be aware. His no-anger is not the absence of the energy of anger; his no-anger is because of awareness. This man can love and love tremendously, this man can become a great compassion. The whole world can be filled by one man’s compassion – the world is not big enough. A single man’s compassion, if it explodes, can fill the whole universe.That’s how it has happened when a Buddha moves on the earth or a Jesus moves on the earth. That’s how it has happened: a single man’s energy – purified, absolutely purified, with no identification – becomes a soothing shower on the whole of existence.It is said about Buddha and Mahavira… These stories are beautiful, that if Buddha moves in a forest – don’t take it literally, these are beautiful stories – then trees start flowering out of season. When he attained to enlightenment, the whole forest surrounding the area bloomed in the morning. The trees completely forgot that it was not the season. Sometimes one has to forget, when such a miracle happens. Buddha showered on those trees, they were happy, and how can a tree show its happiness?It is said about Mahavira, whenever he would walk – and he was a naked man, with no shoes, with no clothes – thorns on the path would turn upside down. Thorns turning upside down so that Mahavira is not hurt: beautiful stories indicating great phenomena.Yes, it should be so. I know thorns won’t do that, I know it well, but it should be so: when Mahavira passes by even a thorn should become a flower.Energy is good, identification is bad.Mahavira must have been potentially a very sexual man; otherwise from where does this nonviolence and love come? The same energy is released. In awareness it becomes love; in identification, unconsciousness, it becomes sexuality. Buddha must have been a very, very, angry man, very violent. I know it, intrinsically – whatsoever the scriptures say is irrelevant. He must have been intrinsically a very angry and violent man; otherwise from where will the compassion come?That is the meaning of the historical fact that in India the twenty-four teerthankaras of the Jainas, and Buddha, Ram, Krishna, were all kshatriyas, warriors. All the Hindu avatars except one man, Parashuram, were kshatriyas, warriors – angry people, violent. Twenty-four teerthankaras of Jainas, all kshatriyas, not a single brahmin; Buddha himself, a kshatriya. The whole history in India indicates something. Why did it happen to kshatriyas, that they became the greatest openings of compassion in the world? They had anger, they were fighters, they could have been violent. Once the energy is released and awareness arises, the awareness rides on the energy and uses it.Only one brahmin, Parashuram, was one of the avatars. But he was not a brahmin at all. It is said that you cannot find a more violent man in the whole history of the world. He was so against the warriors, the race of kshatriyas, that it is said that he killed all the kshatriyas in the world thirty-six times. He wanted to uproot all the kshatriyas from the world. He was not a brahmin at all, the world has never known such a great warrior. Why?The fact is simple and scientific: if love is released, sex must have been there; if compassion is released, anger, hatred, violence must have been there; if non-attachment is released, greed must have been there, jealousy, possessiveness must have been there. You can know a tree by the fruit, and you can know a man… Whatsoever happens in his enlightenment is his fruit and you can know from where that fruit comes.A lotus flower comes from the ordinary mud. By seeing the lotus flower, you cannot conceive that it comes from the ordinary mud. They seem so contradictory, but life joins contradictions. The most beautiful flower in the world, the lotus, the most delicate, comes out of ordinary mud, dirty mud.Love comes out of the mud of sex, compassion comes out of the mud of anger, and nirvana comes out of the mud of this world.The last question:Osho,I wonder, what is Hasidism?I also wonder.Enough for today.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,With my friend, meditation, I clean the skeletons from the closet.With my friend, trust, I enter the dark basement and sweep it clean of ancient dust.With my friend, the heart, I open all the windows and allow the fresh breezes in.With my friend, awareness, I light candles in every room. In the kitchen, my friend, patience, prepares the tea.In the garden, I sit with my friend, the master, and wait silently, for I know that the guest will soon be here.Osho, when the doorbell rings, will I be there to answer it?The guest always comes; its coming is certain. The bell also rings. The door is also always opened, without fail.But the moment you open the door, you are not there. Existence is, being is, but you are not. The way you have known yourself up to now is no longer there, and what is there cannot be named, cannot be defined. It is all and everything…it is the very essence of existence.You will not be there as you think yourself to be.If you are there, then the guest cannot enter in.In fact, the guest can come only when it becomes a certainty that you are ready to disappear. Your disappearance is the appearance of that which you have been seeking all along. This is a paradox: when the sought is found, the seeker is lost.There are these words of Jesus – in some sense significant, but in a very much deeper way, not right. He says, “Seek, and ye shall find” – just a small sentence, “Seek, and ye shall find” – and every word is wrong, because if seeking continues, there is desire, there is longing. Seeking must stop, must disappear. “Seek, and ye shall find it.” You cannot find it; it will be found, but you cannot be the finder.And it is the same with the other sentences that follow. They are beautiful sentences, very poetic – “Ask, and it shall be given to you” – but every word is wrong. Unless you stop asking, nothing can be given to you. Ask, and you will go on missing; stop asking, and it is there. It has always been there – you could not see it because your eyes were so full of asking. “Ask, and it shall be given to you” – again, to you? To you, nothing is possible; you are the barrier, you are the hindrance. You have to dissolve into the whole, just like a dewdrop disappears in the ocean.And the third sentence is also beautiful: “Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you.” But all the words are wrong. You are not to knock; even that much effort on your part will not allow you to be totally relaxed. And the door is not closed, so there is no need to knock. If you are knocking, it must be before a wall, not before a door. The door of the divine is always open; you just go on knocking here and there.“Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Who is there to open it? There is no God; that there is a God is presumably the idea behind Jesus’ sentence. But there is no one to open it – and particularly to you. If you are not, you suddenly find yourself at the door. And the door is open; it has always been open, so that you will not come and find it closed.Existence is infinitely compassionate. Its doors cannot be closed; you are always welcome. But remember, when you come close to the door, take your shoes off, and with those shoes leave your idea of yourself also. Just enter as an innocent, just-born child, without any name.These three sentences are beautiful, some of the best in the whole New Testament. But looked at through the experience of enlightenment, poetry is not the thing; it has to be reality.So everything is right, just you are wrong. And the whole effort is to bring a state of being in you where you can say, “I am not.” Logically, you cannot use that sentence “I am not,” because who is denying? But existentially you can understand. There are moments when you are not and still you are. A beautiful sunset, a sky full of stars…for a moment you forget that you are, although you are, but in a totally new way – fresh, new, reborn.Osho,I am constantly criticizing myself and judging other people. This makes me feel divided and tense, and I cannot establish a real contact with people or nature. I want to open my heart and I don't know how to do it.Please, could you say something about this?Our whole education is so ugly, our whole upbringing is so wrong, that it takes away every possibility of your inner growth and gives you stupid ideas which have no relevance as far as your joy, your understanding and your maturity are concerned.Every child is being told, in thousands of ways, to criticize himself, so this is not only your problem. He is always told he is wrong in everything. Slowly, slowly he catches the disease of criticizing himself. And a person who criticizes himself cannot forgive others. How can he forgive? – for the same reasons, he criticizes others. His whole life simply becomes a condemnation – condemn yourself, condemn others. Then love becomes impossible, friendship becomes impossible, and he simply suffers. And what he is criticizing is so absurd.A young boy came running fast into the house, went directly into the kitchen and said to his mother, “My God! It must be God’s mercy that I am saved. A lion was following me from the school to the house. He is standing outside.”The mother said, “How many millions of times have I told you not to exaggerate?” She is saying, “How many millions of times have I told you not to exaggerate? Where can you find a lion in the city?”The boy said, “Perhaps out of fear it looked big. But it is certainly a very dangerous dog.”The mother said, “Now you are coming to your senses. If it was dangerous you would not have been here.”He said, “That’s true. In fact, it is a small dog.” But the child made the comment, “I was exaggerating, and that is wrong. What about you? You said, ‘How many millions of times have you told me….’”I was staying in Calcutta in a friend’s house from where I was going to a conference. I was sitting with him in the car and we were waiting for his wife. He was honking the horn. She came very angrily to the window and said, “I have told you a thousand times that I am coming in a minute!”I said to my friend, “This is something – a miracle. She has told you a thousand times that she is coming in a minute. In fact, in a minute, one cannot say it a thousand times. And she has again disappeared into the bathroom.”The man said, “You don’t know how she exaggerates. And the disease has caught me too. Once in a while, I suddenly become aware that I am exaggerating and it is just my wife….”Parents are doing everything for which they are criticizing the child. And he is watching – and his watchfulness is far more clear. His intelligence is still growing; he can see that the same thing for which he is wrong, the parents are right. They are watching television late into the night – they are right – and he should go to sleep before nine o’clock. Slowly, slowly he gets accustomed to these things and starts feeling, “Somehow I am wrong. Everything I do is wrong.”I once asked my father, “Will you tell me some time, some day, just once, ‘What you are doing is right’? Can’t you see that it is impossible to do everything wrong for twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year…everything wrong? If it is true, I am really accomplishing something miraculous. Just make an exception – just one time say to me, ‘What you are doing is right.’”He was shocked because he understood the meaning of what I was saying, that it is impossible that I could be doing everything wrong.But parents enjoy the idea because it is very fulfilling: it is the lust for power. Whenever you say to somebody, “No,” whenever you say to somebody, “You are wrong,” you feel powerful. It feeds your ego and it feeds the ego of everybody – the teachers, the neighbors. Wherever the child goes, everybody is enjoying the lust for power, and the child is crushed. And when so many people are saying that he is wrong, naturally he has to believe it.But remember, as a reaction, he starts judging others. When everybody else is judging him, there is no reason why he should not judge others. You are teaching him to judge, to judge everybody – and as much as possible to judge negatively. So he starts judging that others are wrong.And this is our world – where everybody is judging himself as wrong and judging everybody else as wrong. How can you be loving, friendly, trusting? How can you open your heart? You will be isolated, you will be completely closed, you will live in a world which you condemn and the world will condemn you.It is not a beautiful situation, but you have to understand: asking me, “How to open my heart?” is not the real question. The real question is how you managed to close it.Stop judging.Whatever you are doing, if you like doing it, do it. There is no question of judgment; nobody else has the right to say that what you are doing is wrong. If you enjoy it, you are not harming anybody, you are not disturbing anybody…but it is a strange world.From my childhood I have always loved to just sit in a corner silently. Everybody who would pass by would say, “What are you doing?”I would say, “Nothing.”And everybody would say, “This is not good.”I said, “This is strange: I am doing nothing, doing no harm to anybody – just sitting silently in this corner – and you say, ‘This is not right.’ It seems it has just become your habit to condemn, to criticize. But I am enjoying sitting here doing nothing, and I am going to continue it in spite of your judgment. I have not asked for your advice, and to give advice unasked for is unwise.”Slowly, slowly one has to assert oneself, to make one’s point clear. Unless I trespass on somebody else’s rights – if I am doing something which I am enjoying and I don’t see it as harmful in any way – then I will not allow anybody to judge me, because it is not only a question of this act, it is a question of my whole life. You are teaching me a very subtle disease of judging. And when I condemn myself, how can I leave anybody else uncondemned?It is said that Mulla Nasruddin used to come to his house, and every day there was trouble. His wife was suspicious – as all wives are – that he was having an affair with some other woman, because going out of the house he looked so happy and went so fast; coming home he looked sad. Certainly there was something outside the house which attracted him. So when he used to put his coat on the hanger, she would look on his coat, on his shirt, to see if she could find any hair or anything else to prove that he had been with some other woman.One day – for seven days she had been searching and she could not find a single hair – on the seventh day, she burst out crying, screaming, “This is too much. Now you have started going with bald women!”Now, it is very difficult to find a bald woman – almost impossible. I have seen only one woman who was semi-bald, not bald. But for seven days, no hair? The conclusion is clear, that he has fallen so low that he is now going with bald women. “Can’t you find a woman with hair?”If a husband is sitting silently, then the wife is angry. If he is reading the newspaper, the wife is angry; she will snatch the newspaper and say, “I am here and you are reading the newspaper as if I don’t exist.”Everybody is so miserable that he wants to find some reason somewhere to explain to himself why he is miserable, why she is miserable. And the society has given you a good strategy: judge.First, naturally, you judge yourself in every way. No man is perfect, and no man can ever be perfect – perfection does not exist – so judgment is very easy. You are imperfect, so there are things which show your imperfection. And then you are angry, angry with yourself, angry with the whole world: “Why am I not perfect?”Then you look with only one idea – to find imperfection in everybody. And then you want to open your heart – naturally, because unless you open your heart, there is no celebration in your life; your life is almost dead. But you cannot do it directly; you will have to destroy all this upbringing from the very roots.So the first thing is, stop judging yourself. Instead of judging, start accepting yourself with all your imperfections, all your frailties, all your mistakes, all your failures. Don’t ask yourself to be perfect. That is simply asking for something impossible, and then you will feel frustrated. You are a human being after all.Just look at the animals, at the birds; nobody is worried, nobody is sad, nobody is frustrated. You don’t see a buffalo freaking out. He is perfectly contented chewing the same grass every day. He is almost enlightened. There is no tension; there is a tremendous harmony with nature, with himself, with everything as it is. Buffaloes don’t make parties to revolutionize the world, to change buffaloes into super buffaloes, to make buffaloes religious, virtuous. No animal is concerned at all with human ideas.And they all must be laughing: “What has happened to you? Why can’t you be just yourself as you are? What is the need to be somebody else?”So the first thing is a deep acceptance of yourself.I was constantly asked by my teachers, “Don’t you ever feel that you are mischievous?”I said, “I am perfectly contented. This is the way I am, and I don’t want to be anybody else.”They said, “This is strange because things that you do must make you feel guilty.”I said, “For what?”One of my teachers was constantly talking about fearlessness – that he was a man of fearlessness, that he could go in the darkest night into the thickest forest. Listening to him again and again I said, “I am suspicious – because you are talking so much about your fearlessness. And what fearlessness is this, going into the dark night, into the thickest forest? This is not great bravery. My feeling is that you are a perfect coward.”He was very angry; he said, “You will have to prove it.”I said, “I will prove it. When I say it, it means I will prove it.” And I could immediately see that he started perspiring.That night I proved it. He used to live in a small house with mud tiles on it – I knew where he used to sleep – so I just went on top of the house, removed one tile, and I dropped a fake rubber snake tied to a rope, slowly, slowly, until it touched his face.Once or twice he threw it off, and again and again the snake came back. Then he opened his eyes, half asleep in the middle of the night…and a long snake and the face just…and he screamed. I have never heard such a scream; that was a real primal scream. I had to take my snake and run away.Next day he came to class, but his legs were still trembling; the fear of the snake touching his face…. He started teaching and I said, “First things first.”He said, “What first things?”I said, “What about last night? You wanted something to be proved.”He said, “So you were behind it?”I said, “I was not behind it, I was just watching what the snake was doing to you.”He said, “You were there?”I said, “I know the whole story; you cannot hide it. I even know about your scream which woke up the whole neighborhood; everybody knows.”“But,” he said, “you are saying it so definitely – because they must have heard a scream; but when they all came in, the snake had gone. We saw that one tile was removed, so the snake must have got away.”I said, “You are right: that was the place from where it came and through where it got out. And if you really want the proof….” I pulled out the snake from my bag and I showed him that this is the snake. “You are such a fearless man, and this is only a rubber snake. And it just touched your face – two, three times, not much – and such a scream came out of you. I was not expecting that it would create so much fear in you.”He was so ashamed that that very evening he resigned and escaped from town, because everybody was asking him, “What happened with the snake? Was it real? – because somebody said that it was just a rubber snake and that some boy in your class had accepted your challenge.” The whole town was talking, and it became so difficult for him that he escaped.He met me ten years later on a railway station. He tried not to recognize me. I said, “Don’t try not to recognize me because I still have the snake in my bag. I have been in search of you for ten years. I have been keeping it with me. Where have you been for ten years?”He said, “Talk silently. Don’t speak so loudly, because in this small place I have become a teacher and I don’t want the same story to be spread here. And why have you come here?”I said, “I have not come here, I’m just passing through by train, and the train is waiting for some other train to pass by. Seeing you, I got out. But what about your fearlessness?”He said, “I have dropped the idea. One good thing you did was to make me free of a false idea that I am fearless. You made it clear to me that it is my fear that I am repressing with the idea of fearlessness. I was angry with you, but now I feel grateful. You did well.”I said, “I enjoyed it enough. I don’t need any gratitude, any thankfulness from you.”He also asked, “Don’t you feel sometimes that you are doing things that are not right?”I said, “I have never felt that. I simply do things which I like. In this short life, who is going to bother and waste time wondering whether it is right or not? I just do not harm anybody. I did not harm you. That scream that escaped from you was good; it must have cleansed your whole being. It must have taken much of the rubbish from inside you with it.”I have never judged, so I don’t exactly know the experience. When you say that you judge yourself, it is borrowed. People have judged you, and you have accepted their idea without any scrutiny. You are suffering from all kinds of people’s judgments, and you are throwing those judgments on other people. And this game has grown all out of proportion; the whole of humanity is suffering from it.If you want to get out of it, the first thing is: don’t judge yourself. Accept humbly your imperfection, your failures, your mistakes, your frailties. There is no need to pretend otherwise. Just be yourself: “This is how I am, full of fear. I cannot go into the dark night, I cannot go into the thick forest.” What is wrong in it? – it is just human.Once you accept yourself, you will be able to accept others because you will have a clear insight that they are suffering from the same disease. And your accepting of them will help them to accept themselves.We can reverse the whole process: accept yourself. That makes you capable of accepting others. And because somebody accepts them, they learn the beauty of acceptance for the first time – how peaceful it feels – and they start accepting others.If the whole humanity comes to a point where everybody is accepted as he is, almost ninety percent of misery will simply disappear – it has no foundation – and your hearts will open of their own accord and your love will be flowing.Right now, how can you love? When you see so many wrongs, so many weaknesses, how can you love? You want somebody perfect. Nobody is perfect, so you have to accept a state of no-love, or accept that it doesn’t matter whether somebody is imperfect. Love can be shared, shared with all kinds of people. Don’t make demands.Judgment is ugly; it hurts people. On the one hand, you go on hurting, wounding them, and on the other hand, you want their love, their respect. It is impossible.Love them, respect them, and perhaps your love and respect may help them to change many of their weaknesses, many of their failures – because love will give them a new energy, a new meaning, a new strength. Love will give them new roots to stand against strong winds, a hot sun, heavy rains.If just a single person loves you, it makes you so strong that you cannot imagine it. But if nobody loves you in this vast world, you are just isolated; then you think you are free, but you are living in an isolation cell in a jail. It is just that the isolation cell is invisible; you carry it with you.The heart will open by itself. Don’t be worried about the heart. Just do the primary spade work.Osho,To me, you house a paradox. You embody the essence both of eternity and of the here and now.Around you I feel a sense of something that has always been and will always be, something that I have always known – although I am not aware of what it is exactly. At the same time, whenever I see you, it is so delightfully new and fresh…As though it were the first time I had seen you. But the first time I actually ever did see you in Pune, I felt as though I had always known you.Osho, am I also going crazy?You are not going crazy, Maneesha – because you are already crazy. But to be crazy here with me is to taste sanity for the first time.It is true that there is a paradox. You can feel at the same time in my presence, the intensity, the depth of the present moment, of the herenow, and – very illogically – the essential, the eternal, which has always been and always will be. But the paradox is only apparent – all paradoxes are only apparent – because to be here and now is the door to eternity.To experience this moment is to experience, at the same time, all that has been and all that will be, because this moment contains both. It contains the whole past, because where will the past go? – it goes on and on entering into the present moment. And it contains the whole future, because from where will the future come? – it will grow from this moment, from the next moment and the next moment and from the whole eternity.The present moment is a seed which has all the trees of the past…generations and generations of trees. This seed has not come from nowhere, it has come from a tree. That tree had come from another seed, that seed had come from another tree. If you go backwards, the seed will take you to the very beginnings – if there were any beginnings.It has been forever here.And this seed also contains the future trees. From this seed will grow a new tree, and from that tree will grow thousands of seeds and thousands of trees. A single seed can make the whole earth green…or, it can even be said that it can make the whole universe green. So much is contained in a small seed.This present moment is a seed of time.It is invisible. That’s why we don’t know what it contains.It contains the whole past; it contains the whole future. That’s why I insist: Don’t think of the past, don’t think of the future. Just remain in the present moment, and the whole past is yours and the whole future is yours.Because of this paradox you feel in my presence as if you are seeing me for the first time; and when you saw me for the first time, years before, you had the feeling as if you had always known me. But it is an extension of the same paradox; it is not different.We are always seeing each other for the first time, and we have known each other forever – because change is the only unchanging reality in existence…and particularly with a man like me, who does not live logically, who has no respect for any logic, who never bothers about whether this statement will contradict some other statement. In fact, I don’t remember which statements I have made before, so it is very easy for me: each statement is fresh, and I don’t compare it.So you may have listened to me for years, but still you will find me fresh, for the simple reason that I don’t have any remembrance of what I have said in all the yesterdays that have passed. I don’t exactly know what is going to be my next sentence.These are not prepared lectures of a professor in a university or prepared sermons of a priest in a church. I am simply responding to your silence, to your questions, to the implications of your questions. You may have asked the same question thousands of times, but my answer is not going to be the same – because everything goes on changing. You have changed a lot, I have changed a lot. The question may seem to be the same, but it is not the same, because it is coming from a different person who has changed.Ten years have passed; in ten years one cannot remain the same. And certainly the answer cannot be the same, because I go on moving each moment with life; I don’t lag behind. I have no investment in any system, I have no desire to be respected as a consistent thinker. I am simply playing with words. But my work is somewhere else; it is with your heart, and it is, every day, fresh.So both are possible: from one angle you can see me as new; from another angle, as very ancient – you have always known me.One more reason: whatever I am saying is phrased in a totally spontaneous way, but it contains the ancientmost truths ever uttered by any human being on the earth. So those who can understand can see that what I am saying has always been said by the mystics, and yet, every day I am saying something in such a way as it has never been said before. So there is a newness and freshness – and there is a deep, long ancientness in it.But there is no paradox. All paradoxes are only apparent. At least with me, there cannot be anything paradoxical because there is nothing paradoxical in my being. My being is so harmonious that contradictory statements cannot arise out of it. So I don’t bother about statements. I know my being, I know its harmony.And to be crazy in this mystery school is the only way now to be sane in this mad world. So the day I give you the certificate that you are crazy means you have passed the examination.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In the olden days it was called melancholia; today it is called depression, and it counts as one of the major psychological problems of developed countries. It is described as a sense of despair or hopelessness, a lack of self-esteem with no enthusiasm or interest in the surroundings. In addition, there are physical symptoms of poor appetite, sleeplessness and a loss of sexual energy. Electroshock treatment has largely been abandoned today, and drugs or talk therapy seem equally effective – or ineffective. Explanations for depression have varied from the chemical to the psychological.Osho, what is this depression? Is it a reaction to a depressing world, a kind of hibernation during “the winter of our discontent”? Is depression just a reaction to repression – or oppression – or is it just a form of self-repression?Man has always lived with hope, a future, a paradise somewhere far away. He has never lived in the present…his golden age is still to come. It kept him enthusiastic because greater things were going to happen; all his longings were going to be fulfilled. There was great joy in anticipation.He suffered in the present; he was miserable in the present. But all that was completely forgotten in the dreams that were going to be fulfilled tomorrow. Tomorrow has always been life-giving.But the situation has changed. The old situation was not good because the tomorrow – the fulfillment of his dreams – never became true. He died hoping. Even in his death he was hoping for a future life – but he never actually experienced any rejoicing, any meaning. But it was tolerable. It was only a question of today: it will pass, and tomorrow is bound to come.The religious prophets, messiahs, saviors were promising him all pleasures – which are condemned here – in paradise. The political leaders, the social ideologists, the utopians were promising him the same thing – not in paradise but here on earth, somewhere far away in the future when the society goes through a total revolution and there is no poverty, no classes, no government and man is absolutely free and has everything that he needs.Both are basically fulfilling the same psychological need. To those who were materialistic, the ideological, political, sociological utopians were appealing; to those who were not so materialistic, the religious leaders appealed. But the object of appeal was exactly the same: all that you can imagine, can dream of, can long for, will be absolutely fulfilled. With those dreams, the present miseries seemed to be very small.There was enthusiasm in the world; people were not depressed. Depression is a contemporary phenomenon and it has come into being because now there is no tomorrow.All political ideologies have failed. There is no possibility that man will ever be equal, no possibility that there will be a time when there will be no government, no possibility that all your dreams will be fulfilled.This has come as a great shock. Simultaneously man has become more mature. He may go to the church, to the mosque, to the synagogue, to the temple – but they are only social conformities, because he does not want, in such a dark and depressed state, to be left alone; he wants to be with the crowd. But basically he knows there is no paradise; he knows that no savior is going to come.Hindus have waited five thousand years for Krishna. He promised not only that he would come once, he promised that whenever there would be misery, suffering, whenever vice would be on top of virtue, whenever nice and simple and innocent people would be exploited by the cunning and the hypocritical, he would come. Sambhavami yuge yuge: “I will make myself a reality in every age to come.” But for five thousand years no sign has been seen of him.Jesus has promised he will come, and when asked when, he said, “Very soon.” I can stretch “very soon,” but not for two thousand years; that is too much.The idea that our misery, our pain, our anguish will be taken away is no more appealing. The idea that there is a God who cares for us seems to be simply a joke. Looking at the world, it doesn’t seem as if there is anybody who cares.In fact, in England there are almost thirty thousand people who are devil worshippers – just in England, a small part of the world. And their ideology is worth looking at in reference to your question. They say that the devil is not against God, the devil is God’s son. God has abandoned the world, and now the only hope is to persuade the devil to take care as God is not taking care. And thirty thousand people are worshipping the devil as a son of God…and the reason is they feel that God has abandoned the world – he no more cares about it. Naturally, the only way is to appeal to his son; if somehow he can be persuaded by rituals, by prayer, by worship, perhaps the misery, the darkness, the sickness can be removed.This is a desperate effort.The reality is that man has always lived in poverty. Poverty has one thing beautiful about it: it never destroys your hope, it never goes against your dreams, it always brings enthusiasm for tomorrow. One is hopeful, believing that things will be better: this dark period is already passing; soon there will be light.But that situation has changed. In the developed countries…and remember, the problem of depression is not in undeveloped countries – in the poor countries, people are still hopeful – it is only in the developed countries, where they have everything that they had always longed for. Now paradise will not do anymore; nor can a classless society help anymore. No utopia is going to be better. They have achieved the goal – and this achievement of the goal is the cause of depression. Now there is no hope: tomorrow is dark, and the day after tomorrow will be even darker.And all these things that they have dreamed of were very beautiful. They had never looked at the implications of them. Now that they have got them, they have got them with the implications. A man is poor, but he has an appetite. A man is rich, but he has no appetite. And it is better to be poor and have an appetite than to be rich and have no appetite. What are you going to do with all your gold, all your silver, all your dollars? You cannot eat them.You have everything, but the appetite has disappeared for which you have been struggling all along. You succeeded – and I have said again and again that nothing fails like success. You have reached a place that you wanted to reach, but you were not aware of the by-products. You have millions of dollars, but you cannot sleep.When Alexander was in India he met a naked saint in the desert.He declared: “I am Alexander the Great!”The saint said, “You cannot be.”He said, “What nonsense! I am saying it myself, and you can see my armies all over the place.”He said, “I see your armies, but one who calls himself ‘The Great’ has not yet reached to greatness, because greatness makes people humble, as it is such a failure, an utter failure.”Alexander was a disciple of Aristotle and he was trained by him in fine logic. He could not listen to all this mystic garbage. He said, “I don’t believe all these things. I have conquered the whole world.”The naked man said, “If in this desert you are thirsty, and I offer you a glass of water, how much would you be able to give me for it? – and for miles there is no water.”Alexander said, “I would give you half of my kingdom.”The saint said, “No, I will not sell it for half of the kingdom. Either you can have the kingdom or you can have the glass of water. And you are thirsty and you are dying and there are no possibilities of finding water anywhere – what will you do?”He said, “Then naturally, I will give you the whole kingdom.”The saint laughed; he said, “So that is the price of your whole kingdom – just a glass of water! And you think you have conquered the whole world? From today start saying you have conquered a whole glass of water.”When man reaches to the cherished goals, then he becomes aware that there are many things around them. For example, for your whole life you try to earn money, thinking that one day when you have it, you will live a relaxed life. But you have been tense your whole life – tension has become your discipline – and at the end of life, when you have achieved all the money you wanted, you cannot relax. The whole life disciplined in tension and anguish and worry won’t let you relax.So you are not a winner, you are a loser. You lose your appetite, you destroy your health, you destroy your sensibility, your sensitiveness. You destroy your aesthetic sense – because there is no time for all these things which do not produce dollars.You are running after dollars – who has time to look at the roses? and who has time to look at the birds on the wing? and who has time to look at the beauty of human beings?You postpone all these things so that one day, when you have everything, you will relax and enjoy. But by the time you have everything, you have become a certain kind of disciplined person – who is blind to roses, who is blind to beauty, who cannot enjoy music, who cannot understand dance, who cannot understand poetry, who can only understand dollars. But those dollars give no satisfaction.This is the cause of depression. That’s why it is only in the developed countries and only in the richer class of the developed countries – in the developed countries, there are poor people also, but they don’t suffer from depression – and now you cannot give a man any more hope to remove his depression because he has all, more than you can promise.His condition is really pitiable. He never thought of implications, he never thought of by-products, he never thought of what he would lose by gaining money. He never thought that he would lose everything that could make him happy just because he has always pushed all those things aside. He had no time and the competition was tough and he had to be tough. At the end he finds his heart is dead, his life is meaningless. He doesn’t see that there is any possibility in the future of any change, because “What more is there…?”I used to stay in Sagar in a very rich man’s house. The old man was very beautiful. He was the greatest bidi manufacturer in the whole of India. He had everything that you can imagine, but he was absolutely unable to enjoy anything.Enjoyment is something that has to be nourished. It is a certain discipline, a certain art – how to enjoy – and it takes time to get in contact with the great things in life.But the man who is running after money bypasses everything that is a door to the divine, and he ends up at the end of the road and there is nothing ahead of him except death.His whole life he was miserable. He tolerated it, ignored it in the hope that things were going to change. Now he cannot ignore it and cannot tolerate it because tomorrow there is only death and nothing else. And the whole life’s accumulated misery that he has ignored, the suffering that he has ignored, explodes in his being.The richest man, in a way, is the poorest man in the world.To be rich and not to be poor is a great art.To be poor and to be rich is the other side of the art.There are poor people whom you will find immensely rich. They don’t have anything, but they are rich. Their richness is not in things but in their being, in their multidimensional experiences.And there are rich people who have everything but are absolutely poor and hollow and empty. Deep inside there is just a graveyard.It is not a depression of the society because then it would affect the poor too; it is simply natural law, and man now will have to learn it. Up to now there was no need, because nobody had reached to a point where he had everything, while inside there was complete darkness and ignorance.The first thing in life is to find meaning in the present moment.The basic flavor of your being should be of love, of rejoicing, of celebration. Then you can do anything; dollars will not destroy it. But you put everything aside and simply run after dollars thinking that dollars can purchase everything. And then one day you find they cannot purchase anything – and you have devoted your whole life to dollars.This is the cause of depression.And particularly in the West, the depression is going to be very deep. In the East, there have been rich people, but there was a certain dimension available. When the road to richness came to an end, they did not remain stuck there; they moved into a new direction. That new direction was in the air, available for centuries.In the East the poor have been in a very good condition, and the rich have been in a tremendously good condition. The poor have learned contentment so they do not bother about running after ambition. And the rich have understood that one day you have to renounce it all and go in search of truth, in search of meaning.In the West, at the end, the road simply ends. You can go back, but going back will not help your depression. You need a new direction.Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, or Parshvanatha – these people were at the peak of richness, and then they saw that it is almost a burden. Something else has to be found before death takes you over – and they were courageous enough to renounce all.Their renunciation has been misunderstood. They renounced it all because they did not want to bother a single second more for money, for power – because they have seen the top, and there is nothing there. They went to the very highest rung of the ladder and found that it leads nowhere; it is just a ladder leading nowhere.While you are somewhere in the middle, or lower than the middle, you have a hope because there are other rungs higher than you. There comes a point when you are on the highest rung and there is only suicide or madness – or hypocrisy: you go on smiling till death finishes you, but deep down you know that you have wasted your life.In the East depression has never been a problem. The poor learned to enjoy whatsoever little they had, and the rich learned that having the whole world at your feet means nothing – you have to go in a search for meaning, not for money.And they had precedents: for thousands of years people have gone in search of truth and have found it. There is no need to be in despair, in depression – you just have to move into an unknown dimension. They have never explored it – but as they start exploring the new dimension, it means a journey inwards, a journey to their own self. All that they have lost starts returning.The West needs very urgently a great movement of meditation; otherwise, this depression is going to kill people. And these people will be the talented ones – because they achieved power, they achieved money, they achieved whatsoever they wanted…the highest degrees in education. These are the talented people – and they are all feeling despair.This is going to be dangerous because the most talented people are no more enthusiastic about life, and the untalented are enthusiastic about life but they don’t even have the talents to get power, money, education, respectability. They don’t have the talents, so they are suffering, feeling handicapped. They are turning into terrorists, they are turning towards unnecessary violence just out of revenge – because they cannot do anything else. But they can destroy.And the rich are almost ready to hang themselves from any tree because there is no reason for them to live. Their hearts have stopped beating long before. They are just corpses – well decorated, well honored, but utterly empty and futile.The West is really in a far worse condition than the East – although to those who don’t understand, it seems that the West is in a better condition than the East because the East is poor. But poverty is not as big of a problem as is the failure of richness; then a man is really poor. An ordinary poor man at least has dreams, hopes, but the rich man has nothing.What is needed is a great meditation movement reaching to every person.And in the West these people who are depressed are going to psychoanalysts, therapists and all kinds of charlatans who are themselves depressed, more depressed than their patients – naturally, because the whole day they are hearing about depression, despair, meaninglessness. And seeing so many talented people in such a bad state, they themselves start losing their spirit. They cannot help; they themselves need help.The function of my school is going to be to prepare people with meditative energy and send them into the world just as examples for those who are depressed. If they can see that there are people who are not depressed – but on the contrary, who are immensely joyous – perhaps a hope may be born into them. Now they can have everything and there is no need to worry.They can meditate.I don’t teach renunciation of your wealth or of anything. Let everything be as it is. Just add one thing more to your life. Up to now you have been adding only things to your life. Now add something to your being – and that will do the music, that will do the miracle, that will do the magic, that will create a new thrill, a new youth, a new freshness.It is not unsolvable. The problem is big, but the solution is very simple.Osho,Sometimes people have said that they see in my face that of a very old, hard witch. And I have felt inside me a deeply buried, revengeful, cold rage against all men who have ever forced, raped, killed or hurt women. This feels like something I have been carrying within for lives, and the realization of it is very painful. Is this some unknown part of myself, a mean personality in the closet? If so, please help me uncover and befriend this old witch.The first thing to be clear about is that it was Christianity who condemned the word witch; otherwise, it was one of the most respected words, as respected as “mystic” – a wise man. It simply meant a wise woman, the parallel to a wise man.But in the Middle Ages, Christianity came to face a danger. There were thousands of women who were far wiser than the bishops and the cardinals and the pope. They knew the art of transforming people’s lives.Their whole philosophy was based on love and transformation of sexual energy – and a woman can do that more easily than a man. After all, she is a mother and she is always a mother. Even a small baby girl has the quality of motherliness.The quality of motherliness is not something connected with age, it is part of womanhood. And the transformation needs a very loving atmosphere, a very motherly transfer of energies. To Christianity, it was a competitor. Christianity has nothing to offer in comparison to it – but Christianity was in power.It was a man’s world up to then; and they decided to destroy all witches. But how to destroy them? It was not a question of killing one woman but thousands of women. So a special court was created for inquiry, to find out who was a witch.Any woman said by Christians to have had an influence on people and who people respected was caught and tortured – so much so, that she had to confess. They wouldn’t stop torturing her until she confessed that she was a witch. And according to the Christian mind, to Christian theology, the meaning of witch was changed: a witch is one who is having a sexual relationship with the devil.You don’t hear any more of any devil having a relationship with any woman. Either the devil has become a Christian monk, a celibate, or…what has happened to the devil? Who was it that was having sexual relationships with thousands of women? And these women were mostly old women. It doesn’t seem to be rational. When young and beautiful women were available, why should the devil go to the old, the very old women?But to become a witch, it was a long training, a long discipline, a long experience. So by the time a woman was a witch – a wise woman – she was old; she had sacrificed everything to attain that wisdom, that alchemy.They forced these poor old women into saying that they were having sexual intercourse with the devil. Many of them tried hard…but the torture was too much.When my back had gone bad, Devaraj and other sannyasins trained in bodywork started traction on me. And I inquired, “What is traction? How was it invented?” They had no idea.It was invented in the Middle Ages by Christians to torture the witches – to pull their bodies from both ends and to go on pulling to a point where it became unbearable. Many became unconscious; many died on their traction machine. But, by the way, it was found that many old women who were put into traction had had a back problem; when they got out of it, the back problem had disappeared. So now Christians don’t use it, but doctors do. Now it is part of the medical world.They tortured these women in many ugly ways, just for one thing: they should confess. The women continued to try to say that they had nothing to do with the devil, that there was nothing to confess. But nobody listened to them; they went on torturing them.You can make anybody confess anything if you go on torturing him. A point comes when he feels it is better to confess rather than to unnecessarily suffer the same torture every day. And it would have continued for his whole life. Once a woman confessed that she was a witch and was having a sexual relationship with the devil, her torture was stopped and then she was presented before a court – a special court made by the pope – and before the court she was to now confess. And once she confessed before the court, the court was able to punish her – because it is the greatest crime in the eyes of Christianity.In fact, even if the woman was having a sexual relationship with the devil, it is none of the business of anybody else – and it is not a crime, because she is not harming anybody. And the devil has never complained to any police station, “That woman is dangerous.” On what authority was Christianity burning these women?The only punishment was to be burned alive so that no other woman dared to be a witch again. They destroyed thousands of women and completely removed a very significant part of humanity. And the wisdom that those women contained – their books, their methods, their techniques of transforming man, transforming man’s energy….So the first thing to be understood is: don’t think that witch is a bad word. It is more respectable than pope – because I don’t think a pope is a man who can be called wise; they are just parrots and nothing else. It is possible that it may be connected with your past life, and the wound has been so deep that still some remembrance in your unconscious goes on reminding you. And that creates the hate for men, because what was done to you was done by men.So it is a simple association, but that association has to be dropped. It was not done by men, it was done by Christians. And the Christians have done so many crimes, and they go on doing them. It is unbelievable.Just now in the United States, there is a case in the court against the Catholic church, because they cannot have a tax-exempt status if, in any way, they try to participate in politics. And they are participating in politics in every way. They have their lobbyists in the Senate, in the congress; even the president, Ronald Reagan, is a fundamentalist Christian, so they must be influencing him, because that is a fanatic section of Christianity.The magistrate was convinced by all the evidence that was produced by a small group of liberated people – liberated from the slavery of Christianity – that these people are lobbying and influencing the law, influencing the government, and their tax-exempt status should be taken away.The magistrate told them that they will be fined one hundred thousand dollars per day, for as long as they don’t answer. But this is how the world is: after seven days the magistrate changed his statement – “They will not be fined, they can simply answer.”Now, that is again a proof that a pressure from higher sources is forcing him…that this is too much in a Christian country. That’s what Ronald Reagan thinks – that America is a Christian country and should respect Christian values, and this would be a condemnation of the whole Christian church. So no fine; they can simply answer whether it is true or not. But the thing is out; it cannot remain that way for long. They will have to accept the fact.Our commune was destroyed by Christians hiding behind the politicians. They have money, they have votes, so any politician is vulnerable to their influence.And all over the world they are doing ugly things. Ronald Reagan was going to give a large amount of war material to Saudi Arabia, which the congress rejected because it was strange – on one hand you go on giving war material to Israel, and on the other hand you give war material to the Mohammedan countries. On both sides your war material is being used, so you have found a good market. People will be killed, and your old-fashioned war material – which is of no use anymore – you can sell. Otherwise, what is one to do with that war material? Every day new things are happening, and the old becomes out-of-date.But to sell to both parties is simply so absurd. If you want Israel to be saved, then you should not sell war material to Mohammedan countries. But that is not the question. Who cares about Israel and who cares about the Mohammedan countries? The real care is how many things you can sell. President Ronald Reagan vetoed it; he’s still going to sell.The United States has a treaty with the European countries, NATO. Ronald Reagan has proposed to produce chemical war material, which is the ugliest. Only five countries out of sixteen have voted against it, but that does not matter because the majority is in favor. And all the great countries – England, France, Germany – are in favor.When chemicals are used in war, it is more dangerous and more ugly – more inhuman. For example, a bomb will not be dropped here, but chemical gas will be released into the city and whoever breathes that gas will die immediately.There are gases which will melt only your bones; you will live, but all your bones will be melted. So you will become just a bag without any bones. What kind of life will that man have when all his bones are gone? He cannot walk, he cannot sit; he can only lie down.And they go on talking about truth, talking about God…and speaking lies.Doctors from the West have now gone to Kiev and have found that Soviet Russia has given exact information about the disaster in their nuclear plant. Only two persons have died, and America managed to influence the whole world news media to say that two thousand people have died. There is a limit to exaggeration – two people became two thousand! And now Western experts have gone there and they have confirmed that only two persons have died. Four persons died afterwards, so in all, six persons have died.And these are religious people trying in every way to deceive the world, to deceive the human mind, to pollute with ugly lies. So don’t be against men as such; just being against Christian atrocities is enough.And don’t feel bad that something is wrong in you. It must be a remembrance. You can go through hypnosis so that you can remember better. That will help in both ways: you will not feel bad that you are having such bad, evil ideas, and secondly it will help you to make clear the distinction between men and Christians.Now all European countries are Christian and they are ready for chemical war. And they will go on reading, “Love your enemies, Love your neighbor,” and they will continue praying in their churches…and they will prepare a chemical death for millions of people. And the initiator is a fundamentalist Christian.Ronald Reagan has been brought up in a fundamentalist Christian school, and he has not grown up from there. He is still retarded.You can see the Christian mind: Americans were asked, “If you want your brain to be changed, with whom would you want to change it?” God came last. Nobody cares about God; that’s how you can see.If you directly ask somebody, then he will fight that God is the supreme being. But in an indirect way, they got caught. Ronald Reagan is ahead of God, ahead of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and God – these are just fictions, even to the Christian mind. Otherwise, in the poll God should have come first – he couldn’t even have come second – and Jesus Christ should have come second. And there are hundreds of beautiful people in the world; Ronald Reagan cannot have any place.But for two thousand years Christianity has been killing people in the name of religion, in the name of God, in the name of Christ, in the name of the nation – so it is perfectly right to condemn them. But not every man is a Christian. To be a Christian is a degradation; it is becoming subhuman.But it will be good to go through a hypnotic process to find out more clearly. Perhaps you may remember what were the techniques of the witches – how they functioned, how they managed to change people – because unless they were a danger to Christianity, Christianity would not have killed them.It was a real danger, because Christianity has nothing to offer in comparison.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You are utter silence and so still, and yet I see, wherever you are, a mad cyclone surrounds you. Is this just your leela, or does existence always balance so perfectly?It is neither. I have nothing to do with it. It is not my leela, my playfulness; nor is it nature balancing itself. It is something totally different from both.The world is always a madhouse…at least up to now it has been a madhouse. But when everyone is mad, you don’t become aware of it.If one person, just a single individual, comes out of madness – becomes sane – then suddenly the distinction is seen. Then you see sanity surrounded by madness, silence surrounded by a cyclone. If everybody else also becomes silent and the cyclone disappears, that will be a perfect balance by existence.In our logical minds, balance happens between opposite things. In reality, balance means disappearance of the opposition, the two becoming one, their diametrically opposite ways merging into one, melting into one reality. That is balance, true balance.I can understand your problem, that I am utterly silent; still, wherever I go, a great turmoil surrounds me.The turmoil was there already; it is just that there was no way to contrast it. It is not that the turmoil suddenly appears. My silence is not creating it, but my silence is exposing it.In many ways you can understand it. In a world where everybody is blind, to have eyes is dangerous because you are creating an opposition to the whole world. It is more convenient and comfortable to destroy your eyes and become blind, or at least keep your eyes closed and pretend to be blind.But to make it known that you have eyes and you can see…and naturally, you would like everybody else also to be capable of seeing the beauty of existence, all the colors, all the stars. Without eyes a man is only twenty percent alive; eighty percent of experiences are through the eyes. Naturally you want to help. But if everybody is blind, they are not going to accept such an idea that they are blind. Their parents were such, their forefathers were such; for generations traditionally, this is the way they have been, and this is the only way to be.And you are introducing something so new, so outrageous, so insulting to them, that rather than helping you to help them they would like to kill you, destroy you, so that any comparison, any contrast, which reminds them that perhaps they are blind, which creates a doubt in them: “Who knows, perhaps that man is right….”They don’t want to get into such doubt. They don’t want to have any inconvenient ideas. Removing this man – crucifying him, poisoning him, murdering him – is far easier than for millions of people to accept a very inconvenient, uncomfortable, humiliating phenomenon: they are all blind.The most difficult thing in the world is to accept that you are ignorant. Even the most ignorant person will not be ready to accept it. Only the greatest geniuses like Socrates have been able to accept that they know nothing.The normal, the mediocre, the common people love to believe that they know, they know everything. And anybody who creates a question, creates a doubt, creates an air of skepticism, is dangerous because he is disturbing so many people’s comfortable lives of ignorance. He cannot be tolerated.This is the greatest crime known to man.So it is not my leela, not my game; nor is it nature trying to have a perfect balance – because the perfect balance will be absolute silence. There will be no opposition to it.The situation is created because the society has lived in ignorance, believing it is knowledge. It has lived in all kinds of immoralities, believing they are moral. It has believed in all kinds of things, thinking that they are true; in reality, they are only fictions.And anybody who tries to expose all these fictions and lies…he will be silent, because only a silent person can do that, only a person whose silence cannot be disturbed even by death. Then suddenly, all around him there is trouble of all kinds – lies, allegations – and every effort is made to prove that the majority of the world cannot be wrong.It is a strange thing that truth is not democratic. What is true is not to be decided by votes; otherwise, we could never come to any truth ever. People would vote for what is comfortable – and lies are very comfortable because you don’t have to do anything about them, you just have to believe…. Truth needs great effort, discovery, risk, and to walk alone on a path which nobody has traveled before.Just today, Anando was giving me some information. One piece was very significant: all schizophrenic people, neurotic people, psychotic people, or any other kind of mentally disturbed people, always want to be in the crowd – they don’t want to be alone. This was discovered by psychoanalysts who have been working with these mental cases for years – that these people have a great fear of being alone and that they are very comfortable in the crowd.The reverse is also true – if you feel comfortable in the crowd, that means unconsciously you have a tendency to fall mentally sick if you go out of the crowd, if you are left alone.In jails, the greatest punishment is the isolation cell. When a person is put into a dark isolation cell, just a piece of bread is slipped underneath the door; that is the only communication between himself and humanity. Nobody speaks to him, nobody comes to see him. And within three weeks he starts losing his sanity, he starts seeing things he has never seen – hallucinations, all kinds of illusions…the crowd was a protection.Those psychoanalysts have not said what the basic reasons behind it are. The crowd is a protection because it supplies you with a common hallucination in which everyone believes. So you need not be worried about it, you need not think that this is something sick: “It is healthy to be a Christian, to be a Mohammedan, to be a Hindu, to go to the temple and to bow down before a stone statue and pray to a god who lives in heaven. Everybody is doing it, it must be true; so many people cannot be wrong….” It is a common hallucination.Now, by putting a person into an isolation cell you have taken him out of the crowd, out of the comfort and the coziness of the crowd. He has never been on his own. Now, for the first time, in darkness, with nobody to talk to, with nobody to say anything to…his mind goes berserk. And now, to keep himself engaged, he has to do something, his mind has to do something.One Russian scientist was kept in an isolation cell for years, but he kept himself sane by just counting figures. From one he would go counting up to millions and millions, and then he would count backwards, and then again…he was a great mathematician. And he was a chess player, so when he would get tired with figures, he would start playing chess with an imaginary partner. Just by playing chess and thinking of ways to win, he kept himself sane.But the ordinary man within three weeks breaks down and starts having hallucinations. These are private hallucinations. That is the difficulty: they don’t have the sanction of the crowd. And that is why the jail authorities have thought keeping people in isolation the greatest punishment you can suffer. It is really the most terrible torture.The crowd is living – it may be miserable, it may be suffering, but so is everybody else. If somebody wakes up and sees that everybody is asleep and having nightmares – unnecessarily suffering, creating illusions which have no counterpart in reality – that man will be looked upon as an enemy. He is the greatest friend, but he is bound to be looked upon as an enemy.This is the whole history of man: all the friends have been looked upon as enemies, and all the enemies have been looked upon as friends.I am carrying a silence around me. It is simply a by-product of my silence inside. And when I stand in the marketplace, naturally everybody feels disturbed, humiliated, contradicted – his beliefs are being destroyed; otherwise, what danger can I be?I am a danger only because they are living in false beliefs. And I am doing my best to make it clear to them: whatever you believe is nonsense – and unless you drop it you cannot have any experience of blissfulness, you cannot become in touch with truth as it is.I will go on doing it because I cannot think that there is not a possibility of humanity waking up – if not today, then tomorrow; if not by me, then by somebody else. But to lose hope means to drop all possibilities of future growth for human beings. So I will continue to do whatsoever I feel is right…and they will continue to avoid whatever they feel is dangerous.Even if a few people are turned on, that’s enough – more than enough – because those few people will turn on a few more people. It can become a wildfire.The turmoil, the disturbance, the ugliness all around has to be destroyed, and it cannot be destroyed by anybody who is using destructive means. It can be destroyed only by silence, by peace, by love, by compassion.Osho,Sitting in your presence is such a beautiful experience. We call it discourse. This word seems to me so poor next to what is happening here. Is there a word in any language that could point to, if not describe, what is happening between the master and the disciple?There is no word in any language for what transpires between the master and the disciple. It is the strangest phenomenon in life. It is not a relationship, it is something far deeper, far greater, far more eternal. Once you have known the taste of being a disciple, the last problem for the master will be how to help you drop it – the idea of disciplehood – because it is so fulfilling, so perfect, that one doesn’t want to stop it.It is said about Mahakashyap, one of Gautam Buddha’s disciples, that he never said anything. He was asked again and again by other disciples – because he was a great philosopher before he came to Gautam Buddha, and he had thousands of followers; he was one of the sharpest minds around Gautam Buddha, perhaps next only to Gautam Buddha – “Why don’t you speak? Why don’t you say anything?”Because the disciples were persistently harassing him, he finally said, “The truth is that I don’t want to say anything because I don’t want to go beyond disciplehood. Saying anything, coming into the light, becoming important in Gautam Buddha’s eyes, is dangerous. I simply want to sit in a corner and just enjoy the presence of the master. I had come to seek truth, but now I do not have any desire for it. I had come here for enlightenment – I have dropped the idea. Just to be in the presence of this man – just to feel his love showering, his silence penetrating to the very core of my being – is so much, that to ask for more is simply ungratefulness.”But these are the paradoxes of life: Mahakashyap was the first to become enlightened. His totality in being a disciple was enough to make him enlightened. And the only thing known about him in the Buddhist scriptures is that he laughed. That was the first time that he made any gesture.Buddha looked at him and said, “Mahakashyap, you never speak – why are you laughing?”He said, “It’s hilarious! I was trying to hide myself so that I wouldn’t come into the direct focus of you. And there are so many who are desirous of enlightenment, of truth, of the ultimate, that I thought, ‘Let all of them reach; I can wait. This waiting is so beautiful.’ But I had to laugh because I’m the first to have entered the world of enlightenment – and I never asked about it.”Buddha said, “It is because you never asked about it. You in fact even dropped the desire for it. You were coming closer to it, you even became afraid that it might happen, so you were hiding in corners, you would never ask a question. And I knew that it was going to happen to you first – before anyone else – because these are the qualities that are needed. Unknowingly you fulfill all the conditions. And don’t be angry with me; I have nothing to do with it. You are solely responsible for what has happened.”Mahakashyap said, “I have only one desire: though I have become enlightened – and it is a tremendous experience – please allow me, while you are alive, not to be sent anywhere else. Let me remain in your commune wherever you move.”It was a moving, wandering commune – a few days here, a few days in another place. Buddha said, “I cannot say no to you; you have never asked anything.”Mahakashyap remained his whole life with Gautam Buddha. When Gautam Buddha died, then he started speaking. Asked why, he said, “Now I have to create the same atmosphere for those who don’t have any taste of disciplehood. I had no intention of becoming a master, but destiny would not allow me not to. I wanted to die before Gautam Buddha so I wouldn’t have to carry this burden.” He proved to be one of the great masters – of the same caliber as Gautam Buddha – and he created a lineage of great disciples and great masters.I have talked about Zen: Mahakashyap was the first – not Gautam Buddha – to initiate the process which culminated in Zen, because it was his disciple, Bodhidharma, who took the message to China. And perhaps Gautam Buddha would not agree with everything Zen consists of, because the real master of Zen and its origin is Mahakashyap, who has a totally different personality from Gautam Buddha – less serious, with a sense of humor, with no idea of holier-than-thou.The man who was finally the decisive factor was Bodhidharma; he comes in the fifth generation of disciples of Mahakashyap. He was very decisive in giving a certain character to Zen, which it still carries.Bodhidharma is farther away still from Mahakashyap. He has a great sense of humor, is very straightforward, knows no etiquette, no manners, is very simple and innocent, has no philosophical background, speaks in an ordinary way. But ordinary words from the mouth of a man like Bodhidharma start having such freshness, such authority – more than any philosophical jargon can ever have.Philosophical words are vague, wishy-washy, big – much ado about nothing. Bodhidharma speaks exactly telegraphically; if ten words will do, he will not use eleven words.But nobody would have conceived that this small stream arising in a silent man like Mahakashyap would become the world’s most purified and essential religiousness. But Mahakashyap has the quality of humbleness – so humble that he drops even the idea of enlightenment, of truth. Certainly, he has experienced something in the presence of his master: he is ready to forsake everything – truth included. If Gautam Buddha is going to hell, he would like to go to hell; he is not interested in going to heaven.It is a strange phenomenon, that the West has no idea about. It knows students, it even knows the word disciple, but it has never gone very deep into the existential experience of it. The word disciple comes from the same root as discipline, and the root meaning of disciple is the capacity to hear.Everybody hears, but not like the disciple. Everybody hears because everybody has ears. But the disciple hears not only with his ears but with his whole being, with his heart. While hearing, he is not thinking about it – whether it is true or not. That is the way of the student. The disciple simply drinks it, soaks it up, allows it to penetrate every fiber of his being.The culmination of disciplehood is the devotee. When the disciple is perfect he enters into a new phase, which is that of the devotee. Now he feels no distinction from the master. Now there are two bodies but one soul. Now he even hears things which are not said, he understands things which are not indicated. He starts feeling the very vibration of the master’s being. The devotee is absolutely unknown to the West.You are right: what is happening here is not of this world. It is in this world but not of this world. We are trying to bring the other world in – to smuggle it into this world.Osho,The magic keys you have given to go beyond duality are one thing to hear and another to live. Last night a miracle happened. I love to gamble, and walking through the door of a casino for me is like the people who have a snake bite on their tongue and have to stay aware. Last night I was able to remain present for the first time after hundreds of tries; and even though I lost money, the victory of not being identified couldn't be bought by all the money in the world.Osho, I'm so happy.I am also very happy.It does not matter where awareness happens; what matters is that it happens. If it happens in a casino, then the casino has become a temple, a sacred place. For most people it does not happen, even in temples, in synagogues, in churches. For them, those places are not sacred because they have not tasted anything sacred there.The place does not count, the act does not count. What counts is: can you do it absolutely unidentified? Let it happen in different situations and it will bring more and more flowers to your being.Osho,A curious thing happened to me once when I was a little girl – perhaps eleven or twelve years old. During recess time at school I was in the bathroom and I looked into the mirror to see if I looked tidy. Then suddenly I found that I was standing halfway between my body and the mirror, watching myself looking at my reflection in the mirror.It amused me to see the three I's, and I thought it must have been a trick one could learn. So I tried to show my girlfriend and I tried it again myself – without success. It didn't, in retrospect, feel like witnessing; it felt like my essential self had stepped out of my physical form. Is it of any value to understand what happened to that little girl?It happens to many children, but because the atmosphere around is not supportive of awareness, those experiences are not nourished by the parents, the school, the friends, the teachers. And if you say that it has happened to you, people will laugh – and you yourself will think that something has gone wrong, that it was not right.For example, all children in every culture around the world like to whirl. And every parent stops them from whirling and says, “You will fall down.” It is true, there is a possibility they may fall down. But that falling down is not going to harm much.But why do children like whirling? While the body is whirling, small children can see it whirling. They are no longer identified with it, because it is such a new experience.With everything they are identified – with walking they are identified, with eating they are identified, with anything they are doing, usually they are identified. This whirling is such an experience that the faster the body moves, whirls, the less is the possibility of their remaining identified.Soon they are lagging behind; the body is whirling but their being cannot whirl. It stops at a point and starts seeing its own body whirling. Sometimes it can come out of the body too. If the whirling child is not staying at one place but goes on moving – whirling and moving around the place – then his essential self can come out and watch it.Such activities should be helped, nourished, and the child should be asked, “What are you experiencing?” and told, “This experience is one of the greatest in life, so don’t forget it. Even if you fall, there is no harm; there is not much that can be harmful. But what you can gain is invaluable.” But they are being stopped in this and in many other things.My own experience in childhood was…the flooded river of my town – nobody used to cross it by swimming when it was flooded. It was a mountainous river. Ordinarily, it was a small river, but in rainy times it was at least one mile wide. The current of the water was tremendous; you could not stand in it. And the water was deep, so there was no way to stand anyway.I loved it. I waited for the rainy season because it always helped…there would come a moment when I would feel that I was dying, because I was tired and I could not see the other shore, and the waves were high and the current was strong…and there was no way to go back, because now the other shore was as far away. Perhaps I was in the middle; it was the same either way. I would feel so completely tired and the water would take me down with such a force that there would come a time when I would see, “Now there is no possibility of living any more.” And that was the moment when I would suddenly see myself above the water and my body in the water. When it happened the first time, it was a very frightening experience. I thought I must have died. I had heard that when you die, the soul goes out of the body: “So I have gone out of the body and I am dead.” But I could see the body was still trying to reach the other shore, so I followed the body.That was the first time I became aware of a connection between your essential being and the body. It is connected just below the navel – two inches below the navel – by something like a silver cord, a silver rope. It is not material, but it shines like silver. Each time I reached the other shore, the moment I reached the other shore my being would enter into the body. The first time it was frightening; then it became a great entertainment.When I told my parents, they said, “Someday you are going to die in that river. This is enough of a sign. Stop going into the river when it is flooded.”But I said, “I am enjoying it so much…the freedom, no force of gravitation, and seeing one’s own body completely away.”Then I moved to the university and there it happened once. I have talked about it. Just behind the university campus there was a hillock with three trees. I used to love those trees because it was impossible to sit silently in the hostels. So I used to go and climb up a tree. The middle tree was very comfortable to sit in – the way its branches were – and I would sit there for hours in silence.One day – I don’t know what happened – when I opened my eyes I saw my body lying down on the ground. It was the same experience that had happened in the river many times, so there was no fear.But in the river, it used to happen automatically that when the body reached the shore, my being would enter into the body. I had no idea how to enter the body; it had always happened of its own accord. So I was stuck. I had no idea. I could see the cord joining me to the body, but how to enter the body, from where to enter? I had never learned any technique from anybody. I simply waited. There was nothing to do.A woman who used to bring milk to sell to the hostel students came by, and she saw my body lying down. She was puzzled. She just touched my head to see whether I was alive or dead, and the moment she touched my head I entered into my body with such a quick force that I still can not get the idea of how it happens.But one thing became certain: if a man’s being is out, a woman’s touch to the body will help him to come into the body. And vice versa: if a woman’s body is away from her being, then a man’s touch – and particularly on the forehead where the third eye is…. It was just by accident that she touched me on my head to see whether I was alive or dead, to see what had happened. She had no idea that I was sitting in the tree seeing everything that she was doing. When I opened my eyes she was shocked.She said, “What are you doing here?”I said, “I was going to ask you what you are doing here touching my head.”She said, “I was thinking perhaps some accident had happened or something. You looked almost dead.”I said, “I was almost dead, and I am grateful to you that you helped me. It was because of your touch that I came into the body.”She said, “You mean you were sitting in the tree?”She got so frightened of me. She used to give me milk. She stopped coming to my barrack. She simply said, “I don’t want to face that person. He is dangerous. What he was doing I don’t know, but he was doing something dangerous.”I had to catch hold of her and tell her, “You need not be worried. I was not doing anything. I was just meditating and the body fell. You helped me, and I am grateful. And there is nobody who brings such good milk as you, so you cannot stop doing it. If you stop doing it, I will start sitting in the same tree where you have to pass, coming and going – remember! And my body will be lying down, and I will be sitting in the tree.”She said, “Don’t do it again. I will give you milk – pure milk without water – but don’t do it again, at least not while I am passing by, because that hill is empty…there is nobody there, and I have to pass by it to go to my village.” The village was beyond the hill.So I said, “Remember, if you stop coming and delivering milk, then I am going to do the trick there. I can even come to your village; just in front of your house I can do it.”She said, “I am a poor woman. Don’t create any trouble for me.”What happened to you was just accidental. If you had pursued it, it would have come back.In fact, to watch in the mirror is one of the methods prescribed by the Tantra system – but to watch long enough so that you become so identified with the reflection in the mirror, that when you step back, your body remains in the old position. And for women, it is more possible, because nobody wastes as much time in front of the mirror.Mulla Nasruddin was killing flies, and his wife said, “Now it is enough. For one hour you have been killing them. How many have you killed?”He said, “Only two: one male, one female.”His wife said, “How did you manage to find out which one was male and which one was female?”He said, “One was sitting on the mirror for the whole hour; no male can do that. The male was also sitting there once in a while; but the female remained stuck on the mirror.”But it is a method prescribed in the scriptures, that you watch in the mirror long enough so that you become identified with the reflection in the mirror. Then you step back. Your body will not step back, but your being will step back. Then you can see three bodies.By the way, if you go on looking into the mirror every day for a particular period of time, one hour every day just looking into your own eyes, in a few days, a few weeks – it depends on each individual – one day you will suddenly see that the mirror is empty. You are standing before it, but the mirror is empty. That, too, is a great experience. When it happens you will feel tremendous silence and a peace you have never known – as if you have gone beyond all reflections and you have come back to the real.But it was good…it happens to many children. Many people have reported it to me, but nobody persists. So once in a while it happens, and then one forgets it, or one thinks perhaps one imagined it, perhaps it was something, just a fancy, a dream. But it is a reality. You had walked out of yourself, and what you saw is a kind of awareness outside the body.The same awareness you have to practice from inside the body. They are not different in quality. And the easiest way to find this out-of-body experience is to lie down on a bed, flat on your back. Relax, and when you feel completely relaxed, then just start feeling that you are leaving the body, floating upwards toward the ceiling. In a few days you will be able to float above the body. But make sure that nobody disturbs you while you are in such a position, because if somebody disturbs you and the cord is broken, you are dead.So the best suggestion: ask Kaveesha to be present to help you to relax and suggest to you that your soul is leaving the body and floating in the air. And you will see, from the air, Kaveesha sitting in the room and that you are lying flat on the bed.Just keep a very dim light with candles, and burn incense. But anything that you do – burning incense, candles – then the same thing should be repeated always so that it becomes associated. So you need not be dependent on Kaveesha forever.After two or three sessions, just when you light the incense and the candle and you lie down, immediately you will be able to float out. But keep alert that nobody disturbs you, that nobody comes into the room and wakes you suddenly. That can be fatal. If the cord is broken, then there is no way to rejoin it.So, first try it with Kaveesha. She can give you post-hypnotic suggestions that you will be able to float out of the body without any disturbance. And tell somebody to wait at the door so that nobody comes in for one hour and you are left alone.When you give the suggestion that your body will be left by the soul for fifteen minutes or thirty minutes, exactly after thirty minutes it will automatically come back to the body.Never forget that – because entering into the body is difficult. And if it happens sometimes…then anybody who is watching the door has to remember: if it is a woman, then a man should touch the third eye, or if it is a man, then a woman should touch the third eye. And the soul will simply rush back to the body. Those opposite energies are needed to attract each other.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Whenever you talk about music and dance, it touches something really deep in me, and my whole being is absorbed in every word and gesture, like a sponge. When you talked about awareness and being totally lost in the music, I suddenly understood what an incredible gift you have given me by letting me dance around you – where nothing was said, but awareness had to be there, and it came naturally, together with being lost in the dance. In moments like that I am filled with awe and gratefulness, just seeing how you guide us so perfectly and so caringly and how you create situations through which, with just a little bit of effort, we can gain so much.I am so immensely grateful to be here with you.Gayan, the most important thing in spiritual guidance is that it should not be direct. The guided should not feel he is being guided. Whenever guidance is direct it brings a kind of slavery; the guided becomes dependent on the guide.But to guide indirectly is very difficult. It is a kind of persuasion where the guided cannot feel at all that he is being told to do this, to do that. He is simply being given indications, with such love, that he likes to go in those directions in those moments. And he becomes aware that he has been guided on each step – carefully guided – but only when he has reached.Now there is no problem and no fear. One who has arrived cannot be made dependent, he can only feel gratitude. The responses will be totally different.If you guide a person directly he will resist it, because you are trying to mold his personality; you are taking away his freedom, making him move in a certain direction.In the first place he will never reach, because with this reluctance, this resistance, there is, deep down, anger and rage. He is doing it – becoming dependent, accepting a certain spiritual slavery – for his own desires.And these are the factors which will create resentment in him. They will not bridge him to the master; they will create a wall between the two. Reaching the goal is almost impossible.This is a vicious circle: when you do everything that you are being told to do, outwardly you are obedient, ready to serve the master – outwardly grateful – but inwardly reluctant, resistant, angry. And when doing everything that the master has said, and you don’t reach…that is the point where these kinds of people turn into enemies. Rather than bringing gratitude into them, the whole process has only gathered more and more enmity.But to guide a person without his being at all aware that he is being guided…it is just like when you smell perfume in the garden and you start moving towards it. You will not feel reluctant, resistant, inimical to the perfume – although it has guided you. In fact, spreading the perfume is nothing but spreading a net in which those who are capable will be caught and brought closer and closer.They will recognize only after they have reached that they have been guided, that they have been guarded, cared for – and not a single word has been told to them to do this or not to do this. Their freedom has not been touched in any way. They have not been turned into slaves.This has been my experience: it is very rare to find a master who can guide you in such a way, because it is with each step difficult, arduous. And the master has to be very conscious, very cautious that the disciple does not feel in any way lower than him. He has to take his hand in his own hand in such a way as if the disciple himself is taking the master’s hand in his own hand. It is a tremendous art. He allures, he does not dictate.So amongst masters you will find very rare masters who are perfect guides. And this is the definition of the perfect guide: he does not allow you to know that you are being guided. You come to realize it only at the very end of the journey – and suddenly there is great gratitude, gratitude for all the arduous roundabout ways the master has had to use just not to hurt you in any way, not to create any dependence. On the contrary, making you more and more free, he has functioned only as a friend.But not all the disciples are capable of being guided in this way. I have been asked hundreds of times why women are attracted so much to my philosophy, my way of life. I have given some answers, but the real answer is: the woman is a more efficient disciple than the man, and she knows the delicacy of being guided without direct instructions. She does not function through the mind, which needs a direct, clear-cut catechism.“Just tell me the Ten Commandments” – that is the language of man. But there are men also who have the same feeling heart as the women. They can become perfect disciples, but the percentage will be less than that of women.And amongst the men, those who don’t have a heart, who function through the mind, many may come close to the master – intellectually interested according to their prejudices – and may seem to have understood him well, better than anybody else…their intellectual understanding will be more clear.The land of the heart is not the land of arithmetic or logic; it is poetry, it is music. You can enjoy it, but you cannot understand it.I am reminded of one great English poet, Coleridge. Although he never completed more than seven poems in his whole life, he still became one of the greatest poets of the English language – because it is not the quantity that counts, it is the quality. When he died he left almost forty thousand incomplete poems.His whole life, his friends were harassing him continuously: “You seem to be mad! You have such a treasure. Just a few poems have made you a great poet; if you could produce forty thousand poems of that quality, perhaps in the whole world there would be no competition against you – in the whole history of man, past, present and future. Why do you go on piling up incomplete poems?”He said, “You don’t understand; I cannot do it. Unless existence guides me so politely that I don’t feel the guidance, that I don’t feel the push and pull to do it, I am not going to do it. These poems are the poems of my freedom – existence becoming free through me. These poems will have to wait.”Sometimes a poem was just missing one line, and his poet friends said, “You can compose that line yourself.”He said, “It does not work that way. I have tried, but the quality is as distant as the sky is from the earth. I can deceive others, but I cannot deceive myself. I will wait; when existence comes – without forcing me, because I cannot do it under force – and it simply persuades me, encourages me, and I know only afterwards that I have been guided, then only will I complete a poem.”Once it happened in the London University…the professor who was teaching literature came across a line of Coleridge which he could not make any sense of. And he was a sincere man; he said to his students, “I cannot give any reasonable explanation for it. And I don’t want to deceive you. Coleridge lives just in my neighborhood; he is old, but being his neighbor, I am still allowed to see him and meet him. I will go to him and ask him myself what the meaning of this line is.”He went to Coleridge the next day and asked him. Coleridge looked at the whole poem and he said, “There is meaning in it. When I wrote it two persons knew the meaning. Now only one knows.”Hearing him say that only two persons knew the meaning, the professor became afraid: where was he going to find those two persons? And when Coleridge said, “Now, only one knows,” then the professor became even more afraid. There was only one hope; he said, “But that one must be you?”Coleridge said, “No. When I wrote this I knew it, God knew it. Now, only God knows; I don’t know. It is a beautiful line; alas, I have no way of remembering. In fact, I have not written it.”His name for existence is God, that’s all – there is no difference. He is saying, “I have not written it. The writing was done by me, but a bigger, vaster energy was persuading me, encouraging me to write it down. I was used as an instrument, a medium.”This word medium reminds me of what Gayan is saying, that dancing, singing around me, she had become completely lost in the dancing, in the singing, and she had no idea at all that she was being guided. I have never mentioned any guidance; I had left it to her. The way she wants to dance, she can dance. But I was there.She was dancing around me, so she could not remain out of my presence. And my presence was persuading her to go further and further, deeper and deeper. Unsaid, unheard…but the guidance was there. Now she remembers, retrospectively, the tremendous experience she has gone through, which has changed her forever. She cannot fall back; she can go ahead, but not backwards.In the beginning she must have thought that it was just simply decorative: “In a darshan, dancing must be just decorative.” But slowly, slowly she got into it. If I had said that there are guidelines to be followed, she would not have been able to be totally in it; those guidelines would have been a disturbance.Whether man or woman, the way of truth is the way of the heart. And the way of the heart cannot be taught, it can only be inspired, thrilled, excited, to go on a new exploration…invited, but not ordered.She has brought a beautiful question which will help many. The words order and guidance and commandments – they are all mind words. The heart has no parallel words; it knows only inspiration, becoming aflame, not knowing why…but it is so juicy, of such a grand beauty that the heart goes on following it.But many of the religions have destroyed the way of the heart because there were not many masters who could manage it. It is a fine art, superfine. It was easy to manage teachers, teachings, guidance, discipline for the mind – but the mind has nothing at all to do with religion.Once, I was coming home from the river, and there was a boy who must have been an idiot; he was trying to pull a cow back towards home. The cow must have gone to the river and was not willing to go back home – and she was much more powerful than the boy. And he was trying hard.I stood there and watched. Instead of the boy pulling the cow, the cow was pulling the boy towards the river. And he was shouting and asking people to help: “This cow is going mad!”I said, “Nobody is going mad; it is simply that you don’t know how to bring a cow home.”He said, “How do you bring a cow home?”I said, “Drop this rope, and instead of the rope, take some green grass in your hands, move ahead of the cow, and the cow will follow. That is persuasion; you are not forcing. The cow is free; she can go to the river or anywhere she wants…but with this green grass in front of her, she cannot go anywhere.”Guidance is exactly like that. You have to inspire, not instigate. You have to be very polite and humble, not even giving a hint that the other person is being ordered to do something. You have to be inviting, requesting, and let the person come into the field of energy where things start taking place on their own.With men the problem is that many cannot manage the language of the heart. Sooner or later they fall out. And when they fall out, then a trouble is there. People start asking them, “Why have you left?” And the mind never wants to say, “I don’t know.” The mind may have to create lies, allegations to justify itself: “I had to leave because that was not the right place.”The reality is you were not in the right shape. You tried to manage the work that can be done only by the heart by something else – by the mind. You failed. In the beginning you will succeed, but soon there will come a point where you will have to turn towards the heart, because the mind can go on, round and round, but it never reaches to the center.And those who are very deeply grounded in the intellect cannot leave it; it is their investment, their whole lifelong investment. So rather than coming to growth, to gratitude, they fall out – empty, angry, ungrateful, saying things which if they had even thought twice, they would not have said. And all that they are saying really goes against them, because what were you doing for ten years with this man? It took you ten years to find out that this is the wrong place? Then, even in ten lives you are not going to find the right place. You are simply retarded.To have a soft heart, in a man or a woman, is of immense value in the growth of, the evolution of, your consciousness.Osho,I recall a beautiful story of Hermann Hesse. A woman is pregnant and an old wise man tells her that she may have one wish granted in respect to her child. She wishes that her child be loved by all. This wish is fulfilled, and although the young boy is bad, he is loved by everyone. By the time he has become a young man, he has everything around him that he ever wants. But he is so unhappy that he wants to commit suicide. However, the old wise man reappears and indicates that he can have one wish.The young man wishes to be able to love everyone rather than be loved by everyone. His wish is fulfilled. His beautiful face becomes old and ugly, and the whole town turns against him. He is stoned and can find no food or clothes. But he is overflowing with love, and every small thing in life becomes a love affair.He decides to go on a pilgrimage, and one cold night he encounters the same old wise man, who receives him with tremendous love. The pilgrim relaxes into the old sage and becomes an innocent child again.Osho, would you please comment?Hermann Hesse is one of the Western minds who has come very close to the Eastern way of looking at things. Perhaps there is no other man of his quality who understands the East better. This story is an indication of his understanding of the Eastern wisdom about love.The first wish the mother asks is that her child should be loved by all. Looking at the words you will not understand what is hidden behind them. He becomes a young man, he has everything, he is beautiful. Although he is not well-mannered, he is spoilt because everybody loves him unconditionally. But he is not satisfied. As he goes on becoming more mature, the situation comes to a point where he wants to commit suicide.This is the whole history of all those who want to be loved. Why is he in so much despair? He should be happy. What more can you ask? – everybody loves you, in spite of you. But to the perceiving eye there is something: when you are loved by everybody you become an object of love. You lose your individuality, you lose your integrity, you lose your subjectivity. You become an object. Everybody loves you like a beautiful piece of art – and nobody wants to become an object.That’s what his mother forgot. That’s what millions of people in the world have forgotten. The wish looks perfectly good, but its implications are very dangerous. First, it reduces you from the high status of a subjective consciousness into an objective reality. Everybody loves you without bothering whether you are worthy of it or not. And you are not worthy of it; it is because of the blessing of the old wise man that they are loving you. Their love has spoiled you; you are not of any worth. You understand it, that you are not worthy, but still people are loving you. A great guilt arises in you that something has gone wrong.Love has to be earned. Unearned love is just like a beggar – without earning anything, spreading his begging bowl before you. Man wants everything to be earned; he wants to be worthy of it. He should not be just a beggar. He is reduced to an object, he is reduced to a beggar. And the boy had no love for anybody, because that was not part of the wish. So you can see: he cannot understand love either.The fire should be burning on both sides simultaneously.He has no fire; he is utterly cold, ice-cold. He has never loved anybody. And you can understand the misery of a person who has never loved – because he does not know what love is. According to the blessing everybody is loving him, but according to his understanding, nobody has loved him because he does not know the feel of love. He has never loved anybody – how can he know it?So all that love surrounding him is just meaningless. As far as he is concerned nobody has loved him. And he is not aware of the wish of his old mother, of the blessing of the old sage. And even if he had been aware, it would not have made any difference.To understand love, first you should be loving.Only then can you understand love.Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved, but they don’t know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.So much love being showered on the man, and still he decides to commit suicide…because it is not what people give to you that satisfies, it is what you give to people that satisfies. It is not by being a beggar that you can be contented, it is by being an emperor, and love makes you an emperor when you give. And you can give so much, inexhaustibly, that the more you give, the more refined, the more cultured, the more perfumed your love becomes – the more there is contentment.But that poor fellow was in a difficult situation. Everybody was loving him and he did not know what love is. Just fed up with this love he decides to commit suicide. The old sage appears again because the sage knew that that was going to be. The mother had asked something – according to her a great wish but not according to the sage. He knew this wish would lead to suicide. He says, “I can give you one wish.” And you can see immediately what the boy asks for, because that is what he is lacking.The story is tremendously methodological. On the surface you may not understand it, but underneath everything is so well-connected. The second wish proves what I have been telling you. He asks that he does not want others to love him, he wants to love others. In that, he is showing that the first wish is meaningless without this second wish. He wants to love everyone.But the story here may seem strange to you, that as the wish is granted, the young and beautiful man changes into an ugly and old man. It indicates that it is only in old age that people come to understand what they missed in their life: they never loved. In their whole life they wanted others to love them, and were miserable. They always wanted to get more and more love; they were greedy.At the end, when people start forgetting them because they have become old and ugly, they have a look at their whole life, at what was missing; and the revelation – they never gave, they only wanted. Ordinarily, it is too late. Now, even to find people to receive love from them will not be possible.And you have in all languages, “the dirty old man” – in all languages the same expression – because in old age, when he is no longer young and no longer beautiful and everything has turned ugly and he is ready to die, the understanding arises that he missed one thing. That’s why his whole life has been empty and meaningless; he never loved, he never gave. So now he wants to love people. But who wants to love an old and ugly man? He is disgusting. His love looks like lust – not love but the lust of a dying man.So the story is significant in that as the young man receives the blessing of the old sage, suddenly he becomes old and ugly. He is granted the wish to love. The whole story is about humanity: now he can love, but nobody will receive his love; now he can give, but everybody will be escaping from him. He will be disgusting. Talking about love is a faraway thing; nobody wants even to sit with him. He is half dead and he wants to love you. And naturally he will want to love the young, the beautiful, and obviously he will be denied.He has moved from one extreme of the pendulum to the other extreme of the pendulum; either by itself is only half, and no extreme can be fulfilling. Seeing the situation that neither was he satisfied when people were showering their love on him, nor was he satisfied by loving people – because now it is difficult to find people to love – he goes on a pilgrimage, and for the last time he meets the sage.The sage knew, because this is the dialectic: the mother had chosen one part, which proved wrong; he had chosen the other part, which is going to prove wrong. Both together they can prove right, but not separately.But now, seeing that both have failed, he has come to a kind of transcendence and sees that all dualities fail. And when he meets the old man, the old man hugs him and he becomes just like an innocent child – exactly the same child that the mother had brought to the old sage to be blessed. Life has done a whole circle; he is back again as a small child.That too is very significant, because each of life’s failures brings you a little understanding, a little transcendence. It is that little understanding and that little transcendence of dualities that gives you a new birth after death – again as an innocent child; again, an opportunity not to fall into the same old trap. But people go on falling into the same old trap again and again; it becomes habitual.The innocence of childhood will come after each failure of the extreme – after the failure of both extremes. But you may start again the whole game….In the East they are right in saying that circles of life go on moving in the same rut with the same failures, into the same ditches with the same miseries – and nobody seems to learn anything. If somebody really learns, and the transcendence beyond duality is no longer the blessing of a saint but your very understanding – it arises out of your own being – then there is no longer any need for a new birth.This is what I call enlightenment – the understanding that all extremes fail. Remain in the middle, exactly in the middle, where the pendulum stops and the clock stops, where time stops – no movement, no desire, no goal, nowhere to go, but just to be here now.Now that this innocence is arising out of you, this presence is born out of you, you will not need another birth. Your education in the world is finished. Now you can be accepted in the wider existence, with all the awakened ones.The story is certainly very beautiful; try to go deeper into its implications. And there are thousands of stories like this, which people simply read like stories. Almost always they are in the books of children, who cannot understand anything; they simply read the story.These stories are needed to be read by those who are meditating, who are no longer childish, who have a certain maturity, so that they can open the hidden meaning of the story.Wherever you find such stories, you can bring them to me. They contain the wisdom of the ages.Osho,I expect I must have changed over the twelve years I have been with you, but I would find it very difficult to describe to anyone just exactly how and in what respect I have. Yet I can see that others around you have changed. I can also recall and trace through it changing aspects of my relationship as a disciple to you as my master. In fact, that seems to have been the whole pivot for me for any change that has come about. My connection with you has been like a lamp, a gauge, a compass.Is it important to have an idea of what changes have happened to oneself?No. If the right changes are happening, then the answer is no. If you are feeling good, if you are feeling that you are in a symphony, then the answer is no. But if things are going wrong – changes are happening, but you are becoming worse – then yes, you have to think about them.Remember, thinking is needed only when things are going worse. When things are going towards higher states of being, thinking is a disturbance.It is almost like this: if you are healthy you don’t ask if you should go to the doctor to be examined because you are feeling too healthy, too much in a well-being. The answer would be no. But if you are feeling sick, the answer would be, “Yes, go to the doctor.”So my answer depends on your feeling. If you are feeling that you are growing, becoming more silent, more peaceful, more loving, more compassionate, gaining higher values, reaching towards the stars, then there is no need to think about what changes are happening and why they are happening, because all that thinking will be a disturbance – it will stop the growth. Then, just forget about thinking; put your whole and total energy into growing.But if you feel that something is going wrong – you are more tense, more in anguish, more in misery, more in despair – then certainly you should think about what the reason is, why you are falling back rather than growing up.Osho,Shakespeare wrote, as part of the dialogue describing two characters in two of his plays, the following phrases which have come to me so often in the years I have known you, in reference to you.Of one, he wrote: “He bestrides the narrow world like a colossus. He is man of men.”And of the other: “Age cannot wither, nor custom stale…A man of infinite variety.”Osho, our words are so inadequate, and yet the desire is so strong to express something of what it means to us. In you, all that is fine and pure and of the noblest heights has taken form.In your disciples, the nameless silence has taken root and will find a voice and be living proof of who you are.There is no need…. I can understand the desire to describe your feelings. You have devoted your whole life to me; you have given yourself to me totally. Naturally, the desire is bound to arise to describe what kind of man you have come across.All words will look inadequate.But there is no need at all – because I can see in your eyes, I can see in your tears, I can see in your laughter, I can see in your silence all that you want to say…and that you cannot say it.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In the Japanese language, the word for love is a picture of a person with a full stomach, kneeling, with both hands raised in offering. The picture means, “I am so full; please allow me to share, please take from me.” Osho, is it possible that the languages of cultures that use symbols are more protected from depreciation in value, as happens for example in English with the word love?The languages like Japanese or Chinese are certainly more protective of the essential quality of a word. But these languages are pictorial languages.The pictorial language is the language of the unconscious mind. That’s why in the unconscious mind you see dreams.The pictorial languages are also the languages of the child, who can only think in pictures, not by the alphabet. That’s why in children’s books you will see bigger, more colorful pictures. And as the child grows, pictures start becoming smaller, and finally the pictures disappear; only abstractions, alphabetical letters, take their place.The alphabetical languages have some qualities; that’s why they have won the race against the nonalphabetical languages. They are simple to learn.Some languages have twenty-six letters; all words will be made out of these twenty-six letters. Sanskrit has the biggest number – fifty-two letters. More are not possible, because you cannot make more sounds than fifty-two. So while in English many sounds are missing which are in existence – there is only one s and in Sanskrit there are three – Sanskrit is as perfect a language as it can be.But Sanskrit also got defeated in the race of languages. It was very poetic like Arabic and other old languages, but you cannot do science in poetry, you cannot do mathematics in poetry. You need a more prose-like style of language. Poetry may be closer to emotions and subjectivity; prose is closer to facts and the objective world. And we are dealing with the objective world. Very few people are dealing with the subjective.So languages that were leaning more towards the subjective, towards the poetic, got defeated, and languages that were pictorial were very difficult. Unless you are born Chinese or Japanese, it will take almost half of your life to learn the language. That is too much – thirty years – because you will have to remember so many pictures of all things…so many symbols. So although those languages have the innocence of child, a purity….And they are not so corruptible, because for each different shade of meaning, they have different symbols. For example, love – people love all kinds of things. People love their cars, people love their clothes, people love their food, people love their houses, people love their wives, their friends, their husbands – one word has to be used for so many different things. It naturally loses its purity.A thing cannot be loved in the same way that you love a person. And if you love both in the same way you don’t know what love is. Love should be a definite quality. But the language does not offer many words – only one word for everything. It is simpler, less complicated, more utilitarian, but you cannot save the purity of the word.This Japanese symbol for love – a man with a big belly, offering with both his hands – can only be interpreted in one way; there are not two ways. It is simply saying that you are so full that you want to share. And that is the purity of love, when there is no desire to get but to give. And you can give only when you are overflowing, you can share only when you have too much – out of abundance.The picture makes it definite. But then you will have to learn millions of symbols for every small thing in the world. And it is too tedious, too tiresome; for each small thing you have to make a symbol. In Chinese, the symbol for fight or war is one roof, and under one roof, two women. It shows that if you have two wives, there is going to be a constant fight. So for all fights, this is the symbol.In a way it is very solid. It has its own beauty and gives a definite meaning which cannot be easily corrupted; hence, you will not find in Chinese or Japanese any commentaries on scriptures. A commentary means you have to interpret.In Sanskrit you will find thousands of commentaries on a single scripture, because Sanskrit is a subjective and emotional and poetic language, immensely capable of expressing any nuance of feelings, sentiment – the whole spectrum. It has tried to be perfect, and it has almost attained perfection. But in attaining perfection it has lost something of humanness.Each word has many meanings – a dozen meanings – because it has taken all sounds as letters. Now it wants no meaning in life or existence to be left without a name. Even with fifty-two letters you cannot exhaust the whole existence, so each word has a dozen meanings. It gives a very flexible beauty to it, because poets can play with words more easily when there are so many meanings. But it creates a new phenomenon: the commentary.Krishna has spoken in the Shrimad Bhagavadgita, and there are thousands of commentaries. The same line can be interpreted in a thousand ways. Now it has become a jungle of commentaries; you don’t know what Krishna really wanted to say.It became such a phenomenon – it has not happened anywhere else in the world – that Shankara will write a commentary on Krishna, then Shankara’s commentary itself becomes a question – what does he mean? Then Shankara’s disciples start writing commentaries on his commentary, and so on and so forth, generation after generation.Krishna’s Gita is left far away. You will not find even the echo of it, because from one commentary to another commentary, they are changing their focus. The person who writes a commentary on Shankara is not concerned with Krishna, he is concerned with Shankara – with giving a definite meaning to Shankara. And there are other disciples trying to do the same – to compete with each other – so there are hundreds of commentaries on Shankara. Then these people, on their own, will produce disciples who will be writing commentaries on their commentaries.To go into Indian scriptures is really to enter into a wonderland. How people can go on playing with words, finding new meanings contradictory to each other! And there is no way to say who is right, because the language allows all the meanings.Because of this flexibility Sanskrit cannot be a scientific language, although it has beauty. To chant it is almost like singing. It has flexibility, not monopoly. Everybody is free to manage the meaning, to derive a philosophy from it, which nobody else has ever tried to do before. So there is a freedom of thought, but there is bound to be confusion. Science cannot afford that.The pictorial languages like Japanese are very systematic. They have a single-pointed meaning. No commentary is needed, the meaning is in the symbol. But you need so many symbols that such a big language cannot be used for the whole world as an international language, because if you are not born with it from childhood, it is going to take half of your life just to learn the language; the question of using it does not arise. Life is so short, people are in a hurry, death is so close, that it will be a sheer wastage of time – thirty years or more just to memorize symbols.All the languages of the world have something significant in them, but they also have problems.Geeta’s question is significant. It is true – in English or in any language which uses an alphabet, no word can remain pure, because it will have to be used for many things. In different contexts it will get polluted, contaminated – and people don’t even recognize it. Somebody says, “I love you” in the same way that he says, “I love smoking.” He does not see that loving to smoke and loving a person cannot be put in the same category; they can’t have the same meaning. English is poor in that way.In Sanskrit, if a brother and sister love each other, there is one word for it that excludes a sexual relationship automatically without saying anything. It is love, but not of the kind that exists between husband and wife. So for the husband and wife there is a different word. For your parents there is a different word, because the same words cannot be used. When you are using it for your parents, there must be something of gratitude in it, something of respect, reverence. And when you are using it for a thing, again, it cannot be from any other category; it will have its own category. It will be more like liking, not loving.But then there are so many words that it becomes unmanageable, and with slight changes their meanings change. And every language has developed with a different background.I have been thinking that there must be a language which can have all the beautiful qualities of all the languages without their problems, but it seems impossible. There have been efforts like Esperanto, but they don’t take root; they are artificial, man-made.It would be a great thing if the whole world had one language. It would help immensely to bring humanity closer to each other. It would be one of the greatest steps against war – a basic groundwork for understanding – because most of the conflicts are of misunderstanding, and language plays a great role in understanding or misunderstanding.So there have been people who have tried to create an artificial language accepted by the whole world, but no effort has succeeded for the simple reason that the language you have learned since you were born has gone so deeply into your bones, into your blood, into your marrow, that it is almost a part of you. Something can be transplanted over it, but it will not be a joy. And why should one carry a burden?The mother language goes so deeply into your being…. One of my professors, S.K. Saxena, who lived almost all his life in the West studying, then lecturing, being a professor, came back to India only in his old age. But he confessed to me, “It is strange, but I have to confess to you that I have lived almost all my life in the West, but still, if I fall in love with a woman, I want to talk in my mother tongue. To talk with her in a language which is not my mother tongue seems to be superficial.”Or in fighting you will forget the transplanted language. You would like to fight in your mother tongue.There is a famous incident in the life of the famous emperor, Bhoj. He was well-known for respecting all kinds of talented people. His court was full of talented people. From all over the country, he had picked up the best – the cream – in every direction, in every dimension. He had the best scholars, the best philosophers, the best singers, the best poets.One day a man appeared, and he challenged Bhoj: “You are too proud of your so-called scholars. I challenge your scholars to recognize my mother tongue. I speak thirty languages; I will speak in those thirty languages, and if anybody can recognize which one is my mother tongue, then there are one hundred thousand gold pieces for him. If he loses then he has to pay me the same amount – and all are challenged.”The first day he spoke a few passages in one language, then in another, then in another. A few people tried and they lost. Just one man, a poet, Kalidas – he is the Shakespeare of India – remained silent, for the simple reason that the challenge was for the scholars, not for the poets. But he was watching the man very carefully. But after thirty languages – and at least fifteen persons had already lost – even Kalidas could not manage to find even a small way to distinguish which one was his mother tongue.When all the scholars were finished – nobody else was ready to take the challenge, seeing the fate of the fifteen most prominent scholars of the court – Kalidas appealed to the man, “I could not participate today because you did not invite the poets. You invited only the scholars. It would be a great kindness if you can come tomorrow again and give a chance to the poets.”The man was more than happy. He said, “I can go on continuing as long as you want. Poets, singers, musicians, dancers, theologians, philosophers…anybody. I can go on coming every day.”The next day Kalidas was standing in front of the gate with the whole court and the emperor. He asked them to stand there to receive and welcome the guest. They said, “This is not necessary,” but he said, “This is part of my strategy – you just stand here.”There were at least a hundred marble steps leading to the palace, and as the man reached the upper step, Kalidas pushed him. He slipped on the steps, rolled down, and started shouting. Kalidas said, “This is your mother language!” – and the man had to accept that this was his mother language.“But,” the man said, “this is not right.”Kalidas said, “There was no other way – either love or fight. It is something that cannot be managed superficially.”I told the story to Dr. S.K. Saxena. He said, “The story is perfectly true; it is my experience. I have loved many women, but it was always superficial because I could not speak my mother tongue. I could not say how much I loved her. And to say it in a foreign language was simply a translation; it was not the original.”In the world there are thousands of languages, and nobody is willing to drop his own language. The only way seems to be that everybody be allowed to have two languages.One is the international language – and English is perfectly right for it. It is more contemporary than any other language. Every year eighteen hundred words are added to it. No other language has that. It goes on renewing itself continually with the times. It seems right now to be the only language which is still growing, and the future needs a continually growing language, growing in all directions so that it can be very comprehensive.But it cannot fulfill the need for a mother tongue to everybody. So everybody should be taught two languages from childhood. Every person has to be bilingual. And the gap can be bridged if both languages are brought in from the very beginning. It is not that one first learns the mother language up to a certain age and then starts learning another language; then the other language is never going to have the rootedness which the mother language has.Any efforts like Esperanto are going to fail. They are arbitrary. They have taken everything good from this language, from that – eclectically. But a language has an organic unity which is missing in Esperanto.One of my friends, a sannyasin, a traditional sannyasin, Swami Satyabhakta, has developed a language of his own. He was a linguist, knew many languages, and was developing a new language that could become a world language. He used to stay with me. I told him, “Don’t destroy your life unnecessarily. Many people have tried, but it simply does not work.”I told him a small story. Charles Darwin’s birthday was being celebrated. He used to teach about birds, insects, animals – that was his whole life. The children of his family and the neighborhood all enjoyed his stories about exotic lands where he had visited and the different kinds of animals there.The children had an idea: “Let us see whether he can find it or not….” They caught at least ten or twelve insects, cut pieces from them – somebody’s legs, somebody’s head, somebody’s wings, somebody’s tail – and they glued together all those different parts of the different insects. It looked like an insect. They pasted it well, framed it as a present for his birthday, and they all came to present it to him. They said to him, “We have only one question. We have found this insect; we just want to know the name of it.”He looked at the insect. He had never seen such a thing in his whole life…and just in the neighborhood! How did these children get this? He has been searching all over the world…. Then he looked closer and he found that it was not one insect. They had been really clever; all the parts were separate and they were glued together. So he said, “Its name is ‘Humbug’!”All these arbitrary languages are humbug. You can manage to give them a shape, but it doesn’t work.But a vast area of the Far East is nonalphabetical, and it will be very difficult for Chinese or Japanese to exist in the future because, for scientific use, they are not the right languages; they are too big. Science needs precision, simplicity, directness. It wants to use as small an amount of letters as possible. That is a basic theory in science: use as few hypotheses as possible, because otherwise complexities grow.So for a scientific future of the world, I don’t see that Chinese, Japanese or allied languages of the Far East, can survive. And it will be a sad thing if they don’t survive; they have a beauty of their own.The only way for them to survive is that one international language be accepted and used for all scientific and international communications and research work – and their own mother tongue can continue to grow in its old path, with its old beauties and its old frailties. If this is not done, then either they will lag behind scientific progress or they will have to kill their own languages.In India the same problem is there. There are thirty major languages, and all have their own beauty, something of a special quality. Hindi is the most widely understood and widely spoken language, and for forty years they have been trying to make Hindi the national language. But they have not succeeded, because it may be the majority language, but all other languages together….Against each single language, Hindi is the major language. For example, forty percent of people speak it, and no other language has that majority. But all those other languages together are spoken by sixty percent; so as far as a fight is concerned, they are major. If a vote is to be taken they will defeat Hindi. They are not friendly with each other – they are against each other – but as far as Hindi is concerned, it is a common enemy and they are all together.Only two percent of people understand English. But still I have suggested that India should accept thirty national languages and one international language. English should be the international language, because nobody is against it, it is nobody’s mother tongue. Nobody is for it, people are neutral about it. And if their national language is also accepted, then the area where their language is spoken can go on growing its own literature, its own poetry, its own drama, without any trouble. Except for that, there is no solution.English should be taught from the very beginning, not at a later stage; otherwise, it will always remain superficial. And the world has to accept one language. It is just a coincidence that the British Empire has spread the English language, but the opportunity should be used. The English language should be made the international language by the U. N.Each person should have two languages: one, his mother tongue; the other, his international language. And efforts should be made that both grow together as early as possible. Then the international language also enters into your being so that your mother tongue and your international language are interwoven. There is no conflict, and you have the capacity of smoothly moving from one language to another language – no question of translation, but a smooth movement – if both languages are available to you with the same roots within your being.It is one of the significant questions facing humanity. But it is strange that humanity never decides anything that is significant. It goes on fighting about insignificant things, things that are meaningless. For centuries they have been wasting time and not bothering to see that unless you can create one international language, you cannot create one world. These are basic steps.I am for one international language, and my choice is English – for the simple reason that it is already spread all over the world, although it is not the major language.Of the major languages, first is Chinese. But it is confined only to China; it cannot become a world language. More people speak Chinese, read Chinese, than any other language. Out of five, one person speaks Chinese, but they are located only in China; it cannot have any possibility of spreading. And if you have to learn it for thirty years I don’t think it is wise to even advise that it should become a world language.The second is Spanish, but its scope is also not as wide as English. And it is spoken not in the most advanced countries, but in the less advanced countries.Third in number is English. Although less people speak it than Chinese or Spanish, it is spread over a wide area, and that is a more significant reason to make it an international language.But people are concerned with such stupid things. Anando was just showing me a book review on Christianity in the Middle Ages.I have said again and again that Christianity is a cancer – but that book review even shocked me!In the Middle Ages they had special courts appointed by the pope and the Vatican where any woman could declare that her husband was impotent and that she wanted a divorce. And you cannot think of such stupidity – none of those bishops or cardinals had any knowledge of gynecology. And the court used to be full, because the man had to be naked before the court and show whether he was impotent or not.It is a simple, well-known fact that if people are watching you, you cannot have an erection. With so many people around watching and the fear that if he does not succeed in having an erection he will be stamped impotent, divorced…. And even if he managed – if he could not manage, that was decisive, he was finished – if he managed an erection, that was not enough. He actually had to make love to his wife before the court – because you may have an erection and you may not be able to penetrate the woman.And all this was being done in the name of religion! Humiliating!And it was an everyday thing. Any woman in anger would simply go, knowing perfectly well that her husband was not impotent. But to show your potency in public is a totally different affair.All those cardinals and bishops sitting and lining the court as judges were nothing but voyeurs. On a table the naked woman is lying and the man is trying to make love to her before this whole crowd of stupid people. In what kind of things humanity has been involved! – And it continued for centuries.It was also easy for a man to divorce – very easy. He just had to declare that he is impotent and stand there naked without an erection. Just take a cold bath and stand there in the court so it is proved that you are impotent – and sealed, a divorce is given to the woman. And all these people had great theological degrees and honors – and some of these people were going to become, in turn, popes.But humanity has remained involved with stupid things. Even if it was such an important thing, then a gynecological doctor and his dispensary – that would be the place to check the man and then inform the court, not in the court itself. But they really were voyeurs; they wanted to see living pornography. They were talking against pornography while creating living pornography, and never thinking for a second that they were reducing two human beings almost to animals, degrading them from humanity.But you can look from every aspect, from any corner, and you will find the so-called great religious leaders, political leaders, concerned with such stupid and small things – while the bigger issues, the real issues, are not even discussed.I don’t think anybody is bothering about whether there should be a world language, because that is the very foundation for one world.Osho,Hearing you talk about the difference between being a disciple and a devotee, I realized how far away I still am from devotion. My mind imagines dependency; but something else in me moves towards being dissolved and sucked into your being, in spite of all the fears. I experience those moments of disappearance – they are tremendously relaxing, but on the other hand they are painfully short.Can I turn into a devotee only when I reach to the center of the cyclone, or is it a condition for reaching there?It can happen both ways. Either you reach the center of the cyclone and you become a devotee, or you become a devotee and you will reach the center of the cyclone. They are not two things, just two ways of saying the same thing.And don’t be worried that you are too far away; you are not. Even if you have moments when you feel a merger, that is enough indication that greater moments will be coming. But don’t be greedy; greed is destructive. And don’t be desirous; desire is obstructive.Go on flowing the way you are flowing. You are exactly on the right path. It doesn’t matter whether you become a devotee or you reach the center of the cyclone; they are two names of the same space.It is going to happen to everybody – whoever is courageous enough to remain in tune with me just a little more. I don’t ask you for many years, for many lives – but just a little more; because my experience is, if you can go deeper for a few moments it will be beyond you to go back. Once you have passed the barrier from where a person can go back, then there is no fear, then you can take it at ease. It may happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow – it doesn’t matter.My concern is only that somehow I should help you to cross the barrier from where you cannot return.Beyond that, existence takes care of you.Osho,A few years back, every night when I was going off to sleep I would go into a space that was in between sleep and wakefulness and feel like I was leaving my body. There was no effort on my part; it was happening on its own. It felt like I would always only go a little way out, and then my body would suddenly jerk – although there was no outer or inner disturbance – and immediately I would return to my body.Now this space has not come up for me for a while. I'm wondering if it is that I am less relaxed. Also, what was holding me back when it was happening that did not allow me to go out further?First, there is no need to be worried about it. Out-of-body experiences are good nourishment for your spiritual growth, but they are not necessary. So if they are happening, or just by relaxing they come upon you, it is good; otherwise, don’t bother about them. They don’t have any essential meaning for your growth.So just out of curiosity don’t try to get out of your body. It won’t work. It either works spontaneously for certain reasons of which you are not aware…and I cannot say what the reasons were in your situation at that moment which caused your being to go out of the body.One thing is certain: whenever you spontaneously get out of the body, the body will give a jerk – because it is the death of the body, and you are going into a dangerous state.If something happens that disturbs your coming back, if somebody suddenly opens the door and your silver cord is broken…. The body has its own wisdom; it allows you a certain rope of freedom, so it allowed you in a certain state to go out, but not to go too far. That’s where it jerked, and that jerk was enough to bring you back because the relaxation was gone.And now it is not happening; there is no need, because it helps in no way in your spiritual growth. It only helps you to become a more authentic seeker, because you know your being as a truth. But if you are a seeker already, it will not be happening.There is no need to worry about it. Always remember: whatever happens, let it happen. Enjoy it. When it does not happen, just forget about it; perhaps its work is done. Don’t get puzzled, worried about it – why it happened, why it is not happening.This is what I call trust: something happens, you enjoy it; something does not happen, you enjoy that too. And whatever is necessary for your spiritual growth, existence will go on leading you towards it. Simply leave yourself in the hands of the unknown.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I was a boy, between twelve and fifteen years old, I often had, lying in my bed in the dark, strange experiences which I loved very much. It started by my imagining that my bed disappeared, then my room, the house, the town, all people, the country, the whole globe…Everything in the universe faded. There was utter darkness and silence; I was just floating in space.The disappearance of the last material things created a tremendous whirling around me. I was sucked into it; this feeling was almost sexual. It created a sweet, pulling sensation in my belly, which could last for seconds or sometimes for one to two minutes.I never talked to my parents or anybody else about it, because I feared they might think me mad.Osho, what was this experience?There is a Tantra method in which one does exactly the same exercise as you are describing from your childhood. For children it is easy, but for grown-ups also, it is not impossible. It is simply an exercise of the imagination. But that does not mean that what you experience is unreal.First, let me tell you about a Tantra method. It is for all ages. It has to be done in the dark, because in the dark you cannot see things, so it is easy to imagine that they have disappeared.Lying down is the most appropriate posture for it. Because man became man, attained a little bit of consciousness by standing up on his two feet – he became vertical – the blood stream now reaches less to his head than when he is lying horizontal. Lying down, the blood reaches in a greater quantity with more speed just because of gravitation. When you stand up, the blood has to go against gravitation; its flow is slowed down, its quantity is cut.That’s why no other animal has a conscious mind. Even when walking, a cow, a horse, a buffalo – they are horizontal. Their heads are receiving as much blood as any other part of the body. They cannot grow the very subtle, very small cells which enable man to think.But there is a possibility – and as far as I am concerned it is a certainty – that animals do imagine. They don’t have a conscious mind, but they do have an unconscious mind.Watching a dog you can see it. A dog is sleeping nearby; you can just watch: once in a while he will try to catch an imaginary fly, a fly which is not there. What is he doing? He imagined it. That catching of the fly which is not there must have been to him a reality in his imagination. And, of course, dogs think of flies just as men think of women.Nobody has tried to explore the unconscious of the animals. We are not even finished with man, so the question of animals does not arise. They are far back in the queue, standing and waiting. But the wisdom of people has always attributed a certain intelligence to animals.Aesop’s fables are fables about man, but all the actors are animals. panch tantra, the ancientmost book of stories, has fables which talk about man because they are written by man, but the actors, participants…everybody is an animal. And in every country there are ancient books in which animals are taking part, just like man. For example, in one of Aesop’s fables, a little goat – a kid – is drinking water from a mountain stream, and the king of the animals, the lion, comes by. It is breakfast time, and the kid is just a perfect breakfast. But even animals have to find excuses first, so the lion says to the goat, “Kid, you are very arrogant; you see the emperor of the whole animal kingdom, and yet you are muddying the water which I am going to drink.”The poor kid says, “Uncle, the stream is going this way. I cannot make the water muddy for you; you are standing above me. The stream comes first to you and then to me. This is too much.”He was right. The lion becomes very angry and he says, “You don’t know manners – how to talk with elders. The same was so with your father. Yesterday he was talking with me and he misbehaved. I was engaged in some political work, but I am searching for him.”The kid says, “Forgive me, uncle, my father has been dead for a few weeks; he could not have insulted you yesterday.”Finding no excuse, the lion still catches the kid and tells him, “You talk against your elders? I will teach you a lesson – and the lesson is a good breakfast.”A story about animals but not about animals, it is about man, his inhumanity to those who are weak, powerless, poor. But still, for manners’ sake, you have to find some excuse.These stories have always been interpreted as parables for children, but my feeling is there is something more to it. It indicates that animals may not be thinking, but they still dream – because dreaming does not need anybody to stand erect.For dreaming you also have to lie down, to be in a horizontal position, so the conscious mind cannot function. It needs only a very small quantity of blood; with a greater quantity it goes to sleep. If an even greater quantity comes, it becomes dead. But the unconscious mind goes on working. Of course its language is not alphabetical; its language is of pictures.So a small child lying down on his bed can very easily visualize that the walls are disappearing, the room is disappearing, the bed is disappearing, the trees outside are disappearing. Everything is disappearing and the world is fading…only he is left in his total aloneness in this beautiful dark deep silence.But this is a method prescribed by Tantra scriptures that anybody can do – and it will be helpful for meditation.It is an unfortunate thing that parents are unaware of the whole heritage of man. In different directions man has been working to develop consciousness. If all that is available to the parents, perhaps they will not think you are going crazy; they will rejoice, they will help you, they will reward you. They will try to help you so you can go deeper into the experience.You have found, accidentally, a right door. And the child can have from the very beginning a taste of meditation, and he can go on helping it grow every day. By the time he is a young man he will have a mature meditativeness. Then there is no need to lie down on the bed. He can sit or stand, and he can go into the same silence – even with open eyes. It is just a question of going more and more into the same experience so it becomes easy, simple.But all the societies have condemned everything that can help your being to evolve. They don’t want it. If you had told anybody, you would have been condemned as mad: “Stop it; otherwise you are risking your sanity.” And in fact by stopping it you risked your sanity.That’s why I say that every father, every mother, should go through a certain training in which they are taught how to be a father, how to be a mother; where they are made aware that the child is very potent, and that he can manage many things that you cannot, and that this is the time. If you stop him, later on it will become more and more difficult.Your experience, Premda, was good, immensely good. And if you try it again, perhaps you may be able to enter the same space without any trouble. We are here together to go into all these experiences; these are different ways of touching your own being.The method is imagination. The walls don’t disappear, and neither do the trees or anything else. That is only a device. But if you can visualize their disappearing, naturally, only you are left, which cannot disappear whatever you do. No imagination is possible to make you disappear; the watcher is beyond imagination, beyond mind. What has remained is a watcher, a witness – and that is your pure consciousness.So don’t be worried that what you have used as a strategy was imagination. It doesn’t matter, because you were not interested in walls disappearing; that was just to create a space in which you are freed from everything – whether it is there or not – and you come to the beautiful aloneness of your being. Just a moment of it is an eternity.And this is a prescribed Tantra method, well established for centuries. You cannot go mad. In fact, anything that could have led you into madness has disappeared; now only pure consciousness is there. Pure consciousness has never gone mad.So what happened in childhood was good. It would have been better if you had continued, but you can start again – because anything that has happened once, leaves a certain mark in you; you can start from there again. It may take a little trouble, it may not be so easy, but it will come – in one day, two days, it will come. And if it doesn’t come, then you go to Kaveesha.Osho,The other night, along with a few other people, I was hypnotized by Kaveesha. When she began by asking us to take deep breaths – the Zen flute playing, the incense and the candle burning – I immediately went into a space where my chest felt full, like tears were welling up inside. I felt like I was in a space that I once was in before – a place where I was closest to my inner home, a place my body was relaxed in, where meditation came naturally and the surroundings were warm.Why was there sadness coming up when this experience was happening?With every experience of this kind you will feel a certain sadness coming to you. The sadness is: “Why does this experience not remain forever?” The sadness simply signifies your deep longing for this state to become stable. And it is a natural phenomenon: whenever you feel something that is of immense beauty and peace, you would like to remain in it forever, to feel there is nothing that can bring you out of it. But one has to come out of it – and that brings sadness.But don’t take that sadness in any negative way. It is a good indicator. It simply shows that you should practice it more – go deeper – and one day it becomes a natural phenomenon. Twenty-four hours a day you are surrounded with a fragrance, with a light, with silence within. Twenty-four hours a day you are relaxed, there is no tension in your body, in your mind. But before it comes, many times you will feel sad – “Why is it not a permanent state of my being?”It is simply a longing that is becoming sadness. The window opens, you see the sunset; and before you have even seen it and the beauty has been absorbed, the window closes. And there is sadness: “The window could have remained open a little more.” But the window opens only according to your capacity. Whatever you have earned, the window remains open only for that long. Beyond that it can be dangerous.So don’t feel bad about sadness; it is a safety too. Even in experiences of oneself, safety measures are needed. But nature has them already prepared for you. You will have a glimpse only for that much time and to that much depth – as much as you deserve – neither less nor more. And it is good, because if you get more you will not be able to absorb it.Everybody who is meditating comes to a point when he starts feeling, “Why does meditation not continue the whole day?” But he does not know that he is not capable of handling the world and its affairs with meditation running as an undercurrent. He will be in difficulty. He may be in great danger: the world has no need of meditation. You will have just as much as you deserve, and you should feel thankful for it. It will be growing…with your gratitude it will be growing.But sadness can become a barrier, because each time you come to the window you will have sadness; they will become associated. And the law of association is really a difficult law. Then it will become more and more difficult to get rid of sadness.So simply don’t pay any attention to sadness. If it comes, take it in the natural way. It is natural; you had a beautiful experience, and it has gone. Sadness is simply its going away, a friend departing. But don’t give more importance to it. Ignore it; accepting it as natural, ignore it.You know about Pavlov, one Russian psychologist, who in the beginning of this century proved the law of association – which is his great contribution. In Russia you will not hear the name of Freud, Adler or Jung – only Pavlov. He has developed a totally different psychology – Pavlovian psychology. And because it fits with communism, they have rejected all other psychologies; there is only one psychology, and that is Pavlovian. It is not a complete picture of the human psyche, but this law is certainly true.He used to give his dog…all his experiments were with dogs…he had seventy dogs. Even after the revolution when private property was dissolved, the communist government allowed him to have private property – because how could he manage his seventy dogs and a big lab with strange kinds of instruments? But his psychology was proving in some way that communism should be allowed. He was the only man in the Soviet Union who was allowed to remain exactly the same way as before the revolution.He would feed the dog, and while the dog was eating he would go on ringing a bell. Now, a bell has nothing to do with food; you can ring a bell before any dog and he will not take any interest. He will think that you are a little crackpot: “What are you doing ringing a bell before a dog? What is the point?” He may even turn away just to avoid listening to your ringing bell.But you could not have expected what happened to Pavlov’s dogs. After fifteen days of feeding the dog and at the same time ringing the bell, on the sixteenth day there was no food, just the ringing of the bell – and the dog was ready for food, his tongue hanging out. And this was done with not one dog but seventy dogs. He was a scientist: one dog cannot prove anything, you need to have enough evidence – seventy dogs. As the bell was ringing, their saliva was dripping, their tongues were hanging out. Nobody could believe that with the ringing of a bell this could happen. This he called the law of association.While he was eating, the dog was also listening to the ringing of the bell. The eating of the food and the listening to the bell became associated in his mind. They became locked, so much so that not only when you rang the bell was the dog ready for food – although there was no food – but he was perfectly ready to eat. And vice versa: when the food was there, he was waiting for the bell to ring and he would not eat.That was a surprise to Pavlov himself. He was thinking that the first thing was okay – that the bell became associated with food. But food is associated with hunger and biology…. The dog would look at him as if to say, “What are you doing? Ring the bell!” – because it had become locked. Without the ringing of the bell, the dog would not feel that the food was juicy. It became a kind of music that helped him to taste the food better – and not one dog but seventy dogs were behaving in the same way.So always remember this law. When you are entering inwards, don’t get associated with anything that can become a hindrance.For example, when you feel some beautiful, blissful experience, sadness is bound to come – because that experience will go. But don’t pay too much attention to the sadness, just think that it is natural: “It only shows my longing that the experience should continue.” Otherwise, if you pay too much attention to sadness you are creating an interlock system in your mind, so that whenever you have a beautiful experience, immediately your mind will produce sadness – whether it is now necessary or not.Emphasize the positive, be grateful for the positive, rejoice in the positive – and ignore the negative that is bound to follow like a shadow.When your friend leaves your home, departs, do you pay much attention to his shadow? You don’t even take note of it. In the same way, remember: anything beautiful happening to you will have a shadow to it, until you come to a stage when the twenty-four hours of your day are lit up and there is no shadow possible.That happens – that will happen – but you have to keep these things in your awareness. When sadness comes, thank sadness too: “You are simply my longing for the beautiful experience.” In this way you are cutting the roots of sadness, you are not making it a polar opposite to your experience. You are changing the whole arrangement. You are saying to it, “I know you are my longing for that beautiful experience; but it will come, and it will be coming more and more.”In this way, even through sadness you are emphasizing the beautiful experience, its longing. You are not making sadness a separate entity, in itself important. If it becomes a separate entity, it will become associated; then you can’t have a twenty-four-hour-a-day, waking, sleeping meditativeness, you will have only fragments…alternating, a beautiful moment and sadness. And as the beautiful moment will become deepened, the sadness will also become deepened; it is its shadow.So on the one hand you will be earning ecstasy; on the other hand you will be suffering again – and the whole fault will be yours. From the very beginning, be careful. Don’t give it any independent existence. Thank it: “You remind me of the beautiful experience; you remind me that the beautiful experience should be continued.” And soon it will happen.So make it secondary, just an epiphenomenon. And as your aloneness will be deepening, the sadness will not be deepening, because you are not giving juice to it; it will remain shallow. And soon a day will come: you will come out of your meditation and you will not find sadness. Now, you have accepted that there are moments of meditation and there are moments of no-meditation; but there is no question of sadness. You have dropped the desire and the longing which were creating the sadness, and you have not paid any attention to it. It has died of its own accord.Attention is food.We are not aware of many things which we are living…. In one scientific experiment, two baby monkeys are fed the same food, given the same medical care, the same comforts…everything is the same. Just one thing is different for one baby monkey: the doctor gives him attention – pets him, sits with him, plays with him. And with the second he simply does his duty – no communication, no human warmth, no attention. The monkey that is given attention survives; the monkey that is not given attention dies. The same experiment has been done on other animals; the result is always the same.Now it is to be accepted that attention is some kind of nourishment. By giving attention to anything you are pouring your warmth, your love, and you are saying, “There is somebody for whom you have to exist, there is somebody who will miss you.”The other baby monkey, he lives, but there is nobody for whom he lives; there is no meaning in his life. Nobody pays attention to him, nobody communicates with him. It does not matter whether he lives or not. If he dies nobody is going to shed a single tear for him. That idea itself kills him. But it is the idea – “If I die somebody will miss me, somebody will come and sit by my cradle and weep” – that revives the spirit.So, attention is a very psychological nourishment, a psychological vitamin. And the same is true about your emotions, your feelings, anything that you are doing.Remember the rule: whatever you want to save, give attention to it, pour your love on it, appreciate it. And whatever you want to disappear from your life, ignore it…at the most thank it: “You remind me of the positive and the beautiful feeling.” That is a sure killer.One of my friends married a woman…he used to love another woman, but he could not marry her. She was of a high-caste Hindu brahmin family, and he was of a low caste. She was rich, he was poor. And in India it is very difficult – an intercaste marriage – because you then become an outcast. You will not get a job, people will not like to talk to you, you will not get a house for rent – a simple boycott. And you cannot live if the society boycotts you completely.But finally he married another woman.I asked him, “What are you doing?”He said, “She looks exactly like the woman I wanted to love.”I said, “That’s true. But she is not the woman you loved, she only looks like her. And the moment she discovers it – and she’s bound to discover it as you cannot hide it – it will kill her.”He said, “No, how she can find out? I have confided only in you, and I know you are not going to tell her.”I said, “I am not going to tell her. You, yourself, with your behavior, will tell her twenty-four hours a day.”And within two years the woman was badly sick. I went to see her. She was a young woman just two years before. I could not believe how she had withered away. I asked, “What has happened?”She said, “Nobody can understand, but perhaps you can. He has married me because I look like the girl he loved. But he does not love me; he only pretends. But his pretending cannot satisfy me. I don’t want to be anybody else’s substitute, I want to be myself. My sickness is not of the body, my sickness is of the soul. I will never say it to him because he has suffered much. The first woman he loved, he could not get. And now I should not make more suffering for him. It is better I should die.”I said, “This is nonsense – you have your own life.”She said, “I don’t; I am only a substitute. When he hugs me I know whom he is really hugging. He does not give me any warmth. When he loves me I know whom he is really loving, and suddenly I become cold.”Within two months she died, and I told the man, “You are a murderer because you don’t understand a simple fact of life – that people cannot live by bread alone. They need something more: they need attention, they need love.”And attention and love are very invisible nourishment. But the same is true about your emotions, so never feed any negative emotion. Pour all your love, all your energy, into a positive experience. And the day will not be far away when the experience will start spreading as an undercurrent into the twenty-four hours of your day.Osho,I feel emotionally totally exhausted. Something is ripping me apart, but I can't figure out what. In the last few days I've been through intense spells of hating myself. It feels like an attack, and it looks impossible to love such a creature. On another level I am telling myself to watch, be aware of these emotions, telling myself they are not real. But when I am caught up in them, everything is totally real – it just depends on what level has the upper hand at the time. When I step outside of this inner turmoil I can see this insane person going through her daily routine, acting quite normally.Is this the way to grow, or am I just plainly cuckoo, schizophrenic, stuck in a circle?Everybody goes through the circle; it is normal. Only one thing you are doing wrong – which will make you take longer to get rid of the misery – and that is: when you feel these negative emotions about yourself, don’t try to watch them. It is not yet the ripe time. Simply live them.It is watching that is giving you the idea of a schizophrenic or split personality – because on the one hand you have these negative feelings about yourself, and on the other hand you are trying to remind yourself that you are just a watcher and these are just images which will fade away. You are cutting yourself in two.The first thing I suggest is: don’t cut yourself in two.I would have suggested to you to be watchful, but the time is not ripe, you cannot be. Before you can be totally one with watchfulness, you have to go through the hell of all your negative emotions; otherwise they will be repressed and they will erupt at any moment, at any weak time.So it is better to get rid of them. But getting rid of them does not mean you have to be watchful. First, forget about watchfulness. Live each emotion that you feel; it is you. Hateful, ugly, unworthy – whatever it is, you be actually in it. First give them a chance to come up totally into the conscious. Right now, by your effort of watchfulness you are repressing them into the unconscious. And then you get involved in your day-to-day work and you force them back again. That is not the way to get rid of them.Let them come out – live them, suffer them. It will be difficult and tedious but immensely rewarding. Once you have lived them, suffered them, accepted them, that this is you, that you have not made yourself in this way so you need not condemn yourself, that this is the way you have found yourself – once they are lived consciously, without any repression, you will be surprised that they are disappearing on their own. Their force on you is becoming less, their grip on your neck is no longer that tight. And when they are going away, there may be a time when you can start watching.In the East they have a parable: an elephant passes through a door…the elephant has passed, but his shadow is still inside the door and it looks almost like the elephant. This is the time when the elephant has passed and only the shadow has remained. That you can watch – because shadows cannot go into the unconscious; shadows don’t have any existence. If you are watchful, aware, the shadow will die, disappear. But first let the elephant go.You are keeping the elephant in. You can hide the elephant inside, but for how long? And you will be carrying the elephant and its weight all the time. In each of your actions it will have some influence. You will do things but there will be anger, you will do things but there will be hatred, you will do things but almost like a zombie – because that elephant is too heavy.And you are not responsible for it. In fact, nobody is responsible for it. God used to be responsible, but he is dead; that was his only function. You can call the society responsible, you can call the parents responsible, but that does not help. That may give you a kind of solace, but it is not a solution. Remember, nobody is responsible; this is the way you have found yourself.And I don’t see that there is anything abnormal in it; everybody passes through it more or less. One thing has to be remembered: the bigger the elephant you are carrying within you, the bigger will be the release and freedom. So everything is balance. Your suffering may be great, but your blessing will also be great. So don’t be bothered by it. What is wrong in it?Just live it.For you, for the time being, the only way is to live it totally, so that the elephant can come out unafraid: “Now I am ready to live; there is no problem to hide.” And once everything comes into the conscious mind it disperses, and when only the shadow is there, that is the time to become aware. Right now it will create schizophrenia; then it will create enlightenment.And never be worried about big problems. All our problems are small. We are small – how can there be big problems? Secondly, whatever the depth of the problem will be the depth of your freedom, of your benediction when the problem disappears. So you will be perfectly balanced.But remember not to repress. Your idea of being watchful right now is nothing but repression.I will tell you one day – you will ask me one day – “Now it is the time to start being awake.” Just a little patience…and we all can afford it.Osho,Why do I always feel like you are pulling my big toe when you answer my questions?Milarepa, I am pulling everybody’s toe, but nobody is crazy enough to confess it. Everybody knows it…because do you think I come here to speak? I come here to pull your big toe. And everybody knows – but nobody tells it to anybody else!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When you relate to us the stories of your student days, or your time as a professor, I often wonder what it must have been like to have been one of those studying with you or under you – I know I certainly would have had a crush on you. I imagine your fellow students were both wary and admiring of you. Your own students must have enjoyed you tremendously. I was intrigued when you mentioned recently that you started a small meditation group in the university. I should love to hear you talk about how you affected the lives of those around you. I often wonder if they have followed your various exploits through the media and other friends. Quite possibly this is simply one of those questions which fall under the category of mere curiosity, but I adore it when you talk about your earlier days. It makes me feel I loved you even before I knew you.The students who studied with me had strange feelings about me. Different persons have different ideas about me. The majority was certainly against me for the simple reason that to them I appeared as a disturbance. They were not there for any search, they were there to attain a degree, to find a job, to have a family. I was not interested either in the examinations or in the degrees, my focus was always in the present, on the subject that was being taught. And I wanted to explore it exhaustively.The majority was against that, because if each subject has to be studied in such an exhaustive way, then the syllabus cannot be completed in three years…it cannot even be completed in two hundred years…and they were worried about their examinations. My concern and their concern were totally different – diametrically opposite.I was interested in the moment, in the subject; they were not interested in the subject, they were only interested in taking notes, preparing for the future examination. I have never taken any notes; neither have I allowed any student, when I became a professor, to take notes in my class, because taking notes means you have moved to the future, you are not here now, you are preparing for somewhere else, for something else.Even professors continually encouraged students – and I think that is the practice all over the world – to take notes of important things they are teaching, without understanding the simple fact that while a student is concerned with taking notes, he is not being totally available to what is being taught.I told my professors, “It is unimaginable for me that you people encourage rather than discourage an activity which is a direct insult to you. You are teaching; the taught should be totally alert, listening to it, absorbing it, drinking it. Not one of you bothers about it. You tell them to take notes; you are teaching them postponement for the future.”The teachers were against me, the majority of the students were against me, but these were the mediocre people.There were a few students who were immensely in love with me because what they could not question out of fear, what they could not present in an articulate way as an argument, I could. And they all enjoyed. I became, in a certain way, their spokesman. They were more interested in my arguments than in what the teacher was saying, because my arguments were taking the subject to its deeper roots.A few teachers were also there who loved me. But very few enjoyed and openly accepted that my argument was weightier than their own argument. They said, “But please remember that my argument will help you to pass the examination. Your argument will not help.”I told them, “I have no concern with the examination at all. Whether I fail or pass, that is not the point. To me, the point is whether I present myself sincerely, authentically.”In my final MA examination, one of my professors was very much concerned because my paper was going to be examined by an old professor of Allahabad University who was world famous as a scholar on Indian philosophical thought – Dr. Ranade. And it was well-known that to get a passing mark from him was the most you could hope for. He has, all over the country, a name for that. Mostly, people failed; his criteria were not ordinarily fulfilled.My paper was also going to be examined by him, so my teacher of Indian philosophy was very much concerned. I told him, “Relax, because it is my examination, not your examination!”He could not sleep. He said, “I know you are going into a difficulty. That man is a little eccentric, and he is such an authority that nobody can challenge him.”I said, “The need will not arise. Who knows, he may be waiting for me. I may be his criterion.”He laughed; he said, “You don’t know him. He has failed so many people and he has not given a first class rating to anybody in his whole life. And now he is retired. But still because of his fame, universities go on sending him examination papers.”It was almost as if he was going into the examination. I had to console him and tell him to relax and rest and not be worried.And I did just what he was afraid of…I did exactly that because I could not do anything else. My answers to his paper, his question paper, became rather an argument, and that’s what my professor was worried about: “He is such an authority that nobody questions him. And you will create a situation in which he may feel offended. He may give you zero; he has given zero to many people.”His first question was “What is Indian philosophy?” and I simply answered in one line: “There is no such thing in the world. The question is absurd and does not deserve any more wastage of time for the simple reason that philosophy cannot be divided by geography; you are putting geography on a higher scale than philosophy. Now, what has philosophy to do with geography? Thoughts have no geographical boundaries, they are universal. There is only one philosophy, and that is universal. So never again ask such a question.”Certainly he must have been shocked because he was not expecting…and his whole life people have been polite to him. And now he was an ancient, wise man…but all his questions I answered in the same way. And when I told my teacher how I had answered his questions, tears came to his eyes.I said, “You are mad! I am going to be given a mark of zero because he cannot give less than that. But why are you…?”He said, “I feel for you. I understand you. What you are saying is right. But right is not the question; the question is what is acceptable, what the knowledgeable people recognize as right.”But Dr. Ranade really proved to be a man of integrity. He gave me ninety-nine percent and wrote a special note to the vice-chancellor mentioning that the note should be shown to me. And the note was: “You shocked me as nobody ever has. But your answers were original, and you did not care at all whether you were going to pass or fail. You were so total in each of your answers that it was irrelevant what happened to be the result. I loved your totality, I loved your intensity, I loved your originality – and for the first time I have come across a student I have been waiting for.”The vice-chancellor called me. My teacher said, “Some note against you must have come because the papers have come back. I am coming with you.” And when he saw the note he could not believe it. He said, “Today I can say that miracles happen. I was thinking you were going to get zero, and you have ninety-nine percent!”And Dr. Ranade had mentioned in his note, “I was going to give you one hundred percent but that may look as if I am favoring you too much; that’s why I have taken off the one percent. It is not that something is wrong in your answers, it is just my old habit, a lifelong habit of cutting. I cannot do much, but at least I can take off one percent.”I enjoyed my student life immensely. Whether people were against me, for me, indifferent, loved me…all those experiences were beautiful. All that helped me immensely when I myself became a teacher, because I could see the students’ viewpoint simultaneously when I was presenting mine.And my classes became debating clubs. Everybody was allowed to doubt, to argue. Once in a while somebody started worrying about what would happen to the course, because on each single point there was so much argument.I said, “Don’t be worried. All that is needed is a sharpening of your intelligence. The course is a small thing – you can read for it in one night. If you have a sharp mind, even without reading for it you can answer. But if you don’t have a sharp mind, even the book can be provided to you and you will not be able to find where the answer is. In a five hundred page book the answer must be somewhere in one paragraph.”In Russia they have already experimented with it, and they have made significant conclusions. They allow students to carry as many books as they want. They allow students to ask the teacher in the examination hall, “I need a certain book.” Immediately it will be brought from the library.Their understanding is that the old kind of examination was only an examination of the memory; now this is an examination of your intelligence. You have to find an answer – and you can find it only if you have studied, argued, known those books. Only then can you find the answer. In a dozen books you cannot immediately find the question and its answer.They were surprised to find out that in the ordinary old-style examinations – as they do all over the world – certain students come first. With the same class, with the new methodology – where all books are available – a different kind of student comes first, not the same old ones who were coming first, because now it is an examination of intelligence not of memory. Now memory is not of much help. You need a sharpness, an understanding of what is being asked, and you need to be well read so that either you know the answer by yourself or you can consult the books. But the time is limited; if you are not sharp enough, within three hours you may not be able to answer even one question.And the phenomenon that a different category of students comes first and the category that was coming first gets a second class rating, a third class rating, definitely proves that intelligence is a totally different phenomenon from memory. Memory can create servants, slaves, computers, not intelligent people.So my classes were totally different. Everything had to be discussed, everything had to be looked into, in the deepest possible way, from every corner, from every aspect – and accepted only if your intelligence felt satisfied. Otherwise, there was no need to accept it; we could continue the discussion the next day.And I was amazed to know that when you discuss something and discover the logical pattern, the whole fabric, you need not remember it. It is your own discovery; it remains with you. You cannot forget it.My students certainly loved me because nobody else would give them so much freedom, nobody else would give them so much respect, nobody else would give them so much love, nobody else would help them to sharpen their intelligence.Every teacher was concerned about his salary. I myself never went to collect the salary. I would just give my authority to a student and say, “Whenever the first day of the month comes, you collect the salary, and you can bring it to me. And if you need any part of it you can keep it.”All the years I was in the university somebody or other was bringing me my salary. The man who was distributing the salaries once came to see me just to say, “You never appear. I have been hoping that sometime you would come and I would see you. But seeing that perhaps you will never come to the office, I have come to your house just to see what kind of man you are – because there are professors who start early in the morning, on the first of each month, lining up for their salary. You are always missing. Any student might appear with your signature and authority, and I don’t know whether the salary reaches you or not.”I said, “You need not be worried, it has always been reaching me.” When you trust someone, it is very difficult for them to deceive.All the years I was a teacher, not a single student to whom I had given the authority had taken any part of it, although I had told them, “It is up to you. If you feel like having it all, you can have it. If you want to keep a part of it you can keep it. And it is not lent to you so that you have to return it, because I don’t want to be bothered by remembering who owes how much money to me. It is simply yours; it doesn’t matter.” But not a single student ever took any part of the salary.All the teachers were interested only in the salary, in the competition of getting higher posts. I have seen nobody who was really interested in the students and their future and particularly in their spiritual growth.Seeing that, I opened a small school of meditation. One of my friends offered his beautiful bungalow and garden, and he made a marble temple for me, for meditations, so at least fifty people could sit and meditate in the temple. Many students, many professors – even the vice-chancellors came to understand what meditation is, tried….But as I left the university and I initiated the movement of sannyas, a tremendous change happened. My initiation of the movement of sannyas created trouble. None of my colleagues – teachers who had been with me for years – would even come to see me. Some were Hindus, some were Mohammedans, some were Jainas – and I was a rebellious spirit. I belonged to nobody.And the people who used to come to me – I was still teaching the same meditation – started spreading opposition to me, because now it was a question of their religion, their tradition, their church. They did not even come to understand that I am doing the same thing. Just because my people have started wearing red clothes does not mean that my teaching has changed. I just wanted to give an identity to my people so that they could be known all over the world and they could be recognized everywhere.But they stopped coming – not only teachers but even students who had loved me. And then I saw that all our love and all our respect, all our friendship is so shallow that if our tradition, our convention, our old, ancient beliefs are in some way attacked, all our love, all our friendship disappears.You will be surprised: even the friend who had given me his bungalow and had the marble temple made especially for me sent a message – he could not face me himself – he sent a message from his manager that because I did not belong to any ancient path, I should not use his place for my meditation school…as if anything old is bound to be gold. Most probably the older it is, the more rotten it is.I sent him a message, “I will leave your house and the temple, and you can do whatsoever you want with it. But I am with the sunrise; I am not with the sunset. And I want the whole world to be with the new and not with the old.”Truth always moves with the fresh and the young and the innocent. It dies with the knowledgeable, the scholarly, the clever, the so-called wise – who are really otherwise.After sannyas, there was a demarcation line. The people who used to know me before, slowly, slowly backed away. New people, new faces started coming. And this has been going on with each new phase of my work. A few old faces disappear and a few new faces bring new blood and new juice to the movement.From all over the world messages have come to me that at every center, even though the whole movement is in a difficulty – I do not have a home, the movement does not have a headquarters – from each small center news goes on coming that new people are becoming sannyasins, people who we have never thought would become sannyasins. The pressure from all the governments of the world is helping immensely. Anybody who is courageous, who has some respect for freedom, some taste of intelligence, has started coming into the movement.A few old faces will be lost, and it is good that they are lost. Perhaps they were no longer in tune; their time was over. You can be with me only if you are alive. The moment you are dead, we simply celebrate. We say good-bye to you, and you vacate a space for some new one, some new blood, new life, a new flower to take your place. This has been going on….There are many layers of people who have been with me and have dropped. Only very few people have remained with me from the very beginning; they are the most blessed ones. Since they have come they have broken their bridges, they have forgotten to look backwards. They know they have come to the home they were searching for and seeking, and now there is nowhere else to go.One thing is certain: those who for some reason or other are left on the road, who have moved in some other direction, will never find again the same love, the same light, the same understanding. They will miss me forever. And this is going to be my last life, because I will not be in the body again – so I feel sorry for them.Those who are with me can understand it, what those people are missing – people who for some small reason, some excuse, departed on their own. I have never told anybody to leave – I am always a welcome. I feel sad for them, because they cannot find any other place on this planet. They will always remain missing, and because of their ego they will not be able to come back.But the whole journey has been of tremendous joy. I started alone, and then people went on coming without my calling them, without my inviting them. The caravan began to become bigger and bigger, and now it is spread all over the world.This bigness and this spontaneous coming of people has made all the politicians and all the religious people tremendously afraid. Their fear is not unfounded. They know that they cannot give what people can get somewhere else; hence, their efforts are to prevent me from reaching people, to prevent people from reaching me – in such ugly ways. It was good in a way to know that this whole world for which I have been struggling my whole life to make a better world…. But I have never been in such contact all around the world.From one island, the prime minister himself has invited me to come there and said that he would love it if I accepted his invitation. I sent Jayesh and Hasya to see the place, and when they reached there – just today they informed us – the prime minister asked for one billion dollars as a bribe.This is our world.He invites me himself, and I sent my people to work out how many people he can give permanent residence to, how many people will be coming every year to visit. When they arrived he immediately – he didn’t even bother to talk about anything else – he immediately said, “I am ready to accept, but the price is one billion dollars, cash.”These are our political leaders.In another country we are trying to purchase a castle. Because my name is involved, the price immediately goes so high. The owner is asking nine million dollars for the castle! He cannot sell it for nine million even if he tries for his whole life.And this is not all – he is asking almost double the price…. The country has two parties, and each party wants some money so there will be no problem from anybody – the ruling party gets money, the opposition party gets money. And it is not only once; every time there is an election they are saying that we have to give at least two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to each party.And these people teach about morality, purity, character – and this is their character.It has been a good round. I have just sent Hasya and Jayesh to the last country. I have sent the message to the prime minister: “We were going to bring five billion dollars, but not now. With such a mean-minded prime minister who invites us and then asks for one billion dollars…we are not going to come to your country, we are going somewhere else.”There is one country left which is a possibility – a one percent possibility; otherwise, we have to go on a liner, an ocean liner. And that will be a clear-cut condemnation of the whole earth and all these nations. If a man speaks the truth, he has no place on the earth…he has to live on the ocean.We will be bringing the biggest ocean liner so at least five thousand people can be on it. My only worry is that these mean politicians and religious leaders may start – and it has never been done – to make laws that our ocean liner cannot stop at their ports. If they can make laws that my airplane cannot land at their airports, they can make laws that my ocean liner cannot come to their ports.But that too…it will be good for the whole world to see their real faces, that they can kill five thousand people, let them go hungry, without water, without food…. They are talking about loving your enemy and they are talking about beautiful things – and their behavior is simply disgusting.Osho,In an American magazine article, Mother Teresa is described as a rebel in the male-dominated hierarchy of the Catholic establishment. If Mother Teresa is regarded as being on a par with someone like Joan of Arc, God help the Catholic church!The person who has described Mother Teresa as a rebel does not know the meaning of the word. She is a slave in the male-dominated Catholic hierarchy. She is no one. No woman has ever been a pope and no woman ever will be.And what kind of rebel is she? – she kneels down before Pope the Polack and kisses his hand. This is rebellion? And she goes on supplying more orphans to the Catholics to increase their population…because population is a great factor in politics, so much so that nobody looks at the whole world.Just the other day I saw that because Mohammedans produce more children – naturally, because they can marry four wives – Israel is very worried. The Mohammedan ocean all around is becoming bigger. So, Israel is perhaps the only country now in the world whose government is giving incentives to produce more children, saying that everybody should have at least four children. They are not concerned about the world, that the population is already too much. Their only concern is with their local politics, that Mohammedans should not become too many, and Jews, in number, too small.There is a politics of population. The Catholic church has more than seven hundred and fifty million people in the world – the biggest single block as far as religions are concerned. And Mother Teresa is praised, not because she is a rebel but because she is a servile person who is simply bringing more and more orphans into the Catholic church, converting poor Indians to the Catholic religion. So the pope blesses her.I would have accepted the description if the pope had knelt before Mother Teresa and kissed her hand; then it would have meant something, that the Catholic, male-oriented hierarchy accepts Mother Teresa as being higher than the pope. But she is simply an instrument in the hands of the male-dominated church. She has no position. But because she has been helping the population to grow so much, they arrange a Nobel Prize for her, they arrange other awards, doctorates for her. Don’t be befooled by these things; these are just toys, and all are political.One of my sannyasins, an economist from England, got a Nobel Prize. Our sannyasins told him, “You are now a Nobel Prize winner…nobody has contributed so much to modern insights into human relationships, the human revolution, as Osho. You should try for a Nobel Prize for him.”He said, “Do you think I have not tried? In fact, I tried so much that I said, ‘Don’t give it to me; I am his disciple. Let this Nobel Prize be given to Osho.’ But his name, just his name is enough to shock everybody. There was a pin-drop silence in the committee, and my friends suggested, ‘Don’t mention that name in the committee again. It has nothing to do with what a person has contributed or is contributing – it is all politics. And unless there is political support, it is impossible to get a Nobel Prize.’”I informed the sannyasins: “You tell him to tell the committee that even if they want to give me a Nobel Prize, I will reject it because I know it is all a political drama. And I don’t want to be categorized with Mother Teresa and all kinds of fools.”In fact, Mother Teresa is against women’s liberation, so whoever has written the article is either ignorant or trying to praise Mother Teresa. And there is a political motive behind it: she is against women’s liberation for the simple reason that she is against birth control. She is against the pill, and the pill is the greatest possibility for women to be liberated from men; otherwise, women will always remain dependent, slaves.If you follow Mother Teresa’s ideas, then a woman will have child after child, a woman will remain only a mother, continually pregnant. Her whole life will be wasted in producing children, bringing up children. She cannot be economically independent, she cannot be educated, she cannot stand in any field with man as a competitor.The pill can create the situation where the woman is equal to the man, because the pill makes her free from constant pregnancy, it makes her free from dependence. She can be economically free, financially free, and ultimately she can demand that marriage not be needed: “If we love, we are together; if we don’t love, we say goodbye to each other – in good faith.” There is no question of any fight.So whoever calls Mother Teresa a rebel is just an idiot. She is one of the persons in the world who is the most reactionary.Rebellion needs real guts.She is traditional, orthodox, conventional…a believer in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, a believer in the miracles of Jesus Christ, a believer in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a believer that Christianity is the highest religion, a believer that only one who is Christian will be saved – and you call this woman a rebel?Then who am I?Osho,Sitting in the dark I become lighter and lighter, emptier and emptier, like a soap bubble bouncing on the grass. And a giggle arises from my belly to play with the soap bubble, and I feel possessed. I am so happy to be with you. Osho, when I took sannyas you taught me how to feel possessed, and this was the greatest gift of my life. And yet after it happened a few times, I remembered that it used to happen often when I was a kid, at night, lying in my bed. Is that what you mean when you said that you are giving us back what we always had?Right…absolutely right!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-transmission-of-lamp-08/

Osho,A couple of years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock. In it he described how the world around us is changing faster than ever before. And not only that: the rate of change is increasing all the time. He describes how half of all Americans change homes at least every five years; how people change husbands, wives, jobs, cities and careers with increasing rapidity…Not to mention all the trivial proprietary products from cars to soap powder that change with bewildering frequency.He also outlines the enormous increase in information, scientific and otherwise. Human knowledge is said to double every ten years, and the doubling time is getting shorter all the time. Compared with the relatively unchanging world of our parents and grandparents, this is a new phenomenon indeed. In the old days they said that a sense of stability was necessary for a normal development and the avoidance of mental illness. This stability has clearly gone forever. Even if we avoid any of several catastrophes looming before mankind, it seems this rapidly changing world is only going to be healthily populated by meditators – the only people who will be able to live joyously in the center of the cyclone.Would you please comment?Alvin Toffler’s book is already out-of-date. He writes that in America people change things within five years. Now the time is three years: within three years’ time they change their jobs, their spouses, their cities – not to mention small things which are changing every day. The rate of knowledge, according to him, is doubling every ten years; now it is doubling every five years.It is true that in the past there was stability. But it is not true that stability is a basic necessity for normal growth of human beings. Stability is good only for the mediocre, only for the retarded – because the mediocre and the retarded never want any change, because any change is a trouble. They would have to learn things again, and learning is their difficulty.So in the past the world was very good, very convenient for the mediocre people; whatever you learned in your childhood remained true till you died. No change in anything kept the mediocre mind very comfortable.The new phenomenon is really dangerous, but not for humanity as such; it is only dangerous for the masses, because they cannot keep pace with the change. Before they can become accustomed to one thing, it is already changing. They are always left behind. They can go insane, become abnormal.But for the intelligent people the changing world is the right world – because intelligence wants new excitements, new challenges, new ecstasies. In the old world there was no possibility.So I will not agree with Alvin Toffler; he is thinking of humanity as a whole. But this is not a truth; humanity is divided between those who want to remain confined in the familiar and those who want new skies, new stars to explore.The past was very dangerous for these people – the explorers. The past was against them. In fact, many things were invented in the past, but they were suppressed in favor of the masses. They were dangerous because they bring changes – and the larger part of humanity is more afraid of change than of death, because death is a release, a deep sleep, but a change is a trouble.Three thousand years ago China developed printing presses. But they never used them widely; they were used only for the royal families. The ordinary masses continued to write their books with their own hands. It was thought that it would be dangerous to give the printing press – a very innocent invention – to the masses, because then there would be so many books available that the mediocre mind wouldn’t be able to cope with it; it would go berserk. To avoid that, printing presses remained suppressed.Gunpowder was discovered two thousand years ago. But it was never used in war for the simple reason that the soldier is the most retarded person in society. He needs to be retarded; it is society’s demand that he should be retarded. His training is for remaining mediocre so that he never doubts anything, he never questions anything, he never says no to anything. He has no mind of his own. Orders come from above, and he simply follows.He was accustomed to the old strategy of war; he was trained for archery and other things. Now gunpowder will be so new to him that he may not be able to use it, or he will use it wrongly. It is better to leave him alone; he is doing perfectly well with his archery….In India it was discovered almost five thousand years ago that the elephant, in comparison to the horse, is not the right vehicle as far as war is concerned, because the horse has more mobility, quickness.The elephant cannot move as quickly, cannot change positions as quickly. And the most dangerous thing about the elephant is that if a few elephants become afraid, then those who are in front start running over their own army. Horses never do that; horses are far more intelligent. And even if they would, it is not going to kill people. But when elephants run over people, they are finished.And elephants are accustomed to a certain kind of warfare. For example, for archery they were ready – but not for gunpowder. When the enemy brought guns, they freaked out; they could not understand what was happening. And then they turned back and ran over their own army, killing their own people. Defeat happened again and again in India because of the elephants.Indians knew that horses were better, but to introduce anything new was against the old mind. The elephant has a prestige, an old and long prestige, and people were trained how to use the elephant, which is not the same as using a horse.The elephant’s skin is so thick that to move him or to change him or to turn him, you have to use a certain kind of spear; only the spear can make him change his route or movement. Whips won’t do; they won’t reach him. His skin is so thick, and he is bulky. They are good for a royal parade but not good for fighting, where you need more agile, quick movements.A good horse is one that moves even by the shadow of the whip; you need not hit him.The whole training was going to be changed…so knowingly they continued with the elephants and went on being defeated by each invader. But they would not change their way of life.It was comfortable, because everything was static. Whatever your father told you was always right, and that was what his father had told him. Generation after generation the same thing was said; naturally it was bound to be true. So many people cannot be deceived for so long…somebody must have found the fault.So belief was the basis of the old society, and it worked.The new world is not for the mediocre.Toffler is not clear about the distinction – that human beings are not equal. Economically they can be made equal, politically they can be given equal freedom – equal freedom of expression – but what they will express will show you that they are different, what they will do with their freedom will show you that they are different, how they will use their equality will make it clear to you that they are unequal.So he takes the humanity as a whole; that’s where he goes wrong in his analysis.The old society was sane for the mediocre and insane for the intelligent – because for the intelligent there was no scope. You were not allowed to invent anything: “God has made everything. Whatever is needed has already been created by God.”A preacher in a church was giving a sermon and saying, “Everything that is needed is created by God.”One little boy had come with his father. He stood up and said, “What about railway trains? He did not create them, and they are needed. You yourself have traveled by railway train to come to the church. We have traveled, to come to the church, in a railway train. What about railway trains?”The priest was shocked for a moment. Then he looked into the Bible and there is a sentence: “God created all things that creep.” He said, “It is written clearly that all things that creep, God created. Everything is not noted down, but trains are creepers. This sentence is enough proof that God created the railway trains.”But it has to be God who created everything. Man was not allowed.So it was very sane for the mediocre, for the stupid. They enjoyed it. And nobody could say to them that they are mediocre, they are stupid, because there was no difference between them and the intelligent and the genius.Today you can see the gap.So for the genius, the modern world of constant change is just what he has been waiting for for millennia. But to the mediocre, it is very difficult – he cannot exist, things are changing so fast, he feels lost.For example, in the past there was no divorce; marriage was permanent. Once you got married, there was no way of going back; you were married for your whole life. Even the question was irrelevant.In the countries which are still living in the past…for example in India, in the villages nobody ever thinks of divorce. The word is never used, although the constitution allows it. But divorce happens only in a very small minority of educated people who are confined only to the big cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Delhi. The rest of India knows nothing of it.It was convenient for the mediocre to have one husband, to have one wife, to know each other, to know each other’s habits, to get adjusted to each other. It may be miserable; it does not matter. But at least it was stable and it was good for the children, it was good for the society – because it gives stability to society’s traditions, conventions.But for a man who really loves, it was not a sane society – because love changes; nothing can be done about it. Just as we accept every other change in the world…. Seasons change – what can you do about it? Summer comes, rains come, winter comes – what can you do about it? Day changes into night, youth changes into old age…the whole existence is changing.Against this changing world we created a fake society which was stable. It was against existence.In existence everything is momentary, and we were trying to create something permanent. To the mediocre it brought great happiness, because once something is settled it is settled forever. But to those who are not just looking for a wife to take care of their children, for a wife who is going to be a factory for producing children, for a wife who will take care of the household affairs, it was not very sane. Those people suffered.Those who are looking for a woman as a human being, those who are looking for love, they have to accept that love can change. It is a reality; it is not an artifact made by society.It is a flower that blossoms in the morning, and by the evening it is gone. It is not something plastic.Those who are looking for the real flower and its fragrance and its aliveness have to accept that change is the law of life – the only law.It means that the new changing society gives opportunity to authentic, sincere, intelligent people. They can live together, if they feel like living together, or they can separate.It does not create insanity; it is really the sanest thing to do. If the love disappears, then what is the point of living together? Why pretend? Why go on saying false things to each other? – “I love you.”Dale Carnegie suggests in his book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, that every husband at least three times a day should say to his wife, “I love you.” Whether you feel it or not is not the point; it has to be repeated mechanically. Whenever you have a chance to repeat it, repeat it.But no intelligent person can do that.All these kinds of advisers are making man phony. And in America there are thousands of books of this type which make man phony.I have heard that Henry Ford was in a bookstore looking through the new publications, and Napoleon Hill…he writes well, impressively, but all phony stuff. In his book Think and Grow Rich – a best seller – he proposes that if you visualize that you are rich, you will be rich. Your visualization will sooner or later become a reality. You remain poor because you cannot visualize. So learn how to think and grow rich, and nothing else has to be done. You just have to close your eyes and think persistently, visualizing a Cadillac, and one day suddenly it appears on your porch.His book had just come out of the press, and he was selling them there with his signature. He was very happy that Henry Ford was there. So he said, “I would like to present one of my books to you.”Henry Ford looked at the title, Think and Grow Rich, and he knew that to grow rich is an arduous job; it is not just how you think. He said, “I will accept your book after a little inquiry. Have you come here on a public bus or in your private car?”He said, “On a public bus.”Henry Ford said, “That’s enough. Keep your book. First visualize yourself into a private car. The day your visualization materializes, bring your book to me. And I don’t need it; I am Henry Ford. I have more riches than you can visualize, and I don’t think I need any more. So give it to someone else.”But how beautifully he refuted the man – that you have come on a public transport bus, you don’t even have your own private car, and you dare to write a book that says that just by thinking, visualizing, continually visualizing, things can be materialized.Now, however many times you may repeat it, if love has disappeared it is not going to come. It had never come because of you. It was not something you had done. It happened; it came and it possessed you. And one day you find it is no more there. It was not your doing, so you cannot do anything to prevent it from going.So for the intelligent person it is perfectly good that things are changing fast. He will be constantly thrilled by the change.Now, doing the same job all your life you become a robot; you start doing the job mechanically. There is no need to think about it.In the body there is a robot part. First you think something, practice something, and then it is transferred to the robot part. In Gurdjieff’s system, that robot part plays a very important role.You can see it. If you are learning to drive a car, it is very difficult in the beginning…it is almost impossible. You have to look ahead on the road, so that you do not crash and kill somebody. You have to stay on the right side, so you have to be constantly aware of the steering wheel. You have to stay within a certain limit of speed, so you have to be aware of the speed you are going. And your foot has to be in tune with you on the accelerator. And you have to be constantly aware of the brake, because at any moment anything can happen and you have to brake.So many things…and in a crazy traffic, which is going all over. If you look at the brake, you forget that you have to look ahead. You are not to look at the brake; your foot has to do the work.It seems impossible. Things are being asked, so many things together. If you manage one, the other goes off; if you manage the other, something else goes off.But through a little practice, the whole learning is transferred to the robot part. Then you can sing, you can smoke, you can listen to the radio, you can talk to your friend, you can do anything…and your body itself takes care of the vehicle. You need not pay any more attention; it is now all automatic. Not only is the car automatic, you are automatic.The mediocre person finds that once you become automatic in anything, it is good to remain in it. Learning again a new job, learning again a new wife…you knew perfectly well your old wife; good or bad or whatsoever she was, you knew her. Now this is something unknown. And what she will do with you, you don’t know. A new job means new learning, a new city means finding a new friends, finding a new society.But, if every three years you have to go on changing, your life will remain sharpened; more and more rich it will become.So I don’t see the speed of change as a danger to the genius. And the whole progress of humanity depends on the genius; the masses have never done anything as far as progress or evolution is concerned.So Toffler is unnecessarily worried…unless he himself belongs to the mediocre. And it seems he belongs; otherwise, it would have been clear to him that we have come to a world where everybody has to sharpen his intelligence just to survive. Even the mediocre person has the potential, but he has not made any effort. But if the world is changing he will have to make the effort.I can see the difference…. In India, any young man – if he is educated – knows only geography, history, mathematics…but he does not know carpentry, he does not know music, he does not know cooking, he does not know anything else.While in the West the same young man of the same age knows many more things, because the Western youth has to prepare himself for a world which you cannot take for granted. Today it may be possible that you can be musician; tomorrow it may not be possible, and you have to be a carpenter or a plumber or a cook. It is richer.For example, the way we created the commune in America…. We cannot create that kind of commune in India, because either you will get absolutely uneducated, unskilled people, who cannot do anything unless supervised, ordered, told, continually reminded – and then, too, it will not be a piece of beautiful art, it will be a hatchet job – or you will get those who are educated, who cannot do even that. They will say, “We can do geography, we can do history, we can tell you when Socrates was married, and we can tell you when he was poisoned – on what date and at what time.”But that is not needed to create a commune. They cannot make a house, they cannot make a road, they cannot make a dam, they cannot plant trees. They are very poor in that way. Their only capacity is to be a clerk.It is such a difficult thing because India is still living in the stable past, where things have always remained the same.This whirlwind that has arisen in the West is of tremendous importance. It is not a crisis, it is a critical moment. It is a great chance for the talented, and also an opportunity, for those who have lived up to now a stable life, to learn something from a changing pattern. It will not make them poorer, it will make them richer. A man should be able to do many things, and that is possible only if he goes on moving from job to job.Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers, refused a post as a professor in Oxford because he just wanted to be a teacher in a school. A professor he had been. So he said, “I know that I would like to know something new – how to deal with small children.” He was not concerned about the salary, he was more concerned about his own learning. And finally he dropped the school and became a fisherman.Now this is impossible in India, that anybody could drop from professor to teacher, and then from teacher to fisherman. People would think, “What kind of progress is happening?” But I say that it is progress, because this man knows three jobs and he is enriched because of his many activities.A man loves a woman or a woman loves a man – it is good as far as it goes, but it should not be stretched when it is no more there. Then it is better to change partners, because each new woman and each new man are going to be different and will bring to your life a new aspect, a new revelation.People who have changed their lovers many times are immensely enriched because no two lovers are the same. And this should be the criterion for everything.There is no danger in this changing world that is opening up. It has already come in. And the speed will go on becoming faster and faster – so you have to learn how to adjust yourself quickly to a new situation. That will give you a flexibility, that will make you more alive. You will have to find ways that you have never tried before, because situations have changed.And if you are going to change continually you will live, in one life, a thousand lives, and your life will become, not a stale repetition of the same from birth to death, but every day a new sunrise and every day a new flower blossoming in your garden. So to me, it is not something bad.It is going to be difficult for the mediocre, but they have lived in safety for millions of years. It is time they should be shaken and awakened.And they have ruled over the intelligent for millions of years. Now it is time they should be put in their right place. Now, one who is capable of adjusting to new modes of living, loving, working, will prove his genius, his talent.The New Man must be a multidimensional man. And this situation is simply an absolute necessity for the multidimensional man to arrive on the earth.Osho,It seems so unfortunate that existence had to give women this thing called menstruation every month. It's one of those things you know is coming, and you know all the emotions and crazy things that follow with it. And yet it is the most difficult thing to be able to watch and not be identified with – at least for me. Funnily enough, even the men seem to get involved and identified with it when we are in it.How can we watch something that is such an intrinsic part of our biology?The art of watchfulness is the same whether you are watching something outside of you or you are watching something in your own biology – it is also outside of you.I know it is difficult, because you are more identified with it; it is so close. But the problem is not watchfulness, the problem is identification. That identification should be broken.When you feel that your menstruation is coming, try to watch, try to see what it is bringing along with it – anger, depression, hate, a tendency to fight, a desire to throw tantrums. Just watch – and not only watch but say to the man you love, “This is going to come within me. I will try my best to be aware, but if I get identified you need not get involved in it, you can simply watch. You are far away and outside of it.”And the man can know that a woman in menstruation is in difficulty. She needs your compassion.And the same should be done by the woman, because you may not know, but man also has his period every month. Because it has no physical expression, for centuries nobody has been aware that man also goes through the same cycle. He has to, because he and she are parts of one whole.A man also, for four or five days each month, goes into a dark hole. you can at least throw the whole responsibility on your menstruation. He cannot even do that because his menstruation is only emotional – he passes through the same emotions that you pass through. And because there was no physical expression of it, nobody ever thought about it. But now it is an established fact that every month he passes through the same situation as you. So he is not superior in that way, and you are not unfortunate in comparison to him.The difficulty arises, that when you love a man and you live with him long enough, slowly, slowly your body rhythms become very, very harmonious. So when you have your menstruation, he also has his menstruation. That creates the real trouble – both of you are in a dark hole, both are depressed, both are sad, both are in despair. And you throw the responsibility on each other.So the man has to find out when he has his period. And the way to find out is to just write down in your diary, every day, how it is. And you will find a block of five days when you were continuously in depression, in a bad mood, ready to fight. Watching for two to three months – noting in your diary – you will come to an absolute conclusion: these are the five days. Make your woman aware: “These are my five days.”If they are different from your woman’s, it is good, fortunate, because the trouble will be only half. So, the man can watch when the woman throws tantrums and does all kinds of stupid things. He need not participate, he need not answer, he need not react. He should play cool and give the woman a chance to see that he is playing cool, which means “I should be aware.”But if these periods coincide, then there is a real calamity. But then, too, you both can be aware. You can see that he is also suffering from his menstrual period and it is not good to throw anything more upon the poor fellow, and he can understand that you are suffering and “It is good to keep my load on myself.”Just be watchful.Soon there will be a possibility…. It was really the religions of the world who have been preventing it; otherwise, the menstrual period can disappear – and from women more easily than from men.If you are on the pill, perhaps it may disappear. To most women the pill is a perfect thing – the period disappears. So there is no harm; be on the pill.And just a few days ago I heard they have discovered a pill for the man too, so he can also take his pill.But that will only change your biological situation. What is more important is to be aware. If you can be aware of the situation and not get identified, that will be far more significant.But the pill will take away your physical pain. And I am perfectly in favor of that. There is no need to suffer any physical pain unnecessarily – if it can be alleviated. So find a pill and forget about the physical, the biological suffering.And the man should also do the same, because he goes through the same period. It’s just that the poor fellow has not been aware of it for millions of years because there is no physical expression of it. But there is psychological expression, and it is exactly the same.So first, find out when the period is. And if the pill is now available in the market for the man too, he should also take the pill.And awareness you can practice in a thousand other ways. There is no need to suffer bodily, physical pain unnecessarily. Certainly the pill can stop your period; it can also stop the possibility of your getting pregnant – which is a blessing, because the world does not need any more population.But meanwhile, try awareness.Osho,When I became a sannyasin I started feeling, much more, that existence is taking care of me. Is my whole life being taken care of by existence? And if it is, how is it that I feel it more since I have been with you?Existence is taking care of your whole life, because you are part of it. Being with me, it is not taking more care than before, it is just that you have become more aware of it; you were not aware at all before.The change has happened in your awareness. It is not that existence has started taking more care, but now you can feel it, be aware of it.(There is a loud noise from another room.)Is somebody suffering from a menstrual period upstairs?…Whether you know it or not, existence goes on taking care of you.If you know it, you feel grateful.In your gratefulness is your religiousness.In your gratefulness is your awakening.But the care is the same. It cares for the smallest blade of grass just as it cares for the biggest star. But those poor fellows cannot be aware of it. You are fortunate: you can be aware of it.Awareness will create a new situation in you – that of gratitude. And to me gratitude is the only religiousness there is.Osho,You mentioned the meditation of staring for one hour into the mirror. Is it good to look with a soft, unfocused gaze, rather than to stare? Also, is it better to look into either the left or the right eye, or at both? On another occasion, you suggested that couples could look into each other's eyes. My questions for the first meditation also apply to this method. Would you please comment?It is best to look in the mirror, not in the eyes of your lover – because in the eyes of your lover you can get identified. With the mirror, there is no such possibility.Staring is not good – it will be tiring and tense. So, a soft gaze…and not in one eye but in both eyes…a very soft gaze, without any tension, just looking for no reason at all. In staring you may stop blinking, but in soft gaze you can continue blinking; there is no harm.Remain as relaxed as possible.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-transmission-of-lamp-09/

Osho,When you spoke about devotees I was very deeply touched because that is what I feel for you: devotion. If the price of enlightenment were to stay away from your presence, I would give it up gladly for the bliss and centeredness I feel right now just looking into your eyes.It happens to me several times during discourse: looking at you, suddenly time and movement stop. And with this phenomenon I feel a rush of almost tangible love-energy entering my body with such strength that a few times I literally feel my body pushed back by it.I love you, and I hope I never have to leave for as long as you live.These moments of devotion, of love, are the moments of enlightenment – just glimpses…as if you see, from a faraway place, the sunlit peak of a mountain. Although you are still far away, this is the peak where one day you have to arrive.You don’t have to go away from me, so there is no question of any conflict between being with me and seeking and searching for enlightenment. You are with me for enlightenment; otherwise, there is no purpose in being with me. The only purpose is to have a little feeling of that great experience, because without this little feeling the word enlightenment remains empty for you.These small moments will start filling the word enlightenment with meaning, with a certainty, with a guarantee that it is not just a word but a reality to be realized; that just by being in the presence of a man who has found it, you can be touched by its reality. Time can stop, and for a moment you are transported to another level of existence, where in a sense you are, and in a sense you are no more – and both are true at the same time.Enlightenment is not something philosophical, it is very existential. It is something to live, something to be, something to experience, something to share. It is almost tangible.Looking into my eyes, you are looking into your own silence. Your eyes also have the same silence – you have never allowed it to happen.Being in deep devotion comes as a surprise the first time, because it is so difficult for people to feel even love, and devotion is the highest form of love…just the essential fragrance of love. If love is the flower, then devotion is just the fragrance. You cannot catch hold of it. You can feel it, you can smell it, you can be surrounded by it, you can be drowned in it, but you cannot catch hold of it. It is not that material.If these moments are happening to you, you are on the right path. There is nowhere to go, no need to go. You have found the place from where the pilgrimage begins – it has already begun. You should feel blessed by it.Otherwise, people are simply wandering into words, theories, philosophies, theologies, religions, and all kinds of gymnastics of the mind; and nobody bothers that the ultimate reality is beyond mind. You can go on for lives searching into the mind and you will not find anything except empty words. Mind is a desert where nothing grows.But if you can move just a little above the mind, the whole sky opens up for you…a little courage, and you can open your wings.To be with the master is simply to see someone who has opened his wings and is on the wing in the sky. And he reminds you – not only by his words, but by his very being – that the same is possible for you, that you have wings but you have forgotten it. You don’t have to achieve anything, you only have to remember. And these moments, by and by, push you to that remembrance.That remembrance is freedom from all cults, from all beliefs, freedom from all kinds of stupidities, superstitions. And not only freedom from…. Remember this: freedom from superstitions is good but not enough, freedom from beliefs is good but not enough. Freedom for truth…freedom from beliefs and freedom for truth; freedom from superstitions and freedom for reality. When freedom comes with both wings – from and for – you are coming back home.Osho,Years ago during a psychosynthesis workshop, when we were in a hypnotic state the leader took us through Plato's allegory of the cave, where the men were standing by the fire looking at the shadows on the wall, never having seen the opening of the cave.This left a deep impression on me, and I would be so grateful to hear you speak on this.Plato’s allegory is of slaves who, working in a cave, see only their shadows on the walls and believe that what is happening on the walls is the only reality. They don’t know of any other reality except those shadows…they don’t even know that those shadows are their own. They know nothing about the outside world, outside their cave; it doesn’t exist for them.This is one of the most beautiful allegories – of tremendous importance. It is our allegory. Translated into our life, it means we are living in a certain cave and we are seeing shadows on a certain screen and we know nothing else about the screen. We know nothing about there being a world beyond the screen; we know nothing about these shadows on the screen, even that they are our own.Looked at rightly, it is the allegory of our mind.What do you know of the world? Just a small skull is your cave; and just the screen of your mind…and the things which you call thoughts, emotions, sentiments, feelings, are all shadows – they don’t have any substance in them.And you get angry, you get depressed, you are in anguish – because you have learned to be identified with those shadows. You are projecting them; they are your own shadows. It is your own anger that is projected on the screen of the mind. And then it becomes a vicious circle: that anger makes you more angry, more anger projects more anger, and so on and so forth. And we go on living our whole life without ever thinking that there is a world of reality beyond the mind, on the outside, and there is also a world of reality beyond all these sentiments, feelings, emotions – beyond your ego. That is your awareness.The whole art of meditation is to bring you out of the cave so that you can become aware that you are not those shadows but that you are a watcher.And the moment you become a watcher, a miracle happens: those shadows start disappearing. They feed on your identity; if you feel identified with them, then they are there. The more you identify with them, the more nourished they are.When you are just a watcher – just seeing, not judging, not condemning – slowly, slowly those shadows disappear, because now they don’t have any food. And then there is such a tremendous clarity, perceptivity, that you can see the world beyond – the world of sunrise and the world of clouds and the world of the stars; that is your outside. And you can become aware of your inside, which is far more mysterious.The outside world is so beautiful, but the inside world is a thousandfold more beautiful.Once you are somehow capable of getting out of the cave you become part of a universal consciousness. Inside, you have the whole eternity; you have been here forever and you will be here forever. Death has never happened and cannot happen. And outside there is a tremendously beautiful existence.And now to call them “outside” and “inside” is not right; those are the old words when the skull was dividing them in two. Now it is one. Your consciousness and the beauty of a sunset and the beauty of a starry night, your consciousness and the freshness of a rose – they are no longer separate because the principle of separation is no longer there. It is all one cosmic whole.And I call this experience the only holy experience. To experience the whole is the only holy experience. It has nothing to do with churches, temples, synagogues; it has something to do with you coming out, slipping out of the clutches of the mind. And it is not difficult, it is just that you have not tried it.One Japanese professor has been training small children to swim. His idea has been that in the mother’s womb the child is in a certain liquid which is exactly the same as the ocean water, with the same constituents. And the child floats in that water.It is well-known that whenever a woman becomes pregnant, she starts eating more salty food. She needs more salt because the child needs ocean water. And this has given the idea to the evolutionists that man must have first been born in water. And if you look at the child’s growing stages – in a photograph every day for nine months – you will be surprised: he begins by being a fish.In the Hindu religion God’s first incarnation is a fish. It cannot be coincidental, because even to conceive of God as a fish would have looked condemnatory. But for thousands of years Hindus have believed that God originated first as a fish. And to them God is life; they are just different words.This Japanese professor thought that if life was first born in water, then swimming should be intrinsic; it has not to be learned. To prove his point he started working with small babies, and he has been immensely successful. Six-month-old babies can swim. And now he is trying with three-month-old babies – and they are swimming. And his expectation is that one day he will be able to show to the world that the just-born baby can be put in a tub of water and he will be swimming.Swimming is not an art which has to be learned, it is something that we already know. But how many people know swimming? – Not very many people. Although it is something intrinsic we have the capacity to ignore it, to forget it.The English word sin is very beautiful. I love it because its original meaning is forgetfulness. It has nothing to do with the crimes we call sin. It is concerned with only one crime, and that is forgetfulness. We have forgotten ourselves; the remedy is remembrance.Plato’s allegory rightly depicts the situation which we are in. But Plato never went further than that. Plato himself was never a meditator; the allegory remained a philosophical idea.If he had interpreted this allegory and had given it a turn towards meditation, the whole Western mind would have been different. This allegory would have changed the whole Western mind and the history that followed Plato – because Plato is the founder of the whole Western mind.Socrates never wrote anything; he was Plato’s master. Whatever we have about Socrates is from Plato’s notes of him talking with others – the famous Socratic dialogues. As a student he was just taking notes on them. Those notes have survived. In those notes is this allegory.It is difficult to know for what purpose Socrates was using the allegory, but it is certain that Plato misused it – he was not a man who was in search of truth, he was a man who wanted to think about truth. But to search for truth is one thing and to think about truth is totally different: thinking keeps you within the cave. It is only non-thinking that can take you out of the cave.So be silent, be still, whenever you can find the time. Allow silence to settle in you like a lake, so silent that there is not even a ripple – no thought in your mind – and suddenly you are out of it. And only then will you understand that the allegory is not for philosophical purposes; it is for authentic search, it is for realization.Plato never gave that interpretation. So the whole Western mind followed Plato – he was a genius – and philosophy remained only a thinking about truth.What can you think about truth? Either you know it or you don’t know it. Sometimes even geniuses can do such stupid things that it looks unbelievable. How can you think about truth? – It is almost like a blind man thinking about light. What can he think about light? – he does not even know darkness.Ordinarily, people think that blind people are living in darkness. You are wrong, because to see darkness you need eyes – as much as you need them for light. So don’t be in a misunderstanding. Because you close your eyes and there is darkness, that does not mean that a blind person sees darkness. You see darkness, because you can see light and you can see its absence. The blind man cannot see light, so he cannot see its absence. What can he think about light? And whatever he thinks is going to be wrong. He needs not a philosopher but a physician.And Gautam Buddha has actually said, “I am not a philosopher, I am a physician. I don’t want you to become great thinkers, I want you to become great seers.”And if you can see, then it is not a question of thinking; you simply know it. And the way to see is to learn the simple art of non-thinking.In the beginning it will be difficult because you have become so accustomed to it. It has become such an old habit that it goes on by itself; it has its own momentum. Even if you don’t want to think, it goes on and on. But if you are a little patient and you just watch the mind going on with its routine, without giving it any energy anymore, just seeing it as if you are seeing a film on a screen, remaining aloof, alert, watchful, without getting identified – soon the mind disappears.And the disappearance of the mind is your coming out of the cave. For the first time you see the world that is surrounding you – its beauty, its tremendous silence. And you can see your own being – its immense light, its great blessings, its ultimate benediction.Osho,From early childhood until my first few years as a sannyasin, an experience of expansion would happen: my head would fill the whole room, and later on it would fill the house and then move outside the house and surround it.This has not happened for a few years, and although it does not feel like a loss, I wonder why it stopped and what it was.If every person were to remember his experiences which were extraordinary…you would be surprised to know that by just finding those experiences, you would be able to find all the methods that have been developed for transforming man.This is one of the old methods; it is greatly helpful. Just feeling that your head is becoming bigger and bigger, that you are not in the room but the room is within you…and then your head goes on becoming bigger and bigger. And the garden outside is not outside you but inside you, and the moon and the sun and the stars are not outside you but everything is inside your head, and your head becomes the circumference of the whole existence…. It is imagination; it is not that it is really happening.But the very imagination gives you a key, and that key is: your mind is your servant. You can make it do things – and it is a very obedient servant. But for your whole life you have listened to it as if it is the master.These experiments will give you the idea – the most important idea – that you are the master; the mind has to do anything you want it to do.And also, while you are visualizing expansion, thoughts will disappear – because your whole concentration will be on the expansion, on the mind becoming bigger and bigger – and there will be a great silence. In that silence perhaps you may become aware of your awareness – that you are just a watcher, that you are not the mind. The mind can become big, the mind can become small – both exercises are as ancient as man’s search for truth.Another method is: you start thinking that your mind is becoming smaller, very much smaller. Finally it disappears and you don’t have any head. That, too, is perfectly good. It is not that your head disappears – it will remain where it is – but you will learn one thing: mind is nothing but a faculty of imagination, so through mind you can never achieve reality.The people who are trying to achieve reality through the mind are simply imagining things. Somebody is seeing Jesus Christ, somebody is seeing Krishna, somebody is seeing Hazrat Mohammed – and they don’t know that this is only their imagination. These people are not there, but their minds are capable of focusing on a certain subject and making it almost appear real. Many religions have been befooled and have been befooling others through such exercises.I say it is good if these exercises help you to become alert – you are separate and mind is just a game of imagination. But almost all the religions have used these tricks to deceive millions of people. Sitting every day in front of Krishna’s statue, praying, hoping that one day he will appear – and one day Krishna does appear…but it has nothing to do with Krishna. It is your own game; you have played a trick upon yourself. All so-called cults, which depend on prayer, are really based on imagination – and all the religions have done that.Real religion is to know that your mind is a faculty of imagination. You can create any kind of hallucination you want. If it is something difficult, then there are ways to help, which scriptures have provided. For example, if you fast for twenty-one days, then any hallucination becomes easier, very easy. When you are well fed and healthy, that hallucination will not be easy. Sometimes when you have a fever, lying on your bed, you may see that you are rising up from the bed, or perhaps your whole bed is rising. Beyond a temperature of one hundred and five degrees you start hallucinating all kinds of things.In isolation hallucination is easy. Go to a mountain cave at night, alone, with all the wild animals. Fear, death, darkness, all force you; your mind is compelled. Whatever you want…if you want to hallucinate that Krishna is with you or Christ is with you, it will be easier than in your own house where your wife is, your children are, the neighbors are. These people – Krishna and Christ and Rama and Zarathustra – are very much afraid of coming; they always come when you are alone and in a faraway place.It created in all the religions the idea of renouncing the world, because when you renounce the world and go to the mountains, the realization of God is very easy. On the mountain, Sinai, Moses encounters God. Why could he not encounter God with all his fellow Jews? What was the need that he should go alone? At least he should have kept a secretary and a few journalists with him to report to the world what really happened. Now he is the only person; whatever he says you have to believe. All the people who have experiences of God or his incarnations have always done so in privacy. Why don’t these people do it in public? The reason is: when fasting, when in darkness, when in the forest, in the desert alone the mind has more flexibility to imagine; then, you can visualize anything that you want. In that way this kind of experience has been exploited by religions. The people who realize God in this way become saints, great prophets, saviors – and they are really simply victims of hallucinations.But the method itself can be used for better purposes. If you use it to be aware that you are the master and the mind is only a servant, you can give the orders and it has to follow.Your experience was good. It stopped because you became grown-up and you must have started thinking to yourself, “This is childish, this is something crazy.” Your rational mind must have been creating antagonism towards it. That’s why it stopped.If you want it to begin again it can begin very easily, because you have experienced it. You can use it, but use it to remember your mastery, because whatever is happening – either expansion or shrinking – both are imagination; they have nothing to do with reality. But to give you the sense of mastery is great, because that sense can be then used to stop thinking. If you can manage to expand your mind to the very limits of the universe, you can say to the mind, “Now, stop thinking!” and sit silently and let thinking stop.This was the original purpose for which these kinds of exercises were used – not to help your imagination but to free you from the grip of the mind.Osho,What is it about trees that evoke such feelings of the primordial in me?They are beings of such silence and stillness. They seem to have that dignity which comes with knowing something eternal, and they represent something I feel I must know or once knew. Their appeal is not simply that of the beautiful and graceful; they have such an unobtrusive allurement, the attraction of something fathomless that I do not even feel I need to understand, but long to be enveloped in.The instinct is to move towards relating to them; and yet to hug or touch a tree doesn't seem to be what it's about at all.And I know I have often felt of you as a tree, for you bear those same qualities.Are trees trying to tell us something?Everything in existence is trying to tell you something – not only trees. The mountains, the ocean, the rivers, the sky, the clouds – everything is telling you something. It is telling you that existence is eternal, that forms change but the essence always remains. So don’t get identified with the form, get in tune with the essence. Your body is your form, your mind is your form; beyond both is your reality. And that reality has everything.This existence is poor before that inner reality of yours. The tree has many things, the mountain has many things but your inner reality has all those things plus. And this plus point is awareness.The tree is, but it is not aware that it is. And unless you become aware that you are, you are just a walking tree; you have not evolved. Evolution is trying, through humanity, to reach to the ultimate peak of consciousness.A few people have reached; they are proof enough that everybody can reach – just a little effort, just a little sincerity, just a little search. Everything is telling you that the way you are living is not enough, the things you are doing are not all. Your mundane life is only the superficial; your real life remains, in most cases, untouched. People are born, they live and they die – and without knowing who they are.The whole existence is silent. If you can also be silent you will know who this consciousness is within you; and knowing this, life becomes a joy, a moment-to-moment rejoicing, an unending festival of lights.And then trees will feel jealous of you rather than you feeling jealous of trees – because you can grow flowers of consciousness. Those trees are poor; they are very far back on the way. They are also travelers; some day they will reach where you are today. Some day you must have been in their place.Gautam Buddha has told many stories of his past lives. One of his stories is that he was an elephant, and once in the middle of the night the forest caught on fire. It was so wild and the wind was so strong and the fire was spreading so fast…all the animals were trying to escape but were not finding the way.The elephant was tired of running, so he stood under a tree looking all around to see where he could escape. Just as he was about to move – he lifted up one of his legs – at that very moment a small animal came and sat under his foot. His feet were big enough, and the animal must have thought it was a good place for shade. But the elephant was in a difficulty: if he put his foot down the animal would die, and if he did not put his foot down then he would die – because the fire was coming towards him.But Buddha said that the elephant decided that it didn’t matter: “One day, one has to die, I should not lose this opportunity. If I can save one life…as long as I am alive I will protect this creature.”It was difficult to stand in that posture for very long. The elephant fell to the side where the fire had moved to. He was burned and he died. But his decision to save some life, his reverence for a small creature was the reason he was born in his next life as a human being.We are moving; those trees are also moving. It depends on what we do, it depends on what consciousness we live with; that is what takes us to a higher step.It is beautiful to enjoy the trees, to enjoy the whole existence; but remember, right now you are at the highest peak – and your basic work is not to miss the opportunity of human life but to find the center of your being.That finding will make you part of the universal soul; then there is no need for any other form. And to have a formless existence is the greatest freedom. Even the body is an imprisonment, the mind is an imprisonment. When you are pure consciousness, one with the whole, your freedom is total – and that is the goal.Osho,Recently you mentioned some ancient meditation techniques in relation to some of our childhood experiences. Imagination seems to be the basis of many of these techniques.What is the difference between imagining one is enlightened and being enlightened?Milarepa, what is the difference between me and you? That’s exactly the difference between being really enlightened and just imagining to be enlightened!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,To me one of the most tragic falls of man today is his valuing all the wrong things. Somewhere in the collective unconscious there must be some idea of wanting all the most beautiful things of life for free – and paying hugely for all the nonessentials. We worship the words of football players, movie stars and politicians with no appreciation whatsoever for wisdom.This situation is so pitiful: how can one understand the beauty of cosmic payment circling back to the source when we remain in such poverty?Would you please bring light to these blocks that man has agreed upon, buried in the unconscious?The real values are not buried in the unconscious, the real values are revealed when you move above consciousness to the superconsciousness. What is buried in the unconscious is what is making man’s life so stupid: he may pay attention to a football player’s words, an actor’s words, and will not heed the words of the wise.Unconsciousness is the basement of your mind. In your unconscious many things are buried which find expression through your conscious. For example, millions of people watch boxing or football matches and really get excited and they never think about what they are watching. In boxing they are watching sheer violence, but they enjoy it. This is the expression of hidden violence in you.Society has managed man with an absolutely wrong strategy. The idea of the society has been that if something is thrown into the basement, into the darkness of the unconscious, you are finished with it. That is not the case. You are not finished with it. It will come up in a different form, and with a vengeance. And it will go on collecting.A little anger is not much to be worried about; it comes and goes. But if you go on suppressing anger, there comes a point when it becomes like a volcano, which is just going to burst with any excuse.Throughout the whole history suppression has been the way to keep man civilized. But in fact, it has been the cause of keeping man only superficially civilized – skin-deep civilized. Just scratch anybody a little and you will find the barbarous, the primitive, the animal, all hidden behind.All your games are in a subtle way about satisfying your desire to win. In the movies you watch violence, you watch murder, you watch rape – and any movie which has no murder, rape, seems to have no appeal. These are essential ingredients which attract humanity, because in the unconscious they are waiting to be satisfied, and this is a vicarious way to satisfy them. You become identified with the murderer or perhaps with the murdered. You become identified with the rapist or with the raped, and a little release happens. That is your joy in watching a movie, reading a novel.In California, the University of California has continuously for one year been studying the fact that whenever there is a boxing match, crime increases by fourteen percent for the next week, compared to the normal rate. What happens? Things which were hidden… Seeing violence in boxing, your own violence starts coming up, and that violence increases the crime rate by fourteen percent above the normal. For almost one week it remains, and then slowly it goes back down to normal.Now, the government knows that boxing should be made a crime, something against the law. But it is not being done because boxing earns money for the people who manage it. It earns money for the government, and it seems that anything is legal if it brings money with it.In the unconscious, the real values are not present because nobody has repressed the real values. Real values don’t need to be repressed because they are not against anybody, they do not do any harm to anybody. They are the qualities of love and compassion. But man has not experienced them because they are above the conscious mind.You have to go beyond your conscious mind to have some glimpse of the glorious world of real values: truth, sincerity, love, friendliness, compassion, sympathy, sensitivity, appreciation of beauty, grace. All those are lined up waiting for you. But the society has put you in a struggle with the unconscious, forcing all your animal heritage into the unconscious; you have to go on continually forcing it. It is not that once forced, you are finished with it; it goes on coming up, it wants expression.And you don’t have anything else in your life – creativity of any sort – in which your energy can be involved, so no energy is left for the unconscious to use. So it is a strange situation; all creative dimensions are closed.The superconscious is not talked about in your educational systems. The only thing talked about is your conscious mind, and that the only way to get any poisonous thing away from you is to throw it into the unconscious.This whole strategy is wrong. That’s why human society has come to such a wrong situation where people are living, but not truly alive – they are almost like walking corpses. From the cradle to the grave they are simply dying every day, slowly, slowly. It is a long death, a seventy-year long death. It cannot be called life because no flower blossoms, no song arises, no beauty is created.You do not enrich life. And remember it as a basic dictum: unless you enrich life, you don’t have it. If you have life, you are bound to enrich life; you will leave life better for the world than you found it when you entered into the world. But right now it seems you will leave the world more dark, more gloomy, more sad, more miserable. The old strategy has to be abandoned, absolutely abandoned without any exception.A few fundamentals have to be remembered. One: the unconscious has no way of releasing any content directly from itself. It has no doors, it is a basement. For anything to go out of it, it first has to come to the conscious mind. The conscious mind is the door.In the same way the superconscious mind also has no doors. Anything to be expressed has to come to the conscious mind. The conscious mind is your ground floor; only from there can anything go out.So the first thing is that the unconscious should be emptied. But one becomes afraid of emptying it because it is carrying all kinds of ugly features. How to empty the violence that is there: the anger, the sadness, all kinds of worries that you have dumped there because you could not manage to sort them out? How are you going to bring them to the conscious? And if they come, then what are you going to do with them?The unconscious is not interested in the object of violence, it is interested only to throw the violence. You can just beat your pillow and you will feel immense relief. It will look a little awkward to you, that you are beating your pillow and the pillow has done no wrong to you. You think yourself very cultured, sophisticated, intelligent – and what are you doing beating the poor pillow which has not done anything? It is not a question of whether the pillow has done anything or not, but beating it will release the violence in you because violence has nothing to do with the object. Whether you beat somebody or you beat the pillow, it makes no difference to it. Whether you kill somebody or you just kill a teddy bear, it doesn’t matter. But killing has to be done.In many primitive societies even today they make sacrifices to their gods – cows made of mud – and with great celebration. They sacrifice other animals, even men, but they are all made of mud. And the strangest thing about these primitive societies is that there is no violence, people don’t fight, they don’t have the energy to fight. They have killed somebody; the idea to kill is no longer there.There are societies in the world where even a dream is taken to be true. There is truth to it; Sigmund Freud is proof of it. But those societies have been doing a far better psychoanalysis for thousands of years – and they are poor primitives, they don’t know what they are doing.If somebody dreams in the night – because those people rarely dream; dreams exist because you have repressed things during the day. You wanted to look at a beautiful woman, but your wife was with you and you could not look at that woman. In the dream that woman will appear.In those primitive societies there is no suppressive system. If somebody likes someone, he goes to the person and says, “You are beautiful and I like you very much.” The person may even be a stranger. But if somebody dreams, the first thing that happens is that the elders of the society gather, and he has to confess his dream to them.It is a great thing that somebody has dreamed. If he has dreamed that he has insulted somebody, then he has to go to that person to apologize and bring sweets and fruits to present to him as a token of friendship because in the dream he had insulted him.To us it will look absolutely absurd because what you do in the dream is your business; the other person does not know that you insulted him. That is not the question, that the other person does not know; the question is that you have a certain antagonism towards the person that came up in your dream, and it is better to make things clear. Go to the person to apologize, give him presents and the dream will never come again.A king of Egypt had ordered his court and the whole kingdom that if anybody comes in his dream then death is the penalty. Now this is real absurdity. People were so afraid – but what can you do if you appear in his dream? That is really his problem; you have not gone into his dream. And he killed a few people because in spite of the warning, he saw them in his dream. Why should they disturb his sleep? And he was a monarch with all the powers over life and death; he killed people.The whole kingdom was afraid that at any moment they could be killed for no crime. And they had nothing to do with his dream. His dream is his dream, it is his problem. But who was going to say this to him?These primitive people are far more intelligent, far more innocent. This society – where dreams are taken as if they are real, and something has to be done consciously so that an ugly dream does not come to you and destroy your dignity – has never had any war in its whole history. Their small tribes have never fought with each other; there is no violence in that sense.Nobody fights with anyone. If, even in a dream somebody insults you or you insult somebody, it has to be settled consciously, then it is impossible to have any violence. People are utterly simple.The unconscious simply needs fake objects to throw its garbage at. There is no need to kill anybody: you can kill a statue, you can kill a photograph, you can burn a photograph and feel at ease. And slowly, slowly, whatever comes in your dreams or in your waking hours from the unconscious, give it a reality so that it goes out. Don’t repress it. Don’t think, “This is bad and I should not show it to anybody;” it will become a wound and finally a cancer. Release it.In your private room you can release it in any way you want. Dynamic meditation was basically devised to help the unconscious unburden itself. The Indonesian latihan does the same.Once the unconscious is completely clean and there is no energy wasted in repressing it, the same energy starts moving upwards because remember, that energy cannot remain static, it has to move. Now that there is no work in the unconscious, it starts moving upwards towards lighter spaces in you, and there you will find real values which make a man a man and take him beyond the animal.Whatever you experience in the superconscious has also to be brought to the conscious and acted upon. Don’t just think great thoughts, don’t just go on experiencing beauty – let your experiences become actions, creativity. Do something about them, and as you start doing something about them you will find that deeper qualities are pouring in.Just writing a poem may release a great source of energy. Doing any beautiful act, doing any compassionate act, sharing something that you have in abundance with somebody and your superconscious will start coming more and more to the conscious mind. Now it has got a door to move into the world.When the superconscious is completely empty, then the collective superconscious starts dropping its great hidden treasures. And when the collective superconscious is emptied you have come to the ultimate glory, the cosmic conscious.From this cosmic superconscious mind, each of your acts starts taking on a fragrance of divinity, of godliness. Whatever you touch becomes gold, whatever you say becomes truth. Each of your movements in life creates ripples of beauty, joy, ecstasy, which will go to the farthest ends of existence, touching millions of people who have never known you and who may never know you – but they will share your joy.You may have felt it sometime – you are sitting, feeling good, and suddenly you become sad and you don’t know why. It is because somebody is releasing ripples of sadness just close by, and they are strong enough to have an impact on you.Sometimes you feel just the opposite – you feel very light, weightless for no reason: you feel a freshness, a joy. You cannot even tell anybody, “I am feeling joyous;” they will think you are crazy because there is no reason to feel joy. What is the reason? You cannot give a reason because you don’t know it yourself. It is just somebody’s joy that has created a ripple that touched you. We are very sensitive beings. Like the antenna of your radio, it goes on catching every ripple that comes close to you – very subtle ripples.Most of the time you are suffering other people’s sufferings, and just once in a while you are enjoying somebody else’s joy because the sad and the miserable are many, and the joyful, blissful are very few, very rare. If you can understand this, you will also feel a certain distance when you feel sadness. It may not have anything to do with you. When you feel a certain happiness, a certain pleasure, it may not have anything to do with you. You can keep a certain distance and you can watch these feelings – and watching these feelings will help you to find your own sources.Man is born with great treasures, but he is also born with the whole animal heritage. Somehow we have to empty out the animal heritage and create a space for the treasure to come to the conscious and be shared, because this is one of the qualities of a treasure: the more you share it, the more you have it.Osho,Have you suggested that now is the time for me to live out my negative emotions because in the past I never allowed myself to show them in public? I remember a group experience, years ago, in which one of the exercises was to express, in your own way, any emotion suggested, and I was unable to express anything except anger. Maybe I really didn't even know what such emotions felt like, in a conscious way; I didn't even allow myself to admit that these emotions were there. I am trying to put together the pieces in this puzzle. Am I on track?First remember not to misunderstand me. I have said, “Express your negative emotions;” I have not said, “Publicly.” That’s how things become distorted.Now if you are feeling angry with someone and you start expressing your anger, the other person is not going to be a Gautam Buddha and sit silently. He is not a marble statue, he will also do something. You will express anger, he will express anger. It will create more anger in you, and anger or violence from the other side create the same, with more vengeance. And then you will feel like going into it more, because you have been told to express. Yes, I have told you to express, but I don’t mean publicly.If you are feeling angry go to your room: lock the room, beat the pillow, stand before a mirror, shout at your own image, say things that you have never said to anybody and always wanted to say. But it has to be a private phenomenon, otherwise there is no end. Things go on moving in a circle, and we want to end them.The moment you feel any negative emotion about anybody, that other person is not the question. The question is that you have a certain energy of anger. Now, that energy has to be diffused into the universe. You are not to repress it within yourself.So whenever I say, “Express,” I always mean privately, in your aloneness. It is a meditation, it is not a fight. If you are feeling sad, sit in your room and feel as sad as you can – it can’t harm. Be really sad and see how long it stays. Nothing stays forever; soon it will be passing away – if you feel like crying, cry, but in your privacy. These things have nothing to do with others. Everything is your problem; why make it public? And that way it is not going to be helped, but on the contrary, it will be increased.So every day before going to sleep, for one hour at night, sit on your bed and do all kinds of crazy things that you wanted to do, that people do when they are angry, violent, destructive. And it does not mean that you have to be destructive to very valuable things; just tear paper into small bits and throw them all over – and you know the story. And that will do. Destroy anything valueless – but everything has to be done in your privacy, so when you come out, you come fresh.If you want to do something in public, do what I was telling you about those primitives. You can go to the person you were angry with and tell him, “In private I have been angry with you. I shouted at you, I abused you, I said ugly things to you; please forgive me. But it was all done in privacy because it was my problem; it has nothing to do with you. But in a certain way it was directed at you, and you are not aware of it, hence an apology is needed.” This has to be done in public. That will help people to help each other. And that person will not be angry. He will say, “There is no need for an apology. You have not done anything to me. And if you are feeling clean, it was a good exercise.”But in public don’t bring your negativities, your ugliness; otherwise, you are creating bigger problems while trying to solve small problems. Be really very careful. Everything negative has to be in private, in your aloneness. And if you want to make any public statement about it – because somebody may have been in your mind with whom you were hateful, whom you killed while you were tearing the paper – go to him and humbly ask for his forgiveness.And here you can see my differences from the so-called Western therapies. They don’t help, their relief is temporary. But once and for all, understand that every problem is yours, so it has to be solved in your privacy. Don’t wash your dirty linen in public places. There is no need. Why unnecessarily involve other people? Why unnecessarily create an image of yourself as ugly?I am reminded of a very strange story…There was a great conference, a world conference of psychologists, psychoanalysts, therapists and all other schools for treating man’s mind. One great psychoanalyst was reading a paper. But he could not read it because his attention was continually distracted by a young female psychoanalyst who was sitting in the front row, and an old ugly fellow who was continuously playing with her breasts. And she was not bothered at all.He could not read his paper. He tried to hide that woman and that old man behind the paper, but he would forget which line he was reading and he got so messed up that finally he said, “It is impossible.”The conference could not understand what was impossible and why he’s behaving in such a way – he was a very systematic thinker, and today he is talking nonsense. He reads half of one sentence and then another which has no connection with it, and then another page comes in, and now he is saying, “It is all messed up and I cannot…”And he would not look at the woman who was sitting just in front. Somebody stood up and said, “What is the matter? Why are you making a fool of yourself?”He said, “I am not making a fool of myself. This young lady is not doing anything, and that old ugly fellow is playing with her breasts.”The young lady said, “But that is not your problem. You should read your paper. Even I am not taking it as my problem. It is his problem, so why should I be worried? He has a repressed sexuality; perhaps he could not get his mother’s breast for long enough. And he is still, at this age, he must be eighty… He is not doing any harm to me. It is not my problem, so why should I stop him? And it is not your problem, why should you get disturbed? It is simply his problem. He should get psychoanalyzed – and he himself is a great psychoanalyst. In fact, he is my teacher.”But what the woman said, “It is not my problem, what he is doing,” needs a very integrated personality, a very clear-cut vision that even though he is doing something with her, the problem is his.She continued “Why should I get disturbed? The poor fellow has been suffering from his very childhood it seems, and he has never found any opportunity – and now he is almost half in his grave. If I can give him some satisfaction, there is no harm. It does me no harm at all. But I am puzzled why you could not read your paper. You seem to be standing behind this old fellow. You also have the same problem.”And it was a fact. That man also had the same problem, otherwise there was nothing to be worried about. He should read his paper and let the old man do what he is doing. And if the young lady is not preventing him, is not even taking note of him, it is none of his business.If people can keep to their own problems, and don’t go on spreading them all around – because then they become magnified.Now what this old man needed was simply a baby’s milk bottle, so in his aloneness at night he can suck lukewarm milk from the bottle and enjoy it. And in darkness, whether it is a nipple or just a rubber teat makes no difference. All that he needs is a small baby’s milk bottle every night so that he can die peacefully without any problem. But he is throwing it on a poor woman who has nothing to do with it. And not only that, somebody else who is absolutely out of the whole thing is disturbed because he also has the same problem.Just keep your private problems to yourself. Group therapy is not of much help because whatever you do in the group you cannot do in the society. And the group cannot become your whole life; out of the group you will again be in the same trouble.What I am giving to you is a simple method that you can do by yourself very easily. Clean your unconscious and come back into the outside world, with other people – with a softer face, cleaner eyes, more human acts.So everything is right, just don’t misunderstand me. You have used that word public; it is not a question of public, it is your problem. Why bother the public? – they have their own problems. Let them tackle their problems in their privacy. Other than that, you are on the right track.Express. Find a way to express it as cheaply as possible, as economically as possible, but always in your aloneness so that only you know the ugliness that you have thrown out.Osho,Did you have an awareness of your past lives before you were enlightened?Yes.Osho,Although you were born almost enlightened, when I listen to your stories of your early life, I never get the impression that you saw yourself as a spiritual seeker. Were you looking for enlightenment, or was enlightenment a by-product of an impeccable resolve to never compromise what you felt to be true?There are things which cannot be sought directly. The more valuable a thing is, the more indirectly you have to go into it. In fact you have to do something else that simply prepares the situation around you – in which things like enlightenment, truth, can happen.You cannot go seeking and searching for truth. Where will you go? Kabul? Kulu-Manali? Kathmandu? Goa?…and then back home. All seekers of truth go this route and come back home looking more foolish than before. They have not found anything.Where will you go to seek the truth? You don’t know the way, there is no map, there is no direction available. Nobody knows what, where, when it is possible to realize truth.The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, unauthentic, insincere – and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.I have never been spiritual in the sense that you understand the word. I have never gone to the temples or the churches, or read scriptures, or followed certain practices to find truth, or worshipped God or prayed to God. That has not been my way at all. So certainly you can say that I was not doing anything spiritual. But to me spirituality has a totally different connotation. It needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people’s aloneness.So my spirituality has a different meaning from your idea of spirituality. My childhood stories – if you can understand them – will point to all these qualities in some way or other. Nobody can call them spiritual. I call them spiritual, because to me they have given all that man can aspire to.While listening to my childhood stories you should try to look for some quality in it – not just the story but some intrinsic quality that runs like a thin thread through all of my memoirs. And that thin thread is spiritual.Spiritual, to me, simply means finding oneself. I never allowed anybody to do this work on my behalf – because nobody can do this work on your behalf; you have to do it yourself. And you cannot do it directly either, you have to create a certain milieu in which it happens. It is a happening; enlightenment, liberation, awakening, realization – all these words point towards absolutely one thing and that is a happening.That creates a kind of fear in many people: “If it is happening, then what are we supposed to do? Whenever it will happen, it will happen.” That is not so. It is a happening, but you can do much to prepare the ground for it to happen.Preparing the ground may not look spiritual to those who do not understand. But it must be spiritual because the enlightenment has happened.The end proves that whatever means were used were substantially right. It is the goal that proves that the way that was followed was right.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I cannot distinguish between imagination and reality. Can I assume that I do not know reality yet, so why not enjoy watching the whole movie without trying to distinguish? Or, is it necessary to be aware of the difference between imagination and reality?There is no question of making any distinction between imagination and reality. Imagination is that which disappears if you become aware of it, alert to it.Reality is that which becomes more real if you become aware of it, alert to it.You cannot distinguish between the two, because both are never present simultaneously.And you need not worry about it. All that you have to do is simply be watchful. Whatever passes through your experience – thoughts, feelings – don’t let it go unwatched, and the unreal will disappear on its own accord. It cannot face the watching eyes; only the real will remain.So for the watcher, there is only the real.For the sleeper, there is only the unreal.And they never meet, so the question of distinction does not arise. It is not that you can put reality on one side and imagination on the other side and make a comparison, or find differences.For example, in this room, either there is light or there is darkness. You cannot manage to have both. Darkness appears to be as real as light, but it is not a reality because you cannot do anything with it. You cannot bring it in, you cannot take it out, you cannot cut it into pieces; you cannot do anything with it.Just bring a lighted candle in, and the darkness simply disappears. It is not that it goes out of the door, or runs out of the windows. You can keep all the windows and doors open or closed; in either case darkness will not be found.Light is real because you can do everything with it. You can bring it in, you can take it out. You can light a candle, you can blow it out. It is a reality.Darkness is only an absence – an absence of light.Light is presence, darkness is absence. Imagination is not even absence; it is simply a thought in your mind, just a signature made on water – you have not even completed it and it is gone.So don’t be worried about these subtle distinctions; rather, simply be aware that shadows will disappear – the unreal, imaginative experiences will disappear – and only that which remains in your awareness and becomes more and more clear as you become aware is true, is real, is the nature of existence.Osho,In Japan there is an ancient form of theater, which I studied for a short time, called Noh. In it, the actor moves slowly forwards, one step at a time; simultaneously he focuses inside, and with his energy creates a path behind him. If the audience is really in tune with him, they can also see both his physical movement forward and the path he is creating behind him.Osho, you always say that you don't know where you will be in the next moment, you don't care where your feet will be next. My concern is that I be able to see clearly, every moment, the path that you are creating behind you.What a wonderful journey to be with you, Osho! We go wherever existence leads us.The moment you trust in let-go, the moment you stop struggling against existence, you need not worry about anything; existence takes care.The whole trouble with the human mind is, it is constantly fighting, it is trying to go against the current. There is a reason why it does so: only by going against the current does it feel the ego. Just going with the flow of life – without any struggle, letting life lead you wherever it wants to – your ego will disappear. You will be, you will be more than you are now – more authentic, more true – but there will be no sense of I. And then you will be able to see where you are going.Even the path that is created as you move can be seen by those who have no egos. You can even see the footprints of the birds flying in the sky. They don’t make any footprints but if the mind is clear of the ego, the whole being becomes such a clean mirror that even those footprints reflect in it.The Japanese form of drama called Noh is a by-product of Zen experience. Zen has given birth to many things. No other religious movement in the world has been so creative, so productive. It has created art – which has a quality of its own – it has created poetry, it has created literature, it has created drama, it has created sculpture. Whatever it has created, it has left unmistakably the mark of meditativeness on it; it has turned things into meditation which nobody has ever imagined can even be associated with meditation.For example, swordsmanship. Who can think that swordsmanship can be a discipline for meditation?And drama. All other religions have condemned the whole world as drama. Zen has used even drama. And if the actor moves, focusing his whole energy just under the navel – two inches under the navel, where according to Zen is the point hara, our life source – if he concentrates inside on the hara and moves slowly step by step, those who are silent enough in the audience will see, behind him, a path is being created. His energy is moving forward leaving a certain imprint which can be read only by those who are capable of some silent awareness. It is tremendously beautiful, the whole drama. It is not like any other drama in the world, they have changed the whole character; they have made it sacred. The audience is not sitting in a theater but in a temple, and the actors are not just acting, they are meditating.Zen painting or Zen poetry, they have the same quality; Zen has transformed the whole meaning of any art that it has touched. No religion has been able to do that; in fact, no religion has been creative. They have all been destructive.Zen is the very essence of creativity. You can do anything and yet your action can be sacred.The question is not what you do; the question is whether you do it with awareness or unawareness.They have shifted the whole question. Every religion thinks, “This is wrong, that is right. Do this, don’t do that.” They are pointing towards certain acts which are wrong, certain acts which are right – which is a very childish thing, because an act can be right in one context and the same act can be wrong in another context.You cannot stamp a certain act as wrong or right. Then how to decide what is moral, what is immoral, what has to be done and what has not to be done? Zen does not decide. Zen simply says, “Just be aware, whatever you are doing. If your awareness remains unwavering while doing it, it is right. If you have to lose your awareness – only then you can do it – then it is wrong.” The decisive point has gone inward; not to the object, but to your subjectivity.And the same you have to understand here with me – no act in itself is right or wrong, no person is good or bad. It all depends on awareness.I am reminded of one great mystic, Nagarjuna. He used to live naked. He had only a begging bowl; that was his only possession. But perhaps he was the greatest genius that has been born on this earth, as far as intelligence is concerned – his sharpness is incomparable. Great kings, queens, great philosophers were his students.One queen was very much devoted to him, and when he came to her capital she had made a golden begging bowl studded with diamonds. And when he came to the palace to beg, she said, “First you have to give me a promise.” He said, “You are asking a promise from a naked man who has nothing but his begging bowl.” She said, “That will do. I’m just asking for the begging bowl.” He said, “You can take it.” She said, “That is only half. I will replace it, and you will have to take my begging bowl.” He said, “There is no problem, any begging bowl will do.”He was not at all aware of what she was hiding. It was a golden begging bowl studded with very valuable diamonds.He took it. As he was going back to the ruins of the monastery where he was staying, one thief saw him and could not believe his eyes. The begging bowl was shining like stars and he is a naked man – of course very beautiful, magnificent; but what is the begging bowl doing with this naked man? And how long can he keep it? Somebody is going to take it away, so why not I?He followed Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna went inside a room, which was a little shed with just the walls left. The whole monastery was in ruins, and there was a window by the side, and the thief was hiding outside the window knowing that Buddhist monks eat only once a day. Now he will eat, and then he will have a little sleep – just a nap. And that will be the right moment. In this monastery nobody lives. It is thousands of years old.But before giving him a chance to steal the bowl, Nagarjuna ate his food and threw the bowl out of the window where the thief was sitting. The thief could not believe it. He was really shocked. For a moment he could not think what to do; what kind of man is he? He has eaten his food and thrown away this immensely valuable bowl as if it is of no use – and exactly where I am sitting.He stood up and he asked Nagarjuna, “Can I come in just to ask one question?” Nagarjuna said, “To bring you in, I had to throw the bowl out. Come in. The bowl is yours; don’t be worried. I have given it to you so you will not be a thief. It is a gift, a present. I am a poor man. I don’t have anything else, only that bowl; and I know I cannot keep it for long because I will have to sleep, somebody will take it away and you have taken so much trouble. From the capital you followed me, and I have been watching. And it is a hot summer day. Please don’t refuse. Take it.”The thief said, “You are a strange man. Don’t you know how costly it is?” Nagarjuna said, “Since I have known myself nothing is costly.” The thief looked at Nagarjuna and said, “Then give me one present more: how can I know myself in comparison to which this precious bowl is nothing?” He said, “It is very simple.” But the thief said, “Before you say anything I want to introduce myself. I am a well-known thief.”Nagarjuna said, “Who is not? Don’t be concerned with trivia. In this world everybody is a thief because everybody comes naked without anything, and then everybody has something or other. All are thieves, so don’t be worried. That’s why I live naked. It is perfectly okay. Whatever you are doing, do it well. Just do one thing: when you are stealing be aware, be alert, be watchful. If you lose watchfulness then don’t steal. That is a simple rule for you.” The thief said, “It is very simple. When I can see you again?” He said, “I will be here for two weeks. You can come any day, but first try it.”For two weeks he tried, and he found that it is the most difficult thing in the world. Once he reached even into the palace, opened the door of the treasures, but when he will try to take something he will lose his awareness. And he was an honest man. So he will leave that thing – that cannot be taken. But it was difficult: when he was aware, there was no desire to take anything; and when he was not aware, he wanted to take the whole treasure.Finally he came empty-handed to Nagarjuna and he said, “You have disturbed my whole life. Now I cannot steal.” Nagarjuna said, “That is not my problem. Now it is your problem. If you want to steal forget all about awareness.” But the thief said, “Those few moments of awareness were so valuable. I have never felt so at ease, so peaceful, so silent, so blissful – the whole treasure of the kingdom was nothing compared to it.“Now I understand what you mean by saying that once you have known yourself nothing else is costly. I cannot stop practicing awareness. I have tasted just a few drops of the nectar which you must be tasting every moment. Will you allow me to be a disciple and follow you?” Nagarjuna said, “I knew it that very day. I had initiated you already when you followed me. You were thinking you are going to steal the begging bowl and I was thinking how to steal you. We are both in the same business.”Never be bothered about anything else, only one thing – one thing is the whole religion, and that is awareness, and then you will be able to see where your life is going, where all of life is going. And you will be able to feel that this is the only way to be at ease and in harmony with existence, the only way to dissolve yourself into the whole.So just remember one thing, whatever you are doing – it may be drama, it may be cooking in the kitchen, it may be washing the dishes.I used to have a German disciple, Gunakar. He was too much in a hurry to become enlightened, just like any German! While he was with me, of course, he could not become enlightened because I was there and he could not declare himself enlightened, he knew that he is not enlightened; but when he went to Germany, there he will declare that he is enlightened. And he will start writing great letters to world leaders, religious leaders, representatives in the UN, presidents, prime ministers, advising them how the world can be transformed. And somebody will inform me that Gunakar has become enlightened. And I will call him back, and he will come back to me. And I will say, “Gunakar, is it true?”He will say, “It is not true, but when I go to Germany the temptation is so great – because to other Germans who don’t know anything about enlightenment I can declare, but here it is difficult. It is strange. People come here to become enlightened, but whenever I come here I become unenlightened. In Germany I remain enlightened.”Three or four times he became enlightened, became unenlightened. Then for a few years – five years almost, I had been in America – I had not heard of him. I was worried that perhaps he has become really enlightened and is afraid to come. But no; the reality was something else. Just two days ago, somebody informed me that he saw Gunakar in a sannyasins’ commune in Germany, washing dishes.And he knew that this man had become many times enlightened. He asked, “What happened to your enlightenment?” He said, “Forget all about it. I’m just a dishwasher. Don’t talk nonsense to me.”This awareness may make him one day enlightened – washing dishes I am a dishwasher; cleaning the floor I am a cleaner; cooking food I am a cook.Each moment, whatever you are doing, do it with full awareness, with totality, intensity, love; and do it as if it is the greatest thing in the world to do. Make it an art, so that each moment of your life becomes the life of an artist.Enlightenment will come on its own accord without even knocking on your doors. One day suddenly you will see that your joy, your ecstasy, never leaves you; whether you are awake or asleep, it is within you. For days you have not been miserable, for days you have not felt any agony, for days you have not felt anger, jealousy, competitiveness, for days you have not felt yourself as an I.This is the whole work of the mystery school, to let your ego dissolve and to help you into a deep let-go with existence.Osho,A friend wrote to me that two days after her father died, sitting by the corpse she felt an incredible rise of energy in her. What is happening around a dead person, and how should we look after the body of a person who has died?The moment a person dies he releases all his energy. If you are receptive, you will feel it. If you are available, open, you will feel your energy level rising up. It depends on many things – what kind of man has died, what kind of energy he used to have. If he was a man of anger, violence, then it is better not to be close to him because all his repressed anger, all his repressed violence will be released and you can unnecessarily suffer from all that energy entering you.And it is very natural because when somebody is dying or dead, you automatically become silent by their side – nobody makes any noise, nobody talks. Death is such a mysterious phenomenon that everybody is in shock.So the first thing to be aware of is, what kind of person is dying. If the person has been a loving person, compassionate, kind, always helpful, always sharing whatever he had, then to be close to him and sit silently will be very helpful to you. When he is leaving, these energies will be radiated all around him.But if he was sexually repressed, a rapist, or some kind of criminal, it is better not be close to him because whatever he has been collecting in his life is going to be released. He is moving into a new house, so all his old furniture is going to be left in the old house. He cannot carry all that furniture with him; it will be diffused around him.Because of this fact, in India the three great religions – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism – have decided that the dead person’s body should be burned as quickly as possible, so that it does not radiate unnecessary, harmful things to people – and mostly people are repressing ugly things. So in India, only the saints are not burned; that’s the exception. Their bodies are kept in samadhis – in a certain kind of grave, so that their bodies can go on radiating for years, sometimes for hundreds of years. But ordinary persons’ bodies are immediately burned – as quickly as possible.Other religions of the world have decided not to burn bodies but to put them in a grave. It is dangerous. It means you are putting away accumulated anger, hatred, sexuality, murder – all kinds of energies which will be radiating from their graves – and you can catch them, they are infectious.In the East whenever a man who has attained to himself dies, he announces beforehand when he is going to die so that all his disciples can come to share his energy – his last gift. He wants to die amongst his own people, his own disciples who can understand him and be receptive to him. And his whole life’s treasure of beautiful feelings he showers on them.As far as the man who is dying or dead is concerned, one has to be very watchful.There is an ancient parable. A man was dying. He had four sons. They were all present. He said to the eldest, “Come close to me, I want to give you a message.” But he wouldn’t come. Even though he was dying, the man was very angry; and he said, “I always knew that you were good for nothing, you cannot even take a message from a dying man and I’m your father.” But the young man remained in his place, like a frozen statue, he didn’t move. He asked the second; he didn’t move. He asked the third; he didn’t move. But the fourth was very young so he went; and he whispered in his ear, “All these three are traitors. They have betrayed me. Now you be faithful to me. Do one thing. When I am dead, cut my body into pieces and throw a piece into every neighbor’s house and inform the police.” The boy said, “But why?” He said, “Just to give peace to my soul. Seeing them all handcuffed going towards the police station, my soul will feel more peaceful than I have ever felt before.”The three sons knew their father perfectly well. His whole life he was fighting. His whole day he was in the court. His whole life was nothing but a fight. They were afraid to listen to the last message, in case there may be something dangerous, and you cannot deny a dying man his last wish.And he died.They all asked the young man what he had said. The young man said, “I had no idea that our father was such a man. I cannot do it. But his soul will suffer very much.”This is an ancient parable signifying that whatever a person has been throughout his life, will be accumulated at the end, at the very end; and energy in itself is natural, but what form it has taken in a man depends on the man, his personality, his whole life’s actions.Bennett remembers in his autobiography that after the second world war he was so tired – he had been in the war fighting – that he felt close to dying. But he wanted to see George Gurdjieff, his master, for the last time – at least before he dies. So he went to see him in Paris. He went in, and Gurdjieff said, “What has happened to you, Bennett? You are looking so pale, as if you are going to die. You have come at the right time. Just come close to me.” He took hold of his hands, stared in his eyes, and within two minutes Bennett started feeling a tremendous rush of energy. But that was only one side of it. At the same time he saw Gurdjieff becoming pale, and he became afraid of what he was doing. He stopped him, saying, “Stop. I am perfectly okay.”Gurdjieff said, “Don’t be worried about me.” He somehow managed to walk to the bathroom, and closed the door; after ten minutes he came out. He was perfectly okay.Bennett remembers, “I had never thought that energy could be transferred in such a simple way.”But it is being transferred.It was so direct, that’s why he became aware of it. In other ways, every master is giving his energy to his people – every moment he looks into your eyes – every moment he comes close to you. What else he can give to you? He has achieved whatever one can achieve in life. Now his energy is just to share.But if somebody is dying to whom you are closely related – your father, your mother, your wife, your husband, your child, your friend…and you would like to do something to take part in it – the person is dying, you are alive – you can sit by the side of the person, you can put your hand on his heart or hold his hands and just be silent, and just be peaceful. And your peace and your silence will be transferred, transmitted; and if you can help the person to die peacefully, silently, you have done a beautiful act, a virtuous act. You may feel afterwards a little weak, tired, exhausted; but that is nothing – just a little rest and you will be perfectly okay.So from your side you can help the dying person to move on to a better plane of life, but for that you have to be silent and you have to be peaceful. Then you are on a higher plane and energy can flow.Energy flows in the same way water flows – downwards. It cannot flow upwards.So remember it, that both ways energy can be exchanged. If the person is certainly of an evil character, it is better to avoid him. You will not be able to help him; on the contrary, he may help you – give you some of his deviltry, sow some seeds in your heart, in your being. It is better to avoid him. But if the person is a good person, has not done any harm to anybody…the basic thing is that if you love the person, you have a feeling for the person, then you can pour your energy into him. This is the time – and the last time; you won’t have another opportunity to give him a gift.And there cannot be a better gift than this, because this gift can change his whole future journey. If he dies peacefully and silently, he will be born on a higher plane.But you have to be very careful. Don’t try sitting in meditation and helping Adolf Hitler – don’t try. It is beyond you. You cannot give energy to him; he will give energy to you – and all the more easily if you are silent and peaceful.One has to be very careful with the dying person, because much can happen between the two of you. His future life can be affected, your future life can be affected – unless you are so much aware that nothing can affect you. Then there is no problem, then you can sit in full awareness even by the side of Adolf Hitler, he will not be in any way capable of harming you. Perhaps you may be able to help him a little bit.Osho,Is it possible that as modern intelligent people become more and more accustomed to change as part of their daily lives, they will also become more open to your radically innovative approach to life?Certainly. The more they are uprooted from the stable past and become accustomed to changing things in all spheres of life, the easier it will be for them to see what I am saying, to understand what I am saying.In stable societies in the past people were absolutely closed.Things were so settled that your religion was given at your birth. There was no question of you changing it. It was part and parcel of your blood, your bones, your marrow.The two oldest religions in the world are the Hindus and the Jews. Both are non-converting religions, they don’t convert anybody.These two religions are the oldest – all other religions are off-shoots of these two. They do not believe in conversion because conversion means the possibility of change.In a stable world, where everything is stable, a Jew is a Jew; he is born a Jew, he will live as Jew, he will die as a Jew. There is no question that he can change.Now things are in a more flexible state. It is possible to have different views from your parents, it is possible to have different ideologies from your teachers. In fact, if you are intelligent you will have different ideologies because their ideologies are out of date.You have to find fresher visions, more up-to-date approaches to existence.So it is absolutely certain that as things are moving and people are moving – changing their jobs, their wives, their husbands, their countries – they will be more open to me. And this you can see.In the East it is difficult for me to find somebody open and receptive. In India it is difficult.In the West it is easier. It is not a coincidence that most of my sannyasins are from the West. The reason is clear. The Western mind is now accustomed to change.The Eastern mind is still not accustomed to change. It still lives in a stable world.According to the Hindus, the stars don’t move. Even today they go on saying that. Everybody knows that they move with tremendous velocity. But according to the Hindus, they are just decorations on the ceiling of the earth, they don’t move. Nothing moves.In fact, India was very much shocked after Hiroshima and Nagasaki – not because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves, but because after the atomic explosions the weather changed, the climate changed. Before, in India dates were fixed. On a certain date every year the rains will come, on a certain date the summer will start, on a certain date the winter will start; it was fixed for millions of years.There was no question of change. But the atomic explosion shook the whole atmosphere. Now nothing is certain. Even that gave the Indian mind a great shock – that change is possible, that one should not take it for granted that things are going to remain always the same.But India is still far from being receptive as far as their belief systems are concerned. They are very closed about it. Nobody talks about it. There is no question of talking. Everybody has his god, everybody has his holy book, everybody knows where his temple is, everybody knows his ritual from birth – the prayer, the priest. Everything is settled. There is no need to search. Nobody goes in search of a master.The search for a master starts only when you become suspicious of your belief systems.That was the reasoning of the pope when he said to Galileo, “You should change in your book where you have written that the earth goes around the sun. It should be changed because according to the Bible the sun goes around the earth.” And Galileo said, “Just a small statement: what difference does it make to you?” And the pope said, “It is not a question of a small statement. If one statement in the Bible is proved wrong, then suspicion arises in the believers – that if one statement is wrong then what guarantee is there about other statements? And if God can write one statement wrong, then he is not infallible. You have to change it. It is not a question of factuality, of science. The question is the whole prestige of the Christian religion.” – On that small statement, which has nothing to do with Christianity, which has nothing to do with God!But in a way the pope’s argument was right. If one brick out of your temple is taken, then the danger is that other bricks may start falling. And once doubt arises, there is no end; and doubt has arisen.The West is far more fortunate because it is now full of doubt, skepticism, disbelief.The East is unfortunate because it is still lingering in the old stable world where nothing changed, everything was static, and everything was known – there was nothing left to be discovered, so there was no question of any quest, any inquiry, any science. All was in the religious books, and as it was, even to have a question about it was thought to be sinful.It is a perfectly right time for me.And the fear of the Western governments shows it clearly. Why they are so afraid of me? I don’t have an army, I don’t have nuclear weapons. What can I do? But they know that I can destroy their belief systems very easily, people are ready; just somebody is needed to make them aware that the earth they used to stand on is no longer there, that they have to find a new earth to stand on.This world-wide conspiracy against me looks strange because never before have all the countries agreed about a single individual, that he is dangerous.Just the other day a German court has given us its verdict, that the German government was wrong to declare me dangerous.A fight was going on between sannyasins and the German government in the courts, and the German government was trying to prove that I am a dangerous man. And all that they could prove was that I could prove a dangerous man. And the magistrate seems to be a fair man, intelligent. He said, “That can be said about anybody – could prove – but you don’t have any proof that this man has been dangerous. On what grounds are you predicting the future? And just on your assumption?” So he has prohibited the German government from using such words against me, or my followers – that they are dangerous, that they are a cult.This government’s effort to prove that I am dangerous because I could prove dangerous…but in what ways could I prove dangerous? Can I manufacture nuclear weapons there? They cannot even say it. They know what the fear is, but to say it will expose them, it won’t help them.The fear is that I can catch hold of the younger people, and they don’t have any way to prevent it. Their philosophies are dead and their theologies are dead, their churches are graveyards, their priests and their popes are just corpses from the past. They don’t have any argument for the present, for the new age, for the new man.Osho,I love to look into your eyes while in your presence. You have suggested a way to look in the mirror for meditation. Is there a way I can look at you for meditation?There is no harm in looking at me, but the meditation on your own eyes in the mirror has certain effects which will not be the same as looking at me.Looking at me you may feel peaceful, silent, in a kind of beautitude; but that is not the purpose of the meditation. The purpose of that meditation is totally different.You can do both. There is no need to make them alternatives.Nobody is preventing you from looking at me. But don’t try to avoid that meditation, because that meditation will give you great insight into your own ego, your own mind. It will help your watchfulness. So don’t avoid that.You can do anything else that you want to do. But every meditation has its own consequences.Osho,In days past, Sufis had to whirl in order to become aware of their unmoving center. In this rapidly changing world, can the modern man simply stand still and achieve exactly the same effect?No, it won’t do, because you cannot stand still. You don’t know how to be still. It is not just a matter of standing. The world is moving, but that movement is invisible. The earth is moving, but you don’t feel its movement because you are also moving with it. The earth is making a double movement: first, on its own axis – it is moving round and round; and second, it is going around the sun. So a double movement is there, but you are not aware of either. You can stand still, but the earth goes on moving and you are moving with it. In twenty-four hours it makes one round of itself, and in three hundred and sixty-five days it makes another round of the sun.You will be moving. You cannot stand still. There is no place where you can stand still. Everything is movement. Stillness is possible only if your mind is without thoughts. If your awareness helps you to get rid of your thoughts, then there is stillness; and that is the only stillness possible in the world.Archimedes used to say, “If I can find a silent still point in the universe, I can revolutionize the whole world.” But he never found it because he was always looking outside. And that silent still point is within you; it has never moved. The earth moves, the sun moves, the stars move, now everything is whirling; but something within you is always absolutely still, and eternally still.But to see it, to feel it, you have to get rid of your thoughts. If you don’t get rid of your thoughts, those thoughts will not allow you to see yourself. They keep you engaged, occupied. And it is easy to disperse them.Just try the simple thing that I am insisting on continually: do whatever you are doing, just go on watching your thoughts. If you miss, no harm; whenever you remember again, start watching. You will miss many times. Slowly, slowly you will miss less. Soon there will be big gaps when you will be aware and there will be no thoughts. In those gaps you will see the silent, still point; and certainly if you have found it, you can revolutionize the whole world.The people who have brought evolution to the world are those few people who have found their center. They are the people who have changed humanity for better, and they are needed now more than ever, because humanity is in such a critical stage that if we don’t have enough people to transform it onto a higher level, it is going to destroy itself.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have just read an article by Stephen Jay Gould, a warm, amusing, open-minded scientist whose field is biology, and particularly evolution. It seems probable that about five to eight million years ago the chimp-human ancestral line split into what was to become modern chimp and modern man. Homo erectus appeared about a million or so years ago.The interest in all this is that if true, it means that man learned to stand up very fast in evolutionary terms – over only about a million years. Elsewhere, in trying to explain missing fossils it has been suggested that evolution is not necessarily slow, but may occur in sudden leaps.When I think of an imaginary conversation between pre-chimp and pre-human, as they parted company so long ago, I think of you talking to mankind.Are we living through an equally momentous point in evolution, where you, as the first of Homo Novus point to a beautiful vision which is as far removed from Homo Sapiens as he, in turn, is from the chimpanzee? Might the jump into enlightenment as a quantum leap in consciousness have any natural equivalent in evolutionary jumps in the physical world?The quantum leap is the latest discovery in modern physics. Up to now evolution was always thought of as a slow process. Hence it was always contrasted with revolution. Revolution was fast, quick; evolution was very slow.But a quantum leap cannot even be called fast. It is instantaneous: from one point, from one stage, you disappear, and you appear at a higher, at a different point, at a different stage.It was very puzzling in the beginning because no such thing had ever been conceived of. But slowly, slowly physics has settled with it, that it is a reality. Electrons disappear from one point and appear at another point and between the two there is no time gap. Here it disappears, there it appears; the distance is covered but time is not taken in covering the distance.In physics it has now become accepted; in metaphysics, as far as human consciousness is concerned, it can be even quicker, because if matter can take such jumps that it moves almost beyond imagination, beyond the speed of time, in consciousness many more miracles are possible, because of course consciousness is the highest flowering of existence. It seems that the whole existence has been working to reach to the stage of a Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha followed slowly the path of evolution, because that was the only possibility in those days.After twenty-five centuries, it is possible to declare that quantum leaps are available, for those who have the courage, in the field of consciousness too. Particularly in consciousness, time has no reference, no relevance – consciousness in non-temporal.One can move from sleep to awakening instantly – or do you think it takes a long slow process – that first one is partly awake, then a little more awake, and by the evening one is fully awake? And then the second process starts – you start partly asleep, then more, then more, then by midnight you are fast asleep?We know that it happens to everybody that you wake up instantly. Any device may do – just an alarm clock, which has nothing to do with you. The alarm clock is not even aware of you, is not concerned with you – it may be enough to change you from deep sleep into a quick awakening. The same is possible as far as spiritual sleep is concerned. It is only a question of finding a device. The problem is a little complicated, because an alarm clock will do for everybody, but spiritual devices are meant for unique individuals. One device will not work for all, because people are so different, so unique. Nature does not produce carbon copies, everybody is original. Hence he needs an original device.In the past, one hundred and twelve methods have been found for meditation – those are the devices. The undercurrent is the same, just the devices are a little different from each other, because individuals are different from each other.The religions which have been teaching the same prayer to everybody are doing an enormous harm, because that prayer in the first place is based on a belief in a God no one has seen, no one has heard of. Different religions define God in a different way.In England there is now a growing movement of Satanism, devil worshippers. Thirty thousand people already openly declare that the devil is not God’s enemy, but God’s only begotten son. And they worship the devil because God, after creating the world, has either gone senile or has completely forgotten about the world. But one thing is certain, that he is no more interested, because after those six days, he has never been seen. There is not a single eyewitness. So why bother the old fellow? His young son, the devil…the word devil helps them, because it comes from the same Sanskrit root as divine. It means “godly.”It depends on you what you make of God, and such things. Nobody interferes. God has never said anything about himself. He has never said to any religion “Don’t say these things, they are not true.” In fact God is only an image created by man, so is the devil.You can change your images, and you can go on praying to your own handmade, homemade gods for millions of years. Nothing will happen to you, because these are not devices.I have told you Leo Tolstoy’s story. Before the Russian revolution, Russia was one of the most orthodox Christian countries, more than anywhere else. The archbishop of the Russian church was getting more and more angry about three men who lived beyond a lake, under a tree – poor folks, villagers, uneducated, uncultured; but people had started worshipping them as saints.And thousands of people were going there. And that was hurting him very much. These were the people who were supposed to come to his church; they are going to three persons who are not even recognized by the church as saints.The English word saint is ugly. It comes from the original sanction – a man who has been sanctioned by the church in his holiness. He has a certificate of holiness from the church.These people have never been sanctioned in any holiness, and thousands of people are going. Finally, outraged, he himself went in a boat.Those three poor fellows were sitting under a tree, very happy, very peaceful, very silent. But the archbishop was very angry. He screamed at them, shouted at them. They all kneeled before him and said, “Forgive us if we have done anything wrong, but why are you shouting? What is the problem?”The archbishop said, “Who told you you are saints?”They said, “Nobody, and we don’t think we are saints, we are poor people. But what can we do if people have started coming to us, just as you have come. What can we do?”“But why have people started coming to you? What is your religion?”They looked at each other. They said, “We are uneducated people; don’t talk in such cultured, sophisticated language. Make it simple.”The archbishop was happy that they were humbled by him. He said, “What prayer do you do?” All the three giggled. He said, “What is there to giggle about; is this your prayer?”They said, “No, this is not, but what it is creates giggling.”“Say it.”Everybody said to the other, “You say it.” The second said to the third, “Better you say it. You are older than us. It is your right to say it.”The archbishop said, “I don’t have much time. Say it! What is your prayer?”They said, “We are ashamed. Just forgive us, because our prayer is very poor. Hearing that God is a trinity and we are also a trinity, we have made our own prayer. Our prayer is simple because we are very simple people. We cannot remember long words and big prayers. Our prayer is, ‘You are three, we are three; have mercy on us.’”Even the archbishop giggled. He said, “This is a prayer? You were right that it brings giggling. I have never giggled in my life, I am a serious man, but seeing you three fools creating a prayer on your own – and we have a prayer authorized by the church. I will tell you the authorized prayer, and from today, you start the authorized prayer. Become real Christians!”They said, “We will try. Just tell us what we have to do.” So he repeated the whole authorized Russian prayer. As he was saying the prayer, all the three were becoming very sad. At the end, they said, “It is almost impossible for us to remember. You will have to repeat it two, three times so that we can manage. One part I will remember, another part the other remembers, the third part, the third remembers. But the whole prayer to be remembered by one single person is asking too much.”He said, “Okay, that will do, but at least it will be authorized prayer, the right prayer, the only right prayer in the world.” So he repeated again.They thanked him; “It was great of you to come here. God must have sent you here.”And he went very happily back in his boat, feeling satisfied that now this foolishness will stop. People will not go to these people. I will expose them, that this is their prayer. And how have they become saints?But in the middle of the lake, he saw suddenly all three running on water towards him. He said, “My God!”They caught the boat and said, “One more time because we forgot. We forgot which part is to be remembered by whom. And there was so much conflict that we said it is better to go to you. You can decide which part – and the reality is, we have forgotten the prayer. You repeat it once more.”But now it was a revelation to the archbishop, that these people are walking on water. He said, “Forget the prayer I have told you. Your prayer is right. You continue your prayer, because I have been praying this authorized prayer my whole life. I cannot walk on water. My prayer has not been heard, but your prayer has been heard. You go. Just forgive me for interfering in your life. Whatever you are doing is right. Continue doing it in your own way.”These one hundred and twelve methods of meditation are exhaustive. There cannot be one hundred and thirteen. Everything that different human types will need is included in one hundred and twelve methods. And they are handed down from centuries. They are simple. The key in all those one hundred and twelve methods is witnessing – in different forms, in different strategies – but the innermost core is witnessing, awareness, watchfulness. You can call it anything, but it will be another meaning of witnessing.With witnessing, you can have a quantum leap. You can move from your sleep – not the ordinary, but the spiritual sleep – and you can wake up. Not the ordinary waking that you have done every morning, but the real awakening, which brings you to the highest realization in life – of yourself, and the whole, and that you are part of it; that the whole is you and that you are the whole. There is no distinction.Physics has given the words quantum leap. No spiritual thinker, philosopher, has tried to think of a parallel for spiritual growth. That shows the poverty of your so-called spiritual thinkers, theologians. But in fact, meditation is the way which can bring a sudden flare-up in your being. And not only that, it can start a chain reaction. One flares up and suddenly people of the same type, who have not even tried meditation, who are not even seekers, who have never thought about anything spiritual, catch the infection – it is contagious.So a few people around the earth get the quantum leap, then thousands more will become part of a world-wide fire. And that is the only way to save whatever millions of years of evolution has brought to us.You have to choose between Ronald Reagan and Gautam Buddha. It is not a coincidence that Ronald Reagan used to have a chimpanzee as his friend. A man is known by the company he keeps. And when he became president, the chimpanzee was also very happy.They both went for a walk. An old man saw the chimpanzee and Ronald Reagan; he was ashamed that the president of America cannot find friendship with any human being, he has to find friendship with a chimpanzee.He went close to them and said, “Mr. President, this does not look good.”Ronald Reagan said, “What does not look good?”That old man said, “You shut up, idiot. I am talking to the president. You have no right to interfere. You may be his friend, not mine.”The future is in danger if man does not understand the methods that can bring him quick transformation. We don’t have time for evolution. We don’t have time even for revolution. Only a quantum leap can save humanity and the universe.And I think as the pressure of death, destructiveness, nuclear war, becomes more and more heavy, the quantum leap will also become more and more possible, because it will be the only way out of a global suicide.Osho,When we start watching our bodies, and then our minds and emotions, there remains an element, although subtle, of concentration. Initially, for example, watching my breathing, I would watch it to the exclusion of everything else – here there was an element of focus. On other occasions, when silence is just there, the breathing may be all there is to watch. This seems to be nearer, but still I feel that more soft focusing of the awareness would take me further and further back, as if relaxing enough to let the watcher move far enough away so that all is seen, rather than any one thing like thoughts or breathing. Does relaxing allow the watcher to be on the hill?It is true. Relaxation helps the most. No part of concentration should be in your watchfulness. Concentration is sabotaging the whole process of watchfulness, because concentration is an act of the mind, and watchfulness is something that comes from above, from beyond.If there is any concentration…I can understand, if you start watching your breathing – in the name of watching, you are concentrating on the breathing, you are excluding everything else. Don’t exclude. Watch your breathing inclusive of all.Watching your breathing…a temple bell starts ringing, a car passes by, a child starts crying – all that should be included. Your watchfulness should be open. Watching the breathing is simply to begin with. It is not the end. It is just learning how to watch.But there is a difficulty – you can start thinking that concentration is watching. Concentration is not watching. Concentration is narrow, narrowing the mind, bringing it to a focus on one thing, forgetting everything else. That’s why in relaxing, you will feel more watchful, yet without concentration. If that is happening, that’s perfectly good.The essential thing is watchfulness, inclusive of all. Concentration can be disturbed, watchfulness cannot be disturbed. These are the differences. If somebody is concentrating on something, anybody can disturb him. Just a small boy can do something and he is distracted and his focus is lost – or not even a small boy, just the wind comes and the door opens and the noise is enough.So you will find the phenomenon in so-called religious people. They are always angry, because their concentration is continuously disturbed.Watchfulness cannot be disturbed. It is simply inclusive of all. If the door opens, makes a noise, the wind passes through the trees singing its song, it is available to it. It is not choosing breathing or anything in particular, but simply being there, open, available, present to everything that is happening.So remember the difference: concentration is sabotaging watchfulness.To begin with, something has to be given to you, so you can have a little taste of what watchfulness is. Then it has to be made wider and wider and bigger, so much bigger that there is no need to do anything. You simply sit, or lie down relaxedly and everything that is happening around you is mirrored in you.You don’t think about it, you don’t justify it, you don’t condemn it, you don’t evaluate it – you simply watch.So it is perfectly right. Relaxation, utter relaxation with no focusing of consciousness is real watchfulness.Osho,Once, some years ago, while making love, I disappeared. I would like to say, “literally disappeared,” because I felt as if all of me simply vanished. But certainly my body must have been there, because my partner didn't notice that he was suddenly alone. I heard my voice say: “I am going,” and then possibly only for a second or two, no one was there. Though I have had moments of joy while making love since, I have always been present to know that they are moments of joy. Presumably ecstasy was the trigger for what happened, but the happening itself wasn't ecstatic, it wasn't anything, it simply was.Is meditation that previous stage of ecstasy, or that state of not-even-ecstasy, just isness?Ecstasy or blissfulness are all toys to allure you towards meditation. You will find them only in the beginning. As the meditation grows deeper there is only isness.Everything disappears, even ecstasy, because ecstasy too, carries with it, just behind it, the shadow of agony. It is a duality. Blissfulness carries with it, hiding behind it, suffering, misery. It is a duality. Only isness is not a duality because isness is simply synonymous with existence, and there is no non-existence.Anything can trigger it. Love is one of the most likely things to trigger it because you are so totally in it, so intensely in it – and without any effort. It is a biological help to man to experience his first isness. It can be scary to feel that you have literally disappeared, and to tell your partner, “I am going,” rather than “I am coming!” – is to kill the poor man! What is happening? What kind of love is happening?He has always heard that in love one comes, but this is a rare quality – to be going! The man must have been cultured; otherwise he would have got up and said, “I am going also! you are going – what am I doing here?” He was a man of culture and etiquette that he remained!But coming and going – both are two sides of the same coin. People have noted only the coming; they have not been sharp enough to see the other side of it. The moment of coming is simultaneously the moment of going. You as a personality, you as an ego, are going; you as pure isness, are coming. So they are not contradictory, they are complementary.But it can be triggered anywhere…sometimes for no reason at all – just the situation – and you may not be able even to know what has triggered it.I used to go for a morning walk, and I used to pass a beautiful house every day – that was my route. And one day, when I was coming back, the sun was just shining on my face; I was perspiring – I had gone for four, five miles, and just…I could not move from that place. I must have been eighteen or seventeen. Something happened between the sun and the beautiful morning, that I simply forgot that I have to go home. I simply forgot that I am. I was simply standing there.But the man who owned the house, he has been watching me for almost a year – that I come and go by the side of the house; today, what has happened? I am simply frozen. But frozen in such ecstasy!He came and shook me, and it was like coming down from a very far away place, rushing into my body. He said, “What has happened?”I said, “That’s what I was going to ask you. Something certainly happened, and something that I would like to happen forever. I was not. You unnecessarily got worried, shook me, and brought me back. I had moved into some space which was absolutely new to me – and it was pure isness.”Anything can do, it seems that just your preparedness, knowingly or unknowingly, your closeness to the point where the phenomenon can be triggered…. But this kind of experience is not within your power. It happens to you like lightning. You cannot do anything to bring it back, unless you start with a device that suits you; for example, if relaxation suits you, then whenever you have time, relax – and relaxation does not mean that you have to lie down and relax. You can go on walking and relax. You can go on working, but in a relaxed way. No tension, no hurry, no speed, nowhere to go…just in the moment.And the window will be opening again and again and more often, and one day it remains open forever.It is pure isness.Chetana has asked one question: When awareness is total and all thoughts disappear, does enlightenment, realization, or any other experience happen or only the awareness remain?The truth is that all experiences are lower. Truth is not an experience. It has to be said that it is an experience; otherwise how to convey it to you?Truth is pure awareness.Just all is, and all is beautiful, and all is benediction.But the basic quality is of awareness.You can call it isness.The Sanskrit word for theist is astik. It is a beautiful word, distorted because of the association with God. Astik comes from the root, ast, and asti means isness. In that sense, nobody is astik by believing in God; astik is one who has come to the state of isness, and this state is not separate so there is no way of it going away; it remains.All words – silence, peace, ecstasy, blissfulness – fall short. The juice of isness is far deeper, far juicier than any word that any human language can provide.Osho,Laughing with you is such a beautiful, pure and freeing experience. Within seconds it takes away all heaviness and thoughts. I would like to dance the path with you, laughing and laughing. What is laughing in you? What is laughing in us, and wants to laugh? What is the difference between a buddha's laughter and the disciple's laughter?That is the only place where there is no difference. That’s why it is the greatest spiritual phenomenon: the master’s laughter and the disciple’s laughter have exactly the same quality, the same value. There is no difference at all.In every other thing there are differences: the disciple is a disciple, he is learning, groping in the dark. The master is full of light, all groping has ceased, so every act is going to be different. But whether you are in darkness or in full light, laughter can join you.The darkness cannot distort laughter, it cannot contaminate it; neither can the light enhance it. To me, laughter is the highest spiritual quality, where the ignorant and the enlightened meet.And if a tradition is too serious, and the master and the disciples never laugh, that means that in that tradition, there is no possibility of meeting: there is a demarcation.One of my contributions to religion is a sense of humor which no other religion contains. And one of my basic statements about it is that laughter is the highest spiritual quality.It is such a strange world. Just a few days ago, a court in Germany in a way decided in my favor against the government, but in a way the judge could not understand my approach to life. The government was trying to prove that I am not a religious person, because I myself have said that religion is dead, I myself have said that I am not a serious person, and the judge said: “Those statements were made in a press conference, they cannot be taken seriously. And we do not know the context. You have to produce statements from his written books. I consider him to be a religious man, and I consider his teachings to be a religion. And whatever he is saying and doing is a serious work.”Although we won the case, the judge could not understand, neither could the government.I am seriously non-serious, but that is beyond the scope of courts to understand. I am religiously non-religious, but courts are not meant to understand such koans. The government was thinking that to bring the point that I have said I am not a serious person is enough to prove that I am not religious, because all religious people have been serious.Half of it is true: all religious people up to now have been serious. And it is because of their seriousness that humanity has not come to a transformation. If all the religious people could laugh rather than just talking about beliefs, arguing about things which cannot be proved…. If Gautam Buddha and Confucius and Lao Tzu and Moses and Zarathustra and Jesus and Mohammed all could have gathered together and laughed, human consciousness would have taken a quantum leap. Their seriousness has become a heaviness on the human heart. It creates guilt in people: when you laugh, you feel you are doing something wrong.Laughter is good in a movie hall, but not in a church. In a church, you almost enter a graveyard where poor Jesus is still hung on the cross. Twenty centuries…you can take him down now. The Jews hung him for only six hours, and Christians have been hanging him for twenty centuries. And seeing the poor fellow hanging there – it is difficult to laugh.All the religions have made it difficult to laugh. Sense of humor has not been recognized by any religion as a religious quality.I declare it to be the highest religious quality. And if we can decide that every year, for one hour, at a certain date, at a certain time, the whole world will laugh, I think it will help to dispel darkness, violence, stupidities – because laughter is the only human characteristic which no animal possesses.All animals are incapable of laughter, and whenever these religions make somebody a saint, he becomes like an animal, he loses laughter. He falls down the evolutionary ladder, not rises higher.Laughter has a beauty, multidimensional. It can relax you, it can suddenly make you feel light, it can make your world not a burden, but a beautiful experience. It can change everything in your life. Just the touch of laughter can make life something worth living, something to be grateful for.So as far as laughter is concerned, the master and disciple meet only at that point. That’s why it is so refreshing, so rejuvenating.Osho,One of the things I have heard some people say about you is that they think you are the Antichrist.Would you please comment?These are the same people who crucified Christ on the grounds that he was not Christ. And these are the same people who poisoned Socrates, claiming absolutely falsely that he is demoralizing the youth, corrupting the youth. These are the same people who murdered al-Hillaj Mansoor, saying that his utterances are against God. Because he was saying, “I am God” – “Ana’l Haq.”But he was not saying, “You are not God,” he was saying, “You are God too, but you are determined not to recognize it. I have dropped the old stubbornness and I have recognized that I am God.” Nothing was wrong in it.Now they are saying the same things about me. In fact all the things that they said about Socrates – that he is destroying people’s morals, corrupting their minds – they are saying about me. One government to another government, one nation to another nation, they are sending messages that this man is capable of corrupting human minds; hence, he is dangerous.The Christians think I am the Antichrist because that is their way of condemning a person, although I have praised Christ more than any Christian has ever done. But I am absolutely fair: if I see that something is not correct then it does not matter who the person is; I will criticize it. I have praised Christ, I have criticized Christ. I have praised Buddha, I have criticized Buddha, because no human being is perfect. Perfection is not possible.What they said about al-Hillaj Mansoor, they are saying about me, that I am against God. And I had devoted my whole life to teach people how to be godly.One thing should be understood: that all these people have no arguments against me so they just pick up a name which condemns me, without giving any argument. They should prove on what grounds they call me Antichrist, because I am fighting on many fronts; I am not only fighting against Christians, I am fighting against Jews, against Mohammedans, against Jainas, against Buddhists.Where in their Christian scriptures is it written that the Antichrist will fight against all religions? Where in their Christian scriptures it is written that the Antichrist will teach people how to rise in consciousness towards enlightenment?They don’t give any arguments, they simply condemn. Their condemnations are meaningless. They simply show the poverty of their intelligence. They simply show the anger and rage that is boiling within them. In fact, they are saying that if they kill me it will be perfectly right, because I am the Antichrist. They are trying to find an excuse to justify their actions against me.But Hindus also want to kill me. They have tried.Mohammedans also want to kill me.I think if I was the Antichrist, then all the religions who are anti-Christian would have accepted me with great joy – here comes the Antichrist who will destroy Christianity. They will not be against me. They will not be against the Antichrist.But you can say anything. The archbishop in Greece declared that I have been sent from hell, a direct messenger from hell, to destroy the Christian orthodox church of Greece; and I was only a tourist for four weeks there. The messenger from hell comes on a tourist visa for four weeks. Have you ever heard such a thing before?These are just old rotten strategies to condemn something which they cannot argue against, but they are utterly meaningless.If I am the Antichrist, I have challenged the pope to face me in a public encounter – not anywhere else, but in the Vatican. Christ is on their side, I am the Antichrist – it will really be a great discussion.But these cowards go on doing things against me in an underground way, and they keep their hypocrisy intact.In Italy, sixty-five eminent people in different fields – Nobel prize winners, painters, dancers, directors of world fame, actors, actresses, writers, poets, all kinds of creative people – have signed a petition to the government that I should not be prevented from entering Italy – why am I not being given a visa?But the pope is preventing it. The government does not say yes or no because that will create a great uproar all over the country. They cannot say yes because the pope is against it, and Catholics may not support them in the coming elections so they want to just keep it in limbo.But they should see that their most talented people and their geniuses are asking that I should be allowed and I should be listened to.I have said to my sannyasins, “You go to the pope too with the protest to sign. If he does not sign it, that means he is against freedom of speech. If he signs it, then show it to the government – ‘Now you are in no danger, even the pope has signed.’ So put him in an embarrassing situation.”I would love to argue on each and every point because Christianity has nothing worthwhile that can be supported by intelligence. That is their fear; otherwise, a four-week tourist visa cannot destroy a church, cannot destroy a country’s morality. And if it can be destroyed in four weeks then it is not worth preserving, it should be destroyed. For two thousand years, you have been creating it and a tourist for four weeks will destroy it…that shows the quality of your morality, your religion, your philosophy.Things are coming closer to an ultimate exposure, and it is going to be tremendously helpful because all the world governments are now caught in a net.I am going to fight every country in their own courts, and I am going to enter every country – because nobody can prevent it without any reason, just out of fear.All these great nations are proving to be simply cowards.Osho,For Christians, the greatest miracle is that Jesus could walk on water.As I saw you wobble, entering the room yesterday morning, I held my breath. Is not the greatest miracle just that you make it to your chair walking on the ordinary floors of this house?Milarepa, although you only imagine that you are enlightened, even in your imagined enlightenment you get a few beautiful glimpses. This is true – walking on water is just an invented story.I have heard that two old rabbis and one Christian bishop – all great friends – went fishing one day on the sea of Galilee. The rabbis asked the bishop, “Do you believe that Jesus walked on water?”He said, “Of course.” Then they said, “Can you walk then?”That frightened him. He said, “I will walk only if you two walk first – because you are an older religion. Jesus was a Jew. You are Jews. And you are great rabbis.”So one rabbi went out of the boat, walked twenty feet on water and came back. The bishop could not believe his eyes.The second rabbi went out, walked twenty feet and came back. The bishop said, “My God!”But now he had gathered courage…if two rabbis can walk – who are not even Christians, and I am a follower of Christ…. He got out of the boat and as he put his first foot in the water, he started drowning. The two old rabbis said to each other, giggling, “Should we tell the poor boy where the rocks are?”Nobody has walked on water; you have just to know where the rocks are.But this is really a miracle every morning, Milarepa. I wake up and I think whether I am going to make it to that goddamned chair. But somehow or other, the miracle has continued to happen, and I think it will continue to happen. I am completely drunk on the divine. So it is a miracle to find the way – and that’s why my people have made the chair red, so that I can see where it is.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You were saying the other night how Mahakashyap brought his own uniqueness to Buddha's religion. When did the patriarchs of Buddha stop being unique and become Buddhists?Gautam the Buddha is one of the most unique expressions of human consciousness. It is difficult to conceive of someone going beyond him, but Mahakashyap, his disciple, really did go beyond him.Gautam Buddha’s whole life was a fight against the whole tradition, the orthodoxy. He could not express himself; his energy was more involved in destroying the false so that the truth could be seen clearly.Mahakashyap had a unique position. He had nothing to destroy – Gautam Buddha had already done that. His whole energy moved into creativity. That is where he transcends Buddha.Mahakashyap lived mostly in silence with Gautam Buddha; hence he was not a great master. When he became enlightened, he was not articulate. Only those who were ready to understand silence could become his disciples, and certainly such people are very rare.Mahakashyap could not create a great movement like Gautam Buddha, but in a different way he created a very solid movement of the selected few. Gautam Buddha’s work is widespread, but because it is widespread everybody gets a very small quantity of it. Mahakashyap has only a few disciples, who can be named on ten fingers. As far as numbers are concerned, nobody would consider him comparable to Buddha, but because he was a silent master the people who came to him were of a different quality, very receptive.Buddha’s story will make you understand it. He used to say, “There are horses which, unless you whip them, will not move. There are horses to which you simply have to make the noise of a whip – you need not touch their bodies – and they will move. And there are horses which will move simply with the shadow of the whip – and they are the best quality horses.” And he used to say that disciples are also of those three kinds.Mahakashyap got the third kind of disciple, who could see the shadow of the whip and move. Because it was a silent transfer of energy, not through words, there is no scripture. It was person to person, heart to heart, so there is no record.In this lineage a few names stand out. Bodhidharma is the greatest…in a few ways reaching higher than Mahakashyap. In other words it can be said that Gautam Buddha created a revolution which culminated in Bodhidharma. If Gautam Buddha is the source, then Bodhidharma is the ultimate flowering. He had all the qualities of Gautam Buddha, all the qualities of Mahakashyap, and a few qualities of his own.For example, he was the first one in history to be outrageous. Buddha is very cultured; obviously – he is a prince, trained in the manners of the court. He cannot be outrageous. Mahakashyap is a silent master; the question of being outrageous does not arise. Bodhidharma is very outrageous, very straightforward. Whatever he says hits the person almost like a sword. Naturally he also could not transform many people.People were afraid of him, even emperors were afraid. They wanted to see the man; they had heard so much about him. His ways and methods were unique, and those who had been courageous enough to remain with him changed totally into a new form of humanity. The man suddenly became famous. But side by side, a fear was created in people who wanted to see him, meet him, because nobody knew what he would do, how he would act. He is the most unpredictable master ever.After Bodhidharma there have been many other patriarchs, but Bodhidharma is the last Indian patriarch of Zen. He crossed the Himalayas and went to China. Asked where he was going, he said, “In search of lions. I cannot work with cowards.” And he was right: the country was full of cowardly foxes.China was still a fresh land, just turned towards Buddhism. Even the Emperor Wu, who must have been at that time the greatest emperor in the world, because he ruled over the whole of China, was waiting with eagerness to meet Bodhidharma.He had met many humble, meek, beautiful, nice Buddhist monks. He had heard stories about Bodhidharma – stories were coming ahead of him, that he was not a meek person, not a humble person, neither egoistic nor arrogant; that he was a very simple and sincere person, but he did not go in a roundabout way, he went directly to the point. He functioned like a surgeon – even though it hurt, he could remove cancers from people’s psyches.Wu had come to receive him at the border. He presented himself and told Bodhidharma, “I have opened all my treasures for Gautam Buddha. There are thousands of monks, hundreds of monasteries, temples, sculptures, thousands of translators working on every word of Buddha’s to translate them into Chinese. What will be my reward?”Bodhidharma looked at him with his very stern eyes and said, “Reward? – you will fall into the seventh hell.”Wu was crestfallen. He could not believe it; what kind of man was this? Still, he was a man of great patience, and knowing about Bodhidharma, he said, “I have not done anything wrong. Why should I fall into the seventh hell?”Bodhidharma said, “It is not a question of doing wrong or right; you have done it with a wrong motive – you want a reward. There is a desire to be rewarded; you are still childish. Can’t you do something as a reward in itself? If you cannot do something as a reward in itself, forget all about religion.“If the reward is in the future, the monks who have been telling you that you will reach to the seventh heaven have been befooling you, cheating you; or perhaps they themselves are fools. Religion has nothing to do with the future. Its whole concern is this moment, lived in its totality. And it brings its own reward. If you have really loved Buddha, then whatever you have done, you should have enjoyed. You have already received the reward.“Asking for a reward simply means that what you have done was not your love, was not your love affair – it was business. And I am shocked that even being an emperor, you are nothing but a businessman. I will not enter into your empire. I had come in search of lions, but if the emperor himself is not a lion, then it is futile.”And he went into the mountains. Before he went to the mountains, Wu asked, “Forgive me, your teaching is so new…. Nobody ever told me that this moment is all, but I can see there is truth in it. I can see it in your eyes – you are a living proof of it. Don’t leave me like this. At least before you go you have to help me to get rid of the ego – because in every scripture Buddha goes on saying, ‘Drop the ego.’ I have been trying in every possible way, but everything fails.”Bodhidharma said, “I never say to anybody, ‘Drop the ego;’ I do it myself. You come early – four o’clock in the morning, alone, without your bodyguards, without your sword – to the temple I am staying in and I will finish your ego forever.”The emperor could not sleep, thinking whether to go or not to go: “The man seems to be crazy! How can somebody else destroy your ego? I have never heard of it, and I have been listening to so many mystics. They all say, ‘You have to do it yourself, nobody else can do it.’ This is the first man…and he seems to be so certain…and the way he looks and the way he talks, also create fear, and he has asked me to come alone – no bodyguards, no sword – at four o’clock, while it is still very dark; ‘Come, I will be waiting in the temple, and I will finish it forever.’”He had been to wars, and he had never worried, but this man was creating great fear in him; he can do anything. He has a great staff in his hand; he might hit him or…”One never knows, because I will be alone. I have never been alone.” Many times he decided, “Forget all about it,” but he could not sleep. At four o’clock, he had to go: the man had such charisma.And as he arrived, Bodhidharma said, “So finally you decided to come – and the whole night you wavered.”Wu said, “How do you know?”Bodhidharma said, “There is no question of knowing. Ego is such a phenomenon that if somebody promises to destroy it, it is going to create a great wavering in you: ‘To go to that man or not to go to that man?’ But you are courageous, and I am happy. Now sit down and close your eyes. And just try to find the ego, where it is. And the moment you catch hold of it – I am sitting in front of you with my staff – one hit and the ego will be finished.”The Emperor Wu could not understand what to make of it. What was he saying? But there was no other way than to do what he was ordering. So he sat in front of him. For the first time in his life, with closed eyes, he tried to find the ego, knowing that Bodhidharma was sitting there with his staff – a dangerous man.“And what does he mean that he will give one hit and it is finished? He ill finish me – or the ego? But now whatever is going to happen is going to happen. It is better to give it a try.”Wu looked all over inside: he could not find any ego anywhere. Ego is just imagination; it is not a reality, something that you can find. And as he was searching for the ego – and so totally, because that madman was sitting in front of him with his staff – thoughts stopped, time stopped. How two hours passed he had no idea, but he felt for the first time such a great silence, such peace.As the sun was rising, his face was also lit with a new light. Bodhidharma shook him and told him, “It is enough. You have not found it because it is not there. Those who have looked for it have never found it, and those who go on trying to find out how to drop it, how to get rid of it, how to be free of it, remain confined in the same prison, because they never look for it first. Before you start thinking of dropping something you should find out where it is. You cannot drop something which does not exist.”Emperor Wu touched Bodhidharma’s feet and said, “I am relieved of a burden that I thought was impossible to get rid of in this life, because those scriptures say it takes lives and lives to get rid of the ego – and you managed to finish it within seconds.”Bodhidharma said, “I have not finished it, it was not there. It has never been there – it was only your belief.”Bodhidharma had his own way. Wu tried hard to persuade him to enter the empire. Bodhidharma said, “You have missed – that chance you have missed; but you can always come to me. I will remain in this temple, and I will remain in the same position, sitting before a wall, facing the wall, and I will turn only when the right person comes to inquire. I am not interested in curiosity-mongers or in philosophers. Only if a real seeker comes, only then will Bodhidharma look at him, otherwise he is finished.”It is said that for nine years he sat facing the wall. And then his successor appeared. He cut off one of his hands, threw it before him and said, “Turn, otherwise I am going to cut off my head too.” And Bodhidharma had to turn. You cannot refuse such a man, who in advance has cut off his hand, and is ready to cut off his head if you don’t turn.Bodhidharma said, “Wait! You are the right man – I have been waiting for you.” He became his successor, and before leaving China to go back to the Himalayas in his old age…. The Himalayas have been for centuries the place where the awakened ones, the masters, the mystics have loved to die – it is so peaceful…. Before going he called his four chief disciples and asked them, “What is Zen? This is going to be your examination – a single question – because I want to choose my successor.”The man who had cut off one of his hands was also among them. One man said, “Zen is silence, peace, the experience of oneself.”Bodhidharma said, “You have my boots.” That’s how he was – his way of expression was his own.The second one said, “Zen is the transformation of consciousness into super-consciousness.”And Bodhidharma said, “You have my flesh.”He turned to the third, and the third said, “Zen is, but can only be experienced, it cannot be explained. I hope you will forgive me.”Bodhidharma said, “You have my marrow.”He turned to the fourth, and the fourth was the man who had cut off his hand. He didn’t say a single word. He simply bowed down, touched the feet of Bodhidharma, and tears of gratitude dropped onto his feet like flowers.Bodhidharma hugged him and told him, “You have it. Now you will be in my place.”In this way Zen has gone on to many other Chinese mystics, and from China it moved to Japan. It is still alive…the story of a miracle. Twenty-five centuries have not been able to destroy it. With no scriptures, with no temples, with no special commandments, just from one heart to another heart a transmission beyond words…. It is still alive.When I was arrested in America, on the first day among the many phone calls and telegrams I received, one phone call was from a Zen master in Japan. He had phoned the president, he had phoned the jailer, and he had told the jailer that he would like just a word with me.He told the jailer, “You have committed one of the greatest crimes of the century, because we teach Zen through his books in our monastery. Although I am an enlightened master, I am not articulate. Whatever he says I know is right; but the way he says it, only he can say it – I cannot.”The jailer gave the phone to me, and the old man – I don’t know him – simply said, “I know that wherever you are, you will be in bliss, so it is pointless to ask you, ‘How are you?’ I just wanted to convey to you that those who know, are with you; and those who do not know, don’t count.”By the evening the phone calls had become so many that they had to put two or three other phone operators on. The telegrams were so many that they had to arrange a few more clerks. And the jailer, in the night, told me, “You have created such a chaos in the jail! In this jail there have been cabinet ministers, candidates for the presidency, but we have never seen such love pouring in from all over the world. You can be certain that no government can harm you – the whole world’s eyes are watching. They can harass you, but nobody can harm you – they cannot take the risk.”When that old voice said to me on the phone, “Those who know, are with you, and those who do not know, do not count,” all these people – Bodhidharma and Mahakashyap and Gautam Buddha – were whispering in the voice of that old man. He is a living line. He has sent his disciples to India also, and one of his nuns used to come every year to the commune festivals in America.Zen is still a living current, and it is the only living current. Out of hundreds of schools that have been born in the world, most of them have died; and they died because they became organized religions. They died because they became more interested in converting people than in transforming people. They became more interested in the past and in imposing the past on people than in freeing people from the past and opening them up to the future.Any truth remains alive if it remains open to the future.Osho,Years ago – I had just taken sannyas – walking past the mirror in my room, I suddenly caught the reflection of my eyes in it, and was pulled into a spontaneous mirror meditation. After a while I started to see my mother in me; I became my mother. It was a joyous feeling, recognizing one of the halves I was made from, experiencing where I was coming from.At the time, I wanted the same thing to happen with my father, feeling then that something would be complete. I tried, but it never happened. Can you say something about this please?The mother is a natural phenomenon, the father is not. The father is a social institution – among the animals there is no father. In nature the father has such a small job to do that he does not become intrinsic to your being, although half of you is the contribution of man, half the contribution of woman. But man’s contribution is half only at the time of insemination – then his is half and the mother’s part is half – but as time goes on the mother’s half becomes bigger and bigger. Your bones, your blood, your flesh, your marrow – everything is from your mother.The father was only a trigger. He initiated a process. In the beginning it was difficult without him, but once the process is initiated, he is no longer essential. That’s why in animals the institution of fatherhood does not exist. Man has made it an institution. But for centuries man also lived without the father.In every language of the world, uncle is an older word than father. Because marriage was not settled, it was not certain who the father was. Men and women were free, for thousands of years, so all the men of an age to be one’s father were called “uncle.” One of those uncles must be one’s father, but there was no way to know.It was only with private property that the father came into being. As man started gathering private property, as powerful people started gathering more private property than others, their interest became very much concentrated on ensuring that their property, after their death, went to their own children. So it had to be made absolutely certain that their children really were their children.That was the beginning of the bondage of woman. All her freedom was destroyed, all her movement was destroyed. She was confined to the home, reduced to a subhuman species – no education, no financial status, no social prestige, no religious equality.Karl Marx used to think that when communism came and private property was no longer relevant, when property became communal, then marriage would automatically disappear. And it was disappearing. In the early days of the revolution it started disappearing. It was forcibly brought back because suddenly the people who were in power became aware that if there is no family, then the life of the state is not very long.The family is the basic unit of the state, of the nation. If the family disappears then the next step will be that the state withers away. And Marx had said exactly that: first the family will go, then the state will go, then the nations will go. Then there will be only free human individuals, living in small communes. The children will belong, not to individuals, but to the commune.But he was not aware of man’s lust for power. He was just an economist, a theorist, without any understanding of human psychology; hence he missed a basic point. Now, in the Soviet Union, marriage is stronger than anywhere else. It is surprising: if you want to marry in the Soviet Union, you can marry immediately; but if you want a divorce it will take three to four years. They will create all kinds of hurdles.Divorce is not favored, for the simple reason that the state does not want to wither away. It is better to preserve the family so that the state can remain in power and the dictatorship can continue.You saw yourself in the mirror, and suddenly a glimpse of your mother. Every girl is a replica, in many ways, of the mother. She is the extension of the mother; the boy is the extension of the father. And in the old world, when stability was perfect, it was absolutely certain – the girl behaved exactly like the mother, repeated the same pattern in her life. The boy repeated the father’s pattern in his life.Now things are a little disturbed. Man has come to know many things. One of them is that if you are really an intelligent person you should surpass your mother, your father, the past generation; otherwise you are meaningless. What is the purpose of your being here? Each child should surpass the generation that has given birth to it. Each student should surpass the professors that have given all their knowledge to him. Each disciple should surpass the master.So when I said that Mahakashyap in a certain way surpasses Gautam Buddha, and that Bodhidharma in a certain way surpasses even Mahakashyap, you should not misunderstand me. Gautam Buddha will be more than happy that one of his disciples has surpassed him, will be more than blissful that one of his disciple’s disciples has surpassed both of them. This should be the longing, the blessing of each master – that his disciples surpass him. That is his success. Things are now in a flexible state.You watched in the mirror, and suddenly you found your mother’s face. Every person will find not only his mother’s face, but he can go even further back – his mother’s mother, his father’s father; he can go further back.But it happened of its own accord. If you make an effort it will be difficult, because effort makes you tense, and tension becomes a barrier. So if you really want to get into such experiences then hypnosis is the best method. You can simply relax, and somebody can hypnotize you and can take you back.You can be taken back to your own past life, you can be taken back to your mother’s past life. You are connected; you are just a branch of the same tree. Very few people have tried it. People have tried, in the East, to go into their own past lives. But I have made experiments. You can go into your mother’s past lives, because you are a branch, but it will be only a psychological experiment, helping you to know that you are like a tree.We also have our roots – invisible. We are connected continuously with the atmosphere, with the earth, with the moon. More people go mad on the full-moon night. More people become enlightened also on the full-moon night. More people commit suicide on the full-moon night; more people commit murder on the full-moon night.The full-moon night seems to have tremendous impact on your mind, just as it has on the oceans – because man was born in the ocean, thousands and thousands of years ago – but the impact remains. Even today in your body, eighty percent is ocean water; that eighty percent of water is stirred.We are continuously connected by breathing, by food, by water – everything that we are taking in. These are our roots, and we have branches spreading far into the past and also into the future.As a psychological experiment you can do it. It will not help you much spiritually, but it will be a little help in that it will give you the sense that you are not only a body, a sense that you are not alone, that you are connected with the whole. So in an indirect way it may support your spiritual growth.But there is no need to go so roundabout when you can go directly.Osho,How can we find out the difference between imagination and real past life experiences?It is very easy. First, imagination cannot be repeated again and again, but the past life experience will be repeated the same in detail again and again. Second, the imagination will start from A, go to B, then to C, from the beginning to the end. The past life experience will start just in the reverse order – from Z.First you will die; when you go into the past life, what you will come across first will be your death. Then you will move as if you are reading a novel from the back, or seeing a film backwards. Imagination will be direct; it will start from birth and move towards death. The past life will start from death and move backwards to your middle age, to your marriage, to your love, to your childhood, to your birth. And if you can go on, then again the same pattern: first will come death. You are going backwards.In imagination you are creating it, there is no need to go backwards. So this will be a definitive difference.Second, imagination will go on changing. Today you will imagine one thing, tomorrow another thing. Imagination is not a stable thing. But your past life is now a closed chapter. Whatever you do you will always go through the same experiences.The difference is very clear-cut.Osho,You once said that while we sit with you and the more we become relaxed, without our knowing, our unconscious will start emerging like steam from a boiling teapot. As the unconscious starts boiling up, and all the skeletons and dragons start coming out of the darkness, I feel I need some guidance on how to deal with it – for myself, and in relation to other people.Can you please comment?First, don’t do anything about it – just watch. Doing will create problems. You will get mixed up by it; your emotions, your sentiments, your thoughts, may get mixed with it. Don’t do anything; just remain aloof and watch.Just by watching it will slowly disappear like smoke disappearing into the sky. You don’t have to do anything at all.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have talked much about death and dying. I understood you to have said that people are afraid of death itself because they can't really conceive that it is going to happen to them.Am I fooling myself when I feel tremendously excited at the thought of death? It feels that – if the event were prepared for with one having attained as much consciousness as possible, with loving friends around and an aesthetic environment – it could be the most amazing thing going.Death itself has no existence. What actually happens is the transformation of consciousness from one form into another form, or, finally and ultimately, into formlessness.The whole question is whether one can die consciously, or the routine way – the unconscious way.Nature has made a provision that before dying the person becomes completely unconscious, goes into a coma, so he knows nothing. It is simply the greatest surgery possible. If the surgeon is going to remove a small part of the body, he has to make the patient unconscious; otherwise there is every possibility that the pain will be too much and unbearable. And in pain and agony, the surgery may not be successful either.What surgeons are doing, nature has been doing for millennia, and its surgery is far bigger. It takes the whole body away, not a part; it takes the consciousness to another form.Only if you are almost enlightened – just on the border of enlightenment – can you remain conscious, because the whole process of enlightenment is creating distance between you and your body, you and your mind. If the distance is enough, then you can remain aware and anything can happen to the body – you can watch it, as if it is happening to somebody else. Then it is really an amazing, exciting phenomenon, but not before that.To say it in other words: To die beautifully one has to live beautifully.To die amazingly and in excitement, in ecstasy, one has to prepare one’s whole life for ecstasy, excitement, amazement.Death is simply the culmination point, the crescendo of your life. It is not against life. It does not destroy life.That’s why I said death does not exist as conceived. It really gives the body another chance to grow. And if you have grown fully then there is no need for another chance; then your being moves into the ultimate being. You are no more a separate small dewdrop, but the whole ocean of existence.P.D. Ouspensky, in his book Tertium Organum – one of the most significant books – has many statements that are beautiful, but this statement is the most significant of them all. In ordinary mathematics – and he was a mathematician – the part is part and the whole is whole; the part cannot become the whole, neither can the whole become the part.But in the mathematics of consciousness the situation is totally different – here the part can become the whole, the whole can become the part, in fact they both are the same. Rather than using the word part, we should say, “You have a miniature being, a small image of the whole, and the body disappears: the small image becomes one with the greater image.” Death is a great excitement but only for those who are working towards it, to make it so. The key is that you have to remain conscious.I have heard that three friends – a surgeon, a politician, and a jurist, a magistrate – were just chitchatting on a morning walk. And talking of many things, they came to the point of whose profession was the oldest.The judge said, “Of course mine, because as far as we know, the further back we go we find man more barbarous, more criminal, more animal. I must have been needed to keep the peace, to keep society together, to protect the innocent.“And the way we see man even today, he is divided into religions, into nations, into races, and into smaller and smaller groups, and they are fighting: there are continuous riots all over the world. Without the system of justice, it would have been impossible to avoid those riots and save humanity.”Appealing – but the politician laughed. He said, “You can befool others but not me. First, tell me if I was not there who would have created the riots? The politician is a must for every crime.” Although no politician accepts it, what he said was right.The surgeon said, “You all may be right, but you cannot compete with a surgeon. Surgery happened first. God took out a rib from Adam and made a woman out of it. That was a miraculous surgery. And that has to be exactly in the beginning, you cannot go further back than that.” But even God has to make Adam unconscious to take the bone.From ancient times there are strange books – which should be known to the whole world. Nearabout five to seven thousand years ago, there was a man in India – Sushrut, and he has written a book on surgery. And the amazing part is that whatever we are doing now is all included in it – the instruments, the methods, everything – also anesthesia.In the Himalayas there is found a small plant: just a few drops of its juice are enough to keep a man absolutely unconscious for hours. It is still available.So if in our small surgery, from the very beginning, unconsciousness is absolutely necessary…death is the great surgery. Nothing can be greater: The whole body has to be taken away from the being which has become identified with it and clings to it. In unconsciousness it is possible to do it.Very few people die consciously, hence the fear; because very few people live consciously, hence the fear. Whatever you want your death to be, let first your life be exactly the same – because death is not separate from life, it is not an end to life, but only a change. Life continues, has continued, will always continue. But forms become useless, old, more a burden than a joy – it is better to give life a new, fresh form.Death is a blessing; it is not a curse.Osho,Gurdjieff was accused of trying to keep his wife alive while she was dying. His disciples seem shocked and didn't understand.In what way was he trying to help her that he was unable to do before she was dying?The 1917 revolution in Russia disturbed Gurdjieff’s whole work. His disciples got scattered. He himself had to escape out of Russia because the communists, who were coming into power, were materialists: they did not believe in any spiritual growth. They conceived of man just as a vegetable.But Gurdjieff managed to take with him a small group of disciples who had developed and crystallized very much. His wife happened to be one of them. They remained in Constantinople waiting for some opportunity to settle somewhere. It was in Constantinople that they were found by Bennett and brought to Europe.First he wanted to settle in England, but it seems no country – because of its politicians’ mediocre minds – wants any giant to settle there. They cannot accept anybody who knows more, who is more; and Gurdjieff was a very strong, powerful, charismatic man – whoever came into contact with him was changed. England refused. Country after country refused him.It was just by chance that the prime minister of France had read a few of his books and was immensely impressed. He invited him, and gave him a beautiful place near Paris, a few miles away, where he established his commune.In that commune there were two sections. One was the old-guard Russians who had come with him, who were far more developed than the new followers from the West – particularly from America. The difficulty was double.First, the Russian group knew only Russian, so communication was impossible. Second, they were highly developed, and these new people were highly educated but spiritually not developed at all. Those Russians were not very educated. So there was another barrier of communication – intellectually they could not communicate, language prevented it, education prevented it, and on the plane of being also, communication was difficult because the Russian group was far more developed – Gurdjieff had been working for years with them.The oldest disciple was his own wife. And it became troublesome to people, particularly the new group: “Why should Gurdjieff be so interested in his own wife?” It was not a question of being his wife; that was irrelevant. The question was that he had worked on the woman the most, and she was dying. And it was only a question of a few days – if he could manage to keep her alive her crystallization will happen. Otherwise one knows not into how many circles of birth and death she would have to move.And he was capable of keeping her alive, because in his system, transfer of energy is one of the basic methods. It can be used to the extreme – that the dying person can live as much as the person who is transmitting his energy to him; if he transmits his whole energy he will die immediately, and the dying person can live long.Gurdjieff was not trying to sacrifice anybody, but everybody could contribute a little bit of energy to his wife. And it was only a question of a few more days of good health, so she can continue the work. She had almost reached, just a step more and she would not be coming back.But the Western group could not understand why he was so interested: a man who is enlightened should look equally towards everybody – whether one is his wife or not. But they were ignorant of the fact that he was not looking after his wife, he was looking after a human being who happened to be his wife, but who was in such a position that just a few days’ health would release her forever from every imprisonment. It was worth doing. And he managed it – his wife died enlightened.This is possible in a school. If we see that somebody has developed so much that there is no harm if everybody else contributes a little energy…so that the person can continue more in the body and come to fulfillment. Alone it is not possible: it is not the way of the monk, it is the way of a mystery school.And Gurdjieff himself had learned all his techniques, all his experiences, in Sufi schools. He was never a monk; that’s why no religious recognition has been given to him. And Sufi schools keep their techniques very secret. Gurdjieff was the first to bring them to light in the Western world.Sufis were not happy, and the Western world was shocked because they were used to thinking of religion in a totally different way: “What he is talking about does not seem to be religion. He’s talking almost as if it is a science” – and he was right, it is a science.Just because of religious persecution, many mystery schools have kept themselves underground and have worked without anybody’s knowledge. Even if the husband is part of a mystery school, his wife does not know about it – because the church, the orthodox religion, will immediately start persecuting him. So it is better to keep silent, and do what you want to do in a secret way.Gurdjieff’s intention was to make all those secrets available to a wider number of people – in which he failed, not because of himself but because of the masses. They are deaf; they cannot listen to anything that is so new and goes against their well-trodden path.Of this caring for the wife, trying to keep her alive, the ordinary mediocre mind will think, “This is attachment. He’s too much attached to his wife. And a man who is so much attached to his wife cannot be enlightened.” These are the mediocre minds’ logical standpoints; and other mediocre minds will agree perfectly all over the world. The wife has to be renounced! – but here it is something else. He’s trying to keep her in the body, not letting her die.In India I have seen the man – he was very much respected – Ganeshvarni. He was born a Hindu but became converted to Jainism. And whenever somebody becomes converted to some other religion he’s very much respected in that religion. In his own religion nobody cared about him. But being converted into Jainism he brings to the Jaina’s heart a satisfaction that “we are more right than Hindus. Look, a Hindu on his own…” – because Jainas are not missionaries; if somebody asks them, they can convert him, but they don’t go out of their way to convert anybody – “…a man has come by himself.”And the man proved really of great strength to go through all the Jaina austerities – so that he defeated the born Jaina aesthetics. He became, unnominated, almost the head of the whole Jaina community.After twenty-two years – he was in Varanasi – his wife died, whom he had left in the Hindu fold. In his autobiography he says, “I felt a great relief.”When I read this, where he says that he felt a great relief, I wrote a letter to him: “Your sentence has many implications. It means you still consider your wife your wife. It means that you feel guilty that you have left her poor, without any financial support, and escaped; that twenty-two years have not been able to make any change in you – your relationship with your wife is still intact.”When he received my letter he was very angry. One of my friends used to be with him – edit his books and do other kinds of work. He wrote to me that he was very angry.I said, “That shows that whatever I have written is right. His anger is an agreement. Tell him; otherwise what is there to be angry about? If what I had written was wrong, he could have simply laughed – and he has not replied to me. And from you I hear that he was very angry; and he’s supposed to be nonviolent, gone beyond anger, but he has gone nowhere. He has simply forced a certain discipline upon himself because so much respect is being given, his ego is being fulfilled, and people are saying, ‘What a great man.’ The wife dies, and he does not feel sadness; on the contrary he says, ‘What a great relief.’”And when I pointed it out to these people who were saying that this shows freedom from attachment, I said, “This is not the case. It shows he was attached, and he was waiting for her death. In fact, perhaps in his own mind he has murdered her many times; otherwise, why should he feel relief?“For twenty-two years that poor woman has been cleaning other people’s houses and somehow managing to live. He has never cared about her. And he has become a great saint, but unconsciously those words “what a relief” show that he is feeling good that the wife is dead. The wife was still his wife.”Now these people – this kind of atmosphere – are all over the world in all religions.So Gurdjieff was suspected…. “Is he enlightened or not? He’s trying to keep his wife alive longer; an enlightened man is supposed to be detached – whether one dies or lives does not matter.”But they don’t understand that he is functioning under a totally different system, and to him it is not a question of his wife; to him it is a question of a growing soul which is just on the border of entering into the whole. If those few days are missed, one cannot say how many more lives she will have to suffer, and whether she will be able to get a master like Gurdjieff – which is difficult.So if you understand it without prejudice then things are very clear, but if you have already a prejudice – because it was not only his wife, he tried the same with other disciples. Then again too the problem arose, because all those disciples whom he tried, at their deathbed, to help live a little longer happened to be Russians; because they were the most developed, he had worked on them.Now that too was thought by the Westerners to be discrimination. How reason can create almost valid-looking arguments, “He has never done that with any Westerner; but about the Russians he has a different attitude because he himself is a Russian.”Now this is nonsense, that a man of the qualities of Gurdjieff should make a discrimination. But certainly if the man is developed – and those Russians continued to develop better than the Westerners for the simple reason that they were confined to the campus. Their language would not allow them to go out. And they had known Gurdjieff for a long time and had understood the man in deeper ways.The Westerners came like a fashion. To be with Gurdjieff was fashionable; they came, and after a few days they left him – because to be with him was not an easy job. He was a difficult man, and very irrational in his methods; but his methods are very valid under his system.So your logic may think that it is absolutely wrong. For example, to Bennett he said, “Today you dig a trench twenty feet long, four feet deep, two feet wide, non-stop.” – not even a coffee break, no food – “You cannot go anywhere, not even to the toilet. You have to dig the ditch non-stop.”So he tried hard: “The quicker it is done the better, so I am freed.” By the evening it was complete. Gurdjieff came and he said, “Good. Now fill it up exactly the same as it was before you started digging. Then you will be free.”He said, “My God, this is stupid. If it was to be filled exactly as it was, then it was exactly as it was in the morning. Why this whole torture?” The logical mind cannot understand it.But Bennett remained with him a long time, and understood a little bit later on what he was doing – because he felt it himself. When he came to a point digging the ditch where he felt so tired that it seemed he would fall down, suddenly at that very moment there was a great rush of energy, a fresh energy became available. And he was surprised – from where? He had not even taken his tea. And with this fresh energy he started digging again.By the evening he was exhausted, was again on the verge of falling down, and then a second release within his own being – the strongest that he had ever felt in his whole life. But unless you listen to his inner experience, the exercise seems to be absolutely absurd. No sane person is going to remain around Gurdjieff if he has to do such a thing.Only later on when Bennett was lying down in his bed – he could not sleep the whole night because the second release of energy was so much that it kept him awake, it wanted to do something – he said, “This is absolute madness. The whole day I have been doing. I have never done such work. I am a writer, not a grave digger.”Next day he asked Gurdjieff. He said, “That’s what I wanted you to understand, that there are layers of energy in you. The first layer is the routine daily work. It is enough for your routine daily work. If you go beyond it, you will come to a point where you will feel exhausted, almost feeling that you will die if you continue; but that is the point to continue, because only then will the second layer start functioning.“It functions only when you are stubborn enough to provoke it, to challenge it to function. That is your emergency layer. You are tired and you are going to sleep and your house catches fire, and suddenly all tiredness is gone and the whole night you are putting the fire out, and you don’t feel tired at all. The emergency layer has taken over.“And the third layer is the cosmic layer, which is inexhaustible; once you have touched it, you know it, and you can reach it. Then you can work miracles – which will look like miracles to others, but not to you because you know that you have these possible layers.”Almost everybody dies working in the first layer.So Gurdjieff has a system of his own which is not of the routine, traditional religions – they don’t have anything. And he should not be judged by other peoples’ criteria; he should be judged by his own criteria. So first try to understand his system and then judge – if you are bent upon judging.He was one of the most misunderstood men in the world, for the simple reason that everybody was judging according to his prejudiced mind, and here was a man who was trying to bring a secret doctrine into the open for the first time; but he could not succeed.He failed utterly, not because of himself – you cannot conceive a better man than him.But the thick skulls of the mediocre men who inhabit the earth are really too thick.Osho,When I was a small child my mother took me with her when going shopping. Nearly every day we went to a special shop where the shopkeeper always gave me, after we purchased what we needed, a sweetie.One day the man forgot the sweetie, and certainly I was impatiently waiting for it. He still hadn't remembered to give it to me by the time we had reached the door to leave, so I said loudly, “Well, I didn't want a sweetie today anyway!”I have always carried this little story within me, and found myself often behaving the same way through the years. Now, as I'm able to see the mechanism of it, I also see many people behaving that way.Osho, why are we often unable to express what we want and what we need, and why do we often choose the longer way instead of the direct?You are brought up not to show need, not to show your helplessness, not to show your reality, but to pretend that you are a strong character, that you need nothing, that nobody’s help is needed, that you can manage your life yourself. This upbringing goes deep into your fiber. And almost everybody is working as in your story.I have heard, two beggars were lying down under a tree on a beautiful summer night, at the full moon. One beggar said, “I would like to purchase the moon, whatever the cost.”The second beggar said, “It is not possible because I am not going to sell it – whatever the price.” And nobody purchases the moon. Both know it, but nobody wants to recognize it.Everybody is trying to be stronger than the other. The first was trying to purchase the moon whatever the cost. The second did not say, “What nonsense are you talking? – the moon is not for sale.” No. He said, “I’m not going to sell it whatever the price.”People are prepared to be hypocrites because the whole of society has masks on their faces. You don’t see the real face of anybody. And if you find somebody who has no mask, who is authentic, not a hypocrite, he disturbs everybody because he reminds you of your own original face.And you are so rooted in hypocrisy, you have so much invested in hypocrisy, that you cannot pull yourself out. The only way is to condemn this man who has no mask, who simply says the truth as it is.But in this wide world truth does not pay, is not respected. On the contrary, lies pay, and are respected. You have to be very articulate in lying so that every lie looks as if it is the truth.But truth itself remains condemned; therefore, very few people manage to have the courage to say the truth and suffer the consequences.My mother’s brother was getting married for the third time; he was fifty-two. He had already killed two wives – not really, they died themselves – but he was a great lady killer. And he was marrying a girl who was fourteen years old.And when I came to know about it I said, “I will protest.”My mother said, “Are you mad? He’s your uncle, he’s my brother.”I said, “That does not matter. In fact, because he is your brother and he’s my uncle, it is more of a duty for me that I should protest.”Now the whole community tried to persuade me, “Don’t do this to your own uncle.”I said, “I am not doing anything. I am simply making it clear that a fifty-two-year-old man should not marry a fourteen-year-old girl. He can marry a fifty-year-old woman and I am perfectly in favor. He can marry a widow. But a fourteen-year-old girl….“By the time she is twenty-eight he may pop off. This time he is not going to kill the woman; he will be killed. And what is the need? His sons are married, his daughters are married; and this girl is just like a daughter to him, the age difference is so much.”And do you know what they did? They locked me in a room, thinking that I am going to create trouble. And whatever I was saying had some truth – they all understood it, that it was true. But nobody wanted to disturb the smoothness of things. “He is a rich man and he is a powerful man, and he may take revenge. And why should you stick your neck out unnecessarily? – it is not your concern.”I said, “Then whose concern is it? – nobody’s concern! The girl belongs to a poor family. The father is selling the girl – because she is getting married to a fifty-two-year-old man. He’s getting thousands of rupees, so he’s happy. But nobody is worried about the girl, about what she will think – a fourteen-year-old girl getting married to a man who will leave her a widow soon, when she will be at the prime of her life.”They said, “It is not a time for argument.” This was the time when the procession was going. On the horse was sitting my uncle as a bridegroom. And I wanted to stop it on the road and collect the whole town…. “This should be stopped; it is criminal.” They locked me in. I tried hard, but nobody would listen to me; everybody had gone to the marriage.And actually what I had said happened, not many years afterwards, just after two years. The girl was only sixteen and the man died. And then I told them, “Now lock me in the room.”They said, “We never knew that he would die so soon.”I said, “One thing was simply clear: the difference of age was so much that he would die, and the girl will remain a widow almost half of her life. And now she will remain a widow her whole life. So now my proposal is that she should be married.”They said, “How can it be? Nobody can marry her. Widows are not married again.”At that time there was no law. Even now that the law has come onto the books, widows remain widows because it is so insulting. If a widow marries, she has lost her honor – and she has to live in the society. So the law gives the opportunity now, but at that time even the law was not giving any opportunity.But I said, “I will try to persuade her.”They said, “You should not do such a thing. It is a sin if a widow marries somebody.”I said, “I don’t see it as a sin. I see it as a sin that now a sixteen-year-old girl may live at least sixty years or more just as a widow. This is one of the root causes of perverted sexuality.”And they said, “Even if she agrees with you – and in the first place she cannot agree, because it is so dishonorable – where are you going to find a man? No man will be ready to marry a widow.”I said, “She is only sixteen. What does it matter whether she is a widow or a virgin? It is better to marry a widow – a little experience, two years experience – than marry a virgin who has no experience.”They said, “Your mind is simply upside down. Just find a man!”I tried many people. Whomever I spoke to, he said, “Forget all about it. Why should I get involved in trouble?”But I managed to persuade one of my servants, because I told him, “You see, she has so much money. The husband has left much money. You cannot earn that money in many lives. Money, a ready-made beautiful girl, experienced – what else do you want?”The servant said, “You sound right, but if anybody knows that I have said yes, they will kill me. I am a poor servant. If your father comes to know, my service is finished.”I said, “Don’t worry, you will not need the service. Once you get married you will not need the service.”He said, “What is the guarantee? The whole society will prevent me. And you don’t know these people. I am a poor man; I know these people. On any excuse they can lock me up in the police station – that I am a thief or I am anything. And I am a poor man, I cannot even afford an advocate to fight for me.”I said, “You simply say it to me, and keep quiet – so I know that I have a man in my pocket; then I can approach the other client.”He said, “If you promise you will not say anything to anybody.”I promised him, “I will not say, but you will have to marry if the girl is ready.”He said, “I can marry – but in another town, not in this town.”And when I reached the girl, she was so angry at me: “You are taking me onto the path of sin.” She closed the doors in my face, and she said, “Never come back again to this house.”I said, “I will come. I will not come in; I will stand just on the steps in case you change your mind – you can just give two knocks from the inside. And I have a man in my pocket!”And I would go there every day. And I knew that she was standing behind the door, but not gathering courage to give two knocks. Finally she gave the two knocks and opened the door.I said, “It is a simple thing. Sixty, seventy years you may live in this empty house, and you have not known anything. That man was sick, old, dying; and I wanted to tell these people, ‘Don’t destroy the poor girl’s life.’ Now you be ready. Don’t be worried.”She said, “Who is the man?”And as I told her the name she said, “No, because he is not of my caste.”I said, “My God, now I have to find a man of your caste! Is it your life or my life? And what has marriage to do with caste? You need a man and I will give you a young, healthy man. What has caste to do with it but prejudices?”So I told her the name of the man, but she was not willing: “He is just a servant.”I said, “You belong to a poor family. Don’t think that just by getting married to this rich man you have become rich. Don’t forget, just two years before you were almost a beggar. He was earning then – he was never a beggar.”And from her somehow my grandfather managed to get the name, and the servant was gone. When I tried to ask where he had gone, where he had been sent, nobody answered. I have never again seen the servant. They must have just given him some money and told him to leave the town. And I could not manage to find another man.It is a society which lives with prejudices, and it wants everybody to accommodate to its prejudices. So even a small child behaves in the ways of the elder ones. And this creates so much misery in life that you cannot conceive it.You want love from your man or from your woman, but you cannot say it. You simply sit reading your newspaper – which you have read three times – just waiting so that the woman should say it, that she should come to you. It is below the dignity of your being a man to go after her. And, of course, a woman always thinks that the man should follow her.I was just telling one woman – because she is feeling alone, she has no lover. I said, “There are so many people, just catch hold of somebody.”She said, “But that has never been my way. I love the game – that somebody should chase me. And nobody is chasing me.”I said, “Now, this is a difficult thing. Then you chase somebody.”She said, “That is against my whole life. Men have been chasing me, and I have been running – knowing perfectly well that I will be caught, going slow, stopping to see whether the man is coming or not. But unless somebody chases me, I don’t feel the joy of it.”I said, “This is very difficult. Now I will have to find some man and tell him to chase you. I have found the man, but he is so dull that he’s not chasing, nothing.”On the contrary, he told the girl, “I have gone beyond sex. I am no more interested in love, et cetera; it is unnecessary misery.” And that is not true. But a man has to be strong enough; and this is the strongest point when a man says, “I have gone beyond sex, beyond love.”So I asked the girl, “And what happened?”She said, “Nothing, we just cuddled each other.”I said, “Go on cuddling. Something may happen! One never knows.”

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have done or had everything of this world that I have ever wanted. I seem to have run out of ambition to achieve anything further. Even enlightenment appears to be a remote and impossible goal, outside the realm of my understanding.I love to see you and to be with you and I love to sail. Apart from these, it feels like I am simply waiting and biding my time. There is nothing to do and nowhere to go. However I have a sense of sadness and a feeling of unfulfillment.Please comment.It is one of the most significant moments in the life of man, when he feels that he has run out of ambitions and is simply waiting, not knowing for what.This is the moment when enlightenment is nearest.Enlightenment is not a goal. It is not there, far away, that you have to reach to it. You cannot make an ambition of enlightenment: that is the sure way to miss it.Enlightenment happens in this gap, when all your ambitions are finished, you don’t know what to do, where to go. In this silence – because there is no turmoil of desire, no hankering for ambition – enlightenment happens of its own accord. It is a by-product, not a goal.And that’s why you are feeling sad, unfulfilled; although all the ambitions are finished…why should one feel unfulfilled? There must be something in life which is not part of the ambitious mind, without which one cannot feel fulfilled. You can fulfill all your desires, all your ambitions – still you will feel unfulfilled.In fact you will feel unfulfilled more than those who are still running after desires, because at least for them there is hope that tomorrow they will reach the goal. Today may be empty, but the illusion, the hallucination of tomorrow keeps today in a certain way hidden from them. But now for you there is nothing which can hide your reality.You are unfulfilled.So one fundamental thing is very clear: that even if all the ambitions are fulfilled, man is not fulfilled. There is something which is not an ambition, and unless you achieve it – and it is not an achievement – unless it happens to you, the unfulfillment will make you sad.This situation happens to very fortunate people; otherwise everybody is running after desires, and there are so many things in life to do. There is no time to feel unfulfillment, there is no time to feel sadness. The hope for tomorrow dispels all sadness.But now you don’t have any hope for tomorrow. Only today is with you, and it is good that you are waiting, not knowing for what. If you are waiting knowingly for something, that is desire, then the mind is playing a game with you. If you are simply waiting, you have come to the end of the road. There is nowhere to go, what can you do except wait? But wait for what?If you can answer, “I am waiting for this or that,” you will miss enlightenment. Then your waiting is not pure. Then it is not simply waiting. If you can be clear about it, that it is a pure waiting which is not addressed to anything, to any object, it is the right situation in which enlightenment happens.So you are in a beautiful state, unaware of it, because pure waiting and sadness…one cannot see what is beautiful about it. Only the awakened ones can see what is beautiful about it. This is the situation in which, as a by-product, you wake up. Otherwise life remains a spiritual sleep. All desires and ambitions are nothing but dreams in this sleep.So Chuang Tzu, one of the most absurd but one of the most significant mystics, has a beautiful parable. One morning he wakes up very sad. His disciples ask him what has happened. He said, “Something has happened, and I don’t think any of you will be of any help – but still I will tell you; you can try to help me.“In the night I dreamed that I have become a butterfly.” They all laughed.They said, “There is no need to worry about it. It was only a dream.”Chuang Tzu said, “First listen to the whole thing, that is only the half part. Now I am awake, and wondering perhaps if the butterfly has gone to sleep and is dreaming that he is Chuang Tzu. My problem is whether I am Chuang Tzu who dreamed to be a butterfly, or I am a butterfly who is dreaming to be Chuang Tzu.”They all fell silent. Logically there seems to be no way. Chuang Tzu’s chief disciple, Lieh Tzu, was out. As he came in people were sitting sadly, the master was sitting sadly. He inquired of a disciple, “What is the matter? What has happened?” The disciple told him the story; he said, “Don’t be worried, I will put him right.”And he went close to him and threw a bucket full of cold water into his eyes. And Chuang Tzu said, “That’s perfectly right, that’s the answer. But if you were not here…. Today I was lost. Now I know that I am Chuang Tzu; you need not bring another bucket, the water is too cold.”Lieh Tzu said, “When I am out you should not do any such thing. These people don’t understand you. They were all puzzled, and they were all sad that their master is sad, and all that is needed is cold water so you wake up, whoever you are – a butterfly or Chuang Tzu does not matter – wake up! From any point, either from being a butterfly or from being a Chuang Tzu. All that is needed is to wake up! Who cares who you are? We care…your wakefulness, that is our concern.”A sadness, a deep unfulfillment, ordinarily will not look something glorious, not something to be proud of, but I say to you that it is something to be proud of. Just remain in your sadness. Don’t try to change it into something else. Remain in your waiting – don’t try to give it an object.A pure waiting attracts the ultimate experience we call enlightenment to it. One has not to go to enlightenment as a goal.Enlightenment comes to you when you are ripe, and this is the kind of ripeness which is necessary.In the West it is happening to many people, but they do not know, because in the West Lieh Tzu has not entered yet. They are sad, in deep anguish; they are drowning themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in perverted sexualities – they are trying to forget their sadness in all kinds of things. They are trying to find ways somehow to make an object for their waiting.Perhaps they may become religious, and they may start looking for God; but remember, all those who are waiting for God are waiting for Godot.I used to think that Godot must be a German word – it sounds German. It hits like a German word. I used to think it must be German for God and that was exactly the message in the book Waiting for Godot. Nobody has seen Godot, nobody knows about him. Two persons are waiting, but just to wait for nothing is the most difficult thing in the world.So they have imagined themselves…and they have helped each other, and one says to the other, “I think he must be coming.”He says, “I also think. It is already late.” And nobody knows about whom they are talking, but nobody wants to bring up the question, “About whom you are talking?” – because they are both afraid that if the question is raised then their wound will be opened, that there is only waiting and it is for no one, and it will be very sad.So it is good. And they go on talking…“This is not right, this is not gentlemanly – promising and then not coming.”And finally one gets up and says, “I am fed up with this waiting. I am going to look for him – where is he? What is preventing him from coming?”The other says, “Where are you going, leaving me alone here? I am also coming with you.”The whole dialogue starts with no base, but they both get engaged in it.So I thought it can only be God. I asked my German sannyasin, the oldest German sannyasin, Haridas, “Is ‘Godot’ the German word for God?”He said, “No! the German word for God is ‘Gott.’”I said, “Even better – already got! No question of waiting. In Godot there is some possibility to wait. God is a faraway goal, but Gott…?” Only Germans have got it. Nobody else has the guts to say that.A few will become religious and start waiting for Gott. A few may start philosophizing, that life is meaningless, that life is nothing but anguish, that it is nausea. And the beauty is that Jean-Paul Sartre, who was continuously saying, “Life is meaningless, just anxiety, anguish, nausea” – he also wrote a book titled Nausea – he lived long. Then why go on living if life is just nausea – to write a book about it? If it is meaningless, to argue about it? To get a Nobel Prize for it?That reminds me of Zeno, one Greek philosopher, a very sharp logician. He has left puzzles which have not been solved in two thousand years. And I don’t think there is any way to solve them. The man has a tremendous mind for looking at things in such a way that he will find puzzles everywhere.And he preached before Jean-Paul Sartre, two thousand years before him, that life is meaningless, but he was more logical. He said, “Suicide is the only logical conclusion.”Many of his disciples committed suicide, and he himself lived for ninety years! And when he was dying, somebody asked, “This is strange. You preach suicide and many of your closest followers have committed suicide when they were young, and you have lived to ninety.” And in those days to live to ninety was very rare. “What is your answer?”He said, “I had to live, to preach my philosophy, to teach people that life is nothing, and the only way out is to commit suicide. It was such a burden, but a duty has to be fulfilled. I could not commit suicide, because that would have been destructive to my philosophy and its propagation.”He is saying he lived just to teach people that they should commit suicide.Many intelligent people are committing suicide. Those who cannot gather courage to commit suicide go mad. Either there are drugs or madness or suicide or a superstitious religion and creating a bogus idea of God far away, just to give you something to wait for; otherwise it seems like an open wound, and there is no way for it to be healed.Jay, what I am saying is totally different from what is happening in the West. What I am saying is what has happened in the East in the past ten thousand years, whenever a man has come to such a point that all ambitions are useless – he has lived them, and found that it was not worth it; he reached the goal that he wanted and then found that there was nothing to be found, that it was only a hallucination, an oasis that looked to be real from far away – but as he came closer and closer, it disappeared, and there was only desert.The East has used it in a different way. Not a single philosopher has preached for suicide. Not a single man in this state has gone mad, or has turned towards drugs. But for centuries it has been accepted as the most potential moment in life. If you can just wait, without waiting for anything; just wait – pure waiting…. Let the sadness be there, let the unfulfillment be there – they cannot stop your enlightenment.Only one thing can stop your enlightenment, and that is if you make some object for your waiting. If the waiting is pure, enlightenment is going to happen, and with its happening there is fulfillment, and there is great rejoicing and life has come to its flowering.That’s why I say this is a tremendously beautiful moment. Don’t miss it.As far as your love for sailing is concerned, that is not a distraction. In fact it can be a beautiful meditation. Being alone in the ocean, no crowd, no society. You can be silent, you can be relaxed, you can be yourself more easily.And perhaps you are also fortunate, because all the mad politicians of the world may not allow me and my people to live on the earth. Then the only alternative for us is the ocean. And you, Jay, are the only one knowledgeable enough to help in creating the first ocean city of the world.I have already asked Hasya to go and see some ocean liners. Jay is finding where ocean liners are available, and what kind will be right for us. And I am thinking more and more that it will be the right thing to do.We can have our own ocean liner – one, two, three big ocean liners; as many sannyasins who want to come can be there for a few months and work and go back again. And we can stay twelve miles away from land, so no problem arises from anybody. And we can be totally ourselves: no disturbance from anybody.Whatever methods we want to use, whatever techniques we want to practice, we have our own world.So there is going to be some big responsibility on Jay, to manage at least five thousand people, and slowly we will arrange two, three more ocean liners, so when our festival time comes, twenty thousand, twenty-five thousand people can be there, and a big oil platform, on which twenty-five thousand people can sit and dance and sing – out of the world. And that will be our total no to all kinds of superstitions and to all kinds of stupidities, for which we have to make compromises unnecessarily just to live on the earth.And it may be the beginning. Many other groups may start thinking in the same way, “Why bother with the earth. Why not move into the ocean?”So our city will be the first ocean city in the whole of history, and I am certain other cities will follow.So your love for sailing has come handy in time. You have come here right on time.Osho,Most of my life I have been living behind someone. I have been switching back and forth between putting myself on the line and hiding behind someone or something. I only hide when it gets too hot, so I stay safe. But this is not working anymore for me as I realize what I am doing, and it feels that it is time for me to decide to do one or the other.Can you please comment?I don’t see the problem: if it is too hot one has to hide somewhere or other, behind someone or other – and when it is cool, come out!There is no question of deciding that you will always be out, even if it becomes ice cold, or you will always remain behind, whether there is any need to hide or not. There is no reason at all to decide.Just move and remain flexible. When it is hot it is perfectly good to open your umbrella. Are you against the umbrella or what? There are all kinds of umbrellas. And when it is not hot, close the umbrella.Life should be taken very lightly, but we are brought up in such a way that everything becomes a serious problem. Now what is the problem in it? I don’t see any problem. It is simply intelligent. There are times when you need a shelter, and there are times when you need the open sky.So live according to the moment, without any predecision. In fact predecisions create trouble.I was staying in Calcutta in one of my friends’ houses. He believed in Jainism, and he could not eat after sunset, so he told me, “We will discuss later on. The sun is setting, and I have to eat.” The sun had already set – he knew it, I knew it, but there was no point…. So rather than eating on the dining table inside, because there it was becoming darker, we had to eat on the terrace, where it was light.After eating I told him, “You are even deceiving your gods.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “Whether you ate inside on the dining table or outside on the terrace, the time was the same, and the sun had already set. Yes, inside it was a little darker, outside it was a little more light, but the sun was not there. You have seen it setting, I have seen it setting, but I did not want to disturb you.”“But,” he said, “one has to make compromises.”I said, “You have to make compromises, because you have already accepted certain formulas of life; otherwise there was no problem. If you had not decided that it was religious to eat before sunset, there was no question at all. And this formula was made almost five thousand years before when there was no electricity. Now you live in an air-conditioned palace. It is better lighted inside. The formula was made so that you don’t eat in darkness, and some insect falls in it….”And it happens in India in villages, where people eat in the night: they don’t have even a small lamp…utter darkness. You can eat any insect falling, any fly falling – and it was perfectly right at the time. But those people were not aware of electricity.Now in an air-conditioned house, where there are no flies, no insects, nothing, and you have light at your hand – as much light as you want – it is simply stupid…the very idea of sun or no sun.Whenever you decide beforehand, there is going to be trouble, because life goes on its own way. It has no awareness of your prejudices, your disciplines – and it has no obligation to follow them. And you get into trouble, and then life becomes more and more serious, because you have to make compromises, you feel guilty – that you are weak. If you don’t make compromises you will be broken, you may hurt yourself.In my understanding life is a very simple, playful, light-hearted thing. Don’t disturb it by your seriousness. Move with it.So when it is hot, don’t eat hot-dogs; have a cold drink. When it is cold then change; there is no need to follow the same principle every day forever. That is making people so miserable, because they won’t change. They think to remain unchanging in their principles gives them certain strength. They are wrong. It simply sucks all their strength, they are the weakest people on the earth.They are like small children who have grown up and are still using the pajamas which were made when they were babies. Now they are looking awkward. They are feeling difficulty, they are holding the pajamas all the time, because they are slipping again and again. People are laughing. No, as you grow, your pajamas also should grow; but because pajamas do not grow, you have to change them.So I don’t see any problem in it, but I can see this is not only one person’s situation. Millions of people are living this way. They make a strict discipline and then get into trouble. Nobody is putting them into trouble but their own principles. If they leave them they feel bad, if they follow them they suffer.Don’t be too hard on yourself. Be a little more compassionate, a little more loving. So I don’t teach a principled life; I teach you clearly an unprincipled life, a life of intelligence which changes with every change around you. You don’t have a principle that creates a difficulty in changing. Be absolutely unprincipled and just follow life. And there will be no misery in your life.You can live this whole life with so many songs and so many dances, and out of those songs and dances will arise your gratitude. And I call that gratitude your religiousness – gratitude towards existence.But you don’t give a chance for your own life to flower. Your principles are your prisons, and they go on becoming bigger and bigger.You will be surprised to know that for a Buddhist monk there are thirty-three thousand principles to be followed. Now even to remember them is impossible. To follow them means crippling yourself completely. On each step, at each moment you have to consult your holy book: what to do, what not to do.Just do whatsoever is pleasant – pleasant to you and pleasant to your surroundings. Just do something which brings a song to you and creates a rhythm around you, of celebration.This life I call a religious life: it has no principles, it has no discipline, it has no laws, it has only one single approach, and that is to live intelligently.Osho,Listening to you, I hear the constant eternal message of awareness, relaxation, being in the moment, undisturbed. Because of this blessing from you, this gift of these keys to freedom, I feel to devote all hypnosis sessions to these suggestions. Counting from seven to one, remaining alert, fully relaxed, moving into the silence, undisturbed, watching as the mind and emotions are further away. This has been happening for the past ten days.Am I in tune with your guidance?Please comment.Yes Kaveesha, you are doing very well. Continue.Osho,You brought this sutra of Tilopa's to life in Pune. Would you speak on this again as we go deeper and deeper?Do nought with the body, but relax.Shut firm the mouth, and silent remain.Empty your mind, and think of nought.Do nought with the body, but relax.Tilopa is one of my most loved ones. His sutras are very small, but have the capacity of an atomic explosion. The first sutra is: as far as the body is concerned, remember only one thing, only one word – relaxation. If your body can remain relaxed, more and more, you will be coming closer and closer to home.Just whenever you have time simply watch whether your body is relaxed or whether there are some tensions somewhere. Close your eyes and start from your feet, watching inside upwards, and you will find that the knees are tense or the back is tense – whichever part feels tense, just suggest to it, “Please relax.”It is something very fundamental to understand, that the body is always ready to listen to you – you have never talked with it, you have never made any communication with it. You have been in it, you have used it, but you have never thanked it. It serves you, and serves you as intelligently as possible.Nature knows that it is more intelligent than you are, because all the important things in the body have not been left to you, they have been given to the body. For example, breathing, or heartbeat, or the blood circulating, or the digestion of the food – they have not been left to you; otherwise you would have been in a mess long before.If breathing was left to you, you would have died. There is no possibility of your living, you can forget any moment. Fighting with someone, you can forget breathing. Sleeping in the night, you can forget your heartbeats. How will you remember? And do you know how much work your digestive system is doing? You go on swallowing things and you think you are doing a great job. That swallowing can be done by anybody.In the second world war it happened, one man got a bullet through his throat. He didn’t die, but he could not eat or drink from the throat, the whole passage had to be closed. And the doctors made a small passage by the side of his stomach, with a pipe coming out, and he has to put the food in the pipe, but there was no joy. Even when he was putting in ice-cream…he was very angry.He said, “This is…I don’t taste anything.”Then one doctor suggested, “You do one thing. First you taste, then you throw it into the pipe.” And that he did for forty years. He would first chew and enjoy and then throw it in the pipe. The pipe is just as good, because in your body too it is just a pipe and nothing else, it is just hidden behind skin. This poor man’s was just open. And it was better than yours because it could be cleaned and everything.The whole digestive system is doing miracles. The scientists say that if we had to do everything that your small digestive system is doing – a single man’s – we would need a big factory to turn food into blood, to sort out all elements, to send those elements which are needed at certain places. A few elements are needed in the brain, and they have to be sent through the blood stream to the brain. Others are needed somewhere else, to the eyes. Others are needed somewhere else, to the ears, or to the bones, or to the skin, and the body is doing it so perfectly for seventy years, eighty years, ninety years – and you don’t see its wisdom.Tilopa is saying that with the body, the only thing that people are not doing is relaxation, particularly while meditating. Do not do anything else with body, but just relax; put the whole body’s wisdom into relaxation. Relaxation should become the basement of the temple that you are creating; and the mind should be emptied of all thoughts.And just by being aware, thoughts start disappearing. There is no need to fight. Your awareness is enough to destroy them. And when the mind is empty, the temple is ready. And inside the temple the only god worth placing is silence.So those three words you have to remember: relaxation, thoughtlessness, silence. And if these three words are no more words to you but become experiences, your life will be transformed.People like Tilopa are always simple, direct. These are like maxims of physics or chemistry. Not a single word can be added to these sutras, and not a single word can be taken out. He has put exactly the right words in the right proportion in the right sequence. The body is relaxed, the mind is empty, the heart is silent; and then what happens is the knowing, the experiencing of the ultimate reality, of the immortal life of eternity.Without this knowing, we will remain always in fear of death; we will remain always in the clutches of desire; we will remain always in tensions, miseries.Knowing oneself, one is freed from everything; not only one is freed from everything, one is freed from oneself too. Only freedom remains. This freedom is the cherished idea of all the awakened ones.Tilopa comes into the same category as Gautam Buddha, Mahakashyap, Bodhidharma, Chuang Tzu.If one is going to get the essence of all the awakened ones, just to understand Tilopa is enough. His sutras will give you all the secrets possible. You need not wander here and there.Osho,Sigmund Freud has said that a spoiled child, especially one who is loved by the mother, has an open road to success.Buddha was spoiled very much.Jesus – having such a Jewish mother – was spoiled too.You were completely spoiled by your parents and grandparents.It seems that spoiling and enlightenment walk together hand-in-hand.For years you have been spoiling us so much, and now it seems that we are completely, totally spoiled.Are we ready for enlightenment, or will you spoil us even more?Just a little bit more!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the difference between the master-and-disciple relationship now, and in the days of Buddha and Bodhidharma? It seems that thousands of years ago a new disciple, upon meeting a master, often had a sudden, dramatic realization that opened him up to a state of availability – unknown in the present time. It was as if the master could slay the disciple with one stroke of the sword. To modern man, those dramatic jumps are so rare. His availability is so partial, his commitment so fragmented, that the master must deliver a thousand strokes of his sword to slay the dragon.Please comment.There are many things which have changed as the centuries have passed. First, the search for truth used to be the only search that any man of genius would undertake. There was no other search in competition with it. For the man of genius there was only one thing, and that was truth. Naturally the highest quality of intelligence came to the masters. And to be a disciple is not an ordinary thing. It needs immense intelligence, great trust, total surrender.Today the situation on this point is totally different. The genius mind is most probably attracted towards some scientific research, to become a great scientist, an Albert Einstein, to become a mathematician, to become a painter, a musician. There are many choices. The genius is rarely interested in the search for truth. He comes to realize it only when his search – whatever he was doing – has come to an end and he feels unfulfilled and cannot see a way leading anywhere. All goals are missed because he has made a certain goal, he has achieved it, but it gives no satisfaction – not even to Albert Einstein.Although his name will remain as one of the greatest scientists ever, it gave him no contentment. Inwardly he was frustrated. At the moment of death he said, “If there is another life – the way the Hindus believe – I would like to be a plumber rather than a physicist.” What he is saying is he would like to be a nobody, a plumber, rather than being a celebrity because physics is enriched by his effort but he remains poor. Physics is certainly enriched. Without Albert Einstein it would have been a different story. He influenced all the spheres of life, but his own life remained empty – and this recognition came too late, and even when it came there was nobody he could turn to.Geniuses have gone on different adventures.Secondly, there are very few masters available. There are only teachers because religions have not allowed masters to exist. Every master is a danger to the establishment – religious, political, social – whatever it is. He cannot say but the truth, and the whole establishment is based on lies, lies upon lies.So down the ages, slowly, slowly, they have crucified masters, poisoned masters, killed masters. Slowly, slowly the phenomenon of a master has become very rare.Even if someone comes to the state of realization he remains silent because very few people like crucifixion, and very few people like to be condemned by the whole world.And the problem is, unless the master declares himself, there is nobody else who can declare him. There is nobody else who is above him. So it is up to him to keep silent or to take on himself all the antagonism and venom of the ugly people who are in power all over the world.So in the first place, very few people reach to that state, because the people who might have reached are working in the world of chemistry, physics, mathematics, astronomy.There are three hundred and sixty-five departments in Oxford University and each department needs geniuses to go deeper into its subject. And there is not a single department in those three hundred and sixty-five departments for mysticism.So rarely by chance circumstances does somebody move into the world of mysticism. He may become a mystic, but he remains silent.And the place of the master has been taken by the teacher, and a teacher is thousands of miles away from truth. He repeats only the borrowed knowledge that he has got from the scriptures, from the elders, from the universities, from the libraries – he collects it, he’s a good collector. And he preaches it as if it is his experience.These teachers cannot help anybody to realize. On the contrary, these teachers put off thousands of people from the very search because as you come closer to them you find that it is an ordinary man, just a little more knowledgeable.But knowledge can be accumulated sitting in a library. There is no need to surrender, no need to trust, no need to be devoted and committed. Books don’t ask you for anything.And as they come closer they can see that he is an intellectual but not an intelligent man, and these are two different things. An intellectual is just a memory system, his memory is full, he’s a well-fed computer.Intelligence is a totally different thing. It may not know anything in particular, but its capacity to know is very sharp. Its receptivity towards truth is very clear.So these teachers of different religions, different cults – first, they don’t help anybody; secondly, they disappoint many to such an extent that people are simply put off – they simply forget all about truth, mysticism, the mystic path, the masters. The teacher has created a barrier for them because he has proved wrong, the whole search seems to be hocus-pocus, and people are exploiting.Many other things have changed.One is that in the ancient days, people were simple, innocent, childlike. The work of the master was very easy. They were open and they could be read like a book, and the master could see where a few touches are needed and the man will be awakened.I will tell you a few stories and you can see the difference – if those things happened today what will happen?Lin Chi, a great Zen master, had many disciples and he had given them the famous koan of “The Sound of One Hand Clapping” to meditate on and report whenever they had found the answer.One disciple was very innocent. He will come everyday to report – anything. He was so simple, just childlike. Sitting with closed eyes, he will think, “One hand clapping…the sound. It must be the wind passing through the pine trees. It makes a beautiful sound.” And he will run. He has found the answer.And the master will say, “You should think a little more. You seem to be in such a hurry. The koan has been given to many disciples, months have passed, nobody has reported except you. Every morning I am waiting for you. And you bring any kind of nonsense. Now what has one hand clapping and making sound got to do with the wind passing through the pine trees? Just get lost! And don’t make such a mistake again.”But he was so innocent. He will go again. The next morning sitting silently he will listen…the faraway sound of a cuckoo. And he will say, “Now, I have got it! That old man cannot now say to me ‘get lost.’” And he went again.It went on for two or three months and finally one day when the disciple came very joyously – again he has found something – the master said, “Keep quiet, because I can see you cannot find the sound of one hand clapping. And after three months experience I know what you must have brought. I will have to do something.”The master was a strong man. He took the student – they were on the third story of a building – and threw him from the window. He fell down onto the rocks, multiple fractures. And the master came from the same window jumping behind him, stood by his side, leaned on him and said, “Did you hear it?”And for the first time he experienced silence. In such a situation what else do you expect? So unexpectedly the master threw him out of the window. He has become accustomed to getting lost, but this was absolutely new. His mind could not work…. And those multiple fractures, and he was lying down on the rocks, and the master is asking, “Have you heard it?”And he touched the feet of the master. He said, “This is the sound? How could I have managed it if you had not helped me? I would have never thought to jump from a three-story building onto the rocks and get multiple fractures; but it is really great, the silence. All words simply disappeared. Now I know you were not telling me to get lost, you were telling my mind to get lost. I tortured you so much. But I have heard it.”And the master recognized that he has heard it.But if you do such a thing today you will be in the court. The person will not hear the sound of one hand clapping, he will run directly to the police station saying, “This master is not a master, he is a murderer.” And soon the master will be in the prison. And the master cannot explain the phenomenon to any magistrate, to any judge. What can he say?In the first place the magistrate will say, “You are asking absurd and stupid things – the sound of one hand clapping!” Now, there is no logical way to explain it. “Secondly, you threw this poor boy from the third story, and you had the nerve to ask him, ‘Have you heard it?’ You almost killed him.”This won’t work today. The simplicity, the innocence, is no more there. The master cannot do any such thing, even though he sees that this will help, that this can bring you instant realization; but still he cannot do it because it will be illegal, criminal; and instead of you becoming enlightened, he will be enchained. And he will not have any answer before the court.Those days were different, the people were different. It was the childhood of mankind. In that innocence it was impossible not to become enlightened if you desired it; just the longing and you would have found the right man – they were all around, all over the earth.Today they have disappeared. Their methods are no more applicable. Man has come to maturity, and he has gained a certain maturity but he has lost something far more valuable – and that is innocence.There is also a maturity which grows in innocence, but that is a totally different thing. The maturity that man has got today he has got against innocence; he has become more cunning, he has become more clever – not intelligent.Another master had a big monastery and he had a pet cat. And the monastery had two wings, right and left. Just in the middle was the cottage of the master. And there were one thousand sannyasins – five hundred living on one side, five hundred living on the other side. And they all loved the cat of the master. Once, the master was out; when he came home, there was a great turmoil because both the wings were claiming that the cat belongs to their wing. And they were fighting.The master came. They became silent. The master took his sword, and called all the monks from both the wings and said to them, “If you can say or do something which shows your realization then the cat’s life will be saved; otherwise, I am going to cut it in two, and half the cat will go to the right wing and half the cat will go to the left wing so there will be no more conflict.” There was great silence. Nobody had expected this, and nobody could find any word or any way to show his realization.The master waited for five minutes and he said, “It seems there is nobody who can come out and claim his realization. So the responsibility of murdering the cat is not mine, it is yours.” And he cut the cat in two, and gave half the dead cat to one wing, the other half to the other wing. It was a very sad affair.And just then Sosan, a disciple who had gone to preach in another town, returned. People said, “Sosan, something very strange has happened. We were fighting over the cat – we should not have done it. And the master caught us fighting about it. And he gave us a chance to save it, but nobody could manage to declare his realization in some act, in some word, in any gesture. So finally he cut the cat in half. The poor cat is dead. She was so beautiful. Now what are we going to do with this dead cat divided into two?”Sosan said, “Wait. I will see the master.”He went directly and slapped the master. The master laughed and said, “Sosan, if you had been here just ten minutes before you could have saved the life of the cat.”The meaning of this story is that a disciple can become so attuned with the master that his hand is not his, it is the master’s hand; that he is not hitting the master, he is hitting himself. He has, through that gesture, declared himself to be realized, enlightened.And the master called the whole crowd and said, “If Sosan had been here, the cat would have lived long. But alas, he was not here. And you idiots, none of you could show or say anything that could have saved the cat.”Everybody asked Sosan, “What have you done?”He said, “I don’t know what I have done. Now, thinking backwards, I feel amazed. Even to touch the feet of the master is a great blessing. But what came upon me? I simply hit him, slapped his face. I will cut off my hand.”People had to prevent him, saying, “Just cool down.”He said, “But how did it happen? And the master is such a beautiful man. I slapped him and he laughed. I slapped him and he recognized me as enlightened.”And Sosan became the master’s successor.You cannot conceive of such a phenomenon today because these so-called teachers – bishops, cardinals, priests, rabbis – will not tell you you are enlightened when you slap them – or do you think they will? Try.To tell you that, you need a real master, one who knows what has happened. Sosan has become so identified with the master that when the master cuts the cat it seems that he has cut the cat. He is not hitting the master, he is hitting himself.It took a little time for Sosan to understand what happened, but since that moment he was a different man.And the master used to say later on, “It was not a great loss. We lost a cat but we got one man enlightened – so it was not a great loss.”One more story I will tell you to explain the differences that time has brought.Kabir, one of the most famous mystics and poets of India, had a son, Kamal. The word kamal means a miracle. And he was a miracle because Kabir lived in Varanasi, which is the headquarters of Hinduism – and according to Hindus it has remained eternally the headquarters of Hinduism. According to them, Varanasi is the oldest city in the world. And looking at Varanasi it seems as if it is the oldest city; you can see layer upon layer of different centuries in different parts of Varanasi.Kabir lived in Varanasi, but he was not a brahmin. So no brahmin high caste Hindu will accept him as a mystic – but it was not a problem to him whether you accept him as a mystic or not. He is. You can close your eyes and say there is no sun, that is up to you; but the sun is there.Every morning hundreds of people will gather at Kabir’s house and they will sing Kabir’s songs – his songs are beautiful, carrying tremendous meaning. And as the time for breakfast comes close, he will say, “Don’t go. Please accept a poor man’s breakfast.” His wife and his son were both very much in despair, they have borrowed from every shop, from every person; but how long can it go on? They cannot pay it back. And this man goes on inviting people every day, hundreds of people. And the arrangement is in the hands of the wife and the son. They have said to Kabir thousands of times, “You should not say this; people are going – let them go, because we are poor. And not only poor, we are now in great debt – which there seems to be no way to pay. And now even shopkeepers are refusing. From where can we get things?”And Kabir will say, “You are right. I will not say it.”And the next day he will do the same. Again, “Don’t go. Just accept a poor man’s breakfast.”Finally in despair, Kamal said to Kabir, “Now the point has come where I have to start stealing. Unless I become a thief, these so-called devotees cannot have breakfast.”Kabir said, “My God, you have the right idea. Why have you not said this before?”Even Kamal was shocked. “Kabir is a saint and he is saying that stealing, becoming a thief, is a great idea.”But Kamal was also his son. He said, “If it is a great idea then you also have to come with me to help me – because I am not an expert. You are old, you have seen the world, your experience may be helpful. You have to come with me.” He was just seeing what he would say.Kabir said, “There is no problem. At night I am absolutely free. You just find out where we have to go, and tonight we start.”Kamal could not believe that this is going to happen – perhaps at the last moment he will refuse. But he was also of the same caliber, the same blood – and blood is certainly thicker than water. He chose the richest man’s house, went there, looked all around, and found the place where they can break the wall and enter into the house.And in the middle of the night Kabir was playing on his flute a beautiful song in praise of God. And Kamal said, “Stop all this nonsense now. Come with me to do something sensible.”And Kabir stood up and followed Kamal.Kamal said, “This seems to be too much. Perhaps he too is hoping to the very last moment that I will say ‘You go home, you are old.’ But I am not going to say it. I am also going to test how far he can go.”He went and started breaking the wall, and Kabir was helping him. He could not believe that this is happening. He entered the house. And he told Kabir, “You wait here. I will pass things from inside so you take them out.” And he brought a big bag with many ornaments and valuable things and passed him the bag. Kabir pulled it out. Kamal could not believe that now…and as Kamal was coming out, Kabir shouted loudly, “Thief, thief!”Kamal said, “What are you doing?”He said, “I am a man of truth. I will say the truth to the world.”The people in the house had awakened. They ran and they took hold of the legs of Kamal – which were still inside.In the old days the walls of rich people’s houses in India were very thick – five feet, six feet.So he had made just a small hole, enough to go through; and he was somehow getting out of it. And Kabir shouted. The people of the house got hold of Kamal’s legs. Kamal said, “You have done a great job. You have been participating and now I alone am caught.”Kabir said, “Don’t be worried. I am taking your head with me. So let them keep the legs. They will never find out who you are.”He said, “Great. You are a saint. You are helping in stealing, and now you are murdering me.”And Kabir cut off his head and took the whole bag and the head home.Those people pulled the man in, and they were surprised – there was no head. They said, “We have been deceived. And who is this man? How are we going to find out?”The story is very beautiful and up to this point it seems to be perhaps historical. Beyond this point it seems to be allegorical.Somebody in the house – a servant – who used to go to Kabir’s communion in the morning, said, “This man is unbelievable. He looks just like Kamal, Kabir’s son. But there is a way to find out if he is Kamal or not.”They said, “What way?”They said, “We should hang his body by the side of the road near the Ganges where Kabir and his whole group early in the morning come singing, dancing, to take a bath; hang his body by the side of the road on a tree.”But those people said, “How will that help? That won’t help.”He said, “You just listen to me. You do it! You don’t have any other alternative.”And it is said that the body was hung by the side of the road, and the next morning Kabir came singing his song and dancing with his followers to the Ganges. And when they reached the side of the tree, Kamal started clapping – without his head.This, I say, seems to be a little too much.And that’s how he was caught. And the servant said, “This was the secret, because I knew that if he is Kamal he is so accustomed just out of habit – he cannot forget in twenty-four hours – that he will clap when the whole gang comes dancing, he will not be able to resist – head or no head.”But seeing this, the man whose house was broken into and whose things were stolen, was transformed completely. He did not go to the police. He went to Kabir and fell at his feet, and he said, “Whose disciples, even after their head is cut off, still remember their devotion, their love, their prayer? I have not come to say anything about stealing. You can take anything you want from my house at any time. Just accept me as a disciple.”And Kabir said, “In fact the truth is, when he said that he wanted to steal from your house I agreed, because I wanted to steal you. I lost my son, but I have got you. And my son was almost enlightened, so there is no problem about him; he will manage. If he can manage clapping without his head – so many people of my congregation have freaked out seeing Kamal clapping without a head – he will manage to enter into a better and higher plane; but you would have missed if I had not come. The stealing in your house was only a device. All your things are here. You can take them. We are poor, we are beggars; it doesn’t matter that we cannot repay people. They already know when they give something to us that we cannot repay.”But the man became Kabir’s successor. He devoted all his wealth to Kabir’s work.Even apart from the clapping of the hands – which does not seem to be historical – it is very difficult to think of such a thing today…. The whole story that Kabir tells, “I came to steal in your house because I wanted to steal you, and you were not going to come on your own and I am getting old. And I have seen you many times, you are the right person to inherit everything that I have.”But today if a saint is caught stealing, neither the man whose house has been burgled nor the state nor the law is going to forgive him.And he murdered also.But even though he reported to the government of the day, “I have murdered my son. If there is any punishment for me, I am ready,” they refused, saying to him, “It is impossible for a man like you to murder. And if you decide to murder, then there must be something good in it. We are not the ones to decide about it. You are beyond our jurisdiction.”Things have changed so dramatically that today, first, it is difficult to find a master; and then it is difficult to have the intelligence, love, devotion, totality, to give yourself completely without any conditions.But it is not impossible because it has been happening with me more than it has happened with any of the old masters. I have thousands of sannyasins whose devotion, whose love, is in no way inferior to that of any devotees who have ever existed on the earth; it is far superior.Osho,For the past several months, day after day, I kept giving massages in a luxurious resort of California to people who refused to breathe, to feel, to open up. No connection was possible, and I felt myself more and more drained by it.The other night you talked about the transfer of energy between a dying person and the people surrounding him.In such a close contact as massage is, is awareness enough to prevent the absorption of negative energy?Yes, awareness is enough. It creates a subtle wall around you. Neither will their energy affect you nor will your energy be drained.And everyone who is doing such an intimate kind of work like massage should learn to be more and more aware; otherwise, massage is dangerous – because you are massaging so many people. You don’t know them. You don’t know their unconscious. You don’t know their anger, hatred, perversions; their energy can flow towards you very easily, and you don’t have any protection.Awareness certainly functions as an armor.Osho,The other day you were talking about three different kinds of horses, in reference to as many kinds of disciples, in regard to the use of the whip. I couldn't find out to which group I belong, and imagine myself being temporarily in each one.Osho, to which group of disciples do I belong?Your feeling may be right. It is not necessary that you should belong to one group. Those categories can be overlapping, sometimes you can function as one category, sometimes as another category.But this understanding and this feeling can be used to belong to the best category. Whenever you are feeling you are belonging to something lower, find out what are the causes that are preventing you from being your best self. And you will be able to find out, because if you can feel this, it is an indication that you have good feeling, sharp feeling. You will be able to know why you are not in the best category in this moment. Then whatever the cause, drop it; and whatever the cost, drop it; and move to the best category.Just the shadow of the whip should be enough.Osho,In Pune I remember you would sometimes say to sannyasins, “Good! Finally you have come. I have been waiting for you.”Osho, do you know our past lives?If I want to know, I can know, but ordinarily I avoid knowing because your present is enough!Osho,I listen to you and watch these mysterious meetings from the soft darkness I know as myself: sometimes silent, but more often than not, a variably cloudy sky of this thought and that. Suddenly you say my name, and all hell breaks loose – bells ring, a whistle blows, and the carnival comes to life as if powered by a high voltage current, millions of lights, thousands of rides, and hundreds of children running all around in wild abandon.I look for the watcher, but he is on the ferris wheel screaming with delight.Osho, when the lights go on, it is certainly a carnival of celebration inside, but much too much for me to watch at this point. So for the time being, all I can possibly do is laugh along with you and feel grateful.Milarepa, everything is right in what you have written in your question except one thing. You should not use the phrase “hell breaks loose,” that is not right; “heaven breaks loose” – although there is no phrase like that. But language is a game. We can make it up. And at least here only heaven breaks loose, not hell.If you were a little aware, you would have watched that phrase. It has a wrong connotation. So just change that, and you are doing everything perfectly well.Don’t be worried about awareness.Laugh totally.Soon awareness will be also coming in.Osho,Although I see myself listening to you with an open heart and a silent mind, I have the feeling that my mind is transformed but not my being.How can I manage a heart understanding that helps me to let go?Don’t be greedy. If the mind is understanding, help the mind to understand it. Mind is bad only when it is your master, bad only when it hinders you from understanding; but if it is helping your understanding then that understanding will sink slowly, slowly, into the heart. You cannot do anything about it, and there is no need to do anything.The mind is not fighting. That’s enough.The mind is available. Soon the heart will follow.Mind opens, it is a good beginning.Some time, when it is ripe, the heart opens; and some time, again when it is ripe, you will come to your own being. Things are very natural, if the mind is understanding – that is the basic condition.The problem arises only when the mind is trying to prevent understanding, afraid that if it understands then the heart will soon become the master. Of course the heart is never afraid to open up the path for your being.So as things are going with you, it is perfectly good. Just wait for the right moment. And you cannot decide the right moment.The very understanding of the mind, at a certain point, creates the right moment.It is just like heating water. At a hundred degrees it evaporates. It will not evaporate before, even at ninety-nine degrees.So there are laws of inner life, that at a certain degree of understanding the mind gives way. You just go on absorbing in the mind and feel happy that your mind is not antagonistic to you, that it is a friend and not a foe.Osho,There is this vague feeling that when I was a young child I was more clear, aware and open than I am now. Today when there is joy, a certain degree of awareness comes back easily. It looks like fear and suffering made me become clouded and unaware, in order not to be touched…As if my darkness were able to extinguish my light.Is a certain climate necessary for awareness to grow?Certainly a certain climate is necessary, and that’s what we are trying to do – to create a certain silence, a certain devotion, a certain love, a certain courage, a certain longing for the unknown. All these constitute the climate.And whenever the climate is ready, awareness appears.There is an old Egyptian saying, “Whenever the disciple is ready, the master appears.” It is of profound meaning.Everything appears only when you are ready for it. You cannot bring anything before its season, and you should not unnecessarily try for it because that will bring failure, frustration, and may put you off from the whole search.So just find out what kind of climate is needed, and create it. Even without your knowing, I am trying to create the climate in which awareness will appear on its own – and when it comes on its own it is such a beautiful experience, such a gift from the unknown, that one becomes full of gratitude for existence.And this gratitude is the only prayer that I can accept as religious.Osho,You spoke of the hidden treasures stored in the super-conscious. Are there any treasures in the unconscious or is it just a Pandora's box full of agonies? Sometimes I feel I suppress happiness as well as negative emotions.The treasures are only in the super-conscious. The unconscious is a Pandora’s box. And if sometimes you repress happiness, then there must be something wrong in that happiness; otherwise, why should you repress it? It may have some implications which are not right.The very effort to repress it shows that you can see something is wrong in it. But you can repress only in the unconscious.So first, you see if your happiness has something wrong in it. Perhaps you are happy because of somebody else’s misery, perhaps you are happy because others are not happy. There must be some reason which is not right. So first that happiness becomes a wrong thing, and when it moves into the unconscious – which is full of garbage, stinking – it will be pressed by all that garbage into the unconscious. And if you want to get it back again, you will not find it the same; it will not be happiness at all. Perhaps it was not in the first place. And once it is repressed in the unconscious, the unconscious itself changes its character.And the unconscious is so vast and so big and so powerful, that a small happiness will be crushed by it. It will no more be happiness.So never repress any happiness at least. If you want to repress, repress unhappiness, repress your misery. If it has become a habit that you cannot resist repression, then repress something wrong. But don’t repress something which can be enjoyed.Happiness should be enjoyed.I have told you the story of one of my teachers. He was a Sanskrit scholar and a very funny looking fellow – very fat, a round face, and he used an old type of headgear, the safa, which is very long – it makes the head look really big; it is almost thirty-six yards of cloth, that one puts on round and round and it makes it bigger and bigger. But he was very simple, almost a simpleton. The Hindi word for simple is bhole, so we used to call him “Bhole Baba.” And whenever he would come it was enough to trigger him, just to write on the blackboard “Bhole Baba.” And he would go mad, and he would throw the chair and he would say, “I am not going to teach this class.” And he would shout and he would throw a tantrum, and we all enjoyed it – because he never asked who had written it. That was the most beautiful thing about it, he never asked who had written it, he never punished anybody for it.In fact, we used to have small stones with us so as he is wiping it off we would be throwing stones at his back. And he would say, “I will see you. First let me finish it.” And still he would not inquire who has been throwing stones.He died. I must have been not more than nine or ten years old. So I went with my father. And he was lying down dead with all his cloth. Seeing his dress, I was almost going to burst into laughter, but my father was holding my hand and pressing it, saying, “Keep quiet!” He had taken my promise at home that I would not do anything.And I had promised him. So I kept it. But it was really hard to see him dead and still with this thirty-six-yard-long headgear.And then suddenly his wife came from inside and fell over him, and said, “Ah, my Bhole Baba.” That was too much! She was hearing continuously that we were taunting him, “Bhole Baba” – we were writing on his door “Bhole Baba,” and he was washing it off. And whenever we were passing by we would shout “Bhole Baba!” And his wife was so angry sometimes. She would say, “You will be satisfied only when he is dead.” But that “Bhole Baba” got into her mind also, because thousands of times she has heard it. And it was so fittingly descriptive of the man, that I simply pressed my father’s hand and I laughed.He was very angry. He took me away and he said, “You promised me.”I said, “I promised you, but I was not aware that his wife would play such a trick. ‘Bhole Baba’ was his nickname and he was so much against it that the whole period would be destroyed if ‘Bhole Baba’ was mentioned. And we tried him and tortured him, and now the poor man is dead and his own wife is doing the same trick on him. I could not contain myself; that’s why I did not allow you to press my hand, I pressed yours. I meant that this is time you should also laugh.”He said, “From now onwards you are not going to anybody’s death, when somebody’s body is being taken to the crematorium.”I said, “I will not go with you. That is decided. But I will go on my own.”In fact that is the only procession at which nobody prevents you. If you go into some marriage procession people prevent you, because you are not invited. If you go to some party, people prevent you because you are not invited. That is the only open procession, and I didn’t want to miss it. If I had not been there the whole thing would have been missed; nobody understood because all the people there were grown up. They were not his students. I was the only student.But everybody was asking me, “What happened to you?”And when I told the story to all the people they all started laughing. They said, “It was worth laughing at.”Even my father was laughing. He said, “The story is certainly worth laughing at, but the situation is not.”I said, “When there is something to laugh at, don’t bother about the situation because then you have to repress it.”From my very childhood I have been against repressing any joyful feeling that comes to you. Why throw it into the garbage of your unconscious? And if you throw it into the unconscious, it is not true happiness; there must be something in it of which you are afraid, something which makes you repress it. Otherwise it is such a human phenomenon to share.But once you repress, remember, everything repressed goes to the unconscious, and that dark hole changes the quality of everything.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,A few days ago I was feeling full of energy and a lot of love for myself.The opportunity arose for me to let myself face my number one devil: jealousy. I went for it wholeheartedly, and the result was to send myself even higher: I felt euphoric and so grateful.I am still left with an almost uncontainable energy which seems composed of sensuality and of lovingness.If I go into it, I risk hurting other people; but the alternative seems a compromise. Sitting and watching it drives me bananas!Osho, my main question is: what is it that I have learned from this experience, and how to use this so as not to be taken over again by jealousy? How to enjoy the freedom to express sensuality without compromising, getting frustrated or slipping on the banana?It has been a very meaningful experience for you, one of the key experiences which can help one to change one’s energy totally.George Gurdjieff used to find the first thing in his disciples – the characteristic that was their number one enemy because their number one enemy contains the key which either can destroy them if they don’t understand it or can bring a transformation.You faced jealousy. Jealousy is one of the most dangerous elements in human consciousness, particularly in the female mind. To face your number one enemy without hiding it, without whitewashing it, without trying to interpret it favorably – that you are right, the situation is such that of course you have to be jealous – without in any way satisfying yourself by explanations that the jealousy was right.If you satisfy yourself that it is right, it is going to remain and it will become more powerful; then the energy that you are feeling now, you would not feel, this energy would have been absorbed by jealousy, it would have remained contained in jealousy, and would have remained looking for a moment when it could explode – to find some excuse. But because you faced it without bringing any explanation to explain it away…you did not justify it, you simply faced it as a fact, that you have this jealousy…and you accepted it, that it has something to do with you, not with anyone else, that nobody else in the whole world is responsible for it.All those are excuses to protect it.You did a good job, and the result is that just being watchful the jealousy disappeared.And that’s what I have been telling you continually for years, that nothing has to be done; simply face a problem the way a mirror reflects something, with no judgment.And because it was your number one enemy, it contained a lot of energy. Now it is gone, and the energy is free. That’s why you are feeling more alive, more loving, more sensuous.Remember one thing: again you can commit the same mistake. Don’t condemn sensuality. It has been condemned by the whole world, and because of their condemnation the energy that can flower in sensuality moves into perversions, jealousy, anger, hatred – a kind of life which is dry, with no juice. Sensuousness is your very life. That is the difference between you and a stone – because the stone is not sensuous. The more sensuous you are, you more alive you are. And if your whole energy is released in loving, in being playfully sensuous without holding yourself back, without any fear – there is nothing to be afraid of. Sensuousness is one of the greatest blessings to humanity; it is your sensitivity, it is your consciousness; consciousness filtering through the body is what sensuousness is.Remember never to compromise. Compromise is absolutely against my whole vision.You see the people. They are miserable because they have compromised on every point, and they cannot forgive themselves because they have compromised. They know that they could have dared, but they proved cowards. In their own eyes they have fallen, they have lost self-respect; that’s what compromise does.Why should one compromise? What have we got to lose? In this small life, live as totally as possible. Don’t be afraid of going to the extreme, you cannot go more than total, that is the last line; and don’t compromise. Your whole mind will go for compromise because that’s how we have been brought up, conditioned.Compromise is one of the most ugly words in our language. It means, “I give half, you give half; I settle for half, you settle for half.” But why? When you can have the whole, when you can eat the cake and have it too, then why compromise?Just a little courage, just a little daring – and only in the beginning. Once you have experienced the beauty of non-compromising and the dignity that it brings, and the joy, and the integrity, and the individuality, for the first time you feel that you have roots, that you have a center, that you live out of your own, you don’t live like a businessman – living life like a businessman is prostitution.Live like a warrior.This way or that, but never compromising. It is better to be defeated, but totally, than to be victorious through a compromise; that victory will not give you anything except humiliation, and the defeat without compromise will still give you dignity.Life is mysterious.Here sometimes victory is just shameful and defeat is a dignity because one would not compromise.So whatever sensuality you feel, whatever love you feel, just don’t keep them in your mind; otherwise, they get sour, they get bitter. Express them.And remember one thing, that expression is always a tremendous release of your own energy; otherwise, your energy goes on accumulating and becomes a burden. And when it becomes a burden, you start throwing the responsibility on other people because you are sad, you are heavy, somebody must be doing something wrong. If you are sad, you are wrong; if you are joyful, you are right.It has been almost a criterion to me that anybody who is sad, complaining, grumpy, is wrong, is bound to be wrong. He may find a thousand and one reasons why he is sad. I don’t accept it. He is sad because he has not allowed his life to blossom. He has been holding back. Even when people want to love each other, they are holding back – because all the religions have poisoned love. They have not been able to destroy it, but they have succeeded in poisoning it.And sensuality is so much condemned, and if you condemn sensuality then what is to remain? Then man remains like a marble statue – you touch his hand and you feel like you are shaking hands with a dead branch. All his energy has shrunken in himself – rather than blossoming in flowers, it has become complexes within himself which are making him sad.At least my people should never think of compromise. Compromise for what? Be true. Be honest. Be sincere. Love as much as you can. Enjoy your sensuality – it is a gift of nature. And be watchful, because what you are enjoying is everybody else’s right too. Otherwise there will be conflict. Because of that conflict people compromise.If you enjoy intense living, you should appreciate everybody who is living intensely. With whom he is living does not matter – because we are all one life, one life force.All the traditions have been against expressiveness because a person who is expressive attains a certain kind of solidity, a freedom. You cannot enslave him. He lives according to his own nature. You cannot force him. You cannot make him a husband or a wife. That’s why the society has tried hard to repress, because the repressed person is so much reduced – he’s almost like the castrated bull.You cannot use a bull in a bullock cart. The bull is too powerful. He can take your bullock cart and you anywhere, where you never wanted to go. You cannot control him. And if he comes across a beautiful female, he will simply jump out of your bullock cart. What happens to you and your bullock cart, that is your business. He will start a love affair immediately, not bothering at all that you are under the bullock cart, the bullock cart is upside down.Man must have learned very early that bulls cannot be used, they are useless.But they found the idea of why they are useless, because they are so full of energy, and so sensuous, and so loving.People started castrating them, and once a bull is castrated you have reduced him to a totally different being that he was not destined to be. Now you can use him in a bullock cart. You can enslave him. You can use him in farms, and wherever you want. You have destroyed his possibility of regenerative forces. You have done a crime against nature. Now the cow may be passing by his side, he will not even look at her, he doesn’t have energy.In my childhood when I saw the farmers castrating the bulls, I inquired what is the matter. My father said, “When you are old enough you will understand.”I said, “I don’t want to wait. I want to understand now, why these poor creatures are being tortured.”He said, “You just wait.”And when I understood, I told him that, “You have not only been doing that to bulls, you have been doing that to human beings too – in a different way, not physiologically but psychologically.”All the religions are castrating human beings. For example, all over the world ladies are told that while making love they should not show any sign of joy. What nonsense. Even while making love they are not allowed to show any signs of joy because that is what prostitutes do, not ladies – and this is compromise. Being ladies they compromised. So when the man is making love to them, they are lying down with closed eyes, because even to open their eyes is not right for a lady – to see such an ugly scene, that the beast on top of them is doing push-ups. It is not lady-like. It is better to keep your eyes closed. And don’t move.For thousands of years women had no knowledge of orgasm – and even today in the East, almost ninety-nine percent of women don’t know what orgasm is. And the same was the story all over the world because they never moved, they never enjoyed, they never allowed their body to dance.There is a difference between man’s and woman’s sexuality. Man’s sex is local, it is genital. Woman’s sexuality is more sensuality than sexuality, it is all over her body. Unless her whole body participates, she will not experience the orgasmic joy – which is the greatest gift nature has given.And it is really shocking and surprising, that because man destroyed the woman, because she was not allowed to enjoy lovingness, he himself was alone making the push-ups. There was no other.I have heard of a drunkard who was walking on the beach…and then he saw a man doing push-ups. The drunkard looked down, looked from this side and that side, went around, tapped the man, and said, “Boy, your girl is gone. Why are you unnecessarily tiring your body? Go home.”But this is really the situation, and the by-product is that these same so-called gentlemen who produced this ugly situation – that they made their own wives non-sensuous, dry – created many things because these women became angry, nagging, fighting. These were just perversions of the energy that could have become flowers, fragrance. And on the other hand, these gentlemen had to go to prostitutes; they created prostitutes – which was another ugliness. To force women just for money, to sell their bodies – because with their own wives they themselves could not get the orgasm. Ejaculation is not orgasm. They could produce children but they could not produce orgasm.Orgasm needs both the partners in a sensuous dance.To create the ladies, they had to reduce other poor women into prostitutes. It is such an ugly society, so nauseating, if you look into its structure and the way it has behaved and destroyed man.At least my people should be totally free. They should love. And there is no lady here, and there is no gentleman here; here are only men and women, real men and real women.And be sensuous. Enjoy life to its fullest, and help others also to enjoy the life to its fullest. And you will find, strangely, that because of your love, your sensuousness, all your ugly traits have disappeared because they no more get any energy – they were perversions, they were by-products of your compromises. No compromise for any reason – respectability, honor, all are nonsense.How many million people have lived before you? And do you remember a few names who were very respectable, very honorable, and they had sacrificed their whole life for their honor and their respectability, and now even their names?…Nobody knows whether they ever happened or not.In Jaina mythology there is a very beautiful story. I have loved it very much. In Jaina mythology if a king conquers the whole world he’s called the chakravartin. chakra means wheel, as if the world is a wheel – it is a wheel – and he has conquered it completely. And the mythology is that in heaven only chakravartins are allowed to make their signatures on a golden mountain.One man became a chakravartin, and he was very happy that now he will be able to write his name on the golden mountain. Very few people – once in a while – have been able to write their names. The mountain is enormous. As he died and entered the gates of heaven, the doorkeeper said, “You have to sign your signature on the golden mountain, but go alone. Don’t take anybody with you.”He said, “Why? I would like a few of my friends who have died before me and who must be here to be with me; otherwise, what is the joy of signing on the golden mountain? Nobody is watching you, nobody will ever know that you have signed there.”The doorkeeper said, “Listen to me. I have been on this post…before me was my father, and this is our heritage. For centuries our family has kept this post. And to everybody who has gone to sign, this was suggested; and everybody wanted the same that you are wanting. And afterwards, everybody thanked us, ‘It was so kind of you to have prevented me from taking anybody.’ So please go alone.”Reluctantly he went in, and the mountain keeper opened the doors and said, “There is a difficulty. The mountain is full of names. There is no space. And this is not only with you; before me my father was here, before him his father was here. This is our family post. And I have heard that since centuries this has been the case, that the mountain is full. So every time a new person comes, first you have to erase one name and then sign your name. There is no other way; there is no space.”Then he recognized that it is good that he has not brought his friends to see. A great mountain and there is not even a small space for his signature.But he was – he must have been – a man of understanding. He said, “I will not erase, because what is the point? Somebody will come tomorrow and erase my name and will sign his. This is all futile. So my being chakravartin, a world conqueror, is useless and I was thinking that it happens only once in a while. I was wrong. This whole mountain is full of signatures.”Just a small life you have. Don’t bother about any respectability, don’t bother about any honor, don’t bother about what others will say. Simply listen to your own energy and follow it. I call it courage. Be sensuous, be loving, and if you can be totally loving and sensuous there is a possibility one day to transcend, to come to a point of awareness where all your energy turns into just a flame of awareness – all your sensuality, all your sexuality, all your love, everything in you – turns into a flame that has been called enlightenment, awakening; a flame that remains forever in the universe without taking another form again, because it has used the whole potential of forms. People are being born to the same class again and again. It is not dignified.If you live totally, once is enough.So you did perfectly well with your jealousy. Now the energy is released – because you did not get into jealousy; otherwise that energy would have burned you, wounded you, made you sad, harmed you, and poisoned others – because we are not so separate as we think.We are very deeply connected, and particularly here with me. You become more and more connected with each other. The differences drop, nobody bothers what is your religion, what is your nation, no barrier remains. People come closer and closer. That means they are affected also. If one person gets sick, becomes sad, feels nauseous, then everybody else will be affected in some measure or other. If one is joyous – dancing, singing, playing on his guitar – then everybody else also feels a certain song in his heart.And I want you to become more and more close, almost like one soul in different bodies.You have been struggling with jealousy for years. Now you have found the key.Next time if jealousy comes, immediately catch hold of it; and the same that you have done with enemy number one, you can do with all the enemies that come into your mind. They are smaller enemies, they will disappear even sooner, they don’t have that much energy.But when energy is left then this problem is bound to arise – what to do with this energy. Up to now it was used by, sucked by, jealousy. Now it is all over your body. You feel more sensuous, you feel more loving. And you, up to now, have remained in a rigid way, always keeping yourself a little off from people. It is not your fault; it is the misery of all England! So drop this England too. Just be human.And don’t wait, because that energy unexpressed can create problems. Express it – dance, sing, love, whatever comes to your mind to do.Osho,When an artist is on the stage or painting, sometimes suddenly the mind stops and there is no one on the stage or doing the painting. As you say, the creativity passes through the artist while he is a hollow bamboo.Then a beautiful work of art is done because no one but existence has done it.I wonder if it is like a glimpse of enlightenment. But it lasts the time of a soap bubble. Back to normal, the poor guy is back in the desert of daily life which is very mediocre, and he doesn't have the passport to reach the reality of his glimpses. The work of art stays at this height – it is far beyond the creator – but the poor fellow stays down there in the valley. Sometimes he can ride on another soap bubble, but he'll soon be back in the valley.Mozart, Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, and many others, burnt themselves in this search, but it seems they didn't arrive anywhere. Is it because they didn't find the right master?And another question arises: If existence is generous enough and has given those guys another chance, are they around now?Osho, why doesn't the boat of creativity have enough fuel to reach the shore of enlightenment?The creative people – whether painters, musicians, poets or dancers – reach to a place once in a while that can be called “a glimpse of enlightenment” but it is only a glimpse. It is not a realization. They have not prepared themselves for it. It has come accidentally.The painter was absorbed in painting. He was so absorbed in painting that he forgot himself, forgot the ego, forgot his thoughts, and without knowing it he was in a state of meditation, and accidentally a door opened and he saw the beauty of the beyond.But because he is not prepared, he cannot remain in meditation. He does not even know the abc of meditation; he may never have heard the word. He was doing something else. It was just because he got lost in his work – in dance, in music, in singing – he fulfilled the condition for a glimpse.Soon he will be back – when the dance is over, when the painting is complete, he will be back in the desert of daily life. And he will be worse than the ordinary man because he has known something which the ordinary man has not even dreamt of. His misery is more. He has seen the door open, he has seen the door closed, and he feels utterly helpless.Now a great problem has arisen for him, that there is something far more beautiful than any painting, far more musical than any music, far more poetic than any poetry. There is a dance beyond dance, but how to reach there? All that he can manage is his ordinary dance. In his ordinary dance, if he becomes conscious that he’s doing it to get the glimpse back, he will not get the glimpse because the condition will not be fulfilled, he will not be lost in the dance. Technically he will be doing the dance but his ego will remain watching for the window to open; it will not open. It will open only when he forgets himself.The problem is that this situation has been only in the West, not in the East.The East is poor, immensely poor, but in a way tremendously rich. In the East if the poet or the painter or the musician had the glimpse, he would not bother about the dance or the painting, he would look for a master, because it is understood – it is in the atmosphere, and it has been there for thousands of years – that creativity can give you a glimpse but not more than that. If you want something that becomes part and parcel of you, then you have to find a master, a path; you have to change yourself, your ways of living. You have to bring awareness to everything that you do, and you need somebody to tell you – not only to tell you, but somebody whose presence becomes a proof that you are not chasing some shadow, some hallucination.The West is poor. It has created great artists, but unfortunately in the West there has been no atmosphere for enlightenment, no masters who could show you the way. The Western artists have suffered more than anybody else – they have gone mad, they have committed suicide, they have drowned themselves in drugs. The Western artist suffered more than anybody else in the West, because he had a glimpse of the beyond and he could not manage to make that glimpse a reality which remained twenty-four hours with him like the heartbeat. His anguish is tremendous.In the East I have not found the name of any painter, any sculptor, any musician, any poet, who has gone mad, who has committed suicide, who has drowned himself in drugs, for the simple reason that in the very air it was possible to find a master. And if you had a glimpse, you were fortunate because you would know that something exists beyond, you had just to find the bridge to go there, to just be there.The division of East and West has been one of the greatest tragedies. It should be dissolved.The Eastern science of inner being should be brought to each Western seeker or potential seeker or possible seeker.And Western science and technology should reach to every nook and corner of the East to destroy the poverty, the uneducatedness.Both have something and both are missing something. And this is really amazing, that what the East is missing the West has, and what the West is missing the East has.It is a simple question of understanding, to let there be a meeting of East and West so that the outer poverty disappears from the East and the inner poverty disappears from the West. The whole earth can be rich, rich in both ways. There is no need for choice, no need to choose; both can be ours, and both should be ours. There is no conflict.My whole work is basically this, but neither is the East ready to listen to me nor the West. It seems to be really an insane situation.Just the other day Anando was giving me information that millions of tons of butter and other foodstuffs have again accumulated in the European market. And just a few months before they had destroyed so much foodstuff that in destroying it they had to spend four million dollars. And again it has accumulated – the surplus. They cannot stop the farmer because then the farmer will fall economically low, so the farmer has to be helped to go on producing; and the market is already over-full, so every three months they have to destroy food.And in the East people are dying every day because there is no food.This is strange and stupid, inhuman too – that every three or four months you have to destroy huge mountains of butter and other foodstuff – and by just drowning them in the ocean you waste millions of dollars. Those millions of dollars can be used to transport those things to the poor countries.But they will not do that.In the East there was Shri Raman. He would not come to the West, and I can understand why – because I have come and I have suffered and seen. Many times he was asked, invited, and he refused. He simply said, “I will not be understood; I will be misunderstood. Just leave me alone.”And now I can understand him. He was right. I have tried my best and the result is a tremendous antagonism. Even in the countries where I have never gone, even in the countries where there is not even a single sannyasin there is so much fear, and absolutely unfounded fear.The man who created all kinds of lies against me has been rewarded; today he has been rewarded by the United States government as a great researcher, investigator; he has been given a gold medal. And whatever he has investigated was absolute lies. But they managed to destroy the commune.The commune could have become a meeting place for East and West. That was my idea.But it seems the East is satisfied with its poverty but will not lose its superstitions – which it has to lose if science and technology are to be introduced. And the West seems to be satisfied with its inner poverty, because if it wants to be inwardly rich it will have to lose all kinds of superstitions that it has been carrying for thousands of years – and it is not willing to do that.Just the other day the secretary of the Dutch parliament, answering the questions of journalists, said that I have not been allowed in Holland and I will not be allowed in Holland because I have said something in praise of Adolf Hitler. And the journalist pointed out that I have contradicted it – and it was the German magazine Spiegel which had misquoted me. And the secretary accepted that that was true, it was a misrepresentation, but still…”His coming may create a disorder.” And the journalist said that when the pope came there was tremendous protest against him and great disorder, and yet he was allowed, and he was a guest of the government.And, as far as I am concerned, in no country have I been protested against by the people. There is no precedent for it, it is just their assumption.And Holland has thousands of sannyasins, the reporter said, who would welcome him.And I am ready to face those protests. I would really love to see who are those people who want to protest against me, on what grounds.And I don’t even want government security. I don’t even want them to be responsible if anything happens to me, it is my responsibility.But the fear is somewhere else. All others are excuses. The fear is that I can change the mind of the younger generation. That’s what the American president has sent in a message here to Uruguay, “The man is dangerous for the simple reason that he is extremely intelligent and is capable of changing the minds of the younger people.”You don’t have anybody else to contradict me? There are six hundred fifty million Catholics – you don’t have a single Catholic who can argue against me?What is the problem? It should be simple and human. I am ready for any public discussion. I am ready to come to all these parliaments who are talking about me. In fact, if they have any guts they should invite me to their parliament – and I am ready to face their whole parliament. But the fear is – they themselves know – they have no future, their death is so certain that they are afraid that I will expose them.But they are not concerned that I am not exposing them in a destructive way. I am exposing your fallacies so that I can substitute the positive, the right dimension which can help the West, its creative people, its intelligent people, to have a transformation.In the West, enlightenment is an unknown factor. There have been great saints like Francis of Assisi – a beautiful man, a very loving man. You cannot find anything wrong in him, but that is not enough; he does not have the experience of the ultimate reality, and that is proved by small incidents. The pope became jealous that Francis was attracting followers and he was not even accepted yet as a saint. He was called to Rome. Now, you cannot call Gautam Buddha like this. And he came, kissed the feet of the pope, who was just an idiot. And he was very happy; he conferred the title of “saint” on Francis of Assisi. He was a good man, but not an enlightened man; otherwise, there would have been a rebellion – he would not have cared a bit about the degree of “saint” given by the pope, and he would not have kissed his feet. He would not have bothered to come to Rome as a servant, having to present himself to the court of the pope. A nice man, a good man – everything is right about him, just there is no light, the room is dark.The West has not known the experience of enlightenment.But I am insistent that we are going to make hundreds of Western people, for the first time in history, enlightened.All these governments and their opposition are not going to stop me. It is not a question of my idea; it is now an existential necessity – that the West must have enlightened people. Only those enlightened people of the West will be able to help the West to be generous towards the poverty of East, only they will be able to create an atmosphere where it is simply inhuman and ugly to go on destroying food when people are dying, just to keep your prices high, so your economy remains the same and does not suffer.It seems economics is more important than love, than compassion; but it is possible only if we can manage – and we will manage.My people are trying to find the place.My other people are trying to find the ships – to create a city in the ocean. And it seems most practical and probable to create a beautiful city of five thousand resident sannyasins, with the capacity of twenty thousand more who will be coming and going. And we can move the city from one place to another place. We can go around the earth.This is how blessings come in disguise.I’m really excited about it!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I hear you talk about the interdependence and interwovenness of everything that exists – that nobody and nothing is an island, something is dawning in me which I can hardly put into words. What so far has just been an intellectual perception sometimes crystallizes as moments of awe and admiration for existence's intelligence, which goes so far beyond our own limited thinking.The small but so revealing fact that a single electron can disappear and reappear somewhere else with no time gap – no matter how far apart events happen – was something like a clue to me. Imagining in terms of energy that nothing is lost or disappears, I feel sometimes how the essence of plants, animals and human beings is interconnected, and just changes forms on this or another planet – let's say, some millions of light years away. Even the biggest stars dissolve and reappear somewhere else in the cosmos.I am reminded of the insight of an ancient master: “As above, so below” – or vice versa.Could you please talk about this?The ancient saying, “As above, so below,” or vice-versa, contains one of the most fundamental truths about mysticism. It means that there is no above, no below, that existence is one.Divisions are created by the mind.Existence is divisionless.Divisions are our projections, and we get so much identified with divisions that we lose contact with the whole.Our mind is just a small window opening towards the vast universe, but when you look always from the window, the frame of the window frames the sky outside – although there is no frame on the sky, it is frameless. But to your perception the frame of the window becomes the frame of existence.It is something like…once in a while it happens to people who use glasses that they have their glasses on their nose and they are looking for them. And they have even forgotten that they cannot see without the glasses, so if they are looking and seeing, it is an absolute certainty that the glasses are in place.But if you have been using glasses for years, slowly, slowly they become part of you, they become your eyes. You don’t think of them as separate from you. But each pair of glasses can give its own color to the things it sees. You are the seer behind – the glasses cannot see themselves. Things outside don’t have the color that the glass is imposing upon them, but you have become so identified with the glasses.I used to live with a man – he was a very nice man – who had glasses from his very childhood, and now they had become thicker and thicker. He was so accustomed to them that he would go to sleep with his glasses on. When one day I saw him sleeping with the glasses on, I woke him and said, “This is too much! Do you need these glasses for dreams? You can see dreams without glasses.”He became aware that he had completely forgotten that those glasses were separate from him. For fifty years continuously they have been there, and he cannot see without them, so even to go to his bed he has to use them, and slowly, slowly, he started sleeping with his glasses on.His whole world depends on his glasses: if they are green, everything will look green; if they are blue, everything will look blue; and he will believe that what he is seeing cannot be wrong.Man’s mind also is only an instrument. The glasses are outside the skull – the mind is inside the skull, so you cannot turn it off every day. And you are so close to it within, that the very closeness has become the identification, so that whatever the mind sees is thought to be the reality. But mind cannot see the reality; mind can see only its own prejudices. It can see its own projections displayed on the screen of the world.I have told you, once it happened that I was traveling from Bombay to Calcutta, and on the railway station hundreds of people had come to see me off. As the train moved, I went in. It was an air-conditioned coupe, and there was another man also in it. He simply fell flat, touched my feet.I said, “What are you doing? You don’t even know me.”He said, “There is no need to know you when there are so many people to see you off; and many of them are very rich people of Bombay – I know them.”I said, “It is your joy – if it feels good, you can touch my feet – but I am a Mohammedan.”He said, “My God! You are a Mohammedan? – you must be joking!” He tried hard to console himself for touching the feet of a Mohammedan. He said, “I am of the highest caste of Kashmiri brahmin. Are you really Mohammedan?”I said, “There is no question about it – I am saying it myself.”He said, “But the people who had come to see you off, they did not look Mohammedan” – Mohammedans use special caps, a special dress, a special language – “they were all Hindus.”I said, “They were all Hindus, but because I can give you the number of the horse who is going to win the next race, those people, just to know who is going to win the race next time, were harassing me.”He said, “My God! I will have to take a shower.”I said, “You will have to.”He went, he took a shower, he changed his clothes and he came back. He said, “Is it really true?”I said, “I was just joking! I am of the highest class of Hindu.”He fell at my feet again, and I said, “You don’t understand at all. I had told you that I am a Mohammedan….”“But,” he said, “just now you were saying….”I said, “I was just joking.”He said, “It is so cold, and I have to take another shower. And why are you making a fool of me?”I said, “I have not done anything – you started the whole game.”He went again, took a shower, came back and didn’t say anything to me; he sat in his seat and wouldn’t even look at me. But I called the servant and told him, “From my suitcase bring the Shrimad Bhagavadgita” – that is the Hindu’s bible.And the man jumped up from his corner and touched my feet. He said, “I have a certainty that you are a Hindu and just joking.”I said, “The night is cold, and again you have made the same mistake. And even if I am a Hindu, you need not touch my feet.”He said, “How can it be? a saint who can see the future – which horse is going to come first in the race…I have to touch his feet.”I said, “That is your decision, but the Shrimad Bhagavadgita is really not the Shrimad Bhagavadgita.”He said, “What? Then what is it?”I said, “What does it have to be – it is the Koran Sharif. There is only one book in my suitcase, and you will see – let the servant bring it.” He went to bring it: it was the Koran Sharif. One man had continually been at me for years that I should speak on the Koran Sharif, the bible of the Mohammedans. This time he had brought the best translation, just published. So I said, “Then let the book come, and you will see.”And when the book came he said, “My God, you are really a Mohammedan. I feel like killing you! – three times I have taken a cold shower, and again I have to take a cold shower. You could have simply said, ‘Bring the Koran.’”I said, “This is my own way. You don’t have to dictate to me.”Before taking a shower he tried to find the conductor. But the conductor was not in the compartment, so he took a shower. And while he was taking a shower the conductor came in, because the man had asked for him. I was there, I told him the whole thing. He laughed loudly. I said, “When he asks you to change the compartment and put him into some other compartment – there are seats vacant, but you simply say that those seats are booked; passengers will be getting on at the coming stations.“And say to that man, ‘He’s neither Mohammedan nor Hindu; he is a Christian – and in fact he is a sudra who has turned into a Christian.’”And to touch the feet of a sudra – a sudra is the lowest Hindu caste – after touching even the shadow of a sudra you have to take a bath…just the shadow!He came out. Seeing the conductor he was very happy. He took him aside and he told him, “This man seems to be crazy or something. Four times I have taken a shower – and the night is getting colder and colder, and the water is ice cold. And he goes on deceiving me: he finds ways, and I get caught in them. I don’t want to go inside. You just give me a seat somewhere else.”The conductor said, “What do you think he is, Mohammedan?”The conductor said, “I have known him for years. He is a sudra who has turned and become a Christian.”The man said, “My God, a sudra! I feel like jumping out of the train and finishing myself! Four times I have touched the feet of a sudra. Never in history has any brahmin done that. Now I cannot go inside the compartment.”But the conductor said, “I am sorry, all seats are booked. You will have to. Don’t touch his feet – he does not tell to you to. Does he tell to you to?”He said, “No, he does not say anything, but he manages it in such a way that I feel like touching them.”The conductor said, “Now you be alert. Now you have taken a bath, just go in. Just don’t look at him. Don’t give him any chance.”He would not look at me. I tried to ask how the water was. He simply said, “Just keep quiet – because I am an angry man. You have fooled me four times. And the conductor said you are a sudra. Either I will kill myself or I will kill you.”I said, “I know what has happened – that conductor is such a joker! He must have told you, ‘He is a sudra. I have known him for many years and he has become converted to Christianity.’”He said, “Yes, he told me.”I said, “You are so gullible – anybody says something, and you believe it.”So he said, “What finally have I to decide?”I said, “You don’t have to decide at all – just go to sleep.”He said, “I cannot sleep with a sudra. And four times you have deceived me, and I am afraid you can do anything.”I said, “I will not do anything…but do you want the number of the horse?”He said, “You have got me in your hands because that’s why I have been touching your feet and taking a cold shower. But I will take the number only if you are a high-caste brahmin.”I said, “There is no question about it. Let the next station come and you will see.” At the next station, many people had come to see me – with many flowers and garlands – and he was convinced that they were all Hindus.When I came back he was smiling and was saying, “Please forgive me. I have been telling you that you are this and that; just forgive me.” And he touched my feet again!I said, “You are a fool! First you should have taken the number of the horse. You have committed the same mistake again.”Then he freaked out, shouting all over the compartment. The conductor came, the servants came: “What is the matter?”He said, “Nothing is the matter. I am a fool!” He asked the servants, “Does this man travel in the air-conditioned class often?”They said, “Often – he is almost always traveling, and always in the air-conditioned class.”“And does he know anything about horse racing?”Those people said, “He knows nothing about horse racing! Are you talking nonsense? He talks about meditation, he talks about consciousness, But horse racing?”He said, “My God, he is deceiving in that too – that those people are after him for a number. I can sleep in the corridor, but I cannot go inside the room. I cannot look at him. Seeing him, something goes wrong in me.”His mind has a prejudice, and that prejudice decides every decision. He has a greed; that greed decides. But these are subjective feelings – they have nothing to do with objective reality.You don’t see the world as it is. You see it as your mind forces you to see it. And this you can see all over the world – different people are conditioned in different ways, and the mind is nothing but conditioning. They see things according to their conditioning – and that conditioning is a certain color.We make distinctions: We make somebody superior, somebody inferior; man is more powerful, woman is less powerful; somebody is more intelligent, somebody is less. Races have been claiming they are the chosen people of God. Every religion is claiming that their book is written by God himself. All these things, layer upon layer, make your mind; and unless you are able to put the whole mind aside and see the world directly, immediately, with your consciousness, you will never be able to see the truth.Mind is polluted by every society for its own interests, given ideas which have no correspondence with reality, but help a certain society to feel egoistic, superior. And you cling to the mind because that mind gives superiority to you too.In this world the greatest courage is to put the mind aside. The bravest man is one who can see the world without the barrier of the mind, just as it is. It is tremendously different, utterly beautiful. There is nobody who is inferior and there is nobody who is superior; there are no distinctions.One Zen master, Hui Hai, was asked, “What do you think about the inferior and the superior people?”He said, “Just outside my door there is a small rosebush and there is a big, one-hundred-foot-high, hundreds-of-years-old cedar, but I have never heard them talking about superiority or inferiority. The rosebush is a rosebush, the cedar is a cedar. Neither the cedar says, ‘Look! I am one hundred feet high and you are just a small bush. You don’t count. I will live for hundreds more years; many like you will come and go,’ nor does the rosebush say to the cedar, ‘Although you are so huge and so big and so ancient, you have not been able to produce a single roseflower. All your life is useless, meaningless. You have not created anything to give as an offering to existence. I am a small rosebush but look at my flowers.’“No, there has been no discussion. I have been hoping that some day the discussion will be there; but the rosebush is happy as it is, and the cedar is happy as it is, and there is no comparison because they are totally different. You cannot compare different things.”In existence there are only unique things; no comparison is possible, no distinction is possible.And once you can see it with your own eyes, it is such a revelation, it brings such peace and benediction to your heart – that in existence there is nobody higher, nobody lower, nobody superior.The biggest star…and you can conceive how big the biggest star is. Our sun is a star; it is sixty thousand times bigger than the earth, and it is considered to be a very mediocre star, a middle-class fellow. The bigger stars which you see in the night as stars are also suns; they have their own solar systems and they are thousands of times bigger than our sun. But the smallest blade of grass and the biggest star in the whole of existence are respected by life equally. They both are fulfilling some need. The world will be less if this small blade of grass is destroyed, it will be less green. And no star can replace it, take its place.Existence is absolutely communistic: everyone is unique and equal. All distinctions are because of our bourgeois mind. And you can go on making distinctions, as many as you want; and those distinctions have been the causes of wars. Millions of people have died for those distinctions, which do not have any relevance as far as reality is concerned.The man who knows, also knows that existence is one. Its expressions are millions, but the spirit that is expressed is the same. It is one godliness with an infinite variety of creations. To see it as it is makes you free from complexes.Ask the psychoanalyst. Most of his patients are suffering from either an inferiority complex or a superiority complex. And you cannot convince them…it takes years; the person who suffers from an inferiority complex still goes on finding reasons why he is inferior. Somebody is more beautiful, somebody is more intelligent, somebody is richer, somebody is taller, somebody is stronger, somebody is never sick – always healthy.Unless you uproot the very idea of comparison it is impossible to free a man from his inferiority complex, and his inferiority complex creates competitiveness. He wants to prove that he is not inferior. In the first place he accepts that he is inferior; and then in the second place he starts fighting with the ghost – which does not exist anywhere – the idea that he is inferior. So he fights elections, he becomes a president or a prime minister; but that ghost is there, it never leaves.Then there are, at the other extreme, people who feel they are superior. That, too, is a disease. Because they have to prove their superiority continuously, they have to condemn everybody, criticize everybody. And it is very easy to criticize, very easy to condemn.Turgenev has a beautiful story. In one village there was a young man who was thought to be an idiot. The whole village treated him as an idiot. He was tired of it, but there was no way to convince the village that he was not an idiot. From where had they got the idea? And once they had got the idea they were proving it in every way…every small fault was a proof, solid proof, that the idiot could not do anything else, it was expected. If anybody else had done it, it would have been just a mistake.One wandering monk was passing through the village. The boy was suffering too much. He went to the monk and asked, “What am I to do?”The monk said, “I will tell you a simple formula. Practice it, and when I come back from my pilgrimage – it will take one year – then report to me what the situation is. You will be the wisest man in this town in one year’s time.”The formula was simple – the young man could not believe it. He said, “Just a simple formula?”The old monk said, “You simply do it. Just now go and do it, and you will see how it changes the whole thing.”The formula was that if somebody says, “What a beautiful sunset,” you immediately ask, “What is beautiful in it? Prove it. Don’t talk nonsense. What evidence have you got that the sunset is beautiful? What is the criterion of beauty?” Somebody says, “That book is great.” Immediately jump on them – whether you have read it or not, that does not matter – “That is all rubbish. Who says it is great? Prove it! On what grounds? What are your arguments for its greatness?”Just go on criticizing, condemning any statement anybody in the town makes. You just watch and immediately jump on it, criticize it, condemn it, and ask for evidence. Nobody can prove that the sunset is beautiful. What proof is there? If somebody says to you, “This woman is beautiful,” and you say, “I don’t agree,” there is no way to convince you – because beauty is not something that can be measured, weighed; there is no criterion.After one year, when the monk came back, the people of the town met him as he was coming to the town and said, “You should see our young man, he is the wisest man we have ever seen!”He said, “I know!”And that boy came, fell at the old monk’s feet and said, “You are really a miracle-maker – just such a simple formula, and the whole town asks my advice. Everybody thinks I am the most intelligent, the most learned, the most educated, the most well-read. Suddenly, in one year, I have become the wisest man of the town – and I’m really the same old idiot, nothing has changed.”But it is difficult to prove that you are superior. Anybody can condemn it. What criterion have you got for your superiority?Even Adolf Hitler could not prove that the Nordic Germans were the most superior people in the world, that they were born just to rule over the world, that in comparison to Nordic Germans, everybody is sub-human – only they are superhuman. He convinced the Germans, and they enjoyed the idea. But nobody else in the whole world was convinced of this nonsense – everybody laughed.And their failure in the second world war proved that they were not born to rule over the world. Hitler killed six million people with this superiority complex – because to kill the inferior people is good for the earth, they are an unnecessary burden. But the people he was killing were Jews – who have been carrying the same idea for centuries, that they are the only chosen people of God.But they have not been able to prove it to anybody else. It is impossible. You can believe it yourself, and you will suffer for it, because everybody whom you are trying to condemn, whom you are trying to make inferior, is going to be revengeful. So Jews have been tortured for four thousand years continuously. They are still tortured, but they will not leave that idea of superiority; that is their disease.And if anybody – a person like me – says, “That is your disease. Drop this idea. There is nothing wrong in being a Jew; simply drop this idea that you are the chosen few of God, because that makes the whole world your enemy,” they are not going to drop it because that is their cherished ego. They cannot prove it – they cannot drop it.It is like the situation when you swallow something – you can neither swallow it nor can you take it out, it is just stuck in your throat. And you are dying because you cannot breathe. Unless your throat is cleared, you will not be able to breathe.This superiority complex has destroyed the Hindus. The Hindus have the same idea – that God created them, that God has chosen them as His people, that he has given his own written book to them, that they are the highest and the purest people. Because of this nonsense, the people who were intelligent enough – even among the Hindus – went out of the Hindu fold. The Buddhists, the Jainas, they left the fold, saying, “This is an ugly idea.”But the trouble is, if somebody gets some fixed idea, and there is some investment in the idea – howsoever crazy the idea may be – you cannot prove it wrong. The man may like to suffer, but he will not leave the idea. All religions do the same, all nations do the same, all races do the same.I am reminded of a mad man. His madness was really special: he thought that he was dead.First his family laughed, and said, “This is the most outrageous thing one can think of. You are alive – you argue about your being dead. That is enough proof that you are alive.”But there was no way to convince the man. He would not go to the shop. He would wake up when he wanted, he would go to sleep when he wanted. He said, “What can I do? You cannot control a dead man’s behavior. I am dead.”Finally they took him to a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst said, “Don’t be worried, I have cured many cases – leave him with me.” First he tried to tell him, “You are not dead. You have walked here and you are sitting here on the chair. How can you be dead?”He said, “Where is it written that dead people don’t walk?” Even the psychoanalyst was at a loss! The man said, “Show me some evidence, where it is written that dead people don’t walk, that they don’t sit on chairs, that they don’t talk. I am a living proof that dead people can walk.”The psychoanalyst saw that the man seemed to be difficult! He took out a paper knife and just cut the man’s hand a little so blood came out. And before cutting his hand he asked the man, “What do you think: do dead men bleed?”The man said, “I have heard that they do not bleed.”So he cut his hand and blood came out. The psychoanalyst was very happy and he laughed. He said, “Now, what do you say?”The man said, “That simply means that that proverb is wrong. Dead men do bleed – the proof is here.” Once you get identified with a certain idea, then you are sick.All identification is mental sickness.In fact, mind is your sickness.And to put the mind aside and just to look silently – without any thought, without any prejudice – into reality is a healthy way of being acquainted with reality. And you will find a totally different reality.The finding of the real will release you from many stupidities, many superstitions. It will clean your heart of all kinds of rubbish that generations have poured into you. Diseases go on from generation to generation; you inherit the whole past with all its stupid ideas. Otherwise, there would be no distinction, there is no comparison.And once you are free from making comparisons and distinctions, you are light, your whole existence is light. You lose all heaviness. You become so light that you can open your wings and fly.Osho,You seem to have retained, or regained, from your childhood, a capacity to dream – something which probably almost all of us begin life with, but which, by and by, becomes eroded with cynicism and the fear of being thought naive and unworldly.I love watching you when you talk of a commune in the sky, floating vegetable gardens around an island-based city of sannyasins, a mystery school assail the high seas: your eyes open wide, and whatever you say – however off-the-wall – always seems absolutely possible, and I can never bring myself to laugh because I adore this ability in you.I can see that this faculty alone is enough to drive the politicians and religious leaders all over the world, nuts. Internally their mouths must be agape at your sheer audacity, because it seems you can envisage anything and get away with it. Laws of logic, gravitation and relativity, all take leave of their senses in your hands.And even if one or other idea doesn't come about, you are not remotely perturbed. It is as if the value lies in the ability to dream – not in whether the dream is realized or not.If the minds of those around you had their say, we would find ourselves confined to the feeble mutterings of the mediocre, the safe, the certain. But it is as if you are sitting in the front seat of a roller coaster, and we, the passengers, are behind you. The heights are so dizzying, the pace, so exhilarating, the joy, so addictive, that one feels, “Hang the expense – I'm going wherever this joker takes me!”It is possible that to you it may seem that I have retained the small child’s capacity to dream. But that is not the reality. I have certainly retained the innocence of the child, but anything that I have said, or done, or will do, is not a dream; and it is never “off-the-wall.” It looks off-the-wall because you think in very utilitarian terms.I am not a utilitarian. I am a poet, who does not compose poetry, who composes living beings. My effort is not to materialize a dream – I don’t have any dream – but to help you to see that your utilitarian life is not all: that much more is possible, it is just that you have not dared to cross the mundane line; that everything is possible, you just have to gather courage.And courage with innocence makes you capable of being a visionary, not a dreamer – and there is a great difference between dream and vision.Dreams happen while you are asleep. They are part and parcel of our spiritual sleep. A vision is the equivalent when you are fully awake. Then you can see things which to others may look off-the-wall, but to you they are just in the tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, just a question of a little time, and they will be realities.The politicians and the religious leaders are afraid because they know that whatever I am saying is going to happen. All their efforts are against the current. They can make a little delay, but they are moving against the current.For example, my vision of ocean cities is going to happen – whether we make the first ocean city or somebody else makes it. But the earth is becoming smaller, and the population is becoming bigger. Except for the ocean there is no place where these people are going to live. And if the whole world becomes full of people, houses, roads, then where are you going to produce food?I am a very realistic person, not a dreamer. When I say ocean cities I speak of a simple reality: If all the people of the world move to ocean cities, around the earth, and the whole earth is used for production – for food, for vegetables, for everything else – we can support a bigger population than is present today, without any difficulty.The ocean also has an infinite capacity for providing food, which has not been explored. It grows a certain kind of vegetation, deep down, thousands of feet down, that can be used as food. And it has been found in experiments that it is full of the vital elements needed for food. And this is simply wild growth. We can manage – just the way we have managed on the earth – to grow food underneath the oceans.Once man was a hunter, and he never thought that he would live in cities, and that he would not be a hunter, but a farmer, a shopper, a professor. For millions of years man remained a hunter, but a time came when the population became too much, and it became difficult to survive through hunting. Then some visionary must have given the idea: “We have not used the fruits which are growing all around. To support a greater population, use fruits.”Then somebody else may have given the vision: “Why just use wild fruits? We can cultivate food. Just watching nature, how these fruits fall, how new trees grow out of the seeds…we can manage it better than nature – we are nature’s conscious hand.” Cultivation came in.And that’s how, slowly, slowly, man has developed things. But first it was always a vision, and people laughed at it, because they were only accustomed to the past, the old way. But the old way had come to an end – something had to be done. So these visionaries who appeared to be off-the-wall had to be listened to. Unwillingly, reluctantly, people followed them and found that they were right: we cultivated the whole earth. Now the earth is in a situation where it cannot feed the whole population sufficiently. The ocean is available. Life can be shifted to the oceans very easily.Just last night I was asking Jay – because I am planning for it – about the platforms which people use in wartime for their aircraft. Huge platforms floating in the ocean are used for hundreds of planes to land and take off. And underneath the platform, five or six thousand people can live; they have cabins underneath the platform.I loved the idea. Just one platform, and five or six thousand people, with all the luxuries: with television, with telephone, with radio, and your own airport on top of you – a meeting place, a mandir. And there is no problem, it simply just has to be done. One person does it, and you will see many others following.And the tremendous silence of the ocean…and you are under no government; just twelve miles off shore and you are really free. No government is over you, and you can prove that six thousand people can live without any government, without any police, without any courts, without any legal experts – without all that paraphernalia – in immense harmony.And on the huge platform you can make lawns, you can make gardens; you can have the beauty of the earth too. So you are not closed up in the cabins; you can come out on the platform, and you have miles of tennis courts, a golf course, swimming pools, lawns, beautiful trees. All this can be managed on the platform. If it can keep hundreds of planes, it can easily bear the weight of earth that we will bring to it and the trees. And you can get your food from the nearby port. Small boats can go and come for your food and your daily needs.The idea can become a world-wide phenomenon. It is not a dream. Once people see that it works, then around the earth there can be many cities, vacating the earth for production. People can go in the day to work on the earth, and at evening come home to the ocean. And it seems to me very logical: man was born in the ocean, and perhaps it is time to come back home.I don’t see it as a dream; it is just a reality which has to be dared. And it is always that somebody has to be the pioneer; then others will follow. Then for them there is no difficulty, they can see that people are living beautifully. A whole university can float; there is no need for them to destroy the earth with their campuses.Finally, if we exhaust the ocean too – which will take many thousands of years – there is always a possibility of having floating cities in the sky. All scientific facts are available on how a city can be floated in the air. People will be coming to the earth for production and taking their production back, but they will be living high in the sky.And these should be adventures, great ecstasies for people, rather than starving and dying like in Ethiopia – one thousand people dying and starving every day, and nobody has any idea what to do.When I started speaking in India the population was only four hundred million. And I was from the very beginning for birth control; I was condemned because religions are against it. I was for the pill; I was stoned, efforts were made to kill me, because I was “destroying their morality.”If they had listened to me they would not be in such a trouble. Now the population is nine hundred million – more than double. And by the end of this century, India will have a population of one billion, eight hundred million.There is no possible way to feed this population – these people are going to die. Fifty percent of the people will be dying, and when fifty percent of people die, you can understand what will happen to the remaining fifty percent: they will be living in a graveyard. Everywhere will be corpses. Nobody will be there to burn them.It is not my dream. I have all the facts from scientific experiments, that cities can be floated in the sky: but for that, the time has not come.But for cities in the ocean the time has come, and it is particularly a blessing that existence has given us the chance to be the pioneers – because no country will accept me and my people, but the ocean belongs to no country.We are going to do it. And only when you see with your own eyes, only when you are living on the ocean, then will you understand that it was not a dream, that it was a vision.Dreams cannot be fulfilled – dreams are unconscious. Visions are conscious. Dreams happen to all sleeping people; visions happen only when you are awakened. A vision is a reality that can be managed; you just have to have courageous people with you. And I have the best, the most intelligent, the most courageous people with me.Never think anything I say is off-the-wall. It may appear to be to you – that is just because you compare it with the old, trodden path. I see it happening.So just wait a little and you will be on the ocean.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,A very revealing incident occurred recently. In the wake of the so-called “giant step for mankind,” when the first astronaut set foot on the moon, the Americans have continued their space exploration, now with the reusable shuttle.Suddenly, a little while ago, this 2.3-billion-dollar spacecraft blew up in the sky, killing all seven passengers.It created an enormous reaction in the US – sorrow, anger, hurt national pride, etc. It turned out that behind the tragedy lay the usual human forces: egotism, prejudice, dishonesty, competition, arrogance, fear, ambition, and so on.An official investigation concentrated on “flawed management procedures,” and “reorganizing the chain of command,” but nowhere felt it relevant to investigate egotism, prejudice, dishonesty, and all the rest.Isn't the real “giant step for mankind” yet to come – the realization that it is man himself who lies at the root of his own catastrophe?It is man himself who lies at the root of all the catastrophes, but the trouble is, it goes against man’s ego to accept it.The way of the ego is very simple: always throw responsibility on somebody else. It is always the other who is hell. One never looks at oneself. The other cannot be hell for me, unless I in some way support the other to create the hell for me. It must be somewhere in the unconscious, my own need.Just today I came to know, that all over the world man wastes enough energy, money, technological power and human genius in three days to support the whole earth for a year with food, clothing, shelter, everything that a human being needs to survive. And this figure is five years old, so I guess that now man must be wasting perhaps every day as much energy as is needed to support the whole of mankind for one year.And who is at the root of it, who is forcing you to do all this nonsense? All this is being done to prepare more efficiently for war, to kill more, to destroy more.It seems man is insane.Everywhere you can see his insanity, and if it were only a few people who were insane, it would be easy to do something for them, but if the whole humanity is functioning in an insane way, then a tremendous effort is needed to stop this idiotic behavior.The people who are responsible for the basic catastrophe – that is, the insanity of humanity – are the people who are in power. They want more and more power. The desire for more and more is unending, and everybody is competing without thinking of the whole humanity – that all this competition for destructiveness is suicidal.The rocket that was carrying seven passengers was not a big catastrophe, but this earth which is carrying six billion people is in the same danger. And there seems to be no thinking about what is needed first. If you have more than enough, then it is worthwhile to explore space. But right now even America does not have more than enough. Millions of people are on the streets: no food, no clothes, no shelter.But Ronald Reagan is not interested in those millions of people, he is interested in the national ego, “We are the first to take passengers into space.”It is hilarious. As far as is known, no planet around the earth is habitable. In this solar system, except for the earth, no planet is habitable – all efforts are useless, because there is no oxygen, no water, and life cannot exist. Perhaps in other solar systems, there may be planets where life can exist, but to reach to those planets is an impossible job right now. They are too far away.We don’t have the energy, and we don’t have the money, and we don’t have the expertise – and right now it is not a problem at all, they are not disturbing you.Our problems are simple, which we are capable of solving for the first time in man’s history. For the first time it is possible – there is no need for poverty; no need for people to die without medicine, without proper care; no need for millions of people to remain uneducated, never knowing great literature, great paintings, great music.Up to now man has simply been fighting. Except for fighting he has not done anything else. One war after another war. What we call times of peace are nothing to do with peace, they are really preparations for the next war. There are only two periods in history: war and the preparation period for another war; we have not known peace at all.Our problems are so simple. Seeing our developed technology, it is absurd that in Ethiopia one thousand people continue to die every day and nobody bothers. Every day one thousand people…from hunger. And death from hunger is not easy, it is the worst death, because it takes almost ninety days for a person to die. Ninety days he has to suffer in starvation. It is really cruel, and nobody seems to be interested.These toys – rockets for space – are absolutely unnecessary. It is not the time for them. Something else is needed that can educate every human individual, that can make every individual live long, be healthy, be capable of understanding all the great treasures of art, literature, music, sculpture, that for centuries human genius has created, and give an opportunity to everyone. Who knows how many Beethovens, how many Leonardo da Vincis, how many van Goghs, simply die uneducated, without any opportunity to express themselves, their talents?There is no way to know how many Gautam Buddhas we have missed, and by missing them how much human consciousness has suffered, human evolution has suffered. And now that science has brought us to a point where everybody can be given equal opportunity to grow, to express his talents, the idiots who are in power are not allowing scientific progress to help humanity to reach to a higher status of evolution, but are trying to divert all scientific progress towards a global suicide – and in the name of beautiful words: democracy, communism, freedom, individuality. And there is no freedom anywhere. There is no freedom of speech, there is no democracy anywhere.And we are forcing the whole world to die for these empty words, which contain no meaning. And this has been going on…. First we were fighting for God. Now nobody is fighting for God, because we have found out that there is nobody behind the word, it is simply a word. We have been fighting for love, for truth, for peace, just words.Rather than fighting with each other, we should fight together, against the ugly past of humanity, so that we can get rid of it; and our love is freed, our freedom is in our hands, our individuality is given to us. There is only one fight which can be justified, and that is against the past, because the past has been simply destructive of all human values.If we can only disconnect ourselves from the past, there is hope for humanity, not only to survive, but survive blissfully; not just to drag on somehow, but to be creative. And unless a man reaches to the fulfillment of his potential, he is never blissful.And the discontented man is the cause of all our catastrophes. Bring contentment to man. Give him simple things – survival and opportunity to express himself – and this very planet will become far more beautiful than the farthest star. There is no need to go anywhere.Restore to every individual his self-respect, which religions have destroyed – people are living like zombies. So many millions of people and just a few politicians and a few religious leaders go on creating all kind of nuisance, and nobody even raises his voice. We have been so suppressed, so humiliated.My only suggestion is: everybody has to take it into his own hands, the dignity of man, and everybody has to be assertive, and everybody has to be questioning about all the rules that the past has forced upon you. And any discipline that is unreasonable, is irrational, is unintelligent, should be dropped without a second thought.If my people can do this much, become purely individuals, freed from all kinds of dark shadows from the past; declare themselves – we are the new man, we are not Christians, we are not Hindus, we are not Mohammedans, we are not Americans, and we are not Russians – we are simply the new man. And we want to live from the very scratch, from ABC, not according to any discipline laid down by the ancient, centuries-old scriptures, which had no idea of what is going to happen in the future.We are facing a time that no scripture has had any idea of. All those holy scriptures have to be reduced to ordinary books. That’s what they are: there is nothing holy in them.Just free yourself from the rotten, from the junk, and free yourself for some creative expression of your life, and you will be laying down the foundation of a new humanity; otherwise more and more catastrophes are going to happen. We are sitting on volcanoes created by our own great leaders, blessed by our great religious saints.Once and for all we have to understand the conspiracy of religions and politics against man. And man has to be freed from politics and religion, both, because both have been exploiting him, destroying him, not allowing him to be individual, completely free and natural, without guilt, enjoying like an innocent child.Osho,You were speaking last night about Gurdjieff's work, and the individual's chief characteristic. How does one find out what one's chief characteristic is?It is very simple. Just watch your mind for a few days and see what is the thing that takes most of your energy: jealousy? lust for power? ego? Just watch whatever takes most of your energy, and you will find what is your chief characteristic, and that it is your number one enemy; and you have always thought that that is your number one friend.Somebody may find greed, somebody may find anger, somebody may find repressed sexuality, somebody may find an inferiority complex or a superiority complex – it does not matter what it is. Finding it is almost half the victory. And only you can find it out.Gurdjieff had his own ways to find it. He will force his disciples to drink as much wine as possible. He will go on forcing them. And by midnight everybody was flat on the floor, and then he will go and listen to what each is saying.And this will continue for days, and then he will figure it out, what is the chief characteristic of that man, because in his unconscious that chief characteristic will surface. It was easier than psychoanalysis, because that takes years – ten years, twelve years. Gurdjieff manages to do it within three or four days.The psychoanalyst finds out what is your chief characteristic by examining your dreams and finding through your dreams what are the dreams that you dream continually…again and again. And then too, his finding is just guesswork, because he has to interpret it, and his interpretation is his interpretation.Another psychoanalyst interprets the same dream in a different way, for him something else is the chief characteristic. For Sigmund Freud whatever dream you bring, he reduces it to repressed sexuality. A few people have even tried to create bogus dreams, but Freud will not change. They have made such dreams that nobody can find any sexuality in them, but not Freud. He will find sexuality in them.Anything – it doesn’t matter, his interpretation is fixed, and he was right about most people, because in a Christian Jewish society sex is repressed. It would have been really worth seeing if he had come to the East to interpret the dreams of a different culture, different traditions, where sex is not repressed, and he would have been at a loss, or he would have had to force his interpretation even on them.The same dream you take to Adler, and it is always will-for-power. Go to Jung, and it is always some ancient mythology being repeated in your dream – the same dream.Gurdjieff was the greatest psychoanalyst of this century. Just within three, four days, forcing people to drink wine, making them as unconscious as possible, and they start showing their true colors. A man who has never been angry is shouting and is angry and throwing things and is ready to kill anybody. You could have never thought that this gentleman can do such things. And he did it continuously for three or four days – that means it is lying down there in his unconscious, as his chief characteristic. Once it was discovered, then Gurdjieff would give him the work to do.With me things are easier. Gurdjieff had no understanding about Freud, Jung or Adler. His method was very crude. He had learned it in the Caucasus. It was a very primitive and ancient method, thousands of years old.My method is so simple. Just put down in your diary for seven days, noting every day what it is that takes most of your time, what it is that becomes your fantasy most of the time, where your energy always moves readily. And just watching for seven days, noting in your notebook, you can find your own chief characteristic. And this finding is half the victory. It gives you a great strength, that you know the enemy.And then the second part is very simple: now be aware of it. When the enemy attacks, don’t react. When it comes, you just remain cool. Just watch it, as if something is passing on the screen, and you have nothing to do with it.If you can remain detached, unaffected, suddenly a great energy will be released which was contained in your enemy, which you were putting into that enemy every day.You were watering it, you were caring about it. If anybody pointed at it, you were very angry; you protected it in every possible way. You gave all kinds of rationalizations. Now you are simply watching. All that energy is simply released. You will feel revitalized. Your whole being suddenly becomes new.And then go on looking for the enemy number two, the enemy number three, because you have to finish all the enemies.The day you don’t have any enemy left in your mind, you have a grace, a beauty, and a great energy that blossoms in thousands of flowers.Osho,Many times I find myself with tears of gratitude flooding my heart, and when I start to whisper thanks, or something like that, inevitably I become dumb, not knowing if I bow to you, beloved friend, or this whole existence, which gives us the blessing of having you among us. I read somewhere that the Buddha said, “If you meet me on the way, kill me.” Is this right, even though I will always be honored to bow to you, and whenever possible, to sit at your feet?The statement of Gautam Buddha and your problem are two separate things. Gautam Buddha is saying that in meditation people see Jesus Christ, and they feel great joy, thinking that Jesus has come to their consciousness. And it was only their imagination: there is nobody to come to your consciousness. Or Krishna…. Different religions have different gods, and if you go on repeating their names, watching their images, sooner or later you will start hallucinating. You will start seeing them.Buddha is saying to his disciples, that if even in your meditation you meet me, don’t be hindered by me. Cut off my head, throw me away, because you have to reach to a point where you experience only nothingness, only pure silence – no image, because all images are imagination.He is not saying that you have to kill Gautam Buddha. He is saying you have to kill the image which is bound to come to you because you love Gautam Buddha. And he is a great master in the sense that he will not even exclude himself. Everybody has to be thrown away: Krishna, and Rama and Mahavira – whoever comes in the way has to be removed. You are not to stop before you have come to pure nothingness.The purity of nothingness is the experience of your isness, when there is nothing to see as an object – any image. As far as you can see, all is nothing. Your consciousness turns back upon yourself, and for the first time you see yourself. For the first time you become aware of your real being.What Gautam Buddha is saying is perfectly true. Your problem is that it will be difficult for you to cut off my head. No problem. First bow down, and then cut off the head. Be respectful, be grateful, but don’t miss the head. If you love sitting beside my feet, cut off the head and sit beside my feet, but don’t miss cutting off the head.Once you have cut off the head, the feet will disappear, and once you have allowed me to disappear as an image, you will be closer to me than ever. And this is not something ungrateful. You will feel more grateful to me than ever before, because now you will see that as I disappear, the whole existence opens up to you. I was blocking it.This is not ungratefulness, and anyway you are following the instructions of the master. And this is only a question of the image, while you are meditating. Just try it once, and you will be surprised. It looks ordinarily that this is not gratefulness, but you don’t know. There is a bigger gratitude just waiting. You will be grateful to the master, that he even suggested to you that you shouldn’t let him become a barrier, that his work is not to become a barrier between you and reality. His work is not to be between you and reality, he has to remove everything, and finally he has to disappear also.This can be done only by a man of immense compassion. And you will feel that compassion when you realize what has happened, you will feel that compassion. And your gratefulness will be a thousandfold more.So don’t make a conflict between the two.Osho,Is it a cosmic joke that most of us are born with awareness and die in unconsciousness?No. Most of us are not born in awareness. Most of us are born in innocence, but that innocence is equivalent to ignorance, it is not awareness.Only very few people are born with awareness. Those are the people who die in awareness. If the death was conscious, then the birth will be conscious, because the death is the one side and the birth is the other side of the same coin.So only very few people, who have attained to a certain consciousness in their life, die consciously and are born consciously. And those who are born consciously will die enlightened, because a child who is born in awareness – it is impossible to conceive how he can miss enlightenment. In his seventy years’ life he is bound to become enlightened.But most of us are born unconscious, and die unconscious. And between the two do you think you live consciously – between these two unconsciousnesses – birth unconscious, death unconscious? How can life be conscious between these two? It is unconscious. People are living like somnambulists, sleepwalkers.You may have seen somebody, or may have heard about somebody who is a sleepwalker. There are many people who will get up in the night…they are asleep, their eyes are open but they are asleep, and they will go directly into the kitchen to the fridge, eat something, drink something, come back, go back to bed. And in the morning they will not remember it. “I have not done anything,” – because the ice-cream is missing, somebody has taken it; but that person is completely innocent, he has not done it consciously.It happened in New York, one man used to sleepwalk and jumped from one terrace to another terrace. High rise buildings…if he falls, you will not find even bits and pieces of him. But this was a nightly routine – in the middle of the night – and slowly the neighbors became aware. And he was doing really something, the jump was long, and people will watch silently down on the street.And in the middle of the night he will come up, every night at the same time, and jump from one side to the other side, then jump back, and go back to bed. And he will not remember in the day. Slowly, slowly the crowd became bigger, and one day when he came, the crowd was so big that they cheered him.The man woke up, because of their cheers, just in the middle of the jump, and he missed and fell down and died. And this had been happening for years, but it had remained confined to the neighbors who remained silent and became more silent when he came, because he was asleep – everybody knew.But these new people came; they thought that it was something like a circus or…so many people, and he is jumping over such a long distance. They cheered, and in the middle he woke up. Seeing himself what he is doing, he could not manage it.And to every psychoanalyst, every day, people are brought who are somnambulists.One of my friends was very much disturbed, because every night in his house something was burned: some cloth, some furniture. And he was there, his wife was there and his fourteen-year-old daughter – three persons only in the house; and naturally in India, if such a thing happens people think some ghost…the place is haunted. And many people were brought to drive away the ghost, the evil forces, but nobody could succeed.Just by the way he mentioned it to me, because he was the registrar in the university. As I was walking in the corridor by his office, he looked very sad and very disturbed, and I went in and asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “For six months my life has become a hell. Every night something is burned, and we have tried all kinds of people who think that they can drive away the evil spirits, the ghosts – nothing works.”I inquired, “How many people do you have in your house?”He said, “Only three.”I said, “If you won’t feel any interference, I would like to sleep in your house.”He said, “If you can help in any way, I will be grateful.”So I slept in the house, because my sleep is almost no sleep. I am just resting with my eyes closed. So I remained looking in the dark, again and again, if any noise was there. And then I found out; the girl stood up, went inside, took out one of the saris of her mother and burned it, went back to her bed and to sleep.In the morning I asked the girl if she had had a dream of something burning.She said, “No.” And she was absolutely innocent.But these are the times when girls and boys become sexually mature, when they are in a very critical situation. Their energy is going through such a change, that many haunted places are nothing but the results of some girl or some boy who is getting sexually mature, and his energy is going through such a deep transformation that he can function as a somnambulist.So I told the father, “I have one suggestion. You send the girl to the hostel.”“But,” he said, “why?”I said, “You simply send her, only for two, three days. And you are the registrar, so there is no problem. You simply manage a room for her. Send her to the hostel. And for three days I will be here, and seeing whether anything is burned or not.”And for three days nothing was burned. The father and the mother could not believe it, they said, “What is the matter?”I said, “Nothing is the matter. Your girl is becoming sexually mature and must be going through some great changes inside her, and this is a common phenomenon, that at these times people can do things which normally are not done. She has been burning these clothes and things for six months. Now bring the child home, and let me have a session with her.”And I talked to her, and I told her, “It is you who have been doing it, but you are not responsible, because you were not conscious.” So I suggested to her, “Do one thing. Tie one leg to the bed, so that you can experience for yourself what I am saying. My saying is just my saying. You have to know it as a validity.”And that very night she woke up, asleep, but could not get up, because the leg was tied down. She tried hard, but could not. The father was awake, the mother was awake, everybody was watching what would happen. And trying to untie the leg from the bed, she woke up, and we turned the lights on.And we asked her, “What are you doing?”She said, “I don’t know, but faintly I remember that I had to do something, and my leg is tied down. So I cannot get to the place where I have to do something. I don’t know what exactly I have to do.”And these people walk in darkness with open eyes – you would not think that they are asleep. They don’t stumble over furniture or anything.Between an unconscious birth and an unconscious death, our whole life is the life of a somnambulist – of course with open eyes – and only a very little part is conscious. And that is our only hope. Only through that little consciousness in us, is a bigger consciousness, a deeper consciousness, possible.It is only a seed, but if you work upon it, slowly, slowly it can grow. And you can die consciously, if you have lived before it consciously.The whole of religion consists of a simple thing: to live consciously, so that you can die consciously. And once you have died consciously, you will be born consciously, and that will be the life which will be the easiest for you to attain to enlightenment in.You can attain to enlightenment right now, but for that a tremendous intensity and totality is needed. Evolution will not do; only a revolution, a radical change, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.Otherwise, slowly go on trying to be conscious. If you can manage even to die consciously, you have managed much. Then your next life is going to be the life of an enlightened person. And the enlightened person has no more lives, because he dies with no desires, with no ambitions; hence he simply becomes one with the whole.Osho,Sitting here every day with you, hearing what you say, listening to how you say it, we go up and down so much. You are continuously pulling our big toe, here and there, trying to put us right, and we go too far, and fall back into the ditch, again and again.Today, I was watching, not what you said, but what you do, and a big laugh came out of me. I imagine that millions of times you must have thought, “My God, they have missed again.”Osho, please don't give up on us. Little by little we are getting this big joke.Don’t be worried. I am not the one who gives up. You can rely on it. It is a promise.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It seems that the implications of Gurdjieff's work were as revolutionary, as threatening to the status quo, as yours. Many of his methods were unequivocally outrageous, yet it seems he was never reported in the local rags as running a camp for slave labor, disrupting public transport, being a menace on the roads or being the instigator of riotous bacchanalian orgies.You said the other morning that Gurdjieff failed because of the thick human skull. Is it for this reason that he chose to work with a small, select group of people – rather than challenge the entire world as you have? And if you have succeeded – which you have – where he did not, is that in part because man was not in quite such a pitifully desperate state fifty years ago as he is today?There are a few things to be understood. One, George Gurdjieff was never interested in changing society. His reason was very strange but seems to be meaningful. He believed that people are not born with souls: the soul has to be earned, you have to deserve it.So the question of the society being revolutionized, transformed, does not arise. For him, only very few people, who have worked hard to crystallize their being, have souls; others are simply vegetables, they don’t count. It hurts. It is shocking. And it is not true either, but it is meaningful.All the religions of the world have been teaching that man is born with a soul. Gurdjieff is the first man in the whole of history with this strange idea – that man is born only with the possibility of having a soul, if he chooses.There have been atheists who have said there is no soul in man, but they never accepted that there is any possibility of deserving it. And there were theists who believed man is born with a soul; the question of deserving it does not arise, you have to discover it.Gurdjieff stands alone in his idea that people are born just as the atheists say, but if they make enough effort they can create souls in themselves as the theists say.Now the problem is a little complicated. It is not a question of what is true and what is untrue. The question is always, what works?The atheist who simply denies the soul – as the communists are doing all over the world – is immensely harmful because he stops man’s possibility of growth. He gives you the idea that you are material and you are going to remain material; there is nothing more. You are born matter, you will die matter, and nothing will be left; life is only between birth and death, neither before or after.It is a dangerous creed, and half of the world has accepted it. It seems it fulfills some inner necessity of man.Man does not want to be a soul, because to be a soul means a struggle for freedom, a struggle for individuality, a struggle to live totally. Once you accept the soul, you are accepting the whole sky of growth. For people who don’t want to struggle for so many things, the easiest way is that there is no soul, so the question of any growth does not arise.It is not coincidental that half of the world or more, for the first time in the whole history of man, are atheists. There have always been atheists, but single thinkers, or a small group, never such a large amount of humanity.All the religions are on one side, and atheism alone is equal in strength on the other side. This is happening for the first time.It seems there is a revenge; a revenge against all those whom we call the enlightened ones, the awakened ones; a revenge against Gautam Buddha, Mahakashyap, Bodhidharma, because their status, without their intention, made you inferior. They never wanted it to be so. They wanted to help you to grow to even greater heights than themselves. But that was only in theory.Humanity remained deeply rooted in the earth. For thousands of years it has worshipped the awakened ones. And always remember the basic rule of life: if you worship someone, one day you are going to take revenge.And this is the revenge against all spiritual giants – the revenge of the pygmies – the declaration, “There is no soul at all, so what all these people are talking about is mere talk. It means nothing. They are talking of the soul and its growth just to reduce you into an unspiritual, retarded human being.”It happened in the court of one of the great emperors of India, Akbar. He was very interested in collecting all the geniuses to his court – and he had really great people in his court. One day he came, and he drew a line on the wall and said to his people in the court, “Can you make this line small without touching it?”They thought of all possible ways, but how to make it smaller without touching it? But one man stood up and drew a bigger line on top of it; he did not touch the line the emperor had drawn, but made it small.It is for centuries that humanity has been accumulating a revenge against all those who really were giants, but whose level the masses could not rise up to. And how long can you live in shame? It is better to accept a philosophy that denies that there is any possibility of any growth – that all these great awakened ones are just fictitious.And spiritual growth is not something that can be put before the people. It is something invisible – either you feel it or you don’t feel it. If you deny it, whatever the reason for your denial, unknowingly you are also denying your own growth and its possibility. Now you can not conceive that a Gautam Buddha can be born in the Soviet Union. It is impossible.Atheism was a very small thing in the past, but still it hindered people from growing. Theism proposed that everybody is born with a soul. All that he has to do is to discover it – nothing has to be created, no arduous effort. A simple awareness of yourself and the cover is removed, and you are face to face with yourself. And the moment you know it, your life is transmuted. Everything in your life changes.These people thought that by insisting that you are born with a soul, the masses will start – because now it is not a question of arduous effort to create it, but only to uncover it.But the masses took another interpretation of it, they interpreted it, “If the soul is already there what is the hurry? – and you have eternal life, you can uncover it any time. But the fleeting pleasures of life – which are not eternal – don’t miss them!“You cannot miss the soul because it is always there and will remain with you always – whether you discover it or not. So it can be delayed, postponed for the next life or another life; but the fleeting pleasures of the flesh…enjoy them!” Even a very great idea can be interpreted in such a way that it turns exactly to its opposite.So all the religions of the world were in a strange situation. There were atheists who were denying the soul, and people were not making any effort – there was no question, no such thing exists. And there were theists who believed in a soul, but when it is already yours, there seems to be no need to be in a hurry – before you discover it, enjoy everything of the world.In both cases people remained materialists.It is against these two standpoints that Gurdjieff brought a new, original idea, that you are not born with a soul. Remember, unless you create it you will simply die, nothing will be left, you will not survive your bodily death. You can, if you work hard, create the soul. It is not a question of uncovering it – you don’t have it right now – it has to be crystallized.But because of his idea – and his idea seems to be significant because it avoids the pitfalls of both the theists and the atheists – a new problem is created. The problem is that the greater masses cannot be inspired to make arduous effort; only a few intelligent people….And I say only a few because even intellectuals will say, “If I die and nothing survives, so what? Once I was not; it was not a problem to me. Before birth I was not; it was not a problem for me because if I am not how can there be any problem for me? After death, if I am not – that seems to be the best solution of the whole problem.”So only a few intelligent people became interested in Gurdjieff. And he never hammered on society’s vested interests, he never hammered on religious superstitions, he never hammered on political social conditions. He was not interested at all. His whole effort was so that he can create a few people who have a crystallized being.He was not interested in the masses. And you cannot complain against him. The masses are such that to be interested in them means to be stoned, to be crucified, to be poisoned, to be killed. The same people for whom you are working hard are going to destroy you.The reason is the same – without intending it, you are reducing the masses to ignorant people. You know – and you can show the path for them to come to the same knowing. But they don’t know, and they are the majority – the whole world.Rather than bothering about your path and its mysteries, the easiest way is to finish you so you don’t bother them; otherwise you create disturbances in people’s minds. They were satisfied with “eat, drink and be merry”; and suddenly you come and start talking about enlightenment. You disturbed their ignorant life – ignorant but with a certain satisfaction.P.D. Ouspensky, before he betrayed Gurdjieff, wrote one book on Gurdjieff’s teachings, In Search of the Miraculous. He dedicated it to “the man who disturbed my sleep.”But nobody likes to be disturbed in sleep, and spiritual sleep is so deep that to be disturbed…there is anger. Gurdjieff knew exactly what happened with Socrates, what happened with Jesus, what happened with al-Hillaj Mansoor, what happened with Sarmad – and thousands more who tried to liberate humanity. Humanity rewarded them with death.He was a totally different kind of man, a very practical and pragmatic man. He said, “Why bother about these people and waste my time? I should just choose those who are ready to go all the way along with me.”It is because of this that there was no world-wide antagonism against him. Very few people in America, a few people in France, a few people from Russia, a few people from England – not more than two hundred – were working on his principles. Now, if only two hundred people are working on the principles, and those principles are not against any orthodox system, any religion, any tradition, any past, the society will ignore it.They thought that he is a slightly eccentric person and those who are of the same type go to him. But he could not disturb the whole world, he could not create a stir; he was not interested. And even if he was interested, he could not do it; he was not articulate.He never delivered a single lecture in his life; he never talked, even to his own disciples. He will write; somebody else will read it, and he will watch the faces of his disciples to see what impression the reading of the article is creating. And according to that impression he will change again the article, and it will be read again. The same article may be read for the whole year, until he was satisfied that it was creating the right impression on everyone.This kind of person cannot stir the whole world. To write one lecture, if it needs one year…. He has written only three books – in this way. It seems that he wrote those books more for himself than for anybody else, because he wrote them in a strange place. He was a strange man.People go to a silent place in the mountains to write something. He will go to a restaurant in Paris and just sit there in the restaurant, in the middle of hundreds of people coming and going…and all kinds of talk and everything happening…waiters bringing things and plates being broken, and he will be writing there. That was his place to write.His disciples said, “You have a beautiful silent place near Paris. Why don’t you write there?”He never agreed. He said, “I want to write in a place where every kind of disturbance is there – the road is there, the traffic is there, and a restaurant…. I want to write there and remain undisturbed. I don’t want any outer silence to help me. My inner silence has to write it.”So he wrote those three books for two reasons. Basically it was his own continuous testing, that if you are writing in such a disturbing situation and you remain undisturbed and calm and quiet – as if you are in the hills in a silent cabin writing by yourself…. So first it was for himself; and second, whatever he would write would be read before the students.He was not certain that the impression he wanted to create would be created by what he had written. So there were continuous changes in his script. He took his whole life to write three books. And still they are of no use to the common people. You cannot understand what he is writing. He was not a writer. He was not a speaker.He had learned a few techniques, and he had worked hard and achieved a crystallization in himself; but he was not articulate enough to express it to others. In fact, he had learned from people who were less concerned with verbal communication, than with actual exercises. He had been through monasteries. He went up to Tibet. And he moved in many hidden Sufi monasteries – but they were all interested in exercises.But the modern man first wants to be convinced intelligently that something is worth doing; otherwise, he is not going to waste his life doing something, about which he has no conviction. That conviction Gurdjieff could not create.He had a charismatic personality so that those who came close to him became almost convinced of the fact that whatever the man says has to be true. But only a few people – he was not a world-famous name. But those who came to him certainly gained much – although the exercises were outrageous – because in the Western tradition that kind of exercise has never existed. But in the Sufi tradition they are common exercises. They look outrageous because they are out of the Sufi context.And he was not basically interested in creating a revolution in the world, creating a new man, a new humanity. His concern was very limited; to create a few people – because that’s how Sufis have worked for centuries – just to create a few people, because this has been their understanding: the more you become known the more there is danger.Many Sufis who became known have been killed. Then Sufis went completely underground. Now to find a Sufi master may take months or years for you. Unless you happen to meet a disciple of the master, and he is convinced of your real search for the truth – that you are not just a curiosity-monger, not just a tourist who by the way wants to see what a Sufi school is like, what Sufi exercises are like – then only through a personal introduction will you enter into a school, on the responsibility of that person who is bringing you to the master. It was sheer necessity because Islam was very cruel.Jews have killed only one Jesus.Islam has killed many Jesuses.And unfortunately, Gurdjieff learned everything from the Islamic Sufi schools, so he always remained secretive; it became part and parcel of his being – just a few students and he was satisfied.My situation is totally different, because for centuries we have been trying to change a few individuals; and a few individuals have been changed, but that has not affected humanity at large. And unless humanity at large evolves in consciousness, we will not be able to create thousands of buddhas.One emperor in China made a temple of ten thousand buddhas. In that temple there are ten thousand statues of buddhas. The whole temple is nothing but statues – all the walls. It is a whole mountain cut into a temple.I understand the message of the man who made that temple of ten thousand buddhas. To me it is not a temple, it is an indication that unless we create thousands of buddhas in the world, this world is going to remain miserable unnecessarily, suffering for no reason at all, creating troubles for itself – because you cannot create anything else. Unless your creativity moves towards some other meaningful projects, you are going to create trouble for each other.We have seen it – buddhas have been here, there have been teachers like Gurdjieff who changed the quality of a small group, but it is like throwing a teaspoonful of sugar into the ocean – the ocean remains the same, it takes no notice of the sugar. It does not become sweet.The effort for creating enlightenment has been very disproportionate. The masses are huge, and once in a while one person, or a few people, get the point. But it remains in the margin – and the world goes on moving in the same rut, on the same rotten wheel.My interest is to create as many buddhas as possible, around the world; as many lighted beings as possible, so that even if they want to destroy me, it doesn’t matter because there will be thousands of others who will do the same work.And you cannot think that thousands of people can be crucified. And even if it happens, that very fact that ten thousand buddhas are crucified, perhaps may be enough of a shock to the whole humanity – to wake them up so they can see what they are doing in their sleep, in their slumber.Moreover, the time is short so I cannot depend on the old slow methods. They are bullock-cart methods. Buddha had a long future ahead of him. I don’t have.Humanity is in danger any moment: by the end of this century, if we have survived it will be a miracle.So the pressure of time, the experience of the whole past, makes me take the risk and start cutting the very roots which are preventing people, and create so many conscious beings around, that the masses cannot think that it is just one man trying to be holier-than-thou. There are thousands…and they can see their actions, their behavior, their love, their compassion, their changed life…and the future is dark, death may take over.We have to use this critical stage. We have to make the masses clearly aware: “You can die any moment – you may not wake up tomorrow morning, so you cannot waste your time in trivia. Do something essential. Do something that can bring you in touch with eternity. So even if the whole globe dies, it doesn’t matter. At least for those who have touched the experience of eternity, for them there is no death.”And it is possible that if we can create thousands of people…the very phenomenon may start triggering it in others, because we are made in the same way, we are connected with each other. Just a strong enough atmosphere is needed, so the forces of awakening move around you like a whirlwind and trigger your own process.And I don’t see that it is impossible.It is possible.It has to be made possible.We are at a point where the forces of sleep and the forces of awakening are coming into conflict in a final battle; and basically the forces of sleep – howsoever big – are weak.Twenty persons may be asleep here, and one person may be awake; that one person who is awake is more powerful than the twenty persons who are asleep.The masses may be asleep, they don’t have any force.We just have to create enough force of awakening.And this is the time. If we miss this time, perhaps something for which the whole of nature and existence has been working for millennia will fail. But I don’t think it can fail.If existence wants that the people should evolve into a superhuman race, then all the nuclear weapons and all the Ronald Reagans just don’t count.Osho,You have pointed out that in dreams we often live out the content of the unconscious in a symbolic form. For example, the wish for a love affair with one's sister is played out in the dream as a love affair with her best friend.In this situation, who is doing the censoring and why?The conditioning of the conscious mind has gone so deep that even in sleep it won’t allow a few things. Even in deep hypnosis it won’t allow a few things.For example, people have been worried that a hypnotist hypnotizing a woman can rape her under hypnosis. But unless the woman herself is willing it is not possible, she will wake up.I was working with one of my cousin-brothers. He was a very talented boy; he is now a professor in a university. But he is very cowardly. So whatever he clings to, it is very difficult to persuade him to drop it if something better is available – because what he is clinging to is safe, he knows it.He was from a very poor family. His mother died and his father married again, and the woman started torturing the boy. So I told the boy to come and live with me so he lived with me. He was studying and he was also working part-time in an office.The principal of his college was a friend of mine. I told him, “He has great talents and it is stupid that he should be working in an ordinary office as a typist. You can employ him also in the college part-time as a librarian, or something you can find.” And he was willing.The boy was getting only seventy rupees per month from the office, and the principal was ready to give two hundred rupees for the same time – and almost no job, just being a librarian.And I said to him, “It will be good, you can read while there is nobody disturbing you, and you can become acquainted with the great literature; it will all be available to you. And you will remain in the college. You can study, you can work there.“Show your talents, so finally I can manage to tell the principal when you pass your MA that it will be good to make you a lecturer in the college.” But he would not leave the part-time typist work in the office. It was very difficult for him to move from anything that he has become accustomed to and was secure in.Finally I tried hypnotizing him – and he was a good medium, he did everything that I told him to do. When I became perfectly satisfied that he goes really deep and forgets everything, I said to him one day, “Now is the time. Tomorrow you resign from your post.”He immediately opened his eyes and woke up. He said “I was afraid continuously for all these days. I can do everything else, but not this resignation. I knew that you would one day tell me to resign from that post.”“But,” I said, “how did you manage it, because you were so deep in hypnosis?”He said, “I was deep in hypnosis, but it was with my willing cooperation. On this point I was not willing.”So even in dreams the long training of your mind will interfere to change the dream, to make it as if you are chasing the best friend of your sister. But your unconscious desire is for your sister, the best friend is only a substitute. But the conditioned conscious has deep roots which have gone even into the unconscious.So if a woman is willing the hypnotist can rape her; but she if is not willing, the moment he suggests anything against her will, she will wake up – however deep the hypnosis may be.It was really a revelation to me, because he was doing everything else. I would tell him, “You just get up. It is morning and you have to milk the cow.” And he would sit in the posture, as in India they do for milking the cow – and there is no cow. He will start milking the cow. And he will not remember anything about what happened. But to resign from the post…he was keeping his conscious censor alert about it.You cannot tell somebody to go and murder, unless that person really wants to murder. Anything that the hypnotized medium does is his willing cooperation – not that he is conscious, but even in unconsciousness the conscious mind is alert so that nothing goes against the conditioning.And if the suggestion is such as making love to your sister or your mother – which is one of the greatest sins in every society, the biggest taboo – the mind will immediately disturb the whole thing. The consciousness will disappear, the hypnotist will disappear immediately, and the person will be awake, fully awake, and will be angry at you that you wanted him to do something which is not right.So it is the conscious mind…but conscious mind, unconscious mind, these are just arbitrary divisions. There are not really walls between them, that they cannot cross each other. There are no divisions, these are just lines on the map. They are all one piece, just one part has become conscious; the other part has not become conscious – but they are joined.So even in dreams there is a censor.And all your dreams, unless they are not against your conditioning, are distorted. And that is the whole work of the psychoanalyst, to find out where they have been distorted and put things right. To find out what was actually wanted by the unconscious, but was diverted by the conscious, that is the whole art of psychoanalysis: to find it out, and to lead the unconscious to exactly the point where it wanted to go, and make you aware of it.And once you become aware of it – that you wanted to make love to your sister, it was not her best friend, you are not interested in her at all – once this is clearly understood, the dream will not appear again, because now there is no point: you have accepted the fact that that was the unconscious desire. And there is no sin in it. All taboos are man-created. It is good for biological reasons that brothers and sisters don’t get married.But in India, the ancient story is that in the beginning, the child was born with his partner – the boy with the girl together, they were twins. So he was born with the wife; there was no question of choice or finding or astrology or anything.The Sanskrit word bhagni means both sister and wife. When I first became aware of the meanings of the word, I was puzzled how a word could mean both sister and wife.So I worked on it and found out that in the beginning – this is the Indian mythology – everybody was born with his wife or husband. And life was very peaceful because they grew up together; they had the same tastes, the same likings. There was never a conflict or fight. But it had to be stopped because their children suffered.If a man marries his own sister, their children will be retarded, crippled, blind, something or other; they cannot be perfectly healthy babies. Crossbreeding brings the best results. This was understood thousands of years ago. That’s why it became a taboo – that no brother should marry his sister, because the children will suffer.But it has to be carried to its logical point. No one should marry into his own caste because, somehow or other, far back they will be related as cousins – their great-grandfathers or even further back. The best is that they should marry into a different caste, a different nation where there is no possibility of their blood being the same.Now, it is an established fact as far as animals are concerned. We are using crossbreeding and the animals are becoming better and better. But with man we are superstitious and stupid.In fact, marriages should be from one continent to another continent – as far away as possible so there is no connection at all; so even thousands of years back there is no connection. If that becomes possible, humanity will have better health, more intelligence, more beauty, less sickness, a longer life. Now these are scientifically established facts.But one of the miseries is that man will not apply his findings to his own behavior. His behavior will be dominated by customs made by people who had no knowledge, no awareness of all these facts that have come just now into our understanding.They should be used with human beings too. And if someday we can find a planet which has human beings, that will be the best. Because not even a suspicion…because here, even if you marry somebody from one continent to another continent, it is not absolutely certain, because all the civilized peoples of the world once lived in central Asia, in Mongolia.When their population increased they had to spread from there. The same people are in India, the same people are in Iran, the same people are in Germany, the same people are in England, all over Europe, in America. Hundreds of generations have passed, but we can find that they were once in one group because of their languages.English has thirty percent of its words from Sanskrit. Russian has forty percent of its words from Sanskrit. And one Western language, Lithuanian, has seventy percent of its words from Sanskrit. All western languages have roots in Sanskrit.That simply means that once a tribe lived in one place, used one language, and then had to spread into different parts of the world because of the population explosion. They learned new words, they made new words, they came across new realities; but a certain percentage of their old language remained with them.Language is a sure sign of whether these people come from one tribe or different tribes. For example, Chinese is a totally different world. Even South Indian languages have no Sanskrit roots. European languages are closer to Hindi than South Indian languages, because South Indian languages and the people who speak those languages are not part of the Aryan group that spread all over Europe and India.The best will be to find someone who is as remotely connected to you as possible; if not connected, that’s the best.So every society tabooed it out of necessity – but every child is bound to fall in love with his sister.One of my sannyasins was just asking me, “I am in trouble. You said that couples should make love without hiding from their children; the children should know that making love is a human phenomenon, natural. Their parents are doing it. And this will be an experience for them to watch, to see, and they will take it not seriously – but playfully.”She said, “It was good, but the boy now says that he wants to make love to me. Now what am I supposed to do?” – because the whole taboo is that you cannot make love to the mother. They had allowed him to be present and he was very happy that he had been taken into their confidence – the father making love to his mother – and he watched it. And he said, “I had never thought of it. But now I want to do it myself.” And he is so small, perhaps six years old.I told the mother to tell him, “You will make love when you grow up. You will have a wife. You are too small, I am too big. Just wait. It is natural, and it will come. And when you are mature, you will be married; you will fall in love with a girl and you will be married. Right now you should learn that there is nothing wrong in it, nothing guilty about it, no sin in it – that it is not something to be done in hiding, even from your own children.”Because when the children discover – and they do discover – their respect for their parents flops. Then they cannot respect these people, they are prohibiting them from doing the same thing that they themselves are doing.She explained it to the boy. And children are very perceptive and very understanding. And he understood that it is right: he is not old enough so he will wait. But he felt grateful, and he will feel grateful his whole life – that he had a special kind of mother and father who took him into their confidence, even in their privacy. They never kept anything secret from him.Now this boy has already asked to make love to his mother, has had explained to him the reasons – “It is not useful, it is meaningless; you are not mature yet” – and he will never have a dream of making love to his mother. It has become consciously clear.But every other boy is unconsciously hankering to make love to the mother, and because of it he is jealous of the father. Every girl wants to make love to the father, and she is jealous of the mother. And that’s how we are creating complexities of the mind which will create mental troubles for these people in their future life.But if everything is cleaned and cleared, explained, you will bring up your child without any repressed feelings. He will have a totally different quality of being: a freshness, a sharpness, and a deep acceptance of himself.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Bodhidharma added a spice to Buddha's cooking, which eventually became Zen.Who else has thrown spice in Buddha's pot?The number is really vast. Buddhism in itself became a world of philosophy – not just a philosophy, but a source of many philosophies because it spread all over Asia, meeting with different cultures, different people, different philosophies.In Tibet it came to a different kind of flowering which is rare. It is pure mysticism and is founded on a school method. Hundreds of lamaseries developed all over Tibet in the deep Himalayan mountains, where people devoted their whole lives in search of truth. It became almost a convention that every family should donate one or more members for these lamaseries, these mystery schools.And what has happened in Tibet has not happened anywhere else. The whole country turned towards a single search devoted to a single goal. It certainly developed its own methods, the seeds of which are in Buddhism, in Gautam Buddha; but in the seeds you cannot see the flowers. When those seeds blossom, only then do you become aware of the fragrance and the color and the beauty.Tibet has given many awakened people; and their methods are as far removed from Zen as they can be. There is no meeting ground. Their source is the same, but they developed in different atmospheres, were developed by different kinds of people, came to the same conclusion but moved on different paths – as if on one mountain you can move from different directions on different paths and still can reach to the same peak. They meet at the peak, but on the way there is no meeting, they are completely unique and separate.In Thailand, Buddhism has taken a different form, a different shape.In China, meeting with Tao, it absorbed completely the whole spirit of Tao.Buddhism has a very big heart. It is not like Christianity or Mohammedanism, confined to a very limited area; it can absorb so many things, apparently looking even contradictory.Tao has no method. Tibet is all method. Tao is no-method, simple spontaneity – living life according to nature with no fight. Every method is a fight, every method is to define yourself. Tao’s work is how to become undefined, how to become one with the whole; and absorbing Tao, Chinese Buddhism came to have a different taste, totally different.And the same has happened in Korea, in Mongolia, in Sri Lanka, in Burma, in other small countries of Asia – because it became the religion of the whole of Asia. And it became a great religion, influencing different races, different cultures, different countries, without any fight. It is something unique in history.Christians have been converting people, Mohammedans have been converting people. Buddhism has never converted people; it has simply allowed itself to be open, available. It has opened its own heart and helped other people to open their hearts, and there has been a meeting – but the meeting was not the victory of anyone. It was simply a merger.In India itself, Buddhism has a totally different characteristic – more philosophic, more logical – because in India, Buddhism had to survive amongst many Indian philosophies which had reached to a climax of understanding. To survive amongst them, Buddhism developed great philosophies. Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dharmakirti – such philosophers are unique in the whole world in their logical penetration.But in Thailand Buddhism is completely non-philosophic: it is devotional. In Japan it is neither philosophic nor devotional; it is pure meditation. In Tibet, it is all methodological. In China, it is no method, no effort, no action.But the beauty is that Buddhism – mixing with so many different philosophies, cultures, viewpoints – still retains its basic character. It is not lost. It has a tremendous vitality to survive. It adapts to any kind of situation without fighting, and slowly, slowly absorbs the situation into itself.And in those days, twenty-five centuries ago, spreading a totally new vision to a whole continent just by sheer intelligence and discussion was a miracle. Not a single man has been killed, not a single stone has been thrown. And all these people have contributed and made Buddhism richer.Ordinarily religions like Christianity or Mohammedanism are afraid that if they allow somebody to come too close, they may lose their own identity. Buddhism was never afraid, and it never lost its identity.I have been to Buddhist conferences where people from Tibet and Japan and Sri Lanka and China and Burma and other countries were present, and that has been my one experience – that they all differed with each other, but they were still connected with a single devotion towards Gautam Buddha. About that there was no problem, no conflict.And this was the only conference – I have attended many conferences of other different religions, but this had something unique about it, because I was using my own experience in interpreting the teachings of Buddha. They were all different, and I was bringing still another different interpretation.But they listened silently, lovingly, patiently, and thanked me, “We have not been aware that this interpretation is also possible. You have made us aware of a certain aspect of Buddha, and for twenty-five centuries thousands of people have interpreted it, but have never pointed this out.”One of the Buddhist leaders, Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan, told me, “Whatever you say sounds right. The stories that you tell about Gautam Buddha look absolutely true, but I have been searching into scriptures – my whole life I have devoted to the scriptures – and a few of your stories are not described anywhere.”I asked him, “For example?”And he said, “One story I have loved. I looked again and again in every possible source – for three years I have been looking into it. It is not described anywhere; you must have invented it.The story I have told many times. Gautam Buddha is walking on the road. A fly sits on his head, and he goes on talking with Ananda, his disciple, and mechanically moves his hand and the fly goes away. Then he stops, suddenly – because he has done that movement of the hand without awareness. And to him that is the only wrong thing in life – to do anything without awareness, even moving your hand, although you have not harmed anybody.So he stands and again takes his hand through the same posture of waving away the fly – although there is no fly any more. Ananda is just surprised at what he is doing, and he says, “The fly you have brushed away from your face long before. What are you doing now? There is no fly.”Buddha said, “What I am doing now is…that time I moved my hand mechanically, like a robot. It was a mistake. Now I am doing it as I should have done, just to teach me a lesson so that never again anything like this happens. Now I am moving my hand with full awareness. The fly is not the point. The point is, whether in my hand there is awareness and grace and love and compassion, or not. Now it is right. It should have been this way.”I had told that story in Nagpur at a Buddhist conference. Anand Kausalyayan heard it there, and three years later in Bodhgaya – where there was an international conference of the Buddhists – he said, “The story was so beautiful, so essentially Buddhist, that I wanted to believe that it was true. But in the scriptures it is not there.”I said, “Forget the scriptures. The question is whether the story is essentially characteristic of Gautam Buddha or not, whether it carries some message of Gautam Buddha or not.”He said, “It does, certainly. This is his essential teaching: awareness in every action. But it is not historical.”I said, “Who cares about history?”And in that conference I told them, “You should remember it, that history is a Western concept. In the East we have never cared about history because history only collects facts. In the East there is no word equivalent to history, and in the East there was no tradition of writing history. In the East, instead of history we have been writing mythology.“Mythology may not be factual, but it has the truth in it. A myth may have never happened. It is not a photograph of a fact; it is a painting. And there is a difference between a photograph and a painting. A painting brings out something of you which no photograph can bring out. The photograph can only bring out your outlines.“A great painter can bring you out in it – your sadness, your blissfulness, your silence. The photograph cannot catch hold of it because they are not physical things. But a great painter or a great sculptor can manage to catch hold of them. He’s not much concerned about the outlines, he is much more concerned about the inner reality.”And I told the conference, “I would like this story to be added to the scriptures because all the scriptures were written after Gautam Buddha’s death – three hundred years afterwards. So what difference does it make if I add few more stories after twenty-five centuries, not three centuries. The whole question is that it should represent the essential reality, the basic taste.”And you will be surprised that people agreed with me; even Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan agreed with me. This kind of understanding and agreement is a Buddhist phenomenon, it is a speciality which has happened in different branches of Buddhism.And I am not even a Buddhist. And they went on inviting me to their conferences. And I told them, “I am not a Buddhist.”They said, “That does not matter. What you say is closer to Gautam Buddha than what we say – although we are Buddhists.”You cannot expect that from Christians or Mohammedans or Hindus. They are fanatics.Buddhism is a non-fanatic religion.Just now when we were in Nepal – Nepal is a Buddhist country – the chief of all the Buddhist monks used to come to listen to my lectures. And I came to know that he was going round meeting ministers, and the prime minister, and other important people and telling them, “You should come. Don’t decide by reading nonsense newspapers. Come and listen to him.”He used to sit just in front of me – an old man – and whenever I said something which was very close to Buddha’s heart, I could see that old man’s head nodding. He was not doing it knowingly. He was just so much in tune that he felt it; this was the purest thing that he has heard. And I was not talking about Buddha; but the taste he understood.The whole day he was moving around Kathmandu, forgetting his own work as president of the monks of Nepal. He was telling people that they should come and listen to me, and saying, “Don’t be bothered what newspapers say. When the man is here, why should you miss him?” And he brought many people by and by.You cannot hope for this with a Hindu shankaracharya, or the head of the Jaina monks, or a Catholic pope. It is impossible.Buddha has left a tremendously meaningful legacy, and his impact is still alive. No man has left such an impact on humanity; no man has made man so humble, so receptive, so intelligent, so unprejudiced.So thousands of people have thrown their spices in the Buddhist pot, but nobody has been able to change its basic essence.That is the greatness of Gautam Buddha – that great philosophers merged with him, great cultures merged with him, but his essential truth remained unaffected. It is still the same.It has taken all the beauties from everywhere, it has collected all the juice from all possible sources, but it has not lost its own identity. It is so certain of its own identity that it is not afraid of mixing with anyone, everyone.This certainty is possible only if the truth is your own experience. You are not a prophet, not a savior, not a messiah, you are not a postman bringing a message from God – this certainty is possible only if the truth is your own.Osho,I get so confused when it comes to women. I have so much trouble seeing the reality.When a woman loves me, I feel strong, attractive, and I like myself much more. Then other women are attracted to me and I go to them.That's when confusion really sets in.If I act on the attraction, the woman who loves me, stops; then I feel guilty, weak, and unattractive, and lose the other women too. If I don't act on the attraction I feel false, cowardly, and angry with the woman who loved me.It seems like it's necessary to walk a tight wire, and I get tired after a while and the fall is so painful.Osho, I know my ego must be intermixed with all this, but I can't seem to sort it out. I have recently fallen in love again, and I'm afraid it will again end disastrously.Would you please comment?The basic problem is not love. Love is never a problem. The basic problem is that you don’t have any self-respect, any individuality. You are made up only of the opinions of others.So if a woman loves you, you feel great because the woman gives you the sense that you must be beautiful. You don’t have any sensibility about yourself – your beauty, your intelligence. You are very much dependent. That’s where the problem is. And because the woman’s love makes you feel great, beautiful, approved, appreciated…. You are not really in love with the woman, you are using her love for something else that you are missing – your self-appreciation. And you are becoming dependent.If the woman stops loving you, again you will be ugly, again you will lose the small support that you had found, again you will start drowning in the ocean.And because the woman gives you the sense of greatness and beauty and a certain individuality, other women also become attracted to you. Then you feel even more a hero.You love to be loved. But you don’t know what love is.You are not sensitive about love, so immediately you don’t miss the chance of using the other woman’s love to make you feel greater. But then the first woman slips out of your hands. That makes you feel guilty, that makes you feel ugly; all your greatness disappears, all your charm disappears. It was borrowed, it was just a reflection. It was given to you by that woman, and she has dropped you. Soon the other woman also leaves you.It is not a question of love at all.You are trying to make it a problem of love.The question is that you don’t have any identity, that you have never loved yourself, that you don’t have any appreciation for yourself. Perhaps you condemn yourself, perhaps you hate yourself, perhaps you feel you are a nobody. In this big world there are great people, talented geniuses. You stand nowhere.This is your problem, and unless you change this, nothing is going to help you. And to change it is so simple, because it is just your idea.Everybody is in the same boat. Just a few people are intelligent enough to appreciate themselves – because whatever nature has given to you, you have not earned it; you have to be thankful for it, you have to be grateful for it – whatever you have got. And whatever you have got, you have to use it creatively.Everybody has some talent. If he uses it creatively it will bring an identity to himself, and that will not depend on anybody else. You will be independent. And if then somebody falls in love with you, you will not feel great for it, you will feel grateful for it. It won’t make you a hero, it will make you rather humble.And not being dependent on the person who loves you, you will not be deep down angry – because nobody likes to be dependent on anybody else, everybody hates it. So the person who makes you great – you hate that person and you are just looking for an opportunity to show your hate. That’s why soon the other woman appears; that is the chance to show the first woman “it is not only you that love me. There are thousands of others.”But this is basically ugliness, insensitiveness, and it arises out of your dependence. Any person who is independent, who is perfectly happy alone – it doesn’t matter whether anybody loves him or not, he is enough unto himself. To love such a person is a joy because that person is not going to hate you, that person is not going to resent you, that person is not going to take revenge on you: he is an independent person, he has no complaint against you.So even if he falls in love with some other woman, this will not be a revengeful act. He will apologize to the first woman. He will make it clear that “the love that used to exist between us has disappeared. I am helpless. You are helpless. I feel sorry, but there is nothing that I can do about it. Anything done will only be pretension, hypocrisy; and I cannot be a hypocrite to someone I have loved. It is better to say clearly that love is over – in sadness, but we have to part.It will not create any guilt in you because you have not hurt anybody. It will not create any ugliness in you because you have not used anybody. And the reason does not exist for the other woman to leave you. And even if she leaves…. One should never take life for granted – everything is in a flux and changing. And who knows, a better woman may be available; but first this woman has to pass.If you are an independent person, you will take all the changes in life as a great situation for learning, for maturing, for graduating.All these love affairs are momentary. They don’t have any insurance, any guarantee with them. They come like a breeze and they go like a breeze.If you are afraid of change, then it is better to be as far away from these love affairs as possible because love is the most changing phenomenon in existence – because it is the most beautiful flower. In the morning it opens, in the evening it is gone. But tomorrow other flowers will open, they have always been opening. So just rest for the night.It is good between two women to have a little time for rest – or don’t you want any rest? Then you will kill yourself. So, sometimes in love, sometimes not in love, is a perfectly good rhythm. You just have to be independent.Your love should be just love. It should not give you anything else that can be taken away. So when it comes it is good, when it is gone it is good; you remain the same.I have seen in my life every kind of situation. But I never look back. I have always found that it was good that it finished: now something new is possible. Otherwise, you would be still playing with toys, teddy bears. Things come and go. You remain; and you go on maturing with every change.Every change is beautiful.Make it as much of a celebration as possible. Don’t hurt anybody, and don’t let anybody hurt you.Just remain human. We are not stones. Things will be changing; there are good days and there are bad days, but if you have a certain integrity, you can pass through good days, bad days, just the same. It does not make any difference to you. On the contrary, everything contributes to your growth.But you have to remember first to find out exactly where the problem is; otherwise people go on solving problems which are not their problems. So they do much work to no purpose.It is not the ego, as you are thinking, that is the problem.You have simply remained from your childhood dependent on other people’s opinions, what they say about you. And you have been collecting those opinions; and files of opinions are surrounding you – that’s what you are.One of my friends – he was an old man, but by chance he came very close to me – he was India’s oldest member of parliament, Seth Govind Das. He was known as the father of the Indian parliament. He had been a member, without any break, for sixty-five years.His son died. His son was acquainted with me, and he was a minister. And just to console the father, I went to see him – for the first time – and he was sitting in his beautiful luxurious palace. He had a palace. His father had the title of raja. And as he saw me, immediately tears came to his eyes.And I said, “You have seen life much more than me, and you know that death is bound to happen, and when it will happen nobody can say.”And he was crying, and he pushed a pile of telegrams towards me – from the prime minister, from the president, from the governors, from other state ministers, and this and that, vice-chancellors of universities…. I said, “That’s okay. That’s perfectly good, they are all sending their consolations.”He said, “But the chief minister of this state has not sent anything.”I was shocked, that his son is dead…and they were once friends – the chief minister used to live with Seth Govind Das in his own palace. But he was a cunning man, a cunning politician. He used Seth Govind Das and his popularity, and his power and money, to become the chief minister.And once he was in power, he did not want it to appear to anybody that it had anything to do with Seth Govind Das. So slowly, slowly they turned into enemies. And even when Seth Govind Das’s son had died, he did not send a telegram of consolation.But I told Seth Govind Das, “That does not matter. It won’t help in any way to revive your son. But it seems you are more interested” – he had all the cuttings of the newspapers in which the news of the death and his son’s photos and biographical sketches appeared – “in the publicity than in the death. I don’t see that you are really shocked by his death. There seems to be something else.”He said, “What do you mean?” He was offended, and it was our first meeting.I said, “I mean he was only a deputy minister of education, and you must have been ambitious for him – that he will become the minister of education, then the chief minister; and then you will take him to the federal government…and you must be hoping in some way for something that you could not be.”He was one of the oldest fighters of the freedom movement, but he could not get any post after the freedom. He was a simple man, not cunning, not a politician. He had sacrificed much. But who cares about sacrifice, who cares that he has been in jails many times and he has gone against his family – because his father was a very staunch supporter of the British government. And the father had threatened that he would disown him if he did not stop that nonsense that he was doing.Against his father, he went on fighting with the British government. He was hoping that he would get some big post. And he got nothing. And I know that he was not capable of any post. He was such a simple person. To fight for freedom is one thing, and to become a prime minister or to become a governor is another thing – different qualities are needed. So he was hoping….I told him, “You were hoping.”He said, “But how” – all his tears disappeared. And he said, “How could you find that out, because you have met me for the first time?”I said, “Seeing all these cuttings and telegrams, it seems you were ambitious. Your own ambitions are unfulfilled and you were hoping that through the son you will be able to fulfill your ambitions. And now the son is dead. You never loved the son, because you have a second son also, and I knew both your sons.“You don’t take any note of the second son because he’s not in politics. Your whole love is for ambition. The son was simply a means. You wanted to use him, and now he is gone. Don’t be worried: use the second son. Politics is not such a big thing. Idiots are succeeding, and you have every power, influence, connection – push the other son.”And he forgot all about his first son. He said, “That’s right, I didn’t think about it.”And he pushed the second son. In the place of his first son, he pushed the second son. He became the deputy education minister. But by a strange fate, the second son also died before the old man. He also could not even become a fully-fledged minister.When I went to see him, I said, “Now I am really sorry, because you had only two sons. Now there is only one way.”He said, “What? It was you who suggested it, and I did it. And things were going well. I had forgotten the first son. What can you do against God’s will? But now he is dead.”I said, “What about your son-in-law?” – because he had a son-in-law – “force him!”He said, “But even now, forcing him, I feel a little afraid. What if he dies too?”I said, “Then we will see. Somebody else we will find. First you force him. Because if you die, then nobody from your family can enter into politics. You have all the connections, although you don’t have any actual power. But all the great leaders of the country are connected with you, are friends with you. You can force it.”He said, “It is worth trying. At the most he can die. What else can he do?”And the son-in-law was not ready at all. Seeing two sons had died in the same post, he had become afraid. He even came to me, saying, “Please don’t suggest anything. That man is dangerous. Now he’s after me; and the same post is vacant because again the son has died, and I am very much afraid. And I’m not a politician.”I said, “It is just a coincidence. And you are not his son in the first place, you are his son-in-law. You just get into it and see what happens.” Fortunately he survived!But the old man died. And once the old man died, nobody cared about the son-in-law, and in the next election he was thrown out. He could not even get the ticket to stand in the election. It was all the old man’s influence.So when he met me, he said, “Even worse has happened. If I had died, even as a deputy minister, at least with government honors, with great publicity…. But something went wrong. The old man died before me, and now I am nowhere. He destroyed my business. I closed the business and went into politics, and now the politics is finished. Because I don’t have any connections or any relationship with those people, I could not even manage to get a ticket to be elected to the assembly.”I said, “You should thank God that you are alive. Just open your shop again and forget all about politics.”That old man was threatening, at the time when his first son died, that he will kill himself. His wife was very much afraid. She told me, “Somehow, prevent him. He says that he will jump, he will kill himself.”I said, “Don’t be worried. A man who is carrying a load of telegrams, all the cuttings of the newspapers, he is not going to jump. This type of person doesn’t commit suicide.”She said, “Are you certain?”I said, “I am absolutely certain. Don’t be afraid of him. He’s perfectly all right, and I have given him the solution.”The death was not the problem. But he was thinking that the death is the problem: that his son has died and he loved him so much, that he cannot live without him.I said, “That is not the problem. The problem is that you loved your ambitions, and he was just being used for your ambitions – and you cannot live without ambitions. Just look at the real problem and things will be immediately clear.” And he understood. And he became a great friend to me. And he was eighty years old.But he said, “Nobody suggested it to me. Everybody thought that the death of my son is the problem.”I said, “If you had remained with that idea, you would have remained miserable because that was not the real problem. And the real problem was your ambitions – just put forward the second son.” And as the second son became the deputy minister, he was happy again. He forgot the first son. It was not a question of who, but that somebody should carry his ambitions.Always remember whenever you are facing a problem, first to find out what exactly is the problem. Don’t be too much worried about the solution.Your most important work is to find and pinpoint the problem. The solution is very easy. But if you have missed the problem, then the solution is impossible – whatever solution you bring will not work.So ego is not your problem.Love is not your problem.Your problem is that you have not been able to accept yourself, to stand on your own feet, to be respectful to yourself, to do something so that you can feel that you have some worth.Your worth should be within you, not donated by somebody else. A borrowed worth is dangerous; the person can take it back. And this goes on happening in so-called love affairs.Only an independent person can love and can be loved. And love will not create any problem for him.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When you were talking about the way that different Buddhist masters have been adding their own flavor to Buddha's teaching, I started wondering whether there will ever be anybody adding a new flavor to your pot. It looks almost impossible to add a new spice to something which already contains all the spices which can be found on this earth.It seems almost impossible, but one can never predict about the future.The future remains open. What seems inconceivable today, may become conceivable tomorrow.We can never come to a point where the future closes. That’s the whole meaning of existence being eternal.It may be very difficult because I am not confined to any particular path, to any particular philosophical viewpoint. I am vast enough to contain contradictions, and whatever has happened on the earth as far as the evolution of consciousness is concerned, I have made it part of my own vision of life.So if you look backwards, everything else will seem a little poorer, even the greatest giants will seem limited. But you are looking to the past, you are not looking to the future – which is absolutely unpredictable.Things will go on happening, new things will go on being added. And I am not a pond which is closed; I am more like a river, which goes on flowing, inviting every other river to join.Whatever I have been giving you will remain uncontaminated, but it will be enriched more and more by the future evolution of man, because it is an open phenomenon.I am not the last prophet, messiah or savior of a certain tradition. I am the beginning, not the end, of a totally new approach to life and its problems, inviting everything conceivable, inconceivable, to be my guest.So you are right. It seems very difficult, but existence is so vast and the possibilities so infinite that you can never say that the full stop has come. It never comes, not even a semicolon comes. Life knows no full stop, no semicolons; it simply goes on and on, and it will continue to add spices of which we are not even aware. And it is good.It means that I am giving you something living, which will go on growing – even beyond us it will have its own growth. I am not giving you something dead, as was the convention of the old.Mohammed says, “I am the last messenger of God. Now there will be no other messenger. And the Koran is the last message. After the Koran there will be no other holy book.”He is not aware that he cannot stop existence with his own death. Many prophets have come and gone.They have added to the beauty of existence, but nobody should be so arrogant as to say, “I am the last.”The same is the situation with Mahavira. He is the last tirthankara of the Jainas. Now there is not going to be any other tirthankara, nothing can be added to his teachings, nothing can be taken away from his teachings.But these people were not aware that they are making their vision into a dead thing with their own hands.That’s why Christians are so afraid in case science should discover anything which goes against the Bible, Mohammedans are so afraid in case anybody should say anything that goes beyond the Koran. But these are the enemies of progress, enemies of life.I am not. I am just a friend, a humble beginning, a living reality with every day new excitement, new ecstasies, new spaces; and capable to absorb them all, not afraid of any progress. If anything is wrong, I am always ready to drop it, always to be on the side of truth.There are two kinds of people: those who want the truth to be always on their side – these are the egoists, arrogant. And there is another type of person who always wants to be on the side of truth, whatever the cost; if he has to lose everything, he is ready, but he cannot stop being on the side of truth. These are the humble ones, these are the true holy people of the earth – and there have been very few.Osho,I like to hear you speak on the meeting of inner man and outer woman.Is the inner man to be found in one of the realms of consciousness and if so, is there a way to provoke his presence so that I might recognize him in situations where I have previously been unaware?The inner man or the inner woman is not to be found unless you reach to the highest peak; unless you come to the cosmic super-conscious you will not be able to recognize it; only at that peak the dualities meet and you can feel the orgasmic experience of the meeting. Slowly, slowly you can become aware of two opposite polarities moving together in harmony, in a dance, but you will not come across it at all on the way, only at the end of the journey.Osho,Looking for my chief characteristic – just looking for it – is proving a great device. It is as though I have always accepted that there are certain “undesirables” in my closet, which at different times I gather some degree of enthusiasm for getting rid of or witnessing more conscientiously.Setting about trying to pinpoint them during the last forty-eight hours, I have found that the actual process of opening the closet and flashing the torch around has, in itself, rendered those skeletons impotent in a way. It is certainly as if merely talking about those skeletons as problems, rather than looking at them, gives substance to something that actually has no life of its own.Osho, am I kidding myself, or is it really that easy?It is that easy. Many of our problems are just there because we have never looked at them, never focused our eyes on them to figure out what it is.It is like an ancient story. It was a full moon night and a thief had stolen much jewelry. And of course he was afraid. He was running, and suddenly he heard some steps following him.It almost always happens – if you have ever tried running in the dark – you hear your own footsteps and you feel as if somebody is following you.And when he looked, he found somebody actually was following him; it was his own shadow. But he was not in a situation to figure out who it was. His problem was somehow to escape out of its clutches. He ran faster, but he heard the follower also running faster. And he went on looking back and he found that it was just behind him. The poor fellow was tired, utterly tired, but could not get rid of his shadow. Exhausted, he fell under a tree where the moonlight did not go and he looked all around and he wondered where the other fellow had gone – just now he was behind him, so close.Gathering courage, looking all around, he could not see him anywhere; but then he came out of the shadow of the tree and again he was behind him. But this time he could not be deceived, he turned around and looked at the fellow. It was no one. It was his own shadow.Many of our problems – perhaps most of our problems – are because we have never looked at them face to face, never encountered them; and not looking at them is giving them energy, being afraid of them is giving them energy, always trying to avoid them is giving them energy – because you are accepting them. Your very acceptance is their existence. Other than your acceptance, they don’t exist.So if you open your closets, and take your light, and look at the skeletons, you will find they are dead.Skeletons cannot do anything, but almost everybody is afraid of skeletons. It is a strange situation. You are not afraid of living people who can do damage to you, who can even kill you – and they are all hiding a skeleton underneath just skin deep, and they are living people. But if you suddenly come across in a room a poor skeleton who has no life, you become so afraid. What can the skeleton do to you?In my university I had a friend who was the son of a doctor, and the doctor was the head of the university hospital and also it was part of the medical college.And they had many skeletons for studying purposes.And one day I was saying to his son, “Your father at least must be the one man who is not afraid of skeletons.”He said, “Certainly he’s not afraid. The whole day he is telling the students about the skeletons, their parts.”And he had a good collection. He used to live in the compound of the hospital.So I said, “Then we have to check whether it is true or not.” I asked the son, “Somehow you have to get the key of the room where the skeletons are and in the night we will bring one skeleton out. Just knock on the door, the father comes to open it and we will hide and the skeleton will be standing there and let us see what happens.”The son said, “ You will get me into trouble.”I said, “You don’t be worried. You simply escape as far as you can. And you can trust me, I will never mention your name if anything happens.”And you will not believe, the man who has been dealing with skeletons for years, when I knocked on his door, he said, “Who is there?”I said, “Can’t you recognize me?”He opened the door.I slipped to the side behind a tree; there was a very big bodhi tree there. And he saw the skeleton. And you should have seen the scene, just as if he lost all his nerve. He fell on the earth. And on top fell the skeleton.His wife came, “What is happening?” Seeing the skeleton on her husband, she screamed and became unconscious.And the neighbors woke up because of her scream, and everybody was coming there – but they were all standing far away, seeing the situation. The wife was lying flat, the husband was lying there, and the skeleton was on top of him. And I was hiding behind the tree. And I thought, “Now what to do?” We had not conceived of such a situation. I had just thought that he will freak out. But the situation had become so complex. And his son was looking from far away.I called to him, “This is not the time to be afraid.” Somehow he picked up the skeleton, left those two there – both were unconscious – and put the skeleton back in its place. And it took great effort to put it back because it had fallen, so one hand was going this way, one leg was going this way, and we were both trying to fix it.Somehow we fixed it, by looking at the other skeletons, “You should behave exactly like the other skeletons.”Then we came back to take care of the doctor and his wife, sprinkling water on their faces, and telling them, “There is nobody. You unnecessarily got worried.”The doctor said, “I cannot believe that there is nobody. He was standing in front of me, and he is no one. He’s skeleton number seventeen, I know him well; but how he dared to come here? And the door is locked, and I always check the lock because skeletons are skeletons, you can’t trust them.”We said, “We have not seen anybody. We had just gone for a walk and we have just come in and we saw you lying down here as if somebody is on top of you and there is nobody. And your wife is on the floor flat. Do something to bring her to consciousness.”So he did whatever he could. Somehow she came to consciousness. And she asked, “Where is he – the skeleton?”And the doctor said, “I cannot believe it, because number seventeen is an old skeleton and has never misbehaved, and suddenly it came and knocked on the door and even said, ‘Can’t you recognize me?’” He said, “Now it will be very difficult for me to continue going into that room. I am going to change my department, no more skeletons.”I said, “You have unnecessarily hallucinated after a whole day working with the skeletons. You may have just seen an illusion – because we were coming, we did not see anybody coming or going, and the key is in your pocket.”So he saw. He said, “The key is in my pocket.”I said, “If you want, we can go and see where number seventeen is. “He said, “No, I won’t allow you to go there. If he has gone out without even opening the door, he can do some harm to you. You need not bother. Tomorrow I am going to change my department.”He changed his department. The vice-chancellor tried hard, saying, “Skeletons don’t come out, and you have had such a long experience with skeletons.”He said, “Whatever, but what happened last night, if it happens again I will die. And you have to think about my wife also. She is very delicate and she has had one heart attack already. And if these skeletons start coming in the middle of the night knocking on the door…!”I have always been puzzled why people are so afraid of skeletons, because they are very poor people – with no life, they cannot do anything. But there seems to be some unconscious current, “We are also skeletons.” Seeing a skeleton, you are seeing yourself without the skin.And this will be your situation one day. Perhaps the skeleton reminds you of death, it reminds you of your reality which the skin goes on hiding. Otherwise skeletons are very innocent, they have never done any harm to anybody.I used to sell skeletons from a Mohammedan graveyard because the medical college needed them and they gave a good price for a skeleton. And nobody was ready to bring a skeleton. I had made friends with the guard of the graveyard and arranged that we would split half and half, “Just you dig out some old fellow and I will take him in my car and deliver him to the medical college.”Once when I was taking a skeleton in my car, a policeman stopped the car – because I was going too fast. He wanted to see my driver’s license. I said, “The fellow in the back seat has it.”So he looked in the back seat.And he said, “Yes, I have seen it. Everything is okay. Go fast, as fast as you can. I can understand now why you are going so fast, but however fast you go he’s sitting just behind you. You cannot escape. But please go.”And many times when I bring those skeletons to the medical college, somebody will see – some professor or some servant. And they will simply just get frozen. Nobody ever asked for a lift in my car, because they knew that a skeleton sits in the back seat. Nobody ever asked. I used to ask professors, “Would you like to come?”“Not in your car.”Such a fear, but it must have some roots.And I can see that the first thing is that it reminds you of yourself. This is going to be the situation. We are all simply well-covered skeletons.And this will be the situation when death comes. So it reminds you of death. So nobody opens the cupboards in their unconscious where they have many skeletons, of many kinds.You yourself have put them there and now you are afraid of them. But the reality is that they are dead; just open the doors, bring light, clean your closets, clean your mind of all the dead luggage that you are filled with – it is making your life really miserable, a hell.And nobody except you is responsible. In the first place, you hide things which you should not. It is good to give them expression and release them. So first you hide them, and just remain a hypocrite – that you are never angry, that you are never hateful, that you are never this, never that; but all that goes on collecting inside. But those are all dead things. They don’t have any energy of their own, unless you give them energy. You have the source of energy. Whatever happens in your life needs your energy. If you cut the source of energy and…in other words that’s what I call identification; if you don’t identify with anything, it immediately becomes dead, it has no energy of its own.And non-identification is the other side of watchfulness.Love the beauty of watchfulness and its immense capacity to transform you. Simply watch whatever it is, and you will suddenly see that there is nothing but a dead skeleton, it cannot do anything to you. But you can give energy to it, you can project energy onto it. Then a skeleton which cannot do anything can even kill you, can give you a heart attack; just start escaping from it and you have given it reality, you have given it life.Give life to things which are beautiful. Don’t give life to ugly things. You don’t have much time, much energy to waste. With such a small life, with such a small energy source, it is simply stupid to waste it in sadness, in anger, in hatred, in jealousy.Use it in love, use it in some creative act, use it in friendship, use it in meditation; do something with it which takes you higher. And the higher you go, the more energy sources become available to you.At the highest point of consciousness, you are almost a god. But that moment we don’t allow to happen to us. We go on falling downwards into the darker and darker and darker spaces where we ourselves become almost living dead.It is in your hands.Osho,A while ago I realized that it is not situations but rather people that I can react to – because if someone I feel good about does something, it doesn't bother me, but if someone I don't like does the same thing, I may think, “What an awful thing to do.”Intellectually I have come to understand that the reason I don't like certain people is simply that they reflect certain characteristics in myself that I would rather not know about.I was hoping that gradually, deep inside, I would come to accept this rather unpalatable fact, and that my judgments would miraculously disappear without my having to face anything unpleasant in myself. Unfortunately, so far this hasn't happened. I still react strongly to some people, and find it difficult sometimes even to remember to turn my energy into watching myself rather than judging.I have been comforting myself by saying, “Nothing to do, just keep watching,” but as my watching is so wishy-washy and this is taking so long, I was wondering if you could suggest some trick to help me – preferably a shortcut through the whole process.There is no trick and there is no shortcut because watchfulness is the shortest way to enlightenment. And the question of tricks does not arise at all.No trick can help you.Tricks are good in playing cards and cheating people, but you cannot cheat existence, you cannot deceive life.If you want to go a longer way, that can be found; because you can be shown some unnecessary, non-essential things and the path becomes longer.Religions have done that. They have made the path very long, so that it cannot be achieved in one life, many lives are needed. It was a strategy of the priests to deceive people because if it is said that it can be achieved right now, then the question is why are you not achieving it, perhaps you don’t want it, perhaps you want to wait a little, perhaps you want to finish some other jobs first, perhaps you think that enlightenment should be the last thing in life. And the trivia, the mundane things of life, keep you engaged.But there may be a few people who may try and still will not get it. Then the priest will be in trouble because he himself is as far away as you are. To be a priest is just a profession for him, he is not a seeker. And you may start asking him, “Why is it not happening?” And he cannot really answer you relevantly because he does not know himself what it is, what can prevent it, what can help it.So the easiest way for him is to say, “It is such a long way. It will happen but in several lives. So don’t be in a hurry, it is not something that you can manage now. Go on working, go on praying; when the time is ripe in some life it will happen.” This was just a shelter for the priest.Watchfulness is the shortest way. It does not need lives to attain it. It needs not length of time but intensity of longing, the way you feel thirst; when you feel thirsty for truth – as if it is a question of life and death – you put your whole energy to this moment and the door is bound to open.And remember never to think of tricks because you cannot get anywhere through tricks as far as reality is concerned.The simple truth is that watchfulness is the shortest possible way. It cannot be made shorter.What is expected of you in watchfulness…just try to see, nothing is expected. You already watch things, you know what watchfulness is. You watch a football match, you watch a movie, you watch the television. You know what watchfulness is, there is no need to tell you; just the same watchfulness has to be applied to the screen of the mind. Close your eyes and let your mind function as a screen of a movie or a television, and whatever passes on the mind you simply remain watchful, doing nothing, not even judging.And this is the only miracle I know of, that as your watchfulness becomes more and more stable, the screen becomes empty. Soon the watcher is there but there is nothing to be watched, the screen is completely empty.And when the watcher is left alone, it starts watching itself – because that is its nature, to watch.And to watch oneself is the greatest happening in anyone’s life. Everything else happens through it – blissfulness, silence, peace, ecstasy, and finally going beyond even all these experiences and just remaining in a pure isness.Those who have attained that pure isness have fulfilled the mission of human life.Osho,A few days ago I watched you brushing aside a fly, and there was all the awareness, grace, love and compassion in it which were missing in Buddha's first mechanical movement in the story you told a few days later. You even waited for the right moment to disguise the movement of your hand in a gesture illustrating your words.I was really thrilled. Thank you, Osho.I can understand your thankfulness because even to watch, even to see a gesture which is full of awareness and grace is a great experience, a great learning.The master not only goes on saying beautiful things to you, he also goes on showing beautiful spaces to you. So you have to be alert not only in hearing him but also in seeing him, also in feeling him – not only his words, but his gestures; not only his gestures, but his presence. All are part of the teaching.Words are the least important.Osho,Among the concluding sentences of the Book of Mirdad are the following:“Let those who would break their moorings from the earth, and those who would be unified, and those who yearn to overcome themselves – let them come aboard.The ark is ready.The wind is favoring.The sea is calm….”Osho, your crew is ready!That is good news because Noah’s Ark is also getting ready, and soon you will be all aboard Noah’s Ark – the first ocean city of the world.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I love hearing the stories of the old masters and their disciples. It is so beautiful to feel the essence of those small oases of consciousness – which centuries of religion have since covered in the dust of dogma and deceit. But still, as I look at us sitting here, feeling the joy, the silence, the tears, the laughter, I suspect there is something present that no master may ever have evoked before. Is it, perhaps, a sense of loving tenderness, a juiciness in those around you – something that could only have emerged had feminine energy been an intrinsic part of those caravanserais of so long ago?Osho, isn't this one of your greatest contributions to spirituality?The realm of spirituality has remained male-dominated – not only male-dominated but male-chauvinistic. There were reasons why all spiritual traditions were against women. They were against women because they were against life, and to destroy life, the most basic thing is to separate man and woman. They were against any joy, any love, any juiciness. The simple way was to condemn the woman, and separate her from man as much as possible, particularly in the monasteries.Women were second class human beings, not on the level of man.Naturally it disturbed many things. It took out all playfulness, sense of humor, rejoicing, and created a very dry structure of life for man and for women too. They are part of one whole, and once you separate them, they are both continuously missing something – and that gap cannot be filled, and that gap makes people serious, sickly serious, and perverted, psychologically unbalanced. It distorts the natural harmony; it distorts the biological balance. It is such a big calamity that for centuries man has suffered under it.Yes, it is my greatest contribution to the future of man, that the women are on the same level as men – spiritually there is no question of inequality.You can see here laughter, tears and joy; this was impossible to see in Buddha’s commune. It was not possible in Mahavira’s communes. They had separate communes for women, but they were in every way humiliated. Even a one-day-old male sannyasin, in Jainism, has to be respected by a seventy-year-old woman sannyasin. She has been a sannyasin for seventy years, but she has to bow down to a man who has just become a sannyasin, because he is a man.And although men were working for their enlightenment, the women were not working for enlightenment directly; they were working to attain to manhood first, because you cannot bypass manhood; first you have to be a man, and then only you can be enlightened.So they looked like monks and nuns, but their goals were totally different. Man had already a far higher spiritual status, which the woman was trying in this life to achieve for the next – she was one life behind. And this is all bullshit. There is no question of man and woman as far as spirituality is concerned, because it is not a question of body or biology; it is not a question even of mind or psychology.It is a question of being, and being has no sexual differences. Souls are not male or female, and the same method will lead man to his inner self, and the same method will lead the woman to her inner self. There is no question at all…because the whole thing is of witnessing. What you are witnessing is not in question – whether you are witnessing a female body or a male body, a female mind or a male mind, is just out of the question; the emphasis is on witnessing – and witnessing has no gender.Even great people like Mahavira and Gautam Buddha remained somehow part of the male-dominated world, and they could not revolt against it. This is the first time that man and woman are together, working for the same experience, and naturally, when opposite energies are working together, there is more playfulness, more sense of humor, more laughter, more love, more friendliness – all the qualities which make us human.The old saints were almost inhuman, dry bones. To be juicy was against their spirituality. To be juicy, to me, is the very foundation of spirituality; if a spiritual person cannot be juicy, then who can be? If the people who are in search of the ultimate truth cannot celebrate, then nobody else has the right to celebrate. But all the traditions were insisting not on celebration but on celibacy, and through celibacy they were creating such psychological disturbances in people that the question of spiritual growth did not arise.First they have to be mentally healthy – they were mentally sick.I want my people to be naturally, biologically, physiologically, psychologically – on every level – healthy. Only then, in these healthy steps, can they move to a healthy spirituality. And their spirituality will not be against anything; their spirituality will absorb everything that is below it. Hence it will be far richer.To me a spirituality that makes you poorer in every dimension of your life is a slow suicide. It is not spiritual. It is not a coincidence that all old spiritual traditions are against me, because what I am trying to do is to uproot them from their very base. If I am successful then ten thousands of spiritual pasts prove to be wrong.So my experiment is very crucial, very definitive, very decisive, and my feeling is that you can get over jealousy only where there is possibility of jealousy; you can get over sex only when there is possibility of sex; you can get over anything only if the possibility is there.Old traditions tried to deceive people; making them separate, the very possibilities were not there, and slowly, slowly, the monks and the nuns started believing that they have transcended jealousy, that they have transcended sex. The reality was just the opposite: they have not transcended, they have repressed with all kinds of religious rituals. Women have repressed everything that needs man; man has repressed everything that needs the woman, to such depth that he himself has become unaware that it is there.A Chinese story is: a woman served a master for years. He was living outside the town in a hut, and this woman was very rich, and she would bring the most delicious food for him, and whatsoever was needed, she provided. He was not forced to go to beg – the woman brought things herself to his hut. And he became a very great saint.The woman was older. Before she was dying, just a day or two days before, she was very sick and felt that her time has come. She called the prostitute of the town – a very beautiful woman – and said to her, “Whatever is your price I will give you but I want just one simple thing. In the middle of the night you go to the monk I have worshipped for my whole life. He thinks that he has transcended sex; I also believe it, but there has been no opportunity to check on it.“In the middle of the night you go – he meditates at that time – you knock on the door, go inside. Just drop your clothes, be naked, and remember everything that he says or does, and then come back to me. And whatever your price, that I will give you.”The prostitute said, “There is no problem in it.” She went, she knocked on the door; the monk opened the door. She immediately dropped her robe – she was only wearing one robe – and stood naked before the monk.The monk shouted, “What are you doing!” and was trembling, and before the woman could say anything, he escaped out of the door. She came back to the old woman and told her, “Nothing much happened. He opened the door, I dropped my robe; he started trembling, shouted, ‘What are you doing? Why have you come here?’ and through the open door he escaped towards the forest.”The woman said, “I wasted my years in serving that idiot. You take your price, and do one thing more; for that also I will give you whatever you want – go and set fire to the hut!”These monks and nuns are forced by their religions to live separately, and sometimes if you look into their scriptures, it is hilarious. A Jaina monk first inquires before he sits in any place, “Has there been any woman sitting here before?” At least nine minutes have to pass. I don’t know how they manage nine minutes! Only then he will brush the place with his small broom made of soft wool, so no small insect or ant is killed, and then he will spread his bamboo mattress and sit on it.I asked these people, “Why nine minutes?”They said, “After a woman has been sitting in a place, for nine minutes her vibrations continue, and a monk can be disturbed by it.”I said, “What kind of monks do you have? Ordinary men are not disturbed. Monks are disturbed? It simply shows that they are continuously thinking of sex and nothing else.”It has been found that ordinary men think of women at least once in nine minutes. Perhaps for thousands of years these people have figured it out in some way – that there is danger for nine minutes, but the danger is not in the vibrations, the danger is in man’s mind. Every man, the whole day, every nine minutes, at least once thinks of women. Women are a little spiritual: they think of man once only in eighteen minutes – twice as spiritual.The basic reason for separating man and woman was that by a single stroke you are destroying many things; otherwise you will need many strokes, and still you will not be able to destroy them from the roots. The seriousness in the religious people has nothing to do with spirituality; it has something to do with the way they are living, separated from their hearts.Just now in Germany we have won the case in a court against the German government, and the German government was trying to prove that I am not a religious person, because I have said in a press conference that I am not a serious man. Their argument was that a religious man is bound to be serious. They go together, you cannot separate them – if a man says that he is not serious, how he can be religious?Looking at the past, what the government attorney was saying was right. All religious people have been serious.But the judge seems to be reading my books, because in his statement he says that because it was in a press conference, we do not know in what context I have said that I am not a serious man. “You have to prove it from his written books, and even if he says he is not serious, that does not matter, because what he is teaching is religion. He is teaching that man is not body, that man is not mind, that man is a transcendental, spiritual being.” and he quoted from my books – and insisted on the words transcendental spiritual being.He said, “That’s enough for him to be religious, and for his people to be religious. What he has said in a press conference is irrelevant.” He gave the verdict in our favor, but the government attorney was trying to prove that a non-serious man cannot be religious.If I had been in the place of the judge, I would not have brought any quotations, I would have fought on the same point, that seriousness and religiousness in fact cannot go together, because seriousness is sickness – sickness of the soul, and when the soul is sick, one cannot be religious.A religious person has to be rejoicing, full of humor, laughter, love.It is certainly one of the most important contributions we are trying to make. It will be opposed by all the traditions and all the religions – by the whole world, because we are proving that for ten thousand years they have been wrong – and it hurts their egos. They would like to destroy us rather than accept the fact that spirituality should be full of laughter, full of a sense of humor, full of playfulness; because now there is no anxiety, no problem, no anguish, and the person has relaxed into a deep let-go with existence.Why should he be serious?But it is going against the whole past. It is not only on this point that I am going against the whole past; on so many points I am going against the whole past, for the simple reason that the past was male-dominated, so only men have created rules, without having any consideration for the female.The female has not been taken into account at all; but the tragedy is that if the man does not take any account of the female, he is cutting himself into half, and the moment he denies the female outside, he has also denied the female inside – and you have created a schizophrenic, not a spiritual being. He needs psychological treatment, not worship.Osho,One of the greatest expressions of the master lies in his art of giving. In fact he himself, just by being, is a constant givingness.It seems to me that part – or perhaps all – of the art of being a disciple, is learning the art of receiving…To receive attention from the master not as fodder for the ego but as a nourishment for something more essential…To see that when you think you are not being given to, it is your inability to receive. It implies the ability to receive direction – when one is going off track – with a healthy sense of humbleness but not with a crippling lack of self-worth…To be able to receive not always what one might have wanted, but what one needs.Osho, could you please speak about the art of receiving on the part of the disciple in the master/disciple relationship?It is true that the whole phenomenon of master and disciple is the art, from the side of the master, of going on pouring whatever he is receiving from existence. He is not the source of it, he is only a vehicle, a hollow bamboo, and if the hollow bamboo is turned into a flute, still the hollow bamboo is not playing the music, the music is coming from somewhere else.The master is a hollow bamboo, a bamboo flute. He is making available to his disciples the music of the divine.The art of the disciple is to absorb, is to receive, but not to demand – and there is a fine demarcation. The disciple has to understand the fine demarcation.Just the other day Amiyo has written a question, “Osho, when you look at me, I feel tremendously joyful. But when you don’t look at me, then I feel very sad.” She is honest in saying it, but one has to understand that if it becomes a binding on me – that I have to look at everyone, otherwise somebody will become sad – then you are making me a prisoner, you are taking even my freedom.When I look at you, you rejoice. You are many, I am alone. Sometimes I may miss you. You need not miss me.In a Sufi saying it says that the eyes of all the disciples should be on the master – that is absolutely necessary. But the eyes of the master cannot be on every disciple – that too is as absolutely necessary as the first. Disciples can be thousands – they are; you should not only rejoice when I see you; you should rejoice when you see me. That keeps your independence, your freedom, and that keeps me free; otherwise you are forcing me.And I don’t look considerably towards anybody in particular. Just as my hands move on their own accord wherever and whatever is needed to be expressed by them, in the same way, my eyes move. I am not the mover, I am not doing anything with my hands or with my eyes.The disciple has to learn receiving.I am available to all, without any question of anybody’s worthiness – whether you deserve or you don’t deserve, that is not the question. You should be open and vulnerable to receive, and whenever I look at you, rejoice, but don’t be sad if sometimes I miss looking at you. Don’t make it impossible for me.For example, Kaveesha is sitting in such a place that to see her I will have to make a special effort; naturally I will not be looking at her. She has to understand that – and she understands. Somebody who is just sitting in front of me is naturally seen more than anybody else – it does not mean that he deserves more; it simply means his position is in front of me.The presence of the master is overflowing with subtle vibrations, and you should remain open to absorb those vibrations. No demand has to be made, because all demands are ugly. And just see: I don’t demand anything from you.For centuries masters have demanded a thousand and one things from the disciples, all kinds of disciplines. I don’t demand anything from you. I want to keep you absolutely free to receive. And please, allow me my freedom; don’t ask such questions or even think such things because that means you are making demands on me. And I may feel that if I don’t look at Amiyo today she will be sad; I have to look – and the whole beauty is destroyed because that will be an effort, and I don’t want to make any effort. I want everything to happen in this mystery school on its own accord. And it is happening beautifully.Just our old mind goes on creating disturbances for such small things that it seems it is so hard for you to distinguish even between trivia and the significant. Now here only four or five people can sit in the front line. A few people are very much worried, sad, and they don’t understand that in this small space you are all in the front line.In the commune in America, with five thousand people, you would have been somewhere in the back. I would not even have been able to see your faces; neither were you able to see my face. And when there were festival times and twenty thousand people were there, it was almost impossible to see who is there beyond three or four lines, it was impossible. And all people cannot be accommodated into the first three lines.Here you are all in the front line. In fact, the first line in the commune was as far away from me as the last line here. So whoever is in the last line here is almost in the first line. And I can see you all, your faces; you can see me. But even this question has come to me that somebody is very much disturbed that they are not in the first line, that they have not yet been given a chance to be in the first line.You are interested in trivia. Be a little more alert and be interested in the significant, and all that is needed is your opening and receptivity.Sometimes it may happen that I may see you; sometimes it may happen that I may not see you. That is not deliberate; that is just as spontaneous as I am speaking to you. Everything with me is spontaneous, so the moment you demand anything from me, I feel you have not understood me.Osho,When I wake up from the relaxation sessions and open my eyes, for a few moments it feels like coming into this world for the first time…Like a new-born child opening his eyes to the world. Everything looks totally new. Even a fly on the ceiling I look at in amazement as it is part of the whole.Is this what you see all the time in everything and everyone?That’s true.Osho,Our questions seem to function as gravitation, trying to keep you with us, while everything in you is being pulled up into the sky and away from us by the law of grace.Whenever we run short of questions, I panic, almost seeing you floating off on the end of a balloon, and I want to call out, “Osho! Please wait! We've found another question!”Don’t be worried: whenever you will say, “Osho, wait!” I will wait!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Mahavira was the twenty-fourth tirthankara of the Jaina religion. Did the Jaina religion start with the very first tirthankara or with Mahavira? And what is the meaning of the word Jaina?The word jaina has a very beautiful meaning, just like the word buddha. Buddha means the awakened one. Jaina comes from a root jina. Jina means one who has conquered.The movement of conquering the ultimate peak of being, started with the first tirthankara, Rishabhdeva.Perhaps he is the most ancient mystic in the whole history of man, and Jainism the most ancient religion. Because it is very small in numbers, the world is not very well aware of it; otherwise, its contribution is immense.Rishabhdeva, the first tirthankara, the first Jaina master, is mentioned with great reverence in the oldest book in existence, the Hindu holy scripture, the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda is thought, by scholars, to be at least five thousand years old. But these are Christian scholars who are trying to fix everything within six thousand years – because the world started just six thousand years ago, according to them. So they have a prejudice: nothing can be older that that – there was no world before that. And this is simply stupid.Even this earth is four billion years old by scientific findings. This solar system is much older; and this is not the oldest solar system. There are millions of other solar systems which are even older. The Christian idea that six thousand years ago the whole existence was created, is very retarded. You cannot even call it wrong, it is simply idiotic.It is against science, it is against even common sense, because we have found in India cities buried underground which are seven thousand years old. And a city buried underground seven thousand years ago, must have existed before some calamity happened. The city must have existed before that; the calamity happened seven thousand years ago, the city may have existed for longer.Looking at those cities – because they have been excavated – one can see that they were not primitive, they were far advanced. The roads are as broad as any modern city’s roads, and that is significant. Varanasi has roads where no car can go, you can only walk. That means those roads in Varanasi are really primitive – when there was no vehicle, people were simply walking. In those small streets the sun never penetrates because on both sides are huge buildings. There is always shade; you will not find such coolness anywhere as in Varanasi. Even in the hottest summer you can walk in the streets; it is cool because the sun never reaches there.Hindus think Varanasi is their oldest city, and they claim it is the oldest in the world. The two cities I am talking about are Mohenjo Daro and Harappa; now they are both in Pakistan. I have been to both the cities.It is simply unbelievable but those cities had bathrooms attached to the bedrooms.You will be surprised as to why this fact should be so important, but just in the last century – just a hundred years ago – when people in America started to make attached bathrooms, there was such a reaction from the masses that the government had to step in. There were cases in the courts claiming that it is ugly, unchristian, because cleanliness is second to godliness, and these people are doing something ugly – having a bathroom, a toilet, attached inside the house. It has always been outside the house; its name was the outhouse.Seven thousand years ago those people were far more advanced in thinking – they had beautiful swimming pools…. And the most miraculous thing is that in Harappa and Mohenjo Daro they had a hot and cold running water system. It was a highly developed civilization. And they must have had vehicles big enough; otherwise there was no need to make such broad roads. They had big windows, which was rare; big doors, which was rare at that time; gardens….According to Hindu scholars, the Rig Veda is ninety thousand years old. And the man who proved it, Lokmanya Tilak – one of the most intelligent Hindu scholars of this century – has proved it on such grounds that nobody has been able to argue against him – because he proved it on grounds not logical, but astronomical.In the Rig Veda there is a description of a certain happening in the world of stars, a certain meeting which has not happened since then. The description is absolutely clear, and it would have been possible only if the people who were describing it had seen it. And in fact astronomy now agrees with Lokmanya Tilak – that it happened ninety thousand years ago, and the way it is described in the Rig Veda is exactly right – the way astronomical things should be described.So astronomy was highly developed, and the people could see the conglomeration of the stars. They even described stars and planets which we have just discovered; otherwise, fifty years ago people were simply laughing, “Where are these planets?” Pluto and Neptune had not been discovered fifty years ago and people were laughing. “This is just fictitious!”But now they have been discovered with better instruments; more and more stars, more and more planets have been discovered; and they are all fitting together with the chart that is given in the Rig Veda.The Rig Veda mentions Rishabhdeva’s name with great reverence. I am emphasizing the words great reverence because Rishabhdeva was not a Hindu. He was born a Hindu but he was starting to disagree with Hindu philosophy, Hindu doctrines, and he was originating a new religion; he was the source of Jainism.In ninety thousand years Hinduism and Jainism have gone very far apart, so far apart that the twenty-fourth tirthankara, Mahavira – the last tirthankara – is not mentioned in any Hindu scripture…just to ignore him; it was thought not worthwhile to mention him.But Rishabhdeva they have mentioned with such reverence. That shows something very psychological. Nobody shows reverence to any contemporary, particularly to a contemporary who is cutting the roots of your vested interests, your powers, who is against the brahmins who are writing the Rig Veda. If they had criticized him that would have been perfectly right; but they are so full of reverence.To me it proves only one thing, that Rishabhdeva must have lived a little before the writing of the Rig Veda – five centuries, six centuries. By that time he had already become well known, worshipped. So even the Rig Veda describes him with reverence. People don’t speak against the dead, but to respect a contemporary needs a very intelligent and innocent mind.He is the first Jina. Jina means the conqueror, and Mahavira is the twenty-fourth Jina. Those who follow the Jina’s are called Jainas; they are simply followers.The word jina is equivalent to the word buddha; they are exchangeable, because in many places in Buddhist scriptures Buddha is called a Jina, and in many Jaina scriptures, Mahavira is called Buddha. These words are not anybody’s monopoly. They simply signify a state which can be described in many ways through different aspects.When I was in America, the ambassador of Sri Lanka to America wrote a letter to me telling me that I should stop calling our discos around the world “Zorba the Buddha” because it hurts the religious feelings of the Buddhists.I answered him, “You don’t seem to be aware of the fact that ‘Buddha’ is nobody’s monopoly. It simply means ‘the awakened.’ Now, if Zorba becomes awakened – nobody can prevent him; he has a birthright to be awakened. And everybody who is not awakened is a Zorba – he may not be so great a Zorba, but in his own way, in a small measure, he is living a life which has no awakening to it, he is asleep. So there is no question of changing the name. My whole effort is to create a bridge between the Zorbas – the sleeping ones – and the buddhas – the awakened ones. And this word simply signifies an awakening of consciousness.”But somebody may be an ambassador of a country – that does not mean that he understands. He never replied, because it is absolutely clear that it is nobody’s monopoly. And everybody has to become a buddha. It should not hurt your religious feelings, it should really make you happy that even Zorbas are becoming buddhas. You should rejoice! But somebody may be an ambassador or a president or a prime minister: the sleeping mind is the same.Just this morning I talked about Amiyo, but she could not get the point; on the contrary, she behaved exactly as one should behave in sleep. It was her question, that when I look at her she feels very happy, very blissful; and when I don’t look at her she thinks perhaps I am angry, perhaps she is not doing well – she feels sad.I answered it, and when I went back, after the lecture, and looked at her, she closed her eyes. That’s how the sleepy mind behaves. On the one hand it asks that I should look at her, she rejoices; and when I looked at her, she was so angry, hurt, that she closed her eyes; she didn’t look at me. And it is not only the case with her, it is the case with everybody else. We are functioning out of sleep; we do not know what we are doing, why we are doing it.A Jina is one who has conquered his sleep. Jainism has not become as famous as Buddhism because it never became a world religion; it remained a very small sect in India. There were basic reasons. First, its monks could not go out of India for the simple reason that they could not accept food from anybody who was not a Jaina.Now, before you go to another country, you cannot expect that people, because you are coming, will turn into Jainas. They could not accept food from anybody else, not even from Hindus or Buddhists – nobody, only Jainas. So they move in a small circle; they cannot get out of it.Secondly, the monks of their most orthodox branch live naked. They cannot go to the colder countries, they have to remain in the warmer places. They cannot eat non-vegetarian food. The whole world is non-vegetarian – Jainas are totally vegetarian.So these restrictions did not allow them to go out of the country, and because of this, it is unfortunate; they have a great philosophy, much to contribute to human understanding, but that remained in the shadows. It never became known to the world.Even today their scriptures are not being translated. Who cares? – they are such a small minority. Numbers play such a role – but truth has nothing to do with numbers. Because they were a very small minority, they managed many things which in India were otherwise impossible.For example, you will not find a single beggar from their community; they are all rich. They had to be rich; otherwise survival was difficult. They were surrounded by people who would have liked to destroy them. They could not take swords in their hands because they believed in nonviolence. The only way to survive was to have as much money as possible – that was their only power.And they became really rich, so rich that even kings had to borrow money from them. Nobody was a beggar, nobody was uneducated. And because they were such a small minority, attacked by all kinds of philosophies, they had to protect themselves; they sharpened their intellect. They created better arguments than anybody else, because for others it was a luxury to argue, but for Jainas it was a question of life and death. They had to win the argument; otherwise they were finished. So they have developed logical systems, great philosophies, which should be made available to the whole world.But the world cares only about numbers, and they are a non-converting religion, so the question of creating great numbers like the Catholics is not possible. They are non-converting because, according to them – and I accept the idea – the very effort to convert somebody is ugly.You can explain your philosophy, you can make your philosophy available, and if somebody wants to join you, that’s one thing. But to make an effort to convert the person, by hook or by crook, just to bring him into your fold to make your fold more powerful, is politics; it is not religion.I may have told you: I was staying in Central India – there is a small aboriginal tribal land, Bastar. I used to go there often just to see how man was ten or twelve thousand years ago, because they are that far back. They live naked; they eat raw meat.I used to study how man must have been and how he must have evolved. I was staying…. In those days Bastar was a state, and the king of Bastar was my friend. He was a very courageous man, and he loved me so much that just because of me, he was killed.The government became afraid because he was a king of a state, and he was too much under my influence. He was allowing me to use all his rest houses in the mountains, in the jungles of Bastar, and they thought that if he wanted…because he was worshipped by the aboriginals as God, just as in the old way every nation in the past worshipped kings as gods. They are still in the past, they are not contemporary people, and if he said anything about me, they would accept it without any question.The chief minister of Central India was very much against me. He was a brahmin, and he wanted that I should be prevented from reaching Bastar. He told the king; the king refused. He said, “He is my friend, and I love what he says – and I am not under anybody’s power.” Finding some excuse, police action was taken and the king was killed…thirty-six bullets; no chance was taken that he would be left alive. His name was Bhanjdeo. Because of him I enjoyed absolute freedom in his state.I was staying in one of his guest houses, and I saw a bonfire in the middle of the tribe – the tribe make their beautiful huts in a circle. So I went there – it must have been nine or ten o’clock in the night – and a Christian missionary was teaching them that the real religion, the only real religion, is Christianity.So I sat just there with the crowd, and the missionary was not aware that somebody else from the outside was present. He had a bucket full of water, and the bonfire was there – it was a cool night. He brought from his bag two statues; one was of Rama, the Hindu god, and one was of Jesus Christ.And he said, “You can see these statues: one is Rama – the Hindu god you worship – and one is Jesus Christ; he is our god. And I will put them to a test to show you.” He put both of them in the bucket of water. Rama drowned, and Jesus remained floating.And he said, “You can see! – this fellow cannot even save himself; how can he save you? And look at Jesus Christ: while he was alive he used to walk on water; even in his statue he is floating! He can save you.”And many poor aboriginals nodded their heads, “That is true. You can see – there is no question.”I said to myself, “This is something I had never imagined – that these aboriginals are being converted to Christianity in this way.” I stood up, I went close, and took both out of the bucket – Rama and Jesus – and as I took them I immediately felt that the Rama statue was made of steel, painted exactly the same way as Jesus’ statue; and Jesus’ statue was made of very soft wood, very light wood. So I asked the aborigines, “Have you ever heard in your scriptures about a water test?”They said, “No.”“Have you heard about a fire test?”They said, “Yes!”…because in Hindu scriptures, the fire test is a well-known fact. A water test nobody has heard of.I said, “So you can see now….” I threw both of them into the bonfire. Jesus immediately started burning! The missionary tried to escape. I said, “Hold this man, don’t let him go! Let him see the whole scene. Now Rama is safe even in the fire; Jesus is gone.”The aboriginals were very happy, and they said, “This is the real test, and this man was cheating us; a water test we have never heard of. But we never thought – we are poor people, we don’t think – we agreed with him. If you had not been here he would have made us all Christians. This is his way; he has converted many tribes here in the forest to Christianity. This is his only game.”I said, “What do you think? – should we put him also to the fire test?”They said, “That will be great, but that will be dangerous because he will be caught in it; he will not be able to save himself.” And he was in such fear, trembling, that these people…and if I had told them to, they would certainly have put him in the fire!And he said, “I will never do such a thing again.”“But,” I said, “this is absolutely ugly. It is not religion that you are practicing; you are cheating poor people, innocent – and you call it conversion.”Any dignified philosophy does not believe in conversion. Jainism does not believe in it. It simply makes available to you all its treasure, and if you are interested you can join the caravan, but nobody wants you to be converted.So only once in a while somebody…because who takes that much trouble to go through scriptures and study and find out what is right and what is wrong? But it is something to be taken note of, that there may be other similar minority groups in the world who have great treasures not translated into world languages. It should be the duty of an organization like the UN to translate all those treasures into world languages so they become available to all.Jainism is the first religion that has made vegetarianism a fundamental necessity for transforming consciousness. And they are right. Killing just to eat makes your consciousness heavy, insensitive; and you need a very sensitive consciousness – very light, very loving, very compassionate. It is difficult for a non-vegetarian to be compassionate; and without being compassionate and loving you will be hindering your own progress.And there are many diamonds in that small group – the Jainas – which can help many people. They are available, but they are available in a language which is no longer alive; they are written in Prakrit.That word is also worth understanding. It is thought that Sanskrit is the oldest language. There is a consensus amongst scholars that Sanskrit is the oldest language of the world; only Jainas don’t agree with it – their language is Prakrit – and I feel that they are right. The very meaning of the word prakrit is “natural,” and the very meaning of the word sanskrit is “refined.”Prakrit seems to be the original language which the people were using, and Sanskrit seems to be the refined form of it which scholars were using. Their very names indicate something. Prakrit means raw, and Sanskrit means cultured. Certainly Prakrit has to be first and only then is Sanskrit possible. And the same words are there; it is just that they are, in Prakrit, more simple – the way people will use them. In Sanskrit those words have taken a cultured form; only educated people can use them.And I have seen it happen in India with English. There are simple words – for example, station…. But in every village of India, for the poor, uneducated people, station is difficult; they use teshan – that is simpler. Station seems to be a little complicated for them. Teshan seems to be simple, uncomplicated.You can see in India how English words, moving to the masses, have taken a different shape. Report – every village in India uses simply, rapat, not report, that is too cultured. Rapat is very simple.Exactly in the same way are the words in Prakrit and Sanskrit. All Jaina scriptures are in Prakrit. It is a very beautiful language because it has the smell of everything simple, unpolished…diamonds just out of the mine – not cut, not polished, but they have a beauty of their own, something wild.It is the duty of the UN to bring all this literature – and it is vast – into international languages, and people will be simply shocked.For example, Albert Einstein in this century talks of the theory of relativity – and Mahavira, twenty-five centuries ago, talks about the theory of relativity. Of course his conception is philosophical, he is not a scientist; but the meaning is the same. Albert Einstein has scientific evidence, Mahavira has philosophical arguments, but both are trying to say that in existence there is nothing which is absolute, everything is relative.Aristotle divides everything into black and white – either this or that; his logic is either/or. Mahavira divides everything into seven categories.It is more complicated, more complex, but shows tremendous insight, intelligence. Aristotle looks like a pygmy – and the world must be made aware that there have been giants of which you are absolutely unaware.It is one of my deep desires that when our mystery schools are functioning, slowly slowly, we will bring from all over the world the great mystical scriptures, without any consideration of to whom they belong, and publish them with the latest commentaries, so that mysticism does not remain just a word but becomes a vast literature, and anybody can devote his whole life to understanding what the mystics have given to the world.Nobody is taking note of it, and its significance is tremendous – because it is not only literature, it has secrets for the transformation of your being.Osho,A few days ago you said that an aware person could follow the footprints of a bird's flight. How about the footprints an enlightened person leaves? Do they keep the radiance and the fragrance of the enlightened one for long? Is it like nuclear radiation? – if a person steps in the footprints of an enlightened one, will he be affected?If the answer is yes, then America should be conscientious enough to make that desert in central Oregon which once was made into an oasis, a high-risk area of dangerous contamination. They should put up a sign post: “Warning! Dangerous area of highly awakened consciousness. Keep out!”It is said that Gurdjieff's last words were, “Bravo America!” In my imagination I add on to this, “But America, what a pity: you missed.”And the reality is that North America missed you. And now it seems the turn of South America to miss you too.Osho, is it possible that human stupidity can prevent the realization of cosmic consciousness?There is no power in human stupidity to prevent the evolution of consciousness. It is impotent. It seems powerful only because the majority of the world has been brought up in it, is conditioned for it. People have been prevented from growing up from their very childhood; but it cannot prevent evolution of consciousness.Once the movement for evolution gathers momentum, it may change the whole face of the earth. And it is time that it should gain the momentum. There is no possibility of remaining lazy any longer; the future is becoming shorter and shorter. Either stupidity will destroy the whole earth, or a conscious evolution can bring a new man into existence. The choice is so clear that I don’t think, however asleep man may be, that he is going to choose suicide instead of a new phase in the life of man.Just now as I was coming in, Amiyo tried again: she closed her eyes when I looked at her, but opened them in the middle. That is a good sign, a great sign. She herself must have felt what she was doing.Human sleep is going to be broken, and the days are very few; you can allow yourself a little more sleep. And remember, before the morning, the night becomes certainly very dark, but there is no need to be afraid of it; the night becoming very dark simply heralds the coming of the morning. We are very close to it.And it is true that wherever an enlightened person lives, moves, sits, he leaves a certain vibration which remains for centuries – and those who are sensitive enough can be affected by it.And your idea is good: America should be aware that the desert that we had turned into an oasis is dangerous. They have forced me out of America, thinking me dangerous. They have destroyed the community, thinking it dangerous. But there are certain invisible things which they cannot destroy; on the contrary, those invisible things will destroy them…not that they will kill them, but they will transform them. That place – they should be aware of it.And how long can they prevent? – because it is not a question of me. How can they prevent Americans from becoming enlightened? I may not be able to go to America but America can come to me. And we don’t need that the whole of America should come to me, we need only a few intelligent people to carry the flame back home.Although America has misbehaved with me and my people, I still insist on Gurdjieff’s statement, “Bravo America!” because the American government is not America. These are the few elected fools. The whole of America has a totally different flavor to it. It is more innocent than any other country, because it is younger than any other country. And it is innocence that is needed as a base for somebody to become enlightened.The old countries have such a long past that they also have a long conditioning. America has no conditioning, just three hundred years. It makes nothing, just a thin layer which can be easily peeled off. Perhaps that’s why the American government became so much afraid of me. They are really living in a paranoia.Here they have tried hard that I should not be allowed. They have blackmailed this small country, threatened it. And we are looking in other places, but wherever we are looking, as we start looking at any country, immediately American pressure reaches ahead of us – because all our telephones are tapped. You will be surprised that all our telephone calls go through the American Embassy, everything first reaches to the American ambassador. They know where we are searching, where we are going, where our people are working; and immediately, before our people reach there, their pressure on the government of that country reaches there.Just two days ago in Ireland things were simple. The man whose property we were going to purchase, on the condition that he obtains a permanent residence for the commune…. It is a big, beautiful castle, renovated completely. He was asking too much. We said, “We will give it, but it will be your responsibility to make the government…all the facilities possible.” And he was absolutely sure. He is a duke and has great influence.But just today the information has come: the American government has pressured the Irish government. Nobody has reached there yet, but the pressure was because the phone call has been detected, tapped. And the duke was surprised. He informed us, “Suddenly the government is afraid.” He had been absolutely certain that there was no problem, the government was willing. Just as a routine procedure, permanent residence would be given within sixty days. But now he is afraid, the pressure is too much.And the kind of pressure America is putting on countries shows that there is no freedom anywhere. The old kind of political slavery has disappeared; a new kind of economic slavery has taken its place.They threaten the country, “First, if you want to allow him and his people to be in your country then you pay off all loans.” And America has given billions of dollars to every country, knowing perfectly well that they are not capable of paying them back, they will never be able to pay them back.“Secondly, if you cannot pay us back, then we are going to increase the rate of interest. Thirdly, if you still insist that you will allow him to stay in the country, then no future loans” – which have been already granted, billions of dollars in this year, billions of dollars in the coming year – “they will be immediately canceled.”Now this is too much for a poor country – and all countries are poor. They cannot pay the loans back, they cannot pay that much interest, and they cannot manage all the projects that they have started. Roads or hospitals or universities or bridges or railway lines, are all incomplete; and if the loans are stopped, then their whole economy will simply fall flat.Here, one minister said – because the same thing they did here – “At least one thing has become clear, that we were under the illusion that we are independent. We are not – nobody is.”But this is only the American government. Don’t make it equal to America. The people of America are the most innocent, fresh, young, and are capable of giving birth to the new man.Whatever happens to me and to my people, I will not disagree with George Gurdjieff.Osho,When, in the past, I allowed myself to be open and vulnerable, I often had the feeling that people tended to exploit this state of mind to hurt me or to do some harm to me.Recently, when in a similar situation, I found myself being less identified than in the past. I could stay more aloof and watchful, and didn't draw myself back. I stayed vulnerable and open and I didn't feel hurt or have the feeling of inferiority as much as before. In fact, I felt more receptive and feminine than ever before, and knew that I was on the right path.I saw myself as a small bird who has accidentally flown through a windmill and emerges from it with feathers askew and a look of surprise on its face.Can you please comment?You are on the right path. What you have been doing in the past was out of unawareness. You have tried just a little bit of awareness, and things have changed. Awareness is the greatest alchemy there is.Just go on becoming more and more aware, and you will find your life changing for the better in every possible dimension. It will bring great fulfillment.And, yes, you will be immensely surprised that you were capable of so much joy, so many blessings. Why did you go on missing it?When one becomes enlightened, one cannot believe it. “It has happened to me?”It takes a little time to believe it, because the phenomenon is so big, and our sleep has been so long and our stupidities have been so deep. And suddenly all has melted away and there is nothing but pure light and a subtle dance and a fragrance that follows you twenty-four hours a day. You have the feeling that now this fragrance and this light and this rejoicing is going to be eternal. It is forever.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Yesterday I was told that I am intelligent. I felt as if I had been called something terrible – as if it was even dangerous.Would you please shed some light on the fear of intelligence?Avirbhava, to feel terrible for being called “intelligent” proves you to be really intelligent. The first and most important part of intelligence is innocence. That’s why you felt terrible; in the world, innocence and intelligence have been divided, not only divided but put diametrically opposite to each other.If intelligence remains innocent, it is the most beautiful thing possible, but if it is against innocence, then it is simply cunningness and nothing else; it is not intelligence.The moment innocence disappears, the soul of intelligence is gone; it is a corpse. It is better to simply call it “intellect.” It can make you a great intellectual, but it will not transform your life and it will not make you open to the mysteries of existence. They are open only to the intelligent child, and to the really intelligent person, who keeps his childhood alive to his last breath. He never loses the wonder the child feels looking at the birds, looking at the flowers, looking at the sky.Intelligence also has to be in the same way, childlike. Jesus is right when he says, “Unless you are born again, you will not see the Kingdom of God.” What he calls “God” I call “existence.” But the statement is true. “Born again,” means becoming a child again.But when a mature person becomes a child again, there is a difference between him and the ordinary child. The ordinary child is innocent because he is ignorant, and the reborn innocence is the greatest value in life because it is not ignorance, it is pure intelligence. So don’t be afraid of intelligence; be afraid of intelligence only if it is against innocence.I know Avirbhava: she is innocent. That’s why she must have felt terrible being called intelligent. To her, it must have appeared that she is being called cunning, crafty, clever. And her feeling is right.But don’t be against intelligence if it is in tune with your innocence. Innocence alone becomes ignorance. Intelligence alone becomes cunningness. Together they are neither ignorance nor cunningness, but simply a receptivity, an openness, a heart which is capable of wondering at the smallest things in life.To me, the man who knows the feeling of wonder is the only religious man. It is through his wonder that he comes to know that existence is not just matter, it cannot be. It is not a logical conclusion for him, not a belief for him, but a real experience. Such a beautiful experience, so mysterious, so unfathomable, indicates tremendous intelligence in him.Existence is not cunning. It is very simple, it is innocent.If you can keep these two qualities together, you need nothing else. They will lead you to the ultimate goal of self-realization.Osho,It seems to me that human beings feel that just to be themselves is not enough. Why do most people have such a compulsion to reach for power and prestige and so on, rather than just being simple human beings?It is a complicated question. It has two sides and both have to be understood. First: you have never been accepted by your parents, teachers, neighbors, society, as you are. Everybody is trying to improve upon you, to make you better. Everybody is pointing at the flaws, at the mistakes, at the errors, at the weaknesses, at the frailties, which every human being is prone to. Nobody emphasizes your beauty, nobody emphasizes your intelligence, nobody emphasizes your grandeur.Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence. On the contrary, everyone is grumpy, complaining. Naturally, if everything surrounding your life from the very beginning goes on pointing out to you that you are not what you should be, goes on giving you great ideals that you have to follow and you have to become, your isness is never praised. What is praised is your future: if you can become someone respectable, powerful, rich, intellectual, famous in some way, not just a nobody.Constant conditioning against you has created the idea in you, “I am not enough as I am, something is missing. And I have to be somewhere else – not here. This is not the place I am supposed to be, but somewhere higher, more powerful, more dominant, more respected, more well-known.”This is half the story – which is ugly, which should not be the case. This can simply be removed if people are a little bit more intelligent about how to be mothers, how to be fathers, how to be teachers.You are not to spoil the child. You have to help the child grow his self-respect, his acceptance of himself. On the contrary, you are being a hindrance to growth. This is the ugly part, but it is the simple part. It can be removed because it is so simple and logical to see that you are not responsible for what you are, that this is the way nature has made you. Now, unnecessarily weeping over spilled milk is sheer stupidity.But the second part is tremendously important. Even if all this conditioning is removed: if you are deprogrammed, all these ideas are taken out of your mind, you will still feel you are not enough, but that will be a totally different experience. The words will be the same, but the experience will be different.You are not enough because you can be more. It will no longer be a question of becoming famous, respectable, powerful, rich. That will not be your concern at all. Your concern will be that your being is only a seed. At birth, you are not born as a tree, you are born only as a seed, and you have to grow to the point where you come to a flowering. That flowering will be your contentment, your fulfillment.This flowering has nothing to do with power, nothing to do with money, nothing to do with politics. It is something absolutely to do with you: it is an individual progress. And for this, the other conditioning is a hindrance, it is a distraction, it is a misuse of a natural longing for growth.Every child is born to grow and to become a fully fledged human being: with love, with compassion, with silence. He has to become a celebration unto himself. It is not a question of competition, it is not even a question of comparison. But the first ugly conditioning distracts you because the urge to grow, the urge to become more, the urge to expand, is being used by the society, by those with vested interests. They divert it. They fill your mind so you think that this urge is to have more money, this urge means to be at the top in every way: in education, in politics. Wherever you are, you have to be at the top; less than that and you will feel you are not doing well, you will feel a deep inferiority complex.This whole conditioning produces an inferiority complex because it wants you to become superior, superior over others. It teaches you competition, comparison; it teaches you violence, fight. It teaches you that means don’t matter, what matters is the end, success is the goal. And this can be easily done because you are already born with an urge to grow, with an urge to be somewhere else.A seed has to travel far to become flowers. It is a pilgrimage. The urge is beautiful; it is given by nature itself. But up to now the society has been very cunning: it turns, deviates, diverts your natural instincts into a social utility. These are the two sides that are giving you the feeling that wherever you are, something is missing: you have to gain something, achieve something, become an achiever, a climber.Now, your intelligence is needed to make it clear what your natural urge is, and what social conditioning is. Cut out the social conditioning – it is all crap – so that nature remains pure, unpolluted. Nature is always individualistic.You will grow and you will come to blossom. You may have roseflowers, somebody else may grow and they will have marigolds. You are not superior because you have roseflowers; he is not inferior because he has marigolds. The point is that you both have come to a flowering and that flowering gives a deep contentment. All frustration, all tension disappears; a profound peace prevails over you, the peace that passes understanding. But first you have to cut the social crap completely; otherwise it will go on distracting you.You have to be rich but not wealthy. Richness is something else. A beggar can be rich and an emperor poor. Richness is a quality of being.Alexander the Great met Diogenes, who was a naked beggar with only a lamp – that was his only possession. He kept his lamp lit even in the day. He was obviously behaving in a strange way; even an Alexander had to ask him, “Why are you keeping this lamp lit in the day?”He raised his lamp, looked at Alexander’s face and said, “I am looking for the real man, day and night, and I don’t find him.”Alexander was shocked that a naked beggar should say such a thing to him, the world conqueror. But he could see that Diogenes was so beautiful in his nudity: his eyes were so silent, his face was so peaceful, his words had such an authority. His presence was so cool and calm and soothing that although Alexander felt insulted, he could not retaliate. The presence of the man was so much that Alexander himself looked a beggar beside him. In his diary he wrote, “For the first time I felt that richness is something other than having money. I have seen a rich man.”Richness is your authenticity, sincerity; your truth, your love, your creativity, your sensitivity, your meditativeness. This is your real wealth.Society has moved your head towards mundane things and you have completely forgotten that your head has been moved.I remember, it actually happened…In India, a man was riding on a motorcycle. It was very cold, so he put his coat on back to front because his chest was feeling cold and the wind was hitting him. From the other end of the road, a sardar – the sardars are simple – was also coming on his motorbike. He could not believe his eyes because he thought, “This man has got his head on back to front!”He became so afraid that, as he came close, he crashed his motorbike into the poor man. The man fell on the ground, almost unconscious. The sardar looked closely and said, “My God, what has happened to him? The city is far away, the hospital is far away, but something has to be done.”In India, the sardars are the strongest people. The poor man was unconscious, so he forced his head around and put it right according to the coat. At the same time, a police car arrived and the policemen asked, “What is happening?”He said, “You have come at the right time. Look at this man – he has fallen from his motorbike.”The policeman asked, “Is he alive or dead?”The sardar said, “He used to be alive when his head was in the wrong position. When I turned his head to the right position, he stopped breathing.”The policemen said, “You were interested only in the head? You did not see that the coat is wrong, not the head!”The sardar said, “We are poor and simple people. I have never seen anybody wearing a coat with the buttons at the back. I thought an accident had happened. He was breathing, although he was unconscious. When I turned his head… It was difficult, but when I want to do something, I do it. I did it; I turned his head until it was exactly right, until it fit with his coat. But then he stopped breathing. A strange fellow!”Your head, your mind, has been turned in many ways by many people according to their ideas of how you should be. There were no bad intentions. Your parents loved you, your teachers loved you; your society wants you to be somebody. Their intentions were good, but their understanding was very short. They forgot that you cannot manage to make a marigold bush into roseflowers, or vice-versa.All that you can do is to help the roses to grow bigger, more colorful, more fragrant. You can give all the chemicals that are needed to transform the color and the fragrance: the manure that is needed, the right soil, the right watering at the right times; but you cannot make a rosebush produce lotuses.If you start giving the idea to the rosebush, “You have to become lotus flowers” – and of course the lotus flowers are beautiful and big – you are giving the wrong conditioning, which will help only in that this bush will never be able to produce lotuses. Its whole energy will be directed to the wrong path so it will not even produce roses – from where will it get the energy to produce roses? And when there are no lotuses, no roses, of course this poor bush will feel continuously empty, frustrated, barren, unworthy.This is what is happening to human beings. With good intentions, people are turning your mind. In a better society, with more understanding people, nobody will change you. Everybody will help you to be yourself – and to be oneself is the richest thing in the world. To be oneself gives you all that you need to feel fulfilled, all that can make your life meaningful, significant. Just be yourself and grow according to your nature; it will bring the fulfillment of your destiny.So the urge is not bad, but it has been moved towards the wrong objects. You have to be aware not to be manipulated by anybody, howsoever good their intentions are. You have to save yourself from so many well-intentioned people, do-gooders, who are constantly advising you to be this, be that. Listen to them and thank them, they don’t mean any harm, but harm is what happens.Just listen to your heart – that is your only teacher. In the real journey of life, your own intuition is your only teacher.Have you looked at the word intuition? It is the same as tuition. Tuition is given by teachers, from outside; intuition is given by your own nature, from inside. You have your guide within you. With just a little courage, you will never feel that you are unworthy. You may not become the president of a country, you may not become a prime minister, you may not become Henry Ford, but there is no need. You may become a beautiful singer, you may become a beautiful painter. It does not matter what you do – you may become a great shoemaker…When Abraham Lincoln became the president of America, his father was a shoemaker. The whole senate was feeling a little embarrassed that a shoemaker’s son should preside over the richest people, the upper-class people who believe they are superior because they have more money, because they belong to a long-standing famous family. The whole senate was in a way embarrassed, angry, irritated: nobody was happy that Lincoln had become the president.One man, who was very arrogant, bourgeois, stood up before Lincoln gave his maiden address to the senate and said, “Mr. Lincoln, before you start I would like you to remember that you are a shoemaker’s son.” And the whole senate laughed. They wanted to humiliate Lincoln; they could not defeat him, but they could humiliate him. But it is difficult to humiliate a man like Lincoln.He said to the man, “I am tremendously grateful that you reminded me of my father, who is dead. I will always remember your advice. I know that I can never be as great president as my father was a shoemaker.” There was pin-drop silence. The way Lincoln had taken it… He said to the man, “As far as I know, my father used to make shoes for your family too. If your shoes are pinching, or there is a problem – although I am not a great shoemaker, I have learned the art from my father from my very childhood – I can correct it.” And he said the same to everybody in the senate, “If my father has made your shoes, and they need any correction, any improvement, I am always available – although one thing is certain, I cannot be that great. His touch was golden.” And tears came to his eyes in memory of his great father.It does not matter: you may be a third-class president, you may be a first-class shoemaker. What fulfills is that you are enjoying what you are doing: that you are putting all your energies into it; that you don’t want to be anybody else; that this is what you want to be; that you agree with nature that the part given to you to play in this drama is the right part and you are not ready to change it even with a president or an emperor. This is real richness. This is real power.If everybody grows to be himself, you will find the whole earth full of powerful people of tremendous strength, intelligence, understanding, and a fulfillment, a joy that they have come home.Osho,For a few moments the other morning, while watching you, I saw that nobody was there. I saw the emptiness, the hollow bamboo. Why did I find this spooky and awesome when you have been speaking of the beauty of emptiness for years?It is because from your very childhood you have been told that the goal is not emptiness, but fullness. Emptiness symbolizes the beggar’s bowl. In the West particularly, the word emptiness never achieved a positive meaning. In the East the case is different.We have two words for emptiness. One, which will translate the English word emptiness, is riktata. It simply means absence of something. The other is shunyata, for which there is no equivalent in the Western languages because that kind of experience has not happened in the West.Shunyata is emptiness from one side and fullness from another side. For example, this room is full of people now, furniture, things. We can empty it: all the people can leave the room, all the furniture can be removed. Then somebody can come and see and can say, “The room is empty.” He is just seeing one side of the phenomenon. What he is saying is that the things that were in the room are not there. But he is forgetting that now the room is full of roominess. The room has more space now than it had before. Before it was cluttered, its space was cut up into pieces: furniture, people, things. Now it is clean, now it is pure. Now it is itself, full of itself. That is the meaning of shunyata in the East: the second side, which has been overlooked in the West.So the Western mind has a certain antagonism about emptiness because it knows only its negative aspect. It does not know its positive side. That’s why it looks spooky, fearsome. And moreover, when I am sitting here talking to you and suddenly you become aware that there is nobody – the chair is empty – it becomes spookier. You start feeling as if you are seeing something which is not the case; or, if this is the case, then just a moment before you were seeing a person when that person was not real, ghostly.You have to look deeply into the phenomenon of the enlightened person. He is and he is not – both together. He is because his body is there; he is not because his ego is no longer there. All the furniture of the mind has been removed; now it is really a hollow bamboo. If the hollow bamboo is functioning as a flute, then too it does not become anything other than a hollow bamboo. And the experience becomes even more mysterious because the hollow bamboo flute is creating music.The Western mind has been trained to think that nothing can come out of nothing. The Eastern mind has been trained to see that everything comes out of nothing. And modern physics agrees with the mystics of the East.It is very surprising that modern Western physics goes against all Western religions and agrees with all the Eastern mystics. The same experience… The hollow bamboo is not giving you music of its own, somebody else – perhaps existence itself, perhaps a strong wind passing through the hollow bamboo – is creating music. But the music is coming in from one side and is going out from the other side; the flute remains hollow.The West is so interested in things being solid, steel-solid. It is not a coincidence that it creates men like Stalin. The word stalin in Russian means man of steel. It was not his name; it was given to him because he was so much like solid steel – there was no hollowness in him. Hollowness is condemned. When you want to condemn somebody you say, “He is just hollow.”But in the East it is a totally different thing. The greatest mystics – Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Bodhidharma – all call themselves hollow bamboos. They have disappeared as an ego. There is no one who can say, “I am” and yet the whole structure is there. Inside is pure space. That pure space is your divineness, your godliness; that pure space is what, on the outside is pure sky. The sky only appears to be, it does not exist. If you go in search of sky, you will not find it anywhere; it is only an appearance.The enlightened man has an appearance like the sky, but if you get in tune with him, sometimes you will find that he is not. That can make you feel spooky, afraid; and that’s what must have happened.You got in tune with me. In spite of yourself, once in a while you will get in tune with me. You may forget yourself once in a while and you will get in tune with me because only if you forget your ego can there be a meeting. Otherwise there cannot be any meeting. And in that meeting, you will find that the chair is empty. It may be just a glimpse for a moment, but really you have seen something far more real than anything else that you have ever seen. You have looked inside the hollow bamboo and seen the miracle of the music coming out of it.You know I have prohibited Milarepa from using my chairs because who knows? – I may be sitting there!Osho,There is an exotic flower growing in Uruguay – a flower which originated in the East and has spread its seeds all over the entire world.Over the years, many have been drawn to the flower because of its extraordinary beauty. Some have enjoyed that beauty, but fleetingly, and have gone on their way. Others have seen its loveliness and have been drawn even closer, for its fragrance is like none other. Its perfume has become part of their very blood, and they now have no other world except that which has sprung up around the flower.The flower hints of even greater treasures that it holds – of greater depth, not readily available to the curious, the cautious, the greedy, the aggressive. And those who linger by its side begin to perceive, as they find eyes, what the flower embodies.Osho, I delight so much in this delicate game of question and answer, this gentle drawing out of all that you have to share.Yes, you are right, this is a game of questions and answers. They are simply an excuse so that you can be with me. You are so accustomed to words that without words you cannot find out what you are doing here. You feel a little crazy. But with words, everything feels right.I would have preferred to sit silently with you, but the trouble is, if I sit silently, your mind goes yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak. I can even hear the sound – so many wheels moving. So I decided this way it is better.I use words. Listening to my words you stop thinking. And in those moments when there is no thinking, much transpires, much that cannot be said but can only be understood; much which no language is capable of expressing. But the very presence of a man who knows starts stirring your heart, changing your being.The West does not know, is unacquainted with many things. For example, it has nothing to compare with what in the East is called “satsang.” To a Western mind, it will look absolutely absurd. Satsang simply means sitting with the master, doing nothing; nobody speaks and nobody thinks either. Any observer is bound to be puzzled.When for the first time, P. D. Ouspensky was allowed to be brought to George Gurdjieff… One of Gurdjieff’s inner circle of disciples had been trying for months, saying that he wanted to bring a friend. Finally, he was given permission. On a cold night in Russia – the snow was falling – Ouspensky came, with great excitement, thousands of questions and words passing through his mind. He was a world-famous man, one of the most significant mathematicians of his time. And as far as writing is concerned, I don’t see anybody comparable to him; he writes magically. His books were already translated into many languages. And nobody knew Gurdjieff; he had just a small group of twenty people. Ouspensky was thinking that this was similar to how he had been introduced into other societies, clubs, meetings; but there was something totally different.By dim candlelight, Gurdjieff was sitting looking at the floor and twenty people around him were sitting in the same posture, looking at the floor. The two joined in and Ouspensky – seeing what they are doing –was neither introduced, nor anything else was done. The man who had brought him simply sat in the posture and started looking at the floor.Ouspensky, thinking that perhaps this was the way, also sat in the same posture and started looking at the floor. But whatever he did, his mind was working: “What am I doing here? He has brought me to introduce me to George Gurdjieff. It seems that this is the fellow, it seems, who is sitting in the middle, but he has not even looked at me. And what are they searching for on the floor?” There is nothing – a clean floor. And all twenty were just sitting!Minutes passed and the minutes seemed like hours. A silent night, just the flickering light of a small candle, and the sound of the snow falling outside… And those people went on sitting. Half an hour passed and his mind was running like mad: “What is happening and what am I doing here?”At that moment, Gurdjieff looked at him and said, “Don’t be worried. Soon you will be sitting here with these people in the same way as them, without disturbance. They have learned how to sit with a master – to sit in such a way that the consciousnesses start merging and melting into each other. Twenty-one people are not sitting here, just twenty-one bodies and one soul, and no thought. But it will take time for you. Forgive me for making you wait for half an hour; it must have seemed to you as if days have passed.“Now take this paper and go to the other room. On one side, write what you know; on the other side, write what you do not know. And remember that whatever you write down as knowing, we will never discuss; that is finished. You know it and it is none of my business to interfere in it. What you do not know will be the only part that I will teach you.”With trembling hands… For the first time, Ouspensky became aware of thinking about what he knew. He had written about God and he had written about heaven and hell, and he had written about the soul and the transmigration of the soul – but did he know?He went into the other room and sat there with the paper and pencil. As he checked in his mind what he knew, what he did not know… For the first time in his whole life, he checked it; otherwise nobody bothers about what one knows, what one does not know. After a few minutes, he came out with a blank paper and said, “I do not know anything. You will have to teach me everything.”Gurdjieff said, “But you have written so many books. I have seen your books and I did not think that a man who knows nothing could have written so well.”Ouspensky said, “Forgive me. I am not acquainted with the way you work, but within a few minutes you have made me aware of my utter ignorance. And I want to begin from scratch. Forgive me for those books. They were certainly written in my sleep because now I can see that I don’t know anything about God. I have read about God, but that is not knowing. I want to know just one thing: what is happening here?”Gurdjieff said, “This is a way of creating hollow bamboos. All these people are waiting here to become empty. When they become empty, that is their entrance to the school. This is just outside the school, the school is inside. When they become empty, when I am satisfied that they are empty, they will be taken in. We are not here to teach you anything. We are here to help you to know. We will create situations in which you yourself come to know.”Just to be with the master… But for the West, it is difficult, hence I speak to you. These questions and answers are really just a game to help you to get rid of words, thoughts. Slowly, slowly, you are finding it more and more difficult to ask.Just last night, Maneesha was worried, “If questions are finished and you start leaving because there is no question, I will shout ‘Osho, I have found a question. Wait!’” No, I will not leave. I am waiting for that moment when no question is left within you; then my real work will begin. Right now, we are just sitting outside the school. Once you are silent, utterly silent, then there is no need to ask anything; there is nothing to ask, there is nothing to answer.Silence is the question. Silence is the answer. Silence is the ultimate truth.In silence, we meet existence; words, languages, all create barriers. To be silent means to be a hollow bamboo. And the miracle is, the moment you are a hollow bamboo, a music descends through you which is not your own. It comes through you, it belongs to the whole. Its beauty is tremendous, its ecstasy immeasurable.These meetings are just a preparation for that music to descend in you. But you can make a flute only of a hollow bamboo. If you are full of your thoughts and ego and philosophy, religion, theology and politics – all kinds of rubbish – then that music is not for you.To me, that music is the ultimate experience, the last benediction, the highest flowering of your consciousness.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In Homer's great epic stories, the Iliad and the Odyssey, he describes Ulysses' voyage homeward when his ship sails near the island of the lotus-eaters. The siren's song wafts across the ocean, hypnotizing the sailors and causing them to steer off their course towards the sensuous sound.Ulysses' efforts to keep the ship on course were of no avail. Sailors leapt off the ship and madly rushed to drink the lotus elixir poured down their throats by the most beautiful women imaginable. Soon the anesthetic and hypnotic nectar dulled their senses, glazed over their eyes, and they fell into a sensuous, eternal trance.Ulysses tried to stop the melee, and himself barely resisted the beautiful women lotus-eaters. Badly shaken, he managed to escape to continue on his arduous journey home. He made it; but most of his crew didn't.Osho, will you speak about the significance of this story to the seeker? Is there a siren's song of sannyas?The story is almost factual; it is a parable. On the way to truth one comes across many spaces which can stop the seeker because the joy, the pleasure, is really hallucination. One has to be continuously aware of beautiful experiences on the way, because no experience is of the truth.Truth is not an experience.Truth is when all experiences have passed away. It is pure isness.There are moments in meditation when one feels as if one has arrived – now there is no further to go. It is so fulfilling and one has never experienced anything like this before. It is inconceivable that things can be better than this, that there can be more pleasant, more blissful experiences.One of the most famous books, and one of the first ones that appeared in the West on Zen, was Christmas Humphreys’ Zen Buddhism. He really wanted to give it the title Go On. He mentions it in the introduction, but it didn’t feel very appealing, Go On, so he changed the title. But Go On was more appropriate.Gautam Buddha’s constant use of it makes it emphatically significant. Whenever somebody would come to Gautam Buddha and would describe his experience of his meditation – how beautiful it is, how joyous he is feeling, how blissful he is – in the end Gautam Buddha would say, “Go on, don’t be stuck by it; there is much more ahead.”And this was a constant thing, whatever you would bring to him he would say, “Go on. Don’t stop. I know you want to stop because you cannot conceive what more there can be, but I know there is much more.” And one day would come when the disciple will approach Gautam Buddha, touch the master’s feet, sit silently by his side. And Buddha would ask, “How is the experience going?”And he would start laughing and he would say, “You pushed me and pushed me and pushed me. Now there is no experience at all, just a pure isness. The beauty of it, the benediction of it, is qualitatively different.“You cannot say ten thousand times more, that will not be right; no quantity will be able to describe it. It is qualitatively different, and I have come just to thank you for your patience – I went on coming with experiences, and you went on sending me back with only the same one sentence, ‘Go on. Don’t stop.’”Because of Gautam Buddha’s “Go on,” Christmas Humphreys wanted to use it as the title to his book, but he finally changed it, thinking that it would not appeal in the market. And perhaps he was right; “Go On” seems to be very flat for a book title.This parable, Homer’s story, has not been understood in the West the way it has to be understood. It is the story of spiritual growth. You will come many times to stages which give you the feeling that the time has come to stop – because the experience is so much that it is beyond your comprehension that there can be anything more.So the mind which has always been telling you, “More, more” – for everything was asking for more – suddenly stops. It cannot comprehend there is more. And that is the point when the master wants you to go on: “Don’t be addicted to any experience, howsoever beautiful, don’t become a lotus-eater; otherwise you will be unconscious – blissfully unconscious, blissfully asleep.” But you had not started the journey for this. You were going to reach yourself, fully awake.The parable is simple if understood in the right way, but the parable must have reached Homer from the East. That’s why in the West there is no explanation for it: it is just a story, a beautiful story.It is an actual existential, experiential factuality of human growth towards the ultimate meaning of life.So remember only one thing: Go on, until there is nowhere to go, until there is no one to go, until you have exhausted everything – the road, the goal, the traveler, all have disappeared – and there is just pure silence of isness.Osho,When we sleep, the unconscious is experienced as dreams. During dreamless sleep, why does the unconscious stop expressing itself? It seems there must be a lot of repressed material that needs expression. Does dreaming, then, act like a safety valve, allowing just enough material to be expressed so that some steam is let off and the pressure cooker of the unconscious does not completely explode?No, it is not like that. According to the Eastern psychology, there are four stages of mind; not just two, as it is according to the Western philosophy – conscious mind, unconscious mind. In the context of the Western division between conscious and unconscious, your question is very relevant.But the truth is that mind has four states: the waking state, which is comparable to the conscious mind; the sleeping state with dreams, which is parallel to the unconscious mind; third, the dreamless sleep which the West has yet to find; and the fourth, the real waking state.The first is only the so-called waking state, and the fourth is real awakening. The second is sleep with dreams, but sleep with dreams is a disturbed state. In an eight-hour night, six hours you are dreaming and for only two hours are there no more dreams. Those two hours belong to the third state, which is not yet recognized in the Western psychology; it has not come across it yet.Those two hours are not in one solid block, but a few minutes here, a few minutes there; in total in the whole night of eight hours sleep, you have two hours of the third state – which is dreamless sleep, which is really the rejuvenation, revitalization.That’s why in this state dreams stop, there are no dreams because there is no suppression. Suppression only goes up to the second, the unconscious state, so the dreams remain only in the unconscious state. The third is deeper than the unconscious; it is unconscious, but far deeper, so that even a dream is not possible.And these two hours are the most valuable because there is no disturbance at all. The body functions absolutely naturally. Everything is relaxed, suspended. Time disappears. You are as if you are dead.And it is also beautiful; it gives you rest. If you miss it, in the morning you will feel you have been sleeping – but you get up more tired than you had gone to bed, as if sleep itself has been tiring. Because dreams are just like worries, pictorial worries, pictorial tensions.And this third is also important because just below it, deeper than it, is the real awakening.This very morning I was saying to you that before the morning the night gets very dark. Don’t be worried about the darkness. The darker the night gets, the closer the morning is.The third state is the darkest, the most unconscious.If you are a meditator, then you can go from this third stage to the fourth. If you are not a meditator, then from the third you come back to the second, from the second back to the first, and your daily routine goes on. And the fourth just remains there in the underground, which is your basic reality.The meditator starts watching with the first stage, the so-called waking stage. And then slowly he starts watching the second stage – when there are dreams he is also there watching. Now he is not a part of the dreams, he is standing alone and the dreams are on the screen.As he becomes more skillful in watching, he can slip even deeper, to where there is all darkness, nothing to watch except darkness, but it is tremendously peaceful, immensely silent, its depth is unfathomable. And the watcher goes on watching it: it goes on becoming darker and darker, thicker and thicker.This has been called by the mystics “the dark night of the soul.”If one becomes afraid – because one has never seen such darkness, one has never seen such deafening silence, one has never entered into such an unknown, unfathomable space – one can go back to the second or to the first.But if one goes on, remembering one thing, that when the night is the darkest, the morning is very close…. These are the moments when the master is helpful; otherwise it will be very difficult – it is only for a very few rare courageous people to enter into such a cave. One knows not whether it ends anywhere or not; you cannot see any end to it, it is endless.But if the master is there and he says, “There is nothing to be afraid of. This is one of the most restful, most nourishing life-giving forces. You should go without any fear. It is your home.”And if you can go without any fear, soon suddenly you see on the horizon the sun rising – and not just one sun. According to the mystics of all the ages, it is as if thousands of suns are rising all over the horizon; the light is so much one cannot believe that one was carrying so much light within oneself under these dark layers.So when the dreams stop, it is not that the repression is working, that only a little steam is allowed to go off. No. You are moving into a third stage which is more necessary – the second is only a passage. But we are so much full of rubbish that six hours are wasted in the second stage just on the bridge, moving here and there, not landing on the other side.And even when we land we remain there only for two hours, and that, too, not in one block – just a few minutes here, a few minutes there, and again we are back on the bridge shuttling between dreams.As your meditation grows deeper, the second space disappears because dreaming stops. As your thinking stops in meditation, in sleep your dreaming stops.Dreaming is like thinking; the difference is that thinking is linguistic and dreaming is pictorial. Dreaming is like Chinese, Japanese, the ancient languages; and thinking is like more contemporary languages. But both are the same.Once you are able, by watching, to stop thinking, you will be able to stop dreaming; then the second stage disappears. From the first stage you enter into the third directly.And because thinking and dreaming have stopped, your third stage will not last long either, because your first stage is becoming closer and closer to the fourth, it is becoming thoughtless awareness.So finally, the second disappears first, then the third disappears, and then the first changes its character totally and becomes one with the fourth. And only the one stage remains, the fourth.In the East we have called it turiya. Turiya simply means “the fourth.” It is a number; it is not a name. We have given names for the other three. First is jagruti, “so-called awakening.” Second is sopan, “dream.” Third is sushupti, dreamless sleep.” But for the fourth the East has not given any name, it is a nameless reality because you can never get rid of it.All those three were not part of your nature, they were imposed layers; but the fourth you bring with your birth, and when you die you take the fourth with you. The fourth is you. Those three were three rings of experiences surrounding you – the fourth is the center.It is a different way of saying the same thing that reaching the fourth you become enlightened, you become the awakened one.Osho,You said that the master is like the sky; he appears to be, but he is not.I think I am, therefore I am.Is this the only difference between enlightenment and unenlightenment?It is one of the most significant differences. In the Western philosophy there are few names which are more important than the name of Descartes. Descartes’ whole philosophy is based on the single statement, “I think, therefore I am.”But it is obviously very childish because you are not thinking constantly, still you are; you are not thinking while you are asleep, still you are; you may be in a coma, you are not thinking, still you are.“I think I am, therefore I am.” Thinking seems to be the most significant part. It is a conclusion of thinking that “I am,” but when you are not thinking, what happens?In meditation there will be no thinking. And those who have meditated for thousands of years, their experience has to be compared. They say, “When thinking ceases, then I am;” just the opposite of Descartes – because thinking is a disturbance. And when you are engaged with thoughts, you are engaged with something objective, and you are not an object.When all thoughts have disappeared and you are sitting silently doing nothing, the East says, “For the first time you know you are – because now there is no object to distract your consciousness. Your whole consciousness is settled at the center, in the heart.”And it is not a conclusion; it is not “therefore…” What Descartes is saying is “my existence is a logical conclusion: I think, therefore I am.” It is not an existential experience, it is a logical conclusion. The East says, “When there is no thought, you experience that you are.” There is no question of “therefore…”Descartes can be refuted because it is only a logical conclusion. It is so simple to refute him, and he has become the father figure of Western philosophy! It is so simple to refute him because when you are asleep, you are – and you are not thinking. Even when you are just going for a walk, you are not thinking.If Descartes is right, then a person will be in a continuous trouble; he will have to think continuously, “I am thinking,” to keep himself alive. The moment he forgets thinking, he is finished.It would be rather more mature to say, “I am, therefore I think. I am, therefore I dream. I am, therefore I meditate.” Then every possibility is open. Then you can do many things, everything: “I am, therefore I am silent.”I can be simply in my amness, doing nothing. There is no need for anything to prove it; my existence is self-evident. That’s what Descartes is missing. He’s trying to prove one’s self.It reminds me of a Sufi story I have told many times to you, but those stories are such that they have so many aspects, so many implications.Mulla Nasruddin is sitting in the coffee house and bragging as ever about everything – that there is nobody as generous as he is.Somebody said, “Mulla, we go on tolerating your bragging about everything, but about this generosity – we have never seen any proof of it. For years we are friends. You have been drinking coffee, and you have never even paid the bill, other friends are paying. We have invited you many times to our houses for dinner; you have never invited us even once. Even a miser would have thought of it. And still you have some nerve: ‘I am the most generous man in this city.’”He said, “Then come on, all of you, the whole coffee house – everybody is coming for dinner at my house. Close the coffee house. The owner, the servants, everybody is coming.”A procession of about fifty or sixty people went towards Mulla Nasruddin’s house. And he was just ahead, going along with strong willpower. And as he was coming close to home, he started staggering a little. He hesitated.Just in front of the house he said to the people, “Listen, please. You are all married and you know…I have also got a wife. In the morning she sent me to purchase vegetables, and I have not returned home. The whole day I have been gossiping here and there. I have eaten with friends, and then I was in the coffee house with you.“I had completely forgotten about the vegetables. And she must be angry. And you know I am a simple man. And now seeing that sixty persons are invited for dinner – and in the house, I tell you truly, there is nothing. So you just wait. First let me go in, so that I can console her. And then I will take you in. Just a few minutes…be kind.”They said, “We understand wives. You go in. It is perfectly right. In front of sixty people, getting insulted is not good. You go alone and first settle with your wife. We are waiting.”He closed the door, went in, and told the wife, “The whole coffee house has come, they were so insistent, for dinner. And you know that we are poor people. And I have not even brought the necessary things that you had asked, because I had no money. How can you manage? So I have thought of a way. You simply go and ask them, ‘Why are you waiting here? What are you doing here?’ And don’t be afraid.”The wife said, “But they will say that you have invited them for dinner.”He said, “You forget about it. You simply say that I am not in the house.”The wife said, “But they have seen you – they have come with you, and they have seen you enter in the house. They are sitting on the steps, and you entered the house and closed the doors.”Mulla Nasruddin said, “You don’t be worried. You just do what I am saying. You simply insist that I am not in the house; since the morning nothing has been heard about me.”The wife said, “If that is the only way, I will go.” And she also had to agree; otherwise, from where to produce a dinner for sixty people? And she said, “I will see you later on. First I will go and finish with them.”She opened the door and asked really strongly, “What are you doing here? Who are you?”They said, “We are Mulla Nasruddin’s friends.”She said, “Whoever you are, your friend has not turned up at home the whole day. From the morning he has been missing. Go and find out where he is.”They said, “This is too much. He came with us. He told us to wait here, and went in just to make a settlement with you about the dinner.”She said, “Nobody has come in.”But they said, “We are not leaving like this, because that man goes on bragging about everything, and this is too much. We had to close the coffee house. He had brought us here. And now this is insulting. We will go inside the house and search for him.” The poor woman could not think what to do, because they were too many, and she could not prevent sixty people.Mulla Nasruddin was hiding upstairs, looking from a small window at what was happening there. And when he saw that “those idiots are coming in the house to search for me, and they are going to find me,” he opened the window and shouted, “Listen! He may have come with you, but he could have gone from the back door.” He himself is saying it! “And don’t you feel ashamed? – arguing with a poor woman whose husband has not come home since the morning? You should feel ashamed!“And it is simple logic. He may have entered through the door. You may be right. And who knows whether you are right or wrong? For argument’s sake, you may be right that he entered into the house, but there is a back door; he may have gone back out again. Find him.”Those sixty people looked at each other, “What kind of man is this? He himself is saying ‘I am not in the house.’”Descartes perhaps never came to know the Sufi story. He is also doing the same, saying the same thing. He is saying you have to prove that you are in the house. And he is trying to prove “I think, therefore I am.” “I am” is secondary; thinking is primary. Thinking is a proof.But he does not know that the whole East has been making the effort not to think. And thousands of people have succeeded in coming to the state where thinking disappears. And their experience is that when thinking disappears, only then you are. Before that it was illusory: You had not really tasted your existence; you had seen yourself as if in a mirror, a reflection.If you ask me, I will say: “I am, because there is no thinking. I am, only when there is no thinking.” Thinking is a barrier, not a proof.But the Western philosophy is a process of thinking, and the Eastern way is a process of getting free of thinking. They have moved in diametrically opposite directions.The West has produced great thinkers, but not a single buddha.And thinkers who are great – Immanuel Kant, Hegel, or Descartes – if you look at their lives, you will find them just like you – no peace, no silence, no compassion, no sensitivity, no awareness. Nothing of the essential has happened to them. They are great thinkers, but they are not great beings.In the East they have been trying to get rid of thinking, so that the being can have all the scope, the whole space.Gautam Buddha may not be a great thinker, but he is a great being.And who cares about thinking? It is like thinking about food – you are a great thinker about food – but you are sitting hungry. And somebody has eaten delicious food and does not think at all about food. Why should he think about it? The essential thing is not thinking about food, but eating food.These great philosophers have been thinking about love, but they have not loved; they have been thinking about peace, but they are as angry as anybody else, as violent as anybody else; they have been thinking about silence, but they don’t know any taste of it…they have had many thoughts about it.So one thing has to be remembered: Thinking about something is one thing; and to be that which you have been thinking about, is quite another. And that is the real thing: to be.So I would like you to remember – forget Descartes – never to make your existence secondary to any logical argument. It is self evident. It needs no proof, for or against. And it reveals itself totally when there are no thoughts, no emotions, no feelings – when the whole inner sky is absolutely empty of all the junk and furniture that you call thinking.In that silence, in that serenity, you become a shrine, you become holy.For the first time you know your godliness.Osho,Of all the wonderful, exciting, and beautiful experiences you have had in your life, there is one experience – the most glorious of all – you haven't had, and that is knowing what it's like sitting in your presence, watching you walk in the room, melting from your look, receiving your grace, coming to life hearing your words, drowning in your silence.Osho, we are the blessed ones.Please understand, I remain helpless in never having enough of you, since I know from my own authority you are everything.I love you.That’s certainly true. I have missed what you have got without any effort. Those who understand will feel they are blessed. Most will take it for granted; they are unfortunate.It is part of human nature that whatever you get without any effort on your part, you tend to forget all about it. You don’t feel any gratitude for it. This is one of the great miseries of the human mind.But you are awakening out of this misery and are feeling the blissfulness that only a disciple can feel. I have never been a disciple. That experience certainly I have missed.You have it, but remember that it will be more penetrating if you don’t take it for granted, if you continuously keep reminding yourself that out of the five billion people in the world, suddenly you have come close to a master – just stumbled upon, accidentally.If you feel grateful to existence for it, it will make the experience deeper, more valuable, immensely transforming. There is no need to do anything – if you can be in tune with the master, that is enough to be enlightened – just merging in his presence, just melting in his silence, just dropping the duality between you and him, just feeling oneness. And that feeling will take you to new dimensions of life. It will help you to transcend the small mind and will open up the whole sky with all the stars for you to explore.Osho,Your story about Buddha and the fly has always intrigued me.Do you have the choice still to be aware or not?No, I don’t have any choice any more. I am in a choiceless awareness. I don’t have to be aware. I am simply aware. Now it is just like my heartbeat or like my breathing. Even if I try not to be aware, it is not possible; the very effort will make me more aware.Awareness is not a quality, a characteristic; it is your whole being. When you become aware, there is no choice left to be otherwise.Osho,You mentioned a few days ago that the various experiences we have recounted to you about our childhood are actually techniques that have been used for centuries to learn a distance from the body.Were these developed as techniques because they were experiences that came naturally to man in his innocence and availability as a child? Or have we retained memories of these techniques from past lives?These techniques – and not only these, but all the techniques that have been developed – are based in human experiences.Many of the techniques are based in the innocent child and his experiences. You have to regain that innocence to make the experience possible.It is through centuries that people with keen insight into human affairs have been watching themselves and others, and finding methods. But all methods are based on certain experiences that naturally happen. But nobody takes care of them; on the contrary, the society tries to repress those experiences, because those experiences will certainly make the individual rebellious.For example, Jalaluddin Rumi became enlightened with a very strange method that he had remembered from his own childhood, whirling.All children like whirling because ordinarily your being and your body are fixed, settled. But when you start whirling and you go faster and faster, the body goes on whirling and at a certain speed your consciousness can’t keep pace with it. So your consciousness becomes a center of the cyclone: the body moves and the consciousness remains unmoving.All over the world small children do that, but parents are afraid they will fall, they may break a bone, get a fracture, they may have sickness, nausea. So they are stopped because their parents don’t have any idea, they never inquire of the child, “Why you are whirling and what you are getting?”Jalaluddin, from his very childhood, retained the capacity for whirling and enjoyed it immensely. And because people were preventing him, he would go into seclusion in the desert and whirl there. And the desert is the best place to whirl because even if you fall you don’t get hurt; you can go with as much speed as you want.He was not aware that he is experiencing something spiritual, but he was seeing changes happening. He was becoming a different person. He was not easily irritated, annoyed, humiliated, insulted. His intelligence was becoming sharper.And he was not behaving like other children, he was becoming a separate individual. He was not interested in their games. While they were playing, he was whirling somewhere far away in the desert. It was so blissful and so peaceful, but he was not aware that this is spiritual or that this is something to do with enlightenment. There is no way he will be able to describe it as spirituality.When he became a young man, many masters were interested in him – seeing his qualities. He was a rare individual. He was just on the verge of enlightenment, and he was not aware of it – he was not even a seeker after truth. Just one thing he was doing and that was whirling. That he continued.And one time he decided to whirl to the uttermost to see what happens. These beautiful experiences are happening – what happens if he goes on whirling as long as possible? He whirled for thirty-six hours non-stop, day and night. And when he fell, after thirty-six hours, he was a totally different man, radiating a new light.He made a tradition, which has remained for twelve hundred years, of the whirling dervishes. They have only one technique – they don’t have anything else. They don’t have any scripture, they have Rumi’s poems – he was a poet of a great caliber. They have Rumi’s poems and one technique, whirling. And just with one technique, many people in these twelve hundred years have reached to the ultimate. And it was found by Rumi – who was not even seeking anything.All the techniques of the world – I have looked into every technique possible, to see how it must have come. Because they are not inventions, they are based on some human experience which was already happening. It just had to be made more acute, more sharp, more methodological, more clean and more clear, so that the person is not doing it on any biological basis or physiological basis for some small gain, but was searching for the ultimate truth through it.All methods have happened that way.I have not come across a single method which is not based in human experience. It seems that nature provides you already with everything to transcend the ordinary mind and to reach to the super-conscious. But unfortunately we don’t use it, we don’t even understand it.But there have been people who have collected all the possibilities, made them clean, short, simple so everybody can use them.It will be really a great job. If I have time I would like to go into explaining every technique used throughout the world, from which human experience it has arisen.But one thing is certain, that there are no techniques for spiritual growth which can be artificially enforced on a man. Nature has already provided – you can purify it, make it better, make it more refined. But there is no way to make an artificial method work.With nature, no artificiality is going to help.And when nature itself is ready to help you, it is simply stupid to go for artificial methods.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It seems so impossible: so many countries have said “No” to you in the West. But even if the so-called democracies accepted you, what can be done about Russia and the other communist nations? Unless there is a great awakening there, it looks like the world is doomed.It is true that so many so-called democratic countries are not courageous enough even to give me a tourist visa. It is a great compliment. They have never given such a compliment to any other man in the whole of history.Their religion is twenty centuries old, so is their morality, so is their tradition; and they are afraid of a man who has no power, and who is coming just like a tourist – only for three weeks. Their paranoia is apparent.It seems they have made castles in the air. Even my presence will be enough to destroy those castles; otherwise, it is impossible – a tourist for three weeks cannot destroy a tradition which has been there for two thousand years, a morality they have been conditioning the people in for two thousand years. They have accepted defeat, and they have also shown that they are not democratic. They don’t value freedom of speech, respect for the individual. They don’t have any value that can be called “democratic.” They have simply shown their cowardice.But I am never pessimistic. One country or other is going to dare to show courage in spite of all the pressures, and once one democratic country allows me in – I am not much worried about the Soviet Union and other communist countries, for the simple reason that if I can raise the level of consciousness of any single, non-communist country, the Soviet Union is going to invite me and my people.It is sheer competition. It is not only a question of them having more nuclear weapons, it is also a question of them having a more solid, integrated individual. If any democratic country dares to let me work on its people, that will be enough to show to the Soviet countries that if these people are ready to drop two-thousand-year-old superstitions, it is not difficult for the Soviet Union. Its superstitions are not even two centuries old.If they can see it as a fact – today what they see in democratic countries is only fiction…talking about God, talking about the soul, but there is no evidence.I can produce as proof people so significantly different from ordinary people that the Soviet Union cannot lag behind; otherwise, even with all the nuclear weapons it will be defeated.The question is to make religion a fact.I started criticizing the Bible on many points; and now Christian theologians are having a conference in Europe – late, but it is better than never. Still cunning, still not mentioning my name, that I was the man who criticized all those things in the Bible – now they themselves are discussing how to save the holiness of the Bible and how to interpret the ugly facts that are there. At least they have come to the recognition that there are ugly facts. So either they have to be dropped or interpreted in such a way that the common masses can be befooled a little more.They are ready even to drop God if Christianity can be saved. They are ready to drop the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth if that can save Christianity. They are ready to drop the idea of Jesus’ resurrection if Christianity can be saved. And for two thousand years they have been insisting that without God, without the virgin birth, without resurrection, there is no Christianity; these are the distinct characteristics of Christianity.They will be happy simply to keep the name, even if everything is dropped. Nobody is concerned with God or the virgin birth or resurrection. You can interpret it in a way that it looks like parables…but up to now, for two thousand years consistently, these same people and their forefathers have been insisting that these are historical facts.If a two-thousand-year-old tradition can do that, it is not difficult, not impossible at all, for communism to drop just two things: the materialist attitude, and the by-product of it, that there is no soul in man. But somebody needs to prove it. If thousands of people meditate and spiritually become totally transformed, new human beings, the Soviet Union is not going to be the last….I am trying the democratic countries, but I have not forgotten the Soviet Union or the other communist countries. They will follow suit once they see that meditation can transform human beings and can give them new values, new awareness, new freshness. I will not knock on the doors of the Soviet Union. They will invite me and you to come to their land and change their inner being.And their tradition is just a hundred years old, not much of a tradition. And there is no problem in dropping it, in dropping two things – the idea that matter is all, and the idea that there is nothing spiritual in existence. They are in a much more simple situation than the Christians or the Hindus or the Mohammedans – they have a thousand and one things to drop. They have accumulated for centuries superstitions upon superstitions. The Soviet Union has only two superstitions.All that is needed is a country which is ready and courageous enough to allow me to experiment on a greater scale, so that I can show to the whole world that spirituality is not a fiction, that enlightenment is not an illusion.The evidence has to be proved in the individuality of human beings. Once it is proved, the Soviet Union is going to be the first to invite us – because it is a competition. They cannot lag behind any other country. It may be nuclear weapons or enlightenment, it does not matter; the question is of competition. In their mind the whole thing is competitive. And to me, that is a great hope. There is no need to be worried.We cannot approach them directly. They will be absolutely antagonistic, because their whole philosophical standpoint is against me.In countries whose whole philosophy is not against me…in fact, I can make philosophy more substantial, more alive, not just a dead past but a living present. If they are afraid, naturally the Soviet Union cannot open its doors to me. So I have kept the Soviet Union on the side.Once a country allows me to work, allows my people to come and transform the whole atmosphere – to bring peace and silence and tranquillity, love and compassion – the Soviet Union is not going to be so stupid as not to see it. And their conditioning is a very thin layer, it can be dropped.So there is no need to be worried about the Soviet Union.Osho,You spoke the other morning about how much importance we may attach to where we sit in relation to you during discourse.We seem to do this kind of thing, whatever the circumstances or the group of people we happen to find ourselves with. The compulsion to judge also seems symptomatic of a need to categorize people, to compare ourselves, and thus come to some definition of who we are.Would you talk about the difference between this avid and non-ending struggle to have some kind of identity – howsoever superficial and transitory – and the search that becomes spiritual, the quest to know “Who am I?”It is something very ancient in man. It must be a heritage from his animal ancestors. A position gives power, gives identity. In sitting in front it seems to you that you are more important; those who are sitting at the back are less important.But at least with me you have to drop this animal heritage. Be a human being. Rather than depending on the place, turn the wheel completely: wherever you sit, that place is important. Why make the place important, and yourself unimportant and dependent on the place? Have some self-respect – and self-respect has nothing to do with sitting in the front row. It has something to do with your inner understanding, that wherever you are, you are yourself, and you accept yourself. The place where you sit becomes more important just because you are sitting there.There is a story about Nanak, a great mystic, who founded the religion of Sikhism. He traveled far and wide. And he was more generous in his attitude; he allowed anyone who wanted, to be in his world. Even Mohammedans entered it, Hindus entered it; all kinds of people from different religions became part of it. The man had tremendous charisma.He went to the holy place of Mohammedans, the Kaaba. It is said that every Mohammedan at least once in his life should go to visit the Kaaba; otherwise he has missed something tremendously important. And even poor Mohammedans go on collecting money – they will starve, but they will collect money. They will sell their houses, their lands, and will go on a pilgrimage to the Kaaba. And they are given tremendous respect for it, those who go to the Kaaba.The pilgrimage is called haj, going to the source. It was at the Kaaba that Mohammed first proclaimed the basic elements of his religion. And the person who goes and comes back is given the title haji, which is just like holy.There was no need for Nanak to go to the Kaaba – he was not a Mohammedan. But he never considered himself as Hindu or confined to any religion. Millions of people go to the Kaaba, and Nanak thought it would be a good place to go, to see and meet millions of people.He went to the Kaaba. It was a long journey, and when they reached, it was getting dark, the sun had set, and they were so tired that he told his companion, Mardana…. That was a beautiful combination. The disciple, Mardana, was a great musician, a genius, and Nanak would sing – his teachings are all songs – and Mardana would play on his instruments. And the company of two had become famous. Mardana was Mohammedan. The master was Hindu, the disciple was Mohammedan, but there was such a meeting between the two that nobody was a Hindu and nobody was a Mohammedan.Nanak told Mardana, “First we should rest tonight. Tomorrow we will start moving amongst the people.”And as he was going to sleep, Mardana said, “Master, you are doing something wrong. You are lying with your feet towards the Kaaba. That is never done.”Nanak said, “But do you think Nanak comes every day to the Kaaba? That too is never done, will never be done again. So don’t be worried, just follow what I am doing.”Poor Mardana, he was a Mohammedan, he knew that this was absolutely wrong, but if the master was doing it…. He also slept putting his feet towards the Kaaba, just outside the Kaaba temple.Somebody saw them, informed the high priest, and the high priest came with guards. They woke up Nanak and Mardana and told Nanak, “We had heard that you are a holy man. What kind of holy man are you? You don’t understand a simple thing – that the Kaaba is the holiest place in the world – and you are lying with your feet towards the Kaaba.”Nanak said, “I was told by Mardana – he is my disciple – that it is the holiest place. But my difficulty is, wherever I put my feet I find the place holiest. It is not the place, it is my feet which makes every place so holy. And if you are skeptical, you can try; you can turn my feet wherever you want.”Up to this point I see that this is history; beyond this it is a metaphor – but significant, meaningful, completing what history cannot complete. The priest turned Nanak’s feet in every direction, and they were amazed that the Kaaba turned to exactly where Nanak’s feet were turned. They went all round turning him, and Mardana could not believe it. Nanak was laughing and saying, “Do your best, don’t leave out any place – because this is my problem: where should I keep my feet? Every place is holy, the whole existence is divine.”The priest touched the feet of Nanak and said, “Please forgive me. People have come here, but none was like you. We have never seen the Kaaba moving wherever someone’s feet are moved. Why did you come here?”Nanak said, “Just to show you that it is not the Kaaba that is holy. Unless your feet are holy, nothing is holy. Worshipping a stone you think you are worshipping something holy.”Wherever you are sitting, wherever you are, your being there should make the place important, not vice versa – not that you start thinking, “Which place is important?” Do you see my point? You are putting places above you. This is self-condemnation. You are not respectful towards yourself.And this is happening all over the world. Somebody becomes the president of a country, and thinks he has arrived. To be the president or the prime minister is just to reach to a certain place – you have not grown. Your growth would show that wherever you are, you have created the center.Become more appreciative of yourself, accept yourself.And at least with me you have to learn it absolutely – that nothing else matters. What matters is your self-respect. Why should you bother who is sitting in front? I don’t see any difference. Those who are sitting at the back, I am available to them as much as to those who are sitting in front. My presence is filling the whole room. I am giving myself equally to you all. Now it is up to you whether you receive me or not. If you get interested in trivia – where you are sitting, whether you are in the first row or in the second row or in the third row – then it is you who are closing yourself.Just open yourself and rejoice that you are here with me.The trivia should never be a concern. The significant part is that you are receptive to me. Give it a try. And the more receptive you are…you will be surprised that your body may be sitting at the back, you are in the front. Somebody’s body may be sitting in the front, and he is in the back. It will all depend on who is more receptive.And always think that the problem is yours. Don’t dump it on anybody else – that because of somebody else you have to sit in the second row.If you can’t even forget where you are sitting, how are you going to welcome me within you?Just be receptive, be available.And I am equally available to all.It does not matter at all where you are sitting.Osho,In a recent article by Stephen Jay Gould, he said, “Certainty is unattainable in science.”Osho, is modern man at last showing signs of coming of age?That Stephen Jay Gould is saying it is certainly a sign of maturity, and a few people are coming of age, but very few. But that is a good beginning. More will be following. Twenty-five centuries ago, the Indian mystic, Mahavira, said, “Nothing is certain. There is no such thing as certainty.” Because of this – he used a strange language – people were puzzled, because before every sentence and every statement he will put a word syat. Syat means “perhaps,” it is to avoid certainty; otherwise your minds are too willing to make things certain.If you asked him anything he would simply say, “perhaps.” He would leave you in uncertainty because perhaps does not mean yes and does not mean no. Perhaps exactly means po. The word po is the invention of a modern, contemporary logician.Looking at scientific researches, which are tending more and more towards perhaps…because what is certain this moment becomes uncertain the next moment, because life is a flux, a change. Except change, everything changes. You cannot be certain of anything. The cowards will be very afraid because they were clinging to things, thinking they are clinging to certain absolutes, ultimates.This logician has invented a word – because there is no word between yes and no. Both give certainty; one gives positive certainty, another gives negative certainty. He has invented a word po. Just the sound of po takes away all certainty. You start wondering, “What do you mean – yes or no?” and he says, “po” – neither yes nor no, or both yes and no together.Life is continuously moving, changing. It is a dialectic between yes and no, positive and negative, day and night, life and death.Mahavira, twenty-five centuries ago, had already used the word syat. If you asked him if there was a God, he would say, “Perhaps.” But is that an answer? Either God is or is not – that is our mind, how we have been trained. If you ask somebody, “Are you there, in the room?” and he says, “perhaps,” what you are going to make out of it?Mahavira saying “perhaps” is closer to reality – because the man’s body may be in the room, he may not be, his mind may be millions of miles away. How can he say yes? What about the mind? How can he say no? What about the body? He says “perhaps”; he leaves it up to you – that it is something that cannot be confined to positive or negative terms. Both have to be used together.In the beginning of this century scientists were very certain – in fact, that was one of the definitions of science; philosophy is all wishy-washy, religion is simply fiction, science is certainty. Two plus two is always equal to four. But this was in the beginning of this century, and in the previous century science had been very fanatic about certainty because it was only superficial, the work had not gone deep. Now it has gone deep, so deep that to understand it you will have to sharpen your intelligence.Bertrand Russell has written one of the most important books on mathematics, Principia Mathematica, and you can understand how complex the thing is. Two hundred and sixty-five pages are simply devoted to proving that two plus two are really four. Two hundred and sixty-five pages of a big book – which nobody reads, which is almost unreadable; it is only for mathematicians.Even Bertrand Russell alone could not write it, because he was not a mathematician – he was a philosopher, and he has philosophic ideas about mathematics – so he had to work in collaboration with one mathematician, Whitehead, who was also a philosopher, and could understand both philosophy and mathematics.Both worked together for years to write Principia Mathematica – which nobody reads. Two geniuses wasted years. And you can see the wastage: “two plus two is equal to four,” needs two hundred and sixty-five pages of intense logical argumentation. But the book was written at the beginning of this century. Now it is no longer relevant.They did hard work. You simply know that two plus two are four; they did hard work from all aspects to prove it. But now the new mathematicians say that two plus two are not four; sometimes they can be five and sometimes they can be three – it all depends.Their reasoning is very deep but very clear. Their reasoning is that two plus two making the figure four has remained traditionally an absolutely certain truth, because you have forgotten one thing – that these figures don’t exist, they are imaginary. Two chairs plus two other chairs, that is reality; but two plus two…? Because you have never met any mathematical figure…Mister One going to the market? The whole of mathematics is imaginary.New mathematics tries to bring it to reality, and then there is a problem. In reality two things are not exactly the same. What to say about four things being exactly the same? For example, two women plus another two women, you cannot make them four – because all four are unique. To combine those four unique persons is to take it for granted that each is given one number – which is not right.In reality it all depends; sometimes one man may be equal to the whole world – a Socrates, a Gautam Buddha, an Albert Einstein may alone be equal to the whole humanity, or perhaps more – because the rest of humanity has not contributed anything and this single man has contributed great insights into matter. You cannot count him as one, equal to anyone; you are not right, you are not thinking of the quality.But then it becomes difficult. So they say for ordinary use in the marketplace, two plus two are still four; but for extraordinary perceptivity, two plus two can be five, can be three, can be anything – it all depends. The old mathematics is gone, the old certainty is gone.The Euclidean geometry was certain; that was its beauty. There was no question of uncertainty, the definitions were clear. The shortest distance between two points makes a straight line. But it is all abstract. If you actually want to create a straight line, you cannot.So there is now neo-Euclidean geometry which says straight lines don’t exist – because you can draw a straight line here on the floor, but this floor is part of a round earth. If you go on stretching your straight line, both ends, sooner or later it will come to a point where it becomes a circle. If a straight line stretched finally becomes a circle, then it was not a straight line, it was an arc, part of a circle; it was just that the part was so small, and the circle was so big, that you fell into the fallacy of certainty.There are no straight lines. All Euclidean definitions have been proved wrong. In abstraction they are right, but in reality they fail; and modern science is trying to be closer and closer to reality.And that’s why I say that it is coming very close in many points, and agreeing, without knowing it, with the mystics, because the mystics were also trying to come to the real, not to the imaginary. From a different path they were coming to the real. And when they came to the real, either they became silent – because to say anything is going to be wrong – or they said things like Mahavira did, “perhaps it is so, perhaps it is not so,” – making at the same time positive and negative statements, which for ordinary use seems to be just confusing.Mahavira could not influence many people, and the basic reason was that he had come twenty-five centuries ahead of his time. Einstein would have understood him. Mahavira was not a mathematician, but what he was saying was essentially the same – the theory of relativity. It is stupid to say that somebody is tall, unless you also say in comparison to whom, because there is no such thing as tallness; it is only a comparison. Some pygmy has to be compared with him, then he is tall.There is an ancient proverb: Camels don’t like to go to the mountains. I don’t know what the camels think about it, but it is certain they don’t go to the mountains. They go to the deserts where there are no mountains. But the people who formed the proverb knew better. Camels don’t like to go to the mountains because as they come close to the mountains they feel very inferior, they have an inferiority complex.Freud discovered it just recently, and camels have known it since the beginning – that it is better not to go to the mountains; there you will get an inferiority complex, and then it is very difficult to get rid of it. It is better to be in the desert where you are the highest, tallest, biggest thing. So why not enjoy a superiority complex? Why unnecessarily go to the mountains?Everything that we say is relative, and the relativity changes, because as I said to you, life is a flux.I have told you the story that Mulla Nasruddin had a beautiful bungalow in the mountains, and once in a while he would say – when he was tired of business and other things – “I am going for three weeks or two weeks or four weeks.” But he was never consistent. He would go for three weeks, and by the fourth day he is back.His friends said to him, “If you were going to come back after four days, why were you telling unnecessary lies? We were not objecting, saying that you cannot come back on the fourth day. It is your house – you can come and go wherever you want, and you can stay there as long as you want. But why do you always say…? We have never found you sticking to the date that you have given.”Mulla Nasruddin said, “You don’t know the reality. I have kept one of the ugliest women as a housekeeper, to look after the house, to clean the house and keep it ready for whenever I go.”Those fellows said, “But that has nothing to do with your four weeks, three weeks….”He said, “Just listen. When I go, I see her, and feel she is disgusting. And I have made it a point that the day she starts looking beautiful to me, I escape. I say, ‘Now it is time.’ So it all depends. I don’t know exactly how long it will take for her to appear beautiful to me. Missing women, sometimes it takes four days, sometimes seven days; it is unreliable. But one thing is certain – I have made it clear – the moment I start thinking of the woman as beautiful I say to myself, ‘Mulla, this is the time. Escape! This is the same woman!’“And I pack up my things and rush away, because if I stay a little longer I may never come back. And the woman is so disgusting! But in three or four days’ time, one gets accustomed to her, and the need for a woman, for a companion, for a friend – there is nobody, only that woman – it changes your perception.”So the same man can say that the woman is disgusting one day, and after a week he can say she is the most beautiful woman. This is “po.”It is better not to say yes, not to say no; to keep the judgment suspended, uncertain.Science is certainly coming of age. Man is lingering, and one hopes that he will also come of age. The moment man comes of age, all religions will disappear; they are childish. All political leaders will look like buffoons – that’s what they are. Cunning, hypocritical, destructive, murderous criminals – that is what they are. If man comes of age the whole vision of life is going to change. Science certainly is coming of age. But one of the unfortunate things is, the vast majority of humanity is not aware of the latest insights of science or the oldest insights of the mystics.My effort, my whole life, I have devoted to bringing the mystics’ vision close to the scientific approach. I want that one day when science has become really fully mature, the distinction between mysticism and science will disappear. They will speak in the same language.Mysticism will speak of the inner reality of man, science will speak of the outer reality; but the language will be the same. And the understanding between the two will be immense. There will be no conflict – there cannot be.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,A sociologist has a theory that Western civilization is taking over the whole world. Already the way of life in all the big cities of the world is the same, and wherever there is progress, it is according to the ways of Western civilization.It was said that one of the by-products of standardization would be that communism and capitalism would become so similar that they would merge into a world government, so powerful that no minority could exist.Is that going to happen, or is there a way to avoid it?It is true that Western civilization and culture are taking over the world. In almost all the advanced countries, the way of life is according to Western standards. Up to this point the sociologist is right, but to conclude from this that communism and capitalism will become so similar that one day they will merge into a world government – there he is simply guessing. It is not going to be so.Communism has a philosophy, while capitalism has no philosophy. Communism is uncompromising, particularly on the fact of materialism; the Western society, although materialistic, is ideologically spiritualistic. It believes in God, it believes in the soul, it believes in eternal life. So on philosophical grounds there is no possibility of any merger.The communist countries are full of hate against those who have; they still belong to the world of the have-nots. So, economically it is not possible that they can meet.Politically, communist countries are dictatorial: they believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat. They don’t have any respect for democracy; to them, democracy is a cunning device to exploit people, to keep the poor, poor, to make the rich more rich. In the name of freedom, it is nothing but exploitation. And there is some truth in it. So politically, the gap is vast, and meeting is impossible.What is more possible is a world war, rather than a world merger and a world government. And man has proved so stupid in the past, without exception, that the possibility of creating a world government still remains utopian. Only people like me think about it. When a communist thinks of a world government, he thinks in terms of a communist world government. When Ronald Reagan thinks of a world government, he thinks in terms of a capitalist world government.In the vision of communists, capitalism has to be destroyed; only then can man evolve. And in the mind of the capitalist, communism is a cancer. The meeting of the two is impossible. There are no signs indicating a meeting of communist and capitalist governments making one world government – which would really be, if possible, immensely powerful.But powerful against whom? Power is meaningful only against someone. Power in itself is meaningless.Communists would like to be more powerful than America – which is the spearhead of capitalist imperialism. America would like to be more powerful than Russia. Power is a relative phenomenon. But if they both meet, certainly two great powers would make the greatest power the world has ever known. But against whom?That sociologist is not aware of the dynamics of the human mind. What he is saying is possible only if we are invaded by another planet; then communist Russia and capitalist America would fight together as one. We have seen it happen: against Adolf Hitler, communist Russia and capitalist America and imperialist Britain all came together. They forgot all distinctions, all conflicts; they became friends because now they had a common enemy.Unless somewhere – on some planet – a common enemy can be found, what the sociologist is saying is not going to happen. It is mere guesswork.The reality is that both powers are getting more and more ready to come to a confrontation. Both are waiting for the right moment so the responsibility is thrown onto the other, because it will be a great responsibility – risking all life on the earth. Both are trying to protect themselves from nuclear weapons before the war begins, and both are trying simultaneously to find something more dangerous than nuclear weapons; for example, death rays.No weapon is involved – it is just like an X ray. Rays just come and pass through a person, and the person is dead; you will not find even the cause of it, why he died. There will be no possibility of finding out.Both powers are interested in looking into death rays. Both the powers are looking more and more into dangerous chemical warfare; a certain disease can be sent which spreads like wildfire; no need to drop bombs on you, just release a certain disease which is a sure killer, and which goes on spreading.As far as I can see, both are stubborn, adamant. If there is some possibility for humanity, it is going to come from the communists, not from the capitalists; it is going to come from the Soviet Union, not from America. My reasoning is that America is a decadent society which is dying of its own accord. There are poor people who are dying of hunger and starvation; and there are super-rich people who are dying because they don’t have any meaning in life, they don’t see any point in it. “Why go on living? Why get up again tomorrow? What is the meaning of moving in the same circle?”America has come to a point where the super-rich – which is the powerful class that rules over the continent – has lost excitement, has lost the meaning, the significance, the very reason for existing. And when these things disappear, there is a suicidal wave that gets hold of the people. America is in the grip of a suicidal wave.For America, it is very difficult to have any hope, because they are living in a hopeless condition. And when somebody is dying, what does it matter if everybody else dies too? In fact, why should he bother? After him, if there is no life in the world it is not his problem.The Soviet Union is in a different situation. First, the country is still poor. It has not tasted the bitter fruits of richness. It is still excited about getting small things; even to have one’s own car is such an excitement in Soviet Russia, because not everybody has his own car – only very few people, very significant people. Everybody else has to move by public transport.In Soviet Russia there is a great desire for freedom because they are living in a concentration camp. There is a great desire for freedom of speech because there is no freedom of speech at all; all news media is controlled by the government, all publications are controlled by the government. You cannot publish a book on your own unless it is approved by the communist party. No news can be published unless it is released through the proper channel – even news like the death of Joseph Stalin. They declared it three days afterwards. For three days they kept it a secret; the world believed that he was living. The communist party was first choosing who was going to be in his place, and only then were they going to declare his death. Even death cannot be declared. There is no freedom of anything, so there is great joy in small things and there is great longing for freedom, for individuality.There is no question of suicide; nobody commits suicide in Soviet Russia. There is nothing like psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia because nobody goes as crazy as they do in California. They cannot afford it, they are poor. These are luxuries: psychoanalysis, all kinds of therapies, primal therapy – and new schools go on producing new theories about how to bring man to his normal state.Soviet Russia may step back from jumping into a third world war – its people are not suicidal. And the capitalist countries are worried. Their worry is that the more they wait, the more countries will go on becoming communist. If they had gone to war immediately after the revolution in Russia, they would have crushed the Soviet Union without any difficulty; but they waited, and the more they have waited, the more countries have joined the communist camp. Those who have joined are halfway, they have become socialists. Socialism is simply a softer way of being a communist, more polite, more gentlemanly, less shocking; but it is no longer capitalist. Its whole creed is the same as communism, with a simple demarcation – it calls itself democratic.But I have seen all these democracies – you have seen them with me; none of them are democracies. So it is just a beautiful name.And the fear of the capitalist countries is that their number goes on lessening; more and more people are turning towards communism. So if they want to have a war, the quicker the better; otherwise, if they wait to the end of this century, only the US will remain alone to fight the world. And then it will be pointless to fight, then their defeat will be certain.And you can see it every day: the Soviet Union is behaving more humanly, and America is behaving in a more inhuman way.The Soviet Union has tried for years to come to an agreement on a treaty for the cessation of creating more nuclear weapons. But it was impossible – America would not agree. Finally, the Soviet Union for ten months has not created any nuclear weapons; on its own, alone, without any treaty, it has stopped producing nuclear weapons. This is a tremendously courageous step.And now America wants to get out of a treaty it has with Russia and the European countries not to produce weapons beyond a certain limit.America wants to pull out of that treaty, and is saying that it is because Russia is cheating, they are producing more weapons. And Russia is saying, “We are available for any inspection from scientists, from UN experts. We have not produced anything more than is allowed by the treaty.”The whole of Europe is in an uproar against America for the first time because they can see that this is simply an excuse, you cannot prove it. But America wants to pull out so it can produce more weapons without any limit.One can see that Ronald Reagan and his company can lie so much because when the nuclear disaster happened in Russia, and only two people died, American propaganda put it out all over the world that two thousand people had died. And Russia was absolutely right – only two people died – because later on, experts from outside Russia confirmed that only two people had died at the time of the accident.Several people died later on, after a few days; in all, less than twenty persons have died, but as far as the accident is concerned only two people had died. Can two people be made into two thousand? One cannot believe that you can lie so much about something which you cannot prove.Since then America has been silent. It has not said anything about those two thousand. If they had any evidence they could have come out and proved it, but their own experts have been there and checked that only two people died. And there is a great difference between two and two thousand – one thousand times more.But why is this happening? This is happening for the simple reason that America, deep inside, feels afraid that if there is no war, America is going to lose. If there is war at least America will not lose – the whole of life will be destroyed. If there is choice – either to be a loser without a war or to destroy the whole of humanity – America is ready to destroy the whole of humanity.These are the signs of a decadent society, a society which has come to a suicidal point – a society which itself does not have any reason to live, and feels, why should anybody else have any reason to live?Communist countries are poor, have no freedom, are not democratic; but this whole thing has made them love life more. They are not suicidal, they are not psychologically sick.If the people of America can see that they are in the hands of mad people, if they can change their government, take it over from the mad people and give it to more intelligent people of whom there are so many in America…. But the trouble is, the intelligent people don’t feel like getting into dirty politics. It is a strange phenomenon that only mediocre people go into politics – the intelligent people remain far away – and these mediocre people have to decide the destiny of the whole world.It is time that American people should take over all the powers from the mediocre people. These powers should be given to those who have real merit – and there are enough people who have merit. The whole nation just has to wake up and think about what these politicians are doing, and create a government of non-political people.Make it a point that politicians are no longer needed, professional politicians are no longer needed. There are doctors, there are professors, there are surgeons, there are scientists, there are artists, there are poets, there are painters – there are thousands of geniuses. Once a nation decides…. “We are not going to vote for the politician; it is not a question of this party or that party, it is a question of politicians versus meritorious people who have nothing to do with politics.”If America changes the power from the hands of the politicians to non-politicians, what the sociologist is saying can become possible – a world government, of immense richness. The question of power does not arise, only that of immense richness.I told you that during three days we waste so much money for war preparations, that it is enough for one year’s food, clothing, shelter – every ordinary need – for the whole of humanity. Just in three days…and these figures are five years old – it may now be just one day. Every day we are wasting so much that the whole earth could live on it for one year comfortably.If there is only one government, there is no need for war. With whom are you going to fight? Then the whole energy is released for creative purposes. Nobody needs to be poor, nobody needs to be without medicine, nobody needs to be without education. We can make this earth a living paradise. But the whole thing depends upon the American government. The mad dogs should be thrown out, they should not be in power anymore. They are the only danger in the world.And American people are capable. Intelligent people just have to spread the message: “Let us have a non-political government. We will not choose any professional politician of this party or that party. All politicians have to be branded ‘criminal.’ We will not choose them, we will choose only non-political people – of some talent, of some genius.”The whole thing depends on America because America is in a hurry to go into a third world war. Russia is not in a hurry, because Russia knows that sooner or later all poor countries are going to become communist. It is not a question of communism having to be imposed from the outside – communism is not to be imported; people are going to become communist by themselves. The world is going to be theirs without any war. So why fight? – just wait. Russia’s whole strategy is to prolong, to give time. And America is afraid of it because there is no way for America; as time goes on, America goes on losing its friends.So the danger is from the White House in Washington. That is the most dangerous place on the earth today.I don’t know whose idea it was to make it a white house.It always reminds me of Mulla Nasruddin….The road was empty except for a beautiful woman who was going to her home, and Nasruddin was following her. He was old, nearly ninety, and he was trying in every possible way to catch hold of the woman. Finally the woman turned, and she said, “Feel ashamed! Just look at your hair – it is all white, and you are trying to chase a young girl!”Nasruddin said, “Believe me, my hairs are white but my heart is not – it is still black, as black as ever. In fact, I don’t know what is happening, it goes on becoming blacker and blacker. As I become older it is becoming blacker! First I used to think of other things also; now I think only of women. So don’t look at my hair, just look at my heart.”This White House seems to have the blackest heart in the world.There is still time for the people of America to prevent the catastrophe from happening. If the people of America cannot do anything, then these politicians are going to drag the whole of life on this earth to the graveyard.Osho,Do you think there is any possibility of your being recognized, or even accepted, by mankind during your lifetime?You have said you don't care about what happens to you after you leave your body, but for the poor historians who will be struggling with the impossible – to capture the phenomenon which is Osho – can you say something about the impact of your presence and your teachings in a future historical context?Also, how would you like to be remembered?I would simply like to be forgiven and forgotten. There is no need to remember me. The need is to remember yourself! People have remembered Gautam Buddha and Jesus Christ and Confucius and Krishna. That does not help. So what I would like: forget me completely, and forgive me too – because it will be difficult to forget me. That’s why I am asking you to forgive me for giving you the trouble.Remember yourself.And don’t be bothered about historians and all kinds of neurotic people – they will do their thing. It is none of our concern at all.Osho,Watching the breath is my meditation. I find it miraculous. Is it a method that needs to be dropped, and if so, does it drop on its own?Would you speak more about Vipassana meditation?There is nothing more to say about Vipassana meditation. The word vipassana means watching, particularly watching the breath – as it comes out, as it goes in. You simply continue to watch it, its movement in and out.And the method has not to be dropped, because when the time comes it disappears of its own accord. When your watchfulness is perfect, the method disappears. All the methods that I have given to you are such that you will not need to drop them. Just use them to perfection, and the moment they are perfect they will drop on their own – just like ripe fruit falling from the tree. And when a method disappears on its own, it has a beauty; then your watchfulness is unscratched.You are on the right path; just continue till the method disappears of its own accord, and you are left simply a watcher on the hill.Osho,I understand you to have said that witnessing is not an experience; it is always that which stands back from all experiences, whether they are mental or physical. However, I notice in discourse that whenever witnessing is happening, a certain inner milieu which affects my body and psychological space is created.It's as though I step into a certain mode of being which is quite distinct and recognizable from other ways I experience myself at different times.Conversely, during the day I can try the reverse process; I recall that milieu with its physical and mental manifestations, and that brings about the space of witnessing.Can you put me on the right track if this is off?No, it is not off – it is perfectly right. Witnessing certainly creates its own milieu, its own space, and soon the witnesser starts recognizing the specific features that are created. And the process can be reversed; you can create those specific characteristics of the milieu – the peace, the space, the silence – and suddenly the witnessing will be there.They are two poles of one phenomenon; if you get hold of one, the other is already in your hands. You can catch it from both sides. And it is perfectly good to change once in a while, to catch witnessing from the milieu. Ordinary witnessing, and creating the milieu, are both perfectly right.But whether it is an authentic phenomenon or not will be determined by whether it is created by the reverse process – you create the milieu and the witnessing happens. That is evidence, a proof, that you are on the right path.Osho,I set my alarm clock at night and trust it to wake me up when the morning comes. I sometimes see the master as an alarm clock that at any moment may ring like crazy and rouse me from my spiritual slumber.Osho, am I simply waiting for you to ring?Milarepa, I have been ringing and you go on turning from this side to that side, and you go on pulling your blanket over yourself.What do you want? Should the alarm clock jump up on you and take the blanket off, and also throw some cold water on your face? What else have I been doing? But sleep is such – spiritual sleep – that you start interpreting even the alarm.In ordinary sleep you also do it. When the alarm goes off, you have a dream that you are in a temple and bells are ringing. That is a trick of your mind. It is deceiving you; it is the alarm clock, not the temple, not the bells ringing.Spiritual sleep is far deeper and thicker. First, it is difficult to hear – and even if you hear it, there is every possibility of interpreting it as something else.Stop interpreting it. Make it a point while you are awake – sometimes you are really awake, when you are with me here – and there are moments when you are touching the fourth stage of awakening. In those moments make a decision that you will not forget. This decision just has to be reinforced again and again in the waking moments; then one day you are going to wake up.It is everybody’s birthright to wake up. It is our intrinsic quality. But everything depends on your decisiveness.I have seen people putting on an alarm clock to wake them up at four o’clock in the morning, and then, in sleep, just putting it off and going back to sleep. And in the morning they don’t remember. They look at the clock: “What happened? I put the alarm on.” And I had to tell them, “Your alarm awakened me and I saw you – you were putting it off.”I have seen people throwing their alarm clocks – so angry, because at four o’clock one is really in such a beautiful sleep, and this alarm clock seems like an enemy. People have broken their alarm clocks, and I have seen it happen in front of me. And I said, “This is something!” And they went back to sleep. And in the morning they inquired, “What happened? Who threw my alarm clock?”And spiritual sleep is certainly far deeper. So your decisions have to come not with ordinary wakefulness; you have to decide to wake up when you are really feeling awake. Then the decision goes deep, as deep as your spiritual sleep.And everybody is going to wake up. Every night has its morning, and every man has his enlightenment.It is just a question of when you want it.Do you really want it?Then it can happen even without any alarm clock. Then it can happen right now.It happened in Sri Lanka…a great mystic was at the last moment of his life, and he gathered his followers. He had thousand of followers who had been listening to him for years. And the whole teaching of the Buddhist mystics is Vipassana – watchfulness, witnessing.Before leaving the body, he said, “Now I am leaving. I will not be here again tomorrow to tell you to watch, to witness, to be awake; so if anybody is ready, he should stand up and I can take him with me.”Everybody looked at each other, thinking that perhaps somebody might be ready. Just one man raised his hand but he did not stand up. Out of those thousands, one man raised his hand. The mystic said, “Even that gives me great satisfaction.”That man said, “Don’t misunderstand me – I am only raising my hand. I want to ask – right now I am not ready because there are so many things to do. My girl is becoming marriageable, my boy is graduating from the university, my wife is sick, some help has to be found. I raised my hand just to ask you, as you will not available again, to tell me what has to be done.”And the mystic said, “I was telling it my whole life! Where have you been?”He said, “I have been coming every day, but what to do? – the whole night there are worries, all kinds. Only in your presence do I find peace and fall asleep. So I have not heard what you have been saying. I wait every morning to come here because this is the only place where I find peace and fall asleep. And because tomorrow you will not be here, I want simply to ask what has to be done.”But not a single man was ready to go or stood up with the master.And the master laughed. He said, “I was just joking! I cannot take anybody with me. But I was seeing whether you have been listening to me or not. And this man is right. And he is not right only about himself, he is right almost about everybody. So I will explain Vipassana again.”He said, “This time, please don’t fall asleep, remain awake because this is the last time. I will not be here tomorrow. Don’t try any kind of consolation – ‘he is just joking, he will be here, he cannot leave us’ – I am certainly going.”And while he was telling them about Vipassana, he looked all around – particularly at the man who had raised his hand. He was fast asleep! It had become deeply associated – the master talking about Vipassana was the beginning of sleep; the moment the master started talking about Vipassana, the man felt so peaceful….The mystic said, “It is useless – you will not hear me unless the time is ripe for you. Perhaps in some life….”It is not necessary that a master is needed. If you are awake then anything can function as an alarm. Your symbolism is right: the master is an alarm, but even the alarm of the master cannot function without your cooperation; you have to be with him, available, ready. It is only a question of total determination in a fully awakened state of mind.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In the face of the huge mystery of life, since the early ages humankind has consulted oracles. It's very famous throughout history – like the oracle of Delphi. People asked the advice of the stars to know about human destiny; witches or wise women used to read destiny in the tea leaves or even in tortoise shells. The Book of Changes and the Aleister Crowley tarot deck are often used nowadays.We use your tarot deck as a meditation to help us to move from the head to the heart in our daily life. But it seems that all oracles are pointing now to the present.Just the very fact of your existence in this moment of the universe helps to make simpler our destiny, showing only two alternatives: disappearing or not.Osho, would you please comment on this subject?There has been a great misunderstanding between life and time. Time is thought to consist of three tenses: past, present, future – which is wrong. Time consists only of past and future.It is life which consists of the present.So those who want to live, for them there is no other way than to live this moment. Only the present is existential. The past is simply a collection of memories, and the future is nothing but your imaginations, your dreams.Reality is herenow.Those who want just to think about life, about living, about love, for them past and future are perfectly beautiful, because they give them infinite scope. They can decorate their past, make it as beautiful as they like – although they never lived it, when it was present they were not there. These are just shadows, reflections. They were continuously running, and while running they have seen a few things. They think they have lived. In the past only death is the reality, not life. In the future also, only death is the reality, not life.Those who have missed living in the past, automatically, to substitute for the gap, start dreaming about the future. Their future is only a projection out of the past. Whatever they have missed in the past, they are hoping for in the future; and between the two nonexistences, is the small existent moment which is life.For those who want to live, not to think about it; to love, not to think about it; to be, not to philosophize about it – there is no other alternative. Drink the present moment’s juices, squeeze it totally, because it is not going to come back again; once gone, it is gone forever.But because of the misunderstanding which has been almost as old as man – and all the cultures have joined in it – they have made the present part of time. And the present has nothing to do with time.If you are just here in this moment, there is no time. There is immense silence, stillness, no movement; nothing is passing, everything has come to a sudden stop.The present gives you the opportunity to dive deep into the water of life, or to fly high into the sky of life. But on both sides there are dangers – past and future are the most dangerous words in human language. Between past and future, living in the present is almost like walking on a tight rope – on both sides there is danger.But once you have tasted the juice of the present, you don’t care about dangers. Once you are in tune with life, then nothing matters.And to me life is all there is.You can call it “God,” but that is not a good name because religions have contaminated it. You can call it “existence,” which is beautiful. But what you call it is not of any consequence. The understanding should be clear that you have only one moment in your hands – the real moment. And again and again you will get that real moment. Either you live it or you leave it unlived.Most of the people simply drag themselves from the cradle to the grave without living at all.I have heard about a Sufi statement that a man, when he died, suddenly realized, “My God, I was alive.” But only death as a contrast made him aware, that for seventy years he had been alive, but life itself had not enriched him.It is not the fault of life.It is our misunderstanding.My insistence for watchfulness will give you life without even thinking about it, because watchfulness can only be in the present. You can witness only the present.Live totally and live intensely, so that each moment becomes golden, and your whole life becomes a series of golden moments. Such a person never dies, because he has the Midas touch – whatever he touches becomes golden.When he touches death, death also becomes golden. He enjoys it as much as life – or perhaps more – because death is more condensed than life. Life is spread over seventy, eighty years. Death happens in a single moment. It is so condensed, that if you have lived your life rightly, you will be able to enter into the mystery of death. And the mystery of death is that it is only a cover.Inside is your immortality, your eternal life.Osho,In one of the festival darshans I was sitting at your feet, bowing down to you, and suddenly found there was no you – there was only an empty chair. And all the thousands of people were bowing down to an empty chair, sitting in silence with an empty chair, singing and celebrating with an empty chair. I nearly burst out laughing, seeing the ridiculousness of us needing you as an excuse to be able to do all this. But then comes the gratefulness of seeing the caring of existence to let us have beautiful, loving eyes to look at, a voice talking to us, a body we can give a dress to, a car to drive…To let us care about someone so totally, that this very love opens us up to be transformed.Buddham sharanam gachchhami – you are the feet of the whole world for me, where I can bow down in gratefulness.Gayan, that was the real experience of me as non-existent. Once in a while a disciple will come so close that he will be able to see that there is no “I” within me. It has died long ago. This body is empty, this chair is empty. But it will be only at rare, intimate moments, that you will be able to penetrate to my reality. I am simply a nothingness – of course covered with a body.Ordinarily you will see the body. To see the nothingness within you need a deep insight. And one never knows in what condition it may happen.You were dancing around me joyously, so deeply in the moment. With great love you were sitting in front of me, bowing down, repeating the greatest mantra there has ever been: Buddham sharanam gachchhami, “I go to the feet of the awakened one.” And thousands of people were creating a milieu around you. It was not an ordinary situation: an extraordinary device, so when you opened your eyes suddenly for a moment I was not there.And your understanding is right, that it is just for your love that I am carrying the body. Howsoever difficult it may be, it is worth it if it can help you to realize your potential. Otherwise my body’s work is long ago finished. It should not be there.I am trying every effort to hang on to it, because most of you are not yet ready to see me. You see only the body. The day you all will be able to see me, there will be no need for the body to be carried continuously – which is for me just a burden, just a trouble. But I will wait until enough of you are aware of my nothingness.Remember, the moment you are aware of my nothingness, you are also experiencing nothingness in you. Only two nothingnesses can recognize each other.Gayan, you saw the chair empty, and the experience was so strange that you forgot to look within yourself. If you had done that, you would have found that the same nothingness is there.We are not egos. We consist of universal nothingness. And nothingness is not a negative word; it simply means absence of everything, just pure existence. Of course the pure existence cannot have a form. So if you happen to see pure existence, you will see the body disappear, the chair empty.If it happens again, then in the same moment look within yourself, and you will find your body is also absent – you are not. And to know that one is not is the door to know that one is eternal. This is the ultimate paradox of spiritual experience.Shakespeare is puzzled by the problem “to be or not to be,” because he is absolutely unaware that the way to be is not to be. There is no question of choice. It is not that you have to choose one. If you choose to be, you will have to choose not to be. If you are ready to disappear, evaporate, you will find your authenticity for the first time. It is certainly a paradox. No logic can explain it, but experience can make it absolutely clear.You had felt ridiculous. You had laughed, because thousands of people are bowing down to an empty chair chanting Buddham sharanam gachchhami, and there is nobody.Your laughter, Gayan, was still half. If you had looked into yourself, your laughter would have been complete. Then you would not have only seen me not there, you would have seen yourself not there, you would have seen those thousands of people disappearing – an empty mandir resounding with the chanting of Buddham sharanam gachchhami.Next time it happens, don’t let it be incomplete. Because if it is complete, then you have come to a clear understanding which will follow you like a shadow in every act throughout your life. It will change your whole being. It will give you a new aroma, a new aura – and not only to you, you will see it in others too; although those others are not aware of it. But you will be aware of it.That’s why the Japanese awakened soul Hotei has been called the laughing buddha. For what is he laughing? – his whole teaching was laughing. Seeing this ridiculousness that people are not what they are thinking they are, and people are what they never dream about…. It is a cosmic joke, but one has to understand it to come to a point when one can become a laughing buddha.And I want the world filled with laughing buddhas, not the serious ones. We are sick of them.We need the whole earth filled with laughter, and not ordinary laughter but cosmic laughter – a laughter that arises out of the understanding that it is a beautiful joke existence has played with us.Osho,The other night you spoke of the dark night of the soul – that state one passes through as one moves from sushupti into turiya.Looking at it logically, it seems curious that as one moves towards the ultimate state of awareness, one is – just before realization – overcome momentarily by darkness. I would have thought that one would have been gathering more and more awareness, thereby dispelling darkness as one moved through the state of deep meditation – so deep that there are no longer dreams – to the point where the watcher is even able to witness sushupti.Is it perhaps, analogous to what happens as death approaches? You have spoken of how life suddenly asserts itself at the point of death – the resurgence of the body's life-force in the face of its extinction. Is the dark night of the soul the final effort of any remaining vestiges of the unconscious to exist before it is totally annihilated by the light of total illumination – enlightenment?Yes, it is the last effort of your millions of lives lived in darkness. The darkness has become so much attached to you, just as you have become so much attached to it. It is the last effort. So in sushupti it brings all its forces possible at a single stroke.So you go deep into sushupti where even dreams cannot enter – but this happens only when the dark forces in your life, the unconscious forces of your life, clearly see that their death is approaching. And naturally they would not like to die. They have dominated you for so long, and suddenly you are slipping out of their hands. They will make the last effort.And don’t think about it logically. Logic and life have nothing in parallel. Thinking logically you go away from life. Don’t think at all, because every thinking in some way is logical; just see the fact that this is how it happens.And it is strange that in ordinary life, in science, we accept things without bringing logic in. If the water evaporates at a hundred degrees nobody asks why – why exactly at a hundred degrees, why not at ninety-nine? It would be logical that it starts evaporating slowly, slowly: ninety, just a little bit…ninety-one, a little more…ninety-two, a little more, and at one hundred it just evaporates. That seems to be logical. But the water knows no logic. And you cannot ask anybody why it evaporates at a hundred degrees. We simply accept facts of existence as they are.D.H. Lawrence, one of the men of this century I have loved most, was walking in the garden with a small child who was asking questions, as every child is bound to ask – just curious. And finally he said, “Uncle, why are trees green?” Perhaps nobody had ever asked why trees are green.For a moment Lawrence stood there thinking why trees are green. And then suddenly it dawned on him that there is no question of why; trees don’t follow any logic, existence is not logical. So he said to the child, “Trees are green because they are green.”The child said, “That’s right. I have asked the question to many people. Nobody can answer – and you have answered. That seems to be perfectly right. Trees are green because they are green.” Neither the child understands logic nor do the trees understand logic.So don’t think logically about inner reality, the inner science of discovering yourself. Be factual, realistic. This is how it happens: before the explosion of light all the unconscious forces make their last effort – and they should be given a chance; you have been using them since the beginning.These forces have every right, every legal right, not to let you go into a totally different realm. And you have been a slave. And once you move out of the darkness of the night, you will be a master. There is a great vested interest of the unconscious forces, so naturally they gather up and create sushupti, dreamless sleep.And the mystics are right to call it the dark night of the soul. It is no ordinary dark night. It is the dark night of the soul, because what is going to happen is the golden dawn of the soul.But remember always to be factual.Logic is not a substitute for it.Osho,Is it necessary that the innocence of childhood and the idealism of adolescence must always be shattered before each individual finds within himself the capacity to search for what he considers the real values of life?It is absolutely necessary, because childhood has been conditioned – not knowingly, not intentionally, but just by unconscious forces – through your parents, through your neighbors, through your teachers, through everybody.Your innocence has been covered with so many layers of conditioning that you cannot find it easily. And your youth has ideals, utopian ideas, great plans for revolutions for changing the whole of humanity. You think they are yours; you are wrong. They are only biological.The biology of man gives him a very romantic youth, because that is the time when he is going to produce children, which in itself is such a mundane affair, if not dirty, that unless it is covered with romanticism it will be very difficult.Have you seen animals making love? Everybody must have seen some animals making love. But have you watched one thing, that while making love both the partners look sad – not happy, as if they are being forced to do something which they don’t want to do.And the force is coming from within their own biology, so they cannot do anything about it. But they are in a good position in a way, because they have only seasons when they make love – two months, three months in the year, and for nine months they are really free.For man the difficulty is very great. One, he is capable of making love all the year round; and each time he makes love, he feels something is wrong. If he sees photographs of himself making love he will not believe that he can do such stupid things. If he is interested in gymnastics, he can go to a gym. But what is he doing here? Women are more clever in keeping their eyes closed, just not to see the gymnastics the man is doing. And also the man is in a hurry. He wants to do it as quickly as possible and be finished. There seems to be a certain biological slavery. He cannot avoid it, and there seems to be nothing in it that looks beautiful.Specially for man, biology has given romantic idealism. That covers his eyes – the woman becomes almost a goddess. And in the eyes of the woman the man becomes almost a god. And their love affair becomes such a poetic thing, such a great romance, as if nobody has ever loved the way they are loving. For the first time in history, something great is happening.This hallucination is necessary; otherwise, man may stop producing children. Animals will go on reproducing, because they don’t have intelligence. But man has intelligence; he may stop producing children, or he may find some other way – test-tube babies made in the lab of some scientist – which looks more clinical, more sophisticated, less animalistic, less barbarous.But because of this romantic fever, he manages to continue. Every day his fever goes down. After making love, ashamed, he pulls his blanket over himself and lies down there, thinking, “What an idiot I am. I did it again, and I have thought thousands of times that this is just stupid.”And the woman is crying on the other side, tears in her eyes, because all the poetry ends here on the bed in an ugly exercise. But after twenty-four hours he will be again ready, he will forget those thousands of idiotic acts he has done. After twenty-four hours he is again feeling romantic.It is simply biology, because biology takes time to create sexual energy again. And as one starts growing older, then it takes a longer time. Then he cannot make love every day: then twice a week, then once a week, then once a month, and he knows now death is coming close. And by the time his whole illusion has disappeared, death is ready to take him away.In those illusory times, there are other dimensions also. Every young man feels romantic, very idealistic – not knowing that this earth has been filled with youth for thousands of years, and every young man has been thinking of idealism, of great revolutions, of great utopias. But they are simply a by-product of his biological romance. It is a chemical thing, a hormonal thing.And it is proved perfectly that if hormones are removed from a man or from a woman, she goes into a complete change of personality. Or if hormones are added, injected, then he becomes even more romantic, almost mad, ready to change the world, ready to save the whole world, ready to become a savior, a messiah.My own feeling is that all saviors, messiahs, prophets, were freaks; just by accident they got more hormones than other people, so their romantic ideology was so much that they were even ready to sacrifice their life; but they will not sacrifice their ideology. Ideology became greater, more important than life itself.But the reality is that generation after generation of young people come and go, and the world remains the same. Their whole idealism and their whole romantic philosophies, utopias, simply go on creating more population. That’s all. Creating more difficulties for humanity – that is the only revolution they bring.A real revolutionary is not romantic, but is very realistic. It is not a dream that he wants to impose on the whole humanity. Who are you to impose your dream on the whole of humanity? Everybody is free to have his own dream, and if everybody starts imposing his dream on everybody else, there is going to be chaos.And there has been chaos, because of Christians wanting their dream to be imposed on everybody, Mohammedans trying to do the same, Jews trying to do the same, Hindus trying to do the same, Buddhists trying to do the same, communists trying to do the same.There are so many dreamers and this poor humanity…and they all want to mold it according to their dream. The ultimate result is they fight, they kill, they create wars and violence. No utopia comes, only war comes. There is no evolution of consciousness but only ugly incidents which the whole past is filled with, all the way along.I would like my people first to meditate, first to become aware – because that is the only loophole through which you can get out of the slavery of biology. And once you are aware, you don’t have dreams. Then a totally new reality comes to you, and that is a vision – you start seeing.And that’s what has been called in the past, the oracles. Women have been found to be more capable of being visionaries – men are more prone to dream. So there were oracles all around the world; and the woman will go into a trance – that is a state of meditation. And in that state she will start saying things, describing the vision.Christianity has committed many crimes. One of their greatest crimes is that they destroyed all those women visionaries – calling them witches, burning them alive, because they were wiser than their popes and cardinals and bishops, and they could not be tolerated. They were a great competition. And all these cardinals and bishops and popes were simply knowledgeable people, not people who are wise.The word witch means a wise woman. There is something tremendously significant in this. Again there will be oracles. Once these rotten religions have lost their hold on humanity, all that they have destroyed – which was worth preserving – will come back.When you are meditating, you can give it any name – you can call it trance, you can call it latihan…. It is simply a state of silence where no thoughts, no dreams are moving on the screen of the brain. In that clarity you start seeing things which are going to happen.It is almost like you are standing under a tree, and somebody is sitting on top of the tree, and a road is just there. You cannot see anybody on the road, it is empty; but the man at the top of the tree can see a bullock cart coming from the left. He can see a bullock cart that is leaving from the right side. To the person who is standing under the tree, those bullock carts don’t exist; as far as he can see, the road is empty.One bullock cart is past, one is in the future, but none of the bullock carts is present to his eyes. But to the man who is sitting at the top of the tree, both of the bullock carts are in the present – the bullock cart that has passed, the bullock cart that is coming; they are not in different tenses. The whole road is present to him, it is just that his vision is from a height.The oracle is really nothing but your consciousness looking at things and the world from a height which is not available to ordinary people. So they can see things which are going to happen, as far as the ordinary people are concerned. For them, they are already happening. They can also say things about that which has happened; but for the ordinary person, there is no trace of it at all.And there are different heights of consciousness, as I have told you: super-conscious, collective super-conscious, cosmic super-conscious. It depends, the trance of the oracle may be only of the super-conscious. Still it will be far bigger, far more real than the ordinary man who lives in the conscious – just a small slit.But the trance can be of the collective super-conscious, then the area will be vast. And if the trance is leading the person to the cosmic super-conscious then everything is present to him – then there is no past and no future.That is going to be one of the basic practices in the mystery school, how to create oracles. The capacity is there – more in women, less in men. But it can be brought back to reality. The burning of thousands of women in the middle ages by the Christian church on the orders of the pope has not destroyed the capacity. We will bring it back. We will introduce techniques for how to reach to those trances.I wanted to go to Delphi when I was in Greece, because that was the place of the greatest oracle. The very genius of oracles was selected from Delphi. It was one of the most significant mystery schools. But the Greek government would not allow me even to stay overnight.For no reason at all, they arrested me, and they wanted to force me to go onto a boat for India. I refused. And later on I saw that their behavior was changing; they were becoming more polite, more friendly, bringing water or anything needed. Only later on I came to know that our friends in Athens had given a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe to the chief of police. Otherwise, they could have forced me onto the boat which was going to India.And I was telling them, “My jet is standing in Athens. If you allow, it can come here – to Crete. Or I can go by plane to Athens.” Only here I came to know why their behavior had suddenly changed – money is a miracle.It was in the middle of the night that I reached Athens; and my friends wanted that I should stay the night in a hotel. The police would not allow it. I could not leave the airport. I had to go to my jet immediately. I could not go to Delphi, but one day I will go to Delphi.Our people are fighting the case in the court, because it was absolutely illegal to arrest me. My visa as a tourist was still valid for fifteen days more – it was for four weeks, and I had been there only for two weeks.And they should not deport me without giving any reason – because there was no reason. I had not even left the house. Just as I am living here in the house and never leave the house, I had not left that house.But the archbishop of Greece was continuously giving press conferences, and sending telegrams, and telephoning the president and the prime minister saying, “If this man is not removed immediately, we are going to burn him alive with his house.” These are religious people. These are democratic governments.I was asleep when the police came. Anando tried, saying, “You just sit, and we will wake him up,” but they wouldn’t listen.John came to wake me up. As I was getting ready in my bathroom, suddenly I heard sounds as if bombs were being exploded. I could not believe what was happening. Those police people started throwing rocks at the windows, at the glass, at the doors – they were destroying…. and they had dynamite, and they were threatening, “We will dynamite the house.”They could not wait for five minutes for me to put my clothes on, wash my face and come down. They were in such a hurry…five minutes more and Christianity will be destroyed, morality will disappear, no woman will remain a virgin – just in five minutes; and I am in my bathroom!And then I was sitting unnecessarily in their jail for almost seven hours. They could not wait for five minutes, and I had to sit there unnecessarily for seven hours. These are the people who are running democratic governments.I told the man, “I came here to see who are the people who poisoned Socrates, and I am not disappointed – I have seen them.”Just one thing I have not been able to see, and that is Delphi. It is now in ruins, but once it was one of the greatest temples in the world, ruled completely by wise women. And only the genius ones were going into trances and saying things about the past and future. And whatever they were saying was going to come true.It is not prediction, it is simply their vision. It is not prophecy, it is not astrology. It is simply the height of their consciousness, that they can see a far bigger horizon.The science has to be revived, but it can be revived only on the grave of the Christian church.Osho,Hotei is remembered by the fireworks in his pockets at his funeral. Was your greatest joke the enlightenment list, or do you have something more devilish up your sleeve?I will not tell you right now.Milarepa, you will have to wait for it!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 31 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The phrase “a broken family” is used to conjure up the essence of a disastrous childhood.By the time I was at university, I had had two fathers and three mothers; and if you include my grandparents – who also functioned as parents for a good while – a grand total of seven, instead of the conventional two. Initially I was puzzled how it was that I seemed relatively free and well-adjusted, while so many of my more “fortunate” friends – who had had the proper stable family life – seemed endlessly troubled by the continuing demands of family ties that pursued them into adulthood. Might not a broken family really be a blessing in disguise?The conventional family is already out of date. It has served its purpose and it has no future. Psychologically, it is very dangerous for the child to be confined to only two parents. If the child is a girl, she starts loving her father and creates an inner image of a man she would like to love. Of course she knows she cannot love her father the way her mother loves him, so she is jealous of her. It is an ugly situation to create for the child. From the very beginning, the first woman in her life is an object of jealousy. And she is never going to get the first man in her life, but her mind will carry the image of her father her whole life, disrupting all her marriages because in every husband she will be unconsciously looking for her father. No man can fulfill those requirements and no man has married her to be her father.From the man’s side, he is searching for his mother. If the child is a boy, he falls in love with his mother and he carries the unfulfilled image of that first woman his whole life. He will fall in love with many women, finding some similarity. But similarities are one thing – perhaps just the hair style is like his mother’s or the way the woman walks, or the eyes, or the nose. But the nose is not the whole woman and the hair style is not going to help in any way. So no woman is going to fulfill his longing for his mother, and no woman marries him to be a mother.Now, we are creating such a complex situation for children that their lives will remain a misery, and they will dump the responsibility on the other. The man will think the woman has betrayed him because she looked just like his mother and after marriage turns out to be something totally different. She deceived him.The same is the situation from the other side. Every woman thinks the man has deceived her, cheated her, pretending to be nice and good and everything before the marriage. After the marriage, the mask that he was wearing disappears and she finds just a male chauvinist.Both parents are continuously fighting, nagging each other, trying to dominate each other. And the children are learning it because there is no other way, this is their first school. It is not a question of arithmetic or geography or history; it is a question of life. They are learning life’s ABC. What they are seeing is that their mother is continuously harassing their father, and their father is continuously trying to dominate, subjugate, enslave their mother.Children are very perceptive because they are very new in the world, their eyes are clear, their perceptions are not yet covered with the dust of experience. They can also see the hypocrisy of it all; if a neighbor comes in while the parents are fighting, they immediately stop. They start smiling at each other, talking about beautiful things, receiving the neighbor, giving the impression to him that they never fight.The child is also learning hypocrisy: whatever you are is one thing; you have to present to society what society expects you to be – not what you are, but what society wants you to be. From very early childhood we are creating a split personality in each child, schizophrenia, a dual being.The children are learning ways to be: the girl is learning how a wife should be, according to her mother’s behavior with her father; the boy is learning how a husband should be, according to the behavior of his father. It is because of this that in generation after generation the same stupidities are repeated, again and again. The whole world lives in misery, lives in hypocrisy and the root cause is the conventional family, where the child is exposed to only two people, the mother and father.In the future, this has to be changed because almost ninety percent of mental illness is born out of this family. We have to make a bigger family. I call it a commune, where many people live together. In our commune in America, five thousand people were living together, working together; in a single kitchen, five thousand people were eating together. Their children were getting acquainted with so many people – everybody their father’s age was an uncle, everybody their mother’s age was an aunt. They were learning from everybody.The children had a vast possibility of experience. And there was no way to have a fixed image of a woman or a man because they were coming in contact with so many women who were all loving towards them, so many men who were all loving towards them. They were not living with their parents, they had their own campus. The parents could go there, meet them. They could come to their parents, live a day or two with them. They were also invited by other couples, by couples who had no children. They were moving all over the commune. The whole commune was their family.Psychologically, it created only a vague image of a woman in the boy’s mind, and a vague image of a man in the girl’s mind. This is of tremendous importance. Because the image is vague and is made up of many impressions of different women, there is a possibility you may find a woman who can easily fit. Because you don’t have a fixed idea, you have only a vague conception, any woman can fulfill it, any man can fulfill it.You have not been living with your parents, so you don’t know how a wife has to behave, how a husband has to behave. You will start innocently, lovingly. You love a man – that’s why you have married him. You love a woman and you are not carrying a certain pattern of how the woman should behave.The Hindu so-called saint, Tulsidas, is the most important Hindu saint in India; no other book is read as much as his. It is the bible of the Hindus. He writes: “If you don’t want your woman to remain in control, then once in a while you have to beat her. If you don’t beat her – physical, corporal beating – you will lose control of her. By beating her, you prove that you are man enough.”Your manliness is proved by beating the woman. But if you beat the woman, the woman is also going to find a thousand and one ways to torture you. Whenever you want to make love to her, she will say she has a headache. There is no communication between the two of you. How can there be? You have enslaved her, and no slave can forgive the person who has destroyed her freedom. No woman can forgive the man who has taken away her freedom. But Hindus have been following their saint’s advice – and it is not new: the five-thousand-year old Manusmriti, the moral code of the Hindus, says the same thing.There is a book published by a psychoanalyst about the man-woman relationship. Its title is significant: The Intimate Enemy. That’s how men and women have lived up to now, as intimate enemies. And the children are learning; they will repeat it – they don’t know any other way.The family has to change into a commune. Five thousand people, ten thousand people living together, are economically better off than five thousand families living separately. In our commune, only fifteen people looked after the kitchen – for five thousand people. Otherwise, twenty-five hundred women would have been crushed and destroyed in their kitchens. And remember, not all women are good cooks. There is nothing in being a woman that makes you a good cook. In fact, all the great cooks are men; in all the great hotels you will find that the great cooks are men, not women.Not every family can afford a great genius of a cook, but a commune can afford fifteen really inventive and creative cooks – both men and women. We have experimented and found that it works so beautifully.Because the children lived together on their own campus, many other things happened. The parents didn’t feel burdened. Parents have a certain freedom which children destroy – you have to wait for the children to go to sleep and by that time you are also feeling sleepy. Children are very strange people: if you want them to go to sleep, they won’t go. They become certain that they are being forced to go to sleep because something is going to be happening. And they cannot understand the logic that when they want to remain awake, they are forced to go to sleep; and when in the morning they want to sleep, they are pulled out of bed and forced to be awake. They can’t understand the logic of it. It seems so absurd.The parents felt free because their children were living with other children. We discovered a new phenomenon; we thought that there might be trouble, the children might fight with each other. But what we found was just the opposite – the older children took care of the smaller ones. There was no fighting. And nobody had any personal things – all the toys and everything belonged to the campus – so there was no jealousy.The children enjoyed the tremendous beauty of being with other couples – not just their parents – and naturally, uncles are nicer people than fathers. In fact, the Jewish God in the Old Testament says: “I want you to be aware that I am not your uncle, that I am not a nice person: I am an angry person, a jealous person, revengeful.” His use of “I am not your uncle, I am your father,” makes it clear that an uncle has a nice quality about him. With thousands of uncles and aunts around him, a child feels almost surrounded in love; wherever he goes he is respected.Because the people are not his parents, they don’t force any of their ambitions on the child. The child is not their own. Otherwise, every parent is trying to fulfill the ambitions which he could not manage to fulfill in his life, through his children. He wanted to become a doctor, but could not become one. So he wants to make his boy a doctor; whether the boy wants to become a doctor or not is not the question at all. So there are doctors who would have been better as butchers, and there are butchers who would have been better as doctors. Everything is upside down.Nobody bothers about the child’s potential. Everybody thinks of what his own ambition is – to see his boy become the president of the country, or the prime minister, without bothering that the boy is potentially a musician, a Yehudi Menuhin; or an artist, a Michelangelo; or a mathematician, an Albert Einstein. Nobody cares about the child; he is not considered at all.In a commune, it is not the parents who are going to decide what their children should be. The children are born of the parents, but they don’t belong to them. They belong to the commune and the commune will decide – through psychoanalysis, through hypnosis, through other methods – what the potential of the child is. And a child should be helped in every possible way to become what he has come here to become. Then he will be immensely happy.In life, there is only one blissfulness and that is to become the potential that you have been carrying within you and to bring it to full flowering. A rosebush should become roses, and that is its joy.A great surgeon was invited by his friends because he was retiring. He was the greatest surgeon of his country and people were celebrating the occasion, giving him a good farewell. But he looked very sad. A friend came to him and asked, “Why are you so sad?”He said, “I am sad because I never wanted to become a surgeon, I wanted to become a musician. Even if I had to die on the street as a beggar with my guitar in my hands, I would have been happier than to be the greatest surgeon in the country because that was not at all my longing, it was not my destiny.”So much misery in the world… And the basic cause is that people are not allowed to move towards their destiny. Everybody is distracted.The family is no longer needed and it will be a tremendous blessing…not only for the children, but for the parents also, as it is because of the children that parents go on remaining together even though they don’t love each other. The moment a man does not love his wife or the wife does not love the man – and they still go on pretending that they love each other – it is nothing but prostitution, permanent prostitution. And it is just because of the children; otherwise, in a broken family, what will happen to the children?In a commune there is no problem. You can be with a woman as long as you love her. The moment you find that the love has disappeared… And in life nothing is permanent, nothing can be permanent. It is not within your hands to make anything permanent; only dead things can be permanent. The more alive a thing is, the more fleeting. Stones may be permanent, but flowers cannot be. And love is not a stone. It is a flower, and of a rare quality. Today it is there, tomorrow one knows not – it may be there, it may not be there. It is not in your hands to control it. It is a happening. You cannot do anything: you cannot create it if it is not there; either it is there, or it is not. You are simply helpless.If children are being taken care of by the commune, then parents can move easily. There is no burden and the children will not miss you because they can find their father, or they can find their mother – there is no problem. The mother can go to the children, the father can go to the children, and the children will become aware from the very beginning that love is a changing phenomenon. To make it permanent has been the greatest fallacy of mankind.Love cannot become marriage. Marriage is law and love cannot be put under any law. It is wild. It is just like a breeze that comes and goes away; fearing that it may go away, you close all the windows and all the doors – but then there is no breeze, just stale air.Marriage is stale air and nothing else. The breeze that was felt – which led you to marriage – is not there anymore. But because of the children you have to pretend as long as possible: suffer, pretend. That creates perversions of all kinds.If the husband no longer loves the wife, he will start moving with some other woman – his secretary in the office. If the woman does not love the husband, naturally she will find somebody – the chauffeur. These are ready-made people: the secretary, the chauffeur. What else to do? Where to go?This creates unnecessary complexities, ugly fights. The whole home becomes tense. The vibrations are no longer calm and quiet and peaceful. And because you are not satisfied with your woman, you have created prostitutes. It is one of the ugliest things that man has done – to force women to sell their bodies just for money. And remember well: you can get the body for money, but you cannot get love for money. Love is not for sale.Up to now, there were only women prostitutes because for thousands of years it was a male dominated society. But now there is a women’s liberation movement. This liberation movement is creating more stupidities because it is simply imitating man. It is not trying to raise the consciousness of women; it is simply trying to imitate man, creating hatred for man. And it has created it.Now in big cities like London or New York or San Francisco, you can find male prostitutes. Naturally – the woman has equal rights. If there are female prostitutes, then male prostitutes should be available too.The women’s liberation movement is trying to create so much hate for men that a few of the leaders of the movement are preaching lesbianism: women should love only women – just cut out men completely. And this is happening. Homosexuality is happening. Men are tired of women, of being harassed by women, nagged by women. They have started looking for a substitute and they have found that it is better to love a man – it is at least not miserable. It is not a coincidence that homosexuals are called gay people; they are gay. But this is turning the whole society into a madhouse. These perversions of sex are going to create great disturbances. Homosexuality has already brought the ultimate disease, AIDS, for which there seems to be no cure.Lesbianism also – because it is something new it may take a little longer, but it will produce something. They will have to produce something, otherwise the women’s liberation movement will feel, “We are lacking something which men have; they have AIDS and we don’t have anything.”The women’s liberation movement is making women ugly: they smoke because men smoke, use four-letter words because men use four-letter words, use the same clothes as the men use. But somebody has to tell these women that it is not liberation: “You are simply becoming second-rate men. It is very degrading, it is humiliating.” All this is happening because of the family. Unless we dissolve the family into a bigger phenomenon, these things will not disappear. If nobody is forced to live with a man or woman where love has disappeared, then prostitution itself will disappear.There is no need to fight and be intimate enemies. If you cannot be intimate friends, there is no need to be intimate enemies – it is better to say goodbye and become strangers again. Life is so short. It is not to be wasted in unnecessary foolishness.Live and love – and love totally and intensely, but never against freedom.Freedom should remain the ultimate value. The family has destroyed that freedom. In my vision, the future is not for families; the future is for communes. The commune is the refined, bigger family; so big that all kinds of perversions that the small family was creating are no longer created. And children should be taken care of by the commune, by the experts. In the first place, just because you have a wife, does not mean that you have the right to become a father or the right to become a mother.The commune should have a training which anybody who wants to become a father or mother must go through. You can remain married, you can remain together – that is between you two – but don’t disturb a third life.You have no right to produce a child if you don’t have the right training to bring him up, to help him to be a blissful human being. The psychologists will explore, the doctors will think about it, the gynecologists will have to ponder over it, and unless you get clearance from these people, you are not to produce a child.Man can produce children without any difficulty. That does not mean that you become a father and a mother. Those are skills, arts. To help a living being grow needs some expertise.The society, the commune, will decide how many children it needs – so that children can be nourished well, educated well; so that over-population does not disturb things; so that nobody is unemployed, nobody is uneducated, nobody is poor.So much is known now about the human child and impregnation, that not to use that scientific knowledge would be simply idiotic. We are using it on animals, but we are not using it on human beings. In human beings we are still continuing with the accidental way of producing children.One of the great poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, was the thirteenth child of his parents. It was good that at that time there was no birth control, otherwise the world would have missed Rabindranath Tagore. And we do not know how many geniuses we go on missing, for the simple reason that as far as human beings are concerned, we are still behaving very superstitiously.In a single intercourse a man releases millions of sperm. At that moment, politics begins – a great race, a competition, to reach the female egg. To us, the distance seems to be very small, but to the sperm, for its size, the distance is proportionately almost two miles – and its life is only two hours.In two hours, millions of sperm are running to reach the female egg. Only one will succeed. And you can take it for granted that the better people will stand aside. The Ronald Reagans will reach first. Better people are better from the very beginning – they will give way to others.Now it is possible to donate your sperm to the hospital; they can find out how many sperm can become geniuses and how many will be just mediocre human beings: Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans, Jews. Those kinds of people can be discarded from the very beginning.The best can be chosen – you can find them. Floating in that crowd are people like Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Moses, Jesus. Why bother with mediocre people? And why remain accidental when the scientific facts are perfectly known and established? When this crowd – and it is not a small crowd – starts moving, it may just be that those who are in front reach first, for no other reason than that they may be Adolf Hitlers, they may be Mussolinis, they may be Joseph Stalins. Why create these people?You go on saying history repeats itself. You are the reason it repeats itself. It is because you go on being accidental. History can be changed completely so that it will never be repeated again; one just has to use a little intelligence.Choose the finest, the best, rather than filling the earth with billions of people. Right now there are more than six billion people; it is better to have just one billion people. But we can create supermen; we just have to change our old patterns of thinking.We have to use science in the service of man too. Science should be used for children.Families should be made very loose, relaxed, and bigger; and we can create a paradise on the earth.Osho,Upon being questioned on his place in history, Einstein said, “If relativity is proved right, the Germans will call me German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.”In your case, Osho, I imagine the Indians will say you had to leave India for lack of space – you had too many Indian followers; the Americans will say they persuaded you to leave to help spread your message; the Greeks will say they were so impressed with you, that they provided a police motorcade to the airport; and the British will say they even provided you with government accommodation. And all the rest will say that they wanted you to stay but did not want to gain an unfair advantage over the others.Osho, what do you say?Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was a simple matter: either it is right or it is wrong, hence what he said is relevant. My work is more complex, almost impossible because it is not a question of any theory being right or wrong. I can be right only if humanity goes through a transformation – which is hoping against hope. But I am an adamant optimist.Knowing the impossibility of the job, I go on working with absolute trust that the revolution is going to happen. And if my revolution happens, there will be no India and no Indians, no Germany and no Germans, no America and no Americans.This small planet earth is simply one. All divisions are false. If I fail, then these divisions can remain. If I succeed in convincing the intelligent youth of the world, then all the political lines on the map will have to disappear – they are absolutely unnecessary. They are against humanity’s welfare.It is one single whole. We should be proud that our planet earth is the only planet in this vast universe, where there are millions of solar systems having millions and millions of planets. Our planet is the only one which has evolved not only life, not only consciousness, but has even produced the ultimate flowering of consciousness in people like Gautam the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Tilopa and many more. We should be proud of this planet earth.All flags need to be burned, all divisions need to be destroyed, and a single humanity has to be proclaimed. So if I succeed, there will be nobody Indian, German, American to say anything about me. Yes, if I fail – which is more possible – then they will all condemn me. They are all condemning me already.Perhaps a single individual has never been condemned by so many nations – almost the whole world together – because my fight is not against any particular superstition, any particular religion, any particular nation. My fight is against the very concept of nationality, the very concept of the divisions of religions.If there is only one science, there can be only one religion. If one science is enough to explore the objective world, one religion is enough to explore the inner world of man. And that one religion need not have any adjective to it – Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism or anything.Just as science is simply science, religion is simply religion. In fact, according to me, there is only one science with two dimensions: one dimension working on the outside world, the other dimension working on the inside world. We can even get rid of the word religion.This is a fundamental rule of science, that a minimum of hypotheses should be used. So why use two words? Just one word is enough. And science is a beautiful word, it means “knowing.”Knowing the other is one aspect, knowing one’s self is another aspect; but knowing covers both.Osho,Recently when we were in Kathmandu, a Japanese businessman stepped into the lift with me and conversationally asked me what country I was from. Without thinking, I said, “Oh, I'm a sannyasin.”I don't know what that man must have made of my reply, but I realized only afterwards that something seemed to fall away from me in that moment. A sense of nationality, of having roots somewhere, even a mother to return to if I really had the need – everything that Australia represented for me in terms of the past – simply died right then and there.Now I really do feel like an existential gypsy, and I love it!I want everyone to become an existential gypsy. You don’t need roots – you are not trees. You are human beings. And the moment you become a sannyasin, everything else automatically falls away from you. To be a sannyasin simply means renouncing your past, renouncing all political ideologies, renouncing all religious theologies, renouncing everything that belongs to the dead past.It means just becoming completely clean, deprogrammed, unconditioned, so that you can clearly see the present and the future, and you can start growing from your own insight, not from borrowed knowledge. Not by somebody else telling you be this, do this, but just by your own insight. Whatever feels right to you is right, and whatever feels wrong to you is wrong.The moment you take such a standpoint, you become an individual for the first time. For the first time, you have respected yourself, you have accepted yourself. For the first time, you are grateful to existence for having made you the way you are.You don’t have any ideals any more. You are not to become like Jesus, you are not to become like Buddha. You have just to be yourself, and allow your being to grow in freedom without any ideals, because every ideal leads towards slavery.Once you are unburdened of the past and free to move in freedom, you almost have wings and the whole sky is yours. The moment you drop the roots, you grow wings. It is so beautiful to have the whole sky with all the stars available to you: with no guilt, with no fear, with no God to dominate you, to enslave you, with no Devil to destroy you – for the first time, just you in your crystal clear aloneness.I teach you simply to be yourself.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 32 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It still puzzles me how, from the teachings of Jesus for example, religions could evolve that would bring so much death and ugliness to the world. Their intolerance and violence seem even darker as it is covered by the image of their almighty God, allowing only those who believe in him and his son to enter heaven.Did Jesus himself plant these seeds of ugliness? Or is it the unawareness of the Christians? Was his enlightenment of a different quality from that of Lao Tzu, Bodhidharma or Buddha?There was no enlightenment in the case of Jesus, and whatever happened after, they are wholly and solely responsible for it. They have sown the seeds of fanaticism.The very declaration of Jesus, “I am the only begotten son of God,” is fanatic and without any evidence. First, God is only a hypothesis, and hypotheses are not known to have sons and daughters. And the emphasis of Jesus is “the only begotten son,” so nobody else can claim that he is another son of God – because I don’t think in those days birth control methods were known. On the one hand they say God is omnipotent, and his potency was finished only in one son!Jesus’ claim is simply to make himself unique amongst all the prophets that have passed before him. They were just prophets, messengers of God; he was more intimately related, and blood is always thicker than any message.Also, he insisted, for all the three years that he was teaching, that he was the messiah for whom the Jews had been waiting.The Jews were not ready to accept him, but he went on insisting. The only people who followed him were uncultured, uneducated, poor people – and not many. They followed him in the hope that perhaps he was the son of God, perhaps he was the messiah, and he would fulfill his promises: “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” “A camel may pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of heaven.”He was consoling those poor people who had no understanding. And Judea was full of learned scholars, rabbis – nobody was impressed by him.His claims and his teachings are contrary. He teaches “Blessed are the meek” but he is not a meek fellow. He teaches, “Love your enemies just as you love yourself,” but he curses a poor fig tree because it is out of season and there are no fruits on it! And he becomes angry, “I and my followers have come here hungry, and you are not ready with fruits – there is no welcome from your side.”Now, cursing a tree when it is not the season for the fruits – what can the poor tree do about it? This is the man who is teaching “love your enemies,” and he cannot even forgive a poor fig tree, which has not committed any crime.He himself was uneducated, uncultured, but had got into his head this madness that he was the only son of God, that he was the messiah the Jews had been waiting for. He has given these ideas to the following generations of Christians.All his miracles are bogus. Miracles don’t happen. Existence never changes its laws for anybody, even for the only begotten son of God. I say with absolute certainty that all his miracles are bogus, because if a man had done those miracles, the whole Jewish community would have accepted him as the messiah.Even today, if a man can walk on water, change water into wine, feed thousands of people from one or two loaves of bread, raise the dead back to life, do you think he will be crucified? He will be crowned! – his miracles will prove what he is saying. But not a single Jewish book of Jesus’ time even mentions his name – he was not even news. A man raising the dead back to life – if he is not news, then what is news? A man being crucified and coming back, resurrected – can you avoid giving him the headlines in all the newspapers? But not even his name is mentioned. The reason is clear: he never performed any miracle. All those miracles were added by the disciples to make his claim substantial – that he is the only son of God, that he is the messiah.They have tried for two thousand years to make Christianity a special religion, unique, far above any other religion for reasons which are all bogus. Buddha never walked on water, Moses never made any dead come back to life again, Krishna was not resurrected – once dead, dead forever.Even trying to prove that he was born of a virgin mother is just a strategy to make Jesus special, unique; he is not a product of sexuality. It is the anti-sexual attitude, the anti-life attitude. Everybody is born out of sex; that means you are born out of sin. How can God’s son be born out of sin? So he is born out of a virgin mother.For two thousand years these have been the pillars, none of which has anything to do with religion. Even if you can walk on water, so what? – you will simply look stupid. And if you can change water into wine, you will be behind bars because you are committing a crime. Being born of a virgin mother will simply make you a bastard, not a great god.And so many people died in Jesus’ time: if he was capable of raising people back to life, then he seems to be very miserly, there seems to be no generosity. He raises only one person – who is a personal friend of his. The conspiracy is clear. Lazarus is his personal friend, and the whole miracle is a made-up phenomenon, if it ever happened.He was not dead. The two sisters of Lazarus were followers of Jesus: they put Lazarus in a cave, and they waited for Jesus. Jesus came after four days, and in four days the body started deteriorating, it was stinking. And Jesus simply called out, “Lazarus, come out!” And it seems Lazarus was completely ready, just waiting; and he came out of the cave.If a man was capable of raising the dead, then he should have shown…Many people must have died, he could have revived them. Why a friend? And what is the point? – because Lazarus, even after being raised from the dead, did not change. We don’t hear of him again, that he was transformed, that his life was now a new life. Nothing happened: he was the same man, with the same ugly jealousies, stupidities, insensitiveness. He had not become a light unto himself.Even Jesus’ resurrection is completely bogus. I have seen his grave – it is in Kashmir in India. He lived in Kashmir to an old age, one hundred and twelve years. A Jewish family – and Jews are very rare in India – still has been taking care of two graves. And a very strange coincidence: Moses died in Kashmir, and Jesus also died in Kashmir. And the reason for this coincidence is that Kashmiris are basically Jews. They are one of the tribes of Jews who lost their way while Moses was finding Israel.It took forty years. In forty years, almost everybody who had started with him was either dead or was going to die, was too old; a new generation had come into power. And Moses was tired of wandering all over the desert of the Middle East. Somehow he convinced his people, “This is Israel, the promised land of God.”It has nothing beautiful. And Jews have not forgiven Moses – because he bypassed all the oil lands. And they will never forgive him; otherwise today Jews would have been the richest people in the world, all the oil would have been in their hands. And this great prophet, Moses, could not see the oil running under the earth and see the future. They ended up in Israel, which is a barren country.And my feeling is, because the new generation was very much frustrated with Moses, just as an excuse he left them in Israel to settle, and he said, “I am going to look for one tribe which has got lost in the desert.” And following the track of that tribe, he reached Kashmir; they had settled in Kashmir.Kashmir seems certainly to be God’s land. It is a paradise on earth. When the first Mohammedan invader of India, Babur, reached Kashmir he could not believe his eyes. He had lived his life in the desert, and then to see the lush green beauty of Kashmir…. Without thinking he said, “If there is any paradise it is here, and only here.”Even today you can find that the Kashmiris look more like Jews than like Hindus. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, was originally a Kashmiri, he comes from that same stock; Indira Gandhi – just look at the face, look at the nose. They are all Kashmiris.Moses reached the tribe, and he could see that they had found Israel, but now it was too late. He must have been very old; it was too late to recognize a mistake. And prophets are not supposed to recognize that they have committed mistakes, they are infallible. But he settled with the group, and he died in Kashmir.Jesus also reached Kashmir. He was crucified, but the Jewish way of crucifixion is such that an ordinary, healthy man takes at least forty-eight hours to die on the cross – because death comes only by the blood slowly leaving through your hands and your feet. And Jesus was only thirty-three, and perfectly healthy, young.It was a conspiracy with Pontius Pilate because Pontius Pilate was not a Jew, he was a Roman, and Judea was under the Roman Empire. He could not see what was wrong in Jesus. He had not committed any crime, and if he goes on his donkey saying to people, “I am the only begotten son of God” – if you want to believe it, you can; if you don’t want to believe it, you don’t have to. But he was not a criminal type.At the most you could think that he is a little eccentric, a crackpot; or you can think he is just a buffoon. He must have looked like a buffoon – riding on a donkey followed by twelve fools, none of whom had any education, none of whom had any idea of what religion is. It was a joke! People could have laughed and enjoyed it – there was nothing to be taken seriously.Pontius Pilate did not want to crucify Jesus, so he made an arrangement – because he felt that he was crucifying a very innocent man – that Jesus should be put on the cross as late as possible on Friday. So it was delayed and delayed, and when finally he was put on the cross, he was left there for only six hours. Nobody has ever died on the Jewish cross in six hours in the whole of history.And then came the Sabbath, and Jews stop every action. And this was the strategy: they had to bring down Jesus’ body. Perhaps he was feeling weak – blood had gone out, but he was not dead – and he was put in a cave. And then it was very easy for Pontius Pilate – because Roman soldiers were guarding the cave – to allow Jesus’ followers to take him out of Judea as quickly as possible.Those wounds healed and he lived a long life. But in India he lived very silently. He had learned the hard way that to say, “I am the only begotten son of God, I am the last messiah, the one you have been waiting for” just brings crucifixion and nothing else.No miracle happened.Even on the cross he was angry at God because it looked to him as if God had betrayed him. It was all in his mind – there is no God, no question of betraying; but in his mind he was so fanatically convinced, that after watching for a few hours, he shouted towards the sky, “Father, have you forsaken me?” – because no miracle was happening. It seems he was hoping angels would be coming, playing on their harps, sitting on white clouds. Nothing happened.In India he remained silent with the group that had traveled with him. Thomas traveled with him. You will be surprised to know that Indian Christianity is the oldest Christianity in the world; the Vatican comes three hundred years afterwards. He sent Thomas to south India, and made it clear: “Don’t talk about those things we were talking about in Judea.” But in India it is not a problem.It happened once, I was staying in one campus, a university campus – it was holiday time, and the campus was used for a Hindu world conference. There were at least nine people who thought they were gods. Hindus don’t bother about it. They said, “There is no harm, it is harmless.”Somebody believes he is a god – rather than crucifying him, they worship him. That is more torturous, remember, because now he has to behave like a god, and he is just a human being so he has to repress his humanity, his biology, his physiology – everything. But Hindus don’t do any harm to him; he himself does it.Just in one campus, nine people proclaiming themselves god…and there is no problem about who is the true one, because Hindus believe in thirty-three million gods, so what does it matter? It is not a monopoly of one god. Only Hindu gods are democratic. All other gods are dictatorial – just one god. They cannot tolerate another.Thirty-three million – that was the population of India in the old days. They have made exactly the same number of gods. So you can have your own special god – unique and personal, no need to share it with anybody else. They can choose their own god. And there are so many religions in India.So Jesus had been in India before, also, and after the crucifixion he was back again. He knew that in India nobody bothers about these things. If you say you are a messiah, they may say, “Perfectly good – remain one!” Nobody will feel offended. In fact they themselves think they are messiahs, so what is the problem? “You are god, we are god – perfectly good. Shake hands! It is always better to be two than just one!”Thomas adapted himself completely to the Hindu way of life. He changed his clothes; he was even wearing the Hindu thread that symbolized the Hindu. He was using the red mark on his forehead that symbolizes a certain sect of Hindu. He shaved his head, and he was using wooden sandals which only Hindu monks use. He tried to learn from Hindu masters whatever he could manage. And he tried in the south of India to teach Christ translated into Hindu terms, and he succeeded.Kerala – the province where Thomas lived, is ninety percent Christian. But he never claimed that he was a prophet or anything. In India these things don’t matter. There are prophets on every street, gods in every bazaar. Nobody takes note of it; it is their personal problem. If somebody thinks he is a god, it is his personal problem.So the resurrection is absolutely false; but for two thousand years these have been the pillars. In all these pillars of Christianity there is nothing which can be said to be spiritual.And now Christian theologians are having a conference in Europe to decide that these things should be dropped because they make the religion look childish. There are religions which have such high flights of consciousness, much deeper insights into human beings.It is Jesus who is responsible for Christian fanaticism because he said to his followers, “Soon you will be with me in paradise.” I like the word soon, but I cannot stretch it to two thousand years – a few days maybe, but not two thousand years. “And at the judgment day I will choose those who follow me, these are my sheep, and they will enter into paradise; and those who don’t follow me, they will fall into eternal darkness and hellfire forever. There is no rescue from there.” Just an absurd thing.You can see the absurdity. In Christianity there is only one life – seventy years. One third of it goes in sleeping, one third goes into education. Of the remainder, much goes into earning bread and butter; whatever little is left goes in nagging, fighting, watching the television, shaving your beard twice a day. You don’t have much time to commit sin. What sin will you commit? – time is needed.Bertrand Russell is right. He says, “If the strictest judge decides about the sins which I have committed, and also includes those that I have only contemplated, not committed, he cannot send me to jail for more than four and a half years.” And Christianity sends you to hell as a punishment for your sins for eternity. There can be no justification. It is the most absurd idea that any religion has ever produced.It is Jesus who is creating the idea in his followers. For these two thousand years Christians have been trying to convert people to Christianity because that is the only way to avoid hell, the only way to be chosen by Jesus at the judgment day. If Jesus does not choose you, your fate is sealed; you fall into eternal darkness, into hell-fire. All kinds of tortures have been invented in hell by Christian saints. And this will continue forever, there is no way out, no exit; you only enter into hell, you never get out of it.This is absolutely illogical, but because Jesus said it, the Christians down the ages have been forcing people in different ways to become Christians. Their intention is very good; they want to save you – even if you don’t want to be saved.I was sitting on my lawn one day when I was a teacher in the university, and a Christian missionary came and started talking to me. And this I have found very characteristic of Christian missionaries – they don’t listen to you, they go on talking, and they go on opening the Bible and reading the passages.I said, “But first you should listen. I don’t want to be saved. That is the basic question you should ask a person before you waste his time. I don’t want to be saved by anybody. If I cannot save myself I don’t want to be saved. And I don’t want to become a sheep, I am a human being. You just go and talk to sheep.”First they were forcing people by the sword – crusades, religious wars – to change them into Christians. Millions of people have been killed by Christianity, burned alive because they were reluctant to be saved. Strange kind of saviors! Strange kind of compassion! If you don’t want to be saved you will be burned alive.Things have changed. Now they don’t come with a sword in one hand and the Bible in the other. They come now with bread and butter in one hand and the Bible in another – to save the poor, to save the orphans.The whole effort is…and I again repeat their intention is not bad, it is just that they are idiots. Religion is a transforming process, it is not a question of believing in Jesus Christ or believing in Mohammed or believing in Krishna that can save you. That is simply a consolation so that you can, under that consolation, continue your life the way you want.An authentic seeker tries to find methods to transform his ugliness into beauty, his violence into non-violence, his cruelty into compassion, his hate into love.The real miracle is not changing water into wine; the real miracle is changing hate into love, changing your unconscious into consciousness – that is the real miracle, and that has to be done by yourself. Nobody else can do it. Buddhas can only show the way, they cannot do it on your behalf. There are things which cannot be done on your behalf.One of the existentialist novels has a beautiful idea of the future. A rich man said to his servant, “Just go and make love to my wife.”The people who were sitting there, they could not believe it. They said, “What are you saying? Sending your servant to make love to your wife?”He said, “I can afford it. Poor people have to do it themselves. I am rich enough to have it done on my behalf.”The servant was also a little shocked and was still standing. And the rich man shouted, “What are you standing there for? You are not going to make love to my wife; you are simply my representative. So just do it on my behalf – don’t start doing it on your own.”The poor servant had to go if the master said so.But can love be made by somebody else on your behalf? And if love cannot be made by somebody else, then can paradise, can spiritual transformation, can enlightenment be managed by someone else on your behalf because you can afford it?The same is true about Mohammedanism – because Mohammedanism was born in Arabia in the desert where nothing grows, and people lived only on invading the neighboring countries; they were the most cruel people. And Mohammedanism has the same idea, that there is only one god, Allah, and there is only one prophet, Mohammed, and there is only one holy book, the Koran. These are the three basic things.If you look into the life of Mohammed you will not find the search of Gautam Buddha, you will not find the search of Mahavira. Jesus and Mohammed are not the scientists of the inner being.The story is that he was on the hills taking care of his sheep – just a poor person – and a voice said to him, “I am God, and whatever I say, remember and recite it.” Mohammed was so shocked, because there was nobody there, that he ran to his home. He had fever, he was shivering. His wife covered him with many blankets, still he was shivering. She said, “What is the matter? You left home perfectly okay. What happened?”He said, “Something very strange. God spoke to me and he said, ‘You are my last messenger,’ and that he will go on sending messages to me which I have to collect.Mohammed married nine women. And he allows a special favor to his disciples – they can have four wives.One of his disciples, the Nizam of Hyderabad in India had five hundred wives – just in this century. This is so stupid and ugly. Women are treated like cattle.And that Nizam of Hyderabad was an old man, but he went on marrying young girls. Perhaps he was the richest man in the world, because in his state is the biggest mine of diamonds. All great diamonds have come from Hyderabad – the Kohinoor and others. He himself had so many diamonds that once a year they had to be put into sunlight and given air. They were not counted because counting was impossible, he had so many.His whole palace had basements which were filled with diamonds, and they would be taken out and spread on all the terraces of his temple. I have seen the terraces; the palace is one of the biggest palaces in India. He had all the money, he had all the power. He was old, but he could purchase any woman. He could give enough money to any man and purchase his daughter. I don’t think he even remembered the names of his five hundred wives, and I don’t think that all the wives had seen him. Perhaps the early ones may have seen him.And he was not worth seeing anyway, an ugly man, and so superstitious that you will not believe it – in the night he used to put one of his feet in a bucket full of salt, the whole night. The reason was that he was very much afraid of ghosts – and that if one of your feet is in salt, ghosts don’t come close to you.When I went there he was dead, but I asked his son, “Have you put the bucket in his grave? – because ghosts in the palace are not many, but in the graveyard there are ghosts and ghosts and nobody else, and in the dark night that old man….”The son said, “You are right! We forgot completely about the bucket of salt.”I said, “It is not too late.” Mohammedans don’t make marble graves or anything, just mud graves – to show humbleness. So I said, “Just arrange with the gravedigger to put one of his feet into a bucket of salt.”He said, “I will do it. I myself sleep with a bucket because ghosts are very dangerous; and certainly in the graveyard there are only ghosts and nobody else.”All kinds of things – how many wives you should marry…things which have nothing to do with religion. Both these religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism, are by-products of Judaism. And the ultimate responsibility goes to Judaism, which is the father religion of both, because Jews got the idea that they are the chosen people of God. From that simple idea, the whole stream of fanatics has been born. Once you start thinking that you are the chosen people of God, that God has given you something special that is not given to anybody else, you are setting yourself up as “holier-than-thou,” and the danger starts.A religious person is the most humble person. He is not a messiah, he is not a savior. At the most he is only a finger pointing to the moon.Don’t pay much attention to the finger. Look at the moon and forget the finger – because the purpose of the finger was just to point to the moon.A truly religious person simply shows the way, the way that he has traveled, and with the condition that you are not to follow it in detail. It is just a vague idea I am giving to you, because your way cannot be exactly the same. You are a different person, you have your own uniqueness. My experience may strengthen your search, my explanation of the way may help you to find your way.But no religious person ever tries to convert anybody.Conversion is an ugly word. It hides in it spiritual slavery.I would like you to be aware: don’t be too interested in saving somebody. That is an interference in somebody’s life. You can explain your experience, you can share your experience; and if the other finds something useful in it, if the heart of the other person starts throbbing with something in it, that is his business. It is not conversion, it is simply a human communication.Religions go on doing one ugly thing after another. And when it is done in the name of religion, people simply accept it – whatever it is, however stupid it is. It just has to be given a good name and that will do.For example, Jews go on doing circumcision. But what is this nonsense? It is symbolic of the fact that anything, once it gives the idea that you belong to a certain community, that you have a certain identity, can take on a religious flavor.I have heard: one bishop used to live opposite a rabbi, and both were competitors in everything. The bishop sold his old Ford and purchased a new Chevrolet. The rabbi was just coming out when the bishop was pouring water on the Chevrolet. The rabbi said, “What are you doing?”The bishop said, “I am baptizing the Chevrolet I have purchased. Now I am making it Christian.”Now this was too much for the rabbi. The next day he managed to purchase a Cadillac, and when the bishop came out, the rabbi came out with garden scissors and started cutting the exhaust pipe. The bishop said, “What are you doing?”He said, “Circumcision. I am making this Cadillac a Jew.”Humanity has been in the hands of these people, and still their grip is strong.A new man can emerge only if such idiotic beliefs completely disappear from human consciousness. Man can evolve spiritually; no belief is needed – either to be Hindu, Mohammedan or Christian. In fact all beliefs are barriers. Once you believe in a thing you stop searching for it; when you believe it, there is no need to search for it. If you believe and still search, then your belief is not complete, is not total, there is doubt in it; then your belief is only hypothetical.All the religions have stopped people’s seeking and searching by giving them beliefs – and any kind of belief is dangerous.My own approach is: start with no belief, start with a clarity of mind, start with intelligence. Be available to whatever you come across, but without any prejudice. Only then is there a possibility to find the truth. And it is truth that saves – neither Christ saves anybody, nor Mohammed saves anybody, nor Krishna saves anybody.It is truth that is a deliverance.It is truth that makes you free from all garbage, the rotten past. It gives you a new birth.Once I was sitting by the side of the Ganges in Allahabad alone, in a very lonely spot, and I saw a man jump into the river. I thought he must be taking a bath, but then he started shouting, “Help! Save me!” – he was drowning.I don’t believe in saving anybody, but I thought that this is a totally different case. So I jumped in after him and I pulled him out. It was hard, he was a very big and fat fellow, but somehow I brought him out. And he started being very angry with me. He said, “Why did you save me?”I said, “This is something! You were shouting, ‘Save me, help me!’ I am not a person to save anybody, but there was nobody else here, and I thought that this is a totally different context. But why are you getting angry?”He said, “I was really going to commit suicide.”“Then,” I said, “why did you start shouting, ‘Save me, help me’? You should have committed suicide – I would not have disturbed you. I was simply sitting silently, I was not interfering with you.”He said, “What to do? I wanted to commit suicide, and with a total decisiveness I had jumped in. But when the cold water touched me, I forgot all that, and when I started drowning and came up, I don’t know how, but I started shouting, ‘Help me, save me!’”I said, “Don’t be worried. Come here.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “You just come close to me.” He came. I pushed him back into the water. He went under once and started shouting again, “Save me, help me! What are you doing?”I said, “Now I am not going to be worried. I did wrong the first time – please forgive me for that time. Now I will simply sit here and see you commit suicide.”He said, “This is not” – and it was difficult to say anything because he was going down and up – “This is not a joke! Just save me. I don’t want to commit suicide!”Somebody else jumped in and saved him. I said, “You are doing something wrong because that fellow wants to commit suicide.”And that fellow said, “No, I have dropped the idea. It is too difficult, I will find some easier way. This going under water and coming up – it is too much for me.”I said, “I can help you with good ideas about how to commit suicide.”He said, “You seem to be a strange man. First you pushed me into the river – I had never expected that anybody would do it.”I said, “I simply did…when I saw that I had done something wrong, I had to put it right. I put you back into your position. But I can suggest to you some better ways. Just near here a railway line goes by, just lie down there. And it is a junction, a big junction; every moment trains are going by.”He said, “The idea is good, but right now I am feeling hungry.”I said, “That is your problem. You can go home, take your meal, and if you are afraid that the train may be late, then bring a tiffin carrier with your food. Lie down on the railroad with the tiffin carrier by your side; if the train is late, you can eat. I can give you any suggestion you want, but I will not do anything for you.”Everybody has a right to live his life according to his own light.We can make the light brighter, but by cutting off the head of somebody, you are not going to help him become religious. Or giving bread and service or a job or education, opening a hospital, you are not going to help people to be religious; you are simply playing a game of numbers, which is a political game – the politics of numbers.I was telling you just the other day that in the Middle Ages they killed thousands of women on the order of the pope because they were witches. And what was the criterion? How did you find out a woman was a witch? The criterion was that anybody could report about any woman that she was a witch, and then that woman was tortured so much, unless she confessed that she was a witch. And that confession meant that she had had intercourse, sexual intercourse, with the devil. And once she had accepted it, she was burned. They forced her to confess, tortured her, and then punished her.There were special courts arranged by the pope; any woman or man could report to the court if they wanted divorce. There was only one way in the Middle Ages; the woman had to say that the man was impotent or the man himself had to confess that he was impotent.And whenever such a case was there in the courts, great crowds would gather to see the scene – all voyeurs, not a single seat would be empty. All the judges, bishops and cardinals would be in the seats – it was great entertainment for them. The man had to stand naked, and before a crowd he had to prove whether he was potent or impotent. If he was saying that he was potent, and his woman was saying something otherwise, then he had to show his penis erect before the court. What kind of religion is this, and what business are they doing?First, it is really difficult when a crowd is watching and you are afraid – and it is a very sensitive matter. Even a potent man may not be able to have an erection with so many voyeurs in deep silence watching him.And if he had an erection then he had to show the second step: ejaculate there before the court. But that was not enough: the third step was the final one, he had to make love to his wife before the court. Now what kind of ugliness in the name of religion is this?So a table was placed there, a naked woman lying down on it, and the man was doing all kinds of gymnastics to prove that he was potent. And mostly even potent people failed – because of the crowd, so many people watching, and so much fear, “If I fail, then the whole world will know that I am impotent.” This was done by religions.One Mohammedan, Khalif Omar, burned the greatest library of the world in those days, in Alexandria. It had all the treasures and all the developed literature, poetry and history of the continent Atlantis – which has since drowned in the Atlantic. It was immensely valuable because Atlantis had reached almost to the same level of civilization as we are now – thousands of years before. From Atlantis they had gathered many books. Alexandria’s library was so big – you can’t imagine: when Omar burnt it, the fire continued for six months to finish off the whole library.And the way Omar did it is worth understanding. He went into the library to the chief librarian with a burning torch in one hand and the Koran in the other hand. And he said to the chief librarian, “I have just two questions to ask you. One is: is there anything more in your library than the Koran? If there is, then it need not exist because all that is true is in the Koran. Apart from that, everything is untrue.“The second question: if you say that it contains only the same content as the Koran, then too this library need not exist. What is the point? – the Koran has it all. Why keep this big library and this arrangement? It is unnecessary. So in both the cases I am going to burn the library – whether you say yes or no will not make any difference.” And he burned the library.Those who had seen the library – for example, Pythagoras – remember that perhaps never again would there be such a rich treasure. The whole civilization of Atlantis – all its growth, all its scientific, technological, literary and artistic treasures – everything was collected in Alexandria.First it was thought just to be a myth, but now scientists have found that there is a vast continent under the Atlantic – ruins of a great civilization, miles down.But this has been the attitude of the Mohammedans. They destroyed the library in Alexandria. They destroyed in India immensely beautiful sculpture because Mohammedanism does not believe in images.In India there were millions of beautiful statues of Buddha, Mahavira, other mystics – they have destroyed all of them. Somebody’s head is missing, somebody’s hands are missing. They spoiled thousands of temples, temples which were built in hundreds of years.In Khajuraho – I have been studying the temples of Khajuraho for years – there were one hundred temples. Seventy temples have been completely destroyed. Thirty temples, out of fear, the Hindus covered with mud; they were in a valley so they were saved. Now they have been restored, the mud has been removed.Looking at those thirty temples – even just one temple – you can understand what they have destroyed. Seventy temples…! One temple seems to be the work of thousands of sculptors over hundreds of years. It has so many beautiful statues. Not a single inch is uncarved in the whole temple, and the temples are big; they all have thousands of statues covering all the walls of the temple; and each statue is a piece of art, nothing like it exists anywhere in the world.Now, it is one thing to believe that you don’t worship images; it is another thing to destroy somebody else’s images. It is his freedom to worship an image or not. You can explain to him that it is not useful; but to destroy his image is inhuman, it is destroying human rights, birthrights.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 33 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Looking into what is my enemy number one, I remembered that as a child when my father used to beat me with a belt or sometimes even a whip, I would not cry or in anyway show him I was hurting. As soon as he would let me go, I would sing, thinking over and over again, “I would rather die than surrender.”This everyday self-hypnosis for years must have created a subtle attitude of passive resistance.Being with you I have not had much opportunity to watch this resistance because being available to you and your work is the only thing that matters to me now. But my fear is: how deep has this childish determination not to surrender gone? And how can I allow it to surface?The attitude of not surrendering is in everyone. It is something natural. It simply means that nature wants you to be yourself, not somebody else’s idea of you.So when such a situation arises in childhood, that you have to constantly fight against surrendering, the idea goes very deep. It is a natural idea. Nothing is wrong in it. This has to be understood very clearly, that there is nothing wrong in it. It can be used in a right way, it can be used in a wrong way, but the idea itself is very natural.People can exploit you, using your own natural instincts; people can also help you to grow in the right direction, using the same natural instincts.So the first thing you have to do is you have to drop the idea that there is something wrong that you have repressed within yourself. There is nothing wrong in it. It is perfectly good that you did not surrender, that you resisted, that you kept your identity safe and well guarded.As far as the world is concerned, up to this point everything is absolutely right. The problem arises only with the wrong kind of teacher, who again asks you to surrender.The right master never asks you to surrender. His very presence is enough.There is no need for him to ask for any surrender. Just in his presence you feel so perfectly accepted that the question of rejecting him, the question of creating a wall between him and you, does not arise. There is no passive resistance.The problem arises only if you happen to be with a wrong kind of teacher; one who is not a master, one who has not a presence, one who has not yet realized himself, one who is simply repeating somebody else’s words, quoting scriptures – the kind of man who is between inverted commas. He will insist for surrender.And anybody who insists on surrender, resist him, because the very effort by anybody to impose himself upon somebody else is against human dignity.I don’t want you to surrender. I want you to be yourself, purely and simply just your natural being. That’s enough. It will create the bridge between me and you.I am not here to enslave you spiritually.I am here to make you free from all spiritual enslavement.The people who have been asking for surrender are asking for slavery in the name of spirituality. And millions of people on the earth are just living in a spiritual slavery – with different names – Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists. It doesn’t matter what name, but they have surrendered their freedom, they have surrendered their awareness, they have surrendered their capacity to choose what is right and what is wrong.The real master simply teaches you what is right and what is wrong. To accept it or not is simply left to your intelligence, not to your surrender.I need your intelligence, not your surrender. I need your consciousness, not your slavery.So there is no problem at all. However deep the idea has gone, let it remain there; it is a perfectly good protection in a society where everybody is trying to make the other in some way dominated, possessed. It is good to have great stamina – that whatever happens, you are going to remain yourself.Osho,After two weeks of hypnosis sessions with Kaveesha, I can now see my resistance to relaxation. In looking for a cause for this, I saw that to me, to relax means to be lazy and useless.My family would rather be sick than let go of their so-called power, thinking that being busy and frantic means success. I learned their message too well, and now, once more, I need you to redefine a word.Would you please explain what relaxation really is?Relaxation is not something big. It is a simple matter. It is just waking sleep. You need every day a few hours of sleep. Try to understand the phenomenon of sleep.The child in the mother’s womb sleeps twenty-four hours a day for nine months continuously. After he is born, slowly, slowly the sleep hours are cut – twenty-two hours he will be sleeping, twenty hours he will be sleeping, eighteen hours he will be sleeping, sixteen hours he will be sleeping.And as he becomes mature, it comes to a fixed normal routine of seven or eight hours. This will continue until he starts feeling old. This will be different with each individual, because somebody will die at seventy, somebody will die at eighty; and some fellows are so stubborn, they will die at ninety, a hundred – and there are people who have gone beyond a hundred.So as a person starts feeling old, tired, his sleep is cut even more – he is sleeping three to four hours, then slowly to two to three hours.Why does this happen? – that in the mother’s womb a child is sleeping twenty-four hours a day, and an old man is sleeping only two or three hours in the night?The reason is that in sleep your body functions perfectly without your interference. For nine months in the mother’s womb, the body works so much – it will not work that much in the whole remaining life – because in those nine months the body has to pass through all the evolutionary steps that humanity has taken since the very beginning.The scientists now say that life was born in the ocean, and the child in the beginning is exactly like a fish. In nine months he covers almost two to three million years of progress. The body is involved in such a work that it does not want any interference; and if a child is awake, there will be interference.The old man, as he gets older his body is no longer building any new tissues, any new nerves. The old nerves are dying, and they are not being replaced by new ones. The inner work of the body is lessened because the man is going to die. Now the preparation for death is cutting off the sleep. Just as in preparation for life twenty-four hours of sleep a day was needed, now preparation for death needs almost no sleep.Relaxation is a deliberate effort to allow the body to do its work without your interference. You simply become absent; you leave the body as if it is a dead corpse – and it is needed. As human life has become more and more tense, more and more frantic, more and more speedy, the ordinary sleep is not enough. Relaxation leads you to a deeper realm of sleep.Hypnos means sleep. The word simply means sleep, but a sleep of a different kind – consciously produced, not biologically but psychologically. Biologically, sleep can go only to a certain extent, but psychologically, sleep can penetrate very deep. It all depends on you.The society certainly prepares you for activity, for ambition, for speed, for efficiency. It does not prepare you to relax and to do nothing and to rest. It condemns all kinds of restfulness as laziness. It condemns people who are not madly active – because the whole society is madly active, trying to reach somewhere. Nobody knows where, but everybody is concerned: “Go faster!”I have heard about a man and his wife driving on a road as fast as they can. The wife was telling the man again and again, “Just look at the map.”And the man was saying, “You keep quiet. Shut up! I am the driver. It doesn’t matter where we are going, what matters is that we are going with speed. The real thing is speed.” Nobody knows in the world where they are going, and why they are going.There is a very famous anecdote about George Bernard Shaw. He was traveling from London to some other place and the ticket collector came. He looked in all his pockets, in the bag, he opened his suitcase. And the ticket collector said, “I know you. Everybody knows you. You are George Bernard Shaw. You are a world-famous man. The ticket must be there, you must have forgotten where you have put it. Don’t be worried. Leave it.”George Bernard Shaw said to the man, “You don’t understand my problem. I’m not looking for the ticket just to show you. I want to know where I am going. That stupid ticket – if it is lost, I am lost. You think I am looking for the ticket for you? You tell me where I am going.”The ticket collector said, “That is too much. I was just trying to help you. Don’t get disturbed. Maybe you can remember it later on by the time you reach the station. How can I tell you where you are going?”But everybody is in the same position. It is good that there are no spiritual ticket collectors around, checking, “Where are you going?” Otherwise you will be simply standing without any answer. You have been going, there is no doubt about it. Your whole life you have been going, somewhere. But actually you don’t know where you are going.You reach a graveyard, that is one thing that’s certain. But that is the one place you were not going to, the one place nobody wants to go, but finally reaches. That is the terminus where all trains end up. If you don’t have a ticket, wait for the terminus. And then they say, “Get down. Now the train goes nowhere anymore.”In my village we had a beautiful graveyard just by the side of the river. It was a very silent place, and nobody came there unless he was brought. Nobody wanted to come there. I had found it a beautiful place to meditate, to relax, to rest. Beautiful marble graves – big trees with great shadow. It was a beautiful place.My father was very angry when he came to know – that when I suddenly disappeared, and I could not be found anywhere…. Somebody told him, “You will not find him whatever you do, because one place you will never look and that is the graveyard. And I have seen him, because going to the river is my business.” He was a fisherman. He said, “I have seen him many times going to the graveyard; and he disappears there.”My father said, “This is strange. Why should he go to the graveyard? Let him come home.” Nobody even tried to look for me in the graveyard; nobody wanted to go there.When in the evening I came home, everybody was angry, and they stopped me outside. They said, “First you take a bath. And every day you have been going to the graveyard?”I said, “Finally one has to go there. Why are you getting so angry? You all will be going there. I am simply visiting the place where finally one has to rest. I am learning already to rest there. One day I will be resting underneath the marble, right now I rest on top of the marble. And it is a tremendously beautiful and silent place.”They said, “We are not concerned about these strange explanations. First, you take a bath.”I said, “I can take a bath. I will take a bath every day, that is not a trouble for me. That will not prevent me going to the graveyard, because your temple is continuously crowded, it is a marketplace – it is in the marketplace. Every place is full of people – wherever you go, there are people. That is the only place where there are many people, but they are all relaxing, in deep relaxation, with no way to wake up again.”In the night my mother asked, “But you must be feeling afraid.”I said, “Why should I feel afraid? Those people are dead. One should be afraid of the living, because those are the people who can do something. These poor people are dead, they cannot do anything. They cannot even get out of their graves. And you are afraid of them, and they are simply relaxing, relaxing forever.”The whole society is geared for work. It is a workaholic society. It does not want you to learn relaxation, so from the very childhood it puts in your mind anti-relaxation ideas.I am not telling you to relax the whole day. Do your work, but find out some time for yourself, and that can be found only in relaxation. And you will be surprised that if you can relax for an hour or two hours out of each twenty-four hours, it will give you a deeper insight into yourself.It will change your behavior outwardly – you will become more calm, more quiet. It will change the quality of your work – it will be more artistic and more graceful. You will be committing fewer mistakes than you used to commit before, because now you are more together, more centered.Relaxation has miraculous powers.It is not laziness.The lazy man may look, from the outside, as if he is not working at anything, but his mind is going as fast as it can; and the relaxed man – his body is relaxed, his mind is relaxed, his heart is relaxed.Just relaxation on all three layers – body, mind, heart – for two hours he is almost absent. In these two hours his body recovers, his heart recovers, his intelligence recovers, and you will see in his work all that recovery.He will not be a loser – although he will not be frantic anymore, he will not be unnecessarily running hither and thither. He will go directly to the point where he wants to go. And he will do things that are needed to be done; he will not be doing unnecessary trivia. He will say only that which is needed to be said. His words will become telegraphic; his movements will become graceful; his life will become a poetry.Relaxation can transform you to such beautiful heights – and it is such a simple technique. There is nothing much in it; just for a few days you will find it difficult because of the old habit. To break down the old habit, it takes a few days.So go on using the hypnotic technique for relaxation. It is bound to come to you. It will bring new light to your eyes, a new freshness to your being, and it will help you to understand what meditation is. It is just the first steps outside the door of the temple of meditation. With just deeper and deeper relaxation it becomes meditation.Meditation is the name of the deepest relaxation.Osho,It always amazes me how chemicals can have such a drastic effect, not only on the body, but also on the mind.For example, my new birth control pill contains double the amount of estrogen as my old one; and immediately upon taking it, it threw my body and personality into chaos – not just physical symptoms such as nausea, but also a sense of dullness and low energy, a brittle tenseness, and a feeling of being completely “off.”It is so frustrating to feel so helpless in the hands of a few chemicals and hormones. Yet I was amazed to notice that sitting with you in these meetings, all the symptoms disappear. They are there before and afterwards, but not while in your presence.What is it about you that influences even the action of chemistry? And is there something we and science can learn from this to help people be more independent in such circumstances?Our whole structure of body and mind is made of matter. And unless you transcend your body-mind structure and become a watcher – beyond both – they will deeply affect your behavior, your thinking, your emotions, your sentiments. Hormones, chemicals or anything – they are the components of our body, but they are not the components of our consciousness.That’s why, when you are sitting here with me, you forget all about the body, all about the hormones, and without your effort a certain transcendence happens. You reach a quality of silence, watchfulness. That’s why their effects are no longer felt – because you are far away, beyond the boundary line of their effect.One Western seeker of truth, in the beginning of this century, was moving in the Middle East, in India, in Tibet, in Japan, in China, and he reported many strange experiences and people that he came across.One of the men he describes is a very well-known Hindu mystic, Brahma Yogi. He became famous in the 1920s all over the world. His only quality was that he could drink any kind of poison, and no poison affected him. And he moved around the world in every university, every scientific lab to show the experts. And they were all puzzled, because poisons which will kill immediately…and that man was taking twenty, thirty times more and he was not even affected. He would not even become unconscious.But in Calcutta he died just by accident. At Calcutta University he exhibited his capacity, drank the poison, but nobody knew his secret. His secret was simple. The secret was that he could keep his witness for thirty minutes without any wavering. In those thirty minutes he would drink the poison, finish the show, rush back to his hotel, and vomit everything.And yogis know how to vomit – because that is one of the parts of their training – to drink water as much as you can and then throw it up. I have seen people drinking two, three buckets of water with living fish in the water; and then they will throw up the water, and the fish will come out alive.His whole expertise was that for thirty minutes he remained a witness, but more than thirty minutes he could not. The accident happened because there was a problem on the road and the traffic was blocked, and he could not reach the hotel in time. He died in the car because after thirty minutes he became again identified with the body and the mind.Paul Brunton is the man who went around the whole of Asia finding out all these strange kinds of people. Naturally everybody was impressed, although there is nothing spiritual in it; the strategy was part of a spiritual technique which he was using for trivia, wasting his time.If he had not wasted his time, if he had continued to practice witnessing – forty-eight minutes is enough. One who can be a witness for forty-eight minutes continuously, without any coffee break – that man has gone beyond the body-mind complex. Now he can live, but he is living almost above his body, not within his body.So what is happening to you here is that you forget your body, you forget your hormones and the pill and everything; you become so silent, so peaceful, so attuned with me. If you can remain the same way afterwards, the effects will not show; if you can remain the same way the whole day, the effects will not show.But out of old habit we immediately fall back – get identified with the body – and then anything that the body feels, we think we are feeling. Now we have lost the distinction.In fact, you know that that body is feeling it. When you are feeling thirsty, it will be a little complex to say every time, “I think, I watch, that the body is thirsty.” Your family and people will get angry at you, saying, “Stop this nonsense; just say simply that you are feeling thirsty.”But for your inner self it is worth remembering that you are always a watcher, you never feel; the body feels and you watch, and you are like a mirror. The body feels and the mirror reflects, but the reflection does not change the mirror, it does not leave any marks on the mirror. The mirror remains pure.Then you can be having immense trouble with the body, and yet you can remain calm and quiet. You know that there is trouble and there is pain, but you are simply a watcher.Learn the art of watching, and you have learned all the religion there is.Osho,Awakening seems more like a process than a single lightning-bolt type of experience as is often described in Zen stories.Could you please say more about the different ways the guest comes to one's doorstep?It can happen both the ways. It depends on what kind of method you are using. There are gradual methods in which enlightenment comes very gradually, part by part. And there are sudden methods in which for years nothing happens; and then suddenly one morning like a lightning bolt, you are awakened.Because of these two – and there are only two possibilities – Zen has two schools. You are aware only of the sudden school, because I go on telling you stories from the sudden school, for the simple reason that the gradual school has no stories. The enlightenment happens, but there is not anything that makes a story. Even the man to whom gradual enlightenment happens does not know with certainty that the process is complete, unless his master says so.It is something like this. If you put two buckets – one with boiling water and one with just ordinary cold water which is slowly becoming warmer, the fire is there…. And you put a frog in the boiling water, he will simply jump out. If you put the same frog in the gradually heating water, which is going to boil at some point, the frog may settle there. It is cozy and lukewarm and good, and it is becoming so gradually warmer, that he cannot see the difference.And the moment comes, the water is boiling, and the poor frog is boiling but he cannot jump. From the lukewarm to the boiling point, the change has been so slow that the poor frog cannot make the distinction.The same is the situation…. There are methods of gradual enlightenment – Vipassana is a gradual enlightenment method. Slowly, slowly, changes will go on happening; you will feel better and better and better. But the koan is a sudden school method. Sudden school methods create beautiful stories.For example, one of the great masters, Rinzai, was given the famous koan of “the Sound of One Hand Clapping.” He meditated over it; and he would find something, and he would come to the master. And the master just seeing his face would say, “No, no! Get lost! Meditate; don’t waste time.” He wouldn’t even listen – that he had brought a conclusion.And Rinzai would go again and sit in his bamboo grove to meditate. Again it had gone wrong. It continued to happen.One day he insisted, he said, “You have to listen to me. I have heard it! And you are simply just looking at me and don’t even allow me to enter the room. You say, ‘No, no, just go and meditate. Don’t waste time.’ Now it is too much. For months I have been meditating. I have to say it.”The master said, “Okay, say what you have found.”He said, “Sitting in my bamboo grove, I heard the breeze passing through the bamboo grove making a beautiful sound. That is it.” And he was not hoping….The master slapped him so hard on the face that he forgot all about the bamboo grove, meditation, the sound of one hand clapping. And the master said, “Did you hear the sound of one hand clapping?”He said, “This is the sound of one hand clapping? You slapped me. If this was the sound, then why you were unnecessarily harassing me for months?”The master said, “This is not the sound. This is the reward for your insistence on wasting my time and your time. Now get lost and meditate. Find it out.”This was very insulting. Rinzai was very well educated, connected with the royal family. With great determination he went back and sat in his grove. And he said, “I am not going to move from here unless I hear it.”Days passed. The master inquired, “Where is Rinzai? I don’t see him, and he does not come to report.”They all said, “He is just sitting in his bamboo grove.”The master went there, shook him. And he said with closed eyes, “Don’t disturb me.” And the way he said, “Don’t disturb me,” with a face of silence as if he was a Buddha statue!And the master said, “Open your eyes and listen. I am your master.”He said, “Forget all about it.”The master said, “What happened about the koan I had given to you?”He said, “What koan? I don’t remember anything. But don’t disturb me, please, whoever you are.”The master had to wake him, force him to open his eyes.He looked at the master as if he was looking at a stranger, someone who has not been known before. And he asked the master, “Who are you?”The master said, “Now you have heard it. Come along with me.”But he said, “Who are you, and where you are taking me? I was rejoicing so much. There was no hand, and there was no sound, there was simply silence.”The master said, “That silence is what we call the sound of one hand clapping. You heard it, and you heard it so deeply you have even forgotten me.”He brought Rinzai back to the monastery, introduced him to all the monks saying, “He has heard it.”And when someone hears, he does not come to report because what is there to report? There is no sound. One goes on insisting to listen to the sound of one hand clapping, and a moment comes – one gets tired and forgets all about the hand and the sound, and only silence prevails. Even the desire or the idea to report does not arise.And the master said, “Rinzai is going to be my successor, because he is my first disciple who has even forgotten me. In his silence he has forgotten the koan, he has forgotten the master, he has forgotten his own name. He has simply become silence.”The sudden school makes stories, because its very methodology is such that it gives scope for sudden turns. But both methods are absolutely correct, equally valuable. It depends on the master to give one to someone according to his capacity, potentiality.For example, in the modern world the gradual method seems to be more useful. The sudden method can be dangerous to the modern man. Few modern people may be able to realize through the sudden method. Most of them will go mad – they are already on the verge of madness, so it is better to gradually change them rather than a sudden change. They may not be able to absorb it.But it does not matter whether you become enlightened gradually or you become enlightened suddenly. What matters is that you become awakened.Most of the people in the world who have become awakened have followed the gradual method. Just very few people – and particularly in Japan – have used the sudden method; it suits the Japanese character. Japanese have a little different character from others, subtle differences.The whole world – all the cultures, white and black – if they want to say yes, they will nod their head; only Japanese won’t do that. If they want to say yes, they move their head from side to side.When for the first time Japanese started coming to me, I was so puzzled. I will ask something, and they are saying yes, but their yes is not the way the whole world does it, nodding the head up and down. That is their no. Moving the head side to side is their yes.So I was at first very much puzzled. The person who used to translate, she told me, “Don’t get puzzled. When they nod this way they are saying yes, and when they do the other way they are saying no.”I said, “My God!” Because I asked them, “Don’t you want to take sannyas?” And they nod the head. And I say, “Then come” – and they are saying no! The Japanese character has developed through the centuries in a very different way.And then Zen came, and it molded itself according to the Japanese character. The sudden method was very suitable. Although there is the gradual school, it never became famous; the sudden school became very famous. But to explain the sudden school to the modern mind is very difficult, because it is illogical.Sometimes Gurdjieff used it, but it is illogical and dangerous. He was working with a small group in Tiflis in Russia, and there was, just by the side, a small canal. He was sitting inside the house, and the canal was empty – the water was not there. It used to be opened once in a while for irrigation purposes.And the people were passing from this side to that side, and he was teaching them a certain exercise, “stop”; so whenever he would say “stop!,” everyone had to stop the way he was. If one foot was up, then he had not to put it down, it had to remain that way – he had to stand on one foot. And whatever he was doing, whatever the position, the posture, he had not to change anything.A few people had been told “stop!” while crossing the canal and suddenly the water came. It was time for the water to come. As the water came, one person looked around, and he thought, “Gurdjieff is inside the house, he knows nothing about the water.” He waited till the water came up to his neck, then he jumped out; he said, “This is stupid. This is simply committing suicide.” The other person waited a little longer, till the water started touching his nose – then he jumped out.But the third person remained. The water went over his head, but he remained as he was. Gurdjieff rushed out of the house, pulled the man out – he was unconscious – got the water out; and as he became aware, he was totally transformed.This was a sudden enlightenment.But a tremendous quality, trust, was needed.He also knew, “The master is inside the house, and he knows nothing…” but rather than saving his life, he chose to follow the exercise that he was supposed to do. The water went over his head, and Gurdjieff was aware of it – he knew the times when the water comes. It was well-managed.Those two other persons simply missed – but they were more reasonable. This man was absolutely irrational. But he changed forever. The old mind was gone. The moment the water went over his head, it took everything with it; he was a new man.Sudden methods have been used by other people also, but very rarely. Sufis have used them, but very rarely. The most they have been used is in Japan, and all those stories are of tremendous beauty. But if it is done to you, you will freak out; you will not be able to assimilate it.Your mind has developed in a very different way for centuries – towards rationality, reasonableness. So the way of gradual enlightenment is for most people, unless it does not fit someone; then only a sudden method has to be used. Otherwise sudden methods are dangerous.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 34 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other night when you were talking about the decadence and suicidal tendency of Western society, peaking now in the USA, I was wondering why the Western lifestyle is capable of penetrating other cultures and spoiling them in a short time.It amazes me again and again how easily aboriginal tribes on all the continents, with, but mostly without force, drop their millennia-old civilization and culture and start imitating the Western way of life – often in quite ridiculous ways.About fifteen years ago, a famous photographer produced two wonderful photo albums depicting two remote tribes in the Sudan, called the Nuba. These physically and psychically very beautiful people, created over thousands of years – besides amazing skills and arts – a social structure full of love and respect for each other. Incidents of major violence were unknown. One incident has been reported in one of these books as a typical example of how these people treat each other.Clay pots to them were as precious as the finest Chinese porcelain is to us – those pots carried supplies of drinking water in that baking-hot climate. One of the workers dropped a pot by mistake and it broke. Nobody jumped angrily upon the poor guy; rather, they consoled the unlucky one and worked on. To me, this is highly-developed, cultured behavior – missing in our rat-race society.Some years later these people came for the first time in contact with the Western lifestyle. Within two years, the whole social structure had collapsed, decayed. They now rate a transistor radio, a torn t-shirt, and an army cap more highly than their old values. Only photographs show what has been lost forever.Osho, what drives people so easily into the arms of Western civilization, thus destroying their unique heritage?It is not a question of Western society. Basically the poor are always attracted towards the rich. They desire to be rich. They can drop any culture, any civilization if they can find a way to riches.The first thing is that their ancient culture and civilization looks to us very beautiful because we don’t know the details of their whole culture – just facets, fragments. If you know the whole culture and its implications, it won’t be difficult to see why these people dropped their heritage so easily, without resistance.For example, in India the same has been happening for hundreds of years. Aboriginal people are becoming Christians. They have a beautiful culture seen from the outside and a highly developed sensitivity. So much so that in one culture which I have been visiting continually in central India, Bastar – the whole mountains are full of aboriginals whose culture must be at least ten thousand years old – there is no police station, there are no police, there is no court, there is no law; yet no theft happens, no murder happens.And if sometimes a murder happens, then a very rare thing happens – which is inconceivable to the outsider. The murderer goes hundreds of miles to the capital to surrender to the police, confessing that he has murdered a fellow man and he needs to be punished. Unless he is punished, he will not find peace of mind.These things look beautiful – nice people – but they are hungry, starving. They don’t have clothes. They live naked. They don’t have any of the facilities that science has made available to man – no comforts, no entertainment. Their life is boring from inside – no education….And the culture that looks to us beautiful, to them is simply taken for granted, they don’t see its beauty. They have been born in it, brought up in it. They have not suddenly come across it, they have grown slowly into it.Things look good to us – that there is nobody who is a thief; but the truth is there is nothing to steal. People are so poor. The same fact can be looked at from two viewpoints. Somebody can say people are so moral that locks are not needed on the houses, and people don’t use locks; but the reality is that there is nothing in the house that needs to be locked. Secondly, the lock itself is a highly technological thing for them, they cannot make locks. They are so far behind.Gautam Buddha, his whole life, was teaching people not to steal. Mahavira was teaching not to steal. One of Mahatma Gandhi’s successors, Vinoba Bhave, spoke in a meeting. I was only a student then. He said that at that time people were so educated, so moral, so cultured that no locks were used.I was just graduating from the university; I wrote a note to him and I told him, “You should tell the whole truth. Was there anything in their houses that had to be locked? Were they capable of making locks? And moreover, you will have to give a second thought to why Gautam Buddha and Mahavira – the great teachers of that time – were telling people every day not to steal.“How do you manage both the facts together? Either Buddha and Mahavira were mad – nobody was stealing and they were continuously preaching to people not to steal – or your story that people did not lock their houses simply means that the vast mass of people had nothing to lock. Those who had something to lock, they had guards with weapons. They also had no need of locks.”So when you look from the outside it is one thing; when you look only at one facet, it is one thing. Their nakedness is not their innocence, it is simply their incapacity to produce clothes. Clothes are the second category of the basic necessities. The first thing is food. If there is no food, what you are going to do with clothes – making beautiful dresses for the corpses? They don’t have enough food. One meal a day – if you can manage it, you are very fortunate. No hospitals. No schools. If somebody falls sick, there is no way for them to help him to recover.When Western civilization reached to these aboriginals, it was not their culture that impressed them. It was not their holy Bible that impressed them. It was simply a question of survival: it was their capacity to give food, clothes, education, medicine, hospitals, doctors, teachers. They made the first roads so people had not to walk hundreds of miles for small things. They could use the public transport. They laid down the railway lines.And if you look into the life of the aboriginal people in even more detail you will be surprised. They don’t murder the way we murder, but that does not mean they are not cruel. They are far more cruel.In an aboriginal tribe, if somebody behaves in a way which is not in tune with the tribe, he is boycotted, completely boycotted. Nobody will speak to him. He cannot draw water from the tribe’s well; he may have to go miles to fetch water for himself. He is left completely alone and isolated. He cannot ask for any help in any trouble. If his hut catches fire, nobody from the tribe will come to help him to put the fire out. Once they have boycotted somebody, he does not exist for them.This is psychological murder – far more dangerous than sitting in an electric chair and within a second you are transported into another world. That is the simplest way, the most kind way.But this man will be in constant trouble. No job can he find. No other tribe will accept him. And what was his crime? Small crimes. For example, he has fallen in love with a girl who belongs to another tribe. And this is not allowed; you should marry into your own tribe. And your parents should decide on the marriage, not you.Now his crime was that he loved, and what is being done to him will be done to the girl too by the other tribe. And in those mountains and forests, you cannot live alone. Life is so interwoven that everybody is dependent on everybody else for everything.In aboriginal tribes there is nothing like freedom, no concept of freedom of speech. The elders decide everything. No younger person can even raise a question – that is disrespectful, and he will be punished for it. And you know their punishments.Just the other day Anando brought me the news. The chief minister of Punjab, under the pressure from the central government, took over the Sikh holy temple – the Golden Temple of Amritsar – just a few weeks ago. This was the second time that the army has taken it over. Immediately the high priest of the temple expelled the chief minister – because he is also a Sikh.Then he was in a dilemma. If he does not follow the central government’s orders he will be thrown out of power. If he follows their orders, he is going against his own religion and they will punish him.So he had to choose between the two. He thought perhaps the religious people would be more humane. But what happened was that the whole Punjab was in uproar against the chief minister, that he should resign immediately, or he should go to the Golden Temple, touch the feet of the high priest, confess his crime and accept whatsoever punishment is given.Resignation was difficult because if he resigns from the chief ministership, he will be killed immediately – the Sikhs will kill him; his own people will kill him because he has trespassed their holy place. And he was one of them.So he went to touch the feet of the priest and the priest said, “I forgive you, but you will have to do a penance. For seven days in Delhi” – they have a big Sikh temple in Delhi – “you sit outside the gate where people leave their shoes.” And he has been doing that for seven days, cleaning the people’s shoes outside the temple in New Delhi. And everybody is looking and a crowd is watching and people are laughing and people are joking and making a fool of him.This kind of punishment reminds one of very old traditions. Otherwise it was enough that he was asking to be forgiven. He should have been forgiven. But no, he has to be humiliated. And what kind of humiliation? The ancient methods of humiliating people, the inner workings of the tribal mind, were really ugly. And on top of it all, they were poor.So it was very easy for Western civilization – particularly Christianity – to open hospitals, schools, to give these people clothes, food. And naturally, when these people were helped in such a way they started imitating those who were helping them. So in the wake of that came transistor radios, army caps – they started dressing like army people. They looked foolish. Naked they were more beautiful, their bodies were more proportionate.Their life was difficult; Western civilization made their life very easy, and provided all these things – second-hand clothes which have been rejected by the army, and small toys like transistor radios. And for them it was something miraculous, that somebody is speaking in New Delhi – thousands of miles away – and they can listen to what he is saying. This was a miracle – because they had no idea of the technology, no understanding of what was happening.Christianity was certainly bringing miracles. Now television has reached. People cannot believe their own eyes, that they are seeing people who are thousands of miles away. Through television and radio, cars, small mechanical things, they proved to these poor people that Jesus walked on water, turned water into wine, raised the dead to life.And seeing all these miracles – for them these are miracles – they could not deny that if these people, who are just followers of Jesus, can do such great miracles, Jesus must have done them.It is very simple to understand the process – that within two years any older civilization will collapse if Western civilization approaches it. The basic things are that the older civilizations should be starving, should not have clothes, shelter, jobs, education, and then certainly the missionary becomes their prototype. They have to become like the missionary.Even if they get second-hand things – used and thrown away – they are perfectly happy with those shoes and caps and dresses. They don’t fit them because they are not made for them – some are longer, some are shorter – but still they enjoy it, it is better than to be naked and cold.They have tasted for the first time something of the man-made world, and they are grateful; and to show that gratefulness they become Christians. In India all the aboriginals are turning Christian by and by. And power functions like a magnet.When there was the British Empire all around the earth, the British missionary was part of the power machine. So anybody who has been humiliated for centuries became an imitator. He could not become Western, but he could at least imitate.It is ugly to look at from outside. They have now got bicycles, they can move far and wide, now they are smoking cigarettes, going to see the movies. Their whole structure has collapsed. Now the elders cannot dominate them, they have lost all their power. They are feeling more free. They can fall in love with a girl of another tribe and both can escape to the city. They are educated. They can find a job.Naked they could not come to the city, and even had they come, they had nothing to do except begging. They were not capable of doing any job or any skill; they were never taught.So the mechanics of the change are very simple; but if we look at the whole thing with a humanitarian vision, it is ugly of Western civilization to exploit these people. You could have given them hospitals, you could have given them schools, you could have given them skills, craftsmanship trainings. There was no need to convert them – as a payment for all your services – to Christianity; that’s where the West has been ugly.Otherwise, whatever has been done is perfectly good. But they were not doing all these things to help these people, they were doing all these things to convert these people – to make their numbers greater. Now in India Christianity is the third biggest religion.They are asking in Nagaland, “We want to have an independent country.” And Christianity, from the outside, is supporting them. Their leaders have been given refuge in London. They are being supplied arms. Their leaders are protected in London because it is now a question of Christians – they are no longer aboriginals – the whole of Christianity will stand behind them.To help the poor is not bad, but to exploit the poor is certainly evil – and in the name of helping them, converting them to your religion. They don’t understand anything about religion, but because you have helped them so much they feel so obliged that whatever you say must be right. This is a very cunning device.In India I have been trying to find a single high-caste brahmin who has been converted to Christianity. I have not been able to find one – and I have toured India many times for years.Not a single high-caste Hindu has been converted to Christianity, because what do you have to give to him? He does not need clothes, he does not need education – he has enough, he can educate you. If anybody is going to learn anything, the Hindu has a long tradition of learning; he can teach you. What do you have to give to him? Naturally no high-caste people have been converted – just the very lowest of the low.It is not a credit to Christianity.It is a discredit.Osho,I love the way you demonstrate at every turn just how absolutely untouchable you are. The Americans imprison you, torture you, destroy your commune and clearly assume that you will be humiliated by their treatment of you; but instead, that untouchability shines through, and it is they who are left humiliated – this is so clear from all their continuing anger at you.You are an impossible enemy! You are that simple truth – that only without ambition is one free to embrace the stars.One can be humiliated only if one is thinking of oneself as higher than another, holier-than-thou – such a person can be pulled down.You cannot humiliate a humble person.There is no way at all.America has done everything – and is continuing to do it. That simply shows utter foolishness. If they could not humiliate me in their jails, how can they humiliate me outside America? I will turn all their efforts of humiliation upon themselves because there is no other way. I simply don’t accept it.I have told you many times the story of Gautam Buddha. He was passing by the side of a village. His enemies had gathered, and they wanted to humiliate him – they were shouting ugly words, four-letter words at him. He remained silent. They looked a little awkward because he was not saying anything.And finally he said, “If you are finished, can I move on because I have to reach the other village before sunset. And if you are not finished, I will be coming again after few days – I will inform you – on the same route; then I will have enough time for you. Then you can do as much as you want, say as many things as you ever wanted to.”One of the men in the crowd said, “We are not just saying things, we are insulting you.”Gautam Buddha said, “You can insult me, but if I don’t accept it, that is not in your power. You can try to humiliate me, but I simply don’t accept these things. You should have come ten years before when I used to get caught in anybody’s net – somebody would insult me and I would feel insulted. At that time I was a slave to anybody; now I am a free man. I choose: whatever is right I take, whatever is not right I give it back.“In the last village people had brought sweets, flowers, to present to me. I said, ‘We eat only once a day and we have taken our meal. So please – we don’t store things, we cannot keep them. We are sorry. You will have to take them back.’ I ask you, what could they do with all those sweets and flowers and fruits that they had brought?”Somebody said from the crowd, “They could have distributed it in the village.”Buddha said, “You are intelligent. Do the same. Whatever you have brought – for ten years I have stopped accepting such things. Now go back home and distribute these things to whomsoever you want.”Humiliation is impossible when you are not living as an ego. It is the ego that is humiliated.And America had to take its humiliation back. That’s why they are still angry and still trying their hardest to harm me in every possible way. They have not learned a simple lesson.I was in chains – they had done everything illegally – without an arrest warrant. At the point of a gun they arrested me, without even showing the cause, with handcuffs, with chains on my legs, another chain on my waist – exactly arranged because they knew my whole medical history.We had presented my medical history to the government – that my back is bad. So the chain was kept on continually, because it was chained on every time I changed jails: five jails in twelve days. But it remained exactly on the point where it hurts. It was absolutely not accidental, because not even a single time was it in another place – and it could have been. I told them, “Just keep it loose.”They said, “No. We will keep it the way we have been ordered.”And they were worried that I would wave to people, even with handcuffs, so they tied my handcuffs with the chain on my waist so I could not move my hands either.And the cars…the way they took me – I have never seen cars driven in such a way. Suddenly they would take speed, and suddenly they would stop, just to hurt my back.The first time Devaraj was with me and he was telling them, “This is not right. There is just no need to do this.” They wouldn’t listen. And this continued for twelve days. Everywhere there were instructions, it seems, how the car should be driven: for no reason, suddenly the car would take speed to a hundred miles an hour, and suddenly it would stop; then again it would speed and stop just to give me as much of a jolt as possible, to hit the painful back with the thick chain they had put on it.But it does not humiliate me. It was simply showing their stupidity. They could not prevent me from smiling. Everywhere people were standing by the side of the road to greet me. It doesn’t matter that I could not wave my hand to them, but I smiled at them.In the court when the magistrate comes, they declare that the magistrate is coming, “Stand up” – so everybody stands up. When the magistrate sits on the chair, then everybody is allowed to sit. When I was coming into the court, people were standing up on their own. There was no declaration – you don’t declare for a prisoner.And that was a clear humiliation of the magistrate and all the police officials and all the court people, that all the people…even those who were not sannyasins, even those who had never seen me, had never heard of me except that just then they had seen me on the television and seen the brutality of the American government.They tried in every way. They were thinking that I would be humiliated; but whenever the press inquired of me, I said, “I am feeling great. As far as I am concerned, I am feeling perfectly great. They can torture my body, but they cannot touch me.”And because I exposed their whole thing…and they are not even capable of replying to it, to all the facts that I have told to the world news press. They have not been able to reply to a single point because I have simply described the story as it was. They are feeling humiliated, and they are trying to harass me – but they are again wrong.They have arranged a world travel for me. I may not have traveled around the world without their help! I may not have been able to see all my people in their own countries, and I may not have been able to expose that political imperialism has ended, but its place has been taken by economic imperialism – which is far more dangerous. Now, as with themselves, they are arranging humiliation for other countries.I was in Ireland for fifteen days. The man who gave the visa must have taken too much beer – just the Irish way of living – so he did not look whose visa it was, whose passport it was. He simply stamped it. We were asking for only a one night stay. He stamped it with a seven-day seal – perhaps it was the closest to his hand! We said, “That’s good.”We moved into a hotel; and as America’s information reached them, that our plane had landed in Ireland, immediately the police went to the airport and found that we had already entered the country.So next morning the police officers came and canceled all the visas for seven days. But we said, “You can cancel it; we are not going to go. We have been here only one night. What crime have we committed that you are canceling them?”They said, “No crime.” They were afraid – because the first man had made the mistake of giving us seven days. “You can live here silently and leave silently.” This is the police. Without our having a visa, they were allowing us to live in the country silently and to leave silently, just to hide their mistake.We lived there for fifteen days, and after fifteen days, when we left, the minister concerned said, in the parliament, that I had never been in Ireland, that it was just gossip. He knew perfectly well that for fifteen days my group had been there.And the day we moved, the press was there, the photographers were there; they took my photograph in front of the hotel. Perhaps they took away all those photographs and all that material from the press before declaring in the parliament that I had never been here. So now America is degrading every country.In Greece, within fifteen days, they arrested me – and the passport and the visa was given to me by the son of the president, who is a minister. He had issued the visa for four weeks himself, and he himself canceled it.And they wouldn’t allow me even to stay in the hotel for the night. But at the airport the whole news media was there – all the television channels and newspapers and magazines and the radio – and at least forty top police officers. I cannot understand what they were afraid of – I don’t carry nuclear weapons with me.And when I was talking to the press, the chief of the police stepped in front of me to stop me. And I said to him, “Shut up and go back and stand in your place!”Perhaps in his whole life nobody has said that. And he was wise enough to simply move back and stand in his place – because he saw the situation, that if he said something, I was going to hammer him then and there. And everything would be in the reports, on the television, on the radio; it was better just to….But this much was on the television, that he came up to prevent me because I was talking against the police, that they wanted to dynamite the house, to burn me alive, that they were threatening my people.Because I was asleep, John came to me; and when he woke me up, I said, “Just tell them to sit and wait five minutes so I can change my clothes and get ready to get arrested again.”Now I am an experienced man, there is no problem.But they wouldn’t listen. They started throwing rocks at the windows, at the doors. From my bathroom I heard explosions as if somebody was throwing bombs. I said, “This is strange.” And when I came down I was informed that they were threatening that if I didn’t come down they would dynamite the house. And I had not left the house for the whole fifteen days I was there.And after I left Athens, the same minister who had given me the visa and who canceled the visa, lied before the parliament again. So it has been a tremendous experience. What I have been saying about politicians has proved one hundred percent correct.Hasya, my secretary, had been with that minister for one hour, and he denied in parliament that he had seen my secretary at all. He said that he had been deceived, and that somebody else managed to arrange the visa and his signature.These are your leaders upon which the whole destiny of humanity depends.We are going to sue every politician. For example, this minister we are going to sue. And Hasya has to be in the court to testify that she has been with the minister for one hour explaining about me, everything that he asked, and he had given the visa only after being fully satisfied. And he simply denies that he has ever seen my secretary.And the same thing has been happening all around the whole civilized world of the West. A few countries are so afraid that I have not even applied for visa and they have decided already that the visa should not be given. I have not even applied…the visa should not be given.They have informed all their embassies that I am a dangerous man and no visa should be granted. If my application comes then it should be rejected immediately. They are so afraid that almost all the parliaments of Europe have discussed me, and on strange things.The Dutch minister for foreign affairs has said that I have been denied entry into Holland because I have spoken against homosexuality, I have spoken against Mother Teresa, the pope, the Catholic religion. And each democracy contends that it is secular.The pope can criticize any religion and he is welcome – I cannot criticize the pope. If he has any guts he should reply to my criticism rather than pulling the strings of these politicians – he has a Catholic majority in these countries so the politicians are afraid of losing votes.I can understand Catholicism, the pope, Mother Teresa; but homosexuality is a totally new thing. I was not aware that homosexuality is Holland’s official religion – criticize homosexuality and you cannot enter Holland. That minister has condemned the whole of Holland as homosexual. If the people of Holland have any sense, they should force that minister and his ministry to resign, because he’s abusing the whole country.And I am dangerous because I have criticized homosexuality. I am criticizing every perversion, and I will continue to criticize them.And America is trying in every way…. It is a humiliation for America. Now they are trying to make every other country also feel humiliated. All the countries which are with America will be humiliated in the same way. And a single individual can put the whole world against himself, and still you cannot humiliate him.The truth is simple. If one is humble, humiliation is impossible. Truth cannot be humiliated. You can crucify it, but you cannot humiliate it.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 35 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In India there is a proverb, “Vasudhaiva kutumbakam: the whole earth is a family.” Perhaps this proverb is one thousand years old. Osho, were there really people once who lived like a family? Or was it a vision of some mystic, a vision which you are going to bring to reality?There has never been any society who has lived according to the vision of vasudhaiva kutumbakam: the whole earth is one family.”The mystics have been, for thousands of years, talking about it, visualizing it, but unfortunately people worship the mystics but don’t allow the mystic to transform them. Worshipping is really a way of escaping from transformation; it is saying, in other words, “You are right, but it is not time for me yet. I respect you, I worship you, and I will remember what you are saying; but I cannot act accordingly right now. I am just an ordinary human being, you are a great realized soul – the distance is vast.”Worshipping the mystics is not real respect. It is a strategy of the mind to avoid seeing the finger that is pointing towards the moon.Man is very cunning. He can crucify somebody to get rid of him, he can worship somebody to get rid of him. Crucifixion and worshipping are not different because the basic purpose is the same: “Just leave me alone; your stupid utopia is good, I don’t have any argument against it, but you are a special being, and I am just an ordinary creature.”To prove this fact, people have called their mystics incarnations of God, messiahs, saviors, messengers. In some way they have made them so far away, they have created such a distance between themselves and the mystics, that the vision of the mystic remained a vision. It is impossible with this approach to make it a reality.The first step to make such a grand vision a reality, is to realize that the mystic is just as ordinary a human being as you are. If he has realized himself, you can also realize yourself. What has become actual in him, is potential in you. What has blossomed in him, is just a seed in you. But between the seed and the flower there is no distance at all. The seed is already on the way, making every effort to become a flower.But there have been two reasons denying this simple fact. One was that the masses wanted the distance; and the other was that it fulfilled the egos of many who were not really mystics, who were simply pretenders.To say, yourself, that you are sent by God, is such a lie – because God is a lie, and now you are making that lie even more destructive by saying that you are a messenger, that you are a prophet. It fulfilled the egos of those who were not really realized people, so they never made any effort to destroy the distance. On the contrary, they emphasized that it was true – what was possible for them was impossible for you.To prove that the distance is immense, either they fabricated miracles or after their death you added miracles in their life – because that makes the distinction very clear. You cannot do miracles, and these people were doing miracles. Certainly, they were coming from a higher order, with some spiritual power that you don’t have.They also wanted that miracles should be fabricated around them; it helped their ego. It helped you also to protect yourself; otherwise you would have to transform yourself, bring something which looks impossible into reality – “Vasudhaiva kutumbakam: the whole world is one family.” Even one family is not one family. Brothers are fighting with brothers, husbands are fighting with wives, wives are fighting with husbands, children are fighting with children. Even the family is not a family – and the mystics are talking of the whole world being conceived as one family.So it helped their egos to create the distance, it helped you because it seems almost impossible. Even five persons in one home cannot live peacefully; there is constant quarreling and fighting and conflict. Even the people who love each other are a pain in each other’s neck. So what possibility is there that the whole world becomes a family, a loving commune?Seeing the impossibility, it is better to accept that it is beyond you, it is only possible for those special beings. But the whole world is not consisting of those special beings, “so all that we can do is worship them.” That is a very sophisticated way of crucifying a person.A real mystic will deny it, that there is any difference, because he can see why you want the difference and the distinction.In Gautam Buddha’s stories about his past lives there is one story that just before this life, when he became Gautam Buddha, he was an unconscious human being as everybody else is, and he heard about one man that had become awakened, enlightened. Everybody was going to see him. He also went to see him, with flowers to offer. He touched his feet, offered the flowers unto his feet. As he was standing up, he could not believe it; the man who was thought to be enlightened bowed down to this unconscious human being and touched his feet.Buddha said, “What are you doing? I am an unconscious, ordinary human being; you are an enlightened, awakened soul. Why have you touched my feet?”The man laughed, and he said, “Yesterday I was also unconscious, unawakened; today I am awakened. Today you are unconscious, tomorrow you will be awakened. Remember that I touched your feet. Never forget it when you become awakened.”This story is so significant. That man is saying, “I am trying to teach you that from now onward…because I can see the possibility, the potential that you will become awakened. It is only a question of time. The time does not matter – tomorrow or one life afterward. But remember that a buddha touched your feet while you were unawakened.”What is the message? The message is, he is trying to create a bridge. He is trying to declare that awakening is not something supernatural, it is something that is intrinsic in your nature; that it is not something to do with God, it has something to do with you. It depends on you. You can go on sleeping as long as you want, and the moment you want to wake up you can wake up.And Buddha remembered it. His last words when he was dying were, “Please don’t start worshipping me. I was not here to create worshippers – there are millions of worshippers already. Don’t make statues of me; otherwise you will forget my teaching, a deviation, and you become satisfied with worshipping – which makes no difference to you. You remain the same.”And that’s exactly what people did. He died, and they started making statues and worshipping him in spite of his last words. In fact, there are more statues of Gautam Buddha in the world than of anybody else.The Middle Eastern languages like Arabic and Persian don’t have another word for statue. Their word for statue is but, and “but” has come from “buddha.” The statues of Buddha were so many that his name became synonymous with statue. And for twenty-five centuries people have been worshipping him. There are thousands of temples in the East. Nobody seems to be interested in the transformation he was teaching, and everybody is very enthusiastic about worshipping him.Worship seems to be a very subtle strategy to avoid the man.Jews also avoided Jesus, but they used a very primitive method. Hindus have also avoided Gautam Buddha but they have used a very sophisticated method. And you can see by the results – because Jesus was crucified, and crucifixion became the source of Christianity. It is out of murder, out of violence and blood, that a religion arises. You cannot expect from Christianity anything else. In two thousand years it has killed millions of people. Its very origin was in murder, in crucifixion.They have not bothered about Jesus’ teachings. He was saying, “Love your enemy like yourself.” Then I cannot understand who these people were killing. If you are going to love your enemy, are you going to kill your lovers? Enemies have to be loved, so who is to be killed – friends? No, the teaching has not been followed; only sermons were given in the churches. But enemies – and innocent enemies, who have done no harm to the Christians…. Their only crime was that they were not Christians, and they were not willing to be Christians; and that was too much, too big a crime.Hindus used a more sophisticated method, perhaps because it was an older civilization, more cultured. They could have crucified Gautam Buddha, but they did not do that. On the contrary, they accepted Gautam Buddha as one of the incarnations of the Hindu God.You will be surprised that Hindus have twenty-four incarnations of God. This number twenty-four got fixed in the mind of India. Just as there are twenty-four hours in the day – one circle is complete – one creation is one circle of millions and millions of years. In one circle of existence there are twenty-four tirthankaras; that was the Jaina concept.Things arise out of strange things. Every language and its arithmetic is based on ten digits, and those ten digits have come from the ten fingers – because uneducated people count on their fingers. So the first counting was done on fingers, and there are ten of them; this is just a coincidence. That’s why from one to ten the whole mathematics is complete, then it is repetition. Eleven, twelve, thirteen – that is repetition. Then you can go to millions of numbers, but they are all repetitions. The basic numbers are ten, but there is no necessity that there should be ten basic numbers.There have been mathematicians like Leibniz who worked only with three numbers – one, two, three – and managed to do every calculation. After three, four does not come because four does not exist in Leibniz’ mathematics. After three comes ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, twenty. There is no problem – you can count that way. In the ordinary mathematics there will be four chairs in the room; Leibniz will count ten, and it makes no difficulties, the calculations will be perfectly right.Albert Einstein even tried to work with two. Just reading Leibniz he said, “Why three?”That too was another coincidence; it was because Leibniz was a very Christian-minded person, and the trinity would be disturbed. If you bring down the numbers to less, if you make the numbers two, what will happen to the trinity? If there are only two digits, then one, two, ten, eleven. Ten will be the number, not three. To save the trinity and not to get into trouble with the pope, he kept the number three. Albert Einstein tried with number two. Two is certainly absolutely essential – you cannot work with just one – and he succeeded; with two it is possible.The same kind of coincidence happened in India. Jainism, being the oldest religion, had the idea that just as a day and night make the whole circle, and then begins another day and night, another circle, it is the same with creation…one creation, then everything goes into dark night, disappears, then another creation starts…. Each creation has twenty-four teachers; those are called tirthankaras, the path-makers. That is the literal meaning of tirthankara.Before Jainism’s twenty-four tirthankaras became famous, Hindus had only ten incarnations of God; but then they started feeling a little poor. “Jainas have twenty-four and you have only ten?”In every sphere, people are so competitive and behave so stupidly, that unless you look you will never find out how suddenly after Mahavira, because he was the most prominent Jaina tirthankara…. Although he was the last, he was the most important person in the whole range of twenty-four. Up to Mahavira, all Hindu scriptures have ten incarnations. Perhaps the fact there were ten incarnations is nothing but the result of ten-finger counting. Perhaps the reason is the same as in mathematics; and you will not be surprised that the number ten is also a Hindu concept. It was the Hindus who first brought the digit ten.So it is not impossible that ten is the complete number; naturally ten incarnations are complete. You can look into your languages and you will find it. For example, all languages which are originated from Sanskrit – particularly all the languages of the developed countries of the West…. The Sanskrit for two is dwa, which becomes in some languages twa and finally culminates in two.The English three comes from Sanskrit tri. The difference is so small – because in English there is no “dthra” sound. The alphabet in Sanskrit is double that of English, so in English you cannot write “dthri”; if you write “dthri” it will become “three.” You have to make “dthra” by making “t-h,” joining two letters.The Sanskrit for six is sasth, and you can see it is connected. For nine it is nov; and you can see it is connected. Ten was the complete number; after ten it is a repetition.But once Mahavira emphasized twenty-four tirthankaras, Hindu scholars started feeling that they were a little behind. People started saying, “You have only ten tirthankaras, while Jainas have twenty-four.” So after Mahavira, Hindu scriptures started talking about twenty-four reincarnations – suddenly, with no reasoning, with no cause. Just as Mahavira died, immediately Hindu scriptures started talking about twenty-four reincarnations, just to compete with Jainism.It gave them an opportunity also, and this was the opportunity – perhaps for this opportunity they made it twenty-four, or vice versa. They accepted Gautam Buddha, who was the most influential person outside the Hindu fold. They could not really crucify him – they were much more sophisticated people – but they could still crucify him in a very logical way.They started a story about Buddha in their famous scriptures, the Shivapurana. The story is that God made the world. He made hell and heaven; he made hell to be guarded by the devil. The devil was the king of hell, just as God was the king of heaven; the devil was his shadow, his opponent. But millions of years passed and nobody came to hell – everybody died and reached to heaven, because people were not doing anything wrong. They were not being criminals, sinners.The devil was very angry, and he reached heaven and he asked God, “This is absolutely stupid! Why have you made hell? If nobody has to come there, then it is mere wastage. And my life is wasted – I am simply sitting there! You have made me the king of hell, and there is nobody in my kingdom. It is just empty space. Millions of years I have waited, and it is enough. You finish that kingdom, or start sending people. I want real people to dominate, I don’t want to sit there alone.”And God said, “Don’t be angry, you go back. I will be born as Gautam Buddha soon, and will convince people to do wrong things. And soon hell will be overcrowded.” That’s why God took an incarnation as Gautam Buddha.You see the strategy: they are accepting Gautam Buddha as a Hindu incarnation of God, but the purpose is to send people to hell. So whoever follows Buddha is going to hell. And since then hell has been overcrowded. And they go on making extensions, but people are always coming in more and more. The situation has completely reversed: now very rarely does someone go to heaven. Most of the trains are going to hell.In the Shivapurana it is said that the crowd is so much that sometimes a few people are kept alive on the earth because they are on the waiting list. You cannot take them to heaven, and in hell there is no room; they are making room as fast as they can. So many people on the earth are on the waiting list, living just until some place is ready for them; then they will be taken there.This way they have condemned Gautam Buddha’s whole teaching – that it is just to destroy people’s spirituality. And you see the effect in India: Buddhism disappeared. It was born in India, and India was immensely impressed with Gautam Buddha. There are thousands of temples and statues that show that the whole country was under his impact.But Buddhism disappeared so totally that even in the most holy Buddhist place, Bodhgaya, where Gautam Buddha became enlightened – the bodhi tree is there and a temple stands as a memorial – they could not find a Buddhist priest for the temple, so a Hindu brahmin has been performing the worshipping rituals for hundreds of years. It has become a family tradition.I asked the man who is the priest, “How long have you been here?”He said, “We have been here since this temple has been here.” Hindus created such an atmosphere that those who had started following Gautam Buddha moved back – who wants to go to hell, and hellfire – to the Hindu fold.I am trying to say to you that Jesus’ crucifixion made a fanatic religion of Christianity, which has been killing millions of Jews down the centuries, and their vengeance is not fulfilled.Hindus did far better. They did not disrespect Gautam Buddha, they respected him as an incarnation of God, but managed to convince people that whoever followed him would go to hell, so not to follow him. The whole of India became completely clean of Buddhism. Buddhism spread all over Asia except in India. I used to go to their world conferences in Bodhgaya. Every nation of Asia was represented except India, because in India, Buddhism does not exist.You can use crucifixion, you can use worship, and manage the same result; and sometimes worship may be a worse crucifixion than any crucifixion can be.The mystics – the authentic mystics – have always tried to convince man: “There is no difference between us and you. The only difference is that you are sleeping and we have opened our eyes and we are awake – and it is not much of a difference.”Vasudhaiva kutumbakam – vasudhaiv means the whole earth, kutumbakam means the family – has never been realized. One hopes that some day it will be realized.It is my vision too.Osho,One day in August, 1985, I was trying with all my efforts to clean the bar of the disco in Rajneeshpuram, and I was sure you would go there that night for the simple reason that the “mama” was so worried that cleaning be perfect! While I was expecting you, I was feeling like a housewife expecting the husband, but I was thinking, “This husband will not nag me, will not criticize my work. He will find everything beautiful.”And it happened that you entered that saloon so gentle, so full of divine charm; my heart was beating so fast. I have to confess I was pretty ashamed. I was sure that I had fallen in love with you, deeply, incurably.And it happened one night in Jesus Grove some thirty days later; I was there celebrating you, and in my heart I was a little bit jealous of those beautiful long-haired girls that used to dance with you!I always had the inferiority complex of being ugly – and now, aged! “Oh,” i was thinking – not with anger but with sorrow – “I would like so much to be pretty now so he would see me!”And when I was not expecting it – surprised – I saw you coming towards me, gazing at me and dancing and celebrating with me! It was an eternity – those long, long minutes!Osho, when I went to my residence that night, talking to the stars, to the full moon, I was saying, “Now I know somebody loves me! I am sure he loves! We are his beloveds, I am sure of that!” And that certainly changed my life one hundred and eighty degrees. From that day on I have felt warmth inside me – not the uncomfortable absence I used to have before, but something that gave me extra energy to live and to spread beautiful things that come from you.Osho, you always say that we should drop the attachment to you someday, but the only thing I deeply wish in my heart is to be close to you, sharing good and bad moments, until death do us part.Can I postpone the moment of dropping the attachment to your presence to another life?You are not aware of the dynamics of spiritual changes. I can say to you, “you can postpone,” but the more you will love me, the more you will love the whole existence, the more you will love yourself. And as that love deepens, you start disappearing. There is only love – and love is not an attachment. The attachment is of the “I.” Love is enough to take you away from that I.So I say don’t be worried, you can postpone; don’t be afraid. Allow love to become total, and the I will disappear; and when on your part the I disappears, who is going to be attached to whom? Attachment falls of its own accord.And you have a feeling – which is in almost everybody’s heart – that when attachment disappears, love will disappear. That’s what happens in ordinary love experiences – love and attachment are almost one thing.But loving me is a totally different phenomenon.In the beginning the attachment will follow just out of old habit, but soon it will understand that now it is no longer needed, love is enough unto itself. And when attachment disappears, it is not that love disappears; it is for the first time that you feel its purity, its grandeur, its perfection. You are not a loser. Attachment dropped, you are victorious.But it is up to you. You can postpone – about that I will not stop you – you can postpone for the next life. But don’t stop love. Get deeper into love, and it will take care of the whole thing. The attachment will go, the postponement will go. It will take away all junk that surrounds your inner space. And when there is only love, it is divine. Then it is not addressed to anyone, it is simply a fragrance available to all – to all the winds wherever they will take it.But feel blissful that it has knocked on your door. And drop the idea that attachment and love are one thing. They are enemies. It is attachment that destroys all love. If you feed, if you nourish attachment, love will be destroyed; if you feed and nourish love, attachment will fall away by itself. They are not one; they are two separate entities and antagonistic to each other.Osho,Your story the other night about the mystic who asked for volunteers to join him in nirvana produced such a strong sensation in the room!Usually when you say, “It can happen now!” I feel, “I've got to get it this time because you've said it so often and it's simply being retarded not to get it.” Along with this feeling though, something in me retracts with fear.The other night I didn't feel afraid at all. I forgot all the unfinished editing, I forgot all the questions that need gathering. I even forgot that you've told me not to disappear yet. I saw the chance to jump, but the chance didn't see me. Could you please comment?It is easy to forget that I have told you not to disappear yet, but I don’t forget anything. You can drop anything you like, but you cannot drop your editing work!So when I say, “It can happen now,” you are not included in that!Osho,If the witness is beyond the body/mind complex, how is it that when the body/mind complex goes to shower in the morning, it doesn't leave the poor witness in the bed?Milarepa, it leaves the witness in bed – particularly when it is too cold. It rests in the bed and waits for you to come from the shower!The watcher is very intelligent!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 36 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In America, many people – from meditators to managers – are using a technique called “positive thinking.” They are trying to change destructive thoughts and conditionings about themselves, others, and existence, into positive ones, and in this way hope to be more successful on the level of their lives that they are concerned with. Picturing their minds as a cage, I wonder whether this technique is just like painting the cage golden.Osho, is the technique of positive thinking helpful for awakening? Or does it dull the awareness of being imprisoned and the desire to become free?The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness.Awareness is always choiceless.Positive thinking simply means forcing the negative into the unconscious and conditioning the conscious mind with positive thoughts. But the trouble is that the unconscious is far more powerful, nine times more powerful, than the conscious mind. So once a thing becomes unconscious, it becomes nine times more powerful than it was before. It may not show in the old fashion, but it will find new ways of expression.So positive thinking is a very poor method, without any deep understanding, and it goes on giving you wrong ideas about yourself.Positive thinking was born out of a certain Christian sect in America which was called Christian Science. To avoid the word Christian, so others can also be allured to it, they slowly dropped that old label and simply started talking about the philosophy of positive thinking.Christian Science – which is the original source – proposed that anything that happens in your life is nothing but a thought projection. If you want to be rich, think and grow rich. It is by thinking positively that you are rich, that you are getting richer, that dollars will start coming towards you.I am reminded of an anecdote. A young man met an old lady on the road. The old lady asked, “What happened to your father? He is not coming to our weekly meetings of Christian Scientists – and he is our oldest member, almost the founder of our society.”The young man said, “He is sick and feeling very weak.”The woman laughed. She said, “It is just his thought and nothing else. He is thinking he is sick – he is not sick. And he is thinking he is weak – he is not weak. Life is made of thoughts; the way you think, you become. Just tell him to remember his own ideology that he has been preaching to us. Tell him to think healthy; tell him to think full of vigor.”The young man said, “I will give the message.”After eight or ten days the young man met the woman again, and she asked, “What happened? Didn’t you give the message? – because he is still not coming to the weekly meeting.”The boy said, “I gave the message, madam, but now he thinks he is dead. And not only does he think he is dead, my whole neighborhood, my family, even I myself think he is dead. And he is no longer living with us; he has gone to the graveyard!”Christian Science was a superficial way…it may help in a few things; particularly those things which are really created by your thought can be changed. But your whole life is not created by your thought.Positive thinking came out of Christian Science. It talks now more philosophically, but the base remains the same – that if you think negatively, that is going to happen to you; if you think positively, that is going to happen to you. And in America that kind of literature is widely read. Nowhere else in the world has positive thinking made any impact – because it is childish.“Think and grow rich” – everybody knows this is simply foolish. And it is harmful, and dangerous too. The negative ideas of your mind have to be released, not repressed by positive ideas. You have to create a consciousness which is neither positive nor negative. That will be the pure consciousness. In that pure consciousness you will live the most natural and blissful life.If you repress some negative idea because it is hurting you…. For example: if you are angry, and you repress it and try to make an effort to change the energy into something positive – to feel loving towards the person you were feeling angry with, to feel compassionate – you know you are deceiving yourself.Deep down it is still anger; it is just that you are whitewashing it. On the surface you may smile, but your smile will be limited only to your lips. It will be an exercise of the lips; it won’t be connected with you, with your heart, with your being. Between your smile and your heart, you yourself have put a great block – the negative feeling that you have repressed.And it is not one feeling; in life you have thousands of negative feelings. You don’t like a person, you don’t like many things; you don’t like yourself, you don’t like the situation you are in. All this garbage goes on collecting in the unconscious, and on the surface a hypocrite is born, who says, “I love everybody, love is the key to blissfulness.” But you don’t see any bliss in that person’s life. He is holding the whole of hell within himself.He can deceive others, and if he goes on deceiving long enough, he can deceive himself too. But it won’t be a change. It is simply wasting life – which is immensely valuable because you cannot get it back.Positive thinking is simply the philosophy of hypocrisy – to give it the right name. When you are feeling like crying, it teaches you to sing. You can manage if you try, but those repressed tears will come out at some point, in some situation. There is a limitation to repression. And the song that you were singing was absolutely meaningless; you were not feeling it, it was not born out of your heart. It was just because the philosophy says to always choose the positive.I am absolutely against positive thinking. You will be surprised that if you don’t choose, if you remain in a choiceless awareness, your life will start expressing something which is beyond both positive and negative, which is higher than both. So you are not going to be a loser. It is not going to be negative, it is not going to be positive, it is going to be existential.So if tears are there, they will have a beauty; they themselves will have a song. You need not impose any song on them, they themselves will be out of joy, out of fulfillment – not out of sadness, failure. And if the song bursts forth, it is not against tears, despair; it is simply the expression of your joy…not against anything, not for anything. It is simply the flowering of your own being; hence I call it existential.Positive thinking has led America into a very wrong path; it had made people hypocrites. It is the most influential philosophy in America, and in fact, it is not even a philosophy, it is just rubbish. It does not understand the psychology of man, it is not grounded in the findings of psychology; it is not grounded in the deeper findings of meditation. It is simply giving people hope – people who are losing all hope. It is giving people ambition.The poor man thinks that if he goes on thinking, then suddenly out of the blue, a Cadillac will appear in his porch – although right now he has no porch. First he has to think of a porch! Positive thinking will create a porch, then positive thinking will bring a Cadillac. And even if it happens, please don’t sit in such a car; it is dangerous. There is no car, and there is no porch – that man is hallucinating. He is not in his senses.Everything has to be earned. There is a famous book by Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, and his whole emphasis is that if you think really hard, you will become rich. Millions of copies have been sold because he is a good writer, one of the best that America has produced. He writes well, convincingly.But I have told you before that when his book was first published, he was at the bookstall so that the publisher could introduce him to the customers, and he could put his signature on the books. And it happened that Henry Ford just came in – he was looking at books, he loved books – and he inquired, “What is happening? What is this man doing?”He found out that this was Napoleon Hill, a great writer, and his new book was just published. “He will be very happy to be introduced to you.” So Henry Ford went to him. The publisher introduced Napoleon Hill, saying, “He has written this book, Think and Grow Rich.”Henry Ford looked at the cover, at the title, and asked Napoleon Hill, “Have you come in your own car, or in a public bus?”It seemed so irrelevant, but when Henry Ford was asking, Napoleon Hill had to say, “Yes, I have come in a public bus.”Henry Ford returned the book and told him, “When you have thought enough about a beautiful car and it appears in your porch, then bring this book to me. I am Henry Ford – I don’t need this book. I know you cannot grow rich by thinking. You can cheat poor people by this book. Everybody wants to become rich, so the book will sell well, and perhaps by the book sales you may become rich, and you may purchase a car. But remember, that is not the condition. I will accept the book if the car appears by your thinking.”The car never appeared, he could never go to Henry Ford. And that old man was very strange; he used to call once in a while on the phone and say, “What happened about the car? If it has not appeared yet, withdraw the book from the market. It is sheer cheating!” And the whole book is about positive thinking – only think positive thoughts.And you can see the difference: what I am doing here is…all thoughts are useless – positive or negative. They are two sides of the same coin. You are not to change from the negative to the positive; you have to go beyond both. You have to drop them both, you have to become a thoughtless consciousness. And out of that consciousness, whatever you do will be right. Whatever you do will have tremendous beauty. Whatever you do will be satisfying.Osho,Does sex energy need to be expressed through sex, or is it just that we label this energy as such through biological needs? If energy doesn't get expressed through sex, is it a repression, or can it be transformed and find other channels?The energy can be transformed, but only after you have lived it naturally. If you have not expressed it naturally – sex energy, sexually – you cannot move towards transformation.When sex is expressed as pure sex – and there is no sin in it, there is no need to feel guilty about it; this is the way your bodies are made, this is the way your biology functions – express it. Just by expressing it naturally, there will come a moment when the compulsion to express it as sex will disappear. That is the turning moment, now transformation is possible.First, natural expression to the satisfaction of the natural instinct in you, and then transformation is possible, because now the energy will not compel you to express it as sex; it is satisfied. It has known what sexual experience is. Only after this, the transformation is possible, and the transformation will happen through meditation.So whenever you feel energy in you, and no desire to express it sexually, simply sit silently and meditate. Meditation will make the path for the energy to move higher, and you will know that the same energy which was expressed as sex, ultimately is expressed as samadhi, as super-consciousness. It is the same energy – just the label of expression goes on changing. But if something remains incomplete, you will be dragged again and again to it.The religions have a reason to repress sex. They all wanted to transform the energy, so naturally they thought that sex should be blocked, expressed in any other way; that blocked energy then could be transformed into spirituality. But they had no understanding about sex or energy or transformation.Sex is not something of which you have only a certain quantity in you. It is produced every day, so if you express it sexually, it does not mean that you don’t have any more energy left, so how will you transform it? Sexual energy is created every day. It is not a reservoir, not a bank, that if you take out something, that much is less. It is created every day by your living, by your movements, by your food, by your breathing, by the circulation of the blood – by your very life. It is a by-product of life. But if you start stopping it forcibly, you will be doing a harmful act to yourself.First, if you forcibly repress sex, your mind will continuously think of sex – sex and nothing else, because the energy that has been repressed is going to revolve in your mind.Let me remind you that your sexual center is in your mind; genitals are just the extension of a center which is in the head. That’s why you can dream about sex, you can fantasize about sex – and each fantasy will immediately affect your genital organs. You are thinking, it is in the head. The genitals are the extension of a subtle center in your head, so when you repress the energy, your head becomes full of it. Your sex becomes cerebral, mental, so you think about it, you dream about it. And this is an ugly state.One man reached to a psychoanalyst’s office and said, “Help me; otherwise I will die.”The psychoanalyst said, “You look perfectly healthy and young. Why should you die? What is the problem?”He said, “The problem is, I continuously think of sex.”The psychoanalyst said, “It is not a big problem, everybody thinks of sex.”He said, “You don’t understand….”So the psychoanalyst said, “I will try and understand.” He drew a line of the paper and asked him, “What is it? What does it remind you of?”He said, “Don’t joke with me! It reminds me of sex.” A line? – even the psychoanalyst was a little shocked that a line reminded him of sex. And the man said, “I have read all the psychological books – this is a phallic symbol.” And he was right, because that’s what Freud’s analysis says it is, it is a phallic symbol.So he drew another figure, a triangle. The man closed his eyes, he said, “Don’t! I don’t want to think about that.”The psychoanalyst said, “It is just a triangle!”He said, “It may be triangle, but think of Sigmund Freud and you will understand what I am saying. This is my trouble.”The psychoanalyst said, “Okay.” He drew a third figure – a circle. And the man jumped up from the chair. He said, “Stop! Stop! I am not a homosexual! And I have never seen such a pornographic psychoanalyst – you do nothing but make pornography!”And just then from the window they saw a camel passing by, and the psychoanalyst said, “Forget about that. Look outside. What does that camel remind you of?”He said, “The camel? It is the most dangerous animal; I don’t want to have anything to do with camels! Anything to do with the camel, forget all about it.”The psychoanalyst said, “But this is strange.”He said, “Nothing is strange – everything reminds me of sex, and it is because of an idiot who has told me to repress, because this is the way: when you repress the energy, the energy level inside you starts going higher. It is not going higher, I am going lower! I have never had such fear of camels or other things, but now I cannot move outside, I cannot look at anything, because everything somehow manages to remind me of sex.”Repression will do you harm in that it will make your mind full of sex…no transformation but only an ugly, cerebral sexuality.Natural sex is far more beautiful. It is simple and innocent.Secondly, if you start repressing sex, you will never be able to transform it. Your whole energy will be split in two parts. Sex is your energy that has to be repressed, and the remaining energies of your life have to repress it, and nothing is left which can be transformed. Who is going to transform it? Who is going to be transformed?Repression is the worst thing that religions have preached to people.A natural sex automatically brings you to a point where you feel that it is a simple, biological phenomenon, and the old compulsion is gone. Through experience it goes; and now the energy will be there, but because you are not repressing it, it will not become cerebral, it will not make sex any problem for you.With meditation you will be opening up higher doors of your consciousness, your super-conscious. And the energy always needs movement, it cannot remain static. And these new areas will be far more enchanting.The sexual area you have experienced. It was good as far as biology goes, but it was an ordinary experience available to all the animals, to all men, to all birds. It was nothing special, nothing unique. But if meditation makes a way towards super-consciousness, and energy is available, that energy will automatically start moving through the new channel that has opened up.This is what I mean by transformation.So take everything at ease. Just remember one thing, that with your at-easeness with nature, meditation should continue. So whenever anything with nature is satisfied, energy is available; it will move into the paths meditation has created.It is a simple process. In transformation you don’t have to do anything. All that is needed is that there is no repression. Energy is available – there is no compulsion that it should go into the sexual ways – and a new way has opened up. The energy immediately becomes excited about moving into the new ways. And once it has experienced higher qualities of blissfulness, there is no question of repression; it never arises.And remember the last thing, that even if you have experienced super-consciousness and higher levels through sexual energy, it does not mean that you cannot use the energy through the sexual channel. From the higher you can always come lower without any difficulty; but from the lower, to go to the higher, a great preparation is needed.You will be surprised to know about a strange phenomenon that used to happen in India, in the Vedic times, five thousand years before – almost unbelievable…. If some couple found that they were incapable of producing children, then they would go to the great seers, the great masters who lived in the forest, in the mountains, and had their universities – thousands of students.And they would ask the master, “We would like somebody who is no longer sexual to be compassionate on us and give a child to my wife.” And it was an accepted phenomenon, there was no condemnation in it. But you can see a great insight – that somebody who has gone beyond sex has much more potentiality to give birth to a better child than an ordinary person.It continued in India till Buddha and Mahavira’s time. These were the two persons who brought repression and condemned this convention.I am still for the vedic convention; that is absolutely closer to science. Buddha and Mahavira, both, are in favor of repression – and that is dangerous. It was not a repressive society in India before Buddha and Mahavira; it was a very different kind of society. Everything natural was accepted, and if a couple was finding difficulty in having children, the best way was to find someone who had no sexuality in his sex, whose sex was just meditation. In that meditative act there is more possibility of having a better child than in any other way.So remember it, Arpita: everything in life has to be accepted naturally, and by the side you continue meditating. And whatever energy comes to a point of satiation as far as nature is concerned, that energy will start moving towards meditation, on its own.Transformation happens to you – you cannot do anything about it. You can simply prepare the ground.Osho,Why is it that all over the world, throughout the ages, people have had such a great capacity to imagine ghosts?It has always been one of the most important problems for people: what happens when a man dies?There have been very few materialists in the past, most of the people were believers in a spirit, in a soul; the body dies but the soul remains. Different religions tried to explain what happens to the soul, but there were loopholes everywhere. And those loopholes gave the idea of ghosts.For example, Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, all believe in one life, and then will come the final judgment days. But in between, what will happen to the soul? One person dies today; tomorrow is not the judgment day, the judgment day will be at the end of the world. So up to now all the Christians and all the Mohammedans and all the Jews asked, “What are these people doing? And where are they?” After judgment day a few will go to heaven, most of them will fall into hell; but in the meanwhile they are roaming around without bodies – ghosts.And man has passed through such periods of fear. There was no fire at the time, the night was dark; no fire, wild animals, and above all, these ghosts. Because of the ghosts, people started worshipping their elders who had died, just to keep them satisfied, “We remember you – don’t torture us.”In India, even today, every year there are a few days set aside for all the old generations who have died, and people throw sweets and fruits and other things towards the crows. I don’t know how they have got the idea that those ghosts will come in the shape of crows, but the crows will eat the sweets and they will be satisfied.Crows are ugly, they are black – I don’t think there is anybody who loves a crow and has made a cage in his house and put a crow into it. You will think him mad. And crows are such a nuisance. If they remain silent it is good, but they don’t remain silent, they are continuously vocal. Perhaps their ugliness, their blackness, their sound, all gave the idea that these are ghosts in the form of crows.And every year people feed the crows; for two weeks they go to the river and worship their parents, their forefathers…and they don’t know all of them because it is a long line, but they offer them whatever they can. That offering goes to the brahmin, who does the worshipping. But they satisfy them every year, “Don’t be worried about us. We are happy, you remain happy. There is no need to come here.”This kind of ritual must have come when people were very much in fear; fear of wild animals was tremendous. And there are schizophrenic people, people who have been thought up to now to be possessed by a ghost. They are psychologically sick; but for centuries they have been the proof that ghosts are there.In India, moving around the country, I have seen many trees which are famous for releasing you from the possession of ghosts. And what actually happens is really ugly. The person thinks that he is possessed of a ghost, and he behaves in a different way – he is really a split personality. Sometimes he is perfectly okay, ordinary; that is one personality. Everybody is split, but he is so split that he has become almost two persons in the body, and both need space for expression.People are accustomed to one – when the other takes over, people think a ghost has taken possession. That is the ancient interpretation – they had no idea of split personality. So they take them to these trees; the person is beaten, badly beaten, so that he comes to his senses. And coming back to his senses means he has come back to his old personality.The tree is worshipped because it is thought that the tree has helped, so a piece of the man’s clothing is hung on the tree. So if you come across thousands of pieces of clothes hanging on a tree, that means thousands of people have been beaten under that tree. And with each person coming back to his personality, a big nail is hammered in, into the tree. That means that the ghost has been hammered in with the tree; now he cannot escape from there.The beating is such that in most of the cases it helps; the person becomes afraid to move to his other personality because he has been given such good treatment. It is just an old way of psychological treatment, but it works.I had a neem tree by my house – a very big neem tree. I just purchased a few big nails and stuck them all around the tree, and a few pieces of cloth I hung here and there on the tree. The next day people said, “What happened – because this tree was never thought…?”But nobody knew, nor did my family know, what I had done. And the unknown is always fear-creating.Why should anybody do it? – there was no reason – so something unknown had happened. And from that day, that small street by the side of my house became dangerous. After evening nobody would pass by there. They would go round about, almost a mile, to reach their homes, and from my place it was just a few feet away. But to pass under that tree was dangerous; who knows, sometimes a nail may become loose, and a ghost may get out.My family had a suspicion about me; they started asking me, “Is it your work?”I said, “I don’t know anything about ghosts.”They said, “Nobody can come into the house, so it is somebody in the house who has done this. And now you have prevented people from passing by here.” And even the people of my family…because just by the side of the tree was the well, and in the night, if water was needed, they would wake me up: “You go and pull up a bucket of water.”I said, “This is strange. Why should I be unnecessarily harassed?”They said, “You are harassing the whole neighborhood.”I said, “If you know absolutely that I have done it, then you need not be afraid.”They said, “We know you have done it, but still the fear comes – because you won’t admit that you have done it, it is just our guess. Whatever the case, you go and bring one bucket of water; it is needed right now.”The tree became so troublesome that one of the students who was studying with me used to go from that street – it was a small street, and the teacher lived on the other corner – he used to go there, and he would run from this side to that side; with closed eyes he would run.I would tell him, “Don’t be afraid – those are all very friendly ghosts.”He said, “Don’t talk to me about ghosts! And when you say friendly, that makes me more afraid. I don’t want any friendship!”He told his teacher – he was an old man, a brahmin, and very well respected in the town. The brahmin said, “Don’t be worried. I will give you a mantra: ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.’ You just say, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,’ and pass that tree fast.”But the boy said, “I am becoming more afraid every day. You are not afraid?”He said, “No, I am not afraid. I am a believer in God – I can go anywhere.”So the boy said, “Today you lead me. Anyway it is so late in the night” – it must have been ten o’clock – “you lead me out of the street.”I had told him, “Your teacher has given you this mantra; first tell him, ‘You show me how to do it.’ Bring him one day.”He said, “I will bring him today.”So I was waiting; the boy and the teacher, with a lamp in his hand, came just looking all around to see whether any ghosts or anything were there or not. And the teacher said, “There is nothing. Just start, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.’” And they both were repeating, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.”I had simply to drop a tin can of kerosene oil – an empty tin can. I beat it first with my hand, and just dropped it on the teacher – it simply hit the teacher’s head, and it was worth seeing how he ran away! And he would not remove it. Even with the tin can, he rushed towards the road, and a crowd gathered – I was also in the crowd.And they said, “Now it is becoming too difficult! Such a respected brahmin, well versed in the ancient law – and the ghosts are not afraid even of him. And this is not right” – because when they removed the can, the teacher was smelling of kerosene because it was a fresh tin, I had just emptied it.They all smelled him, and they said, “This is strange! And why were you going there? And what happened to your lamp?” The lamp was dropped there; in such a critical moment to remember it….Somebody said, “Go and bring his lamp,” but nobody was ready to. So I told his student, “You can go. You know the mantra, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.’”He said, “That mantra is useless! Even my teacher could not…he was repeating the mantra, and just as he was repeating the mantra, the can came down with a noise, and got fixed onto his head.”My father told me, “I know…because a new can has come into the house – where is it? Certainly you are part of it. And now the only way to keep this neighborhood free of fear is to cut this tree down.”I said, “I have no objection, but can you find any man who is capable of cutting the tree?”He said, “I knew it – that that’s why you were agreeing, because nobody will be ready” – and nobody was ready to cut it.There were many woodcutters in the town. They said, “That tree we cannot touch. Releasing those ghosts…who knows, whether they will start coming to our home, or follow us, or possess us.”My father was ready to give double the price. They said, “Whatever you want to give us – you find somebody else.” They suggested, “You inquire in some other town for somebody who does not know anything about the tree.”But anybody who came from another place, looking at the tree with the nails and the pieces of clothes hanging from it, would simply refuse. There was no way.I told my father, “I am the only person – if you want, I can cut this tree. But then don’t tell me if your whole house becomes full of ghosts. They are living in the tree – leave them alone. And they are peaceful people, they don’t harm anybody. They just did that to the teacher because he was saying a mantra against them. He started the antagonism. They were not…they are peaceful ghosts.”My father said, “I know they are peaceful ghosts, but we also have to live in this house. Nobody now can sleep on the terrace.” In the summer in India people sleep on terraces or outside. “Nobody is ready…except you, nobody goes to the terrace in the night,” because the tree was spreading its branches on the terrace.And things started happening which I had not done; people managed it themselves. Somebody would suddenly fall there, near the tree. The reason may have been that it was raining and it was slippery, and he slipped. But the whole blame went on the tree, that the ghosts were now slipping people up.It came to a stage that even in the day the street was blocked, nobody was going there. And people were angry because they had to go so long round about to reach to their home from the main street; and it was so close by the small street.There is no such thing as a ghost. The ghost is in your fear; and the fear can be created by anything. And once it is created, it becomes difficult to get rid of it.In fact all these three religions are wrong about souls. The moment a person dies, he immediately – within two, three seconds – enters into another womb. Only a few people remain in the unembodied state – very bad people like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, because they cannot get such a bad womb, so they have to remain hundreds of years; or very good people remain for hundreds of years waiting to find a right womb. But they are rare. The good ones will not do any harm to anybody; and the bad ones have done so much harm in their life that now they are repenting, feeling guilty.A few people of these two types may be around the earth, but they are not going to hurt anybody or harm anybody. The whole idea of ghosts has arisen out of fear – and anything can create fear. People passing by the side of a graveyard will run. If it is night, they will be afraid to go that way. Just small things…it is really your fear that becomes the ghost. If you don’t have any fear….In the East, because transmigration of the soul is a fact accepted by all the religions, there is not so much fear of ghosts. England is the most ghost-haunted place – and this question is from Chetana! So many houses in England are ghost-haunted, but it is strange that this happens only in England; in other places, very rarely. But in England there are so many houses which are ghost-haunted.It seems for a long time England has been doing as much evil in the world as possible; otherwise you cannot create an empire. Millions of people have been murdered and butchered; and whenever you do so much evil, you cannot remain unaffected. The fear of the unknown – that you have killed so many people….In my town there is a beautiful ashram of the followers of Kabir…which is rare, because there are very few followers of Kabir. The man who was there as the chief of the ashram, Satya Sahib, was really a sincere man, and a seeker. He died. The ashram has many beautiful things; it has caves, and it has underground caves, so deep that half the cave is filled with water, so you can have two parts in the cave. Half the cave is just a little higher, where you can go for bathing, for drinking or for anything else; the water is there, constantly flowing. And there are many caves.Satya Sahib was a man of great discipline and had a good following. But he died – I had not seen him but I knew his follower, Sahibdas. He had no qualities of his teacher, but was very much knowledgeable. I used to go to him with my father – my father was a friend of his teacher.One day he started talking about ghosts; somehow the topic came up, and he said, “There are no ghosts.”I said, “That is not right. Even your guru, Satya Sahib, has become a ghost.”He said, “What!”I said, “I have seen him, just standing on his grave. And if you want to see him, I can make arrangements.”He said, “To see him? He was dangerous even when he was alive – I don’t want to see his ghost. But how did you come to see him?”I said, “I was just passing by, and he was standing, naked, on his samadhi. And as you know, I just inquired, ‘What are you doing, Satya Sahib – standing naked here on such a cold morning?’”And he said, “For a ghost there is no cold, no hot; everything is perfectly good – clothes are not needed.”Sahibdas said, “This is all nonsense! You are just making it up.”My father said to him, “Don’t listen to him! He has made my house almost into a haunted house – people are afraid to pass. He never told me that he has met your teacher – and he was my friend.”I said, “I did not tell you because you would not believe that he has become a ghost, poor fellow.” But Sahibdas, his disciple, became interested, although he was afraid: “What is the truth?”So he called me one afternoon, and he said, “You just tell me the truth – what is the truth?”I said, “I have told the whole thing. All that I can do is, I can make some arrangement. I have met your guru again.”He said, “What!”I said, “Yes, he was again standing there – just a coincidence. I go for a morning walk, and he was standing, naked, and I told him this time, ‘Your disciple does not believe that you have become a ghost.’ He said, ‘He is an idiot! He never believed anything I said.’ I said, ‘I have given him the opportunity to see you. What can be done so that he can see you?’“He said, ‘Just bring him in the night, midnight, when the watchtower of the city makes it twelve. Bring him, and he will see me here. But because he is such an unworthy disciple, I will have to cover myself with a cloth, a white cloth. I don’t want to show my face to him, nor do I want to see his face.’”“Whenever you want, I can arrange…”Sahibdas said, “He is angry?”“He is certainly very angry. He said, ‘Don’t touch my clothes and don’t come close to me.’ He has shown me the place, ‘Stand there, near the tree’ – there was a tree – ‘near that tree. And don’t come close, because I am really angry: my disciple has proved absolutely unworthy. And in anger, you know, a man can do anything.’”So that night, at twelve o’clock, I had to persuade one of my friends, who was the same height, to stand there with a white cloth covering him, and I took Sahibdas. And as the watchtower clock gave the signal of twelve, Sahibdas looked and said, “My God! He is standing there! He is so angry that if we go near him, he can do anything!”I said, “You can go near him, but he has said that he will do anything – I don’t know what he will do – that he will jump upon you, or he will hit you or something.” I had given the friend a good staff and said, “If he comes, just give him a good hit.” He had a clean-shaved head, the way the Kabir followers keep their heads, clean-shaved. “Just give a good hit on his head, and that will be enough, with the fear and all, and he will become unconscious. And I will call over everybody concerned, my father and others, and say, ‘Look!’”And that happened. He went close, got a good hit, fell down, and became unconscious. When I brought my father and other people with lamps and torches, they saw Sahibdas lying down by the side of the grave. He would open his eyes and just look at the grave – the afterimage was still there – and would close his eyes again, because he was still seeing…My friend had disappeared; I had told him, “You disappear; otherwise people will beat you very badly. You simply give the hit and disappear.” And the place was such, almost a jungle type – “You can disappear very easily.”It took almost one hour to bring Sahibdas back. My father asked him, “What happened?”He said, “Your son was right; we unnecessarily suspected him. He has shown me my guru – he was standing here! And he had told me, ‘Don’t go near him because he is very angry.’ But even when he was alive, he never hit me that hard! He hit me with a staff so hard on my head” – there was blood on his head – “And the fear of his ghost…I fell, and then I don’t know what happened.”He became so afraid – it was outside the town, the ashram – that he left the town the next day. We have never heard about him or what happened to him. But one thing is certain, he must have remained believing in ghosts, spreading the story of ghosts.I have enjoyed showing many people ghosts – which is very easy. They have believed it; and the reason is the basic fear within you. Otherwise, I have not come across any ghost, and I have been in search of them.Now psychologists are working on it, and finding different reasons for happenings that were unaccountable before; now they can be explained. But one thing is certain: ghosts don’t exist. They are just as much a creation as God – out of fear.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 37 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have described how the ability to communicate his experience is the essence of the master. Yet in you something even more beautiful has happened.Buddha conveyed his message to a select few thousand men in the local Pali language – in response to the failings of brahminism.By comparison, you are talking to millions of men and women from every continent, from every race, from every religion, from every possible background. Rather than being restricted to the shortcomings of brahminism, you draw from, and synthesize, every spiritual, psychological and scientific element ever conceived by man.You were able to express existence in Hindi so poetically that people said you were the finest Hindi speaker alive. On top of that, you are able to do the same in a second, foreign language, to people from these widely differing cultures who are, for the most part, a generation away. You don't just express yourself in that second language, but manage to catch the fine nuances and colloquialisms of everyday speech that usually only natives have a grasp of.Osho, is this supreme ability to communicate what makes you the master of masters?The situation of the world has changed dramatically. Just three hundred years ago, the world was very big. Even if Gautam Buddha had wanted to approach all human beings, it would not have been possible; just the means of communication were not available. People were living in many worlds, almost isolated from each other. That has a simplicity.Jesus had to face the Jews, not the whole world. It would not have been possible, sitting on his donkey, to go around the world. Even if he had managed to cover the small kingdom of Judea, that would have been too much. The education of people was very confined. They were not even aware of each other’s existence.Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu in China, Socrates in Athens – they were all contemporaries but they had no idea of each other.That’s why I say that before the scientific revolution in the means of communication and in the means of transportation, there were many worlds, sufficient unto themselves. They never thought of others, they had no idea even that others existed. As people became acquainted more and more with each other, the world became smaller. Now a Buddha will not be able to manage, nor Jesus nor Moses nor Confucius. They will all have very localized minds and very localized attitudes.We are fortunate that the world is now so small that you cannot be local. In spite of yourself, you cannot be local; you have to be universal. You have to think of Confucius, you have to think of Krishna, you have to think of Socrates, you have to think of Bertrand Russell. Unless you think of the world as one single unit, and all the contributions of different geniuses, you will not be able to talk to the modern man. The gap will be so big – twenty-five centuries, twenty centuries…almost impossible to bridge it.The only way to bridge it is that the person who has come to know should not stop at his own knowing, should not be contented to only give expression to what he has come to know. He has to make a tremendous effort to know all the languages. The work is vast, but it is exciting – the exploration into human genius from different dimensions.And if you have within yourself the light of understanding, you can create, without any difficulty, a synthesis. And the synthesis is not only going to be of all the religious mystics – that will be partial. The synthesis has to include all the artists – their insights – all the musicians, all the poets, all the dancers – their insights. All the creative people who have contributed to life, who have made humanity richer, have to be taken into account. And most important of all is scientific growth.To bring scientific growth into a synthetic vision with heart and religion was not possible in the past. In the first place there was no science – and it has changed a thousand and one things. Life can never be the same again.And nobody has thought ever of the artistic people, that their contribution is also religious.In my vision it is a triangle – science, religion, art.And they are such different dimensions, they speak different languages, they contradict each other; they are not in agreement superficially – unless you have a deep insight in which they all can melt and become one.My effort has been to do almost the impossible.In my university days as a student, my professors were at a loss. I was a student of philosophy, and I was attending science classes – physics, chemistry and biology. Those professors were feeling very strange; “You are here in the university to study philosophy. Why are you wasting your time with chemistry?”I said, “I have nothing to do with chemistry; I just want to have a clear insight into what chemistry has done, what physics has done. I don’t want to go into details, I just want the essential contribution.”I was rarely in my classes, I was mostly in the library. My professors were continually saying, “What are you doing the whole day in the library? – because so many complaints have come from the librarian that you are the first to enter the library, and you have to be almost physically taken out of the library. The whole day you are there. And not only in the philosophical department, you are roaming around the library in all the departments which have nothing to do with you.”I said to them, “It is difficult for me to explain to you, but my effort in the future is going to be to bring everything that has some truth in it into a synthetic whole and create a way of life which is inclusive of all, which is not based on arguments and contradictions, which is based on a deep insight into the essential core of all the contributions that have been made to human knowledge, to human wisdom.”They thought I would go mad – the task I have chosen can lead anyone to madness, it is too vast. But they were not aware that madness is impossible for me, that I have left the mind far behind; I am just a watcher.And the mind is such a delicate and complicated computer. Man has made great computers but none is yet comparable to the human mind. Just a single human mind has the capacity to contain all the libraries of the world. And just a single library – the British Museum library – has books, which if you go on making them like a wall, one by one, they will go three times round the earth. And that is only one big library. Moscow has the same kind of library – perhaps bigger. Harvard has the same kind of library.But a single human mind is capable of containing all that is written in all these books, of memorizing it. In a single brain there are more than a billion cells, and each single cell is capable of containing millions of pieces of information. Certainly one will go mad if one is not already standing out of the mind. If you have not reached the status of meditation, madness is sure. They were not wrong, but they were not aware of my efforts towards meditation.So I was reading strange books, strange scriptures, from all over the world; yet I was only a watcher, because as far as I was concerned, I had come home. I had nothing to learn from all that reading; that reading was for a different purpose, and the purpose was to make my message universal, to make it free from local limitations.And I am happy that I have succeeded in it completely. I don’t have anything which is local. I don’t have a land, a mother country. I don’t have a house to live in. I don’t have any place on this earth anywhere. This is a very strange situation.I am a world citizen, but in the world I don’t have even a space to stand, anywhere.I can remain here only four or five days more; then I have to move. But perhaps that is good. What I have known through books, this way I am coming to know in reality.I have become a universal gypsy.Because you love me, you call me “master of masters.” It is out of your love.As far as I am concerned, I simply think of myself only an ordinary human being who was stubborn enough to remain independent, resisted all conditioning, never belonged to any religion, never belonged to any political party, never belonged to any organization, never belonged to any nation, any race.I have tried in every possible way just to be myself, without any adjective; and that has given me so much integrity, individuality, authenticity, and the tremendous blissfulness of being fulfilled.But it was the need of the time. After me, anybody trying to be a master will have to remember that he has to pass through all the things I have passed through; otherwise, he cannot be called a master. He will remain just localized – a Hindu teacher, a Christian missionary, a Mohammedan priest – but not a master of human beings as such.After me it is going to be really difficult to be a master.Osho,After being here with you two months, I will be leaving today.Last night I thought that since I might be away for a while it would be a good idea to clear up any problems or issues with the people in the house where I've been living. I was shocked to realize that there were none – that we had been living in such harmony as I have never experienced before. Nowhere else could thirty people live in one house with so little jealousy, fighting or tension.Your miracle is happening – the new man is being created, your vision is manifesting. We will move on. We will show the world that with you the impossible happens every day.Tthat is our whole effort, to show to the whole world that there is no need of any war, no need of any fight, no need of jealousy, no need of hate. Life is so short and love is so precious. And when you can fill your life with love, with harmony, with joy, when you can make your life a poetry unto itself…. If you miss, only you are responsible for it, nobody else.What can happen in a small group can happen in a bigger group, can happen all over the world. It is only a question of understanding; a simple insight is needed not to be dragged down by the forces of darkness, negativity, destructiveness. Just a little alertness is needed to devote oneself to creativity, to love, to sensitivity, and to make this small life just a series of songs…that you dance in your life and that your death will be your crescendo of dance; that you live totally and you die totally with no complaint, with gratitude, with thankfulness to existence.I don’t call the prayers that happen in synagogues and churches, and temples and mosques, real prayer. The real prayer is only one, and that is to live in such a way that you start feeling grateful towards existence, that existence has given you such an opportunity – which you had never asked for, which you never deserved. And yet you got it, and you blossomed into thousands of flowers, and you left the world with the fragrance of thankfulness.Avirbhava, what is happening around me in different places – we want to make it a wildfire so that before the idiotic politicians of the world destroy life, we can make life so precious that nobody is ready to fight. The politicians can commit suicide with their own nuclear weapons if they want, but humanity is no longer interested in killing and being killed. And it is such a simple phenomenon, that once you have got the taste of it, you can never be the same person again.And we are determined, against all powerful forces…. We don’t have any power. Love is our only power, silence is our only force. But I say unto you that there is no power which is higher than love, and there is no force which can defeat silence. And it is through love and silence that one comes to know truth…which is the ultimate victory of life.I repeat: we are determined to spread the message to all nooks and corners of the world, to every intelligent person who can understand. Except this, there is no way to save this beautiful planet.And this planet is the blessed planet, because all other planets – and there are millions of planets in the universe – are simply dead, not even grass grows there. Nobody sits there silently doing nothing. It is all empty. Only this small earth is so fortunate that all kinds of life exist. In man it has become conscious, and in a few men it has become super-conscious, and in every man it has the possibility of becoming super-consciousness. That means attaining, arriving at the very essence of truth, of immortality, of eternity.We may not have a home, but we will go on wandering like gypsies around the world, making the whole world our home.Home is where we are. Home is where there is love. Home is where there is harmony.Osho,I often feel that people, particularly men, only see certain facets of me, thinking this is the real me, but deep down I feel misunderstood because I don't know if all these facets are all that I am. But I feel there is much more to me that nobody sees or perhaps wants to see.With you I feel the situation is just the opposite: I feel you contact the real me. When I am surrounded by people, it makes me sad that they don't see the real me.Could you please say something about this?Firstly, people can see only aspects of you. They cannot see your real self because they have not seen their own real self. Neither have you seen your real self.You simply feel that people are taking your aspects as your whole reality – and that is not true, because you know there are other aspects.But you also are not aware of your real self. Even the sum total of all your aspects is not the real you – you are more than the sum total of all the aspects.In fact, it has nothing to do with aspects.Your real being is only a watcher, a seer, a witness.All the aspects are of your mind, of your personality.You are simply a mirror which reflects anything that comes in front of it, but the moment it has moved away the mirror is again empty.So the first thing to remember is; don’t get angry, don’t get disturbed that people are not seeing you in your reality. You yourself have not seen you in your reality. First try to see yourself in your reality. The moment you see yourself in your reality you will not feel angry if somebody thinks a certain aspect is your whole; you will feel compassion for the person because his capacity to know is very limited. You will help the person to know your other aspects, and finally to know you – which is not an aspect, which is something beyond all aspects.That is why with me you feel different.I don’t see your aspects. I am not concerned with them. I simply see you as a mirror, because I know everybody is just a mirror in their deepest core.So I never judge a person because every judgment means you have taken certain aspects and you have made that aspect the person’s whole being.Somebody steals. That is only an aspect. Somebody murders; that is only an aspect – because the person who has murdered somebody, has also loved. Perhaps he has murdered because he loved too much, because he was a friend indeed to someone, that was…another aspect.But our whole society is based on judgment. Even our so-called fair courts are all judgmental, prejudiced.Just the other day I was looking at a judgment one court in America has given against my commune. In the judgment the judge has made it clear that all the laws are in favor of my commune, but still he feels that the money – one hundred and forty thousand dollars – should be given to this man, from the commune’s fund.He says in his judgment “I assume” – that is a strange word in a judgment – “I assume that this man needs that money. All the laws are in favor of the commune. They are for the commune.” And that man was a servant of the commune. He was receiving one thousand dollars per month. He managed, with the clerk who was giving the salaries, that rather than getting one thousand dollars per month he was getting one thousand dollars per week.Now even the president of America, I don’t think, gets one thousand dollars per week.And his work was nothing.Because we purchased the land and he was the caretaker of the land for the old owner, the old owner said that he will be helpful. The land is big – one hundred and twenty-six square miles. “He will be helpful to you to find places where cultivation is possible, where water is possible.” So we had kept him.And when we found out that he has been drawing four thousand dollars per month instead of one thousand dollars, naturally we had to put a case against him. That case has not been decided.This is what prejudice is. That man put a case against the commune that because we put a case against him we have made his name notorious, we have condemned him as a thief. So he was asking for three million or four million dollars as a compensation.The first case is not decided yet, and perhaps will never be decided, but the second has been decided, and the wording is simply amazing – that all the laws are in favor of the commune but still this man is to be paid one hundred and forty thousand dollars. He needs it. His name has been damaged.His act has not been yet decided, whether he cheated the commune or not, but because we have put the case against him and published it in the paper, his name has been condemned, and he needs the money. And the judge himself feels that all the laws are in our favor, but still he “assumes.”Our whole society depends on aspects, judgmental.Now this judge must have been feeling jealous of the commune and its standard of living, and this is a good chance – without showing any jealousy; otherwise, there is no reason. He should have at least waited for the first case to be decided. But his own jealousy must have been creating the prejudice.In another case they were trying to find twelve jurors who were unprejudiced to me and to the commune. They interviewed at least fifty people, and putting their hand on the Bible they became afraid and they said, “We are prejudiced.” So they were rejected as jurors; otherwise, they were going to sit as a jury.Now these people were rejected – because we insisted that their interview should be taken and their oath. It was so difficult that even the judge said, “Your cases should be decided outside of the state of Oregon because in Oregon you cannot get justice. Everybody is prejudiced.”But outside also we have seen the same thing.In North Carolina, for three days the US government attorney tried hard to prove that my arrest was legal, and he himself had to accept in the end that “We have not been able to prove anything.”Now this is a simple thing, that the US government attorney accepts that he has not been able to prove anything against me. Still the magistrate said, “You may not have been able to prove that his arrest was legal, but I am not going to give him bail.”Of all my friends who were arrested with me, without any arrest warrant, three were left without bail, three were left on bail. I was not given bail. The reason that was given was that I am extremely intelligent, that I have thousands of followers who can do anything for me, that I have unaccounted sources of money, that however big the bail is – five million dollars, ten million dollars – I can jump it and go out of America.I have not committed any crime. My arrest is unjustified, but bail cannot be given because I am capable of getting out of America.This raises two points. One, is America such a weak country, powerless? It is the most powerful country in the world – all the armies, all the police, all the nuclear weapons. A single man, and you are afraid that you cannot give him bail?Secondly, if this is the case then in America anybody who is rich enough should not be given bail. You can arrest any Rockefeller for no reason, there is no need to prove anything. Bail can be refused because he has so much money he may manage to get out of America. Then no rich man should be given bail. But for me a special reasoning has been found: the real thing has been put aside, that I have been arrested illegally without any arrest warrant, without any reason for arrest; and a secondary thing, which is absolutely illogical, has been used. That means only poor people can get bail, the very poor who cannot escape, who cannot purchase a ticket from one place to another place, who don’t have any friends – only these people can get bail. Anybody who has friends, who has money, who has sources, cannot be given bail.And the real reason…when I came back to the jail, the jailer was very much shocked. The old man’s eyes had tears. He told me, “This is sheer injustice as I have never seen in my life. They could not prove – with three days continually arguing – they could not prove anything. And still they refused bail. This I have never seen or heard in my whole life.” He had come perfectly prepared to release me from the court. And he said, “This is simple injustice, and the reason is that the woman magistrate is hoping to become a federal judge. The post is vacant, and it is in the hands of the politicians who are pressurizing her, saying, ‘If you give bail to this man you will never become a federal judge, remember. So use any reason, that is up to you; but bail has not to be given.’”I said to that old man, “If this is the reason, then there is no harm. Let that woman become the federal judge. At least I have come to be of some use to somebody; otherwise, I am good for nothing!”The whole society is based on judging. It takes one aspect – because you cannot see the whole person. The whole person is a big thing. If I put a small stone in your hand, you cannot see the whole stone; you will see only one side of it, and when you will see the other side then the first side will not be seen. You cannot manage to see it in one glance in its totality.What to say about human personality, which is a multidimensional phenomenon?So don’t be angry with anyone. They see a certain aspect.It is as if you take out from a novel a page and you read the page and you decide about the novel.A single aspect, a single act, is just like that.But this is the way people have lived, judged; and the reason is because they themselves are not aware of their wholeness. Once they become aware of their wholeness then they cannot judge anybody by any small aspect. They know that the man is far bigger. In its wholeness this small thing will be lost, like a dewdrop in the ocean. It doesn’t matter.But to come to such compassion, to such non-judgmental seeing, you need first to realize your own wholeness.So it is not a question about others.It is a question about you.With me you will feel good – because I never judge anybody. I have no prejudice against anybody, and I know that anything that comes in front is only a small part – which may be deceptive, the whole may just be different. And this small part taken separately may have a different meaning; in the whole it may have a different meaning because the whole will give a context which is not possible taking things out of context.So do two things. One, make every effort to be watchful of your own life so that slowly, slowly you simply remain watchfulness. That is your reality. Secondly, don’t judge others.You cannot prevent others, of course, judging you – that is not possible; but you can stop judging others. Perhaps that may help. Others may start thinking about you as a man who never judges, and they should be more compassionate towards you.And there is no need to feel hurt because whatsoever they are doing, in their sleep, in their unconsciousness they can only do that.So remember to forgive people, to forget people. Otherwise you will start having a prejudice against the person, that he judged you wrong; and then any moment, any situation, you will take revenge. This game goes on in society.At least from your side, stop it, let the other person play the football alone. Soon he will be tired. Nobody can play football alone for long. You don’t give juice to him. Ignore. But this is possible only as a realization of your inner being, not as a determination by the mind. Then it is so simple that I don’t think there is anything simpler than this – not to judge people.Otherwise people judge every moment; everybody – whether it is their concern or not it is not the question, it is just a mechanical habit.I was traveling in a car from Nagpur to Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha, with a very rich woman follower of Gandhi. She had come to take me. On the way, one tire got punctured so I told her that I would rather sit out under the tree, as it was a beautiful evening. So I went out and sat under a tree, the driver also went. She was alone in the car. And the driver was sitting by my side smoking a cigarette.When I came back and entered the car, I was sitting in the back seat with the lady – some smoke of the cigarette must have caught either on my hair or on my clothes – that woman just looked at me and said, “I hate smoking. You have been smoking outside!”I said, “You should at least be graceful enough first to inquire.”She said, “What is there to inquire? I can smell.”I said, “You can smell. I can smell also. I could have said, ‘In the car there is a smell of cigarettes. you must have been smoking – because you were alone here.’ I didn’t say that.” And I said, “You seem to be a snobbish type. What business is it of yours if I have been smoking? Who are you? Have I made any conditions that I will not smoke? You have just come to receive me from the ashram. I don’t even know you. You may be rich. You may have your influence in the ashram. I don’t care about all these things.”The driver was listening. He stopped the car and he said, “This is wrong,” to the lady. “I have been smoking and I know how ashram people are. In Gandhi’s ashram smoking is a sin. I was afraid that this man may stop me, but he didn’t say anything. And even now he has not mentioned that I was smoking.”I said, “You don’t come into the picture. I am trying to tell the lady that if she doesn’t like smoking she can go and sit in front. And judging just by the smoke, and I have not been smoking! Still, just the smell and you just…and not only your condemnation, the way you told me, the way you looked at me.”I refused to go in that car. I got out. I said, “Tell the ashram to send another car. This lady smells too much of smoke.”The driver said, “I will be in trouble because you were not smoking and this woman is dangerous. She gives money, so she has great hold in the ashram.”I said, “Either she gets out or I am out. Just bring my luggage out and leave me here under the tree. And tell to Ramdas, Gandhi’s son” – Gandhi had died, but his son was my friend – “Tell him what happened. If he can manage to send another car, good, otherwise I will find my way back to Nagpur.”Seeing the situation, the lady became aware that she was wrong, she should have asked. I was not smoking. The driver was smoking, and she simply jumped on me. And I am not an ashramite, I am not a Gandhian. I am against Gandhi on each and every single point. And Ramdas will be very angry if I am left here. So she came out, and said, “I am sorry.”I said, “This will not do. You will have to change your attitude. You must be doing it to everybody.”I was staying in another Gandhi ashram, where one of his chief disciples, Balkova Bhave, was the teacher of the ashramites. Every morning he would go and look into the rooms and he would look even into their bathrooms – whether they are clean or not. I said, “This is insulting.” And I said, “All these people go on suffering this torture. It is to be made clear that things should be clean, but that does not mean that every day – every day….” And he would find something or other, and that would be enough to condemn the man. I said, “It seems it is just an excuse to find something to condemn.”The same was the situation in other Gandhi ashrams in India – you cannot drink tea, you cannot drink coffee, you cannot smoke cigarettes, you cannot play cards. It is okay if you prevent gambling, but just playing cards is innocent, there is nothing in it, no harm. You cannot use even mosquito nets because it is luxury.And in Wardha there are such big mosquitoes that you cannot sleep, and the whole night the mosquitoes will suck your blood.So Gandhi has found a way, kerosene oil. Everybody has to paint his face with kerosene oil – and his hands or anything that remains out of the clothes.I said to Ramdas, “Up to evening I can be here, but not in the night. I don’t think a mosquito net is a luxury; it is nonsense, whoever says that a mosquito net is a luxury.”Mahatma Gandhi must have been a mosquito in his past life! Otherwise from where he can get this idea?“I cannot stay here. And painting your hands and face with kerosene oil, you can simply see that even mosquitoes don’t come close and how can you sleep? The whole night you are smelling the kerosene oil. Even mosquitoes are intelligent enough, they are not coming. How can you sleep?”I said, “I can stay only up to the evening; then I go back.”But these things were judged.If you start judging people, then you can condemn everybody in the whole world, and the ultimate result will be that you will be living in a world of condemned people so you will be in misery because everybody is condemned all around you.I live in a world with beautiful people because I never condemn anybody for anything. To me, everybody is intelligent enough to take care of his life.This is because Avirbhava could not find, in two months, any quarrel, any fight, any tension, any disharmony. She must have been puzzled, thirty people living in a house in great harmony. The only way is that they are not judging each other. That is not proper, that is inhuman.Start from yourself. Don’t judge others. Don’t take their aspects as their whole personality, and find out your wholeness. And slowly, slowly you may be able to see better, and you will not feel hurt if somebody judges – that is his problem.Osho,It used to take a full glass of wine to get me drunk, but the other night I got completely sloshed on just one third of a glass.What is happening here?Just wait and you will start getting drunk with empty glasses. When you start getting drunk with an empty glass, just remind me. You’re coming closer!That’s how I get drunk.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 38 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Richard Wilhelm, the man who translated the I Ching from Chinese to German, came back to Vienna very disturbed after spending thirty years in China. He consulted his friend, Carl Gustav Jung. Jung's diagnosis was that Wilhelm was in a dangerous crisis. He had put aside the German culture and adopted the Chinese one, the whole package – religion, education and whatsoever.Jung said, “The part you sacrificed comes back as the sacrificer, the repressed part comes back as the repressor.”And Wilhelm loved the Chinese culture, he even worshipped it, but his mind was no help at all. He died from this crisis.Nietzsche, the man who wrote “Out of chaos it will shine forth – the dancing morning star,” was not a lucky man either. He freaked out.Nijinsky used his body beyond the boundaries, and freaked out as well.It seems that mind alone or body alone can't take you anywhere.Osho, is the mystical experience the wings that will take mind, body and heart to a non-sleeping condition? Are you the dancing morning star that came out from the East to put fire to the world – or better, to the rebels of the world?Richard Wilhelm certainly died in a very torturous way. He was a genius, and spending thirty years in China, he became aware of the subtleties and the grace that Chinese culture had developed for thousands of years.The I Ching is a very strange book.There are many books like that in the East, which give you a glimpse of your future and also a glimpse of your past.The crisis was that he was educated, brought up in the Western style, in the German culture, which does not believe in any past lives, which does not believe that the future can be seen. But thirty years is a long period, and to become a real scholar of Chinese language, that is the minimum time needed.He devoted himself totally. The result was a schizophrenic personality, he became two persons – one that had gone to China, and one that came from China.The one that had gone to China was absolutely Western, and the idea was only to translate the book; but as he was translating the book, he got more and more involved in it. The whole Western culture started looking pygmy in comparison to the Chinese insight of Tao. So a second personality started growing, and in thirty years the second personality became perfectly mature. But the first personality was not erased.And Carl Gustav Jung, the great psychoanalyst and his friend, simply did a diagnosis – but a diagnosis is not a cure.What Wilhelm needed was meditation, which could have bridged the West and the East in him. He was torn apart. His logic was saying one thing; but he has seen in thirty years that there is much more to life than logic, and people have lived it, experienced it. But this was only an intellectual understanding, it was not an insight.If he had in those thirty years also meditated, the catastrophe would have been avoided, and a genius mind would have been of tremendous help in bringing East and West closer.But he was too much in learning the language and translating the I Ching. He forgot completely that a book like the I Ching is not an ordinary book, it is a book out of deep meditative insights. It is not intellectual, it is intuitional.He managed to translate literally, but he missed the point that the book was also totally different from all the other books he had known before. They were produced by the mind, by the intellect.This book was not produced by the intellect. It created a chaos in his being.It is unfortunate that he died in that chaos. It made Carl Gustav Jung very much afraid of the East, and he started teaching a certain hypothesis – which is simply stupid – that Eastern methods are suitable only to Eastern people, and Western methods are suitable to Western people, and they should not be mixed.This seems to be a very superficial analysis of the whole case.This means that your intellect should remain unbridged with your intuition. This means that your head should never come in contact with your heart. This means that the West will remain half, and the East will remain half.Richard Wilhelm’s case is very symbolic. It shows that things should be done under proper guidance.He was learning language from the linguists – they were not masters of intuition. He was translating a book which has nothing to do with intellect, which needed a master to help him, so that the translation is not only literal but essential, that it carries the very fragrance of the original – not just the verbal change of language.He was never a disciple of a Tao master; otherwise, this catastrophe would have been avoided, and things would have been totally different. Because since his death, nobody has tried that hard to understand the East’s basic contribution.Intuition cannot be translated into intellect. A certain bridge can certainly be made, but the more intuition takes possession of you, the more intellect has to function as a servant.And that was the problem. Although for thirty years he worked with an intuitive book, his intellect remained the master.And intuition can never be a servant. It is your innermost core. It opens up only in deep meditation.And Richard Wilhelm never bothered about meditation. His whole concern was the translation of the book, without thinking that books can be different. The books written by the mind – of which the West is full – and the books arisen out of intuition are a totally different category.The I Ching is perhaps five or seven thousand years old. Nobody knows who wrote it – because in the East it is not important that the name of the person should be on the book, particularly the intuitive ones whose egos have been lost, in fact they have become nameless. Some nameless master, a visionary, wrote the book not because he wanted to write it, but because existence wanted it to be written. He was simply a vehicle, a hollow bamboo.Although Richard Wilhelm remained thirty years in China, he remained with wrong people. He had to. First he had to learn the language, and for that he had to be in contact with linguistic experts. And once he had learned the language, he started translating the book, thinking that every book belongs to the same category – and there is the fallacy.The Upanishads in India do not belong to the ordinary category of books. The Dhammapada of Gautam Buddha does not belong to the ordinary category of books.Even in modern times there have been a few intuitive books. The Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore, The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran, The Book of Mirdad by Mikhail Naimy – they do not belong to the ordinary category of books, and if you think they are just as other books are, you are going to have trouble. Your heart will accept them, and your intellect will reject them. So you will be split in two parts, a constant conflict.That’s what happened and it killed one of the great geniuses of the West, Richard Wilhelm.And the man he consulted was not the right man – although they were friends. And again he committed another mistake.The problem could be solved only by an Eastern master of meditation, not by Carl Gustav Jung – who had no idea of meditation.After Wilhelm’s death, Jung had gone to India – because he was interested in the ancient mythologies. And wherever he went, he was told, “Why are you wasting your time in ancient mythologies, when by chance there is a man alive who represents existentially all the best that has happened in the East. Go to south India, to the hills of Arunachal and meet a simple man, Shri Raman Maharshi.”He was told so many times the same name everywhere he went, but he was afraid. His friend had died, and he did not want to get into any trouble. He went up to Madras, from where Raman Maharshi’s place was just two hours drive, but he did not go there. On the contrary, to explain his behavior, he said, “Eastern methods are developed only for Eastern people. They are not suitable for Western people.”This is utter nonsense.“Western people should remain confined to their own tradition, to their own past; otherwise they will create the same kind of trouble for themselves as Richard Wilhelm.”It is nonsense, because man in his essential being is neither Eastern or Western. It is only a question of right approach under right guidance, so the split is not created. On the contrary, a bridge is made – and a bridge between the intellect and intuition will give you a tremendous clarity, understanding, a new kind of intelligence of which you are absolutely unaware.Jung has prevented many people, because in the West he is thought to be an authority. And he knows nothing about the Eastern methods. Just the fear of the death of his friend…. But that fear does not mean what he makes of it, he has not understood the whole situation.If I was to suggest, I would have told Richard Wilhelm, “You learn language from a linguistic expert. And while you are learning language, also learn meditation under some Taoist master – because the I Ching is a Taoist book – so before you are capable of translating it, you are also capable of understanding it; so it is not only word-to-word translation, but it is translation of a deep understanding.“And it will not only produce the I Ching in Western languages, it will also produce in you a new man.”And the same things have been happening with other people. The reason is always a split.In the case of Nietzsche, he is not a meditator but he has the capacity of flights towards the unknown. Once in a while a window opens, and he sees things. But the window is not under his control, it is circumstantial. If circumstances are right and suitable, if he is feeling a well-being, a certain kind of joy, peace, the window opens, and he can see beyond the ordinary human mind. And he can write about it.If he was also a meditator, the window would not be accidental; it would be within his own power to open it or to close it.So he becomes dependent, and that also creates a deep trouble in his being – because ordinarily, in twenty-four hours he lives just like everybody else, and then suddenly one evening looking at a sunset the window opens, and he sees things which are self-evident, they don’t need any proof. They are more real than your reality, they are so authoritatively real that you cannot even question them. But it is only for moments, and then it is gone, and he is back again on the earth.You can understand the difficulty of the person.Now all kinds of doubts, all kinds of questions – whether he has been dreaming, whether it has been a hallucination, illusion – and the intellect goes on. But again the window opens, and the scene is the same. You cannot have the same hallucination again and again, and you cannot have the dream either – and fully awake.This made such an anguish in his being – what is real? The ordinary reality that he sees twenty-four hours, or the reality that once in a while opens its door?The same was the case with Nijinsky. He was the greatest dancer perhaps of the whole history of man. But it is strange that a man like Nijinsky simply suffered in deep anguish. This is not a reward of being a genius. The trouble was that while dancing, he will become sometimes so deeply one with the dance that there was not the dancer and the dance, but only the dance. In those moments almost a miraculous thing used to happen.He will take such long jumps, high jumps – which are not possible, physically not possible – and he himself was not capable of doing those high jumps or long jumps in other times. He could not believe it, as if certainly when the dancer disappeared somehow gravitation lost its grip on him. And he jumped so high that nobody could believe that this is possible. And more miraculous was his coming down; anything falling down, gravitation pulls it with great force.Just the other day Anando was telling me that when asteroids fall towards earth, they come into the sphere of earth’s gravitation, which is two hundred miles around it. They start falling with a great speed of fifty thousand miles per hour, and that’s why the friction burns them. But once in a while, if it is a very big asteroid – miles long – then it may not be burned completely, it may reach to the earth. Sometimes it has killed many people. It is a very strange kind of stone, because it has passed through a strange experience; that fifty thousand miles per hour, and the heat and the friction give it a new quality.In the Kaaba, the Mohammedan’s holy place, is an asteroid that has reached the earth, and they have been worshipping it, just because there is no other stone like it, it has come from heaven. And certainly it has come from the sky.But when Nijinsky used to come back, everybody in the audience forgot to breathe. It looked so dangerous from that height – if gravitation works rightly, he is going to have multiple fractures. But he will fall like a leaf, slowly descending towards the earth – with no hurry. And the movement of coming back was so slow that even physicists had no explanation of it. The jump was unexplained, and the coming back was even more mysterious. He himself had no idea.Only one thing he said, “Whenever I try it does not happen. I would like it to happen every time I am on the stage dancing, but whenever I am consciously, deliberately trying, it simply does not happen. It happens only when I am not trying, when I am not even thinking of it, when in fact I am not there. In my absence, when there is only the dance, and the dancer has completely become one with the dance, it happens. So I cannot give you any explanation, because I was not there.”He also died badly. First he became mad – because such a thing has never happened to any other man. He was trying hard, and it would not happen, and then when he was not thinking about it, it happened and with no explanation coming from the experts. And he himself had no idea why it was happening. It drove him mad. For one year he was in a madhouse, and he died in the greatest misery.The same person would have become a Gautam Buddha in the East – because he has found the key – but he could not recognize it. And there was not a single master in the West to show him what was happening.And this is the whole teaching of the East, that if you forget the ego, if you forget yourself, if you are just nobody, miracles start happening. That is the law of nature. There is nothing in it to be disturbed about. In that moment when you are absent, it means you are so silent, so peaceful, so at ease, that there is no disturbance at all.The East has known a certain thing against gravitation. They call it levitation. The grip of gravitation loosens; and it has happened even to people who have been meditating that suddenly they have started moving upwards. If it was happening in the West, the man was certainly going to be considered mad. He could not say to anybody that it is happening, because nobody is going to believe, and they will think that he is cuckoo. How can you go on just sitting in a lotus posture? And the man said, “But what can I do? Just when I opened my eyes, I saw my head is touching the ceiling.”The ego is very heavy. It is like an anchor that keeps you under the control of gravitation.In meditation you may find, even if your meditation is not very deep, one thing: while you are sitting with closed eyes, you will feel that you are rising up. You open your eyes, you are sitting in your place. And what was happening? Because the moment you close your eyes – again you are attuned, and the feeling arises that you are rising up. But opening the eyes, suddenly you find yourself sitting just as you were sitting before. Your body remains still on the ground, but your soul, your consciousness, starts rising up beyond the body. This is the beginning. Soon a day will come when meditation will be so deep that with the consciousness rising, your body will also follow.Body is a little slow, in everything.Man learned to stand up in one million years. Between the monkeys and man, just learning to stand up on two feet, there is a gap of one million years.The body learns very slowly, very cautiously; but it learns.If Nijinsky was in the East he would not have been mad, he would have been declared enlightened. His dance was his meditation.Just like Jalaluddin Rumi’s whirling was his meditation, and he became the most loved Sufi master. No other Sufi has been called mevlana. Mevlana means ‘my beloved master.’ Only Jalaluddin Rumi has become known as Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. People loved the man so much, because he has given such a simple method, that thousands of people in these twelve hundred years since him have become enlightened just by whirling.It is unfortunate that Nijinsky had to go to a madhouse – because he could not understand what was happening, nobody could explain what was happening. It disturbed him too much.The thing was the very simple thing I have been telling you every day, that your effort is a barrier. If you really want to go deep in meditation, then make it effortless – it sounds crazy, how to make it effortless? – because that too will be effort. Just drop those words because they give you a wrong connotation. It is better to say, “Be in a let-go, just relaxed.” Sit silently, watching whatever is happening inside you with closed eyes, just watching it – and a moment comes when only the watcher is there, and there is nothing to watch. And for the first time you will be on the threshold of the miraculous.All these three people would have reached to a state of tremendous benediction.Something was happening which was immensely valuable, but the West pressured them, “You are mad, you are a split personality” – all condemnatory terms – “you are schizophrenic….”In the East, the same people with the same talents would have been worshipped, loved, respected.And I can understand a certain secret principle: when somebody is moving into a new world, into a new realm, he needs an atmosphere where he is respected, loved, appreciated, encouraged. That’s the purpose of a mystery school. Alone you may go mad, but in a mystery school you have people who will support you; that you are on the right path, that you are blessed, that you should just go on. There is no need of explanations, because they will only delay the process, disturb the process.The West is too much interested in explanations, and the East is interested only in experience – not in explanations.And you cannot eat explanations, you cannot be nourished on them. It is experience that is going to nourish you, and a supportive milieu.And I don’t see that there is any problem of bringing Eastern methods to the West.As far as human consciousness and its evolution is concerned, there is no problem in taking the Western scientific technology to the East. So why there should be any problem in bringing the spiritual technology to the West? Carl Gustav Jung is absolutely wrong, and if such wrong ideas are being spread, then there will be cases like Nijinsky, Richard Wilhelm, Nietzsche and others.And the time is ripe. The East is taking all objective scientific technologies from the West. The West should try to pick up all methods of maturing consciousness from the East. This way we will be creating a new man who will not be Eastern or Western, who will be simply man.Osho,As far as I can remember, I had the feeling that there was somebody somewhere alive on this planet that I had to meet, who was a sage, an alchemist, a master. This was long before I knew what a master really meant. I thought this was just a fantasy, because as a child I loved reading stories about people like Merlin the magician and other alchemists. This feeling was so strong that it kept me from committing myself to anything – marriage, business, politics, countries.Could this feeling be a vague remembrance of having been with a master like you and missing the opportunity in some past life? If so, why was there such a strong feeling that I had to find him in this lifetime?I am asking this, because maybe somebody else may have the same feeling, and if they knew this is possible, they would not lose as much time as I did in irrelevant things.There is every possibility that you have been with a master in your past life. Lives change, but as far as evolution of consciousness is concerned, and its experiences, they go on goading you to start again from the point you stopped at in the last life. Otherwise it will be almost impossible for anyone to become enlightened, because man’s mind is such, he wastes his whole life in irrelevant things.But after each death, whatever has been your most precious experience follows with you. Anything gained in spiritual evolution remains with you, you don’t lose it. And it certainly creates a goading feeling in you to search for a master, to search for a path, to do something – although you are not clear what exactly has to be done.But any desire, any longing for truth, any longing to meet someone who can guide you, who can help you, will persist. Unless you meet the person…. There is a simple criterion for whether you have met the right person or not – if the goading disappears, if there is no more persistence of searching, then you have found the person you were looking for.Because of the Western religions, a very strange situation has been created in people’s minds – that you have only one life. That is creating craziness because…such a small life and so much to do, so many desires to be fulfilled, so many ambitions to be achieved, that everybody is running faster and faster till he falls into his grave.The Eastern religions agree only on one point – and that is significant. They have different philosophies, different explanations for different things, but on one point all Eastern religions are absolutely in agreement: that reincarnation is a reality, that you have been here since eternity, in many lives, in many forms, developing slowly, slowly towards man. And in man’s form you may have been many lives; and you will remain in man’s form in the future too for many lives unless you attain to the ultimate experience of truth.And it seems to be right. Giving man just a seventy-year life span and so many desires and so many ambitions and so many troubles – where he is going to get time to meditate? Where he is going to seek the truth or the master?And science is absolutely certain that in existence nothing can be destroyed, it only changes forms. If nothing in existence can be destroyed – not even a stone – then the most valuable phenomenon, consciousness, cannot be destroyed just by one death.You have been born many times, you have died many times, but you have continued. And all your experiences, as far as your evolution of consciousness is concerned, are with you. That is the only possibility for man some day to become enlightened, because even if he gets a few steps closer each life towards the truth, one day he is going to reach home.To me, it is a truth – reincarnation. I am not telling you to believe in it – because I am against believing. I am simply saying, accept it as a hypothesis, so that you can work upon it.A hypothesis is not a belief, neither is it an experienced truth. It is simply accepted, so that you can work in a certain line.The master – the real master – cannot give you any belief, because belief is the number one enemy of all search. The real master can only give you a hypothesis – which is for him his truth, but for you he gives it as a hypothesis to work out. Perhaps you may also find truth. When you find the truth, then it is up to you. Once you have found it, there is no question of belief either; you know it.Your constant yearning, longing, from childhood for a master, an alchemist…because alchemists were also masters. They were hiding behind alchemy, because Christianity was destroying every school of wisdom, and people had to hide even to meditate. So alchemists were not really as it is said in the books and the encyclopedias, that they were trying to change base metal into gold; that is not true, that was only a code language for alchemy. Base metal is the man who is unaware of himself; to change him into gold is to make him aware of himself. That was their code language. And they had to use code language, because the church and the pope did not want anything other than Christianity to have the monopoly of man’s consciousness.And it is a very strange thing. They had nothing to offer, and they destroyed all those people – the witches were simply wise women who had certain secrets to impart, the alchemists were simply hiding behind the name of alchemy, that they are trying to make gold. In every alchemists’ school, if you entered in the beginning, in their reception room you will find all kinds of fictitious instruments, tubes filled with different color water, and it looked as if it is a great chemical shop, a workshop, a lab; but this was only the frontage. Behind it was their real school, where they were trying to change base humanity into golden humanity.Your constant longing is certainly a proof that you have carried a seed from your past life.Now don’t miss this life. Make every effort that the seed starts becoming a sprout, so in the next life you are not unconsciously groping for a master, you are fully conscious – and even without a master you can work.Osho,When I become enlightened, who will be the first to know?Milarepa, as far as you are concerned, I will be the first to know. As far as others are concerned, they may be able to know.But Milarepa is a special case.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 39 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,If the whole history of the world were condensed into one year, with us standing at the end of that vast year, it would look something like this.The earth is formed on the first of January. It is only in December that the continents start drifting into their present position. The dinosaurs become extinct about five days before the end of the year, and not until about midday on the 31st of December does man evolve from the monkeys. From where we are standing – at midnight on New Year's eve – the Ice Age took place just over a minute ago, and Buddha, Lao Tzu and Socrates appear only seventeen seconds ago. The whole of modern times since the birth of Karl Marx happens in the last second before midnight. When I think of you as the crowning glory of this long year, it seems to me, whether or not there is a New Year's day, the experiment succeeded.There will be a New Year’s day. The forces of darkness may be great but they can’t stand even a small flame of a candle. Their greatness is only an appearance, because basically darkness has no existence of its own. It is only the absence of light.Light has its own existence, and to have one’s own existence is the true power.The dawn is bound to come. The night may be long. The agony may be great. The darkness may be becoming more and more dark but nothing can prevent the new man arising on the horizon.In a way, he has already come, he has just to be recognized.One thing has always to be remembered, that whatsoever is destructive is impotent, only creativity has potentiality, is potent.Hate, anger, jealousy, despair – they may overwhelm you for a moment, and you may think that all is lost, but all these things are impotent. They cannot destroy the eternal being in you. In fact, the situation today is more destructive than it was ever before.But as I see it, it may prove a blessing in disguise.Nuclear weapons have made war itself out of date. It is meaningless. There cannot be a third world war, and the whole credit goes to nuclear weapons – because now there is no point having a war. Nobody is going to be victorious, nobody is going to be defeated, all are going to be destroyed. The third world war will be a global suicide, and life is not ready to commit suicide. Life wants more life. Love wants more love.All that is beautiful and real in existence has an inner urge to expand.So I can say it with absolute certainty that the third world war is never going to happen.But it has created a great opportunity, a pressure on the consciousness of man, that if you remain as sleepy as you are it is dangerous. Something has to be done to bring more consciousness, to bring more love, to bring more light.The nuclear weapons are serving in two ways. First, they have stopped the possibility of the third world war, and secondly they have awakened man towards growing into a better consciousness, into a more harmonious existence.As far as I can see, everything is just going fine.Osho,From what you have said about masters who preceded you, it seems that none, or very few of them, had love as a basis for the master/disciple relationship. Buddha's compassion seems cool and distant.Gurdjieff must have always remained an enigma to those around him. They must have admired him, but one doesn't get the impression that they loved him.And it seems Krishnamurti never allowed people intimate contact with him.While awareness is the greatest key I have received from you, I know I would never persevere if it weren't for the love you emit, and the love that you evoke in us.Would you please comment?It is true that the masters of the past have not only been cool, they have been really cold. They had to be, according to their own standpoint. Love was the most dangerous thing in their view. The whole past of man is dominated by religions which are against life, against love, against joyfulness, against celebration.In fact, in the eyes of so-called religions life is a curse, it is a sin.According to the Western religions, man is born out of sin and life is a punishment – because Adam and Eve disobeyed God.This is such an irrelevant idea, what Adam and Eve did. Thousands of generations have passed, but every man still carries the same sin, and life is a punishment. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden as a punishment, that’s how life began; and unless you go backwards renouncing life, its joys – even renouncing the fruits of the tree of knowledge – you will not be able to enter into the garden of God again. You can enter again only when you have renounced everything that life gives to you.In the Eastern religions there is a different interpretation, but pointing to the same thing. You are born because of your past lives’ evil acts, and you are born to suffer the consequences of them as a punishment, and you will continue to be born again and again until the moment you have cleaned yourself totally. It may take thousands of lives, and only then you will be accepted back into the divine, into the truth.So one thing is certain, that all the religions – whether Eastern or Western – agree on one point, that life is not something to be proud of, it is something to be ashamed of. And these masters of the past were part of the milieu in which they were born.They managed to rebel against many things, but this is very fundamental, the whole religiousness has depended on it, that man has to cut himself completely from any love, any intimacy towards the other. He has to be absolutely independent and alone.Naturally they were afraid, and they were cold.And this is one of the reasons that all the religions are against me, because I am taking their very foundation stone away.To me religiousness means warmth, to me religiousness means lovingness. To me religion does not mean that you have to be a stone – make your heart a stone. To me it means that you have to melt into thousands of intimacies, that you have to disappear, and just a lovingness remains.All the religions will condemn me. I can understand their condemnation, because if I am right then their whole past and their so-called masters prove to be wrong. They have to be against me, because too much is at risk. But they are not going to win finally, because coldness is inhuman – and who cares about the Garden of Eden, and what will you do there? Adam and Eve, before they disobeyed God, were just animals. Their disobedience was the first signature of man becoming independent of animalhood, their disobedience was the first act of intelligence.I have all the respect for Adam and Eve and no respect for the God who expelled them. He is just an ugly dictator, to prevent his own children from becoming wise, from eating the fruit that will make them eternally alive. What kind of father who does not want his children…two things – knowing, and eternal life. Then what does he want? That they just go on grazing the grass in the Garden of Eden? If Adam and Eve had not disobeyed, you would not have been sitting here, you would be in the Garden of Eden – but not like human beings.In England there are thirty thousand people now who are worshippers of the devil – because they say either God is dead, because nothing has been heard about him since he created existence, or he has abandoned existence and does not care what is happening here. And you cannot deny their arguments, they have a certain sincerity. World wars go on happening, and God has no concern – and he was so much concerned that Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and he is not concerned at all that Adolf Hitler should kill six million people.So these devil worshippers – they call themselves Satanists – they have brought a very new idea, that the devil is the son of God – a rebellious son, just the generation gap. So either God has gone senile, has abandoned the world or has died. But they don’t have one significant argument that I would suggest for them, that it was the devil who suggested Eve to revolt, to disobey; otherwise she will remain an animal.The whole of humanity and progress would not have been possible without the devil. They have not added that argument. They should add it, because that is the most potential, that whatever we are, the whole credit of our evolution goes to the devil.I am not telling you to become devil worshippers. To me God and the devil are both just fictions. None of them exist.But one thing is certain, that man’s whole progress has depended on disobeying, on doubting, on being skeptical; not on being naive, or on being believers, or on being faithful, but asking questions and finding the answers. Very few people have contributed to the whole progress of man.These masters who were very cold have also contributed. They could have done much more, but their coldness deprived humanity of many more things. They were all male chauvinists, and they all thought that the woman is the way to hell, so the woman has to be avoided.And the woman is the source of warmth. Her love, her devotion, if combined with man’s intelligence, her heart if combined with man’s head – then miracles are possible. And that’s what my basic contribution is: I want man and woman to be together growing in a symphony, in a deep intimacy and harmony.We can create a totally different world.Right now it is so miserable. It is in our hands to make it happier, full of laughter. And I don’t see that there is any reason that people who are happy, blissful, singing, dancing, celebrating, are in any way harming existence. They are enhancing existence, they are making it more alive.And if the whole humanity lives in love and warmth, spiritual growth will become very easy. It will not be so arduous and so long a journey. It was arduous and long because it was cold.You can reach to the ultimate, dancing all the way, singing all the way. There is no contradiction in being blissful, in being loving, in being warm, and being spiritual. In fact, you cannot be spiritual if you are not able to share your love, if you are not able to share your heart.Osho,From the stories of the time before you became enlightened, it looks like you have been a master and an alarm clock to your surroundings all along. Is the difference between master and disciple one of consciousness only, or is there something like a master personality and a disciple personality?The truth is that there is a difference of type. Everybody cannot be a disciple. I have missed, myself, being a disciple. For lives I have been searching but I could not manage to be a disciple.I came in contact with many masters, but to be a disciple simply was not in my very nature. I had to go alone, I had to find the way myself. There was no question of ego, there was no question that I don’t want to learn from others – I was completely willing, but something was not in my very type.Everybody cannot be a disciple, and everybody cannot be a master either.It seems to be a difference of personality type – not only a difference of consciousness.There have been many disciples who attained enlightenment but never became masters.In this life I used to know a certain very remarkable man, Masto. The word means “drunk with the divine” – and he was drunk with the divine, a man of the highest caliber, but not a master. He remained a disciple even after he became enlightened.And I used to talk to him again and again – because he loved me very much, and I said, “Now your master is dead, and you have to spread his word, his message.”He said, “I have thought about it, but it simply does not ring any bell in my heart. I am perfectly happy just to be a disciple. It does not matter that my master is dead; my discipleship is not dead, I am still alive.”And there is no question of hierarchy either, that the master is higher than the disciple. All that nonsense is not part of the spiritual world. The disciple can reach to the same level of consciousness as the master, but even if the master encourages him to become a master now, it is just not possible. It is not in his nature. It is not in his blood and bones and marrow.So the question is not that somebody is higher and somebody is lower. The difference is just like man and woman – nobody is higher, nobody is lower.But a man cannot be pregnant with a child. He cannot become a mother. A woman cannot become a man.This kind of effort is being made, and it creates only idiots. There are men, particularly in California…California is simply the human zoo. Anything that is stupid, nonsense, absurd, will find a way towards California.Because I used to receive letters from California that a few men wanted to become sannyasins but they wanted my permission to dress as women. We have enough women here already – men are in shortage! The situation has become so difficult that women are chasing men. Whenever something is in shortage naturally…otherwise the woman is not a chaser. She loves to be chased, that is natural to her. But in the commune how long can you wait for nature – because nobody is coming to chase you. And sannyasins were writing letters to me, “What should we do?”I said, “There is nothing to do. Just start chasing! Forget about nature. Perhaps we have come to a point where we have to transcend nature.”I have to refuse those people; we have a shortage, and they will create even more trouble.Why should men want to dress like women? Why should women want to dress like men? Why can’t you be just yourself? Because we have created hierarchies – which are all man-created.At least in the world of spirituality there is no hierarchy, the master is not higher than the disciple. The master is master and the disciple is disciple. Both together are doing something which is miraculous. Neither the master alone can manage it nor the disciple alone can manage it, so they are complementary. They are archetypes.And once we know what type you are, things become very simple. Then you stop trying to be somebody else. You simply follow your own type and don’t waste your life and time, and put your whole energy into your own type. And then there is every possibility you will come to flowering.Osho,The other day you said that you are making every effort to hang on in your body because most of us are not yet ready to see you and your nothingness.Osho, the way you said this reached deep down into me. I heard and felt so many more things like, “Come on! Why do you wait? There is nothing else to wait for.” There was this incredible sweet persuasion, almost like a seductive invitation to melt into your being and into existence.I don't know how I can still manage to resist. Perhaps you really have to wait and nudge us a little longer. I know this is no question, but I still wanted to say it.I also know this is not a question, but I will have to answer it! Geeta…you can laugh! There is no need to worry. I can wait as long as it is needed by you.Waiting, for me, is not a problem. I am becoming accustomed, because for years now I have been somehow hanging around, but now I have become an expert in hanging around. So you need not worry. You can take your time.Just remember that whatever I am saying to you I will make my best effort to keep my promise, but it is not within my hands totally. I am in the hands of existence; as long as it allows I will be here to go on knocking at your doors.But don’t take it for granted, because it cannot be continued forever.Osho,When I first read your books it dawned on me with total clarity that, “This man speaks the truth. He knows it and he is it.”How is it possible to recognize the truth without knowing it? And there are many people who I think are more aware than I am and have more experience in life, and still they don't recognize you.Is my recognition and their non-recognition just a different kind of dream?No. If you listen to me or read my words without bringing your own prejudices, without bringing in your own knowledge, your own so-called experience of life, then you will instantly recognize whether it is true or not.So the first thing; you recognized it, not because you are much more experienced, much more knowledgeable, much more prejudiced, but simply because you are more innocent, and innocence has a clarity.The others who seem to know more have simply lost their innocence, they know nothing, just garbage that they have collected from experience or from books or from universities. Their heads are full and heavy, and it is very difficult to penetrate their heads – they are really thick.In the world they will be respected as wise people. The truth is they are otherwise people.But the masses are impressed by their knowledge, but knowledge is not knowing – knowledge is simply repeating somebody else’s words. Knowing is your own.So it happened to you, because you are not knowledgeable, you are not full of rubbish gathered from all kinds of sources.Your question is significant, “When I don’t know what is truth and what is not truth, how was it instantly recognized that this man is speaking the truth?”You are not aware that truth is not something far away from you, it is something within you. You may not be aware of it, but if you read something or hear something which is even just an echo that reminds you of the truth that is hidden behind you, in your own innermost core, there will be recognition, immediate recognition. It is not a question of knowing truth or not knowing truth. You have the truth. Your being is the truth.How do you recognize when you see your face in a mirror that it is your face? You have never seen your face – as far as I know! Nobody has known his own face, but before a mirror you recognize that this is your face because the function of the mirror is to reflect.Listening to me is just being available to a mirror. Reading me is just being available to a mirror. And what you will recognize as the truth in those words is simply a reflection of your own.And the knowledgeable people are in difficulty, because they are not clean, so whatsoever you say to them or whatever they read they interpret it. Their mind is constantly making commentary on it. So what they see in the mirror is not my words but their own commentaries – which have nothing to do with truth.So, first, it will be difficult for them to recognize.Secondly, the people who have respectability as knowers – people who have wisdom, people who are saints, sages – to them my words will be a challenge, and they would like to crush those words, to put them aside immediately because there is danger. Their whole respectability is in danger. If I am right, then their whole life and their whole experience is wrong – and very few people are so sincere that they will risk everything for truth. They will risk truth for anything.But respectability is a great thing.It happened that one Jewish scholar – and a professor in the university of Jerusalem – was interested in the words of Jesus, particularly in the authority that he was saying them with.He has heard many people, but this man has a way of his own. No man he has known speaks with such authority.He was a great scholar, so he could not go to listen to him while he was giving talks, because people will see, and they will think, “You are such a great scholar, and he is just a carpenter’s son – uneducated, cannot read, cannot write – and you have come to listen to him?” That was against his ego.So one night when everybody had gone to sleep he went to Jesus. He woke him up and said, “Please forgive me. I am a professor in the university, and I am a great scholar of religious matters. I am a rabbi but I have certainly been impressed by the way you say things, no man has said things like that. But I had listened to you only by passing on the road, moving slowly so that I can hear a little more, but I cannot come to listen to you, because my whole respectability is at stake. Jews will not forgive me, the university will not forgive me.”Jesus said to him, “In this life nothing is possible. You will have to be reborn.”He could not understand. He said, “What do you mean?”Jesus said, “What I mean is that you will have to drop all your respectability, all your knowledge, if you want to understand me. And this is no way of being a disciple, to come in the middle of the night like a thief. This simply shows your impotence and weakness. So just get lost! Come in the day. Have some self-respect. Why should you depend on respect from other people? Only people who do not have self-respect depend on other people’s respect.”So the people who know more, knowing nothing much, they are just like donkeys who are carrying great scriptures – but that does not mean that the donkey becomes a rabbi. The donkeys remain donkeys. That load of scriptures is not going to help.One of the greatest problems in the world is these so-called knowledgeable people. They have the most difficulty to recognize any truth because recognizing any truth means losing much respectability, scholarship, knowledge.Socrates has two categories. One category he calls knowledge that is ignorant, and the other category he calls ignorance which knows. Beautiful, clear-cut conception. “Ignorance which knows” means innocence, nothing to lose, nothing to risk – you can open your heart, you can sink deeply into the waters of life without any fear.And the knowledgeable, those who are ignorant, will not come close to anything that will expose them.Against truth, the greatest enemy in the world is the knowledgeable person. And the greatest friend is he who knows that he does not know.Osho,A friend of mine and I are having a little disagreement. I say that a great enemy of enlightenment is coziness, while she contends that jet-set traveling is far worse. Can you enlighten us?One should try to understand that every thing is not to be decided by discussion or argument. There are a few things which depend on people’s types, their likings.Before you enter into a discussion, you have already accepted one fact – that you both are of the same type and your likings are the same, which almost always is not the case.If somebody likes Chinese food, and somebody does not like it, there is no question of discussion. It is simply a question of liking or not liking.Somebody likes roses, somebody likes some other flower.This, too, is a question of type and liking. Don’t make it a point of discussion. You will never come to any conclusion.If you like coziness, a relaxed stable atmosphere, then a constant changing atmosphere will not suit you.But there are people who would like constant change. They cannot remain in one place more than few days. They cannot love one person more than few months. Their life is geared in a totally different way.Now, arguments are not going to change this. And in this case, it is really a little strange that the man likes coziness, and the woman would like to be a gypsy – which is really a very rare phenomenon. Man is basically a gypsy. It was because of women that you see in the world houses; otherwise, at the most tents. It was the woman who forced the man to live in one place, make a beautiful home and not be a vagabond.But from the very beginning man has been a hunter. The woman was staying at home, and the man was hunting far and wide, traveling miles; and sometimes the hunting place was no more giving food, they had to move. Hunters had to keep on moving, because the hunted animals went on moving farther from the hunters. It was the woman who invented agriculture – not man. Now you cannot go on dragging your agriculture farm from one place to another place; you are stuck, now you have to be there.And the woman has reasons to remain in a stabilized place. She is going to become a mother. Those nine months she is carrying a child, she cannot go on moving from here and there. She is already in trouble.I don’t think any man would be able to carry a baby in his belly for nine months. He will commit suicide, absolutely certain.The woman cannot eat well while the child is in the womb; she vomits, she is constantly sick in bed. And when the child is born, the child is too small – moving from one climate to another, from one place to another, is not going to be good for the child.So agriculture versus hunting was the basic question, and agriculture won over hunting.And hunting was ugly, too.The woman is kinder, more compassionate. Hunting was something ugly, insensitive. The woman is a mother, and she knows that if you have killed a mother, a deer, what will happen to her children? You have killed a lioness, what will happen to her cubs? The woman has been against hunting.And when hunting became scarce and difficult, and there were days that you have to starve and then get food, man finally decided for cultivation. But with the cultivation everything changed. Now tents were useless. Houses are more permanent.And with it, the whole civilization started growing. Then the schools were possible, then the hospitals were possible. Then other productions – manufacturing, everything became possible with cultivation.But man deep down has remained a hunter. He has not forgotten the joys of hunting. He still wants to be a gypsy.But in your question it seems the man wants to be cozy and feels in coziness there will be enlightenment more easily; and the woman wants to be a gypsy, jet-set speed, and she thinks in such a constant whirlwind enlightenment will be easy. No one is wrong, no one is right. It all depends on your personal feeling, type, choice.Never waste your time arguing upon things which are likings. Simply accept, “That is your liking and this is my liking, and unfortunately our likings are different.” And close the subject rather than discussing.And start becoming enlightened!Right, Geeta?

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 40 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It is said that when Buddha achieved enlightenment the whole universe became blissful – flowers showered from the sky, deities began to dance around him. Indra, himself, the king of all the devas, came down with folded palms and surrendered at Buddha's feet. Trees began to flower out of season – the whole existence became a celebration.Although the story around Buddha's enlightenment is just poetry, I feel that existence must have enjoyed, and still rejoices much more in your enlightenment. It seems to me that in you all the awakened beings of the past are showering wisdom, love and compassion on this thirsty, agonized planet in a last dramatic effort.Osho, what happened when you became enlightened?The happening of enlightenment cannot be described in prose. Prose is too mundane. And the happening of enlightenment is too poetic.It is the ultimate romance in existence.The problem is how to put the wordless happening into words.No trees blossom out of season. No flowers are showered from the sky. No deities dance around the enlightened one. But still, all these are true. It is as if trees blossomed out of season. Remember “as if”; as if gods danced around the enlightened one, as if the whole existence became a celebration.It becomes a celebration, but it is so silent and so peaceful; and it is so far away from language that to say it we have to use fictitious phenomena. In other words, trees should have blossomed out of season – although they did not; flowers should have showered – but they did not.You have to understand the poetic way of saying that whenever somebody becomes enlightened it is not only his enlightenment – because he has disappeared, that’s why there is enlightenment – it spreads all over existence, it is being felt through every fiber of life.And with each single individual becoming enlightened, the whole level of consciousness of humanity goes a little higher. Whatever man is today, it is not due to his own effort; the credit goes to those few enlightened people around the world. They can be counted on fingers. But each disappearing, becoming pure light, has given a tremendous push to the whole sleeping humanity towards a better state of consciousness.Wherever we are, we owe tremendously to people we don’t even know.But with poetry there is a difficulty. One difficulty is, if you explain it, it becomes prose; it loses its poetic quality. Secondly, the believers, the faithful, think that it is not poetry; whatever is said did actually happen, it is history – not fiction but factuality. They get angry if you call it poetry – although poetry is a far higher expression than prose.And this kind of poetry has been used for all enlightened people around the world.It happened, the first time I had come to Bombay – it must have been in 1960 – to speak at the birthday celebrations of Mahavira. And Bombay is the stronghold of the Jainas.I was absolutely unknown to them.They had two speakers. I was introduced to them by a very eminent person in India, a very simple and humble man; but by chance he was the general manager of Jamnalal Bajaj in Wardha. Jamnalal Bajaj was one of the richest men in India who sacrificed his everything for the freedom struggle. He had made a big guest house, at least five hundred people can stay there at a time, and continually there were conferences for the freedom fighters. And finally he persuaded Mahatma Gandhi also – who was the leader – to come to Wardha, and he made an ashram for him nearby, outside the city.And this old man, Chiranjilal Badjatya, was in charge of taking care of all the guests. These guests finally became president of India, governors of all the states, chief ministers, cabinet ministers – all the great posts after freedom came into the hands of these people, who had been guests in Jamnalal’s guest house – and Chiranjilal Badjatya was taking care of them. So he was intimately connected with all India’s well-known leaders, not a single man of any eminence was unknown to him. And they all respected him – because he was an old man, and he served them so lovingly.Just by chance again, he came across me.In Jabalpur there is a very beautiful complex of Jaina temples in the mountains. And the stones in Jabalpur have a speciality – they’re all round. Big stones, huge stones but all round, egg-shaped, which has proved that the earth in Jabalpur has come out of the ocean first. Those big boulders have been rolling in water for millions of years – that is why the roundness…. And not one – millions of boulders. It is a strange mountain. It is not an ordinary mountain, just those boulders upon boulders – it has its own beauty.And there was a celebration. I had gone to speak there, and as I was coming out this old man was standing by the side of the road. It was a cold morning. He had a blanket around himself. He simply threw the blanket on the ground and asked me to sit there, but I said, “Your blanket will get dirty.”He said, “Don’t be worried about the blanket.”I said, “You are old. You may get cold. “He said, “Don’t be worried. You just sit. Just sit with me. And I cannot tell you to sit on bare earth.” He said, “I have listened to all the great speakers of this country – from the lowest up to the highest, Mahatma Gandhi – but the way you said things, nobody has touched my heart in this way. I have just one request, please don’t refuse an old man.”I said, “First you tell me what you want.” I had no idea who he was.He said, “On a certain date this year I invite you to Bombay. I want to introduce you to prominent people. Otherwise, just as I was unaware of you they will remain unaware.”And Bombay is the real capital of India for intelligentsia, for industrialists; even the politicians from Delhi are under the thumb of the people of Bombay because for elections they need money and all the money is in Bombay.You will be surprised that Bombay has only a population of ten million – in a country of nine hundred million – but it has half of the wealth of the whole country. Ten million against eight hundred and eighty million people are holding half the wealth of the country. Certainly they have a power.So he said to me, “I don’t want these people to miss you.”I said, “You are inviting so lovingly. I will come. But I don’t know anybody there. Nobody knows me.”He said, “I will be there, and I will make arrangements that people will recognize you.”And it was hilarious because when I arrived I was standing at the air-conditioned compartment door waiting, and almost fifty people were running from here and there looking. And they will look at me – somehow convinced that this is the man, and somehow unconvinced. And they will go on. The whole train was emptied. Only I was standing there, and those fifty people who had come to receive me. Now there was nobody else.So finally they asked me, “What happened? Are you not wearing your Gandhi cap today?”I said, “Who told you that I have ever been wearing a Gandhi cap?”They said, “Chiranjilal Badjatya, who has invited you here.”I said, “He is an old man, and his whole life he has lived with people who were all wearing Gandhi caps” – that was the symbol of the freedom fighters – “So everything else he has described perfectly well, he just added the Gandhi cap.”And they all will look from down upwards – everything was right, and just the cap was missing – so they will go on, “This is not the man.”And Chiranjilal Badjatya had got caught in some traffic so he arrived late, when they had already discovered: “I don’t wear it and I am the person you are looking for. I know that you are looking for me and you have been running from here and there.”And Chiranjilal came huffing, whuffing, an old man. And he said, “Listen, I have forgotten one thing. That Gandhi cap he does not wear. It is just I have seen so many people my whole life wearing Gandhi caps that somehow I imagined or perhaps what happened, just a slip of the tongue, and I told you.”These people were completely unaware of me, of my ideas or anything. So they were a little suspicious, but because Chiranjilal Badjatya was a very important person they requested me and they invited me.But they also invited the most famous Jaina monk in Bombay, Chitrabhanu.And naturally everybody was interested in Chitrabhanu, to listen to him; he was the most prominent Jaina monk in the Bombay area.So he spoke first. And as he ended and I stood up, people started leaving their seats. An unknown man, who knows, it may be just a sheer waste of time. I had to shout at those people and I told them, “Just wait for five minutes, and after five minutes you can leave – but not before that. So sit down! Back to your seats!” They had never thought that somebody will do that.And I said, “This is absolutely uncivilized. You should listen at least five minutes and then you are free, then you can go. Whoever wants to go will not be prevented, but for five minutes nobody can leave.”So they all went back to their seats, a little afraid. Seekers are not of this type.And I started criticizing Chitrabhanu point by point, and after five minutes I asked them, “If anybody wants to leave now he can leave. After this, nobody will be allowed to leave until I am finished.” Not a single person left because in those five minutes what I had said was enough to convince them that Chitrabhanu is just an idiot.Because in Mahavira’s story the same kind of poetry comes in different ways, and Chitrabhanu was trying to prove that it is real happening.For example, Mahavira is bitten by a snake on his feet and milk comes out of his feet, not blood. And he was trying to prove that this is actual fact, that when Mahavira moves – he was naked, barefooted – on dusty roads, if there is a thorn on the road, the thorn immediately moves out of his way because Mahavira has finished all his evil karmas, now existence would like not to give him any pain. So even the thorn is so sensitive that it immediately moves out of the way. And he was trying to prove that these are actual facts.And I started criticizing him, “This man, Chitrabhanu, whom you listened to with such respect, is just an idiot.” There was a shock. A few of the people at that meeting are still my sannyasins, and they say that they thought that there was going to be a riot. Chitrabhanu was so much respected by the Jaina community, and this man starts calling him an idiot. And they were not even aware who I am. Certainly I am against Jainism. And I said, “This man cannot understand the difference between prose and poetry. Poetry has a truth but it is not factual; it is true, but it is not factual. It has a meaning, a significance, which cannot be said in any other way.”Mahavira was the first man to bring non-violence as the basis of a religion – non-killing, not giving any kind of pain or suffering to anybody.Now existence must respect this man. I don’t think that a thorn will understand Mahavira, even man doesn’t understand, even this Chitrabhanu does not understand – he is worse than the thorn. No thorn has ever moved out of his way.But this is simply a way of saying that existence respects Mahavira’s sensitivity to such an extent that if it is possible it will remove the thorn from his path.The intention is there, but the fact is not there. And the fact is meaningless.The real thing is that the whole existence intends, respects, loves this man’s tremendous contribution to humanity.Now from a snake bite on the feet milk cannot come out. There are only two possibilities. Either Mahavira is filled with milk – a milk bottle! He has no blood because there was no guarantee that the snake will bite only on a certain place. He could have bitten on any other place, so he must be filled with milk. But milk is a different problem. Soon it becomes curd, and then Mahavira must be stinking of curd! And butter may be oozing out from his pores! It is nonsense to make it a fact.Or another possibility is, a woman can transform blood into milk, but then she has a certain mechanism in her breast. So the other possibility is that Mahavira has breasts all over his body.But the truth is that it is poetry, and this idiot does not understand poetry. It is simply a way of saying that the man was so full of love – like a mother – that even though the snake is biting him, he cannot give anything else than milk to it.And snakes love milk very much.In India there are snake worshippers. Every year they have a certain day for snakes, and snake charmers bring snakes from all over the country and people bring milk. And snakes drink milk so joyously.So I said, “It is simply poetry, that it is what the snake loves most – milk. Although he gives poison to Mahavira, Mahavira can only give milk to him.”It is not fact. It cannot be a fact.And I said, “I challenge this man to prove on what grounds he says it is a fact. I say it is more than fact, it is truth itself. But to say it, you will have to use language in a poetic way, not in the ordinary mundane prose way.”And when I said to people, “Now, anybody who wants to leave, stand up and leave immediately – because after this I will not allow anybody to stand up and disturb the meeting,” there was such silence, nobody left.I said in my talk to the people that Mahavira is really two persons. Mahavira is not his name, mahavira means a great warrior. That’s why he is called “Mahavira the Jaina.” Jaina means conqueror, one who has fought with all that was wrong in him and conquered, and is victorious. But he was not always “Jaina.” His original name was Vardhaman. That too is significant because vardhaman means one who is evolving. In that way everybody is a Vardhaman, evolving to higher states.But the day he achieved, Vardhaman died and Mahavira was born.That Chitrabhanu was going mad because of what I was saying to the people – and they were his audience for years, and I was just an intruder. Nobody knew me. And he was trying to find something he could criticize. Seeing this, that I am saying Vardhaman and Mahavira are two persons he immediately stood up and he said, “This is wrong. Vardhaman and Mahavira are one person.”I said to the president, “You keep hold of this man. He’s not in his senses. Again he cannot understand poetry. I am also saying that Vardhaman was his old name, but a day came that the old died and a new life began. To symbolize the new life he was given a new name, Mahavira. Mahavira is absolutely discontinuous with Vardhaman. So if you can understand poetry then there is no problem, there were two persons – one who was and is no more, and one who was not and is now; but if you don’t understand poetry, it is your problem.”And as I ended up, the president stopped Chitrabhanu and said, “You are in anger and you don’t understand. The man is saying simple but significant truths.”It became such a problem for Chitrabhanu – because I was continually coming to Bombay. More and more of his people started belonging to me. He even tried – these are non-violent people….I was coming from Pune and a phone call came, “Don’t bring him in the car because on the way Chitrabhanu has put a few dangerous people, paid murderers, who can do anything. So we are sending a plane, bring him by plane.” But a few of my people went by car and their cars were stopped. And they looked for me – a gang of eight persons. You cannot believe! On the one hand people talk about non-violence…. His whole life he has been a monk, a learned monk; and then because he cannot cope with me intelligently, he thinks to murder me.And I told the meeting on that day that this has happened. Certainly there were people because the cars were checked. And the people who were in the cars could see the type of people who stopped the cars – they put big rocks on the road so there was no way for them to move, they had to stop. And they were puzzled that I was not there. And I said to these people, “People like Chitrabhanu – just because they have a certain scholarship, a certain articulateness – should not be so easily accepted. If he can commit violence, then his celibacy is suspect, then his whole personality is that of a hypocrite.”And that’s what happened. He escaped with one of the richest men’s girl to New York. Now he is in New York, married to the girl. And New York was chosen because the girl’s parents had a big business in New York. So he is living in all luxury now – against which he was preaching his whole life.To experience something and just to borrow other people’s words are so distant from each other that one should always be aware whether you are listening to a parrot or a man who has experienced.You have asked me what happened at the time of my enlightenment. Everything that is described in Buddha’s enlightenment. One feels like flowers are showering. One feels a strange fragrance. One feels as if divine forces are dancing all around. But it is one’s feeling, just a by-product of enlightenment, but it is not factual. And it will be very difficult for you to think of something as truth which is not factual.Poetry has a truth, but it is not factual.Art has a truth, but it is not factual.Facts are mundane things. Only newspapers collect them, and ultimately the same newspapers become history.Truth is a totally different thing.Let me explain to you. Jainas have twenty-four masters. If you go in a Jaina temple – and they have the best temples in the world, the most beautiful, the most simple, the most serene, and they have always chosen the mountains so their temples are on high mountains – there you will find twenty-four tirthankaras, statues in white marble or black marble. One thing is bound to strike you, that they all look absolutely alike, there is no difference. Even the priest of the temple cannot tell the difference, who is who. So finally Jainas have decided to make small symbols underneath the statue; for example, underneath Mahavira, because his name is “the great warrior” there is a line, that is his symbol. So each statue has a symbol, and according to the symbol they can say whose statue it is; otherwise they are exactly alike.Now this cannot be fact. Twenty-four persons spread over thousands of years cannot be exactly the same.But it is a truth, because these twenty-four persons experienced the same truth, saw the same light, felt the same bliss. To signify that their experience was exactly the same, how you can manage to show it in marble? Marble has its own poetry, and they have managed it perfectly well; their statues are made exactly the same. That shows now that the body does not matter, the figure of the body does not matter. Now what matters is the inner experience; how to show its similarity? And in stone?So those twenty-four statues exactly similar have a poetic truth about them.And whenever anybody becomes enlightened, all these experiences happen. He feels the whole existence celebrating – the trees blossoming out of season, the birds singing although it is not morning. In this mood of festivity, all rules are put aside.That is the meaning, that in the mood of festivity all rules are put aside.And the greatest phenomenon in existence is enlightenment, and certainly it should be rejoiced by the whole existence.But I repeat: remember, it is poetic experience, poetic expression of something which cannot be brought to words. But it exists.Osho,When I told you I saw you empty, you said, “Emptiness in you is a ‘real' experience.” You said that twice. My understanding of the proof of reality is that it – the observed – remains with awareness, whereas imagination dissolves.Seeing you empty did not return and as much as I try it will not return. And yet something has remained with me, something will not leave me since seeing you like that.Is that reality, Osho?It is reality, there is just a little confusion – which is natural. I have said that with awareness imagination disappears but the reality remains. You saw me absent or empty and I said this is real.Then you tried to see me empty again but you forgot one thing, that while you are trying you cannot be aware.So it is not that my emptiness was your imagination. Just be aware and you will see the emptiness again, but don’t try – because for the first time when it happened you were not trying, you were simply sitting silently here listening, and out of nowhere you felt the emptiness. It will come in the same way, without even knocking on your doors. With effort you cannot bring it.It is not imagination.But the other half you have forgotten. In the silence you were aware without any effort, and once you have seen it you started trying to see it again and now it is not coming, hence the confusion. You think it must have been imagination; it was not.But this happens to everybody. Any experience of the beyond first happens without your effort. You were doing something else. You were listening to me, you were not concerned about the beyond, and suddenly a door opens.And in the day you see the stars. It will leave an impact on you forever. You will never be the same again.But remember not to make an effort. That is a trouble, that the mind says, “Such a beautiful experience. Make some effort, do something so that you can find it again.” But any doing is undoing, you will not get it.You simply forget all about it; just as it has come uninvited, it will come.And once you know the secret – that these great experiences come uninvited, you cannot pull them down – then whatever happens, you relax into it, you drown yourself in it, and when it is gone you don’t feel that you are missing something. You feel grateful – not a despair that it disappeared. Feel grateful that it appeared to you and you had not asked for it, it came on its own, uninvited; and slowly, slowly you will get the knack of it, that it is not within your power, within your hands. In fact, you, your hands, your effort, are all barriers.So when sometimes, doing anything, you are so totally absorbed, these tremendous moments will come to you and they will go on changing you; each time they come they will go deeper in you.One day it happens that the moment comes and never leaves you.Osho,Does knowledge of the esoteric play any role on the path of awareness?No. No knowledge – esoteric or otherwise – plays any role on the path except that of hindrance. Innocence helps, knowledge hinders.Be a child – full of wonder, without knowing anything.One Indian saint was very much respected in India. There were only two men in India who were called mahatma. One was Mahatma Gandhi – mahatma means “the great soul” – and the second was Mahatma Bhagwandin.This second man used to stay with me whenever he passed the city I was living in.I used to go for a morning walk, for a night walk, and he was also very much in love with going for a walk. He was an old man, but immensely knowledgeable; he knew the names of all the trees – Latin names, Greek names – all the flowers. He was almost a walking encyclopedia.I told him, “You have wasted your whole life. What is the point of remembering all the names of all the trees in the garden, all the flowers? You are so much concerned with knowledgeability that you cannot enjoy the beauty. I don’t know any of the names of these trees and I don’t have to – because they don’t talk, I don’t have to call them. What is the point of knowing their names? You are not a botanist. You are not a physician” – because he knew what flower, what leaves can be used for what disease.I said, “These things are for experts. You are considered to be a spiritual man, and these things I don’t think belong to spirituality.”He was very angry. He said, “Everybody has appreciated my knowledge. In fact, everybody feels awe at my knowledge of things around the world. You are the first person who has insulted me.”I said, “I have not insulted you. I have simply been trying to make you aware that now you are seventy, soon death will be coming and death will not ask all these names. Death will ask, ‘Can you be aware or not?’”But at that time he was very angry and he wouldn’t listen.And after eight years he died. Before he died, just two days before, I passed through his city – he used to stay in Nagpur. So I went to see him, hearing that he is very sick. He was very sick. He had become almost a skeleton. It was sad to see that man. And I said, “What happened?”He said, “What you have said that day, it seems it is going to happen. Death is coming. I can hear the footsteps. Life is slipping out of my hands. And please forgive me for my anger. You were right. All my knowledgeability is of no use. Had I listened to you, even eight years was enough time to meditate, to become aware, and this time I would not have been sad that death is coming, I would have been excited that the greatest experience in life – death – is coming close and I am going to watch it. But I don’t think I can. I will become unconscious. I am already losing my consciousness, I am becoming more and more sleepy.”I said to him, “Just try to remember in the next life at least, don’t get too much bothered by unnecessary knowledge – just to impress people. The essential is very small, and if you can understand the essential your life has been that of a glory, a victory.”

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 41 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have always felt a great love from you for John the Baptist. It seems that the man who is regarded as the prophet who heralded the coming of Jesus was of greater stature than Jesus himself. Would you please comment?John the Baptist is not much known. He is overshadowed by Jesus Christ and Christianity. He was certainly more powerful and a greater revolutionary than Jesus himself.It is very unfortunate that Jews won’t talk about him because he was declaring that the old Judaism has come to an end and a new message is just on the way.This is an old way of saying that he declared that he is preparing the ground for the new messiah.Symbols change as time changes, but to be more exact and true about the man, it will be better to say that he was preparing the ground for the new message, not the new messiah; and proof for this exists.I will talk about it.Jews, out of necessity, have not taken note of John the Baptist. He was declaring the death of the old and the birth of the new, which really the old, the orthodox, the traditional, cannot respect.And Christians have ignored him for another reason – because he baptized Jesus, initiated him into religion. Christians don’t want to mention the fact that Jesus had a master because that lowers the status of Jesus in the eyes of Christians – the only begotten son of God need not have any master, he is born a master and he is born with the message. So although it is mentioned – it is just a mention that John the Baptist initiated Jesus.But it is ugly that they will not talk much about the master of their master. They make so much fuss about the crucifixion of Jesus. Their whole religion depends on the crucifixion of Jesus; if he was not crucified there would have been no Christianity at all. But they don’t talk about the fact that John the Baptist also was beheaded.Neither do the Jews take any note that the man was murdered. They were happy about it because he was declaring the death of the old.Nor are the Christians interested in him because he was not a Christian. He initiated Jesus into Judaism, not into Christianity.And the man must have had a tremendous charisma, that even a man like Jesus felt to become his disciple.Thousands of people were baptized by John. He must have had a great magic around him, and at the same time he was a very humble man – because he did not declare himself to be the messiah. That point has to be remembered. A tremendous beauty…he has every characteristic to call himself a messiah. He influenced more people than Jesus.Jesus was crucified by the Jews because he was talking – talking against their conception of God, saying that he is the only begotten son of God. He was claiming something for which he had no evidence, and he was also claiming that he is the long-awaited messiah. Jews have been waiting for that savior since Moses.John the Baptist was a charismatic personality. He could have declared himself to be the messiah, to be the only begotten son of God; but he was a humble man. He did not declare anything. On the contrary, he simply said, “I am making the way for the new messiah to come.”In the Jewish psychology nobody can ever be accepted as the awaited messiah. There is a very fundamental reason for it. Jews have suffered so much.First they suffered in Egypt in slavery…. Those great pyramids that you see, which even science thinks impossible to make – four thousand years old, such big blocks of stone – it is impossible because powerful enough cranes did not exist, neither do they exist today; and these powerful stones, huge stones, were carried to heights by human beings. Each stone has taken hundreds of lives. Those pyramids were not made by Egyptians, they were made for the Egyptian kings and queens but they were made by Jews under slavery; they carried those stones, with the soldiers on horses whipping them all the time so they don’t feel the burden. And if somebody fell and died, he was immediately replaced by another Jew.Since those days, Jews have been suffering. Forty years wandering in the desert with Moses to find a place, and finally they settled on Israel – which was called in those days Judea – and immediately it was invaded by the Romans. And the Romans were not less cruel than the Egyptians, perhaps they were more cruel.John the Baptist was not killed by the Jews, because he never claimed himself to be a messiah, and they cannot accept anybody as a messiah because that is their only hope. And when people are in great suffering, the hope functions as an immense help but it has to be far away – but not too far away that it becomes beyond reach. It has to remain within reach and yet as you move towards it it also goes on receding. It always remains within your reach but you never attain it.So Jews have been hoping. Their whole hope has been that the messiah will come, that he will redeem them from all suffering.Now it is impossible for them to accept anyone as a messiah. First, because nobody can redeem anybody from suffering. So it may look to others that walking on water is a miracle, but the Jews were not waiting for a messiah who walks on water. They had a deep hope for a messiah who would take away all their pain and anguish, all their suffering; not someone who raises one man from the grave – that doesn’t matter. These things don’t make sense because their hope is not fulfilled by them.Secondly, accepting anybody as the messiah means now there is no hope. This man certainly is a kind of magician – he turns water into wine, walks on water, feeds hundreds of people out of two loaves, raises a man from the dead, cures a few sick people. But if this is the messiah, what about their suffering and anguish, thousands of years old? Now even the hope is finished. The messiah has come, and the messiah has failed.Rather than see the messiah fail, they would like the messiah to be crucified – because that keeps their hope alive.Nobody bothered about the psychology of the Jews. They were not cruel people, they are not cruel people. They have not tortured anybody.Why suddenly did they turn upon Jesus? He was destroying their hope, and that was all that they had – no joy in their life, no freedom in their life, simply a hope that one day all this suffering will end. This night cannot remain forever; the dawn is going to come, the messiah will come and redeem God’s chosen people, the Jews.They could not sacrifice that hope. That hope was such a big solace, consolation; that hope was their only future.And just a carpenter’s son comes and wants to destroy it.They could not forgive Jesus.But they were not against John the Baptist, although he declared the end of the old and the beginning of the new, although he declared that he is preparing the path for the new messiah to come.He was killed by the Romans, particularly Pontius Pilate’s wife. That is a very strange thing. She was a beautiful woman, and Pontius Pilate was a powerful man in the Roman Empire…and politics works in strange ways. He was so powerful that the king of the Romans was afraid – he was getting old, and when he dies his son has no chances to become the king if Pontius Pilate remains in Rome. He had such influence on people so he had to be sent far away – in such a graceful way that nobody thinks that he has been simply removed from the path of the king’s son. And when the king orders Pontius Pilate to go…. A powerful man, an intelligent man, and he has a powerful wife.But the more beautiful a woman is the more egoistic she is.Man becomes egoistic if he is rich, he becomes egoistic if he has political power in his hands, he becomes egoistic if he has great knowledge, scholarship, he becomes egoistic if he is worshipped as a saint, as a prophet. He has not left the woman any area except beauty to fulfill her ego – a very limited scope, one dimensional.But because the scope is limited, the ego becomes very strong. A beautiful woman has a stronger ego than any man can have.Pontius Pilate’s wife heard about John the Baptist – and she has known only men who immediately became interested in her beauty, she has never known a man like John the Baptist. When she went to see John the Baptist, he wouldn’t even look at her, and he simply said, “Come some other day. I have to see many other people and they have their appointments before you. And here everybody is equal. It doesn’t matter that you are Pontius Pilate’s wife; take an appointment because I have to see thousands of people.” And he did not look at her, and she felt so insulted. She was politically powerful, the first lady of the land, and she was a beautiful lady. She became so angry that she ordered the arrest of John the Baptist through Pontius Pilate.Pontius Pilate tried to persuade her, “You don’t know this kind of people. They are not to be overpowered by beauty or power or anything. You should be patient. Go again.”She simply refused. Against his will he has to arrest John the Baptist, and the woman was so much nagging him that she wants to see John the Baptist’s head brought to her on a plate, she will not feel satisfied without it.It took almost twelve years – because Pontius Pilate did not see any reasonableness in it.But this is the problem with every husband. Whether the wife is reasonable or not, you cannot logically convince her. And she will go on nagging and torturing you, and finally just to get finished with the matter his head was cut off and was brought on a plate before the lady.From the jail John the Baptist heard these declarations of Jesus. The declarations I have been criticizing were criticized by his own master too. When he heard that Jesus had been declaring himself as the only begotten son of God – that he is saying to people, “Those who believe in me shall inherit the kingdom of God and those who don’t believe in me will fall into eternal hell” – when he started declaring such egoistic statements, John the Baptist, who was a humble man, could not believe that any religious man, any sensitive man could utter such statements.And when Jesus started doing these so-called miracles – which are below the status of an awakened being, street magicians do such things – he sent a message from the jail by one prisoner who was being released, to ask Jesus a simple question: “This is from John the Baptist who initiated you; he has a question and the question is, are you really the messiah?” Just a simple question mark, “Are you really the messiah?”It contains much. It says, “What you are saying, what you are doing is not worthy of a messiah.”Christians have not paid much respect to John the Baptist because of his suspicion.But when a man like John the Baptist suspects, it cannot be meaningless. I can see that his suspicion is right.The messiah cannot even declare himself a messiah. Those declarations are childish.Your very being, your presence, your words, your actions, will themselves declare who you are. You need not declare again and again that you are the only begotten son of God, that you are the messiah, that you are the one for whom the whole Jewish race has been waiting. Repeating these things again and again he makes it clear that he himself is psychologically insecure.If he is the messiah it does not matter whether anybody believes in it or not. Even if the whole world disbelieves, it will not make any difference, he will still be the messiah. And if he is not, even if the whole world believes he is, he will not be the messiah.No scripture about John the Baptist survives – about his sayings, statements, about his actions. There are just these few incidents, but these incidents are enough to give you the quality of the man – his humbleness, and at the same time his indifference to power, to beauty.His doubt about his own disciple is very significant. He does not think himself infallible. He has declared that now that Jesus is initiated he has found a man of great charisma and now he can retire – he was getting old, “Now he will take my place and I will retire.”His trust in a person who has just met him, the first day…. And he retired, went into the wilderness. His great trust and yet his capacity, when he heard all these things about Jesus in jail, to doubt him.The doubt is not about Jesus. The doubt is about his own feeling that Jesus will be able to take his place. Perhaps he was wrong.Just see it in that light. He is saying, “I am not infallible. Perhaps I was wrong. You were not the right person I have chosen to succeed me.”Although nothing much is known about the man, just a few incidents, those few incidents make him a very loving individual, a very charismatic individual.And he is one of those who have been sacrificed for humanity’s sake, but there is nobody even to remember them. And there have been many such people – because they never created an organization. They remained individuals. They shared their insight with people without making any kind of bondage.Thousands of people were baptized by John. That’s why he became famous as John the Baptist. But no organization arose, no religion. He never tried to make any organization to go on preaching his message to the world after him.There have been many people like that, and they were the very salt of the earth.There is no need. If existence is capable to create a John the Baptist, it will be able to create other John the Baptists in other names. There is no need to create a dead organization which creates popes, Ayatollah Khomeiniacs, shankaracharyas and all kinds of idiots.It is better to leave the space only for the authentic ones to appear.Osho,Years ago a good friend of mine committed suicide. I met her in Pune and she used to tell me things which I never understood – it was another dimension of the world. Everybody avoided her, they thought she was mad. But she loved me very much. And one day she told me, “There is no reason for me to hang around. Now I have got a message. There is something I have to do through this body. After this I will finish myself.” Whatever she described was nothing I have experienced – I don't know if it was true or not, so I cannot say that she was living in her own imaginary world. But I never saw someone living so sincerely and intensely. She became more and more a nobody.Osho, each time when I feel your vast love and understanding pouring on me, I feel sorry for her. She loved and trusted me very much, but I couldn't understand her at all.Life is not only that which you know, which you feel, which you experience. It is vast. It is so vast it can contain contradictions very easily.It has many dimensions.Never condemn anybody as mad because you cannot be certain whether his madness is a higher form of sanity or something which you are incapable of conceiving.Never judge anybody as imaginative because it is not your business to judge people. It is always helpful to remain non-judgmental.Experienced people try to understand people – perhaps they are experiencing some other dimension of life, some other aspect of life, and understanding them you will be richer.Judgment stops you.You label somebody as mad and then there is no need to understand them.Your constant judgmental attitude is nothing but to close yourself into your small world and keep every other possibility of life out of it.Learn to be open. Learn to be vulnerable. Try to experience putting yourself in the other person’s place.In this world there are as many worlds as there are people, every person is a world unto himself. It is not his skin that makes him different from you, it is his inner experience, his ways of looking at things.Even if a person commits suicide, beware, don’t judge.Vincent van Gogh, one of the greatest painters of the contemporary world, committed suicide at the age of thirty-three, and before committing suicide he was one year in a madhouse because his friends and family – particularly his younger brother – were very much concerned that he can go mad, he can do anything.In a certain part of France, I think Arles, where the sun shines the hottest and the brightest, for one year he was painting all possible positions of the sun – a whole series of paintings, just sun, the whole day from morning to evening. And doctors thought that too much sun has driven him crazy.But in the madhouse also he continued to paint, and the problem is that in the madhouse the paintings he has done are the best out of all the paintings that he has done before and after. In that one year in the madhouse he has done his best paintings.And people were afraid he was going mad – because his paintings were becoming a little bizarre. Nobody could understand what they are, what is their meaning.One of his paintings – a copy of it – I saw just a few days ago. A little while ago modern physics has come to find that many of the stars that you see in the sky are spirals, although you don’t see them as spirals. And he has painted, in one of his paintings, stars as spirals. And every critic thought that he is mad because stars are not spirals. Van Gogh said, “What can I do? Whenever I want to paint a star, my whole being says it is a spiral.”After one hundred years science has come to the conclusion that they are really spirals.Now what to make of it? Was that man mad, or was that man one hundred years ahead of his time? Was that man mad, or did he have a certain insight which others don’t have, and even now don’t have? Even the scientists who have found it have found it only through the latest developments in instruments; they don’t see them as spirals, it is through the instruments they have discovered it.Perhaps he had a consciousness totally different from the ordinary man.One thing is certain; a sannyasin, a seeker of truth, should not be judgmental. He should allow everybody to be himself without making in his mind any kind of idea whether it is right or wrong.After the madhouse Vincent van Gogh painted his last painting, again about the sun. And he wrote a small letter to his brother, “My work is completed. I was painting a series of all the positions of the sun. Only one painting has remained incomplete because you forced me into the madhouse and they prevented me from painting the sun because they thought it was the sun that has driven me crazy. Now I am released, I have painted the painting, completed it. My work is finished. I am absolutely feeling fulfilled. Now there is no need of this body; hence, I commit suicide.”Who can say that this suicide is wrong or right? Who has the authority to say that?Millions of people are living uselessly and nobody says to them, “What are you living for?”I used to know a retired professor who, once in a while, met me on the road in the morning when I was going for a morning walk. And he would ask only one thing, thousands of times. Whenever we met, he would say, “Listen” – and he was a retired professor of philosophy, a well-known man, who had written many books – “just tell me one thing. I don’t find any reason for going on living. Can you help me?”I used to ask him, “If you don’t find any reason for going on living then why do you live?”He said, “That is the difficulty. I don’t find any reason for committing suicide either. I am in such a dilemma and nobody seems to help me. People think I am going crazy, and for the first time I am feeling very clear – that there is no reason for me to die either. You help me any way!”I said, “If I help you to commit suicide I will be committing a crime; you will be gone but I will be in jail. So it is very difficult to help you in that way. As far as living is concerned, I also don’t see, for you, any point in living – because you are retired, you don’t have a wife, you don’t have children, you don’t have friends; you are old enough, living alone in a cold house, no coziness, no love, no warmth, nobody to take care of you. You have become too weak, you cannot do anything on your own. You have to eat the rotten food from a hotel. Your eyes are weak, you cannot read any more, you cannot write any more. So you are creating a dilemma for me too.“You certainly don’t have any reason to live. And as far as committing suicide, I don’t know what happens after suicide so I cannot say whether there will be any reason, whether things will be bettered or will become worse. So you can just forgive me, but don’t harass me about this question. You can ask me anything else you want.”He said, “I don’t want to ask you anything else. This is the only question.”And finally he committed suicide.And he wrote a letter to me. In his letter he said, “I am writing it to you because I don’t think anybody else will be able to understand it. They all will judge it but nobody will understand it. I tried hard to find any reason to live, I could not; and life was becoming more and more difficult, it was almost dragging. I had not found yet any reason to commit suicide, but at least one thing was in favor of suicide and that was that it will be at least a new experience, not the old rotten everyday. For years I have been moving in a wheel. At least something new – better or worse, whatever it is – but something new.”I cannot say he did anything wrong.In fact, I have been in favor of euthanasia, that people after a certain age, if they feel that they don’t have any reason to live, should not be forced to commit suicide, but they should be provided in nursing homes or hospitals with at least one month of rest, a peaceful atmosphere and a help to meditation, care of their body by the doctors. And one month’s time so their friends can meet them, faraway people can come and see them, and they can learn how to be silent, how to be peaceful, how to die with awareness. That is not suicide.Only one religion, Jainism, has accepted it for almost ten thousand years. They call it santhara. They don’t call it suicide. Santhara simply means a man has become ripe; just as a fruit becomes ripe and falls from a tree, a man has become ripe, has no need to live in the world. He has experienced all that the world provides and now to go on living seems to be unnecessarily troublesome for himself and for others.He should be allowed to leave his body.That is the only spiritual philosophy which gives euthanasia a validity.And I also feel it is valid. It should be man’s birthright – but not that a young man wants to die because his girlfriend has gone with somebody else. That will not be enough for euthanasia. That simply means he has to find another girlfriend.When there is no reason, no complaint, no grudge, no grumbling, if one is not against life, one simply finds that all that has to be lived has been lived – now what are you doing here?Up to now society has been forcing such people to commit suicide, which is ugly. And the responsibility is of the society because the society does not provide proper means for a man to have a beautiful death.I am in favor of beautifying everything – death included.Osho,When you said that there are no ghosts, it is only man's fear, I thought, “Well, that's that; there are no ghosts. Osho says so.”I was happy to believe you and put the matter aside, comforted that I knew something for sure. But this is belief. You have told us not to believe blindly. And my experience with ghosts is not connected with fear but with friendliness. I feel I am now in a predicament. I have pulled a nail out of your neem tree. Please help!Chetana, if you have friendly experiences of ghosts then ghosts exist. Friends are such a valuable thing that even if ghosts need to exist for friendship, they have to be allowed to exist! If you are having friendly relationships, that’s great.Just Milarepa has to be afraid now.Do you think Milarepa is a ghost? Poor Milarepa, he is a real man.And if you have other ghosts as friends then he should be alert.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 42 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In response to Anando's question the other evening about your place in history, you told us to forget history and historians, to simply let them do their thing. But so much of value is contained in your books which is being made available to contemporary people, and which could be part of a record of a whole different dimension from that which is conventionally regarded as history.A new record could be compiled of the real history: the evolution of man's consciousness beginning with primeval man and the first hints of man's awareness of himself, taking in all those who have become awakened, all mystical scriptures and documents, and culminating in you and your work.Of all the masters, you have the most eclectic and comprehensive record of your own evolution in consciousness – from those days immediately following your enlightenment, your days of traveling around India, to Bombay, Pune, Oregon, and now, the World Tour.In addition, the questions you provoke in us, your disciples, outline the process of our growing consciousness, and are, in themselves, another unique aspect of your work.Osho, we have already forgiven you for not allowing us to forget you. We, your editors, just want to ensure that your words and the fragrance that you are haunt people for generations to come and drive them totally sane!That is your problem.Next question.Osho,There is a story of a disciple who comes to see his master and asks him whether man is free.The master tells his disciple to stand up and to lift one of his feet off the ground. The disciple, standing on one leg – and the other one in the air – understands less than before.Now the master asks him to also lift the other foot off the ground.Osho, can you speak on the difference between freedom for and freedom from?Freedom from is ordinary, mundane. Man has always tried to be free from things. It is not creative. It is the negative aspect of freedom.Freedom for is creativity. You have a certain vision that you would like to materialize and you want freedom for it.Freedom from is always from the past, and freedom for is always for the future.Freedom for is a spiritual dimension because you are moving into the unknown and perhaps, one day, into the unknowable. It will give you wings.Freedom from, at the most, can take away your handcuffs. It is not necessarily beneficial – and the whole of history is a proof of it. People have never thought of the second freedom that I am insisting on; they have only thought of the first – because they don’t have the insight to see the second. The first is visible: chains on their feet, handcuffs on their hands. They want to be free from them, but then what? What are you going to do with your hands? You may even repent that you asked for freedom from.It happened in the castle of the Bastille – I have told you – in the French Revolution it was the most famous French prison, it was reserved only for those who were sentenced to live in jail for their whole lives. So one entered the Bastille alive but never came out alive – only the dead bodies came out.And when they put on the handcuffs, the chains, they locked them and threw the keys in a well which was inside the Bastille – because they were not needed. Those locks would not be opened again so what would be their use?There were more than five thousand people. What is the use of keeping five thousand peoples’ keys and maintaining them unnecessarily?Once they have entered their dark cells, they have entered them forever.The French revolutionaries necessarily thought that the first thing that had to be done was to free the people from the Bastille.It is inhuman to put somebody for any act whatsoever into prison in a dark cell just to wait for his death which might come fifty years afterwards, sixty years afterwards. Sixty years of waiting is an immense torture to the soul. It is not punishment, it is vengeance, revenge, because these people disobeyed the law. There is no balance between their acts and the punishment.The revolutionaries opened the doors, they dragged people out from their dark cells. And they were surprised. Those people were not ready to get out of their cells.You can understand. A person who has lived for sixty years in darkness – the sun is too much for him. He does not want to come out into the light. His eyes have become too delicate. And what is the point? He is now eighty. When he entered he was twenty. His whole life has been in this darkness. This darkness has become his home.And they wanted to make them free. They broke their chains, their handcuffs – because there were no keys. But the prisoners were very resistant. They did not want to go out of the prison. They said, “You don’t understand our condition. A man who has been sixty years in this position, what will he do outside? Who will provide him food? Here food is given, and he can rest in his peaceful, dark cell. He knows he is almost dead. Outside he will not be able to find his wife – what has happened to her, his parents will have died, his friends will have died or may have completely forgotten him.“And nobody is going to give him a job. A man who has been for sixty years out of work, who is going to give him a job? – and a man from the Bastille, where the most dangerous criminals were kept? Just the name of Bastille will be enough to have him refused from any job. Why are you forcing us? Where will we sleep? We don’t have any houses. We have almost forgotten where we used to live – somebody else must be living there. Our houses, our families, our friends, our whole world has changed so much in sixty years; we will not be able to make it. Don’t torture us more. We have been tortured enough.”And in what they were saying there was reasonableness.But revolutionaries are stubborn people; they won’t listen. They forced them out of the Bastille, but by that night almost everybody had come back. They said, “Give us food because we are hungry.”A few came in the middle of the night and they said, “Give us our chains back because we cannot sleep without them. We have slept for fifty, sixty years with handcuffs, with chains on our legs, in darkness. They have become almost part of our bodies, we cannot sleep without them. You return our chains – and we want our cells. We were perfectly happy. Don’t force your revolution on us. We are poor people. You can do your revolution somewhere else.”The revolutionaries were shocked.But the incident shows that freedom from is not necessarily a blessing.You can see all over the world; countries have become free from the British Empire, from the Spanish Empire, from the Portuguese Empire – but their situation is far worse than it was when they were slaves. At least in their slavery they had become accustomed to it, they had dropped ambitions, they had accepted their situation as their destiny.Freedom from slavery simply creates chaos.My whole family was involved in India’s freedom struggle. They had all been to jail. Their education was disturbed. Nobody could pass the university because before they could pass the examination they were caught – somebody was three years in jail, somebody was four years in jail. And then it was too late to start again, and they had become bona fide revolutionaries. In jail they contacted all the leaders of revolution; then their whole lives were devoted to revolution.I was small but I used to argue with my father, with my uncles: “I can understand that slavery is ugly, it dehumanizes you, humiliates you, it degrades you from the prestige of being a human being; it should be fought against. But my point is, what will you do when you are free? Freedom from is clear, and I am not against it. What I want to know and understand clearly is what you are going to do with your freedom.“You know how to live in slavery. Do you know how to live in freedom? You know a certain order has to be maintained in slavery; otherwise you will be crushed, killed, shot. Do you know that in freedom it will be your responsibility to maintain the order? Nobody will be killing you and nobody else will be responsible for it – you have to be responsible for it. Have you asked your leaders what this freedom is for?”And I never received any answer. They said, “Right now we are so involved in getting rid of slavery; we will take care of freedom later on.”I said, “This is not a scientific attitude. If you are demolishing the old house, if you are intelligent you should at least prepare a map for the new house. The best would be that you prepare the new house before you demolish the old. Otherwise you will be without a house and then you will suffer – because it is better to be in the old house than to be without a house.”In my family, great leaders of the Indian revolution used to stay with us – and this was my constant argument with them. And I have never found a single leader of the Indian revolution who had the answer to what they were going to do with freedom.Freedom came. Hindus and Mohammedans killed each other in millions. They had been kept from killing each other by the British forces; the forces were removed – and there were riots all over India. Everybody’s life was in danger. Whole towns were burning; whole trains were burning, and people were not allowed to get out of the trains.I said, “This is strange. It was not happening in slavery, and it is happening in freedom – and the reason simply is that you were not prepared for what freedom is.”The country was divided into two parts – they had never thought about it. In the whole country there was chaos. And the people who came to power had a certain expertise and that expertise was in burning the bridges, in burning the jails, in killing the people who were enslaving the country. This expertise has nothing to do with building up a new country. But these were the leaders in the revolution; naturally they came to power. They had fought, they had won, and the power came into their hands. And it was in the wrong hands.No revolutionary should be given the power – because he knows how to sabotage, but he does not know how to create; he only knows how to destroy. He should be honored, respected, given gold medals and everything, but don’t give him power.You will have to find people who can be creative – but these will be the people who have not participated in revolution.It is a very delicate matter.Because the creative people were concerned with their creativity, they were not interested in who rules. Somebody must rule, but whether it is the Britishers, or whether it is the Indians doesn’t matter to them. They were concerned with pouring their energy into their creative work, so they were not in the revolutionary ranks.Now, the revolutionaries will not allow them to have the power. In fact, they are the renegades. These are the people who never participated in revolution, and you are giving power to them?So every revolution has failed in the world up to now, and for the simple reason that the people who make the revolution have one kind of expertise and the people who can make a country, create a country, create responsibility in people, are a different lot. They don’t participate in destruction, murder. But they cannot get to the power. Power goes into the hands of those who have been fighting.So, naturally, every revolution is intrinsically bound to fail.Unless what I am saying is understood clearly…. There are two parts in revolution, from and for; and there should be two kinds of revolutionaries: those who are working for the first – that is freedom from – and those who will work when the work of the first is finished, for freedom for.But it is difficult to manage. Who will manage it? Everybody is full of lust for power.When the revolutionaries are victorious, the power is theirs; they cannot give it to anybody else. And the country will be in chaos. In every dimension it will fall lower and lower every day.That’s why I don’t teach you revolution; I teach you rebellion.Revolution is of the crowd; rebellion is of the individual.The individual changes himself. He does not care about the power structure; he simply manages to change his being, gives birth to a new man in himself.And if the whole country is rebellious…. The most wonderful thing about it is this: in rebellion both kinds of revolutionaries can participate, because in rebellion much has to be destroyed and much has to be created. Things have to be destroyed in order to create, so it has an appeal for both – those who are interested in destruction and those who are interested in creativity.It is not a crowd phenomenon. It is your own individuality.And if millions of people go through rebellion, then the power of countries, nations is going to be in the hands of these people – rebels.Only in rebellion can revolution succeed; otherwise, revolution has a split personality.Rebellion is one, single.And remember this: in rebellion, destructiveness and creativity go hand in hand together, supporting each other. They are not separate processes. Once you make them separate – as they are in revolution – you will repeat the story.The story in the question is not complete.It is a beautiful mystic story. A man comes to a master to ask how much man is independent, free. Is he totally free, or is there a limitation? Is there something like fate, kismet, destiny, a God who makes a limitation beyond which you cannot be free?The mystic answered in his own way – not logically but existentially. He said, “Stand up.”The man must have felt this was a stupid kind of answer, “I am asking a simple question and he is asking me to stand up.” But he said, “Let us see what happens.”He stood.And the mystic said, “Now, raise one of your legs up.”The man, by this time, must have been thinking he had come to a mad man; what has this to do with freedom, independence? But now that he has come…and there must have been a crowd of the disciples…and the mystic was so respected; not to follow him would be disrespectful, and there was no harm.So he took away one of his legs from the earth, so one foot was in the air and he was standing on one foot.And then the master said, “That’s perfectly good. Just one thing more. Now take the other foot up also.”That is impossible.The man said, “You are asking something impossible. I have taken my right foot up. Now I cannot take my left foot up.”The master said, “But you were free. In the beginning you could have taken the left foot up. There was no binding. You were completely free to choose whether to take the left foot up or the right foot up. I had not said anything. You decided. You took the right foot up. In your very decision you made it impossible for the left foot to be lifted up. Don’t bother about fate, kismet, God. Just think of simple things.”Any act that you do prevents you from doing some other act that goes against it. So every act is a limitation.In the story it is so clear. In life it is not so clear because you can’t see one foot on the earth and one foot in the air. But each act, each decision is a limitation.You are totally free before deciding, but once you have decided, your very decision, your very choice brings in a limitation. Nobody else is imposing the decision; it is the nature of things – you cannot do contradictory things together simultaneously. And it is good you cannot; otherwise…you are already in chaos…you would be in greater chaos if you were allowed to do contradictory things together. You would go mad.This is simply an existential safety measure.Basically you are totally free to choose, but once you choose, your very choice brings a limitation.If you want to remain totally free, then don’t choose. That’s where the teaching of choiceless awareness comes in. Why the insistence of the great masters just to be aware and not to choose? Because the moment you choose, you have lost your total freedom, you are left with only a part. But if you remain choiceless, your freedom remains total.So there is only one thing which is totally free and that is choiceless awareness. Everything else is limited.You love a woman – she is beautiful but very poor. You love riches – there is another woman who is very rich but ugly, disgusting. Now you have to choose. And whatever you choose, you will suffer. If you choose the beautiful girl, she is poor; and you will always repent that you missed all those riches unnecessarily – because the beauty after a few days’ acquaintance is taken for granted, you don’t see it. And what will you do with beauty? You cannot purchase a car, you cannot purchase a house, you cannot purchase anything. Now beat your head with your beauty – what you will do?So the mind starts thinking that the choice was wrong.But if you choose the disgusting, ugly woman, you would have all that money can purchase: a palace, servants, all gadgets, but you will have to tolerate that woman – not only tolerate but to say “I love you.” And you cannot even hate her, she is so disgusting; even to hate, one needs somebody who is not disgusting – because hate is a relationship. And you cannot enjoy those cars and the palace and the garden, because the disgusting face of that woman will be constantly following you. And she knows that you have not married her, you have married her riches. So she is going to treat you like a servant, not like a lover. And this is the truth: you have not loved her. Then you will start thinking it would have been better to have a poor house, ordinary food – at least the woman was beautiful, you would have enjoyed her. You have been an idiot to choose this.Whatever you choose you will repent because the other will remain and haunt you.If one needs absolute freedom then choiceless awareness is the only thing.And when I say instead of revolution go for rebellion, I am bringing you closer to a complete whole. In revolution you are bound to be divided, either from something or for something. You cannot have both together because they need different expertise.But in rebellion both qualities are combined together.When a sculptor makes a statue he is doing both; he is cutting the stone – destroying the stone as it was – and he is, by destroying the stone, creating a beautiful statue that was not there before.Destruction and creation go together, they are not divided.Rebellion is whole.Revolution is half-half – and that is the danger of revolution. The word is beautiful, but down the centuries it has got connected with a split mind.And I am against all kinds of splits because they will drive you schizophrenic.Now all the countries which have become free from slavery are going into an agony which is inconceivable. They had never been in such agony when they were slaves, and they had been slaves for three hundred, four hundred years. In three hundred, four hundred years, they never encountered such agony; and just in thirty, forty years they have gone into such hell that they wonder, “Why were we fighting for freedom? If this is freedom then slavery was far better.”Slavery is never better. It is just that these people don’t know that they have chosen half of the freedom; and the other half can be completed, but not by the same people who have done the revolution. The other half will need a totally different kind of intelligence, wisdom. And those are not the people who will murder and throw bombs and burn trains and police stations and post offices – those are not the people.In my family, only my grandfather was against sending my uncles to universities. It was my father who somehow managed to send them to the university. My grandfather was saying, “You don’t know. I understand these boys. You will be sending them to the university and they will end up in jail – such is the atmosphere.”Most of the revolution was done by students, young people. Knowing nothing of life – they had not experienced anything – but they had energy, they had vitality; they were young, and they had this romantic idea of being free. They did everything – making bombs and throwing bombs and killing governor-generals and governors. They did everything.And when they came out of jail, they suddenly found they had all the power and they had no skill to use it. They had no intelligence either – what to do with it? They pretended they enjoyed a euphoria, and the country also enjoyed euphoria for a moment – now our own people are in power! – but soon they started fighting with each other.For forty years in India they have been simply fighting with each other. Nobody bothers about the country and nobody bothers to risk his own neck because to tackle any problem of the country he will have to go against the traditions of the country.I have talked to two prime ministers – Lalbahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi – and the answer was the same: “Whatever you say is right, but who is going to get into trouble? We cannot say these things to the public. Birth control we cannot say because once you say birth control, the whole country goes against you, saying that you are destroying the morality of the country; then all religious people start thinking that this man should not be in power, he is dangerous.”And Indira even tried, and because she tried she was thrown out of power. For three years she was harassed in every possible way.What can you do? If the problems are connected with the traditions and the old conditionings of the mind…. The politician is enjoying his power and he is fighting for his own power – so that he remains powerful, so that he starts moving upwards.I am reminded of a very funny situation.Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister after the freedom came, and he was visiting a Commonwealth conference in London. In his cabinet the second man was Maulana Azad. Thinking that since the prime minister is out of the country, and he is second…he must start acting as prime minister. Now there is no such thing in the world as an acting prime minister. If the president goes out, then the vice-president functions as the acting president. But the president is in the country, the head of the country is there. Prime ministers, wherever they go, are prime ministers and there is no need for anybody else to be acting prime minister.And Maulana Azad, an old man, very much respected…that’s why he is called Maulana. Maulana means a great wise man. He was a Mohammedan – but so childish that he immediately put the flag on the car of the prime minister and started sitting in the prime minister’s office, acting as prime minister.And when Jawaharlal Nehru heard in London that Maulana Azad was doing that, he informed him, “You do not know that there is never any acting prime minister. Only the head of the state, if he is out of the country, is replaced for the time being by the vice-head. But the prime minister is not the head of the country. He is the most powerful man, but he’s not the nominal head, so don’t do this foolish thing.”Jawaharlal phoned him and said, “Stop this nonsense. If somebody comes to know it, they will laugh that these people want to create a country so big – a sub-continent – and they are only children.”Revolution has the trouble – and I think it will always have – that one kind of people will do it and power will come into their hands…and it is just human, lust for power, will for power. They will not want it to be given to anybody else. But that is exactly what is needed to be done. Now people have to be found who are wise enough – creative, intelligent – who can help the country in all possible ways by bringing new technology, new methods of agriculture; who can introduce new industries in the country; who can open the doors of the country for the whole world to put their money in, as the country has cheap labor.India can produce anything. It needs money, and the money is there around the world – and the people who have money, they don’t know what to do with it. It needs new industries. It can create any kind of thing, it just needs money, experts. And the labor is so cheap that it competes in the whole world.That’s how Japan has come first. The per capita income is even higher now than in America. But Japan is handicapped with a trouble – it has not land enough. A small land…now it cannot grow more industries, the land is not there, the people are not there. India has enough land and millions of people. Only the right man is needed to be in power and then freedom from can be transformed into freedom for. The country can enjoy a tremendous growth in all directions.But just the opposite is happening. The country is falling every day, deteriorating. And it will go on deteriorating and nobody will point out the simple fact that the wrong people are in power.Just give them honor, give them prizes, give them awards, great certificates written in golden letters that they can put in their houses – but don’t give them power.Seeing the disastrous situation of all revolutions, I started thinking of rebellion – which is individual; and the individual can be capable of synthesizing the destructive and the creative forces together in his choiceless awareness.And if many people go through this rebellion – which is not against anybody, it is just against your own conditioning – and bring forth a new man within you, the problem is not difficult.Revolution should become out of date.Rebellion is the word for the future.Osho,Does it really matter that I can't distinguish imagination from reality?If I can be aware that “I am,” is this not enough?It is certainly enough. It does not matter. There is no need to make any effort to discriminate between imagination and reality. You simply remain aware of yourself.And whatever is imagination will slowly disappear, and whatever is real will remain.It is again from Chetana.But remember, your friendship with ghosts…. Those ghosts will disappear. Because you cannot discriminate between who is a ghost and who is a real person, there may be fear that perhaps you are thinking that this is a real person – and he disappears. But that much risk has to be taken.In the commune Milarepa used to disappear. That was because of your awareness of yourself. Then you can’t find where he is.So if you are not afraid, then there is no problem. You simply remain aware of yourself. And I have never been teaching discrimination.Imagination is that which disappears.Reality is that which remains.So you have to see. If Milarepa disappears, then he was a ghost. If he remains, then he is a reality. In life many things which you enjoy are imaginary; that’s why people don’t want to let them disappear. In life there is not much reality, so you don’t know what joys reality will bring. But one has to go into it. It is a gamble.Only one thing I can say – that you will not be a loser. Reality is far richer than imagination.I have told you the story of Mulla Nasruddin. One night, in the middle of the night, he nudged his wife and whispered, “Just bring my glasses.”He said, “Don’t ask. Just bring them. I will explain everything later on. This time don’t disturb me.”She said, “Okay,” and brought the glasses.He put the glasses on, closed his eyes, started saying, “Okay, okay. I am ready for ninety-nine.”The wife said, “What is he doing?”Then he said, “Okay, I am ready for ninety-eight. But where are you? Ninety-seven?”The wife said, “Are you mad or what? What are you doing?”He said, “I was having such a beautiful dream. An angel was giving rupees. I have never seen such a miserly angel. He started with one rupee. I said, ‘What do you think I am? A beggar? One rupee, no.’ With great trouble and struggle I brought him up to ninety-nine. And I said, ‘Listen, it doesn’t look right – ninety-nine. Why not make it one hundred?’“He said, ‘Okay, I will make it one hundred.’“I was so joyous that I woke up, and I thought that I would get my glasses to see whether those notes were real or imaginary – because he was giving…a miser who starts with one rupee and is ready for one hundred….“But when I put on the glasses, he was not there. I tried hard; ‘Come on, I am ready for ninety-nine, ninety-eight.’ I even went down to one rupee…because even a rupee from an angel is a blessing. But that goddamned fellow did not appear at all!”Small children sometimes wake up and start crying and weeping and asking for something they just had that now somebody has taken away. They were simply dreaming of something, and now that they are awake, the thing has disappeared. They cannot make any distinction between dreaming and reality.As you grow mature, you become more aware of the difference between imagination and reality.But if you really become fully aware of yourself, imagination simply disappears, because it is a spiritual awakening. Now no dreaming is possible and only the reality remains, and that reality is tremendously fulfilling. One never feels any loss when imagination is gone.Osho,Maneesha has her editing, but I'm trying hard; I can't seem to find a good reason myself for not becoming enlightened.Can you help me?I will do my best so that you don’t become enlightened – although that is not my work, but just a favor.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 43 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the difference between being oneself and being egoless?There is no difference between being oneself and being egoless. The difference is only in the expression. If you see it from the negative standpoint, egolessness will be the expression because ego disappears.If you see it from the positive standpoint then being oneself will be the expression.They are just two ways of saying the same thing, but they are not two things so there is no distinction.And always remember that every experience can be expressed in two ways and they appear so different that it seems as if there are two things. And great thinkers have been quarreling about it, great philosophies have arisen out of the insistence that these are two things.For example, Mahavira prefers to express it in the positive way, being oneself. Gautam Buddha prefers the negative way, egolessness. Both have their merits and demerits.When you say “being oneself” there is a danger that you may mistake your ego for your being. Being oneself may become your egoistic standpoint. That is dangerous.On the other hand, describing the experience as egolessness has no challenge in it, no excitement in it. It is emptiness, nothingness, negativity. Very few people will be attracted towards the negative. The negative expression may close the doors for them. But the negative way has a beauty in that it will not allow in any way – from the front door or from the back door – the possibility of the ego.So for the ignorant people, it is better to describe it as egolessness because they are accustomed to their ignorance.But for those who know, being oneself does not mean ego; being oneself means egolessness, but it is only for those who know.My own approach is that egolessness is the way to reach the experience of being oneself. So they don’t appear two, and both are combined, and the merits of both are together.Osho,You spoke the other morning in response to a question, about the need for energy to be expressed sexually; until that point, if one simply tries to divert the energy into spirituality it will create a block.On another occasion you spoke of Ramakrishna and how he would meditate on his wife's naked body whenever he felt sexuality arising. Was he already enlightened, or was he simply in a stage of consciousness not comparable to the state that was asked about the other morning?He was not enlightened, and whatever he was doing was a subtle way of repression. You do it by looking at a pornographic magazine – that looks ugly. He was doing it looking at his own wife, who was a beautiful woman. That doesn’t seem to be ugly, but it is living pornography.And Ramakrishna was not enlightened at that point, and he became more and more repressed. That repression was coming into his mad dances before the god, singing for hours – that was simply expressing energy that he had been repressing.He became enlightened only in the end when he came in contact with a master. The name of the master was Totapuri. After that he never worshipped his wife in her naked form, after that he never worshipped even the mother goddess of the temple in which he was the priest, after that he became a totally different man – all worshipping, all singing, all dancing disappeared. He became utterly silent, peaceful, but tremendously radiant, playful, blissful.The meeting with the master changed his whole life.The followers of Ramakrishna don’t give much space in their books, in their biographies of Ramakrishna, to the meeting of Totapuri and Ramakrishna – because after that, Ramakrishna was such a different man that the ordinary religious man will not find any appeal in him. He finds great appeal in the old Ramakrishna – in his devotional songs and dances and rituals before the goddess, and his whole life of a devotee.Ramakrishna was fortunate to find a master, but he was not fortunate enough to find disciples.And the meeting with the master happened in the very last days of his life.So the followers of Ramakrishna go on thinking about the old Ramakrishna who was unenlightened; and the disciples who started the Ramakrishna mission, they also talk about the long life of Ramakrishna, his teachings, his devotion. But nobody mentions that the real Ramakrishna was born after Totapuri’s meeting, in fact they want to avoid that fact.I have been in contact with his disciples. They feel a little embarrassed that Ramakrishna had to be a disciple to a master, that only then he became enlightened. They simply don’t want that part. They would like Ramakrishna himself to be the origin, the source of a new tradition – the Ramakrishna order.And in Bengal there a thousands of sannyasins who belong to the Ramakrishna order, and there are many more who are not monks but who are deeply devoted to Ramakrishna – but they are all concerned with the wrong Ramakrishna. And whenever I said this they were very much shocked.In the beginning they used to call me to speak at their conferences, and when I started focusing on this point they stopped inviting me – because I was destroying their whole joy. They were not people who wanted to sit silently doing nothing, and the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. They wanted chanting, ritual, dancing, an image of God, a belief in God.And Ramakrishna, before he became enlightened, had believed in all these things; but before he died he dropped everything. That small period is the only important period in his life.But that is very empty, utterly silent. It is only for those who are seekers of silence, serenity, truth.Osho,As I was writing today, I realized that all my questions come to the same point: is this really me? Is this authentic? Is this my truth? The real burning question is: Who am I? Sometimes I feel that I am never going to know if this mind continues to create barriers of nonsense. At other times I do feel that I am coming closer. I don't even know what my question is, but could you please answer it?I know, and you know too, what your question is. I know the answer. You also know the answer. But my answer will only become a belief in you. I would rather like to help you to find the answer within yourself – that will be authentic.You want to know who you are. This is the basic question everybody wants to know.And the barrier is not big. The barrier is not great. You have just not tried what I have been continually telling you to try – watch your thoughts whenever you have time, or whenever you are doing something then watch the doing, watch the doer.The whole point is that your capacity to watch should increase. You will become more and more a clear watcher, and the thoughts will disappear.Thoughts are very poor. They don’t have their own life. You give them life because you don’t watch them. If you watch them, they start disappearing – because the life of thoughts is your identifying with them. You think, “These are my thoughts.” They are not your thoughts, not a single thought is yours. Only watchfulness is yours. All thoughts come to you from outside.If you simply remain watchful, just as they come they will go, and slowly, slowly they will come less and less. They don’t like to come uninvited. They don’t like to come when you don’t welcome them. And when your whole energy is centered in watching, there is no energy left for thoughts to move on the screen of your mind, they simply stop.And the moment thoughts are not there, the answer is. That answer will not come in words, the answer will come as an experience.Osho,A nurse, working in a hospital with small disabled and backward children, told me of the following case which she had to take care of.There was a small boy about four years old who was confined in a bed – not only with cot sides but with bars across the top too – like a cage. He was very small for his age, unable to speak or walk or even to sit. He was fair-skinned and was covered all over his body with long, dark brown hair, and was always hanging by his hands and feet from the roof of his cage, making sounds like a monkey. He refused all kinds of different foods except bananas – he ate nothing else; however, he was a very happy and friendly child. Early man looked similar to monkeys, and modern man often behaves like a monkey. Would you please comment on this?The behavior of a monkey is the behavior of a frantic mind jumping from here to there, from this branch to that branch, never stable, never able to sit silently even for a few moments, always doing something, always going somewhere, continuous in activity – meaningless or meaningful, relevant or irrelevant.Charles Darwin’s theory may be right or wrong; most probably it is wrong – because for thousands of years we have been seeing no monkey come down from the trees and start walking like a man. And why did only a small bunch of monkeys change into man and the remaining monkeys stay as monkeys for millions of years? Did it not dawn in their minds that their cousins, their brothers, their sisters, their in-laws have progressed so much and they are still hanging in the trees?That’s why I say most probably Darwin’s theory is not right, not factually right; but psychologically it seems to have some validity.Man’s mind is a monkey. If you watch your mind you can see. It is never quiet. The most difficult thing for it is not to do anything.But a few men have managed to get out of this monkey mind and have been able to remain inactive as long as they wanted.In the East for centuries all the mystics have agreed on one point: that if the mind can remain silent for forty-eight minutes non-stop you are free of its grip. Then you can eat as many bananas as you want! You will not go bananas. But for forty-eight seconds the mind cannot remain still, what to say about forty-eight minutes!And this is the whole work of a spiritual seeker, to change the monkey mind and bring it into a state of stillness. Perhaps that is the last stage of evolution.There are stones which have life, though it is very dormant – because they grow. Then there are trees which have life – and recent research says they have sensitivity too. Then there are animals of thousands of species. They have a certain kind of intelligence also. And then man is there. He has more intelligence than anybody else in the known world.If he can use this intelligence to help the monkey to be still, to relax, then the super-mind comes into being and you have a clarity that was never before, a clarity that makes you aware of yourself and aware of existence that surrounds you, and fills you with tremendous gratitude.Otherwise, Darwin may not be factually right but psychologically he is right. Looking at man, anybody could have predicted that somehow he is related to the monkeys.When I used to travel in India for many years continually I was almost always on the train, on the plane, in the car, just traveling, moving. The train was the only place for me to rest. Once I got out of the train there was no possibility of rest – five, six meetings per day, colleges, universities, conferences, friends, journalists, press conferences. It was impossible. The only place for me to rest was the railway train. After twenty years continually traveling I could not sleep because the whole noise of the train and its wheels and the people coming and going and railway stations and hawkers and people shouting and all that – was missing. You will be surprised to know that I had to record it on a tape recorder, so when I go to bed they will put on the tape recorder and just listening to it I will go into a perfect sleep. Then they will remove the tape recorder. Otherwise it was difficult, I will toss and turn. Twenty years is a long time, and it became such a habit.Mostly I was in an air-conditioned coupe for only two people, and because I was so tired I had no desire to talk to the other person or to answer his questions.One day in Amritsar I entered the train. And the man was looking out of the window. Thousands of people had come to see me off. So he was getting very curious. As I went in, he touched my feet. I said, “Just sit down. You are too curious. This is my name. This is my father’s name. I have so many brothers, so many sisters, one sister has died. My father has so many brothers, so many sisters, both his sisters have died. My grandfather…”He said, “But I am not asking these things.”I said, “You will ask. Rather than wasting time, I am simply giving you all information possible so that after that just forgive me, forget me, and let me rest, don’t ask anything. I give you five minutes, you can ask me anything you want.”He said, “I don’t want. You are a strange person. I have never seen such a person. I have not said anything. You give me your name, your brothers, your sisters, your father, your uncle, your aunts, their children, your grandfather.”I said, “So you are satisfied?”He said, “I am satisfied, perfectly satisfied.”So I said, “That’s okay. Now I am going to rest. No questions any more.”But that man was boiling. These were not the questions he was interested in. He wanted to know what these people had come for, and what is my teaching; but now he has said that he was perfectly satisfied and we had settled that there would be no more questions.And I rested and looked at him and I could see his trouble. He will open his box, look into it and close it and put it back; open a book, look into it and then put it down again – just to do something. He will go into the bathroom, and just come out. And I knew that he was not doing anything – even in the bathroom he was unnecessarily going in and coming out. And I simply sat there watching him, and that made him more mad because he knew that I am seeing him and whatever he is doing is stupid, there is no need for it. Again he is opening his suitcase for no reason. He will start reading the newspaper he had read from the morning – and it was evening. He must have been reading a morning newspaper the whole day, and again he will see and close it and put it aside because he has read it.Finally he said, “Call the servant and ask where the conductor is. I want to change this room.”The servant said, “But what is the trouble in this room? You will not find such a silent room anywhere.”He said, “That is the trouble. This man has completely silenced me. I cannot speak in words. And it is driving me crazy; I am going into the bathroom and there I have nothing to do, and I come back again, and open the suitcase, but I don’t have any reason to open it. And this man is strange. He is simply sitting there and looking at me. If he was not looking, it would be okay; but just with his watching and my stupid behavior, I simply want to go into some other room.” He said, “Let the conductor come.”The conductor came and he said, “What is the trouble? – because rooms are full; we can ask somebody to exchange the place.”I said, “There is no problem. I can exchange. I can sit on his seat, he can sit on my seat.”The conductor said, “So simple. The solution is right now here. Why are you worried? Just change the seat.”He said, “You don’t understand anything. This man is the trouble, and it will not make any difference, from that seat he will create trouble.”The conductor said, “This man has been traveling for years, and I know him. He has not created trouble for anyone.”He said, “How to explain? He is not doing anything. He has simply stopped asking anything, and without asking, without a little chit-chat, a little conversation, I am getting crazy. And his watching is driving me nuts, and now this – he will be sitting on my seat, I will be sitting on his seat – this makes no difference.”The conductor said, “This is beyond me. I don’t understand.” He asked me, “Do you understand?”I said, “I don’t understand, because this man is a very good man and he has not done any nuisance. He simply does a few innocent things – opens his suitcase, closes his suitcase, for no reason. But it is his suitcase, he can open it as many times as he wants, I am not going to prevent. I know he is opening it uselessly, but it is his suitcase. He goes to the bathroom; there is no problem for me, he can go as many times as he wants. He can read the same newspaper as many times as he wants. He can open the book and close the book. He can do all these exercises that he is doing. I have no objection. Why is he so much worried?”But the man simply packed all his luggage and got out and said to the conductor, “You have to find me some place; otherwise I can go even to the first class, no need for air conditioning, because to live with this man for twenty-four hours” – the journey was twenty-four hours – “I will not be reaching home alive; my heart is beating so fast. And this is true – that he has not done anything except tell me his name, his father’s name….”The conductor said, “But this is harmless. He was simply introducing.”But he wouldn’t enter the room. He escaped. He said, “Wherever I can get into the train I will, but I cannot enter into his room.”I said, “That is very good. That is all I wanted. Now I can rest. And don’t send anybody else in this room because the same will happen.”The conductor said, “This is…. You have not done anything and this man is out of the compartment, and he has paid for the air-conditioned class.”Man is very frantic, he just goes on doing something or other – arranging the furniture again and again in the room, putting things from here and there even though they are not needed that way – but he cannot simply sit silently. And that is the only thing to learn, just not being on the tree does not make any difference.Sit silently.Only a man in deep meditation goes beyond monkeyhood, for the first time becomes really human.Osho,Ten years ago when I first struggled through dynamic, it was so outrageous that I expected immediate results in the form of amazing, psychedelic, spiritual experiences. I had almost given up and was about to ask for my money back on the third day, when lo and behold, stars exploded before my eyes! “My God, it really works,” I thought, and wondered if I need bother to finish the ten-day course, or if that was it. When I removed my blindfold, I realized that this – my first and last great spiritual happening – was simply the result of a too-tight elastic on my blindfold. I have only now realized that somewhere between then and now I have stopped expecting the universe to explode over my head at any minute. It is so exquisite just to sit at your feet, and melt and soar…Very, very quietly. Is this just a symptom of middle age?No, it is not a symptom of middle age. It is a symptom of maturity, a symptom of deep understanding. Spirituality is not something exotic, some outrageous experience, some psychedelic explosion of colors and stars.Spirituality is a very innocent state of consciousness where nothing happens, just time comes to a standstill, all desires are gone, there is no longing, no ambition. This very moment becomes all.And this is not a symptom of middle age.The word middle age is derogatory.On the spiritual path nobody ever comes across it. On the contrary, one becomes a child – reborn, simple, trusting, eyes full of wonder. Every small thing – flowers, butterflies, birds – is a mystery. You are surrounded with the miraculous in your pure innocence and joy. It is not excitement. It is a very silent and peaceful joy. It is not feverish. There is a dance in it, but it is invisible. You can feel it deep at the very center of your being, but there is no movement.So what is happening now is the right thing, just allow it – don’t condemn it by calling it middle age. It is the return of your childhood. You are being born again, it is a rebirth.Osho,The other day I was in a black hole; there was only great hollowness – no way to get out. I said to myself, “Go to your bed and just be with it.” I went to my room and lay on my bed, and I deeply felt that I wanted to die. At the same moment suddenly the bed broke and I hit my head on the wall. I was thrown to the floor.Osho, did you do that? It hurt me, but the black hole was gone!Naturally. Who else would do it? If somebody else had done it then your head would not have hit and the black hole would not have gone. Your bed may have broken, you may have fallen on the floor, but you would have been in an even bigger black hole. If the black hole is gone, then it must be me – there is no doubt about it.Osho,For more than two months you have not been out of this house, and you seem to enjoy so much what I would call a boring life.Osho, what makes it so hard for us – and sometimes so scary – to face those feelings of emptiness, hollowness, loneliness? Is the desire for excitement just to hide this emptiness?If one is happy with oneself, centered, there is no need to go anywhere because you cannot find any place better than your own inner being. All the restaurants, the movie houses, the casinos, are visited by very poor people, who have lost contact with themselves. They don’t know that they have a space within themselves which is the most beautiful and the most delicious.Certainly anybody looking at me will think that this must be a boring life. I can live in my room for lives. I don’t see any point of going anywhere – because what you are seeking I have found, and I have found it within myself. And you will go on seeking everywhere in the world and you will not find it.To you, certainly it will seem that if you were to live in one room you will feel bored; but as far as I am concerned, even the idea of going out has not arisen in me. I simply enjoy myself so deeply and so greatly that I cannot conceive that there can be any place which can make me more than what I am.I have been around the world. I have been in millions of houses and hotels and…but it doesn’t matter, I am always myself wherever I am. And because I am blissful wherever I am, the place becomes blissful for me.In Crete one Greek journalist was asking me – because he had seen me in Pune, he had seen me in Oregon, and now he was interviewing me in Crete – “Osho, how do you manage always to find a paradise?”I said, “It is not a question of finding a paradise. It is a question of carrying it within yourself so wherever you are it is there. And if you don’t have it within you, you cannot find it anywhere else. There is only one place where it exists and it is within you. It has no concern with houses, no concern with places. And if you get bored, that simply means you were hoping to find it here and you have not found it so you are bored, so you are thinking to go somewhere else to find it. There you don’t find it so you again get bored, and life starts becoming more and more boring. As you become older it becomes sheer boredom because slowly you start realizing that paradise does not exist anywhere. And the miracle is: all this time you have been carrying it within yourself. You can go to the moon, but you will not go within yourself; you cannot believe it, ‘Within me and paradise? Impossible!’“You have been conditioned to hate yourself, to condemn yourself, to reject yourself. ‘Within me? And paradise?’”So from the outset, rejection. You never go in.Just give it a little try. I am not preventing you…if you have found your paradise, still you can go to the restaurants, there is no harm; still you can go to the movie houses, still you can go to the casinos, there is no harm. But you will not feel bored anywhere.In America in the jail, every jailer in five jails continually, sooner or later was puzzled that I was taking things with such ease. And they asked me, “You don’t seem to be disturbed. It seems clearly that the government wants to humiliate you but you are not humiliated, you are perfectly enjoying it.”I said, “It does not matter. I am myself wherever I am – in jail or in a palace. I don’t change. My inner space remains the same. Nobody can humiliate me. Nobody can make me miserable.”In fact, just the reverse happened. When I left the first jail – where I lived the longest – there were tears in the eyes of the jailer. And he said, “We will miss you. I would like you to remain with us. You have changed the whole flavor of the jail.”I was in the hospital section, and most of the time I was sitting in the nurse’s room or the doctor’s room. And all the authorities of the jail were coming and asking questions. And the head nurse told me, “This has never happened. These big people, great authorities, they never come. Once in a month for a visit they come for two minutes. And now six times a day the jailer comes, the doctor comes, everybody comes, everybody has their spiritual problems, and you have made it a school.”One nurse was very much interested because she had done an MA in philosophy, and she said, “This is my first chance to talk with someone who will understand my problems. I cannot talk to anybody in this jail. After doing my M.A. I joined and became a nurse here. I can neither say what I know, nor can I say what my questions are. You are the first person.” She will not even take her off-days, she will continue to come.And they were so happy that for three days continuously I have been with them…they will always remember. And they were cutting my photos from newspapers and taking my signature and the date to keep as a memory.But I said, “Do you do this with other prisoners?”They said, “We cannot conceive of you as a prisoner. We can only conceive of you as our guest.”The question is not where you are. The question is whether you know yourself or not. If you know, then every place is paradise. If you don’t know, then every place is hell and sooner or later boredom is bound to arise.So by changing places you cannot escape boredom, it will follow you like a shadow. It is by changing your consciousness that you can get rid of all possibility of boredom.It is your question that reminded me that yes, for two months I have not been out. I had not even thought about it. I simply come to see you and rejoice with you, and then go and remain in my room – just myself. I don’t have to open boxes and open books. The monkey is dead.Osho,Why do people bug our telephones everywhere we go? Are they looking for spiritual guidance on the cheap?Certainly. Let them have it. We have nothing to hide. They can come and be here and enjoy, but poor people! – they feel embarrassed to come so they bug.So whenever you are phoning just put in a few spiritual things for the buggers!Osho,To have a hot lover is something, but to have a hot master is really something else! What do you say?It is a very difficult question. Geeta understood it. It is something else, because hot masters have never been there. It is a totally new experience. Hot lovers have always been there, but hot lovers get cold very soon. You cannot depend on them.But a hot master is a hot master.In fact I have to keep myself continuously air conditioned!

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 44 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Every time you talk about transforming passion into compassion, something in my heart gets triggered; but still, I do not understand what it means.Could you explain it to me again?The energy called passion is always addressed towards someone. It is possessive, and because it is possessive it is ugly. To transform passion into compassion means that your energy for love is not addressed to anybody in particular; it is simply your fragrance, it is simply your presence, it is simply the way you are. It is not directed, not one-dimensional. It is radiation, so whoever comes close will feel your love – and it is non-possessive.The possessive love is a contradiction in terms because possessiveness means you are reducing the other person into a thing. Only things can be possessed, not persons. Only things can be owned, not persons.The person’s essential quality that differentiates him from things is his freedom; and possession, ownership, destroys freedom.So on the one hand you think you are loving a person; on the other hand, you are destroying his very essence.Compassion is releasing love from the clutches of possessiveness. Then love is just a soft glow, undirected, unaddressed. You simply shower it because you are so full of it, but it is not a question of just thinking.Passion has to go through the whole process of meditation to become compassion. Meditation will take away all possessiveness, ownership, jealousy, and will leave only the pure essence, the very perfume of love.Only a man deeply rooted in meditation can have compassion.So when I say change your passion into compassion, I am saying let your energy be purified through meditation from all that is garbage in it. Let it become simply a fragrance available to all. Then it does not destroy anybody’s freedom but enhances it, and the moment your love enhances somebody’s freedom love becomes spiritual.Osho,I have been feeling more and more ashamed of being an American after seeing the disgraceful way you were treated there.And it seems the symbiotic economic relationships between the USA and other governments make it very difficult even for other nations to act independently towards you.It has become a conflict for me to even participate in the economy of the U.S. and enjoy its benefits, knowing that the taxes I pay help to keep it in the business of violating human rights all over the world.Can you comment on whether it is even possible to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar's” and still maintain some integrity and self respect? I feel like such a hypocrite going about my business as usual, but if I open my mouth there is usually trouble.I cannot say to you to render unto Caesar what belongs to him because nothing belongs to him, and your so-called Caesars are just great robbers – so big that the law cannot catch hold of them.All your political leaders are criminals, but they are the ones who determine the law of the country and they are the ones who punish the small robbers.One never thinks of how all these royal families and royal blood came into existence. Nature does not produce royal families separately, neither is there any such thing as royal blood. There are different kinds of blood, but there is not any category for royal blood. What is today a royal family was once a robber’s gang, a mafia; it possessed land, it killed people, it possessed people, and slowly, slowly there was no need for them to remain robbers. They had got enough, and they were respected out of fear.In the long history slowly, slowly they settled as royal families. Their blood became special.And still even in the twentieth century things have not changed. Just as kings and queens have come from robbers’ generations, the politicians are coming from other sources of criminality.So I cannot say to you that Caesar has to have rendered what belongs to him. Nothing belongs to him and nothing has to be rendered to him.That has been the old compromising attitude – why get into trouble, give to the Caesar what belongs to him, and in return he gives you safety, security.If you are really disturbed and feeling sincerely that there is something criminal in it, then move to something which is not taxable. For example, cultivation in many countries is not taxable.It will not give you so much money, and it will make you have to work hard just to earn your bread, but you will have a great blissfulness and peace, integrity and individuality. You are producing, you are creative, you are helping yourself and you are helping others; but you are not helping the criminals.And in every nation there are things which are not taxable.People should start moving towards those things which are not taxable. That will weaken the powers of criminal politicians.To exist in this world without compromising is certainly getting into trouble, but it is worth it. It is immensely valuable. We need people who are ready to get into trouble but they will not compromise; these are the real salt of the earth – humanity can be proud of them.Osho,There seem to be connected stages through which man has passed – from tribe to family to commune, from magico-religions to pseudo-religions to the religionless religion, and from nomadic hunter-gatherer to the agriculturalist, and now to the existential gypsy.Are these trends really connected?They are connected. They are like rungs of a ladder. For example, in the beginning it was impossible for man to cultivate. He had no idea that cultivation is possible. He had seen animals eating animals, that gave him the first idea of hunting – that this is the only way to get food. There was some example.But you cannot go on hunting forever. As human population became bigger and bigger and the population of the poor hunted animals started shrinking – because they were being killed – man had to find some other way to survive.It is always only in a very deep crisis that man finds something new.Then he looked at trees, their fruits, and the wild growth of vegetation. And there was no other way so they tried it, and it worked. And just watching, they found that they need not depend on nature; otherwise, again they will destroy. They can cultivate.They saw fruits falling on the earth and sprouts coming up. It is just by watching they learned cultivation.It is connected and overlapping.Hunting continues, but now it has become a game. Man does not depend on it. There are professional killers who have started cultivating animals; just the way you cultivate fruits or wheat they cultivate animals, and bring meat for you. The whole earth still remains meat-eating.Just a small fraction in India and a few individuals outside India have dropped completely that ugly, insensitive way of living.And if the whole humanity decides to drop it, it will immediately find new ways.The whole ocean is available. The ocean has its own vegetation, which is very nourishing. The way we cultivate the earth the ocean can be cultivated.Everything is connected as steps to a higher step.There was no family in the beginning, only tribes, so you could not say who was the father of the boy. Only the mother was known. So there are countries where the father’s name is not asked when you are filling a form for something, but the mother’s name is asked still.For example, Mohammedans don’t believe that Mary became pregnant by a holy ghost. To anybody who is not a Christian it looks a stupid idea.But one thing is certain, that Joseph is not the father of Jesus Christ, and to cover up the whole thing the holy ghost has been brought into the story.Mohammedans don’t believe in the virgin birth. So when they speak about Jesus, they say “Jesus Ibn Mariam” – Jesus, the son of Mariam, not the son of Joseph.It was the situation all over the world. People knew only their mothers.In the Upanishads there is a tremendously beautiful story which shows how a real saint responds.I lived for almost twenty years in Jabalpur in India. It must be a very old city because its name is derived from a great sage, Jabali, and this story is concerned with Jabali.One young man wanted to study under Jabali, but only brahmins could study. And the problem with the young man was that his mother was so poor that she never got married and she worked in many people’s houses, and she was so beautiful that many men took advantage of her poverty. So when Satyakam became a young man he said, “I want to go to some great sage to study.”The mother said, “It is going to be difficult because only brahmins are accepted, and I cannot be certain that your father was a brahmin. I don’t know who your father was. So you can go, and when the master asks you about your name, you tell your name, tell my name, and say that you are my son. And certainly he will be surprised because the mother’s name is not usually mentioned. And he will ask, ‘Who is your father?’ Tell him exactly what I have told you.”So when Satyakam went to ask Jabali, he said “My mother was very beautiful but very poor. She could not get married, and many people took advantage of her poverty so she does not know who my father is. And she sent me to tell you exactly the truth. Now it is up to you to accept or reject me.”The whole congregation of the disciples fell silent.Jabali said, “One who can say such a truth must be a brahmin. You are allowed. Only a brahmin can have this much courage, to say ‘I don’t know who my father is. I know only the name of my mother.’”And Satyakam became a great sage in his own right. Because Jabali had accepted him, there was no question of anybody being skeptical.The reason that he had given is tremendously beautiful. He has said it is possible that a brahmin may be untrue, but it is not possible that a truthful man can be anything else but a brahmin.The society has passed through a tribal maternal state to the joint family, where all the brothers were living together – their children, their wives, their uncles, their father; and it was economical because only few people could work and the whole family could be supported.But then the population went on growing and the joint family had to disperse.So first the tribe was divided into joint families. The tribe was a big phenomenon. Then the joint family was cut into unitary families with only father, mother and his children.And now the situation has come when even that family cannot be supported – it is too costly, uneconomical, unpsychological.Hence the commune, which will be many things – freedom from marriage, which has become a psychological burden; freedom from the responsibilities of parenthood; freedom from the nuisance of the children; freedom for the children from the parents’ dictatorial and monopolistic attitude, because they will belong to the commune. And because the commune will not be cut into fixed units but will be a mobile phenomenon, it will be more alive, more joyful. Whenever people get stuck they can separate. There is no need for anybody to ask either for marriage or for divorce; the only thing they have to ask is about children because now the responsibility is on the commune.Unless the commune allows, they cannot produce children.That will help the whole world immensely to reduce its population – not only to reduce its population but to bring only the children who are needed. The unnecessary, the mediocre, the idiots, are a burden. The whole consciousness of the society can be raised.Sooner or later children are going to be produced outside the mother’s womb; because that is a great wastage – for nine months the woman is absolutely incapable of doing anything. That is why in the whole history although half the people on the earth have been women they could not produce anything, they could not create anything, they could not be geniuses from their side. And they had to become slaves to man because they had to depend on man.Children can be produced in the scientific lab far more perfectly. They will be more healthy with less defects. We can give them whatever we want – what kind of color, what kind of hair, what length of life, what kind of health, what kind of mind. Everything is now in the hands of man.So the children should be the commune’s responsibility and the commune will take care of it by means of the scientific lab.It looks strange just because it is new.Everything new looks strange.When the first train started from the London station, just an eight mile run, nobody was ready to sit in it even for free. Lunch was also served free. Because all the churches were sermonizing for months that God never made the train and this is the devil’s invention. And they were telling people, “You can sit in it. It can start, but what guarantee is there that it will stop?” – Naturally it has never stopped before because it has never started – “Once you are in it, you are gone forever. It is not going to stop. It is a devil’s trick.”Only very courageous people – atheists, agnostics, scientists – came to sit in it, and they were also feeling very nervous because they were taking a risk. Their families were persuading them not to do it because of what might happen to them if the train does not stop.But the train went. It stopped. It came back. Now nobody bothers about the train. Nobody bothers whether it was created by God or not.For centuries man has been very proud, “This is my child” – whether he is an idiot or not does not matter, he is proud that he has given birth to a child.In the coming world the man will be proud, the woman will be proud, that they have given to their child the best sperm and the best egg. Neither the egg is of the woman nor the sperm is of the man, but a new pride – “we have given the best sperm and the best egg to our child.”Just now it looks absurd – “in what way is he your child?” But to look at it in a more scientific, rational way, it is not the question that your sperm has any speciality or your egg has any speciality. And when you are giving birth to a child, you should find the best egg and the best sperm. This should be a simple arithmetic – when you can have a genius as a child then why create one of the crowd?Humanity has to go on progressing.All these are links. Just as from tribes came the family, from the family the commune, finally from the commune will come the universal gypsy.Why remain confined to one place when the whole universe is yours? When you can be in the mountains sometimes, and you can be in the ocean sometimes, and you can be on the earth sometimes, why remain confined? Why remain closed? Why not make yourself available to all that is possible?”And tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, the planets will be available. Some day the stars will be available. Before that happens, man has to become a universal gypsy; only then will people be available to go to the moon, to go to Mars.There was a time that nobody left his own village.In India I have seen people who have never left their village, who have not seen a railway train – who have been born in that village and will die in that village. That village is their whole world. It cannot be very rich. It is bound to be very poor.Then people started moving, finding new continents, new countries. And just three hundred years ago, Columbus found America.The stars are not very far; man has just to change his structure of thinking to the idea that living means becoming richer, experiencing more and more.And certainly there are planets where life has evolved up to the level of humanity or perhaps even further, and contact with them will bring a revolution to humanity too.We have brothers and sisters all over the universe, and we are not aware of them. And they must have learned different skills to live in a different climate, in a different atmosphere. Much can be learned.And man can mature with this learning.And if Albert Einstein is right – and most probably he is right – that if we can find vehicles of the same speed as light then man will not age; he will leave this planet when he is thirty years old, he will come back after fifty years, sixty years, and all his friends would either have died or would be almost on their deathbed, but he will be still thirty years old. At that speed aging stops.And when a man like Albert Einstein gives a hypothesis you cannot simply reject it – because all his other hypotheses which were rejected in the beginning had to be accepted by and by. It took time, but they had to be accepted.And when I say man can become a universal gypsy, he can become almost immortal. He need not grow old. And then his experience, his knowledge…everything goes on growing and he remains as young as ever.Today it may seem impossible, but nothing is really impossible. Some way can be found and will be found – because once an idea has taken shape, it is only a question of time before it becomes a reality.Osho,All of us have missed in past lives; otherwise we wouldn't be having the wonderful experience of sitting at your feet instead of being dissolved into the whole forever.The other night you said that my constant longing is a proof that I am carrying a seed from my past life, and that I shouldn't miss this life but let the seed sprout and die consciously so that I can work on in the next life – even without a master. You have already excluded Maneesha and Milarepa from disappearing. Am I also doomed to go round again?It all depends on you. If you want to do another round, it is very easy. You have done many rounds before – millions, because since the beginning we have been here doing rounds, circling. But if you are satisfied that enough rounding has been done and it is time now to stop, that too is not difficult. Nature is very simple, and it gives you total freedom – you just have to be decisive.To stop the round, you will have to drop many things – your desires, your ambitions, aspirations, greed, ego – the laundry list is long. But if you can do without laundry, you can stop any moment the wheel of life and death.It was necessary that you should go through all these rounds to bring you to the realization that now it is enough and you should stop, because there is another world that begins with stopping – another universe, desireless, passionless, full of love, full of joy, just absolute in every sense. Nothing can be more than that.So by stopping you are not losing anything, just stopping the sorry-go-round. People call it merry-go-round. I have always been puzzled why they call it merry-go-round. Nobody seems…. So I have made my own word, “sorry-go-round.”And if you see the suffering and the anguish of it all, that very seeing will stop it and then begins a totally new world of which only a few indications can be given, and those indications are not descriptions of its entirety. They are just arrows pointing. It is infinite, it is eternal, it knows no sadness, no sorrow.And everything depends on a single thing: your decision.And my whole effort is somehow to stop your sorry-go-round, but you insist that you want just one time more – as if you have not been on the same trip millions of times – just one time more.Try to understand your life as it is, and there will be no problem. The stopping will come on its own accord.Maneesha will also stop, she has just to finish her editing. She has got into a trouble because unless I stop speaking she cannot finish her editing – and I am not going to stop! But the work that I have given her will help her more than anything to stop. She may not stop because she has to finish the work – which will help millions of people to stop, but the words that she continually has to come across are bound to penetrate her more than anybody else.So don’t feel jealous of Maneesha.Milarepa is already on the verge of stopping. Chetana already thinks he is a ghost! Just one thing is wrong, that ghosts are never known to play on the guitar.Everything is possible in this universe. So we can take his guitar any moment and he can disappear. But while I am speaking he has to play on the guitar.But you all are going to disappear, this way or that.So by the way, Milarepa, you keep hold of your guitar as hard as possible. Whatever happens, don’t leave it. Chetana may try to take the guitar – “Nothing doing,” tell her, “this is the only thing. I am holding the wheel; otherwise it is going to stop.” But a guitar can be dropped any moment, there is no problem; or you can pass it on to somebody else who still wants to have a few rounds.Take life playfully. Take the stopping of life also playfully. There is nothing to be serious about. And once a person learns to take everything playfully then nothing is going to prevent him. He is going to disappear into the universe, into godliness.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 45 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The Vatican has just issued a statement in which the pope suggests that cults, sects and “new religions” should be seen as a challenge to church and society.The statement says that deprogramming of cult members is misguided. The Vatican made the statement after consulting Catholic experts in seventy-five countries. Have you any comment?Christianity is dying so fast that every effort is being made to somehow keep it alive. No effort is going to succeed, for the simple reason that the whole Christian attitude, the religion and its philosophy, are so out of date that it is impossible to convince intelligent people to have faith in them any more.Just in England the church attendance has fallen to five percent. Ninety-five percent of people are no more going to the church – and the same is the situation all over the world.Thinking that perhaps psychology and new trends in psychological schools may be of help, Christianity has been trying for twenty years to imbibe as much psychology as possible, giving it a color of Christianity. The latest effort was deprogramming.This was a desperate effort – because young people are joining new movements, new religions – and it is for the first time in history that parents are kidnapping their own children, and forcing them into psychiatric homes to be deprogrammed.It is possible to deprogram a person very easily. And they were very happy because they were succeeding in bringing the sheep which has gone farther away from the fold back into the fold.But then a new problem arose, and that was: the people who were deprogrammed, for them religion became only a question of programming, it lost the value of being a faith. You can again deprogram the person and he becomes a Hindu; you can again deprogram him and he becomes a communist – so programming and deprogramming became a psychological game. It destroyed the seriousness of the so-called religions: that it was not something of inner realization, it was only a question of conditioning the mind.The people who were deprogrammed left the new movements, but they never became at ease with Christianity. Now they know what it is all about: it is simply a program. If somebody else kidnaps them and pays the fees to some psychiatrist he can program them into any religion, into any philosophy, into any dogma.So it is simply a mind game. All talk of spirituality and religion is simply nonsense.But people like Pope the Polack have no understanding of their own.This was a simple fact which could have been seen in the very beginning – that if you can change a person’s idea by a certain strategy, the same strategy can be used to change the idea that you have put into his mind.In communist countries they have been using deprogramming for almost half a century.In the Korean war, American soldiers who were caught by the communists were all deprogrammed. They returned – the war ended – but they could not fit again into their society. And you will be surprised to know that within ten years after the war, thousands of veterans – soldiers who had come from Korea – had committed suicide in America, for the simple reason that they were in a limbo. The communists programmed them heavily for communism, and it was not a question of a few days – for years they were in the hands of communists. They cleaned them of all Christianity, all democracy, all capitalism – “these are all nonsense, the real thing is communism, dictatorship of the proletariat” – and when they came back, naturally they could not fit with American society; and nobody bothered about them – what had been done to their minds. It was so difficult to live in America for them because everything that they were seeing around them was wrong. Now they have brought a mind that has been conditioned, and nobody was aware of it.It was such a torture that the only way out was to commit suicide, and no American leader – political or religious – even bothered to talk about it: “What is the reason that these people are committing suicide? They should be happy that they are back home.”Now the pope is consulting experts from seventy-five countries…it is not his own insight, it is not his own understanding. It is these experts who first suggested deprogramming. Now seeing the results…. It does not help, it simply creates a confusion in the mind of the person – a part of him still remains with the new movement he joined out of his own choice, and a part is what you have forced on him, and he cannot forgive you; you have been violent with him.And many deprogrammed people again join the movements, and you cannot deprogram them a second time, because they know all the tricks that you did before.These are the same experts who had suggested that people who are leaving Christianity and moving into new movements, can be turned back very easily. Now they see that they cannot be turned back so easily. Even if you force them back, they are never the same person. Their minds become mixed – and they know that they have been kidnapped, they know that they have been forced. They cannot forgive their parents, they cannot forgive the programmer; they cannot forgive the church; they cannot forgive the religion – because violence has been done against them. Their basic human right has been violated. Either they will have to join some movement or they will remain in this confused state.And the greater danger that Christianity created was for itself: the people who had not moved into new movements, who had not been reconditioned, became aware that it is only a game of programming. You can program a person into any kind of thing; it is just to put certain ideas into his mind-computer, and there are ways and methods by which this can be done.You have taken away the profundity of religion itself. That’s why the pope has issued the order that nobody should be deprogrammed.This could have been seen from the very beginning. Anybody who understands the abc of psychology could have seen it.Now to say that new religions should be accepted as a challenge…. What has Christianity got to offer to humanity? If it had anything these people would not have moved into all kinds of things that are superficial, sometimes even stupid – but still they are more exciting than the dullness of Christianity, than the boring dogmas, the illogical concepts for which your heart never says yes and you are being forced to say yes.It is just to cover up the stupidities that they have done in twenty years of deprogramming. Something has to be said to them, “Now what will you be doing? If not deprogramming, then what else? Take it as a challenge.”But are they alive to take it as a challenge? Have they any validity to take it as a challenge? About all their fundamentals all that they can offer is “believe in it.” But the new humanity wants evidence, proof, rationality, a scientific approach.Challenge is possible if you can provide a scientific approach, but in scientific approach they will be in trouble.Then virgin birth becomes difficult to prove, then resurrection becomes difficult to prove, then a man walking on water becomes difficult to prove. These things can only be taken on faith. If they want a challenge, and accept the challenge, then they will have to learn the language of science, the language of reason – not of belief.And I don’t see any possibility that Christianity can offer anything. It is doomed to die. The sooner it dies, the better – because it will free millions of people to think on their own, to search on their own. It will create a great revolution, the death of Christianity, because it is the biggest religion in the world, and it will not only be the death of Christianity, it will be the beginning of the death of other religions too. When the big brother dies, the others are going to follow.In India when somebody dies his eldest son goes through an unnecessary torture – his head is shaved; his mustache, beard, everything is shaved. I have been asking Hindu scholars what is the reason for it. They said, “We don’t know, but this has been happening for centuries. The eldest son has to shave all his hair.”I was talking to a shankaracharya and I asked him. He said, “I don’t know but there must be something in it. What do you think?”I said, “My thinking is that this shaving of the head is the signal to the eldest son that now it is his turn. ‘Get ready! Your father is dead. Now you are in the front of the queue. Next your name is going to be called. This is the beginning!’”He said, “From where did you get this idea?”I said, “From nowhere. It is simply…you can see it, that the moment the father dies every responsibility comes to the eldest son; he becomes the head of the family. And certainly he is the next to follow. And whoever invented this strategy of shaving his head was doing a great service to make it known to the whole city that now this fellow is going to pop off any moment. And to this fellow also it was made clear that he should start getting ready, it is only a question of time. He has come to the first place in the queue.”Christianity’s death, to me, is very significant.Just the Catholics are seven hundred and fifty million in number – half of humanity is Christian. It will be a tremendous freedom. The pope is asking his followers to accept the challenge, but he himself is such a coward he cannot accept the challenge.I have not come across a single Christian bishop or cardinal who was able to accept any challenge, for the simple reason that their basic philosophy is based on faith, on acceptance, on belief. And the person who is challenging you is not going to accept it as belief – you have to give evidence, you have to give proof, you have to provide eye witnesses for God.They don’t have even arguments. And the arguments Christians have given are all childish, retarded. Anybody can destroy them without much effort.But it has tremendous meaning that their experts from seventy-five countries are saying that deprogramming should be stopped. It means you cannot force man any more the way that has always been successful up to now. Times have changed and man has come to a certain maturity. Now he wants freedom to choose his way of life. He does not want anybody else to decide it; he wants to decide it himself, because that is the first step of declaring one’s individuality.If the pope really means that it is a challenge, then he should not prevent the Italian government from giving me entry into Italy. Sixty-five prominent figures in Italy, internationally known people who have contributed in different dimensions, have protested, “Why is he not being allowed to enter?” The government has not said no, and it is now almost six months since I applied for an entry visa – just to be a tourist there.And I have my people in Italy. They go on saying to our sannyasins there, “Yes, we will give it; it is coming.” For six months every day, they say “tomorrow.”But the pope is heavy on the government.If he really means challenge then let us begin it from the Vatican itself.I accept the challenge, and I am ready for a public discussion – open discussion – on every Christian dogma, and to prove it absolutely meaningless, nonsense and absurd.Osho,I recently read about an American woman who claims to be possessed by a thirty-five-thousand-year-old being from Atlantis called Ramtha.The woman dispenses mystical messages from Ramtha via satellite TV, in concert halls, and on thousands of audio tapes. People pay up to four hundred dollars a seat to hear the thirty-five-thousand-year-old outpourings which, just by coincidence, seem to be based on a fair amount of modern, self-help therapy.I know you say to trust existence, but I cannot help but be skeptical. Can you help me?Anando has brought me the news about this woman. In America, any idiotic thing has an appeal, and the more you have to pay for it, the more appeal it has.In other countries you pay more if the thing is more valuable. In America, it is just the reverse: if you have to pay more then the thing becomes more valuable.That woman – I have not heard it before – not only says that she is a thirty-five-thousand-year old ancient being from the lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, she also says that she is the reincarnation of the Hindu god Rama. In fact, she has concocted the name Ramtha from Rama. And whatever she is saying there is nothing new in it.In the article that Anando has brought to me she has criticized me also. She has said that the moment her books are published, Osho’s books will simply disappear from the market, nobody will read them.One thing is certain – that she is reading them! And perhaps most of her outpourings are from those books. Otherwise out of thousands of books why has she chosen only my name? It cannot be just an accident. She must be reading those books, she must be using the material from those books, and now she has to prove that those books are not right – because of the inner fear that she has stolen from them.It is very significant that there are many writers around the world who are stealing words, sentences, paragraphs, whole ideas from the books – not mentioning my name because then they won’t look original; but they are afraid that somebody may find out that these are from my books so they have to do one thing more: they have to condemn me in some way, to balance. “This man cannot be stealing from Osho, he is against him.” So they do both: they condemn, they criticize, and they steal.I don’t know this woman, but one thing is certain: she is reading my books. She is stealing from those books, she is afraid of those books, she would like those books to disappear from the market. Otherwise why mention it? I am nobody. Why bother about me?And in America it has been now a long tradition. There are always people who are from Atlantis, Lemuria, Tibet – saying things which are written in ordinary literature. You have just to go to a library and look and you will find every sentence that they are saying is stolen; it is not from Lemuria, it is from the public library of the town.But people don’t read. They listen to all this garbage and they pay for it. And there is psychology in it; if you pay four hundred and fifty dollars just to sit in audience, when she goes in a trance and starts talking…. And not only that, if you are listening to her and seeing her on your television in your home, you have to pay two hundred dollars….When people pay that much money, they themselves are caught in a difficulty. If they say it is all nonsense then they have been an idiot to pay. They have to go home and say, “It is just far out. Four hundred and fifty dollars is nothing. Any amount of money is nothing. What she is saying is so valuable.”This was the case with EST. Werner Erhard was charging people two hundred and fifty dollars – and insulting them, not allowing them to go to the bathroom. The whole day the session was continuing, they were not allowed to eat, and they were in every way humiliated – and they had paid two hundred dollars for it. They could not leave in the middle of the session because they had paid two hundred dollars. They wanted to see the whole thing – perhaps in the end something comes out – and something came out: many of the people will piss sitting there in the hall! And if you have been holding your bladder for the whole day and then you cannot hold it any longer – in spite of you it starts coming out – it is such a great relief that one has a taste of let-go! And people loved it because it was an experience. It was an experience!And they will tell their friends, “It is miraculous. I felt so relieved, all tension gone. Every fiber of my being relaxed.” And just word of mouth – Werner Erhard was not advertising at all – just word of mouth.He will simply say to people, “Share to your friends the great experience that you have had.”And nobody wants to go outside and say that it was simply stupid and we have been befooled and conned.But the trick was significant – because nobody has ever done it before. You can do it alone, although it will be difficult. But there are three hundred people and the bathroom is locked and one person is standing there not to allow anybody; you can leave, but you cannot go to the bathroom.So the whole strategy is that your mind, your thoughts, all will stop. Your whole thing was how to keep control of your bladder, your whole life was in the bladder. And naturally, it was a great concentration.But there is a limit. After a certain limit you cannot manage it. And when one person relaxed, at first he felt a little embarrassed, but the relaxation was so great that people started standing up and telling, “I have got it – the experience!” And then others followed. When they saw that others are doing it here in the hall and getting the experience, and they are like idiots holding it…so most of the crowd got it! And they spread the message to their friends, “You should go. You should not miss.”And certainly it was a relaxation after such a tense day; humiliation on the one side – shouting, making you look stupid, retarded; making you confess that you are stupid, that you are retarded, “Say exactly what you feel but you never say! Be truthful, be sincere!” And all the time you are holding your bladder. The whole trick of EST was contained in the bladder.Now, many people have pissed, got the experience, and the whole movement is gone! Now nobody wants to piss for two hundred dollars!Osho,When I read the first book I had ever read of yours, Come Follow Me, and I came to the story of Bodhidharma who was staring at the wall, I collapsed in great laughter for almost an hour. The following night I had an extraordinary dream because I dreamed in words – which I had never done before. It was a four-second dream:An old man asked a young man, “Is?”The young man answered, “Yes.”The old man asked, “What?”The young man said, “Nothing.”Please comment.The dream was really the whole message of the book that you had read. Those few words – it came in words because there is no way of making a picture of it. How will you make a picture of “is” or a picture of “nothing”…and a picture of “yes”? That’s why you saw the first dream in your life in words – because the book that you were reading was concerned with these words. It was concerned with isness.The old man said, “Is?” Perhaps he is the master…And the young man, perhaps the disciple, said, “Yes.”But the old man asked, “What?” He wanted to be certain whether the young man has understood “is?” or has just said “yes” rationally. If it was only a rational answer “yes,” things would have been different. That is why he is asking, “What?”And the young man said, “Nothing.” Because isness is at the same time nothingness. It is both together. In fact, it is one thing, just two names of one thing.You dreamed really a golden dream, which summarizes my whole message, that you should come to feel isness as nothingness; and there is nothing else, nothing more to realize or to know; you have known all. It was truly, authentically, a very insightful dream – too close to reality to call it a dream.You must have been impressed so much by the book that it went directly to your very heart.But this has to become your whole life. This dream has to become your reality.Osho,Shrivatsa Goswami, the so-called spiritual master of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, the Hare Krishnas, has recently stated that you are “very low class, not to be counted as a religion, an outright scoundrel.”Do you have any words for this saint?I don’t know Shrivatsa Goswami. It is very strange that a scoundrel knows nothing of the saint and the saint knows about the scoundrel. He thinks he is criticizing me; he is wrong.I have never said that I am holier than others, higher than others. I am really the last.I could have agreed with Jesus if he had just changed his statement a little bit. He says, “Blessed are those who are the last because they shall inherit the kingdom of God.”I have criticized it. I would not have criticized it if he had said, “Blessed are the last for they are in the kingdom of God.” My criticism is that he is putting the kingdom of God in the future and consoling the people who are in misery here. His statement is more a consolation than a truth. “Blessed are those who are the last because they are in the kingdom of God this very moment” – I would have agreed with this wholeheartedly.Shrivatsa Goswami said that I am low class. I would like to say to him that I am the lowest of the low.He says I am not worth considering. Then why is he considering me? I am simply surprised. These people are in some way haunted by me. I have never heard his name before.I used to know his master, Swami Prabhupada, who created the movement of Hare Krishna. He was one of the greatest idiots, and had a great talent for attracting idiots. If you want to find a gathering of idiots you can find it in the Hare Krishna movement.This man – if he has become the successor – must have proved to the master that he is the greatest idiot amongst the other idiots.And one thing I want to tell him is that it is better to be a scoundrel than to be an idiot. To be a scoundrel needs some intelligence.And when I say that these people are a collection of idiots, I don’t say it without reason.His name is Govats Goswami. Govats means the son of a cow, and goswami means the husband of a cow. Now only an idiot can give such a name, and only an idiot can carry that name.And these people drink every day…because they are absolute fanatics; just as in Christian cults there are fundamentalist Christians, there are the Witnesses of Jehovah – Hare Krishna belongs to the same category.The devotees of Krishna in India don’t call heaven by the same name as anyone else. Buddha calls it nirvana, Hindus call it moksha, Jainas call it kaivalya – beautiful names; kaivalya means absolute aloneness, moksha means freedom, nirvana means nothingness. But the followers of Krishna call their heaven golok, cow-land. Krishna seems to be the ancientmost cowboy; and they drink every day a certain thing they call panchamrit, five elixirs; and it is made of five things coming out of the cow – the urine of the cow, the cow dung, the milk, the curd, the butter. They mix all five every day and they drink it, and this is five elixirs; and those who drink these five elixirs are certain to reach to golok. I don’t know why one should want to go to golok. What are you going to do there?So when I say these people are idiots, I have reasons to say so. Only idiots can think that cow dung and urine of the cow are something spiritual, and they will transform your consciousness. They have not transformed the cow. How they are going to transform human consciousness? And what is the point? Even if your consciousness is transformed and you reach to golok it was better here; at least you were human beings.And I don’t think it a criticism when he calls me a scoundrel. I am. It is a compliment.To all the religions I will appear as a scoundrel because I am destroying them so mercilessly. Nobody has been so hard – knowing that they have the same weaknesses as other religions, everybody was silent about other religions’ weaknesses. Because I don’t have any religion I don’t have any fear. I can expose everybody. They don’t have anything to criticize me with, they can only call me names.In another report Anando has showed me, he has called me a charlatan. In this report he calls me a scoundrel. But one thing is certain, that he is more interested in me than in his own great idiot who created the Hare Krishna movement, Prabhupada. He should talk about him, not about me.They will talk about me and they will say that I am not worth considering. And they can’t see the contradiction – so clear, in the same statement, that I am following them wherever they are, disturbing their sleep, cutting their roots, and they have nothing to defend.I have criticized Krishna. That’s why they are angry. Prabhupada was very angry, because I had called him a dodo. But he was a dodo.He was teaching those people celibacy which necessarily brings sexual perversion. He was teaching these people begging. He was teaching these people that you need not do anything except repeat continuously “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.”This is a sure way of destroying anybody’s intelligence. These are the methods of programming.Now if somebody thinks that this is enough to transform your consciousness, that whatever you are doing you go on chanting inside, loudly or silently, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” dancing in the street, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama” – because only these two words will be continuously hammered. All your subtle cells, your whole system of mind, will be spoiled. It is not made only for two words. It will not be used, and unused those delicate cells start dying.So first the idiots get attracted, and if by chance somebody has some little intelligence, then these methods will destroy it.These people are continuously chanting – not knowing that repetition of a single word or a single mantra is going to kill your intelligence.Intelligence needs to be sharpened in new areas, new dimensions. It has to move into the unknown. “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama” – it becomes stuck there.Prabhupada was angry because he could not answer my criticism of Krishna. If he was honest, and if these people are honest – this Goswami – then they will call Shri Krishna the greatest scoundrel ever. He forcibly collected sixteen thousand women as his wives, without marrying them – and they were all married, they had children, they had husbands…but he was powerful, fascist. Any woman he liked was immediately taken to his palace, without any consideration of what will happen to the children. Sixteen thousand women! No other man in the whole of history has been so ugly.And he was the cause of the greatest war in India, the great Indian war, Mahabharata. He forced Arjuna, his friend and disciple, to fight the war – and it was almost at a similar time as we are living in today, the same critical moment; the war was going to be very dangerous because the whole world was divided in two parts, and both the parts were ready to fight and destroy each other; whoever will be the winner will find only corpses and corpses all around the kingdom. Arjuna could see it. Anybody could have seen it, that this is a very stupid kind of thing – because they had all the scientific means to destroy people on a great scale.There are suspicions in scholars’ minds that perhaps they had come to know atomic energy. Their few weapons look like atomic weapons.And Arjuna was saying, “It is better that I should go to the Himalayas and forget all about it, let my other brothers rule” – it was a fight between cousin-brothers – “because I don’t see the point. If everybody is dead, even sitting on the golden throne I would be ashamed, I would feel so guilty that I might commit suicide.”But Krishna forced him, argued, rationalized, explained, and finally – the ugliest argument that religions use – he said to him that, “It is God’s will, and if you go against it you are going against God. Don’t play God. If God wants the war, let it happen!”Bringing God into the argument is always cunning. It means you don’t allow the other person any chance. He would have to say, “I don’t believe in your God”…but he is also conditioned like you in God. If it is God’s will, then Arjuna unwillingly fought the war. And what he envisaged happened – millions of people died, and then for years disease spread all over the country and it broke down the very spine of the land. India never could become again the same beautiful country with the same joy, the same forest universities of the seers, the same synthetic vision of body, mind and soul, of matter and spirit; it could never come to those beautiful days again. It went on falling into poverty, into repression, into all kinds of ugly things. And it goes on falling. It is now five thousand years; it is still suffering from this man Krishna.And chanting his name you will reach to golok?…And these are the cults the pope thinks are a challenge.I am the only challenge. These cults are not a challenge. What challenge will these cults make? – because they are as idiotic as the pope’s Christianity is.What new movements are there? They are all fanatic, stupid – anybody can see their stupidity. They are not a challenge.But the pope is such a coward he cannot even mention my name directly. I am the only challenge, because I can see that all these movements have nothing to challenge with because they are in the same boat, with the same kind of beliefs – if not in Christ then in Krishna; if not in Krishna then in Rama. But the base is rotten, and the philosophy is just rubbish.

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The Transmission of Lamp 01-46Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Transmission of Lamp 46 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You once said something like when we take sannyas it is either too early or too late.I have often wondered what you meant by this. Would you please comment?Man is so unconscious that he does not know what he is doing, or for what he is doing it, or when the right time to do it is – so perhaps someone takes sannyas too early. It is just accidental. He comes into the influence of a group of sannyasins, reads some books or listens to my words and feels that he is ready.A few people take sannyas too late. That too is accidental. It is sheer chance that they did not come across sannyasins, my message, earlier.It is a very rare coincidence that a person takes sannyas exactly at the right moment in his life for the simple reason that man is not conscious.The right moment comes and passes by, and he is lost in his dreams, in his ambitions, in his desires.But my statement simply describes a factuality.As far as you are concerned, it does not matter.I would like to say to you that whenever you take sannyas it is the right moment. You are helpless as far as your unconsciousness is concerned, you cannot do anything about it, so you cannot be held responsible for being early or late. And even those who take it at the right moment, that too is coincidental.So all the three persons are taking sannyas accidentally. So basically it makes no difference.And the real thing is not the right moment. The real thing is your right determination, your right decisiveness, your right commitment.My statement may look contradictory. It is not. Only the contexts are different.There was in India a great sage, Eknath – not of the ordinary run, unique. He used to sleep in the temple made for Shiva. And the king had gone to visit him. The king was sent to him by his own master – because he was too argumentative, too rational, too much in the mind, and the master was tired. And finally he said, “If anything is going to happen to you in this life it can happen only through Eknath. You go to Eknath.”The king agreed, out of curiosity, but he was suspicious, “If my own master cannot make me a convinced seeker of truth, who is this guy Eknath? I have never heard about him. What is he is going to do to me?” But it was worth it. He went early in the morning – it must have been nine o’clock. Hindu brahmins wake up at five o’clock in the morning or even earlier, but not later than that; and the saints, the holy ones, get up near about three in the morning.Eknath was fast asleep at nine o’clock. The king was shocked. What kind of saint is he? And this was not all; when he went closer he said, “My God, is this a saint or a devil?” – because he was putting his feet on the statue of Shiva, just as a footrest. He said, “My master must have gone mad to send me to this man. Although I am not convinced of the existence of God, even I cannot touch the statue of God with my feet. I am afraid…. Who knows? After all, God may exist. Why take unnecessary trouble upon yourself? But this man is something!”And when Eknath woke up the king said, “I have been sent by my master.”Eknath laughed and he said, “While I am alive there is nobody else who is a master.” This was very insulting to the king.He said, “You seem to be an insane person. In the first place you are sleeping up to nine, in the temple, resting your feet on the statue of Shiva, and now you are saying that there can be nobody else master while you are alive.”He said, “Yes. Tell that to your master; otherwise why has he sent you to me? These are just pygmy teachers pretending to be masters, and as far as my sleeping up to nine and my feet on the statue of Shiva, remember one thing: wherever I put my feet there is God, so what does it matter? God is everywhere, so why not find a comfortable place? And my waking up at nine – remember, any people who say that saints wake up before sunrise are just mediocre minds. I say to you that whenever the saint wakes up, that is sunrise.”Strange statements, but very true – true in depth, true in intensity. Whenever a saint wakes up, that is sunrise; his waking is far more important than your ordinary sun rising up every day – a mechanical phenomenon. My waking is not a mechanical phenomenon, and I am a free man – I will wake up when I want to, and I will go to sleep when I want to. I act according to my consciousness, my awareness. I don’t follow any discipline. I don’t have any rules for my life. My life is my only discipline. Therefore I say unto you that whenever you become a sannyasin that is the right moment.So don’t be bothered about the statement that a few people come to sannyas earlier, a few people come later, very few people come at the right time.Remember, whenever you become a sannyasin you make that time the right time. So don’t feel that you have missed anything.A sannyasin never misses anything in life. Once a sannyasin, he forgets missing, he simply goes on gaining more dimensions, more riches – riches of all kinds, more awareness, more love, more compassion, more beauty, more grace. Who cares for chronological time? Who bothers to look at the calendar and then take sannyas?And it is not possible in the first place. So let me repeat: whenever you take sannyas, that is sunrise.In India we have a proverb, that the man who has lost the way to his home, who has gone astray – even if he does not come home until evening he should not be called lost. Whoever coined the proverb must have been a man of great wisdom. The real point is not that he went astray. The real point is that he has come back. Going astray is ordinary, and in a way essential for coming back. Forgetting the way home is an absolute necessity for finding the home. So even if you have come in the evening of your life to sannyas you have not missed anything, you have come home.Osho,Since we have been singing and dancing in our seats for the past discourses, I have found witnessing so much easier and deeper. It's almost difficult not to witness because everything is so bright and clear. This makes me wonder how monks who do Vipassana can keep it up, not having a master to dance with. Can you please comment?The traditional method of Vipassana is a very cold, dull and dead way, and because it is cold it takes a longer time – perhaps a few lives to become awakened.But because all the religions of the world have praised coldness in their saints, in their seekers, searchers, they have all delayed progress, delayed the evolution of consciousness.Energy moves better when it is warmer.This is one of my contributions, which will be condemned by all the religions – the religions of the cold. I teach you a religion of warmth, love, singing, dancing, music. These are all tremendously helpful to make you alert, wakeful.Sitting in a cave – a dark cave in a mountain alone – people have been dozing in the name of Vipassana. They can doze, it is their life. I am not in any way going to interfere. They have chosen it. They will doze their way towards enlightenment, however long it takes.But when there is music and your whole body is thrilling, and when there is song, although you are sitting, in a subtle sense there is a dance in you. You cannot remain unconscious, you have to become more watchful.I want Vipassana to be a warmer path; then it becomes a very short cut. I would like you to sing and dance and play on instruments – that will take you away from the mundane world, the day-to-day world. I would like you to love, I would like you to laugh.The society has repressed everything; even when you laugh it is halfhearted because it is thought to be not gentlemanly. To laugh wholeheartedly looks a little rustic. But if you laugh totally, then the laughter will be coming from your hara, just below the navel, two inches below the navel, and that is the source of your life, that’s where your center of life is.You should learn laughing through Geeta. She is Japanese and she knows how to laugh from the hara and then it is like bells ringing in a temple. It is only Geeta who makes me laugh; otherwise I somehow manage seriousness.Whenever you are total in anything you will feel more watchful, more alert, more awakened, more fresh, more alive.I am all for life. Your so-called religions are all against life, they are anti-life. Naturally they have to be as cold as a corpse.I would like my sannyasins to be living totally and multi-dimensionally, even in small things – bringing their whole being to a focus. And if you can start living moment to moment in different ways – but always total – Vipassana will happen to you more easily than you can conceive because you have never seen anything happening so easily, without effort, on its own accord. You can force yourself to sit in silence and remain awake. I don’t teach that kind of Vipassana. I teach a Vipassana that follows you like a shadow, as a by-product of your total living.Osho,The forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness – did he meditate? – he never mentions meditation if he had known of it.Just what did he get up to out there?He did not meditate. If he could have meditated the shape of things in the world would have been different. What he did in those forty days and forty nights was prayer. Prayer to a god which he knows not. No one knows whether he exists or not.Millions of people have been praying and the sky remains utterly indifferent; no answer, no response.The whole ideology of Jesus and Christianity is based on fiction. It is a religious fiction. The same is true about all the religions which are religions of prayer.There are two kinds of religions in the world: religions of prayer and religions of meditation.The religions of prayer are fictitious because they begin from the very beginning with a belief in a god. Belief is not knowing, and belief cannot destroy your doubt. At the most it can repress, it can cover up your doubt, but underneath the belief you are always suspecting whether your belief is true or not. Doubt dies on its own accord when you know something; then there is no question of doubt.Belief carries doubt with it.And to make the belief system strong, prayer is the method. First the god is bogus – you create the god out of your fear, it is a phobia, and then you start praying to that god which is your own creation.The Bible says God created man in his own image. Just looking at this statement, it does not need much intelligence to see the utter stupidity of it. The man that you know, is this man the image of God? And if this is the image of God, you cannot expect anything better from God. No, the statement is not right, and is not in any way respectful towards God either. It is disrespectful, condemnatory. It is as if somebody says, “Man created buffaloes in his own image.”God created man in his own image? This is his reflection – all these jealousies, all these miseries, all these despairs, anguish, anxieties, wars, murders, rapes? The list is infinite. This is the image of God, this is his reflection in the mirror?So firstly, the statement is very disrespectful and irreligious.Secondly, it is untrue. The truth is that man created God in his own image. God has not created man, it is man who has created God. That’s why there are hundreds of gods in the world – because different people created different kinds of god, according to their own idea. A Chinese god will not appeal to anybody else, and nobody else’s idea of God will appeal to the Chinese because they are a different race of man with differences which are very clear-cut. They don’t grow thick beards or mustaches – the beard, maybe you can count one dozen hairs, more than that is simply wild. They are the civilized people of the world, according to themselves. Their god also has those one dozen hairs in his beard. Hindu gods don’t have any beard, don’t have any mustache. No religion born in India – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism…. It seems that Hindu gods started shaving from the very beginning. It seems first they created the razor. It is all nonsense that first there was the word and God was with the word and God was the word – nonsense! There was first a razor! And God was with the razor, and God was shaving himself, finding nobody else to shave.I inquired of Hindu scholars, “Why do your gods not have beards or mustaches?” And it is not one god, it is all the gods – and India has the biggest number of gods, thirty-three million. That was exactly the population of India when these gods were being developed. Why be miserly and why create a monopolistic god? Why make a god like Adolf Hitler? They create a very democratic situation – everybody can have his own god.They were not aware that one day India will have nine hundred million people. They were thinking that this is too much – thirty-three million, we have reached the limit; but even nine hundred million is not the limit. By the end of this century India will have the greatest population in the whole world. China will be left far behind.China’s estimate for the end of the century is one point two billion.India’s estimate is one point eight billion.But all these gods in one thing are similar, they are without mustache, without beard. What is the problem? This can happen only if they are missing some hormones. It happens once in a while that you will find a man who has no beard, no mustache, and it does not grow and there is no need for him to use a razor. He is missing particular hormones which are needed for the growth of the beard and the mustache.Nobody has answered my question, why these people are all shaved; but the reason, I feel on my own, is that India does not want its gods to grow old. They have to remain so young that even beard and mustache have not yet started growing. And they are stuck there. That is the Hindu idea.In their heaven they have apsaras, air hostesses. They don’t allow their air hostesses in heaven to grow beyond the age of sixteen. Millions of years have passed and they are still sixteen.Naturally their gods are not more than eighteen at the most. And it has to be so; otherwise it will look very ugly. They will all become dirty old men, and the young girls…and they are millions of years old, and the gap, the generation gap will be really so big, unimaginable.But the Christian God or the Jewish God is an old man, not a young man, with a beard, ancient, because the old is gold. The older a person is the more wise he is. Nobody can be older than God, remember. That’s why he prevented Adam and Eve from eating from two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of eternal life. Why prevent them? Because if they eat the fruit of the tree of eternal life they may start becoming older than God himself. He does not want anybody to be older than him because he wants to be at the top.These are different conceptions of different people, and they have created their god according to their own image; and the foolishness is they are sitting before a mirror with folded hands praying to the reflection of their own face and hoping that they are doing something religious, something spiritual.They should be treated psychologically. Prayer is addressed to a fictitious god; hence, it has no value in reality.Meditation is a totally different affair.Jesus had no idea of meditation.The West, unfortunately, has missed the dimension of meditation, and it has missed because of Judaism, Christianity, Islam – which have dominated the Western sphere and forced people to pray.In fact, there has been a condemnation in the West – particularly by the Western religious people – of meditation. To them meditation looks selfish because meditation does not need God, meditation does not need any prayer. Meditation is simply sitting in deep silence so that you can sink to your very center, it is sinking within yourself. It has nothing to do with anybody else.So those who do not understand can call it selfish.But meditation leads you to your own reality.Prayer is only leading to your own reflection, which is futile – talking to your own reflection. It is not going to help you in any way. It may give you a good ego – “God really looks like me, he must have created man in his own image.”So the people of prayer are bound to become egoists, arrogant, holier-than-thou – that will be their attitude continually.The meditator becomes humble. He does not feel holier-than-thou. As he reaches to his center he becomes more peaceful, more blissful, more harmonious with existence. He loses all problems, all questions. He knows. Now there is no question of doubt.The religions of prayer begin with belief.The religions of meditation don’t begin with belief but end in an absolute certain knowing. But the knowing has to be differentiated from knowledge. They don’t become knowledgeable. They simply know that the whole existence is divine. Their knowing is innocent, not knowledgeable. Their knowing makes them humble – because they can see everybody has the same center; we are different only on the periphery, but at the center we are one.You can see many points.The religions of prayer have been fighting, killing, burning people alive, in the name of religion – forcing people at the point of a gun or a sword to be converted to their religion.The religions of meditation have not done anything like that, and there is a great balance.The prayer religions have been creating religious wars, crusades, jihads. Their whole history is full of blood. They have not made man better, they have made him worse.Religions of meditation have not had a single war. They have not even tried to convert anybody for the simple reason that there is no point; the other person is as divine as they are, he is just asleep and it is his right to sleep as long as he wants, and whenever he wants to wake up he will wake up.Being awake themselves, they have found tremendous treasures of blissfulness, of ecstasy. They would like to share it, so they go on sharing it but there is no question of conversion.Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism – these three religions are the religions of meditation. Their history is simply clean, no bloodshed.Judaism, Christianity, Islam are the religions of prayer. Their whole history is full of blood and so ugly that to call it religious and to call these people religious looks like a mockery.Only one religion, Hinduism, is left. Hinduism is a totally strange phenomenon, different from both the religions I have described. Hinduism is many religions together, it is not one religion. So you cannot characterize Hinduism with other religions which have a certain personality. Hinduism is a chaos. There are hundreds of religions under the umbrella of Hinduism, different from each other. Even the word Hinduism was not given by Hindus themselves.There was no name in India. People were free to follow whatsoever they wanted to follow. That’s why hundreds of small paths, having their own uniqueness, developed. There was no singular name for the whole complex, it was a crowd; but as India was invaded, the invaders gave it a name. And by coincidence, when you enter India you have to pass one of the biggest rivers of India, Sindhu, and the first invaders had no letter for s, the closest letter was h. So Sindhu became Hindu and they called the people who lived beyond the Hindu river “Hindus.” They had to call them something – these people who are living beyond the Hindu river.And you will be surprised that from Hindu the word traveled to other tribes, became Indu, became India; but it is the same Sindhu river which created all these names – Hindu, Indu, India.Otherwise, India was totally a free country. Everybody was accepted, whatever he was doing and whatever he wanted to do. It was his right.But now, slowly, slowly, in these two thousand years, even Hindus have started thinking of themselves as one fold, but they are in continuous difficulty because they have contradictory religions within themselves. So nobody can say what Hinduism is; one sect will define it in one way, another sect in another way, and the third sect in a third way. And there are so many sects and all have equal value, so that Hinduism has no definition. From godless people to people who believe in god, all are in the fold – under the same umbrella.But looking at it as a whole, not thinking much of the inner contradictions, Hinduism will also be one of the religions of prayer. It cannot be one of the religions of meditation.There are a few sects in Hinduism which have meditated, but they are in a minority. For example, yoga. The founder of yoga, Patanjali, was really a daring man. Five thousand years ago, in his yoga sutras, he says something which even the contemporary man has not the guts to say. He says, “God is a hypothesis. It is not a reality. If you enjoy prayer, then the hypothesis of God is needed; otherwise to whom are you going to address it?”People like Patanjali are also under the same umbrella. They should be taken out. They belong really to Taoism, Jainism, Buddhism – the religions of meditation.Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism – they don’t believe in any god. They don’t believe in anything. They believe only in one thing – and that, too, hypothetically. You know you are. You feel you are. You cannot deny it because even your denial will prove that you are. If you say, “I am not” that will be simply a proof that you are, because who is denying?It is just as if you are in your house, and somebody knocks on the door and you say, “I am not in the house. I have gone out to the market. Come some other time.” Do you think the man is going to believe you?He will simply say, “This is hilarious. You are inside the house and you are saying, ‘I have gone out to the market.’ Open the doors.”You cannot deny yourself. This is the only fact in existence which is undeniable – everything else can be denied. It is possible that you may be all just a dream. It is possible that I may be to you just a dream.It is not certain. But one thing you cannot deny – you can deny the dream, but you cannot deny the dreamer. You can say that it was a dream, but you cannot say that “I was not.” Even in a dream your existence is absolutely necessary; otherwise, how will the dream happen?So the only thing in the religions of meditation is “I am.” And now the question is to discover who I am.Meditation is only a methodology to discover who I am. It is purely scientific.Jesus was not doing meditation. He was praying, praying to the Jewish God – who is not a very good or nice fellow. In all the gods of the world, he is the worst. And it is not that I am saying it, he himself says it. In Talmud he says it: “Remember that I am not a nice God; I am terrible, I am very jealous, I am revengeful. If you go against me, you will be thrown into hell. I am not your uncle!” – Because uncles are nice people, more than fathers. He makes it clear, “You have to be afraid of me.” And it is fear that will make you religious.In India Mahatma Gandhi used to pray every morning, every evening, and after prayer he will give a small speech. One of his sons was my friend. Gandhi had died; Ramdas, who was taking care of the ashram where Gandhi used to live, became interested in me. He was a man of really very sharp intelligence. He became interested in me because I started criticizing Gandhi. And it was very strange that all the Gandhians became my enemies, and Gandhi’s own son became my friend. He invited me to be with him. He said one thing to me, “When I heard about your statement in the newspapers, I read it, that Gandhi after his every prayer meeting used to say, ‘I am not afraid of anybody except God,’ and we have been listening to this from our very childhood,” Ramdas told me, “but we had never thought about it. And when you criticized it we realized that to be afraid of God simply means your religiousness is out of fear – it is not out of love.”If I was in the place of Mahatma Gandhi I could say, “I can be afraid of everybody but I cannot be afraid of God” – because to be afraid of God destroys the whole basis of being religious.But fear has been the base of all the religions of prayer.The Talmud declaration of God that “I am terrible” is just to help you to pray, not to go astray, to obey, not to be a rebel.And Jesus was not a rebel, as many understand him to be. He was born a Jew, he lived as a Jew, he died as a Jew. In fact, he had never heard the word Christian. He had never known that he would be known to the world as Jesus Christ.Christ is from the Greek, and he knew not even Hebrew. He used only his own local language, Aramaic. He was uneducated. Hebrew was of the educated people, scholarly people – rabbis. He used only the local villagers’ language, Aramaic.In those forty days he was praying. And what can you pray for? Whenever you pray you are always begging; prayer is, deep down, begging. On the one hand it is begging for something, on the other hand it is impressing God that you are great, you are the greatest of the great.On the cross Jesus was waiting just as everybody else was waiting, expecting that some miracle is going to happen. Nothing happened. And after a few hours, when nothing happened, he looked many times up into the sky, hoping that angels will be coming with their harps playing on the white clouds. Not even a white cloud appeared. Finally he had a breakdown and he shouted at God, “Have you forsaken me?”Naturally a man who had lived his whole life fanatically with belief, who had risked his life, and was hanging on the cross – and God is absolutely absent – it is natural that he should ask “have you forsaken me?” A doubt has entered into his mind. Doubt was always there, hidden behind a belief system.If he had been a meditator, things would have been totally different. He would not have declared that he is the only begotten son of God. He would not have declared that he is the messiah the Jews have been awaiting for centuries. He would not have declared that he has come to redeem humanity, that he is a savior. These are impossible statements from a man of meditation.A man of meditation knows there is no God. He knows there is godliness, a quality but not a person; not like a flower but like a fragrance. And godliness is all over, you just have to be alert and awakened at the center of your being.And there is no question of the only begotten son, and the meditator knows that nobody can save you except yourself because nobody can enter into your center. That is your privilege and your privacy. You can be killed, but nobody can touch your innermost being, for good or for bad.A meditator cannot say, “I can save you,” or “I can save the whole humanity,” or “I am the savior.”A meditator cannot say, “I am a messiah, a messenger” because there is no God who is sending messiahs and messengers.A meditator can do only one thing. He can make himself available to you with all his joy, with all his grace, with all his dance, with all his beauty. He can remind you in a certain way that the same reality lies asleep within you. He can only become a pointer. He can show the finger pointing to the moon, he cannot take you to the moon.If Jesus had meditated, there would have been no crucifixion, and without crucifixion the world would have been saved from Christianity.That’s why I say that he did not meditate and he has left the world in the hands of Christians who have done every crime against humanity and who are still doing every crime against humanity.Meditation cannot be violent. Even to convince you is not possible for the meditator. He can only communicate. He can only commune with you in a deep friendship and love, “I have found something. Perhaps you can find it too. Just look within.” He can tell you how he has looked within himself and how he has found the very source of life.But he is not a prophet. He does not claim any speciality, he does not claim that he is higher than you. He simply says he is as ordinary as you are, with just a little difference – that he has opened his eyes and you are still snoring.Osho,What is the connection between these two: the trinity of the father, the son and the holy ghost; and the body, the mind and the witness. Or is the holy ghost just another old ghost?There is no trinity the way Christians conceive it. The father, the son, the holy ghost – in fact, the whole idea is anti-feminine, it is against women.In the divine trinity there is no place for any woman. There is a place for a ghost, and I don’t think that he is holy because this is the guy who made poor Mary pregnant, and if he is holy then every rapist is holy. This is the most unholy ghost, but there is a place for him.And what kind of family – father, son and holy ghost? Where is the mother?No, the woman cannot be accepted as part of God.This is the conspiracy.Otherwise it would have been far better: God the father, God the mother, God the son; it would have looked more contemporary, a beautiful family, using birth control – because centuries have passed and only one son.And the pope and Mother Teresa and all these people go on around the world teaching people against birth control and their God has been practicing it for millions of years. They cannot see a simple fact. But it is ugly simply because there is no place for woman. The whole idea is fiction, but even in fiction the woman has equal rights to man but she has been denied.Even Jesus behaved very rudely with his mother. Once he was speaking in a crowd and somebody shouted from outside, “Jesus, your mother has come to see you and she is here. When you are finished, come out of the crowd.”And Jesus said, before the crowd, “Tell that woman” – he could not even call her his mother – “Tell that woman that I have only my father, who is in heaven. I don’t have any relationship on the earth with any man or with any woman.” Simply ugly.But almost all the religions have been doing this to the women of the earth.The other trinity, the trinity of meditation, is certainly a reality – body, mind and the witness.Body is nature, body is part of the earth.Mind is part of the society, of the whole human heritage.And the watcher is your own individuality.This is a real trinity. There is no question of man or woman because the witness is neither man nor woman. The body will go back to nature as you become awakened, mind will disperse back to the society as you become awakened, and the witness will go back to what I call the godliness that surrounds the whole existence.But the Christian trinity is ugly. You can create a trinity for meditators which is far more real and far more useful.The body has to be taken care of, has to be respected, has to be loved. It is your home.The mind has to be cleaned from any rubbish, from any dust that may have gathered during millions of years of journey, and the moment you have cleaned the mind you will find the hidden reality of your being, the witness.And to find it is to conquer the whole universe, to find it is to find all.

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Take It Easy Vol 1 01-14Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Take It Easy Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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A rest on the way backFrom the Leaky RoadTo the Never-leaking Road;If it rains, let it rain;If it blows, let it blow.My self of long ago,In nature non-existent;Nowhere to go when dead,Nothing at all.When asked, he answered;No question, no answer;Then master DarumaMust have hadNothing in his mind.Our mind –Without end,Without beginning,Though it is born, though it dies –The essence of emptiness!All the sins committedIn the Three WorldsWill fade and disappearTogether with myself.Religion is irrational – by the irrational and for the irrational. Reason cannot contain it; reason is so small.Religion is the vast sky of existence; reason is a tiny human phenomenon. Reason has to be lost, has to be dropped. Only by going beyond the mind does one start understanding what is. That’s the radical change. No philosophy can bring that radical change – only religion.Religion is non-philosophic, anti-philosophic, and Zen is the purest form of religion. Zen is the very essence of religion; hence it is irrational, it is absurd. If you try to understand it logically you will be bewildered. It can only be understood illogically. It has to be approached in deep sympathy and love. You cannot approach Zen through empirical, scientific, objective concepts. They all have to be dropped. It is a heart phenomenon. You have to feel it rather than think it. You have to be it to know it. Being is knowing – and there is no other knowing.That’s why religion has to choose a different kind of language. Religion has to talk in parables, in poetry, in metaphors, in myth. Those are indirect ways of hinting at the truth – only hinting at the truth, no direct pointing; just whispering, not shouting. It comes to you in a deep rapport.These small poems of the Zen master, Ikkyu, are of immense importance. They are not great poetry, remember, because that is not the concern. The poetry has been used as a device so that your heart can be stirred. The poetry is not the goal. Ikkyu is not concerned with creating great poetry. He is not really a poet, he is a mystic, but rather than speaking prose, he speaks in poetry – for a certain reason.The reason is poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine; prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague – that’s its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate, and one has to fall back to poetry.There are two languages in language. Each language consists of two languages: one is prose, the other is poetry. Prose has become very predominant because it is utilitarian. Poetry has disappeared by and by, because it has no utility. It is needed only when you are in love. It is needed only when you are talking of love, death, prayerfulness, truth, godliness. These are not commodities; they are not sold in the marketplace, they are not purchased either.Our world, slowly, slowly, has become linear. The other language, the deeper language, has lost its meaning for us, and because of the disappearance of the second language, the language of poetry, man has become very poor, because all richness is of the heart. Mind is very poor, mind is a beggar, mind lives through trivia. The heart is an opening to the profundities of life, to the depths of existence, to the mysteries of cosmos.Remember this: there are two languages in language, two ways of speaking, two levels of linguistic usage. There is a language of clear truths, concepts and formulas: the language of pure logic, objective information, exact science. But that is not the language of the heart, and that is not the language of love, and that is not the language of religion.Science and religion are diametrically opposite. They belong to different dimensions of existence. They don’t overlap each other’s grounds, each other’s fields. They simply never meet! They don’t crisscross. And the modern mind has been trained for science; hence religion has become almost out of date, of the past. There seems to be no future for religion.Sigmund Freud has declared that there is no future for the illusion called religion. But if there is no future for religion, there is no future for man either. Science is going to destroy humanity – because humanity can live only through the poetic, the metaphoric. Life gathers significance only through the heart. Man cannot live by mind alone; man cannot live by calculation, mathematics alone. Mathematics can serve, but cannot be the master. The head can only be the servant. As a servant it is very useful, but when it pretends to become the master it is dangerous, it is fatal.The language of objective science lives in the world of facts. Things are as they are: you say what you mean, as precisely as you can, and as unequivocally. Speaking, then, is deciphering a puzzle, defining, prescribing limits: this is this, not that. It is water, not steam and not ice. Here is here, not there. One is one, two equals two, dead is dead. This is the world of facts – dull and dead, stale and stagnant.It is impossible to live just in the world of facts, because then you will never be able to relax. In fact, it is meaningless to live in the world of facts – from where will you get meaning, from where will you get value? Then a rose has no beauty; it is only a botanical fact. Then love has no splendor; it is only a biological fact.How can one live in facts? Living in facts, life starts becoming meaningless. It is not an accident that modern philosophical minds are talking continuously about meaninglessness. We have created it by deciding to live only in one language: the prose language.It is a good thing that we have this language, the language of facts, the language of prose. Our world cannot do without it, true. It is needed, but it cannot be the goal of life; it can only serve. But we never use it when we want to pour out our hearts and say what is really in us, hidden and almost impossible to name.A man is certainly poor if he has not felt the inadequacy of ordinary language. If there is somebody so unfortunate that he has not felt the inadequacy of ordinary language it simply shows he has never felt love, he has never felt any meditative moment, he has not known ecstasy. His heart beats no more; he is just a corpse. He lives and yet does not live. He moves, walks, but all his gestures are empty; they contain nothing.If a man has not felt the inadequacy of the prose language – the empirical language, the language of facts, mathematics – that simply shows that he has not experienced any mystery of life, he has really not been living. Otherwise, how can you avoid the mysteries? It simply shows that he has never seen the full moon in the night, has never seen the beauty and the splendor of human eyes, has never laughed, has never cried, does not know what tears signify. He is a robot; he is not man, he is not human; he is inhuman. He is just a machine; he works, he earns, and then he dies. He reproduces and then he dies – but in vain. He cannot say why he lived in the first place.It is true that this kind of language is needed, it is a need, but even if all the needs are fulfilled, the ultimate need remains unfulfilled by it: the need to celebrate, the need to rejoice, the need to have a dialogue with the stars and the ocean and the sand, the need to hold hands, the need to fall in love, the need to dance and sing. Ordinary language cannot fulfill that ultimate need, and that ultimate need is what is specific to humanity. A man is man only insofar as he lives in that ultimate need.In questions of love and death and of God and man, the first language is not only inadequate but also dangerous. If you use the first kind of language for the ultimate concerns of life, by and by your very language will destroy them. That’s how we have destroyed godliness. That’s how we have destroyed all that is beautiful and significant. Use wrong language, and sooner or later you will be trapped by that wrong language, because your mind lives through language. You know only that which comes into your language; you know only that which you can clearly think about.If you have dropped the vague world of heart, the vague world of feelings, sensations, emotions, ecstasy, then naturally you are closed to godliness. And then if you say God is dead, it seems to be absolutely true. Not that God is dead – only you are dead to godliness. To be alive to godliness is to move into poetry. Poetry is the rainbow bridge between man and godliness, between man as mind and godliness as mystery. That is the opening, the door, the threshold.Have you ever seen Khajuraho, Konarak, or other beautiful temples of India? In the old scriptures it is said that on each temple’s threshold there should be a statue, a sculpture of lovers. It is very strange. Those scriptures don’t specifically say why; they simply mention it for the architects, that it is a must. On each temple’s threshold, on the door, there must be at least one couple in maithun – in orgasm, in deep love, their limbs intertwined with each other, in great ecstasy.Why on the door? Because unless you know love, you cannot know the bridge between man and existence. And the door is a symbol: the door is the threshold between the world of mind and the world of no-mind. It is love that bridges the world of mind to no-mind. It is only through love that we come to know the orgasmic mysteries of life.It is very significant, although many temples are not built that way. People have been avoiding it; they are too moralistic and stupid. But the ancient prescription is of great significance: only love can be the threshold, because only love will make your poetry alive.If you use only the first kind of language, you will be destroying something very delicate in you. You will become more and more accustomed to the rocks and less and less aware of the flowers.There is a second language, deep below the first, like a much older structure wide around the first. It is the language of what cannot really be said. Yes, poetry is the language of what really cannot be said. Still it has to be said. There is an urgency to say it, and poetry is the language of that which cannot be said.That which can be said can be said through prose. How will you say that which cannot be said if you don’t have poetry? It is the language of what cannot really be said, the language that you speak so as not to have to be completely silent, the language of emotion and ecstasy.These small poems of Ikkyu may not be very poetic. In fact, R. H. Blyth, writing about these doka of Ikkyu, says: “Ikkyu’s little poems are not of great poetical value, yet they portray for us a man of deep sincerity, too honest perhaps to be a great lyrical poet.” The purpose is not poetry. The purpose is to convey something which cannot be conveyed through ordinary language. Poetry is being used as a vehicle, remember. Don’t think in terms of literature: think in terms of ecstasy.And sometimes ecstasy can be expressed through small words. Just the other day I was reading William Samuel. He writes:Pondering the enigma of communication one day out in the back-country of my hills, I witnessed the happy reunion of a father and his five-year-old son who had been lost in the woods for many hours. I knew the boy would be found – and I knew I knew – but despite the positive knowing, I was unable to allay the father’s fears or bring him to understand the truth I saw. Then, even as I wondered – even as I asked about this inability to communicate when it seemed so important to do it – I saw the little boy and the father find each other.Oh, such a reunion! A barefoot ragamuffin came running out of the woods shouting with all his might, “Daddy! Daddy!” and I saw the father, unashamedly sobbing, sweep the child into his arms. All he could say was, “Hallelujah! Praise God!” again and again. “Hallelujah! Praise God!”There are moments when something has to be said and nothing can be said. There are moments when tears say much more than words. There are moments when laughter says much more than words. There are moments when gestures say much more than words. There are moments when silence speaks more than words. All the laughter, all the tears, all the gestures and silences are contained in the second language, the language of poetry.William Samuel also writes:Once in China, I was given a simple verse to read and then to give my interpretation. I was ready to give an answer immediately but was informed that I had twenty-eight days to think about it. “Why so long?” I asked, with the usual impatience of a Westerner.“Because nothing has been read once until it has been read twelve times,” was the answer. “Read and re-read.”I did. Twelve times twelve to make twelve readings – and I heard a melody I could not have heard otherwise. Since then I have known why it is that certain lines in the Bible, or any other book, that have been read countless times will one day, upon just one more reading, suddenly take on a grand new significance.That is the whole secret of mantras. A mantra is a condensed poem; it is essential poetry. Just by reading it, you can’t understand it. Not that you don’t understand intellectually – it is simple, the meaning is apparent – but the apparent meaning is not the real meaning. The apparent meaning comes from the first reading, and the hidden meaning will have to be waited for. You will have to repeat it in deep love, in great, prayerful moods, and sometime it will suddenly erupt from your own unconscious, it will be revealed to you. A melody will be heard, and that melody is the meaning – not the meaning that you had deciphered from the first reading, on the first reading. And one never knows when it will happen.Hence, in the East, people have been reciting the Koran, the Bhagavadgita, the Dhammapada. They keep reciting; every day, morning and evening, they keep reciting. They recite as many times as possible. They don’t even keep count; what is the point of keeping count? But with each recitation, something goes deeper into you, the groove is deepened. And one day the melody is heard. When you have heard the melody, you have come to know the real mantra. You have stumbled upon the second hidden layer, the real poetry in it that cannot be understood, that can only be heard; that cannot be understood, that can only be experienced.These small poems of Ikkyu are like mantras. Don’t try to understand them intellectually. Rather, play with them with deep love, sympathy, rapport. And, slowly, slowly, like a fragrance, like a melody, something will arise in you and you will be able to see what this man wants to convey. He wants to convey that which cannot be conveyed; he wants to say that which cannot be said. And he has been able to convey it.This man Ikkyu was a strange master. Zen masters are strange masters. A religious person is bound to become strange, because he lives in a totally different way, he lives in a separate reality. He starts existing here as an outsider. He becomes a stranger to this ordinary world because he is here and yet not of it. He lives here, but untouched, uncontaminated, unpolluted by it. He lives here, and lives in such a way that he is untouchable. He does not escape from the world. He lives in the ordinary world in an extraordinary way.I have heard a few stories about Ikkyu. One is this, which will give you some taste of the man. Before we enter into his poems, it is better to have some taste of the man.One summer day while working, perhaps weeding, Ikkyu got so tired, and being hot, came up to the temple porch and aired himself in the cool breeze. He felt so fine that he went into the temple and took the buddha from the shrine, and binding him to a pole outside, said, “Now, you too, cool yourself!”It looks absurd, binding a wooden buddha to a pole, and saying to the buddha, “Now, you too, cool yourself!” But look, something deep is there. For Ikkyu, nothing is dead anymore, not even the wooden buddha. All is alive. And he has started feeling for everything as he feels for himself. Those boundaries of “I” and “you” are no longer relevant. He has come to the one.And now another, just the polar opposite of this story:One night, a very cold winter night, he was staying in a temple. And then suddenly, in the middle of the night, the priest of the temple heard noise and saw light, so he came running: “What is happening?”He saw Ikkyu sitting there; he was burning a wooden buddha. The priest was aghast. He said, “Are you mad or something? What have you done? This is sacrilege! There can be no other sin greater than this. You have burnt my buddha!”Ikkyu took a small stick and started poking in the ashes.The priest said, “Now what are you doing, and what are you trying to do?”Ikkyu said, “I am trying to find the bones of the buddha.”The priest said, “You must be absolutely mad, how can you find bones in a wooden buddha?”And Ikkyu laughed and he said, “The night is long and very cold, and you have so many wooden buddhas. Why don’t you bring a few more and you can also warm yourself up.”Now this man is a strange man. One time he binds the wooden buddha on a hot summer day to a pole and says, “Now, you too, cool yourself.” Another time he burns a wooden buddha because the night is too cold. And he says to the priest, “Look at me: the buddha inside is shivering.” In fact, both the stories are the same, from two different angles the same.A man of realization, a man who has understood, makes no differences. Distinctions are lost, divisions disappear, all boundaries become meaningless. A man of realization starts living in the unbounded, in the infinite.Now, these doka…A rest on the way backFrom the Leaky RoadTo the Never-leaking Road;If it rains, let it rain;If it blows, let it blow.Each word has to be penetrated with sympathy. “The Leaky Road” means this world, the world of desires. Through desires we are leaking our energy. Through desires we are wasting our being; through desires we are disappearing down the drain.This world is the Leaky Road. Man simply wastes himself here. Nothing is gained out of it, never; in fact you come as emperors and you die as beggars. This is a Leaky Road! Each child is born as an emperor and soon the kingdom is lost, the purity, the innocence is lost. Each child is Adam in the Garden of Eden, and each child has to be expelled from the Garden.He starts moving into the world of desires. Ten thousand desires are there. They cannot be finished, they cannot be fulfilled; they bring only frustration and more frustration. Each desire is a new trap of the frustration. You hope again and you are trapped, and each desire only brings a great frustration. But by the time it comes, you start desiring again. You move from one desire to another desire. You can go on moving for millions of lives, in fact that’s how we have been moving.Ikkyu calls it the Leaky Road. And the Never-leaking Road is the world before we and it were born or the world when we and it are no more.In Zen, this is one of the most fundamental meditations: to search for the face that you had before you were born, or, to search for the face that you will have when you are dead. Just to think about it brings great realizations. Just meditate upon it constantly and one starts feeling something faceless. That is your original face: facelessness. You had no face before you were born; you had no body, you had no mind, you had no name, no form – no namarupa – neither name nor form. You were, but you were not identified with anything.To realize it again, amidst all this noise of the Leaky Road, amidst all these people who are just running after desires, chasing one desire and then another and then another; to recognize and to realize the original face when you were neither a body nor a mind, but only a pure consciousness, a witness, is the goal of all meditation. That is called the Never-leaking Road. If you can remain in that state, your life energies will not leak.And the way back is the return to that source, to that original face. All religions are the way back. Religion means a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, an about-turn, an absolute about-turn. We are rushing away from the original source, we are rushing from ourselves. We have to return; we have to come to our original source because only there is peace and contentment and bliss. Only there is fulfillment.The source is the goal – they are never separate. Only the source can be the goal. When one has come back to one’s original source, one has achieved all that life can give, all that life is meant to give.Life is losing the paradise; religion is regaining it. Rushing into the world of desires is Adam falling from grace; returning back is Christ. They are the same person. Adam and Christ are not two separate persons; they are the same person, only their direction has changed. Adam is on the Leaky Road, going away from the source, farther and farther away from the source. Christ is turning back, has taken the turn.The Christian word conversion means exactly that: turning back. Conversion does not mean a Hindu becoming a Christian, or a Mohammedan becoming a Christian. Conversion means Adam becoming Christ. It has nothing to do with Christianity; it has something to do with Christhood itself. By becoming a Christian you don’t become converted, nothing changes. You were a Hindu and you were rushing into the world of desires, then you become a Christian and you go on rushing into the same world – just the label on you changes. Now you are no longer called a Hindu, you are called a Christian. Or you can be a Christian and can get converted to being a Hindu; that is not conversion either.Conversion means a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn: Adam turning back, the way back.Buddhists have an even more beautiful word for it. It is called paravritti – that exactly means about-turn and exactly a hundred and eighty degrees. Less than that won’t do. If you miss by even a single degree you will still be rushing into the world.That is the meaning of my sannyas too: the way back.And the rest means our short human life, so short that rain or wind, grief or passion, are of little moment or meaning.Now listen to the doka: A rest on the way back from the Leaky Road To the Never-leaking Road; if it rains, let it rain; if it blows, let it blow.Our human life is so momentary. There is no point in getting disturbed about it. Somebody has insulted you and you make so much fuss – and it is so momentary! It is not going to stay; all is going to be lost. Or somebody has succeeded and goes mad. Or somebody has accumulated much wealth and cannot walk on the earth, he starts flying.In the ancient days in Rome there was a tradition, a beautiful tradition. It should be followed in every country. Whenever a Roman conqueror would come back after he had conquered new countries, had been a great soldier, and was coming home with great success and victory, the masses, the crowds, the mob, would shout in joy. He was greeted like a god. The tradition was that a servant used to walk just behind him and continuously remind him: “Don’t be deceived by the people. Don’t be deceived, sir, by the people! Don’t be deceived by the fools, otherwise you will go mad.” A servant, a slave, had to repeat it continuously just at the back of the conqueror so that he would remember; otherwise it is very easy when success comes to go mad.This should be followed in every country. A person should follow Jimmy Carter, Morarji Desai, just reminding them: “Don’t be deceived by the success. It is momentary; it is just a bubble, a soap bubble. Don’t let it get into your head.”Success gets into the head, and so does failure. It hurts. And all is momentary. This rest is momentary. Just think of the infinities: before your birth there was infinity – beginningless time preceded you – and after your death endless time is going to succeed you. And between these two infinities, what are you, what is your life? A soap bubble, just a moment’s dream.Don’t allow it to affect you. If one can keep aware, and is not affected by success and failure, praise and insult, enemies and friends, then one is moving back to the original source. One becomes a witness.A rest on the way back from the Leaky Road to the Never-leaking Road; if it rains, let it rain; if it blows, let it blow. Don’t get disturbed about it. Ponder over it, contemplate over it. It is a great secret, one of the great secrets of buddhas: just to be alert that all is trivial, momentary, a midsummer dream. It is going, it is already going, you cannot hold on to it. There is no need to cling to it; there is no need to push it. It is going of its own accord, good or bad, whatsoever it is, is going. All is going; the river is flowing. Remain undisturbed, detached, just a witness. This is meditation.My self of long ago,In nature non-existent;Nowhere to go when dead,Nothing at all.Again, try to understand each word: My self of long ago… Before birth we were non-existent, and we will be so again after death. No self was there, and no self is going to be there after death.Buddha insists very much on this vision of no-self, because all our desires hang around the concept of the self: “I am.” If I am, then a thousand and one desires will arise. If I am not, then how can desires arise out of nothingness?This is one of the greatest contributions of Buddha to the world. As far as the idea of no-self is concerned, he has surpassed all other masters – Krishna and Christ and Zarathustra and Lao Tzu – he has surpassed all.This is one of the most fundamental meditations. If it can settle in you that “I am not,” then suddenly the world disappears. To know that “I am not” is to know that there is no need to do anything, to be anything, to possess anything, to attain anything. When there is no self, ambition is irrelevant. If there is a self, then ambition is relevant.That’s why all other religions except Buddhism have fallen in a trap. The trap is: they try not to desire the things of this world, but then they start desiring things of the other world. But it is the same – desire is the same. It does not matter what you desire. It makes no difference at all what the object of your desire is, desire is the same.You desire money or you desire meditation: desire is the same. Only the object has changed. And the object is not the problem; the problem is the desire itself, desiring itself. Somebody desires long life here, a beautiful body here, success, name, fame; somebody else desires eternal life with God in paradise. What is the difference? The only difference seems to be this: that the first man is not as greedy as the second; the second is greedier.That’s why your so-called spiritual people are very greedy people. It is not just an accident that India is very greedy – it is so spiritual! That spirituality creates new greed. In fact, the so-called mahatmas go on teaching people: “Don’t desire things of this world because they are momentary; desire things of the other world, because they are eternal.” And this they call renunciation? Is this renunciation? This is getting more desirous. This is asking for eternal gratification.Worldly people are simple people; they are satisfied with momentary desires. And the otherworldly seem to be absolutely greedy: they are not satisfied with this world; they need another world where eternal pleasure exists, where beauty never fades, where life is always young, where one lives and lives and never becomes old.This is greed; this is pure greed transplanted into another world. This is greedier than the first. Avoid this so-called spiritual materialism; it is utterly materialistic. It does not change your life; it can’t change it. It simply nourishes your old mind. It poisons you even more.Buddha says the basic meditation is to see that “I was not and I will not be, so how can I be in the middle of two nothingnesses? If I was not before and I will not be again after death, then how can I be right now?” One cannot exist between two nothingnesses; then this too must be a nothingness – we have not seen it rightly.My self of long ago… Before birth we were non-existent, no-self, and we shall be so after death again. Therefore we are in this condition at the present moment, without a thing in the world we can call our own, not even our own selves. This goes to the deepest core of the problem.Don’t dispossess things. Dispossess your self, and then things are automatically dispossessed. If I am not, then how can the house belong to me? If I am not, then how can I possess a woman or a man? If I am not, then how can I possess a child? If I am not, then how is possession possible? There is nobody to possess. See the difference.Other religions have said: “Renounce possessions!” Buddha says: “Renounce the possessor.” Certainly, it goes infinitely deeper. You can renounce the possessions, but the possessor remains, and with the possessor the blueprint to possess again – the possessor will bring his possessiveness by the back door.You can see it happening: a man renounces his worldly life, moves to a Himalayan cave, but then he possesses that cave. And if somebody else comes and starts living in the cave, he will throw him out. He will say, “Get out! This is my cave.” And this man has renounced his house, his wife, his children. Now the same possessiveness has entered in a new form. It does not matter what you possess, but if you possess then you remain on the Leaky Road. Dispossessing things does not mean escaping from things. Things are there, they will be everywhere. In the Himalayan cave things will also be there – the mountains, the trees – and you can start possessing them. If you sit under a certain tree, you start possessing it. This is your tree; no other ascetic can come and meditate there; he has to find his own tree. Or you start possessing the temples, the mosques, the churches. Or you start possessing philosophies: Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Or you start possessing scriptures: the Gita, the Koran, the Bible. Or you start possessing concepts of God: “This is my concept of God. Your concept is wrong and my concept is right.”Buddha cuts the root. He says there is nobody to possess. Just see the beauty of it and the tremendous import of it. He simply cuts the roots. He does not cut the branches and the leaves as they will sprout again because the roots remain intact. Cut the root and the whole tree dies. Don’t drop possessions; drop the possessor. And then you can live in the world and there is no problem. Just live in the world and don’t possess because there is nobody to possess.That’s why I don’t tell my sannyasins to renounce the world. I say renounce the ego and live in the world. The world cannot do you any harm. All the harm that happens, happens through the ego. That’s what Buddha calls “self”; it is his word for ego: atta – the self.My self of long ago, in nature non-existent… Buddha worked for six years continuously in search of the self. You have heard the famous teaching of all the ages: Know thyself. Buddha worked hard. For six years he tried from every nook and corner, from every angle, from every possible side, to penetrate into this reality of the self. But he could not find it. Know thyself, and the day you know, you will know there is no self.That day when you know that there is no self, there is utter emptiness inside, absolute emptiness, silence undisturbed, virgin silence. You have known; there has never been anybody, it is just a dream.In the night you dream and you think you have become an emperor. And in the morning you find yourself in the same old bed, and you are not an emperor. But the mind can imagine; the mind is a great imaginative force. The self is mind’s imagination. It does not exist in reality.Those who have penetrated deep into their own being have come to know utter silence. Nobody has been found there. And that is the greatest realization: to find nobody there. Then all problems disappear, because the problem creator has disappeared.My self of long ago, in nature non-existent; nowhere to go when dead, nothing at all.Nothing means no thing at all.There is a famous Zen anecdote…A man came to a Zen master and asked, “Does a dog have buddha-nature?”Now you cannot ask such a question anywhere else. If you ask a Christian, “Does a dog have christ-nature?” he will be absolutely enraged. You are insulting Christ, the only begotten son of God. This is not only profane, this is sacrilegious. But in Buddhism you can ask; there is no problem about it.The disciple asked the master, “Has a dog the same nature as Buddha?”And the master’s answer is very strange and very puzzling, and down the centuries people have been contemplating it; it has become a koan to meditate over.The master said, “Mu.” Mu means nothing. Now the problem is: what does he mean by saying mu? It can also mean no; it can mean nothing, it can mean no. Is he saying that the dog has not the same nature as Buddha? That is not possible from a Zen master. Then what does he mean by mu? He does not mean no; he means nothing. He is saying: “Buddha is nothing, so is the dog.” He is saying yes by saying no.He is saying: “Yes, the dog has the same nature as Buddha, but Buddha is nothing! So is a dog. There is no self, either in Buddha or in a dog. There is nobody there inside. Buddha is empty and so is the dog. Only the forms are different, dreams are different. The dog is dreaming it is a dog, that’s all. You are dreaming you are a man, somebody is dreaming he is a tree. But inside there is nobody, just pure silence.”This silence is samadhi. When you start having a glimpse of this silence, your life starts changing. Then you live for the first time in a poetic way. Then death creates no fear in you. Then nothing can disturb you or distract you.The master’s reply, mu, really means yes. But he didn’t say yes for a certain reason. The yes would have been misunderstood, the man would have thought that the dog also has the same self as the Buddha; that’s why he didn’t use the word yes. He said no. But he does not mean that the dog has not the same nature. He means both have nothingness inside. The form differs.For a Buddhist, and particularly a Zen Buddhist, there is nothing profane and nothing sacred.Listen to this story…It was a solemn, dignified gathering of deeply concerned people assembled to learn the Truth. They had gathered, they believed, to hear the final secrets of the universe. At long last they were face to face with the Absolute, the Ultimate, finally, they thought, to hear the gems of wisdom for which prince and pauper have struggled since the beginning of time.Imagine the dignity of it all, the solemnity, the air of expectancy that filled the room as the master entered. An electrified hush descended. The room became a cathedral. Every eye was upon the master and there were those who thought they saw his aura. There were those who saw angels hovering near.The master sat down and prepared to speak. The audience leaned forward and with bated breath prepared to catch his every word. Finally, after what seemed an interminable time, The Master of Righteousness opened his mouth and taught them saying, “Today, this very moment, I am wearing fuzzy underwear.” And that was all that he taught that day.Zen has a totally different approach toward life. It does not believe in the sacred, it does not believe in the profane. It does not believe in anything, it is all one. Dog and God, it is all one. Buddha, no Buddha, it is all one. The ignorant, the wise, it is all one. The sinner and saint, it is all one.When asked, he answered;No question, no answer;Then master DarumaMust have hadNothing in his mind.Try to go into each word. Mind in its own purity is just a mirror, an empty mirror. It contains nothing. It is a mirror because it is empty, because only emptiness can mirror. If something is contained already, then your reflection will not be the true reflection. When the mirror is absolutely empty, it is the most perfect mirror.In meditation the mind becomes more and more mirrorlike. Slowly, slowly all the dust of the thoughts disappears, all the clouds of desire disappear – and then there is nothing left, anatta, no-self, nothingness, mu. Mind in its purity is just a mirror, undisturbed by passion and unclouded by thought. Everything appears as it is.Daruma – Bodhidharma’s Japanese name – answered when questioned, ate when he was hungry, slept when he was tired. The true life of a sage: nothing in the mind, nirvana.Listen: When asked, he answered… The enlightened person has no readymade answer. He has no thought ready to throw into your heads. He responds; his utterances are his responses. He is a mirror. The disciple comes in front of the master and he responds; he responds to the needs of the disciple. He has no fixed idea; he is not concerned with dishing something out and giving it to everybody. He simply waits there like a mirror. You come and you see your face.Hence the contradictions of a master. A teacher is consistent; a master is bound to be contradictory, inconsistent. A mirror has to be inconsistent: one moment it is mirroring a cat; another moment it is mirroring a man; another moment it is mirroring tears, another moment, laughter. How can a mirror be consistent? You cannot tell the mirror: “Be consistent! Yesterday I saw tears in you, today I am seeing laughter. Yesterday I looked in you and you were sad, and today you look very happy. Yesterday I saw you were in deep meditation; today I see you are dancing and singing. This is inconsistent!”Only a photograph can be consistent, not a mirror. The photograph is a photograph. If there are tears, they will remain there forever. The photograph is dead; it does not respond. If a monkey comes, the photograph will go on showing its tears. If a sage comes it will be the same. But remember, with a master it is different. If you are a monkey, then the master will show your face; then his answer will be in response to your being. He responds; he does not reply, he responds.When asked, he answered; no question, no answer… That’s why it happened that Kabir and Farid, two great Indian masters, met and sat together for two days continuously and not a single word was exchanged. Two mirrors reflecting each other, what can they reflect? Just put two mirrors in front of each other: one mirror will mirror the other mirror, and so on and so forth, mirror and mirror and mirror, but nothing will be mirrored. There is nothing.Two silences sat together, Farid and Kabir, looked into each other. There was no question, hence there was no answer. There was nobody, hence there was no response.When asked, he answered; no question, no answer; then master Daruma must have had nothing in his mind. Yes, that is the mind of a master: he has nothing in his mind. To have something in the mind is to remain unenlightened. To have nothing in the mind is to become enlightened. Even if you have enlightenment in your mind, then you are not yet enlightened. To have nothing in the mind is to be enlightened, remember.Let me repeat it: If you have the idea that you have become enlightened, then you are not yet enlightened. Even this idea is enough to keep you tethered to the road which leaks; even this idea is enough to keep you tethered to the world of desires.Just the other day, somebody wrote me a letter. He thinks he has become enlightened, so he wants to come and shake hands with me. Shaking hands is perfectly good, but the very idea that you have become enlightened will keep you unenlightened. Wait. When you are ready, I will shake hands with you. Just wait, have a little patience. Let all ideas disappear, even the idea of enlightenment.The day you come like a mirror, I will shake my being with your being – why hands? Hands won’t do.…then master Daruma must have had nothing in his mind. Ordinarily, we are walking bundles of solutions to problems that no longer exist. Everybody is so. You are carrying thousands of solutions for problems which are no longer existent, and you call it knowledge. It is hindering your capacity to know. It is not knowledge.Drop all the solutions that you are carrying. Drop all the answers that you are carrying. Just remain silent. And whenever a question arises, out of that silence you will hear the answer – and that will be the answer. It will not come from you, it will not come from scriptures, it will not come from anywhere. It will come from nowhere and it will come from nobody; it will come from your innermost nothingness.The other religions call that nothingness God. Buddha often emphasizes the word nothingness, and significantly so, meaningfully so because once you use the word God, people start getting attached to it. Then they have some idea; they ask what God looks like. You cannot ask what nothingness looks like, can you? Once you have the word God, you start asking: “How to make the image? How to create a temple? How to worship? How to pray? What name to give to him?” And then there are many names and many images, and then the fight ensues.That’s why Buddha emphasizes the word nothingness so much, because it is really beautiful. It does not allow any games to be played with it. It does not allow itself to be corrupted by you. But if you understand rightly, nothingness means God, God means nothingness.Our mind –Without end,Without beginning,Though it is born, though it dies –The essence of emptiness!Mind has to be understood in two ways. One: Mind with a capital M. That is the universal Mind, the cosmic Mind, the Mind of the whole, the whole itself, the consciousness that pervades existence. It is a conscious existence; it is alive, alive to the very core. Everything is alive. You may know it, you may not know it. It may not be tangible to you, it may not be visible to you, but everything is alive. Only life exists.And death is a myth. Death is an illusion. So is unconsciousness. Even the rock is not unconscious – it is conscious in its own way. It may not be available to us, it may not be possible for us to know whether it is conscious or not, because there are millions of ways of being conscious; man’s way is not the only way: trees are conscious in their own way, and birds in their own, and animals and the rocks.Consciousness can be expressed in as many ways as possible. This universe has infinities of every expression.Mind with a capital M is the cosmic Mind that has to be attained. That’s what Buddha calls “nothing,” that’s what he calls mirror-like emptiness.Then there is another mind that we go on talking about with a lower case m, the small mind. Then, my mind is different, your mind is different; man’s mind is different from the trees’ minds, and the trees’ minds are different from the rocks’ minds. Then there are differences and each mind has its own limitation; it is tiny.One has to disappear from the tiny to the infinite. The lower case m has to be dissolved into the capital M.The lower case m, the small mind, is part of time, and the capital M, the cosmic Mind, is eternity. The lower case m is also part of the capital M. Eternity penetrates into time just as the moon is reflected in the lake – not really there, but reflected.Our small minds are only reflections of the great Mind. When the full moon rises millions of lakes on the earth will reflect it, and the seas and the rivers and the ponds. Wherever there is some water it will be reflected. But the moon is one and reflections are millions, so are our small minds. The Mind is one – you can call it the Buddha Mind, you can call it the Mind of the whole, the cosmic Mind, or the Mind called God. These are just different names for the same reality.This small mind has a beginning and an end. That great Mind has no beginning, no end.Now listen to the words: Our mind – without end, without beginning, though it is born, though it dies – the essence of emptiness!A very contradictory statement. On one side Ikkyu says: Our mind – without end, without beginning…. He is talking about the Mind with a capital M.Then he says: Though it is born, though it dies… Now he is talking about the lower case m mind, the small mind. The small mind is born and dies; the great Mind continues. The small mind is only a reflection; reflections are born and die.As a reflection you are born and you will die. If you cling too much to the reflection, you will suffer. That’s what suffering is, that’s what hell is. Don’t get too attached, clinging to the reflection; this body is a reflection, this mind is a reflection, this life is a reflection. If you watch it silently, you will be able to see all these reflections are passing, and then you become aware of the mirror in which these reflections are passing.That mirror is eternity. To attain to that mirror is to know what truth is.All the sins committedIn the Three WorldsWill fade and disappearTogether with myself.The Three Worlds are the worlds of the past and the present and the future – the world of time. The sutra is of great revolutionary meaning.All the sins committed in the Three Worlds will fade and disappear together with myself. The moment you know that you are not, then all that you have done in the past, are doing in the present, or will be doing in the future, has also disappeared. When the doer disappears, the doings have disappeared.In the East, people have been too much concerned with karmas, actions. They have been very much afraid because whatever bad things they have done in the past, they have to pay for them, they have to suffer for them.Ikkyu is giving you a great key: Don’t be afraid – because you are not, so you have not done anything. How can you? – because in the first place you are not. He is taking the very ground from underneath your feet. With it, all disappears.All the sins committed in the Three Worlds will fade and disappear together with myself. So the only thing is to go deep into yourself and to see your nothingness. You need not do good things to weigh against the bad things that you have done. You are not to go and do good deeds because whether you do bad or good you remain in the illusion of a doer.See the difference. Ordinary religions teach you to be moral, do good, avoid sins. Remember those Ten Commandments consist of the ordinary religion: Don’t do this, do that. The extraordinary religion says: Disappear as a doer; don’t be bothered about doing good or bad. And who knows what is good and what is bad?In fact, nothing is good and nothing is bad, because existence is one – how can there be two? It is all one. Good turns into bad, bad turns into good; one never knows what is what. Things are changing continuously into each other.You can watch it. You were doing something good, and something bad turns out. A mother tries to protect her child from all the bad things of the world, and just because she is protecting she is forcing the child to go into them – because she is creating the temptation.Remember the old story: God said to Adam not to eat from this tree. He created the temptation. He must have been a good father, he destroyed the child. Just by saying, “Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge,” he created the temptation and the desire, the irresistible desire, to eat from that tree. Now, he wanted to do good, but what happened? The original sin happened.All people who go on doing good prove to be very mischievous. Do-gooders are the most mischievous people in the world. The world has suffered a lot from them. Their intention is good, but their understanding is nil, and just good intention is not going to do anything.Those who understand say it is not a question of good and bad: it is a question of the disappearance of the doer. Or we can say it in this way: to remain as a doer is bad; to disappear as a doer is good. Not to be is virtue; to be is sin.This is Buddha’s understanding. All our doings are just dreams. When one becomes awakened, one simply starts laughing: all the bad, all the good, have been just dreaming.Listen to this story…Once upon a time there lived a working man who detested coffee. His wife did not know this, however. He had never told her. She loved coffee very much and took great delight in packing a thermos of the stuff in his lunch box every morning.He always carried the box and the thermos to work, but being a frugal man brought them home again in the evening, the thermos of coffee still untouched. Then, to save a penny, and because his wife loved coffee as much as he detested it, he poured the java back into the coffee pot when she wasn’t looking. He was excused from the evening coffee on the grounds that it kept him from sleeping well.One night the wife dreamed that her husband was unfaithful to her. The next night she had the same dream. It angered her, but she said nothing. A week or so later, the dream happened a third time, causing her much jealousy and anguish.“It is true,” she thought. “It must be true. The worm is unfaithful to me!” So she set out to avenge herself. This she did by putting a pinch of arsenic in his thermos every morning until she killed herself.At the husband’s trial of acquittal, the judge said, “It is always the same: those who believe the dream murder themselves.”The greatest dream is that “I am” – and that has become our suicide. Now it will look very paradoxical. The idea that “I am” has proved very suicidal. And if you disappear as a self, if you commit that spiritual suicide, for the first time you will start living. For the first time you will be born to eternal life, for the first time you will know something which is not of time.And then there is nothing good, nothing bad. Then a man eats when he is hungry, sleeps when he is tired, answers when a question is raised. Then a person has no idea how to live; then a person lives without mind. Then a person lives with nothingness in him, and this is the goal of Buddhism. To live as nothingness is nirvana.Enough for today.

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Take It Easy Vol 1 01-14Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Take It Easy Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You said yesterday that science and religion are diametrically opposite. In the West there are many schools teaching scientific mysticism, and the paths of Tantra and Yoga are also very systematic. Your literature is also deeply and artistically rational. There seems to exist a bridge between the rational science and the irrational religion.Please comment.The bridge is possible, and the bridge is possible only because they are diametrically opposite. The gap exists, so the gap can be bridged.Opposites can meet, and they can meet only because they are opposites. Opposites attract each other. That’s how the whole life moves, has dynamism. It is dialectical. It is through polar opposites: man/woman, yin/yang, matter/mind, the earth and the sky, this and that. There is a constant bridging, but the bridging is possible only because they are opposites. If they are not opposites there is no need for any bridge.So the first thing to be understood: science and religion are diametrically opposite, but to bridge them is possible. That bridge will not make them the same. In fact, that bridge will make their diametrical opposition louder, clearer.Religion can have a scientific flavor, it can be systematic, but it never becomes science, it remains mysticism. It takes the garb of a science, the methodology, the terminology of a science, but it remains mysticism, it remains poetry.You can translate poetry into prose; the prose can be translated into poetry. Just by translating prose into poetry you will not make it poetry, it will remain prose. And just by translating poetry into prose, it will not become prose, it will remain poetry. Buddha speaks in prose, but what he speaks is poetic.I am not a poet. I speak prose, but what I speak is poetic, its soul is poetic. And it remains poetic.Religion can use scientific systematization – that’s what Tantra and Yoga have done. Science can also use mysticism as a method to inquire into reality, and all the great scientists have used it. But still it remains science; its basic trust is in reason. Religion’s basic trust is not in reason. On the periphery, religion can become scientific, but at the core it remains irrational. And science, on the periphery, can become very, very poetic, but at the core it remains rational.Albert Einstein, or other great scientists, great explorers, are very much like mystics. Their search into reality is almost the same as the search of William Blake into reality. Einstein’s eyes are full of mysticism, but deep down his trust is in reason. Even if he stumbles upon something through his poetic feelings, through his intuition, he will immediately translate it into reason. He will trust it only when it becomes rational.And just the opposite is the case with a mystic: even if he comes to know something about reality which is very rational, he will transform it into the irrational; he will turn and change it into poetry.They are opposites, but they can be bridged, and they are always bridged wherever you can find a contradictory person. But then that man is going to be contradictory: he will speak two languages together and he will speak in contradictions, in paradoxes. All the great scientists are paradoxical, and all the great mystics also.A master, whether of science or of religion, is bound to be paradoxical. He cannot be one-dimensional, he has to be in tune with both the realities – but then he becomes very, very difficult to understand.That is your problem with me: I talk about the irrational, but I talk rationally about the irrational. I am all for the illogical, but my approach? – I slowly, slowly persuade you toward the illogical through logic. I argue for it. My argument for the illogical is bound to be logical, because no argument can be illogical in itself, it has to be logical.The other day I mentioned that in old scriptures it has been said that each temple should have at least one maithun figure on the threshold of the temple, at least one. If it can have many, good. A master is a threshold, a door, an opening. His feet are rooted in the earth and his hands are reaching toward the sky: the master is the bridge between the rational and the irrational. The master is the bridge between religion and science, between love and logic. A master is a threshold; hence he can convince you, he can use all logical argumentation, and yet his goal remains illogical. Once you are convinced, he throws you into the mysterious. It is a quantum leap.I would like to say something more about that ancient tradition. Mediaeval architects’ manuals, all the manuals in India, make it a rule that all temples must bear maithun sculptures on their doorways. Maithun is a Sanskrit word – very pregnant. It does not mean ordinary intercourse, it does not mean an ordinary couple in love, it means unio mystica, it means two persons so deeply dissolved into each other that they are no longer two. It is not just a couple making love; it is love, and the couple has disappeared into it. It is a state of being lost into each other, of oneness.Other architects’ manuals say that the temple has to be a meeting of the sky and the earth. The earth is visible, logical, material. The sky is vague, nebulous, undefined. The temple has to be a place where the defined meets the undefined. The temple has to be a place where the known meets with the unknown.Man is logic; man represents logic, mathematics, systematization, science. Woman is illogic, intuition, feeling, emotion, poetry – vague, undefined and indefinable. The maithun figure represents this meeting of logic and illogic, of mind and heart, of body and soul, of all the pairs of opposites of yin and yang. And when yin and yang meet and merge and become one, a temple is created. Love is the temple. Orgasm – that state of orgasmic flow where you don’t know who you are, man or woman, where you don’t know any identity, all identity is lost, when you are in an utter state of forgetfulness and remembrance, forgetfulness of all that you had known about yourself and remembrance of all that you really are, forgetfulness as an ego and remembrance as a whole – that is the meaning of maithun.Maithun means lovers in a deep state of oneness, in a state of inner marriage, not just the outer marriage. You will be surprised to know that only man can come to that inner marriage, animals can’t. Have you ever seen animals making love? You will never find any ecstasy on their faces, in their eyes, never. Lovemaking is done as a matter of fact, as a biological phenomenon. They do it almost as a drag.Biologists, physiologists, have agreed upon the fact that the female, except in human beings, has not known orgasm at all; no animal female knows orgasm. It is man’s privilege to know orgasm. Orgasm means the inner marriage, even in man.Ninety percent of women in the past have not known orgasm: that means they never knew anything about the inner marriage. Their love remained biological. They were used by nature to reproduce, but there was no meditativeness in it. My own observation is this: because of this phenomenon, all the old religions were against sex because sex represented the animal. But they were not aware that man can transcend sex, and the transcendence can happen only through sex – that man can attain to something inner through the outer. That which is not possible for animals is possible for man. Man can move in an orgasmic state, in an ecstasy where sex becomes irrelevant, is left behind. Bodies become irrelevant, minds become irrelevant. One plunges into the very depth of being – for a single moment, of course, but godliness becomes available.Maithun means: love so deep, so tremendously deep, that a glimpse of godliness becomes available.Maithun means a couple which is no longer a couple, a state of being: a couple from the outside, but from the inside there is only one – it exists all alone. For a moment the duality is surpassed, for a moment the harmony attained, the accord has happened; hence orgasm is so relaxing. And Wilhelm Reich is right: if man can become capable of orgasmic joy, then madness, all kinds of neurosis, psychosis, will disappear from the earth.That is the experience of Tantra, too. But to put a maithun figure on the threshold of a temple took great courage. The very step was of deep revolution. Those people must have been courageous; they declared something by it. They were saying: It is only through love that the polar opposites can be bridged.A master is love. A master is in a state of orgasm – continuously. He is oneness. His duality is gone: he knows that only one exists. In that state, opposites can be bridged. The couple entwined in deep love stands there on the threshold of the temple in a great ecstasy of oneness – lost, merged, one with something deeper and higher than both.You have to fall in love with a master. The master is a threshold to godliness. You have to learn how to merge with the master, how to become one with the master. Only through that will you know the bridging.They stand there possessed by the God called Love. And that’s exactly the relationship between a disciple and a master: possessed by deep, immense love. It is non-sexual, it is non-physical – but it is the same that is attained by two lovers. It is the same, the peak is the same. Two lovers move through physiology, through biology; they go through a long way to reach the peak. A disciple and a master reach to that peak immediately. They don’t go round and about; they don’t pass through the body or the mind. That is the meaning of surrender, or shraddha, or trust. Their love opens the doors of a new perception, a new way of looking at reality. That new way of looking at reality bridges the polar opposites. They are passing from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from prose to poetry, from logic to love, from separation to unity, from the ego to the state of egolessness.Have you not seen it happen? Deep in love, the ego disappears, you cannot find it. Hence I insist: while making love, remember always to look within at least once when you are reaching to the peak. Look in: is there any ego? And that experience can become a satori.Ordinarily you don’t look within. You become so engrossed with the fun of love, with the joy of love, that you forget meditation. If you can remember in that moment when you are dissolving, if you can remember to have a look within, you will never be the same man again. Coming out of love, you will emerge a totally new man. A new being is born. You will have new ways of perception and new ways of seeing reality.Once you have seen that the ego does not exist you cannot gather that ego again. And even if you gather it, you will know it is false, it is pseudo. Now that understanding has penetrated deep into you.Lovers move from time to timelessness. Observe: when the peak happens, time disappears. For one moment, time stops, the whole world stops, all movement stops. That stopping of all movement and time is what we mean by peak, the climax, the orgasm.Time can stop with a master too. And it stops! – it stops every day here for many people. For moments, you are just in tune with me. You are no longer there, I am no more here. We have both disappeared. Something exists which is beyond both. You have entered the temple; you have bridged the polar opposite.Reality cannot really be divided; it cannot be divided into logic and love, into time and eternity, into body and soul, into godliness and matter – it cannot be divided. Although the polar opposites exist, they are not enemies, they are complementaries. They support each other: without the one, the other will not be possible.Can you think of poetry if there is no logic left? Or can you think of logic if no love is left? They look opposite, yet deep down somewhere they support, they feed each other, they strengthen each other.So, bridging is possible, but it always happens through love. It always happens through a threshold. I call the master the threshold.In a moment of love or trust, you are just here and now – the eternal now, the absolute here. You are on the doorway.Remember, doorways are openings. Porphyrus wrote: “A threshold is a sacred thing.” A threshold is that which joins the opposites. What is a temple really? – a threshold. It joins the world with the beyond; it joins the marketplace with meditation. That’s why the temple exists in the marketplace; it has to exist there.That’s why I insist: Don’t renounce the world. Be there! And remaining there, search for the other and you will find it. It is hidden somewhere there in the marketplace. If you listen attentively to the market noise, you will be surprised. There is hidden music in it, great music in it. Just drop liking and disliking. Listen attentively, be in rapport with it. And everywhere in the known you will find the unknown, in the visible the invisible.Porphyrus is right when he says a threshold is a sacred thing. A threshold is the boundary between this and that, between two worlds: ordinary, profane space and the sacred world beyond. The threshold is the point where we pass from one mode of being to another, from one level of consciousness to another, from one reality to another kind of reality, from one life to another kind of life. To enter into a temple is symbolic of entering into one’s own depths, or heights. Existentially they mean the same thing. You can call it depth or you can call it height – they mean the same thing. It is the vertical dimension.There are two dimensions: the horizontal and the vertical. The threshold joins these two dimensions. The ordinary profane life is horizontal; the religious life is vertical. Let me remind you about the Christian cross: it is simply a representation of these two dimensions, the horizontal and the vertical. The cross is a beautiful symbol; the cross is a threshold. The cross is a bridge where the horizontal and the vertical meet, where the ordinary and the extraordinary meet.And obviously, the most natural metaphor for opening and opener can only be the state of lovemaking. Another ancient text says: “Where cows have sported with bulls, accompanied by their young ones, or where beautiful women have dallied with their lovers, that place is an appropriate place for a temple.”A strange statement. Listen again. You will be shocked, particularly Hindus and Christians and Buddhists will be shocked. But this comes from an old Eastern text. It says: “Where cows have sported with bulls, accompanied by their young ones, or where beautiful women have dallied with their lovers, that place is an appropriate site for a temple.”Strange, but tremendously significant. That’s how it should be. A temple has to be a meeting, a bridging.You ask: “You said yesterday that science and religion are diametrically opposite.” Yes, they are diametrically opposite, hence they are attracted toward each other as man and woman. They can fall in love. They are complementaries too. All opposites are complementaries too.“In the West there are many schools teaching scientific mysticism, and the paths of Tantra and Yoga are also very systematic.” True. There is a way to teach scientific mysticism, but mysticism is always going beyond science. That’s what I am doing here! I am teaching you logical illogicalness, scientific mysticism, worldly religiousness.Remember, whenever there is really something happening, there will be the paradox, because the bridge will be needed. But still, mysticism is mysticism. Science can be used as a device, but mysticism never becomes scientific. The ultimate flight remains unscientific, transcendental. And Tantra and Yoga are very systematic – but just on the way they are systematic. Once you have followed them long enough, they push you into the chaos, they push you into the chaos of existence where all systems have to be abandoned – because all systems are tiny, because all systems are small prisons made by the mind.A prison is very systematic. Have you not seen it? Have you ever gone to a prison? Just go to see, it’s the most systematic thing in the world. Your house is not as systematic as the prison; everything is systematic, everything follows certain rules, and absolutely. People get up early in the morning at exactly a certain hour, they take their breakfasts, they take their baths, they move almost like robots. Everything is systematic.In fact, when everything is too systematic you are imprisoned, freedom is crushed. Freedom needs chaos.A strange thing has been observed by psychologists. The strange thing is that in the army people are taught to be very systematic and their goal is to create war, their goal is to create chaos, their goal is death, to kill and to be killed. Their goal is to destroy; their goal is Hiroshima, Nagasaki. But army people are absolutely systematic. The army lives in order to create disorder. Just see the complementariness: the army lives in order to create disorder.And have you seen another polarity? Artists create order out of disorder, but they live very sloppy, lazy lives, very disorderly lives. If you see how an artist lives, you will start thinking of committing suicide. Just lousy! No system at all. You can go and see Chaitanya Hari – when he goes to sleep, when he gets up – there is no order. And he creates beautiful music, he creates order.Artists create order; hence they have to complement it by disorder in their lives. And army people create disorder; hence they have to complement it by order in their lives. Things move in balance.Buddhas talk very logically because their goal is illogic. And you can see modern physicists talking very illogically: the theory of relativity is illogical, the theory of uncertainty is illogical, non-Euclidean geometry is illogical, higher mathematics is illogical. They talk very illogically and they create logic, their goal is logic. They are moving toward order.You will always find this balance happening. Life cannot be one-sided, otherwise it disappears. It needs day and night, summer and winter, birth and death; it needs love and hate.So I say that science and religion are diametrically opposite, but I am not saying that bridging is not possible. Bridging always happens, is continually happening. It happens from the side of science and it happens from the side of religion. And when it happens, you have a great master, a Buddha or an Einstein. Whenever it happens you have the super phenomenon.The second question:Osho,Won't you speak to us of dreams? I have taken to dreaming I am dreaming, or to living through painful situations of the past or future and dealing with them differently. Sometimes I wake in the dead of night or after a short sleep with such a sense of terror and vulnerability, I feel I am five years old. Your presence is in my dream-consciousness without fail, every dream since I've been here. What are all these new developments? I know you play down our dream-life, but aren't they as much part of the “Who am I?” quest?Savita, whether you are dreaming or not dreaming, you are dreaming. Whether you are dreaming with closed eyes or open eyes makes no difference. You dream in the night, you dream in the day. There are night dreams and there are daydreams. You simply go on changing from one dream to another dream, one kind of dream to another kind of dream.Listen. You dream in the night, and then abruptly the sleep is broken, then you feel horror – that too is a dream. Now you are dreaming of horror, of vulnerability, fear. Then you fall asleep again and you start dreaming. And in the morning you open your eyes and you start dreaming with open eyes. Dreams are a continuum. Your mind is made of dreams, your mind consists of dreams.Remember the one who is seeing the dreams. Awake to that witness. Don’t pay much attention to the dreams. That is where the East and West differ. The Western psychology is too much addicted to dreams, dream analysis; one has to go deep into dreams.Savita is a therapist, a psychoanalyst, so obviously she must be feeling offended when I put down or play down your dream-life. Don’t feel offended; this is a totally different approach. By analyzing dreams you will never come to end them. By analyzing dreams you may become a little more understanding about dreams, but awareness is not going to happen through it. By analyzing dreams you may even start dreaming better dreams, but better dreams are just dreams all the same. By analyzing dreams you may start feeling your motivations hidden behind the dreams, your repressed desires, your ambitions, but you will never come to know who you are. How can one come to know who one is by analyzing dreams? Dreams are objects and you are the subject. You have to take a paravritti – a conversion; you have to move a hundred and eighty degrees. You have to stop paying attention to the dreams; you have to pay attention to the one who has been dreaming.The East is concerned with the witness, not with what it witnesses. You may be seeing a real tree or you may be seeing a dream tree – it makes no difference. For the Eastern approach it makes no difference whether the tree is real or just a dream tree. In both cases it is the object, in both cases you are not it. So what difference does it make whether it is there really or you have just imagined it?The only thing that makes any difference is the one, the mirror, in which the tree is reflected. True or untrue, that is irrelevant, but the pool of pure water in you where it is reflected – pay attention, emphasize the witness, go deeper into the witness.And that’s my purpose here: in order to help you, not to analyze your dreams. That you can do in the West in a far more scientific way. The West has become very, very skillful in analyzing dreams. But the East was never worried because the East says all is dream so what is the point of analyzing?And there is no end. If you go on analyzing and the source that creates the dreams is there, it will go on creating new dreams. They will be coming and coming and coming. That’s why nobody is ever totally psychoanalyzed; there exists not a single person on the earth who is really and totally psychoanalyzed, because the goal of total psychoanalysis is that dreams should disappear. That does not happen. It didn’t happen even to Freud or Jung. They continued to dream. That means they continued to remain suppressed; that means they continued to remain the same as they were before. Dreams were still coming, because the source had not been radically changed.The projector is working and you go on analyzing the film on the screen, and you go on thinking how to analyze it. And then you differ, your analysis differs; and then there are schools of psychoanalysis. Freud says something, Jung says another thing, Adler another, and so on and so forth. Now there are as many psychoanalyses as there are psychoanalysts, and everybody has his own opinion, and nobody can really be refuted, because all is dream work.Whatsoever you say, if you can say it loudly, convincingly, with authority, with argument, with logic, it appeals to people, it must be true. And they all seem to be true. All those interpretations seem to be true, because no interpretation is of any worth. All interpretations are wrong.The East has a totally different kind of approach: witness, don’t analyze. In analysis you become too much interested, focused, on the dream. Forget the dream: just look at the watcher. That watcher is constant. In the night it sees dreams; in the day it sees dreams. First you see the dream, and then you are awakened abruptly, and you see horror. Then you fall asleep again and you may see a sweet dream, a beautiful dream, a happy dream – or a nightmare again – and this goes on and on. One thing is constant: the seer, the watcher, the witness.Turn upon the witness. And that’s what I am trying to say to you: while you are dreaming in the day and when you are dreaming in the night.Only one good point about dreams is that you say: “Your presence is in my dream-consciousness without fail, every dream since I have been here.”That’s good. At least one thing is constantly there which will help you to fall upon yourself. Emphasize that presence.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, “Make one thing constant in your dreams and sooner or later you will get rid of dreams.” And he used to give small things, small techniques, devices – and they worked. To one person he said, “Whenever you dream, just in the dream see that you are raising your hands above your head. And in the daytime also, practice this many times so you become very accustomed and habituated to it, so it becomes almost mechanical, so even in dreams you can raise your hand above your head.” And the man said, “What will happen?”Gurdjieff said, When you have become capable, come and tell me.”Three months passed and the man continued, day in, day out, walking, eating, whenever he would remember, he would raise his hand, and would remember also, “Tonight I am going to raise my hand in the dream.”And then, after three months, it happened: one night he was dreaming that he was walking on a road and there was much traffic and noise, and suddenly he realized, and he raised his hand above his head – and the dream was broken. And in that moment of broken dream, he suddenly saw himself for the first time – the turning, the conversion. It was in the middle of the night. He danced, he was so joyous. And since that day, dreams disappeared.And when dreams disappear, reality comes closer and closer every day. It is the dreams that are hindering you from seeing that which is.When he came in the morning to see Gurdjieff, before he had said anything, Gurdjieff said, “So it has happened – because I see your eyes have a different shine, a different light. They have clarity. That dream stuff that used to move behind your eyes is no longer there. So it has happened! So you were capable of raising the hand! Now don’t be worried: whenever it comes, raise the hand again.“Every possibility is that it may not come again, because at least you have done one thing consciously. Even in your dream, just a small thing of raising your hand, you remembered a small thing. It was very small, but remembrance is great. You remembered, even in your dream. So the witness has reached there – now no need to worry.”I would like to say to Savita: Invite me more and more in your dreams. Let me also enjoy your dreams. Go every night with a very conscious feeling that I will be there in your dreams. Make it an alert effort, deliberate, and one day it is going to happen. It will not be just a dreamlike phenomenon. I will be really as present as I am now, or even more, because right now I can see there are dreams in Savita’s eyes. If in your dream you can see me as I am even for a single moment, all dreaming will disappear.Analysis has no point. Dreams have to go. When dreams are gone, reality comes in. By one door, dreams go out; from another door the reality enters in. And reality is silent, quiet, peaceful, blissful…The third question:Osho,Why does it feel like you are dying when you are in love? Is falling in love a suicidal desire? Or just a self-destructive instinct like the lemmings' march to the sea or a moth's flight into a flame? It's weird.Love is death, but the one who dies in love has never really existed. It is the unreal self, the idea of an ego, that dies.So love is death, it is suicide, it is dangerous. That’s why millions of people have decided against love. They live a loveless life. They have decided in favor of the ego – but ego is false. And you can go on clinging to the false and the false will never become real. So the life of an egoist always remains in insecurity. How can you make something unreal, real? It is always disappearing. You have to cling to it, you have to constantly create it again and again. It is a self-deception. And it creates misery.Misery is the function of the unreal. The real is blissful – sat-chit-anand. The truth is blissful, and the truth is awareness. Sat means truth, chit means consciousness, anand means bliss. These three things are the qualities of truth. It is so, it is alert, and it is blissful.Unreality is misery. Hell is that which does not exist but you create, and heaven is that which exists but you don’t accept. Paradise is where you really are, but you are not courageous enough to move into it, and hell is your private creation. But because it is your creation, you cling to it.Man has never left existence. He lives in existence, but still suffers because he creates a small hell around himself. Heaven need not be created, it is already there; you have to relax and enjoy it. Hell has to be created.Take life in a relaxed mood. There is no need to create anything, and there is no need to protect anything, and there is no need to cling to anything. That which is, will remain whether you cling to it or not; that which is not, cannot remain whether you cling to it or not. That which is not, is not, and that which is, is.You ask: “Why does it feel like you are dying when you are in love?”Because the ego, the unreal, dies. Love opens the door to the real. Love is the threshold of the temple. Love opens you toward godliness. It brings great joy, but simultaneously it brings great fear: your ego is disappearing. And you have invested so much in the ego. You have lived for it; you have been taught and conditioned for it. Your parents, your priests, your politicians, your education, your school, college, university, they have all been creating your ego. They have been creating ambition – they are factories to create ambition – and one day you find yourself crippled by your own ambitions, caged by your own ego. You suffer much, but your whole life you have been taught that this is valuable, so you cling to it; you suffer and you cling to it. And the more you cling, the more you suffer.There are moments when godliness comes and knocks at your door. That’s what love is – godliness knocking at your door. Maybe through a woman, through a man, through a child, through a love, through a flower, through sunset, sunrise; godliness can knock in millions of ways. But wherever godliness knocks, you become afraid. The priest, the politician, the parent – the created ego – is at stake. It starts feeling that it is dying. You pull back. You hold back. You close your eyes, you close your ears; you don’t hear the knock. You disappear back into your hole. You close your doors.Love feels like death. It is. And those who want to be really blissful have to go through that death, because the resurrection is possible only through death.Jesus is right when he says you will have to carry your cross on your shoulders. You will have to die. He says, “Unless you are reborn, you will not see my kingdom, you will not see what I am teaching to you.” And he says that love is God. He is right because love is the threshold.Die in love. It is far more beautiful than to live in ego. It is far truer than to live in the ego. Life in the ego is death in love. Death in the ego is life in love. Remember: when you choose ego, you are choosing real death – because it is death in love. And when you choose love you are only choosing unreal death, because to die in ego you are not losing anything – you had nothing from the very beginning.That is the whole emphasis of Ikkyu’s doka, yesterday. You are not, so why be afraid? Who is going to die? There is nobody to die! To whom are you clinging? Whom do you want to make safe? Whom do you want to protect and armor? There is nobody. There is only emptiness, emptiness – utter emptiness.Listen to Ikkyu’s song. Accept this emptiness and the fear will disappear. Be a moth when you find the flame of love burning bright – be a moth! Jump into it – and you will lose the false and you will gain the real, you will lose dreams and you will gain the ultimate, you will lose something which was not there and you will gain something which has always been there.The fourth question:Osho,Why is the relationship between an Indian man and a Western woman not successful? It always breaks at some point. What is the real problem which comes in, which stops the relationship from growing mature? Please say something.All relationships break at some point; they have to break. You cannot make your house on the threshold, you should not. Love is a door; pass through it. Pass, certainly, don’t avoid it. If you avoid it you will miss the deity in the temple. But you should not make your house on the threshold, at the door. Don’t remain there.The door is just an opening. You have to move.Love relationship is a must, but not the destiny, not the end – only the beginning. I am all for love. But remember: love is something that has to be transcended, too.There are two types of people and both become neurotic. One type is those who are much afraid of love because they are afraid of dying. They cling to the ego. They avoid love. They may call it religion, but it can’t be religion – it is just sheer ego and nothing else. That’s why the monks – the Catholic, the Hindu, the Buddhist – have such strong egos, subtle but very strong, hidden but very strong. The humbleness is only superficial, is just a sugar coating on the poisonous ego. They have pious egos, but egos are there. And a pious ego is more dangerous than an ordinary ego – because the ordinary ego is apparent, you can’t hide it, but the pious ego is deeply hidden and you can carry it in subtle ways for ever and ever.So this creates one kind of neurosis: people avoid love and they think they are going toward godliness. You can’t go because you have avoided the door itself.Then there is another kind of neurosis: seeing the beauty of love, taking the courage to jump into it, dissolving the ego for a few moments – because in love it can only be for a few moments. The ecstasy of love cannot be eternal, because it is ecstasy between two parts meeting, dissolving into each other. Unless you dissolve with the whole you cannot have eternal ecstasy. Dissolving with the part – with a man, with a woman – you will be dissolving only in a very small drop of existence. It can’t be oceanic. Yes, for a moment you will have the taste, and then the taste disappears. This creates another kind of neurosis: people cling to love affairs. If love dies with one woman, they change to another woman, another man; they go on and on. They start living on the threshold. They have forgotten the deity, they have forgotten about the temple. Love has to be transcended into prayerfulness.Never be in the neurosis of the first kind, and never cling to the second kind of neurosis. Go on, move on.A great emperor, Akbar, created a small, beautiful capital in India. It was never used because before it was completed Akbar died. So his capital was never transferred to it from Delhi. The place’s name is Fatehpur Sikri. It is one of the most beautiful towns ever planned – and never used by any man.Every small detail was looked into. Great architects of those days were consulted, great masters were consulted. Akbar asked all the great teachers in India of those days to give him a small sentence which could be written on the door, the passage. A bridge led to Fatehpur Sikri; a river had to be crossed and Akbar had made a beautiful gate on the bridge. Some Sufi suggested a saying of Jesus, and he loved it. Many sayings were suggested, but he loved that saying and it was written on the door. That saying is beautiful. It doesn’t exist in the Bible; it has come from another oral source. It says: Life is a bridge – pass through it, but don’t make your house on it.Love is also a bridge – pass through it.So no love affair ever succeeds. It gives you hope, gives you great hope, but always ends in frustration. That frustration is inbuilt. Just as the ecstasy is inbuilt, so is the frustration. In the beginning it is ecstasy, in the end it is frustration. That frustration will lead you to go beyond, otherwise how will you go beyond? When will you search for the real deity in the temple if you cling to the door? If you think, “The door is enough and I am contented,” then nobody will ever move.Jesus says man reaches to God through love; love is God. But this is only half of the truth. The other half is: man never reaches through love, man reaches only by transcending love. When both are understood together, you have understood the phenomenon of love. Love is God and love is not God. In the beginning it is, in the end it is not. In the beginning it brings ecstasy, those honeymoon days, and then the frustration, the boredom that every marriage ends in.Just think of two persons sitting together, bored. All has been explored and there is nothing to explore anymore. This is the moment! Either you can start looking for another man, another woman, or you can start looking beyond love.You have lived love, you have seen its beauties and you have seen its uglinesses; you have seen its joy, you have seen its misery; you have seen its heaven and its hell. It is not pure heaven, no; otherwise nobody will ever go toward godliness. It is pure heaven and pure hell – it is both. Hell and heaven are two aspects of it – in the beginning, hope; and in the end, frustration.Passing through that hope and that frustration again and again, one day the understanding arises, “What am I doing on the threshold? I have to go beyond!” And not out of anger but out of understanding one goes beyond.So the first thing: no relationship ever succeeds. And it is fortunate that no relationship ever succeeds, otherwise when will you relate to existence? Why should you think of godliness? Man thinks of godliness because love gives a glimpse. Man thinks of godliness because love gives hope. And man has to think about godliness because love gives frustration. All hopes turn into hopelessness.Without love there will be no search for godliness because man will not have any experience of hope and meaning and significance and grandeur. Love gives you a glimpse of the beyond; don’t cling to it. Take a hint from it and search for something more, go on searching. Use love as a stepping-stone.You ask: “Why is the relationship between an Indian man and a Western woman not successful?” The first thing: no relationship is successful, whether between an Indian man and a Western woman, or a Western man and a Western woman, or an Indian man and an Indian woman. It cannot succeed; its very nature prohibits it. It feels it is succeeding, but it never succeeds. It comes very, very close to success, but it never comes exactly to the point. It takes you on great journeys, but it never supplies the goal. It keeps your hope aflame, but just hope. But good, at least it takes you to the threshold. One step has been taken; half the journey is complete, but half the journey still remains.And the second thing: it is more difficult between an Indian man and a Western woman, or a Western man and an Indian woman. The problem is not between man and woman, the problem is between Eastern and Western. Man and woman are just man and woman; East and West make no difference. But the minds are there. Those minds create trouble.The Indian has one kind of mind and the West has evolved a different kind of mind. So when an Indian man is with a Western woman, or vice versa, there is no communication. They don’t speak the same language. It is not only that they don’t speak the same language – English, German or French or Italian – they may speak the same language, still they don’t speak the same language, because they have different kinds of minds. Their expectations are different, their conditioning is different. The Indian man says one thing and the Western woman understands another thing. The woman says one thing and the Indian man understands something else. Unless they drop the minds, unless they become pure man and woman, there will be great difficulty.And Vedant Bharti must be asking this question out of his own experience. One night, eavesdropping on Vedant Bharti, I heard this dialogue:Vedant Bharti: “Oh, my gorgeous, sweetest darling! Am I the first man you’ve ever been to bed with?”And the American girl: “Of course you are! Why do all you Indians always ask the same stupid question?”Different minds… The Indian mind is very male chauvinistic. The Western woman is now a liberated woman; she lives in a totally different kind of milieu. She is not the woman you have lived with for centuries in India. It cannot be possible now to possess a Western woman; she is no longer your property, she is as free as you are.In India, the woman has been taken as property; man can possess her. Not only ordinary men, even great men in India think of a woman as a possession.You may have heard the famous story of the Mahabharata. Yudhishthira, one of the most famous men in Indian history, has been thought to be very religious; he is known as dharmaraj, a religious king, or a king of religion. But once, when playing, gambling, he staked his wife. He gambled her, because it was thought that your wife is your property. He staked his kingdom, he staked his treasury, he staked everything; then only the wife was left – he staked the wife, too.And still in India he is thought to be one of the greatest religious men. What kind of religious man is this? Just to think of staking a live person, gambling! But in India the woman has been thought of as property; you are the possessor, and the whole and sole possessor.In the West there is no longer slavery , it has disappeared. It is good. It has to disappear from India too. Nobody can possess anybody, man or woman. No person can be possessed; no person can be reduced to property. This is ugly, this is sin. What can be a greater sin than this?You can love a person, but you cannot possess. The love that possesses is not love – it is ego.In India, the man is very male chauvinistic. And the Indian woman has not yet asserted her freedom. There exists nothing like the women’s lib movement in India. The woman still goes on living in the same way.So when an Indian falls in love with a Western woman, the problem arises: he starts possessing. And the Indian mind is very much obsessed with sex; that too creates a problem. You will be surprised when I say the Indian mind is very much obsessed with sex, because you think India is very religious and moral. Yes, it is, but its morality and religion are all so much based on repression that deep down is the obsession with sex.If his woman just holds somebody else’s hands, the husband is mad. Just holding hands! Holding hands can be just a simple gesture of friendship. There is no need to give any sexual color to it, but the Indian man cannot think that. If his woman is holding hands with somebody else, that means she is sexually relating to somebody else. He will be in a rage. He will not be able to sleep. He would like to kill the man or the woman or himself. Something has gone very wrong.In the West, things are looked at in a different way. One can hold somebody’s hand just as a sheer gesture of friendship, of lovingness, of sharing. It need not have any sexual overtone to it. Or, even if it has, it is nobody else’s business. It is the person’s freedom. A person has to decide his life, how to live, with whom to live. Nobody else can be the decisive factor, but that creates problems.Just listen to this: sex is not as important in the West as people in the East think it is. Sex has almost become a sharing of energy, a loving play with each other, a fun. It no longer has that seriousness that it used to have in the past. In India it is still very, very serious. And when something is serious, remember, ego must be involved in it. Ego is always serious; it makes everything serious. And whenever something is playful, that simply shows ego is no longer involved in it. And all playfulness is good because it is liberation.When you fall in love… If an Indian falls in love – and here it is going to happen again and again – when an Indian falls in love, he is falling very seriously. That is the trouble. And the woman may not think it serious at all. She may think it is for the moment. You appeal to her – for the moment. There is no commitment in it; there is no tomorrow to it. But the Indian mind is bringing not only tomorrow – the whole life. Or there are people who even think of other lives in the future. Those are hidden sources; you don’t talk about them, but the clash is going to happen.She has fallen in love with you because she enjoys loving; it is a beautiful experience. She has not fallen in love with you in particular, she is in love with love itself. That is the difference. You are not in love with love itself, you are falling in love with this particular woman. It is a life-death problem for you. If tomorrow she starts moving with somebody else, you will be mad. But you misunderstood. It was a gesture of the moment.The American girl had just returned to New York from a holiday in England and was talking to her best friend.“Mabel, I’ve been thinking about Keith ever since I left England. Now I’m back home, and I don’t think I should write to him as our friendship was only slight.”“But, Wendy, you promised to marry him!”“I know, but that was all.”Marriage no longer has that seriousness that it has in the East. Marriage is just a kind of friendship – nothing special about it.If you don’t understand these different minds it is going to be a difficult problem, communication will not be possible. Man in the East has always enjoyed freedom. They say “Boys are boys.” But the woman has not been given any freedom. Now in the West there is no discrimination. Man or woman, both are free. And whatsoever man has been doing, now woman is also doing, it; she has every right to do it.In the East we played a trick. The trick was that we placed woman very high on a great pedestal; we worshipped woman. That was a trick to imprison her. We satisfied her ego through worship. We said: “A woman is a goddess, a woman is purity. A woman is not of this earth. A woman has to be a virgin before marriage and then she has to remain monogamous for the whole of her life.” And we gave so much respect for this, and we conditioned the women so much for this, that they became addicted to the ego, and they remained on the pedestal – imprisoned there, chained there! And man was enjoying all kinds of freedom. Boys are boys…The woman in the West has come down from the pedestal. She says, “Either you also come up on the pedestal or I am coming down. We both have to exist on the same ground.” And that’s how it should be.“I say, old man,” said Clive to the host of the party, “there’s this rather delectable young chick whom I’m getting along with really well, if you know what I mean.”He winked and continued, “And I wondered if I might use your spare bedroom for a short while.”“No, I don’t mind,” replied the host. “But what about your wife?”“Oh, don’t bother about her,” said Clive. “I’ll only be gone a short time and I’m sure she won’t miss me.”“I know she won’t miss you,” stated the host. “It’s only five minutes ago that she borrowed the spare bedroom!”The male ego has never allowed that to happen. It has allowed itself all kinds of freedom; it has not allowed that freedom to the woman. Now things have changed in the West. Man and woman are standing on the same plane as human beings. The woman is no longer a goddess, and she does not pretend and she does not want to pretend.But the Indian mind is very much clouded by the past.If you drop these minds, if you are just a man and a woman, then there is no problem. The problems arise out of the Indian mind and the Chinese mind and the American mind. If you drop the minds then there are no problems; then love can flow and you can grow through it.But still remember: no love can be ultimately satisfying. It can go a long way but it cannot go the whole way. Finally, you have to go beyond it. Learn how to love by loving people, then one day use that learning to fall in love with the whole, with existence itself. Only that day have you come home.The last question:Osho,Nothing good, nothing bad. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose. Take it easy. With this as a reference, please explain the difference between an Epicurean hedonist and a Zen Buddhist.There is none. The Zen Buddhist knows it, the Epicurean hedonist does not know it. That’s the only difference, otherwise there is none.Between the enlightened person and the unenlightened person there is no difference at all, not even a single inch’s difference. The enlightened person knows it, the unenlightened person does not know about it, that’s all. The unenlightened person believes in the distance, in the difference, hence he creates it. The enlightened person has come to know there is no difference. The belief has disappeared.Enough for today.

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Take It Easy Vol 1 01-14Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Take It Easy Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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If at the end of our journeyThere be no final resting place,How can there beA way to lose ourselves in?Sakyamuni,That mischievous creature,Having appeared in the world,Misled, alas,How many people!The mind –What shall we call it?It is the sound of the breezeThat blows through the pinesIn the Indian-ink picture.The mind remainingJust as it was born –Without any prayerIt becomes the Buddha.Tell a lie,And you fall into hell.Then what will happen to BuddhaWho contrivedThings that don’t exist?Truth is not a commodity that is wanted by people. They think they already know it. And even if they think they don’t know it, they think “Who needs it?” Their need is for more magic in their life, for more illusions, for more dreams.The ordinary mind is constantly seeking new dreams, new sensations. In fact, it is afraid of truth. The truth may shatter its magic; it may shatter its desires, it may shatter the beautiful dreams that one has been going through.Truth is not needed by people. The moment a person becomes interested in truth he is no longer part of the mob; he becomes an individual. That very interest creates individuality, otherwise, you remain part of the crowd, you don’t really exist. You start existing only when you start searching for truth. But the search is arduous. It needs courage, it needs intelligence, it needs awareness.Buddhism is no ordinary religion. It is not a religion of the mob, it is the religion of rare individuals. It is not the religion of the mediocre, it is the religion of those who are really intelligent. No other religion is so individualistic. And the paradox is that Buddha says there is no self, the paradox is that Buddha does not believe in individuality – but his religion is that of the individuals.Just to be interested in what Buddha has said is a great adventure, because nobody before or after has been such a radical revolutionary.Today’s sutras of Ikkyu are of immense importance.The first sutra:If at the end of our journeyThere be no final resting place,How can there beA way to lose ourselves in?You will have to meditate over it. Slowly, slowly, the meaning will dawn into your consciousness.First: there is no goal, so nobody can go astray. Let it penetrate your heart, let it pierce you like an arrow. There is no goal in life, so there is no way to miss it. All other religions depend on that; all other religions go on telling people: “You are missing.” That is the meaning of the word sin – to miss, to miss the target. The original Hebrew root means to miss the target; not being able to reach the goal – that is sin.According to Gautam Buddha, there can be no sin. You can’t miss it because there is nothing to miss. The goal does not exist; the goal is imaginary, it is your creation. You create the goal, then you create virtue and sin. Those who are moving toward the goal are virtuous, and those who are not moving toward the goal are sinners. You create the goal and then you divide humanity into saints and sinners. Drop the goal and saints disappear, sinners disappear, divisions disappear, the higher and the lower disappear – and valuation disappears, and then there is no heaven and no hell.See the point of it: just the idea of the goal creates heaven and hell. Those who are moving toward the goal – the obedient people, the good people – they will be rewarded by heaven. And those who are not going toward the goal – the sinners, the bad people – they will be punished by hell. First you create the goal and then everything follows: then heaven and hell are created, then saints and sinners are created, and then fear is created – fear of losing the goal – and then ego is created, the ego of attaining the goal. You have created the whole mess, the whole neurosis of mind.Buddha strikes at the very root: he says there is no goal. Just this simple statement can become a liberating force: there is no goal. Then one is not going anywhere. One is always here; one is never going anywhere. There is nowhere to go, and there is nobody to go. All has always been here, and all has always been available.The goal means the future; then you start becoming more interested in the future, you start forgetting about the present. The goal creates tension, anguish, fear – whether you are going to make it or not – and competition and jealousy and conflict, and the hierarchy. Those who are coming closer to the goal are higher; those who are not coming closer to the goal are lower.The whole Christian church depends on a single phenomenon: disobedience. Buddha says there is nobody to command and there is no way to obey.Life has no goal as such. Life itself is its own goal; the goal is intrinsic. The value of life is in itself; it does not come from anything else. Life is not a means to some end somewhere in the future. Life is its own end, its own means. Life is all. Once you understand this you cannot say life is meaningless.Socrates started a certain idea in the West which has culminated in its logical perfection in Sartre. Socrates says: “A life lived without meaning is not worth living.” Now this is the seed. From Socrates to Sartre this seed has been growing and growing down the ages in the West. Now Sartre says: Because there is no meaning, life is meaningless, not worth living at all.Albert Camus says: “The only problem that man has to solve is the problem of suicide, the only metaphysical problem.” Why? – because he says life is meaningless, so why live? If Socrates is right, that a life is only worth living when it has some meaning, some goal; when it is moving somewhere, reaching somewhere, attaining something, achieving something – only then it is worth living – then if there is nothing to achieve and nowhere to go, life is meaningless. Then why live at all? why not commit suicide?Buddha’s understanding is totally different. He says: Life is its own meaning. You need not create any other meaning – and all created meanings will become just sources of anxiety. The rose blooming in the garden is not blooming for something else, and the river flowing to the ocean is not flowing for something else. The flow is the joy, the flowering is the celebration.You are in love – meditate over the phenomenon. Is the love leading you somewhere? Love is its own delight; it need not have any other goal. It is enough unto itself.When you drop the idea of meaning and goal, a strange phenomenon happens: the idea of meaninglessness also disappears. With the idea of meaning, side by side, parallel, runs another idea: the idea of meaninglessness. Buddha cuts the root. He says there is no meaning to be attained, hence there is no question of feeling meaninglessness. Life in itself is its value.Ikkyu comments on this beautiful existential intuition:If at the end of our journey there is no final resting place, how can there be a way to lose ourselves in? There cannot be. Nobody has ever gone astray. Adam has never left the Garden of Eden. He is still living in the Garden of Eden – but he has become goal-oriented, so he cannot see it. He has started thinking of the future. Because of that thought of the future, his mind is clouded and he cannot see that which is around.When you are too much future-oriented, you start becoming forgetful about the present which is the only reality.These birds chattering, that faraway cuckoo, this moment, this herenow is forgotten when you start thinking in terms of achieving something. When the achieving mind arises, you lose contact with the paradise you are in.This is one of the most liberating approaches: it liberates you right now. Forget all about sin and forget all about saintliness. Both are stupid, both together have destroyed all the joys of humanity. The sinner is feeling guilty, hence his joy is lost. How can you enjoy life if you are continuously feeling guilty, if you are continually going to the church to confess that you have done this wrong and that wrong? And wrong and wrong and wrong…your whole life seems to be made of sins. How can you live joyously?It becomes impossible to delight in life. You become heavy, loaded. Guilt sits on your chest like a rock, it crushes you; it does not allow you to dance. How can you dance? How can guilt dance? How can guilt sing? How can guilt love? How can guilt live? So the one who thinks he is doing something wrong is guilty, burdened, dead before death, has already entered into the grave.And the person who thinks he is a saint cannot live, cannot delight either, because he is afraid if he delights he may lose his saintliness, if he laughs he may fall from his high posture. Laughter is mundane, joy is ordinary; the saint has to be serious, utterly serious; he has to be a long face. He cannot dance, because dance may distract him. He cannot hold the hand of anybody; he may fall in love and attachment may arise. He cannot look at a beautiful woman or a man – who knows, somewhere lurking in the deeper layers of unconsciousness there may be a desire, a lust. He cannot relax, because if you relax, your repressed desires will start surfacing. He has to repress them continuously. A saint is never on a holiday, cannot be, because the holiday means he will have to allow all that he has been controlling. A saint cannot relax, and if you cannot relax, how can you enjoy, how can you celebrate, how can you be grateful?The sinner loses because of guilt and the saint loses because of the ego, the pious ego. Both are losers. And both are parts of the same game, partners in the same game, and the game is created by the goal. Give a goal to humanity and humanity will remain in misery. Goals are misery-creating.The achieving mind, the constantly achieving mind, is the original source of all illness, of all disease.Buddha says: There is nowhere to go – relax. You can’t miss in the first place – relax. How can you miss? There is no target! Wrong has never been done, and right has never been done. There is nothing right, nothing wrong. In fact, there is no doer – how can you do wrong or right? There is no doer – how can you be a sinner or a saint? Deep inside you are just a hollow bamboo and existence flows through you for no other motive than the sheer delight of flowing.Existence flows because it delights in flowing. There is no utilitarian goal.That’s why I say religion can only speak the language of poetry. It cannot speak the language of arithmetic, it cannot speak the language of logic – it can only speak the language of love. Logic is always goal-oriented; arithmetic is always goal-oriented. Watch the roseflowers and the grass leaves and the rivers and the mountains, live with nature, and slowly, slowly you will see nothing is going anywhere. Everything is moving, but not in any particular direction to a particular goal.Movement is delight.That’s what William Blake, one of the great mystic poets of the West, says: Energy is delight.If there is no way to lose yourself, no way to sin, no way to become a saint and no way to feel guilt, the so-called religion disappears, the church becomes meaningless, the dogmas and the rituals lose all significance. Then life becomes religion, and then there is no other religion beyond life, other than life. Then life becomes the only scripture, then life becomes all that is there.Live and know, live and feel, live and be.The religion of Buddha is a religionless religion, and Zen is its culmination, Zen is its fragrance. What was a seed in Buddha has become a fragrance in Zen. Zen is the pure essence of Buddha’s heart. What this man, Gautam Siddhartha, realized, what this man came to see, has been expressed by Zen in its uttermost beauty. It rarely happens.Ordinarily what happens is… Jesus comes and he himself is the greatest expression of what he has experienced. Slowly, slowly, the followers are less intelligent, more mediocre. And by the time the church has become established, it has become part of the mob, of the crowd, of the lowest – the lowest in intelligence, awareness, love. It has lost its glory. It has lost its snow-capped peaks. Now it moves in the dark valleys.With Buddha, a totally different phenomenon happened. He was one of the most fortunate masters of human history, because what he found has been going on higher and higher in its expression, in its poetry, in its rhythm. In Zen it has come to its uttermost flowering. Zen is pure essence, just fragrance. Only those who are really intelligent will be able to understand it; otherwise, the mediocre will feel offended – even mediocre Buddhists feel very offended.Just listen to Ikkyu’s words… The mediocre man cannot find any security in them. He lives through goals – the mediocre sinner and the mediocre saint both live through goals. Only an absolutely intelligent person can live without goals; only intelligence can live herenow. Only intelligence can live in the moment without bringing anything from the outside.Jesus says to look at the lilies of the field. They think not of the morrow, they toil not. And yet even Solomon, attired in all his costly clothes, was not as beautiful as these poor lily-flowers.What is so beautiful in these lily-flowers? Solomon is not so beautiful with all his kingdom and riches. Even he was not attired in such grandeur, in such splendor as these poor lily-flowers. What is so beautiful in these flowers? They live in the moment, they think not of the morrow.A man of absolute intelligence becomes a flower. He lives herenow. He has no past and he has no future. And because he has no past and he has no future, you cannot say that he lives in the present either, because present is just a midway station between the movement that happens from past to future. The present is just a station on the way. When past and future disappear, present also disappears. What is left is timelessness. Now is a timeless moment. It is eternity – and Buddha calls it meditation.If guilt disappears, religion disappears. And guilt disappears if the goal disappears. Guilt is a shadow of the goal.Now, Christianity won’t like it, Islam won’t like it, Hindus won’t like it – they all live on the goal. They will not like this flight to the beyond; they will not like this poetic, aesthetic religion. They have become accustomed to a very ordinary religion, businesslike; it is part of their marketplace.Buddha is very wide-winged. He goes to the farthest sky. He wants you to come to those heights of being, depth of being – and they are all available now. So remember again and again: he is not giving you a goal somewhere in the future, he is simply making you aware that all that you need is available now. Nothing more is needed. Nothing more will ever happen, nothing more can ever happen. If you want to live, all is happening now. Become part of it, dissolve into it. And to help you dissolve into it he emphasizes that there is no self – because if there is a self you cannot dissolve. You can dissolve only if there is no self.With one stroke of his sword, Buddha makes all religions disappear – the priest, the saint, the sinner, the commandments, Adam and Eve, disobedience, the original sin. With one stroke of his sword they all disappear, they are annihilated. Man is left alone – and nature. And because there is no self inside you, there is no division between inside and outside, there is no boundary between outside and inside. Outside is inside, inside is outside.That’s why a strange paradoxical statement has been made by Zen people: Samsara is nirvana – this very world is enlightenment, this very earth is the lotus-land of buddhas, and this very body the Buddha.Second thing: this understanding has not to be practiced. You cannot practice it, because practice implies the goal. This understanding either is there or is not there. There is no methodology to practice it.Practicing means you are again thinking to do something tomorrow, or at least you can do it tomorrow and you can reap the results tomorrow. But the tomorrow has entered somewhere deep in your unconscious, it has come back. No practice can give you this understanding. This understanding is not a question of practice; this understanding is only a question of understanding.So it was not accidental that Buddha and his teaching were destroyed in India, because the mediocre mind could not tolerate him, his insight: it was too much. They could not understand it. They wanted some methodology to be given, to be practiced, and Buddha was talking of pure essence. And he says: Right now is deliverance.And a very strange phenomenon happens: if there is no sin and no saintliness, whatsoever you have been doing starts changing. Not that you change it, in fact, to commit a sin, first it has to be a sin. Go deep into it. The temptation of a sin is because of the denial, the joy of committing it comes because it is a sin. If it is no longer a sin, the very temptation disappears.If Adam had not been told, “Don’t eat from this Tree of Knowledge,” he would have never bothered about it. The very commandment created the temptation.Watch your own mind, how it functions. If it is said about something, “Don’t do it!” a great desire to do it arises. One feels offended by the commandment. One wants to rebel; one wants to assert oneself. One wants to say, “I am myself, and I will do my own thing, and I am not going to listen to anybody.”Each child passes through that stage, and each man and woman is stuck in that stage. Whatsoever your parents have been telling you not to do you have been doing. In fact, by their telling you constantly not to do they are creating temptations. Freedom is very non-tempting, remember it. If the world has freedom to do things, sins will disappear of their own accord; there will be no need to make them disappear.And man has tried down the ages to make them disappear and has not succeeded. But the same stupid, vicious circle continues. Again and again man has tried to force laws on people, and the more those laws are enforced, the more people become rebellious. They have to become rebellious, because that seems to be the only way to protect their freedom, their being. Otherwise, they will be turned and reduced to slaves.Adam did well; otherwise he would have been in paradise, but a slave. What is the point of being in a paradise and a slave? That doesn’t appeal to the dignity of your inner consciousness. It is better to be in hell but to be oneself; it is better to suffer but to be. It is better to suffer and to go to the very end of suffering, but not to lose one’s ground, one’s freedom, one’s dignity.Adam did well. If he had lived in paradise and had not rebelled and had not eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he would have been an impotent person, he would have been spineless, he would have been bloodless, he would have been dead. He did well. He came out; he risked, he was courageous. It was worth losing that paradise for freedom’s sake.And this happens to everybody, and the society has not yet understood this simple phenomenon. People go on prohibiting: “Don’t do this!” “Don’t do that!” And the same commandment creates a great urge to go against it. Sins exist because of the saints.I have heard…A small boy saw a small girl carrying an apple. He told the girl, “Would you like to play a game with me?”The girl asked, “What game?”He said, “Adam and Eve.”The girl said, “Good – what has to be done then?”The boy said, “You tempt me, you say, ‘Don’t eat this apple!’ and I will eat it.”The human mind functions that way.Buddha says: If goals disappear, virtues and sins will automatically disappear. And people will be transformed, because there will be no temptation to do anything, because there will be no commandment. Just see the point of it. Just watch that inside you. What have you been doing?My own observation of thousands of sannyasins is that they are still fighting with their parents, continuously. Their deep problem is their parents have told them not to do something: if they do it, they feel guilty, if they don’t do it, they feel they are not free. Either way they are in a trap, and they go on fighting.A man becomes free only when he is no longer reacting to his parents, when those parental voices have disappeared from consciousness, when they have no more impact this way or that, when they no longer create for or against in you. When you are almost able to ignore them, to be indifferent to them, you have become a mature person.People ask me: “What is the definition of a mature person?” The person who is free of his parents is a mature person.Jesus is right when he says to his disciples that unless you hate your parents, you will not be able to follow me. Now, a man who preaches love saying that looks very absurd – but he is right.My own feeling is that the word hate is a mistranslation from the Hebrew. I don’t know Hebrew, but I know Jesus. That’s why I say it must be a mistranslation. He must have said: Be indifferent, ignore. Don’t be attached anymore. He must have used some term which means “be detached” from your parents, because the word hate cannot be used for many reasons.One thing: if you hate your parents, you are not yet detached, you are not free. Hate means you are against, so they will control you still. They will control in a subtle way: you will go on doing things that they wanted you not to do because you hate them. Your parents were saying, “Don’t smoke,” and you will go on smoking because you hate them. This is the way you show your hatred. But you are attached, you are still connected. You have not been able to disconnect yourself. You are still tethered; you are still holding the apron string of your mother. You are still childish.Neither love nor hate – the parental voice has to disappear. You have to just watch it disappearing.Buddha goes even further. He says: Unless you kill your parents… “Unless you kill your parents” – he does not mean that you have to actually murder them, but deep inside you have to murder them. You have to drop them. You have to forgive and forget. Don’t react to your parents’ voices inside you.And a modern trend in psychoanalysis – transpersonal psychoanalysis, transpersonal psychotherapy – will agree perfectly with Buddha and Jesus. Once you are free from the goal, the guilt, the ego, you suddenly lose all temptation.It happened once…A young man wanted to commit suicide. He was my friend. His parents were very worried. He closed himself in a room; his father came running to me. First they tried to persuade him to come out of the room, but he wouldn’t listen to them, he wouldn’t answer. The whole neighborhood gathered there; they were all trying to persuade him. He stopped talking to them; he became quiet, absolutely quiet. They would knock on the doors and he would not answer. There was great fear: “Has he committed suicide? Is he going to commit? What is happening?” There was a panic.The father came to me and said, “You come – something urgently needs to be done. His life is in danger.”I went there and they were crying. The mother was crying – he was the only child. The father was crying and the friends had gathered. The whole neighborhood was there. I went to the door, I knocked on the door and I said, “Listen, if you really want to commit suicide, this is no way. Why gather such a crowd? Why make so much fuss? I have brought my car. I will take you to a beautiful place on the Narmada River. You can jump from there.”He opened the door; he looked at me with very suspicious eyes. He could not believe it. I said, “You come with me.”He came with me. I asked him, “Would you like to do anything before you commit suicide? Would you like some food – some Italian dish, spaghetti, or something else? Would you like to go to a movie? Would you like to see your girlfriend, or anything? – because this is your last chance. And I have other things to do also, so you just finish soon. I want to be back home by twelve o’clock at night. So eleven we will leave, you take the jump, I say goodbye to you – and it is finished! Why make so much nonsense? And this is not a place to die, in the marketplace.”And the place where I used to live, Jabalpur, has a beautiful spot. If anybody wants to commit suicide, I have never come across a more beautiful spot. For three, four miles, marble hills, just marble hills, and between those hills flows the River Narmada. People say there is no other place in the world so beautiful. The Taj Mahal is nothing compared to it. It is unbelievable. When you go into it on a full-moon night on the boat, you cannot believe your eyes that such a thing can exist.Many times when I took people for the first time, they could not believe it. One of my old teachers went with me, and he started crying and he said, “I would like to touch and feel the rocks, because I cannot believe that they are real. This is more beautiful than any dream I have ever seen.”So I said, “In such a marketplace, trying to die? Come on!”By and by – and he was just listening to me and he was not saying yes or no – he said, “I have nothing to do, but I am very tired. I would like to sleep for a few hours.”I said, “Okay, you sleep in my room. I will also sleep and we can fix the alarm and we will go.”So I fixed the alarm, and I saw he could not sleep. He was turning and tossing, and when the alarm went off he immediately put it off. And I said, “What are you doing?”He said, “I am very tired!”I said, “I am not tired, that is my problem because I will have to come back, too. You will be finished once and forever. These are not questions a dying man has – tired, this and that. What is the point of being tired or rested? Just get into the car!”He became very angry and said, “Are you my friend or my enemy? I don’t want to commit suicide! Why are you forcing me to commit suicide?”I said, “I am not forcing – you wanted to commit. I am simply a friend and helping; I am simply cooperating. If you don’t want to commit, that is your business. But whenever you want to commit, come and I will be here!”And he never came. Not only that, he started avoiding me. I have not seen him for years.Temptation comes out of denial. All those people clamoring and shouting and crying and weeping would have helped him to die; they were tempting him. He was getting more and more into the idea. When so many people are saying no, it is very natural to get tempted.Just watch inside yourself: what have you been doing? Are you still fighting with your parents, going against them, doing something that they never wanted you to do, doing something that they were very angry with? Are you fighting with your priest and your politicians? Then you will remain in their power.Buddha says: Once the denial disappears, the temptation also goes with it. Temptation is a shadow of the denial.So remember, don’t think that Buddha is saying: Go on committing suicide, go on committing sins, go on doing this and that. He is simply saying: Understand it. And through understanding you will simply see that life takes a new turn, a transformation happens. You start living in a totally different way than you have ever lived before. You start living silently, joyously, celebratingly.The second sutra:Sakyamuni,That mischievous creature,Having appeared in the world,Misled, alas,How many people!This can be said only by a Zen master. It is said in utter respect and love. Sakyamuni is the Japanese name of Gautam Buddha. Now, Ikkyu is a follower of Gautam Buddha, in tremendous love with Gautam Buddha, a Buddha himself. Now, very jokingly he says:Sakyamuni, that mischievous creature, having appeared in the world, misled, alas, how many people! What is he saying? Christians can’t understand it, Hindus can’t understand it. This is a totally different language – a language of love, a language of understanding. Buddha will understand; Ikkyu knows that. Others who are buddhas will understand it; Ikkyu knows it. It can be said.He is saying: There is no goal, there is no way, then what were you teaching to people? If there is no goal and nobody can go astray, then what were you doing for forty years continuously, guiding people? You mischievous person, having appeared in the world… In the first place there was no need for you to appear in the world, because Buddhists say – traditional Buddhists, not Zen Buddhists – Buddhists say Buddha appeared in the world to guide people to salvation. Ikkyu is referring to that.Buddhists say Buddha appeared in the world to guide the ignorant toward enlightenment. Ikkyu is saying: “What nonsense! Buddha says there is no goal, there is no enlightenment, there is nowhere to go – why did he appear in the first place? And for forty years teaching people, naturally, is mischievous – because all guidance is misguidance. There is nowhere to go, then what is the point of guiding?”Sakyamuni, that mischievous creature, having appeared in the world, misled, alas, how many people! And millions and millions of people have been following Buddha. They have not understood. If they had understood they would have become buddhas, not followers.And, being with me, you have to remember that. Become enlightened, don’t try to become enlightened. Trying is missing the whole point. I am not here to guide you. I am here to take all guidance away. I am not here to lead you into some other world. I am here to make you aware that there is nowhere to go and there is nobody to lead and nobody to be led.Seeing the point, laughter arises, and that laughter is enlightenment. Seeing the point, one relaxes – that relaxation is enlightenment.Jokingly, Ikkyu is teasing the master. He is saying: Sakyamuni, that mischievous creature, having appeared in the world, misled, alas, how many people! See the beauty of it, the love and the tremendous respect. If some Christian says such a thing about Jesus – “mischievous creature” – all Christians will be very offended. That person will be immediately excommunicated from the church; he will be condemned as a sinner. You can’t call Jesus a mischievous person – because you have never loved him so deeply. You are afraid. Love is not afraid. You have not really respected Jesus. You are afraid if you say such things, your respect will be destroyed. But Ikkyu knows the respect is so deep that it cannot be destroyed by anything. He can burn Buddha on a cold night, and no fear arises. No Christian can do that, no Hindu can do that, no Jaina can do that. That simply shows there is some fear: you are afraid it may be disrespectful. But the fear arises only if you have some disrespect somewhere.Ikkyu is so certain, so absolutely certain, so unhesitatingly certain – that’s why he can burn Buddha, and he can tie Buddha to a pole and can say to him, “Now you cool yourself.”There is no goal, there is no way – and Buddha taught the way? There is no way to be there, but to be there. And, moreover, there is no there either, but only here. All leadership is misleading, and to guide is to misguide. Buddha was not a guide and Buddha was not a leader.Neither am I a guide; I am simply sharing my understanding, not guiding you. If you love me, if you love this moment of sharing, you will see a few things immediately. You need not wait for tomorrow, because all that happens, happens now. The trees are green now, and the birds are singing now, and the rivers are flowing now, and I am speaking now. And you are thinking to get enlightened tomorrow? Now or never!It is a sharing. It is not guidance. There is no way, so there cannot be any guide, and there cannot be any guidebooks, either.The master is one who guides without guiding and leads without leading – who simply shares his understanding, his being, his love; who makes himself available to people who are ready to see, who are ready to open their eyes, who are ready to open their hearts. I am available. If you are also available to me, then something is going to happen this moment. Then something is already happening. In that availability between the master and the disciple, something is immediately transferred, some transformation happens.One cannot get out of illusion, because illusion is that which is not. You have never been in it. See the point and you are out of it – the goose is out! The great illusion is to think that there is illusion.The mind –What shall we call it?It is the sound of the breezeThat blows through the pinesIn the Indian-ink picture.Ikkyu has expressed it perfectly well. What is this mind, this illusion in which we are living? What to call it? The mind is not something and it is not nothing. It is something between the two. It is not real, otherwise you could not get out of it. It is not unreal either, otherwise it would not have been there. Then what is it?The mind – what shall we call it? It is just in between the two; it is unreal and appears as real – it is an appearance. You see…One evening, the sun has set and it is darkening. The night is descending, and on a footpath in a forest you come across a rope. But you don’t see the rope, you see a snake. The rope is there, but the rope has triggered the idea of a snake in you. Many things must have contributed to it. You were afraid; it was getting dark and you are not yet home and the forest is dangerous, and the animals and snakes and lions and – who knows? – and ghosts. And when you are alone in a forest all kinds of things start becoming, taking shape in your mind. And out of that fearing mind you see a rope, but you can’t see the rope. Your eyes are so full of fear, ideas, imaginations, you see a snake. And maybe the wind was blowing and the rope had shaken a little bit, was trembling. And you start running away, and you scream, and you are in danger.Such is the mind! A rope not seen as rope, a rope seen as a snake, is the mind. One has to come closer to the snake to see what it actually is.That’s what meditation is all about. Come closer to the mind, become a witness, watch it. Watch silently. Don’t analyze – just watch. Look into it, what it is, what is happening. And sooner or later you will see there is only a rope, no snake. The moment the rope is seen, the snake has disappeared. Then you will not ask, “What am I going to do with the snake now? Should I kill it?” That question is meaningless.This is the situation of the mind. We have not seen it clearly, we have not seen it from a closer viewpoint. We have not seen it through awareness, alertness. We have not watched it.The mind – what shall we call it? It is the sound of the breeze that blows through the pines in the Indian-ink picture. A beautiful illustration: fragile Indian-ink on a fragile Japanese rice-paper, and pine trees and wind blowing.Have you seen Zen paintings? No other style of painting can paint breeze. For that, that fragile rice-paper is needed and the fragile Indian black ink, and a Zen master to paint it because he knows the mind. Just an idea – but you can see in the painting the breeze blowing and the trees bending and the river has ripples. And a small, small human figure, and his clothes are also showing the wind; you can see the flow of the wind. The wind can’t be seen, but you can see the impact of the wind. It is not unreal, it is not absolutely unreal, otherwise how can you see it? It is not real either, because how can it be real? – it is just an ink painting. So it is somewhere between the two; it is maya, it is magic, it is illusion, it is dream.So don’t fight with the mind and don’t flee from the mind either. In both cases you have taken it for granted that it is real. There are two types of people: those who follow the mind – they have taken it as real – and those who either fight or flee; they have also taken it as real. There is no need to follow it, there is no need to fight or flee. All that is needed is to look deep into it.A deep look, and you see the pine trees bending in an ink painting. The breeze is just a painted breeze; nothing is real there, nothing is really happening there. Have you not seen your mind as just a movie, millions of pictures moving?Aldous Huxley has imagined in some future century that movies will change into feelies. It is possible, and it is going to happen, because whatsoever a man once imagines sooner or later becomes a reality. A feelie is going to happen. A feelie means you will be sitting in a movie house, but you will not only see, you will also feel.For example, it is raining…then you will feel the wetness in the air, the wind blowing, even a few drops of water coming to you. You see on the screen a rose garden and the whole house will become full of rose fragrance. If the film is three-dimensional and creates all the sensations that are moving in front of you, it will create more illusions.And it can be done in such a way… That too is possible. In Disneyland they have some place like that, where the screen is not only in front, but the screen is all around you. You are sitting just in the middle, just as you are sitting here in the middle. If you look at the back, you see the trees. If you look at me, I am here; if you look at the side, the people. You are sitting in the middle and the screen is all around.They have made a few films, experimental. For example, you are flying in an airplane and you look out of the window this side and you see the clouds and the sun setting, and you look from the other side and it is darkening, and you look at the back and you see the clouds going further away, back, and you look ahead and you are reaching into something else. And if you can also smell, then the reality will become more and more real. It can almost grip you absolutely; you can forget for a few moments that what you are seeing is just a movie or a feelie. You can be lost.And this is the situation we are in; this is what mind is. Mind is a feelie. It is simply making many dreams available to you, but in three dimensions, with all the feelings.Just think: it is possible one day, sitting glued in the chair before your TV, you see a beautiful woman walk out of the TV, hug you – and you know this is just a feelie. This is possible! This is going to happen. And you know deep down that this is just nonsense, there is nobody, but still, you can smell the woman, the French perfume. You can even touch her, the curves…How can you protect yourself? This is possible; this is not impossible. This is going to happen. Theoretically it has become possible; now practically it is going to become possible. Then you may be lost for a few seconds in a great love affair. You will forget – you would like to forget. Who wants to remember the truth when such a beautiful woman is there? You say, “Okay, let it be a dream or whatsoever it is, but let me enjoy right now.” And she is hugging you and you can feel her all over your body. And still deep down somewhere a consciousness goes on saying that this is just a feelie, there is nobody.This is what happens to a meditator. A meditator will still love a woman, but he knows this is a feelie. He will hold hands and will know. Who knows whether there is anybody or not? There is no way to prove that somebody else exists outside you. In a dream you think whatsoever you are seeing is true; in the morning it is not true, no longer true. Now, is there any way to say, right now, whether you are seeing me in a dream or in reality? It may be just a dream! You have fallen asleep and you are dreaming the morning talk. Is there any way to distinguish whether it is real or unreal? There is no way. It may be just a dream; you may be just seeing things and they may not be there.And the problem becomes very, very deep, because in a dream you forget that it is a dream. And you have seen the dream so many times, millions of times, and always in the morning you find it was all unreal. But the next day again you see the dream and it is real again.The day-dream becomes unreal in the night, and the night-dream becomes unreal in the day. Now what is the way to decide which is which, and which is really real and which is only apparently real?Buddha says it is all a mind game. Closely watch the mind, and slowly, slowly you can start seeing the mind game. Not that you need not be there anymore, because it is all a mind game – where are you going, where can you go? There is no need to go anywhere, but just to know.You can enjoy this picture all around you in Disneyland: you are flying in an airplane, and you can see Niagara Falls and the mountains receding back, and you can see from every side…and then you are disillusioned for a moment. There will be a continuous shifting of consciousness: one moment you will think it is real, one moment you will think, “It is not real; I am just in Disneyland.”Mind is a Disneyland.The mind –What shall we call it?It is the sound of the breezeThat blows through the pinesIn the Indian-ink picture.The mind remainingJust as it was born –Without any prayerIt becomes the Buddha.A very revolutionary statement: the mind remaining just as it was born. If the mind remains just a mirror and reflects nothing, is not conditioned by anything, has no content… The content-less mind is the only reality we can be certain about and certain of.That’s why Zen people say: Look into the original mind. “Original mind” means when there was no impact of anything on the mind: before conditioning started, before you were told who you are, before you were taught, before you learned, before your mind started collecting contents. Just go deep down into that first moment where there was no content but only the container, just the mirror reflecting nothing. That is real. The witness is real.The mind remaining just as it was born – without any prayer it becomes the Buddha. Then there is no need to pray, no need to do anything; no methodology, no technique is needed. Just go deep down and see the original mind, the contentless mind – the mirror without dust, the mind without thoughts, without clouds – and you have arrived, and you are a buddha.The difference between you and Buddha is only this: you have more than Buddha. Buddha has less than you, because Buddha is just a pure mind and you are a thousand and one things added to that purity. So remember, Buddha is poorer than you, I am poorer than you. You are far richer than me. I am lacking many things, missing many things: misery, meaninglessness, frustration, anger, passion, greed…and a thousand and one things you can count. You are really rich!When Buddha attained enlightenment, somebody asked him, “What have you gained?”He laughed. He said, “I have not gained, I have lost much. I am far poorer than I used to be. I have lost all ignorance, all illusions, all dreams. Now I am just my originality.”Tell a lie,And you fall into hell.Then what will happen to BuddhaWho contrivedThings that don’t exist?Again, Ikkyu is again and again teasing Buddha. He says: Tell a lie… Buddha has said: Don’t tell lies. Buddha says: “Tell a lie and you will fall into hell.” “Then what about Buddha himself?” Ikkyu asks. “He has been telling all kinds of lies.”In the first place, truth cannot be said, so whatsoever you say about it is a lie. And Buddha talked for forty-two years, day in, day out, morning, evening, he was talking and talking. And he says truth cannot be said! Then for forty-two years, what was this man doing? Was he crazy? Truth cannot be said, and he went on saying and saying…and that’s what I am doing.I say truth cannot be said, never has been said, will never be said – so whatsoever I am saying cannot be true.Ikkyu asks:Tell a lie, and you fall into hell. Then what will happen to Buddha who contrived things that don’t exist? And Buddha not only says a thousand and one things about truth, he also goes on devising methods, meditations – vipassana, anapansatiyoga. And he says there is no way to do anything, there is no need to do anything, and still he teaches people what to do, how to do. He says there is no goal and he talks about the path. He says there is nowhere to go and he says: I will teach you the right path to it. Now what kind of nonsense is this? It is nonsense, but still of great significance.Through talking for forty-two years continuously and saying again and again that truth cannot be said, he made many people aware of the phenomenon that truth cannot be said. He made many people realize the phenomenon that truth cannot be said – that truth can only be experienced. By devising methods, meditations, he helped many people to come to a point where one knows no meditation is needed and no meditation was needed in the beginning, either.But people are such that even if they come to truth, they come very, very slowly, very grudgingly, very hesitatingly. Inch by inch they have to be pushed. The phenomenon can happen in a single jump, but they have to be pushed inch by inch. And to push them, a thousand and one lies have to be invented by the master, have to be invented. I go on inventing lies – and just have mercy on me, otherwise I am going to hell!Listen and understand what I am saying, otherwise I will have to invent more lies. If you don’t listen then there is no other way than to go on inventing lies. It is like this – Buddha has told a story:A man returns home – he has been to the market. When he comes home, suddenly he sees the house is on fire. His children are playing inside, and he calls them and he shouts, “The house is on fire. Come out!”But the children don’t understand what it means that the house is on fire. In fact, they become very intrigued, and they jump and shout and they enjoy the flames all around the house. They have never seen such a beautiful scene. Children are children. And the father is very worried. He cannot go in; the whole house is surrounded by fire. He can simply shout.He devises a method. The children are not ready to understand. They don’t understand that the fire is dangerous – they can’t understand, they have no experience of it. He simply remembers that when he was going to the market they had said, “Bring some toys for us.”So he shouts, “I have brought those toys for you. Come out!” And they all come rushing out. He has not brought the toys, but the children are out – that is the point.That is the whole work of a master. You come to me and I give you toys: go to the Encounter group, go to Tao, go to Tai Chi, or – if you are a little toughie – then to go to the torturers, Rolfing, etcetera. These are toys. You don’t want to come out of the house; I have to create toys. But these are all lies.Ikkyu is just jokingly saying this: Tell a lie, and you fall into hell. Then what will happen to Buddha who contrived things that don’t exist? If you meditate over these sayings, great will be the revelation out of them. All teaching, the teaching of Buddha included, the teaching of Ikkyu included, my teaching included, all teachings included, are lies, false, as far as words are used in them – because the moment truth is said it becomes a lie. It can be experienced but not expressed.The Buddha tells us the way to salvation, but there is no way and no salvation! Then what is he saying? He is simply saying there is no way and no salvation. See it, and the salvation has happened. There is nowhere to go – see it and you have arrived. It is a question of seeing it.And if you start seeing, your whole dream-life disappears.I was reading…Tucker N. Callaway has written in his memoirs: It was twilight as I wandered through the spacious grounds of a Zen temple, Nanzenji, in the ancient city of Kyoto. Overhead the rush of water through the brick trough of the ivy-covered aqueduct mingled with wind sighs from boughs of gigantic pines. Tasting the fragrance of burning needles, I moved toward the red glow of a tiny fire deep in the shadows. A black-robed monk was at his task of raking clean the sand. After timeless moments of pregnant silence, I spoke: “What is your intention in Zen?”“To be this smoke,” he replied.All had been said.If you understand what Ikkyu is saying to you, your dream-life will disappear like smoke. You will disappear like smoke. And then what is left is truth. And then what is left is nirvana. One never becomes enlightened. When one is not, there is enlightenment.Enough for today.

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

Take It Easy Vol 1 01-14Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Take It Easy Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-04/

The first question:Osho,Today you said that the way to enlightenment is long and arduous, and also that it is here and now, now or never.As it is herenow, how can it be long and arduous?That’s why it is long and arduous – because you are not herenow. You are far away from herenow. You will have to come, you will have to journey.When I say truth is not far away, I mean truth is herenow – I don’t mean you are not far away from truth. You are far away from truth. Truth is not far away from you, truth cannot be far away from you. Truth, godliness, exists in you as you. It exists as eternity, not as past or future. It simply is. How can it be far away? There is no place for it to be far away. It is all over the place. It is everywhere – in your breathing, in your heartbeat. But you are not here.Truth has not gone away: you have gone away from it.You have to understand this. For example, in the night you sleep and you dream – you dream you have gone to the moon. You are here, but the dream has taken you far away. In the morning when you awake, you will not find yourself on the moon – you will be here in Pune. But in the dream you were far away from your reality. You have to come back from your dreams…and the journey is arduous because you have invested so much in those dreams, and you are hoping to gain so much from those dreams, and you have lived in those dreams for so long that they have become reality, your reality.The East calls this dreaming state of mind maya – illusion. And then you can go on searching for truth in your illusions and you will not find it. You have to awake. And to be awake is arduous because a thousand and one dreams will be shattered. And in those dreams all your joys, all your so-called successes, ambitions, are involved. Your whole ego is involved. The ego will be shattered.You are here, but the ego has gone to the moon – and the ego can only live through dreams, it can only live through illusions. It is nourished by illusions. The more illusions you have, the more grandiose an ego you have. The greater your illusions, the bigger your ego. It is very difficult to renounce those dreams.In the East this is called sannyas: to renounce those dreams. When it is said, “Renounce the world,” it is not meant the actual world – the wife, the husband, the children, the house, the marketplace. No, not at all. What is really meant is this dream-world in which you go on constantly moving away from yourself and away from reality. Renounce the dreams! And that is arduous.Now, let me read your question again: “Today you said that the way to enlightenment is long and arduous” – it is – “and also that it is here and now” – it is. “As it is herenow, how can it be long and arduous?”That’s why. You are not to go anywhere, you have to come here! You have already gone somewhere. You have moved away from your innermost core. You never come home. And truth exists there, but you keep truth at the back. Your eyes are roaming far away in distant stars; they never come back. From one star to another you go on hopping. Your mind is a vagabond.So it is arduous and yet it is easy. The contradiction is only apparent. It is arduous because of you: it is easy because of existence. If you think of existence you can take it very easily, you can relax. If you depend on yourself, it is very arduous.That’s why I say if you depend on yourself, if you depend on your effort, you may never come back – because it is through effort that you have gone away. You have to surrender. In that very surrendering, grace descends.And what can you surrender? What have you got? Why are you so afraid of surrendering? You have only dreams and nothing else, just soap bubbles.Surrender your dreams and the truth is herenow. That’s why I say now or never – because existence always exists in the now, and the mind exists in the then. Existence is here and the mind is always there, and they never meet. Here and there never meet; now and then never meet. Just look deep down in your mind: it is very rare to come across a contemporary.Somebody is living five thousand years back; he is still part of the days of Rig Veda. He is still reading Rig Veda; he is still following the Vedic ritual. Five thousand years have passed, but he has not come here, now. He lives there: in the dead, in the gone, in the memory.Why do you call yourself a Hindu or a Christian, or a Mohammedan or a Jaina? To call yourself these things simply means you cling to the past. These are names that come from the past. Herenow you are only a consciousness, neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian. If you get entangled with the past, you are a Hindu, or a brahmin or a sudra. Or there are a few other people who think they are very progressive: Communists, Socialists. They are involved in the future; hence they think they are very progressive. But to be in the past is to be as far away from the present as to be in the future. It makes no difference.There are two kinds of mind in the world. One: involved with the past, the orthodox mind; and the other: involved in the future, the so-called revolutionary mind – but both are minds. The orthodox thinks the golden age has passed, the Ramrajya has passed. And the revolutionary, the so-called revolutionary, thinks the golden age has to come, the Utopia has yet to happen. His eyes are there on the distant future. But there is no difference between these two; they are the same kind of people. Both are avoiding the present, both are escaping from the present, both are denying reality. So a Communist or a Mohammedan, a Socialist or a Hindu, to me are all in the same boat – the boat of time.Whom do I call religious? The man who is no longer in the boat of time, who starts living in eternity, who lives in the now, who has no past and no future. Who does not go to the Rig Veda and who does not go to Das Kapital – who simply goes in himself. Who looks at the sun that is there on the horizon, and who listens to the birds that are singing right now, who looks at the trees that are blooming. Just see that quality of being; here, that collectedness, that integrity, that centering I call religiousness.Religion does not mean affiliation. Religion means being in reality without any dreams. Dreams come either from the past or from the future. A religious man is an empty man, a hollow bamboo. He allows the reality to live through him, he flows with it. He has no goals, he is not going anywhere. He is just being here, as godliness is just being here…hence the meeting.That’s why I say now or never. Now is eternity. But I am never denying time: I am saying you will not find truth, godliness in time.The present is not part of time; that has to be remembered. Ordinarily you have been taught that time has three tenses: past, present, future. That is absolutely wrong. It has no understanding about time. Time has only two tenses – past and future. The present is not part of time: the present is part of eternity. The present is that which abides, which is always. To relax into it is meditation, or call it prayerfulness. And to know it is celebration. Infinite joy starts showering on you, great benediction descends; with the past and the future all worries disappear, all dreams disappear.That’s what Ikkyu means when he says the original mind is clean, clean of all ideas. It is a mirror without dust. It simply mirrors that which is.The second question:Osho,It has been my experience that it is not so much that the religious experience is illogical as it is supra-logical; that is, it seems to transcend the more limited and fear-invented logic that is of the head alone in that it includes the logic that is of the heart and beyond. For it has been that whenever I have allowed myself to feel rather than think, that which emerges only seems illogical at first to that aspect of mind which is strictly limiting my perspective. But then whenever I have allowed myself the freedom to plummet to the depths of the feeling, then the cosmological reason for my particular need to express has been shown in terms post-birth, birth, pre-birth and past life trauma. Could there be anything more grandiosely logical than the infinite interconnectiveness of the vast emptiness? How could it be any other way? If it cannot be any other way, then it must all hold supra-logically together as it so obviously does.From such an analysis it would seem logical to conclude, as mystics have always done, that the head's fear of taking the quantum leap into the much vaster logic is where the problem sits, rather than it being a problem of logic per se.The question is from Swami Anand Parad. He is a well-known author. And the answer is in the question itself.That’s why my people were laughing – they have answered. They have not left anything for me to answer. It is all logic, logic-chopping.And remember, logic is very cunning. Cunningness is intrinsic to logic. It can pretend, it can talk in terms of supra-logical, but that supra-logical is nothing but an extension of the same logical mind.Go slowly into this question: “It has been my experience that it is not so much that the religious experience is illogical as it is supra-logical.”Now the logic is trying to defend itself. The logic is afraid of the illogical. If it is called supra-logical then it is okay – just by changing the label? A rose is a rose is a rose – what you call it will not make any difference. It will be a rose called by any other name whatsoever. Just by calling it “supra-logical,” why does your mind feel better? Calling it supra-logical, the mind has claimed it. It says, “It is within my limits – supra maybe, but it is within my limits. I can cover it, I can hold it. You need not go beyond me.”You have just to become a little more logical. You have to just make your boundaries a little bigger.Your imprisonment will remain. The jail becomes a supra-jail. It has bigger boundaries; you push the boundaries farther away. You can push them so far away that you cannot see them. That’s what is happening in the world, has been happening always. What you call a nation, what is it? It is a supra-jail. The boundaries are so far away that you cannot see them. But when you cross the boundaries of a country to another country, you remember then that you are a prisoner. Then you know that you are surrounded by police and the army, that a visa is needed, that a passport is needed. That you don’t belong to the earth, that the whole earth does not belong to you, that it is a big jail called India, China, Pakistan, America, Canada. There are many jails on the earth, but they are so big! Unless you come closer to the boundary you will not know them.Have you not felt it? Crossing the boundary of a country you feel great uneasiness; you simply feel yourself a prisoner. You are not a free man. And the freedom seems to be just talk.Freedom cannot exist on the earth unless nations disappear. Nations cannot allow freedom. All the constitutions of the world, even the so-called democratic constitutions, talk and only talk about “freedom of movement.” What kind of freedom of movement is this? And you must know it from bitter experience, because you are here suffering all kinds of indignities. The police are after you, the government is after you, telling you: You have to leave the country; your six weeks or eight weeks are over. What kind of freedom is this? Freedom of movement, you call it, and a man cannot move from one country to another country.The prison is big. It is a supra-prison. If you are not a Hindu you cannot go into a Hindu temple. If you are not a Jaina you are not allowed in a Jaina temple. These are again prisons. And there are prisons and prisons and prisons… Mind is very cunning in deceiving itself.That’s why I don’t call it supra-logical. I simply call it illogical – for a certain reason. The reason is this: by calling it illogical I want to shatter all the walls. Supra-logical and the wall remains. It recedes farther back, it may almost become invisible, but it remains. Hence I insist that it is illogical. The jump into godliness is illogical, it is not logical.I agree with the Christian mystic Tertullian: “Credo quia absurdum.” He says: “I believe in God because God is absurd, illogical, irrational.” A rational God will not be much of a God; it will be just a concept. A logical God, a logical universe, cannot be a real universe – because logic is an imposition, it is an invention of man. The trees don’t know about it. The stars don’t know anything about it. It is only man who imposes a certain pattern.All patterns are imposed out of fear. That fear is why man always wants to label things – once he has labeled a thing he feels very at ease. Now he thinks he knows. This naming business has gone very deep.Somebody asks, “What kind of tree is this?” and you tell him, “This is a pine.” And he is satisfied, as if he now knows what it is. Just by calling it a pine, he thinks he knows. If he had not been told what kind of tree it is, he would have felt uneasy, because that illogical tree, beyond human language, human comprehension, is standing there as a challenge. Pin it down, put a label on it, and you are satisfied. What have you come to know by putting a label on it? Thousands of talented people simply go on doing this naming business – they call it research. What kind of research is this? This is not research at all, it is not even one search; it is just making mind feel easy. Small children go on asking, “What is this?” you just answer anything – ABC – you say anything, and they are satisfied. Then they are asking about something else: “And what is this?” They go on just asking, “What is this?” From that very curiosity, all naming business arises.When I say life is illogical, I mean it is not nameable. Try to understand what I mean. I mean it is not nameable. You cannot pinpoint it. Call it supra-logical and you have pinpointed it, you have pinned it down. Now it is no longer a live butterfly; it is a pinned butterfly in an album, dead. You have transformed its quality completely, you have destroyed it.When I say illogical I mean unnameable, I mean no word will be able to express it.Lao Tzu says: “Truth cannot be said.” The moment you say it, it becomes untrue. This is what I mean by calling reality illogical, irrational. It is beyond the comprehension of mind. Call it supra-logical, and you feel at ease; then you are no longer afraid of it. You have the feeling that you know about it.Absence of knowledge creates deep insecurity. There is still something which we don’t know. It has to be known! Maybe there is danger. Have you not felt it when you meet a stranger? The immediate curiosity is who he is: what name, what religion, what country? Immediately you start inquiring. Just within four, five questions you have pinned the man down – he is a Hindu, an Indian, works as a clerk in an office. “How much salary?” In India they even ask that, and they even ask how much you get on the side. Nobody feels any insult; nobody feels, “What is being asked?” People say, “Answer!”Once you have known the financial position, the status, the name, the religion, the caste, you relax. So you can relax, you know this man. You have known this type of man before. But can any man be pinned down like that? No two men are alike. Each individual is only like himself. By calling him a Hindu you are just misinterpreting the whole thing. You may have known other Hindus, but they were other Hindus, and this Hindu is a totally different phenomenon. You cannot understand him by understanding other Hindus. You may have known other clerks, but this is a totally different man.There is no way of understanding him through these queries. If you really want to understand a man, you will have to go deep down into this man’s mystery – and that is illogical. You will have to go into love. That’s what I mean when I say illogical.You say, “It has been my experience that it is not so much that the religious experience is illogical as it is supra-logical.” You have not experienced religion yet. You don’t know what you are talking about. You may have felt a few emotions, very elevated, but that is not religion. Any experience as such is not religion – religion is not an experience. Try to see the point. Religion is not an experience because there is no experiencer left; it is a dissolution. One disappears into it. One cannot experience it. One is not found. One simply dissolves, just like a drop of water falls into the ocean and disappears into the ocean. Is this an experience? It is death, it is disappearance. And yet the drop has become the ocean itself.When a man disappears into existence like a drop disappearing in the ocean, this is religious experience, but can you call it experience? The experiencer is no longer there. The subjectivity is no longer there; there is no object to it. Our ordinary experiences are divided into three things: the knower, the known and the knowledge. The religious experience is a unique phenomenon. There is nothing known, there is no knower, there is only knowing. The knower has gone, the known has disappeared, there is only knowing. The lover is no longer there, the beloved is no longer there, there is only loving. It can’t be called an experience ordinarily. If you want to call it “experience,” put it in inverted commas.You say: “It has been my experience that it is not so much that the religious experience is illogical as it is supra-logical.” Then whatsoever you have experienced is a mind phenomenon. Your mind can comprehend it. Then you can make it supra-logical!For example, if you feel a certain energy arising in your spine, this is supra-logical. In fact, I will not even call it supra-logical – this is just logical. There is no need to bring that supra, that big word. It is all experience, a physical, tangible experience. Or you see light deep down in your third-eye center, great light arises – this is an experience. And this you can call supra-logical because it is not an ordinary experience. But this is not religion.Religion is still far beyond all this. There is no light, there is no energy, there is no God to be encountered, there is no you left – all has disappeared. There is utter emptiness, what Buddha calls shunyata – nothingness. That is not supra-logical: it is simply illogical. Logic cannot exist there because mind as such is no more. Logic is a shadow of the mind. When the mind itself has disappeared, logic cannot exist, and supra-logic can exist only when logic is in existence; they are linked together.You say: “That is, it seems to transcend the more limited and fear-invented logic that is of the head alone…” What you are calling “the logic of the head alone” is the only logic. Sometimes you can even start calling the logic of the heart a different kind of logic, but it is not logic at all. If it is still logic, ordinary or supra, then it is still of the head. Head is logic, heart is illogic – that is their polarity. And if you call it also logic, then you have made your heart also an appendage to the head; it is no longer the polar opposite. Head is logic and heart is supra-logic – you have put them into one line; they have become part of one syllogism. Heart is not part of the same syllogism. Heart cannot think, so how can it have supra-logic? Heart feels; feeling has no logic. It is illogical.You fall in love with a woman, what logic is there? And if there is logic, there can’t be love. If you think she is rich, if you think that she is the only daughter of her parents, if you think power and prestige are going to come through her, then there is logic but there is no love. That is the problem. Your parents think logically about your love affair, and you think illogically. That’s why parents and children can’t communicate – the gap, the generation gap. The young person is still brave enough; life has not cowed him down. He can still take the risk; he would like to take the risk. He has energy and vitality to go into the unknown.But the older generation, the people who have lived their lives, they know that it is dangerous, that it is insecure: better be logical. Marriage was created by logical people. They killed love affairs completely; it was dangerous. India is one of the most logical countries in the world. The logic was: let the children get married, even when they don’t know anything about love – child-marriage. That was the logical conclusion.Once they become youths, they will want to fool around. It looks foolish to the older generation: they will get into difficulty; they will start falling in love with people who may not be economically secure. Or there will be a thousand and one other problems. A Brahmin boy can fall in love with a Sudra girl, and that will create difficulties. A rich man’s girl can fall in love with a poor man’s boy, and there will be difficulty. It is better to avoid all difficulties: child-marriage was invented. That was a logical conclusion. Before they know anything of love let them get married, so they will grow like brother and sister, as brothers and sisters do. You never choose your sister, you never choose your brother – and still you love. That love is not real love; that is only liking, familiarity. Living together, playing together, one starts liking.India reduced marriage. There is only one relationship with all freedom to choose. You cannot choose your father, it is given; you cannot choose your mother, you cannot choose your sister, you cannot choose your brother. You cannot choose, you cannot choose your uncles – they are all given. There was only one freedom left which was dangerous: you could choose your wife or your husband. India destroyed that freedom too. You were not allowed even to choose that. Small children, four years old, five years old were married.When my mother got married she was only seven years old. I was asking her again and again, “Tell me how you felt?”She said, “I didn’t know what was happening. I was simply joyous that something was happening. I used to run out to see what was happening, and they would pull me back inside the house. And they locked me in on the day when the real ceremony was going to happen, because I was so interested in the bands and the music and the horses. And the people were coming…”And I asked my father, “What did you feel?”He said, “I don’t know, I just enjoyed the horse ride!”He was just a small child, he must have enjoyed it. And with so many people walking around, he must have felt like a king. Something was happening, but what was happening?Then they grew together. Then naturally, when you grow together you start liking each other, but love has been denied, love has been killed. It is very rare, there is not much possibility of love growing, because all romance has been destroyed.Heart is illogical, mind is logical. Don’t call heart supra-logical. That is again your fear. You are afraid of the heart; you want to bring it under the rule of the head. Logic is head’s rule.There are people who don’t love. They think they love: their feeling also comes via thinking. When they come to me and they say, “I think I am in love,” I ask them, “You just be true: either you are in love or you are not in love. How can you think you are in love?” Thinking is bogus and false, but thinking has become so predominant. We have been taught to think and to avoid feelings.Feelings are dangerous. They have no utility. Thinking is utilitarian; it makes you capable of living in the world, of fighting in the world – for survival, for your ambitions. It makes you calculating, cunning, clever. It gives you power. Feeling? Feeling does not give you any power. Feeling has no politics in it – that is the problem. Thinking is political, feeling is religious – and I have never come across a political person who is religious or can be religious, unless he renounces politics. I have never come across a religious person who can be political. It is impossible. If he is political, then his religion is false. Then his being religious is also part of his politics.You say: “For it has been that whenever I have allowed myself to feel rather than think…” My feeling is that you were still thinking – you were thinking that you were feeling.“…that which emerges only seems illogical at first to that aspect of mind which is strictly limiting my perspective. But then whenever I have allowed myself the freedom to plummet to the depths of the feeling…” Who are you going into “the depths of feeling?” – the head, the mind, the thinking, the logic? Yes, if you go into feelings with logic… Logic is a chronic systematizer; it is obsessed with systematization. Wherever it goes, it systematizes, it immediately starts categorizing. It cannot allow chaos; chaos seems to be like a death. It immediately starts putting things in order.Who is this one who goes deep into the feelings? About whom are you talking? You are identified with the head; feelings are something accidental into which you are going. You are not the feeling. You are the head, you remain the head. Then, naturally, sooner or later, you will systematize. And, if you cannot systematize something which goes on rebelling against the systems, you will deny it; you will say it doesn’t exist. You will ignore it, you will forget about it. Nobody wants to allow something which becomes a constant strain.Millions of people have denied God because the very presence of God, the very idea that God is, is frightening. That means sooner or later you will have to encounter him; sooner or later you will have to face him. That makes people very much afraid. They start trembling – the very idea: facing God! Then what are you doing? Is it worth it? Will you be able to say to God that this is what you have been doing? This is what you have wasted your life in? That you were a prime minister? That you were so stupid as to waste your whole life for power-politics? That you were a rich man; that you wasted your whole life in collecting rubbish? Will you be able to face God?And all that you attained in life will be left here. You will not be able to carry your money or your power. You will be standing naked, utterly ashamed.There is a beautiful story…When Alexander the Great was coming to India, he met one strange man, Diogenes, on the way. Diogenes is one of the rare flowerings of human consciousness. Alexander was interested in the man; he had heard many stories about him. He was afraid to go to him. It was beneath him, it was against his ego. But he was coming to India, and on the way he heard that Diogenes was living just by the side of the river. Then he could not resist the temptation and he thought, “Nobody will know back home that I have gone to see Diogenes. And I can always say that I was just passing and I met him by accident.”He went to see Diogenes. It was a winter morning, a cool breeze was blowing, and Diogenes was lying on the river-bank, on the sand, taking a naked sunbath. He was a beautiful man. When there is a beautiful soul, a beauty arises which is not of this world – which is illogical. If Alexander looks beautiful, it is logical, remember, because he has all that you think one should have. He has power, money; he has all that one can think or imagine to have. His beauty is that of possessions.Now, here was a man lying naked, with nothing – he had nothing, not even a begging bowl. At least Buddha had a begging bowl. Diogenes didn’t have a begging bowl, because one day when he was walking, and going toward the river with his begging bowl to get some water to drink, he saw a dog rushing to the river. Of course, the dog reached first, and the dog jumped in the river and drank. Diogenes laughed and he said, “This dog has taught me a lesson. If he can live without a begging bowl, then why can’t I?” He threw away the begging bowl; he also jumped like the dog into the river and drank. Since then he had had nothing. And this dog must have felt something for Diogenes, because they became friends; they lived together.Alexander came. He could not believe the grace of the man. He had never seen such a graceful man, such utter beauty, something from the unknown, something illogical because there was no reason: you could not pin it down, where it was coming from. He was in awe and he said, “Sir…” He had not said “Sir” to anybody in his life. He said, “Sir, I am immensely impressed by your being, and I would like to do something for you. Is there something that I can do for you?”Diogenes said, “Just stand to the side because you are preventing the sun… That’s all. I need nothing else.”Alexander said, “If I have another chance to come to the earth, I will ask God, instead of making me Alexander again, to make me Diogenes.”Diogenes laughed and he said, “That you won’t ask for, because who is preventing you right now? You can become Diogenes. Where are you going? For months, I have seen armies moving and moving – where are you going, and for what?”And Alexander said, “I am going to India to conquer the whole world.”“And then what are you going to do?” Diogenes asked.And Alexander said, “Then I will rest.”And Diogenes laughed again and he said, “You are mad – because I am resting now; and I have not conquered the world. I don’t see the necessity of it. If just in the end you want to rest and relax, why not now? How are they related? Who has told you that before resting, you have to conquer the world? And I tell you: if you don’t rest now, then never. You will never be able to conquer the world, because something or other will always remain to be conquered, and life is short and time is fleeting. You will die in the middle of your journey – everybody dies in the middle of the journey.”Alexander said, “I will keep it always in mind, but right now I cannot do it. But many, many thanks for your advice.”And Alexander died when he was returning from India, he died on the way. He never reached home, he died on the way. And that day he remembered Diogenes. Only Diogenes was in his mind: he could never rest in his life, and that man rested.And then a strange story has been told down the ages, that Diogenes also died on the same day. And they met on the way to God, just crossing the border river. Alexander was ahead, a few feet ahead, when he heard somebody behind. He looked back, and he was surprised, surprised and ashamed. It was Diogenes, the same beautiful man.Alexander tried to hide his shame. He said “So again! Again we are meeting, the emperor and the beggar.”And Diogenes said, “That is true. But you misunderstand one thing: you don’t know who is the beggar and who is the emperor. You are the beggar, and I am the emperor, because I lived my life totally, I enjoyed it. And I can go to God, I can face him. You will not be able to face him, because I can see: you cannot even face me! You are trembling, you are ashamed. You cannot look into my eyes – what will happen to you when you have to face God? Your whole life has been a waste.”People deny God – they have to deny because the presence of God makes them very, very uneasy. My own experience is that people who are very much in fear, deeply in fear, deny God. They deny all that is incomprehensible to them. They always want everything to be systematized, because once you systematize something, it is within your control, it is in your fist, you are the master. When something goes on slipping out of your systematization, you start freaking out.And life is illogical. If you don’t understand the mystics, ask the physicists – they have also stumbled upon the same fact. Ask Albert Einstein or Eddington, ask these people, because they are now seeing very strange phenomena, strange and illogical.Looking into matter deeply, physicists have stumbled upon the same illogicality. Electrons behave in a way that is not logical; there is no way to predict the behavior of an electron. And its behavior is contradictory – that’s why it is called quanta. Quanta means – and from quanta the word quantum leap that you have used in your question – quanta means a particle is behaving in such a strange way that you can think of it as a particle or as a wave – both together, simultaneously. That is impossible. That is very much against Euclidean geometry. Either something is a dot, a point, or something is a line; either something is a particle or something is a wave. One thing cannot be both together, simultaneously. But that’s how it is.When Heisenberg was asked, “How can you say it? It is illogical,” he said, “It is illogical, but what can we do? We cannot order those quanta to behave rightly and logically. We have no power over them. That’s how they are behaving. So if it is illogical, change your logic – but we cannot change quanta. We cannot put policemen there to say, ‘Behave! Behave logically, behave morally!’”Hence, the theory of indeterminacy. Uncertainty has arisen. Physics has become almost mysticism, because they have also come across the phenomenon. It is illogical, it is incomprehensible. That is the meaning of a mystery. If the mystery becomes comprehensible, then it is no longer a mystery; you have solved it.And man, out of fear, has been trying to solve all the mysteries. If he cannot solve them, then he denies. That’s why scientists go on denying the soul – because they cannot solve it. The very idea creates so many problems. It becomes insoluble: “There is no soul.”There are things which are not comprehensible and yet can be experienced. Just think of two persons going to listen to great music. One is a musician, the other is a non-musician. Both listen to the same music. The musician will listen to the harmony, the melody, and the non-musician will listen only to the single notes, individual notes. He will hear the noise – one note, another note, another note, notes following notes – but he will not see the thread running between them, he will not be able to see the melody that arises out of them. That melody remains invisible to his ears; it is not heard. But the musician will be able to hear the melody, although he cannot prove it – it is incomprehensible.What is melody? That is godliness. What is melody? Melody is that music which is something more than the parts; it is something more than the sum total of the parts. That is the meaning of soul: something more than the sum total of the body-mind is soul. And what is godliness? Something more than the universe, more than the sum total of all the parts. But that is incomprehensible, and that is not supra-logical, because supra-logical is again comprehension of the same mind – the same mind trying to become more and more clever.“From such an analysis,” you say, “it would seem logical to conclude, as mystics have always done, that the head’s fear of taking the quantum leap into the much vaster logic is where the problem sits rather than its being a problem of logic per se.”Logic is fear. They are the same thing. Logic is out of fear! Out of the fear of the uncomprehended, out of fear of the chaos, logic creates a small world, clear-cut. Logic is like a garden that you have planted, and not even like a Zen garden, but like an English garden – clean-cut, symmetrical, rational. That’s why English gardens are so ugly, because they are so artificial and so unnatural. In nature there is no symmetry. If you go into a jungle there is no symmetry; trees are growing in their own ways and every tree is doing its own thing. But that is the beauty of a jungle. You can feel something godly there, but you cannot feel anything godly in an English garden. You can feel something Victorian, but not godly.That’s the beauty of a Zen garden.It happened once…A great emperor was learning from a Zen master about Zen gardening. He had been learning for three years, and he had made a beautiful garden; he had thousands of gardeners working on it. He was learning from the master and he was implementing everything that he learned.After three years the master came. It was the examination. The emperor was trembling, because he had known the man for three years: he was ferocious, and you could not deceive him. The emperor had tried every way, whatsoever the master had said had been implemented, but still he was afraid, because he had not yet learned the secret. He was still logical, he was systematizing things. although he had made a very asymmetrical garden – but in the asymmetry itself there was logic, there was symmetry hidden behind.The master came. He looked around, and he never smiled. For hours he went around and around. He looked at the whole garden. The emperor was perspiring. He had failed; the master had not said a single word. And then finally he said, “I don’t see a single dead leaf in the garden. Where are all the dead leaves? How can such a big garden be without dead leaves?”And the emperor said, “I told my servants to remove all the dead leaves because you were coming.”He said, “Tell them to bring all the dead leaves back!”They went outside the garden, they brought all the dead leaves back, and the master threw the dead leaves in the garden. And the wind started playing with the dead leaves and it took them all over the place. He laughed and he said, “Now it is okay, now it is natural. But you have failed. Three more years, then I will come again.”What is a quantum leap? A quantum leap is going from system to no system, going from cosmos to chaos, going from the finite to the infinite, going from the knowledgeable to the unknowable. A quantum leap cannot be from logic to supra-logic. What leap is there? There is no leap; there is a connection, a continuity. Logic and supra-logic are in one continuum – where is the quantum leap? The quantum leap is when you break away from the continuity, when the old disappears and the new suddenly exists – and there is a gap between the two, there is no connection. That needs courage.That’s why I insist again and again: religion is only for the courageous people. Religion is only for those who dare enough, who love to live dangerously.The third question:Osho,I don't believe in ghosts and yet I am afraid of them. When I am alone in the night, I feel that they are there and they want to speak to me.In fact, you deny things which you are afraid of. Your denial simply shows your fear. You say, “I don’t believe in ghosts.” If you really don’t believe in ghosts, then from where can the fear come, then why should you be afraid? For what? But your disbelief is nothing but a way of hiding your fear.Remember: your belief is out of fear; your disbelief is out of fear. If you live in fear, whatsoever happens to you is going to happen out of fear. I see religious people going to the temples and the mosques and the churches out of fear, and I see atheists denying God out of fear. If I look deeply I don’t see any difference between the theist and the atheist. They are both the same – reacting differently, but the situation is the same, and the fear is the same. Their differences are only superficial.In each atheist the theist is hidden. And in each theist the atheist is hidden – that’s why it is so easy to convert them. Have you heard the famous story of Khalil Gibran?It happened in a city:There were two great philosophers – one was a theist, the other was an atheist – and the whole town was getting bored with them, because they were both continuously trying to convince the town. They puzzled everybody because they would roam around and talk to people, and one day a person would talk to one philosopher and would become a theist, and another day he would come across the atheist and he would convince him of atheism, and so on and so forth. The whole town was in great confusion. Their life became impossible.People want to live. They are not much concerned about atheism or theism. These are just their ways to deceive themselves. But the confusion was too much, and deceiving was impossible because the other was always there – and both were very convincing.The people of the town decided, “Let these two discuss and debate and decide. Whosoever wins, we will be with him. We are always with the winner.”People are always with the winner.In Soviet Russia they are Communists and atheists; they have the power. In India they are all theists. Do you know that before 1917 in Soviet Russia everybody was as religious as they are in India? It was one of the most religious countries – and what happened? What kind of religion was that? What happened? The same country turned absolutely anti-religious! This country can turn absolutely anti-religious. Once Communists are in power, this country will turn absolutely anti-religious. This religion is all bogus. This is just fear. So whosoever is in power, people follow him. If atheists are in power, then they must be right. Power is right; power convinces people.So in that town, people gathered and they said, “Tonight is a full-moon night and we will stay awake the whole night, and you both discuss and debate and decide. And whosoever wins, we will follow him. We always follow the victorious.”In India we have an ancient saying that truth always wins. In fact, the case is just vice versa: whatsoever wins becomes the truth. People are always with the winner.So it happened: that full-moon night, both philosophers debated and discussed. They were both very great logicians. But by the morning the town was in even more confusion: they had convinced each other, so the atheist became the theist and the theist became the atheist. But the trouble continued.These are not really two different things.You say: “I don’t believe in ghosts…” You believe; you are simply trying to deceive yourself – hence the fear. You know that when you are alone in the night they are there. But you are unnecessarily afraid of poor ghosts. Compared to human beings, they are very innocent people. Have you ever heard of any ghost turning into an Adolf Hitler, or Genghis Khan or Tamerlane? Have you ever heard of ghosts creating Hiroshima, Nagasaki, preparing for the Third World War? Have you ever heard of ghosts doing any harm? Their harm, if sometimes you hear some stories, is more or less trivial – small things.I have heard about one young ghost…The young ghost got very scared when his friends told him too many human stories.And I have also heard…Then there was the ghost who did not believe in people.They are also afraid of you! And you say you are afraid that when you are alone in the night: “I feel that they are there and they want to speak to me…”I have also heard…The father ghost told his son, “Spook only when you are spoken to.”Don’t be worried. They are already very worried; they are afraid of you. Ghosts are simple people, very simple. In fact, they are the same people as you; they just don’t have bodies so they can’t do much harm.But the fear does not come from ghosts. Fear is there, and out of fear come the ghosts. You are afraid and you would like to project your fear somewhere or other – because to be afraid without any reason to be afraid makes people more frightened. Just to be afraid will be too much; you will not be able to bear it. You need something to be afraid of. So people create their ghosts.In America they are afraid of Communists. In Russia they are afraid of capitalists, and so on and so forth. People create their ghosts. Hindus are afraid of Mohammedans; Mohammedans are afraid of Hindus. Everybody is afraid of everybody else. Man is afraid of woman; the woman is afraid of man. Children are afraid of their parents, and parents are very deeply afraid of their children. Students are afraid of their teachers, and teachers are very much afraid and trembling inside because of their students.It is fear, fear is there. And to know fear in its purity is to get beyond it. So don’t bother about ghosts. If somebody convinces you there are no ghosts, or somebody convinces you that they are very beautiful people, that won’t solve the problem. You will simply shift your fear onto something else. Fear will remain; you will find another cause.It makes no difference. Down the ages man has been changing his philosophy, the causes, but basically human reality remains the same. For example, in the past people were afraid of ghosts; they used to become possessed by ghosts. Jesus relieved many people of ghosts. Then philosophies changed. Sigmund Freud created new ghosts, new explanations of the same fear: schizophrenia, paranoia – new explanations, new dressings, but the same old problems.First people were possessed by ghosts – and it was easier, those ghosts were not so difficult. Even a simple man like Jesus relieved many people just by a single touch. Those ghosts were simple. The ghosts that Sigmund Freud has created are very difficult: you have to lie down on a couch for five years, and then you get up and all the ghosts get up with you! And again you will be lying on another couch with some other psychoanalyst…and the same story will be repeated again and again. Slowly, slowly, if you don’t have much money, understanding will arise that one has to live with these ghosts. There is no point, why not enjoy them? But if you have money then there is a great problem; then the understanding will never arise. Understanding never arises in rich people because they can afford it. Understanding arises only in poor people because they can’t afford it, they have to understand. They are forced to understand.That’s why psychoanalysis is not a business in poor countries. Who can afford lying down on a couch for five years talking nonsense to a stupid person looking at you? Nothing happens. But in the West people have money and time – and what to do with it?And communication has become so impossible. Nobody wants to talk to you, so you have professional listeners. They are the psychoanalysts: they are professional listeners: you pay for them; you talk and they listen. You feel good. At least you have one audience, and a very expert one. And he listens very attentively; at least he shows that he is listening attentively. It feels good – at least there is one person who understands you, listens to you, pays attention to all the rubbish that you are talking. You feel good, enhanced; your ego feels good. But the problem remains where it was. It doesn’t change.The problem can only be changed if you understand it directly, immediately. Fear is there. Don’t bring any cause as to why the fear is there – of ghosts, of illness, of disease, of old age, of being fat, of falling in love, of being killed, or of being a murderer. Listening to thousands of people, I have come to see all kinds of fears. Somebody is afraid that if he does not control himself enough he will commit suicide. Now that fear is there. Somebody is afraid that if he doesn’t control himself he will kill somebody. Somebody is afraid that he is becoming old, somebody is afraid that he is getting fat, or she is getting fat – people are afraid of a thousand and one things. If you are not getting fat, you are afraid maybe you are getting thin. One has to be afraid. It is very difficult to find a person who is not afraid of something or other.So, to me, those things are irrelevant. Fear is the basic thing. Why is man afraid? Don’t go into reasons and causes and explanations. Go directly into the fear.So the next time you are alone in the room, just close the eyes and go into your fear. Don’t bother about ghosts, just go into the fear. Tremble if trembling comes, but don’t find any explanation that you are trembling because of the ghosts. That is just an explanation to explain away the fear. Just go into trembling, tremble for no reason at all. If you feel like screaming, scream for no reason at all – but go into the fear itself; don’t bring anything else in-between you and the fear. That is a trick of the mind. And if you can go deep down into the fear, you will be surprised: the deeper you go, the more and more fear dissipates, disappears.When you touch the very core, the very bottom core of it, it has disappeared. You are simply there, utterly silent. There is no ghost there, even you are not there. All is silent, utterly silent, absolutely silent. That silence is joy, that silence is fearlessness.The last question:Osho,One of your old sannyasins says that there are three steps to enlightenment: witnessing, choiceless awareness, suchness. What do you say?The question has not been signed. I don’t like questions which are not signed, because the person who is not signing his question is being very cowardly. You don’t want to say that you have a question. You want to hide that fact.It always happens to knowledgeable people – they don’t want to ask a question because that shows that they are ignorant. But if you are ignorant, you are ignorant! Accept the fact. Through that acceptance, some transcendence is possible.And what is the fear? If you cannot even ask a question, how will you be able to receive the answer? A question deeply, rightly, asked prepares the ground for the answer to be received. When you are committed to a question, when you are involved in it, when it is a life-and-death problem to you, then only will you understand the answer; otherwise the answer will be cheap, and it won’t go deep in you. So never ask a question if you cannot sign your question.And secondly, you have not mentioned who this old sannyasin is. You should mention it, because here I am working with individuals, not with a mass. And I want to relate to you individually. Who is this old fool? You should mention it because all these three words mean the same thing. And there are not three steps to enlightenment. There are no steps to enlightenment. Enlightenment is an explosion, it is a sudden awakening. It is a quantum leap!Steps mean continuity: you remain the same, you become a little more polished; you remain the same, you become a little more decorated; you remain the same, you become a little more modified. There are no steps in enlightenment. Those steps are also created out of fear: you don’t want to jump so you need steps. But only the jump is needed.You will have to gather courage and take the jump into the abyss, into the chaos of existence, into the chaos of love, into that illogic that I have been talking about.You say: “There are three steps – witnessing, choiceless awareness, suchness. These are the same. What is the difference between witnessing and choiceless awareness? Witnessing is choiceless awareness. If you choose, you are not witnessing. You have liked, disliked. You have chosen; you have become identified.For example, in your mind there are a few thoughts moving. Witnessing means you simply stand there seeing that they are moving, like clouds moving in the sky or the traffic moving on the road. You don’t have any choice. You don’t say, “This is good, let me keep it” and “That is bad, let it go.” If you talk this way you are not witnessing. You are getting involved, you are getting identified. You are creating love-hate relationships. And when you relate, you cannot be a witness.Witnessing means choiceless awareness.And what is suchness? When you don’t choose, things are as they are. Now anger passes by: so there is anger, there is witnessing and there is anger. You are not angry, you simply watch. If you choose, you are angry; if you choose against it, you become repressive of it. The anger comes, the greed comes, and they pass by. They come and they go, and you watch, you don’t choose. So things are as they are: you don’t give value. You don’t say this is higher, this is lower; this is spiritual, this is material; this is sin and this is a very holy act. You don’t bring any evaluation. You drop all evaluation. You simply see like a mirror, an empty mirror. Whosoever passes by, the mirror reflects. This is witnessing.And the mirror never chooses, because the mirror is not a photographic plate. The photographic plate immediately chooses. It gets caught, trapped. The mirror remains clean: you have passed, the mirror is again clean, empty. In fact, when you were passing, then too there was only reflection, but the mirror was not having any content in it. It was only a shadow, a shadow passing by.When you don’t choose, things are as they are. That is suchness – that is tathata. Witnessing comes from the Upanishads – sakshin. That is the word used by the seers of the Upanishads. Choiceless awareness comes from J. Krishnamurti – a new word for the same old thing. Suchness is a Buddhist word – tathata. It comes from Buddha. But they all mean the same thing. Don’t be caught in words, and don’t start becoming knowledgeable through words.But these problems arise because you never go into any practice; you never go into any experience. Everything remains theoretical.I have heard…The slightly worried parents inquired of their son how the lesson on sex went that day. They were hoping that the teacher had not been too “progressive.”The boy gave a somewhat bored reply, “Oh,” he said, “it was useless. We only had the theory today!”Remember, only the theory won’t help. Something has to be experienced, something was to be practiced. Something has to become living in you. Only then will you understand.If you had witnessed a little bit, you would have known; there would have been no need to ask the question. You would have known that it is choiceless awareness; you would have known that this is suchness, and all distinctions between words would have disappeared. But you have not experienced any meditativeness, hence the question.And you talk about some old sannyasin. He may be old, but he cannot be a sannyasin. He may have lived here, but he has not lived with me. Otherwise this is impossible.People go on reading books, go on cramming scriptures; they become very, very efficient with words. And then they start using words without knowing what they are doing.I have heard…As the doctor said to his girlfriend: “I love you with all my heart – and my kidneys, liver, epiglottis, spinal cord, etc., etc.”This is what happens to people who go on cramming words. Wake up a little. Wake up from your linguistic patterns. Drop your drunkenness with language, and things will become very easy.Things are easy. Things are very simple. Truth is simple, only you are complicated. Truth is herenow, only you are far away, lost in words, scriptures, theories, systems, philosophies. Come back home.Enough for today.

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Take It Easy Vol 1 01-14Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Take It Easy Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-05/

Of heaven or hell we haveNo recollection, no knowledge;We must become what we wereBefore we were born.Rain, hail, snow and iceAre divided from one another;But after they fall,They are the same waterOf the stream in the valley.Should you seekThe way of the BuddhaAll night long,Searching, you will enterInto your own mind.When they ask you,“Where is your country?What is your native place?” answer,“I am a manOf Original Inactivity.”The figure of the Real ManStanding there –Just a glimpse of him,And we are in love.Man can live in two ways: the natural and the unnatural. The unnatural has great attraction in it because it is new, unfamiliar, adventurous. Hence, every child has to leave his nature and go into “un-nature.” No child can resist that temptation; to resist that temptation is impossible. Paradise has to be lost. The losing of it is inbuilt; it cannot be avoided, it is inevitable. And, of course, only man can lose it. That is man’s ecstasy and agony, his privilege, his freedom and his fall.Jean-Paul Sartre is right when he says: Man is condemned to be free. Why condemned? – because with freedom, choice arises: the choice of being natural or being unnatural. When there is no freedom, there is no choice.Animals still exist in paradise; they never lose it. But because they never lose it, they can’t be aware of it. They can’t know where they are. To know where you are, you will have to lose it first. That’s how knowing becomes possible: by losing.You know a thing only when you have lost it. If you have never lost it, if it has always been there, you naturally take it for granted. It becomes so obvious that you become oblivious to it.Trees are still in paradise, and the mountains and the stars, but they don’t know where they are. Only man can know. A tree can’t become a buddha. Not that there is any difference between the inner nature of a buddha and a tree, but a tree can’t become a buddha, a tree is already a buddha! To become a buddha, the tree first has to lose its nature; it has to go away from itYou can only see things from a certain perspective. If you are too close to them, you cannot see them. What Buddha has seen, no tree has ever seen. It is available to trees and to animals, but only a buddha becomes conscious of it – and paradise is regained.Paradise is only when it is regained. Nature’s beauties and mysteries are revealed only when you come back home. When you go against your nature, when you go farthest from yourself, only then, one day, does the return journey start. When you become thirsty for nature, when you start dying without it, you start returning.This is the original fall. Man’s consciousness is his original fall, his original sin. But without the original sin, there is no possibility of a buddha or a christ.The first thing to be understood is: man can choose. He is the only animal in existence who can choose, who can do things which are not natural, who can do things which should not be done, who can go against himself and against existence, who can destroy himself and all his bliss, who can create hell.By creating hell, the contrast is created, and then one can see what heaven is. Only through the contrast, is there the possibility to know.So remember, there are two ways: one can live naturally or one can live unnaturally. When I say one can live naturally, I mean one can live without improving upon oneself in any way. One can live in trust – that’s what nature is. One can live in spontaneity, one can live without being a doer, one can live in inaction, what Taoists call wei-wu-wei, action through inaction.Nature means you are not to do anything; it is already happening. The rivers are flowing – not that they are doing something. And the trees are growing – not that they have to worry about it, not that they have to consult any guide for it. The trees are blooming – not that they have to think and plan about the flowers, of what color, of what shape. It is all happening.The tree is blooming in a thousand flowers without a single worry, without a single thought, without a single projection, without any blueprint. It is simply blooming! Just as fire is hot, the tree grows. It is natural, it is in the very nature of things. The seed becomes the sprout, and the sprout becomes the plant, and the plant becomes the tree, and one day the tree is full of foliage, and then another day buds have started appearing and the flowering and the fruits…and all is simply happening!The child growing in the mother’s womb is not doing anything; he is in wu-wei. But it is not that nothing is happening. In fact, so much is happening that never again will so much ever happen in his life. Those nine months in the mother’s womb contain so much happening that if you live ninety years, that much happening won’t be contained by you.Millions of things are happening. The child is conceived only as an invisible cell; then things start happening, things start exploding. The child is not sitting there in that small cell like a little man and thinking and planning and worrying, and suffering from insomnia. There is nobody!To understand this is to understand Buddha, that things can happen without your ever being worried about them. Things have always already been happening. And even when you become a doer, you become a doer only on the surface; deep down, things go on happening.When you are fast asleep, do you think you are trying to breathe? It is happening. If man had to breathe, had to remain constantly aware to breathe, nobody would ever be able to live, not even for a single day. One moment and you forget and it is gone. You forget to breathe in, and you are finished. Then how will you go to sleep? You will have to be constantly alert; you will have to wake yourself up many times in the night to see whether you are still breathing or not.You eat food, and then forget all about it. And millions of things are happening: the food is being digested, broken down, destroyed, changed, transformed chemically; it will become your blood, your bones, your marrow. Great work goes on. The blood is circulating continuously, throwing all the dead cells out of the body.How much is going on within you without your doing at all. Doing remains on the surface. Man can live on the surface in an artificial way, but deep down in the innermost core you are always natural. Your artificiality becomes simply a layer upon your nature. But the layer thickens every day – more thoughts, more plans, more activity, more doing. More of the doer, the ego, and a crust grows. And that is the crust Buddha calls samsara, the world.The phenomenon of the doer, of the ego: this is losing nature, going against nature, going away from nature. One day you have gone so far away that you start feeling suffocated. You have gone so far away that schizophrenia arises in your being. Your circumference starts falling apart from the center. That is the point of conversion, the point when religion becomes relevant, the point when you start searching for a way out, the point where you start thinking, “Who am I?” The point where you start looking back: “Where am I coming from, what is my original face, what is my nature? I have gone too far and now it is time to go back. One step more and I will fall apart. I have broken all the links; only a small bridge has remained.”All neurosis is nothing but this. That’s why psychology itself cannot cure neurosis. It can give you beautiful explanations about it; it can satisfy you, console you, solace you; it can teach you how to live with your neurosis; it can help you not to worry too much about it. It can give you a pattern of life in which neurosis can exist and you can also exist – it can teach you a kind of coexistence – but it cannot dissolve it. Only religion can dissolve it. And unless psychology takes a quantum leap and becomes religion, it will remain partial.Why can religion cure the neurosis? Why can religion cure schizophrenia? – because it can make you whole, one. The circumference is no longer against the center; they are holding hands, they are embracing each other. They are one, they function in one rhythm, they vibrate as one vibration. That is real health, and wholeness, and holiness. That’s where buddhahood arises – a man has become sane again.Unless you are a buddha you will remain insane, more or less. Insanity is bound to remain a part of your being. You can manage to live with it somehow, but it is going to be just somehow. It is a management; you cannot relax about it.Have you not observed? Everybody is afraid of going mad. One keeps oneself in control, but the fear is always there: “If something goes wrong, if one thing more goes wrong, then I may not be able to control myself any longer.” Everybody is on the verge of it. People are just about ninety-nine percent on the verge. One percent more, any small thing, the last straw on the camel – the bank fails, your woman leaves and escapes with somebody else, the business dwindles – and you are no longer sane, all sanity gone. It must have been just a facade, that sanity that goes so easily. It must have been very thin, fragile. In fact, it was not there.The change between the ordinary man and the insane is only of quantity, not of quality. Unless you become a buddha or a christ or a krishna – these are all names of the same state of consciousness, where center and circumference function in a dance, in a symphony – unless that symphony arises, you will remain phony, you will remain false, you will remain arbitrary, you will not really have a soul. And it is not that you cannot have it; it is always yours just for the asking. Jesus says: “Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you. Ask, and it shall be given” – just for the asking you will get it.But there is great attraction in the unnatural, because the unnatural is alien, the unnatural is opposite to you, and the opposite always attracts, the opposite always intrigues, the opposite is always there as a challenge. You would like to know…That’s why a man becomes interested in a woman, a woman becomes interested in a man. That’s how people become interested and attracted to each other: the opposite. And the same follows deep down. Your natural being seems to be already yours, so what is the point of getting hold of it, of being it? One wants something new.And that which you have, you lose all interest in. That’s why you are missing godliness, because you already have godliness and you cannot be interested in it. You are interested in the world, in money, in power and prestige – those things you don’t have. Godliness is already given. Godliness means nature. Who bothers about nature? Why think about it when in the first place you already have it? We are interested in that which we don’t have. And the unnatural attracts: one becomes focused on the unnatural and the artificial, and one rushes from one unnatural style of life to another unnatural style of life.And remember: not only are the so-called worldly people unnatural, the so-called religious are also unnatural. That is the great understanding that Buddha brings to the world – and that understanding has become a ripe fruit in Zen. That is the fundamental contribution of Buddha.A man remains artificial in the so-called world: earning money, power, prestige. Then one day he becomes religious, but he is moving into another kind of unnaturalness. Now he practices yoga, stands on his head – all stuff and nonsense. What are you doing there, standing on your head? Can’t you stand on your feet? But to stand on your feet seems so natural that it has no attraction.When you see somebody standing on his head, you think, “Yes, he is doing something. Here is a man.” And you are attracted – he must be gaining something that you have not known yet, and you would also like to practice it.People start doing all kinds of stupid things, but those are all again the same. The pattern is the same, the gestalt is the same. The change is very slight; the quality is the same.You were earning money, now you are more interested in heaven, the next life. You were interested in what people think about you, now you are interested in what God thinks about you. You were interested in making a beautiful house here, now you are interested in making a beautiful house in paradise, in the other world.You were being unnatural; you were eating too much, now you start fasting. Just see how one changes from one unnatural attitude to another unnatural attitude. You were eating too much, you were obsessed with eating, you were continuously stuffing yourself, then one day you are fed up with this – literally fed up with this – so you start fasting. Now, again, a thrill arises in you; now again you can hope something is going to happen. And you can go to the extreme of fasting, which is as much against nature as eating too much.To be natural is just in the middle. Buddha has called his way “the middle way,” because the natural exists just exactly in the middle between opposite extremes.You have been chasing women your whole life, and then one day you decide to become a celibate and move to a Catholic monastery, or become a Hindu monk and go to the Himalayas. Now, this is the same person who was continuously chasing women; now he is tired of it. Now he wants to drop it absolutely, he wants to move into the opposite direction. He escapes into a monastery. Now he enforces celibacy on himself, which is as unnatural as the first attitude. But one unnaturalness leads to another and one can go on in circles… Beware of it.To be natural has no appeal, because to be natural means your ego will not be satisfied in any way. And Buddha is preaching only one single thing: to be ordinary, to be nobody, to be natural.The natural man is the enlightened man. To be natural is to be enlightened. To be as natural as animals and trees and stars, to have no imposition upon oneself, to have no idea of how one should be, is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is a state of being natural.It is not something like an achievement. When you think of enlightenment you always think of it as an achievement. People come to me and they ask, “Osho, how are we going to achieve enlightenment?” It is not a state of achievement because whatsoever you achieve or you can achieve will be artificial. The natural need not be achieved: it is already there. It has never been otherwise.You are not to achieve enlightenment; you are simply to drop the achieving mind. You have to relax into it. It is available; from the very beginning it is available. Relax into it.An enlightened person is not somebody who has reached to the pinnacle, who has reached to the topmost rung of the ladder. You are all ladder climbers; you need a ladder. It may be in the marketplace or in the monastery – it makes no difference – but you need a ladder. You carry your ladders with you. Wherever you can find a place, you simply fix your ladder and you start climbing. And nobody asks, “Where are you going? Where is this ladder going to lead you?” But after one rung there is another rung. And you are curious: “Maybe something is there!” so you go one step more. Another rung is waiting for you, and you become curious and you start moving.That’s how people move in the world of money, that’s how people move in the world of politics. And it is not only that you have to move: because many people are going on the same ladder, you have to push others. You have to pull their legs, you have to make a place for yourself, you have to make space for yourself; you have to be aggressive, you have to be violent. And when there is so much violence and so many people fighting, who bothers where they are going? People must be going somewhere when so many people are interested.And if you become too much of a thinker, you will lose the race. So there is no time to think about it, to think “What is the point of it all?” Thinkers are losers, so one has not to think; one has just to rush and go on rushing.And the ladder is non-ending – rung upon rung, rung upon rung. The mind can go on projecting new rungs. And when you move into a monastery the same continues. Now a spiritual hierarchy is there and you start moving in the hierarchy. You become very serious and the same competitiveness comes in.This is just an ego game, and ego can play its game only in the artificial. Wherever you see a ladder, beware – you are in the same trap. Enlightenment is not the last rung of a ladder. Enlightenment is getting down from the ladder, getting down forever and never asking for any ladder again, becoming natural.I have to use the word becoming which is not true. It should not be used, but that’s how language is: it is made by those ladder-climbers. You cannot become natural because whatsoever you become will be unnatural. Becoming is unnatural; being is natural. So, forgive me, I have to use the language, the same language, which is not meant to be used for something which is natural. So you have to understand it. Don’t be caught by words.When I say become natural, I am simply saying: stop becoming, and fall, relax into being. You are already there!Why do people go on moving in circles? First, they have become very, very skillful in it, and nobody wants to drop his skill, because the skill gives you a feeling of confidence, it gives you a feeling of strength. There are millions of people in the world who go on in the same rut again and again because they have become skillful. If they change, in the new space they may not be so skillful – they will not be – so they go on running in the circle. And they go on becoming more and more bored. But the more they move in the circle, the more skillful they become. Then they can’t stop themselves, and they can’t stop because of others too, because others are rushing by. If they stop, they will be defeated. It is really a mad world.Then one feels very good repeating the same thing again and again. Monotony is very consoling. People who are bewildered and frightened by too much change find relief in monotony. That’s why teenagers like beat music, and some mental patients repeat the same act or word over and over.You can go and see in a mental asylum, and you will be surprised that all the mad people are some kind of mantra doers, they have their mantras. Somebody is washing his hands continuously: day in, day out, just washing his hands. It is his mantra: it keeps him engaged, it keeps him occupied, it keeps him unafraid. And he knows how to do it; it is a simple act. If he stops doing it he becomes frightened with nothing to hang onto. If he stops doing it, he is empty with nothing to cling to. If he stops doing it, he does not know who he is. He has his identity as the hand washer. He knows himself perfectly well who he is when he is washing his hands. Once he stops it, difficulties arise.In a mental asylum, those people who have devised their own mantras – in action, in words – are just consoling themselves. This is the whole secret of transcendental meditation and its success in America. America is today a great mental asylum; it needs something to repeat, monotonously, continuously; it helps people. Just the same gesture, the same posture, the same mantra – you know that territory perfectly well. You go on moving in it. It keeps you away from yourself. Transcendental meditation is not meditation, and it is not transcendental, either. It is just a consolation: it keeps you unaware of your insanity. Only an insane person can be convinced to repeat a mantra, otherwise not.So people go on doing the same thing that they have done down the ages, in so many lives. Just watch yourself: you fall into one love, then into another, then into another…this is transcendental meditation, the same act. And you know that the first time it was frustration, the second time it was frustration, the third time it was frustration – and you know beforehand the fourth time is also going to be frustration. But you don’t want to see it, you don’t want to look into it, because if you look into it then you are left alone with nothing to do.Falling in love keeps you engaged, keeps you on the run, keeps you moving. At least you can avoid yourself, you can escape from yourself. You need not look into the deepest question: Who are you? You know that you are a great lover, so you go on counting how many women you have loved. There are people who keep count; they go on keeping count: three hundred and sixty, three hundred and sixty-one, three hundred and sixty-two… They have not loved a single woman. And there are people who keep count of their mantras, how many times they repeat the mantra. There are people who go on writing in their books: Rama, Rama, Rama… They go on writing it.Once I stayed in a man’s house. I was surprised at his great library. I asked, “What kind of scriptures do you have?”He said, “Only one kind of scripture: I go on writing Rama, Rama, Rama – that’s my mantra. From the morning to the evening I do only one thing; I have written it millions of times, and these are all my records.”And that man is respected very much. Now, he is just a madman, utterly mad. If he is stopped from doing this nonsense, he will immediately go mad. This mad activity is keeping him sane in some way. Ninety-nine percent of your religion is nothing but a device to keep you somehow sane.Buddha is a totally different kind of person. He is the arch enemy of showbiz. He is somebody who wants to tell the truth, and wants to tell it as it is. He shatters all rubbish, religious ideologies. He simply shocks you to the very roots. And if you become available to him, he can become a door – a door back home, a door, a threshold that can make you able to fall back into nature.In every complicated culture, in every complicated civilization, there are professional liars and professional truth-tellers, but they are not very different; they are the same people. The professional liars are called lawyers, and the professional truth-tellers are known as priests. They simply repeat scriptures.Buddha is neither a liar nor a professional truth-teller. He simply makes his heart available to you; he wants to share. Hence, the whole Indian priesthood was against him. He was thrown out of his own country, his temples were burnt, his statues were destroyed. Many Buddhist scriptures are available now only in Chinese translations or Tibetan translations. Their originals are lost; they must have been burnt.Thousands of Buddhists were killed in this nonviolent country. They were burnt alive. Buddha shocked the professional truth-tellers very deeply. He was bent upon destroying their whole business. He simply made it an open secret.Listen to these words of Ikkyu. They describe the Buddhist approach profoundly.Of heaven or hell we haveNo recollection, no knowledge;We must become what we wereBefore we were born.Everything finally returns to its source. That’s the law of nature. Nature moves in a perfect circle, so everything has to return to its source. Knowing the source, you can know the goal because the goal can never be other than the source.You plant a seed, and the tree arises. It will take years, and the tree will spread its wings in the sky and will have dialogues with the stars, and will live a long life…and finally what happens? The tree produces seeds again and the seeds fall into the earth and again new trees arise. It is a simple movement.The source is the goal!Your body will fall back into the earth and will become part of the earth because it comes from the earth. Your breath will disappear into air because it comes from the air. The water that is in your body will go back into the sea from whence it came. The fire that is in you will go into fire. And the consciousness that is in you will move into the consciousness of the whole. Everything goes back to its source. This fundamental has to be remembered – because by knowing it, by understanding it, you drop all other goals, because then all other goals are arbitrary.Somebody says, “I want to become a doctor, an engineer, a scientist, a poet.” These are all artificial goals that you have fixed upon yourself. The natural goal is the innocence that you had in your mother’s womb, or go even deeper: the nothingness from where you came, that is the natural goal. And to live naturally means to know this; otherwise, you are bound to create some artificial goal.Somebody wants to become enlightened – that is an artificial goal. I am not saying that people don’t become enlightened, but I am saying not to make it a goal. People become enlightened only when they have fallen back to their original source; when they have become natural they are enlightened.Let me repeat again: enlightenment is a natural state. It is not some supra-conscious state, supra-mental. Avoid Sri Aurobindo and his terminology; that is all a mind game. It is not something very special; it is very ordinary. It is so ordinary that there is nothing to brag about in it.Everything finally returns to its source, so heaven and hell are arbitrary goals, created, invented by the priests to dominate people. A great strategy – it worked for thousands of years. Buddha wants to burn hell and heaven and the whole ideology surrounding it.There is a beautiful anecdote in one great Sufi woman’s life, Rabiya al Adabiya:One day she was found running in the marketplace – she was known as a mad woman. She was carrying a pot of water in one hand and a burning torch in the other. People gathered together and asked, “What is the matter? Where are you going? And why are you carrying this burning torch and the water in your hand?”She said, “I want to drown hell with this water, and I want to burn your heaven with this torch. Unless these two are utterly destroyed, man will never know what religion is.”The idea of heaven and hell is a political strategy to repress people. It is a simple psychological phenomenon and we know it: people can be persuaded to do things either by reward or by punishment. This is a simple game; parents play it with their children. They say, “If you do what we say, you will be rewarded – you will get more ice cream or more toys or a visit to the movie. And if you don’t follow what we say, you will be punished, you will have to miss one meal.”Heaven and hell is the same strategy just stretched to its logical conclusion. Man has been made very much afraid of hell, and whenever man is afraid you can dominate him. A fearful man is ready to become a slave. Make any man afraid and you will become the master. You can dominate him then very easily, because a man who is afraid wants to lean on something, wants some consolation, some promise, some shelter.The priest makes people afraid of hell. That’s why hell has been painted with such ugliness, with such cruelty, violence. The people who have painted hell and have talked about it must have been great sadists. Their ideas are great. And you have been thinking all along that these people were saints. Either they were sadists or they were very cunning and crafty priests.And for those who will follow the line, who will be obedient, who will not disobey the priest and the politician, heaven is the reward. That, too, has been painted beautifully. And whatsoever was needed at a particular time, in a particular country, has been provided. And that you can see.The Indian heaven, obviously, is very cool. You can understand it, sitting in Pune! Very cool; constantly, twenty-four hours, cool breezes blow. The sun rises but it is not hot. In other words, it is air-conditioned. And hell is all fire. But the Tibetan hell is different, it has to be, because it was invented by other people to dominate another kind of country. Fire is not allowed at all in the Tibetan hell, because Tibetans love fire; they are dying because of cold. So the Tibetan hell is completely, absolutely snow; the snow never melts, it is eternal, and you will be buried in that snow. In the Indian hell you will be thrown into fire, eternal fire; it burns continuously.Now see the point. The Indian hell is different from the Tibetan hell. If there is a hell, it can’t be different.I have heard…A man died, an Indian; he reached hell. He was very surprised because no Indian believes that he is going to hell. All Indians are such great religious mahatmas. Seeing himself in hell, he thought, “Something has gone wrong – that red tape and some official mistake…”He said, “What is the matter?”The man on the gate said, “There is nothing wrong. You have been brought to the place where you belong. Now choose! Which hell would you like to have?”He said, “Which hell? Are there other hells also apart from the Indian?”“Of course, there are other hells. You can have the German hell, you can have the Italian hell, you can have the Indian hell, you can have the Japanese…”He was puzzled. He said, “I had never thought about it. But what is the difference? What is the difference between the Indian and the German hell?”The man said, “There is no difference on the surface. The fire is the same, the burning is the same, the torture is the same.”“Then why do you tell me to choose?”He said, “But there is a subtle difference: in the German hell things are done with German efficiency. And, of course, in an Indian hell, things are done with Indian lousiness.”The man said, “I will choose the Indian hell!”Hells can’t be different. But priests were trying to dominate different kinds of people in different situations. Heaven is also different, has been taught by the priests differently. Whatsoever people were asking for has been provided. In the Mohammedan heaven homosexuality is provided for. In the Indian heaven you cannot conceive homosexuality, but in the Mohammedan heaven, homosexuality is provided for because it has been prevalent in Mohammedan countries, and acceptably prevalent. There has been no condemnation about it. These are just rewards. Whatsoever you like will be given to you. All that you have to do is be obedient to the priest.Buddha says there is no heaven and no hell. And by denying heaven and hell any reality, he has taken the very ground from underneath the feet of all the priests. Naturally, they were angry; naturally, they were absolutely enraged. They are angry with me, and their anger has a reason. It is not irrational, it is very rational, because I am also pulling the very earth from beneath their feet.I also say to you: There is no heaven and no hell; there is no punishment and no reward in the afterlife. There is nobody to punish you or reward you. Each act has its own punishment and reward intrinsic to it. When you are angry, you are punished in your anger, in your being angry. There is no other punishment than that. When you are loving, in that very loving act, love is its own reward. There is nobody keeping accounts, there is nobody writing down what you are doing here – good or bad, and finally at the last judgment day you will be rewarded or punished. That is stupid. Each moment, each act brings its own reward or punishment. The priest is not needed. Even God is not needed to punish you or reward you.Existence is autonomous. Just help somebody and you feel such a joy arising in you. Hurt somebody and you are hurt. It is a natural process. It should not be exploited by the priests.So Ikkyu says: Of heaven or hell we have no recollection…Ikkyu says: Ordinarily, do you remember anything of hell and heaven before you were born? If you don’t remember anything, then know well you will not be going back to them – because one only goes back to that from where one has come. The source is the goal.And Ikkyu says: You may not remember much, but I recollect absolutely. In my consciousness, in my awareness, I recollect absolutely – there has never been any hell or any heaven in the beginning, so it is not going to be in the end.If you go deep down into your source – which is easier to go into because you have been there once. The goal is difficult: thinking about the goal is going to be imaginary because you have never been there.See Ikkyu’s pragmatic attitude. He says: Don’t bother about the goal, because how can you know about it? You have never been there. It is in the future. But you can go into the source; you come from there. You can go deeper and deeper into your being and touch the very source. It is there. Nothing is ever lost. Seeing that, you will know the goal too.And those who have gone, layer upon layer into their being, and have touched the very ground, they agree with Ikkyu. That very ground has no hell, no heaven. In fact, you are not there, just pure non-being, emptiness – shunyata – nothingness, no-thingness. We come from that no-thingness, and we will be going back to that no-thingness.If this is understood through meditations, through your own inner search, then you will never choose any artificial goal. All artificial goals lead you astray. Then one starts relaxing into nature; one becomes one’s original nature; one becomes one’s originality. And in that originality, in that ordinary naturalness, is buddhahood, is enlightenment.Rain, hail, snow and iceAre divided from one another;But after they fall,They are the same waterOf the stream in the valley.All distinctions are arbitrary: rain, snow, ice. All distinctions are arbitrary: the same river can become frozen, the same river can flow and become water, and the same river can evaporate, can become vapor and clouds, but it is the same river.Out of the same nothingness, the trees arise and the animals and man and woman. And these are all distinctions, utilitarian, but not true; necessary, but not absolute. When we disappear, we disappear again into that cosmic-ness, into that oneness, into that simultaneity.Buddha never uses the word God, because God has become so much associated with wrong things – with the priest, with the temple, with the scripture, with the ritual. So Buddha avoids that word. His word for God is nothingness. And why does he insist on nothingness? Because you cannot pray to nothingness. And when there is no possibility of prayer, the priest will disappear.You cannot talk to nothingness. It will look so foolish. You can talk to God. You can say, “Father, who art in heaven…” but you cannot say to nothingness, “Nothingness, who art in heaven…” It will look so foolish. You cannot say to nothingness, “Save me!” It will be ridiculous.You cannot pray to nothingness. You cannot create a ritual, you need not have a priest, you need not go into the scriptures. That’s the beauty of the word nothingness, it simply cuts the very root of so-called religion. It creates a different kind of religiousness – a religiousness which understands but does not pray, a religiousness which falls into silence but does not start talking with existence, a religiousness which knows no dialogue except silence, utter silence.See the beauty of it. Buddha has chosen one of the really very potential words: shunyata. The English word, the English equivalent, nothingness, is not such a beautiful word. That’s why I would like to make it no-thingness, because the nothing is not just nothing, it is all. It is vibrant with all possibilities. It is potential, absolute potential. It is yet unmanifest, but it contains all.Rain, hail, snow and ice are divided from one another; but after they fall, they are the same water of the stream in the valley. And so we all disappear into nature when we fall back. In the beginning is nature, in the end is nature, so why in the middle do you make so much fuss? Why in the middle? Becoming so worried, so anxious, so ambitious, creating such despair?Nothingness to nothingness is the whole journey.There is a Buddhist expression for it. Buddha used to say: In a cold night, in a cold winter night, dark night, a bird enters into a palace by one window, flutters in the room for a while – the coziness of the room, the king’s palace, the light, the warmth – and then is again out of the room by another window. Buddha says such is the life’s dream – just a moment’s warmth, a moment’s coziness, a moment’s palace and the pleasures of it, and again we plunge into nothingness.From nothingness we come and to nothingness we move, and just in the middle a momentary dream. Why be so attached to it? Why be so obsessed with it? Seeing it, that we come from nothing and we move to nothing, in the middle also we can be nothing. That is buddhahood: just being nothing, nothing special, nothing extraordinary.That’s why the Zen monk is the most ordinary man in the world. Chopping wood, carrying water from the well, and he says, “How marvelous! How wondrous!” He continues doing the small things of life. That is the beauty of it. But people start looking for something extraordinary.Just the other day I was reading a lecture of U.G. Krishnamurti. He says he went to see Ramana Maharshi. He was not attracted because Ramana Maharshi was chopping vegetables. Yes, he was that kind of man, very ordinary. Chopping vegetables! U.G. Krishnamurti must have gone to see somebody extraordinary sitting on a golden throne or something. Ramana Maharshi just sitting on the floor and chopping vegetables, preparing vegetables for the kitchen: U. G. Krishnamurti was very frustrated. “This man knows nothing. This man is very ordinary.” He left the ashram; it was not worth it.But I would like to say to you: This man, Ramana Maharshi, is one of the greatest buddhas ever born to the world. That was his buddhahood in action.U. G. Krishnamurti must have been in search of a pretender. He could not see the ordinariness and the beauty of it and the grace of it. And this same man, U. G. Krishnamurti, lived with Swami Shivananda of Rishikesh for seven years – and that chap was just stupid – and practiced yoga with him. And after seven years he recognized that he has nothing. But only after seven years – it took him seven years! That simply shows that he also has a mighty dull mind. Seven years to see that Shivananda has nothing – seven seconds are more than enough! And with Ramana Maharshi, seven seconds were enough, because he saw him chopping vegetables or reading jokes, looking at cartoons. That’s how the ordinary mind, the egoistic mind functions.The ego is always searching for something bigger, some bigger ego. And the true sage has no ego; he is an ordinary man. He is utterly ordinary: that is his extraordinariness!Should you seekThe way of the BuddhaAll night long,Searching, you will enterInto your own mind.Should you seek the way of the Buddha all night long. The ordinary mind is interested in the outside. The outside is intriguing, wondrous, worth exploring. So we explore it for money, for prestige, for other things, and then one day when we are finished with the so-called worldly things, we start looking for a master, for Buddha, for Christ – still outside! We start looking for the way, but still outside. And the buddha is not found outside, and the way is not found outside.To go seeking outside is to go farther and farther away from the way, because the way is inside, the buddha is inside.Should you seek the way of the Buddha all night long… And you can go on seeking all night long, this dark night of millions of lives, and you will not find anything – except this truth. If you stumble upon it you are fortunate.Searching, you will enter into your own mind. If you can find only one thing out of all kinds of frustrations – that there is nothing to be found in the outside, nothing at all – and seeing it, realizing it, you turn in, then your own mind is the whole thing; then inside you is all:Searching, you will enter into your own mind. By and by, as you go deeper into your own mind, you penetrate from mind to no-mind. The superficial layer is of the mind, but the inner content is of no-mind. The superficial layer is of the ego, the inner content is of egolessness. If you enter in, first you will come across mind, thoughts, desires, fantasies, imagination, memory, dreams, and all that stuff. But if you go on penetrating, soon you will come to silent spaces, thoughtless spaces. Soon you will start coming closer and closer to the innermost core of your being which is timelessness, which is nowhere-ness, which has no time and no space.When you come to a point where you can’t see any time and you can’t see any space, you have arrived. But this arrival is arriving back to your own nature. You have not arrived to something new: you have arrived to that which was already given and has been always yours.When they ask you,“Where is your country?What is your native place?” answer,“I am a manOf Original Inactivity.”When you have arrived at this point you can understand that there is no need to do anything; all is happening. There was never any need to do anything; all was already happening. You were unnecessarily worried. You carried all those weights because you were ignorant. Otherwise, things were happening.The world is running so smoothly and so beautifully and so perfectly, but because we think we are separate from it the problem arises: How to run our lives? If you know that you are part of it, there is no need to worry. This cosmos, such an infinite cosmos, running so perfectly well – can’t you remain in it without any worry? But the separation is there.You have taken one thing for granted: that you are separate. Going deep inside, that separation disappears. That is the meaning when I say: Egolessness arises. Ego means separation. Ego means, “I am separate from the whole.” Ego means the part is claiming to be the whole in its own right. Ego means the part is claiming, “I have my own center and I have to survive and fight and struggle for myself. If I don’t fight for myself, who is going to fight for me? If I don’t try to survive, I will be killed.”Insecurity arises because of the ego. When the ego is gone there is simply security. In fact, there is no insecurity and no security; all those dualities have disappeared. To live in that is to live nirvana, is to live enlightenment.When they ask you, “Where is your country? What is your native place?” answer, “I am a man of Original Inactivity.” It does not mean that you will not be doing anything. For example, I am speaking – this is doing. But still I say to you: I am not doing it, because there is no doer in it. Speaking is happening just like trees are flowering or birds are singing, just as new leaves are coming to the trees. Seeing you, seeing your questions, new answers are coming into me. Otherwise, there is nothing in my mind. It is a response; you call me, I respond.What I am saying to you is what you have provoked in me; there is nobody saying it. There is nobody: while I am walking, there is nobody walking; while I am eating, there is nobody eating. Eating is happening, walking is happening, talking is happening, listening is happening, but there is nobody behind it. There is pure nothingness, a mirror-like nothingness. Not that activity disappears, but the doer is found no more.Buddha disappeared when he was forty. Still he lived up to eighty-two years, forty-two more years. And he did all kinds of things, but there was no doer; it was all natural. Natural means that which happens of its own accord.That’s why Zen people say: When you feel hungry, eat, and when you feel tired, sleep.A great master died and his chief disciple, who was known all over the country as an enlightened person himself, started crying. Many had gathered and it was very shocking to them, because they had been thinking this man was enlightened. In fact, because of this man the old master had become famous; otherwise, nobody would have known him. He was a very silent man, a man of few words, few and far between. Because of this disciple – this disciple had a charisma, this disciple had a magnetism – the old master had become known.And now this disciple is crying? People felt this was not right. They told him, “Please don’t cry, otherwise what will people think? So many people are coming to see the old master, to give him the last send-off, and seeing you, an enlightened person, crying will have a very, very bad effect on them.”But the enlightened person said, “But what can I do? Tears are coming and I am no longer there to prevent them. When laughter comes, I laugh. And when tears come, tears come. When it happens, it happens. I am not there to prevent, I am not there to create; the doer is no longer there.”In this state, this natural state, this utterly ordinary state – Ramana Maharshi chopping vegetables, or this Zen man crying, or Bodhidharma laughing – there is nobody behind it. You just watch: you also do a few things when there is nobody behind it, and those are the only things which bring bliss to you.Have you not observed some moments in your life when you are not there? The morning, the sun is rising, and it is cool and the birds are singing, and suddenly you lose track of yourself, and you become so absorbed in the rising sun and in the beautiful morning that for a moment you forget that you are. Immediately, there is beauty. The beauty does not arise out of the sunrise, because there will be many who are passing by the same road and they are not looking at the sunrise. It has happened to you because you are not there.Making love, sometimes you disappear. When you disappear there is orgasm, there is great beauty and great joy and great blessing, ecstasy, but only when you disappear. If you are looking for orgasm then there is no beauty, then there is no grace, because you are there continuously hankering. How can orgasm happen when you are there? Orgasm is when you are not. Ecstasy is when you are not, beauty is when you are not, godliness is when you are not, love is when you are not.But these moments come to everybody, because this is a natural phenomenon. You can avoid, but not always. Sometimes in spite of you it happens. A child giggling, and suddenly something opens in you. Doing nothing, sitting in your room, and suddenly something drops like a weight from the head – and it is there! Yes, I call it “it.” It is there: the benediction.This is original inactivity. Ikkyu says: Let this be your land. This is where you really belong, this is from where you come, and this where you should relax and be.The figure of the Real ManStanding there –Just a glimpse of him,And we are in love.A tremendously beautiful sutra. The figure of the Real Man: this is the figure of the real man: original inactivity, doing without the doer, being there without being there. Action flows, but it is natural; it is a happening, not a doing. This flow, this spontaneity, this responsiveness, this oneness with the total, with the whole, is what Ikkyu calls the original man or the real man.You are unreal – as you are, you are unreal. Let me remind you. Man can live in two ways: real, unreal; natural, artificial. Everybody has become unreal. It takes great effort to remain unreal; hence, unreality is agonizing. It is very arduous to remain unreal. It is a constant work, because you have to go against nature. It is going up-current, it is pushing the river; with your tiny hands pushing the gigantic river. You feel tired, you feel washed out, you feel dissipated. And sooner or later you will feel defeated; the river will possess you and you will be thrown with the current of the river.Being real means going with the river, flowing with the flow, allowing the flow to flow through you.The figure of the Real Man standing there… And once you have seen the figure of the real man in you… And it is always standing there, waiting for you to look back. The figure of the Real Man standing there – Just a glimpse of him, and we are in love.Just a glimpse of him… and suddenly all hatred, all anger, all aggressiveness, all violence, disappears. Just a glimpse of the Real Man…of your reality, of your authenticity, of your naturalness …and we are in love. In fact, we are love. Then life takes a new color, a new aroma, a new fragrance, a new flavor. The flavor is called love.Buddha has said that when a man attains to the insight, from the outside there is only one indication to know whether he has attained or not, that is love. I would like to say to U.G. Krishnamurti: You should have looked in the eyes of Ramana Maharshi. He looked only at the hands which were chopping vegetables. He should have looked into his eyes to see with what love he was chopping the vegetables. He should have looked into his eyes to see what love he was. He was the real man.There is only one indication and that is love. But to understand love you have to be a little silent, a little loving, a little open. If you are full of prejudices about how the enlightened man should be, then you will go on missing. You should not have any prejudices.Just look into the eyes of a real man, and suddenly something will start stirring in your heart too. Tears will come to your eyes, your energy will have a great delight, your heart will throb with new vigor, your soul will spread its wings.Just a glimpse of him, and we are in love. A single glimpse transforms the whole life. Once you have looked into your innermost core, you are never the same again. Then your life is nothing but love. Then you live love; then you are love.And that love is not the love that you know. What you know is nothing but lust camouflaged as love. What you know is a kind of exploitation, a mutual exploitation of two persons who are not capable of being alone. They exploit each other and help each other to be together. Real love arises only when the real man has been looked into, when the real man has been encountered. Then love is a state of being, not a relationship. Then you give because you can’t do anything else. Then you share – not that you decide to share, then you find sharing happening. Then you bloom in love, then great lotuses open up and the fragrance is released.Buddha has said two words: pragya and karuna. Pragya means samadhi, wisdom, enlightenment; and karuna means love, compassion. These two are two aspects of the one phenomenon of encountering the real man.Look in! You have looked out enough. You have searched out enough. You have lived in the dark night for many, many lives; it is time, it is the right time to look in. You have become very artificial, very unnatural.Let me introduce you to yourself. Become acquainted again with who you are. And a single glimpse transforms, and transforms forever.And again I would like to repeat: this transformation is not something special – it is very ordinary because it is just your nature. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and ye shall find.Enough for today.

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Take It Easy Vol 1 01-14Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Take It Easy Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You said life and existence have no goal, they are a purpose unto themselves. Other masters, for instance, Sri Aurobindo, teach evolution as the aim of the world, evolution in always reaching for still higher levels of consciousness – from the kingdom of minerals to the kingdom of vegetables, animal, man, from present man to enlightened man.Are these teachings wrong? Or is there a bridge to purposelessness?Sri Aurobindo is a great philosopher but not a master at all. He is very intelligent, very scholarly, a great intellectual, but not an enlightened master. He talks about God and talks beautifully, but it is all talk, it is all abstraction; it is not a realization.If it is a realization, then there cannot be any goal. For example, if the world has evolution as the goal, then what will be the goal of evolution? Why evolution at all in the first place? You will have to create another abstraction, and it will be a regress ad infinitum. Whatsoever you fix as the goal, the question will remain relevant about that. Why?If this is the goal of evolution, to realize godliness, then what is the goal of realizing godliness, the ultimate? Just ask that question and you are back to the same place. If enlightenment is the goal of life, then what is the goal of enlightenment? And then you can see the point: enlightenment will have no purpose. And if the ultimate itself has no purpose, then what is the point of saying that life has purpose and the world has purpose? If the ultimate is purposelessness, then that ultimate permeates all.This goal-orientation comes from the ego. The ego cannot accept that there is no goal. The ego cannot accept that there is no hierarchy. The ego cannot accept that minerals and trees and animals and man and enlightened people all exist in a great simultaneity – there is no gradation. You would like to be higher, you would like to be somebody special. You are man, not a mineral. But what is so great in being a man? What is so great in being an animal, or a man or an enlightened man? Why create the hierarchy? Finally the whole thing falls flat – in the end God has no purpose, and God is all.Those who have experienced, those who have not just been thinking about God, but those who have experienced will say godliness is nothing but the cosmic simultaneity of all. Minerals are exactly where man is, in their own way, in a different form. Trees are exactly where enlightened people are, in their own way, in their own form. Nobody is higher and nobody is lower. The ego cannot accept that, because if there is nobody higher, nobody lower, it cannot exist at all. The ego can exist only through comparison; it has to put somebody lower and somebody higher. It can exist only in the middle of these two falsities. It has to put somebody lower so it can feel good: “I am special.” Then it has to put somebody higher so it can go on striving, so that it can go on achieving, so that it can go on ladder-climbing.But if the ultimate has no purpose, what purpose is there in enlightenment? Buddha is purposeless – just think of it – and you are purposeful; existence is purposeless, and you are purposeful. If existence is purposeless, you are purposeless, because you are not separate from existence. Who is existing in the trees? Who is treeing in the trees? Who is hidden in the rocks? Who is singing in the birds? Who is speaking in me and who is listening in you? It is all one. The speaker and the spoken to are one, the knower and the known are one, the lover and the beloved are one.Once this becomes comprehensible to you, you relax – you relax in the cosmic simultaneity. That’s what I mean when I say, “Be natural.” Ego brings unnatural desires in you; it drives you crazy. Life is simple, but to be simple one has to be purposeless. Any goal, and you can’t be simple; any goal and you can’t be herenow. Any goal and the desire to reach it will rock you. Any goal, and you are on the way, again moving, unable to enjoy this moment, the grace of this moment, the benediction of herenow.Once you understand this, all goals disappear and with all those goals, you disappear – then what is left is enlightenment. To know that there is no purpose is to become enlightened, to know that all is good as it is. And we are all participating in the same reality. Nobody is higher and nobody is lower; no comparison is needed.Which is higher, ice or water? Is vapor higher than ice? We know that there is nothing higher or lower – ice, water, vapor, are all manifestations of one reality called H2O. H2O has these three forms. Existence has millions of forms: man, woman, beautiful, ugly, stupid, intelligent, sinner, saint. Nobody is higher, nobody is lower. To see it is to be transformed. From that very moment you start disappearing, you start melting.People like Sri Aurobindo will give you a new kind of ego, a spiritual kind. You start striving for supra-mental states, supra-conscious states, and you are again in the same rut, the race has started again. First it was for money, power, prestige; now it is for supra-mental states. And all that comes as a shadow with it will be there. There will be competition: somebody going higher than you, you are lagging behind, or going higher than somebody else. Everybody has to prove that he is higher, and has to continually fight those who are competing, and the whole nonsense has entered again. Then you are in a marketplace again, a spiritual marketplace, of course, but what is the difference? In the ordinary marketplace somebody was richer than you, now somebody has more satori quality in him, now somebody is more meditative, now somebody is more enlightened.If there is a goal, then even enlightenment will be in degrees – more or less. If there is no goal, you can become enlightened this very moment. You are! You just need the courage to recognize it, the courage to be it. It hurts because the ego will have to be left, and all that you have tried in your life has been because of the ego. You may even be meditating because of the ego and for the ego. You want to have that attitude of “holier-than-thou” so you can condemn the whole world and you can say, “I am a spiritual person, you all are materialists.”You can go around India and you can see: every Indian thinks that the whole world is materialist except Indians – holier-than-thou. And then people have to invent ways so they can prove that they are holier-than-thou. They will eat this and they will not eat that; they will live according to a certain pattern, they will have a certain style. All these are mind games. Beware of people like Sri Aurobindo!My approach is not that of evolution. Nothing is going anywhere: all is here. Things are changing, certainly, but there is no evolution. Things are moving, certainly, but nothing is going higher and nothing is left behind as lower. Drop those categories. By dropping them you will immediately be entering into a new world. Suddenly you will find friendship with trees, because they are no longer lower; you will find a great affinity with birds, because they are no longer lower. Suddenly you will look into the eyes of your dog, and you will find a buddha there too. Then the sheer joy of it is infinite. You will look into the eyes of your woman, and a buddha is hiding there too.I make all things divine. I don’t want you to go to God – I bring godliness to you. And not only to you – I bring godliness to the whole existence. It is really there; there is no other reality; this is the only reality there is. This is the only dance there is. Don’t miss this dance! Don’t get obsessed with ideals, otherwise you will be losing an opportunity.Sat Bodhi asks: “You said life and existence have no goal, they are a purpose unto themselves.” Yes, it is so. It is not a philosophical statement. I am simply sharing my experience. I am not saying anything which I have not seen, felt, lived. I am simply opening my heart to you.It is so. It is not an argument. I am not trying to convince you of anything at all. I am simply making it clear to you what has happened to me. And I say to you: this is available to you too, this very moment. Not a single moment’s postponement is needed because enlightenment is a state of nature.Relax, don’t be tense about goals, because all goals make tension, create tension, stress, strain – because you always have to look ahead, to look far away. You have to think of future things, to plan for them; you have to strive. Naturally, tension arises, anxiety arises, anguish arises. You are torn apart: your reality is here and your heart is somewhere else. You become schizophrenic.When I say relax, I mean drop all goals, drop all ideals. Relax into this moment, listen to this moment, live this moment, have a taste of it. Be surrounded by the reality that is already here, and suddenly you will also have the same taste I am talking about. It is an experience, existential. It is not speculation.You say: “Other masters, for instance, Sri Aurobindo, teach evolution as the aim of the world… I don’t teach you anything “as the aim of the world.” I teach you only life, love, joy. I don’t want you to become obsessed with the future. Now is my teaching, if it can be called a teaching. Rather than calling it a teaching I would like to call it a sharing. I am not a teacher in that sense. I am not giving you a doctrine so that you can adapt yourself to the doctrine and you can become a follower. I want you to become me, not a follower.But you are so miserly. Not only in giving: even in taking you are miserly. To hide that miserliness you philosophize in so many ways – these are strategies. You are afraid to relax. First you were tense for money, for a better house, for a better job, for a more beautiful woman. Now you are tense for evolution: how to become enlightened, how to become a buddha. You need a good kick in the pants! That’s exactly what happened…A great seeker, a philosopher, a thinker, came to Ma Tzu. Ma Tzu is one of the rare Zen masters. The philosopher, a university professor, asked how to become enlightened, how to become a buddha. Ma Tzu, who was sitting in the temple just by the side of a great Buddha statue, said,, “To talk about such solemn and serious things, let us start by the right approach: you first bow down to Buddha.”It looked so right: to talk about buddhahood, to talk about enlightenment, and Ma Tzu had said with great seriousness, “Bow down to Buddha,” so the philosopher bowed down. Ma Tzu gave him a good kick, a terrific kick in the pants. And something happened – not only that you are laughing: the philosopher started laughing, seeing the whole ridiculousness of it – his first satori; in that moment he had some taste of buddhahood.What really happened? He was not expecting such a kick from such a great man, such an enlightened sage. You never expect such things. It was such a shock that for a moment, his thinking stopped; for a moment, he could not think at all. This was so unexpected.That moment, bowing down to the statue of Buddha, and Ma Tzu kicking him so unexpectedly, was like an electric shock. It must have gone to the deepest core of his mind. For a moment, all thinking stops, all time stops and he is looking at Buddha’s statue. In that very moment, that meditative moment, he started laughing.Years later, he was asked again and again, “What happened to you? – because you have never been the same man since.” He would answer, “Something strange happened. Since the day Ma Tzu kicked me, I have not stopped laughing. Whenever I bow down to Buddha, I remember Ma Tzu and the kick is there again. For a moment my thinking stops and I can see what this man means. He taught me without using a single word.”That’s exactly what you need: a kick in the pants – a terrific kick. You are buddhas, you have simply forgotten. You need only remembrance, not evolution. It is not that you have to become a buddha, you are a buddha, fallen asleep. Somebody needs to kick you, somebody needs to shout at you, somebody needs to hit you. That is the purpose of a master. Ma Tzu is a master.Sri Aurobindo is not a master; Sri Aurobindo is just philosophizing, giving consolation to people. Many people come to him, thousands became interested in him because it is cheap to become interested in philosophy. Nothing is lost, nothing is at stake, and you learn beautiful words, and you start dreaming about things, and somebody systematizes the whole thing. He is a great systematizer: he labels things, categorizes them; he goes with a system that has great appeal to the logical mind, the modern mind. But his appeal simply shows that he suits the modern mind, and anything that suits the modern mind is not going to change it.You need somebody who can possess you unexpectedly, who can shatter your ideas, who can shatter you, who can take the very earth from beneath your feet. Only very courageous people become interested in a master. To be with a master is dangerous. One never knows what he is going to do; one never knows what he is going to say. He himself does not know! Things are happening. He is in tune with the whole, so whatsoever happens, happens.Remember, Ma Tzu has not kicked this man: if Ma Tzu had kicked this man there would have been nothing, maybe a fight. Existence has kicked through Ma Tzu; Ma Tzu functioned only as a hollow bamboo.The ways of a sage are strange, illogical, paradoxical. Sri Aurobindo cannot be a sage: he is so systematic, so logical. His very logicalness is enough proof that he knows nothing. He is clever with words, a genius with words. I don’t think anybody else in this century has been as capable with words, or had his talents of logic, scholarship, reading, research. But behind all that jargon there is nothing.Another man was alive in Sri Aurobindo’s day, Ramana Maharshi. He had the experience. Very few people went to him, very few, but those who went were benefited. But to see Ramana Maharshi needs a totally different kind of approach. He will not speak much; he will not try to convince you. He will be sitting there – if you are available, he is available. And his ways will be very simple; unless you have a heart to feel that vibe, you will miss him.It is not always so. J. Krishnamurti is there. He talks; talks very intelligently. Remember, I will not say logically: he talks very intelligently; goes into the analysis of any problem as deeply as is humanly possible. But he is not a philosopher. All of his talk is like uprooting weeds from the garden; he destroys your problems through his analysis. He does not give you anything; he simply takes away all that you have been carrying in your mind. For a moment you are utterly lost, and in that very moment you can see his reality. His experience starts flowing in you. People can miss him also.People used to miss Sri Ramana because he was silent; he would not say much. Just the other day I mentioned U.G. Krishnamurti. When he saw Ramana Maharshi reading joke books and looking at cartoons, he was very frustrated. Not only that: a man asked a question about God and U. G. Krishnamurti was present there when, very seriously, bowing at his feet, the man asked about God. And what did Sri Ramana do? – do you know? He gave him a joke book and said, “Read it!”Naturally, U. G. Krishnamurti was very much offended: “Is this a way? This seems to be disrespectful to the man who has asked such a serious question, giving him a joke book.” This is again a kick in the pants, in its own way.What he is saying is, “What nonsense are you talking about? God? It is not a thing to be talked about – better read a joke book and have a good laugh.“If you can laugh, maybe you can know God – not by what I will say. But if you can laugh a hearty laugh, a belly-laugh, in that moment thinking stops.”Now, he has given a great message without saying a single word. Have you not watched it? When you laugh, for a moment you are no longer in the mind. Laughter takes you somewhere else. Where does it take you? It takes you to the same place where meditation takes you. So if you see a very serious and sad man and he claims that he is meditating, know well that he is not meditating. Meditation is always dancing; it is never serious, sad. It is sincere, of course, but never sad; it is joyous, it is gay.You must have heard the old proverb: “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone.” They have changed this proverb a little bit in modern times. Now they say: “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you; weep and you sleep alone.” But it is the same.In the moment of laughter, you are suddenly one with the harmony of existence. Weep, and you have fallen apart, you are no longer part of it. In sadness, in seriousness, in despair, you are not in rhythm with existence. In laughing, in dancing, in singing, in loving, you are in rhythm with existence.There is no evolution, only rhythm or no rhythm. These are two states, and they are available right now. You can be in rhythm, you can be not in rhythm – that is the freedom of man. Trees are continuously in rhythm, birds are continuously in rhythm. Man can choose. These are different manifestations. Because you can choose, you have chosen the wrong. The wrong has an appeal: by choosing the wrong, you become important; by choosing the right, you disappear. And you have been taught from the very childhood to be important, to be the first in the world. You have been taught ambition; you have been poisoned to the very core. You always want to be important.Now, this U. G. Krishnamurti missed Sri Ramana, and something great was happening. Sri Ramana giving a joke book to a man who is asking about God, is almost like Buddha giving his flower to Mahakashyap or Ma Tzu giving a terrific kick in the pants. U. G. Krishnamurti missed Ramana. Then he missed J. Krishnamurti, too, and he lived for years with J. Krishnamurti.Now, J. Krishnamurti is totally different in his expression, very logical, very rational. The beginning of his work is always with the mind; then slowly, slowly he leads you beyond the mind, But U. G. Krishnamurti thought it was all abstraction, philosophy. He stopped going there because “it is all abstraction.” He left Sri Ramana because there was no philosophy, he left Krishnamurti because there was too much philosophy; in both cases he missed.He lived with Sri Shivananda of Rishikesh for seven years doing yoga postures. For seven years there he thought, “Something is here.” And there was nothing! Shivananda is a very ordinary teacher. You can find dozens of them all around this country teaching people how to stand on their heads, teaching people stupid things. U. G. Krishnamurti remained there for seven years and became a disciple.Now, he missed two pinnacles. This is what goes on happening. You have a mind, a certain mind, and when you go to a master, you look from your mind. If it fits, you are happy; you start clinging. But that is not going to help, because if it fits, it will strengthen the same mind that you brought with you. If, by chance, you come across a real master, nothing is going to fit. He is going to disrupt all your ideas about how a master should be; he is going to sabotage you. He is not going to meet your expectations. He is going to frustrate you, he is going to disappoint you in every possible way because that is the only way real work can start. And if you still can be with him, then you are going to be awakened.Sleep is easy, cheap; awakening is arduous. You will have to renounce your dreams and you will have to renounce much comfort, much convenience. You will have to renounce many ideas that you have always thought were very valuable.My approach is that no evolution is happening. The world is exactly where it has always been, and will remain there. And I don’t mean that things are not changing – bullock-carts have disappeared and cars have come, and cars are on the way to disappearing sooner or later; soon private airplanes will be around.Many things have changed, but really nothing has changed. At the core, everything is exactly the same. Do you think that if you become enlightened today you will be more enlightened than Buddha because twenty-five centuries have passed and man has evolved? Do you think the people who were there in Buddha’s day were more unenlightened than you are? Or go still further back to Moses, or still further back to Krishna. Do you think in the days of Krishna, five thousand years ago, there were fewer enlightened people or more unenlightened people than there are today? It is exactly the same.Time makes no difference. When you become enlightened, the date will not be a decisive factor. When you become enlightened, you become enlightened! You simply become aware. You are no longer asleep. You remember, you recognize your reality, and you are in tune. Cars may be passing by, or bullock-carts – do you think it makes any difference? Would Buddha have been more enlightened if cars had been passing by in Bodhgaya and trains had been shrieking and airplanes had been rushing from one airport to another? What happened to Buddha in Bodhgaya twenty-five centuries ago would have been the same – bullock-carts or cars or airplanes or spaceships make no difference. And the people who were unenlightened were as unenlightened as the people are today.At that depth nothing ever changes, there is no evolution. Otherwise, Buddha will have to come back to become more enlightened this time – and then there is no end. Then, every time you become enlightened, after a few centuries you have to come back and become more enlightened because now more sophisticated enlightenment is available. At the deepest core, nothing is changing. Only on the periphery do things change.“Other teachers, for instance, Sri Aurobindo, teach evolution as the aim of the world…” These people appeal to you because you want something – longing, ambition, desire, passion – and these people supply you with it. Whatsoever is demanded is supplied. Because you want something to cling to, they give you spiritual commodities. You can’t remain without desires, so you say, “Now I am no longer interested in the world” – and they give you otherworldly desires.They say, “Okay, take this, now worry about this. You have worried enough about the world, now worry about meditation, worry about enlightenment. You have competed enough to reach to Delhi, now forget about Delhi and reach moksha, nirvana, paradise, but go on reaching!” You feel very happy: a new toy has been given to you and you start playing with the new toy. Sooner or later you get fed up with that toy, then some other toy has to be given to you.Just the other day, somebody had written a letter to me. In Germany, somebody has invented something new, far superior to enlightenment that is called “transformation.” Now you have played with the word enlightenment too long, now somebody is bound to come and say, “That is nothing. Take transformation. Enlightenment is simply enlightenment – we transform! We take you to another, a new formation. Enlightenment means you remain the same and light comes to you. Transformation means you become totally new.” Now this has appeal, it is a new toy. Then somebody will come and will give another word. People go on playing with words. Beware!I really want to do work here. I don’t want to give you any more toys; I want to destroy all toys. It is going to be hard work; it is going to be painful. But if you can move with me just one step – I ask only one step – your dreams, your sleep, will have gone for ever, and then real life starts. Real life is with the whole; unreal life is alone.“Are these teachings wrong?” Sat Bodhi has asked. They are neither right nor wrong, they are simply illusory. You cannot call them wrong. They are not right, they are not wrong, they are simply illusory. They have nothing to do with truth. They have something to do with your mind. Your mind demands those things; somebody comes and supplies you. It is a con game.The second question:Osho,Does anything or anyone need correction? It puzzles me.Nobody needs correction. And who is going to correct? The moment it is said that somebody needs correction, sooner or later somebody is needed to dominate you, to manipulate you, to make a slave out of you.That’s why leaders down the ages have been calling and shouting from the housetops that everything needs to be corrected, everything needs to be changed, improved. If nothing needs to be corrected, they won’t be leaders any more. They live on the idea that things need to be improved, revolutions have to be done, then they are great leaders.And nothing is ever improved, nothing can ever be improved. You can either be fast asleep or awake. And awakening is not a correction, remember. It is not correcting your sleep. If sleep is corrected that will mean a few more tranquilizers are injected in you so that you can sleep better. This is correction: new pillows, more comfortable; a new bed, more convenient; a better bedroom. These are corrections so you can remain asleep in a better way, so you can almost remain in a coma.Sleep does not need correction. Awakening is not a correction in sleep, it is simply dropping sleep. It is moving into another kind of reality, having a totally different kind of relationship with existence.Moralists, politicians, puritans, priests, they are always after you, calling for correction. Everything needs to be corrected, every person needs to be corrected – that is their power. Because of this, the world is dominated by politicians. They always go on finding what has to be corrected, and they always go on deluding you that now the correction can be made. But there is only one way: if they are in power then the correction can be made.First they convince you that the correction is needed; then naturally when you become convinced, the correction is needed. And why do you become convinced? – because you are suffering. You are not suffering because of sleep, not because of immorality, not because of sin, but because you are unconscious. And they come and they say, “This is why you are suffering. A better morality, a better code of conduct, better behavior, a better character, and your suffering will disappear.”You start correcting yourself, and you cannot do it, you need help, you need a priest, a guide to guide you. You need a leader! First they convince you correction is needed, and then naturally they come by the back door with all the paraphernalia to correct you. You become slaves. That has been the trick down the ages. People have been dominated; people have been reduced into things, they have been condemned, they have been praised, and they have been dominated through this condemnation and praise.This is the great conspiracy. I would like to tell you once and for all: There is no need for any correction. You are not to be improved upon. Then what is needed? Awakening is needed, not correction. Not more morality, not more ethical conduct, no, just consciousness. With consciousness, morality comes on its own accord.In deep sleep, unconscious, how can you correct yourself? At the most, you can have better dreams, maybe not in black and white but technicolor dreams, psychedelic dreams. But you can only have better dreams in sleep; you cannot have reality in sleep.I have heard…It was a dark, cloudy night and the drunk staggered into the cemetery and fell into a hole which had been dug in preparation for a burial the following day. The drunk hiccupped and fell asleep.Half an hour later another drunk swayed into the cemetery. He was singing loudly and his raucous voice woke up the drunk in the grave who suddenly started to yell that he was cold.The singing drunk tottered to the edge of the grave and peered blurrily down at the complaining drunk. “It’s no wonder you are cold,” he shouted down to the drunk, “you have kicked all the soil off yourself!”This is what has been going on. You are asleep, your leaders are asleep; you are asleep, your priests are asleep. The problem is not that the man has kicked all the soil off himself… And if this other drunk starts helping, what do you think he will do? He will throw the soil on him again: “No wonder he is feeling cold!”You need only one thing.And corrections are millions, and still they never suffice. You put one thing right on this corner, and something else goes wrong on another, because your sleep keeps a certain balance. Have you not watched? You stop smoking and then you start chewing gum. You stop one thing and you have to start another, and it is the same old game. You go on changing things; you remain the same.Corrections are millions. There is no end to them; you can go on correcting and correcting and you will never be correct. You will never be right. You can put all the wrongs right, and you will find yourself still wrong, because deep down you are still unconscious, you don’t know who you are.The first and the only step is to know who you are, to become aware.Timothy was on holiday in Ireland and staying at a small country inn. One evening in the bar he was amazed by the following conversation: “That’s a beautiful hat you’ve got there,” said an old man to a young fellow who was standing next to him at the bar; “where did you buy it?”“At O’Grady’s,” replied the young man.“Why, I go there myself!” commented the old man. “You must be from around these parts then?”“Aye. From Murphy Street.”“Gracious!” exclaimed the old man. “I live there too!” “Quite amazing,” commented Timothy to the barman. “that those two folk over there live in the same street and have only just met.”“Don’t you believe it!” said the barman. “They’re actually father and son, but they’re always too drunk to recognize each other.”No correction is needed, just awareness is needed. Become more alert. No character is needed, because all character is false if you are not conscious. And all character is a bondage if you are not conscious. All character is nothing but chains, it doesn’t bring freedom. All morality is hypocrisy if you are not aware, if you are not conscious.So, to me, religion means only one thing: to be more conscious, to live more consciously.You ask: “Does anyone or anything need correction? It puzzles me.” It has puzzled everybody down the ages. Forget about correction. Put your total energy into awakening. There are only two ways to be: unconscious or conscious. Choose.The third question:Osho,“Enlightenment is my true nature; there is no need to do anything.”“Only when effort is completely exhausted and one feels utterly useless does grace come.”What is all this? I am confused. What should I do? Should I continue with meditation or should I just sit and let things happen?Please guide me.If you are confused then you will have to continue meditations. Confusion is the illness, meditation is medicinal. Both the words – meditation and medicine – come from the same root. If you are confused, you will have to go on meditating. When you see the point without any confusion, then there is no need. But meditation will prepare you; meditation will force you to see the point that there is no need to do anything. Only meditation can do that.Just listening to me… I have told you that to be natural is to be enlightened. Now you think, “So, that is great! I can sit silently and do nothing.” But can you really sit silently and do nothing? If you can really sit silently and do nothing, then this question would not have arisen. You would have sat and known and you would have bowed before me and thanked me. There would have been no question. You would have come dancing to me, not with a question and a confused mind.If you can sit silently doing nothing, what else is needed? That’s what Buddha was doing under the bodhi tree: sitting silently doing nothing – and then it happened. That’s how it happened to me. That’s how it always happens.But doing nothing is not so easy. Because you have become so accustomed to doing something or other, even sitting will be a doing to you. You will have to force yourself in a yoga posture and you will sit strained, still, in control, holding, trying to sit silently and not do anything, and boiling within, to do a thousand and one things, and thousands of thoughts will clamor around, will distract you.Can you just sit and do nothing? That is the ultimate; that’s what nirvana is, samadhi is. It can happen; just listening to me it can happen also, but great intelligence is needed. Then, simply, you have seen the point: that to be natural is all. Then where is the confusion? What is the confusion? Where does it come from? You have seen it, or you have not seen it. If you have seen it, all confusion has disappeared and you will sit silently, you will walk silently, you will eat silently, you will talk silently. You will become a non-doer; you will become a natural being.But if you have not seen it, then you will need a few more crazy things; you will have to go through them. Those meditations will force you to see the point. Either you see just by listening and sitting by my side, or you will have to see the hard way.Buddha meditated for six years, and meditated intensely, totally. Then this realization arose in him: “What am I doing? Trees are perfectly happy, birds are perfectly happy – what am I doing? And these trees are not meditating, and these birds have never thought about meditation, and they have not read Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and they don’t do yoga asanas and they don’t chant any mantras. And the whole existence is so tremendously ecstatic! What am I doing standing on my head and fasting and all that nonsense?”He saw it, but it took six years for him to see this. And he was no ordinary man; he was tremendously intelligent. It took six years for him to see the point. But the moment he saw it, he relaxed under the bodhi tree. He fell asleep and the next morning he was awakened. Not only were his eyes opened physically, but his eyes were opened spiritually. Next morning when he opened his eyes, he was totally a different man, the real man had arisen. Just a glimpse of the real man, says Ikkyu, and you are in love. And the moment he saw his real man, he started living a life of compassion and love. There was no other way now, no choice. He became a natural man.So, if you feel confused, then go on meditating. Meditation is not for enlightenment: meditation is for confused people. Meditation does not lead you to enlightenment; it simply makes you fed up with your confusion. Just see the point: meditation is not a way to enlightenment, it is just a way to get rid of confusion. And when there is no confusion, enlightenment comes of its own accord.Meditation’s work is negative; it takes things away from you. It does not give you anything; it simply goes on taking things away from you. Anger disappears, greed disappears, desire disappears, and you start losing whatever you had. You become poorer and poorer every day. That’s what Jesus means when he says: Blessed are those who are poor in spirit.Anger is not there, greed is not there, ambition is not there. Slowly, slowly, chunks of your being are cut from you. And one day suddenly nothing is there, or, only nothing is there. That very moment, light penetrates. All those things – greed, anger, passion, lust, hatred, ambition, ego – were hindering the path. They were not allowing the light to penetrate into you; they were functioning like a rock between you and existence. All those removed and suddenly existence enters into you and you enter into existence.If you understand me, there is no need for any meditation. But if you don’t understand me, then meditation will be needed. Then go on doing it.I understand your confusion, your trouble. You can meditate only if it leads to enlightenment. That’s what your problem is. You have not said it so clearly, but that’s exactly where the problem is. You can do it if I emphasize that it will lead you to enlightenment, and I cannot do that, because that is not true. You want me to promise you so that you can go on doing meditation. You want me to hypnotize you, you want me to go on supporting your desires, your goals, that you want to become enlightened, that you want to become natural. Now look at the whole absurdity of becoming natural! How can one become natural? You are natural. All becoming will lead you toward unnatural structures. Becoming cannot bring you to being natural; becoming means becoming unnatural.Natural you are, but you want me to support you because you cannot sit silently. You cannot sit really; you need something to think about, something to do. You want some goal. And if I take the goal away you ask, “Then why should I do meditation if it is not needed?” It is still needed. It is needed, not for enlightenment but to destroy this constant restlessness in your mind.It is like this: if you live in a room with closed doors the sun will not penetrate, although by opening the door you are not creating the sun. By opening the door you don’t create the sun, the sun is there, but by opening the door, you become available to the sun. Meditations are just like opening the door.Right now if you sit, you will be sitting in confusion, and the confusion will grow more and more as you sit. You will gather it; it will become almost impossible to bear it, you will have to go to a movie or listen to the radio or TV or go to a club, or somewhere.Meditations are cathartic. They throw all the rubbish that you contain inside. They simply cleanse you; they open the doors, they open the eyes, and the sun is there. Once you are available, it starts penetrating you.Then you will never say, “I became natural.” You will say, “I was natural. The problem was not how to become natural; the problem was how not to go on becoming unnatural.”The fourth question:Osho,Yesterday you said that there is no goal, no path, no one to lead and no one to follow. Is this statement a lie again? Were you kidding us yesterday?That’s what I am doing every day. That’s the only possible thing to do. All statements are lies; truth remains unstated. Truth cannot be reduced to a statement; it cannot be reduced to a formula. It is vast! How can you reduce it to a statement? The moment you state anything about truth, the very expression becomes a barrier. Words cling around truth like chains.Truth can only be transferred in silence. Those who really listen to me don’t listen to what I say, they listen to what I am. They listen to the gaps, they listen to the intervals. Words are not important, but there are small gaps between words and the meeting between you and me happens in those gaps.Those gaps are of meditation. Slowly, slowly, words move on the periphery and my meeting, my communion, with you becomes the central phenomenon. Words are there, just distant, on the periphery. Silence starts happening.If you fall silent listening to me, then you have listened to me. If listening to me your mind stops and there are moments when there are no thoughts, all is still and quiet, then you have been listening to me.Hearing me is one thing; listening to me is quite another. Those who come near to me for the first time, they hear. Those who stay with me for a longer time, slowly, slowly the transformation happens and hearing starts changing into listening.Listening is non-verbal. Then my presence is listened to; then something is bridged between me and you. My heart and your heart start beating together in one rhythm. Then it is a song, a dance of energies.This is what in the East is called satsang – being in the presence of the master. It is not a verbal communication at all. Then why do I go on speaking? Why can’t I sit silently here? You will not be able to absorb that much silence. You can absorb it only in homeopathic doses, just once in a while.And my words help. They don’t state the truth, but they help, they indicate; they are fingers pointing to the moon. They are not the moon themselves, just fingers pointing to the moon, arrows. Don’t be obsessed by the fingers, don’t start clinging to the fingers, don’t start worshipping the fingers – because that is how you will miss the moon. Forget the fingers and look at the moon. That moon is silence, utter silence, where not even a single word has ever been uttered.You have that space inside you. I have become one with it. You are not one with it, but moving with me, flowing with me, hearing my words, listening to my silences, once in a while it happens. And those moments are of grace. In those moments you have the first taste of godliness. Slowly, slowly, you will become more and more capable. That’s why I go on speaking.And then, new people are always coming; I have to speak for them. The older ones, slowly, slowly will not be bothered by my words. Hearing will disappear completely. They will listen to my words just as they listen to the sound of a waterfall; they will not search for any meaning in them, they will not search for any truth in them. They will not search even for any coherence in them. They will not be constantly looking into consistency, contradiction, logic, illogic – no, all these things by and by disappear. They will listen to my words as they listen to the songs of the birds, or the wind passing through the pine trees. You don’t ask what the meaning is, you simply listen, and in listening you become that sound passing through the pine trees, you become that wind.Whatsoever I say is a device, so it is a lie. Truth has never been said, cannot be said. Truth is unutterable. But you can listen to it. It is unutterable, it can’t be said, but it can be listened to.Let me repeat: it cannot be uttered, but it can be listened to. You can catch hold of it – in silence, in love, in communion. I am not able to say it, but you are able to listen to it; hence, this device of talking to you every morning, year in, year out. This is just a waterfall: listen to it, don’t remain just hearing.I am so contradictory by arrangement. I manage it, because if I am very consistent, you will never be able to listen to me, you will go on hearing me. I am so contradictory that sooner or later you are tired. You say, “What is the point? This man is going to say one thing this morning and tomorrow he is going to contradict it.” Seeing it happening again and again… You will cling to my statement and then tomorrow I contradict it, I have to contradict it. Whenever I see that somebody is clinging somewhere to any of my statements, I have to contradict it immediately to relieve him of the burden, to relieve him of his clinging, to relieve him of the words that he has accumulated inside himself.So I will go on, zigzag, contradicting myself a thousand and one times. Slowly, slowly, the understanding dawns on you that there is no point in clinging to any words of this man, there is no need to bother about what he says. But by that time, you have fallen in love with me. By that time you are in a totally different kind of relationship with me than you have ever been with anybody else. By that time, you have started enjoying my presence. By that time, you have started imbibing me. By that time you have started feeling the nourishment. Now you don’t care what I say: now you care more that I am. Then listening has started.And you will understand me only by listening. You will understand me only when you have forgotten all about understanding what I am saying. All statements are lies. What Lao Tzu says is true. He says: Tao cannot be said, and the moment you say it you have betrayed it. He is absolutely true.Truth is so infinite and words are so finite. Only when you have something infinite in you… Silence is infinite, unbounded, it can contain truth. Love is infinite, unbounded, it can contain truth. Trust is infinite, unbounded, it can contain truth.Be natural, spontaneous, here with me. Be in the moment, as if all time and space has disappeared, as if the whole world has stopped. The mind has stopped, and suddenly there is truth in all its radiance, grandeur, splendor.It is here, right this moment. If you have ears, hear it. If you have eyes, see it. And if you cannot see it, and if you cannot hear it, then don’t go on clinging here unnecessarily. I am in a hurry – I don’t want any weeds here. I will find every possible means and ways to drop people who are just sitting here like rocks.Either throb with me, or get lost. Either be with me, or don’t be here – because I mean to do business!The last question:Osho,I see I don't trust life one hundred percent. Nothing feels possible unless I do. There are moments when trust happens, but what am I supposed to do at other times when I don't feel it? Pretending trust seems even worse. Living in fear feels no good either.Rupa, that’s how we go on creating new goals. I go on taking goals from you and you go on creating new goals. Now one hundred percent trust becomes the goal; ninety-nine percent and you are worried.Can’t you simply be as you are? Why bother about one hundred percent trust? Trying to be one hundred percent when you are not is bound to create hypocrisy. You will become artificial, you will become unnatural.Do you know what one hundred percent trust means? One hundred percent trust means trusting even in your mistrust – that’s what one hundred percent trust means. If there is a moment of distrust, you trust that moment, too! What can you do? One moment you trust me, good; another moment you don’t trust me, good. This is one hundred percent trust. When all is good, it is one hundred percent trust.Now you are again trying to create trouble and anxiety for yourself. One moment you trust me – good, you feel very good. Then another moment comes distrust – now you are worried, now somehow you have to change this distrust into trust. Now you are again starting a new ladder.Now you will compare: “Somebody has one hundred percent trust, this moment never comes to him. And somebody has even less trust than me.” You are becoming part of a hierarchy, you have started comparing, you are creating ambition and fever. And when it does not happen, what are you going to do? And anything done by you will be unnatural. So you will become artificial: when it is not there you will pretend. You will believe at least on the surface that it is there; you will become afraid of going deep into yourself, because if you go deep into yourself you will know it is not there.One hundred percent trust means: Accept life whatsoever it brings – trust, mistrust, love, hate, godliness, evil, good, bad. You don’t try to change anything, don’t try to correct anything. Be in a let-go – that is one hundred percent trust.Let me remind you again, otherwise tomorrow Rupa will be here saying, “I can allow let-go sometimes, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. The let-go is not one hundred percent.” Let-go again means the same: when it happens, it happens; when it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. You are not supposed to do a thing.Do anything and you become artificial – and people have become so artificial. It is very rare, very rare, to see even a small part in a person which is not artificial. And it has all happened, this calamity has happened, because you are such a great improver, continually improving upon yourself, correcting and correcting. From your very childhood your parents were correcting you, then your teachers were correcting you, then your professors were correcting you, your priests were correcting you, the whole society has just been correcting you. And, naturally, after twenty-five years of correction by everybody, you yourself become a great corrector. Then you start correcting yourself.In fact, you are allowed to leave the university only when you start doing the work of the parents and the teachers and the professors and the priest on your own. Then they will allow; then they will say, “Right, now there is no danger. This man will do whatsoever we were doing, and will do it far better because he will know from the inside, he will know the inside story.”Have you not observed it? Sometimes doing something, suddenly you hear your mother’s voice: “Don’t do it!” If you have not heard it, try to hear, and you will find your mother still saying, “Don’t do it!” actually your mother’s voice you can hear, or your father’s, saying, “This is wrong. This is not the way to do the thing. Correct it!” Or your teachers correcting. They have created such a rift in you that you have become two.This whole society exists in a kind of schizophrenia. Every person is split. This society has tried the trick of “divide and rule”; it has divided every person into two: the corrector and the one who has to be corrected. So everybody has become like a small student and the headmaster – both are there! And the headmaster with the cane shouting and threatening, and the small child always being corrected. And, of course, the small child also takes revenge. Whenever the headmaster is not looking at the child, he does something – at least he can show his tongue or laugh or joke. Or there are moments when the small child will take possession of you and will force you to do something that you never wanted to do, and will make you repent. It always says, “Yes, sir,” but it never means it. It says, “Because I am afraid I am saying yes, but I will show you!” This constant conflict goes on within you, and then everything becomes false, pseudo, phony.I have heard…Groom: “Would you be very annoyed with me if I confess that all my upper teeth are false?”Bride: “Not at all, darling. At least I can now relax and take off my wig, inflatable bra, glass eye and artificial leg.”Now what is left? Just watch what you are carrying around yourself, what you think is your personality. What is it?An American tourist, visiting England, had just enjoyed a delicious dinner in a Winchester restaurant.“Would you like coffee, sir?” inquired a waiter.“Certainly,” replied the American.“Cream or milk?”“Neither,” said the American firmly. “Just give me what I’m used to back home: a pasteurized blend of water, corn syrup solids, vegetable oil, sodium caseinate, carrageenan, guargum, disodium phosphate, polysorbate 60, sorbitan monostearate, potassium sorbate, and artificial color.”Now what is left? Slowly, slowly, everything becomes false, artificial, synthetic, plastic. Then you lose the taste of life. And when you lose the taste of life, you lose contact with existence. When you become inauthentic, you become uprooted.Please don’t try anything upon yourself. Stop trying; let things be. Let things be as they are. They are utterly beautiful; all ugliness is created by you. Yes, sometimes mistrust is perfectly beautiful. Sometimes doubt is good: it protects you from many foolishnesses, it protects you from gullibility. Sometimes trust is good, sometimes no trust is good. But whatsoever the case, I call this one hundred percent trust – that you always say, “Good, so this is the thing in this moment. So this moment existence wants me to be trustful and this moment existence wants me to be doubtful.” Leave it to existence, and you simply be at the receptive end, a receptacle, and you will be surprised. Life will start happening to you and existence will start happening to you. But we are trained very deep down from childhood to be false, to be untrue, to be formal.An Englishwoman and her young son were traveling in a taxi in New York. As the taxi passed a particularly seedy part of the city, the small boy was fascinated by the garishly made-up ladies who were walking along the streets, accosting some of the male passers-by.“What are those ladies doing?” asked the boy.His mother blushed and said, somewhat embarrassed, “I expect they are lost and are asking people for directions.”The taxi driver overheard this, and said in a loud voice, “Why don’tcha tell the boy the truth – in other words they’re prostitutes.”The woman blushed even deeper red, and her son asked, “What are p…p…pros…what the driver said? Are they like other women? Do they have children?”“Of course,” replied the mother. “That’s where New York taxi drivers come from.”Truth is not accepted anywhere; people are annoyed with truth. False pretensions are very, very acceptable. We have lived in lies for so long that truth simply annoys. It is not just an accident that Socrates was poisoned – his only sin was that he was trying to make people aware of the truth. His sin was nothing else. He was a simple, innocent man, harmless, utterly harmless. He had not harmed anybody in any way, but still Athens was angry. Why were they angry? He was trying to make people feel uneasy about their lies; he was trying to force them to see the truth. Whosoever tries to make you aware of the truth is going to be thought an enemy by the society. The society lives in lies, it depends on lies.I am not here to help in your lies. I can’t say to you to be one hundred percent in trust, or at least the way you mean by one hundred percent. Then what will happen to those moments when you can’t trust? What will you do? You will simply cover them up. You will pretend that they are not there. You will throw them into the unconscious, in the basement of your being, and will never look there. And they will accumulate there and one day they will explode. No, that is not to be done. When distrust comes, allow it to come, and know that it is there. Accept it. It must have some meaning. If it is there, it must have some meaning.It is like a thorn in the rosebush – it is not all roses, there are thorns, too. They protect the roses. There must be some deep harmony between the thorn and the rose; so there is between trust and untrust. Accept the harmony of polarities. This I call one hundred percent trust – from my side. Trust everything that happens. Mistrust is included, doubt is included; nothing is excluded.I teach you totality in life. And sometimes when you are not total, that too, is included in totality. Accept that too, and this will be a liberation. Then there will be no more creation of chains, no more creation of lies, no more repressions. And a man who is not repressed is bound to have a glimpse of the real man.One glimpse of the real man, and Ikkyu is right, you are in love.Enough for today.

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Take It Easy Vol 1 01-14Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Take It Easy Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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If it rain, let it rain;If it rain not, let it not rain;But even should it not rain,You must travelWith wet sleeves.Look at the cherry blossoms!Their color and scent fall with them,Are gone for ever,Yet mindlessThe spring comes again.BuddhismIs the shaved part of the saucepan,The whiskers of the pebble,The sound that accompaniesThe bamboos in the picture.The puppet-player hangs themRound his neck, not his heart;He can take out a devil,He can take out a buddha.If he says,“There is nothing special about it,”Already he has transgressed,And can say nothing else,This Daruma Ikkyu.What is religion? It is not the howling of the wolves at the moon, but that is what it has become to the masses. If the masses are right, then animals have a great religious sense: wolves howling, dogs barking at the moon, at the distant, at the faraway.Paul Tillich has defined religion as the ultimate concern. It is exactly the opposite. It is the immediate concern, not the ultimate concern. In fact, the immediate is the only ultimate there is. Religion is not a desire for the distant, a curiosity for the faraway – it is an inquiry into one’s own being.That’s why Buddhism is not concerned with God at all; it is concerned with you, with your reality. Its whole process is like peeling an onion. Buddhism continues to peel your reality, layer upon layer, destroying the illusions, the dreams. And just as it happens when you peel an onion, ultimately nothing is left in your hands.That nothing is the source of all. Out of that nothing all arises and slowly, slowly disappears back into that nothing. Now physicists are coming very close: they call that nothing “the black hole” – where matter disappears into black holes, is utterly annihilated, becomes nothing. Now, after black holes, there is talk in scientific circles about white holes, too. Out of white holes, matter arises. It seems black holes and white holes are just two aspects of the same reality. They are like a door: on one side of the door is written “Entrance”; on the other side of the same door is written “Exit.”When things appear out of the womb of nothingness, the door is called a white hole – white because it gives birth, white because life comes out of it. By calling it white we are appreciating it, we are valuing it. One day everything disappears back into the same door, and then we call it black. We have always called death black; man has always been afraid of blackness, of the dark, of death. But it is the same reality: from one side it is a black hole, from the other side it is a white hole. Buddha calls it shunyata.There is every possibility that modern physics will come closer and closer to Buddha. It has to; it has to recognize Buddha’s insight into reality, because nobody else ever dared to call nothingness the source of all. How did Buddha stumble upon the fact? He was not a physicist, he was not working into the deepest reality of matter, but he was working into the deepest reality of his own psychology.Let me remind you that Buddhism is not metaphysics. Metaphysics is always a concern with the ultimate. Meta means beyond – beyond physics, beyond that which can be seen, beyond the earth, beyond the visible, the tangible, the sensuous. Metaphysics means always the faraway, the distant reality, God.Buddhism is basically purely a psychology; it is not concerned with metaphysics. Its concern is with the reality of the mind: how it functions, what constitutes the mind. It goes on penetrating deeper into the layers of the mind, and finally comes to the realization that at the deepest, the bottom core, there is nothingness.Buddha was not believed by people – because who can believe in nothingness, who wants nothingness in the first place? Modern physics is also puzzling people, driving them crazy. But reality is as it is; whether you like it or not is not the question. Your liking or not liking is not going to change it; your liking and disliking can only keep you in illusions. Reality has to be seen as it is, and to be capable of seeing that is all that is needed to become religious: the courage to see reality in its utter truth, in its nakedness, undisguised, uncovered, undressed.Once you have seen reality as it is, once you have had a glimpse of the real man, a great transformation happens of its own accord. That very insight transforms you, transmutes you; you are never the same again. All illusions disappear, and seeing the reality, how can you continue to delude yourself? How can you continue to dream? How can you continue in your prejudices? How can you go on keeping false opinions? How can you carry on with doctrines and philosophies and scriptures? Seeing the reality, all simply disappears, only reality is there, and to be with that reality is liberation.Jesus is right when he says truth liberates. Truth is liberation. There is every possibility that Jesus learned the secrets of truth from Buddhist masters. There is every possibility that before he started his work in Israel, he was in India, in Nalanda, with Buddhist masters. Nalanda was one of the most ancient buddhafields, a great university of monks. Never before and never after has anything like that existed.I am hoping to create something like that again, on a wider scale, a bigger scale. Nalanda was a great experiment, an experiment with truth, an experiment to see truth as it is. Ten thousand monks continuously meditated, worked, penetrated, with no prejudices, with no a priori ideas. They were not bent upon proving anything; they were real seekers.The unreal seeker is one who is bent upon proving something from the very beginning. The unreal seeker is one who says, “I am in search of God.” He has already accepted that God exists. Without knowing? If he knows, then why search? If you don’t know, then how can you search for God? Who knows? – God may exist, may not exist. The search is already based on an a priori belief.In Nalanda, those ten thousand monks were not searching for God; they were not searching for any heaven. They were not searching in reality for something a priori. They were simply searching into their own being with no idea what they were searching for. Their search was pure; they were just looking into reality to see what is there. And because they were not preoccupied by any idea, they stumbled into nothingness, they came to know nothingness.If you are preoccupied by some idea, then you are bound to create the illusion of your own idea in that nothingness, and that nothingness is capable of supporting any idea. Any dream that you are carrying in you can be projected on the screen of nothingness. If you are searching for Krishna, you will find him, and it will be just a projection. If you are searching for a Jewish God, you will find him. If you are searching for a Hindu God, you will find him. Whatsoever you search for you will find, but it will not be truth, and it will not liberate you; it will just be your imagination.Remember, one of the most important things in life is that if you start a search with a fixed idea, a fixed attitude, you are bound to find it. Then there is a vicious circle: When you find it you think, “Of course, it is, because I have found it,” and this enhances your belief even more. Then you start finding it more often – the more you believe, the more you find it; the more you find it, the more you believe. You go on pouring reality into a dream, and you can go on wasting lives together.Buddha’s message is: Search without any idea. Look, just clean your eyes and look. Don’t look for something in particular, just look, a pure look into things, into the suchness of things. The eyes have to be clean and pure, otherwise they can project: even a small particle of dust and it will show on the screen of nothingness. Just a little liking, disliking, a little choice, and you will create reality. Buddha’s approach is such an absolute experiment – simple once you understand it, not complicated. But if you don’t understand you can go on deluding yourself.There is every possibility Jesus lived in Nalanda. That’s why in the New Testament his whole life is not accounted for. You see him when he was about twelve, once he is mentioned, and then you see him when he is thirty. Eighteen years are missing in the New Testament story of Jesus. Where was he for those eighteen years? What was he doing? Why are those days not accounted for? It seems to be a big gap in that small life. He only lived thirty-three years and more than half his life is missing.The story is fragmentary; something consciously, deliberately has been dropped. It is impossible that those who were writing the story would not have been aware of the fact that eighteen years are simply missing. And they are the most important years, because up to twelve a child is a child. When at thirty he suddenly appears with John the Baptist, he is already a mature man, enlightened, arrived, a siddha – one who has known, one who has seen, accomplished, attained. The painting is complete.The three years that are related in the Bible story are just about his work on others. What about his work upon himself? Where did he meditate? With whom? What was he doing? How did he become what he became? The most important years are missing. And by the thirty-third year he is crucified, so really only three years’ story is available. First his birth story; then he is seen arguing with the rabbis in the temple of Jerusalem when he is twelve; and then these last three years. The most important part – his preparation, his work upon himself – seems to be deliberately dropped. Yet his teaching in those three years is ample proof that he must have come in contact with Buddhist groups.There are ample proofs that he had traveled to India, and ample proofs that he had lived in India. And whatever he is saying in those three years’ time of his ministry is absolutely in tune with Buddha. Of course, he is translating it into Jewish terms: he talks about love, about compassion. The Jewish God was not a God of love at all. He was a very jealous God, a very angry God; ready to punish, ready to destroy. He was not at all a God of love! From where did this idea of a God of love arise in Jesus? He must have come in contact with people who had worked hard and had come to know that when one becomes enlightened, one’s whole energy becomes love energy. And if this happens to man, then this must be so about the ultimate reality, too. Godliness can only be love.And then Jesus says if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too. That is an utterly Buddhist approach: Forgive! That too, was not at all a Jewish concept. The Jewish approach was if someone throws a brick at you, you have to throw a rock at him – tit for tat. If someone has destroyed one eye of another then both of his own eyes have to be destroyed – justice, not compassion. Jesus brings compassion. Instead of justice he brings the value of love.Jewish ideas were much too moralistic. Those Ten Commandments have been haunting the Jewish mind ever since; thirty-five centuries have passed. Jesus brings a new commandment. He says, “I give you a new commandment: just as I have loved you, you love everybody else. Love is a new commandment.” But that is the flavor of Buddha.Remember again, Ikkyu says: One glimpse of the real man, and you are in love. You are love.The Buddhist approach has been to look without any idea so that reality can reveal itself. Allow reality to reveal itself; don’t enforce anything upon it. All other religions have been enforcing something or other, hence they go on missing. Their work becomes metaphysical; in fact, their work becomes a kind of autohypnosis. Buddhism dehypnotizes, dehypnotizes man. Buddha’s work is dehypnosis: how to drop all kinds of hypnosis, all kinds of suggestions given by society, by the people. And when you are utterly silent, with no conditioning, truth becomes known. That truth liberates.Now the sutras:If it rain, let it rain;If it rain not, let it not rain;But even should it not rain,You must travelWith wet sleeves.One very precious word in Buddha’s approach toward life is samata. Samata means equanimity, equilibrium, balance, choicelessness. Don’t move to the extremes, avoid extremes. Pain and pleasure are two extremes – don’t choose. Don’t avoid either and don’t cling to either; just remain in the middle, watching, looking at it, unattached.Pain comes, let it come – just be a watchful consciousness; just be awareness. There is a headache, just watch it. Don’t say no to it, don’t start fighting with it; don’t deny it, don’t avoid it. Don’t try to engage yourself somewhere else so you are distracted from it. Let it be there: simply watch. And in watching it, a great revolution happens.If you can watch it without like and dislike, suddenly it is there but you are out of it, you are no longer in it; you are standing there unbridged to it. Choicelessness unbridges you from all kinds of moods, from all kinds of minds. That is samata.Pleasure comes, let it come. Don’t cling to it. Don’t say, “I would like to have you for ever and ever.” If you cling to pleasure, then you will avoid pain. And don’t go to the other extreme: don’t start denying pleasure, don’t start escaping from pleasure, because that is the same. If you start escaping from pleasure, you will start clinging to pain. That’s what ascetics do.The indulgent person clings to pleasure, avoids pain. And the ascetic person avoids pleasure and clings to pain. Both approaches are wrong; in both you lose balance. Buddhism is neither indulgence nor asceticism. It does not teach anything, it simply says: Watch!And that’s what Jesus repeats again and again: Watch! Be watchful. Keep alert, keep awake.You try it! This is an experiment in psychology – nothing to do with God. You will be surprised and immensely benefited. The day you can see that you are neither pain nor pleasure is a great day, the greatest day, because from then onward things will be different.If it rain, let it rain… If there is pain, let it be so. If it rain not, let it rain not… If there is no pain, let it be so. If there is pleasure, let it be so. But you don’t get identified with anything.But even should it not rain, you must travel with wet sleeves. But remember one thing: even if your life has been of convenience, comfort, pleasure, and there have not been great pains, great miseries, then too you must travel with wet sleeves. Why? Because you will still become old, you will still have to die one day. One can live a very pleasant life, but old age is coming, and death is coming. Death cannot be avoided; there is no way to escape from it, it is inevitable. So whether you lived a painful life or you lived a pleasant life will not make much difference when death comes. And death is coming; death has come the day you were born. In the very idea of birth, death has entered in you.I have heard a very beautiful anecdote about one of the most famous Zen masters, Bankei:Bankei had a terrible fear of death from his earliest age. When he was a small child, his mother created the fear of death in him. He says that at the age of three, his mother, as a punishment, constantly frightened him with death. Not only that: sometimes if Bankei had done something which was not right, she would pretend that she had died. She would lie down with closed eyes and stop her breath, and, of course, the small child would cry and weep around her, and call, “Come back! I will never do such a thing again.” Only then would she start breathing.So from the very childhood the fear of death had entered into him; he was constantly afraid. Perhaps that is why when he was young he became interested in Zen – Zen people say there is no death. He entered a monastery and way overdid the austerities. Whatsoever was said, he overdid it, out of the fear of death. He wanted to see that there is no death; he wanted to overcome death, he wanted to conquer it. He practiced zazen sitting for such long periods at a time that the places on his body where he sat became covered with sores and boils. He became so ill he nearly lost his life; he withdrew for a few months to recuperate.It was during a feverish period of his convalescence that he had his first satori. This consisted of an instantaneous realization that he could not die for the simple reason that he had never been born. The crux of the matter was that he had never been born. Now, Bankei knew as well as you know and everybody knows that his body emerged from his mother’s womb, that his body had been born. Yet he realized that he had never been born.With the idea of birth, the idea of death arises. They go together, aspects of the same coin. Unless you get rid of the idea of birth, you will not get rid of the idea of death. That’s why Zen people insist: Go deep into your being and see your face that you had before birth. If you can have one small glimpse of that original face which you had before birth, then death has disappeared. If you are attached to birth you are going to die, if you are not attached to birth you need not be afraid of death. Watch birth and you will be able to watch death too.The greatest experience of life is to die watching death. But you have to prepare for it. If you cannot even watch a headache, if you cannot even watch a small pain in the stomach, if you cannot watch these small things, you will not be able to watch death.Buddhism says “Watch! Let every moment of life become an experience in watchfulness – pain, pleasure, everything; love, hate, everything; good, bad, everything. Go on watching. Let one taste spread on your being – the taste of watchfulness – and samata arises out of it. One becomes utterly balanced in the middle of the polarities.That balancing is just like a tightrope walker walking balanced on a tightrope. He remains in the middle, does not lean to the left or to the right; or whenever he finds himself leaning to one side, he immediately balances himself. Between pain and pleasure, day and night, birth and death, go on balancing, and that very balancing will give you an insight of the reality you are. That reality has never been born. This body has been born; this body is going to die.Another Zen master, Bokuju, was asked by a man… Bokuju was ill, old, just on the verge of death, and this stranger came and asked, “Master, where will you be when you are dead?”And Bokuju opened his eyes and said, “I will be in the grave, all my four limbs raised toward the sky.”A strange answer. And you will miss the point if I don’t remind you. When Bokuju is saying, “I will be lying in my grave with all my four limbs raised to the sky,” what is he actually saying? He is saying, “The body will be in the grave and I will be watching it lying in the grave with four limbs raised to the sky. I will still be watching, I will still be a watcher. I have always been a watcher. The body was born and I was watching; the body became a youth and I was watching, the body became old and I was watching. And one day the body will die and I will be watching. I am my watchfulness.”This Buddha calls sammasati – right awareness.If it rain, let it rain; if it rain not, let it not rain; but even should it not rain, you must travel with wet sleeves. So don’t be deceived by your comfortable, convenient life – because death is coming to disrupt all, to destroy all. Prepare yourself!And the only preparation is balance.Look at the cherry blossoms!Their color and scent fall with them,Are gone for ever,Yet mindlessThe spring comes again.Life repeats itself mindlessly; unless you become mindful, it will go on repeating like a wheel. That’s why Buddhists call it the wheel of life and death, the wheel of time. It moves like a wheel: birth is followed by death, death is followed by birth; love is followed by hate, hate is followed by love; success is followed by failure, failure is followed by success. Just see!If you can watch, even for a few days, you will see a pattern emerging, a wheel pattern. One fine morning you are feeling so good and so happy, and another day you are so dull, so dead that you start thinking of committing suicide. And just the other day you were so full of life, so blissful that you were feeling thankful to existence that you were in a mood of deep gratefulness, and today there is great complaint and you don’t see the point of going on living. And tomorrow again that blissful moment will come; the cherry blossoms will come again, there will be fragrance and the singing of birds, and the sunlit days, and then again the cloudy days, and the dark nights of the soul. And it goes on and on, but you don’t see the pattern.Once you see the pattern, you can get out of it – once you see that it goes on and on mindlessly, not needing you. People ordinarily think that when they are angry, somebody has caused the anger in them. That is utterly wrong. Even if you were alone, nobody was with you, you would have been angry in that moment. That has something to do with your inner wheel, with your inner periodicity, inner rhythm – it has nothing to do with somebody outside.The outside is just an excuse, because it is so ugly to think, “I am creating my anger myself.” The excuse feels good, it relieves you of a burden. Then some day, meeting a friend, you feel so happy and you think, “The coming of the friend has made me so happy,” and that too is false. Even if you were sitting alone in that moment, you would have been happy.That is one of the great realizations that comes to people who move into isolation for a few days. Moving into isolation, being alone for a few weeks, is a good meditation. You will be surprised to find that out of nowhere one day you are feeling good and there is nobody there, nobody has done anything to you, and one day you are feeling so bad. One day you are dancing, another day you are crying. And then you can see that you create your own states.Once this is seen, you stop throwing responsibilities on others and life becomes a different life. Otherwise, we are all throwing our responsibilities on others. We are making others feel guilty: “It is because of you that I am angry or sad.” Naturally the others have to accept it because they are doing the same thing. And they have to accept it also because sometimes they are praised for making people happy.Once you know that you can’t make anybody happy, you have never made anybody happy, and nobody can make you happy and nobody can make you unhappy, once this insight has become settled in your heart, you will never throw responsibility on anybody. All struggle, futile struggle, disappears. Then you know that you have an inner wheel that goes on moving. Sometimes one spoke is on top, sometimes another spoke comes on top.And remember, it moves mindlessly; the only way to get out of it is mindfulness. It is a robot; it is a mechanical thing; it is an automaton. All meditations are nothing but de-automatization. All the processes that have become automatic in you have to be de-automatized; anything that de-automatizes helps immensely.For example, you walk at a certain pace. Buddha told his disciples: Walk slowly; change the pace, just walk very slowly. And you will be surprised: if you walk slowly, you suddenly become aware of your walking. In fact, you can walk slowly only if you remain aware. The moment you lose awareness, you will gather speed; then you will become again an automaton.Buddha’s meditations are to make you aware about life’s activities. Eating, eat with full awareness; chew with awareness of what you are doing. When walking, take each single step with full awareness of what is happening, what you are doing. Not verbally, but with a consciousness behind: “I am raising my left foot.” Not that you have to repeat, “I am raising my left foot”; that is stupid, there is no need to repeat it. But you can watch it: “I am chewing. I am standing under the shower. The water is cool. It is too hot and the body is perspiring.” Not that you have to repeat these words: you have just to be watchful. Then slowly, slowly a new integration happens in you, a mindfulness arises. That mindfulness can take you out of the wheel: nothing else can.Look at the cherry blossoms! Their color and scent fall with them, are gone for ever, yet mindless the spring comes again. How many times has it happened to you? You had fallen in love with a woman or a man, and then came great frustration and great misery, and you suffered and there was anguish, and you decided you were finished forever. Never again! And after just a few days, the spring came again, and again you felt love blossoming in you, again you fell into the same rut, the same routine. Again you were saying the same stupid things to another woman; again you were whispering those sweet nothings, and hearing those sweet nothings. You were back in a dream world, and you had completely forgotten the old experience.This will happen again and again; the spring goes on coming. Don’t think you are very different from a cherry tree! You are angry – and this is so about all your moods – you are angry and you feel the fire of it and the poison of it and the destructiveness of it, and you suffer. And you decide, “No more. It is ugly and it is foolish and it is a sheer wastage of energy. So why should I be in anger again?” And you decide, and you decide very strongly, “This is the last time. Now I am going to avoid it.” Then one day, mindlessly, it comes again. Just a small thing triggers it, and you are again on fire, again red, doing destructive things. Later on you will remember, you will become mindful, but always later on. Then it is of no sense, no meaning, it is impotent.Mindfulness means in the moment. Everybody is wise when the moment has passed, remember this. The really wise are those who are wise in the moment. When something is happening – you are sad – this is the moment to become so watchful that you are unbridged from sadness, that you are disconnected from sadness; that sadness is there, you are here, and there is no connection. You are no longer identified; you are simply seeing it. You are not sad, you are the seer. Then you are wise.When sadness has gone, then you think, “It was not good to become sad. It was so trivial, so foolish; there was no meaning in it. Next time I am not going to become so sad. There is no point.” But you will become sad again because awareness can be practiced only in the moment. This repentance is not on the right track.Everybody repents, and things go on happening the same way they have always been happening. There is such a vicious circle that sometimes you think you are doing the opposite and you are not really doing the opposite but the same thing.An angry person can decide, “I will never be angry,” and can go on repressing anger. Then by repressing anger, one day he has so much anger that it is uncontrollable, it explodes. If he had not repressed, he may not have been so angry. Now he is angrier because he tried not to be angry.And man moves in such a mindless way that you cannot imagine. Just the other day I was reading a story by Raymond M. Smullyan:Once upon a time there was a hippie. His philosophy of life was that one should not amount to something. More specifically, he believed that the three greatest evils which can befall a man are acquisition of fame, acquisition of wealth, and acquisition of prestige.His parents always insisted that he should amount to something. For years and years they pleaded, cajoled, threatened, argued, and did everything in their power to rid him of this “childish” notion that one should not amount to something. But the hippie was as adamant and stubborn as his parents – he simply refused to amount to something.He was not content that just he should not amount to something – others also needed salvation. And because he knew the secret of salvation he became a great missionary. His mission was to save the whole world from amounting to something. He became a passionate preacher of his gospel, and soon he was considered to be a great prophet by other hippies. He traveled much and delivered speeches on why people should not amount to something, and his speeches were utter masterpieces of eloquence. His ideas spread farther and farther from home, and finally a great book publisher knocked on his door and he said, “Your ideas are so unique, why don’t you write a book?” The idea appealed to him and then he wrote a book: Why You Should Not Amount to Something.The book spread like wildfire throughout the entire world. Not only were copies bought by all the world’s hippies, but also by all parents who were afraid their children might become hippies. After all, the arguments in the book were so ingeniously clever and persuasive that the parents had to master them thoroughly so they could provide counter-arguments for their children.At any rate, in a matter of weeks the boy became a multi-multi-millionaire. Then one day the entire horror of the situation stabbed him like a knife. He exclaimed, “My God! My God! What has happened? Of all people, I, I have suddenly amounted to something? More specifically, I have acquired enormous fame, enormous wealth, enormous prestige. I have betrayed my entire life! Oh, dear God, what can I do? What can I do?”This happens. You can go on thinking that you are doing something else, something contrary. But if you are mindless, something else is going to happen. Your life is not lived by you – it is lived by a very mindless process. You are not really living it: you are being lived by a mindless existence. You are born, you are young, you become old; you have emotions, ideas – and they all are happening in you just like the cherry blossoms. You go on repeating the same thing, year in, year out; you go on moving in a wheel. To see it, to see it totally, to see it as it is, is Buddha’s way of becoming aware.The vicious circle of birth and death has to be broken, but it can be broken only if you start looking into things which happen to you in a detached way, in a non-passionate way. What scientists call “a detached observation” is really a Buddhist discovery. Scientists have been trying this for only three hundred years. In their labs they simply watch, without any prejudice, neither for nor against. They simply note down the facticity of it. But this is an ancient Buddhist meditation: the same way one has to watch one’s own mind, one’s own mind’s functionings, structures, and slowly, slowly you start becoming aware of a wheel that goes on moving inside you. And you are not moving the wheel; it moves on its own. The spell can be broken only if in this mechanical process of life something of awareness penetrates.De-automatize yourself.BuddhismIs the shaved part of the saucepan,The whiskers of the pebble,The sound that accompaniesThe bamboos in the picture.Still Buddhism is not an “ism,” it is not a philosophy. It does not give you any idea of what reality is – because once the idea is given to you of what reality is like, you immediately jump upon it, you start clinging to it. You will make reality like your idea, you will create it.Buddhism simply takes all ideas away from you, it is negative. It does not give you any positive notion. It does not say what truth is: it only says what truth is not. It eliminates, it goes on eliminating. It is very severe; It does not allow you any nook and corner to cling to. It takes all, everything that you possess away from you. Only one thing is left, which cannot be taken away and that is your awareness. Then uncontaminated awareness is left; you become a mirror. In that mirror the reality is reflected. So Ikkyu says: Buddhism is the shaved part of the saucepan, the whiskers of the pebble, the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture.So Buddhism as an “ism” is as false as …the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture, or as false as …the whiskers of the pebble. As an “ism” Buddhism is false. Then what is it? If it is not a philosophy, then what is it?It is just an approach toward reality, an opening. It is not a belief system. It is utterly devoid of beliefs; it negates beliefs. It is not a positive philosophy. And that is the beauty of it – because all positive philosophies are nothing but creations of the mind.People are very much interested in positive philosophies. They appeal to people because they enhance the mind, they nourish the mind. They give you great ideas on how to live your life, how to achieve more, how to become more, how to be enlightened, and all that.Buddhism simply says: Just drop your ideas and you are enlightened. Just drop your mind and you are divine.But Buddha was very, very careful even about saying that, because people are hankering so much to cling to something. He was very careful about making even a single statement positively. If you ask him, “What will happen when all has disappeared and one has become a mirror?” he says, “There will be no pain”; but he never says, “There will be bliss.” Never for a single moment, for a single time, does he become positive.People used to insist to him, because they had heard it down the ages that when the ultimate happens you will be blissful. And Buddha would say, “You will not be miserable” – that’s all. People would ask him, “Why don’t you say that we will be happy and blissful?” And he would say, “If I say that you will be happy, then it is never going to happen – then you will search for happiness. You will fall into new dreams and new imaginations, heaven and paradise and so on and so forth; you will create your own ideas of what happiness is. And all that you know is misery. So I only say there will be no misery – and let me keep absolutely quiet about what there will be. You just drop misery and see what is.”It didn’t appeal to ordinary, mediocre minds. The mediocre mind wants something to possess; he wants some keys which can open new doors to new treasures. Buddha simply takes all the keys out of your hands. He leaves you utterly alone, but in that utter aloneness, something immense happens, something infinite happens, something unimaginable happens, something inexpressible happens. And the first condition for it to happen is that you should not think about it, that no idea should be given to you about it – otherwise it will never happen because the idea will prevent it.Buddhism is the shaved part of the saucepan, the whiskers of the pebble, the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture. Then what is Buddhism? It is just a gesture, just a painted picture. There is no sound in it, no wind is blowing. There is just India ink, and nothing else – no sound, no wind. You just imagine sound and wind, you imagine movement. Nothing is moving. So people have created Buddhism out of their own imagination.The religion that exists in the name of Buddhism is just a painted religion. Buddha never delivered this thing to the world. It is a creation of the people; because people cannot live with nothingness, they created something.What I say to you, you may not hear, it may be too much for you. You may hear something which I have not said at all, because you can manage that. You may hear a few fragments. You may delete something, you may add something; you may create something out of what I am saying; you may create something out of it which is absolutely yours.That’s how Buddhism has happened, that’s how Christianity has happened, that’s how all the religions have happened. The original expression has been lost in interpretations. What exists in the name of Buddhism is not what Buddha has said. What Buddha has said can only be experienced if you become a buddha – there is no other way.What I am saying to you can be experienced only in the same state of mind, in the same state of awareness. It is impossible to convey it. Once it leaves one state of consciousness and enters into another kind of state, it is transformed, it is translated, it becomes polluted, it is never the same again. If you can also become silent, quiet, unprejudiced, with no opinion in your mind, then things can happen. But people carry opinions in their minds – such opinions, amazing opinions!Just the other day I was reading an article by Ashoka. Now he feels doubtful about my enlightenment because sometimes I look at the clock. “How can an enlightened person look at a clock? Can’t he know what time it is? And if he can’t even know what time it is, what can he know?” And this type of thing continues. It is not only in Ashoka’s mind, it is also in many people’s minds, because minds are minds.But you have not looked at it without prejudice. You have some idea of how an enlightened person should be. You have some idea that he should know without looking at the clock what time it is. The reality is just the contrary.You may be able to know what time it is without looking at the clock, but an enlightened person cannot – because for him time has disappeared. For him there is no more time; for him there is only the eternal now, nothing moves, all has stopped. His clock has stopped! Now no calendar exists in him. He has to look to know what time it is. You can feel the time because your clock, your clock inside, is working; you can have a certain inference about what time it must be. And within minutes you will be right; at the most, within ten minutes you will be right. Your mind can calculate. You know what time is; you know how much it feels when one hour passes by.But to the enlightened consciousness, nothing passes. All simply is, and always is. There is no way to infer what time it is; hence, I have to look at the clock again and again. Sometimes Vivek becomes very puzzled, because just five minutes before I had looked at the clock and I look again. And she says, “You just looked five minutes ago, and you are looking again.” And I can understand her puzzlement: anybody can infer, any child can infer that only five minutes have passed. But nothing is passing for me; I even have to inquire what day today is, what date today is.But you have your mind, your idea, and naturally you can look only from your mind and from your idea. You will go on missing that way. You have to drop your prejudices; you have to drop all ideas. Why bother how an enlightened person should be when an enlightened person is with you? Why not look directly? Rather than having an idea, why not look directly?You have a certain idea how a rose should be. Maybe you have never seen a black rose, and you think that a rose has to be only red. And there is a black rose, and you will say, “This is not a rose because a rose has to be red, has to be rosy. This is not a rose! It is not rosy, it is black, how can it be a rose?”Drop the idea. Come close, smell the flower, sit silently with the flower. Let its fragrance give you the message, let it have a communion with you, and you will know. That will be far better, far truer. Otherwise, this goes on happening.Buddha was there, and people were not listening to what he was saying. They were listening to something else; they were translating. Please, don’t translate me; otherwise, sooner or later I will be just …the whiskers of the pebble, the shaved part of the saucepan, the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture.Don’t create a picture. While the reality is here, why can’t you have a contact with the reality? Why can’t you bridge yourself? What is preventing you? – a priori prejudices, opinions that you have gathered.A Christian comes, and he looks at me and he wants to find Christ in me. And if he can’t find Christ he says, “This man can’t be enlightened!” A Buddhist comes, he looks for Buddha in me; a Jaina comes, he looks for Mahavira in me. And when they do not find… They cannot find, because I am myself.This roseflower is black, that roseflower is yellow, another roseflower is red. There are thousands of roseflowers. Don’t be too concerned with the color, with the shape, with the form. But the rose-ness is the same, the flowering is the same.There were people in Buddha’s time who followed Jaina philosophy. They would look at him, and because he was not naked they would think he was not yet enlightened, because Jainas have the idea that when a person becomes enlightened he drops all his clothes. It is a beautiful idea, but clothes don’t mean clothes literally. He drops all his clothes, he becomes nude, utterly nude, but not literally. But who is going to prevent people from being literal? And Buddha was not nude, so he was not an enlightened person.Buddha was one kind of roseflower. Jesus was another kind. Bodhidharma, Buddha’s disciple, was a third kind. Buddha was silent and Bodhidharma was laughing, but I say to you: the taste of Bodhidharma’s laughter was the same as Buddha’s silence.But if you have seen Buddha sitting silently under his bodhi tree, you will not believe in Bodhidharma because he will be rolling on the floor. Such mad laughter! And you will say, “What is happening? This man must be mad, how can he be enlightened? An enlightened person always sits under a bodhi tree and never looks at a clock!”Your ideas continuously interfere. You can miss this opportunity, It all depends on you. You can use this opportunity. You can be transformed by this opportunity.The puppet-player hangs themRound his neck, not his heart;He can take out a devil,He can take out a buddha.Buddha has said that mind is a magician; all that it creates is magic work. You must have seen our sannyasin magician, Avinash. He can produce things out of empty boxes! Mind is a conjurer: once you have a certain idea in the mind, it becomes a seed and the seed starts growing, and soon it will become a reality for you.Just the other night, Nirgrantha had a heart attack. Now, he says that for six months he was feeling that this heart attack was coming. The situation is just vice versa: it has come because for six months he was thinking that it was coming. Not that he had some knowing it was going to come; it was not an insight into the future. He has created the future. Six months continuously thinking that it is coming, it has to come. Mind is a conjurer. It creates, it can create anything!Now much research is going into this phenomenon. A new kind of therapy is arising called placebo therapy. A placebo is a false, pseudo medicine, with no medicinal qualities in it, but it is given in such a way that the patient believes it is medicine. And not only the patient believes it is medicine, the doctor also believes it, otherwise his gestures may show, may reveal the truth. The doctor is kept in ignorance; he is given just water to inject, or given just sugar pills with all the marks and names and labels of the true medicine. He knows that this is medicine; the patient knows this is medicine. And the miracle is that it works – and there is no medicine in it. The patient is healed because the very belief of the doctor that it is medicine, and the paraphernalia of the hospital create an atmosphere, a psychology, a hypnosis. And the patient wants to get rid of his illness. When a famous doctor gives the medicine it is bound to help; whether it is medicine or not doesn’t matter very much.It has been found that medicine or no medicine functions almost in the same proportion. If seventy percent of patients are cured by medicine, real medicine, then seventy percent of patients are cured by unreal medicine, placebo medicine. It is creating a great stir in the medical world. What is happening?What is really happening is that in the first place the illness has been created, it is a mind phenomenon. And in the second place, if the mind is convinced that it is going to be cured, then it is going to be cured. That’s why if the doctor’s fee is not really big, medicine is not going to affect you much. The bigger the fee, the better the medicine! If the therapist has a big fee and you are paying fortunes, then it is going to affect you more, because then you want to be affected. When it is free, who bothers whether it works or not? “If it works, good; if it doesn’t work, okay, because we have not paid for it.” When you pay for it and you are intent that it should work, then it works.Buddha says mind is a conjurer; it creates illnesses, it can create cures. Mind creates all kinds of illusions – beauty and ugliness, success and failure, richness and poverty. Mind goes on creating, and once an idea settles in you, your whole life energy functions to create it, to make it a reality. Every thought becomes a thing, and every thing in the beginning was only a thought and nothing else. You live in a kind of hypnosis.Buddha says this hypnosis has to be broken, and no other religion has tried so hard to break this hypnosis. Man has to be dehypnotized. Man has to be made aware that all is mind: pain and pleasure both, birth and death both. All is mind.And once this has been seen absolutely, the conjurer disappears, and then what is left is truth. And that truth liberates.The puppet-player hangs them round his neck, not his heart; he can take out a devil, he can take out a buddha. This is a tremendously important statement. You can become a devil, you can become a buddha – it is all mind game. You can become a sinner, you can become a saint; you can become a criminal, an Adolf Hitler, or you can become a great mahatma – and it is all mind game. In both ways it is mind playing.Then who is a real buddha? If the devil is a mind thing and a buddha is a mind thing, then who is a real buddha? The real buddha is one who is no more the mind, who has come to see all the games of the mind and has retired from all the games of the mind. That is renunciation; that is sannyas: retiring from all games of the mind, playing no more new games.Zen people say Buddha was never born, never lived, never uttered a word, never died, never attained enlightenment – and they are right. And obviously wrong too, because Buddha was born, he lived for eighty-two years, he is a historical person, he is not only a myth. He has left immense marks on the sense of time. He was born, he became enlightened, and he uttered millions of words; for forty-two years continuously he was teaching. These are obvious facts.When Zen people say Buddha was never born, never lived, never uttered a word, never died, never attained enlightenment, they are not denying these historical facts. Remember it. They are uttering something of more value. They are saying: Yes, he said many things but he never uttered a word – his real reality remained silent. Yes, he was born to a certain mother, to a certain father, in a certain place, but that birth was only a mind phenomenon, a dream that he lived through. In his reality he was never born.In reality, you are not born either. And in reality Buddha never died, because how can you die if you are not born? Who can die? Who is there to die? And, of course, when you are not born and you cannot die, how can you become enlightened? Who is there to become enlightened? There is no one; there is nobody to become a buddha.This is buddhahood, this is enlightenment: seeing the fact that there is nobody, that the house is utterly empty, that nobody has ever lived, that we were only playing games of the mind, that we were creating shadows, that we were fast asleep and dreaming things, then all disappears.When in the morning you wake up, it is not only that the bad dreams were wrong or false, the good dreams were also false. Whether you dream in the night that you were a thief, or you dreamed that you were a yogi doesn’t matter in the morning because both are false. Whether you dreamed that you were Adolf Hitler or you dreamed that you were a Gautam Buddha doesn’t matter in the morning. When you are awake, all is finished. Adolf Hitler is gone, Gautam Buddha is gone, all is gone. And what is left has always been there as the substratum. That eternal, that formless, that attributeless, that nirgun, that conditionless, is your reality. On that conditionless all kinds of conditions have been imposed; on that unconditional a thousand and one conditions have been put together. Those conditionings together are called the mind. And the only way to get out of the mind is to see the mind, to be aware of it.Slowly, slowly, the more you become aware of the dream, the dream starts dissipating, the dream starts receding. When awareness is perfect, the dream has disappeared. Then you are neither a buddha nor a man nor a woman, neither this nor that. Who are you then? – nothing can be said about it. Only one thing can be said about it: A glimpse of the real man, and you are in love, and you are love.If he says,“There is nothing special about it,”Already he has transgressed,And can say nothing else,This Daruma Ikkyu.And Ikkyu says: I have said that Buddhism is nothing but the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture. I have said that Buddhism is nothing but a dream. I have said that there is nothing special about it, that it is utter ordinariness, that it is nature. But he feels, “Even to say that, I have transgressed – because even that must not be said.”Nothing can be said about it. Say it, and you have done something wrong. Say it, and you have betrayed.If he says, “There is nothing special about it,” already he has transgressed… It cannot be said that Buddhism is a special religion, a great religion. It can’t be said that there is nothing special in it. There are two schools of Buddhists. One school says that Buddhism is the greatest religion, the most profound, the highest that has ever happened. Just as Christians say, and Hindus say, and Jainas say – everybody claims his religion, really claims his ego through the religion. So there is the greater mass of Buddhists who say Buddhism is the greatest religion, and Buddha is the greatest man.Then there are Zen people who say there is nothing special about it, it is very ordinary; nothing to brag about, nothing to claim. But Ikkyu says: Even to say there is nothing special about it, you have said something special about it. This is making it special.Christians say Christianity is special, Hindus say Hinduism is special, Mohammedans say Mohammedanism is special. And Zen people say: “There is nothing special about it, you are making it too special.” When all others claim that they are special and you say, ‘We are not special,” you become special. That is a way of claiming specialness. When everybody is claiming “I am extraordinary,” the man who says “I am ordinary” is really claiming extraordinariness.Just think: ten thousand people claiming, everybody claiming, “I am extraordinary,” and then you are standing there, a humble person, and you say, “Sir, I am very ordinary.” What are you doing? – you have claimed real extraordinariness. You are saying, “You fools, ten thousand fools! You are all claiming you are extraordinary, this is all ego. Look at me, this humble person, this nobody – only I can say that I am just ordinary.” But only this man is extraordinary. All the others are ordinary because they are claiming the same thing. Everybody is claiming it.Ikkyu is right: If he says, “There is nothing special about it,” already he has transgressed, and can say nothing else, this Daruma Ikkyu. Daruma is the first founder of Zen Buddhism in China from India, the first who traveled from India to China to deliver this message beyond words, this religion which is religionless. So all the Zen masters feel greatly indebted to Daruma – Bodhidharma’s Japanese name is Daruma.Ikkyu says, “This Daruma Ikkyu – this follower of Daruma, this disciple of Daruma – can’t say a thing. I can’t say Buddhism is special; I can’t say there is nothing special about it. I simply can’t say anything.”In that silence he is saying something immensely beautiful. When you cannot say anything, it means something of such enormous gravity is there that no word can be adequate to express it. And Buddha has a vastness that cannot be contained in any word.No disciple can ever say anything about his master. If he can say something about his master, and feels that he is able to say it correctly, and feels that he has expressed it adequately, then he is not a disciple and he has not understood the master at all. To understand the master is to lose all language and all capacity of expression; you face such a huge reality you simply become dumb.The disciple is always dumb before the master, and only he knows who is dumb. One who can say, has not known, and one who cannot say, knows.Enough for today.