Datasets:

DhruvDancingBuddha

/

osho_discourses

like 0

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

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

Take It Easy Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-08/

The first question:Osho,When I was younger I used to feel a certain pull near open windows, high up in buildings. Many of the people with whom I work now also do. The feeling is if I go any closer, I may have to jump.My experience is that it is not suicidal. What is it? Can you say more about it?Yes, I can say more about it because I have felt that same fear in you when you come close to me. You keep a certain distance; you are afraid. The fear is not suicidal, or is suicidal in a very different sense, in a spiritual sense.You are not afraid of the ordinary death; you are afraid of what Zen people call “the great death.” You are afraid of disappearing; you are afraid of melting. You are afraid of losing your hold upon yourself, and everybody is afraid of that in one way or other.That’s why we live always in control. Control is not only imposed by the society; even if the society removes all control, people will continue to live in control. They will create their own control, their own discipline. Even if society decides to make everybody absolutely free, people will not be free, people will not accept freedom. They will create their own bondage, they will create their own imprisonments, they will create their own chains; they will become their own jailers.Freedom is frightening, because freedom simply means you will not be there. It is not that you are going to be free: you are going to be free from yourself. You are the bondage – when the bondage disappears, you disappear.Sometimes that fear can come to you when you are close to a window on a high building, or close to an abyss in the mountains. That feeling can take possession of you, that physical situation can become a triggering inside your psyche. It can give you the idea that it is possible to disappear.And remember, there is always both fear and attraction: whenever you are attracted by something, you are also afraid of it. That’s why man is attracted toward women and is at the same time afraid of them.That’s why I say your so-called saints who are still afraid of women, are still in love with women. Certainly they are – they are obsessed, because fear and love go together. They may have moved to the Himalayan caves; sitting in their caves they may not be thinking at all that they are in any way interested in women, but they are frightened. If the rumor comes that a beautiful woman is coming to the mountains to visit, something will stir inside them. It will be fear, but fear shows attraction; fear shows that you are still involved.Scriptures that say anything against women are scriptures written by people who were obsessed with women. They may have renounced but they have not changed; they are the same people. One day they were rushing toward women, another day they start rushing away from women, but it is the same game played in a different way. The woman remains their attraction, and remains their fear.This is also the case when you are attracted to a man. When a woman is attracted toward a man, there is fear. All love creates fear, immediately brings fear. So these two things go together. You are attracted to the open windows, because there is great attraction in being free from this cage that has become your life. But this is the only life you know; fear comes because who knows if there another life or not. You may simply disappear as you are and you may not appear on another plane, in another existence – and then what?Making love to a woman or man, the same fear grips you. That’s why orgasm is so impossible, so difficult. And don’t think that only women find it difficult to have orgasm; it is just as difficult for men as it is for women. With man one simple thing helps him to pretend: his ejaculation helps him to think he has attained orgasm because he can see something visible happening. The woman has no visible ejaculation, so she is puzzled, worried whether she had an orgasm or not. Ejaculation is not orgasm.Orgasm means you use the other’s being as a window and you leap into the unknown; the other uses your window and leaps into the unknown. When you disappear, orgasm happens. Orgasm is a state of immense expansion of consciousness; it is a state of unboundedness. You become one with the sky; you are no longer tiny, you are no longer in limitations.You are no more. As long as you are, there are limitations, boundaries, definitions. When all definitions have been broken and you are simply there, indefinable, inexpressible, something of the grandeur of godliness has happened to you; for a moment you have melted and you have known, you have tasted.The same fear happens to a disciple coming to a master; hence, down the ages, so much has been talked about trust. What is trust? Trust simply means the courage to take the jump. It is risky, it is a gamble, because there can be no security. What security is there to be with me? What security is there to surrender to me? I don’t guarantee you anything. I can’t say what is going to happen because it can’t be said. You have to move in darkness, you have to move in great trust and only then can you move.You would like some objective proof of God. That’s why people ask about proofs of God. You would like some objective proof of samadhi, of buddhahood. You would like something tangible that you can touch and see and hold in your hands, that you can feel and you can judge. Then trust would be easy, but then trust would not be needed.You don’t trust in the sun, you don’t trust in the moon, they are simply there. Nobody asks any proof for the sun or for the moon; they are simply there, they are facts, no trust is needed. That is why in science trust is not needed, because science searches for the facts.In religion trust is needed because trust makes you available toward the ultimate and makes truth available to you. Trust is the door, a window to truth, but courage will be needed.That fear, that attraction to the windows that pulled you, was showing one thing: that from your very childhood you have been in a search. Maybe the search has been carried down the ages through other lives. This is my feeling about you: you have been groping and searching. You have been continuously searching; hence the fear and the attraction. Attraction because the search is there, and fear because who knows? – if you go too close to the window, in a sudden mad moment you may be so thrilled, you may be so possessed by the idea, you may take the jump. Then what? So it is better not to go very close.I have been watching that in you since you have come to me. Even in Germany you were not wearing orange and the mala, which is part of that fear. You don’t want to get too involved with me; you want to keep a safe distance. When you come here you allow a little bit of closeness, but when you go away you start avoiding me. I have been trying to contact you, but you were not available. I can contact you only if you remain involved with me; I wanted to help you, but you were disconnected.If somebody is trying to cheat me, he is really cheating himself. I go on trying to contact my people, and I can contact only those who are really with me, through thick and thin, in joy and in misery, in ecstasy and agony, in life and death. I can contact only those people.Now become a little more alert. Much is possible. I am also a window. There is no need to be afraid – fear is natural, still there is no need to be afraid. In spite of the fear, come close to me. One kind of suicide will happen: the ego will commit suicide. That’s what sannyas is all about.Attraction is there, so you have become a sannyasin; and fear is there, so you are still trying to avoid. Hesitantly, you take one step toward me and one step away from me. This hesitation can destroy this opportunity. Jumping from the window of a high building is not going to help. But now the window is available for which you have been hankering, and you can jump, and you can die and be reborn.The second question:Osho,I don't understand what you say, but while sitting alone or in discourse something happens to me and tears start coming out of my eyes. What is this all, Oh my master?So you have started listening to me. That is the way to listen to me: through tears. That is the way to listen to me: through love, through the heart. Pulsate with me, let my words be drowned in your tears. You will not be at a loss, because what I am saying is not important. Far more important is some other energy surrounding those words that reach you.Don’t pay too much attention to the words. If your heart is open, the energy will be released into the heart. My words are just carriers, they are containers. The content is utterly different; the content is diametrically opposite. The container is the word, but the content is a wordless silence. It is my love. The word is just a capsule. The capsule is not the medicine; the medicine is inside it. Forget about the capsule, drink me. And the best way to drink is to be with tears, because then you participate, then you come very, very close.Those tears are indicative that your heart starts pulsating with me, that there are moments when you start breathing just in tune with me – then suddenly those tears will arise. Those tears are symbolic; they are like flowers. Rejoice!The third question:Osho,Why are your teachings not accepted as religion or religious by the society?They are not religious or religion in the ordinary sense of the term. They are far more: they are far deeper and higher. The so-called society has no vision; it consists of blind people. It has been happening, always.When Buddha appeared, they didn’t believe that his teachings were religious. When Jesus appeared, they crucified him. When Mansoor declared, “I am God,” they killed him. Mohammedans thought Mansoor was one of the most irreligious persons who has ever been on the earth. To declare oneself God? This is kufr; this is irreligion, this is anti-religion.Whenever it happens that something of the pure truth is expressed, is sung, society starts becoming uneasy about it. It is natural, because society has a very pseudo kind of religion: comfortable, convenient, consolatory. It has false temples to worship in, false gods to worship, false priests to follow. And it is very convenient because it doesn’t disturb your life; you can remain a Christian. In fact, it never disturbs your life – on the contrary, it helps your life. You fit better into the so-called society, the so-called society’s rules, moralities if you are a Christian. But to follow Christ is dangerous.No Christian ever follows Christ, cannot follow him. In fact, being a Christian is a way of avoiding Christ. To be a Buddhist is a way of avoiding Buddha. If you really love Buddha, then you would like to become a buddha, you would not like to become a Buddhist. Why should one want to become a Christian? Either be a christ or forget all about it. But Christ is dangerous. He was not killed by immoral people, bad people; he was killed by good people, respectable people. Remember it always.Buddha was not attacked by the criminals; he was attacked by those whom you can never consider criminals, good people, moral people, puritans. Why does it happen? Jesus is killed by rabbis, religious people, scholars, priests, good in every way. Their lives are completely clean, people who have character. And he was loved by people who have no character, a Magdalene.Just a few days ago, a young woman came from Switzerland whose name is Magdalena. I didn’t change her name when she took sannyas. I love that name, Magdalena. A prostitute followed Jesus, and rabbis killed him. Thieves and drunkards and gamblers followed Jesus, and rabbis killed him. All the so-called saints were against him and the so-called sinners were for him – what kind of world is this? What paradox? Why has this always been happening? There is a certain reason in it.Whenever a new religion, a new dispensation arrives on the earth, whenever a new glimpse of godliness arrives on the earth, whenever a new window or door opens to godliness, it is first accepted by those who are not very respectable. Why? Because they have nothing to lose; they can accept it. They can even accept truth, they have nothing to lose. What did Magdalene have to lose?But the chief rabbi had much to lose; he had an investment in the old, rotten religion, which was dead and had been dead for a long time. It was stinking, it was just a corpse, but he had an investment in it: he was the chief priest of it. If he follows Jesus, he will no longer be the chief priest, and all the prerogatives that he has by being the chief priest will be lost. He has the most beautiful house, the best salary, is the most respected person. Why should he follow this vagabond, Jesus? It would have been just a loss for him.Magdalene could follow Jesus. She had nothing to lose, and much to gain. A gambler or a drunkard, has nothing to lose but something to gain. All great religions start with rebellious people; all great religions start with young people because old people have investments. They have been praying, worshipping, their whole lives, now they can’t just suddenly stop; stopping would mean their whole lives had been wrong. To accept that goes against the grain, against the ego. Only a few rarely courageous old people can follow a Jesus, a Buddha, only those who are so courageous that they can see the point and they can say, “Okay, so it was wrong and I will drop it. My whole life was wrong and I will start anew.” To start anew in old age is very, very difficult, because ahead there is only death, no time is left, and you are starting something new? Great trust is needed: great trust in life, great trust in existence, and adventurousness.All great religions start with adventurous people, young people, the downtrodden, oppressed, criminals, sinners; all religions die when they become respectable and saints arrive and churches evolve.A new flower is opening up here. All the so-called religious people will be against it, they are against it. They have to be against it. How can they risk all their investments, all their privileges, all their consolations? They will cling, they will fight with me. They are fighting with me, they are creating all kinds of trouble for me. You may not be aware of it, because I never talk about it, what is the point? I never say anything about it and you may not be at all aware of what trouble is continuously being created.For one year, I have continually been trying to find a place to move to, but they go on creating trouble: legal trouble, other trouble. And the politicians are with them, and the priests, and all the respectable people are with them. They have power; they can create a thousand and one troubles. They don’t want the commune to be established because they are very much afraid: once there is a commune and the work really starts – this is just an introduction – when the real work starts, then all those who are courageous anywhere in the world are going to come. Thousands and thousands of people are going to come and be transformed. I just need a right situation, a buddhafield. So they are creating every kind of trouble in every way,. And the more my work spreads, the more trouble will be coming, because they will become more apprehensive, more afraid.You ask me: “Why are your teachings not accepted as religion or religious?” How can they be accepted as religion and religious? It is pure religion, that’s why it cannot be accepted as religious. I am not Hindu, otherwise they would have been very happy. They would have loved you all if I had been Hindu. They would have said, “Look! Our religion is so great, so many people from all over the world, from all races, are being converted to Hinduism.” They would have worshipped you, they would have invited you to stay in their houses; they would have bragged about it in their papers, magazines, books, radio stations, TV. They would have bragged, “Look! See the beauty and the grandeur of Hinduism, so many people are being converted to Hinduism!” But I am not a Hindu.They have to repress everything that is happening here so that it cannot reach people. They don’t want anybody to hear about what is happening here, or they want such wrong information to be given out that nobody becomes attracted here.I am not a Mohammedan, I am not a Jaina, I am not a Christian, I am not a Buddhist, so naturally all those people are against me. They are all united in at least one thing: they are all against me. About that they have no differences. The Hindu and Mohammedan, the Christian and the Jaina, are all together about one thing, at least about one thing they agree, I have given them one thing to agree about: that this man is wrong.What I am saying is rebellion. It is going to destroy their very foundation; hence, they cannot accept it as religion. They will deny, they will fight, they will try to crush this opening bud. They will be against you; you will have to face a thousand and one difficulties. That’s the risk you take by being with me, and that is the challenge too. And that challenge is going to become a blessing to you.Those who will be able to accept the challenge and be with me, and those who will be so much in love with me that they can suffer for me, will grow. They will grow to infinite heights; they will know something which is not ordinarily known by human beings. It is not available in churches, it is not available in temples; it becomes available only when a master lives and when a disciple allows himself to be so open to the master that the master starts living in the disciple too. When this transfer of energy happens…They think they know what religion is; they have certain definitions. I don’t fit in any of their definitions. Naturally, how can they call it religion? And just see, then it will be clear to you: Christianity cannot believe that Buddhism is a religion, because they have a definition and Buddhism does not fit in it. How can there be a religion without God? So Christians cannot call Buddhism a religion. At the most, they can accept it as a morality, but not as a religion. How can there be a religion without God?Ask the Buddhists, “Is Christianity a religion?” and they say, “No, how can it be a religion when people are so stupid that they believe in God? They have not known anything. How can a religious person believe in God?” Buddhism has its definition: To believe in God means a deluded person, a person in hallucination, a person who is pathological, who needs psychiatric treatment.Ask the Jainas and they will not agree that Christianity is a religion or Buddhism is a religion. And ask the Mohammedans… Nobody will agree that the other religion is a religion. What is the problem? – they have a certain definition, a fixed idea. If something fits with that idea, it is religion; if it doesn’t fit, it is not religion.So whenever a new insight arises, and new insights continuously arise, then it cannot be called religion. And new insights have to arise because old insights slowly, slowly become so rusty, so dusty, become covered with so many interpretations, jargon, that they lose aliveness. New insights have to go on coming. When a new insight comes, it certainly will not fit with any definition available, it cannot be called religion.Each new religion has to create itself and its definition. Remember it. When my orange people have spread all over the world, and we have millions of orange people, then it will be a religion because we will have created our definition of what religion is.Definition comes later on. First the religion has to come; first the religion has to penetrate people’s hearts, then slowly, slowly definition arises. Definition is not there ready-made beforehand. Each buddha has to create his religion, the definition, the following, the field, and it always has to be started from ABC, from scratch. No old temple can be used for it, a new temple has to be raised. And not only that, but the old temple has to be erased, destroyed, because only when the old temple is no longer a temple in people’s eyes do they start searching again, do they start groping for the new.It is very natural that my approach will not be thought of as religion, as religious. It depends on you: if you start living what I am saying, you will be creating the definition. It depends on you; it solely depends on you. If you become one with what I am saying and you start living it in its totality, sooner or later the definition will follow. But who cares about it? Live what I am saying. Don’t be worried about what people think.The fourth question:Osho,Why do your statements seem to me to be arrogant?It has always been so; it will always be so. When Jesus said, “I and my father are one,” do you think people thought he was a very humble man? When Jesus said, “I am the truth, the way, and the light,” do you think the rabbis came rushing and fell at his feet and said, “Such a humble man has never been seen before!” They said, “This man is arrogant. This man is egoistic.”Logically, they look right, this does look like arrogance! When Krishna said to Arjuna, “Sarva dharma parityajya mamekam sharanam vraja – leave all the religions aside and come and fall unto my feet,” do you think people thought this was a humble statement? “Leave all religions aside and fall unto my feet!” This is pure arrogance.You will be surprised to know that according to legend when Buddha was born he exclaimed, “Above the heavens and below the heavens, I alone am the honored one, I alone am the honored one.” When he was born, just a child, the first assertion, not that he became Buddha and then declared this. The legend is beautiful. The day-old child, the first moment’s assertion, expression: he declared to the world, “Above the heavens and below the heavens, I alone am the honored one.”What do you think about it? That it is sheer arrogance? Truth is truth. It is neither arrogant nor humble; it has to be declared as it is. It can appear humble to you if you understand; it will appear arrogant to you if you don’t understand. And if you don’t understand, then there is no need to go to these statements which look apparently arrogant. People who don’t understand or don’t want to understand can find arrogance anywhere.Once it happened…I read these words of Lao Tzu to a professor: “When the superior man hears of the Tao, he practices it, when the ordinary man hears of the Tao, he ignores it, when the inferior man hears of the Tao, he laughs at it. If it were not laughed at it would not be the true Tao.”And do you know what the professor said? He said, “How arrogant of Lao Tzu – who does he think he is to know? He thinks himself the superior man, the sage? That he knows? How arrogant of him to claim that he knows Tao.” He said, “So Lao Tzu thinks he is one of the superior ones who really understands the Tao, while lesser people ignore or laugh at it? How arrogant!”Now it is not very apparent. You could not have thought this way, but it can be interpreted this way.Just to see the resistance of the professor, I quoted Jesus to him. Jesus said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”And what did he say? He said, “These words are also arrogant. Who does this guy, Jesus, think he is, taking such a superior, condescending, arrogant, forgiving attitude?”Now, it is not apparent, but it can be found. If you search, you can say this man is arrogant – who does he think he is? “Father, forgive them…” Who are you to forgive?That’s exactly what Friedrich Nietzsche used to say against Jesus, “He was the most arrogant man. He is saying to God, ‘Forgive these foolish people because they know not what they do – they are all foolish, forgive them.’ He is insulting them. He does not even allow them the dignity of knowing what they are doing; he does not think of them as human beings. He is treating them as if they are worms – ‘Forgive them!’ This holier-than-thou attitude!”Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that Jesus has said that when somebody hits you on one cheek, give him the other. And Nietzsche said this is very inhuman, because that makes you look very superior. From Nietzsche’s viewpoint, when somebody hits you in the face and you give him the other cheek, it is inhuman. The human way is hit him back! At least give him that much respect: “You are also a human being, as much as I am; we are equals.” Giving him the other cheek means you have reduced the man to a worm. This is really insulting. It can be interpreted this way.My statements are neither arrogant nor humble, because they can’t be arrogant and they can’t be humble. Ordinarily you think humbleness is the opposite of arrogance. It is not. Humbleness and arrogance are both the same. They are like hot and cold – degrees of the same energy.The humble person has as much ego as the arrogant person. The arrogant person claims the ego; the humble person denies the ego, but the ego is there. The arrogant person says, “I am special,” and the humble person says, “I am nobody, sir – just the dust underneath your feet.” One is claiming, the other is also claiming in a different way.When you really see your nature, ego disappears, and with ego, arrogance and humbleness both disappear. Jesus is neither humble nor arrogant; Buddha is neither humble nor arrogant. They simply state the fact. Now it depends on you to interpret it.You say: “Why do your statements seem to me to be arrogant?” There must be something in you that is creating the trouble, something in you that is resisting, fighting. Look deep inside yourself. Once you have seen what is creating this idea in you, you will be free of it; then things will be very simple.There is another, similar question:Osho,Why did you attack Shivananda? How do you know his method does not work? What right have you to judge him?To call a spade a spade is not to attack it. I have not attacked Shivananda; I have simply stated the case. But you must have some attachment with Shivananda; your attachment is feeling hurt. It has nothing to do with Shivananda! Something inside you is feeling hurt, look into your own wound.You ask: “How do you know his method does not work?” No method ever works; it is not a question of his method. No method ever works, even my methods. And because he believed that methods work, I say he was a stupid person. We use methods because there are people just like you who need methods, who cannot go easily, simply into reality, who can only go the hard way. If you tell them to sit silently, they can’t understand it. They say, “Then, just by sitting silently? Is something going to happen just by sitting silently?” They cannot sit silently, and all happens only when you sit silently.Sitting silently, doing nothing,The spring comesAnd the grass grows by itself;This is the ultimate truth. But you cannot let it grow. You say, “I cannot just sit and let the grass grow, I have to pull the grass upward!” So I say, “Okay, then follow Shivananda, then do something. Then jump, do Kundalini. Or if that does not feel enough, then do Dynamic, Chaotic. Or if you have some other karmas to suffer, then go to Encounter.”These methods are used here just because of your stupidities. Their whole function is to make you so tired of doing that one day you come to me and say, “Osho, can’t I sit silently?” That’s all. I send you into groups and meditations and tortures and wait for the day when you will come crying and weeping and crawling and will say, “Enough is enough! Can’t I sit silently?” And I will say, “I have been waiting for this moment.”Sitting silently, doing nothing,The spring comes And the grass grows by itself;No method ever helps. How can a method help? A method can help to create something unnatural. Nature does not need to be created, it is already there. It has to be lived, enjoyed, danced, sung. It is already there, you need not do anything. The grass is already growing, the spring has come. But you cannot sit silently; you have so much restlessness, and that restlessness needs methods. I give you methods, not because through methods you will become enlightened, but through methods you will come to know how stupid you are – and that is great enlightenment!I have heard about a politician. He went to a master, a Sufi master, and asked, “You had told me to meditate, to pray, this and that, and I do, but no revelation ever happens.”The master looked at him and said, “Go outside and stand in the street for ten minutes.” It was raining hard.The politician said, “Stand in the street when it is raining so much?”The master said, “Just go, and a revelation is going to come.”And the politician thought, “When the revelation is going to come then it is worth trying. Ten minutes just standing in the falling rain is not such a big problem.”He stood there. He looked stupid, because people were passing and they thought, “What is our Prime Minister doing?” But he kept his eyes closed, and he looked again and again at his watch – ten minutes was a long time because a crowd gathered and people started laughing. They were puzzled, “What has happened to the Prime Minister?”And then he rushed into the house and told the master, “Nothing happened! You deceived me.”The master said, “But just tell me how you felt?”He said, “I felt like a very stupid person standing there, absolutely stupid!”He said, “This is a great revelation! What do you think? In just ten minutes’ time to come to know that you are a very stupid person. Don’t you think it a great revelation?”This is what happens in meditations, in yoga, in therapy groups. Slowly, slowly understanding penetrates your heart: “What am I doing, shouting, screaming, fighting? What am I doing?” Just that very revelation and you can see the point, then you can sit silently. All that you need is already available. That’s why I said that his methods don’t work – not that somebody else’s methods work. No method ever works.You ask: “And what right have you to judge him?” I have not judged him. I have simply said what he is. What judgment are you talking about? I have not condemned him. To call a spade a spade is not to condemn it. I am simply factual.But the question is from Mark who must be a new person here. He can’t understand me; he has no participation with me yet. He must have felt offended. He may be following things like Shivananda’s, something like that. His ego is hurt, but rather than saying, “My ego is hurt,” he has changed the question. That is a camouflage; it is utterly meaningless. If something is going to happen between me and Shivananda, that is my business, don’t you be worried. If we meet some time, then it is for us to decide whether I should have judged him or not, or why I called him stupid. He can ask me, but why should you be worried?You must have something else inside; this is just a rationalization. You may be doing those kinds of methods. But ego is so subtle, it protects itself. You have made a question in such a way that you can hide, but you cannot hide from me. Mark, mark it! You cannot hide from me. And remember, I never miss the mark. You are going to be caught. Now you cannot escape, because if you have been doing these things, then how long will it take for you to realize, how long will it take for you to allow the revelation to happen? And I have made all kinds of methods available here, all kinds of nonsense that you can get anywhere in the world. People are even coming from Californialand – here!The sixth question:Osho,What is the difference between being totally surrendered and being a brainless robot?A brainless robot cannot surrender; and those who find difficulty in surrendering are brainless robots. To surrender, great understanding is needed, great intelligence. You will be surprised to know that the more stupid a person is, the less possibility of surrender. Idiots can’t surrender, although those who can’t surrender think they are very intelligent and that’s why they are not surrendering. But have you ever heard of any idiot surrendering? Imbeciles cannot surrender, retarded people cannot surrender.The highest intelligence is needed to surrender, to see the point that “I have been running in circles. If I go on depending on myself, I will go on running in the same circles again and again.” The only possibility to get out of the wheel is to take somebody else’s hand, somebody who is outside the vicious circle. To take that support is what surrender is.Down the ages it has been thought that the intelligent person can’t surrender, that it is the gullible person who surrenders. That is not so. Modern research says something else: it is only the very, very intelligent who can surrender. The gullible believes, but does not surrender. The intelligent surrenders, does not believe. And the difference is great.You can believe without surrendering; then the belief is just a lip-service. You say yes on the surface, and deep down you go on doing whatsoever you are doing. To be surrendered means you have said yes from the circumference to the very core. You have become a yes from the center to the circumference. There is only one quality of consciousness: yes. And immediately, in this yes, you come out of the ego – because ego exists on no, ego feeds on no. The more you say no, the more ego is strengthened. No is the food for the ego; yes is the food for egolessness.It is a simple phenomenon, but only very, very intelligent people can understand it.Have you observed? Whenever you say no, you feel very clearly that you are. That’s why people enjoy saying no. Even when there is no need, they will say no. The child asks the mother, “Can I go out to play?” and she says, “No!” Now there is no need to say no, and she knows perfectly well that the child is not going to listen. And the child also knows perfectly well that if he creates some kind of tantrum that she is going to say yes, so he creates a tantrum. The mother says no because she feels good by saying no. Then the child starts saying no to the mother; that is how he creates his ego.That’s why parents and children are always in conflict; teachers and students are always in conflict. Universities are not just accidentally burning all over the world: the conflict is that the teacher says no and the student says no. Two no’s fighting! Husbands and wives are fighting continuously; each has to say no, and the ego feels very hurt. Watch: whenever you have to say yes, it feels that you are defeated, the other is a winner. Then you try to find a situation where you can again say no and remain with your no and force yes on the other.This is how the ego exists. The day the child learns to say no is the beginning of the ego. Before that there was primal innocence; before that the child was in trust; he had no idea of who he was. There was utter silence and peace and joy and celebration. The day he says no, something closes up; he becomes defensive, he creates an armor, and he starts saying as many no’s as possible. If the parents say, “Don’t smoke,” he will smoke. If the parents say, “Don’t do this,” he will have to do it. The rebellion has started. He has to become an ego.Surrender means you have lived through the ego and you have seen the futility of it, you have seen the utter misery of it. You have lived through the ego and you know that you have not been able to really live through it. It does not allow you to live, because it does not allow you any expansion. It makes you smaller and smaller and smaller; it encages you deeper and deeper. It puts you into a windowless state, all openings disappear. You start living in a kind of grave. To surrender means to see this, and then to find a person with whom it will be easier to say yes, a person who has had a glimpse of the real man and to whom love has happened, who has become love.If you can find a man with whom you can say yes easily, you have found your master. This is the criterion for how to decide if you have come across a master: if you can say yes easily, simply, innocently. The presence of the man makes you feel to say yes. No becomes difficult; even if you want to say no out of old habit and structure, you hesitate, you find it hard to say. Yes comes easily, like a flood. Whenever you say yes, great joy arises; whenever you say no, you feel great misery, as if you have harmed yourself.Whenever you have found a person with whom this starts happening, you have found the master. Then forget about the whole world and what they say about the master. You have found the master. He may not be the master for others, but he is the master for you. Disappear into him.You ask: “What is the difference between being totally surrendered and being a brainless robot?” A robot can never surrender, not even partially. Only an utterly intelligent person can surrender. Of course, in the beginning it is partial; slowly, slowly, one gathers more and more courage. As one tastes the joys of it, the more one adventures, explores into it.The man of utter intelligence surrenders totally. In that surrender, the ego disappears. Not that in that surrender you become a slave to the master – there is nobody to make you a slave. The fact that there was nobody to make you a slave is why you were feeling so beautiful in saying yes to the man. If there was somebody to make you a slave you would have naturally felt it impossible to say yes. His ego would have offended your ego; there is a subtle interaction between egos.If the man has helped you to surrender, that simply means there was nobody to offend you. There was pure love, there was nobody trying to possess you. You were not being cowed down. Once you have surrendered the ego, you will be surprised that there is nobody to take possession of you – the ego has disappeared. The master and the surrender was just a device. You have attained to primal innocence; you can move on your own.When the master sees that you have surrendered totally, he makes you absolutely free. He says, “Now there is no need, now there is no question of surrender.” Once surrendered, then there is no need for any surrender. The need for surrender is because of the ego. Once the disease has disappeared, the medicine has to be thrown away. The master takes it away, himself.And then you are free of ego and free of egolessness. That’s what Ikkyu calls real emptiness: you are empty of everything and empty of emptiness too. Ego has gone and egolessness has also gone. Now there is nobody, absolute nothingness. And the purity of it and the benediction of it are such that if you don’t taste it in this life, you have wasted it again.The seventh question:Osho,If I disappear, who will pay the rent?Let the other party bother. Why should you be worried? But my feeling is that you have not asked the question rightly. You must be worried about those who have to pay the rent to you if they disappear.It happened…A man came to a psychoanalyst and he was very worried and going berserk. The psychiatrist asked, “What is your problem really?”He said, “I am worried. The worry is that I have to pay ten thousand dollars I owe to people. And there seems to be no way! And I am thinking to commit suicide, because this is becoming too heavy and I cannot live with this heaviness.”And the psychoanalyst said, “Don’t you be worried. Just look at me: I had to pay one thousand dollars to a man. I simply dropped the idea of paying and all worry disappeared.”And the man said, “I know it – I know about it. You tell me something else.”The psychoanalyst asked, “How do you know it?”He said, “I am the man to whom you were going to pay $1000 – that too is part of my worry. This won’t help! Give me some other idea.”Why are you worried: “If I disappear who will pay the rent?” Is rent so very important? Are you here only to pay the rent?I have heard…The Scotsman was visiting London for the day and called upon a lady of pleasure in Soho. After he had partaken of her bodily delights, he gave her a hundred pounds.“Why, that’s incredibly generous of you!” exclaimed the surprised lady. “No man has ever given me so much. And yet, from your accent you sound Scottish, which makes it even more incredible for you to be generous. Which part of Scotland do you come from?”“From Edinburgh,” replied the Scotsman.“How fantastic! My father works in Edinburgh.”“I know,” said the Scotsman. “When your father heard I was coming to London he gave me a hundred pounds to give to you.”Do you come from Scotland? What part? Thinking of paying the rent? There is nobody to pay the rent, there is nobody to be paid, really no rent either, no house either. That’s what Ikkyu says: all is dream.Have you not heard this: A madman was asked, “What are the differences between psychoanalysts, psychologists and psychiatrists?”The madman said, “Psychologists build castles in the air, psychoanalysts live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent.”What are you talking about? Forget all about it! Disappear! And remember, when you disappear as an ego, that does not necessarily mean that you disappear from the world – the world continues. Kabir disappeared as an ego but continued to remain a weaver, continued to work, but now it is no longer serious, now it is just a dream. If others are enjoying, why disturb them? You can disappear and still pay the rent. Don’t be worried about it, unless you don’t want to pay the rent and only for that reason you want to disappear. That is another matter. Otherwise, what is the problem? Disappear and still pay the rent!“If I disappear, who will pay the rent?”Osho,Yesterday you talked of natural and unnatural. Money, it seems, must come into the unnatural category. With the ego and the mind, it is relatively easy to deal with it. But if we are to live in the marketplace and to live naturally, will money not become a problem?Money is not a problem at all unless you want to make it a problem. Down the ages, the so-called religious people have been very worried about money – such a foolish thing to be worried about. Play with it! If you have it, enjoy; if you don’t have it, enjoy. What else can you do when you don’t have it? Enjoy! When you have it, what else can you do? Enjoy! Don’t make unnecessary problems about it. Money is a toy, when you have it, play with it.But my feeling is: people who can’t play with money, who renounce money, are very serious about it. Then they become very afraid about money, because deep down clinging is there.Do you know that the chief disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, can’t look at money? If you bring a one rupee note – which is worthless, which has no monetary value at all – he closes his eyes. Now what kind of attitude is this? And this is thought to be very saintly; it is praised all over the country, that he is so free of money. If you are really free of money, why do you close your eyes? Is that one rupee note so attractive that you have to close your eyes? Is there some fear that if you don’t close your eyes you may jump upon the man? Something must be there. This looks a little obsessive; there must be great fear, otherwise why close your eyes? So many things are passing and you don’t close your eyes – just poor money!Money is nothing but a device to exchange things, but people who are really misers deep down, clingers, are very much in despair and misery. They think that it is money that is causing their misery; it is not money that is causing misery. How can money cause misery? It is miserliness that is causing the misery. Thinking that it is money that is causing misery, they renounce money, they escape from the world of money. Then they are continuously afraid; in their dreams they must be entering into banks and opening treasures and things like that – and making love to money. That is bound to happen.Money is not a problem. It can be used. If you have it, use it; if you don’t have it, then use the freedom that comes from not having money. This is my approach. If you are rich, enjoy; richness has a few things which no poor person can enjoy. I have been both rich and poor, and I tell you honestly, there are a few things only rich people can enjoy. Enjoy when you are rich. And I tell you again, I have been both rich and poor, and there are a few things which only poor people can enjoy. And there is no way to enjoy both together.So, whenever, whatsoever is happening, enjoy it. A poor person has a kind of freedom. Poverty has a kind of cleanness, a relaxedness, contentedness. The mind is not very worried; there is nothing to worry about. You can sleep perfectly well; insomnia is impossible for a poor man. So sleep well and snore, and enjoy the freedom that comes from poverty.And sometimes when you find yourself rich, enjoy richness, because there are a few things that only a rich person can enjoy. You can have great paintings on your walls; a poor man cannot have that. You can have the best music in your house; the poor man cannot have that. You can create a Zen garden around your house; the poor man cannot do that. You can read poetry, you can paint, you can play on the guitar, you can sing, you can dance, you can meditate – a thousand and one things become available.My approach is: whatsoever is the case, just see what you can make out of it. If it is poverty, become a buddha, start wandering; take a begging-bowl – and enjoy the beauty that only a beggar can have. He belongs nowhere. Today he is here, tomorrow he is gone. He is a flow; he clings nowhere, he has no home. He need not worry that the rains are coming and the roof has to be fixed. He need not worry that somebody may steal something from him – he has nothing.Enjoy poverty when you are poor, and enjoy richness, then become a Janak, an emperor, and enjoy all the beauties that become available through money. My approach is total. I don’t teach you to choose. I simply say: whatsoever is the case, the intelligent person will make something beautiful out of it.The unintelligent person suffers. If he has money he suffers because money brings worries; he does not enjoy the music that money can bring, the dance that money can bring, the painting. If he has money, he does not go to the Himalayas for a rest, to meditate and to sing and to shout in the valleys and to talk with the stars. He worries, loses his sleep, loses his appetite – he chooses wrongly when he has money. And this man, if somehow he becomes poor, if he becomes poor by God’s grace, then he suffers poverty. Then he is continuously worried that “I don’t have this and I don’t have that.” You have poverty! Enjoy it.But there are people who are wrong in every situation: wherever they are, they will always choose the negative part of it, and they will suffer. And there are people who enjoy wherever they are, and I call those people intelligent people, and I would like my people to be intelligent people.In my childhood it happened: once my father was very angry, so he locked me into the bathroom. I meditated! What is the point…? After three, four hours, he became worried. He was at the shop, but he was restless. He became worried about what had happened to me, and no message had come from the home – my mother had not sent any message, no servant had come to say what had happened to me. Have I disappeared, or what? Or has somebody opened the bathroom? So he could not do his work there; he had to come.He came close and he listened and there was silence. He knocked and I told him, “Don’t disturb me.” That was the last time he punished me that way. It was pointless! He said, “I became so worried I could not do my work in the shop – I had to come.”I said. “This is nonsense! – I enjoyed it.”In my school when I was small, in second grade, my teacher was very strict and he used to punish us by demanding: “Go and run seven times round the school. Run!” And he gave me this punishment: to go seven times.I said, “Why not seventeen?”He said, “Are you mad?”I said, “This is such a good exercise and every morning I would like to do it.”I started doing it every morning. He would see me and he would beat his head; he would say that I had destroyed his punishment by making it an exercise.I used it! Then he stopped giving me punishment.Why not use an opportunity, whatsoever it is? And if you are alert you can find opportunities everywhere – even if you are imprisoned you can use that as a great opportunity. And there are people who are under the sky, free, and not using that opportunity. Money or no money, house or no house, the question is not what you should have: the question is what you should do, whatsoever you have.My emphasis is totally different. You disappear, and then let things happen. If you feel good to be in the marketplace, then that is natural, because there are born shopkeepers. Don’t think that there are only born poets; that is wrong, there are born shopkeepers, too. Whatsoever you try to make of them, they will become shopkeepers; wherever they are they will open a shop. They cannot avoid it.Have you not heard about the Jew? A ship was moving and it was attacked by a crocodile, a great crocodile, a very great crocodile. And they started throwing things in her mouth: chairs and things, tables and a bag of oranges, and finally the Jew. But again and again the crocodile came to attack.Finally they decided, “This is not going to help. We go on giving it things; just for a few moments the crocodile becomes engaged, and again it comes.” So all together they attacked and cut open the belly of the crocodile, and do you know what they saw? The Jew was sitting on the chair, the table was in front of him, he had opened the bag of oranges and he was selling to other people who had been swallowed by the crocodile before.You cannot escape, where will you go? There are born shopkeepers. So if you are a born shopkeeper, even when you have disappeared you will be in the marketplace. But then it will have a totally different quality to it: you will enjoy it. It is God’s world, a beautiful dream. You will know those customers are dream customers, and the things that you are selling to them are just dreams, and the money that you are collecting is just a dream. Why not enjoy it? That enjoyment is not a dream.Let me remind you again: everything is a dream, but if you can consciously enjoy it, that joy is not a dream – that joy is the goal of all religions. And you can enjoy more if everything is a dream. Then there is nothing to be worried about. If success comes, good; if failure comes, good.The last question:Osho,I know that I am not my body, but still I want to love and be loved. Is spiritual love possible in this rotten world?This world is not rotten. This world is full of godliness, or, in Buddha’s words, full of nothingness – which is the same. If anything is rotten, it is your mind. And, yes, it is very difficult with a rotten mind to find love.Never think in terms of spiritual and material love. Love is simply love, it is neither material nor spiritual. How can love be material or spiritual? Love is simply love. Love means the joy of sharing your life with somebody. Yes, your body can be shared, your being can be shared, but sharing is love, not what you share. Sharing is love; all love is simply love.But I can see the problem must be coming from your upbringing: “I know that I am not my body.” Who told you? You are more your body than your mind. You are more your body than your so-called self. That’s what Ikkyu is saying: self is a false entity, rotten, and the mind is just a phenomenon conditioned by society. Your body is truer than your mind and than your self; your body belongs to existence.But you must have been contaminated by the priests into believing that you are not the body. They have created a dichotomy in everybody that “You are the soul, and how can a soul fall so much as to love a body?” You will not find ghosts around here; you will find people who live in their bodies, who are their bodies.That’s why you cannot find somebody to love and be loved by – you are in search of a ghost. And I don’t think if you really come across a ghost that you will like it. But that’s what you are hankering for. You have been told to condemn your body; and if you condemn your body and if you don’t like your body, do you think somebody else is going to like it? If you don’t even like it, who is going to like it? By liking your body, by loving your body, you create a situation in which somebody else can also love your body. But you create that milieu, that climate.Deep down you hate your own body because from the very beginning you have been told to hate the body – the body is something ugly, the body is something unspiritual. You have been taught that the body is the enemy. The body is the temple of godliness. In this body lives that nothingness that Buddha talks about; in this body lives that seed of enlightenment I go on talking about. This body contains your greatest joy, this body contains godliness. Don’t condemn it, otherwise it will be impossible.You say: “I know that I am not my body, but still I want to love and be loved.” The desire to love and to be loved is natural. It is part of human consciousness, an intrinsic part of it, built in. Society can contaminate your ideas about the body, but it cannot destroy your desire to be loved and to love; that desire continues. But now it becomes impossible because that desire can be fulfilled only through the body. So you are in a fix.Either drop the idea of love – which you cannot do, which nobody can do. We are made of the stuff called love, it is impossible to drop it. Just let me remind you again: a single glimpse of the real man, and you are in love. Even at the ultimate stage, love explodes, love remains; you really become totally loving. So you cannot drop that, it is your destiny; it has to be fulfilled. But when you condemn your body, it is very difficult. You want to go to the other shore and you condemn the bridge. You want to go to the other shore and you condemn the boat. Now, how are you going to manage it? The bridge can take you to the other shore. The bridge can take you beyond the bridge. The boat can take you beyond the boat, but only the boat can take you.Love your body. Accept yourself as your body; receive it with gratitude, it is a gift. Otherwise it will be impossible. And even if somebody falls in love with you – the question is from a woman – if somebody falls in love with you, you will not allow him to love you. If he wants to hold your hand, you will shrink back. You will think, “Here comes a hedonist, a materialist. He wants to hold my hand! He should only hold my ghost hand, spiritual hand, not my real hand. This is just the rotten body.” And he wants to hug you and you will escape because this is that same rotten lust. You won’t allow anybody to approach you.And, naturally, when a person wants to have communion with you, he would like to hold your hand. It is not that he just wants to hold your hand – it is through the hand that something else is contacted. It is not necessarily so that it will be contacted, but there is no other way to contact it. When he holds your hand, he is holding something of you, and there is no way to hold it without holding your hand. If he hugs you, he is hugging your soul; but the body is the visible part of the soul. It is through the body that you communicate.Even if silence has to be communicated, words have to be used. Words are the body of the silence; silence is the soul. Even I have to use words, Buddha has to use words. Drop that conditioning. And drop the idea that this world is rotten, because if it is rotten then nothing is going to happen in it. You have already become prejudiced.Meditate over this anecdote:Cuthbert married a very refined virgin from an impeccable background, and took her away to Tunis for their honeymoon.On the first night in their hotel, Cuthbert quickly stripped off all his clothes and jumped into bed and then watched while his wife slowly removed all her garments.But Cuthbert was rather surprised when she clambered into bed completely naked except for her white gloves.“Why don’t you take your gloves off?” he asked.“Because mummy said that I might actually have to touch the beastly thing,” she replied.Now, this type of mind is not going to know what love is. This type of mind is closed, absolutely closed. And this type of mind is there in everybody, more or less. Drop this mind. All is good and all is divine, the body included. The whole body is included; never make any distinction between the upper body and the lower – there is nothing lower and nothing higher. The whole body is one, it is a unity. Accept it, welcome it, and you will start blooming, and you will start radiating love. And that radiating love will attract others toward you.You must not be attracting; you must have become very repulsive. The ideas that this world is rotten, that “I am not my body,” that “I want some spiritual kind of love,” are all wrong ideas. They will poison your whole life.I know there is a love that goes far beyond the ordinary forms, but that love is not against the ordinary forms – it is based, rooted, in the ordinary forms. The tree grows very high in the sky and starts whispering with the stars, but it remains rooted in the earth. The tree blooms into beautiful flowers, but it remains rooted into the earth, in the dark earth, with a thousand and one roots, invisible.Godliness is rooted in matter, the spirit is rooted in matter; never be against matter. Once you create this dichotomy of matter and spirit, you are forever going to remain a schizophrenic.Bridge yourself. Come together! Become one piece, and out of becoming one piece, peace arises, love flows, life becomes a fragrance.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 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-09/

My abiding placeHas no pillars;It is roofless –Yet the rain does not wet it,Nor the wind strike it.When it blows,The mountain wind is boisterous,But when it blows not,It simply blows not.Though it has no bridge,The cloud climbs up to heaven;It does not ask aidOf Gautama’s sutras.Ripples appearOn the unaccumulated waterOf the undug well,As the formless, bodiless manDraws water from it.The mind:Since there is reallyNo such thing as mind,With what enlightenmentShall it be enlightened?A story…Zen master: “I have here a staff, and yet I don’t have a staff. How would you explain that?”Jewish novice: “I wouldn’t!”Master: “Now, don’t be impertinent! It is incumbent upon you, if you really wish to attain enlightenment as you claim, to make every possible effort to answer this.”Novice: “All right, I guess that looked at one way you have a staff; looked at another way you don’t.”Master: “No, that is not what I mean at all! I mean that looked at exactly the same way, I have a staff and I don’t have a staff. Now how do you explain that?”Novice: “I give up!”Master: “But you shouldn’t give up! You should strain every ounce of your being to unravel this.”Novice: “I won’t argue with you as to whether I should give up. The existential fact simply is that I do give up.”Master: “But don’t you wish to attain enlightenment?”Novice: “If attaining enlightenment means considering such damn fool questions, then to hell with it! I am sorry to disappoint you, but goodbye!”Twelve years later:Novice: “And so I return to you, Oh master, in a state of absolute contrition. For twelve years now I have been wandering about feeling terrible for my cowardice and impatience. I now realize that I can’t keep running away from life. Sooner or later, I have to face the ultimate problems of the universe. So now I am ready to steel myself and try to work in earnest on the problem you gave me.”Master: “What problem was that?”Novice: “You said that you have a staff and yet you don’t have a staff. How do I explain that?”Master: “Is that what I really said? Why how silly of me!”Zen has no teaching, Zen has no doctrine; Zen gives no guidance because it says there is no goal. It says you are not to move in any certain direction; it says you are already there! So the more you try to reach there, the less is the possibility of reaching. The more you seek, the more you will miss; seeking is the surest way of missing. Getting it simply means getting the point that it is already available, it has already happened; it is the very nature of existence.Enlightenment is not a goal but the quality of being herenow. How can it be a goal? A goal is never herenow, it is always there-then; it is always somewhere else. It is like the horizon: it is always distant and yet it looks close by. One feels that “If I travel a little bit, I will reach the horizon.” But one never reaches, because the more you reach toward the horizon, the more the horizon goes on receding. In fact there is nothing, it is just an illusion.The earth and the sky are not meeting anywhere. They can’t meet because they are not two, they are one. The earth is just a materialization of the space of the sky; it is a wave in the ocean of the sky. How can they meet? At least two are needed for a meeting, and they are not two. The horizon exists only in the mind of man; it has no existential truth in it. But you can go on searching and searching. And the more you feel that you are not getting it, the more anxious you can become to find it. You can become mad searching after it.Zen says: There is nowhere to go, so no guidance is needed. Then what is the purpose of a Zen master? His purpose is to bring you herenow. His purpose is to hit you so hard that you awake herenow. You have fallen asleep and you have started living in dreams.Another story…Zen student: “So, master, is the soul immortal or not? Do we survive our bodily death or do we get annihilated? Do we really reincarnate? Does our soul split up into component parts which get recycled, or do we enter the body of a biological organism as a single unit? Do we retain our memories or not? Is the doctrine of reincarnation false? Is perhaps the Christian notion of survival more correct? And if so, do we get bodily resurrected, or does our soul enter a purely Platonic spiritual realm?”Master: “Your breakfast is getting cold.”That’s the way of Zen: to bring you herenow. Breakfast is far more important than any paradise, far more important than any concept of God. Breakfast is more important than any theory of reincarnation, soul, rebirth, and all that nonsense, because breakfast is herenow. For Zen, the immediate is the ultimate, and the imminent is the transcendental. This moment is eternity; you have to be awakened to this moment.Zen is not a teaching but a device to disturb your dreaming mind, to create such a state that you become alarmed, that you have to get up and see, to create such strain around you that you cannot remain comfortably asleep.This is the beauty of Zen and the revolution that Zen brings to the world. All other religions are consolations; they help you to sleep better. Zen tries to awaken you; it offers no consolation at all. It does not talk about great things, not because great things are not there but because talking about them is not going to help.People have a very stupid idea that talking about a problem is doing something about it. That is why psychoanalysis has become so important. It is nothing but talking: the patient goes on talking about his problems and he thinks that by talking about his problems he is solving them.People ask questions, and get answers, and they think that by asking a question and getting an answer they are doing something about their real problem. Answers that are given by others are not going to help you; they may help you only as consolations.You ask somebody, “Is there survival after death?” and he says, “Yes.” And you are freed of a fear – the fear of death; you start thinking the soul is immortal. If you look at the people who believe in the immortality of the soul, you will find they are the greatest of cowards. This country, at least for five thousand years, has believed in the immortality of the soul, and for one thousand years this country remained in slavery. People had become so cowardly they could not rebel against it. Not a single revolution has ever happened in India.People who believe in the immortality of the soul should be absolutely courageous; they can face death because they are not going to die. But the case is just the opposite; in fact, their belief in the immortality of the soul is nothing but a protection, just armor around their cowardice. They are afraid of death; hence they believe in the idea that the soul is immortal. They go on clinging to the idea – against death. They don’t know.If you ask a Zen master, “Is the soul immortal?” he will not answer, because he knows it is your fear that is asking for the answer. Your fear wants to be calmed; you need a solace. You need somebody authoritative who can say, “Yes, don’t be afraid.” You need a father figure.It is not just a coincidence that Christians think of God as the father, or the Catholic priest is called “father.” Out of fear, people are searching for the father. They need fathers here and they need a great father up in the heavens. These people are childish, immature; they can’t stand on their own. They can’t live their lives on their own; they need someone to lean on.Zen does not talk about God, not because God is not, but God is not a father. And neither is God a mother. You cannot conceive of God in any word; all your words are irrelevant. Godliness can only be experienced in utter silence, in absolute silence. But there is no point in talking about it, because in talking about it people start thinking they are doing great work. Then they read the scriptures and they philosophize, and they polish their concepts and doctrines, and go on believing, and nothing ever changes in their lives. Their belief never brings any light to their lives; their belief hinders the light.Zen is not a belief system: it is a way of awakening. The Zen master is bound to be tough, out of compassion. He has to hit you, and he goes on finding devices to hit you.Just listen to this story:A Zen master was worshipping at a statue of the Buddha. A monk came by and said, “Why do you worship the Buddha?”“I like to worship the Buddha.”“But I thought you said that one cannot obtain enlightenment by worshipping the Buddha?”“I am not worshipping the Buddha in order to obtain enlightenment.”“Then why are you worshipping the Buddha? You must have some reason!”“No reason whatsoever. I like to worship the Buddha.”“But you must be seeking something; you must have some end in view!”“I do not worship the Buddha for any end.”“Then why do you worship the Buddha? What is your purpose in worshipping the Buddha?”At this point, the master simply jumped up and gave the monk a good slap in the face!It looks so wild, unexpected. The monk is not asking any irrelevant question: he is asking a simple human question out of curiosity. He should not be treated like that; there is no need to hit him. No Hindu priest would hit him, nor would a Catholic priest hit him, because their purposes are different. Only a Zen master can hit him – his purpose is different.Why didn’t the master hit him in the first place? Why did he bother to answer so many questions and then hit him? He created the situation, the right situation. He created heat, he created more and more curiosity. He brought the monk to a state where the hit could simply shock him to a kind of awareness.He helped the monk to think about it more and more and more, to bring a peak of thinking, because only from the peak can the hit be of any help. But his hitting the monk is neither wild nor arrogant – it is not out of anger, remember. I have found a story in a book written by an American who thinks the master became angry because of the persistent query of the monk, and hit him out of anger. This is stupid, he missed the whole point; it is not out of anger. He is not offended by the question; he is enjoying the question. He is bringing the monk to a more and more feverish state by answering in such a way that the question is not answered, but enhanced. Just see the difference.Ordinarily, you answer a question so that the question is finished. The Zen master is answering so that the question becomes even more pointed and poignant. He is helping the question to arise with a totality. He is giving the idea to the monk that his question is very important and the master is unable to answer it. He is helping the ego of the monk to become a big balloon so that with just a small prick the balloon bursts.It is not out of anger; it has nothing to do with anger. He is not angry with the monk, he is not annoyed with the monk. He must be feeling perfectly happy with the monk because he has asked and now is giving a chance for the master. His not answering is a device.Even the slap is not the answer, remember. A few people think the slap is the answer and it is not. The slap is just to give you a jerk, just to shake your foundations, so if for even a single moment you slip out of your thinking you will have a glimpse of reality. Then you will forget about God and about Buddha and worship and you will just see that your breakfast is getting cold. You will come to herenow.Zen is not a philosophical approach toward life. It is an existential approach, and it has helped tremendously; it has brought many people to awakening. Zen does not believe in analyzing a problem because it does not believe that any problem can be solved at its own level. No problem can be solved unless your consciousness is raised a little higher than the problem. This has to be understood; this is something very fundamental.You ask me a question. I can answer it, but you remain on the same level of consciousness. My answer cannot raise your consciousness. You ask, “Does God exist?” I can say yes or no – but you remain the same! Whether I say yes or no, it will not help you in any way to become more conscious. It will not give you more being; it will only give you more knowledge this way or that.If you are an atheist and you ask, “Is there a God?” and I say no, you will feel very happy. You will say, “So I was right.” Or if I say yes, you will say, “This man is wrong. He does not know anything. He is just a blind person. I have argued, I have looked into the matter deeply, and I can’t find any proof for God.”Whether I say yes or no, whether you are a theist or an atheist, either you will accumulate the knowledge, receive it if it fits with you, or if it doesn’t fit with you, you will reject it. That’s what you are doing continuously in your mind. But your consciousness is not raised, and unless your consciousness is raised, no problem can be solved. In the first place the problem is created because of your consciousness, and it cannot be solved by any answer; it can only be solved by helping your consciousness to rise a little higher.That’s the work of Zen. It is not a transfer of knowledge; it is a transfer of consciousness, being. By slapping the monk, the master has simply helped the monk to become a little more alert. And if the monk becomes a little more alert, that slap is not just a slap, it is a leap of the master’s being into the disciple. But for that you need great love for the master, otherwise you will miss the slap. You need great trust in the master.This happens here every day. If I slap somebody, if I say something hard, if I hit somebody’s ego, then out of a hundred people ninety percent will start reacting antagonistically. They will miss the point; they will miss a great opportunity. If I criticize you, that is a slap on your face. If I am hard on you, that is a slap on your face, a subtle slap.But humanity is no longer interested in truth as much as it is interested in its ego. Immediately you are ready to leave; this man is not for you. A single slap and you forget all about the search. Rather than becoming aware, alert, rather than receiving more consciousness and being, you simply close up.Zen needs a particular atmosphere, a milieu of love, trust. That’s why I insist that unless you are a sannyasin, my work cannot start on you.Just the other day, somebody had written a letter, a beautiful letter that must be from a very good heart. He asked, “Can I not relate to you without becoming a sannyasin? Can I not just be a friend? Is it a must to be a disciple?” The question is relevant. You can be a friend to me; that is not a problem. But you will miss as surely as the foes miss. The friend is going to miss as much as the foe – because when I slap you, you will not be able to awake. You will become angry because you don’t expect that from a friend. When I hit you hard, you will simply be angry; you will retaliate, you will argue, you will fight back. You will simply say, “Then I am going!”Sannyas means that you are ready to go with me even if I hit you. You are ready to go with me even if I crush you, annihilate you. You are ready to go with me to any limits. Your trust is more in me than your trust in yourself. Then the work starts. “The work” simply means you have become available to the master. Only then can you be awakened, because awakening is going to be painful. It is not going to be very sweet, you have slept so long, and you have dreamed so many beautiful dreams. Awakening is certainly going to destroy all those dreams. They are dreams, but you have thought that they are realities. When somebody starts taking them away from you it hurts. You start feeling that “I am getting nothing – on the contrary, I am losing all that I had before.”Zen is a particular milieu, a climate between the master and the disciple of trust, of love, of infinite love, so the disciple is ready to go to any end. You will be surprised: sometimes Zen masters have been really wild.It happened in one Zen master’s ashram: whenever he would talk about truth, he would raise one of his fingers toward the sky. That was his particular gesture. Naturally, it became a joke; anybody who wanted to imitate the master would raise the finger.A very young disciple became artful in repeating and imitating the master’s gestures: his face, the way he walked, the way he talked, the way he sat. And anywhere and everywhere, whenever there was some serious discussion going on, this young boy would raise his finger toward the sky in the same way as the master.One day, the boy was standing behind him while the master was talking to people, and when the master raised his finger, the boy also raised his finger. The master called him, then took a knife and cut off the boy’s finger.Now, you cannot think of cutting off his finger as compassion. The boy screamed out in pain, and the master said, “Don’t miss the point! Now raise the finger.” The finger is gone, there is nothing to raise, and the master says, “Now, raise the finger – don’t miss the point!”And the boy, with tears in his eyes, raised his cut finger toward the sky; in that very moment the satori happened. The boy was transformed.On the surface it seems very cruel, violent. If you can only see the surface you will be forever against these Zen people. They don’t look like saints. Saints are not known to do such things. Saints talk to the fish and saints talk to the trees, and birds come and sit on their shoulders. We have known such saints. But saints who cut off the finger of such a simple young boy, who was, out of his innocence, imitating the master? What is the reason? Is the master angry? But if you look deep down, the boy was transformed.If you see the transformation, then it was worth it; even if the master had cut off the head of the boy it would have been worth it. A finger is nothing. The boy was totally transformed.It is said about this same Zen master that when he was searching with his own master he became very famous because birds would come and sit on his shoulders and on his head. Once even, while he was meditating under a tree, a bird made a nest in his hair. He had become famous all over the country; people used to worship him like a buddha.He became very egoistic, naturally with such a great attainment. His own master came and was very angry. He said, “What is this bird doing in your hair? Drop all this nonsense!”He was hurt, but he understood. And since that day, birds stopped coming to him.People would come to see, and were surprised that there were no birds. They asked the master, “What has happened to your disciple? First birds used to come, animals used to come and sit by his side, but now they no longer come.”The master said, “Now he has disappeared, he is no longer special. He has attained. Now birds don’t take any note of him. Animals simply pass by. He is not there. First he used to be there. He was becoming a special person; he was attaining to a specific kind of ego – now even that is dropped – he was becoming enlightened! Now even enlightenment is dropped, so birds no longer come to him. Why should they come when there is nobody? And why should animals come and sit there? They can sit anywhere, it is all the same. There is nobody anymore.”Now see the point: Zen has a totally different approach toward life. Now the master is happy that the disciple has completely disappeared, because one can even become attached to the idea of enlightenment. You have to be alert about it.Just a few months ago I told Somendra “You have had a small satori,” and since then I have not seen him laughing. Since then, he has become very serious. He has become enlightened! He has taken it to his heart. He has become special. He cannot laugh, he cannot enjoy, cannot be ordinary.And now, if this idea gets too much into him it will become a crust around him. He has to drop it. He has to become unenlightened again. He has to forget that satori. Not because it did not happen, it did happen, but many satoris happen before the ultimate satori happens. And the ultimate satori is dropping of all satoris, of all samadhis. The ultimate enlightenment is when you forget the very idea of enlightenment. Then there is innocence, there is just simple nature. I played a joke upon Somendra and he got caught in it.I am creating here a climate of work: many things are happening, and many are going to happen. You have to be ready, and the first readiness is when I hit you, when I shock you – and now Somendra will be shocked – when I shock you, use the shock to become a little more alert, a little more aware.Zen is a device, not an analysis of life. And always remember, the universe is unknowable, absolutely, because it is alive. Analysis kills. And remember also: only dead things can be known. Life remains unknown and unknowable. The moment you know, you have killed something, and people go on killing. They kill love: once they analyze it, it is killed. People are so violent that even in love their violence is clearly there, loudly there.Sending flowers is a form of life sacrifice to show high esteem. When you send a beautiful roseflower to your girlfriend or boyfriend, what are you saying? What are you saying when you say something with a flower? You give a roseflower to your girl, and you are saying: “I will kill for you, baby! I am ready to kill, I can murder. Look, I have murdered this rose.” This is not understanding.Even your love is nothing but a power trip. Power always kills. Bacon has said knowledge is power, and it must be so, because knowledge also kills. When you can kill something, you feel great power.I have heard that the most favorite pastime of people around Stalin was hunting. When Brezhnev took Kissinger on a hunting trip, he showed his power. It is said that whenever Tito wants to know that he is still in control, he kills stag and bear. Whenever people want to show that they are powerful, they kill. Adolf Hitler had to kill to show his power. And killing goes on, on many levels. Knowledge is also a subtle way of killing a thing.Zen people are not interested in knowledge because they are not interested in power. They are interested in life as it is. They are interested in breakfast, not in God, not in heaven, not in the soul, not in past lives, not in future lives, simply breakfast. They are utterly for the immediate.We know only that which we have killed. So never be a seeker for knowledge, otherwise you will become a killer; you will be a murderer. That’s what science goes on doing. In all the scientific laboratories what is happening is nothing but murder and murder: they have murdered nature. It is a beautiful device to hide violence.Just go and look in a scientific lab at the many ways they have devised to torture simple, innocent animals in the name of experimentation, in the name of inquiry, in the name of truth – unimaginable torture. But when it is for truth’s sake, it is allowed – nobody thinks of the scientist as violent. Nobody thinks of the philosopher as violent, but he is also violent. He goes on analyzing everything.Zen is not interested in killing – not even in killing a single word. It is not interested in knowing. It is interested in being. And these sutras will help you to see the point.My abiding placeHas no pillars;It is roofless –Yet the rain does not wet it,Nor the wind strike it.Go into each word with deep love, with deep sympathy.First: My abiding place has no pillars… The inner has no boundaries, no supports, no pillars. It is infinite space, it is pure space. It is nothingness. And there is nobody there. It is utterly silent. Not a single sound has ever penetrated there. Nobody has ever walked on that beach of your inner being, no footprints are there; it is virgin land.If you look into that inner space, you will start disappearing. The more you look inside, the more you will disappear. That’s why people don’t want to look inside. They talk about self-knowledge, they talk about how to look inside; they talk about techniques, but they don’t look. And there is no technique!It is a very simple phenomenon to look inside. It is as simple as looking outside. You can simply close your eyes and look inside. But fear arises, great fear arises in looking inside because that emptiness overwhelms you. You start disappearing; you start feeling as if you are going to die. You rush back. You start thinking a thousand and one things.Have you observed that whenever you sit silently and look inside, the mind creates many thoughts immediately? Why? It is your device. It is just like the octopus: whenever he sees that some enemy is coming around, the octopus releases dark black ink like a cloud around himself. Immediately the ink cloud surrounds him and the enemy cannot see where he is.When you go inside, immediately your mind starts secreting a thousand and one thoughts; immediately there is a great rush of energy into thinking. This is just like the octopus releasing dark black ink around himself; it is to create a cloud so you cannot see the innermost nothingness. You don’t want to see. To see in, is to commit suicide: to commit suicide as an ego, as a self.Ikkyu says: My abiding place has no pillars; it is roofless… It is just the vast open sky, no pillars, no roof. It is infinity. …yet the rain does not wet it, nor the wind strike it. How can the rain wet it if there is no roof and no pillar, and no ground either? Do you think when it rains the sky is wet? The sky remains as it is, rains can’t wet it. Do you think when it is cloudy those clouds leave any impact on the sky? Do you think the sky becomes contaminated, polluted by the clouds? Do you think it becomes darkened? Do you think any mark is left on the sky? Nothing is left.How can you touch pure nothingness? And just as there is an outer sky, there is an inner sky; outer and inner are just arbitrary words. It is all one sky – outer and inner, it is all one. One has to be very courageous to go into it. Once you have the courage to see your reality, all fear disappears, because all fear is for the ego, all fear is because of the ego. “Am I going to survive or not?” is what fear is all about. But once you have seen the inner sky, the fear cannot remain. You are not, so what? You have never been and you will never be, neither born nor dying. And that which is has been always there and will always be there. But you are not that.It appears only when you are not, when you have disappeared. You are just a dream. The dreamer is also part of the dream, and when the dream disappears, the dreamer also disappears. Living in this inner space, you are not afraid about security. Then insecurity is security.That’s what Alan Watts means when he says “the wisdom of insecurity.” There is only one way to be really secure and that is don’t have any roof, don’t have any pillars. Just move into the open sky. And then if it rains, let it rain; you will not get wet. You will be the sky, how can you get wet? Then if death comes, let it come, you will not be dying, because how can you die? You were never born. You don’t exist as a thing, as an entity.Living in insecurity, one is secure. Trying to be secure, one remains insecure. This is the law of reverse effect. If you want something you will miss it just because you want it. The more you want, the more difficulties you create, and then there is a vicious circle. You want to be secure, you don’t want to die. If you don’t want to die, you will have to die a thousand and one deaths; you will have to die every day. If you don’t want to die, then everything will become a death message; then you will be continuously trembling and afraid. You will see death coming from everywhere.If you forget all about death, and you accept death, then even in death you will not die, even in death you will be a watcher. Death will come and go. You will see it coming, you will see it passing, and you will remain, you will abide. That which abides in you forever and ever is not an entity, it is a consciousness. It is not a soul, it is awareness; it is pure awareness. And that awareness is part of the universal awareness.My abiding place has no pillars; it is roofless – yet the rain does not wet it, nor the wind strike it. One Zen master was walking with his disciples. They came to a small river which they had to cross. It was not very deep, a shallow river. They started passing through it. The master had always said to his disciples, “When an enlightened person passes through the river, his feet never become wet.” They were all waiting for an opportunity to see. They were puzzled because his feet were becoming wet. They became very confused: “Is our master not yet enlightened?”And just standing in the middle of the river, the master started laughing an uproarious laugh, a belly laugh, and they asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “You fools! I had said that the enlightened person’s feet never become wet, and my feet are not becoming wet, and the feet that are becoming wet are not my feet. You need not be confused; you need not look so puzzled and perplexed. This water is not touching me. Nothing can touch me because I am not. This water of the river is not touching the sky, it is not making the sky wet, how can it make me wet? I am part of the sky.”…yet the rain does not wet it, nor the wind strike it. So when you are communing with a master, remember you are communing with somebody who is a nobody; you are communing with something which is not an entity, but only a presence. Communing with a master is not communing with a person, but with a presence. A person will become wet, but the presence cannot become wet. The presence remains uncontaminated.That presence is you. One has just to find it out, that’s all. But you have become so entangled with the ideas about yourself – that you are a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian, a man, a woman, white, black, this and that – you have become so entangled with identities that you never look inside to see that you are just a pure sky and nothing else. No Hindu exists there, no Mohammedan, no man, no woman, no black, no white. These are all identities.Think of the one who is identified with these things, think of the inner sky. These are all clouds – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Communist, capitalist – these are all clouds. Don’t get too obsessed with the clouds. Go on remembering the sky.When it blows,The mountain wind is boisterous,But when it blows not,It simply blows not.Once seen, this inner nothingness, a person becomes a suchness. This word suchness is of infinite value in Buddha’s experience, on Buddha’s path – tathata or suchness. When there is nobody, then what happens? A few things happen…First, if there is nobody, there is nobody to control your life, there is nobody to manipulate, there is nobody to discipline. All control, all discipline, all manipulation disappears. That’s what freedom is – that’s what moksha is. Not something far away in the skies, but something deep inside you right now.When you are not there, how can you control your life? All control disappears, and as control disappears all kinds of tensions, all uptightness, all anxieties also disappear. You become an open flow, so open that:When it blows, the mountain wind is boisterous, but when it blows not, it simply blows not. Then whatsoever happens, happens. A man of Zen is totally different from the man of Yoga, and the distinction has to be understood. The man of Yoga is in tremendous control. The whole methodology of Yoga is how to control yourself, how to control absolutely. The man of Yoga cannot be disturbed because he is in such utter control. The man of Zen cannot be disturbed because there is no control. But the difference is great.The man of Yoga is not absolutely in control, nobody can be. There are possibilities when he will lose his control. You just have to bring about those possibilities and he will lose control, because all control is relative, it is only to a certain extent.Watch your control: if there is a ten rupee note you may not steal it, but ten thousand rupees? Then you feel a little inclined. And ten lakh rupees? Then you start thinking; then the idea seems to be worth thinking about. You start dreaming about ten lakh rupees. And you start thinking, “Just this once!” People are doing so many sins, you will be doing one and only one. Then you can donate half of the money to the church or to the temple. “And it is not so wrong either, because it doesn’t belong to a beggar, it belongs to some very rich person, and it doesn’t matter to him whether he has ten lakh more or less. And in the first place he has exploited people for all this money.” Now you are gathering energy to do it. But if it is ten crore rupees? Then you will not think twice: you will simply grab it and rush.There is a certain limit to all control; beyond that you will fall. Nobody can be in absolute control, because control is an unnatural thing and nothing unnatural can ever be absolute. Only nature can be absolute. The unnatural has to be maintained; it takes energy, conflict, struggle, And when you are controlling yourself, there is somebody inside you who is against it, otherwise what is the need of controlling?Control always splits you: the one who controls and the one who is being controlled, the top dog and the bottom dog. And the bottom dog waits for its own opportunities. There is constant barking and they go on fighting inside you, and you know it. There are moments when you can control your anger, and there are moments when you cannot. There are moments when you can control anything, and there are moments you cannot control. Sometimes the top dog is powerful and sometimes the bottom dog is powerful.The conflict continues and the victory is never absolute; nobody ever wins it because the other remains there, maybe tired, resting, waiting for its time. Whenever one is in control, the other is gaining power by resting; and the one who is in control is losing power by controlling, because controlling means energy is being lost, dissipated. Sooner or later, the controller becomes weak and the controlled becomes powerful. And this goes on, this is a wheel.The man of Yoga seems to be in great control, but cannot be in absolute control. He has repressed, and all that he has repressed is waiting there underneath him like a volcano. It will erupt, and when it erupts, he will be thrown into fragments.The man of Zen cannot be disturbed but the reason is totally different. It is not because he is in absolute control that he cannot be disturbed. He cannot be disturbed because he is not! Then one thing more has to be understood: because he is not, there is no division. He is just a natural man. But you carry the idea of control from the man of Yoga, and that’s why the natural man has always been misunderstood. For example…A master died and his disciple started crying, great tears started coming, sobbing. The disciple himself was known as an enlightened person. Others said, “This is not right – you should not cry, you should not weep. What will people think? Is it right for a man who is enlightened to cry?”That disciple said. “There is no question of right and wrong – if tears are coming, they are coming. There is nobody to prevent them.”This is a totally different vision – this is the natural man.The people said, “But you have been telling us that only the body dies, then why are you crying and weeping for the master’s dead body? Only the body has died and the body was just material. It was going to die – dust unto dust.”He answered, “What are you talking about? I am not crying for the soul – the soul never dies, okay, so I am not crying for the soul. I am crying for the body, because it was beautiful, so beautiful. I will never be able to see such a beautiful man walk again. I will never hear his voice.”And they said, “But you should not be attached!”But he said, “I am not attached. Just a flower has withered away and tears are coming to my eyes – I am not attached. These tears are not out of attachment.”This is very difficult to understand, because we know only tears which come out of attachment. We have not known natural tears – we have forgotten all that is natural. We know tears of attachment; we don’t know tears of innocence.A Zen man is a natural man. When it blows, the mountain wind is boisterous… This is the description of a Zen man. …but when it blows not, it simply blows not. When he laughs, he laughs; when he cries, he cries. It is a simple phenomenon. Just as birds sing, the Zen master speaks; just as flowers bloom, he lives. But his life has no ulterior motive, no goal. His words are not teachings but assertions of joy – hallelujah! It is his celebration of being. And that, too, when it happens, happens; when it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.There have been Zen masters who talked their whole lives, and there have been Zen masters who never talked. Sometimes it happens that the song is sung in words, and sometimes it happens that the song is sung in silence. But there is nobody to do anything, whatsoever is happening, is happening.This is what Buddha called freedom: nobody to control and manipulate. When all control disappears freedom is born: freedom from the self, the true freedom, Freedom for the self is the pseudo-freedom. Yoga tries freedom for the self, and Zen is nothing but freedom from the self. Then one becomes like a tree, like an animal, like a child.The sage is like a child, not like a yogi, not like a mahatma. The mahatma is trying to control himself continuously: day in, day out, curbing, dropping this, creating that. His whole life is his own effort. And, naturally, the so-called mahatmas look very tired, sad, desperate. Their life does not have the quality of joy. They talk about sat-chi-anand, but their life has no quality of joy.Zen people have the quality of joy. They don’t talk about sat-chit-anand, they are sat-chit-anand. They are truth, they are bliss, they are consciousness.Once Ma Tzu was asked, “Why did Buddha never talk about God?”Ma Tzu said, “He was busy living him, that’s why. He didn’t talk about God because he was too busy living him.”This state is a simple state, a natural state. You cannot brag about it. No child brags about his childhood, no sage can brag about his sagehood. It is the second childhood; he is reborn, the circle is complete. He has seen the world, he has seen the ways of the world, he has seen all the miseries of it; he has become wise. Now desires no longer drag him away from reality. He simply lives. Feeling hungry, he eats; feeling sleepy, he sleeps. He goes on doing the small things of life, but he becomes absolutely a nobody.Though it has no bridge,The cloud climbs up to heaven;It does not ask aidOf Gautama’s sutras.When you become natural, spontaneous, simple, you start rising on your own accord. You need not ask Gautama Buddha for his help. No help is needed.Though it has no bridge, the cloud climbs up to heaven; it does not ask aid of Gautama’s sutras. There is no need to have any guide. If you are simple, then simplicity is enough. If you are natural, then that naturalness is enough. If you are not natural, you will need the help of a master. And the master is not going to give you anything – he will simply take away all that is plastic in you, all that is inauthentic in you.The master, the real master, simply throws you back to your own utter naturalness. He does not make you an achiever. He does not give you great dreams that you have to become this and you have to become that. He simply says: Relax, be in a let-go; be – don’t become.This is one of the basic messages of Buddha: Be a light unto yourself. If you are not, then you need the help of a master, just for the time being. But what is his help? He throws you back to yourself; he goes on throwing you back to yourself. You would like to cling to the master and he goes on throwing you back.The real master does not allow you to cling to him. He helps you to un-cling, because un-clinging is maturity, clinging is childishness. And remember: to be a child is one thing, to be childish is quite another. To be a child means to become a sage; to be childish means to remain clinging, immature.Ripples appearOn the unaccumulated waterOf the undug wellAs the formless, bodiless manDraws water from it.This is the constant refrain of Buddha: all is a dream. Nothing has ever happened, and nothing is ever going to happen. But the mind lives in hope and through hope; it goes on thinking that something is going to happen. Nothing has ever happened; nothing is ever going to happen. All is; hence, the master reminded the disciple about the breakfast.All is. You have to be reminded constantly of it, because you go on rushing away from it. All seeking is dreaming, whether you are seeking money or God does not matter. Whether you think of the body or of the soul does not matter. Whether you want to become very rich, very famous, or enlightened, does not matter. All is a dream: becoming is a dream.Look into that which you are, and don’t go on looking for that which you would like to be. Hope is the secret of the mind; the mind lives through hope, nourishes itself on hope. Once you stop hoping, once you relax and just let hopes disappear, suddenly you are awakened to the truth – the truth of your being, the truth of the whole existence.Ripples appear on the unaccumulated water of the undug well… Such is your life. In your dreams again and again you will see a lake with ripples, and a boat, and you are traveling in the boat, and in the morning you find yourself just lying in your bed: there is no lake and no ripples and no boat and no traveler. There is nothing, but it all had appeared.Let me remind you of the famous dream of Chuang Tzu:He dreamed one night that he had become a butterfly. Next morning, sitting among his followers, he started laughing madly. And one disciple asked, “What is the matter? We have never seen you laugh so madly.”He said, “There is such a trouble, and I don’t think that I will ever be able to solve it. I have fallen into a great riddle.”They said, “Just tell us – maybe we can be of some help.”And Chuang Tzu said, “Last night I dreamed that I had become a butterfly.”So they said, “But that is not a great riddle. We all dream, and we know it is a dream.”Chuang Tzu said, “That is not the point. Now the problem arises: it may be that now the butterfly has fallen asleep and is dreaming that she has become Chuang Tzu.“Now who is right? Whether Chuang Tzu was right dreaming that he is a butterfly, or the butterfly is right dreaming that she is Chuang Tzu?“And who am I? Am I just a dream in the mind of a butterfly? Because if Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in the dream, then why cannot a butterfly become Chuang Tzu in a dream?”Just think of butterflies sitting under the shade of a tree taking a good sleep in the afternoon, and dreaming that they are sannyasins, in orange, meditating, doing Vipassana, thinking of great things. And you will also be puzzled, perhaps Chuang Tzu was right.Who is true? A butterfly dreaming of Chuang Tzu, or Chuang Tzu dreaming of a butterfly?Buddha’s answer is that neither is true, only the one who has become aware of the problem is true. He is neither Chuang Tzu nor butterfly, he is the mirror in which these dreams are reflected, the screen on which these dramas are played; he is that witnessing.The mind:Since there is reallyNo such thing as mind,With what enlightenmentShall it be enlightened?And now comes one of the most significant sutras, and only those who have followed the sutras up to now will be able to understand it. Now Ikkyu hits hard. He says:The mind: since there is really no such thing as mind… Mind means nothing but all the processes of dreaming. You call a mind a materialistic mind because it dreams of money; and you call a mind a spiritualistic mind because it dreams of satoris, but mind is only dreaming, mind lives in dreams. It thinks of the faraway, of the distant. It lives in imagination and in memory; both are part of imagination. It never comes to reality; reality is too much for it. Facing, encountering reality it melts and disappears just like dewdrops disappear in the morning sun. Whenever the mind comes to herenow, to the breakfast, suddenly it evaporates.Try it: eating your breakfast, just eat breakfast and don’t think of God and the Devil and money and the woman and the man, and love and a thousand other things. Don’t think, just eat; just be there, totally there, in it. Don’t go here and there, be utterly present. And where is the mind?You will not find the mind. Mind has never been found. Those who have looked, they have always found there is no mind.The mind: since there is really no such thing as mind, with what enlightenment shall it be enlightened? Then the question arises: If there is no mind, then why this talk about enlightenment? If there is no mind, then there is nothing to enlightenment, nobody to become enlightened. If there is no mind, no illusion, then how is it possible to get out of illusion? If there is no mind, then how can we become something which is beyond mind? If mind does not exist, then what is the point of saying that one has to attain to no-mind?Mind in itself is not; one cannot talk about enlightenment any more. But in fact, this is enlightenment. Enlightenment is not getting out of the mind, enlightenment is seeing that the mind does not exist. Then you are suddenly enlightened; you are a buddha.There is the well-known incident about the Confucian scholar seeking enlightenment from a Zen master. The student constantly complained that the master’s account was somehow incomplete, that the master was withholding some vital clue. The master assured him that he was withholding nothing from him. The student insisted that there was something the master was withholding from him. The master insisted that he was not withholding anything from him.Later on, the two went for a walk along the mountain path. Suddenly the master said, “Do you smell the mountain laurels?”The student said, “Yes!”The master said, “See! I am not withholding anything from you.”It is a strange story, but of tremendous importance. What is the master saying? The smell of the laurels… He says to the disciple, “Do you smell the mountain laurels?” Zen masters always bring you to the immediate: to the breakfast, to the mountain laurels. They don’t bother about philosophical things.And the disciple smells and he says, “Yes!”And the master says, “See! I am not withholding anything from you. Just as you can smell the mountain laurels, so you can smell buddhahood right now, this very moment. It is in the mountain laurels, it is on this mountain path, in the birds, in the sun. It is in me, it is in you. What keys and clues are you talking about? What secrets are you talking about?”It is said that Zen has no secrets. Zen is all openness. Zen is not a fist, it is an open hand. It has no esoteric ideology. It is down-to-earth, very earthly, very simple. If you miss, that shows that you have a very complex mind. If you miss, that simply means that you have been looking for complex ideologies, and Zen drags you back to reality, to the breakfast, to the mountain laurels, to…this bird calling.This is Buddha calling! In this utter silence is Buddha present, in this communion between me and you, in this moment when I am not and you are not. All is open, all is available.Someone asked a Zen master, “What is the ultimate nature of reality?”The master replied, “Ask the post over there.”The man responded, “Master, I don’t understand.”The master said, “Neither do I.”It is not a question of understanding. Either you see it or you don’t see it. Either it is there, felt, seen, recognized, or you have missed. It is so simple. There is no complexity in it.The master says, “Ask the post over there!”It is very natural that the disciple said, “Master, I don t understand – how is the post going to answer me?” because he had asked one of the greatest questions: What is the ultimate nature of reality? And so he said, “Master, I don’t understand.”And the master said, “Neither do I.”There is nothing to understand and nobody to understand. All simply is! Understanding creates problems. You think you don’t understand so you have to understand – then understanding creates new problems, and then you solve them and your solutions again create more new problems…and it goes on and on. One answer creates ten questions, and it is an infinite regress.Nothing has to be understood! Life has to be lived, not understood. You are buddhas, and so are the posts.Another time it happened…The same master inquired of a disciple, “You have come very late. Where have you been the whole day?”The disciple said, “There was a great polo match going on and I became interested. I was watching.”The master asked, “The players were tired?”He answered, “Yes, by the end they were very tired.”“And the horses were tired?”The disciple said, “Yes, the horses were also tired.”The master asked, “And the posts? The posts were tired?”Now the disciple was puzzled – how can posts be tired? He said, “Sir, give me a little time to think.” He meditated over it the whole night, and only by the morning, as the sun was rising did he get the point.He rushed to the master’s room and said, “Yes, master, they were tired.”And the master said, “So you have seen the point.”All is one, so if the players were tired, the horses were tired, the posts must have become tired. All is one. Nothing is separate. We are not islands. The stones and the stars, all are joined together.And everything is joined in this moment, is participating in this moment. If you become just this moment, all is attained. There is no other enlightenment.Zen is a way back home – and the simplest way and the most natural way.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 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-10/

The first question:Osho,What exactly is boredom? If I don't do something, even something needless, a panic arises, a huge fear. What is it that causes this frenzy of movement? Why am I so uncomfortable with this feeling?The frustration of boredom increases when I think that what I would do is equally a meaningless frenzy. I feel caught.Boredom is one of the most important things in human life. Only man is capable of boredom; no other animal is capable of being bored. Boredom exists only when mind starts coming closer and closer to enlightenment. Boredom is just the polar opposite of enlightenment. Animals cannot become enlightened; hence, they cannot become bored.Boredom simply shows that you are becoming aware of the futility of life, its constant repetitive wheel. You have done all those things before, nothing ever happens. You have been into all those trips before, nothing comes out of it. Boredom is the first indication that a great understanding is arising in you about the futility, meaninglessness, of life and its ways.Now, you can respond to boredom in two ways. One is what is ordinarily done: escape from it, avoid it, don’t look eye to eye into it, don’t encounter it. Keep it at your back and run away; run into things which can occupy you, which can become obsessions; which take you so far away from the realities of life that you never see boredom arising again.That’s why people have invented alcohol, drugs. They are ways to escape from boredom. But you cannot really escape; you can only avoid for a while. Again and again the boredom will be coming, and again and again it will be louder and louder. You can escape in sex, in overeating, in music; you can escape in a thousand and one ways, but again and again, the boredom will arise. It is not something that can be avoided; it is part of human growth. It has to be faced.The other response is to face it, to meditate on it, to be with it, to be it. That’s what Buddha was doing under the bodhi tree, that’s what all Zen people have been doing down the ages.What exactly is meditation? Facing boredom is meditation. What does a meditator do? Sitting silently, looking at his own navel, or watching his breathing, do you think he is being entertained by these things? He is utterly bored! That’s why the Zen master moves with a stick in his hand – because those bored people are bound to fall asleep. There is no other escape, so only one escape is left: at least they can fall asleep. They cannot escape. They have themselves, of their own accord, become part of the Zen training and the discipline – they cannot escape. But one escape is always available: you can fall asleep, then you forget all about it. That’s why in meditation one feels sleepy.The whole effort in meditation is this: be bored but don’t escape from it – and keep alert, because if you fall asleep you have escaped. Keep alert! Watch it, witness it. If it is there, then it is there. It has to be looked into, to the very core of it.If you go on looking into boredom without escaping, the explosion comes. One day, suddenly, looking deep into boredom, you penetrate your own nothingness. Boredom is just the cover, the container in which is contained your inner nothingness, shunyata. If you escape from boredom, you are escaping from your own nothingness. If you don’t escape from boredom – if you start living with it, if you start accepting it, welcoming it – that’s what meditation is all about: welcoming boredom, going into it on one’s own; not waiting for it to come, but searching for it.Sitting for hours in a yoga posture, just watching your breathing, one gets utterly bored. And the whole training of meditation is such that it helps boredom. In a Zen monastery you have to get up at the same time in the morning every day, year in, year out. It doesn’t matter whether it is summer or winter. You have to get up early, three o’clock, you have to take a bath, you have to drink the same tea, and you have to sit… The same gestures followed again and again. And the whole day is also a very, very fixed routine: you will eat your breakfast at a certain time, then you will meditate again, then you will have a meal at a certain time, and the same food will be served…Everything helps boredom: the same clothes, the same monastery, and the same master every day with his stick walking around. Every evening you have a session with the master, and the questions he asks are such boring questions to meditate on: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Just think of it – it will drive you mad! What is the sound of one hand clapping? There is no answer to it, you know it; everybody knows there is no answer to it. And the master goes on insisting, “Go on repeating, go on meditating on it.”It is all well managed. The boredom has to be created immensely, tremendously. The boredom has to be allowed as totally as possible, has to be helped, supported from every side: the same evenings, the same work, the same chanting of the mantra, the same time to go to bed again – and this goes on, this wheel. Within a few days you are utterly bored and you cannot escape. There is no way to escape. You can’t go to the movie, you can’t look at the TV; you can’t have anything that can help you to avoid it. You are thrown into it again and again.Great courage is needed to face it. It is almost like death; in fact, much harder than death, because when death comes you become unconscious. In the monastery you are stirring all sorts of boredoms. What happens? There is the secret of all meditations: if you go on watching, watching, watching, boredom becomes bigger and bigger, more and more intense, and then the peak…nothing can go on forever. There is a point from where the wheel turns. If you can go to the very extreme, to the very peak, then the change, transformation, enlightenment, satori, or whatever you want to call it, happens. Then one day, suddenly, the boredom becomes too much. You are suffocating; you are almost being killed by it. You are surrounded by an ocean of boredom. You are over-flooded by it and there seems to be no way to escape. The very intensity and totality of it, and the wheel turns. Suddenly boredom disappears and there is satori, samadhi. You have entered your nothingness.Now there will no longer be any boredom, you have seen the very nothingness of life. You have disappeared. Who can be bored? With what? You exist no more. You are annihilated.You ask: “What exactly is boredom?” It is a great spiritual phenomenon. That’s why buffaloes are not bored; they look perfectly happy, enjoying. Only man is bored, and even in man, only very talented, intelligent people are bored. The stupid people are not bored. They are perfectly happy doing their jobs, earning money, making a bigger bank balance, raising their children, reproducing, eating, sitting in the movie, going to the hotel, participating in this and that. They are enjoying, they are not bored. They are the lowest types; they really belong to the world of buffaloes. They are not yet human.A man becomes human when he starts feeling bored. You can see it: the most intelligent child will be the most bored child, because nothing can keep his interest for long. Sooner or later he stumbles upon the fact and asks, “Now what? What next? This is finished. I have seen this toy, I have looked into it, I have opened it, I have analyzed it, now I am finished with it, what is next?” Soon he starts finishing things. By the time he becomes a young man, he is already bored.Buddha was utterly bored. He left his kingdom when he was only twenty-nine, at the peak of his youth. He was utterly bored: with women, with wine, with wealth, with the kingdom, with everything. He had seen all, he had seen through and through. He was bored. He renounced the world not because the world is wrong, remember. Traditionally it is said he renounced the world because the world is bad – that is absolute nonsense. He renounced the world because he became so bored with it.It is not bad, neither is it good. If you are intelligent, it is boring. If you are stupid, you can go on. Then it is a merry-go-round; then you move from one sensation to another. You are interested in trivia and you go on repeating and you are not conscious enough to see the repetition that yesterday you were doing this, and today you are also doing it, and you are imagining doing the same thing again tomorrow. You must be really unintelligent. How can intelligence avoid boredom? It is impossible. Intelligence means seeing things as they are.Buddha left the world out of boredom; utterly bored, he ran away from the world. And what was he doing for six years sitting in those forests? He was getting more and more bored. What can you do, sitting in a forest watching your breath, looking at your navel, day in, day out, year in, year out? He created that boredom to its ultimate peak, and one night it disappeared. It disappeared of its own accord.If you reach to the peak, the turn comes. It comes! And with that turn of the tide, light enters into your being; you disappear, only light remains. And with light comes delight. You are full of joy – you are not, but full of joy – for no reason at all. Joy simply bubbles up in your being.The ordinary person is joyous for a reason: he has fallen in love with a new woman or a new man and he is joyous. His joy is momentary. Tomorrow he will be fed up with this woman and he will start looking for another. The ordinary man is joyous because he has got a new car; tomorrow he will have to look for another car. It goes on and on…and he never sees the point of it, that always, finally, you are bored. Whatever you do, finally you are bored, every act brings boredom.The intelligent person sees it. The sooner you see, the more intelligence you show. Then what is left? Then only boredom is left, and one has to meditate over it. There is no way to escape from it. Then go into it. See where it leads. And if you can keep going into it, it leads into enlightenment.Only man is capable of boredom, and only man is capable of enlightenment.The second question:Osho,It seems that though the society is at present rejecting you, by and by it will accept you.Please comment.Siddhartha, why are you worried about the society, its rejecting me or accepting me? Forget about the society! It has always accepted people like me only when they are gone; it always accepts buddhas when they are dead. It accepts only when buddhas cannot do anything; it accepts only when buddhas become just theories. The flame is gone; it is only a memory now. Then they accept, and not only do they accept, they worship. That is what they have always done and what they will always do in the future too.Nothing has changed fundamentally. The unenlightened remain unenlightened. Why do they reject? They reject out of fear. Just listen to me: just now I was saying something about boredom. Now the ordinary person can’t accept it, that one has to go deep into boredom. He will be afraid. He will say, “What nonsense is this man talking about?” He will become afraid even to listen to it, because who knows? The idea may get into his mind that life is boring. Then all his joys that he was going along so happy with and all those small toys that so delighted him will all be gone. Those toys will be broken! He does not want to do that; he is too obsessed with his toys. He does not want to listen to such things. When I am gone, then he can worship me, because I will not be shouting at him.Worship is cheap. To be with a living master is hard, arduous; it needs guts. Worship is a polite gesture. Worship says, “You may be right, but we are not ready for it. You must be right; we are not even ready to argue about it, because who knows? If we argue about it, you may prove right. So we don’t argue; we will worship you. You must be right. How can you be wrong? But we don’t want to follow you, yet. We will make a beautiful image of you in the temple. We will bring flowers to your feet, we will repeat your name, and we will go on doing the same stupid things we have been doing before. You will be just decor, a decoration. We will put a beautiful picture of you in the home; it makes the drawing room look so pretty. But that’s all. And once in a while we will even garland your picture, but that’s all.”This is a polite way of avoiding, a very polite way of saying, “No, we can’t come with you, at least, not yet. Ultimately you may be right, but we are not worried about the ultimate. For the moment, forgive us, and let us live our joys. Life is so enchanting, who cares about enlightenment?”And any person who comes and throws a stone in your glass house looks like an enemy. Any person who comes and disturbs your sleep and destroys your dreams looks like an enemy. So when a buddha is alive he has to be rejected. If he is not rejected, then he is not a buddha. When he is dead, he has to be worshipped. If he is not worshipped when he is dead, then he is not a buddha.That’s how we have always been behaving with Buddhas, Krishnas, Christs – that has been our usual procedure. We have found a very, very cunning, clever way. We don’t want to say no, because then we have to enter into the argument with these people – and these people are argumentative. To face them is dangerous because they may convince you, their very being is convincing. One does not want to come close to them. When they are dead, then it is perfectly okay. When Christ is alive, crucify him – and these same people who crucified him now go to the church. The same people! If he comes again, these same people will crucify him. People are people; they are not Jews and not Christians and not Hindus and not Mohammedans. They are just the same people.There are only two possible categories: the enlightened and the unenlightened. The unenlightened are all the same, and the enlightened are all the same. Their tastes are not different.It was not that Jews crucified Jesus – it was the mediocre mind, the mind that is afraid, afraid to face reality; the mind that is afraid to go into utter boredom. And utter boredom is a passage: it leads to the temple of celebration.But don’t be worried about people. Why should you be worried? Is there some doubt in your mind? Are you searching, seeking support from the people? It must be creating a certain restlessness in you: “How can Osho be right if so many people are against him?” You feel a little shaky, afraid, a little trembling arises in you. When you are here with my orange people, it feels good: “Osho must be right because there are so many orange people.”When you go to M.G. Road, naturally you start thinking. “What am I doing here? These are not orange people, and not only are they not orange, they are dead against all orange people.”Fear arises in you, doubt arises in you: “Maybe I have fallen in the trap of a magician, of a hypnotist? An intelligent person like me, what am I doing here? Why did I get caught into these meditations? Nobody else is meditating. And I am coming from so far away, and the people who live in Pune don’t care a bit.” Something seems to be unsettled; you become shaky, you tremble. Now, deep in your mind you would like to be with me, but what to do with this crowd that is against me? Now you are creating consolations for yourself.You ask: “It seems that though the society is at present rejecting you, by and by it will accept you.” You are not really concerned with the society. You want to hear from me that “Yes, don’t be worried, these people are going to follow me,” so you can feel good. “These people will accept me, wait. All these people are going to become orange, just wait, just time is needed.” You want an assurance from me so the presence of those people who are against me does not disturb you.Look into these things: become very alert to what happens in your mind when you ask a question, why you ask a question. The question may not show anything of the reality of you, but you cannot hide it from me. I don’t answer your questions as much as I answer the reason why the question has arisen in you. So sometimes it feels that I am not directly answering your question; sometimes you may even be surprised that I am going a little roundabout, not direct. Sometimes you may even think that I am avoiding the question that has been asked – it is not so. My whole effort here is not to answer the question on the surface, but in the depth, from where it has arisen, why it has arisen.There are people who ask questions, and then they make a note that “This is not really my question, I am asking it for others.” But why can’t the others ask it? Why should you be worried about others? Now, this person wants to ask but does not want to show that the question is his.One day a man came to me and he said, “One of my friends has suddenly become impotent. I have come for him. Is there some help?”I told the man, “Why didn’t you tell your friend that he could have come himself and told me that one of his friends has become impotent, because I see perfectly well that you are your friend.”He became very worried; he started perspiring. I said, “Don’t perspire! But why can’t you face it? If you have become impotent, don’t be so impotent that you cannot even ask the question. At least save that much potency, face the problem.”There are a few people who go on thinking… And it is not just that they are deceiving, they really think that they are asking to help others. Yoga Chinmaya often asks questions saying that “This is to help others.” Deep down the question is his, but he cannot accept that “It is my question.” That hurts: “I am asking such a question? I should not be asking such a question. I have lived with Osho so long, I should not be asking such a question.” But the question is there and it has to be asked, so one finds a clever way to ask it.Now, on the surface it seems Siddhartha is worried about the society. Deep down, he is worried about himself. He wants an absolute promise that “You are on the right track, and the others are wrong. Just wait! They will not only worship me, they are going to worship you, too. You are going to be my apostles; you are my Luke and Thomas and Mark. Wait, just wait! You have done such a great work by becoming a disciple to a madman. Just wait – these foolish people will not only worship your master, they are going to worship you too. Then they will recognize; then they will see what a great opportunity they have missed.”Just go deep into your own fear and let the fear be expressed clearly in your question. At least find the cause of your questions. If you can find the cause of your questions, out of one hundred, ninety-nine questions will simply disappear because in the very cause you will find the answer. To go deeply into a question, to its very roots, is to find its answer. And the one question that will not find an answer from yourself…asking it will be of great import – that will become a bridge between me and you.Always go into the unconscious roots of your question.There is another question on similar lines:Osho,In your last lecture you called Yudhishthira, the Dharmaraj, an irreligious person simply because he lost his wife in gambling. But what about one of your own followers who is mad after wine and women? Not only this but he smokes charas and ganja freely. In what sense is he following a religion superior to that of Yudhishthira? Please explain.The question is from Sohan Bharti. He is a new sannyasin; he took sannyas just a few days ago. He must be having a very, very strong Indian mind, deeply conditioned.Now, staking a woman in gambling – and he says, “Simply because he lost his wife in gambling!” A wife in India is just a thing, furniture, so what is wrong in it? In fact, Yudhishthira and his brothers were behaving with the wife with that attitude that “she is property.” There were five brothers and the five had divided the wife; the wife had five husbands. You can’t divide a person like a property. This is such a horrible thing to think about: a woman has been divided by five men as if she is a piece of land!And then, finally, he staked her as a bet in gambling and lost her. Can you think of any woman staking her husband in gambling? Would you say, “So what, it’s just a husband – why not?” But there is no such story in India. You would never have forgiven that; you could not have conceived of it.The husband in India is called swami – master. And the wife is called dasi – servant, a slave. This is ugly. But Sohan Bharti’s Indian mind must have been hurt when I said it, because this man, Yudhishthira, is thought to be a great religious man, one of the great religious leaders of the Hindus. To me he is not even human! What to say about his being religious? He is not even human, he is inhuman.And he asks: “But what about one of your own followers who is mad after wine and women?” Then he is perfectly human; nothing inhuman about it. What is wrong in being mad after a woman? It is natural. Yes, one can go beyond it, but one goes beyond only when one has gone through. And everybody is in search of some kind of wine, some kind of intoxicant, to drown one’s miseries, one’s anxieties.Morarji Desai is trying to create prohibition in India. Now, he himself is intoxicated with power. That is a far more dangerous intoxication than ordinary wine; when you drink alcohol you harm only yourself, nobody else, but when you drink the alcohol of power, you harm millions.If a person is smoking charas and ganja freely, he is simply harming himself. Yes, he is doing harm, but he is simply harming himself. That is his birthright, to harm himself. He is committing a slow suicide, but that is his birthright. He is not harming anybody; he is not trying to force his ganja on you or his charas on you.Now, Morarji Desai is trying to force his idea on the whole country! That is bossy, that is irreligious. Who are you to direct everybody’s life? Nobody should be so arrogant. You can say what you feel, but it should not be imposed as a law. I also know that alcohol is not good, but you should go and teach people, tell people that alcohol is not good. Nobody should try to impose it by violence. To make it a law is violence: it means now the police will be behind it, bullets will be behind it.What does it mean when you make a law? It means now you are not capable of converting people, persuading people; now you are trying to do things by force, by power, by violence. This is undemocratic, this is absolutely undemocratic.And nobody sees the power trip, the alcoholic, intoxicating state of power. Whenever somebody gets into power, he is drunk!I am not saying that people should drink alcohol or use charas and ganja, but I am saying that it is everybody’s birthright. One has to be allowed at least one thing: to do harm to oneself if one wants to, if one decides that way. You make it dear that this is harmful, that’s all. Nothing else can be done; you cannot be the deciding factor.So, if you ask me, “What higher religion is your follower following?” I will still say that he is better than Yudhishthira because at least he is not staking his wife in gambling. He may be staking himself, he may be foolish, but I cannot say that he is harming anybody else. Yudhishthira had no respect for the woman. And if you don’t have any respect, how can you have any love? Love and respect go together.Don’t pretend that you love your woman if you don’t respect her. If you respect, only then do you love. If you don’t respect, you only exploit her; your relationship is that of lust, not of love. Yudhishthira had to be exploiting this poor woman. Just think of the idea, of the horrible idea, using her like a thing. She was being used like a thing, and now she was being staked like a thing. And that’s what happened: Yudhishthira lost her. The others who had won immediately tried to undress her then and there. And then Yudhishthira and the four brothers were all sitting silently there, watching: “Now you cannot do anything, now she is somebody else’s property. Whatsoever they want to do, they can do.” What kind of respect? What kind of love? It is ugly, irreligious, and inhuman.Remember, I am not saying that my follower – I don’t know who this follower is, may be just a figment of your imagination – is doing very well if he is doing these things, but still if you compare him with Yudhishthira he is far better, he is just harming himself.The other has to be respected as an end, is never to be used as a means. The woman is equal to man. But for the Indian mind it is very difficult to accept the equality of the woman. So many so-called saints of India have been condemning the woman, down the ages, in such words that it seems unbelievable that these people had any sense of respect, of love, of sympathy, of compassion.The Indian saints have been saying that the woman is the door to hell. The woman is not the door to hell; it depends on you. She can be a door to hell if you decide to go to hell, and she can be a door to heaven if you decide to go to heaven. Don’t forget that the same is also true about you. If women are the door to hell, only men must go there – then where do women go? And how can they go? They will not find any door. Men must be functioning as a door for them, too.Nobody is a door to heaven or hell. You create your heaven and hell. But these so-called saints were so afraid of woman and their fear shows in their condemnation.I have heard a story that a rabbi used to go around the famous condemned city, Sodom, shouting to people from every corner of every street, “Stop your sins! Don’t do this! Don’t do that! Avoid sex, avoid this, avoid that…” for years.One day, one of the disciples of the rabbi asked, “You never become tired? Nobody listens to you, nobody has ever listened or paid any attention to you, but you continually go on shouting around the town. People are tired of you, but are you not tired? From where do you get this energy? Do you still think, do you hope, that you will be able to convert these sinners?”He said, “What are you talking about? I am not worried about them. If I go on shouting against them, at least I can save myself. If I don’t shout, there is every possibility they will convert me. I may start doing the same things that they are doing, that is my fear. So I go on shouting! The more I shout, the more I become convinced. I am not worried about whether they are convinced or not. The more I shout, the more I convince myself that I am on the right track. And then I can easily repress those desires which are also in me. And if I don’t say anything against them, there is every possibility I may become just like these people.”Your so-called saints who have been talking against women are afraid. They know if they don’t talk, if they don’t go on condemning, they will fall into some kind of relationship with women. They are afraid of their desires, they are afraid of their own sexuality. By condemning women they are simply creating an atmosphere around themselves, they are simply trying to repress their sexuality and nothing else. But the Indian mind has become accustomed to this, that’s why you can ask such a question: “In your last lecture you called Yudhishthira, the Dharmaraj, an irreligious person simply because he lost his wife gambling.”Now, Sohan Bharti must not be behaving humanly with his own wife. How can he behave respectfully with his own wife if he has this idea? Look deep into your question. If you cannot respect women, you cannot respect anybody else. It is from women you come; the woman mothered you for nine months, then she took every care, she loved you for years. And then again you can’t live without a woman; she is your solace, your warmth. Life is very cold; the woman becomes your warmth. Life is very uninspiring; the woman becomes your inspiration. Life is very, very arithmetical; the woman becomes your poetry. She gives grace to your life. She takes care of you. She loves you, she goes on loving you, tremendously, totally. And you say “…simply because he lost his wife gambling?”He must have been a man without heart. Instead of a heart, there must have been a hard rock.The fourth question:Osho,“I am life, love, joy. Here I give you life, love, joy.” Osho, when I heard you say this two mornings ago, my body trembled with awe and also a deathlike fear of getting lost in you or of missing out completely.Why am I finding it so hard to receive this life, love, joy, from you?Chintana, everybody finds it hard, because to receive joy, to receive light, love, goes against your ego. The ego wants to be the donor, not the receiver; the ego always wants to give, not to receive. It is easier to give love; it is very difficult to receive it. To be at the receiving end ego feels very hurt.It is always difficult, and it is going to be still more difficult if you are with a Buddha or a Christ or a Krishna, because you have nothing to give to them. You have to take from them and have nothing to give them in return. Your ego feels annihilated.If you can give me something in return, it will not feel so bad, but what can you give? And whatsoever you can give will be just a token and nothing else, because whatsoever you have is nothing.Just the other night a sannyasin gave me a seashell, must have found it on some beach. I loved the gesture. It is nothing, but shows great love for me. Not only love, something else too. You receive so much from me, you would like to give something in return so it remains balanced. And all that you can give, all, I say, can’t be more than seashells.So, fear arises in everybody. You have to drop that fear; when you are receiving from me, you are not really receiving anything from me, because I am not there. I am just a passage. If you are receiving anything from me, you are receiving from existence, not from me. Forget all about me! You need not even say a thank you.Whenever a sannyasin comes to me and says, “Thank you, Osho, for all that you have done for me” I feel a little uneasy, because what is he saying? There is nobody to receive this thankfulness.Remember Jesus: he was passing through a crowd and a poor woman, an ill woman, rushed behind him and touched his garments. And she was healed – immediately, instantly, so deep was her trust. She had come from a great distance in much agony and pain and suffering. But such was her trust that she believed if she could even touch the garments of Jesus all would be cured – and all was cured.Jesus looked back and the woman said, “How should I thank you, Lord? You have healed me! I had come ill and I am now healthy and whole.”Jesus said, “Your faith has healed you.” And he said not to thank him, but to thank God.Never be worried. Don’t feel that you are becoming grateful toward me. I am just a vehicle, a passage, a window. And if the sun has penetrated through the window to you, feel thankful to the sun, forget about the frame of the window. I am just the frame and nothing else. You can receive from me as much as you want, as much as you can dare, as much as you need.Remember always, you are receiving from existence. From wherever we receive, we always receive from existence. It is the only giver; there is no other.You ask me: “‘I am life, love, joy. Here I give you life, love, joy.’ Osho, when I heard you say this two mornings ago, my body trembled with awe and also a deathlike fear of getting lost in you or of missing out completely. Why am I finding it so hard to receive this life, love, joy, from you?”Feel fortunate that you are standing on that verge from where, if you receive, you will be transformed. If you don’t receive, you will suffer all your life. The memory will haunt you. If you have come to me, and you don’t dissolve, the memory will haunt you. You will never be at ease with life again. You have tasted something of the beyond; now life will feel almost tasteless. Going back, hiding, back into your old caves of the mind, is dangerous. And the mind tends to do that. Beware of it. Take the jump! When I give you the call, take the jump.Remember always that it is not from me as a person that you are taking anything, because the person no longer exists. It is only a presence. It looks like a person to you, because you cannot yet see the presence. Once you accept this love, this joy, this life, that is happening here, you will forget about me as a person, you will start feeling me as a presence. You will forget my boundaries – they are arbitrary – and you will start seeing the unbounded, which is true, which is truth.The person is just a wave in the ocean; presence is the ocean itself. Let me be just a door, an opening. And that’s exactly what I am, and that’s exactly what a master is supposed to be.Put your ego aside, and open up. Receive it! A disciple has to be feminine to receive godliness; a disciple has to be just a womb, become a womb. That’s why it happens almost always that women are the best disciples in the world.Buddha had fifty thousand disciples, and forty thousand were women. This was also true with Mahavira. Why? Why does a woman easily become a disciple, very easily, naturally? She knows how to receive.For a man it is a little more difficult. For a man it takes a little longer because he has no physical womb; he does not know how to receive. He also has a spiritual womb, but that is unconscious. The woman has a spiritual womb and a physical womb too, so she is conscious of being a womb. She receives, and gives birth to a child. She knows that she can receive with great joy, in exhilaration, in ecstasy. But man ordinarily is a donor, biologically a donor. His ego is hard; he never thinks in terms of receiving, in terms of surrendering and trusting.That’s why it is difficult for man to surrender; it takes him a little longer. And whenever a man surrenders to a master, you will see in the man disciple some feminine grace arising. Many women have reported to me again and again, “What is happening to your men disciples? They are turning feminine.” That is true. Whenever somebody becomes a disciple, naturally a feminine grace arises. He becomes less aggressive; his aggression slows down. His ego is no longer so prominent. And, slowly, slowly, spiritually he comes to recognize his womb.Only when you have recognized your womb can you connect with a master – that’s what sannyas is all about. When I say to some new person, “You are ready for sannyas,” and he hesitates, and he says, “But I have not thought about it.”Just the other night it was happening. You must remember Mark – I had told him that I never miss a Mark. Last night he came to see me, and he tried, but I didn’t miss him. He was so perfectly womblike, but he was not aware of his own womb. It is hidden deep in the recesses of the unconscious. And the moment he surrendered, a great grace arose in him. His face changed, became luminous.The problem with you, Chintana, is you are a woman but you have fallen into wrong company. She has been a Catholic nun, and that is the difficulty. She has forgotten about her biological womb also. A nun has to forget; a nun has to forget her biological receptivity. A nun has to become a non-woman.So Chintana has almost turned into a man as all nuns do. She has lived in wrong company. Those people have enforced a certain structure upon her being. She is a soft woman deep inside, but on the outer side the character of a nun, the armor of a nun, has made her hard. It is fortunate that she has come here. Slowly, slowly that hardness is disappearing; her woman is arising, her womb is taking possession of her again. The nun is going away. But when you have practiced a certain thing for years, it takes time, it lingers.That Catholic nun, the shadow of that Catholic nun, is around Chintana yet. That is what is making her so hesitant about taking the ultimate jump. In fact, she must have had a great religious desire, otherwise why should she have become a nun? She must have been a seeker for many lives, otherwise nobody becomes a monk or a nun. It is out of people’s search. And the search was such that she was not contented there; naturally, she moved to the opposite polarity.My sannyasins are a totally opposite polarity from being a Catholic nun or monk. Now, here, she can relax. But the conditioning is there and it will go, slowly, slowly. Don’t cooperate with that conditioning. It is on the way, it is dying. Let it die.Once the nun has disappeared from Chintana’s consciousness, she will bloom into a beautiful flower. And the day is not far off.The fifth question:Osho,Yesterday you said a major difference between Buddhism and Christianity, Hinduism, etcetera, was that in the former there were no a priori concepts, and in the latter a predetermined image of God conditioned one's experiencing of that God, which in turn reinforces the initial image: a vicious circle. However, in the Buddhist way, not holding a priori images, holding non-images, obviously still conditions one to experience God as no-thing, void, which then in turn reinforces the initial non-image – still a vicious circle. Please comment.Don’t play with words; see a simple fact. Buddhism is not giving you an image of nothingness, there cannot be any image of nothingness. Can you imagine nothingness? Try. How will you imagine nothingness? What image? Nothingness simply means: no thing, no image. You cannot make an image of no image. Buddhism is not saying create an image of nothingness. In the first place, it cannot be created. If you create an image of nothingness, then certainly you are conditioned again; then God will look like nothingness. But Buddhism is not saying to create an image of nothingness. Buddhism is simply saying avoid all images. And if you can create the image of nothingness, that is included in “all images.” Avoid all images; just keep your inner space clean and open, mirrorlike, and then see whatsoever is seen.Buddhism is simply saying: Don’t decide before knowing. That is the meaning of don’t have an a priori image: don’t decide before knowing. Let knowing happen, and let the decision come through knowing. Don’t believe beforehand, because your belief will contaminate your knowing, and you will never be able to know whether what you have known is really there, or is there because of your belief. Your belief can create it.Man’s mind has great potential to create imagination. That’s why hypnosis works. Have you watched a hypnotist working? He can hypnotize a person, and he can just put a small pebble on the hand of the person and can say, “This is burning coal, red hot burning coal.” And the man who is in deep hypnosis simply believes it, because deep hypnosis means your faculties to doubt have been put to sleep. He believes, and the belief creates reality. His hand will burn – from the cold pebble! He will shriek, he will scream in pain; he will throw away the pebble. Not only that – a blister will arise on his palm.Now what has happened? When this man is dehypnotized, the blister will be enough proof that a burning coal had been in his hand. And you know that there was no burning coal, nothing like that, just an ordinary cold pebble. But the belief has created the reality.Vice versa also happens: you can put a burning coal in the hand of a deeply hypnotized person, in a deep trance, and you can say, “This is a cold pebble,” and there will be no blister, the man will not scream and there will be no mark left. That’s how people fire walk.Now, what Buddhism is saying is: belief can create a certain kind of reality. Buddhism is not saying believe in nothingness, because that will create, certainly. But how can one believe in nothingness? You can’t create the image of nothingness.Nothingness simply means no image. So don’t play with words. Logically, it looks relevant, your question looks relevant, that Buddhism creates the belief, the image of nothingness; then God appears as nothingness, and so it is the same vicious circle. It is not. Buddhism simply takes all the beliefs away. It does not create any belief; it leaves you in a state of no-belief.Remember: it does not create disbelief either. It simply leaves you in a state of no-belief. No-belief is not disbelief. Buddhism is not atheist; Buddhism is not theist. Buddhism does not say anything about God. Buddhism says be silent, utterly silent, utterly imageless, empty, your eyes completely clean of all dust.Now you can say, “This cleanness will be the dust in the eyes” – then you are playing with words. If I say, “Let your eyes be clean, then you will be able to see better,” you can say, “But cleanness will be there. How can I see better? Cleanness will be a disturbance just like any dust!”Logically, linguistically, you are right. Existentially, you are not right. Cleanliness does not mean any thing; cleanliness simply means there is no dust, all is clean. When I say, “Nothing is written on this paper,” will you say, “Then nothing is written on this paper, so something is written?” You say nothing is written on this paper – nothing at least is written on the paper. Now you are creating an unnecessary puzzle for yourself.When I say nothing is written on the paper, I am simply saying nothing is written on the paper, the paper is empty. But you can start a philosophical argument: “At least nothing is written on the paper, so the paper is not empty because nothing is there.” Nothing is nothing, sir.There is a beautiful story…Alice reached the king. When she reached the king, the king asked, “I am waiting for a messenger. Did you meet somebody on the way coming toward me?”Alice said, “Nobody, sir.”The king thought that she had met somebody who is known as “Nobody.” Alice simply said, “Nobody, sir.” She is saying, “I have not met anybody,” but the king must have been a great linguist, a philosopher. He thought, “So she has met Nobody on the way.”After a few minutes he asked, “But it seems Nobody walks slower than you, otherwise he must have arrived by now.”Alice thought, “He is saying, ‘Nobody walks slower than you,’” that he was condemning her. So she said, “No, sir, nobody walks faster than me!”And the king said, “But then it puzzles me: if Nobody walks faster than you, then why has he not arrived yet?”Out of desperation Alice said, “Sir, ‘Nobody’ is nobody!”And the king said, “Of course, Nobody has to be Nobody – but why has he not arrived yet?”And so it goes on…Buddhism is not saying nobody is there inside, not in the sense the king took it. Buddhism is saying there is simply nobody, it is empty.And beliefs gather around. And then you start looking through the beliefs. Then those beliefs change the color of reality. Then you start seeing things as they are not. Drop all belief systems. And remember: Buddhism is not a belief system; you are not to replace it. It is not saying to drop Christianity and replace it with Buddhism. Then you would not be doing anything except choosing one disease for another. Then you would move from one prison into another, from one bondage into another.That’s why Ikkyu says Buddhism is not an “ism.” It is not a religion in the ordinary sense of the term. It is not a church: it is an insight. It is not an organization: it is an understanding. It is not a philosophy: it is a realization.Once you understand the point, this problem will not arise. But if you have a philosophical bent of mind, you can go on creating such unnecessary questions and solving them, and you can get very messed up.It happened:Dashing young Edward was walking through the park one afternoon when he heard a female voice cry out, “Get down, you beast! If you put your filthy paws on me once more I’ll never come on the grass again.”He rushed behind the hedge from whence the voice had come, hoping to rescue a fair maiden from a foul creep, but instead discovered a little old lady talking to her pet dog.These are your ideas, your interpretations. Drop all ideas, drop all interpretations. Ikkyu is not saying to accept Buddha’s interpretation instead. Listen to what he says: “Sakyamuni, this mischievous guy – how many people has he misled?” Not that Buddha has misled anybody, but people have been misled, that is true, people like you. They start creating images of nothing, they start believing in nobodies, they start believing in nothingness, they create a belief around nothingness, and then nothingness is lost. Then your nothingness is no longer empty, it is full of nothingness. Then you miss the point.When Ma Tzu attained to emptiness he went to his master, bowed down and said, “Sir, now I have attained emptiness.” He had been waiting for this moment for years and years, to go one day and tell the master. Now the moment had come, he had attained. And the master slapped him.He said, “What nonsense are you talking? Go out and empty your mind of this emptiness. Empty your mind of emptiness! Go out! How can you have emptiness inside you? Because then emptiness becomes something.”And Ma Tzu understood, and that very moment the illumination happened. He bowed down, and he said, “Yes, I had started clinging to emptiness. I was cherishing it as something great. Again the ego was coming from the back door. Now it was claiming, ‘I have attained emptiness.’”One has to be empty of emptiness, too. One has to be simply without any beliefs; then the reality is as it is, then you know its suchness.The last question:Osho,I very strongly believe in God. Why do you condemn belief?I am not condemning belief: I am simply explaining it to you, that belief is the barrier to God. Belief is not a bridge, but a barrier. It is your belief that is hindering you from God. If belief is dropped, immediately you are in God, you are God.And why is there any need to believe? You don’t believe in the sun, do you? You don’t believe in the earth, do you? You know the earth exists, so there is no point in believing. You only believe in things which you don’t know. Belief is out of ignorance. Buddha does not believe in God because he knows God! You don’t know God, that’s why you believe in God. And if you go on believing, beware – you will never come to know.Belief simply means you are hiding your ignorance. Rather than destroying it, you are hiding it, decorating it, making it a little comfortable, convenient, acceptable. You are worried that you don’t know God, so you cling to a belief, and you make yourself feel that you know. Repeating your belief constantly, again and again, you start creating a kind of autohypnosis that “I know, I believe!”Just look at your question: “I very strongly believe in God.” Just belief won’t do? It has to be strong – and then very strong! What does it show? You can’t hide. The truth shows itself: you are very afraid of your ignorance. Deep down you know that “I don’t know.” You have to push that ignorance, you have to fight with it, so you have to believe strongly.Just think: somebody comes to you and says, “I love you very strongly!” What in the world does he mean? Love is not enough? Has it to be very strong? If love is there, it is enough. If love is there, there is no need even to say it. Silence is its expression.But when somebody says, “I love you very strongly, very, very strongly,” then there is one thing certain, that he is afraid that his love is not there. He is managing it somehow, creating it somehow. He is making great effort to create it; that’s why he calls it strong, because he knows his unloving nature is difficult to repress. He has to fight with his unloving nature.Your very words, “Very strongly I believe in God,” shows that you don’t know God at all; otherwise, there will be no need for strength. There will be no need for belief. God simply is. How can you believe or disbelieve? It is not left to you. But we go on hiding.Just listen to this story:Farmer Jim was very worried about the poor performance of his prize bull for which he had paid an astronomical sum. He talked to all his friends every time he went to the market, and one day learned from a cousin that there was an amazing vet way down in the West Country.He was so depressed about the bull that he decided this last resort was the answer, so he set off to Cornwall to find the vet. At last he found the chap who urged him to give his bull a great big pill once a day.A few months later he met his cousin who asked him how he had got on. “Oh, it was marvelous,” he said. “He gave me these pills for the bull and I had no sooner started him off on them than he hit the jackpot. In fact,” he said, “I’m making a fortune out of the local farmers – they can’t get their cows round here fast enough!”“What are these pills then?” asked his cousin.“Oh!” said Farmer Jim, “huge, great green jobs like bombs – with a peppermint taste!”Do you see the point? Do you get it? You cannot hide it: that peppermint taste will say everything. Very strong belief? That is the peppermint taste.You don’t know anything about God. That’s why you are worried about why I am condemning belief. Your belief must be feeling shaken; the fear is that if the belief is gone, you will again be ignorant. But that is my work here. Excuse me, but that is my work here – to make you absolutely as you are. If you are ignorant, you are ignorant. It is better to be that which you are, because only from that authentic reality can you be bridged to ultimate reality. With your false beliefs… All beliefs are false. Belief as such is false; knowing is true, believing is false.I am here to make you ignorant again. If you cooperate with me, this will happen: you will become ignorant, innocent. Your knowledgeability will disappear – and in that very disappearance you will find for the first time the mystery of life dancing around you, and the benediction of that mystery. That mystery is godliness.Godliness can never be a concept. Godliness cannot be reduced to an idea. Godliness cannot be reduced to a belief. Become ignorant. I have never heard of pundits and scholars reaching godliness. Sinners have been known to reach, but not scholars. The original sin is the sin of knowledge.Remember the biblical story again and again. It is one of the most precious parables of human history. Adam has been turned out of the Garden of Eden because he has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. His sin is his knowledge.You will have to vomit your knowledge. Vomit the apple! Become innocent and ignorant again. You will be attaining to a second childhood – and fortunate are those who can attain to second childhood, because through it, and only through it, is one bridged to existence. But then there is no belief. One knows.And remember, knowing and knowledge are different. Knowledge consists of beliefs, knowing consists of experience.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 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-11/

Pitiful arePeople who do not knowNirvana and its eternal felicity!How they grieveAt life, death, and mutability!Shakya, and Amida too,Were originally human beings;Have I not alsoThe form of a man?Wonderful, indeed,The Lotus Flower of the Law!However many ages may pass,Still that same color.The crescent moonBecomes full, and wanes,And nothing is left;But still, there in the dawn,The crescent moon!Whenever we see them, all areJust as they are:The willow is green,The flower is red.A parable…There was once a Turkish teacher who was not really a teacher. He went to a foreign country and started to teach. Of course, the people there did not understand Turkish, but the man spoke with such authority and such drama that he soon had many devotees and followers. Then, one day, a group of Turks happened to pass by. When they listened to him, they understood what he was saying – bullshit! So they ran him out of town.Afterward, when the man returned to his home and was asked how his trip had been, he said, “Great, until these Turkish people came by and understood what I was saying.”The moral of the story being that it is possible to speak to people in a language they don’t understand, but when they do understand, the bullshit stops forever!The appearance of Gautam the Buddha was one of the most phenomenal events of human consciousness. Whatsoever was going on in the name of religion before he appeared, stopped forever. He brought truth to such simplicity, to such felicity, to such grace. He spoke the way an enlightened person speaks, through his being. He was not a scholar, and he was not worried about speculation. He had no abstract ideas; he was very down-to-earth.And since then, Zen people have carried the flame down the ages. They speak, not because they have a philosophy to propound; they speak because they have seen something that has to be conveyed. They speak as seers, not as thinkers. They speak as masters, not as believers.Buddha transformed the very quality of religion. It was theology before him; after him it became anthropology. God was dethroned, man was enthroned. God is not a relevant word with Buddha, man is. He says all that is needed is hidden inside human consciousness. Man has not to look up to the heavens, he has not to ask for any grace from anywhere. He has to become a light unto himself.The light is there, it is the very core of your life. Just one thing has happened, you have forgotten it. Not that you have lost it, just forgotten. Remember it, because that is very fundamental to Buddha’s approach.Life is a forgetfulness and a remembering. And that’s all, and that’s the whole story. One falls asleep and dreams a thousand and one things, and in the morning one wakes up and all the dreams are gone. So is life. We have fallen asleep – fallen asleep to our inner being. We have forgotten who we are; hence, the world, the samsara. The samsara means the world of ten thousand things.We go on rushing from one thing to another thing in search of a self. Because we have lost contact with our self, we are continuously searching for it. If you look deep down into the agony of man, this is the agony. He has forgotten who he is and is searching and asking, asking of everybody, “Who am I?” Maybe not consciously…That’s what you are asking when you fall in love. You are asking your beloved to tell you who you are. Why do people feel so beautiful when they are in love? – because some identity starts arising. The woman you love says, “You are beautiful. You are intelligent, you are unique.” She is giving you a self.When you say to the woman, “You are beautiful, I have never come across such a beautiful person. I cannot live without you, you are my life, my joy, my very existence,” you are giving an identity to the woman. She was searching for it; she does not know who she is. Now you are creating a self. She is creating a self for you, you are creating a self for her.That’s why people feel so at ease when they are in love. When love disappears, is broken, shattered, they are shattered. Why are you shattered? You are shattered because your identity is lost, again you don’t know who you are. It was the woman or the man who was giving you a certain kind of idea of who you are. Now the woman is gone and the idea is gone with her; you are again in darkness. Again you don’t know, again you start searching.Why do you seek money and wealth? Just to have some identity, so that you know who you are, so that people can say who you are. Why do you go on searching for power, prestige? – for the same reason.Man is in a constant search for the self, in a constant identity crisis. In the past things were more settled, and people were more at ease. Now things are changing so fast that again and again your identity is shattered.In the old days, once you got married, you were married for life. You were not going to be searching again for a woman or for a man; it was a whole life thing, a settlement. A certain idea would become fixed, slowly, slowly, that you were the husband, the father of the children, this and that. But now it is difficult, and more so particularly in the West. Every once in a while you will change the woman; every once in a while you will change the man. Again and again you will have to search for your identity.In the past, people used to do the same work their whole life; it was traditional. Your grandfather was a carpenter, your father was a carpenter, you are a carpenter, your children will be carpenters – you knew who you were. Now it is impossible to know. People go on changing their jobs; things are changing so fast.You knew where you belonged in those days. You were an Indian, a Christian, a Hindu, a Chinese, a Buddhist. You no longer know; the world has come very much closer, boundaries have become false. The world has become a small village, a global village. Now you know there is not much difference between a Hindu and a Christian or a Mohammedan; that identity is not of any help any more.Who are you? This problem is one of the most fundamental problems. Modern man is very puzzled, almost paralyzed. Buddha says it is not going to be of any help if you create a false identity. You can live with it your whole life, and still not know who you are.The only way to know who you are is to go within yourself with great remembrance, with great mindfulness, with awareness. Asking from the outside, whatsoever you get is a pseudo thing. Your woman, your man, your country, your religion, your church will give you a certain kind of identity; they will create a false self. But it is not real, and only the mediocre can be deceived by it, only the stupid can be deceived by it. The intelligent person sooner or later will have to see the point that these identities are from the outside: “In fact I don’t know who I am. My being a husband does not say anything about me. My being a father or a mother does not say anything about me. My being a Christian or a Hindu does not say anything about me. I am still in darkness.”These labels may be of some help in the outside world, but your identity card is not you. Your name is not you, even your photograph is not you, because you go on changing and the photograph remains static. It simply represents one moment in your life. It is not that it represents you, it only represents one gesture in your life, and even that very superficial. For example, you were smiling when the photograph was taken, and you may have just been smiling for the photographer.I have heard…A photographer was saying to a very, very serious-looking man, “Just for a single moment, sir, smile. And then you can be your usual self again.”Now, this photograph of this serious man smiling is absolutely false; that smile is just on the lips. The photograph cannot penetrate inside you. In fact, not even an X-ray can penetrate inside you, it may take the pictures of your bones but it cannot take your picture.There is no way to see who you are from the outside. There is only one way, and that is to become alert inside, to awaken inside, to make great effort inside, so that you are not asleep there. Then only will you have the first glimpse of the real man.And remember Ikkyu: One single glimpse of the real man and one is in love. The man who is searching for his identity cannot be in love; his love is also nothing but a search for the identity. Among other searches, that also is one. You write a book, you become a famous author, or you paint and you become a painter, or you sing and you become a singer. But these are all efforts to somehow categorize you, to identify who you are.There is an ancient story about a philosopher who was very forgetful. He was so forgetful that in the night he would sleep with all his clothes on, even with his shoes on. Somebody suggested, “This is not a way to sleep, how can you sleep with your shoes on, and your hat on, and all your clothes?”He said, “It is very difficult. If I put them away in the night, then in the morning I forget where I have put my shoes, where I have put my coat. And what is a coat, and what are shoes, and what is my hat? Everything becomes such a mess and it takes so much trouble to find and sort things out that I have decided never to do it again. Half my day is wasted.”The man was a practical man. He said, “This is a simple thing. I know that you are a very forgetful man, but there is one thing you can do. You can write small labels and stick them on everything: ‘This is my coat,’ ‘This is my shoe.’ And you can keep a diary also: where you have put the shoes, underneath the bed; and where you have put your coat, and where your underwear is, just make notes.”That appealed to the philosopher, and he did it. And next morning he was really in a mess, he had never been in such a mess. Everything had seemed to work out. He found his shoes, they were underneath the bed. He found his coat, it was hanging in the closet. He found his shirt, he found everything. But finally, he shouted, looking at the sky, “My God! But now where am I? I have forgotten to note that down!”He looked in the bed, but he was not there. You can imagine the poor man’s anguish. He searched all over the house, he looked in every nook and corner, and he was not there. And he came running out of the house shouting, “Please, somebody tell me where I am! I have found everything else in its place; just one thing I forgot. I didn’t write in the notebook where I have to find myself. I think I was in the bed, but the bed is empty.”The story looks fictitious; it is not. It is your story; it is everybody’s story. It is man’s story. You know where your house is, you know your phone number, you know who your wife is, you know who your son is, you know you are a Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Indian, Japanese. But do you really know who you are and where you are? And you will be in almost as much bewilderment as that ancient philosopher. But people don’t ask this question, because this question creates such uneasiness. They avoid it. They go on living, avoiding it.Buddha transformed the quality of religion. Religion with Buddha became man-oriented. Before Buddha it was God-oriented. Now, God is not a problem at all; whose problem is God? How does God concern you? It seems to be a bogus problem, nobody’s concern. Maybe priests have some investment in it, maybe politicians have some investment in it, but really it is not an existential question. The existential question is: “Who am I?”With Buddha, religion changed its quality. It became realistic, it became pragmatic. Buddha said: There is no need to be worried about God. Let him worry himself about himself, if he wants to know who he is he can ask, “Who am I?” Why should you be worried? And in the first place, God is your creation. That is your ultimate effort to avoid yourself. You go on creating fictitious problems. There is one beautiful thing about fictitious problems: they can be solved, they can be solved very easily. In fact, the problem itself is fictitious so any fictitious answer will do. The disease is pseudo, any pseudo medicine will do.People become very interested in pseudo problems, and they think they are great seekers. Buddha hit them hard and shattered their ego, the ego of being a seeker. He said: If you are seeking and searching for God, you are simply befooling yourself.God is nobody’s problem. Just see the point. How can God be your problem? But people think it is a problem. By making it a problem, they can avoid their own problems. They become very occupied with God. They start thinking, they start collecting answers, they start philosophizing, speculating; they delve into scriptures, and they are lost in the jungle of words. And they have forgotten the simple question that was really their question: Who am I? God may be the greatest escape.It has been noted by psychologists that in times of anguish, misery, war, trouble, people start thinking of abstract things: God, truth, heaven, afterlife. In times of stress when people are very uneasy on this earth, they start looking at the sky. They focus their problems there so they can avoid the real problems of the earth. This has been watched, observed, over and over. After each war there is a great revival of religion – the so-called religion.You also know it from your personal experience. Whenever you are in misery, in pain, you remember God. Whenever you are happy, when you are flowing and life is a celebration, you don’t care a bit about God, you don’t remember. This is a simple experience; no psychologist is needed to observe it. Everybody can observe in his own life. What does it say? It simply says that when you are in anguish you create a false problem in order to escape it. A great occupation…You start praying. And you had never prayed. In fact, when things were going well you had never gone to the priest. When things were going beautifully and you were succeeding in life and life was a bed of roses, you didn’t remember God. But when life becomes a bed of neurosis, then suddenly you remember God. God is an escape.Bertrand Russell is right in saying that if life on earth becomes really blissful, people will forget all about God and there will be no religion. He is right, because he does not know the religion of Buddha. He knows Christianity. Yes, religions like Christianity and Hinduism will disappear. But if life is really happy on the earth, something like Buddha’s message will become very, very prevalent.When life is going well, beautifully, and all is flowing and flowering, this question arises in the deepest core of your being: “Now is the time to know ‘Who am I?’” When life is not flowing, all is blocked and there is only misery and more misery and all is hell, how can you ask “Who am I?” To come that close to yourself is dangerous because there is only hellfire and nothing else. How can you come that close? How can you sit silently with closed eyes and look into yourself? You have to avoid, you have to escape, you have to run away. So anything will do.And that’s how things always happen. Whenever a society is in turmoil, people become very interested in occult, esoteric things. They start seeing UFO’s, they start seeing beings from other planets, they start thinking of great things that are going to happen. They start going to astrologers, and all kinds of nonsense.Buddha brings a very sensible religion to the world: empirical, experiential, existential. In Buddha’s way, there is no God, no prayer. And just think of your poor God, if he exists. What will his situation be? Think of him with all kinds of people praying and shouting at him and complaining. It has been going on for so long, either he does not listen at all, or he must have gone crazy by now.A great psychotherapist was asked by his student… The student watched the great old man working from the morning until evening, continually psychoanalyzing mad people, all kinds of nuts, listening to them. The young student was dead tired by the evening, and the old man was as fresh as he was in the morning.One day the student could not contain his curiosity. He asked, “What is the matter? How do you manage? The whole day listening to such horrible tales, nightmares, and you never become tired?”And the old man said, “Who listens?”God must be avoiding you.I have heard…A man who had been very pious all his life, and had prayed to God continually at least ten hours a day, died. And he died miserable and broke. His wife had left him, his partner had cheated him, his house had burned down, and his children were all delinquents. His brother, on the other hand, who was an atheist, had not prayed a single prayer in his life, was wealthy, had his health, a wonderful wife, fine children, and in short, was having a great time of it.When the pious man finally came face to face with God, he asked, “Lord, I’m not complaining. You know I’m not complaining. When you took my house away, I prayed to you in thanks. I knew there was some good reason for it. And when my wife left, I again prayed in thanksgiving, because I knew you had a good reason for that; and when my children turned against me, again I prayed to you with thanks, since I know that nothing happens without your approval, and I have to bow to Divine Wisdom. But why did all these things happen to me who prayed to you ten hours at least every day, and not to my wicked brother who is an atheist?”“Because,” said the Lord in disgust, “you are such a nudge!”You are such a bore. This man must have tortured God – ten hours every day. Just think of poor God! Buddha relieved man of God, and Buddha relieved God of man. Buddha’s approach is such that if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born in a Buddhist land, he could not have written that God is dead and that from now onward man is free. There would have been no need.Buddha helped God disappear without any bloodshed. Nietzsche had to kill. Nietzsche said: God is dead; and not that he has died a natural death – we had to kill him, just to be free of him. How can man be free with God? If God is there, then religion becomes nothing but obedience. If God is there, then religion is reduced to obedience.That’s why in Christianity you don’t talk about freedom, you don’t talk about moksha. Moksha means absolute freedom. And absolute freedom includes freedom from God, otherwise, how can it be absolute? If there is somebody to whom you are responsible and answerable, you can’t be free.Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that God is dead and we had to murder him, is just a reaction created by Christianity and its obsession with obedience. Christianity has created slaves in the world. Nietzsche had to utter that word, had to utter that statement. If Nietzsche had not done it, then somebody else would have done it; it was a need, it was inevitable.Christianity leaves only two alternatives: either commit suicide, lose all your freedom, become a zombie in the name of God; or, murder God and be free. Suicide and murder are both ugly.Buddhism does not give you such ugly alternatives. It simply says God is not the problem: the problem is man. God is an escape from the problem. Look into man, find your source inside, and all will be solved.And remember again, Buddha is not an atheist. He is not saying there is no God, but his concept of God is totally different. When you come to the deepest core of your being, to your very source, you will know that you are God.Christianity says you are sons of God. Buddhism says when you come to know yourself, you are not sons – you are godhood itself. There is no God other than you, there is no God other than the universe. Hence, Buddha never talks about God, because there is no God other than this. There is no other that than this; this is that. Existence is divine.But to know this, no prayer is going to help. To know this, no philosophy is going to be of any support. To know this, one has to go utterly into oneself with only one question like an arrow piercing your heart: Who am I? And the deeper you go, the deeper you will see that you don’t exist as an individual.That is the meaning of Buddha’s doctrine of anatta – no-self. You will not come to see any self inside you. The whole idea of being a person will slowly, slowly melt, and there will be a kind of presence but no personality. The individual will disappear and there will be the universal. You will not be separate from existence, you will find yourself one with the whole.Now the sutras:Pitiful arePeople who do not knowNirvana and its eternal felicity!How they grieveAt life, death, and mutability!People suffer because they have forgotten their innermost no-self. Because they have forgotten their innermost presence, they have forgotten that they are one with the whole. How have they forgotten it? It is a natural rhythm. Whatsoever is given becomes so obvious that one tends to forget it. The new is remembered because it is such a sensation. You pass through the same garden again and again and again, and naturally you tend to forget. Trees are there, but you don’t look at them, you take them for granted; birds are singing, but you go with your inner chatter.Just imagine if you had lived in a desert and suddenly one fine morning you had come across a beautiful garden with trees and birds singing, would you have passed the same way as you pass your garden every day? You would have danced and sung; you would have shouted in joy, you would have exploded! It would have been such a great experience that you would have become very, very aware and alert. All inner chattering would have stopped. But you pass through the same type of garden every day, and you tend to forget.Remember the first day that you saw your woman or your man, how enchanted you were, how thrilled, how blissful! And now you sit with the same woman and you don’t look at her face at all. It is a well-known fact that husbands cannot remember their wives’ faces. Try. Try to remember how your wife looks, and you will be very puzzled. You can remember how the neighbor’s wife looks, what kind of sari she was wearing this morning – your neighbor’s wife, not your wife. You have not really looked at your wife for years. If suddenly her face is changed by a magician you may not become aware for months or years, because who looks at his own wife?How long has it been that you have not touched her hand with a thrill, with a song in your heart? You take her hand in your hand; it is an empty gesture, you have to do it.One day, a man came to his home and just saw his partner kissing his wife.The partner was very afraid that the man would create trouble, but the man took the partner aside and said, “You puzzle me. I have to kiss that woman, but why do you? I don’t see the point. I have to kiss that woman but why do you? Have you gone mad or something?”Sooner or later, you tend to forget that which is available. Others know what a beautiful house you are living in; you don’t know. Others know what beautiful children you have; you don’t know. Others think that you are fortunate, this and that; you don’t know.This is the problem: because we are our own selves, and we have been always that, from eternity, it is natural to forget all about it. Because of this natural tendency, one has forgotten oneself. And one has become interested in others, in those ten thousand things – the samsara.You go on rushing from one new sensation to another new sensation. You don’t have any time to sit in meditation. People come to me, and if I tell them to meditate they say, “But we don’t have any time.” They have enough time to go to the movies, they have enough time to play cards. You can find them gathered together in Somendra’s room playing poker. They have time to gossip. But for meditation? Suddenly there is a scarcity of time. They have time to fight, to be angry; they have time to read the stupid newspapers, and how deeply they go into those newspapers! Those newspapers have become their gospels; they read every line, from the beginning to the end. But you talk about meditation and immediately, without a single thought, the reaction comes: “But we don’t have any time!”What are they really saying? They are saying that they are not interested in themselves; they are not interested in sitting silently for one hour and looking into their own being. For what? They can earn money in that time, they can tend their shop, or they can do a thousand and one things. Why just go on gazing at your navel? For what? Nobody seems to be interested in oneself; one is already there, one is already that, so why bother?Everybody is going out, but only when a person goes in does a person come to know what truth is.Ikkyu says: Pitiful are people who do not know nirvana and its eternal felicity! Yes, they have to be pitied. They are creating their own misery; they are creating their own agony and their hell. They are putting fuel into the hellfire. They have to be pitied because they don’t know what felicity, what grace arises when you go in. They don’t know what kind of benediction is waiting for them. They don’t know that life takes on a totally new color, a new vibe – the vibe of jubilation, the vibe of celebration – when you go in.They are all asking for happiness, and they are all creating misery. People go on asking for happiness and go on creating misery; they have to be pitied. Ikkyu is right. He says:Pitiful are people who do not know nirvana and its eternal felicity! Go in, and you will come across the greatest treasure there is. You will come to know that all that you have been seeking, down the ages, through so many lives, has always been available inside you, has been there from the very beginning, a part of your nature. And that’s why you are missing it – because you look without and it is within. You search out and it is in. So your search and the treasure never meet.Before you go trekking the infinite ways of the outer world, have a little glimpse of the inner. Before you go searching out what seems to be very pragmatic and realistic, have a look within. Who knows? Buddhas may be right; and all the buddhas cannot be wrong! Whosoever has looked within has found it, without any exception. And whosoever has been looking without has not found it, without any exception. All those who have been searching in the world have been failing and failing. Only frustration comes in the end, and failure.Just think of those people – a Gautama Buddha, a Krishna, a Christ, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu – think of those people, how blissful they look, what fragrance they have. From where does it come? Just sitting silently by their side and one is thrilled, enchanted. These people have some magic, some miracle is constantly happening around them. From where does it come? They don’t have any visible power of the world. They don’t have anything that you think one needs to be happy.It is reported…When Buddha came for the first time to Varanasi, he was staying outside Varanasi underneath a tree, a great banyan tree. It was evening and the sun rays were filtering the sunset, and the clouds were aflame with the setting sun. And through the thick foliage of the tree those red rays were falling on Buddha’s face, and he was sitting there relaxed.The king of Varanasi came on his chariot. Accidentally, he saw this man by the side of the road, sitting so beautifully, in such splendor. That man, that king, had everything one can desire. And do you know where he was going? He was going to commit suicide! He was tired, he was exhausted, frustrated; he had seen the futility of all and he had decided, “Now enough is enough.” And he was going to the mountains to kill himself.Then he saw on the road this beautiful man, this beggar, sitting there in such a let-go that even the sunset was nothing compared to his beauty. Buddha was looking so golden. And a great silence was surrounding the tree, and it was not the silence of the tree, certainly, because the king had passed by many trees.When a buddha sits, he creates his own space. The Eastern scriptures say: Wherever a buddha lives, a certain space is created around him. Those who live in that space start growing in spite of themselves. They are taken by the tide; they start riding on the wave of the buddha. That is the meaning of buddhafield.The place where Buddha sat was utterly quiet. The king had never seen such silence, such a pregnant silence, such an alive silence. He had seen the silence that exists in the cemeteries, but he had never seen a man like Buddha, he had no idea what real silence was. For the first time it was there, almost tangible. You could have touched it, you could have taken it in your hand; you could have tasted it, you could have put it against your cheek and felt its coolness. It was there, so visible.He stopped the chariot. He said to his charioteer, “Stop! I will have to think again. If this man can be so blissful and so silent, maybe there is still something in life that I have not searched for. Forget about my suicide! This man has changed my mind; this man has changed my being. The presence of this man is enough proof that life can be lived in some other way. I don’t know what way it is…He said to Buddha, “I have only one question to ask: I don’t see anything around you, just a begging bowl. How can one be so happy with just one begging bowl? I am not happy with a great kingdom, and you look so utterly happy, so ultimately happy.”Buddha opened his eyes, those lotus eyes…and the king could not believe that he was suddenly bowing down and touching Buddha’s feet. Something had happened in him – just that look, those two eyes. Those two eyes behind which there was no person but only presence, a radiation. Those two empty eyes, and yet full of existence; empty of the ego, but full of being. Those two knowing eyes must have penetrated that king’s being like two rays of light. He was touched, moved.Buddha said, “The situation that you are in, I also was in one day. I can understand you. I was also the son of a great emperor; I have lived in the palaces, I have lived in luxuries, I know. I know the misery of having all and yet having nothing. I can understand you; nobody will be able to understand you, but I can understand you. I was exactly like you and I had also contemplated suicide many times, many, many times.“But I say to you: Look into my eyes. One day I was in the same state as you are in today. And I say to you, you can be in the same state one day in which I am, because we are both the same.”Every man has a built-in possibility to explode, to bloom, to become a lotus.Pitiful are people who do not know nirvana and its eternal felicity! How they grieve at life, death, and mutability! What is people’s grief? What is their misery? Their misery is: they have created an ego. They had to create it, because they don’t know their self, and one cannot live without a self. They don’t know who they are, and one cannot live, cannot exist, without knowing who one is. So what to do? They have created a false self.To search for the real seems arduous. To create a synthetic, artificial, plastic self seems very easy. We have created the ego as a substitute for the real; it is a false center that gives us a feeling that we know who we are. But this false self is constantly in danger. It is false; it has to be continuously supported.Remember always, if you have to support something continuously, it is false. The real remains of its own accord: the false has to be supported. If you have to remind yourself continuously that if you don’t support it, it will be gone, that simply means it is false.The real cannot be gone; there is nowhere it can go. The real remains. Just think: you have not looked into yourself for millions of lives – still it is there. It does not need your support. It is your very ground. It supports you. How can it need your support? But the ego needs your support.If you have a certain amount of money in the bank, you have to go on increasing that amount; otherwise, your ego starts feeling suffocated. If you have a certain prestige in the society, you have to go on increasing it. You have to go on puffing up your ego continuously; if you stop puffing, it starts dying. It is like pedaling a bicycle; you have to continually pedal it, if you stop pedaling you will fall. The ego needs continuous effort; it has to be created again and again.That’s why every day you are waiting for people to support you. Your woman had said yesterday, “You are a beautiful man.” Now it is pointless to say it again and again, because she has said it once. But today also you are waiting for her to say that you are one of the most beautiful men. It is just a repetition. Now there is no point in saying it. She has said it! But you are waiting, and again it thrills you. And tomorrow again you will be waiting, and it will thrill you. Pedaling!Somebody respects you; he has to go on respecting you. In fact, he has to go on growing in his respect toward you, only then can your ego be supported. And the problem is that you cannot keep this ego when you are dying. When you are dying, how can you support something? So when death comes, ego starts disappearing. You cannot pedal any more; you cannot go on bicycling when you are dying.Death will destroy your ego; hence the fear of death. Death cannot destroy you, but death is going to destroy your ego; hence the fear of death. Everybody is afraid of death. And be mindful: not only are you afraid of death, you are also afraid of life. Ego is afraid of life too, because in deep life experiences it also dies.When you really fall in love…why do you call it “fall”? You fall from the ego. When you fall in love, the ego is shattered. That’s why the real egoist never loves anybody – he cannot, because he will have to descend from his ego tower, he will have to come down. He will have to hold the hand of an ordinary woman or an ordinary man; he will have to behave in an ordinary way.Many people become celibates, not because they are religious but because they are egoists. It feels very good that you don’t need anybody; ego feels very good. You need not bow down to anybody. In love one has to bow down, one has to surrender; one has to behave in a human way, one has to be a human being. Love is dangerous for the ego.And love is life! If you are afraid of love, you are afraid of life. So in life situations, the ego is continuously afraid. It is a false thing, managed, somehow manipulated. It needs a thousand and one props. And still it remains continuously afraid, because life goes on changing. Nothing ever remains the same, it is a river.So how can you believe that today people are respecting you, tomorrow they will also respect you? How can you believe that tomorrow you will be able to keep your ego? Who knows? Today you are a prime minister, tomorrow you may not be. Yesterday you were not a prime minister, today you are; there is no certainty for tomorrow. Just as you have snatched the prime minister-ship from somebody else, somebody else is going to snatch it from you, because millions of people are trying to become prime ministers; everybody is trying in his own way. How can you be safe? Where everybody is making all kinds of efforts to become the prime minister, how can you be safe? You can’t sleep, you can’t relax; you have to be continuously on guard. You have to watch where people are moving, what they are doing; you have to watch even the closest colleagues, because they are the most dangerous. They are so close, they can topple you any moment; even colleagues are enemies.Machiavelli says in polities there are no friends, there cannot be. Machiavelli says don’t reveal your secrets even to your friends, because if they turn some day and become your enemies then you will be caught, then you will be in trouble.If you have money you have to be constantly afraid, because everybody is ready to grab it. That’s how you got it in the first place, so you know the way to get it. In this life, where everything is constantly changing, you cannot remain certain. So these three things are constantly creating misery, grief: life, death, mutability.The irony is that deep inside there is a space which is eternal, which never changes. There is a space in you which is timeless, is never affected by any changes in time, through time; remains transcendental, beyond. There is a space in you which is life, pure life, and knows nothing of death. There is a space in you which is pure love. And you are afraid of love and you are afraid of life and you are afraid of death and you are afraid of change.This whole thing is happening because you have created a false substitute. The false substitute seems to be appealing because everybody has it. People imitate. Have you watched it? If your neighbor purchases a bigger car than you, suddenly you also need a bigger car. Just a moment before, there was no need; just a moment before, you had not thought about a bigger car. Now suddenly, the need has arisen, because the neighbor has purchased one. Now he has a bigger ego and your ego is threatened; you have to purchase a bigger car. Even if you cannot afford it, you have to purchase it.People go on wasting their lives in such things which they don’t need in the first place. People go on accumulating things which they don’t need, go on putting their money into things which they will never need, to impress people whom they don’t like. This is something! People even go on putting their money into things when they don’t have the money. They purchase a car in installments; they may get it two years later. The money they don’t have right now they have to put into a car that they don’t need, to impress people that they don’t like.I have heard…Two cows were grazing in a pasture alongside a highway when a milk truck drove by. On the side of the truck was printed: “Pasteurized, Homogenized, Grade A, Vitamin B Added.”One cow turned to the other and said: “Makes you feel sort of inadequate, doesn’t it?”People are having such big balloons, balloons of egos, and one starts feeling inadequate. Somebody is having this, somebody is having that, and you start feeling poor. You are not poor! Comparison brings poverty.The really rich man is one who lives without comparison. How can he be poor? Drop comparisons and you are rich; then you will never be poor. Go on comparing and you will remain poor, howsoever rich you become is irrelevant. You will always remain poor, because there will always be somebody who has more.There are millions of things, so there are millions of poverties. Somebody has a more beautiful wife; you are poor. Somebody has a bigger car; you are poor. Somebody has a bigger house; you are poor. Somebody is taller than you, and you are poor. So many poverties, as many as there are things. Drop comparison. But the ego lives through comparison.Shakya, and Amida too,Were originally human beings;Have I not alsoThe form of a man?Shakya is Buddha’s name. He came from the clan of Shakyas, hence he is called Shakya. Amida is a name of another buddha, Amitabh – Amida is the Japanese form of Amitabh. But they both are human beings, Ikkyu is saying.Shakya, and Amida too, were originally human beings; have I not also the form of a man? This is what I mean when I say Buddhism destroyed theology and created a new kind of religion, an anthropological, a man-centered religion. Buddha gave such dignity to man as has never been given before or since. Buddha made man the highest peak of consciousness. Buddha loved man and respected humanity.Buddha says: “You are just like me! You need not be worried. If I can become a buddha, you can become a buddha.” And to be enlightened is nothing special; it is your birthright.Wonderful, indeed,The Lotus Flower of the Law!However many ages may pass,Still that same color.And what is buddhahood? What is this buddhahood to which every man can attain? It is an inner opening, the opening of your inner core; it is your inner core becoming a lotus. Wonderful, indeed the Lotus Flower of the Law! However many ages may pass, still that same color.And it is unchanging, it is timeless, it is eternal. Once you have seen that flowering inside, death disappears. Once you have seen that flowering inside, fear disappears. Once you have seen that flowering inside, your life becomes fragrant. Your life becomes a song, a celebration. Then life has benediction and beauty and beatitude.Everybody is carrying this inner lotus, and nobody comes to be aware of it. Our whole awareness has become obsessed with things. Relieve your awareness from things, take an about turn. And I am not saying take the about turn forever; I am saying just once in a while take an about turn. That’s what meditation is all about.For sixty minutes every day, just forget about the world. Let the world disappear from you, and you disappear from the world. Take an about turn, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and just look inside. In the beginning, you will see only clouds. Don’t be worried about them; those clouds are created by your repressions. You will come across anger, hatred, greed, and all kinds of black holes. You have repressed them, so they are there. And your so-called religions have taught you to repress them, so they are there like wounds, and you have been hiding them.That’s why my first emphasis is on catharsis. Unless you go through a great catharsis you will have to pass through many clouds. It will be tiring, and you may be so impatient that you may turn back into the world, and you say, “There is nothing. There is no lotus and no fragrance; there is only odor, rubbish.”You know it. When you close your eyes and you start moving in, what do you come across? You don’t come across those beautiful lands that buddhas talk about. You come across hells, agonies, repressed there, waiting for you. You find the anger accumulated through many lives. It is all a mess there, so one wants to remain outside. One wants to go to the movies, to the club, to meet people and gossip. One wants to remain occupied until one is tired and falls asleep. That’s the way you are living, that’s your style of life.So when one starts looking in, naturally one is very puzzled. Buddhas say that there is great benediction, great fragrance, you come across lotus flowers blooming – and eternal fragrance. And the color of the flowers remains the same; it is not a changing phenomenon. They talk about this paradise, they talk about this kingdom of God that is within you. And when you go in, you only come across hell.You see not buddha lands, but Adolf Hitler concentration camps. Naturally, you start thinking that this is all nonsense, it is better to remain outside. And why go on playing with your wounds? – it hurts. And pus starts oozing out of the wounds and it is dirty.But catharsis helps. If you cathart, if you go through chaotic meditations, you throw all these clouds outside, all this darkness outside, then mindfulness becomes easier. That is the reason I emphasize chaotic meditations first, and then silent meditations; active meditations, then passive meditations. You can move into passivity only when all the junk has been thrown out. Anger has been thrown out, greed has been thrown out…layer upon layer, these things are there. But once you have thrown them out, you can easily slip in. There is no hindrance.And suddenly, the bright light of the buddha land. And suddenly you are in a totally different world – the world of the Lotus Law, the world of dharma, the world of Tao.Wonderful, indeed,The Lotus Flower of the Law!However many ages may pass,Still that same color.The crescent moonBecomes full, and wanes,And nothing is left;But still, there in the dawn,The crescent moon!Individual lives come and go, but the eternal life remains. It is like the moon – you see? For fifteen days it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, and then comes the full-moon night. Then it starts becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, and then one night it has disappeared completely. But do you think the moon disappears or appears? The moon remains the same; it is always there. The appearance and disappearance is only the appearance of the moon. The reality of the moon is always there. The crescent moon becomes full, and wanes, and nothing is left; but still, there in the dawn, the crescent moon!You live in two dimensions, on two planes. In the Upanishads there is a story, a parable or metaphor, of two birds living in the same tree, absolutely alike. One bird is sitting on the highest branch, utterly quiet, silent, unmoving, doing nothing, with closed eyes, somewhere in. The other bird on the lowest branches, jumping from one branch to another, hankering for this flower, for that fruit, competing with this or with that, jealous of this and that, in a continuous restlessness.Slowly, slowly, the restless bird becomes tired of restlessness. And one day he looks up and sees the other bird which is exactly like him – exactly like him, just a replica – and is so silent, so restful, so calm, so collected, as if the other bird does not exist. There is only silence. The restless bird becomes attracted by this magic and starts moving toward the upper branch. This is the beginning of disciplehood. He comes closer and closer and closer and closer, and finally becomes one with the other bird.The Upanishads say these two birds are not two, but two aspects of consciousness; everyone has these two aspects. On the tree of life your innermost witness is sitting right now. The Lotus Flower is blooming in all its beauty and grandeur and splendor, and you are jumping from one branch to another, competing, jealous, angry, hateful, fighting, doing a thousand and one things and getting more and more frustrated.Look up! And remember, “look up” means exactly what is meant by “look in.” “Look out” means “look down”; “look up” means “look in” – they are synonymous. Look up or look in, and suddenly there is a being sitting inside you, a buddha. One starts moving, attracted by the charisma, by the magic of this silence, and one day becomes one with the innermost core.All changes happen to this restless bird: the rising moon, the waning moon. Nothing happens to the other bird, the witness: it is always the same.Whenever we see them, all areJust as they are:The willow is green,The flower is red.Nothing changes in the world, remember. When you go in, nothing changes in the world. Just you change, your attitude changes, your vision changes. The world remains the same, it goes on the same. Rivers go on flowing, the birds go on singing, flowers go on blooming; the world continues the same. But you are no longer the same.And when you look at the outside from that inner vision, things also now have a new beauty.Whenever we see them, all are just as they are… Now you can see things as they are. Before that, you have not seen things as they are, never. For example, you are passing by the side of your neighbor’s garden, and a beautiful roseflower has bloomed. Can you see this roseflower just as it is? You cannot; jealousy will prevent you. The flower has bloomed in your neighbor’s garden, not in your garden, how can you enjoy it? In fact, you are hurt, offended by it, because your own flowers look so tiny. There is comparison; you feel bad. See the nonsense of it. Such a beautiful rose, but the idea that “It is not in my garden, it does not enhance my ego,” and you miss the beauty of it. Now you want to possess it.You see a beautiful woman passing by, but she is somebody else’s woman, not yours. You would like to possess this woman. You can appreciate this beauty only when you can possess it. In fact, to possess beauty is to kill it. How can you possess beauty if you love it? It is impossible. To love and to possess are antagonistic, contradictory; they can’t go together. The moment you possess beauty, you have already killed it. You have reduced it to a thing, it is a commodity.Beauty can be loved, enjoyed, only when there is no possessiveness. So when a man has become transformed by his inner vision, when he has reached into his innermost core and seen that all the games of the ego are false, and has settled there in the joy and silence of eternity, has become only a witness, then he opens his eyes: now he can see things as they are.The flower is just a flower, it is nobody’s. The beautiful woman is just beautiful, she is nobody’s. How can a woman be somebody’s? Suddenly existence appears as it is, all I-thou is gone. And when I-thou is gone, conflict disappears. In that consciousness:The willow is green, the flower is red. The flower is not less red because it has bloomed in the neighbor’s garden. The willow is not less green because it is not yours. The willow is not less green because you are sad. Have you watched it? Things change with your mood. If you are happy the moon looks beautiful and very happy, and when you are sad the moon looks sad and very miserable. You project your moods on things.When a man has reached to his ultimate core, there is no longer any projection. He sees things as they are. He is never unhappy, never happy now; all those dualities are gone. He remains non-dual, he remains eternally silent, calm and quiet and blissful. Now things are as they are. The willow is green, the flower is red.Buddhism helps people to attain to great aesthetic sensibility. It is not an accident that Zen masters write poetry. Nobody has ever heard of Catholic monks painting, nobody has ever heard of Hindu sannyasins painting. Buddhism released great creativity into the world. Why? Other religions have been very uncreative, other religions have been very, very dull; the flavor of life is missing. They have not helped people to dance, to sing, to paint, to play.Zen seems to be the best that has happened up to now. My vision of religion is also that of creativity. You come closer to godliness through creativity; you come closer to the creator through creativity. Creativity should be one of the fundamental criteria of a religious person.Create! Let creativity be your religion, and you will never be lost again. The more you create, the more you will grow in. It happens both ways: if you create more, you grow in more; if you grow in more, you create more.If religion is just negative and life-denying it becomes ugly, it becomes a monster. When religion is creative it helps you to see the greenness of the world, the rosiness of the roses, helps you to hear these birds in a crystal clear way, helps you to feel and be sensitive to the silences, the pauses, the sounds in existence, helps you to be in such a harmony that you can feel the harmony of the whole. To feel the harmony of the whole is to become holy.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 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-12/

The first question:Osho,Though your talk was quite serious and deep yesterday, there were strange tickles and laughter arising in me. Somewhere deep within, there was a sense of humor as a subtle undercurrent. Tears often rolled down!Do the moments of clarity and insight give birth to a sense of humor? And what are the tears?Yes, Chinmaya, clarity always brings a sense of humor. One starts laughing, not at others but at oneself, at the whole ridiculousness of ego games, the whole stupidity of the human mind. And when there is laughter, tears are not far away; they are aspects of the same energy. They are not diametrically opposite, they are complementary.Whenever there is deep laughter, tears are bound to follow; whenever there are deep tears, laughter will soon follow. They go together; they are parts of one climate – the climate of clarity, depth, height.You may be surprised to know that schizophrenics cannot laugh, and a person who cannot laugh has something of schizophrenia in him, is mentally ill. Schizophrenics start laughing only when they are getting out of their schizophrenia. It has been observed that a psychoanalyst can terminate treatment once he sees a schizophrenic laughing. This is a fact of great importance.Many so-called saints are really schizophrenic, they cannot laugh. And if you cannot laugh, how can you weep, how can you cry? Both become impossible, and when laughter and crying are impossible, your heart is completely closed. You don’t have any emotions, you start living only in the head; your whole reality consists of thoughts. Thoughts are dry: they cannot bring laughter, they cannot bring tears. Tears and laughter come from the heart. Clarity is of the heart, not of the mind; confusion is of the mind.So, it has been a good experience: your schizophrenia is disappearing, I can terminate the treatment. Laugh more, cry more, become a child again. Seriousness is your disease: drop seriousness and don’t confuse seriousness and sincerity. Seriousness is not sincerity. Sincerity need not be serious; sincerity can have laughter, can cry, and can weep. Seriousness is a blocked stage of mind, a stage where you cannot flow; it is a state of unflowing stagnancy. Serious people are ill people.Religion has been destroyed by serious people. There is one thing about serious people that you have to remember: they are very articulate, because they live in the head. They are logic choppers; they can express well. And because they have no heart, because they cannot feel, they are very authoritative. A man of feeling cannot be authoritative – how can compassion be authoritative?A man of feeling always hesitates; he cannot make dogmatic statements. The man of feeling whispers, persuades, he cannot convince; he comes indirectly, like a subtle breeze. But the serious person, the person who lives in the head, the schizophrenic, is articulate, verbal, logical, rational, loud, authoritative, and these qualities enable him to gather a following.All political leaders are schizophrenic. The crowd follows them because of their dogmatic statements; their dogmatic statements convince people. People are very vague, uncertain, insecure, and they need somebody to make them feel secure, even if he is a fool, an Adolf Hitler. It is a great puzzle to those who ponder over human problems how Adolf Hitler, a mediocre person of below average IQ, could convince a country like Germany, an intellectual country, an intelligent country, a country of professors, philosophers, thinkers. How was it possible that this idiotic person, Adolf Hitler, could convince people of such an intelligent race?To me, it is not a problem at all. I can see through and through how it happened. Adolf Hitler was dogmatic; whatsoever he said, he said it absolutely. Only a foolish person can be dogmatic. Lao Tzu hesitates. Lao Tzu says: “I walk as one walks in cold winter in a cold stream. Everybody is certain except me; I am uncertain, I hesitate. I cannot claim knowledge, because all is so mysterious.”Now, Lao Tzu is not going to convince people. If you hesitate, nobody is going to follow you. People are in deep confusion. They need somebody to shout so loudly in their ears that they are convinced: “This man must be true, this man must be in the know about things. How can he shout so loudly? How can he argue so loudly? Only truth can be so loud.” They are mistaken.These dogmatic people go on repeating; Hitler continued to repeat the same theme. Slowly, slowly, when any untruth is repeated again and again it begins to look like a truth. People need somebody to lean on: they are uncertain, and need somebody who is absolutely certain. Politics is dominated by schizophrenics; religion is dominated by schizophrenics. These people are very, very articulate, convincing, they lead masses, establish religions, churches, organizations.Jesus could not manage to lead many people; it has been estimated that he had a following of less than five hundred. And when he was crucified, thousands gathered to jeer at him. He had only twelve close disciples, only twelve – a man with the qualities of Jesus. What happened, was he not convincing?He was not convincing in the way that people need. He was saying things in a mysterious way: in parables, in metaphors, in poetry. He was not logical, he was utterly illogical. He was vague. He was hinting, pointing, but he was not assertive.Christianity was not born with Christ, it was born with Saint Paul, who must certainly have been a schizophrenic. Saul – his original name – was at first against Christ, so anti-Christ that he wanted to destroy all the Christians. One day he was traveling to the country where Jesus’ followers were slowly gathering, slowly becoming courageous, slowly starting to teach people, spreading the message. He was going there to argue, to discuss, to defeat them.The story goes that on the road something happened, he was possessed by the spirit of Christ. He fell down on the road, dust in his mouth. He could not believe it! He saw Jesus. He asked forgiveness, he became converted. He changed his name from Saul to Paul. And this man was the founder of Christianity.Now, what actually happened in psychological terms? This man must have had a split personality; he must have been a schizophrenic. Nobody appeared, no Christ appeared. But he was very much against Christ with one part of his mind, and completely unaware of another part. When he went deep into that part which was against Christ, the pendulum swung from one extreme to another extreme. That’s how it always happens.He was going to persecute Christians – that small number of people who were talking of Jesus, remembering the man and the beauty of the man, the suffering that he went through for them, and the message that he had given to them. Slowly, slowly the word was spreading and this man Saul was going to persecute these people. And he was able to argue well. Jesus’ followers would not have been able to convince him; he would have convinced them. They were simple people, innocent people, farmers, fisherman, carpenters, uneducated people.When you go to one extreme the pendulum swings back of its own accord. This is what actually happened. The pendulum swung, moved to the other extreme, and another part of his being took possession of him. He had a dream, a vision – there was no Christ, but he saw him. He was convinced and he was converted; this schizophrenic created the whole Christianity. He was going to persecute Christians: he converted the whole world to Christianity. He created the church.It has always been so. Whenever a religion is born, sooner or later schizophrenics will catch hold of it. They are great leaders; they convince people. Their impact is great, their slogans convert people. They are loud, logical; they collect proofs, they argue.Because of these people, no religion remains pure for long. The really religious persons are those who are not articulate, who are innocent, those who are simple, meditative, loving, who cannot convince anybody. They simply live religion; they cannot create great religions, great religious empires.It is good that humor is arising in you, Chinmaya. Allow it, don’t crush it. Help it to come, let it surface. Humor will join your split parts, will glue your fragments into one whole. You may have observed that when you have a hearty laugh, suddenly all fragments disappear and you become one. When you laugh, your soul and your body are one – they laugh together. When you think, your body and soul are separate. When you cry, your body and soul are one; they function in harmony.Remember always: all those things are good, for the good, which make you one whole. Laughing, crying, dancing, singing: these things make you one piece, functioning as one harmony. Thinking can go on in the head, and the body can go on doing a thousand and one things; you can go on eating, and the mind can go on thinking. This is split. You walk on the road: the body is walking and you are thinking. Not thinking of the road, not thinking of the trees that surround it, not thinking of the sun, not thinking of the people who are passing, but thinking of other things, of other worlds.But laugh, and if the laugh is really deep, if it is not just a pseudo laugh, just on the lips, suddenly you feel your body and your soul are functioning together. It is not only in the body, it goes into your deepest core. It arises from your very being and spreads toward the circumference. You are one in laughter, or in crying, or in dancing, or in singing! Whatever makes you feel one is good, is meditative, is prayerful.The second question:Osho,Is the purpose of the therapy groups to bring the participants to their natural self? If so, isn't the effort to be natural, unnatural? If not, what is the essential difference between natural and unnatural?The purpose of the therapy groups is not to bring the participants to their natural self, not at all. The purpose of the therapy groups is to bring you to the point where you can see your unnaturalness. Nobody can bring you to your natural self; there can be no method, no technique, no device, which can bring you to your natural self, because all that you will do will make you more and more unnatural.Then what is the purpose of a therapy group? It is simply to make you aware of the unnatural patterns that have evolved in your being. It simply helps you to see the unnaturalness of your life, that’s all. Seeing it, it starts dispersing. To see it is to annihilate it, because once you have seen something as unnatural in your being, you cannot persist in it. Seeing something as unnatural, you have also felt what is natural – but that is indirect, that is vague, that is not clear. What is clear is this: you have seen that something is unnatural in you. Seeing the unnatural, you can feel the natural. Seeing the unnatural, you can no longer support it. It existed because of your support, nothing can exist without your support; your cooperation is needed.If you cooperate, something exists. Certainly the unnatural cannot exist without your cooperation. Where will it get the energy? The natural can exist without your cooperation, but the unnatural cannot. The unnatural needs constant support, it needs constant care, it needs constant control. Once you have seen that this is unnatural, your grip on it becomes loose; your fist opens of its own accord.The group is not a device to open your fist. It is just to help you see that what you are doing is unnatural. In that very seeing, there is transformation.You ask: “Is the purpose of the therapy groups to bring the participants to their natural self?” No, that is not the purpose. The purpose is simply to make you aware of where you are, what you have done to yourself, what harm you have done and are still doing, what wounds you are creating in your being. On each of the wounds is your signature, and the purpose of the group is to make you alert about your signature. To see that it is signed by you, nobody else has been doing it. To see that you have created all the chains around you, the prison you live in is your own work; nobody is doing it to you.Seeing that, “I am creating my own prison,” how long can you go on creating it? If you want to live in the prison, that’s another matter. Nobody ever really wants to live in prison; they do because they think that others are creating the prisons, and they can do nothing. They always throw the responsibility on somebody else. Down the ages, people have found new and different devices, but the purpose remains the same: throw the responsibility on somebody else.You will be surprised at the excuses man has been able to find. In the ancient days, man used to think, “This is the way God made us, so the responsibility is God’s. What can we do? We are just creatures, and we are the way he has made us. We have to live in this misery. This is destined.” That was a trick to relieve themselves of all responsibility.But when a trick has worked for a long time it becomes a cliché. It no longer works; people are fed up with it. They start searching for new ideas, but the purpose remains the same. Marx says it is the society, the economic structure of the society, the exploitation, the exploiters, the imperialists, the capitalists that are doing the harm; they are the reason. Again you are relieved of the responsibility. So what can you do? The slavery is imposed upon you, you have been made miserable. Unless the revolution comes nothing is going to happen; so you can postpone.And the revolution never comes; it has not happened yet. Not in Russia, not in China – nowhere. The revolution never comes; it is just a postponement. Man is as miserable in Russia as he is anywhere else, as much in the mire of the mind as anywhere else. Jealousy is as much in Russia as anywhere else. Anger is as much, violence is as much. Nothing has changed.Freud says it is because of your upbringing. In your childhood you have been brought up wrongly, what can you do? It has already happened; now there is no way of undoing it. At the most, you can accept it and live it. Or you can go on fighting unnecessarily, but there is no hope.Freud is one of the greatest pessimists ever. He says there is no hope for man, because in childhood the pattern is settled for ever. Then you go on repeating the pattern, throwing the responsibility. Now your mother is responsible. And the mother thinks what can she do when her own mother is responsible, and so on and so forth. These are all devices, but the purpose is the same; they are just different devices for the single purpose of taking responsibility off your shoulders.The group therapy is to make you aware that neither God nor society is responsible, nor your parents are responsible; if anybody is responsible, it is you. A group process is a hammering of this simple fact: that it is you who are responsible. And this hammering has a great significance because once you understand that “This is me, I, myself, am doing wrong to myself,” then the doors open. Then there is hope; then something is possible.Revolution is possible through responsibility, individual responsibility. You can transmute; you can drop those old patterns. They are not your destiny. But if you accept them as your destiny they become your destiny. It is all a question of whether or not to support them.I am not saying that parents have not done something to you, remember, and I am not saying that society has not done anything to you. The society has done much, parents have done much, education and priests have done much. But, still, the ultimate key is in your hands; you can drop the whole conditioning. Whatsoever they have done, you can erase it, because your consciousness at the deepest core always remains free. That is the purpose of a therapy group, to bring this truth home: that you are responsible. Responsibility is the most important word in a group therapy process. Nobody wants to take responsibility, because it hurts. Just to see the point, “I am the cause of my misery,” hurts very much. If somebody else is the cause, one can accept it, one is helpless. But if I am the cause of my misery, it hurts, it goes against the ego; it goes against pride.That’s why group therapy is a difficult process, hard. You want to escape from Encounter, from Tao, from Primal Therapy. You want to escape because you have always believed that you are perfectly right, you are perfectly good; others have been doing harm to you.Now the whole thing has to be changed; you have to put everything upside down. Nobody is doing any harm to you, or if they are doing any harm, it is through your cooperation. So finally you are responsible, you have chosen it. You say, “My husband is doing harm to me,” but you have chosen this husband, in fact, only so that he can do harm to you. You wanted to be harmed and that’s why you have chosen this husband, this wife.Just watch people who go on changing their wives. You will be surprised that again and again they find the same type of woman. It is a difficult thing to find the same type of woman, but they find one. And within six months they are complaining again, and the complaints are exactly the same.I have heard about one man who married eight times; again and again he managed to find the same type of woman. Just see the point: he had a certain kind of mind, a certain conditioning. In that conditioning, only a certain type of woman appealed to him. A blonde or a brunette, a long nose, black eyes, or something – a certain kind of woman appealed to him; he was always attracted by a certain kind of woman. When that woman started doing the same things he was puzzled – he thought he had changed the woman.You have changed the woman, but you have not changed your mind. So your choice remains the old, because the chooser is the old. It is not going to help; you will be in the same trap. The color of the trap may change, the fiber of the trap may change, but the trap is there and you will be trapped again and again, and the same misery will arise.Group therapy is a great process of understanding “What I have been doing to myself!” You can go still deeper, where no group therapy, not even primal therapy has gone. But Buddha has gone deeper. He says if you have chosen a certain kind of parent, that is also your choice.See the point: millions of foolish people were making love when you were hovering to take birth, but you chose a certain couple. Why? You must have had a certain idea; it was your choice. You say, “My parents have done harm to me.” Why did you choose them? You think your wife, your husband has done you harm? The society has harmed you, but who has created this society? You have created this society; it does not come out of the blue.The beggar on the road has not appeared suddenly out of the blue; we have created him. If you want to become rich, somebody has to become a beggar. Seeing the beggar you feel very sorry, and you still carry the idea of becoming rich. Whom are you trying to deceive? If you want to become rich, somebody will have to become a beggar. If you want to become somebody, then somebody will not be able to reach fame. It is a competitive world. You don’t want wars, but you are violent; in everything you are violent, and you condemn wars.Have you seen the pacifists and their processions? How violent they look with their slogans against war, their shouts against war. Sooner or later the procession turns into a riot; they are burning cars and destroying offices and burning buses and trains and attacking the police, and all in protest against war. Now what is happening? These people are violent people; war is just an excuse. Their protest is nothing but their expression of violence. They are not concerned about war; they are using it as a pretext.This society is created by you. And then you say that society is responsible. Nobody is responsible except you. This is one of the hardest truths to accept. But once you accept it, it brings great freedom, it creates great space. Because with this, another possibility immediately opens up: “If I am responsible, then I can change. If I am not responsible, how can I change? If I am doing it to myself, then it hurts, but it also brings a new possibility that I can stop hurting myself, I can stop being miserable.” A group process is not to make you natural; it is to make you aware of your unnaturalness, of your phoniness.“Is the purpose of the therapy groups to bring the participants to their natural self?” No, not at all. The purpose is just to make them aware of the unnatural self. The natural self comes of its own accord; nobody can bring it. When the unnatural disappears, the natural is found. The natural has always been there, hidden under the rubbish. Unnatural gone, you are natural. You don’t become natural; you have always been natural. How can one become natural? All becoming will lead you into unnaturalness.“If so, isn’t the effort to be natural, unnatural?” Yes, the effort to be natural is always unnatural. But to understand the unnaturalness is not the effort to be natural, it is simple understanding. If you see that you have been trying to squeeze oil out of sand, you see the futility of it, you drop the whole project. Seeing that you have been trying to pass through a wall and hurting your head, you stop trying to pass through the wall, you start looking for the door. Yes, exactly like that.“If not, what is the essential difference between natural and unnatural?” Natural is that which you have been given as a gift – a gift from the whole. Unnatural is that which you have created by teachings, scriptures, character, morality. The unnatural is that which you have imposed upon the natural, the given. The natural is from existence, the unnatural is from yourself. Take away all that you have imposed upon yourself, and godliness will burst forth into a thousand blossoms in your being.Somebody asks Jesus, “What is your fundamental message?” And he says, “Ask the fowl and the fish and the flower.” What does he mean, “Ask the fowl and the fish and the flower”? He is saying: Ask nature.My message is: Allow nature to take possession of you; don’t try to create any character. All characters are wrong; be characterless. Don’t create any sort of personality; all personalities are false. Don’t be a personality.Then, slowly, slowly, you will see something arising from the deepest core of your being. That is nature. Its fragrance is great. It is good; it is never bad. It is not cultivated at all; hence it has no tensions in it, no anxiety, you need not maintain it.Truth need not be maintained; untruths have to be managed, maintained, need care and maintenance. Still they are untrue and they never become truth. Only truth liberates.The therapy available here is not to make you natural. Nobody can make you natural, existence has already done that. The problem is not to learn how to be natural: the problem is how to unlearn the unnatural.The third question:Osho,How to be total? How to give everything?One can be total only when one is not. Only emptiness can be total. If you are, you can’t be total. Your very presence will be a disturbance in your totality; your very presence will continue interfering with your totality.That’s why Buddha says become a nothingness. Just look deep into yourself and let the cloud of the ego disperse. Let there be empty sky; in that empty sky there is no division. Clouds divide; when there are no clouds, the sky is undivided, one. Thoughts divide; when there are no thoughts in you, there is totality. And remember, even the thought of totality will be a divisive factor.Now you ask: “How to be total?” This is an idea. Listening to me, seeing the grandeur of totality again and again, greed arises in you: “How to be total?” But you have missed the whole point. How can you ask such a question? Totality is not something that you have to do. If you do something, you will remain partial. Doing can never be total, only non-doing can be total. When you are a non-doer, when there is nobody doing anything, there is totality. Totality is absence of all doing, all thinking, all that divides. Totality is silence, utter stillness.Don’t ask: How to be total? Just ask: How to see why I am not total? Remember, that’s why Buddha’s path is known as “via negativa“ – via the negation. It does not talk about positive things; it simply talks about the negative.Don’t ask how to be natural; ask how not to be unnatural. Don’t ask how to be total; ask how not to be non-total. Just seeing is the question. Sometimes you are total; just watch what happens in those moments.Making love, sometimes it happens, you are total. That totality is called orgasm. Mind stops for a moment. The frenzy of love, the madness of two energies meeting, merging, and the mind is surpassed, transcended. The mind is pushed aside; the mind is no longer needed in that space. All thoughts disappear, time stops, and suddenly you are total.That’s why people are so much in love with love in spite of all the saints. They don’t bother about the saints. People go on loving – they pay lip service to the saints but they go on living and loving; they don’t follow them. They know that they have only one moment of ecstasy, and that is love.If you have gone to Khajuraho you must have seen the ecstatic expression on the faces of maithun figures – lovers in deep ecstasy. Even the stone has become ecstatic. Those stone statues, that sculpture, has great poetry, has great softness. Those creators must have been of immense experience; to turn stone into loving ecstasy is great art. I have seen many things, but nothing compared to Khajuraho. Khajuraho remains the greatest wonder on the earth: transforming stone into ecstasy. The faces show something of the transcendental; time has stopped. There are no thoughts in the heads; all division has disappeared. These moments are holy moments, because they come from the whole.You ask me how to be total. Just look in some moments when you are total, just to see the taste of totality. Sometimes is happens listening to music, or watching a sunset. It can happen listening to me. If you are deep in love with me, it happens; it happens again and again every day. I can see on your faces the same expression as is there on Khajuraho statues. You disappear; something stops deep down in you. There is no movement, everything is utterly quiet, and you are total.I give you the taste of totality every day, and you ask me how to be total! Just allow these moments more and more; don’t miss a single opportunity. Looking at the trees, look so deeply that you disappear in the look. Listening to the birds, forget yourself completely, and so on and so forth.Every moment there is a possibility to be total. Whatsoever you are doing, be absorbed in it so utterly that the mind does not think, is just there, is just a presence. More and more, totality will be coming, and the taste of totality will make you more capable of being total.Try to see when you are not total. Those are the moments which have to be dropped slowly, slowly. When you are not total, whenever you are in the head – thinking, brooding, calculating, cunning, clever – you are not total. Slowly, slowly, slip out of those moments. It is just an old habit; habits die hard. But they die, certainly, if one persists, they die.I have heard about a man whose wife died. And he was sitting late, very late, in the pub. Somebody asked, “Why do you still go on sitting late? You used to tell me that it is because of the wife that you sit in the pub so long. But now the wife is dead!”The man suddenly stood up. He said, “Thank you! I had completely forgotten – just old habit!”Just a few months ago, it happened: the defense minister of India, Jagjivan Ram, spoke somewhere in the south. For one hour he criticized the Congress party and Indira Gandhi. He himself has been in the Congress his whole life; he was a defense minister in Indira’s government too. Then he changed his party, became part of the Janata party. For one hour he spoke against the Congress party, and in the end he asked the audience: “Please vote Congress.”Just old habit – must have been doing this for fifty years: “Vote Congress!”Habits die hard; to be untotal is just a habit. And sometimes, in spite of yourself, totality happens. So just watch those moments: when it happens, how it happens. Learn some secrets from those moments and move in those moments more and more. Then see when it is not happening and get out of those moments, slip out. It is not a science; it is a knack, a very, very subtle art.You ask: “How to be total? How to give everything?” It is not a question of giving everything. On the contrary, it is a question of recognizing the fact that you have nothing. This idea of “How to give everything?” is again egoistic. What have you got to give? You are all beggars; you have nothing to give.And you ask: “How to give everything?” The very idea of giving is meaningless. When you have something to give, it gives itself, it shares itself. When you are happy, happiness spreads. When you are blissful, it overflows. One never asks “How to give?” One simply gives! One cannot do otherwise. That state finds its own way of expression and sharing. When you have a song it sings itself; you don’t have to ask how to sing it. It bursts forth in jubilation, in a great shout of joy. The shout may be wordless, may be meaningless, but that is not the point.What is the meaning of hallelujah? There is no meaning in it. It is not a word at all; it is just a shout of joy. You are saying that you have something which cannot be said. You are saying something which has never been said and cannot be said.But when it is there it happens. When the clouds come and they are full of rain they don’t ask, “How can I give everything?” They simply start giving, they start showering. When the flower opens it does not ask, “How can I share my fragrance?” In fact, what can the flower do? There is no question of doing. The fragrance is already on the way, on the wing; it has started moving.When you have, sharing happens. When you don’t have, only then do these questions arise: “How do I give? How do I share?” Every evening, people come to ask me how to share. And my problem is that I don’t see anything that they are going to share; there is nothing. When you don’t have anything, this question arises: “How to share?” This question keeps you happy that you have something to share but you don’t know how to share. This keeps you unaware of the fact that you don’t have anything to share. When you have, it happens spontaneously; you cannot resist it, it has to be given forth. There is no way to avoid, it is inevitable.So first you ask: “How to be total?” Not to be, is to be total. Secondly, you ask: “How to give everything?” Know that you have nothing, and wait in silence, in patience. Something will start flowing out of your being. It will take you unaware; it will be a great surprise that you have started sharing.The most difficult thing in the world is to see that you don’t have anything. It is the most difficult, because it feels so bad that you are empty, that you are a beggar. People go on pretending that they have something.Just the other night, Prem’s mother came to see me. She has been here for many months. Now, within two or three weeks she will be leaving, so she came to see me for the first time. For many months she has been here, but avoiding me, protecting herself, defending. Listening to me, and yet not listening to me, seeing me, yet with closed eyes. Being here with my people, but keeping aloof.Last night she was there to see me, and I asked her to become a sannyasin – now it is time. And she said, “I cannot become, because I am a Roman Catholic. And I believe in God, and you are against beliefs, and I cannot leave my belief. And God has been very good to me.”Just the idea of becoming a sannyasin disturbed her deeply. She immediately became defensive. That’s why I had asked – to bring her whole defense mechanism to the surface. Now she says, “I believe in God, and I cannot drop this belief.”I asked her, “Do you believe in your belief more than you want to know God? God is not so very significant, it seems. Your belief in God is more significant. I am saying to you that if you drop your beliefs you will be able to see God!”But she said, “No. I cannot drop my belief. How can I drop my belief? Why should I drop my belief? God has been very good to me.”As if God has not been good to everybody else. God is simply good! That is the meaning of the word God – unconditionally good. It is not so that it is good only when you believe in God. Then what kind of God will it be? If you believe, he is good; if you don’t believe, he is bad. If you believe, he brings blessings to you; if you don’t believe, he brings curses to you.Josephine thinks that God has been good to her because she believes in him. God is simply good. Believing or not believing makes no difference. The sun shines on both the theist and the atheist. When the moon comes it shares its joy with everybody, Communist and Capitalist. There is no distinction. God is good! But people think this way.Really she is saying, “If I drop my belief then I am afraid God will not be good.” What kind of trust is this? She said, “I cannot drop my belief.” I said to her, “Your hands are empty; I see your hands are empty. You don’t have anything in your hands.” But she wouldn’t listen.God is not important to her, her belief is important to her. And what is “my belief”? It is just hiding your ignorance, pretending that you know. It is very difficult to know that you don’t know. It is very difficult to see that you don’t have anything, that your hands are empty. This is the courage that I am trying to create in you: to see that you don’t have anything, that your hands are empty, and that you are empty, that there is no being inside, that all beliefs are just tricks to create the feeling that you have something.When one becomes utterly naked and nude and empty, and all disappears and all is dropped from the hands, then the great, radical change comes. One is transformed. In your emptiness, one day you become full. Out of emptiness, fullness is born. The sharing is inevitable; nobody can stop it, there is nobody to stop it.The fourth question:Osho,You say that you want the new commune to be separate from the rest of the world. What I see is that the ashram is the marketplace. Please comment.The commune has to be separate from the rest of the world, but that does not mean that it cannot be a marketplace. That does not mean that it has to be some other world. It is going to be this world, with a different quality to it: it will be a marketplace with meditation and love in it.I am not against the marketplace. I am not against the mundane, I am all for it. But the mundane can have a suffused quality of the sacred. I am not against the ordinary; the ordinary, lived rightly, becomes extraordinary.My commune is not going to be a monastery; it will be a marketplace, with a difference. It will not be a monastery and it will not be the ordinary marketplace. It will be something that transcends both and implies both. It has to be like that, because man is body and soul together. The body needs the marketplace, the soul needs a monastery.The monastery has always existed against the marketplace – soul against body. And the marketplace has existed against the monastery – body against soul. I don’t want to divide you; I want to create individuals here, not divided, split personalities. I accept all; the world is beautiful. The monastery has to become a marketplace; the marketplace has to become a monastery.It will be separate from this world, not because I am against the world, but because right now this world won’t allow a new wave to arise. It will crush it. The new wave has to be protected; the commune is going to be a nursery. Once my sannyasins have become strong enough, then there will be no point, no problem. They can move into the world, they can go into the world and be in the world. But only once they have become strong trees. If they are very soft, small plants, just budding, they will be crushed by the world.The commune is going to be a nursery. And the commune is also going to be a marketplace, because all your needs have to be fulfilled. I am not against your needs, I am not against anything; I am not life-negative. My approach toward life is not that of an ascetic. My commune will create people who are both Buddhas and Epicuruses, together; people who enjoy life, and enjoy godliness, and don’t create any division. When meditation is released, the marketplace becomes a temple. You can see it happening here: people who are working here, their work is their worship.Josephine was telling me about her daughter, Prem. She could not believe her own eyes as she watched her for many months: Prem works ten hours every day, typing, typing, typing, with no holiday, and yet she seems to be very happy. It looks as if she is typing for ten hours, on the surface it is so; deep down something else is happening. It is a love affair with me; those are my words she is typing. It is worship, it is her prayerfulness; it is her devotion. And if you love your work, there is no question of any holiday. All days are holidays; each moment is holy.My commune is going to be of this world, and yet an opening for the other. It has to be rooted in the earth; in fact only when something is rooted in the earth can it grow unto the sky. A tree, to go high in the sky, to whisper with the winds, to dance with the sun, to have a dialogue with the stars, must first go deep down into the earth, spread its roots into the deepest layers of the earth.You don’t say to a tree, “You are contradictory: you want to rise high in the sky, then why are you spreading your roots into the earth? This is a contradiction.” Yes, it is a contradiction as far as logic is concerned, but life is not logical. The tree will laugh at your logic and will call you foolish, because if there are no roots deep in the earth, there can be no branches in the sky. The tree can move only proportionately, in the same proportion: as it goes deep, it goes high. Depth brings height, in the same proportion; it is always balanced.The marketplace is the earth. My commune is going to be a marketplace. It will be rooted in the earth; it will have roots deep into the earth. And still it will dance with the winds, sing with the sun, rise higher into godliness. Where godliness and the world meet, there real religion exists.So, you must have some condemnatory idea about the marketplace. The marketplace has not to be dropped but transformed. Nothing has to be dropped, everything has to be transformed. Whatsoever is given to you is given with a purpose; it can be used. The same substance can become manure and can create great fragrance in roses. If you collect manure in your house, it will stink: it stinks if you collect it. If you spread it on the soil, it brings thousands of roses, and a fragrance that is not of this world, a freshness that is not of this world.Each and everything has to be transformed. My commune has to be magical.The fifth question:Osho,Rene Descartes says, “Cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am.” There is another statement which is now going round in the West: “Coito, ergo sum – I love, therefore I am,” or, “I copulate, therefore I am.” What is the difference between the two statements?First, both are wrong. “I think, therefore I am” is putting things upside down. Your being is first; your thinking arises later on. Your thinking cannot become a proof for your being. Being precedes, being is first; thinking is later.Descartes is not aware at all of the Eastern approach: that a moment comes when thinking can be dropped again, and still you are. That’s what happens in meditation: thinking is no more, but you are. So thinking is arbitrary, non-essential; it is not essential to “I am.”He says: “Cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am.” No: “I am, therefore I think.” But that is only one dimension. “I am, therefore I feel,” is another dimension. “I am, therefore I love,” everything is preceded by “I am.” That pure existence, that “amness” precedes all.So both statements are false, not true. But if you have to choose between the two, then the second is far better. First is “Cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am.” Second is “Coito, ergo sum – I copulate, therefore I am.” The second is far better than the first. Thinking is of the head, very fragmentary; copulation is more total, more orgasmic.The second statement can be approved by the whole philosophy of Tantra. The first is ordinary, the second is extraordinary. But one has to remember that being precedes all. You are in the beginning, and you will be in the end. And all else is in between; like dreams, things come and go.I have heard…A villager, an old man, was sitting on his fence watching the traffic go by. Many cars were passing, and trucks and buses, and he was enjoying the scene. A motorist stopped, seeing the old man, very old – must have been eighty or more – enjoying himself so much just sitting on the fence. He asked, “What is the matter, old man? You look so happy. I cannot sit on the fence for more than a few minutes; I will become so restless. And you look so happy and so silent. I am always on the go, driving from one place to another, from one town to another. That keeps me happy; I am a traveler, a born vagabond. You are just the opposite.”The old man laughed and he said, “Son, there is not much difference. You go in your car seeing fences pass by. I sit on my fence seeing cars pass by. There is not much difference. It is all the same.”In the beginning I am, in the end I am. In the middle, a thousand and one things happen – what Zen people call “the ten thousand things” happen. But it is all the same: misery and happiness, ecstasy, excitement and agony, pain and pleasure – just dreams on the way. The source remains uncontaminated, and to return to the source is the whole process of coming to truth.The sixth question:Osho,Nothing to do, nowhere to go. You say it so clearly. Your words fall like a crystal clear waterfall on my head. Some keep dancing in my heart. Yet I wonder. What are we doing here?I wonder too, because we are not really doing anything here. That’s what we are doing: we are learning how to be in a state of non-doing – wu-wei.And the last question:Osho,somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyondany experience, your eyes have their silence:in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,or which i cannot touch because they are too nearyour slightest look will easily unclose methough i have closed myself as fingers,you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first roseor if your wish be to close me, i andmy life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,as when the heart of this flower imaginesthe snow carefully everywhere descending;nothing which we are to perceive in this world equalsthe power of your intense fragility: whose texturecompels me with the color of its countries,rendering death and forever with each breathing(i do not know what it is about you that closesand opens; only something in me understandsthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)nobody, not even the rain, has such small handse. e. cummingsThank you, Katya.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 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-13/

Since the journey of lifeIs little but grief and pain,Why should we be so reluctantTo return to the sky of our native place?To write something and leave it behind us,It is but a dream.When we awake we knowThere is not even anyone to read it.Though we do not preach the doctrine,Unasked the flowers bloom in spring;They fall and scatter,They turn to dust.We are born, we die.All are the same,Sakyamuni, Daruma,The cat and the ladle.To harden into a buddha is wrong;All the more I think soWhen I look at a stone buddha.A fable is told of a centipede with arthritis who sought the advice of a wise old owl. “Centipede,” the owl said, “you have a hundred legs, all swollen up. Now if I were you, I would change myself into a stork. With only two legs you will cut your pain by ninety-eight percent, and if you use your wings you can stay off your legs altogether.”The centipede was elated. “I accept your suggestion without hesitation,” he said. “Now just tell me, how do I go about making the change?”“Oh,” said the owl. “I wouldn’t know about the details, I only make general policy.”Buddhism is not interested in general policy. It is not interested in philosophical speculation. It is interested in the details of life, its sufferings and their causes. It does not give you outlandish solutions; it does not provide you with new dreams. It simply looks face to face into life. It does not bring God in, or heaven and hell. It does not create a theology at all, because all theology is an effort to escape from the real problems of life.So sometimes it happens to philosophers, to theologians, that Buddhism seems to be not a religion at all, because it does not talk about paradise, it does not talk about the eternal soul. It talks about the suffering, the misery, the frustration, the anxiety, the anguish of life.Many have thought that Buddhism is pessimistic. It is not. It simply wants to face the life as it is, and life is misery, and life is anguish. The easy way to avoid it is to escape into abstraction, to move into some dreamlands, to start thinking about something else, to spin and weave theories so that you can hide the fact, the wound of life.Buddhism is very earthly, earthbound, factual. It wants you to encounter life, because only through encountering the anguish of life is there a possibility of transcendence. But people don’t want to face life. They are afraid; they are frightened. Deep down they know that life is anxiety, and facing it means becoming anxious, troubled. Facing it means it will become impossible to live, you will be paralyzed by fear, paralyzed by death, because life is death and nothing else. Everything is dying every moment, disappearing into death.Buddhism says escaping into abstractions is not going to help. Going into the details of life is really going to help. It is hard, it is arduous, it needs guts, but that’s the only way to face it.Down the ages, priests have been exploiting people. They have been giving people easy escape routes, deceiving people. Priests have never allowed people to become literate, to become intelligent, because if people become literate and intelligent they will be able to see through the whole game that priests have been playing. The priests have depended on the ignorance of human beings, and have tried to keep human beings as ignorant as possible. The religious scriptures were not allowed to people; they could not read them.In India, only Brahmins were allowed to read the Vedas, because if people are allowed to read the Vedas, then how long can you pretend that there is something in it? There is nothing! People will see it, and once they have seen it, how are you going to deceive them? How are you going to exploit them? The power of the priests and the politicians depends on the ignorance of men.Buddhism brings a totally different light. Buddhism says forget about the Vedas and the Upanishads; don’t be worried about them. Your life is enough to go into – that is the real Veda. The only book that has to be read is the book of life, and the only wisdom that is possible is through reading the book of life. Become intelligent. Buddhism is the religion of intelligence. The word buddha comes from buddhi. Buddhi means intelligence. It is only through intelligence that one can become aware.Priests were very angry at Buddha; they uprooted his religion from this country. And the day that priests succeeded in uprooting Buddhism from this country, this country fell from intelligence, became stupid, and has remained stupid ever since. This country’s greatest flowering was Buddha. It was the culmination of centuries of work, effort; it was a culmination, a climax. The days of Buddha were the days of the greatest peak of this country; this country knew the sunlit peaks. Once Buddha and his roots were destroyed in this country, it fell from those sunlit peaks into the dark valleys.But priests were very happy. People were again ignorant. People were again asking them what to do and what not to do, and they were dishing out old recipes which have never worked.I have heard…An illiterate millionaire decided to leave his money to a small local college. The son was not ready to be cut out of the will. He knew that his father was ignorant and a prude, so he said to the old man one day, “Father, I hope you are aware that at that college, the one you’ve decided to give all your money to, the boys and girls matriculate together!” The father looked startled, and the son continued, “Not only that,” he said, “but both boys and girls use the same curriculum!”Now the father’s face began to darken, and the son leaned forward to whisper, “But the worst of all, Father, before a girl can graduate she has to show her thesis to the dean!”“That settles it,” roared the father. “That school won’t get a penny from me!”The priests have lived on that down the ages – just big words. People don’t know what those words mean. Big words uttered with great solemnity and seriousness, and people have been thinking something great is happening. Nothing has happened! People have remained ignorant, people have remained miserable. Nothing has happened through the concept of God and heaven and soul and all that. Nothing has happened; people have remained irreligious, and in fact, have become more and more dull. The more they have believed in these big words, the duller they have become.Buddhism brings a totally different dimension. It says religion is not in books. It says religion is not in great words, big words, or complicated philosophies. Religion has nothing to do with linguists, with language experts. Religion has something to do with the quality of your life. If you can bring intelligence into your life, religion explodes.Nobody can give it to you; only you can give this gift of intelligence to yourself. Everybody is carrying in himself the potential. The potential has to be polished; the potential has to be worked out, helped, nourished. Each man is born as a seed of great intelligence. Each man is born as a buddha. There is no need to beg for knowledge or wisdom; you contain it. Just search within.But priests are not interested in it, because if a person starts searching within he will stop going to the temple, to the mosque, to the church. If he starts looking within he will not ask the priest, the rabbi, the pundit. For what will he ask anybody? He will have his own light; he will be a light unto himself.That’s why priests were so angry at Buddha. They were not as angry at Mahavira, and Jainism has continued in India, but they were very much against Buddha. What happened? This man must have brought some new light. This man must have been a breakthrough in human consciousness. What was his contribution? His contribution was this: that each man can be a light unto himself; that no man needs to follow anybody, to imitate anybody; that no man needs to take orders from anybody, commandments from anybody. And if you continue to take commandments from somebody, you will remain less than a man, you will remain a robot.Religion is not obedience: religion is rebellion. Through the religion of obedience, what has happened? People have become more and more sophisticated, cultured; they have become pretenders, hypocrites, but deep down they remain the same. Nothing really has happened. Just the surface has become more shining; something like a decor, a decoration has happened. But human consciousness has remained primitive, unevolved.I have heard…There was a convention of missionaries from all parts of the world. Each one reported how with his fiery speeches, his pioneer work, and his exemplary conduct, he had converted the natives to Christianity.Among those reporting was a missionary from the cannibal area of Africa. He, too, boasted of his progress with the natives. After all the reports had been submitted, a question was directed to the missionary from the cannibal area: Had he stopped the cannibals from eating human flesh?The missionary answered that he had not stopped cannibalism, but while formerly they were eating, with their hands, he had achieved the great goal of having them eat with knives and forks.That’s how religion has succeeded. People remain the same: they are still cannibals, but now, instead of eating, with their hands, they eat with knives and forks.Buddhism wants to change your very roots. It is a transformation. It is a way of living on another plane of consciousness. These sutras are just glimpses of those details.The first sutra:Since the journey of lifeIs little but grief and pain,Why should we be so reluctantTo return to the sky of our native place?Life is a journey from nowhere to now here. Nothing is attained through it. Nobody has ever attained anything through life. People run, and they run fast, and they go on gathering speed, but they never reach anywhere. They work hard, they labor hard, but nothing ever happens out of that work, nothing is created.Millions of people have lived before you, and where are they? Disappeared into the dust, dust unto dust. And we will disappear into the same dust sooner or later. All our achievements will fall into dust and disappear. Thousands of civilizations have existed and disappeared with no trace.Life seems to attain nothing. It is much ado about nothing, much fuss about nothing; a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.This is the first encounter that one has to go through. If you want to understand Buddha, you have to look eye to eye into life. Don’t shirk. Don’t look sideways, look directly into life. What is the meaning of life? What does it attain? What does it come to, finally? To nothing! It is just like a great dream with beautiful palaces, and a great kingdom, and by the morning, when you awake, all is gone and gone forever. In fact, it was not there at all, you had only believed that it was there.Your success is your belief…Just the other day I was reading about a man, a madman. He was put into a hospital and treated. His problem was that he believed that he was Alexander the Great. One day, after three years of treatment, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, electric shocks and insulin shocks and all that, the doctor came to the patient and said, “Now you are cured. You can go home.”The man started crying and he said, “Yes, I know I am cured. But what kind of cure is this? When I came I was Alexander the Great, and now I am nobody, just nobody! What kind of cure is this? When I came, I was so elated. When I came, I was somebody special. Now you have reduced me to nobody! And you call it “cure”? Cure me again, back to my old state. At least I was somebody.”Your success is your belief; your fame is your belief, they are projected dreams. Now there is a consensus among those who work in the deepest depths of the human mind that all human beings are neurotic. It is not that a few people are neurotic, everybody is neurotic. The difference is only of degree.Pascal is reported to have said that man is a mad animal; the only animal who has gone mad, berserk, off the track, astray. Pascal has said that is the original sin, that man is no longer a natural animal. Something unnatural has happened to him, something at the very core of his being; he has become alienated from himself, from his own source.The normal people that you see walking on the roads, doing their business at the office and the factory, are just normal for the name’s sake. Nobody is normal. Only once in a while, a Buddha, a Christ, a Krishna, is normal, once in a while. All people are abnormal. And what is the abnormality? They go on believing in this dream of life. They go on believing in new dreams. If one dream is frustrated, they immediately create another. They never give a gap.One desire fails you, and immediately you are ready to move into another desire. In fact, before a desire starts failing, you start creating a new desire so you have some house to abide in. One hope disappears, you create another hope, but you keep hoping. You see death happening everywhere, and still you go on hoping. “Hoping against all hope”: this is the neurosis. Seeing that everything falls into dust and disappears, you still dream of becoming famous, successful.Life is a journey from nowhere to nowhere: a vicious circle, a dream journey. It is not a sweet dream, but a nightmare. Want and woe, grief and pain, suffering and suffering, and to what do you attain? Just see the taste on your tongue: what taste have you attained? Just suffering and suffering.All joy is just a hope. Suffering is reality, joy is a hope, and the hope never happens. The hope is like the horizon: it only seems to be happening there somewhere, but it never happens in you. You go on rushing toward the horizon and the horizon goes on rushing away from you. It does not exist; it exists only in your idea.To be utterly frustrated with life is the beginning of wisdom. To see the futility of life is the beginning of a totally new journey, the inward journey. Otherwise, you go on being enamored of one thing or another.Just look: you have lived thirty years, forty years, fifty years, sixty years, and what is the gain? Look into your hands: they are empty.When Alexander died he told his ministers, “When you carry my body through the streets, leave my hands hanging outside the coffin.”They were puzzled. They said, “For what? Nobody has ever heard of it. And that is not done.”And he said, “But it has to be done.”“For what?” they inquired.And Alexander said, “So that people can see that I am also going with empty hands. I worked hard, I struggled hard, but nothing is the only taste on my tongue. My hands are empty. I would like people to see that Alexander is dying as an utter failure!”Everybody dies that way, but to recognize it that late is meaningless. To recognize it in the middle of life is of great import, because then the radical change becomes possible. Buddha realized it when he was only twenty-nine. He was still young, married just a few years, and his child just one month old. Suddenly one day, he saw the dream disappearing. And how did it happen?He was passing…he was going to participate in a celebration, the annual celebration of the youth of his country. And on the way he saw an old man. He asked his charioteer, “What has happened to this man?”And the charioteer said, “Sir, this happens to everybody sooner or later. Everybody becomes old.”Buddha asked, “So am I also going to become old?”Just see: he is not concerned about the philosophy of old age – why old age happens, how it can be prevented – he is immediately concerned with his own being. He asked, “So am I also going to become old?”And the charioteer said, “It is difficult, sir, to say, but I cannot lie either. Everybody is going to become old, including you. Nobody is an exception.”And Buddha said, “Then turn the chariot back to the palace. Why am I going to participate in the festival of youth? For what purpose? I have become old. If I am going to become old, I have become old! I am no longer young; that youth was a dream. If it is going to disappear like that, it is meaningless to think about it, to cling to it.”Returning home, they came across a dead man. The dead body was being carried and Buddha asked, “What has happened to this man?”And the charioteer said, “The next step – after old age this happens. One dies.”Buddha was so young and so radiant, and something changed in his very chemistry. His face became pale. He closed his eyes. The charioteer was very afraid. And Buddha said, “Then, if life is going to disappear like that, before it disappears I have to search. Now I cannot waste a single moment.”Just when they were entering the palace door, they came across a sannyasin, an ochre-robed sannyasin. And Buddha asked, “What has happened to this man? Why is he in ochre?”And the old man said, “This man has become aware of old age, this man has become aware of death; hence he has renounced all that stupidity that everybody lives through. He has become a sannyasin; he has renounced hopes. He is searching within. Before death comes he wants to know what this life is, from where it comes, to where it goes.”That very night Buddha escaped from the palace. He became a sannyasin. What is sannyas? Sannyas is the recognition in the midst of life that life is a fleeting dream.Since the journey of life is little but grief and pain, why should we be so reluctant to return to the sky of our native place? Everybody knows there is suffering. We pretend there is not, but pretensions are pretensions. Only very stupid people can pretend for long. The more intelligent you are, the sooner the recognition comes that life is fleeting; it is just a soap bubble. And that, too, full of suffering! Have you not suffered? But what keeps you alive then? If life is such a suffering, why don’t you collapse? Why do you go on and on? What keeps you going on? Hope.Hope is there like the horizon waiting ahead. It says, “Up to now life has been suffering, but that has not to be the case for ever. Tomorrow things will be better. With this woman you are suffering; with another woman things will be better. With this job you are not happy; with another job you will be happy. With this rotten car you are feeling miserable, but there are beautiful cars; you can have a better one. With this much money, of course, how can one be happy? But money can be earned.” Just being nobody you are feeling that life has no meaning, but become somebody and life will start having meaning and color.These hopes go on and on pulling you, somehow keeping you together. Hope is the glue that keeps you together: otherwise, you will fall into pieces. And what I am saying is not speculation. Just look into your life and you will see the truth of it. What is keeping you together? It is not life that is keeping you together; life has been hitting you hard from every nook and corner, from every direction life is hammering you. It is hope. Hope functions like a buffer. The shocks of life are absorbed by hope, and one goes on living and waiting for tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes. Whatsoever comes is never that which you had been hoping for.You go on thinking that everybody else is happy except you, and that is also the situation of everybody else. They think you are happy. It is a mutual deception; the grass is always greener on the other side of the hedge. And so is the case with your neighbor too: he thinks the grass is greener in your lawn.People go on pretending to others that they are happy. They have to, otherwise it will be impossible to live a single moment. Deep down they are suffering and they are full of tears, and on the surface they go on maintaining a smile. But that smile becomes a poisonous phenomenon. You see everybody else smile and you see everybody so happy that you think, “Only I am suffering. If I do a little more work, if I work a little harder, if I become a little more aggressive in my ambitions, I will reach. Look! Others have reached; somebody has become the prime minister, somebody has become the president. I can also work it out; I still have life left.”This is the whole game that goes on.Somebody asked George Bernard Shaw, “What is politics?”And George Bernard Shaw said, “The king of the mountain game. One kid gets atop a big pile of dirt and the others try to displace him. That’s politics.”But one who has reached somewhere pretends that he has attained. Nothing has been attained. But now he has to save his face too, otherwise people will say, “Then what have you been doing? If nothing has been attained by becoming the president of a country and you have devoted your whole life for it, how stupid you have been!” So when a person becomes the president of a country, he goes on smiling, and he goes on pretending that whatsoever he wanted he has achieved. This is just a face-saving device. Deep down he knows all has failed; deep down he knows now there is no hope. But what is the point of saying it to people? They will just laugh and think you are stupid. And they will think, “Your whole life you worked for this position, for this power, and now you have arrived and you say you have attained nothing, that your whole life has been a wastage?”Nobody wants to see that “My whole life has been a wastage” – it goes against the ego. So those who arrive on those big piles of dirt, who reach the top, they start declaring that they have attained.In life there is no attainment; there cannot be. That is not the nature of life. Life fails, it fails utterly. Whether you fail or succeed makes no difference, the failure is the same. Those who fail, certainly fail; but those who succeed also fail, and in the same proportion. To see this is of great import.A great thinker, Ruskin, has said that in life there are only two disappointments: to desire a thing and not to get it, and to desire a thing and to get it. Only two disappointments: if you don’t get it, you are disappointed, but if you do get it, then too, you are disappointed. Because whatsoever you were hoping is not attained through it. It is something else. That hope was your projection; it was not reality.It is like you saw a colored stone shining in the morning sun and you thought, “This is a Kohinoor!” and you rushed. Not only you, but many rushed; the whole town became involved in it. And the more people got involved the more you thought, “There must be something in it. When so many people are rushing toward it, there must be something in it because so many people can’t be wrong.”Remember always: so many people can’t be right. It is very rarely that a person is right; so many people can’t be right. Whenever you see a crowd going to some place, forget all about it; just drop the idea. So many people can’t be right. The majority consists of very, very mediocre people. But one starts believing in the crowd.I have heard…A speculator in oil leases died and went to heaven, only to find the place so crowded that he could barely find room inside the door. The speculator hit upon a trick which he hoped would relieve the congestion. He produced a scrap of paper and a pencil from his pocket and scribbled a note: “Oil discovered in hell,” which he dropped on the floor.Soon the note was picked up and read. The man who read it whispered to a few other persons and slipped away. Those in whom he had confided similarly whispered to others and followed him. There was a regular exodus in the direction of the reported strike.Watching the procession, the man who had started the rumor grew more and more restive. At length he could stand it no longer. “There may be something in this thing, I’d better look it over,” he said as he joined the stampede.Even if you create a rumor and many people start believing in it, finally you will believe in it too. It is a very, very mutual deception. Create a lie, let people believe in it, and finally you will believe in it. So many people believing in it – there must be something in it. You must have been wrong thinking that it is a lie. You must have accidentally stumbled upon a truth, otherwise so many people can’t believe in it.So many people rushing toward a colored stone on the street in the morning sun, and all are thinking that it is a diamond, a very valuable diamond. But when you reach… If you don’t reach, of course you suffer. You will always carry the wound. If you reach and it is just a colored stone, then too you suffer.Failure fails, success fails too. To see this is to let hope evaporate. It does not matter whether you die rich or poor. It does not matter whether you die as a sinner or a saint. It does not matter whether you die well known or unknown, famous or notorious. Death comes and destroys everything.Death is very democratic; it does not believe in hierarchies. It does not bother whether the person was a peon or a prime minister. It simply comes, and dust falls into dust and disappears. It won’t help you in any way that you are rich; it won’t help you in any way that you are famous; it won’t help you in any way that you are a great emperor, this or that.If you can see it while you are alive, then something is possible – something which is beyond life and death.I have heard…There was a fellow, an army man, posted in the South Pacific, who happened to contract, in the usual way, a very strong and particularly annoying venereal disease, and moreover, it was not the ordinary type of venereal disease, but something completely out of the ordinary in every respect.To begin with, this fellow’s private parts became so swollen he had to wear pants fourteen sizes larger than usual. And they turned the most peculiar shade of purple, and also orange with polka dots and stripes all around as well! It was, in short, a mess, and nobody knew what to do. The doctors he consulted had no idea how to treat it; the best they could offer was to cut it off, which the fellow said he would absolutely never allow. So it came to the point when he decided to go back to the island from where he had got this peculiar disease, because he figured they would be familiar with it, which it turned out was correct. They knew exactly what it was – boy, was he relieved!“You mean you won’t have to amputate it?” he asked the island doctor.“That’s right,” the doctor said.“I knew it, I knew those doctors in the States were full of baloney!” he told the doctor. “They all said that it would have to be amputated.”“Oh, no,” the doctor soothed, “it will fall off by itself in a few days.”But what consolation is that?Success fails, failure fails – all fails. And the ultimate is death. It is not a consolation that you will be dying rich. It is not a consolation that you will be dying famous. It makes no difference. Beggar or king, poor or rich, death comes and simply effaces your whole life.That is the meaning of Ikkyu’s sutra: Since the journey of life is little but grief and pain, why should we be so reluctant to return to the sky of our native place?He raises a very pertinent question, that life is misery, suffering, an utter failure. Still, …why should we be so reluctant to return to the sky of our native place?One would think that when life is such a failure, people would start turning inward, easily. That is not the case. And there is a strange mechanism working. My own observation is that if life were not such a suffering people would be moving inward more easily. Because life is such a suffering, they go on hoping more and more. To deny suffering they create bigger hopes. They cannot turn back. To deny suffering, to make suffering look small, they create bigger mountains of hopes, and those hopes go on pulling them outward and outward.This strange phenomenon has to be understood. Whenever you are in suffering, you need a great dream to come out of it, a great hope, some kind of inspiration, some vision in the future, some paradise somewhere, so that you can pull yourself together again and jump out of the misery. But that big hope is going to become a big misery again, and then you will have to come out of it and you will have to create a still bigger hope. This is how one goes on and on, away and away from oneself.Watch people, and watch yourself; it is very difficult to drop misery, very difficult. One clings to it. Is there nothing else? Just think if there are two alternatives available to you. One is: be empty, there will be no misery and no joy. And the other is: don’t be empty, be somebody, something, but you will have to suffer, misery will be there. And you will always choose misery instead of emptiness. Emptiness frightens people more than misery. And the innermost core is empty. Nothingness scares people more than suffering. Nobody wants to be a nothing, and our innermost nature is nothingness, hence we cannot accept it. We go on searching; we go on trying to become somebody, something. And if we cannot have joy, at least we can have pain. If we cannot have pleasure, we can cling to agony. But there is one consolation: at least there is something to cling to; we are not just empty.That’s why people are so reluctant.I observe every day… Couples come to me: they are both miserable, but not ready to leave each other. At least life seems to be full, maybe full of misery, but at least full; full of poison, but the cup is full. An empty cup, not even poison to fill it, seems to be more difficult to accept. The woman feels that to be alone will be more difficult than to be with a man who is simply creating misery for her and nothing else. And the man thinks that to be alone in the dark nights, and nobody around, will be more miserable than the nagging woman who is driving him crazy. At least somebody is there to nag him, somebody is there to look forward to, somebody is there to be afraid of, somebody is there to escape from; at least somebody is there. You can do something with somebody. You can sit in the hotel late in the night and enjoy the time because of the woman who is at home, you can escape from her. But if there is nobody, even escape becomes difficult, even that joy of escape is no longer available.I see them in misery, they say they are in misery, and they have been in misery for seven years, ten years, and not for a single day has there been any happiness, and they are tired and they are weary, but when I tell them to separate, that it is so simple, why create misery for each other? They say, “No, we cannot separate, we cannot leave each other.” Then suddenly they start thinking they love each other. This is strange.If you love each other, then why do you create misery for each other? But the moment somebody suggests separating, suddenly a great desire arises and great understanding, “No, I love the woman and she loves me so much.” And they start thinking of days which have never been there, and beauties which have never been there. And they start hoping again that maybe tomorrow things will be different.Ten years they have tried hard. Nothing has happened. But they say, “One day more, and who knows?” People go on hoping. And this hope ultimately leads you into death and nowhere else.To drop hope is to become religious. To attain to a spiritual hopelessness is to become free of misery. Remember, the word hopelessness is of infinite beauty. It is not just absence of hope; it is absence of hope and hopelessness both, because when the hope has disappeared, how can you be hopeless? To be hopeless, hope is needed; it is the shadow of hope. When the hope has gone completely and you have seen it through and through and you have dropped it, hopelessness also disappears of its own accord – you are left without hope, without hopelessness – and the purity of it and the benediction of it.Then only does one come to know one’s inner sky: it is as empty as the sky. And that is our native place. That is from where we come, and that is where we should go, and that is where we should be. To be in that state is to be without suffering and agony.Keep it in mind: pleasure is only when it is not; when it is, it is not. Pleasure always disappears, so we have always to search for it. That is the original sin. Don’t taste an apple because you are going to have to go looking for another one right after, and then there is no end to it. One thing leads to another, and you become entangled in ten thousand things, then it becomes very, very difficult to come back home. You have invested yourself in so many things that it becomes almost impossible to get out of those entanglements.The religious person is one who is not entangled anywhere, who has no hope, who has no future, who does not live in the tomorrows, who lives now here. In the beginning I told you life is a journey from nowhere to nowhere; with the religious person life becomes a journey from nowhere to now here.I am reminded of a small story…There was a great atheist. He had written in his drawing room with big letters: God is nowhere. Then a child was born to him, and the small child was slowly growing, learning words. Nowhere was a big word for the small child and he was trying to spell the sentence, so he said, “God is now here.” He made two words out of nowhere – now, here. But it became a transformation in the life of the father.Hearing the child reading, “God is now here,” the father attained to a kind of satori. He had never thought about that. Now here was nowhere! “Nowhere can turn into now here?” Suddenly he was awakened to a totally different kind of space. The innocence of the child became a door, an opening.Life is from nowhere to nowhere, but it can be from nowhere to now here. That’s all meditation is about: turning nowhere into now here.To be now and to be here – and suddenly you are transported from time into eternity. Then life disappears, death disappears. Then for the first time you know what is. You can call it God, or you can call it nirvana – those are all words – but you come to know that which is. And to know it is to be liberated, to be liberated from all agony, from all suffering, from all nightmares.To be now here is to be awake. To be somewhere else is to be in a dream – then and there are parts of a dream. Now and here are not parts of a dream but reality, part of reality, part of existence.To write something and leave it behind us,It is but a dream.When we awake we knowThere is not even anyone to read it.Whatsoever we are doing is so futile, as if in a dream somebody wants to write a poem with the idea that when he will awake in the morning he will be able to show the poem to others, and they will love it and enjoy it. But when he awakes in the morning, there will be no poem, and all those people he had seen in the dream will not be found again; there will be no one to read it. But that is all our life consists of.To write something and leave it behind us, it is but a dream. When we awake we know there is not even anyone to read it. The idea of being remembered in history, having a name, leaving a name behind, is carried by almost everybody. That is a vicarious kind of immortality: you want to live through others’ memories. You know death is coming; now the only way to live is: live through others’ memories, do something so others will remember you. If you can do something good, good; otherwise do something bad, but do something so that others will have to remember you.This gives a kind of consolation: “I will be gone, but I will be remembered.” But what is the point? Even if people remember you for centuries, what is the point? You are gone, and you are gone! Their remembrance will not re-create you; their remembrance will not give you any life. Who bothers to remember anybody?I have heard that in a school the teacher was telling about Adam and Eve, and a small boy was getting very excited about the whole story. It was a history class and the teacher was teaching history from the very beginning, from Adam and Eve, and she asked the boy, “Johnny, you look so interested in the story – what is the matter?”And Johnny said, “I would have loved to be Adam.”The teacher said, “You are not happy being what you are – why would you have loved being Adam?”He said, “For one thing at least, if I was Adam I would not have to read history.”Who wants to read history? Who is interested in some stupid kings, some stupid prime ministers, who bothers? If you were a prime minister, do you think somebody is going to bother about you? Just small children will be forced to read about you; they have to be forced, threatened, punished, or rewarded. And then, too, once they have taken the examination they will forget all about you. Moreover they will be angry at you and will never be able to forgive you. Could you not have just lived like an ordinary man? Why did you become a prime minister? Just to torture children?But everybody has that idea of leaving a name, footprints on the sands of time. All is nonsense. Live the moment. Live the moment in its truth, in its now hereness, and forget all about the future. There is no other time, and there is no sense in any tomorrow.Though we do not preach the doctrine,Unasked the flowers bloom in spring;They fall and scatter,They turn to dust.Ikkyu says Buddha has not preached the doctrine, he has simply shown it, not said it. Though we do not preach the doctrine… The ultimate truth cannot be preached; it can be shown but not said, it can be indicated. And it is everywhere! It is happening all around.The dead, pale leaf falling from the tree is a sermon about the whole life, a sermon about death. The morning dewdrops, disappearing, evaporating in the sun are a sermon on life. That’s how life disappears. Don’t be too much attached to it. Don’t become possessive about it. It is going to happen to you too, you are not more than dewdrops on grass leaves.Have you seen a dewdrop slipping out of a grass leaf, going, going, going, and gone? Mahavira has used that exact metaphor. That’s what life is: a dewdrop on a grass leaf, slipping slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. One moment it was there, another moment it is gone. One moment we are here, and another moment we have gone.For this simple moment, we make so much fuss, so much violence, ambition, struggle, conflict, anger, hatred. Just for this small moment! Just waiting for the train in a waiting room at a station, and creating so much fuss: fighting, hurting each other, trying to possess, trying to boss, trying to dominate – all politics. Then the train comes and you are gone forever. You will never be heard of again, never be seen again, and you will never see those people you were fighting with, and you will never see the woman you tried to possess, and you will never see the man you nagged to death.See it. Buddhism is not a doctrine. It is simply an effort to spell life as it is. It simply opens the book of life to you to read, and it is everywhere!Though we do not preach the doctrine, unasked the flowers bloom in spring; they fall and scatter, they turn to dust. That is the whole of Buddhism, the whole taste of Buddhism: flowers blooming one moment, another moment they are gone, fallen into dust, disappeared. We arrive on the earth, the spring comes and we bloom, and then we are gone, and dust is left behind. All the chatter, all those miseries and agonies we unnecessarily suffered, those nightmares of defeat and victory, of failure and success, all that turmoil was for no purpose at all.Buddhism is a simple indication toward life. Buddha says look at life! Dhamma is preached every moment; it is in every grass leaf and in every star. Just see: life is momentary, and death comes, inevitably comes. Seeing it, how can you become possessive? Seeing it, how can you become jealous? Seeing it, how can you become money minded? Seeing it, how can you become a miser? Seeing it, how can you go on killing each other?Seeing that life is so momentary will be a transformation. A silence will descend suddenly, and not a practiced silence. There is no need to practice. Just seeing this point, a silence will descend in you, a peace will arise in you. In that very moment of silence and peace, you will be able to see, your eyes will become clear.Though we do not preach the doctrine,Unasked the flowers bloom in spring;They fall and scatter,They turn to dust.We are born, we die.All are the same,Sakyamuni, Daruma,The cat and the ladle.We are born, we die. All are the same… This is the great democracy of death. We are all equal; death is absolutely communist. Life differentiates; death never. Life makes people different; death turns them into oneness, alike. Life depends on boundaries, distinctions, definitions; death comes and effaces all.We are born, we die. All are the same… There is no difference: Sakyamuni, Buddha, Daruma, Bodhidharma, …the cat and the ladle! A dog dies or a buddha dies, there is no difference.See this penetration of death. Death takes away everything, so why cling? What is the point in clinging? When death is going to take everything away, why not un-cling on your own? In that un-clinging you will be able to see something which is of absolute value. If you un-cling from everything – from the body, from the mind, from the property, from the land, from the wife, from the husband, from the children, from country, from religion, church – if you un-cling from everything, then what is left for death to take away? You have dropped them yourself; you have dropped them of your own accord. Then what is left for death? Nothing is left.This dying, dying to all and everything, this un-clinging, is the meaning of sannyas, renunciation. Then nothing is left for death, you have already dropped it. No work is left for death; you have conquered death. Now death cannot take anything away from you. Whatsoever it could take away has already been renounced. Now what is left in you? Only a witnessing is left, a silent awareness, uncontaminated by possessions, uncontaminated by desires and longings.This awareness is buddhahood. This awareness is the ultimate experience. And this awareness is what we are all searching for, but searching for in wrong ways. This is awakening.To harden into a buddha is wrong;All the more I think soWhen I look at a stone buddha.But remember, don’t harden yourself. This has to be remembered because it happens. If you see life is fleeting, death is coming, one need not possess anything, you start becoming hard because you think if you are hard enough you will be able to renounce. You are not renouncing by understanding, you are renouncing by hardness. You miss the point. Then again ego arises, because all hardness is ego.That’s why monks become too egoistic. They think they have renounced the world – as if they have done something great. Thinking that they have done something great shows their ignorance. If the world is momentary, what have you done? You have simply seen its momentariness, that’s all.In the morning you don’t go shouting in the neighborhood, “I have renounced the palaces of my dream!” People will laugh; people will say you are mad. A dream is a dream! You cannot renounce it. You cannot catch hold of it nor can you renounce it. A dream is a dream. If you know it, it disappears; if you don’t know it, it remains.Those people who say they have renounced their children, their wives, their family, their world, their money, their bank balances, are simply saying that those dreams are still real for them. They are escaping from those dreams, but those dreams are following them; those dreams will haunt them wherever they go. They may sit in a Himalayan cave, but those dreams will go on coming again and again. They are there; they have left them deep down in the world, but they are realities. They are afraid. Why this fear? Nobody is ever afraid of a dream; once known, all fear disappears.These people harden. Go and see how hard a Jaina monk is. His whole effort is to shrink, he lives in a kind of shut-upness; he closes himself from everywhere. He is so afraid of life that he will not look at a woman; he is so afraid of life that he will not stay in a householder’s house. He is so afraid that he remains hiding behind himself, closes all doors and windows. He becomes very hard; he becomes almost stone.This hardness is not liberation. This hardness is not nirvana; it is a kind of suicide. Afraid of death, he has committed suicide, but what kind of gain is this? Afraid of life, he has not reached to some higher plane of consciousness, he has relapsed back. Out of fear, he has become paralyzed.He will fast because he is afraid that if he eats well then sexuality will arise; if you eat well, natural energy is created and your biology goes on creating sex hormones. He is afraid of food, hence he fasts. He is afraid of seeing a woman because he knows his mind. Looking at a beautiful face, again something will be stirred in him, something will arise. He knows those desires are there. He has renounced objects, but those desires are inside. You can renounce objects, but how can you renounce desires? They are part of your being.So he is afraid. If he comes in contact with an object of a desire, the presence of the object may help the desire to bubble up, to surface. He cannot sit with a woman alone and be at ease; he will be very restless. Now, what kind of liberation is this? This is not a higher stage, but a lower stage than ordinary, a pathological stage. To protect himself he hardens himself, he becomes thick.That’s why you will not find intelligence at all in the so-called saints. They become thick; they have to become thick, because even intelligence is a danger. They have to become more and more unintelligent: they relapse into a certain kind of idiocy. They eat less, they fast more, they sleep less; they torture their bodies in a thousand and one ways. If it is cold, they will sit naked so the skin becomes hard. If it is hot they will sit by the side of a fire, so slowly, slowly all sensitivity is lost, because with sensitivity they are afraid sensuousness can come any moment. If you are sensitive, sensuousness is just behind it. They become like stones rather than becoming like flowers.A buddha has to be like a flower: infinitely sensitive, open. A buddha cannot remain in a shut-upness; a shut-upness is a state of pathology. A buddha is utterly open, available to the winds and the sun and the moon, available to the whole. He has seen the futility of life, now there is no fear. He has seen all the dreams through and through. He has looked, meditated upon them, and has gone beyond them. The only sign of a buddha is his softness, his delicateness, his utter delicateness.Ikkyu is right. This sutra is of great importance, remember it: To harden into a buddha is wrong; all the more I think so when I look at a stone buddha.I have heard about Ikkyu: a young monk came to see him and the master asked, “What do you desire from me?”The young monk said, “I have come in search of enlightenment.”Ikkyu asked, “Where have you been before? Have you been to somebody else?”He said, “Yes, I have been with a certain master.”“And what have you learned there?”The monk said, “I will show you – I have learned yoga postures.” And he sat in a siddhasana – in a buddha posture – with closed eyes, unmoving.Ikkyu laughed, hit him hard on the head, and said, “You fool! We don’t need any more buddhas – we have many stone buddhas in this place. You get away from here. No more stone buddhas here!”And it was true, because he used to live in a temple where there were ten thousand stone buddhas. He said, “We are tired of taking care of these ten thousand. Now we don’t want any more. Get lost!”But that’s what people learn in the name of religion: to become stone buddhas. My emphasis is that you should be soft, open, feminine, flowerlike, flowing. The more flowing you are, the more sensitive you are, the more alive you are, the more you can be now here. And to be now here is to be really a buddha.Buddhahood is not a kind of hardening. So wherever you find somebody hard, wherever you find a mahatma absolutely hard, know well that this is the wrong place to be. Look for softness, for love, for compassion, because out of a hard person only violence can arise.Sometimes it happens: the person may believe in nonviolence, but out of a hard person only violence is possible, nonviolence is not possible. My own understanding of Jaina monks, and I have seen many of them, is that they teach nonviolence, but they live in deep violence. Of course, they don’t kill others, but they kill themselves, and that is the same. They are not aggressive toward others; they have turned their aggression on themselves; they have become their own enemies. They torture themselves, and they enjoy that torture; they are masochists. They need psychiatric treatment.A real man of awakening is not hard, he is not frozen. He has melted; the ice has disappeared into water. And finally water disappears into vapor. The first stage of buddhahood is melting from the ice as water, and the second stage is disappearing even from water into vapor. Then one becomes part of the sky; then one has come home.To harden into a buddha is wrong; all the more I think so when I look at a stone buddha. Remember this sutra – because you are in search of buddhahood, that’s why you have gathered around me. That’s why you are here. Knowingly, unknowingly; deliberately, or accidentally you are here for the sole purpose of becoming buddhas. Remember this: don’t become hard.That’s why my insistence is so much on singing, dancing, chanting, loving. The emphasis is just to keep you flowing, melted. The ego wants to freeze, the ego can be there only if you are hard. The ego disappears if you melt. So all that helps melting is good, and all that helps hardening is bad.Be alert, because freezing yourself into a certain pattern is very easy, freezing yourself into a certain character is very easy. To live characterlessly, melted, is very difficult, but that is the real challenge. A real man accepts the challenge that “I will not create a character. I will live moment-to-moment, without a character, out of my consciousness, not out of my conscience.”A man who lives through conscience becomes hard. A man who lives through consciousness remains soft. Why? Because a man who has some ideas about how to live, naturally becomes hard, he has to continuously carry his character around himself. That character is like armor, his protection, his security; his whole life is invested in that character. And he always reacts to situations through the character, not directly. If you ask him a question, his answer is ready-made. That is the sign of a hard person: he is dull, stupid, mechanical. He may be a good computer, but he is not a man. You do something and he reacts in a well established way. His reaction is predictable; he is a robot.The real man acts spontaneously. If you ask him a question, your question gets a response, not a reaction. He opens his heart to your question, exposes himself to your question; he responds to it. You hear the answer for the first time; he also hears the answer for the first time. It was not managed, it was not prepared; it was not ready-made. Your question stirred it, created the situation for it to happen; all his responses are spontaneous. He does not live according to an ideology. He simply lives without any ideology, just like a river.A river does not carry a guidebook; it does not carry a map. It does not know where the ocean is; a vague longing for the ocean is enough. Then it starts moving, slowly, slowly finding its way. Sometimes going to the north and sometimes going to the south and sometimes moving to the east and sometimes to the west, zigzag. It is not like a railroad track. Each moment it decides. Wherever it can find a lower space, it moves into it, and feels it is coming closer to the ocean. The ocean is the lowest space, so finding a low place, it is moving toward the ocean. The ocean is far away; you cannot see it, but the river reaches it.Have you ever heard of any river missing the ocean? Without guidebooks, and without maps, a miracle that no river has ever missed! No river can miss.Consciousness is a river. Don’t carry guidebooks. Don’t be a Hindu or a Mohammedan carrying guidebooks. Just move slowly, slowly, spontaneously, alert, sensitive, alive to each moment, totally alive, because there is no tomorrow, there is no next moment. This way one comes home one day, one evaporates, one disappears. That is the day when one has come home.Your disappearance is the beginning of the real appearing in you. Your disappearance is the appearance of godliness. Remember it. This is one of the most important things to remember; otherwise, the so-called spiritual people, sooner or later, harden. And the moment they harden, they have destroyed all possibility. Then they are not becoming more and more intelligent, aware; they are becoming dull and dead.Never become a mahatma, dull and dead. Be alive. Become innocent of all character, of all ideology, of all perfectionist ideas. The man who is a perfectionist is bound to become a neurotic. All hard people are neurotics; only soft people are divine, and the softer, the more divine.That’s why you cannot see God, because he is so soft, so soft that he is invisible. You cannot see God because he is so soft, you cannot touch him. You can become gods, but you cannot see him, you cannot touch him.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 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/take-it-easy-vol-1-14/

The first question:Osho,What is a mystic?I don’t know, and nobody else knows, either. That’s why a mystic is called a mystic. There is something indefinable, something very elusive, something that cannot be grasped, that cannot be comprehended. Not that it is something special; it is very ordinary, and that deepens the mystery ten-thousandfold.A mystic is in a natural state. He is the most ordinary man; he has renounced all extraordinary desires. All desires are basically to become extraordinary, to become somebody special. A mystic is one who is and who has no desire to become anybody else. A mystic is in a state of utter contentment, a state of no movement. He is not going anywhere; he has no goals, no motives. He simply is. He has stopped all desire to know; rather, he has started living.There are people who go on searching for knowledge. They are anti-mystic; their whole effort is to demystify life. That’s what knowledge means. Knowledge means knowing each and everything so that life can be demystified, so that the wonder of life is killed and man can become the absolute boss, a manipulator who can control everything.Knowledge is an effort to control, knowledge is power. All curiosity, all desire for knowledge, is desire for power. Science is non-mystic. A scientist is just the anti-pole, the other extreme, of the mystic. He is trying to poke his nose into reality, to find out its secrets. He is trying to undress reality. He is trying to see reality so that reality can be manipulated.The mystic is one who has come to see that there is no way to know reality, because we are part of it, and how can the knower know itself? There is no possibility; it is an impossible search, it is doomed to fail.A mystic is one who has become mature enough to be able to live without knowledge, to be able to live in ignorance, to be ready to truly live. He is not worried about knowing, he does not make it a condition that “First I have to know; then I will live. How can I live without knowing? If I am to love, first I have to know what love is, and only then I can love. If I am to enjoy, first I have to know what enjoyment is, otherwise how can I enjoy?”The non-mystic makes questions out of simple phenomena, creates questions, and transforms everything into a problem. That is the state of the non-mystic. The mystic is one who has relaxed, who says, “There is no need to know what love is, you can still love, knowledge does not help in any way, on the contrary it hinders.”If you know everything about love you will never be able to love. It is a blessing that you are not capable of knowing what love is. It is a blessing that existence has made it an utter mystery, otherwise nobody will ever love. Once you know, love will disappear, awe will disappear from life; your eyes will not know the quality of wondering. You will become smug, you will become satisfied with your knowledge; you will become dull. Knowledge makes people dull. The more knowledgeable a person is the duller and more insensitive he is.The mystic has come to see the point that knowledge is not possible, that life, existence, godliness, or whatever you call it is basically not only unknown but unknowable. All effort to know is futile. Relax and live.The mystic lives, the non-mystic thinks. The non-mystic thinks about how to live, how to love, how to be. The mystic simply is. He is so occupied with living that he has no energy for knowing. And the paradox is that because he does not bother about knowing, he comes to know in a deeper way. It is not knowledge, it is experience.The man who tries to know, never comes to know. His very effort is egoistic. The seeker after knowledge is a rapist; he is violent, aggressive. The mystic loves life, and in that love mysteries are opened, veils upon veils are removed. But the mystery deepens; it is not finished. One door opens, and you see another door. That opens, and you see another door. Deeper and deeper you move, but there is no end to depth.I was reading…A Yugoslav peasant reading the newspapers came more and more often upon the word dialectics. He wanted to know what the word meant, but nobody could tell him…Communists talk much about dialectics: dialectical materialism, dialectical evolution. Hegelians also talk about dialectics, the theory that life moves through thesis, antithesis, synthesis; that everything moves through struggle, conflict with the opposite. And each synthesis becomes a thesis again, and it goes on and on.So this peasant went to the priest who said, “It is simple and I’ll explain it to you with a concrete example. Two men, one clean and one dirty, are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”“The dirty one,” said the peasant.“No, why should he? He is already used to his dirt. It is the clean one who will want to remain clean. Let us see it one more time. Two men, one dirty, one clean, are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”“It is simple,” the peasant said. “The clean one, for he will want to continue in cleanliness.”“No,” the priest said. “Why should he, since he is already clean? It is the dirty one who will want to become clean. Let us see it one more time. Two men are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”“Both,” the peasant said – confident he has finally caught up with dialectics.“Neither,” the priest said. “Why should they? The clean one is already clean and the dirty is used to dirt.”And so on and so on…The man who is looking for knowledge moves this way, that way, this way, zigzagging. He argues for, and then he starts arguing against, then he starts arguing for because each for leads to against; and each against leads to for.Atheists become theists, theists become atheists, Christians become Hindus, Hindus become Christians, and this goes on, this search for knowledge. The West comes to the East, the East goes to the West… See the absurdity of it. The Eastern seeker of knowledge goes to Western universities, to Oxford, to Cambridge, to Harvard, and the Western seeker of knowledge comes to the East, to the Himalayas.What is this nonsense all about? Thesis becomes antithesis. Everyone changes and turns into one’s opposite sooner or later, because he gets tired of one position and then starts thinking of the opposite position. The opposite seems alluring, new, unfamiliar, an adventure; then tired of that, he starts moving again, by now having forgotten that he had been in the first position before. That’s how people go on moving.It has been my observation that if you are a man in this life there is every possibility that you were a woman in your past life. If you are a woman, there is every possibility that you were a man in the past life. A man becomes tired of being a man and starts thinking that there must be some joy which is not available to him but which is available to women. A woman becomes tired of being a woman; people go on changing.Now science is making change available even in one life. Sooner or later, by the end of this century, people won’t bother waiting for another life. Three years you have been a man, enough is enough. Now why not try being a woman? And it is chemically possible now, physiologically possible; you can be changed. Then you can try being a woman. Then within a few years you will be tired and you will start thinking again of being a man. That’s how things go.People get tired of heterosexuality, they become homosexual. Homosexuals become tired of homosexuality, they become heterosexual. Thesis, antithesis, and there is also synthesis: bisexuals. In every possible way, man goes on moving from one extreme to another. Sometimes he gets tired of both; then he tries some synthesis.A mystic is one who has dropped the whole search, the whole project. He does not look for any truth. He simply enjoys the simple things of life. Breakfast in the morning, a shower, a morning walk, a child giggling on the street, a dog barking, a crow crowing, he enjoys these small things. He is not concerned about the distant: his whole concern is immediate.That is the whole approach of Zen. Understanding Zen, you will become a mystic. Then each moment is such joy, such glory, such splendor, each moment is so precious. Once the hankering for knowledge is dropped, everything takes on grandeur. Just a pebble on the beach is beautiful. “Look at the lilies of the field, how beautiful they are. Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not attired like one of these.”Then this moment is all. A mystic is one who knows no time; time has disappeared from his mind, he lives in this moment and in eternity. He is not worried about birth, he is not worried about death; he is not worried about becoming. It is becoming that keeps you away from yourself, and he has dropped all ideas of becoming. He is not trying to become, he simply is, and when becoming disappears, being is revealed. That revelation of being is the state of being a mystic.People are trying the impossible. Becoming is the most impossible thing. You are – how can you become? How can you become that which you are not? And what is the need to become that which you are? Just see the impossibility of it. You can’t become that which you are not; you need not become that which you are. A is A, and cannot become B. And, of course, A has no need to become A; it is already A. This simple understanding is mysticism.I have heard…There was once a man who owned a beautiful garden. One day he trapped a hummingbird which was eating his finest fruits. The bird promised him three wise teachings as the price of his release. The man agreed.Safely out of reach, the bird said, “Do not regret the irrevocable. Do not believe the impossible. Do not seek the unattainable,” and burst into laughter. “If you had not let me go, you would have found inside of me a pearl the size of a lemon.”Enraged, the man climbed up the tree after the bird. As he came closer, the bird flew higher. With the man in frenzied pursuit, the bird flew to the highest branch of all and walked to its very tip. The man came scrambling after; the branch snapped, the bird flew off, the man dropped to the ground with a thud.Bruised, he picked himself up and gazed ruefully at his tormentor. “Wisdom is for the wise,” the bird admonished. “I told you not to regret the irrevocable, but no sooner did you let me go than you came after me again. I told you not to believe the impossible, yet you believed that a bird my size could contain a pearl the size of a lemon. And I told you not to seek the unattainable, yet you climbed a tree to catch a bird. You are a fool!”The mystic is a wise man; he is wisdom incarnate. Not knowledge, remember, wisdom. Knowledge is a search after the impossible. Wisdom comes out of relaxing into your being. A mystic is a relaxed person, he is in a let-go, immense is his joy; inexpressible is his bliss.Relax and see. Be and see.The second question:Osho,Why do I allow women to hold power over me, to accept or reject me? This old rut makes me sick at heart. I want to get out.Do you know that women love a deluded man? They are always searching for a deluded man, somebody who is mad and insane because the insane is very attractive: the mad, the deluded, has a certain magnetism. He is full of possibilities, dreams – and women love a dreamer.And men? Men love a sane woman – otherwise, they will really go mad – to keep them back on the earth. The woman represents the earth. A man needs a woman because he has no roots in his own being. He needs a woman, the warm earth, the dark soil, where he can have his roots and remain rooted in the earth. He is afraid; he has wings but no roots. And he is afraid that if he is not holding to the earth he may be gone, he may disappear into the infinite sky and there may be no coming back. That fear keeps men running after women.A woman has no wings, she has roots, great roots; a woman is pure earth. And she is afraid that if she remains alone she will never be able to fly into the unknown. A woman can’t be a dreamer like a man. It is not just accidental that women have not created great poetry or music. They don’t have wings; they are very earthly, very pragmatic, very real. And, of course, they are sane; they are so sane, that’s why they don’t write poetry. You have to have some insanity to write poetry; you have to have some delusions, megalomania.A woman makes a laundry list, not a poem, a shopping list. Her concern is immediate. She talks about the neighbors; she is not worried about Vietnam or Israel. She simply laughs at men and wonders why they are so concerned, why they get into such excitement. If something is happening in Israel, it is happening in Israel. Why are you worried? And a woman in the neighborhood has run away with somebody else – that is the important thing; it is so immediate.Women are not interested in gospels, they are interested in gossips. Both the words come from the same root: when it is about the faraway it is a gospel, when it is about the close by it is gossip. When it is immediate it is gossip, when it is ultimate it is a gospel.Man cannot live without woman, because then he loses his roots. He simply becomes a vagabond; he belongs nowhere. Just see a man who has no woman: he has no home, he becomes like a piece of driftwood, waves taking him anywhere. Until he gets entangled with a woman somewhere; then the home arises.Researchers say that the home is the creation of the woman. If man had lived alone, there would have been no home and no civilization either. He would have been a wanderer, a hunter; he would have gone from one corner of the world to the other corner. Look: man is trying to go to the other planets; now he has reached to the moon. And women simply laugh at the whole lunacy. Men must be lunatics, they are so interested in reaching the lunar, the moon. For what? You can’t go shopping there. There seems to be no point at all. And there are no people, no gossiping, nothing of the sort, just empty desert.Man without woman is a wanderer, a vagabond; hence, sooner or later, he needs to get rooted. The woman becomes his earth. Unless a man finds something in him that can become his earth, unless the man finds his own inner woman, he will have to look for the outer woman.Yes, there have been men who have lived without women, a Buddha or a Jesus. But they too have not really lived without a woman; they have found a deeper woman in their own being. Man is both man and woman, and woman is also both woman and man. It has to be so, because you come from two persons – your father and mother. Your father has contributed the man in you; your mother has contributed the woman in you. Each person is fifty percent man, fifty percent woman. Unless you turn inside yourself and find your woman or man there, you will have to look outside, the outside is a substitute.You ask me: “Why do I allow women to hold power over me?” Because without them you will be insane. And the same is true about women – without men they will be too sane, and to be too sane is just a different kind of insanity. To be too sane becomes heavy; to be too sane, you cannot sing, you cannot dance.A woman needs somebody who can dream for her, and a man needs somebody who can become a home for him. This is a must unless you have found your other polarity inside yourself. When a man has found the other polarity inside, he becomes a total orgasm. Then there is no need to look out. You can still go on loving women, but there will be no clinging; you will not become possessive or possessed. When you have found your unity inside, you will still be loving men but it will not be an obsession, it will be just a sharing. Then love is a joy; then love has a totally different quality.Otherwise it will have something of fever in it. The fever has to be there, for a certain psychological reason. If you cannot be alone, naturally you feel powerless before the woman or before the man. If you cannot be alone, then your woman is your need, then you are dependent on her. And you are annoyed because your independence is lost. You are annoyed because she has so much power over you. You cannot forgive her. And the woman cannot forgive you either, because without you she is simply earth. The sky disappears, the stars disappear. Without you she is just earth, dark, waiting for somebody. Waiting for somebody to come and bloom into her being, waiting for somebody to release her fragrance.Have you noticed a woman without love and then one in love? They smell different; they actually smell different; their fragrance is different. When a woman is alone she has sadness all around her: depressed, lonely, forlorn, in despair, just anxiety. The moment she falls in love she starts blooming, something immediately opens up; then she has beauty.A woman not in love shrinks, closes up; she starts living in a shut-upness. She closes the doors and the windows. There is nobody to wait for, so why keep the windows open or the doors open? She starts living in a kind of grave; she is no longer alive. She starts dying, she becomes suicidal. Just mathematics, just arithmetic, just sanity is not enough; some poetry is needed to keep balance.A man alone looks lost; he does not know who he is. Unless he sees himself in the eyes of a loving woman, he will never know who he is. He can go on doing the Enlightenment Intensive and go on asking “Who am I? Who am I?” And no answer will come unless he looks into the eyes of love. Only then will he be reflected, only then will he see who he is in the mirror.The woman gives him form, substance; makes him aware who he is. By her love she creates the man. It is not only that you are created by your mother in her womb; you are created by each woman whenever you fall in love. Whenever you fall in love the woman gives you shape, color, polish; she makes you human. Otherwise, man will be very, very barbarous, violent, aggressive, uncaring, uncompassionate.But the problem is that both depend on each other and both feel hurt because nobody wants to be dependent. And on whomsoever you depend, you will never be able to forgive him or her. You will take revenge; that’s why lovers go on fighting. The fight is nothing more than an attempt to show that “I am still independent” – just to feel that “I am still independent. If I want I can leave her.” And for the woman the fight is just to feel, “I am not so dependent on him. I can still bloom alone, I will still be happy without him.”Hence they fight, just to test their independence. But within hours the fight is gone and they are hugging each other. Because the moment they start separating from each other, they start feeling suffocated, hungry, thirsty. They start losing whatsoever they had. The warmth is missed, the man starts feeling cold. And if there is nobody to hold the woman she starts feeling absolutely lonely.If there is no love we are all alone. If love is not possible, then loneliness is the truth and has to be accepted. Only love gives you glimpses that loneliness is not ultimate.You ask me: “Why do I allow women to hold power over me?” It is not a personal question, every man allows that power. And every man resists it. Every husband becomes a henpecked husband – and I say every! There is no other kind of husband. Whatsoever the pretensions, the only kind that really exists is the henpecked husband.When the tree takes so much nourishment from the earth, it becomes dependent; it cannot remain independent, it is a simple phenomenon. And when the earth sees its own joy, its celebration, its potential, being expressed by the tree in the green foliage and the red flowers, and the branches raised high into the sky with wings that the earth always wanted, and now they are there, how can the earth remain independent?Man and woman exist in a kind of interdependence. Independent, they are half-hungry, starved for the other. Interdependence is the truth, but then independence is lost. It is not an accident that all the monks of the world, down the ages, have been escaping from woman. The woman represents the world. They are really escaping from the feeling that they are dependent; they want to be independent.This is a human phenomenon, not personal at all. The woman cannot feel happy without a man. Without a man she cannot flow in dreams. A deluded man is more attractive than an ordinary man. That’s why women fall in love with people who have great illusions about themselves. An ordinary man is one who has no illusions; no woman is attracted toward an ordinary man. A deluded man looks magical. He has magic, his eyes flare up with something unknown, and that is the desire of the woman. He has the sense of possibility, and that sense of possibility gives him the quality of magic.In nature, watch: the bird with the best dance and the best song gets the best female. This is also the case with human beings. Have you observed how many good-looking women hang around musicians, singers and actors? Why? They sense something magical, something not of this earth, something of the beyond, and they immediately become attracted. This is a natural attraction; both fulfill each other. And this is going to remain.You say: “I want to get out.” You will have to get in. You cannot get out so easily, everything has a price. Get in, as deeply as possible. Don’t be in such a hurry; if you get out, and you are not mature enough to get out, you will have to get in again. Go through the whole lot; go to the very end of it, see it through and through.Meanwhile, go on meditating and watching the phenomenon. Don’t take it personally, it is not personal. If you take it personally, you will misunderstand the whole thing from the very beginning. It is something between man and woman, nothing between you and your woman. It is something between man-energy and woman-energy; it is something between masculine energy and feminine energy.Just watch it as a detached observer. Don’t bring your small egos in it, they are irrelevant. They create a mess, they don’t help any understanding. Just see what is happening with your energies. And, slowly, slowly, that very meditation will help you to find the woman within you; she is there.The day that happens and you start turning in then you can get out. Get into yourself to such a depth that you can find your inner woman and it is there. If you are a man, then your conscious is masculine, your unconscious is feminine. If you are a woman, then your conscious is feminine, your unconscious is masculine. Just dive deep into the unconscious.That is what meditation is all about. Go on loving; go on experiencing the joys and the miseries that love brings, they are all needed to make you ripe and mature, and meanwhile go on meditating. Both these processes, love and meditation, if they continue simultaneously, will make you aware slowly, slowly that whatsoever you are finding outside can be found inside in a far better way.Once that happens, when your unconscious and conscious meet, you become ardhanarishwar, man and woman together. Then there is a difference, a total difference; your quality is no longer the same. Then you can still love a woman, but it is no longer dependence. It is now a sharing. You can still love a man, but it is just pure joy, it is just overflowing energy. You have so much that you have to give it to somebody. But you can be alone too, and as happy as together.When a man is capable of being alone and as happy as when he is with someone, then he will never be in the grip of anybody else. He will not feel that “Somebody holds power upon me.” Then he will not be fighting with his woman or man, because then there is no question of fight. Then two independent people are sharing out of independence, out of immense freedom.But there is no necessity to share; it is for no other motive than because you are overflowing. Then you don’t feel hurt, you don’t feel that you have become a slave. Then you remain a master and she remains a master. Nobody possesses anybody, all possessiveness disappears.Why does this possessiveness come in the mind again and again? Why are you so jealous and so possessive? The reason is that you are dependent, you are afraid. If your woman leaves you tomorrow, you are afraid you will lose your earth. And what are you going to do in the cold lonely nights? You cannot imagine yourself lonely, it is frightening; hence you are afraid.If your woman is laughing with somebody else, talking to somebody else, you become suspicious. Or if your man has gone to the movies with some other woman, you boil, you become feverish. You are sitting on a volcano; you are ready to explode into ugliness. Why? Why so much possessiveness, jealousy? It is because of fear.Who knows? He loves you, he can love another woman. He loves you as a woman, his love for women is still alive, and he can find another woman. Maybe the new woman is more attractive than the old because the unfamiliar is more attractive than the familiar. He has become completely aware of you. Now it is a kind of repetition, you know it. He still loves you, but it is a kind of repetition. It has lost that glamour, it has lost those beautiful beginning days; those honeymoon days are no longer there. Things have settled into a routine.Now you are afraid that he may fall into somebody else’s love and may have again those honeymoon days, and you will be left alone. Fear arises; death arises in you. You have to stop it; you have to create a Wall of China around your man or around your woman. You have to not allow him or her to have any kind of relationship with anybody, any friendship with anybody, so that you can be certain that tomorrow also he will be available to you.But the more possessive you become, the more the relationship becomes ugly, the more the relationship becomes repulsive. The more you become possessive, the more it becomes a boredom. And the man starts dreaming about other women, the woman starts thinking about other men. They are just physically together then, deep inside, they are no longer together.And the more you see it happening, the more panicky you become and the more you possess. Possessiveness is the poison that kills all love. But that seems bound to happen, almost inevitable; in this state of dependence it is bound to happen.You can only be non-possessive, non-jealous, when a different kind of love has arisen in you which is no longer dependent, which needs nobody, which simply goes on overflowing. If somebody partakes of it, good, you are grateful. If nobody partakes of it, very good, you are alone, absolutely happy.The third question:Osho,Yesterday you commented on the creativity of Buddha's religion. Since coming to you, my urge to create has slowly dropped away, while I've become more sensitive, more open, more alive. Everything feels fine as it is, more than enough, and to add to it by making anything else whatever, seems like painting the river.That is true. The creativity that you ordinarily know is not the creativity I am talking about. Ordinary creativity is nothing but an ego trip. You want to show to the world that you are somebody: you are a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a musician. You want to show to the world that you are somebody; your creativity is not really creative, it is just a prop to the ego.When you come to me, that kind of creativity will start disappearing because in the first place it was not real creativity. All that creativity will simply disappear from your mind. But you will become more sensitive, more open, more alive. Just wait, and out of this aliveness, sensitivity, openness, another kind of creativity will take possession of you soon. You will be possessed by something from the beyond. It will not be your ego trip; you will be just a vehicle, a hollow bamboo. The music will flow through you; it will not be of you, it will only flow through you. You will be just a hollow bamboo, a flute. You have only to allow it.I am preparing you for that. The openness, the aliveness, the sensitivity, is nothing but making your bamboo as hollow as possible, so when existence starts singing through you, you don’t hinder.Existence is the only creator. The ordinary creativity comes from the ego: “I am the creator.” That’s why you see the ordinary poet and the painter so egoistic. It is difficult to find more egoistic people than the artists; they are very egoistic. Always fighting among themselves like dogs, criticizing each other and fighting and barking, and everybody pretending that he is the only authentic, original, creative person, and everybody else is just phony. Why does this happen to artists?The reason is simple: the creativity is not yet from the beyond, it is not of the transcendent, it is very tiny. They are simply bragging about themselves. This happens here to many people every day. So many people come to me. They say, “We want to become therapists, we want to become healers, we want to become this and that.” They see that the therapists seem to be important people, healers are important people, they are doing something extraordinary; everybody who comes here sooner or later starts thinking that he has to become a therapist or a healer.This is not creativity; this is just finding a way, a means, for the fulfillment of the ego. And if the ego is there, you cannot be a real therapist. Real therapists are rare. A real therapist is one who is ready to let existence work through him, and that is also the definition of a real healer. Therapy means healing. A healer is not a healer; a healer is just a passage for the healing forces of existence to flow through. He cannot claim anything.So if you move toward healing with the idea that “I have to become a healer, so I will be somebody important, doing great miracles around,” you will never be a healer. How can you be a healer when the very condition of being a healer is dropping the ego.It is very rare to find a healer, very rare to find a therapist. I am training my therapists, my healers, here. The whole training is that they should disappear. They should not be there, they should become absent. And through the absence of the ego, some presence, some unknown presence, starts working through you. That brings miracles to life. That is a real phenomenon, not a created, believed-in thing.So when you come to me, whatsoever you have been doing, if it was not real, it will disappear. And it is good that it disappears. If it was real, then it will be enhanced immediately, and that too is good. But I am not here to support anything unreal.This buddhafield is going to take everything away from you that is ego-centered, ego-oriented. Then, slowly, slowly, one day you will be surprised by the arrival of a new energy knocking on your door. The sun has risen, you are not to be found, the poetry arises and the painting happens. You cannot even sign it; you cannot say, “This is mine.” At the most, you can be grateful that “Existence has chosen me as a vehicle, as a medium.”The fourth question:Osho,What is the difference between a contented pig, a discontented Socrates, and a natural man of Zen?You will have to understand these five categories: First, the contented pig. This has nothing to do with pigs, remember; all these categories are of human beings. The contented pig is that man or woman who lives in an unconscious way; who simply vegetates, who has no awareness; hence, there is no discontent. Discontent presupposes a little awareness.If you are unconscious and somebody is doing surgery on you, you will not feel any pain. How can you feel pain? To feel pain, consciousness is needed. That’s why in surgery we have to give anesthesia, so the man falls completely into a coma. Then you can operate, remove parts of the body without any pain. Otherwise, the pain is going to be unbearable.A contented pig is that kind of man who lives in life absolutely like a robot, a zombie. He eats, walks, goes to work, comes home, makes love, reproduces children, and dies, never becoming aware of what really was happening. Just moves from one thing to another in a kind of daze.The second is the discontented pig. He is still unconscious, ninety-nine percent unconscious, but one percent of consciousness is arising. The first ray of consciousness has penetrated; one is becoming aware of the pain and the anguish and the anxiety of life. People avoid the second state; they want to live in the first.The first state is that of the materialist. Don’t think, don’t contemplate, don’t meditate upon anything. Don’t become conscious: consciousness is dangerous. Remain unconscious, and if sometimes in spite of you some consciousness happens – because life has so much pain that sometimes it can happen that just the pain can give you a little consciousness – then go and take drugs, tranquilize yourself. Or use alcohol, other intoxicants, dull yourself again, back into your anesthetic life, into your unconsciousness. Fall again into that anesthesia.The discontented pig is one who is coming out of this anesthesia. Have you ever been in anesthesia? Slowly, slowly, when you start coming out of it, you start hearing a few noises around: the traffic noise, the doctors walking, the nurses talking. Slowly, slowly, you start feeling some pain in those parts of the body where the operation has been done. Slowly, slowly, you come back.The discontented pig is one who is coming out of the anesthesia of life, who is becoming a man. It is painful, because to be a man is painful, to remain a pig is very painless. Millions have decided to remain pigs. When the discontent arises, you are becoming religious: the first approach toward godliness.The third state is discontented Socrates. You are fully alert about the pain, and you are divided. You are two now: the pain is there and you are there. And life becomes almost unlivable; the pain of it is so much. Something has to be done, either you fall back and become again a pig, or you start moving and become a buddha.The discontented Socrates is just the midpoint. Below, at the lowest, is the pig. Above, at the highest, is the buddha, the real, natural man of Zen. Discontented Socrates is just in the middle, in the middle of the bridge. And there is every possibility that you will fall back because the old is known, and the future is unknown. Who knows? If you go ahead, the pain may increase even more, who knows? You have never known that state ahead. But one thing you do know: at the back there was a moment when there was no pain. Why not fall back into it?That’s where people start becoming interested in drugs. That is falling back, that is a regression. Man cannot be freed from alcohol and such intoxicants, unless man is on the way toward buddhahood. No government can prevent people from alcohol; they will find ways. Because life becomes so unbearable, one has to forget it. Either one has to become a buddha or one has to become a pig. One cannot remain in the middle; the middle is such a torture.The fourth state is contented Socrates. You start moving ahead, you don’t go back. You move more and more into awareness, you move more and more into meditation. Your thinking is transformed into more of a kind of meditativeness. So the fourth stage is contented Socrates: consciousness and unconscious are being bridged.And the fifth state is: no contentment, no discontentment; no pig, no Socrates. All is gone, all those dreams have disappeared. Neither conscious nor unconscious, but a new thing, transcendence, has arisen. This is buddhahood. This is what Zen people call the natural state of man. Purified of all junk, cleaned of all dust, purified of all poisons and the past and the memories, sanskars, conditionings, you have come home.The pig is completely unconscious. The natural man of Zen is completely conscious. Between these two are those other three states. These five states have to be pondered over. Find out where you are, and start moving from there.The goal is not far away. Sometimes it can be reached in a single step, in a single leap. All that is needed is courage. It is out of fear that people fall back into the old rut. If I can teach you courage, I have taught you all. If I can help you to be courageous, then I have made you religious. To me, courage is the most important religious quality, more important than truth, more important than honesty, more important than anything else. Without courage, nothing becomes possible, not truth or love or godliness.The fifth question:Osho,When is mind against itself?Always.The last question:Osho,During your discourse yesterday, you spoke on how we can move from being like ice to becoming like water, then evaporating. Your words prompted a feeling I have been getting for a few months now – a feeling of great affinity for and attraction to water. I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise. I want to become the water and merge with it. But I get out of the water feeling frustrated – I can't quite make it.It is the same with looking at a river or lake – the desire for union is there, but the realization seems both so close and yet so far away.Can this tell me anything about myself?By the way, I'm a plumber.Metaphors are metaphors, don’t take them literally. When I say: Melt, let your ice become water, and evaporate, let your water become vapor, I am talking in metaphors. All that I am saying to you is metaphorical, because that is the only way to say it. But don’t become too attached to metaphors, otherwise you will miss the point.Water is beautiful, and a love for swimming is beautiful. But if you take the metaphor too seriously and you stretch it too far, you will create trouble for yourself. That’s what has happened to you; that’s what has happened to many people here. They listen to me, they jump upon one metaphor that appeals to them, they take hold of it, and they start thinking; that they have got something of the truth.A metaphor has to be understood and dropped, and forgotten. A metaphor is dangerous. If you take it too seriously, you miss the point. A metaphor is only an indicator; it is a way of saying.It is good if you understand what I mean by melting. You are not ice, certainly not. Had you been ice it would have been so easy; you would have melted in the Pune heat automatically. You are not ice, certainly not. Things are more difficult.Metaphors are simple. They have to be simple, because they are meant to relate something which cannot be related in any other way. Melting has to be understood. By melting I mean become loving, because love melts. The warmth of love – not the Pune heat – the warmth of love melts you. What do I mean when I say, “Become water?” I mean become a flow, river-like, but not that you have to become a river. You have been a river somewhere millions of lives before. You have lost that, you have gone far away from it, and there is no need to go back to it.You have evolved much; hence the desire remains there. When you go to the sea and you feel a great attraction toward the sea, a gravitation, almost a pull, do you know from where it comes? Millions of lives before, you have been in the sea, you have been a fish, life started there. And our bodies have not forgotten it; they never forget anything, their memory is absolute.The body knows the thrill, the freedom, the flow of the ocean. So when you see ocean waves, you cannot resist. Something pulls you: “Come into the ocean.” It is your fish inside. Do you know that in the mother’s womb for nine months you swim in almost the same kind of water as in the sea, with the same chemicals, in the same proportion? Do you know inside your body, eighty percent is sea-water? If you don’t take any salt for a few days you will feel tired, because that sea-water is not getting as much salt as it needs, and the fish is feeling thirsty, tired, worried.You are still eighty percent water, and the water is exactly of the same kind as sea-water. That’s why when it is full moon you feel great upsurges of energy in you. Exactly like the ocean, when it is full moon the ocean is affected. You are also eighty percent ocean. You are bound to be affected.In your small ocean, in your tea-cup, storms arise. Many more people go mad on the full-moon night than on any other night. That is only one side of the story: many more people become enlightened, too, on the same night. Buddha became enlightened on a full-moon night. He was born on a full-moon night, he became enlightened on a full-moon night, he died on a full-moon night. He must have been a great fish.So when you are attracted to the ocean it is because something is ingrained deep in your memories. That’s what happens when you go to a lake, or a river, a swimming pool, or even just under your shower, if you cannot go anywhere. The falling water on you stirs memories in the body. The body feels relaxed, happy; it feels nourished, rooted, centered.But that is not what I mean. Enjoy all these things, these are beautiful things. I am not against them, I am all for them. My metaphor has another meaning. When I say “melt” I mean love. Create as much love-heat in you as possible. Only that can melt you. When I say “become water” I mean become a flow, don’t remain stagnant, move, and move like water.Lao Tzu says: “The way of the Tao is a watercourse way.” It moves like water. What is the movement of water, or of a river? The movement has a few beautiful things about it. One, it always moves toward the depth, it always searches for the lowest ground. It is non-ambitious; it never hankers to be the first, it wants to be the last.Remember, Jesus says: “Those who are the last here will be the first in the Kingdom of Heaven.” He is talking about the watercourse way of Tao, not mentioning it, but talking about it. Be the last, be non-ambitious. Ambition means to climb uphill. Water goes downhill, it searches for the lowest ground; it wants to be a nonentity. It does not want to declare itself unique, exceptional, extraordinary. It has no ego idea.That is what I mean when I say become water: drop the ego, drop ambition. Don’t struggle for the top of the hill and don’t start moving upstream. Go with the stream, down the stream, seek and search the lowest, because only in the lowest will you find peace, tranquility and silence. Only in the lowest will you find the inner emptiness I have been talking about all these days. When you start striving to be somebody, you will not be empty. You will become full of bullshit, you will become garbage.Go downward. Search the lowest depths and disappear there, that is the first thing. The second thing: the water is soft, feminine, non-aggressive; it never fights. It makes its way without fighting. It is from water that the Chinese and Japanese learned the secret art of judo or jujitsu, winning without fighting, conquering through surrendering – wei-wu-wei.Learn this one thing from water: it comes across great stone walls, granite walls. It does not fight, it goes on flowing silently; if a stone is too big it finds another way, it bypasses it. But slowly, slowly the granite is dissolved into water, becomes sand. Ask the sands of the oceans from where they have come. They have come from the mountains. They will tell you a great secret: “Water wins finally. We were hard, and we thought that water cannot win. We were very, very settled; we could not believe that this poor water, so soft, unharming, unhurting, nonviolent could destroy us. But it destroyed us.”That is the beauty of feminine energy. Don’t be like a rock. Be like water, soft, feminine. And victory is yours.Remember Jesus again: Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek? Yes, they follow the watercourse way and they will reach the kingdom. It takes time, but they have patience. They have no idea of winning, that’s why they win. The people who want to win are defeated by their very idea, because they start struggling, and in struggling they dissipate their energy.That’s what I mean when I say “become water” – melt, become water. And what do I mean when I say “evaporate”? That is the ultimate: learning how not to be, learning the art of absence. The vapor simply disappears, you cannot catch hold of it; you cannot even see it. You can see it only when it is turning into vapor and soon it is gone, soon it is invisible.A buddha is seen only when he is in the body. Once the body is dropped, you will not be able to catch hold of him. He is simply gone, he has become part of the ultimate sky. That is the ultimate – to disappear. Buddha calls it anatta – no-self, shunyata – emptiness, nothingness, nirvana, cessation.So when I use these metaphors, always remember they are metaphors, poetic ways of saying things which cannot be said in any other way.You ask: “During your discourse yesterday, you spoke on how we can move from being like ice to becoming like water, then evaporating. Your words prompted a feeling I have been getting for a few months now, a feeling of great affinity for and attraction to water.” Get attracted to water, feel affinity with water. Feeling affinity with any element of nature, water, fire, sky, earth, or air is immensely helpful. But that’s not what I meant.“I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise.” You are a good man. That’s how one should think of paradise. Do you know about Jaina monks? They don’t take a shower, they don’t take a bath. Never go to a Jaina paradise, otherwise you will be in difficulty. There will be no showers. And plumbers, of course, will not be needed. They are so much against the body that even a simple joy like a shower seems to be too much of a luxury.See the pathological mind, how it works. They are afraid that if they take a shower they will be enjoying the body, that joy will come, and gladness will spread all over the body. They are so against the body, how can they take a shower? They stink; they don’t brush their teeth because that is a kind of beautifying of the body. And for what? – for the idea that the body has to be dropped, and the sooner the better. The body has to be felt as horrible, so make it as horrible as possible. Make it horrible for yourself and for others too.It used to happen in the past: Jaina monks and nuns would come to see me. Now they have become too afraid, they don’t come. And even if they want to come, their followers won’t allow them. They used to come; it was such a difficult thing to talk to them, because their breath smells so bad that one really feels that the body is horrible. Their bodies smell so bad.What have people been doing on this earth? They have been negating life. My approach is that of affirmation. I am in love with life. It is fleeting, it is momentary, but who says that it is not momentary and it is not fleeting? Still you can love it even more so because it is fleeting. You can pour all your love. Tomorrow it may not be there. Go on loving, go on being as much in celebration as possible, in all the ways possible.You say: “I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise. I want to become the water and merge with it.” That is taking the metaphor too far. It is good when swimming in a river to feel one with the river. Feel the river pass through you. But please don’t become water itself, otherwise how will you come back? And who is going to do the plumbing in the ashram? Please don’t do that; you have to come back too.And that will not be a real thing, either. If somebody thinks he has become water, he has simply gone mad. If somebody thinks that he has become the tree, he has gone mad. It is the same as if somebody thinks he has become Napoleon and somebody has become Alexander the Great, it is the same. Now you are doing the same trick with water, but it is madness.Enjoy the unity, the affinity, the synchronicity with water, the harmony. But there is no need to become water, there is no need.“I want to become the water and merge with it. But I get out of the water feeling frustrated.” Naturally. If you want to merge with it and then you have to get out of it, frustration comes. It is your idea of getting merged with the water that is creating the frustration. You have to get out of it just as you got into it. Enjoy being with it but don’t become obsessed, and then the frustration will disappear.“I can’t quite make it.” There is no need. “It is the same with looking at a river or lake, the desire for union is there but the realization seems both so close and yet so far away.” It is bound to be so. You are trying to live a metaphor. A metaphor has to be understood, not lived. Live life; understand metaphors.The word God is not God. Don’t start living the word God – that’s what people are doing. The word love is not love – don’t start living the word love – that’s what people are doing. Love is just a symbol to indicate toward something which is far more complex, far simpler, far bigger and more infinite, than the word can contain. Only silence can contain it.“Can this tell me anything about myself?” Certainly. It tells one thing: you take words too seriously. You don’t understand that which is hidden behind the words, you don’t understand that which is between two words in the intervals and the gaps. You jump upon the words and you try to carry them in your life. Your life will become false, phony, pseudo. Avoid it.“By the way I am a plumber,” you say. By the way, I am also a plumber. I plumb into the depths of your being. And when somebody starts leaking, I have to fix them. And when somebody’s nuts and bolts become loose, I have to make them tight again. Or when somebody’s nuts and bolts are too tight I have to make them loose.By the way, I am also a plumber.Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-01/

Hakuin sings:All beings are from the very beginning buddhas.It is like water and ice:apart from water, no ice,outside living beings, no buddhas.Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar. What a pity!It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst;it is like the child of a rich house who has strayed away among the poor.The cause of our circling through the six worldsis that we are on the dark paths of ignorance.Dark path upon dark path treading,when shall we escape from birth-and-death?The Zen meditation of the Mahayanais beyond all our praise.Giving and morality and the other perfections,taking of the name, repentance, discipline,and the many other right actions,all come back to the practice of meditation.By the merit of a single sittinghe destroys innumerable accumulated sins.How should there be wrong paths for him?My beloved ones.I love you. Love is my message – let it be your message too. Love is my color and my climate. To me, love is the only religion; all else is just rubbish, all else is nothing but mind churning dreams. Love is the only substantial thing in life; all else is illusion. Let love grow in you and God will be growing on its own accord. If you miss love, you will miss God and all.There is no way to God without love. God can be forgotten – if love is remembered, God will happen as a consequence. It happens as a consequence, it is the fragrance of love and nothing else. In fact, there is no God but only godliness, there is no person like God anywhere. Drop all childish attitudes; don’t go on searching for a father. Divineness is, God is not. When I say divineness is, I mean whatever is, is full of God. The green of the trees, and the red and the golden: all is divine. This crow crying, and a bird on the wing, and a child giggling, and a dog barking: all is divine. Nothing else exists.The moment you ask “Where is God?” you have raised a wrong question because God cannot be indicated anywhere. He’s not in a particular direction, he’s not a particular thing, he’s not a particular being. God is universality. Ask where God is not, then you have asked the right question, but for that right question you will have to prepare the soil of your heart. That’s what I mean by love – preparing the soil of your heart. If you are full of love, the world is full of God; they are parallel, they are part of one symphony.God is the echo from the universe. When you are in love, the echo is there; when you are not in love, how can there be an echo? It is only you who are reflected again and again in millions of ways, it is you who are thrown back to yourself again and again. If you are in love, God is. If you are not in love, then what to say about God? Even you are not.I was thinking what I should give you today – because this is my birthday. I was incarnated into this body on this day. This is the day I first saw the green of the trees and the blue of the skies. This was the day I opened my eyes for the first time and saw God all around. Of course the word God didn’t exist at that moment, but what I saw was God. I was thinking what I should give to you today, then I remembered a saying of Buddha: Sabba danam dhamma danana jnati – the gift of truth excels all other gifts. And my truth is love.The word truth looks to me a little too dry and desertlike. I am not much in tune with the word truth – it looks too logical, too heady. It gives you the feeling of philosophy not of religion, and the idea that you have come to a conclusion, that there has been a syllogism behind it, argumentation, logic, and reasoning. No, truth is not my word; love is my word. Love is of the heart; truth is partial, only your head is involved. In love you are involved as a totality: your body, your mind, your soul are all involved.Love makes you a unity – not a union, remember, but a unity. Because in a union those who join together remain separate. In a unity they dissolve, they become one, they melt into each other. That moment I call the moment of truth, when love has given you unity. First, love gives you unity in your innermost core; you are no longer a body, no longer a mind, no longer a soul. You are simply one – unnamed, undefined, unclassified. No longer determinate, definable, no longer comprehensible. A mystery, a joy, a surprise, a jubilation, a great celebration.First, love gives you an inner unity. And when the inner unity has happened, the second happens on its own – you are not to do anything for it. Then you start falling in unity with the whole beyond you. Then the drop disappears into the ocean and the ocean disappears into the drop. That moment, that moment of orgasm between you and the whole, is where you become a buddha. That moment is the moment buddhahood is imparted to you. Or, better, revealed to you – you have always been that, unaware.My word is love. So I say: my beloved ones, I love you. And I would like you to fill the whole world with love. Let that be our religion. Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Islam, not Jainism, not Buddhism, but love. Love without any adjective to it. Not Christian love, because how can love be Christian? It is so stupid. How can love be Hindu? It is ridiculous. Love is simply love. In love you can be a christ. In love you can be a buddha – but there is no Buddhist love and there is no Christian love.In love you disappear, your mind disappears. In love you come to an utter relaxation. That’s my teaching to you; I teach love and there is nothing higher than love.Then I thought I should give you something beautiful on this day. And I remembered Hakuin’s Song of Meditation. It is a very small song, but a great gift. Hakuin is one of the greatest Zen masters. His song contains all: all the Bibles, all the Korans, and all the Vedas. A small song of a few lines, it is like a seed – very small, but if you allow the passage of it to your heart, it can become a great tree. It can become a bodhi tree – it will have great foliage and much shade and thousands of people can sit and rest underneath it. It will have big branches and many birds can come and have their nests on it.See: I have become a tree. You are the people who have come to make their nests on my tree. You can also become this. Everybody should become this – because unless you become this you will go on missing your fulfillment. Unless you become a great tree which has come to its foliage, flowers and fruits – which is fulfilled – you will remain in discontent. Anguish will go on gnawing in your heart. Misery will linger around you. Bliss will be only a word, signifying nothing. God will be just gibberish.When you have fulfillment, there is grace and there is God. In your fulfillment you come to realize the benediction of existence.This is a song of meditation. Hakuin has called it a “Song” – yes, it is a song. If meditation is without song it is dull and dead, it does not beat, it does not breathe. It is a song and a dance: sing it and dance it. Just don’t think upon it – then you will miss the message, you will miss its content. You will find this song and its meaning only when you are singing and dancing, when the music of life has overtaken you, has possessed you.Hakuin’s song is so small and yet so vast, it is unbelievable. How can a man condense so much truth and so much love and so much insight into so few words? But Hakuin was a man of few words, a man of silence. For years he did not speak at all, and then later he would speak only a word or two.Once, the emperor of Japan invited him to deliver a sermon in the palace. The queen, the king, the prime minister, the ministers and high officials and generals all gathered with great respect to listen. Hakuin came, stood there for a single moment, looked around, and left the hall. The king was puzzled. He asked his prime minister, “What is the matter with this man? We had come to listen.”The old prime minister said, “This is the greatest sermon that I have ever heard – he has said it! You had asked him to come and teach you about silence and he has taught it. He stood there in silence, he was silence. What more do you ask for? What more do you demand? He was pure silence standing there for those few seconds, utter silence. He was silence, throbbing, pulsating. But you wanted to hear some words.”About silence nothing can be said, all that is said about silence will be wrong. How can you say anything about silence? To say something will be falsifying it. That’s why Lao Tzu says that nothing can be said about Tao and that if something is said, in the very saying of it, it has become untrue. Tao is silent, but that silence is not the silence of a cemetery. It is the silence of a garden where trees are alive, breathing, and yet there is utter silence. It is not a dead silence, it is an alive silence. Hence Hakuin has called it, The Song of Meditation.Buddha says: “My approach to reality is not that of belief but of seeing.” His religion has been qualified as, ihi passika – come and see. Not come and believe. Buddha says: “Come and see. Ihi passika. It is here, present – just come and see.” He does not require you to believe. He is the only great teacher in the world who dropped belief and with dropping belief, he transformed religion from a very low childish stature to a very mature thing. With Buddha, religion became matured, otherwise it was childish. It was a kind of belief – belief is superstition, belief is out of fear. And belief is blind. Buddha has given eyes to religion. He says: “See,” and there is no need to believe. And when you have seen, it will not be a belief, it will be knowing.In this song of Hakuin you will see the way of seeing – how to open the eyes. Because truth is always there, has been always there. It is not that the truth has to be produced. Buddha says: “Yatha bhutam – It is!” It is already there, it is confronting you. It is in the east, it is in the west, it is in the north, it is in the south, it surrounds you – it is without and it is within. But you will have to see it: ihi passika. Your eyes are closed, you have forgotten how to open them. Meditation is nothing but the art of opening your eyes, the art of cleansing your eyes, the art of dropping the dust that has gathered on the mirror of your consciousness.It is natural that dust gathers. Man has been traveling and traveling for thousands of lives – dust gathers. We are all travelers, much dust has gathered – so much so that the mirror has completely disappeared. There is only dust upon dust, layers and layers of dust, and you cannot see the mirror. But the mirror is still there; it cannot be lost because it is your very nature. If it can be lost then it will not be your nature: it is not that you have a mirror, you are the mirror. The traveler is the mirror. He cannot lose it, he can only forget it – at the most, forgetfulness.You have not lost your buddhahood. Buddhahood means the mirror clean of dust. The mirror again fresh, again reflecting, again functioning – that’s what buddhahood is. Buddhahood means a consciousness that has become awakened: the sleep is no more, the dreams are no more and the desires have disappeared. The dust gathers, it is natural. But you cling to the dust; your desire functions like glue.And what is your desire? That has to be understood. If you have understood your desire, you have understood all, because in the understanding of desire, desire ceases. And when desire ceases, suddenly you have a totally new feel to your being; you are no longer the old.What is the desire? What are you searching? What are you seeking? Happiness, bliss, joy – that’s what you are seeking. You have been seeking for millennia, and you have not yet found it. It is time, the right time to think again, to meditate again. You have been seeking so hard, you have been trying so hard – perhaps you are missing just because you are trying? Maybe it is trying that keeps you away from happiness? Let us think over it, brood over it. Give a little pause to your search – recapitulate.You have been searching for many lives. You don’t remember other lives, no need – but in this life you have been searching, that will do. And you have not found it: nobody has ever found by searching. Something is wrong in the very search. In the search, naturally you forget yourself. You start looking everywhere, everywhere else. You look to the north and to the east and to the west and to the south, and in the sky and underneath the seas, and go on searching everywhere. The search becomes more and more desperate because the more you search and don’t find, great anxiety arises: “Am I going to make it this time, or am I again going to miss it?”More and more desperation, more and more misery, more and more madness – you go nuts. And happiness remains as far away as ever, in fact it recedes farther away from you. The more you search, the less is the possibility to get it because it is inside you.Happiness is the function of your consciousness when it is awake, unhappiness is the function of your consciousness when it is asleep. Unconsciousness is your mirror burdened with much dust and luggage, and the past. Happiness is when the burden has been dropped and the mirror is found again; your mirror can again reflect the trees and the sun and the sand and the sea and the stars. When you have again become innocent, when you again have the eyes of a child – in that clarity you are happy.I was reading a few beautiful lines of Michael Adam:Perhaps trying even makes for unhappiness. Perhaps all the din of my desiring has kept the strange bird from my shoulder. I have tried so long and so loud after happiness. I have looked so far and wide. I have always imagined that happiness is an island in the river. Perhaps it is the river. I have thought happiness to be the name of an inn at the end of the road. Perhaps it is the road. I have believed that happiness was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Perhaps it is here. Perhaps it is now. I have looked everywhere else.So: here and now.But here and now is clearly unhappiness. Perhaps then, no such thing as happiness. Perhaps happiness exists not, it is just a dream created by an unhappy mind. Certainly it cannot be as I unhappily imagine it. Here and now there is not happiness. So happiness is not. I need not therefore waste myself on what is not. I can forget about happiness then; I can cease to care and instead concern myself with something that I do know, can feel and fully experience. Happiness is an idle dream: now it is morning. I can awaken and stay with unhappiness, with what is real under the sun this moment. And now I see how much of my unhappiness came from trying to be happy; even I can see that trying is unhappiness. Happiness does not try….At last I am here and now. At last I am what I am. I am unpretending, at ease. I am unhappy – so what? But is this what I ran from? Is this really unhappiness?Think over it, meditate over it.And when I cease to try to be happy or anything else, when I do not seek anymore, when I do not care to go anywhere, get anything, then it seems I am already arrived in a strange place: I am here and now. When I see that I can do nothing, that all my doing is the same dream, in the moment that I see this, my mind the old dreamer and wanderer is for the moment still and present.Naturally. If you are not searching, not seeking, not desiring, not dreaming, for a moment the mind falls into silence, is still. There is nothing to hanker about, nothing to make a fuss about, nothing to expect, and nothing to be frustrated about. For a moment, the mind stops its constant chasing. In that moment of stillness you are in a strange place, you are in a strange unknown space, never known before. A new door has opened and for the moment the mind is still and present.For the moment, here and now, the real world shows, and see: here and now is already and always all that I had sought and striven after elsewhere and apart. More than that: I have hunted after shadows; the reality is here in this sunlit place, in this birdcall now. It was my seeking after reality that took me from it; desire deafened me. The bird was singing here all the while.If I am still and careless to find happiness, then happiness it seems is able to find me. It is, if I am truly still, as still as death – if I am thoroughly dead, here and now.Happiness suddenly jumps upon you. When desire disappears, happiness appears. When the striving is no more, for the first time you see who you are. That knowing is what Buddha means: “Come and see – ihi passika.” Where is he calling you: “Come and see”? He is calling you from your desires. You have gone far away from your home, you have lost your home base and are not where you appear to be. Your dream has taken you to faraway worlds: imaginary, illusory, your own creation.Zen people have a special word for meditation. They call it fusho. Fusho means unproduced. You cannot produce it; you cannot do anything to bring it. You have to be passive, in a state of non-doing – then it comes. Then it comes suddenly from nowhere, from out of the blue. And in that coming, in that shower of silence and stillness, is the transformation. Zen people say it is nothing special. How can it be special? It is everybody’s nature, so how can it be special? It is utterly ordinary, everybody has it. You may know, you may not know – that is a different thing – but you have it. Not for a single moment have you missed it. Not for a single moment has it been taken away from you. It has been lying and lying there, waiting for you to come back home.Another word Zen people use for meditation is wushi. It means nothing special or no fuss.Now this song of Hakuin:All beings are from the very beginning buddhas.This one sentence is enough, it is the beginning and the middle and the end. It is all: the alpha and the omega.All beings are from the very beginning buddhas. You are buddhas. Never for a single moment have you been otherwise. You cannot. You cannot really go away from your buddhahood, you can only dream. You can only dream that you have gone away, but while dreaming you will still remain here now. It is impossible to lose your buddhahood because God is involved in every thing and every being. And when Hakuin says: All beings are from the very beginning buddhas, don’t think that he is talking only of human beings; animals are included, so are the birds and the trees and the rocks. All that is, is included.The English word being comes from a Sanskrit root bhu. Bhu means “that which grows.” All that grows is God: the trees grow, the birds grow, the rocks grow. All that grows is God and everything grows at its own pace. Remember, the root of being, the word being, is bhu. It simply means that which breathes, that which grows, that which has life – howsoever rudimentary, howsoever primitive, all is included.All beings are from the very beginning buddhas. And what is the meaning of a buddha? Buddha means a consciousness that has come back to itself: is no longer wandering in dreams, is no longer thinking of the future, is no longer thinking of the past. A consciousness that is not possessed by memories or possessed by imagination, a consciousness that has got rid of the past and of the future, a consciousness that has only the present. A consciousness that lives in the moment, utterly here now: alert, awake, radiant.All beings are buddhas. Zen people call this single sentence “The Lion’s Roar.” It is. In a single stroke Hakuin has delivered you, has saved you from yourself. There is no more salvation needed; a single statement is enough to release you from all bondage. You are a buddha. But remember you are not a buddha in any special sense. Everybody is: your dog and your cow and your buffalo and your donkey, everybody is! So don’t take it in an egoistic sense, that “I am a buddha.” Don’t make it ambitious; don’t go on an ambition trip. All is buddha: life is buddha, being is buddhahood, existence is buddhahood.Just think of it, one of the greatest statements ever made: All beings are from the very beginning buddhas. Hakuin has finished in one sentence. The remaining song will be a repetition, really. The remaining song will be for those who cannot understand the first statement. It is said that when Hakuin was writing this song and he wrote his first sentence: All beings are from the very beginning buddhas, one of his disciples was sitting there and he said, “Stop now. There is no more to say.” And he left the room. He said, “Now there is no point. You have finished in the first sentence – this should be the last sentence!”But still the song is beautiful. It will help you to come to the same truth from different directions, to see the point from different vantage points, from different windows. You will see the same buddha from every window of the temple, but it is good: from one window there may be more light falling on the buddha, from one window the green of the trees may be reflected in the buddha’s face, from another window a star may be looking at the buddha, from another window something else, a bird may be sitting singing a song.All beings are from the very beginning buddhas. The universe is made of the stuff called God, so God is not in the end. God is in the beginning, in the middle, and the end. Only God is. But let me remind you, when I use the word God I mean godliness.It is like water and ice:apart from water, no ice,outside living beings, no buddhas.Hakuin says: It is like water and ice… There is no difference between water and ice, and yet a sort of difference. If you had gone to the market to purchase ice, you would not purchase water, you would purchase ice. You would insist. If somebody said, “Take this water,” you would say, “I have come for ice.” There is a sort of difference, but not much, really only on the surface. The ice will melt and become water, and the water can freeze and turn into ice. They are two phases of one phenomenon.You are like ice and a buddha is like water: you are frozen, he has melted. And let me repeat: there is no other alchemy than love to help you melt. Love melts because love is warmth. People melt only in love. When they are not in love they become cold, and in the cold they freeze. You must have watched it, even in your small ways: when you are loving, you are flowing; when you are flowing, you are glowing. When you are loving, you expand; when you are not loving, you shrink. When you are loving, you have warmth around you; when you are not loving, you are surrounded by a cold wind, you are freezing, and anybody who comes close to you will freeze.There are some people who, if they look at you with their cold eyes, you will shiver. And there are some people, when they look at you with their warmth, their love, you suddenly feel this is your home. There are eyes which give you the feeling of being at home, and there are eyes which stare at you and make you aware that you are a stranger here.…apart from water, no ice, outside living beings, no buddhas. So buddhahood is nothing but a state of merger. Frozenness is gone, your definition has disappeared, you are no longer limited, you are no longer confined. At the deepest core, you are no more because if you are, there will be some kind of frozenness in you. If you are, you cannot be flowing – something will be hindering and something will be stuck and something will be obstructing. When you are not at all… That’s why when two lovers are in deep embrace there are not two people, there is only one energy, revolving. When two lovers are in a really deep embrace, there comes a moment when the woman forgets whether she is woman or man and the man forgets whether he is man or woman. If that moment has not yet come then you have not loved.In deep love you disappear. Still something is there, a kind of presence, but nobody is present. There is no center as frozen ice, there is no self. That’s why Buddha has very much insisted that your self is the root cause hindering you from being a buddha. The feeling “I am” makes you ice – icy and cold. If this feeling of “I am” disappears there is no problem, the ice will melt. It is like water and ice: apart from water, no ice, outside living beings, no buddhas.The Buddhist doctrine talks about Buddha’s three bodies. They have to be understood: the first body is the physical body. The second body is called the bliss body – the bridge between the first and the third. You can call it the soul. And the third body is called the body of truth, the universal body, the divine body. You can call it God.You know only your physical body. You have not known your second body, the bliss body, and unless you know the second body you will not be able to know the third, the deepest – your universal body, your cosmic body, your buddha body.This is the Christian trinity – the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost. Or, this is the Buddhist trimurti – the three faces of God. Buddha says everybody has these three bodies. The first, the physical, is very frozen. The second is in a state of liquidity. And the third is vaporous. First the ice has to melt into water and then the water has to evaporate. Have you seen – ice has definition, boundaries; water has no definition, no boundaries? You pour water into any jug, into any pot, it takes the shape of the pot. It is nonresistant, nonaggressive, it does not fight. It is liquid, it adjusts.The man of compassion and love is like water, he adjusts. He has no resistance; he does not enforce his form on anybody. He accommodates, he is accommodative, he is spacious.And then the third, when the water has evaporated and has disappeared and become invisible. Now you cannot even pour it into a pot. It has become part of the sky, moved into the eternal, into the infinite.These are the three states of water, and these are the three states of consciousness too. You have become too gross because you have become too identified with your first body, as if a man has befooled himself into believing that the walls of his house are his house. The walls of the house are not the house, you have to go in a little. You have to find the innermost core of your being and that innermost core is invisible, that innermost core is almost like emptiness.The third body is essence, the second body is form, the first body is action. People who live only in the physical body live only in doings: what to do, what not to do; their whole life is just swerving, swaying, between this and that, their life consists of doing and they don’t know anything else.The second body is of form, man starts seeing glimpses of nonaction. That’s what happens in meditation – when you are sitting silently doing nothing, great joy arises, from nowhere, for no cause. You don’t know from where it is coming, but great joy arises as if out of nothing, miraculously, magically. This is the second, the form; the joy takes form.And then there is the third. If you go on following, moving inward, one day you reach the essence that Buddha calls the body of truth. There, no action and no no-action. All has disappeared, the whole duality has disappeared. You have come to the very essence of existence. That essence is liberating, that essence is nirvana. You are not to go anywhere to find it; you were carrying it all along.All beings are from the very beginning buddhas.It is like water and ice:apart from water, no ice,outside living beings, no buddhas.Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar. What a pity!If you go on seeking afar for that which is near, you will go on missing. Nobody is at fault. Before you go into the four corners of the world to search for it, first go into yourself. If you don’t find it there, then you can go anywhere you like. But people don’t go within, they start from without. And the without is vast, you can go on and on, you can search all over the earth. People are searching, they come to me and say, “We have been searching for our whole lives, we have been here and there, we have been to Japan and to Sri Lanka and to Burma and to Thailand, and we have traveled all over the East. And we have not found it yet.”The East is within you. It is not in Thailand, it is not in India, you will not find it anywhere. At the most, if you accidentally come across an enlightened man, he will throw you to yourself. Not that he will give it to you: nobody can give it to you. It is already there, there is no need to give it.People are becoming even more mad because in the modern world, communication has become easy, traveling has become easy. They go jumping from one city to another, from one airport to another. They are driving themselves crazy. To reach home you need not enter any airplane, any train, any car. You need only to enter yourself. And ticketless – no ticket is needed! Nobody is there to debar you; it is your territory.I have heard…A party of American tourists happened to arrive at Mount Vesuvius during one of its more spectacular eruptions. “Say!” exclaimed one of the Yanks in an awed tone, “doesn’t that beat all hell!”“Sapresti!” said the Italian guide. “How you Americans travel!”Now even hell is in danger, afraid of tourists.People go on searching and seeking for something that needs no search, which can be found only when searching stops. I am not saying to strive to stop it – then again you have started it. If you strive to stop it, you have missed the point. You have just to see the point, that striving will take you away from you, that striving will create more and more tension. See the fact: ihi passika. Seeing this, striving disappears and there is sudden stillness. In that stillness the first glimpse of bliss will come, you will enter your second body. And when you have entered the second body then it will be more and more easy, very lucid, to slip into the central-most core – the essential body, the body of truth.Once you have tasted something of your inner bliss then you have the vision where to really search, where to go now. Disappear into your innermost being and you will find it. Seek, and you will miss. Don’t seek, and find.Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar. What a pity!It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst;it is like the child of a rich house who has strayed away among the poor.And has forgotten that he is rich – may have become a beggar. You are rich, infinitely rich, you are all emperors and empresses, gods and goddesses – just recognize it. Don’t get too much into begging. Desire creates the beggar; even a man like Alexander is a beggar because the desire is there, a man like Napoleon is a beggar because the desire is there. See the richest people of this earth and you will see just beggars and nothing else. And sometimes it happens that you come across a beggar and you see an emperor sitting there under a tree – having nothing, not possessing anything.Just possess yourself and you have possessed all, be the master of yourself and you have become the master of all. Possessing things, you will remain a beggar. People go on changing, but not really transforming: you possess one thing, then you start possessing another thing, then you possess a third thing. Sometimes you start possessing otherworldly things, but nothing changes, just the form changes. Somebody possesses money and somebody starts possessing virtue. It is the same, not much is different.I have heard…Early one Sunday morning, Farmer Giles looked out to see a flock of large black crows devouring his field of prize spring cabbages.Red with anger, he rushed out and began charging up and down the field manically, shaking his fists, tearing his hair, foaming at the mouth and screaming abuse of every known kind at the gouging birds.The Reverend Goodbody passing on his bicycle was surprised by the sight, and shocked to hear loud and violent cries of “Piss off you thieving bastards! Piss off you greedy black bastards!” He stopped immediately and beckoned to the angry farmer.Embarrassed and red-faced, Giles shuffled up with a humble “Good morning Reverend.”“Now this really won’t do, Giles,” said the good vicar. “So early on the Sabbath, there might be ladies present. These fowl too are God’s creatures. If you wish them to vacate your property do it with love and compassion. Say ‘Shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo,’ then the greedy black bastards will piss off!”But what difference does it make? You and your priests, you and your so-called religious people, are all in the same boat.I am not saying start striving to stop striving, otherwise you will simply change the name of your madness and you will remain the same. You will just change the label of your neurosis. There are people who are greedy for money and there are people who are greedy for God. It makes no difference at all, they are the same people. Greed is greed; it makes no difference for what the greed is, greed is greed.Just see the point: striving is meaningless, going anywhere is meaningless. Not because I am saying it – you have to see it: ihi passika. You have to see it, you are not to believe it. Believing won’t help – believing is just a whitewash on the surface. Seeing brings transformation.It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst… Hakuin says you are crying out for happiness like a fish in the water crying, “I am thirsty.” You have it! And you are begging everywhere.It is like the child of a rich house who has strayed away among the poor.The cause of our circling through the six worldsis that we are on the dark paths of ignorance.Dark path upon dark path treading,when shall we escape from birth-and-death?What is …the dark path of ignorance? – looking outward. The farther you look, the more darkness because the light burns inside you. Looking closer and closer, there is more light. That’s why we call a buddha “enlightened” – he has come to know and realize his light. It is a perpetual light without any fuel, it cannot be exhausted. Suns will be exhausted and moons will be exhausted and stars will be exhausted, but the light that burns inside you as consciousness is inexhaustible. It is eternal.Once upon a time there lived an old king in a palace. In the center of a golden table in the main hall, there shone a large and magnificent jewel. Each day of the king’s life, the stone sparkled more resplendently.One day a thief stole the jewel and ran from the palace, hiding in the forest. As he stared with deep joy at the stone, to his amazement the image of the king appeared in it.“I have come to thank you,” said the king. “You have released me from my attachment to Earth. I thought I was freed when I acquired this jewel, but then I learned that I would be released only when I passed it on, with a pure heart, to another.“Each day of my life I polished that stone, until finally this day arrived when the jewel became so beautiful that you stole it. I have passed it on and am released.“The jewel you hold is understanding. You cannot add to its beauty by hiding it and hinting that you have it, nor yet by wearing it with vanity. Its beauty comes of the consciousness that others have of it. Honor that which gives it beauty.”That’s why buddhas go on giving you whatever they have attained. Go on sharing because the beauty of it is in sharing. That’s why Hakuin has sung this song. That’s why I am here, sharing my being with you, my joy with you, my celebration with you. It is something that has to be shared to keep it alive. It is something that has to be given. The more you give it, the more you have of it.Never be a miser with your love and with your understanding. Share it and you will have more and more of it, don’t hoard it otherwise you will miss it – one day you will find it has disappeared and there is nothing but stink left. Instead of fragrance there will be stinking. Share your love with everybody and anybody. Don’t make conditions to your love. And the best way to share is to share your understanding, to share your meditation.Hakuin is doing that in this song. He’s sharing his buddhahood. He is singing about what he has known; he is praising it, he is making it clear to people who have not yet attained but can attain. Maybe somebody will hear the song, somebody will be struck by it, stabbed in the very heart by it. It is a lion’s roar: somebody may be awakened out of his sleep.The cause of our circling through the six worlds is that we are on the dark paths of ignorance. Dark path upon dark path treading, when shall we escape from birth-and-death? Birth means getting attached to the physical body, death means the frustration of that attachment to the body. Getting free of birth and death means getting free of the physical body. But how can you be free from the physical body? Unless you know the second body you will not be free from the physical body. So it is not a question of being free from the physical body; the basic question is how to enter the second body. Once you are in the second, you are free from the first. And once you are in the third, you are free from the second too.That’s why you don’t see Buddha laughing. Not that he didn’t laugh, but he has not been shown laughing because in the third body, the body of truth, even bliss is meaningless. The first body, the physical body, is the body of misery: attached to the physical body you remain miserable. The second body is the body of bliss: once you reach it all misery disappears, you are blissful. But bliss is the opposite of misery – part of a duality. The body of truth goes beyond both, it is transcendental. Misery has disappeared, so what is the point of keeping bliss? When there is no misery, there is no point in bliss. When poverty has disappeared, what is the point in holding richness? Even that can be dispossessed.When all duality disappears – pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, day and night, life and death – then for the first time you are in God.The Zen meditation of the Mahayanais beyond all our praises.Giving and morality and the other perfections,taking of the name, repentance, discipline,and the many other right actions,all come back to the practice of meditation.Hakuin says all that has been done in the name of religion down the ages can be reduced to one single thing, and that is meditation – dhyana. And what is dhyana? Becoming aware of your physical body is the first dhyana, the first step of meditation. Become watchful of your physical body: watch yourself walking, watch yourself eating, watch yourself running, talking, listening. Watch. And through watching you will see you are different from the physical body. Because the watcher cannot be the watched, the observer cannot be the observed, the seer cannot be the seen, the knower cannot be the known.Watch the physical body, and the second body will arise. It is there – but you will start feeling it, you will start recognizing it, it will start penetrating you. This is the first step of meditation: watch the physical body. Then the second step, and the last, is: watch the bliss body. Watch your celebration, watch your joy, watch your silence, watch your ecstasy and then you will suddenly see that the watcher cannot be the watched: “Ecstasy is there, but I am far away from it. Bliss is there, but I am the knower of it.”Then you start getting into the third body, the body of truth. You become a pure witness – sakshin – and that is liberation. Hakuin says it happens through meditation that you discover, or rediscover, your buddhahood.By the merit of a single sittinghe destroys innumerable accumulated sins.How should there be wrong paths for him?Just in …a single sitting… it can happen. Hakuin does not preach the gradual path, he preaches the sudden path. It can happen in a single moment. It can happen now; you need not postpone it for tomorrow. Who knows? – tomorrow may never come, it never comes, really. It can happen this very moment. If your awareness is lucid, if your awareness is there, clear, crystal clear, it can happen this very moment. This very sitting, and you can become a buddha. Nobody is hindering the path except yourself, nobody is the enemy except you and nobody is the friend either.By the merit of a single sitting he destroys innumerable accumulated sins. Hakuin says don’t be worried about your sins and past karma, in a single sitting of meditation all that can be burned – the fire of meditation is so potential that it can burn your whole past in a single moment. There is no need to be worried about past karma – “I have done some bad, so I have to suffer. I have done something, so I have to go to hell.” If you want to go, you will have to go! But these are all rationalizations that you are trying to find. If you wish, it is your wish – it will be fulfilled. This existence is very obliging. It goes on obliging; if you want to go to hell, it supports. It says, “Go! I am all with you.”But if you decide, “Enough is enough, I have suffered enough,” a single moment of meditativeness is enough to burn all your millions of past lives and millions of future lives too. You are released.Start meditating. First on the body, then on your inner feelings of bliss, joy. Go on moving inward and one day the song of Hakuin will burst forth in you too. You will flower and unless you flower you have not lived, or have lived in vain. You are here to bloom and unless you bear fruits and many flowers you will go on missing the meaning of life.People come to me and ask, “What is the meaning of life?” As if meaning is somewhere sold in the market, as if meaning is a commodity. Meaning has to be created. There is no meaning in life: meaning is not a given thing, it has to be created, it has to become your inner work, then there is meaning – and there is great meaning.Love and meditate and you will attain meaning. And you will attain life, abundant life.Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-02/

The first question:Osho,Is enlightened consciousness less spicy than ordinary consciousness?Consciousness is one, you cannot divide it in two. Consciousness is indivisible; you cannot say “ordinary consciousness” and “enlightened consciousness” – consciousness means enlightenment.The ordinary person is not conscious, he is unconscious. He believes he is conscious and his very belief prevents him from becoming conscious. If an ill man believes he is healthy then there is no cure for him, no medicine, no remedy. If a man who knows nothing of love thinks he is a lover, he will never know anything of love. The ordinary man lives in unconsciousness because he believes he is already conscious. He has befooled himself, he has deceived himself.Consciousness is always enlightenment. To be conscious means to be a buddha and the possibility exists in everybody. Yet people go on living in an unconscious way because they believe they are already conscious, so there is nothing to be done, there is nothing into which to be transformed. They go on thinking that this is all they have. This is not even the beginning; the journey has not started, you are fast asleep. But you can have a dream journey; you can go in your dream to the farthest corner of the earth and you can go on believing that you are a traveler. And all the time you are asleep here, now.Here now you are asleep. That is what unconsciousness is. You may be conscious of the past – but the past is no more, so that consciousness is of absence. You may be conscious of the future, and the future is not yet; that consciousness is pseudo. The only consciousness is of here now, of this moment. If you are utterly here this moment, totally here this moment, then you are conscious and in that very intensity you become a flame of light, a smokeless flame. That is what enlightenment is.So please don’t divide consciousness in two; it cannot be divided. Consciousness has one taste – of being aware. Consciousness knows no past, no future, no other time, no other world.A great poet, Paul Eluard, has said: “There is another world. But that other world is hidden in this one.” That’s true, that’s exactly what is the case. God is, but not somewhere else – hidden in this moment.Jesus says to his disciples: “Look at the lilies in the field. They toil not, they think not of the morrow.” Visualize the lilies in the field and Jesus talking to his disciples, indicating those lilies. He says, “Even Solomon in all his glory was not attired like one of these.” What is the beauty of a poor lily flower? And what is the richness of a poor lily flower? – it is utterly here now, it knows no other time and no other space. It knows no other world. Its intensity, its totality, its wholeness, makes it more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory.Yes, even your greatest emperors are poor before the flower of the lily. The lily exists in the moment; the moment you exist in the moment, you are conscious. Consciousness is of the present, consciousness is a kind of presence. Otherwise you live like a robot, a machine: obsessed with your habits, you go on repeating them again and again and again. And because they are mechanical they never satisfy you so the wheel goes on moving. Unsatisfied, you desire a better future; unsatisfied with the past, you project a future. But the future is projected out of the past – it is bound to be like it. Maybe a little bit different here and there, but not much, a modified thing, a little bit decorated, improved, but all the time in essence the same. Again you will be dissatisfied and again you will project.Man is in a deep discontent and goes on projecting a paradise somewhere else. That paradise never comes; it cannot come. Paradise has already come, it is already here; man has never left the Garden of Eden. What really happened when Adam ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? – he fell asleep and he started dreaming that he has been expelled, that he has been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, that God is angry, that he has betrayed. He started feeling guilty, he started feeling a sinner: he created his own nightmare.In fact, Adam has never for a single moment left the Garden of Eden – because where can he go? This whole is the Garden of Eden; paradise is all over the place. It is God’s world – to where can God expel Adam? Where? There is no other world. Expulsion is impossible, this is the only existence there is.So my understanding of the biblical parable is that Adam has fallen asleep, he has become unconscious: knowledge proved to be a kind of poison. It is – knowledge always makes people unconscious because knowledge becomes content in their consciousness, and the content covers their consciousness like dust covers a mirror. The more knowledge, the more dust, and one day the mirror is completely lost – there are layers and layers of dust and it is very difficult to search for the mirror.You are that Adam and that Eve. It is not something that happened in the past; it is not history, it is happening. It has always been happening and will always be happening. Collect knowledge – eat from the Tree of Knowledge – and you become unconscious.Then what is the way to become conscious? – drop content, drop thoughts, drop knowledge. Unburden yourself, let your mind become empty, let your mind become no-mind. And suddenly you will be surprised that you have never gone anywhere else, you have been in paradise.That’s what happened to Gautam Buddha. The day he became enlightened, do you know what were the first words that he uttered? He said: “Wonder! Wonder! I have always been this. Wonder! Wonder! The whole existence has become enlightened with me.” He said two things: “I am surprised, for what I have been seeking and searching, I have always been that!” And the second thing to surprise him was: “Everybody is seeking the same as I was seeking and everybody is really enlightened.”All beings are buddhas from the very beginning. You were a buddha in the beginning, you are a buddha in the middle, you will be a buddha in the end: buddhahood is essential. It is not something accidental that happens and then disappears, sometimes happens, sometimes doesn’t happen. It is your inner nature, it is you.You ask me: “Is enlightened consciousness less spicy than ordinary consciousness?” The first thing: there is no ordinary consciousness. Ordinary is unconsciousness. There is only one consciousness and that is enlightened consciousness. But to say “enlightened consciousness” is repetitive because the two words mean the same – enlightened and consciousness. So there is no need to use two words, simply consciousness is enough.And certainly it is more spicy because it is multidimensional. Unconsciousness is one-dimensional, unconsciousness is very narrow; consciousness is openness, consciousness is wide. Consciousness is like the sky, it knows no boundaries; naturally it is more spicy – absolutely spicy. Only a buddha enjoys the world. Not you, you only dream of your enjoyment, your enjoyment is at the most a kind of entertainment. You try to forget your misery with your entertainments and you call it enjoyment. Only a buddha knows what enjoyment is: it is not entertainment. Once you are aware, you see that you are blissful. Bliss comes as a shadow to awareness. Once you know who you are, you have all that you can dream, that you have ever dreamed. And more, infinitely more.Only those who have become awakened know the green of the trees and the red and the gold. Only those who have become awakened know the beauty of the oceans and the sand and the sun. Only those who have become awakened know the immense joy of love, of being related, of communication, of sharing. Only those who have become awakened know the benediction of this existence. They know; others only search, seek, grope in the darkness of their being.But the question is relevant, for a certain reason; down the ages many religions have existed on the earth – invented by man, invented in his unconsciousness, invented according to his misery, invented out of misery. And they have been trying to depict the ultimate in consciousness as if it is dull, dead, no spice at all in it, no joy in it. Christians say that Jesus never laughed – just ridiculous! If Jesus cannot laugh, then who can? Do you think you can laugh? Yes, sometimes you laugh but your laughter is shallow, it is at the most on the lips, or if it goes very deep it goes to the throat. It does not come from the heart, it does not come from your guts, it does not come from your core. It is just there – superficial, painted, shallow.Only Jesus can laugh and when Jesus laughs, he’s laughter – not that he laughs. When you laugh, you laugh. When Jesus laughs, he is laughter. When you dance, you dance; when Jesus dances, he’s dance. When you love, you love; when I love, I am simply love. I don’t exist apart from it, otherwise there will be a division, split. When you laugh you are standing aloof and laughing – laughing is an act, your total being is not involved in it.And Christians say a very foolish thing, that Jesus never laughed. Why do they say it? – out of their miseries, out of their anguish, out of their meaninglessness, they have depicted Jesus as sad, gloomy, serious, grave. Because of this your churches have become graveyards; the joy of life no longer exists there.Because of this your scriptures have become like something you find in a museum – a snake in alcohol. It will live long. But an alive snake on the grass, in the sun, on the rock, resting in the afternoon, taking a nap, a snake moving up a tree or swinging with the branches of a tree, a snake alive… A snake in the museum, in the hospital, in the science lab, in alcohol – the alcohol snake, or call it the alcoholic snake – will live long because it is dead. The real snake, the alive snake, will not live long because it is alive – death will be coming. But for the alcoholic snake there is no death.Jesus died. He was a flower – bloomed in the morning, by the evening gone. But the Christ invented by the Christians lives. It is an alcoholic snake, bottled, a museum piece, it can live forever and forever. Your scriptures are dead; they are like pinned butterflies. You can go on collecting butterflies and pinning them – they look like butterflies, they are not. Because what is a butterfly if it cannot have freedom, if it is not alive, if it is not roaming from one flower to another, if it is not a vagabond on the wing? What is it? It is nothing, it is a corpse.So are your Bibles, so are your Vedas; they are invented things. Jesus, the real Jesus, is just an excuse. You have imposed upon the real Jesus your own Jesus who never laughs. Jesus was a totally different kind of man, I cannot imagine that he did not laugh. He was moving with beautiful people, he was not moving with saints, remember, he was moving with beautiful people: drunkards and gamblers and prostitutes too. He was moving with real, authentic people. He was not moving with pseudo saints, he was moving with sinners.Saints are pinned butterflies. Sinners are alive – a snake resting on the rock in the afternoon sun. Sinners sometimes can become saints, but then their sainthood has a totally different quality to it. They cannot belong to any church, they cannot belong to any sect. They cannot belong – how can a saint belong? The saint is like a fragrance, free, moving in the winds, he cannot belong. Jesus never belonged to anybody; that’s why the Jews were angry with him, they wanted him to belong.Real saints will not be recognized as saints, no church will sanctify them as saints. And the saints that are sanctified by the church are really bogus, mumbo jumbo, false, artificial, synthetic, plastic saints. Yes, they don’t laugh, that’s true, but Jesus is not that kind of saint: he laughs, he drinks, he eats well, he loves. He was a true man of the earth, very earthly, rooted in the earth.The earth is not against the sky. Observe the trees – the tree can go higher in the sky only if it goes deeper in the earth. So is the rule, so is the law: a man who is deeply rooted in the earth can go deeply in God, not otherwise. A man who can laugh and enjoy and be merry can pray, his roots in the earth will give him enough nourishment to pray. He will be grateful – only then can he pray.God is significant only when it comes out of your gratefulness. But how can you be grateful if you cannot even laugh? Churches have become graveyards.So your question is relevant. You may be afraid that if you become enlightened your life will not be so spicy. I promise you, it will be more spicy. Right now you are only dreaming about joys. They are not really there, not really; they exist just in your fantasy.I promise you real joys, real love, authenticity, and whenever a man is authentic he is not just wise. The just wise are not wise enough. The really wise man – I call him the “other-wise” – the really wise man has always enough courage to befool around a little bit, to fool around. Real wisdom has something of foolishness in it always, and so has the real fool something of wisdom in him. Because the real man is always a meeting of opposites: the meeting of the earth and the sky, the meeting of summer and winter, the meeting of day and night, the meeting of wisdom and foolishness.Foolishness is also not all wrong. It has something beautiful in it – it has playfulness in it, it has nonseriousness in it, it is nonambitious, it is innocent. So the really wise man has something of foolishness in him – it is always there, it makes his life spicy. The really silent man has a song to sing, hence Hakuin’s Song of Meditation.You don’t join meditation and song together in your mind – song of meditation? Song of love is okay, but song of meditation? Solomon’s song is okay, but song of meditation? Meditation seems to be non-singing, meditation seems to be serious, meditation seems to be silent. And song? Song is not silent, song is expressive, jubilant, dancing. But the real meditation has always a song to sing, a dance to dance. It is spicy.That’s why so many people are puzzled here, particularly religious people because they are the least religious – they are very puzzled here. Meditation and dance, sannyas and love, all go together. I am trying to create a meeting of the opposites, and whenever two opposites meet, there is great bliss. When two opposites meet, only then there is bliss. A man meets a woman and there is orgasm and there is joy. Life meets death and there is great ecstasy, if you know how to allow it. The dying moment is the greatest ecstatic moment – if you know how to allow it, if you know how to relax into it, how to surrender to it.Here, love will meet with renunciation. Here, meditation will meet with prayer. Here, silence and sound will be together.Silence alone is poor, so is sound alone. Sound alone is noise, silence alone is death. When silence and sound meet, there is music. Music is the meeting of silence and sound: there is a rhythm between sound and silence, hence the music. Great music always contains silence in it and sound, and great meditation also contains sound in it and silence.Don’t be afraid. I am not teaching you a religion which is life-negative. I am teaching a religion which is absolutely life-affirmative. Life is God.The second question:Osho,Why was the religion of Buddha utterly uprooted from India?A simple reason: because the public can forgive everything except genius.The third question:Osho,What is love? I feel that what I call love and what you call love are totally different.Yes, they have to be totally different. When I talk about love it has the meaning of consciousness in it, when you talk about love it has the darkness of unconsciousness in it. They are two worlds apart.I have to use the same words as you use. It is a shame, but what to do? I have to use the same words. Not that I cannot coin my own words, but then you won’t understand what I am saying at all. Right now at least you have the feeling that you understand – then even that will disappear, then I will look really a madman.Always remember, your words are being used with a totally different meaning, so when you are listening to me, be alert of the fact; don’t jump immediately on the words and don’t give them your color. It is a very mechanical habit. You hear the word love and immediately you know what I mean. Now you need not listen, you can go to sleep, you can have a little sleep – because I am talking about love and you know already what love is.You don’t know what love is, your life does not prove that you know. If you know love, you have known all that is worth knowing; then there is nothing left. If you have known love you have known God, you have known buddhahood, you have known the essential body, the truth body. Love exists in these three bodies. The physical love you know, it is sex – the infatuation of the body. It has no depth; it is as deep as the physical body. That’s what you call love, that’s what you call falling in love. Yes, it is a fall.Then there is a second kind of love, the love of the bliss body. You don’t know about it. It is not a fall, it is stillness, it is a rest. You don’t fall – rather, you become rooted, grounded, you lose all wavering, you lose all waves, you become a silent pool. That’s what should be meant by love.And there is a third kind of love that comes from the essential body. That love should be called prayer. You rise in it, you never fall in it. The first love is a fall, the second love is a stabilizer, a grounding, a centering, and the third love is a rising into the sky – it gives you wings.When I am talking about love I mean both the second and the third, because for the third to happen the second will be needed. But I am not against the first; I am not against the physical love – because unless you fall many times you will not be able to be grounded. Hence I am all for it: fall as many times as you can, so that you can learn how not to fall. That’s the only way to learn – one learns through errors and mistakes. When a child starts learning to walk, he falls many times. If the mother is very much against falling, the child will never be able to walk on his own, he will remain a cripple his whole life.That’s how millions of people have remained crippled. The society and the priests and the parents go on insisting that the physical love has something of sin in it: “Avoid it!” Then of course you don’t fall, but a man who cannot fall will not know how to stand without falling. A child that cannot afford to fall sometimes will not be able to walk at all, will remain crippled, will have to use crutches.Marriage is a crutch – cripples are using it all over the world. Because they cannot fall in love they settle for something synthetic, plastic. Fall as many times as you can; enjoy falling, learn the art of falling because only through that will you be able one day to learn how to stand on your own without falling.Out of the first love, the second has to be found. And out of the second, the third has to be found when you have started standing on your own, rooted deep in the earth, in the soil. This earth is beautiful. This earth is an opportunity, a great opportunity to experiment. Your being here is experimental – you should experiment as much as possible, you should not waste any opportunity to experiment. And each experiment will bring a little bit of wisdom to you. It comes the hard way. A man who tries to remain always secure, safe, will not learn anything, will not learn ever.I have heard…A general had come to visit the army in Pune. He asked some soldiers, “How do you manage with the Pune water?”They said, “First we boil it. Then we purify it. And then just to be safe we drink beer.”Then why bother? People are trying to be safe; people are trying to remain always in security. They don’t explore, they don’t go beyond the boundary and the boundary has been fixed by the priests and the politicians, by the enemies, by the poisoners. Naturally your life has no flavor to it, no tone. It is placid, it is flat, it has no blood, no bones, it is pale. You are like a candle dying. Your life is nothing but a long process of slow death. You never live.I am all for these three loves. Learn the ways of the first, the ways of the body – and then go beyond, because there is much more. Don’t remain confined to it, it is a passage to reach the second body, the bliss body. And yes, sometimes when you are deeply in physical love, then too some bliss spills over you from the second body. Making love to a woman or a man, when suddenly you feel ecstatic it is not coming from the woman, remember. It is not coming from the man, remember. The woman has nothing to give to you, neither has the man anything to give to you. All that is possible between a man and woman is a kind of absorption into each other. They forget themselves for a moment. The self-consciousness disappears, the ego disappears, that’s all.In that disappearance something from the second body, which is within you, starts flowing because the ego is no longer hindering it. Because you are so absorbed by the woman or by the man, in the woman, in the man, that you have forgotten yourself. You are in a kind of drunken state. You are not a self in that moment, not an ego – something spills from the second body. That’s why you feel blissful, that’s what is known as sexual orgasm. It has nothing to do with sex actually; once you have understood the process of it you can have as much of it without having any sex. You can simply sit and sway and it starts spilling.You can attain that orgasm without searching for a woman or a man. But you have to learn through the man and through the woman. I am not against it, I am all for it. It’s beautiful and it is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough; you have to go beyond it, you have to find the real source of bliss, from where it comes. It does not come from the woman, it does not come from the other, it comes from your innermost core. But the misconception is natural because you are so absorbed in the woman that you think it is coming from the woman. And because the woman is so absorbed in you she thinks it is coming from her man.It is not coming from the other at all; it is coming from your innermost core. But you are not conscious of that core. Become more and more conscious; while making love, become conscious from where the bliss is coming, from what direction, and move into that direction. Lovemaking can become one of the greatest meditations; hence Tantra – that is the whole approach of Tantra.Once you have learned how to reach orgasm through your own bliss body, you are freed from the other – your dependence is no longer there. When you are no longer dependent on the woman or on the man, your love becomes nonpossessive, only then is your love no longer political. You don’t reduce the woman to a thing; freedom remains intact. In sex, freedom cannot remain intact; the more you go into sex, the more you become dependent on the other because you think the source of joy is the other. Now you are afraid somebody may take the source of joy – the woman may go away or the man may go away, or he may turn his back. Fear. Because of fear you start possessing, because of fear you become jealous. Sexual love cannot go beyond jealousy, jealousy is ingrained in it.Once you know that bliss is coming from your own core, possessiveness disappears. Then you love and you don’t demand, then you love and there are no conditions in it.And when you have become rooted in the second, and the falling and stumbling in love has stopped, you are coming closer to my meaning of love. Once you have become established, rooted, and you have started enjoying your own bliss body, then one day you suddenly see that something else, far more a blessing than bliss itself, is reaching you. Rays of something more blissful than bliss itself are reaching you. And they are coming from your innermost, your very inner shrine. Then you start searching for those and you start rising; the fall disappears and the tree starts growing toward the sky.When you reach the source of your being – the essential body, the buddha body, the truth body – love is fulfilled. My word love has the ultimate meaning of that experience.But it is natural that you will understand in your own way. Just keep a little space for me too, just a little space. Ninety-nine percent you understand your way, I accept that; just leave one percent space for me. And soon you will see that the one percent has defeated your ninety-nine percent. But right now it is natural.A man walked into a bar in a fiercely Catholic district of Northern Ireland. In his lapel he was wearing a small Union Jack, the emblem of Protestant extremists. Attached by a chain to his left hand was a large, vicious looking crocodile. Silence fell in the bar as the man approached the counter.“Do you serve Protestants in this bar?” he asked the barman.“Yes sir, yes sir,” stuttered the barman nervously, gazing into the crocodile’s yawning mouth.“Well then, I’ll have a pint of beer for myself and two Protestants for my crocodile.”People have different meanings…A bus driver in the southern United States was letting some people onto his bus. He asked a black man what color he was. The man answered, “Black.”The bus driver replied, “No, you are green. Everyone on my bus is green. I don’t believe in black and white.”Then he asked a white woman what color she was. She answered. “White.”The bus driver said again. “No. You are green. Everyone on my bus is green. I believe in one color; the whole humanity is one color.”Then he shouted down the bus, “Has everyone got that? Everyone on this bus is green. Now, all you dark green people to the back and all you light green people to the front.”Just by changing words, nothing is changed. You can replace your words with my words, that won’t make much difference. The meaning will be the same.So I am not saying change the words. I am saying become a little more alert, so you can allow me a little space in you. That’s the meaning of sannyas, you allow a little space in you for me, you become a host and you allow me as a guest in you. And the guest is such that soon the host will disappear and the guest will possess the home.The fourth question:Osho,I will die for you, I think, but I don't believe a single word you say, not a single word.Good. Dying is always easy, living is difficult. To become a martyr is very easy, any stupid person can do that, in fact only the stupid become martyrs. Otherwise who wants to become a martyr? But it is easier to die because it happens in a single moment and once you are dead you are dead, there is no more to it. But to live is the real problem, because life is long.You say: “I will die for you, I think…” I know you cannot even die because that “I think” is not reliable. Thinking is never reliable, only feeling is reliable. Thinking is deceptive; people come to me and say, “Osho, I love you, I think” – how can love come out of thinking? There is no possibility, it is like trying to squeeze oil out of sand. Thoughts don’t have any love. Thoughts can have much hatred, can have much anger, rage, but they don’t have any love. You cannot take love out of them.When you say, “I think I love,” you are deceived by the mind: love is a feeling. When you say, “I will die for you, I think…” what you are actually saying is that you love me and you are ready to die for me. But through thinking that is not possible; at the last moment the thinking will say, “What are you doing? It is your life.” You don’t really mean it.You say: “…I don’t believe a single word you say, not a single word.” Because if you believe what I say, you will have to live it. I am not here to sacrifice you on any altar because all altars have to be destroyed and all temples razed to the ground. All altars have been dangerous to man – man has been killed on many altars, Hindu and Christian and Mohammedan, but man has always been killed.I don’t teach you that you have to offer yourself. No – I teach you life, not death. If you know life, you will know death too because death is the culmination of life; it is not against life, it is the crescendo of the song of life. It is the last alleluia.I teach you life. But if you trust me then you will be getting into trouble. You will have to transform yourself; you will have to go through many, many mutations. That’s why your mind says, “I don’t believe a word you say, although I am ready to die for you.” You are not ready to allow a single word of mine to become a seed in your heart, and you are ready to die for me? You are not ready to accept me as a guest in you, and you are ready to die for me?In the first place, I don’t want you to die, I want you to live and live authentically. Death will come in its own time. When the time is ripe, death is beautiful; when the fruit is ripe, it falls on its own accord. When you have lived your life totally, death is a joy because it is a relaxation into the universe again. The wave disappears into the ocean again to rest – for another life sometime, for another wave to rise.It is just as the whole day you live and then night comes. Night is so beautiful, you can go to bed and forget all the turmoil, the anxiety, the work, the tiredness. You drop into a small death every night. And blessed are those who really drop into death every night because in the morning they are resurrected, they are reborn. They are again fresh, they are again ready to do many things that life requires to be done. They are no longer exhausted, their heart is again dancing, they are fresh. And they are ready to jump into the turmoil of life and to live another day.Just like that, you will die in this body and you will rest in the earth and you will rest in the sky and you will rest for the time being. When you are ready to be born again – another day, another resurrection, another body – you will be back again. This will go on and on till you finish the job that has been given to you, till you fulfill your destiny; till you come to realize that the physical body is not you, that not even the bliss body is you, that you are a buddha.The day you recognize that – not verbally, not intellectually, not as “I think” but totally, wholly, the recognition is absolute, there is no doubt about it, no uncertainty about it, it is not a logical conclusion but an experience, an existential experience, you are a witness to it – then you disappear. Then you will not be coming back on this earth in a bodily form. Then you will be born into God, without body, then you will become God, then you will float into eternity. Then you will be a lotus flower, invisible to ordinary eyes, then you will be a pure fragrance forever and forever.But till that is attained, each death is a new birth. And remember, I am here to teach you how to live this moment, this day. If you die right now you will be unripe. Death will be pain, death will be a suffering, and death will be meaningless. People live meaninglessly and die meaninglessly, and because they live meaninglessly they can be exploited. Because your life is so meaningless anybody can come and can give you a meaningful death. He can say “Die for Islam” or “Die for Christianity,” or for “Christ’s sake” or for “Buddha’s sake,” die! He gives you a meaning. You are meaningless and you say, “Okay. Life is meaningless, let me try this. Maybe this makes me meaningful.” This is a kind of suicide and Islam and Buddha and Christ are just rationalizations for the suicide. You are committing suicide, with beautiful words around you.No, I don’t want to be an altar for you. Nobody has to die for me, my sannyasins have to live for me. Life, living, is arduous because it cannot be a momentary impulse, it is not impulsive. If I say “Die!” you can jump from a mountain – it happens in an impulsive moment, and once you have taken the jump you cannot take it back, finished. But when you have to live, a thousand times you can take your steps back. And you will take your steps back a million times because life cannot be impulsive.I don’t teach you impulsiveness, I teach you transformation. So please, nobody has to die for me – never. If you love me, live for me, love for me, let your life be a song, a joy, a celebration. When you are happy, you are with me. When you are dancing, you are with me; when you are loving, you are with me. That is my work, that is my mission.But in another sense I understand; it is very difficult to believe in my words, almost impossible. I say “almost” because there are people who trust. That’s why I say almost – it is possible, but it is arduous, hard, because what I am saying is of another world. I bring you the message, the gospel, of another world. That world is hidden in this world, but still it is another for you, it is a separate reality; you have not known it, you have not seen it, how can you trust? In that sense I can understand. How can you believe? But I am not saying to believe either, because belief will not be of any help. All beliefs are harmful, belief as such is poison.I am not saying believe in me, I am simply saying: look at me, feel me, and if a desire to experiment arises, experiment with me. Ihi passika – come and see. I would like to say to you exactly as Buddha said to his disciples: ihi passika. I don’t say come and believe, I say come and see. It has already happened here. The rose has bloomed –come close to me and your nostrils will be full of the fragrance of it. Come and see!If you can see my rose you will attain a great trust in your own rose. It will not be a trust in my rose, because that is of no use. Seeing that a man just like you – as fragile as you, made of body, bones and blood just like you, as vulnerable to death as you – a man just like you has bloomed, will give you a trust in yourself. Then why can it not happen to you? That’s my work, to bring you close.Sannyas is nothing but an invitation to come a little closer – a little more, so you can see, so that you can feel. And through that seeing, a trust is bound to arise; not in me, but in yourself – that this can happen to you too. That’s what Buddha calls shraddha. That word cannot be translated. It has been translated as faith, as belief, as trust – but all translations miss the point. Buddha’s word shraddha means confidence – not just trust, not just belief, not just faith, but confidence. Confidence in whom? – confidence in your own being, that if it can happen to one man it can happen to all. Seeing that it can happen to one, a trust, a confidence, arises in you that “It can happen to me too.”Only then will you understand what I am saying. Before that it is difficult. If you can avoid misunderstanding, that’s all I can expect of you. Understanding I don’t expect – just avoid misunderstanding. Just listen to me as you listen to pure music. What do you do when you listen to pure music? You simply listen. You don’t try to understand, you don’t try to figure out what it is, what the meaning is. You don’t bother about the meaning, you listen to it. What do you do when you listen to a bird calling in the early morning? You simply listen. You are thrilled with it, you feel the joy of it.Here I am also a bird calling in the morning. Listen to me as you listen to music or wind passing through the pine trees. Listen just like that, in that listening you will be attuned to me. First misunderstandings will disappear, and when misunderstandings have become impossible, then understanding arises on its own accord. You need not bring it, you cannot bring it. It comes, it descends on you.Otherwise there is bound to be misunderstanding.I have heard…A great film director and his wife were on safari in the African jungle when, just as they were walking along a narrow path in the thickest part of the bush, a huge lion leaped out at them, grabbed his wife in its massive jaws, and began to drag her off.“Shoot, John!” she yelled to her husband. “Shoot!”“I can’t,” he yelled back. “I’ve run out of film!”Now a film director is a film director…A man and his wife on a visit to London were feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. One of the pigeons settled on the husband’s head and relieved itself and flew away. “Well, don’t you just stand there doing nothing,” said the husband angrily to the wife. “Give me some paper. Give me some paper!”“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the wife. “That pigeon will be miles away by now.”You get it? And the last…For Mother’s Day, the teacher gave the class a topic for composition: “There is only one mother.” That was the topic. One kid wrote: “Yesterday I fell off a tree and hurt my knee. My mother heard me crying and came and gave me a big kiss. The pain was gone. There is only one mother!”Another kid wrote: “Yesterday my friends were beating me up. I came home crying. Mother gave me a big kiss and told me she loved me. There is only one mother!”And little John wrote: “Yesterday I came home very hungry. My mother said, “Go to the kitchen. On the table there are two bananas.” And I said, “There is only one, mother!”The fifth question:Osho,So many things to be grateful for – truly Prasadam was a beautiful name, for it has brought consciousness of how much comes as a gift from God. Faith is growing daily in the value of not-doing and receiving more. Yet… The worldwide-held view by sales companies, athletes, musicians, artists, et cetera, is that the only road to success is to concentrate on the goal continuously, single-mindedly, totally, and work as hard as possible to achieve “the goal.” Both systems have now been experienced to be true and effective. And, they seem to be diametrically opposed in philosophy. Would you please comment?The question is from Prasadam. His name means gift, grace. Grace cannot be produced, cannot be manufactured; it comes, it happens, you have only to be receptive to it. It is a kind of nondoing, it is when you are passive, inactive. In fact when you are not, when you are absent – the prasadam, the grace, the gift. When you exist only like a hollow bamboo then God starts playing you as a flute, but only when you are a hollow bamboo. God comes only as a gift, never otherwise.And Prasadam has been in big business, so he has the idea that one has to concentrate single-mindedly, continuously, on the goal – totally, and work as hard as possible to achieve the goal.Now, I can understand his problem. In the world, searching for trivia, the business attitude is perfectly right. Money will not come as a gift. If you simply sit under a bodhi tree, sitting silently and watching for when money will be coming from all directions and will shower on you, it doesn’t happen. It will never come. Sitting under the bodhi tree, nobody will approach and tell you: “Please come and become the president of the United States.” That is not going to happen either.For worldly things, which are trivia, you have to work hard. That is the law of the world because in the world you have to compete, and there are millions of people rushing for money and power and prestige – you are not alone, it is a competitive world. You have to be concentratedly, madly rushing – violently, legally or illegally, that doesn’t matter. If you succeed, all that you did will be thought legal; if you fail, all that you did will be thought illegal. If you succeed then everything is okay, success brings sanctity. Remember only one thing: don’t fail. And if you don’t want to fail, be absolutely mad – the madder you are the better, then you can defeat other people who are not so mad.Only the mad people succeed in politics, in money, in the world of power. Violent people succeed. But what is their success? They succeed, but what exactly is their success? When they succeed they come to know only that their whole life has failed. You have heard the proverb “Nothing succeeds like success”? That is utter nonsense. I say: nothing fails like success. Because when you have succeeded, you know that there is nothing. You have been running after shadows, you have become the prime minister or the president – now what? You have wasted your whole life. Ask Morarji Desai – eighty-two years wasted and he has become the prime minister. So what? What is attained? – nothing is attained. The success is just the climax of his whole life’s failure: now he has utterly failed.In the world, success only seems to be successful. It is a way to distract yourself from your inner search, it is a way to avoid yourself, to escape from yourself. And in the end you will be a loser.If you want to move toward God, action is not needed, madness is not needed, concentration is not needed. What is needed? Only one thing: surrender is needed. A passivity is needed, you have to become feminine, you have to become a womb, a receptivity, a pure receptivity. When you are utterly receptive – so much so that you are not even desiring God because in the desire also there is action; so much so that you are not even expecting God because in expectation also there is action… When all desiring and all expectation have disappeared, when you are just there, silent, not even waiting for God, he comes.In fact to say “He comes” is not right – he arises in you. Even that is not exactly right – you suddenly find in that waiting that you are it. Tatvamasi – that art thou.Prasadam’s mind is goal-oriented, that is his whole life’s training. Naturally he is very confused. He has come into a very strange world and has become a sannyasin. Now I am teaching surrender and he knows only fight, how to fight. He is a warrior – he knows the whole strategy and the technology of fighting, of warring, and he is in a difficulty. This small world, this my world, is run on a totally different line: no strategy, no technique, no fight. I am trying to create an alternate world – a small world, but for people who are ready to surrender, efface themselves, who are ready to become nobodies and can work out of their nobodiness.Then God will come to you. The goal and God cannot exist together. God cannot become your goal, remember – that is the fear, that Prasadam will make God the goal. Then there comes a synthesis, then he will be using whatever he knows from his past experience. But then you have missed the point – God can never be the goal and no goal can ever give you God. The goal-oriented mind is a nonreligious mind, the worldly mind; the religious mind knows no goal.Look at the lilies in the field: they toil not, they spin not, they reap not, they don’t think of the morrow. And even Solomon was not like one of these, in all his glory was not attired like one of these. The lily knows the way to God. Prasadam, become a lily.Goals arise to avoid that which is: to avoid life, to avoid love, to avoid death. Their sole purpose is to avoid, they are distractions, they are refusals to see, to hear, to be. When you are finished with goals and the ideologies that perpetuate them, then there is no need of God, nirvana or truth; then all that you need is porridge for breakfast, a roof against the rain, and the present moment. It is in refusing the fact, in the lie of living, that you need God as a goal, truth as a goal, nirvana as a goal. They are not goals, they are gifts. When you are present, they happen.And the last question:Osho,Why does man go on living in the same repetitive circle, again and again and life after life?It is simple. Because you don’t really live, that’s why you want to repeat; if you really live, there will be no need to repeat. If you have loved and known what love is, there will be no need to repeat, you will be finished with it. Whenever something has been known totally you are finished with it, when something remains unknown you hanker. It is natural, you go on desiring; you have not loved in this life, you will desire another life. You have not loved this woman; you will desire another woman. You have not loved this man; you will desire another man, in some other world, on some other planet. You have not been able to see and recognize and realize who you are in this life, you will hanker for another. The incomplete hankers to be completed, that’s why.And then you can understand my standpoint. That’s why I say: Live totally! Live utterly! Whatever you want to do, do it! Don’t avoid and don’t repress, otherwise you will have to come again, and come again, and come again.Meditate over this beauty…Alone and visiting London for the first time, the businessman hailed a taxi and told the cabby to take him somewhere where he could forget his loneliness. Upon being dropped off, the visitor rang the doorbell of the house indicated by the cabby. An eye-level viewing window slid open and a distinctly sexy female voice asked what the man wanted.“I want to get screwed,” replied the visitor.“Okay mister,” said the woman, “but as this is a private club, you’ll have to slip a twenty-pound introduction fee through the letter box.”The visitor did as instructed, the window closed, and he waited. Time passed but nothing happened. After five minutes he began to pound on the door and again the panel opened. “I want to get screwed,” said the man.“What, again?” said the voice.Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-03/

The first question:Osho,What is maturity?Maturity is knowing that nothing can be done. Maturity is acceptance of existence as it is: yatha bhutam. Maturity is not to desire things otherwise; maturity is relaxing with the whole. Immaturity is conflict, struggle, the part fighting with the whole. The part coming in tune with the whole, coming to a harmonious settlement with the whole – not in defeat but in understanding – is maturity. To realize that nothing can be done is maturity.Also: nothing matters. Allowing it deep into your heart that nothing matters, all is good as it is, is maturity. Otherwise people remain childish; when you desire you are childish, every desire is a complaint against existence. Every desire is a discontent with the way you are, the being you are, and every desire brings frustration in its wake because it cannot be fulfilled. Desire brings in the future and disturbs the present. And desire creates the idea of I. Otherwise there is no I. If you go within you will not find anybody there, it is utter silence; that’s what Buddha means when he says anatta, no-self. To know no-self is maturity.Socrates says: “Know thyself.” Buddha says: “When you will know, you will not find thyself; thyself is found only in ignorance.” If you don’t know, you are. If you know, you disappear. The light of knowledge is enough to disperse the darkness of the ego.Each desire strengthens the idea that “I am.” And I have to assert, and I have to show to the world who I am. I have to prove, I have to justify myself, I have to defend myself, I have to fight. And not only fight, I have to win. Ambition is immaturity.It is very rare to find a mature person; if you can find a mature person you have found a buddha, otherwise all desire in different ways. Somebody desires money and somebody desires moksha, somebody desires power and somebody desires God. Somebody wants to prove in the outer world that “I am somebody” and somebody wants to prove in the inner world that “I am somebody.” The idea of evolving is immature.Hakuin is right when he says from the very beginning all beings are buddhas. To recognize this, to welcome this, is maturity. There is nothing to grow into, there is nowhere to go to, there is no goal. To think of goals is to think of toys; spiritual growth, spiritual evolution, spiritual progress, all is just holy cow dung. You are already there where you want to go, so you can never reach if you try to because you are already there – the very effort is ridiculous, it is absurd. Hence, there is so much misery in the world, because you are trying to reach somewhere where you are already. Naturally you cannot reach. Not reaching you become panicky, not reaching you become more and more frustrated. Not reaching you become more and more ridden with anxiety and anguish. Not reaching you start to create a hell around yourself – that you are a failure, that you are nobody.The more desperate you are, the more effort you make to reach, and you cannot reach where you already are. To recognize this is sudden enlightenment. Enlightenment is not gradual, it is sudden, it is in a single moment of insight, it is a flash. But people go on working upon themselves. Either they work in the market or they work in the monastery, but they work all the same.My teaching is: drop the idea of work. Gurdjieff used to call his system “The Work” and I call my system “The Play.” The very idea of work is dangerous, it will give you more and more ego. It is not accidental that many of Gurdjieff’s followers went mad and died in agony. The reason was that he was trying to put the Eastern realization into Western terminology, and for the West, play is a dirty word. The West has been workaholic for so long; it is intoxicated with work.The word play seems childish to the Western mind; work seems to be more adultish – I don’t call it mature, it is “adultish.” Gurdjieff was trying to transplant something from the East into the Western mind; naturally he had to use Western concepts, words, language. What turned out was really fatal; play became work.If you understand me even for a single moment, that will do – if even for a single moment the glimpse comes, “Why am I rushing, why am I hurrying?”… Relax in this moment; let this moment be. Suddenly all starts exploding in you, in that moment you are mature, and that moment can become your very tacit understanding. Then you live as an ordinary man but you live extraordinarily, then you live in the marketplace but you are no longer part of it; in a subtle way you have transcended it, and without any effort. Without striving you have transcended it. You can go on playing games, but they are all games, you are no longer serious. It is all a drama – it is good, enjoy it, but don’t get engulfed by it: the moment you are serious you are possessed by the world. Seriousness is the indication that the world has possessed you, nonseriousness is the indication that the world no longer has power over you.The really enlightened person has a great sense of humor: it is said of Bodhidharma that when he became enlightened he laughed for many months, he would not stop – at the whole ridiculousness of it, that people are already there and trying to reach. In their very striving they go on missing. And whenever anybody used to ask Bodhidharma about enlightenment, either he would hit him or he would laugh. What else can you do? – this man deserves to be hit. When somebody asked Bodhidharma how to become a buddha, he slapped him immediately, and the man said, “What are you doing sir? I have come to become a buddha.” He said, “I am making you one. If a buddha comes and asks me how to become a buddha, what am I supposed to do? I will hit him!”Maybe that slap brings you back home. That’s why Zen people have been throwing disciples, beating them, and it has happened sometimes – it has happened – a master threw a disciple out of the window, and when the disciple fell on the ground with a broken back, he became enlightened. Because in that pain for the first time he was in the present. In that severe pain, the future disappeared and the buddhahood and all nonsense. In that severe pain for a single moment there was no thought; he became thoughtless, and he understood the whole point.The master came running and looked at him, and he was laughing – with a broken back! He bowed down to the master, touched his feet and said, “I am so thankful to you. Less than that would not have done. You did it in the right time, I deserved it.”Remember, God has made you perfect. God never makes anything imperfect. God cannot make anything imperfect. People say God is omnipotent, I say no because he cannot make anything imperfect. How can imperfection come out of perfection? – that is impossible, only perfection comes out of perfection. This world is a perfect world and you are a perfect being. Listen to Hakuin: From the very beginning all beings are buddhas. That’s how it should be, that’s how it is. You are trying to become a buddha, you are trying to become perfect; you create your own misery, then you fail, and when you fail you are miserable.There is no need to fail, just stop trying to succeed. And when I say stop trying to succeed, mind you, I am not saying strive to stop.A Zen master used to play a small game with his disciples, particularly with new disciples. He would drop his handkerchief and he would say to the disciple, “Try to pick it up. Try to pick it up.”Naturally the disciple would simply pick it up and give it to him. And he would drop it again, and he would say, “Try again! Try to pick it up.”It would happen a few times, then the disciple would get the point – how can you try to pick it up? Either you pick it up or you don’t. How can you try to pick it up? And that’s what the master was saying. He was saying, “Try to pick it up.” You will fail, because how can you try? Either you pick it up or you don’t pick it up. Trying to pick it up?The master was indicating that that’s what you are doing in your life. Either be a buddha or don’t be a buddha, but trying to be a buddha? It is just like that: either be a buddha or don’t be a buddha.Concerned with this, the second question:Osho,While talking to an amazing octogenarian, Mr. Lewis, the other day, I asked him if he was going to take sannyas. He said the idea of changing streams after thirty years of Gurdjieff was a bit much. He felt the emphasis was very much on the heart here, as opposed to the three-centered harmonious development of man.I can understand the old man’s trouble. He is a beautiful man, but thirty years of Gurdjieff work are a heavy load. Now at the age of eighty-two it seems very, very difficult to relax, it seems difficult to drop the work and be playful. It’s very natural, it can be understood.Here I am not giving you any structure for development, because I am not concerned with development at all. Now, he says it is “…opposed to the three-centered harmonious development of man.” I am not interested in developing man. I am simply interested in awakening man – and remember the difference – not in developing. There is no need for any harmonious development, there is only a need to be awakened.You can go on sleeping and you can go on working on yourself. All work is sleep, it is a dream. You are dreaming to develop yourself; you are trying to pull yourself up by your shoelaces. But it is a dream, and people are very, very ready to get into new dreams because they are naturally fed up with the old dreams, repetitive dreams – the wife, the husband, money, power. Then somebody comes and says, “What are you doing? Leave this to ordinary mortals. You are a spiritual being. Come, and I will tell you how to develop spiritually.” Naturally one is fed up with the old games, finished with the old games. There comes a moment in everybody’s life when one can see that it is a vicious circle, one has been in it long enough to know its meaninglessness – then somebody comes and gives hope again.This hope brings in the future again; imagination again starts working. You again start fantasizing – now spiritual growth. You are back again in the same rut.I am not teaching any development. I am teaching you just to be awake. Just open your eyes. You are in the Garden of Eden – just open your eyes. I am not here to give you any other dream. If you want to dream, old dreams are perfectly good. And you are so attuned with them, why change? Money will do, why a new dream of meditation? Old games are perfectly good. New games will give you a little trouble – you will have to turn and toss in your bed and then again settle, and then they will become old. Yes, the honeymoon will be there for a few days and then they will become old.That’s why people go on changing from one guru to another guru, from one school to another school, from one religion to another religion. It doesn’t help, it is absolutely pointless; what is needed is not a new dream, not a new work, not a new desire, not a new ambition, but an awakening.He is right that it is difficult to change streams after thirty years of Gurdjieff. It is difficult. But if you see the point it is so simple; it is a flash. You have been working and working and what has happened? Has anything really happened? It is difficult to realize that too – that nothing has happened – because that goes against the ego. Thirty years of work, and if nothing has happened people will think of you as a fool. Then what were you doing for thirty years? One or two years are okay – then you should have got out of it. What were you doing for thirty years, wasting your whole life? That looks very difficult to accept, so one goes on thinking, “Yes, something is happening, something has happened.” Something has to happen – thirty years? One goes on convincing oneself and defending oneself and one thinks that now it is too late to change.It is never too late! I am not saying change. I am not saying change masters, I am not saying change schools. I am saying change from sleep to awakening. And remember, it cannot be a development from sleep to awakening. Either you are asleep or you are awake. There are no mid-stations between awakening and sleep, either this or that. They are two gestalts, they can’t exist together, so there cannot be degrees – you cannot say, “This man is ten degrees awake and this man is twenty degrees awake and this man is thirty degrees awake.” One is awake or one is asleep, one knows or one does not know.So I am not saying to change – I am not interested in changing your schools because they will be new dreams. That’s why I say it is never too late. If you had gone at the age of eighty-two to Gurdjieff, he would have certainly said it is too late: “Now go and vegetate and finish yourself, nothing can be done.” Not only that you have missed this life – because Gurdjieff used to say you don’t have any soul, so not only this life, you have missed forever! “Now get lost! Vegetate a few more years and be finished. You don’t have any soul and it is too late.”With me it is never too late because it can happen in a single split moment. It can happen on the deathbed – a man is dying and in the last breath it can happen, and he can be completely transformed. Development cannot happen, development needs time, remember, evolution needs time. Transformation is possible because transformation needs no time. That which happens in time is part of time and that which happens in no time is part of eternity.That’s what I mean when I say it happens in a flash: enlightenment is like lightning, it can happen any moment, at the very last breath. The last breath is leaving you, it will not come again – and it can happen. There is no need for time because you are already that, so what is the point of time? Time is needed if you are not that and you have to become that. Then naturally: great effort, planning, training, search.He is right that there is much emphasis here on the heart, as opposed to the three-centered harmonious development of man. The heart simply means harmony, at least that is what I want it to mean – the heart simply means harmony. When you are harmonious you are in the heart, when you are not harmonious you are not in the heart, you are somewhere else. The heart is not a center here – we are not really talking about centers: the heart is a state of being harmonious, the heart is a state of maturity.The head is always full of desires; the head lives in the future. The heart is herenow. Here is the only place and now is the only time for the heart. Whenever you are in the heart you are utterly here, radiantly here; all past has disappeared, all future has disappeared. Only this moment in its crystal purity exists – in its intensity, in its passion.I am not using the word heart in the way that Gurdjieff used to use it, as a center. It is not a center. When all your centers have disappeared into one unity, that unity I call the heart. That’s how Buddha uses the word heart. When Gurdjieff uses the word heart he uses it in the same way as poets use the word heart – the center of emotion and feeling. When I use the word heart I use it as buddhas have always used it; it has nothing to do with emotionality and sentiments and feelings – no, nothing at all. The heart is a state of being when you are harmonious, when all your fragments have disappeared.Remember again, I am not saying that they have become integrated into one. That’s what Gurdjieff says, that all your centers have to become integrated into one, they have to become crystallized. That crystallized thing will be a crystallized ego. When I say, “When all your fragments have disappeared” I simply mean when they are no longer there and only pure absence is left. It is not a crystallization of the parts; the parts are no longer there. They have simply dropped – that furniture has been removed from your being. Now your being is just an emptiness, a nothingness.That nothingness, anatta, no-self – that pure space is what we have been calling the heart in the East. It has nothing to do with the poets’ use of the word.But Lewis has been thinking in terms of Gurdjieff his whole life. He never met Gurdjieff, he missed that opportunity; he can miss this opportunity too.Gurdjieff was a rare man. But he was working in a very, very alien world. He had taken a great message from the East, particularly from the Sufis, to the West and he was trying to translate it. In that translation many things went wrong – it always happens. The higher the message, the more difficult it is to translate. Mundane things can be translated very easily. And Gurdjieff was not the right man to translate it either, he was not a very articulate man. His whole life he searched – from Middle Asia, from Iraq to Mongolia, to Tibet, and to India, he was searching. His whole life was in search. And then when he arrived it was too late to develop the right language to be exactly accurate. He has simply stuttered his message and others have had to interpret it.In fact, whatever is known about Gurdjieff is not about Gurdjieff, it is about P. D. Ouspensky. Gurdjieff became known through P. D. Ouspensky – if P. D. Ouspensky had never been a disciple to Gurdjieff, he would not have been known at all. In one way it would have been very, very unfortunate, in another way it would have been very, very fortunate too because Ouspensky betrayed him. Ouspensky was the right man to translate, but he had no realization of his own. Gurdjieff had the realization, but he had not the language to translate it. It was a meeting of a blind man and a lame man – they helped one another.It was almost like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Vivekananda had no realization, Ramakrishna had the realization. But Ramakrishna had no way to express it. Vivekananda was very articulate, philosophical, very arrogant in his statements, very logical. He was a philosopher. Ramakrishna was a mystic, he had seen God, or truth. Vivekananda had not seen but he knew the language, so Vivekananda introduced Ramakrishna to the world – a wrong introduction.But sometimes it happens: it is very rare to find a man like Buddha, who has seen and who can himself help you to see – who is both together. Johnson and Boswell: both together. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda: both together. Socrates and Plato: both together. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: both together. It is a very rare phenomenon. But when it happens, only then do things go right.Gurdjieff knew, and Ouspensky knew how to make it known to the world. Now, it is like a man who has eyes, but is dumb, using a blind man to express what he knows about light. Using the blind man – who has no eyes, who has never seen the light – using his mouth as a vehicle. He has no mouth.If you read Gurdjieff’s books they are very tiring and boring. I have never come across a man who has really read any book of his completely. One has to skip pages, one has to just go on. When for the first time his first book was published, it was a one-thousand-page book, but the pages were not cut – only the introduction pages were cut. There was a notice on the book that “If you can go into the introduction and you really want to read the book, then cut the other pages. Otherwise you can give it back to the publisher and take your money back.”Even to go a hundred pages into that introduction is a very arduous journey. Unless you are a masochist it is difficult to go through – unless you enjoy misery, then it is another thing. It is shocking; to read those one thousand pages is almost as difficult as to reach the moon. Very few people have ever tried. He was absolutely inarticulate. The problem was that his whole life was spent in schools in the presence of masters. He was accumulating, accumulating, and then a moment came when he felt, “Now I know. I have understood. And I should go to the West and introduce this great tradition, this great wisdom.”Ouspensky became a vehicle – but finally Ouspensky betrayed Gurdjieff, he went against him. That is natural too, because Ouspensky is a totally different type of man – a philosopher, a mathematician, a scientist, a logician. And by and by when he became articulate and started saying things, and his books became world famous, he started thinking that he himself had arrived – now there was no need for Gurdjieff. He betrayed Gurdjieff. That also happens, always.Judas betrayed Christ because he was the most articulate, the most scholarly, the most educated person. Amongst all Jesus’ disciples Judas was the most cultured, most sophisticated. The others were just villagers: farmers, woodcutters, fishermen. Judas betrayed, so did Ouspensky. There has been a long history – it has always been done that way. Buddha was betrayed by his own cousin-brother, Devadatta, who was as sophisticated and cultured as Buddha himself. They had played together in their childhood; they were brought up in the same palace. He betrayed him. Mahavira was betrayed by his own son-in-law. He was the most important man amongst Mahavira’s disciples; he betrayed.The man of knowledge, the knowledgeable man, is a dangerous man because sooner or later he will get the idea that “Now I myself am the master.” The world knows Gurdjieff through Ouspensky who betrayed him. Gurdjieff could not deliver the message. And Lewis missed him. Now he is here, and I feel that he is very open – just the idea that “What can be done now? If it has not happened in thirty years how can it happen now?”…But I say to you that the happening need not have time for it, it can happen in a split moment. If you can unburden yourself, if you can put aside all that you have learned, all the knowledge that you have gathered, if you can again look at things with fresh eyes, it is still possible. It is always possible. You are never too late, nobody is.In India we have a saying: if a man who got lost comes back in the evening, he should not be thought to be lost. The whole day is gone, the sun is setting, in the morning he went astray and now it is evening. Yes, it is Lewis’ evening. You missed Gurdjieff; don’t miss this madman here. Gurdjieff was going to give you a ladder that goes on and on, and you have to develop and work. I am not giving you any ladder, I am not giving you any staircase, and I am not giving you a long way to be traveled: I am simply giving you an insight.If you can receive it, in that very receiving, there will be an explosion.And the third question is also related to it:Osho,Since your program began, what results have there been with your sannyasins? Has anyone become enlightened?They are all enlightened people: I don’t deal with unenlightened people at all. I have never come across any unenlightened person. Since I became enlightened I have been coming across enlightened people – enlightened men, enlightened women, enlightened dogs and donkeys, enlightened trees and rocks and stars. The whole existence exists in enlightenment, that’s its very rhythm.So what are you talking about? “Since your program began…” This is not a program, it is a very, very mad chaotic phenomenon. It is not a program, it is chaos; I call it orange chaos.And you ask: “…what results have there been with your sannyasins?” One hundred percent. Whoever comes to me is enlightened – what more do you need? If they persist not to realize it, that is their joy, that is their freedom! This much freedom every enlightened person should have – that if he wants to behave in an unenlightened way, he has to be allowed. If even this freedom is lost, what type of enlightenment is this? A few people choose to behave unenlightenedly – perfectly good. Sometimes they behave this way, sometimes that way, that too is good.All is accepted here. I am not result oriented at all; result is a dirty word – even though it is not four-lettered, it is dirty all the same. It is result that has poisoned the whole of humanity.We live the moment; it has intrinsic beauty, it has not to be sacrificed for any other moment. When you are result oriented you go on sacrificing the present for the future, and the future never comes – whenever it comes it is the present. You again invest it, again sacrifice it for the future. You miss.We are not result oriented at all. Each moment has its own beauty, and the beauty is intrinsic. Each moment is an end unto itself; it is not a means to any other thing. So we are not result oriented, and we are not counting who has become enlightened and who has not become enlightened. Why bother? – from the very beginning all beings are buddhas.But there are people who go on counting inside themselves.It happened…Mulla Nasruddin was entertaining a guest. He was bringing many things and then he brought samosas. He was forcing and forcing: “Take one more, take one more.”And the guest said, “I have already taken five, now it is enough.”Nasruddin said, “Not five, you have taken nine, but who is counting?”People go on counting deep inside, and they go on saying, “Who is counting?”The person is new – I can understand his difficulty, he must be puzzled. Who is enlightened? Who is not enlightened? So many enlightened people, is it possible? So many buddhas? In the West you have been very miserly, you say Jesus is the only begotten son of God. Has God become impotent since then? You are so miserly that there is only one begotten son. What has he been doing since then? Then Nietzsche is right when he says God is dead: nothing is happening, he must be dead.In the East we are not miserly. That’s why we can say with joy that since the very beginning all beings are buddhas. Buddhahood is not something that has to be conferred upon you. That foolishness also exists in the Christian mind – even a saint has to be recognized by the church. Even the word saint is ugly, it comes from sanction. When the church sanctions and declares, “This man has become a saint” then that man becomes a saint – as if it is a PhD or DLitt degree. Some university confers it upon you and then you become a saint.Here you can declare yourself enlightened, nobody will prevent you. One woman, Oma, goes on informing me, “I have become enlightened, Osho.” There is no problem. Oma can become enlightened, everybody can become enlightened, everybody is enlightened. But I suspect, because her continuous effort to inform me creates suspicion: she needs sanction. Just the other day, Ananda Prem – Oma’s disciple – wrote to me: “Oma says she has become enlightened: ‘You can go and ask Osho.’” But why ask me, who am I to declare you enlightened or not? If I am to declare you enlightened, that will not be much of an enlightenment. Who am I? If you have become, you have become. You have always been – that’s what I am saying. Sanction is not needed at all, no need for an order to be issued, no need for a formal declaration.You need not ask; if you ask, you are suspicious about it. If you have become enlightened you have become enlightened. You don’t go around the neighborhood in the morning asking: “Am I awake?” Otherwise people will think you are mad. You must be asleep!The fourth question:Osho,Why can't I live without misery?Very few people can, very few people can afford to live without misery; misery gives you a sense of being, misery defines you. Misery gives you the ego, self-identity; misery gives you something to hold on to, you can cling to it.Bliss is very elusive. You can possess misery, you cannot possess bliss – on the contrary, bliss possesses you. You can control misery, you cannot control bliss. In bliss you have to disappear, the controller has to disappear. Very few people can afford that much, they are so afraid to go into the unknown. Misery is known; you are well acquainted, you are well introduced. A thousand and one times you have suffered the same thing, the same nauseous thing; but by and by you have become accustomed to it, a kind of familiarity has grown between you and the misery.You ask: Why can’t I live without misery? The “I” cannot exist without misery, that’s why. You will not be there without misery; once misery is missing, you will be missing.You must have heard Descartes’ famous statement: Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. Yes, it is true in a sense – not in the sense he means, but in a totally different sense it is true. The moment thinking ceases, you will cease – in that sense it is true: I think, therefore I am. So you cannot afford to lose thinking.In bliss, thinking disappears; in bliss, there is no thought. Bliss is not a thought at all. You recognize that you were blissful only later on when the bliss has gone, when the moment has disappeared, when the bird has again flown back into the unknown and you are left in your misery – then you remember, you recapitulate. It is always a memory: “Yes,” you say, “I was blissful.” You never know, “I am blissful.” No, nobody has ever known “I am blissful” because when bliss is, I am not.Bliss is so vast it simply throws you away, the flood comes and you are gone. If you are ready to die, if you are ready to disappear, if you are ready to lose yourself – only then will you be able to drop misery. Misery works, it has some utility for you, you have much investment in it, and because it works you go on clinging to it. For example, just watch your misery and see the investment: everybody goes on saying, “I don’t want to be miserable” – but he has some indirect investment in it and he is not ready to lose that investment.For example, if you are miserable it is easy to have people’s sympathy. Now that is an investment. If you are ill everybody pays attention to you, everybody takes care of you. Once that has happened it becomes very difficult to be healthy again, because once you are healthy the care, the attention, the sympathy that you were getting will disappear also. Naturally – it was not given to you, it was given to your disease. Now the disease has a subtle attraction – then why not remain in it? Your wife has never been so loving as she has been since the heart attack. To be healthy and going again seems to be taking a risk; you know your wife – so knowing her, knowing your whole life, she has never been so careful about you, so attentive to you, so caring about your needs. Now suddenly she is so caring; she is all care. How can you afford to lose your illness? You can only hope for heart failure now, nothing else. You can pray to God: “Now give me heart failure, the heart attack was so good.”You cling to misery because there is some investment somewhere, it works.A guide was conducting a party of tourists around Lambeth Palace, the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury. “If you look up to your left,” he said, “You’ll see a large bay window, the third one along from the end. That is the archbishop’s study.”“Oh,” said one of the sightseers, “I do wish we could catch a glimpse of the archbishop himself.”“Right,” said the guide, and stooping down, he picked up a large stone and hurled it through the window. Immediately, a face appeared behind the broken glass, red with anger and shouting incoherently.“There you are!” said the guide. “That always gets the old boy!”Once you know it works, “It always gets the old boy,” you have stumbled upon a key, now you will go on using that key; that’s why you are miserable. When you are miserable the whole world is sympathetic toward you, when you are happy everybody is jealous of you. When you are happy nobody can forgive you, when you are unhappy everybody is so polite to you, so friendly, so generous. When you are happy everybody becomes the enemy. For a blissful man the whole world turns into an enemy; that’s why Jesus was crucified; he was crucified for daring to be blissful. Socrates was poisoned; he was poisoned for daring to be happy. Mansoor was killed, murdered, butchered. What was his crime? A simple crime – that he was ecstatic.These miserable people all around cannot forgive an ecstatic person, because that ecstatic person reminds them of their failure. Jesus walking by your side suddenly reminds you that you have failed. A Mansoor singing a song of joy makes you feel suddenly guilty – what are you doing here? You have sold yourself for mundane things, and here is this man full of God, full of joy, full of light. You cannot tolerate this man; this man is a thorn, it hurts. If it is possible for Mansoor and for Christ and for Socrates, why is it not possible for you? Destroy this man and rest at ease; then you know, “Everybody is just like me, even worse than me.” That makes you feel good.That’s why people like to know of wrong things about people, what wrong is going on. If you start talking about somebody and you say that he is a saint and he is pure and he is holy, immediately the other person will start criticizing. If you say he is the greatest sinner, the other will say, “I know, you are right. I have never said it but I have always known.” No proof is needed. But if you say somebody is holy, no proof is enough, nobody is going to believe it.Jesus was not killed by the Jews; Jesus was killed by miserable people, he would have been killed anywhere. The Jews should be completely forgotten in regard to it, they have not killed him. He would have been killed by the Greeks; he would have been killed by the Indians; he would have been killed – it doesn’t matter where, he would have been killed anywhere.That’s why you cling to misery. Once you have tasted the joys of misery, once you have got hooked to the joy of misery, it is very difficult.A woman was applying for a maintenance order against her husband, who was said to have deserted her seven years ago and to have made no provision for her or his children.“I understand,” said the magistrate, “that you have three children, aged respectively, two, four, and six. How exactly do you square this with your allegation that your husband has deserted you seven years ago?”“Well, your worship,” replied the woman, “he keeps coming back to apologize.”Once you get hooked you go on falling back, it becomes a rut. A groove is created in your being, and whenever you have nothing to do you start moving to that groove. There you can always trust you will have some occupation.You are miserable because you have decided to be miserable. Maybe the decision was unconscious. You have to be conscious about the decision, only then can it be dropped because nothing can be dropped from the unconscious. The unconscious is a great preserver, it preserves everything. Once you make anything unconscious, it will be preserved forever and ever unless you make it conscious again and throw it out. Your unconscious is a basement where you never go, where you always go on throwing things. Whenever you are miserable you repress it. Your eyes may be full of tears but you try to smile – you throw those tears into the unconscious. You may be boiling with anger but you go on repressing the anger, the sexuality, the greed.You go on throwing all this into the basement and there, all these things are creating a great chemistry; all these things meeting together, melting into each other – it is almost a lab of an alchemist, just in the reverse order. The alchemists transform the baser metal into gold and you transform the gold into baser metal, but still you are an alchemist.You have to bring your misery into the conscious; you have to face it. You have to see what your investments are with it, and then if you decide that those investments are worth it, it is perfectly okay. Then be miserable but don’t make a fuss about it. If you think that misery is not worth that investment, it is foolish, just seeing the foolishness of it is the cessation of it. To see anything totally, to recognize its absurdity, is to drop it. There is no need to drop it then – in that very seeing it drops. Seeing is transformation. Ihi passika, says Buddha: come and see.The fifth question:Osho,It seems that unhappy moments are the only times in which I can feel some joy.It is from Anand Anshumali. So have it your own way. Joy is good, I am all for joy. If you feel joy only when you are unhappy, then have it – have as much of it as possible.But this is a morbid kind of joy, a perversion; see the perversion of it, it is masochism. There are people who feel happy only when they hurt themselves, when it really hurts like hell then they know they are. Then they know they are, they exist. Pain makes them a little alert of themselves.But this is getting into a wrong track. These tracks are available: there are people who feel joy only when they are unhappy – this is only one part. There are people who feel very unhappy when they have joy – that is another part of the same perversion. If Anshumali goes on growing in the direction of his choice, the second will be coming soon.But remember, what are you doing to yourself? Joy is available without any unhappiness, uncorrupted by unhappiness, unpolluted by any misery. Why not have that? When pure and fresh air is available, why go on living in a slum? Why go on searching for dirty air? But people can become accustomed to dirty air.I have heard about a man who came out of his house early one morning – it was five o’clock, the beautiful, the most beautiful, moment of the day. But in his whole life he had never been out at that time; he was a drunkard, he used to be awake almost the whole night and then fall asleep. It was just accidental that there was a noise outside; at four o’clock he had just gone to sleep and there was a noise, a house was on fire or something, and his sleep was disturbed so he went out.He asked his watchman, “What type of smell is this?” It was just the fresh smell of the morning, the fresh smell of the soil and the air and the sun getting ready to rise and the birds and the trees. It was the fragrance of the morning. He asked the watchman, “What is this smell?” He knew only one smell, that of alcohol. This was so new and so strange, unfamiliar, he really didn’t like it.The watchman said, “Sir, it is nothing but fresh air.”You can become too accustomed to your misery, so whenever it comes you feel relaxed; the old guest has come, you know it well. But this is getting into a perversion and nobody can pull you out of it unless you see the point. I am not saying that you have to come out of it, I never interfere in anybody’s life. If you are feeling good, this is how it should be; with all my blessings, you can have as much misery as you like.But if you understand me, that if misery can be so joyful, how much more will joy be joyful? Just think of that. If illness can be joyful, how much more will health be joyful? Just think of that.The sixth question:Osho,Why does one want to marry?I don’t know exactly because I never wanted to, so I am utterly inexperienced; you should not ask me such difficult questions. But I guess – these are just guesses – I guess because people like to live in institutions, in prisons. People don’t want to live an open life, they want to live a closed life. That’s why they want to get married.I guess people don’t love, that’s why they want to get married. The love is not enough, so the law is needed to help. If love is enough there is no point in getting married. If you trust your love that’s enough, nothing else is needed to keep you together. Marriage is finding ways to keep you together, because you cannot trust that your love is enough to keep you together. People who don’t love want to get married; people are very cunning – they say, “We want to get married because we love,” but why should one want to get married if one loves? Love is more than enough – how can marriage help? It can destroy, it cannot enhance.The very idea of marriage is the beginning of divorce. The moment you think to get married you should beware – you have already started planning for divorce. The fear is coming, the fear of divorce is coming. Before it takes possession of you, you want to get married, so that the law and the police and the courts and society will be there to prevent you escaping from this woman or to prevent this woman escaping from you.Love is enough, more than enough, and if love cannot keep you together then nothing can keep you together. And nothing should keep you together.People like to get married because they cannot bear happiness. They want some misery: whenever you see a couple, a man and woman, thoroughly unhappy you can trust they are married – but they have to be thoroughly unhappy. It is very difficult to see a happily married couple, whatever their pretensions. They may show happiness but that is not the truth; you should see them when they are not pretending, when they are not wearing their public faces. They are always quarreling, always fighting, always at each other’s throats.People can’t bear happiness; love is such a joy, it is unbearable. It is so unbearable you want to crush it, and marriage is the surest way to crush it. All marriages are destructive to love – the very idea is destructive. Love should be your only trust.I guess men marry because they think they are too tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed. Men want to get married because they are so afraid of women; when you are married you have to be afraid of only one woman – that is the safety in it. If you are not married, all the women make you afraid. Once married, your wife protects you, becomes a great protection around you. Then you are no longer open; then she protects you against yourself.Women want to get married because down the ages men have made them so helpless economically that they are always hankering for economic security. Once the helplessness of women is gone and the woman is as economically independent as the man, I don’t think marriage is going to survive; nobody would like it. It is good if marriage disappears from the world; it is one of the greatest calamities.I am not saying that being together in intimate love and living together for your whole life is wrong. I am not saying that. But it should be only for love, and for nothing else; it should not have any economic motive, it should not have any security motive. It should not have anything else in it, it should be pure love. Yes, love brings many dangers – but that’s how love lives, through dangers. Love remains alive through dangers. Dangers are not bad, they keep things flowing, and love remains an adventure. It is courageous to love, it is cowardly to get married.If the question is a personal question, if the question is your question – because you have asked: “Why does one want to marry?” If that “one” is you, then my suggestion is never get married and always live in love. If you want to always live in love, never get married. Otherwise, you will start living in hatred because nobody can love one’s own prisoner, and nobody can love one’s own jailer either. When you are married you become that – one becomes the jailer, one becomes the prisoner, and both start hating each other; then life has friction and no grace.And the last question:Osho,I believe in God, and it is not out of fear. Why do you say that all belief is out of fear?Then why do you believe? You don’t know; if you know, there is no need to believe. All belief is out of ignorance – belief means ignorance. Buddha knows, he does not believe. I know, I don’t believe at all. But why do you believe? Where does your belief come from? It is not coming from your experience – then from where is it coming? It can come only from two sources, which are basically the same source – either fear or greed. Either you are afraid or you are greedy. These are the two aspects of the same coin, fear and greed.Greed is out of fear, and out of greed more fear arises. They go together. So either you are afraid of hell or you are greedy for heaven. Otherwise why do you believe in God, how can you believe in God? Your very belief simply says that alone you are afraid, you need a protection; you need a father, you need somebody to control destiny, you need somebody to look up to.All belief is based on fear, and your Gods are nothing but your fears personified. Your Gods don’t say anything about God; they simply say something about your pathology, about your mind.A very religious man, deeply asleep, had a dream. In his dream, God appeared and said to him: “I have news for you – bad news and good news. Which would you like to hear first?”“The good news,” said the man.“Well, the good news is that when you die you will be going to heaven.”The man, very happy, said, “And what is the bad news?”Said God, “The bad news is that you are expected there by tomorrow.”You are afraid even of heaven. You are afraid to die.One alpinist fell down from a steep rock, and while he was falling he took hold of a branch and hung suspended.“Help me, help me!” he shouted. “Is there anybody above me?”Suddenly a strong and deep voice echoed over the abyss: “I’m going to help you, my son. But first I need your faith and you have to trust me.”The man answered, “Sure, I’ll do everything you want, my Lord. I trust you, I believe you.”“Then,” replied the voice, “let go of the branch.”A deep silence followed and the man shouted again: “Hey! Is there anyone else above me?”Even if God comes to you and says: “Let go! Die! Disappear!” you will turn your back to him. You will start searching for another God.All beliefs are rooted in fear. A really religious person is born only when all fears and all beliefs are burned, and the scriptures and the idols destroyed. When you are free of belief, you are ready for truth.Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-04/

The first question:Osho,Why do I seem to feel more afraid of life than of death?Death is unknown. You cannot really be afraid of that with which you are not at all acquainted. Fear is a relationship – you have to know something to be afraid of it. Nobody is really afraid of death; whenever somebody says, “I am afraid of death” he is simply saying that he is afraid to lose life. Death is absolutely unknown. So everybody is afraid of life – it is life that is the problem, not death. It is life that gives you anguish and nights without sleep.What is the fear of life? There are many fears but they can be reduced to a few basic fears; one is that life is slipping by and you have not yet lived. That’s the panic, basic panic – that life is going out of your hands, every moment you have less and less life, and you have not yet lived. Great fear arises. Are you going to miss? Will you be able to make it this time? Who knows, there may be no other time; life may not happen again – who knows? This seems to be the only life, and every day it is turning into a wasteland, hence the fear.Secondly, it is life that ultimately brings death: death is the crescendo of life, the finishing touch. If you are afraid of death, that too is basically a fear of life – that life will bring death one day; that the trees will be here and the flowers will be here and the spring will come and the grass will be green and you will not be here.While you are here you are not much here either; sooner or later grass will be growing on your grave and you will not be able to walk on it. While you can walk on it and enjoy the feel of it and the dewdrops and the coolness and the sunlit morning, you are not enjoying it because you cannot enjoy – that’s why you are afraid of life. Life is turning into death, the unknown: the known is always disappearing into the unknown; the light is always disappearing into darkness.So life will one day take you to the door of death. But why are you not living, what hinders you from living? You have conditions, that’s what hinders. You have conditions: “If this happens, only then will I be happy” and life is not going to oblige you. You have to surrender to life. Your conditions don’t allow you the surrender; you have to drop your conditions. You have to say, “Whatever happens, I am going to enjoy. I am going to enjoy unconditionally.”You are in love with a woman or with a man and immediately a thousand and one conditions are there: “I will love you only if this condition is fulfilled – that you will not look at anybody with loving eyes. Then I will love you.” Now, nobody can promise that, and even if one promises it, nobody can keep it. You are asking something absurd. If a beautiful man passes by, how is your woman not going to look at him. How? She may not look, she may close her eyes, she may look somewhere else – but she has looked at him. In that moment she had moved, her heart had missed a beat.How are you going to avoid it? There are so many beautiful women in the world; you can at the most pretend. All conditions create pretensions because all conditions are unnatural.A man who really wants to live, lives unconditionally; he doesn’t make requirements of life. He says, “Whatever comes I am going to dance. Whatever the situation, I am going to dance. I am going to live it, I am going into it with my whole being.” Then the fear of life will disappear. Lived, there is no fear; unlived life creates fear.Let me repeat: because you are not living life, that’s why the fear comes. Life is disappearing and you are wasting a great opportunity. The opportunity may never come again or even if it comes, will you be able to do something else? You will repeat the same thing. You have been repeating – this is not the only life that you have come to, you have been through many lives. You have lived for eternity in a thousand and one forms, and you have always missed. You have missed because of your conditions.See to it that conditions are dropped, that you love for the sheer joy of love and that you live for the sheer joy of living. Be a hedonist, be an Epicurean. To me, Epicurus was on the right track toward the Garden of Eden – his commune was called “The Garden.” He has been immensely misunderstood. I know that there is something even beyond Epicurus, but it goes through him. You will have to pass through the garden of Epicurus, only then will you reach the shrine of Buddha – otherwise not.Hedonism is beautiful – eat, drink, and be merry – but it is not the whole story, it is just the beginning, the porch of the palace. There is far more, far beyond it, far more to life; but you have to pass through the porch. Your so-called religions have taught you to be anti-hedonistic – that’s why the fear. Your religions have taught you misery; they talk of bliss but they create misery. They go on preaching to you how to be blissful, but whatever they do and whatever methods they supply are self-destructive. They don’t allow you to be really blissful.Be happy here, and remember, I am not saying this is all to life. Epicurus is the beginning of a buddha: you can stop at Epicurus, then you will miss much, but it is better to stop at Epicurus than not to enter Epicurus at all because then you miss all. I teach you spiritual hedonism – that is my message to you. First be hedonistic as far as the first body is concerned, then be hedonistic as far as the second body is concerned, and then be hedonistic totally in the third body.Buddha is orgasmic. But you have to learn orgasm from the physical; you have to go from ABC. There are people who want to jump to XYZ – and they don’t know anything about ABC. They have not yet learned even how to live in the body in the world, and they want to live in heaven. They will not be able to live there, it will be impossible. Just think of yourself; if you were by accident welcomed into heaven, what would you do there? You would be as miserable as you are here – maybe more miserable because there life would be more thrilling. There would be more exploration, more love, more intensity in everything. There would be more passion – what would you do there? You have not even been able to live on this earth, which knows passion, which knows love, which knows joy, but in moderate quantities. In heaven there are no limits; heaven knows no moderation – it is excess, it is ecstasy.Start learning how to be unconditional. People miss much for small conditions; just a small thing can destroy their whole joy and they don’t even see the proportion of it. A man has just said something to you, it hurts… And the man has always been beautiful and you have loved him, but he has just uttered a word, and it hurts, and the friendship is broken. You don’t know the joy of friendship, otherwise you would not have broken it for such a small thing, for trivia. You have been living with your wife beautifully, and for just a small thing, just a small negativity from her, bridges are broken and you start thinking of divorce.Petty things, meaningless things, go on destroying, and because you can’t live, naturally you are afraid of life.You say: “Why do I seem to feel more afraid of life than of death?” There is one more thing: life requires more than death will ever require, life requires a willing surrender. Death does not care for you; it simply comes, without even any notification. It simply comes and takes you away; it drags you, you are not asked, your cooperation is not asked. Death pays no respect to you, and gives not even a single moment to prepare. It happens. Life is more respectful toward you; it gives you time, it gives you freedom to choose. It gives you opportunities to cooperate or not to cooperate, hence the fear.The fear of life is really a fear of your own self; you yourself know that you are going to miss. Knowing yourself the way you are, your fear is perfectly on the right track. It says that the way you are, you are going to miss. Life will bring a challenge and you will shrink.Just a few days earlier, a young man came to me from the West. I was looking into his head and into his heart – his heart was ready for sannyas but his head was not ready. Now I was really confused by him – what to do? Should I give him sannyas? His heart was saying yes; a great pulsation in the heart, the heart was simply crying for it. And the head went on saying no. It is as if you are on a crossroad, and the red and the green lights both go on. It is very difficult to decide whether to pass or not – one light says one thing, the other light says just the opposite.I tried to persuade him, I tried to seduce him toward his heart. But the more I tried, the more stubborn he became – the more stubborn the head became. The heart was joyous. When I was trying to persuade him to take the jump, the heart was taking such leaps of joy. The heart was becoming a big flame, it was almost tangible. Anybody who has eyes could have seen it – the heart was aflame. But the head was becoming darker and darker.An opportunity, a challenge is there. In that moment I was the challenge for him, life was coming through me in that moment. Sannyas is the challenge to surrender; sannyas is the challenge to explore something new, which you have not known before. The head never knows anything new, the head is always borrowed, the head knows only things from others. It is secondhand, it is never original; it can’t be original, it collects rubbish. But it feels secure, it feels logical.The heart is illogical. You are afraid to go with the heart; you don’t know where you will land. The head moves on the superhighway, the heart will drag you into some labyrinth in the jungle of life – you will be alone there. The head always lives with the crowd; it is Communist, it is Fascist, it is Catholic, it is Protestant, it is Hindu, it is Mohammedan. The head is part of the crowd, the heart makes you alone – you are neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan. Suddenly you are alone; the whole crowd has disappeared. You start feeling afraid. Life comes only when you are alone, when you take hold of your life in your own hands, when you are no longer part of an insane crowd, when you are no longer part of this pathological world. But then you have to be alone, and in aloneness there is fear.When a challenge like love or sannyas or samadhi or God provokes you, you feel as if death is coming close by. It is a sort of death: you will have to die to the past, to the old, only then can you be reborn to the new. Fear grips you, you say, “I will have to think.” That’s what that young man said: “I will have to think. I will have to wait.”Thinking can never lead you into the new. Logic can never give you any new conclusions, it goes on repeating the same. Logic is a vicious circle, it moves in the same rut. Whatever conclusions come through logic were already in the premise, they are not new. Maybe now they are more articulate, that’s all, but they were given in the first premise.Only love – and love means illogical, paradoxical – takes you to new conclusions because love knows how to take a leap. Logic is continuous with the past, it knows no leap. Love knows leaps, quantum leaps, it can jump from the old to the new, with no bridge in between. Love can give you a discontinuity with the past, but then there is fear. And love is life – if you miss love you will miss life, and then there will be the fear: “I am missing.”You are missing because you have not been able to allow your heart, you are continuously controlling through the head; the heady people always miss. Get deeper into your being, move toward the heart. The heart is not the ultimate; you have to move even deeper than the heart, and then you come to your navel – what the Japanese call the hara. These are the three centers: the hara – two inches below the navel, the heart, and the head. The head is the farthest boundary line; when you are farthest from your being, you are in the head. When you are close to your being, you are in the heart. When you are at the very core of being, you are in the hara.Only through the hara does fear disappear; only through the hara do you live for the first time authentically, sincerely, with no fear. That life needs to be lived, that life can be lived only if you don’t divide existence into two: body–mind, matter–soul, God–existence. If you divide, you will remain in the intellect. Drop all divisions, live as one, all the three bodies have to be lived as one, they are three aspects of your being – the physical body, the bliss body, and the buddha body. I am not against any – I am not saying choose the buddha body against the physical body. If you choose the buddha body against the physical body, your buddhahood will miss something, will lack something. It will not be perfect; it will not be the total flowering.When you don’t reject anything, when your acceptance is complete, then you bloom. Then you bloom into a thousand-petaled lotus, sahasrar.The second question:Osho,Since falling in love, even though having little to do with him, it seems entirely my own journey. Feeling nourished and much power in my being.Love is nourishment, love is exactly like food to the soul. Food is nourishment for the body, love is nourishment for the soul. Without food you will die physically, without love you will die spiritually – in fact you will not even be born. The body needs food; the soul needs love.Jesus is right when he says, “Man cannot live by bread alone” because bread is bread only for the body. You will have to seek and search something which nourishes your soul; so be always in love. And remember one thing: lovers don’t matter, love matters. If one lover disappears from your life, don’t become sour and bitter. If one lover has moved away from you, don’t go on clinging to the past and the memory and the nostalgia of it. That is sacrilegious, that is insulting to love. The lover is good, but the lover is good because of love. You need not sacrifice love for the lover. Lovers come and go, love remains.When one lover has gone out of your life, don’t become poisoned by it, don’t start closing your heart. You have to live, you have to still be in love. One should always be in love – with whom is immaterial. If love goes on flowing, you will be nourished in your soul.But there are people who make this a condition too; they become too attached to the lover. It is as if a flute player has become too attached to his flute and cannot play on another flute. And if this flute is stolen, is broken, now he will never sing. Now he will never sing – because that flute is no longer with him, how can he sing? It will be a betrayal to that flute. This is foolish but it is how humanity has been taught. If that flute is gone, search and seek for another flute, because your devotion should be toward the song, not toward the flute; the flute is just a vehicle, a passage.So are all lovers. If one love is no longer there, start searching, exploring for another. Remain always in love, and your soul will grow, will be nourished.People become obsessed. Obsession is pathological; because of obsession the world suffers so much. A few people suffer because they cannot love, and a few people suffer because they have loved, but all suffer all the same. Nothing is, or can be, eternal here; all is momentary. Our meeting is momentary, all meetings are momentary. It is a miracle that they happen – that you fall in love with a man or a woman or with a friend. It is a miracle that it has happened. Be grateful to God, but don’t take it for granted. Nothing can be taken for granted; it will disappear one day, as it has appeared.It is like a roseflower. In the morning it was there, by the evening it is gone – and the roseflower is far more beautiful because it will disappear. If it was going to be there forever and ever like a plastic flower, there would not have been any beauty; the very possibility of its disappearance makes it immensely valuable. So if you are in love with a person remember the roseflower. Love is a roseflower – it is there but it is not like a “thing,” it is very fragile. It is more like a fragrance – it has come to you on the wings of the wind, the wind may take it away again. It is a gift out of the blue. You cannot cling to it, you cannot possess it. If you try to possess it, you will kill it immediately.So a few people start possessing and kill, and a few people don’t possess, but when the lover has gone or moved away, has taken a separate path, then they are full of tears forever. Just crying over spilt milk – don’t cry over spilt milk. Go ahead, search and seek again, God will come in some other form. Somewhere else another bush may have bloomed and, who knows, a bigger roseflower may be waiting for you.Remain always in love, never betray love. Lovers come and go. Trust love that it will happen again, that you will again be dancing and singing. Trust life, trust love – it is nourishment, it is alchemy. It is through love that one is born, it is through love that one becomes fresh again and again, rejuvenated: again and again feeling enthusiasm for life, again and again feeling the celebration of life, again and again feeling grateful to existence.People whose loves have disappeared, whose hearts have become without love, are like a wasteland, are like deserts. They can pray but their prayer will have no beat to it; they can pray but their prayer will lose all meaning; they can pray but their prayer will have no juice to it – it will be dry, it will be dust, it cannot relate to existence.The day you stop relating with people, you stop relating with existence. People are the closest existence to you; relate to people, relate to trees, relate to birds and animals and rocks, and only then will you be able to relate to God. Love is the way.The third question:Osho,I believe that nothing is impossible. What do you say?Then try to strike a match on a cake of soap.The fourth question:Osho,The Fourth Way, as taught by Gurdjieff, has been called the way of conscience. What place has conscience in your teaching?The question is from Cecil Lewis.No place at all – I don’t believe in conscience, I believe only in consciousness. I don’t believe in morality, I believe only in religion. I am amoral.Conscience is a trick that society has played upon you; society creates conscience so that you may never need consciousness. You have been deceived. For example when Jesus says “Love is God,” it is not out of his conscience, it is out of his consciousness. He knows it. It is not a belief, it is his experience. When a Christian says “Love is God,” it is his conscience not his consciousness. He has not known it, he has not lived it, he has only heard it repeated again and again – he has become hypnotized by it.Each child is being hypnotized by the parents, the priests, the politicians, the society. Constant repetition of a certain thing becomes conscience. You go on teaching the child, “This is right. This is right. This is right.” Hearing it again and again, his mind is being conditioned. After many years he will also say, “This is right.” It will be automatic; it will not be from his own being, it will come from the gramophone record that the society has placed in his being. It is like Delgado’s electrode. It is a dangerous trick that society has played on everybody down the centuries.That’s why there are so many consciences in the world – the Hindu has one type of conscience, the Mohammedan has another type of conscience. How can consciences be so many? Truth is one, and consciences are so many?From my childhood I was taught a very, very strict vegetarianism. I was born in a Jaina family absolutely dogmatic about vegetarianism; not even tomatoes were allowed in my house because they look a little like red meat. Poor innocent tomatoes were not allowed. Nobody had ever heard of anybody eating in the night; the sunset was the limit. I had not eaten in the night in eighteen years; it was a great sin.Then for the first time I went on a picnic with a few friends to the mountains. They were all Hindus and I was the only Jaina; they were not worried about cooking in the night. The mountains were so beautiful and there was so much to explore – so they didn’t bother about cooking at all, they cooked in the night. Now it was a great problem for me – to eat or not to eat? I was feeling really hungry; the whole day had been arduous, moving in the mountains, and I was feeling really hungry – so hungry for the first time in my life.And then they started cooking – and the food smell, the aroma… I was just sitting there, a Jaina. It was so difficult for me – what to do? The whole conditioning of eighteen years made the idea of eating in the night impossible, but to sleep with that kind of hunger was impossible. They all started persuading me, saying, “There is nobody here to know that you have eaten. We will not tell your family at all. Don’t be worried.” I was ready to be seduced, so they seduced me and I ate, but then I could not sleep – I had to vomit two or three times in the night, the whole night became nightmarish. It would have been better if I had not eaten.Eighteen years of conditioning that to eat in the night is sin… Nobody else was vomiting, they were all fast asleep and snoring, they had all sinned and were sleeping perfectly well. They had been committing the sin for eighteen years, and I had committed it for the first time and I was being punished – this seems unjust!Conscience is created, it is a conditioning; all that you think is good or bad is nothing but conditioning. But this conditioning can go on managing your whole life. The society has entered you and controls you from there, from within, it has become your inner voice. Because it has become your inner voice, you cannot hear your real inner voice. So my suggestion is, unburden yourself of conscience: throw out all the conditioning, cathart it, be free from it. That’s what I mean when I say don’t be a Christian, a Hindu, a Jaina, a Buddhist.Just be, and be alert; in that alertness you will always know what is right and what is wrong. Right and wrong are not fixed – something may be right in the morning and may be wrong in the evening, and something may be wrong in the evening and may be right in the night. Circumstances change. An alert man, a conscious man, has no fixed ideas, he has spontaneous responses but no fixed ideas. You never act spontaneously because of fixed ideas; your action is always a kind of reaction – not really action.When you act out of spontaneity, with no idea, with no prejudice, then there is real action. And action has passion in it, intensity in it. It is original and it is first-hand. Action makes your life creative and action makes your life continuously a celebration, because each act becomes an expression of your being. Conscience is a false being.I think the French language is the only language that has only one word for consciousness and conscience – a single word meaning both. That is beautiful; real conscience should be only consciousness, nothing else. You should become more conscious.But I also have differences with George Gurdjieff about consciousness. When he says, “Be conscious” he says, “Be conscious that you are,” he insists for self-remembering. Now, this has to be understood. Your consciousness has two polarities; one polarity is the content. For example, a cloud of anger is inside you – that is the content. And you are aware of the cloud of anger – that is consciousness, the witness, watchfulness, the observer. So your consciousness can be divided in two – the observer and the observed.Gurdjieff says: “Go on remembering the observer – self-remembering.” Buddha says: “Forget the observer, just watch the observed.” If you have to choose between Buddha and Gurdjieff, I suggest choosing Buddha. There is a danger with Gurdjieff that you may become too self-conscious – rather than becoming self-aware, you may become self-conscious, you may become an egoist. I have felt that in many Gurdjieff disciples. They have become very, very great egoists. Not that Gurdjieff was an egoist – he was one of the rarest enlightened men of this age, but the method has a danger in it. It is very difficult to make a distinction between self-consciousness and self-remembering. It is so subtle it is almost impossible to make the distinction; for the ignorant masses it is almost always self-consciousness that will take possession of them; it will not be self-remembering.The very word self is dangerous – you become more and more settled in the idea of the self. And the idea of the self isolates you from existence.Buddha says forget the self because there is no self; the self is just in the grammar, in the language – it is not anything existential. Just observe the content. By observing the content, the content starts disappearing. Once the content disappears… Watch your anger – and watching it, you will see it is disappearing. Once the anger has disappeared there is silence. There is no self, no observer, and nothing to be observed; there is silence. This silence is brought by vipassana, Buddha’s method of awareness.Ordinary man does both: he goes on changing gear – sometimes he observes the self, sometimes he observes the content. He goes on moving from this to that, he is a constant wavering. Gurdjieff says that you must be settled in the observer, Buddha says look at the observed.My own approach is different from both. My approach is that Gurdjieff’s method is more dangerous than Buddha’s method, but even in Buddha’s method there is bound to be some tension – the effort to watch. The very effort to watch will make you tense.A Buddhist monk was brought to me from Sri Lanka. He was unable to sleep – for three years he had not slept. All kinds of medications had been tried upon him but nothing was helping, no tranquilizer was of any help. Nobody had bothered that he went on doing vipassana, Buddha’s method of insight – nobody had thought about it. When he came to me, the first thing I asked him was, “Are you doing vipassana?” Because he was a Buddhist monk, he must be doing it. He said, “Yes, for three years.” I said, “That is the cause of your sleeplessness.”If you are continuously making an effort to watch, then in the night you will not be able to relax and fall into sleep – the watching will become continuous. And if you are even watching in the night, how can you fall asleep? You cannot relax, the tension has become fixed. It is a known fact that Buddhist monks sleep only three or four hours at the most. It is not a gain. They think, and others also think, that this is a gain – that they have attained something, they sleep only three or four hours. It is not. They are losing something very valuable – relaxation. And they will look tense; on their faces they will look tense. They will look very quiet, but tense. They will look very silent, but their silence is not the silence of relaxation, but of effort. You can see the effort in the corner, defining them.My own method is: you relax. Neither watch the watcher nor watch the watched. Just relax, be passive; if something floats by and you cannot help seeing it, see it, but don’t make any effort to see it deliberately. If you are relaxed like a mirror, if some cloud passes by it will be reflected. Be like a mirror – lucid, passive. Drop both the Gurdjieffian method of self-remembering and the Buddhist method of watching.If you have to choose between Gurdjieff and Buddha, choose Buddha. If you have to choose between Buddha and me, choose me.Relax, just see things; and there is nothing much to see – if you miss something, it is not of any worth. You can miss, you are allowed to miss; take life easy, take it easy.So people who have been in some kind of effort – and Gurdjieff’s work is of great effort – will be puzzled here. That’s why Lewis is puzzled, a bit confused, and sooner or later, he has to either understand me or to condemn me – both are open. Condemnation will be easier because for thirty years working hard… And now suddenly he has become attracted to a man who does not believe in effort at all, who does not believe in improvement, who does not believe in growth, who does not believe in going anywhere, who does not believe in any way.He says, “The Fourth Way, as taught by Gurdjieff…” What I am teaching here is: no way. There is really no way, because truth is not a goal. All ways lead away from where we are. All roads, all ways, all paths, distract you from truth. There is nowhere to go, and nobody to go either. There is no way of being here and now but to be here and now. When I say “Be here and now,” don’t ask how. The “how” will take you away. When I say “Be here and now,” don’t ask “What is the way to be here and now?” There is no way of being here and now but to be here and now. There is no way to be still, and no need of any way. To see, wholly to see, that there is no way, is at once to be still. Seeing that, is stillness. All ways lead everywhere but here.To live one’s life as it comes and goes is awareness: passive, lucid, mirror-like, with no tension. I don’t teach you attention because attention has the word tension in it, and the phenomenon of attention has the feeling of tension in it – hence the word attention. Enjoy, relax. Just understanding that there is nowhere to go is liberation. Liberation is not like a goal waiting for you somewhere else: liberation is understanding that you are already liberated.It is impious for us to assert so flatly what should be, in the face of what is. What is, is the truth. Yatha bhutam: that which is, is the truth. To assert what should be is impious, sacrilegious, it is a sin; “should” is a sin. That which is – relax with it, float with it. I don’t even teach swimming, I simply say float with it. It is our responsibility to know how to accept and live through that which is.So I don’t teach any way – fourth or fifth or sixth, and I don’t teach conscience; I teach a lucid relaxed consciousness. Out of that, many flowerings happen; out of that, many songs are born, but they are born on their own. You cannot be the doer of them and you cannot feel enhanced, that “I have done.” You cannot feel your ego fulfilled through them. The more those flowers will come, the more you will disappear. One day there is flowering, but you are not; that is the day, the moment of liberation.The fifth question:Osho,I want to commit suicide.Then first take sannyas, and you may not need to commit suicide because sannyas is the greatest suicide possible.Why should one want to commit suicide? Death is coming on its own. Why are you in such a hurry? Death will come, it always comes. Even if you don’t want it to come, it comes; you need not go to meet it, it comes uninvited.You must be missing your life badly. It is out of anger, out of desperation, that you want to commit suicide. I will teach you the real suicide: become a sannyasin. The ordinary suicide will not help much, you will be born immediately into some other womb somewhere. Some foolish couple will be making love somewhere, remember, and you will be trapped again. You cannot escape so easily – there are fools and fools. Before you escape from this body you will be caught in another net, again you will have to go to school and college and university – just think of that! Think of all those miserable experiences and that will prevent you from committing suicide.Indians don’t commit suicide so easily because they know that they will be born again. In the West, much suicide, and the suicidal idea exists; many people commit suicide, and psychoanalysts say there are very, very rare people who don’t think of committing it. In fact one person has investigated and gathered data, and he says that every person, every single person thinks at least four times in his life of committing suicide. He must be thinking of the West; in the East nobody wants to commit suicide because of the idea of reincarnation. What is the point? You escape from this door and from another door you are in again; you can’t go so easily.I will teach you real suicide: you can go forever. That’s what it means to become a buddha – to go forever. When somebody used to commit this suicide in samadhi, Buddha had a special name for him; he would call him anagamin – one who will not return, one who has gone to the farthest shore and will not be coming back. I can make you anagamin, a nonreturner; then no womb can be a trap for you again.Why do you want to commit suicide? Maybe life is not going the way you want it to go? But who are you to impose your way on life, your will on life? Maybe your desires are not fulfilled? Then drop desires, why drop yourself? Maybe your expectations are not fulfilled, and you are feeling frustrated? In frustration one wants to destroy, and there are only two possibilities – either murder somebody or murder yourself. Murdering somebody else is more dangerous so people start thinking of murdering themselves; but it is murder.Why not change your life rather than destroying it? And please don’t commit it here, otherwise you will create problems for me.I have heard…A policeman saw a man standing on the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge one evening, obviously about to jump. Rushing over to him, he tried to talk him out of it.“If you jump, sir,” he said, “it will be my duty to jump in after you to try to rescue you. Then I’ll get wet, catch pneumonia, and die too. So why don’t you just go home quietly and put your head in the gas oven?”Please don’t create any trouble here. And don’t talk about it because there are many people who would like the idea – you may convert a few people.I have heard…A man was walking across Waterloo Bridge late one night when he noticed another man on the parapet about to throw himself over. He rushed up to the would-be suicide and shouted, “Wait a minute! Don’t jump! Come and have a drink and talk things over.”The two men went off to a nearby pub and spent the next hour chatting over the state of the country, inflation, taxes, and the future of Western civilization. Then they finished their drinks, walked back to Waterloo Bridge, and both jumped.So don’t spread this idea here. If you want to commit suicide just come in the evening to darshan and I will help you.The sixth question:Osho,I love ordinary life. It is like daytime in which I feel more and more awake. But I often have the sense that there is a universe of mysteries that belongs in darkness and is unavailable to me. Esoteric teachings, symbols, “higher knowledge,” seem to point to these mysteries, but I can never get interested in the books. I would rather journey into the night. Can you talk about this please?There is no other life than this ordinary life. Because people are incapable of living this ordinary life, they invent esoteric things. These are the people who are incapable of living – they distract their minds and beings. All esoteric teachings and all hidden teachings and all those so-called mysteries are just mumbo jumbo.The mystery is here. The mystery is in the trees and in the rocks and in the birds. The mystery is in people – in you, in me. The mystery is in relating, the mystery is in singing, the mystery is in dancing, the mystery is in love, the mystery is in prayer. Avoid all that nonsense literature which goes in the name of esotericism; it is pathological. These are the people who are incapable of tasting this life, they have to find some excuses, alibis, to avoid this life. They cannot enjoy, they cannot be passionately in it. They don’t have passion, they don’t have intensity of life, they don’t know how to live. They have forgotten all – how to be natural and spontaneous. Now they have to find some way to pretend that this life is not worth living, the grapes are sour – there are other grapes, hidden grapes, which only they and their inner circle knows.Theosophy and anthroposophy and Masonic lodges – all kinds of nonsense goes on. Avoid it, it is against life. This is the only life there is, the only dance there is. The really enlightened people have known the extraordinariness of this life.A man asked a Zen master: “Since you have become enlightened what changes happened in your life?”The master said: “Before I became enlightened I used to chop wood and carry water from the well.”And the man asked: “Now that you have become enlightened what do you do? What changes have happened?”He said: “I chop wood and I carry water from the well.”But the man was puzzled. “Then,” he said, “what is the difference? It is the same thing.”The master laughed. He said, “It is not the same thing. Before, I used to chop wood and think a thousand and one thoughts. Now I simply chop wood. It is so beautiful just to chop wood and do nothing. Before, I used to have a thousand and one desires while drawing water from the well. Now I simply draw water, and to tell you the truth, there is no one inside me who is drawing the water. When I am chopping the wood it is wonderful because there is nobody in me chopping the wood; I have disappeared! The wood is being chopped and the water is being carried, and it is tremendously beautiful.”The ordinary life becomes extraordinary if you live it totally, fully. Avoid esotericism. They are dangerous things; you can become hooked on them and then you will be just in mind-trips, imagination. If you love imagination it is okay, if you love fantasizing it is okay. You can create your own planes and your own astral travels and subtle bodies and whatever you want.A young woman dreamed that Prince Charming had come on his horse. A beautiful horse and beautiful prince… She had been waiting for this Prince Charming forever and ever, and he had come. When you wait too much, beware – it happens.The prince took the woman on the horse and the horse started galloping toward some unknown destination, and the woman was thrilled – who would not be thrilled? She asked the prince, “Where are you taking me?” and the prince said, “This is your dream. So you say to me where you want to be taken. This is your dream.”In these so-called esoteric trips, wherever you are going it is your dream. Masters will appear – Koot Humi and K.H. – and automatic handwriting will appear, and messages will be received from the beyond. All sheer nonsense: eat your breakfast and have a good sleep.The seventh question:Osho,Why do people like Buddha or Christ appear only at certain times?Because they are afraid of you: they think a lot before they gather enough courage to come back to this earth to be again crucified by you, to be again stoned by you.And sometimes, even if they come, they live here anonymously so that you cannot stone and you cannot crucify them. Then everything happens in its own time. When the spring comes, trees will bloom; and when the right time comes, the fruits will ripen. Every moment things are happening, but nothing ever happens for which the moment has not come. Everything has its own time, and it is good.On the planet Volcanus, the gases from the many volcanoes which supplied the nuclear lighting were running out. It was a race against time to find another way of lighting the planet.Suddenly they were plunged into total darkness.The people of Volcanus were terrified. Just then they heard a slippery slurpery noise, and rays of light appeared at the top of all volcanoes. The lights got brighter and brighter, lighting the whole of the planet.“We are saved,” shouted the people. “The glow worms from inside the volcanoes are giving us the light we need.”The glow worms got closer.“But why haven’t you shone before?” asked the people.“We weren’t needed,” said the leader of the glow worms. “But when the planet was plunged into total darkness, we decided that the time was right. Because when you gotta glow, you gotta glow.”Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-05/

The first question:Osho,What is this urge to create?The urge to create is the first stirring of the divine within you; the urge to create is the presence of God. You have the first message, the first ripple has reached you; it is the beginning and the birth of prayer. Follow it. To be creative is to be religious, what you create is not the point. You create and in that very creativity something starts happening which is not of the world.When you create you are lost in your creation; for example, if you are painting or singing or playing on an instrument or dancing, you start disappearing. The dance is when the dancer is no more: if the dancer is still there it is not a creative act, then it is at the most a skill. The technician is there, but not the dancer; one who knows how to dance is there, but not the dancer because the dancer knows nothing. The dancer remains in a state of not knowing – he forgets all his skill, he forgets all the techniques that he has learned, he forgets himself. He is utterly lost, he is in the hands of God. He cannot even say, “I am dancing,” he can only say, “God has taken possession of me, I am possessed. God is dancing in me. I am the field where God is dancing, I am the hollow bamboo and God is singing. He has made a flute of me.”The creator knows God – only the creator knows God. All other prayers that you go on doing in the temples and the churches are just impotent, meaningless, unless your life learns how to create. Then no other prayer is needed, then the very phenomenon of creativity is enough religion for you, more than that is unnecessary. You need not go to any church, any temple, any gurdwara, any mosque. You have to go into creativity.The question is asked by Gyan Bhakti – she is a creator, hence the question has arisen in her, “What is this urge to create?” She is possessed by that desire. I have seen it in her, aflame. She wants to explode in many, many ways; she wants to create. God has knocked at her door, but when the knock comes it is natural not to understand it because we have never heard it before. It is so new it cannot be reduced to our old mind. It is coming from the unknown – there is no way to figure out what it is, hence the question.Go with the unknown, go with the new. Always remember: if there is a choice between the old and the new choose the new. However dangerous it is, however insecure it is, choose the new, and you will be always moving closer and closer to God. Choose the old, and you will be moving away from God. Choose the old mind and you will sooner or later become destructive. These are the only two ways to live: either be creative or be destructive. There is no other possibility, there is no third possibility. If your energies are not moving into creation they will still be moving, but then they will become destructive: destruction is creativity standing on its head. Something has gone wrong, something has taken a wrong turn.All destructive people could have been great creators but if the energy is not allowed, if you become afraid and frightened with the new… And when creativity possesses you it is fearful. It looks terrible, it is a kind of tremendum. It takes you so far away from the known and the familiar, it takes you to the uncharted sea without a map; it is dangerous, one shrinks back from it.But once you start shrinking back from it, what will you do with the energy that God goes on pouring into you? Something has to be done; the energy cannot wait, the energy needs expression. So if you avoid creativity, you will become destructive.Whenever creativity calls you, go with it; it is God calling you.The second question:Osho,Why is there so much misunderstanding in the world?Because people are unconscious, because people are fast asleep, because people are robots. Communication is impossible; you say something, something else will be understood – there is no way to communicate. The only way to communicate is in love, through silence, but nobody knows how to be in love and nobody knows how to be in silence.Only in love and silence is communication possible. But we are not in love and we are not silent, we are so full of knowledge, that’s why communication is impossible. Language is one of the reasons why there is so much misunderstanding in the world. There is no misunderstanding in the animals and in trees and in birds because language does not exist. They are fortunate – they don’t know anything about language, so they communicate in love, in silence. Their dumbness is a great blessing to them. Man is the only animal who is not dumb, who can speak, and this very phenomenon is a problem.There is an existential principle: existence precedes essence. A simple statement that you are born first, that you are born without any intrinsic nature, that you are born tabula rasa: nothing is written on you, writing comes later on. You are born as pure existence with no essence, with no inbuilt program, with no destiny. You come into the world not knowing who you are. You are nobody when you come into the world, a pure emptiness, and then by your acts, by your doings, you start to define yourself. Essence comes later on by your own effort. A simple statement and a beautiful statement.But I have come across many, many interpretations of this simple three-word sentence: existence precedes essence. The first interpretation I have come across is… For some people, this idea becomes translated into: nothing is possible for man, because man is empty. Man has no intrinsic nature, so there is no destiny to be fulfilled; man is accidental, life has no meaning, life is utterly hopeless.A seed has meaning because it has an inbuilt program that it has to become a tree – that it has to attain a certain kind of fruits and flowers, that it has to rise toward the sky, that it has to be this and that. The seed has an inbuilt program – that’s why there is hope and there is meaning and the seed can trust that something is going to happen. The seed is not accidental because there is a destiny.This is one interpretation – that man is accidental, has no nature, is a hopeless thing. Sartre says man is a useless passion; there is no possibility of any significance in man’s life.For others the idea carries hope because it is translated into: everything is possible for man because there is no nature, hence no boundaries – and they find in it great hope and freedom. Now the second interpretation is contrary to the first. It says that because there is no intrinsic nature, man is not a slave. The seed is a slave: a mango seed will become a mango tree. There is no freedom. Man can become anything, man can be anything, whatever he chooses to be, there is the possibility to choose. The mango tree cannot choose, it is a slave; there is no hope, it is just mechanical. It has to fulfill a certain destiny. Everything is predetermined, so how can there be freedom and how can there be joy? And how can there be any hope? It is a mechanical repetition. Out of a mango seed will come a mango tree and out of a mango tree will again come mango seeds – and so on, so forth, it will go on and on for eternity, there will never be anything else. This is a hopeless situation; this repetitiveness is utter boredom.Now the same sentence has taken a new meaning, contrary to the first: that man is free, that man can be whatever he chooses to be, that man is a kind of god; that nobody decides for man, man has to decide for himself, that man’s decision has to come from his own soul. He is going to write his own writing on the tabula rasa – there will be his signature. Man has individuality. No mango tree has any individuality, no peacock has any individuality. All peacocks are alike, and all mango trees. But man has uniqueness, individuality – there is great hope. Now see – the meaning has turned to the opposite polarity.I have come across a third interpretation too. For others it means: everything is permissible to man. And with that they abandon all restraint, they become licentious. They say, “When there is no nature, when there is nothing as a given program for man, then there is no need for any morality, no need for any discipline, no need for anything. Man is a chaos and should remain a chaos.” Then nothing is good and nothing is bad. If there is an inbuilt program you can decide what is good and what is bad.For example, for a mango tree… You can decide which manure is good and which manure is bad because the mango tree has an inbuilt program. It has to become a mango tree. You can decide which manure will help and which manure will not help, how much water is needed, how much sun is needed, how much space is needed. You can find a pattern, a discipline, for the tree. The pattern and the discipline will be decided by the intrinsic nature of the tree.But man has no intrinsic nature, so anything goes. Man is free – that is interpreted as man needing no discipline, man being permitted to do whatever he wants to do. Adolf Hitler is as good as Gautam Buddha: to kill a man is as good as being compassionate, to hate is as good as to love, because how to decide what is good and what is bad? There are no criteria. Man is a tabula rasa, man is an emptiness, there is no way to decide. All is good – murder is good, suicide is good, destruction is good.Now this is a totally different interpretation – and the sentence is the same: existence precedes essence. With this they abandon all restraint, becoming licentious, indulgent. This indulgence is bound to destroy humanity, but this interpretation is possible.For still others, there is a fourth meaning: everything is permissible against man; man has no nature, so you can bend him this way or that, you can make him a soldier or a saint or a sinner. Man is empty, so you can write anything on him. Everything is permissible against man. So what Adolf Hitler did to millions of people, converting them into robots – those Nazi soldiers were robots, they were trained to be machines not men – that’s permissible. And Buddha turned thousands of people into sannyasins, brought them out of their mechanicalness into consciousness. Everything is good. Buddha is doing his thing and Adolf Hitler is doing his thing and there are no criteria to judge.Language seems to be the medium of communication but it is not. You say something and immediately you will be misinterpreted. You say something and you will be surprised that people have taken such altogether far-out meanings; you had not even dreamed of them, you have not even thought of them. Once you say something you are no longer the master of it. Then whoever gets hold of it will have his own meaning, will squeeze his own meaning out of it. You are helpless – you cannot do anything.Language is not the right medium to communicate, but people don’t know silence, so there is no other way. Even a Buddha has to talk, or a Lao Tzu – he has to use words which are inadequate, dangerous. The day Buddha died, his disciples divided into thirty-six schools. The day he died… As if they were just waiting. Thirty-six meanings to each of Buddha’s assertions. On Krishna’s Bhagavadgita there are one thousand commentaries – one thousand meanings to each of Krishna’s statements. If Krishna comes back and reads these commentaries he will go mad, he will not be able to conceive what has happened. He was talking to his disciple and friend, Arjuna. It was a love dialogue. One thousand meanings? Ten thousand more are possible.I was reading Michael Adam’s memoirs. He writes:As a child I was given twenty-six wooden bricks, each one brightly painted with a letter of the alphabet. A patient teacher taught me to make words, tried moreover to make me see, as adults do, that the four letters b-i-r-d made a bird, that the word was the thing, the real robin, the red-breasted one, brave singer in the snow. It was only pretending. I knew even then that it was only pretending. The bricks could be scattered. Their colors were false. There was no flight and no song.But words become things sooner or later. The word God has become God – and you have forgotten the real God. The word love has become love – and you have forgotten the real love. The word becomes more and more important, people become hypnotized by words. Yes, it is difficult to deceive a child because he can see the pretension, but how long will he be able to see the pretension? A child is fresh – he looks at those bricks, colored bricks, and you have made a word out of them! The teacher is saying, “Now look: b-i-r-d, bird. This is the bird, the real robin.” To explain to the child, he must be saying, “The red-breasted one, brave singer in the snow.” And the child is smiling – he knows that this is just trickery. There is no robin there and the colors are false. This robin cannot sing and cannot fly and the bricks can be scattered. There is nobody behind it, it is just an empty game. But sooner or later he will also become hypnotized by words.Language is the basic problem; that’s why there is so much misunderstanding. If you want understanding you will have to drop language, you will have to learn how to dehypnotize yourself from words. You will have to put aside the word rose and you will have to see the red rose – there on the bush, in the wind, in the rain, in the sun. And while seeing the rose, don’t go on repeating, “This is a rose” otherwise you will carry a curtain on your ears, on your eyes, on your being. You will not be able to hear and see and feel. Don’t go on saying “This is a beautiful rose.” That beautiful is again a word – drop it. See what beauty is, don’t go on using the word beautiful. Just see, penetrate, encounter, beauty itself. The rose is there. What is the point of using the word? Put the words aside, clean the passage between you and the rose that is there. Don’t compare it with other roses that you have seen before, otherwise you say, “Yes, this is a beautiful rose. I have seen such roses before.” Or “This is more beautiful than the roses of last year.” Or “This is more beautiful or less beautiful than the neighbor’s roses.” Again you are getting lost in words. This rose. This robin, this red-breasted bird.Just look and forget all language. In that forgetting of language understanding arises; one has to be nonverbal for understanding to arise. Then start communicating through silence sometimes. Holding the hand of your friend, sit silently; just looking at the moon, feel the moon, both feel it silently. And see, there happens a communion – not only communication but a communion. Your hearts start beating in the same rhythm, you start feeling the same space, you start feeling the same joy, you start overlapping each other’s being. There is communion: you have said without saying anything and there will be no misunderstanding.I have to use words; I am helpless. The day you are be able to understand silence there will be no need for me to talk to you every day, we can sit in silence. That will be a beautiful day – I am preparing you for it. Even though I use words, I use them against words. I use them in such a way so that they can commit suicide in you. That’s why I have to be contradictory: that’s why I say one thing this moment and contradict it immediately – so that no word takes root in you. So that slowly, slowly you start understanding that words are meaningless, their meaning is a pretension. Then there will be no misunderstanding.After many years of trying, a man won a big First Dividend on the football pools. His prize money amounted to millions of pounds and naturally he went a little mad in the first week or two, buying an apartment and a country house, two cars and a yacht. Then one day he rushed into the most expensive furriers in Bond Street and ordered several thousand pounds’ worth of fur coats and stoles.“This is quite a large order, sir,” said the clerk.“Yes,” he replied. “I’ve won a First Dividend on the pools and I’m going to smother my wife in furs!”“Wouldn’t it be cheaper to use a pillow?” asked the clerk.Three girls, one American, one English and one French, were applying for the job of air hostess, and were given initiative tests. One of these involved the capacity to make quick decisions, and the three girls were asked the following by their examiner: “Suppose,” he said, “that you are flying over the Polynesian islands and your plane has to ditch in the sea. You find yourself alone in a rubber life raft rowing toward an island. As you get closer you see a crowd of American Marines on the shore watching you coming in. What would you do?”The American girl said, “I would turn around and row to another island.”The English girl said, “I would carry on rowing, and when I reached land I would ask to see the commanding officer and report to him.”And the French girl said nothing, but looked puzzled. “Do you understand the question?” asked the examiner.“Oh yes,” she replied. “But what is the problem?”It depends on you.A benevolent but forgetful old gentleman was entertaining a party of people, some of whom he had not met for a long time. As they were all standing around drinking cocktails before going in to dinner, the host moved from one to the other, making polite conversation. In the course of so doing, he came upon a young man of whom he had not heard for some time.“I am delighted to see you,” he beamed. “And how is my dear old friend, your father?”“I am sorry to have to tell you, sir,” said the young man, “that my father died some six months ago.”The host expressed his deep regret and at that moment the butler announced that dinner was served.After dinner, the host again espied the young man and, having completely forgotten the previous conversation, inquired once more after his dear old friend, the young man’s father.“I am sorry, sir” was the reply, “but my father is still dead.”Language creates almost ninety-nine percent of problems: philosophy, theology, doctrines, scriptures, political ideologies have all created thousands of problems. Man is in confusion, in a great confusion. All those fighting ideologies are inside you. All the past, the whole past, the maddening past, is trying to possess you. It is not homogeneous: Christianity is in you, Buddhism is in you, Communism is in you, Fascism is in you – and they are all pulling you apart. It is a miracle how man goes on keeping himself together.In this state of confusion, when you hear something, firstly you don’t hear rightly what is being said. Secondly, you interpret it according to your own past and everything goes wrong. If you want to avoid misunderstanding you will have to learn silence. If you learn silence, the first thing will be that you will never misunderstand anybody else. It’s a great joy not to misunderstand anybody; you will become a good listener, you will know the right kind of listening. Everything will be crystal clear to you. That clarity will not come from logic, from intellect, from analysis, that clarity will come through silence. If somebody’s word falls into your silence you cannot misinterpret because there is nobody to interfere. Either you understand or you don’t understand but there is no way to misunderstand. Either you say, “Yes, I understand” or you say, “I don’t understand” but there is no way to misunderstand.What is misunderstanding? Misunderstanding is neither understanding nor not-understanding, it is a mixture, it is a hotchpotch. And it creates more confusion in you – the more knowledgeable a man is, the more confused. The more knowledgeable a man is, the less is the possibility to understand anything.Learn silence, at least with your friends, with your lovers, with your family. This is your family, the orange family; here, sit in silence sometimes. Don’t go on gossiping, don’t go on talking. Stop talking, and not only on the outside – stop the inner talk. Be in an interval. Just sit there doing nothing, just being presences to each other, and soon you will start finding a new way to communicate. And that is the right way.It is said about Mahavira – a strange story, but beautiful and meaningful – that when he became enlightened he remained silent. It created many problems because he had attained and it was his duty to share it. When you have attained, you have to share it. It is intrinsic to attainment to share. That’s why Buddha has spoken and Christ and Lao Tzu. Mahavira kept silent, he found another way. Maybe that is why his religion never became a world religion. His followers remain very few – even now there are only thirty lakhs Jainas. That is nothing – after two thousand five hundred years, only three million? If Mahavira had converted only thirty couples that would have done it, there would have been that many Jainas. He could not convert many people. And the reason? – he wanted to commune through silence, he remained quiet. The way that he found was strange but beautiful. It could not prove very effective because it is very difficult to speak through silence in this mad world. He failed, but the experiment was worth trying.What did he do? He prepared a few people for silence, to understand him in silence. He would sit silently, and only those few people who had learned how to listen to his silence would understand what he meant. And they would tell it to people. But then again the problem arose. He would not speak – he was a strange man, he thought it a kind of betrayal to speak because whatever you say is going to be misunderstood and then you become the cause of misunderstanding. Whatever you say will be only half true because the whole truth cannot be reduced to words, so you will be destroying truth. He was not a man to do that, so he kept quiet. A few disciples who had learned how to commune with him in silence would sit there silently, listen to his silence – would feel what he wants, what he feels, what he knows, and then go to people and tell them.But it didn’t help: the people who told others were misunderstood. So what was the point? He could have told it himself – there would have been less misunderstanding because the power of Mahavira would have been there. Mahavira gave to other people and those people were not so enlightened, not so conscious. They went to people and relayed, broadcast, Mahavira’s message. Much more misunderstanding was there. Of course they could not convert many people, they had their limitations. But he tried – a great experiment.I would also like to try it, but not only with a few people: I would like to create a great mass of people for silence, and it’s that for which I am working slowly, slowly. Once you are ready, thousands of people ready for silence, then I can really say that which cannot be said through words.Buddha gave Mahakashyapa his flower and said, “I am giving to you that which I could not give to others. I am giving you that which can only be given in silence.” I would like thousands of Mahakashyapas to receive that flower. One is not enough.So be more and more silent and you will understand why there is so much misunderstanding in the world. You will understand that now you don’t misunderstand; either you understand or you don’t understand. Both are good, things are clear. If you don’t understand, you can ask again; if you understand, the work is finished, there is no need to ask again. But if you misunderstand you go on thinking that you have understood, so you don’t ask again, and you have not understood. That misunderstanding will make your life a corrupted phenomenon, it will be crippling, will paralyze you.The third question:Osho,My first question is: can you tell me something about the law of karma, what it means in relation to taking sannyas?The other thing that interests me is, what do you think about the Zen sentence “When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him?” And again, how does it relate to taking sannyas?The question is from Wolfgang; he was in darshan last night. He longs to take sannyas, but has conditions in his mind, is knowledgeable. He already knows how things should be – and if they are not like that, how can he take sannyas? He can take sannyas only if it fits with him, if it fulfills his a priori knowledge. That is not possible: you will have to fit with sannyas, sannyas is not going to fit with you. He is afraid of the church that is growing around me. I should be afraid of it – you should not! I am enjoying it; it is beautiful. While I am here it will not do any harm, and when I am gone, I am gone. Then who cares? I am not going to bother with it for eternity. While I am here it’s perfectly good, I will take care that it will not be a harmful thing to anybody. But when I am gone, I am gone; there is no way to plan for the future. Then whatever happens, happens.Just because of the church around me, which is a necessity… If a church had grown up around Jesus, he would not have been crucified, he would have served humanity for many more years; he would not have been so easily destroyed. The church came when he was crucified – it was not the right time. When a christ dies it is time for the church to die with him; but when a christ is there, if a church is possible, if a church is created, much more work can be done.The church that is growing around me is growing with my support, with my blessings. It is not growing against me, it is not growing without me. It is part of my device so that I can work easily, more efficiently with you, so don’t be afraid of it.Now, these questions are knowledgeable questions. First he asks, “Can you tell me something about the law of karma…” It exists only for the unconscious man. The law of karma exists only for the unconscious man; for the conscious man there exists no law of karma. It is really unconsciousness that makes you suffer; if you do something unconsciously, you will suffer, then karma will be created. Karma means unconscious action. If you do something consciously, fully alert, no karma is created. If your act is total, spontaneous, it is finished in that moment; it is atomic, it is not a continuity. It leaves no trace behind.That’s why an enlightened man is unpredictable. Only an unenlightened man is predictable because he moves unconsciously, mechanically, in a routine way. There are no surprises in his life. Somebody loves you and you love him, somebody hates you and you hate him. Somebody comes and praises you and you feel expanded like a balloon. That’s why people use buttering up so much – praising others helps.A Romanian philosopher, Cioran, says that the deepest desire in man is the desire to be praised – one may say, one may not say. Somebody praises you and you fall for him. Somebody insults you and you become an enemy forever. These are not actions, these are reactions; the other is using you like a machine, he is pushing your buttons. You are not acting, you are reacting. The other is manipulating you, he knows what to do.A conscious man cannot be manipulated by anybody. His action is not reaction, his action is action.Buddha was being insulted. People were abusing him in a village. He stood there, and when they had finished he said, “If you are finished, can I go now? I have to reach the other village, people will be waiting for me there. If you have not yet finished, I will be coming back after a few weeks – then you can do the remainder.” The people were a little embarrassed. Buddha looked utterly aloof, as if what they were doing had not reached him; he remained unscratched.They said, “But we have been abusing you sir, we have been insulting you. Are you not going to answer?”Buddha laughed and said, “If you wanted the answer you should have come at least ten years earlier; then I was unconscious, then you could have pushed my buttons and I would have reacted. But now I have become conscious, I have become a buddha. Now I can see what you want to do to me and I am not going to be manipulated by anybody. Now I live on my own, now I do what I feel to do. And I don’t feel any anger, I simply feel compassion for you. I feel sorry for you – more so because in the last village, many people had gathered and had brought fruits and sweets to present to me. And I said, “Sorry, I cannot accept them because I have eaten my breakfast and it will be an unnecessary burden to carry these things. Please, take them back home.” I ask you, what should they have done with those sweets and fruits?’Somebody from the crowd said, “They must have distributed them in the village, they themselves must have eaten them.”Buddha said, “That’s why I feel more sorry for you. Now you have brought these insults and these abuses and I am not going to accept them, what will you do? Now I really feel sorry for you. You can insult, that is your freedom – but to accept it or not is my freedom.”When consciousness has dawned, you act for the first time, you don’t react, and action is beyond the law of karma – the law of karma applies only to the unconscious being. The man of awareness has absolute freedom: no law binds him, no law defines him. He’s as vast as the sky, he’s as infinite as the sky. His freedom is absolute.You ask, “Can you tell me something about the law of karma, what it means in relation to taking sannyas?” Sannyas is the beginning of getting out of the law of karma because sannyas is the beginning of awakening. Sannyas is your effort to get out of the rut in which you have lived for many lives. Sannyas is the insight that “Enough is enough, and I should get out of the routine life, I should get out of the mechanicalness of it. I should get out into a clearance, into clarity. I have roamed in the jungle of unconsciousness, in the dark night of the soul enough. I should search for the dawn, for the morning.”It is the search for the sun, it is the flight toward the sun. That’s why in the East we have chosen ochre as the color of sannyas – it is the color of the sun, the sunrays, the morning sun. A search for light, a search for awareness, a search for enlightenment. Once you start becoming more and more aware, you will be less and less a part of the law of karma. And once you have enjoyed and tasted a little bit of freedom then nobody can force you back into prison, you will open your wings and fly toward the sun.The other question is: “…what do you think about the Zen sentence ‘When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him’?” That’s just the right thing to do: when you meet Buddha, kill him. But to meet Buddha, first you have to become a sannyasin – otherwise you will never meet him. This is said only to those disciples who are capable of meeting Buddha in their inner meditations, it is not said to everybody. It is said to the very closest disciples. “When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” is said to people who are reaching the ultimate in their meditation.What is the ultimate in meditation? – all else disappears except your master. The world disappears, the market disappears, the beloved disappears, money, power, prestige, all disappear. Thoughts, feelings, all disappear. Just one thing remains at the end: the master. When this happens, meditation has come to its ultimate, only the master is there. Then Buddha says, “When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” Now you have to drop the master too.At the last moment, the master has also to be dropped because that will be your last clinging, and when the master has also disappeared you have become a buddha yourself.It is as if you want to cross a river. You make a raft – you gather wood, ropes, you make a raft, and go to the other shore. Buddha says, “What would you do on the other shore? When you have reached the other shore what would you do with the raft?” Would you carry it on your heads forever because it helped you to go to the other shore? That would be idiotic. It would be an unnecessary burden and you would look ridiculous. “When you have reached the other shore, what would you do,” Buddha asks his disciples, “with that raft?”And one disciple says, “We would say good-bye to the raft. We would be thankful to the raft, we would feel grateful to the raft because it is through the raft that we came to the other shore, without the raft it was not possible. And then we would move on, leaving the raft on the shore – with great thankfulness, but we would leave it, we would not carry it.”A master is a raft. You go to the other shore; when you have reached the other shore, say good-bye to the master. It is going to be difficult – that’s why Buddha uses such a hard word. He says, “When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It is going to be hard because to be in relationship with a master is to know love in its most profound sense. It is very difficult to leave a buddha. You have been traveling with a buddha and have known new strange spaces, beautiful spaces through him. You have known so much and are so enriched – it is because of him and through him. He has taken you out of your dark night, morning is coming and now he says, “Kill me. Let me disappear from your being utterly, as if I had never existed, so that you can take the final jump from meditation to samadhi.” Just on the boundary line, the buddha, the master, has to be left.Buddhas can take you to the boundary line of meditation and samadhi. That is the only difference between meditation and samadhi. If your mind has become utterly quiet and silent but only the master is there, then it is meditation. If your mind has become so quiet that even the master has disappeared, it is samadhi. The last barrier is going to be the master. He will take you out of the world, but one day you will have to leave him too, and the real master will always keep you alert that you have to leave him one day, at the final stage.But you can leave only if you have accepted him. You can leave the raft on the other shore only if you have made the raft on this shore. So the question from Wolfgang is not yet valid. Become a sannyasin Wolfgang; make the raft. And then when you meet Osho on the road, kill him – but only then. Right now, please…The fourth question:Osho,Do you know, that Mr. Cecil Lewis has escaped?Poor old man… He was a nice man. But I was afraid that it was going to happen that he would escape. He has been reading my books – to read the books is one thing – and he has been writing beautiful letters to me, and wanted so much to come here. In his old age it was difficult for him to come; to gather so much money was also difficult, but somehow he managed. But to read my books is one thing, and to come face-to-face with me is another. With books you can have your own interpretation, whatever you want. With books you can fantasize; you can impose your ideas, your fantasies.But when you come to me then my reality has to be absorbed, and it was difficult for him to digest me. He had been reading Gurdjieff for thirty years. He wrote to me that he had gone to see Gurdjieff also, but missed; when he reached there, Gurdjieff was dead – he reached just a few days afterward. He was very sorry that he missed Gurdjieff and that’s why he was writing to me, “I want to come, I don’t want to miss you. I have missed Gurdjieff, I have felt the pain my whole life – that if I had gone just a few days earlier I would have seen the master. But I was unfortunate. This time I don’t want to miss. I am coming, anyway I am coming, I will manage the money and I will come.”He came. And he missed again. Now I can say that if he had seen Gurdjieff he would have escaped far sooner than he escaped from here. Here, he at least stayed for two weeks. With Gurdjieff he would not have been able to stay more than two hours because Gurdjieff used to hit very hard. I also hit, but it is never very hard. That’s why I gave him a little shock – just a tongue-tip taste of Gurdjieff – but he could not digest it: he immediately escaped. I can say that he has not understood Gurdjieff at all, otherwise he would have been able to see what I was doing – that I was shocking him, that I was trying to destroy his shock absorbers. He would have felt grateful, he would have stayed.But he has been reading Gurdjieff’s books – it is one thing…It happened once that a young man used to come to me who was fanatically in love with Zen and Zen masters. He always talked about Zen masters who hit and threw the disciples, and I was getting tired of his stories, so one day I hit him. Since then I have not seen him. That’s what happened with old Mr. Lewis – and I had not hit him hard because he is so old. I was very polite. But I was afraid he would escape.To read Gurdjieff through books is one thing; to read Zen masters through books is one thing. But when you come across a Zen master or across a Gurdjieff, it is a totally different experience. Reality is not your fantasy and reality has no obligation to fit with your fantasy. For two weeks he was smiling and happy here – I was giving him time. A small shock, and he reacted; that’s what the unconscious mind goes on doing. He reacted immediately, he could not even take time to meditate over it. He never came back to the ashram; he simply escaped.This is something for you to ponder, to meditate over: I am not here to adjust with you. If I adjust to you then I have no compassion for you. If I adjust to you, how am I going to help you? I can help you only if I destroy you – if I destroy your past, your knowledge, your ideas, your conditionings, your personality. Only by destroying you can I give you a new birth, can I give you a new beginning, a fresh life.I feel sorry for the old man; I wanted to help him in every way. But I cannot help you if you are so afraid, if you are so immature and childish, if you are so impatient in your reactions. So all that I can say is this: Good-bye Mr. Lewis. See you in some other life.The fifth question:Osho,Does an enlightened person always remain enlightened or can he become unenlightened also?Even an unenlightened person remains enlightened; the only difference is that he does not know it. The enlightened person knows it and there is no way to drop that which you have known. Enlightenment is your nature, it is not something that you can put on and put off, it is not something like clothes that you can change. It is your very core, it is your being. Enlightenment is your being. If you don’t know it you can go on behaving in an unenlightened way; the day you know it, there is no way to behave in an unenlightened way. Once you have known, you have known.But an enlightened person can pretend; he can pretend that he is not enlightened – that freedom is available. Gurdjieff used to do that very often, to pretend that he was not enlightened in outrageous ways.One of his disciples reported that he had to travel with him in a train, and for the whole night Gurdjieff disturbed the passengers, the conductors, the stationmasters, and the porters. He went on drinking and shouting and moving from here to there, and the disciple was just worried about what to do, and was apologizing to this one and that one. The whole night Gurdjieff did that – purposely.By the morning he was very happy with the disciple because not for a single moment did he lose the feel for the master; not for a single moment could Gurdjieff make the disciple forget that he was with an enlightened man. Gurdjieff was immensely happy, he said, “You have won. You passed through a great examination.” There was every possibility to forget for a moment: “What type of man is this? Is he enlightened? What is he doing?” Even an unenlightened person wouldn’t do this much. If you want to drink, you drink and just go to sleep. But he went on drinking. And he was shouting and moving from one corner of the train to another, shouting and waking people and abusing them. The disciple was afraid that somebody might start beating him. At one station the police came and the stationmaster said: “We want to take this man off.” And the disciple had to apologize. He said, “We have to reach the other place, and I have to take care of him. He is a great man – you just don’t know his ways.”He would drink too much and then he would drive; then he would insist to drive. The disciples would be sitting there, and he would go faster and faster and everybody was just on the brink – that any moment death is going to happen. But still they had to remember that he was enlightened. He would abuse people in a very vulgar way, and the disciples had to remember continuously. That was the kind of situation he created for their remembrance.When I am polite with you and very gentle with you and you feel “Our master is great,” that is nothing. But when I am not polite with you, not gentle – rough – then to remember that your master is beautiful is difficult, very difficult. One loses track. Gurdjieff would do such contradictory things, illogical things: he would tell you to dig a hole in the ground, and for twelve hours with no break you would be digging the hole – tired, perspiring, hungry, thirsty. He would not allow you to go anywhere, you had to dig the hole, and after twelve hours he would come and say, “Now fill it back in.”It is very natural to get angry: “This is foolish. Why?” But that is the whole point: a master should not be asked why – if you ask the master why, you have not accepted him as the master. Then your relationship remains that of reason. Reason cannot relate with a master. It is a deep trust, the relationship is that of love and trust: if he says it, it must be so, there must be something in it – and there was something in it. He was pushing your buttons in every way and if you become angry you miss the point.That’s what happened with Mr. Lewis, he missed the point. He does not know that he cannot love Gurdjieff more than I love Gurdjieff. But I had to hit – and the only way to hit him was to talk about Gurdjieff as if I am against him. That was the only way to hit him. It is very easy if I say something against you, you can tolerate it, but if I say something against your master it becomes difficult – it becomes impossible to tolerate. Your master is your more subtle ego. If I had said, “Mr. Lewis, you are wrong,” he would have accepted it. But if I say, “Mr. Lewis, Gurdjieff is wrong,” that is impossible – Gurdjieff wrong? Thirty years wasted? He immediately escaped.An enlightened person can pretend. But an enlightened person cannot become unenlightened again.The last question:Osho,What do you think of sex?I think that it is here to stay.Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-06/

The pure land paradise is not far.When in reverence this truth is heard even once,he who praises it and gladly embraces it has merit without end.How much more he who turns withinand confirms directly his own nature,that his own nature is no-nature –such has transcended vain words.The gate opens, and cause and effect are one;straight runs the way – not two, not three.Taking as form the form of no-form,going or returning, he is ever at home.Taking as thought the thought of no-thought,singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth.Wide is the heaven of boundless samadhi,radiant the full moon of the fourfold wisdom.What remains to be sought? Nirvana is clear before him,this very place the lotus paradise, this very body the buddha.Man lives in illusion. Man lives through illusion. Man lives for illusion. In short, man lives because of illusion, hence the fear of truth. Nobody wants truth although everybody goes on seeking it. That seeking is a deception, that seeking is an avoidance; to seek truth means to avoid truth.It has to be understood how the seeker goes on avoiding truth. To seek means to look far away, to seek means to look somewhere else, to seek means to go on a trip. To seek means to postpone: to seek means it will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it is not happening right now. It is not here, it is there. It is not this, it is that.Man goes on living in illusion, but to live in illusion one needs to avoid truth because if truth comes, it will shatter all your illusions and all your so-called life and all your so-called love. Truth looks like a calamity. Friedrich Nietzsche is right in a sense when he says: “Please don’t give truth to humanity; otherwise you will destroy people’s joy, you will destroy their enthusiasm, you will destroy their gusto. Don’t give truth to humanity; otherwise all that they have will disappear because all that they have is a kind of dream. Don’t wake humanity otherwise the dreams will be shattered, and they may be seeing beautiful dreams – or hoping to see, somewhere, sometime.”That’s why Christ is crucified, Socrates is poisoned, Buddha is stoned: they bring truth to people who have become almost illusory, they bring light to people who live in darkness and dream in darkness. And their dreams depend on darkness – when somebody brings light into the darkness, the darkness disappears and the dreams and the desires.One feels hurt by a Buddha or a Christ. Christ looks not like the savior but like the enemy. Otherwise why should you crucify Christ? There is no other reason. The basic reason is that he uproots you, he shatters you. This has to be understood very deeply. And when you live in illusion, you search for truth. That is a double deception so that you can go on telling yourself, consoling yourself, “I am searching. Look what great efforts I am making, how much I am putting my energy into the search – look!”The search for truth arises out of your lie. It is the lie that puts you on the search for truth. It is a protection for the lie, it is the way for the lie to survive. It says: “Go and search for truth. It is there far away in some distant land. You will have to travel, and the travel is long and the travel is not going to be finished soon. It will take lives and lives, it will take millennia, but go! Go on searching, one day you will find it.” The lie gives you hope, it gives you a future, it gives you future dreams. Your God is somewhere far away. It has to be far away because close by he will be dangerous.So you can respect a dead master but you cannot respect an alive master; it is too close, it is too dangerous. Christ is worshipped now; almost half the earth has become Christian. And when he was here no more than twelve people were following him – and they too, half-heartedly. And they too betrayed in the last moment. The day he died he became God, he became divine, and millions and millions started coming to his feet, and down the ages they have been coming and increasing.Why does a dead Christ seem to be more important than an alive Christ? The reason is: an alive Christ can prove fatal to your illusions. A dead Christ cannot do anything to you, a dead Christ is in your control; an alive Christ cannot be controlled by you. A dead Christ is just a name, a word – empty, impotent. An alive Christ is a fire. You can play with the word fire but you cannot come close to fire itself. It will burn you, it will destroy you.But in your very destruction is the possibility of a new birth. Out of the ashes the new is going to be born. The myth of the phoenix is not a myth, it is a metaphor for man’s rebirth: you have to die first to be reborn. An alive Christ is like death; a dead Christ is a consolation, a comfort, a security.Just the other night a woman was here, and she said that she loves my meditations and much is happening through the meditations. Not only that, she has started teaching my meditations to other people, and much is happening to them. But she cannot be initiated by me. I asked why. She said because of “religious reasons” – she may be a Christian or a Jew or somebody. She cannot leave the dead Christ for an alive christ. She calls it for religious reasons. The real reason is that to come close to me can be fatal to her. Christ is perfectly okay; it is just a picture on the wall or a name in the book or a word in your mouth. It means nothing, it is noise.But if you come close to me – and initiation means coming close, initiation means coming as close as possible – you will be burned. You will be burned to ashes; you will disappear.But that is the only real hope. If you disappear as you are, you will be born as you really are. Only the disappearance of the lie that you have become can be the birth of truth. And truth is not far away; it is just hiding within you. You are clinging to the lie; your personality is the lie and because of the personality you cannot move toward the essence. The personality is taught by the society; the society creates lies. Lies are very, very convenient. Lies function like lubricants, lies make life smooth. You see somebody and you smile and the smile is a lie because it is not coming from your heart, it is just painted there on the lips. You have created it, you have managed it, it is a kind of exercise of the lips. But it lubricates a relationship, the other man starts smiling.If you are true, if you are as you are, it will be difficult, the relationship will become difficult. Psychologists say that if every person started revealing what is in his heart, friendship will disappear from the earth, love will disappear from the earth. That is true. It will be impossible to find friends if you simply say what is in your heart. If you say what is in your heart, your beloved will leave you, your lover will leave you.You go on keeping it in the heart, and you go on playing something which is not really there – you do something else, just the opposite. You may be angry, but you smile. You may be hurt, but you smile. You may be boiling within, but you smile. You may want to scream, but you go on singing. You may want to do something else, but it is not feasible, it is not practical, it is not the right thing to do.The society creates this persona, this mask around you, this personality. There are three you’s in you. You number one – that is the personality. The word personality comes from a Greek root, persona. In Greek drama they used to use masks, and the voice would come from the mask. Sona means voice, sound, and per means through the mask. The real face you don’t know – who the real actor is. There is a mask and through the mask comes the voice. It appears as if it is coming from the mask, and you don’t know the real face. The word personality is beautiful; it comes from Greek drama.And that’s what has happened. In Greek drama they had only one mask. You have many; masks upon masks like the layers of an onion. If you put one mask away there is another, if you put that away there is another. And you can go on digging and digging and you will be surprised how many faces you are carrying. How many! For lives you have been collecting them and they are all useful because you have to change many times. You are talking to your servant; you cannot have the same face that you have when you talk to your boss. And they may be both present in the room: when you look at the servant you have to use one mask and when you look at your boss you have to use another mask. You continuously change. It has almost become automatic – you need not change, it changes itself. You look at the boss and you are smiling. And you look at the servant and the smile disappears and you are hard – as hard as the boss is to you. When he looks at his boss, he smiles.In a single moment you may be changing your face many times. One has to be very, very alert to know how many faces one has. Innumerable; they cannot be counted.This is your first you, the false you – or call it the ego. It has been given to you by society, it is a gift from the society: from the politician and the priest and the parent and the pedagogue. They have given you many faces just to make your life smooth. They have taken away your truth; they have given you a substitute. And because of these substitute faces you don’t know who you are. You can’t know because the faces change so fast and they are so many, you cannot trust yourself. You don’t know exactly which face is yours: in fact none of these faces is yours.The Zen people say: “Unless you know your original face you will not know what buddha is, because buddha is your original face.” You were born as a buddha and you are living a lie.This social gift has to be dropped. That is the meaning of sannyas, initiation: you are a Christian or a Hindu, that face has to be dropped because it is not your own face – it has been given to you by others. You have been conditioned for it and you have not even been asked; you have not even been requested. It has been imposed forcibly, violently.All parents are violent and all educational systems are violent because they don’t take any note of you. They have a priori ideas; they already know what is right and they put the right on you. You squirm, you scream inside, but you are helpless. A child is so helpless and so delicate; he can be molded in any way. And that’s what society does. Before the child becomes strong enough he is already crippled in a thousand and one ways: paralyzed, poisoned.The day you want to become religious you will have to drop religions. The day you want to relate to God, you will have to drop all ideologies about God. The day you want to know who you are, you will have to drop all the answers that have been given to you. All that is borrowed has to be burned.That’s why Zen has been defined as: “Direct pointing to the human heart. Seeing the nature and becoming buddha. Not standing on letters. A separate transmission outside the scriptures.” A separate transmission outside the scriptures: the Koran cannot give it to you, neither can the Dhammapada nor the Bible nor the Talmud nor the Gita. No scripture can give it to you; if you believe in the scripture you will go on missing truth.Truth is in you; it has to be encountered there. “Seeing the nature and becoming buddha. Direct pointing to the human heart.” You are not to go anywhere. Wherever you go you will remain the same, so what is the point? You can go to the Himalayas; it is not going to change anything, you will carry all that you have with you. All that you have become, all that you have been made, you will carry all your artificiality. Your synthetic faces, your borrowed knowledge, your scriptures, will go on clinging inside you. Even sitting in a cave in the Himalayas alone you will not be alone: the teachers will be there around you, and the priests and the politicians and the parents and the whole society. It may not be so visible but it will be there inside you, crowding you, and you will remain a Hindu there or a Christian or a Mohammedan. You will go on repeating words like parrots. It will not change, it cannot change.I was reading a beautiful Bavarian story. You may have heard about it. Meditate over it.An Angel from Munich.Alois Hingerl, porter no. 172 at Munich Central Station, worked so energetically one day that he just dropped dead. Two little angels carried him to heaven with some difficulty where Saint Peter welcomed him and told him that from now on his name would be Angel Aloysius. He presented him with a harp and informed him of the heavenly house rules. “From eight in the morning until twelve noon,” he said, “you will jubilate. And from twelve noon until eight in the evening you will sing hosanna.”“What is going on?” asked Aloysius. “From eight in the morning until twelve noon jubilating? And from twelve noon until eight in the evening singing hosanna? So… Hmm… Yes, and when do I get something to drink?”“You will get your manna in due time,” said Peter slightly annoyed, and left him.“Hell!” grumbled Angel Aloysius. “That is going to be rather a drag! I should jubilate from eight to twelve? And I thought there was no work in heaven.” But he finally sat down on a cloud and began to sing as he was told: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”A very high-spirited intellectual came gliding by. “Hey, you!” called Aloysius, “How about a pinch of snuff? Come on now, let’s have some!”But the intellectual angel was revolted by this vulgar idea. He just whispered “Hosanna” and departed.Aloysius became furious. “What kind of silly idiot is this?” he shouted. “If you don’t have any snuff, you just don’t, right? A man can expect a decent answer, can’t he? You country bumpkin, you! Oh dear, what people they have up here! Ah, what did I get into!” And once more he sat down on his cloud and continued to jubilate.But his anger showed in his singing, and he was shouting so loudly that the Heavenly Father next door awoke from his afternoon nap and asked with astonishment: “From whence cometh this noise?”At once he sent for Saint Peter, who came running, and together they heard the scandalous jubilating of Angel Aloysius: “Hallelujah! Scheisse! Hallelujah! Bullshit! Hallelujah! Fuck you! Hallelujah!” Saint Peter hurried away and dragged Aloysius before the Lord.The Heavenly Father looked at him a long time and then he spoke: “Oh, I see: an angel from Munich. That’s what I thought! Now, tell me, what is all this shouting about?”That was exactly what Aloysius had been waiting for. He was so furious that he started right out. “I don’t like all these things! I don’t like to have wings! I don’t like to sing Hosanna! I don’t like to drink manna instead of beer! And let me make clear: I do not like to sing!”“Saint Peter,” said the Lord “this will never do. But I have an idea. We shall employ him as messenger conveying our heavenly advice to the Bavarian government. So he can fly to Munich once or twice a week, and his good soul will rest in peace.”When Aloysius heard this he felt very happy indeed. Soon he got his first delivery job, a letter, and he flew down to earth.And when once again he felt the soil of Munich under his feet, it seemed to him that now he was really in heaven. And, following his old habits, he immediately went to the Hofbrauhaus and found his accustomed place empty and waiting for him. And good old Kathy, the waitress, was still there and he ordered another round of beer, and another, and still another one… And he just sat and is still sitting there today.And that’s the reason the Bavarian government to this day has to do without divine guidance.Wherever you go you will be yourself; even in heaven or in the Himalayas. You cannot be otherwise; the world is not outside you, you are the world, so wherever you go, you take your world with you.The real change has not to be of place, the real change has not to be outside, the real change has to be inner. And what do I mean by real change? I don’t mean that you have to improve upon yourself because improvement is again a lie. Improvement means you will go on polishing your personality. You can make it immensely beautiful, but remember the more beautiful it is, the more dangerous because the more difficult it will be to drop it.That’s why it happens that sometimes a sinner becomes a saint, but your so-called respectable people never become. They cannot become – they have such valuable personalities, so decorated, polished, and they have put so much investment into the personality, their whole life has been a kind of polishing. Now it is too costly to drop those beautiful personalities. A sinner can drop it; he has no investment in it, in fact he is fed up with it, it is so ugly. But how can a respectable person drop it so easily? It has been paying him so well; it has been such a profit. It has been making him more and more respected, he is going higher and higher, he is reaching the pinnacle of success. It is very difficult for him to stop going on this ladder of success. It is a non-ending ladder; you can go on and on forever.Somebody asked Henry Ford when he was on his deathbed – he was still planning some new industries, some new enterprises – somebody asked him, “Sir, you are dying! And the doctors say you will not survive more than a few days. They are not even certain about that; you may die today or tomorrow. Now, why? You have been doing this your whole life and you have so much money, more than you can spend, more than you can do anything with. It is useless money. Why do you go on increasing your enterprises?For a moment Henry Ford must have stopped his planning, and said, “Listen, I cannot stop. That is impossible, only death will stop me. I cannot stop. While I am alive, I will go on and on reaching for a higher rung. I know it is meaningless but I can’t stop!”When you are succeeding in the world it is difficult to stop. When you are becoming richer it is difficult to stop, when you are becoming famous it is difficult to stop. The more refined personality you have, the more it clings to you.So I am not saying that you have to improve upon yourself. All the great masters, from Buddha to Hakuin – nobody has said to improve. Beware of the so-called improvement books. The American market is full of those books. Beware, because improvement is not going to lead you anywhere. It is not a question of improvement because by improvement the lie will be improved. The personality will be improved – will become more polished, will become more subtle, will become more valuable, will become more precious – but that is not the transformation. The transformation comes not by improvement but by dropping the personality utterly.The lie cannot become the truth. There is no way to improve upon the lie so that it becomes the truth; it will remain the lie. It will look more and more like the truth but it will remain the lie. And the more it looks like the truth the more you will be engrossed in it, rooted in it. The lie can look so much like the truth that you can even become oblivious of the fact that it is a lie.The lie tells you to search for the truth. Improve your character, your personality. Search for the truth, become this, become that. The lie goes on giving you new programs. Do this, and then everything will be good and you will be happy forever. Do this, do that. This has failed? Don’t be worried: I have other plans for you. The lie goes on giving you plans, and you go on moving in those plans and wasting your life.In fact, the search for truth also comes out of the lie. That will be hard to understand but it has to be understood. The search for truth comes from the lie itself; it is the lie’s way to protect itself – it even gives you the search for truth, now how can you be angry with your personality? And how can you call it a lie? It propels you, it enforces you, it pushes you to search for truth.But the search means going away. Truth is here and the lie pushes you to go there; truth is now and the lie says “then” and “there.” The lie always speaks either of the past or of the future, it never speaks of the present. And the truth is the present – this very moment. It is herenow. That’s what Hakuin means when he says:…this very place the lotus paradise, this very body the buddha.So the first you is the lie, the act, the pseudo-personality that surrounds you, the public face, the phoniness. It is a fraud; the society has imposed it upon you and you have become a cooperator with it. You have to drop your cooperation with the social lie because only when you are utterly nude are you yourself. All clothes are social, all ideas and all identities that you think you are, are social – given by others. They have their motives to give those ideas to you; it is subtle exploitation.The real exploitation is not economic or political, the real exploitation is psychological. That’s why all the revolutions up to now have been failures. Hitherto, no revolution has succeeded. The reason? – they have not looked at the deepest exploitation, which is psychological. They go on changing only superficial things: a capitalist society becomes communist but it makes no difference, a democracy becomes dictatorial, a dictatorial society becomes democratic, it makes no difference. These are just superficial changes like a whitewash, but the structure remains deep down the same.What is the psychological exploitation? The psychological exploitation is that nobody is allowed to be himself, that nobody is accepted as himself or herself, that nobody is respected. How can you respect people if you don’t accept them as they are? If you impose things upon them and then you respect, you respect your own impositions. You don’t respect them as they are, you don’t respect their nudity. You don’t respect their naturalness, you don’t respect their spontaneity, you don’t respect their real smiles and real tears. You respect only phoniness, pretensions, actions; you respect their acting.This “you number one” has to be utterly dropped. Freud helped much to make humanity aware of the pseudoness of personality, of the conscious mind. His revolution is far deeper than the revolution of Marx, his revolution is far deeper than any other revolution. It goes deep, although it does not go far enough – it reaches the second you, “you number two.” It is the repressed you, instinctive you, unconscious you. It is all that society has not allowed, it is all that society has forced inside your being and locked in there. It comes only in your dreams, it comes only in metaphors, it comes only when you are drunk, it comes only when you are no longer in control. Otherwise it remains far away from you. And it is more authentic, it is not phony.Freud has done much to make man aware of it. And the humanistic psychologies and particularly growth groups, encounter and others, have helped tremendously to make you aware of all that is screaming inside you, all that has been repressed, crushed. That is your vital part; that is your real life, natural life. Religions have condemned it as your animal part; they have condemned it as the source of sin. It is not the source of sin, it is the source of life. And it is not lower than the conscious – it is deeper than the conscious, certainly, but not lower than the conscious.And nothing is wrong if it is animal. Animals are beautiful, so are trees. They still live naked in their utter simplicity, they have not yet been destroyed by the priests and the politicians; they are yet as part of existence. Only man has gone astray; man is the only abnormal animal on the earth – otherwise all animals are simply normal, hence the joy, the beauty, the health. Hence the vitality. Have you not seen it? When a bird is on the wing have you not felt jealous? Have you not seen it in a deer running fast into the forest? Have you not felt jealous of the vitality, of the sheer joy of energy?Children – have you not felt jealous? Maybe you go on condemning childishness because you feel so jealous. You go on condemning. Montague is right when he says that instead of telling people “Don’t be childish” we should start telling people “Don’t be adultish.” He is right, I agree: a child is beautiful, the adult is what ugliness is. He is no longer a flow, he is blocked in many ways. He is frozen, he is dull and dead. He has lost zest, he has lost enthusiasm, he is simply dragging. He is bored, he has no sense of mystery. He never feels surprised; he has forgotten the language of wonder. Mystery has disappeared for him. He has explanations; mystery is no longer there. Hence he has lost poetry and the dance and all that is valuable and all that gives meaning and significance to life, all that gives flavor to life.This second you is far more valuable than the first. This is where I am against all the religions; this is where I am against all the priests, because they cling to the first, the most superficial. Go to the second. But the second is not the end. That is where Freud falls short and that is where humanistic psychology also falls short – it goes a little deeper than Freud, but still does not go deep enough to find the third.There is a third you – you number three – the real you, the original face, which is beyond both you number one and you number two. The transcendental. The buddhahood. It is undivided pure consciousness. The first you is social, the second you is natural, the third you is divine. Or if you want to use Hakuin’s terms, the first you is the physical body, the second you is the bliss body, and the third you is the essential body. These are the three bodies of buddha.And remember, I am not saying that the first is not at all useful. If the third exists, the first can be used beautifully. If the third exists, the second can be used beautifully, but only if the third exists. If the center functions well, the periphery too is okay, then the circumference too is okay. But without the center – only the circumference – is a kind of death.That’s what has happened to man. That’s why in the West so many thinkers think that life is meaningless. It is not, it is only because you have lost touch with your source from where meaning arises.It is as if a tree has lost its contact with its own roots. Now no flowers come. Now the foliage starts disappearing, the leaves fall, and no new leaves arrive. And the juice stops flowing, the sap no longer exists. The tree becomes dead; the tree is dying.The tree may start philosophizing, the tree may become existentialist, a Sartre or somebody else, and the tree may start saying that there are no flowers in life. That life has no flowers, that there is no fragrance, that there are no longer any birds. And the tree may even start saying that it has been always so, and the ancients were only befooling themselves that there were flowers – they were imagining. “It has always been so, the spring has never come, people have only been fantasizing. These buddhas and these jinas, they have been simply imagining, fantasizing, that flowers bloom and there is great joy and birds come and sunlight. There is nothing. All is darkness, all is accidental, and there is no meaning.” The tree can say it.And the real thing is not that there is no meaning, not that there are no longer flowers, not that flowers don’t exist, not that fragrance is fantasy, but simply that the tree has lost contact with its own roots.Unless you are rooted in your buddhahood you will not bloom. You will not sing, you will not know what celebration is. And how can you know God if you don’t know celebration? If you have forgotten how to dance, how can you pray? If you have forgotten how to sing and how to love, then God is dead. Not that God is dead: God is dead in you, only in you. Your tree is dry, the sap has disappeared. You will have to find roots again. Where to find these roots? The roots have to be found here and now. That is the whole message of Hakuin’s Song of Meditation. Before we enter the song, a few things.A man can seem to be the sum total of his days, of all that he does from the beginning to the end. But this is not the true man. What you do is just on the periphery. What you feel goes a little deeper. What you are is really at the roots. A man is not the sum total of his acts. A politician is the sum total of his acts because he lives only on the circumference; that’s why it is easy to write history about the politicians. It is difficult to write history about buddhas because they live at such a depth where we cannot reach them. They live in such eternity that time makes no record of them. They exist in such a transcendental way that they leave no traces on the earth. They are like birds in the sky: they fly, but no footprints are left.Politicians leave footprints. They live in the mud, in the dirt; they drag themselves in the mundane reality. They leave many footprints; they leave much bloodshed behind them. A buddha exists as if he has never existed. He exists so absently, he exists like a space, empty space.Remember, a man is not a sum total of his actions, and if he is, he is not yet a man; he is just a fiction, he is living in illusion. You are not what you do, so don’t be too concerned with your doing. Start going deeper into being. That’s why all meditations are basically a way to sit silently – so silently that all action stops. On the physical plane, on the mental plane, action stops, thought stops. Because thought is also action on the mental plane – you are doing something. When all doing disappears and you are simply there, just there, a presence, then meditation has happened.Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.That is the meaning of the word zazen. Za means sitting doing nothing. And zen means: in that sitting when you are not doing anything, you fall upon yourself, you encounter yourself, you see yourself. That is Zen, dhyana, meditation. The word zazen is beautiful. “Sitting and looking into yourself” – that is the meaning of it.Man is more than the sum total of his acts, his thoughts, his feelings. Behind the acts, thoughts, and feelings there is another man – that which is, that which essentially is. But most seldom, if ever, show themselves in their essential being. Very few ever reach that point of their essential being-hood, to their very ground of being. Only those who reach know that life is a benediction, a sheer joy, eternal celebration.But if you remain on the surface you know only misery, nothing else – agony, nothing else. Let me say it in this way: you number one knows only misery and agony. You number three knows ecstasy of being and joy of being. And you number two neither knows ecstasy nor knows agony. It knows pleasure; it is just in the middle. Ecstasy is so much joy without any bounds to it, infinite joy. Agony is infinite misery, no bounds to it. Just between the two exists the animal and the child. It knows pleasure. It knows neither agony nor ecstasy. It is happy as it is. It does not know infinity.If the child moves toward the first, which society forces him to do, he will know agony. If he finds somebody who can help to move him toward the third, he will know ecstasy. To find a master is nothing but finding a man who has known his essential being, so that he can help you to go toward your own essential being.A master is not to be followed, a master is not to be imitated – a master is only to be understood. In that very understanding is the revolution.A man’s true life is the way in which he puts off the lie imposed by others on him. Stripped, naked, natural, he is what he is. This is a matter of being and not of becoming. The lie cannot become the truth; the personality cannot become your soul. There is no way to make the nonessential the essential. The nonessential remains nonessential and the essential remains essential, they are not convertible. And striving toward truth is nothing but creating more confusion. The truth has not to be achieved – it cannot be achieved, it is already the case. Only the lie has to be dropped.All aims and ends and ideals and goals and ideologies, religions and systems of improvement and betterment, are lies. Beware of them. Recognize the fact that as you are, you are a lie, manipulated, cultivated by others. Striving after truth is a distraction and a postponement. It is the lie’s way to hide. See the lie, look deep into the lie of your personality because to see the lie is to cease to lie. No longer to lie is to seek no more for any truth – there is no need. The moment the lie disappears, truth is there in all its beauty and radiance. In the seeing of the lie it disappears and what is left is the truth.To see the lie of striving after truth is to fall into an eternal silence. A stillness comes when you see the lie of your personality; there is nothing more to do. Hence the stillness – what can you do?Just the other night a sannyasin was saying, “What can I do? Whatever I do, I fail. What can I do?” There is nothing really to be done. Doing is not going to help, doing will be again the same rut. Only being is going to transform you, not doing. So when one fails again and again and again, only then does the insight arise that “Doing is never going to lead me anywhere.” The day that sword has hit you – doing is not going to lead me anywhere – what will you do? Nothing is left to do.In your utter helplessness – the surrender and silence and stillness. This is the silence that transforms, not the silence that somehow you impose upon yourself by repeating a mantra or doing TM; that is not the real silence, it is a created silence. Any silence that you manage to create will belong to the personality. It will not be of much use, it will not go deeper than that – how can your doing go deeper than you? When you have utterly failed, when you have seen your ultimate failure and you have seen that there is no possibility and no hope for you to succeed, what will you do in that silence? You will just be there. All has stopped. The mind no longer spins any thoughts.And in that very moment the door opens. That silence is being, that silence is buddha.This stillness is not the opposite of action; it is not brought about by will or by withdrawal from the world. One cannot withdraw from the world, one is the world. The want to escape keeps us imprisoned – because the wish to be without desire is still desire, and the will to be still is disturbance. You cannot will your silence, the will is the base of all disturbance. The will has to disappear. You can only see into the futility of it. Doing, willing, improving, bettering yourself, achieving, reaching – all these words are just projections of the lie.When the lie has been seen in its totality – the illumination, the enlightenment.Now Hakuin’s sutras:The pure land paradise is not far.Zen people call the state of no-mind: the pure land paradise. So please don’t interpret it in Christian ways. Paradise to a Christian is somewhere there in the sky; for a Buddhist, particularly for a man like Hakuin, it is the state of no-mind.The Pure Land paradise is not far. Stop thinking and you are there. In fact, that is the Biblical meaning of the parable of Adam’s expulsion: he has not been expelled, there is nobody to expel him, he has only eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge – he has become a mind. The more knowledge you accumulate, the more of a mind you become. Adam has become knowledgeable, he has become a mind, and that is the expulsion from paradise. If he can drop his mind, he will suddenly find himself again in paradise and he will also find that he has been always there. Even when he was thinking he had lost it, it was not lost, it was only forgotten. He became too obsessed with knowledge, that’s why it was forgotten.The day that the child starts becoming knowledgeable he loses paradise; each Adam loses it again and again. Don’t think that it happened once in history and that we are suffering for that ancient Adam – no. It has happened to our life, to each life, to each child. For a few months the child lives in the Garden of Eden. He knows nothing. Without knowing, he is a no-mind – he simply exists moment to moment, he has no worries. When he feels hungry he cries, when he feels satisfied he falls asleep, when he is happy he smiles, when he is angry he screams. But he has no ideas about anything; he neither praises a smile nor condemns screaming. He neither feels shy about crying and weeping nor feels very good that he has been a good boy today. He knows nothing about all this nonsense. He knows nothing good, nothing bad, he makes no distinctions. He lives utterly one with reality, and whatever happens, happens; there is no rejection.But by and by he will become knowledgeable, he will start learning things. The day he starts learning things he is trapped by the snake. Now he has started eating the fruit of the tree, sooner or later paradise will disappear. Beaches will be there but no longer beautiful. Butterflies will be still floating in the wind but for the child they don’t exist anymore. What exists is arithmetic, geography, history. Flowers still bloom, but they don’t bloom for the child any more, he is too much in his homework. Once in a while, still he hears the bird singing on the window, but only once in a while, and the whole society tries to drag him away from that.The teacher will say, “Look here at the blackboard! What are you doing there? Concentrate on me!” The child was concentrating: the birdcall was so beautiful outside the window. The child was in concentration, utter concentration. This teacher has distracted him; now he has to look at the blackboard, and there is nothing to look at it, just a blackboard. But by and by we will manage to distract the child.The expulsion is not by God but by society. Society drags each Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. And once you have become too much of the head it is very difficult to enter back into that purity, that: pure land paradise. Zen masters say, just like Jesus said: “Unless you are like small children, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.”A Christian missionary went to a Zen master and started reading the Sermon on the Mount.The Zen master listened and he said, “Whosoever has said it must be very close to buddhahood.” The Zen master had never heard about Christ, he had never read the Bible, but he said, “Whosoever has said it must be very close to buddhahood.”And when the missionary read, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God,” the Zen master said, “Now stop. Now there is no need to read any more. Whosoever has said it is a buddha.”“Poor in spirit” means empty of mind. “Poor in spirit” means empty – all thoughts have disappeared. Then you are again back in paradise.The pure land paradise is not far. It is just there, beating in your heart. Your each breath goes and touches the pure land paradise each moment. You live from it. Every night when you fall asleep and dreams disappear, you are in it again. That’s why in the morning you feel so fresh, again young, rejuvenated. You have been on a short trip to: the pure land paradise.When in reverence this truth is heard even once,he who praises it and gladly embraces it has merit without end.Hakuin says: When in reverence this truth is heard even once… The question is not of hearing the truth many times. If you hear it even once, if you have understood it even for a single moment in deep trust and reverence, it is yours forever. Doubt distracts. Doubt does not allow you to understand, doubt does not allow you to see it. Listen in reverence, in love. Be en rapport.That is the way to be with a master – be en rapport, be bridged. But small things, very small things, distract you; very small things that mean nothing but you are distracted by those small things and doubt arises. Doubt becomes a cloud and you become blind.…in reverence this truth is heard even once… It is enough.How much more he who turns within…Even hearing the truth is a deliverance: How much more he who turns within – who not only hears it but looks within and sees it.…and confirms directly his own nature,that his own nature is no-nature…When you look deep into yourself you will not find anything there obstructing your vision. It is pure space. Your nature is no-nature; it is emptiness, shunyata.…such has transcended vain words.Only when you look into your nature and find nothing – you only find an empty infinity there. Words will not have any meaning any more, you have transcended words. You have looked into your nature and now you know that no word can explain it, no word can define it, no word can even indicate it. All scriptures become meaningless.The gate opens, and cause and effect are one…When you look inside yourself and there is no content, and the no-nature has been felt and you have seen your inner sky: The gate opens, and cause and effect are one. The source and the goal are one. Now you are not to go anywhere, you have come to your source, and to be at the source is to be at the goal. To be at the beginning is to be at the end.…straight runs the way – not two, not three.Taking as form the form of no-form,going or returning, he is ever at home.And once you have seen …the form of no-form… Once you have seen the thought of no-thought, once you have seen the nature of no-nature, you are a totally new being. What happens: …going or returning, he is ever at home.Then wherever you are, you are at home. In prison you are at home, in the temple you are at home, in the shop you are at home, in the Himalayas you are at home, in the marketplace you are at home. You are simply at home. Once you have seen your center, your essential being, your buddhahood has been glimpsed. Then wherever you are, you are at home because all is your home. Then there is no need to leave the world.Zen people are not against the world. They say that to be against the world is still to be attached to the world, to go to the opposite extreme is not transformation. When you no longer choose between two extremes, you settle in the middle. And the middle is the way.Straight runs the way – it is not two, not three. It is a simple way – one.…going or returning, he is ever at home.Taking as thought the thought of no-thought,singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth.Then whatever you do, you express truth. Whatever. Eating, you express truth. Walking, you express truth. When a Zen master hits a disciple, he is expressing truth. When Kabir sings, he is expressing truth; when Meera dances, she is expressing truth. Jesus expresses truth dying on the cross, and Krishna expresses truth singing on his flute. Whatever you do, there is no way to avoid expressing truth. You are truth. The lie has been dropped.…singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth.Wide is the heaven of boundless samadhi,radiant the full moon of the fourfold wisdom.What remains to be sought? Nirvana is clear before him,this very place the lotus paradise, this very body the buddha.Remember the word this. …this very place the lotus paradise… And once you have known your source, wherever you are, you are in: …the lotus paradise.…this very place the lotus paradise, and this very body the buddha. And whatever you do – whatever, without any conditions – is the expression of truth.I have heard a beautiful story about Roshi Taji, a great Zen master.As Roshi Taji approached death, his senior disciples assembled at his bedside. One of them, remembering that the roshi was fond of a certain kind of cake, had spent half a day searching the pastry shops of Tokyo for this confection, which he now presented to him. With a wan smile the dying roshi accepted a piece of the cake and slowly began munching it. As the roshi grew weaker, his disciples leaned close and inquired whether he had any final words for them.“Yes,” the roshi replied.The disciples leaned forward eagerly, “Please tell us.”“My, but this cake is delicious!” And with that he died.Meditate over it. What a man! What manner of man? – a buddha. Each act and each word and each gesture becomes the expression of truth. In that moment only that was true, the taste of the cake. In that moment, anything else would have been false, untrue. If he had talked about God, that would not have been true. If he had talked about nirvana, that would not have been true. In that moment the taste on his tongue was still alive. In that moment that was his authentic gesture.He said, “My, but this cake is delicious.” This cake. …this very place the lotus paradise, this very body the buddha.Zen people talk about four wisdoms: Wide is the heaven of boundless samadhi, radiant the full moon of the fourfold wisdom.The first wisdom is called the wisdom of the mirror: when there is no thought, you become a mirror. This is the first wisdom, becoming like a mirror. The second wisdom is called the wisdom of sameness. When you become a mirror without any thought, all distinctions in the world disappear. Then it is all one; then the rose and the bird and the earth and the sky and the sea and the sand and the sun are all one, it is one energy.When you are a mirror – the first wisdom – the second wisdom arises out of the first: the wisdom of sameness. Duality disappears. And out of the second arises the third wisdom, the wisdom of spiritual vision. When you have seen that all over the world it is one energy, only then can you see inside yourself that you are also that energy. Then the seer and the seen become one, the observer and the observed become one. That is the third wisdom, the wisdom of spiritual vision. Buddha has a special word for it, he calls it dhamma chakkhu – the eye for truth, or the truth eye. The spiritual vision opens – what yogis call the third eye. What Christ also calls the one eye, when two eyes become one. Dhamma chakkhu opens, the wisdom of spiritual vision is attained.And out of the third arises the fourth, the wisdom of perfection. When you have seen that all is the same, and when you have looked within and seen that without and within are also the same, you have become perfect. In fact to say that you have become perfect is not true – you have always been perfect. Now it is revealed to you; it is only a revelation. In that moment one knows: …this very place the lotus paradise, this very body the buddha.Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-07/

The first question:Osho,Does there ever come a moment when one knows why things are this way and not that way?No, that moment never comes; that moment cannot come. Knowledge is impossible. Life is a mystery – the more you know about it the more mysterious it becomes. You cannot reduce it to a formula, you cannot reduce it to theories. It never becomes a doctrine. The deeper you go, the deeper you feel ignorant. But that ignorance is blissful, that not knowing is utterly beautiful, it is a benediction because in that not knowing your ego dies. That not-knowing becomes a grave for your ego. Wonder arises: Ah! And a great joy.Knowledge is a killjoy. Knowledgeable people are not joyous people, knowledgeable people become serious; they are burdened. Their heart no longer dances, only the head goes on growing out of all proportion. It becomes like a canceric growth – their whole body disappears, all their limbs shrink and there is only the head. They become head-heavy.When knowledge disappears you are utterly at peace with life and existence. Knowledge divides. Let me repeat it: knowledge divides you from existence because the knower cannot be the known, the knower is separate from the known. And because of that separation there is continuous anguish, anxiety; something is continuously missing. Only a not-knower can become one with life. So not knowing unites, knowledge divides.In a state of not knowing, you start melting with the trees and mountains and stars. You don’t know where you end and where they begin, you don’t know anything. You are again a child collecting seashells on the beach; again a child collecting flowers, wild flowers; again a child, your eyes full of wonder. Through that wonder you start feeling what existence is – not knowing but feeling. You start loving that which is – not knowing but loving. And through feeling and loving you start living for the first time. Who cares, who bothers, about knowledge?You ask, “Does that moment ever come where one knows why things are the way they are, and not in any other way?” No, things are the way they are; there is no other way. This is the only way and there is no why to it; otherwise you could have come to know. There is no cause to it; otherwise you would have decoded it. There is no reason for existence. It is utterly absurd, it should not exist. There is no reason for it. Why should there be trees and stars and men and women – why? There is no reason why there should be love, why there should be consciousness. Why at all? The why starts slipping away from you. The more you become silent, the more you attain the state of not knowing, the why starts slipping away. One day suddenly you are not searching for causes and reasons and whys, you simply start dancing. You cannot answer why you are dancing, there is no answer to it and all answers that have been given are false.Why do you love? Why does music thrill you? Why, seeing a flower in the morning, are you suddenly pulled by it like a magnet? Why in the night are you so attracted to the moon? Why? A child giggling, and you stop for a moment to see the child and you feel happy. Why is there happiness? Why is there celebration? Why is there life? Why does existence exist? There is no reason, and if you find any reason the question will again be relevant to ask – why?If you say God created the world then the question comes, why did he create the world? It doesn’t solve anything, it simply pushes the question a little deeper – why did God create the world?Just the other day I was reading a theologian’s book and he says, “What was God doing when he had not created the world?” Now one question has not been solved by the answer, and a very strange question arises: What was God doing? He must have existed for eternity before he created the world. Christians believe that he created the world only a few thousand years ago – four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ. So what was he doing before that? He must have been feeling utterly bored, he must have gone mad or may have committed suicide. What was he doing? Or he was just asleep, dreaming dreams. And what has he been doing since then? Since he created the world, to where has he disappeared? And what will he do when he has destroyed this world? Again he will be bored with himself. He must be really lonely.Now, all these unnecessary questions because you answered one question. You were feeling uneasy with the world so you said that God created the world. You wanted some convenience, some comfort – that it is not just an accident, that there is a God-father who looks after it, that you are not alone. You wanted some kind of security. That one question has not been answered and a thousand and one questions have arisen out of it. Why did he create it in the first place? Did he need it? If he needed it, he is as needy as man – then he’s not perfect, something was missing.Was he greedy? Was he an expansionist? Why? And why this world, with so much misery and so much suffering and so much illness and disease and death? Why this world? If he created it, he could have created a better world. He doesn’t seem to be a great creator.I have heard…A man went to a tailor, a famous tailor, and he said that his suit had to be ready as soon as possible. He was going on a world tour. And the tailor said, “Look, it will take at least six weeks – not before that, I am too busy. And I am a perfectionist; when I do something, I do it perfectly. You will have to wait at least six weeks, before that it is not possible.”The man said, “Six weeks? Don’t you remember that God created the whole world in six days?”And the tailor said, “I know. And look at the world, how he messed it up. That’s what happens if you do things in six days. I cannot do that, it will take six weeks.”Why did God create this ugly miserable world? Why did he create this hell? Doesn’t seem to be a master creator, seems to be a very poor artisan; there are a thousand and one mistakes in it.You don’t solve by answering the why. Buddha is far truer, he says nobody has ever created it. In that way he disposes of your question. He says it has always been there and will always be there – for no reason at all, for no cause at all. It exists without cause. That is difficult for the rational mind because we always look for the cause. Once the cause is given we feel at ease. It is a hankering for the reason; once we know the explanation and the cause and the reason, we feel good that we know. But what do you know?All the theology down the ages has not supplied a single answer. The whole philosophy of five thousand years has proved absolutely futile.If you can understand me, I would like to say that there never comes a moment of knowledge when you have known why the world is the way it is and why it is not in any other way. The more deeply you go into your being, fewer and fewer questions arise. One day all questions disappear. I am not saying that you get any answer, only that questions disappear. The man we call enlightened is not the man who knows the answer but is the man whose questions have disappeared. He no longer has any questions. In that state of non-questioning there is great silence, utter silence, absolute silence. And a beautiful not knowing.That not knowing comes, that not knowing is enlightenment. Buddha has not known a single thing; all that he has come to is that his questions have disappeared. Now there are no longer any questions buzzing in his mind; all that noise has gone, he is left alone in silence. He is no longer a knower, he has no claim that he knows this or that. He knows only nothing. That’s what Buddha calls nirvana – to know nothing, or to know only nothing. To be in a state of not knowing is samadhi.The second question:Osho,I read The Song of Meditation by Hakuin many years before but I don't remember getting the meaning that you have given to it.That’s natural: my meaning is my meaning, your meaning will be your meaning – how can they be the same? They cannot be. Your interpretation will come out of you, it will grow out of you. It has nothing to do with Hakuin’s song. When you read the Bible you don’t read Jesus, you read yourself there. When you read the Gita you don’t read Krishna, you read yourself there. Your interpretation is not there in the book, your interpretation is projected onto the book. The book is just an excuse. It is natural.Here, you have gathered around me; if there are a thousand sannyasins here, there are a thousand meanings that they give to each of my statements. And it is very rare that you get the meaning that I want you to get from it. The moment you get that meaning, you start participating in my being. In that moment you disappear, your mind disappears. In that moment you melt into me and you allow me to melt into you.You may have read Hakuin’s song but it was your own song that you must have got out of it. Unless you come to a point of not knowing, you will not know the meaning of Hakuin as Hakuin wanted it to be. If you want to understand what I am saying to you, you will have to come to this same awareness, to this not knowing, to this no-mind that I am. Only then. To know Buddha one has to become a buddha, to know Christ one has to become a christ. There is no other way to know; you cannot remain yourself and know them. To know them is risky. You will have to risk all that you have got; you will have to risk all your knowledge.That’s why many people don’t even try – it seems to be demanding too much of them. Yes, they are ready to go a little way with Buddha, Christ, with me – a little way. They go only up to that point where they feel I am agreeing with them; the moment they see that I am moving in a direction with which they don’t agree, they stop immediately. And unless you go with me headlong to the very end, you will not know what the message was.Remember, when you are listening to me put your whole mind aside. Just listen for the sheer joy of listening, as you listen to a bird calling, as you listen to the wind passing through the trees, just listen that way. There is no need to be worried what its meaning is. And then you will come closer to the real meaning.An Italian immigrant was being examined on his fitness for naturalization.“Who is the boss of the city?” was the first question.“Da mayor,” he replied.“Correct. And who is the boss of the state?”“Da governor.”“Correct. And of the whole country?”“Da Presidenta of da Uniteda States.”“Correct. Would it be possible for you to be the president?”“Err… Excuse please judge, but I very busy worka in da shop.”Your meaning is your meaning.Her husband charged mental cruelty, infidelity, and incompatibility, while her attorney was charging that he had deserted her – or to phrase it in legal terms: “Left her bed and board.”The judge looked down at the young man, then turned his appreciative glance over the well-proportioned blonde. “Young man,” he asked, “is it true you left this beautiful young lady’s bed and board?“Yes, Your Honor.”“That’s a darn lie!” exclaimed the voluptuous blonde. “No man ever left my bed bored!”When the words reach you they start taking a shape, a form, a color that was not there originally. They change. The moment they enter you, the moment they enter your climate, they become soaked with it. Hakuin’s song is not a song, not an ordinary statement – one of the most extraordinary statements ever. Such a small song of a few lines, but so penetrating that if all the scriptures of the world are burned and only Hakuin’s song is saved, nothing will be burned. That will do: a very condensed statement of buddhahood.To know Hakuin’s song of samadhi, of meditation, you will have to enter meditation. The more you know what meditation is – not intellectually but existentially – the more you feel what meditation is, the better you will enter Hakuin’s song. Then one day the meaning of it will explode in your being. The meaning is not given in dictionaries, the meaning is not that of words. That is one of the most basic difficulties in understanding people like Hakuin. What they are saying comes from the beyond. What they are putting into language does not belong to language, what they are trying is almost impossible. They are bringing the whole sky into a small box, or the whole ocean into a small cup. Even maybe that is possible, but to bring your meditativeness into words is more impossible. They are doing a miracle.But you will catch hold of the words and you will go astray. Listen to the silence in the words. Words are not important but the silence that they contain. Listen to the gaps between the words and read between the lines – but to read between the lines you will have to become thoughtless, you will have to become empty. Only an empty heart can read between the lines because otherwise there is nothing, there is only emptiness. Only emptiness can have a rapport with emptiness.Hakuin is an empty man, whose ego exists no longer, who has no self, who is just silence. To have any communion with Hakuin you will have to become that silence. Only then will the meaning start arising. And it will not arise just like a meaning – it will burst. As if spring has come to you and everywhere there is greenery and flowers blooming and fragrance and birds. It will be a spring; you will have a totally different feel to your being, you will be transformed through it.The third question:Osho,Is the only purpose in life self-realization?No sir, not even that; even self-realization is not the purpose. Somehow you cannot live without purpose. You have an obsession with purpose, some purpose has to be there. Now if there is no other purpose, let it be self-realization. And you will feel good, you will feel very good – at least there is some purpose: self-realization. Again you have settled, again you have started thinking in terms of means and ends. Again desire will flower, you have to attain self-realization. Again the future enters, again you can dream.Before, it may have been money, power, prestige. It may have been God, moksha, nirvana, the Kingdom of God. Now it is self-realization. But you have to keep some goal there. Hakuin says all is here. You want to have something on the other shore, and Hakuin says this is the only shore. The other shore is hidden in this shore. You are not to go anywhere, you are not to seek and search, it is already the case. You have just to be here, for a single moment be here, and: “This very body the buddha.”Now you are creating another. Can’t you live without problems? Can’t you drop the goal-oriented approach? Can’t you be in the present? Can you only be in the future? And to be in the future is to be false because the future has not yet come. People know only two ways to be: either they are in the past or in the future. Their identity comes either from the past or from the future. In the present they feel very shaky because in the present the identity disappears, the self disappears. In the present there is nothing like ego.Just look into it this very moment. You are utterly here, not a single thought stirring, silence all around: Where are you? In this silence, how can you exist? It effaces you, you become a tabula rasa, you become a child again.To hold to identity, either you have to look to the past… It supplies identity: you have a PhD from a university, you are a doctor or an engineer, a scientist, a poet, you have written so many books. Or you belong to a royal family, or this and that. You have done these things and those things – all those accumulated acts become the sum total of your being.You are not the sum total of your acts; there is another man hidden behind your acts – the real man, the essential man. The essential man has never done a thing; it is simply there, it is not a doer.But you will cling to the identity; you have been appreciated, you will cling to it. Even if you have been condemned you will cling to it. The saints cling to their past, and so cling the sinners. The good man clings to the past, so clings the bad man because they both need identity – people prefer to have a bad identity than no identity. At least one knows who one is: “I am a prisoner, I have been put in prison for twenty years, I am a thief or a murderer. At least I know something about myself.” Somebody else is a saint and he has renounced the world and he fasts every month and he eats only once a day. He sleeps only three hours, thousands of people worship him; his paradise is certain, he has so many virtues. But both are clinging to identity and both are in the same boat, the sinner and the saint.Or you start gathering identity from the future. You are going to do this, you are going to be this – you will become the president of a country, or you will become very famous, or you will write a book soon and you are going to win a Nobel Prize. You go on thinking of the future and that gives you a feeling who you are.But both are false. Only the present is true. Time knows no past, no future; past and future are mind things. Time knows only one tense and that is the present. But to be in the present means to destroy all goals, to have no future involvement. Otherwise your energy will be flowing in that direction.You say: “Is the only purpose in life self-realization?” I go on repeating every day that there is no purpose in life, life is purposeless, hence it is beautiful. Purpose makes everything businesslike; life is poetry, it is not business. Now you have found a word – you must have thought I would like this word, self-realization. All nonsense; there is no self to realize. Nothing has to be realized. The real is real – what are you going to realize? The real is already real and the unreal is unreal. Realization means something is not yet real and you are going to make it real. How can you make something which is unreal real somewhere in the future? How can you transform a lie into a truth? A lie will remain a lie and truth has always been truth. Nothing has to be realized.Then what has to be done? The question arises again and again in your mind. In fact nothing has to be done, you have only to see the futility of doing. In that seeing, action stops, mind stops. And that which has been with you forever, you come to feel, to know. Not that you realize it, you simply recognize it. A forgotten thing is remembered again, that’s all.The fourth question:Osho,How is one to be happy?If you want to be happy you will become unhappy: the very wanting will create unhappiness. That’s why people are unhappy. Everybody wants to be happy and everybody becomes unhappy. Can’t you see this? Have you ever met a man who does not want to be happy? If you have met such a man you will find he is happy. If you meet a man who says, “I don’t want to be happy, I don’t care a bit” then you will suddenly see that here is a man who is utterly happy.People who want to be happy will be miserable in the same proportion. If they want so much to be happy, they will be that much unhappy – the proportion of unhappiness will be the same as their desire for happiness. What goes wrong? People come to me and ask: “Everybody in the world wants to be happy – but then why are so many people, almost everybody, unhappy?” That’s why; because they want to be happy.Happiness cannot be desired. You desire, and comes misery; desire brings misery. Happiness is a state of no-desire, happiness is a state of great understanding that desire brings misery.There are two ways to be happy – one is to snatch at life, or to let it be. One is to snatch at life, the second is to let it be. The first demands happiness, refusing all else, and so lives between hope and fear, dream and rejection. The second way takes happiness when it happens but does not demand it and accepts all else too. It is in the acceptance of all else that happiness comes; one is no longer bound by the fearful wish to have, nor by the frantic will to hold, nor by the fever to clutch at straws of certainty. There is instead the ease of swimming with the river where the river flows.You ask: “How is one to be happy?” That means you want to snatch at life, you want to be aggressive upon life. You cannot be happy that way; life comes only to those who are not aggressive, life comes only to those who are in a deep passive receptivity. You cannot be violent with life. Because you are violent, you are unhappy and miserable, you go on missing life, life eludes you, it goes on escaping from your hands. You are a rapist, you want to rape life. That’s why you are miserable.Life comes dancing but only when you are not violent, aggressive. When you are not ambitious, when you are not even looking for happiness, when you are simply being here, suddenly you find happiness is showering – there is a meeting between you and happiness.And a man who really knows the art of being happy – that means nondesiring – knows also that whatever happens has to be accepted deeply, with no rejection. Then by and by everything is transformed into happiness. Small things that don’t make much sense, when you accept them become very significant. Things which you go on rejecting create misery. When you drop your rejection and you accept whole-heartedly, you embrace them, suddenly you feel a grace arising in you. Slowly, slowly as the understanding grows and as the desirelessness grows, one becomes over-full of happiness. Not only that one becomes happy, one starts overflowing. One starts reaching over to other people, one starts sharing one’s happiness with other people.So this is my suggestion: don’t be aggressive, relax – that’s how happiness comes. Wait prayerfully, gratefully – that’s how happiness comes. Be receptive, be feminine and happiness comes. Don’t be male, aggressive.You can see it around the world – countries which are too much after happiness are the most unhappy countries. For example, America: too much after happiness. That very hankering, that constant effort to be happy is making Americans neurotic. Almost three out of four are neurotic. And about the fourth I cannot say that he is not neurotic – he is also suspicious, ambiguous, vague. This has never happened in the history of man – so many people in a kind of neurosis, as if neurosis has become the normal state of humanity? – because never before have people been so much after happiness, that’s why.Go to a primitive tribe, people who are still living without civilization, people who are called backward by Americans; just go and you will find them immensely happy. They are backward and sooner or later the missionaries will come and make them forward, will educate them and will open schools and hospitals and will do “great service” to them, and soon they will all be unhappy and they will need psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Then the missionaries will be happy, they have done their job. How much they have served the people. They do great work and they are really devoted people, but they don’t know what exactly they are doing.America needs to become a little backward, and those people who are backward, please leave them alone, they are the only hope. But we cannot tolerate those happy people. Maybe there is some jealousy – we cannot tolerate them.Once a man came to me. For thirty years he had been educating aboriginal children in a jungle in Bastar; he had devoted his whole life. He came to Gandhi when he was thirty and since then he had been working, he had devoted his whole life. He had come to me for help – he wanted some of my sannyasins to go and teach the aboriginals. I said, “You have come to the last man to come to – I cannot do such harm to people.”I know those Bastar people, I have been with them. They are some of the most beautiful people in the world, they should be preserved. They are the only happy people – they still know how to dance and how to sing and how to love and how to enjoy life. They don’t philosophize, they don’t know arithmetic and they don’t know history, they don’t know geography and they cannot write. But they still have being, they still have grace. When they walk you can see that they still have vigor, their eyes are so innocent.For centuries nobody has committed suicide, they don’t know of anybody who has ever committed suicide in their tribe. And if sometimes murder has happened then the person goes himself and reports to the court: “I have murdered. So whatever is the punishment, give it to me.” He goes to the police station; maybe he has to walk two hundred miles, because the police station is very far away from those jungles – and good that it is far away. The man who has murdered will walk two hundred miles and will go to the police station and surrender. Nobody was asking him and nobody was after him. Beautiful people.And they love immensely. You will be surprised – and they are called backward – they have a small hall in the center of the town, their village for their children. They have a small hall for their children; once the children are getting interested in sex, all the community’s children sleep in that hall. They are allowed to make love, but nobody is allowed to move with any girl more than three days. So all the boys and all the girls become acquainted with all other boys and all other girls of the tribe. They learn nonpossessiveness and love is just a play. And they are given all freedom – there are no taboos, there is no repression. There is no possibility… The moment a child becomes sexually capable or interested in sex, he is immediately moved to sleep in the common hall and he has to find partners.Masturbation is not known, there is no need. Only very advanced countries know it, it is part of the advanced countries. Homosexuality is not known – that too is a part of a very affluent society. These are poor people, they don’t know anything about homosexuality, there is no need. And they become acquainted – all the boys become acquainted with all the girls, all the girls become acquainted with all the boys. And only then they choose.Once they get married, their marriage has an immense beauty. It is so intimate because it depends on a kind of attunement. The boy has been moving with all the girls, then he has chosen the girl who goes deepest into his heart and with her he goes deepest into oblivion. He knows with whom he can have the greatest orgasm; now it is not guesswork. He does not decide by the size of the nose and the color of the hair, those are just stupid things, and he does not decide by the height and the weight. And he does not decide by clothes because they are naked people. He simply decides by the innermost experience of orgasm – with whom he has the greatest experience, the greatest ecstasy. The decision comes out of that ecstasy. And these are backward people? These are the most liberated people.And then naturally there is no divorce – there is no need because he has found the woman and the woman has found her man; they have found the right partner, as if they were made for each other. It is not poetic, it is not vague fantasy, it is not a head thing, it is a great experience, and once that experience has settled… And there is no hurry; the society leaves them alone, unless they decide, unless they find a partner with whom they really go into the other world, into the other dimension, with whom sex is no longer sex but becomes prayer… Once they have found that partner, only then. Even then the society tells them to wait at least one or two years: go with the partner and wait two years after the decision before you get married. Because once you get married then you have settled; then there should be no need. So two years… If the honeymoon continues and continues and continues and after two years the boy is still going with the girl and the girl is still going with the boy and they both are still thinking of marriage, only then the society blesses them.They don’t know any divorce. Now missionaries are very disturbed by these “ugly” people – they are ugly people because they allow sexual freedom. The sexually obsessed and repressed missionaries think these are immoral people. They are not immoral: they are amoral, certainly, but not immoral. They don’t know any morality. They are more scientific and their approach is more practical and pragmatic.How do you decide? How do you decide that you are going to be with this woman for your whole life? The society does not allow you experimentation; you have not known other women so you fall in love with one woman and immediately get married. Another day you see another woman passing by on the road – you are interested and you become fascinated. Now what to do? Jealousy arises. Not a single illegal love affair is known in that small community of Bastar aboriginals. Once a person has settled with a woman, they have settled. There is no jealousy, there is no watching of each other, they don’t become jealous of each other. They have settled out of their own heart experience; they have found their woman, their man. They don’t know how to read – but what is there to read? They know how to read nature, they know how to talk to trees, they know how to have a dialogue with the sky. They know real reading because they read the book of life and nature.Yes, they will not accumulate much money: they will not become Fords and Andrew Carnegies and Morgans, they will not become so rich. There is no need for anybody to become so rich – because if a man becomes so rich then millions of people become poor. Nobody is rich and nobody is poor. They have a beautiful tradition each year that whatever you have accumulated you have to distribute; the first day of the year they distribute their things. So nobody accumulates much. How can you accumulate when each year you have to give everything away? All that you have, you have to distribute. So nobody becomes too attached to things; they are very nonpossessive people.They have enough to enjoy; they work hard, they are healthy people, and nature supplies them more than is needed. If you don’t want to become rich, nature has enough to satisfy you. If you want to become rich, there is no way for you ever to have contentment, ever to have happiness.Somebody has asked a question: “Osho, you say that children should listen to the birds and not look at the blackboard. Then what will happen?” Then beautiful things will happen, then great things will happen. If for one hundred years all the universities are closed, and all the colleges and all the schools, man will become alive again. Yes, I know there will not be so much money to grab, money will disappear. But there will be more life – and that is what is needed. You cannot purchase life with money, you cannot purchase love with money. Money you have. The person who has asked this has also asked how they will earn their living – do you think that five thousand years ago when people were not educated they were not able to earn their bread and their butter? They were. Living was never a problem. And they had one thing more – life. Now you have only living, but no life; you think only of a better standard of living, you don’t think of a better kind of life. You have quantity but the quality has disappeared.Nature is abundant, it is enough to fulfill us. But if our desires go neurotic then naturally nature cannot fulfill those desires. When we are after neurotic desires – money, power, prestige – then naturally there is poverty, starvation, war. Wars and starvation and poverty exist because of your schools: your schools teach ambition, your schools teach people to be jealous of each other, to be competitive of each other.What do we teach in our schools? For example, a teacher asks a question and the small boy cannot answer it. He may not have done his homework, maybe he fell asleep in the evening, maybe there was a beautiful film on the TV, or a thousand and one things were there to distract – and beautiful things, good things. Or there were guests in the home and he enjoyed their company. He cannot answer. Now he is standing there like a culprit, a criminal, condemned. He cannot answer the question.And another boy is waving his hand and jumping and wants to answer it. Of course the teacher is happy and the other boy answers it. Now, what has this boy done? – he has exploited the suffering of the first boy, he has proved himself better than the other, he has exploited the situation.Now, this will not be so in a primitive aboriginal village, they don’t exploit each other’s situations. Anthropologists – who cannot understand this – have come across tribes who would not forgive this second boy because the second boy is cruel, violent. When the first was suffering, in a primitive society no boy would answer, they would all keep quiet. It would be thought ugly, violent, that when one is suffering, somebody exploits the situation and answers and enjoys. These people are thought to be backward? They are not, they are the only hope.One thing more: the person has asked what will happen to people’s lives if they don’t know arithmetic and if they don’t know geography and history. How will they earn their living? And what kind of a society will it be?Yes, there will not be much money, there may not be big palaces, there may not be rich gadgets, technology. But there will be joy. And all the technology is not worth a single moment’s joy. There will be love and dance and song and feeling and people will again become part of nature. They will not be fighting with nature, struggling with nature, they will not be destroying nature. There will be no ecological problem. If schools continue, nature is going to die, and with nature we are going to die.And one thing more: I am not saying that all the boys would like, and all the girls would like to listen to the song of the bird at the window. No, there would be boys who would like the blackboard more, who would like arithmetic more. Then it is for them. All do not need to be educated, that is my approach – only those who have an intrinsic feeling for it should be educated. And there are a few people who love arithmetic more than they love nature. There are people who love literature more than they love trees. There are people who love engineering, technology, more than they love music, dance, song. These are the people to be educated. All are not alike. These people should be educated as far as they want, they should be helped.There should be no universal education, that is a crime. That means you are forcing people who don’t want to be educated. That is undemocratic. Universal education is dictatorial.In a really democratic world, a boy who wants to be educated will be educated. But a boy who wants to go to the carpenter’s will go to the carpenter’s, and a boy who wants to become a fisherman will become a fisherman. A woman who wants to cook will cook, and a woman who wants to dance will dance, and a woman who wants to become a scientist, a Madame Curie, will be welcome.People should move according to their inner nature; nothing should be imposed on them. This universal education is destroying people. It is as if – just think of another example – a dictator comes who loves dancing and forces everybody to dance. That would be an ugly thing. There would be people who don’t want to dance and if you force them to dance, what kind of dance would it be? If a dictator comes who wants everybody to become a poet, and opens schools and colleges to teach poetry and everybody has to compose poetry, what kind of world would that be? – a very ugly world. Only a few people, a Shakespeare, a Kalidas, a Milton, a Dante would enjoy it. But what about others? – they would simply be miserable.And that is what is happening. When you force arithmetic on all, that is what you are doing. When you force geography on all, that is what you are doing. When you force anything on all, that is what you are doing. Nothing should be forced; a child should be allowed to find his own way. And if he wants to be a cobbler, perfectly good, there is no need for him to become a president. A cobbler is beautiful if he enjoys his work, if he is happy with his work, if he has found his work. No universal education.Missionaries are the most dangerous people; a world without missionaries will be a beautiful world – it has become a hell.You ask: “How is one to be happy?” Forget about happiness, happiness cannot be achieved directly. Rather, think of what you enjoy, what you most enjoy doing, and get absorbed into it. And happiness will come on its own. If you enjoy swimming, enjoy swimming; if you enjoy chopping wood, chop wood. Whatever you like, do it and get absorbed into it. And suddenly when you are absorbed you will find that climate coming to you, that sunlit climate of happiness. Suddenly you find it is all around you. That’s what I would like to create in our new commune. People have to get absorbed. Happiness is a by-product, it is not a goal. Doing the thing that you want to do, happiness comes.The fifth question:Osho,Can enlightenment happen to a lazy man?It happens only to a lazy man.The sixth question:Osho,Are you the savior? And if you are, how to recognize you?No, I am not a savior. A thousand times no: nobody can save anybody else. And you should not look for that, that is a deception. I have saved myself, I cannot save you; you will have to save yourself. I can indicate the way, I can tell you how I have saved myself. Buddhas only show the way, but all else you have to do. Nobody can save you; you should start being responsible for yourself. You have learned a very ugly trick of throwing responsibility on somebody else – why should anybody else be a savior to you?I am not. I don’t take anybody’s responsibility on me, I throw you to yourself. That is the only way to help you. It is the only way to create a soul in you, it is the only way to make you feel that your life is your life. If you want it to be miserable that is your choice, if you don’t want it to be miserable, I make the way available to you. You can drop your misery this very moment. But don’t start clinging to me and don’t start throwing your responsibility on me, otherwise sooner or later you will be disappointed and you will be angry with me.There are sometimes questions: “I have been here for three months and, Osho, you are not doing anything to me yet.” Who I am to do anything? I can only indicate, I am a finger pointing to the moon. Don’t wait, go to the moon. Don’t wait and don’t cling to the finger. But there are people who start biting my finger rather than going to the moon. I am not a savior.Listen to this beautiful anecdote:In a shopping-plaza parking lot in the American Midwest, a woman kept seeing a strange man who claimed to be Jesus Christ. Crowds would often gather to hear him preach: “I am Jesus Christ! Come and be saved.”One day in exasperation she approached the so-called messiah and said, “You are no more Jesus Christ than I am. You are a fraud.”Whereupon the self-proclaimed Christ declared, “I am too, and I can prove it if you would like. Come with me if you want proof.” So off she went with him. As they walked along he said, “You will see that I am indeed none other than Jesus Christ.”He walked up to the front door of a house and knocked. After a few minutes a man opened the door, looked at the preacher and screamed, “Jesus Christ! Are you here again?!”And he said, “Look, this is the proof.”I am not going to give you any proof of any kind. And don’t ask “How to recognize you?” – there is no need. Just listen to what I am saying to you, let it be transformed into your own insight. You need not recognize me as a savior, as a Jesus, as a Buddha – there is no need. And how can you recognize me? Unless you have become a christ you will not be able to recognize a Christ, you will not know what it means to be a Christ. No, I don’t expect you to recognize me. And there is no need: I am what I am, your recognition will not make any difference so don’t bother about it. And I am not going to give you any proof.And remember again: don’t look toward me as a savior. Because of this idea – that a savior has to come or a messiah has to come – people go on living the way they are living. What can they do? They say, “When the messiah comes then everything will happen.” This is their way of postponing transformation, this is their way of deceiving themselves. Enough is enough, you have deceived enough, now no more. No messiah is ever going to come: you have to do your own work, you have to be responsible for yourself. And when you are responsible, things start happening.And the last question:Osho,Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit. Why don't you shut up? I am bored with your lectures, utterly bored.Oh, another angel from Munich? This time his name is not Aloysius, his name is Deva Bhanu.If you are bored, don’t listen to me. Who is forcing you to listen? You are free. If you want to be bored then it is perfectly okay – listen. But the decision is yours. You cannot tell me “Shut up.” Who are you to tell me? Even if nobody is here, if I want to speak I will go on speaking. That is my joy!There have been masters like that. A great master happened in Greece, Pyrrho, who used to talk even when there were no disciples. A disciple would be sitting there and would feel that it was too long and the master was going on and on; the disciple would leave. And he would continue. Who bothers about disciples? Pyrrho was really a master. It was a song he was singing – if you want to participate, participate, otherwise you are free. Unless you are a masochist and you want to torture yourself, then it is your decision. Don’t listen to me!And your feeling bored may not have anything to do with what I am saying. It may be just that you cannot understand it, that it goes above your head. So raise your head a little higher.Or maybe you are expecting something else, maybe you are here for some kind of entertainment. Then you are in a wrong place. But to be here or not to be here is your decision. You are completely free not to be here.And I don’t know – others may not be bored. Let us see. Where is Deva Bhanu? Can you stand sir, so all can see? Good. And now I will ask the others: those who don’t agree with Deva Bhanu, raise your hands. Now sir, what can I do? I agree with you – but what are we two against so many?Enough for today?

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-08/

The first question:Osho,What is the Zen attitude toward death?Laughter. Yes, laughter is the Zen attitude toward death, and toward life too, because life and death are not separate. Whatever is your attitude toward life will be your attitude toward death, because death comes as the ultimate flowering of life. Life exists for death. Life exists through death. Without death there will be no life at all. Death is not the end but the culmination, the crescendo. Death is not the enemy, it is the friend. It makes life possible.So the Zen attitude toward death is exactly the same as the Zen attitude toward life – that of laughter, joy, celebration. And if you can laugh at death, in death, you are free from all. Then you are freedom. If you cannot laugh at death, you will not be able to laugh in life either because death is always coming. Each act in life, each move in life, brings death closer. Each moment that you live you get closer to death. If you cannot laugh with death, how can you laugh with life and in life?But there is a difference between the Zen Buddhists and the other religions. Other religions are not that deep: other religions also say that there is no need to fear death because the soul is immortal. But in the very idea of the immortality of the soul, your mind is seeking eternity and nothing else. In the very idea of immortality you are denying death, you are saying there is no death. You are saying, “So why be afraid? There is no death. I am going to live – if not as this body, still I am going to live as this soul. My essential being will continue. So why fear death? Death will not be destroying me. I will remain, I will persist, I will continue.” The other religions compromise with your desire to remain forever, they give you a consolation. They say, “Don’t be worried. You will be in some other body, in some other form, but you will continue.” This seems to be a clinging.But the Zen approach toward death is utterly different, immensely profound. Other religions say death is not to be worried about, not to be feared, because the soul is eternal. Zen says that there cannot be any death because you are not. There is nobody to die. See the difference – there is nobody to die. The self exists not, so death cannot take anything away from you. Life cannot give you anything and death cannot take anything away. There is no purpose in life and no purpose in death. There is nobody to die. Other religions say you will not die, so don’t be worried about death. Zen says you exist not – for whom are you worrying? There is nobody in life and there will be nobody in death; you are pure emptiness. Nothing has ever happened there.Zen does not compromise with your desire for eternity. It does not compromise for your security; it does not compromise with your ego in any form. Zen is utterly radical, it cuts the very root. Zen says the idea to survive forever is idiotic – what are you going to do if you survive forever? Are you not yet finished with your doing? Are you not yet frustrated enough with your doing? Have you not seen the foolishness and stupidity of your being? What does it bring you except misery? The more of an ego you are, the more miserable you are. Can’t you see that the ego functions like a wound? It hurts. Still you want to continue this wound, still you want to continue this wound forever and ever. You don’t want to be cured? Ego is illness, to be egoless is to be cured. But you want to be saved forever.In your very idea of remaining forever, being saved forever, there is a kind of miserliness. Other religions say: save. Save yourself. Zen says: spend. Spend yourself because to be utterly spent is to be saved.A Christian was walking with Mulla Nasruddin; they had gone for a morning walk. And the Christian showed Mulla Nasruddin his church. He said, “Look, this is my church.”And on the church there was a big board – on the board was written: Jesus Saves! Mulla Nasruddin looked at it and said, “So what! My wife saves better.”Saving of any kind is a miserly attitude toward life. Spend – don’t hoard. Relax your clinging. Don’t keep your hands clenched like fists. Open them, be spent. Be spent like a flower which has released its fragrance to the winds. Be spent like a candle which has lived its night, danced, and now is no more. The Buddhist word for nirvana means “putting out the candle.” When you are utterly spent, when you have authentically lived and spent yourself totally and there is nothing left in you except emptiness, you have arrived home because emptiness is home.You are the world. When you are not, you have come home.The Zen attitude toward life is that of laughter, of living, of enjoying, of celebrating. Zen is not anti-life it is life-affirmative. It accepts all that is. It does not say deny this, deny that. It says all is good: live it, live it as totally as possible. Being total in anything is to be religious. Being partial in anything is to be worldly. And live so totally that when death comes you can live death totally too. Laugh so totally that when death comes you can have your last laugh.A great master, Lo-shan, was coming closer to his death. When he sensed that death was close, Lo-shan called everyone into the Buddha Hall and ascended the lecture seat.First he held his left hand open for several minutes. No one understood so he told the monks from the eastern side of the monastery to leave. Then he held his right hand open. Still no one understood so he told the monks from the western side of the monastery to leave. Only the laymen remained. He said to them, “If any of you really want to show gratitude to Buddha for his compassion to you, spare no efforts in spreading the dharma. Now get out! Get out of here!”Then laughing loudly, the master fell over dead.Now, this man, Lo-shan, is going to die. He gathers all his disciples. He opens one of his hands, nobody understands. He is saying, “With an open hand I lived, with an open hand I am going. Totally I lived, totally I am going. I was never closed. Now death is knocking on the door, my doors are open.” Then he raised his other hand. People did not understand. Then he said to the people, “Buddha had such immense compassion on you.”What is the compassion of Buddha? The compassion of Buddha is this – knowing perfectly well that you will not understand, he tried. That is his compassion. Knowing perfectly well that it is impossible to understand something that he says, Buddha tried his whole life to help you to understand; that is his compassion. He is trying to help you see that which you cannot see. Trying to bring into language and words that which cannot be reduced to words. Trying to do the impossible, that is his compassion.Lo-shan said to the people, “Do one thing – spread Buddha’s word, his dharma. Whatever he has said, go on spreading it.” Maybe somebody may understand sometime. Even if one in thousands understands, that’s enough. Even if one in millions blooms, that is enough. One person flowering fills the whole earth with his fragrance. Yes, a single individual flower of consciousness transforms the whole quality of consciousness on the earth. It raises the consciousness of the whole earth.And then he told them, “Now get out! Get out of here!” What does he mean by “Get out, get out of here!”? He is telling them: “The mind in which you are, get out, get out of the mind. The ego in which you are, get out of the ego.” But Zen masters have their own ways of expression. First he threw out half the monks from one gate, then the other half from another gate. Then only laymen remained, and he tells them, “Get out! Get out of here!” Then laughing loudly, the master fell over dead.What is his laughter? Why is he laughing?There is a Zen parable…Thus he arrived before a great castle on whose facade were carved the words “I belong to no one and to all. Before entering you were already here. When you leave you will remain.”He is laughing at the ridiculousness, absurdity – the absurdity of everything and all. Everything is so contradictory. Life exists through death, love exists through hate, compassion exists through anger. And only those who are not can be. And those who are cannot be. It is so absurd, it is so contradictory. He is having his last laugh at this whole situation of so-called life. It is not logical, that’s why he is laughing. It is so illogical. What can you do with such an illogical phenomenon? – you can have a good laugh.Another master, Tetsugen, shortly before he died called his monks together. It was December first. “I have decided to die on the eighth of this month,” he told them. “That’s the day of Buddha’s enlightenment. If you have any questions left about the teaching, you’d better ask them before then.”Because the master continued with his regular duties during the next few days, some of the monks thought he was having a little fun at their expense. Most however, were struck with grief.By the evening of the seventh, nothing unusual had happened. Nonetheless, Tetsugen had them all assemble and taught them for the last time about the Buddha’s enlightenment. He then arranged his affairs and went into his room.At dawn he took a bath, put on his ceremonial robes, and sitting erect in the lotus posture composed this death poem:Shakyamuni descended the mountain.I went up.In my teaching,I guess I’ve always been something of a maverick.And now I’m off to hell – yo ho!The inquisitiveness of men is pure folly.Then, shutting his eyes and still sitting, he died.A Zen master can die any moment; he can decide. Why? – because he is already dead. The day he became enlightened he died. Now only the visible form goes on living – inside all is emptiness. He is thoroughly dead so any day he can drop this form. It is just a soap bubble: a small prick and it will be gone. And you cannot choose a better day to die than Buddha’s enlightenment day because that day Buddha died.There is a beautiful story about Buddha: he was born on a certain day, the same day he became enlightened, and the same day he died. The birth, the enlightenment, and death, all these three great things happened on the same day. This is very indicative – it says birth, enlightenment, and death are all the same. It has a message: they are all alike. They are not different, their quality is the same.Birth is a kind of death. When a child is born out of the womb, if the child could verbalize what is happening he would say, “I am dying” because he has lived for nine months in the womb in such comfort, in such luxury, in such convenience; no worry, no problem, no work. Everything is available, you need not even ask for it. He need not even breathe on his own, the mother breathes for him. He need not eat, the mother eats for him. He simply lives. It is paradise.Psychologists say that the search for paradise is nothing but the memory, the nostalgia, of the womb, because you have lived for those nine months at the highest peak of comfort, luxury. And the whole search for paradise is for nothing but how to enter that kind of warm womb again.In India, the innermost part of the temple is very meaningfully called the garbha, womb. Where the deity of the temple sits, the innermost shrine, is called the garbha – the womb. In ordinary life also we are searching the same comfort. When you feel a room is cozy, what do you really remember when you say that the room is cozy? – warm, alive, receptive, welcoming. You are not a stranger, you are a welcome guest. You are reminded of something of those nine months. Science goes on improving comfort, luxury, but we have not yet been able – and I think we will never be able – to create the womb situation again.The child has lived in such abundance; it is just a continuous celebration, in silence, in utter silence. Now he is being thrown out. And he does not know anything about the outside world, whether there is any world or not. He is thrown out of his home. If the child could say anything he would say, “I am dying.” You call it birth, you who are outside – but ask the child, just think of the child. The child will think, “I am being uprooted, I am thrown out. I am being rejected.” The child clings, the child does not want to go out. The child feels it a kind of death. On one side it is death, on another side it is birth.And so again is enlightenment. On one side, on the side of the mind, it is death. The mind feels “I am dying.” The mind clings. The mind tries in every way to prevent this enlightenment happening. The mind creates a thousand and one questions, doubts, inquiries, distractions, wants to pull you back: “Where are you going? You will die.”This happens here every day; whenever a person starts moving closer to meditation, fear arises – great fear. His whole being is at stake, he starts trembling. Actual trembling arises in his being. Now he is facing the abyss – on one side it is death, on another side it will be birth. If the mind dies, he will be born as consciousness. If thought dies, he will be born as samadhi, as no-thought. If the mind disappears, he will be born as no-mind. If this noise of the mind disappears, he will be born as silence. On one side it will be death, another side birth.And so is death. Each death is also a birth, and each birth is also a death.This story of Buddha being born on a certain day at a certain time, then at the same time and the same day becoming enlightened, and at the same time and the same day dying, is meaningful. It simply says that these three things are the same. One thing is missing; I would like to add that too. If you really fall in love then the whole list is complete. These four things, then your whole life is complete. If I am to write Buddha’s story again, I will add this too, that he fell in love on the same day at the same time, because that too is a birth and a death. The people who were writing Buddha’s story were not so courageous. They have dropped the idea of love; it seems to be dangerous.These are the four greatest things in life, the four directions of life; this is the whole sky of life.Tetsugen decided to die on Buddha’s enlightenment day. Many Zen monks have been deciding to die on that day, and they die on that day. They don’t commit suicide and they don’t take any poison – they just collapse. But their collapse is beautiful; they collapse with a smile, with laughter.It is a tradition in Zen that before a master dies he has to compose a death poem. That too is very significant. Death should be received with poetry, with joy. That is your last statement, your testament. It should be in poetry. It should be poetry – prose won’t do, prose will look a little too worldly – something more, something of a song. Tetsugen wrote this poem.Shakyamuni…Shakyamuni is the name of Buddha.Shakyamuni descended the mountain.I went up.He is saying, “I have been just the opposite of Buddha.” Only a Zen master can say that. Otherwise, followers are followers – they are imitators, they are carbon copies. But real followers are not, they are authentic beings. They live their life; they live with great respect for the master, with immense respect for the master, but they live their life. In fact, that immense respect for the master will make you capable to live your own life.Buddha lived his own life. If you are really respectful toward him you will live your own life, that’s how you will pay your homage.Shakyamuni descended the mountain.I went up.In my teaching,I guess I’ve always been something of a maverick.And now I’m off to hell – yo ho!The inquisitiveness of men is pure folly.He is saying, “Now I am off to hell.” He is joking. Only a Zen master can joke at the last moment; only a Zen master can have the guts to say, “Now I am off to hell.” In fact Zen people say that wherever a master is, there is heaven. If he is in hell, hell will be heaven. Heaven is his climate, he carries it with himself.Then shutting his eyes and still sitting, he died, so silently, so poetically, so radically.And the third story…When the master Tenno was dying, he called to his room the monk in charge of food and clothing in the temple. When the monk sat down by the bed, Tenno asked, “Do you understand?”Now, he has not said anything and he asks, “Do you understand?”“No,” the monk said, puzzled.Tenno laughed, and said, “Do you understand?”The monk said, “No.” And was more puzzled.Then Tenno, picking up his pillow, hurled it through the window and said, “Do you understand?”And the monk said, “No. And you are making me more and more confused.”Then he said, “Okay, then I will do the real thing.” He closed his eyes, gave a lion’s roar and died.He was dying. This disciple was not yet insightful. He was dying – if you have loved your master, if you have really loved your master, you will know what is happening to him. That’s why he asked, “Do you understand?” He is asking, “Have you not come to know that I am dying? Has it not yet reached your heart that I am dying?” At the last moment he is testing his disciple. Even death is being used as a kind of teaching; even death is being used as the last effort to awaken the disciple. Then he laughed, and asked, “Do you understand?” The laughter was so total that if the disciple had looked into the eyes of the master and heard the laughter, there was the whole teaching of Buddha in it, all the scriptures in it – the totality of it. And he would have seen that the master is leaving the body.But he must have got into thinking. The master asked, “Do you understand?” And he has not said anything – what does he mean by “Do you understand?” The disciple must have gone into his mind. Because he had gone into his mind, the master laughed to bring him out of his mind. Nothing brings you out of your mind like laughter.Somebody has asked, “Why, Osho, do you go on telling jokes?” That’s why. Nothing brings you out of your mind like laughter. When you have a good laugh the logic disappears – for that moment at least. And the jokes are so absurd. They are jokes because they are absurd; you laugh because they are ridiculous, you laugh because they don’t follow the rules of logic, they go just against it. They take such an unexpected turn that your thinking could not have concluded. Because of that unexpected turn, because of that sudden leap… The whole joke goes in one way, then comes the punch line. And the punch line is a leap, it is discontinuous. A joke is a great meditation.The master laughed. Loud was his laughter, total was his laughter. He wanted to bring this disciple out of his mind: he had gone too much into thinking. He was thinking, “Why has he asked ‘Do you understand?’ What does he mean?” The master has asked a simple question – a question to provoke the disciple to be alert of his situation, what is happening to him. If the disciple was really in tune with the master, that would have been a shock: “Do you understand?” And he would have opened his eyes and he would have looked into the being of the master and would have felt that the master was ready to leave the body. But he went into thinking and missed the point. Hence the master tried again by laughing. And asked “Do you understand?” Still the disciple was more puzzled because he could not see why the master was laughing. He started thinking “Why?”The moment you bring the question “Why?” you are moving into the rut, the dead rut, of the mind. Once you have asked why you miss the meditative moment. Seeing that the disciple is very gross, he had to be gross. He had to throw his pillow out of the window – he had to do something absolutely meaningless, just to shock. But the disciple was more puzzled, even more puzzled.Then he gave a lion’s roar and died. It is said that for many centuries the roar was heard in his monastery; whenever people would sit silently and meditate they would hear the lion’s roar. This was his last shock. And then he died. Why did he do this, this lion’s roar? Maybe nothing is bringing him out of his mind – this utterly absurd thing, a lion’s roar for no reason at all, may bring him out of the mind. And then he died. If nothing else brings him out of his mind, then death will bring him. If even for a single moment you can taste the space called no-mind, then you know that there is nobody to die.Nobody lives, nobody dies. Nothingness lives, nothingness dies. You are not. Have a good laugh at this situation. You are not and you exist. You are not and you are. This is the cosmic joke.You ask me, “What is the Zen attitude toward death?” Laughter. But that is their attitude toward life too.The second question:Osho,What is tantric sex? After monkey sex and after love-bliss sex, before the highest cosmic and religious sex in which no partner is needed, in which the cosmos is the partner, isn't there tantric sex in which two partners are involved, a sex act that is a meditation based on certain techniques?It is good that after meditating on death you will be meditating on Tantra and tantric sex because sex is also a small death. And because of that small death in sex there is so much joy released in you. For a single moment you disappear and that moment is the climax, the orgasm. In that single moment, you don’t know who you are. In that single moment, you are pure energy vibrating, pulsating, with no center to it, with no ego in it.In that single moment of orgasmic space, you lose all boundaries, separation. You become vast, huge. You are no longer separate from the other. That’s why there is so much joy, although the moment is very small and once it is gone you feel very frustrated because it has been so short, it was so fleeting. You start hankering again. And each time that moment comes you reach a pinnacle and then you fall into a deep darkness, into the abyss.So sex brings you joy and sex brings you great misery too. It takes you to sunlit peaks and then drops you into the darkest valleys. After each sex act, one feels frustrated. Something was happening, happening, and it happened – and you could not even catch hold of it and it was gone. So sex remains the greatest fascination and the greatest frustration.Because of these two things in the act of sex there are two types of people. Those who become too fascinated with the fascination, addicted to sex; they are the people who go on indulging in all kinds of sexualities, and their whole life is nothing but a search for more sex, better sex. And the other, who become addicted to the frustration of sex; they renounce the world, the woman, the man; they escape to the Himalayas or into the monasteries. But both have reacted to sex. Your worldly and your otherworldly are not different – they are both sexual, they have chosen one part of the sex act; they have chosen opposite parts, but they have chosen out of the sex act.That’s why your so-called religions are so much against sex – they have chosen the frustration part. The indulgent and the renunciate are two aspects of the same coin. They are not different people, they are the same people, and both have chosen out of sex.Tantra is a totally different attitude. It says that there is joy in sex and there is frustration in sex because the moment of orgasm is very small. That moment can become very deep, that moment can remain there for hours. That moment, once you know the art of remaining in it, can surround you twenty-four hours. Tantra transforms sex. Tantra is the true religion. It does not choose between the fascination and the frustration, it transcends both; it uses sex as a key. And it is a key – because all life comes through it, all flowers bloom through it and all birds sing through it. All that you see around you, the green and the red and the gold, all comes through sex and is sex energy. All the poetry and all the songs and all the music are rooted in sex energy. All art, all creativity, is nothing but an expression of sex.So Tantra sex has to be understood. A few things: the tantric definition of sexuality is opposite to the modern definition. The modern mind regards sex as a need – like hunger for food – which incidentally provides sense and ego gratification. That’s how Freud thinks about sex, that it gives you ego gratification, satisfaction, relaxation; it relieves tensions, it is a need. Tantra regards sex as a powerful instinctual return to our ultimate reality, one of the highest forms of meditation.You have to understand. The first thing to remember – Freud does not understand the ultimate depth of sex. Freud has only looked into the repressed sexuality of man. The wrong that Christianity has done in the West, Freud was trying to put right. But Christianity remains superficial and Freud remains superficial. Why? – because the cure cannot go deeper than the disease. The disease was superficial, the cure cannot be deeper than that.Tantra does not define sex as a need. It is not. A man can live without sex, it is not a need. Not like food – you cannot survive without food. It is not like thirst – you cannot survive without water. But you can survive easily without sex; maybe you can survive longer. Sex is not a need like food or thirst or hunger. Sex has a totally different dimension, a different dimension altogether. It is a way to contact the ultimate reality; it is an urge to move to the original source.In ordinary sex it happens only for moments. Even that is rare, because there are very few orgasmic persons left in the world. People have become so civilized that to be orgasmic seems impossible; a civilized person cannot be orgasmic because he cannot allow himself to be wild. Only a wild person can be orgasmic because orgasm is wild. The more civilized you are, the more cultured you are, sophisticated, educated, the less possibility there is for you to be orgasmic. Then sex is just a relief; it is like sneezing, nothing much – it is sheer wastage.You accumulate energy; you don’t know what to do with your energy and the energy becomes heavy on you, it has to be thrown out in some way or other. So you go on throwing the energy. But you have lost the language of orgasm. What is the language of orgasm? If you are really orgasmic you will groan and moan and shout and sing and pray, and a thousand and one things will happen when you are making love to your woman or to your man. It is going to be a mad thing. And that is difficult in a civilized world. The whole neighborhood will know that now you are making love. And people will start phoning the police station that there is danger, someone has gone orgasmic.Yes, you will dance, you will sing, you will utter incoherent sounds, gibberish will come. One never knows what will happen because you lose control. To be orgasmic means the capacity to lose control. The constant control is there, you are simply sitting on your energies controlling them: “This should be, this should not be. This is right, that is wrong.” You are continuously doing that, inhibiting, repressing. Only go so far, beyond that is danger, only this much is allowed. How can you be orgasmic?And if you are not orgasmic in other things, you cannot be orgasmic in sex. If you control your anger, then you cannot be orgasmic in sex. If you can be orgasmic in anger, only then can you be orgasmic in sex. Man is a totality. If you cannot get into a rage, how can you get into love? Impossible.Have you watched it? Knowingly, unknowingly, couples stumble upon the fact that if they want to make love it is a must that they should fight before they make love. So each evening couples fight, become angry – that becomes a little help. A pillow fight is helpful; your energies start moving, your juice starts flowing. And if you can be a little silly and stupid in anger then you can be silly and stupid in love too. Then who cares?A natural man is orgasmic in all his emotions.Somebody has asked a question: “If people become authentic as you say they should become, authentic and natural, and if they don’t smile because a smile is phony, and if they go on screaming and shouting in the streets, what will happen to the world?” Many things will happen to the world: first, wars will become impossible. There will be no Vietnams and no Israels, because people will never accumulate so much anger in them that they have to kill, and kill millions.Many things will happen to the world if people are natural. Then they will not shout as much as you think they will shout. Right now if they are allowed to shout they will shout – but for how long? If they are given complete freedom, shouts and abusing and condemnation and fights will start disappearing from the world. It is a vicious circle: it is as if you have been starving a person and you don’t allow him to go close to the fridge, and you say, “If we allow him, he will eat too much.” You have been starving him and now you are afraid if you allow him any freedom he will eat too much, he will fall ill. So you don’t allow him to go to the fridge. He has to live by his quota – whatever you give, he has to live on.Now he fantasizes, he dreams: “What to do? How to reach the fridge? How to eat more?” His whole imagination becomes focused on food, he dreams of food.A famous Sufi story says…Three people were traveling. They purchased a Sufi sweet, halvah. But they had not enough money and the halvah was very costly. It was not enough for three, so there was great debate – who should eat it? They decided “We should do one thing: we all should sleep, and in the morning whosoever has dreamed the best dream will be the one to eat it all.” Agreed, they fell asleep.Early morning they related their dreams. One said – he was a Christian – he said, “I dreamed of Jesus, and Jesus said ‘Come to heaven, I have prepared a place for you.’ And he was calling me, inviting me. It was such a beautiful dream, I have never dreamed such a thing. And Jesus was so radiant and I feel so good that I have been accepted by Jesus.”The second was a Hindu. He said, “This is nothing. I dreamed I have become Krishna. And thousands of gopis are dancing around me, beautiful damsels, and I am playing on the flute. It was such a beautiful dream.”The third was a Sufi. And they asked, “What about you?”He said, “Mohammed appeared and said, ‘You fool! What are you doing here? Go and eat the halvah!’ So I have eaten it, because how can you reject when Mohammed commands?”If you are hungry, if you are kept starving, then the fear arises that if you are loose in the streets you may enter a restaurant, kill the owner, or do something. But if you are well fed, nobody does anything like that. This is what has happened – for thousands of years you have been repressed, you have been made more and more phony. Now the fear arises. The questioner is right – the fear arises that if people become authentic and start screaming and shouting and doing things the way they always wanted to do and were never allowed to do, the world will go mad.Yes, for a few years the world will go mad, but that madness will be therapeutic, it will help immensely. After that nobody will ever go mad. Neurosis will disappear, psychosis will disappear; wars will disappear. Politicians will become meaningless, nations and the militaries and armies will become irrelevant – they will not be needed. That’s why the politician and the priest are so much in favor of repressing people because they depend on these repressions. Wars will not be there. Generals won’t like it, army people won’t like it, if there is no Vietnam – then their whole purpose is lost. If there are no nations then what is the point of having prime ministers and presidents? They are irrelevant.Government becomes irrelevant if people are natural. Less and less government will be needed. So, many people have investments and their fear looks right, logical, because man has been repressed for so many centuries that they are afraid that things may explode. Yes, for a few years, for one generation at least, there would be a great explosion. Then things will disappear.Bertrand Russell has written that when he was a child even the legs of chairs were covered with cloth. Legs, because they look sexual. And he says, “I had not seen any legs of a woman.” The garments had to be so long that you could not see. And Bertrand Russell says in those days people used to fantasize about legs, dream about legs. Even a dream about a leg was enough of an excitement, an ecstasy. Now nobody bothers about legs. Once you have seen men and women naked you stop worrying about, dreaming about, their nakedness. Dreams change.The world needs to be more natural. Then there will be less anxiety, less fear, less worry. But for a generation there would be a great explosion – after that, things would settle. We have to take that risk, only that risk can save humanity. Otherwise everybody is going mad.The Tantra attitude about sex is that sex is not a need, it is a cosmic experience, it is an experience of meditation. It is an instinctual return to our ultimate reality, one of the highest forms of meditation. In fifteen minutes to an hour or more of uninterrupted coitus, Tantra seeks a complete loss of the ego. Just see the difference. Freud says it is a gratification for the ego, and that’s what it has become. Freud is not wrong. If you see the modern man, he is right.People go on making love just to prove that they are males or females, or what charming people they are, beautiful people they are. People go on finding new women, new men, just to prove that “I am still attractive.” My observation of people is that they don’t fall in love. Their joy is not love, their joy is conquest. Once they have achieved a woman they are no longer interested in her. It is not love. Now they are seeking new pastures, now they want a new woman. Now they want to prove again that they are still young, looked at, that they still have charisma, magnetism. The more women they can make love with, the more the ego is satisfied. This is not love. And Freud is right that sex gives ego gratification.But look at Tantra. Tantra has a totally different idea. Tantra says the appeal of sex is that it gives you a moment of egolessness, timelessness, meditation. Because of ego gratification, sex has become very, very superficial, it only scratches the skin. It does not go deep, it has no depth. So many people are worried about premature ejaculation. The reason? – they don’t love. If they love, then naturally they can make love for longer periods – the more you are in love, the longer the period will be. For hours you can be in love because there is no hurry, the ego is not controlling.You can remain for hours in tantric coitus. It is a kind of melting with the woman or with the man; it is a kind of relaxation into each other’s being. And it is meditative because there is no ego, no thought stirs. And time stops. This is a glimpse of God. Tantra is the natural way to God, the normal way to God. The object is to become so completely instinctual, so mindless, that we merge with ultimate nature – that the woman disappears and becomes a door for the ultimate, the man disappears and becomes a door for the ultimate.This is the tantric definition of our sexuality: the return to absolute innocence, absolute oneness. The greatest sexual thrill of all is not a search for thrills, but a silent waiting – utterly relaxed, utterly mindless. One is conscious, conscious only of being conscious. One is consciousness. One is contented but there is no content to it. And then there is great beauty, great benediction.The questioner asks: “What is tantric sex…a sex which is a meditation based on certain techniques?” If you are too technique oriented you will miss the mystery of Tantra. It is pseudo-Tantra that is based on techniques because if techniques are there, the ego will be there, controlling. Then you will be doing it – and doing is the problem, doing brings the doer. Tantra has to be a non-doing; it cannot be technical. You can learn techniques – you can learn a certain breathing so that coitus can become longer. If you breathe very, very slowly, if you breathe without any hurry, then coitus will become longer, but you are controlling. It will not be wild and it will not be innocent, and it will not be meditation either. It will be mind – how can it be meditation? The mind will be controlling. You cannot even breathe fast, you have to keep your breathing slow – if the breathing is slow then ejaculation will take a longer time, because for ejaculation to happen the breathing has to be fast and chaotic. Now, this is technique but not Tantra.Real Tantra is not technique but love. Is not technique but prayer. Is not head oriented but a relaxation into the heart. Please remember this. Many books have been written on Tantra, they all talk about technique but the real Tantra has nothing to do with technique. The real Tantra cannot be written about, the real Tantra has to be imbibed. How to imbibe real Tantra? You will have to transform your whole approach.Pray with your woman, sing with your woman, play with your woman, dance with your woman, with no idea of sex. Don’t go on thinking, “When are we going to bed?” Forget about it. Do something else and get lost into it. And someday love will arise out of that being lost, suddenly you will see that you are making love and you are not making it. It is happening, you are possessed by it. Then you have your first Tantra experience – possessed by something bigger than you. You were dancing or you were singing together or you were chanting together or you were praying together or meditating together, and suddenly you find you both have moved into a new space. And you don’t know when you have started making love; you don’t remember either. Then you are being possessed by Tantra energy. And then for the first time you will see a non-technical experience.When you are making love, don’t control. Go into uncontrol, go into chaos. It will be fearful, frightening, because it will be a kind of death. And the mind will say, “Control!” And the mind will say, “Jump in and keep control, otherwise you will be lost in the abyss of it.” Don’t listen to the mind, get lost. Abandon yourself utterly and without any technique and you will come to see a timeless experience. There will be no two in it: oneness. A consciousness will be there, a lucid passive consciousness will be there, you will know what is happening because you will be fully aware. But you will not be there; awareness will be there.You have to imbibe the Tantra spirit – it is not a technique to be learned.And the last question:Osho,If at this very moment I can become awakened or enlightened, why then do you allow all those chaotic brainwashing groups, group leaders and therapists to happen at the ashram and what connection is there between them and my enlightenment?No connection at all. But they destroy your “if.” They are needed just to make you alert that nothing is needed. And you can become aware only the hard way; you cannot become aware easily. You have been asleep so long; your slumber has been of centuries, of millennia. Those therapy groups simply hit hard on your head, they are a kind of hammering to destroy your if. Going through all those hard arduous trips, one day you will realize that nothing is needed, that enlightenment has not to be searched. That you lose the desire for enlightenment – that is their purpose.And the moment you don’t desire enlightenment, it is there. It comes when the desire disappears.Enough for today.

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-09/

The first question:Osho,What is turning inward?Turning inward is not a turning at all. Going inward is not a going at all. Turning inward simply means: you have been running after this desire and that, and you have been running and running and you have been coming again and again to frustration; each desire brings misery, there is no fulfillment through desire; you never reach anywhere, contentment is impossible. Seeing this truth, that running after desires takes you nowhere, you stop. Not that you make any effort to stop; if you make any effort to stop it is again running, in a subtle way. You are still desiring – maybe now it is desirelessness that you desire.If you are making an effort to go in, you are still going out. Any effort can only take you out, outward. All journeys are outward journeys, there is no inward journey. How can you journey inward? You are already there; there is no point in going. When going stops, journeying disappears, when desiring is no longer clouding your mind, you are in. This is called turning in. But it is not a turning at all, it is simply not going out. But in language it is always a problem to express these things.There is an ancient parable…It was a beautiful afternoon and a tortoise went for a walk on the land. He rested under sunlit trees and he roamed around in the bushes just for the delight of it. Then he came back to the pond.One of his friends, a fish, asked, “Where have you been?” and he said, “I went for a walk on the land.”The fish said, “What do you mean by ‘a walk on the land’? You must mean swimming.”And the tortoise laughed and he said, “No, it was not swimming, it was nothing like swimming. It was a walk on the solid land.”And the fish said, “Are you kidding or something? I have been to every place, you can swim everywhere. I have never seen a place where you cannot dive and swim. You are talking nonsense. Have you gone mad?”You understand the difficulty of the fish? She has never been on land; walking on land makes no sense. If the tortoise wants to make sense of his statement he will have to say, “I went swimming on the solid land.” Which will be absurd. But only the word swimming can be understood by the fish.A mind full of desires can only understand desire, hence the desire for God. It is absurd; you cannot desire God. God comes to you when desire leaves. The cessation of desire is the coming of God to you. Again, I am using the word coming, which is not true. God is already there – you only recognize when the desire has ceased. Nothing ever comes, nothing ever goes, all is as it is. That’s what Buddha means when he says: “Yatha bhutam – things are as they are.” Nothing has gone wrong, nothing needs to be put right. Things are as they are, and they always remain as they are. The trees are green and the roses are red and the clouds float in the sky. Everything is where it has always been, the way it has always been. That is the meaning of the word nature – yatha bhutam.But man has a capacity to dream, to desire; that capacity to dream is the problem. Then you start moving into the future, then you start planning for the future. You remain here, but your mind can move into the future. It is like a dream. You fall asleep in Pune but you can dream of Kolkata or Chicago or Washington or Moscow. You are here the whole night. In the morning you will not wake up in Moscow or Chicago, you will wake up in Pune. And then you will laugh, “I have been roaming too much.” While you were dreaming of Moscow you did not reach there, you remained here.You always remain here; here and now is the only reality, there is no other. But desire can create a dream and in desire you go on moving outward.Now, what does it mean to turn inward? The question is significant, it is very relevant. What does it mean to turn inward? – it means seeing the futility of desire, seeing the futility of dreaming, seeing the illusoriness of dreaming. In that very seeing, desire disappears. In that clarity, desire cannot exist. And when you are with no desire, you are in. Not that you have to turn in; not that first you have to stop desiring, then you have to turn in. The cessation of desire is the turning, the transformation – what Jesus calls metanoia, the conversion. Suddenly another gestalt opens; it was there, but you were not aware of it because you were too obsessed with desire. The desire for money, the desire for power, the desire for prestige, does not allow your meditation to bloom because the whole energy goes down the drain in desires.Once the energy is not moving anywhere… Remember, I repeat again, turning in is not moving in. When the energy is not moving at all, when there is no movement, when everything is still, when all has stopped – because seeing the futility of desire you cannot move anywhere, there is nowhere to go – stillness descends. The world stops. That’s what is meant by turning in. Suddenly you are in. You have always been there, now you are awake. The night is over, the morning has come, you are awake. This is what is meant by buddhahood – to become aware, awake, of that which is already the case.Remember Hakuin saying, “From the very beginning all beings are buddhas.” From the very beginning to the very end: in the beginning, in the middle, in the end, all are buddhas. Not for a single moment have you been anybody else. But the emperor is having a nightmare of becoming a beggar and is tortured by the nightmare.The second question:Osho,Is there an intellectual path to enlightenment?First, there is no path; the very idea of a path is fallacious. The path necessarily leads you away – the path necessarily takes you from this to that, from here to there, from now to then. There is no need for any path for enlightenment because enlightenment is being here. The path will be a distraction; all paths are distractions. Follow any path and you will be following a wrong path – there are no paths that are right paths.Let it sink deep in your heart: there are no right paths, paths as such are wrong. To be on a path is to be going in a wrong direction because you will be going away, and away from yourself. You are not really going away from yourself, but in desires, in dreams. That’s why all the religions have become otherworldly – they are all paths. It is needed that God should be far away, the farther the better, because then a path can be created. Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism: paths can be created. God has to be really far away – so far away that the path is non-ending and the priest can go on exploiting.In Dostoyevsky there is a parable…Jesus comes back after eighteen hundred years just to see how things are going now. And he thinks things must be going beautifully now because almost half the world is Christian. He appears in the marketplace of Bethlehem, people surround him and they laugh and they joke. And he feels a little embarrassed: “What is the matter? Why are they laughing?”He asks, and they say, “You look like Jesus – you have almost succeeded in looking like Jesus.”And he says, “But I am Jesus.”And they laugh even more. And they say, “Whoever you are, either you are a pretender or you are a madman. But escape from here. If the priest comes to know, you will be in difficulty.”It is Sunday; Jesus must have chosen Sunday, and the people are coming out of church. But he remains there under the tree waiting for the priest because he thinks, “If ordinary people cannot recognize me, at least my priest will recognize me.” The priest comes and he is so angry – angry in the same way as Jewish rabbis had been eighteen hundred years before. He pulls Jesus down and tells the people to take him into the church – this man seems to be either mad or dangerous, a pretender.Jesus cannot believe his own eyes. “My own priest… He had been preaching about my word just a few minutes ago.” And it is happening, the same drama is happening again. He starts feeling as if he is going to be crucified again. The priest takes him inside, locks him in a small cell and he wonders, sitting there, “Now what is going to happen? What type of Christians are these people? If they cannot recognize me, who are they going to recognize? And they have been waiting for me and continuously praying to me ‘Come back!’ and ‘We need you!’ And now I am here!” This seems to be unbelievable.The whole day he remains in the cell. In the middle of the night the priest comes with a lamp and he touches the feet of Christ and says, “I had recognized you. But I cannot recognize you in the marketplace. You are not needed anymore; we are doing your job so perfectly well. And you are a great disturbance – you have always been. You need not come, we are taking care of your business here.“Everything has settled and you will unsettle it and you will destroy everything that we have done down these eighteen centuries. It has been an arduous journey but now we are established. Almost the whole earth belongs to us. Every town has a church, and millions of missionaries and priests are roaming around the world converting everybody to Christianity. Sooner or later, by the end of this century, we will have converted the whole earth. You need not come – because you are a disturber, an ancient disturber. You will start saying dangerous things again and all our effort will be undone.“I recognize you in the darkness of the night. But in the morning, before people, I cannot recognize you. You had better escape otherwise I will have to crucify you.”Jesus Christ so close is dangerous to the priest, because then the priest is not needed at all. The mediator is not needed, the agent is not needed, the medium is not needed. When Christ is standing by your side there is no need for anybody to become a link. God has to be far away, very, very far away so the priest can play the role of becoming a messenger. So he can become the bridge between you and God.All paths are created by the priests. Buddhas have not given any path; they have given you an understanding that there is no need to go anywhere. Just be silent, just be in, and all is available to you. God is not outside, he is your inside. God is not an object, he is your subjectivity. God is you. So where are you going? What path is needed?No path is needed. No path is the right path.You ask, “Is there an intellectual path to enlightenment?” First, there is no path. And second, God cannot be recognized and realized by any of your parts, God can only be realized through your totality. Neither is there an intellectual path nor is there an emotional path, neither head nor heart. You come to God as a total being; all is included in it. Your intellect, your emotions, your logic, your love, your blood, your bones, your guts. Everything is included in it – you as a totality. But paths are bound to be fragmentary, no path can be total. So there are intellectual paths: in India they call them Gyana yoga, the path of knowledge. Then there are emotional paths: Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion. And then there are paths of action: Karma yoga.Man has three layers in his being: knowing, feeling, doing. Now, these three paths have evolved because of these three layers in man’s being. Intellect can know but cannot feel. Emotion can feel but cannot know. Action can do but cannot know, cannot feel. Knowledge cannot do, feeling cannot do. Man is this trinity, this triangle: action, knowledge, feeling and they all have to be integrated together in one unity. Only then do you know God.Not only has man divided man, man has divided God too – God the father, God the son, God the holy ghost. Or in Indian mythology, the trimurti – the three faces of God. God has no face; God is facelessness. God has no form, how can he have a face? God is not three; God is one. Even to say “one” is not right because one creates the idea of two, and two creates the idea of three, and on and on you go.God simply is: neither one nor three, neither one nor many. God is a simple is-ness. And when you are in your is-ness, you are God. Remember, you don’t come to see God, you don’t encounter God, you don’t come to realize “This is God.” When you come to God you are God. God is not something outside you but is your innermost core, is the center of the cyclone.So there is no path, first. And there are no intellectual or emotional or other kinds; there are no paths, you have to become a totality. In that very totality you become divine.Intellect can go on and on analyzing. It is dry, it is analysis, it is logic, it cannot feel. Through intellect, science is born. That’s why science cannot say God is. Science has to deny God. That denial comes because of its presuppositions; science believes only in reason, and it believes in a very detached reason. Your feelings should not come into it. You should remain aloof, detached, indifferent to whatever you are looking at. You should be just an observer, with no feeling, with no heart. Your heart should not beat; your knowledge should be devoid of feeling.Naturally science stumbles upon matter. Not that only matter is; science stumbles upon matter because of its methodology. The methodology is such that consciousness cannot be caught hold of. Consciousness is excluded from the very beginning, the method excludes it.For example, if you start seeing through the ears then you will stumble only upon sounds. You will not come to see flowers and colors and rainbows and the sun and the moon and the stars. And sooner or later you will conclude that only sounds exist, there are no flowers and there are no colors.Logic has given science. Love has given the so-called religions – the religions of yesterday, the religions that are no longer relevant. They were as partial as science. That’s why there was so much conflict between science and religion. That conflict was not accidental; the conflict was of methodology. Religion was basically emotional, of feeling. Logic was denied, reason was prohibited. Tears were okay, prayers were okay, but no intellect. The intellect was the enemy. So when science started growing, it was natural that the church and the religious people would be in conflict with it. The religion of yesterday was as partial as today’s science.Nobody has ever been able to see the human being in its totality. But that moment has come. Now man is no longer childish. That moment has come – the moment for that idea, the idea of totality, to be accepted has come. And when the moment for some idea comes, then nothing can prevent it. All partial efforts have failed. Science has failed, religion has failed, politics has failed – politics means action. They have all failed. In fact, partiality has failed.The East has suffered because it leaned too much toward the feeling part, hence the poverty, hence the misery, because science could not grow. And without science there is going to be poverty, without science there are going to be a thousand and one problems on the material plane. The West has developed technology. Poverty has disappeared, many illnesses have disappeared, it has been a blessing. But on the other hand, man has also disappeared. And man has turned into a machine. The heart is no longer functioning, love flows no more, the juice of feelings has dried up and man is becoming a desert. Man is feeling meaninglessness and is very close to committing suicide. Individuals have been committing suicide, their number grows every day. And sooner or later if balance is not brought, if partiality is not dropped and totality is not brought, there is every possibility man may commit a global suicide. There are great preparations for it.Love has disappeared from the West as logic has disappeared from the East. This is a lopsided situation. My approach is that of totality, of wholeness. And whatever is whole I call holy. With me, you have to learn this thing. You are not to choose one, you have to choose totality. You have to be a whole man. Nothing should be rejected. You should be whatever you are, with great acceptance. It is difficult to accept all because if you accept logic, it becomes contradictory to accept love. If you accept love, it feels difficult to accept logic. But what can you do? This is how things are. It is not a question of choice; it is how you are made, it is how existence functions.Existence is paradoxical and man has been carrying a very foolish, stupid idea that he has to be non-paradoxical. So when he chooses intellect he destroys feeling, because feelings don’t fit with intellect. But what is the need to fit? Or when he chooses feeling he becomes antagonistic to logic and reason. He becomes superstitious. Because then he feels afraid that if logic comes in, where will faith be? Then faith will be destroyed.But I tell you there is no need to be afraid. You can accept all. Just one thing has to be understood, that life is paradoxical. And life is richer the more paradoxical you are. If you can contain contradictions you will be vast. If you can contain contradictions you will have variety, you will have multiplicity in you, you will have all dimensions in you. And that will be the real birth of man.Man has yet to come, man is still a promise. We are just stumbling and groping for man to come. Man is not yet born, we are in the womb, hence so much anxiety. And it seems the day of birth is very close, hence so much crisis. For the first time man is going to be born – man in the sense of totality, in the sense of paradoxicalness. In the sense of vastness that contains contradictions. A man should be a poet and a man should be a lover and a man should be rational and a man should be active. A man should be all. And there is no problem in it. In fact if there is both logic and love, logic will support love and love will support logic. Your logic will never go dry, the juice of love will keep it green. It will have its green and red and gold. And if reason is there your love will never become a kind of insanity, it will retain a certain quality of reasonableness. It will not take you to extremes. You will remain in the middle, you will remain balanced and symmetrical.So there is no intellectual path, there is no emotional path. Wholeness, totality, is required. Nothing less than that will do. You have to take the risk of being total.The third question:Osho,Do you profess licentiousness in life?I don’t profess anything. I simply clarify things to you, I don’t profess. I am not giving you any ideology, I am only giving you insight. Take note of the difference. An ideology has to be professed, an insight has to be imparted. I simply make things clear to you, I simply help you to clarify things. I am not giving you a dogma. I am not giving you a theory that will solve all your problems – there is none. I am simply telling you: open your eyes, become more aware. And that awareness will help you in every kind of difficulty, in every kind of problem. That awareness will be like a light in the dark night. And wherever you go that light will remain with you, you will be able to see.I don’t give you a theory. You have depended too much on theories. Theories are cheap because they don’t require any transformation on your part. Dogmas are very easy to accept. Then you have an idea which you go on trying to fit everywhere in your life, and you start depending on the idea. That dependence on the idea makes you more and more blind. If you are a Christian you are blind, if you are a Hindu you are blind. If you believe in any dogma you are blind because only blind people believe.A blind man believes in light. But a man who has eyes does not believe in light, there is no need. He knows light – why should he believe? You don’t believe in light, you don’t believe in the sun, you don’t believe in these trees, you know. But a blind man believes that trees are green, that the rainbow has seven colors, that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, that there are colors in the world. A deaf man believes in sounds; you don’t believe. Belief is an ugly word.I help you to see. That’s what Buddha says: “Ihi passika – come and see.” You see the difference? Jesus says, “Come and follow me.” Buddha says, “Come and see.” Both are enlightened – but Jesus must be talking to a very low level of consciousness, he has to say, “Come and follow me.” “Follow me” means believe. Buddha must be talking to highly evolved conscious people, he says, “Come and see.” There is no question of following anything, there is no question of believing in anything. He just says, “I have seen – come and see through my eyes. Just come close to me and see through my window. Maybe that will give you an insight and you can open your own window.”I also say to you, “Ihi passika – come and see.” Seeing is a totally different matter. I don’t teach anything, I am not a teacher. In fact I destroy teachings. I don’t help you to learn anything, in fact I help you to unlearn. You have already learned too much.But the question is relevant. Many people interpret me in that way, they think I am professing licentiousness. I am neither professing licentiousness nor am I professing repression, I am simply helping you to see a saner way of life. Licentiousness is insane, as insane as repressiveness. They are two extremes and the mind always feels good to move from one extreme to another. It is like a pendulum. A pendulum goes on moving from one extreme to another extreme. And if you look deep into the pendulum, if you meditate on it, you will come upon many truths. One, when the pendulum is moving to the right it is gaining momentum to go to the left. When it is moving to the left it is gaining momentum to go to the right. It looks as if it is going to the left, but it is accumulating energy to go in just the opposite direction. Opposites depend on each other. And that’s how the human mind goes on moving.Christianity created a very repressive atmosphere in the West. That has created licentiousness. Your saints are responsible for your sinners. The world will never be without sinners unless it decides to be without saints. The saint creates the sinner, the saint cannot exist without the sinner. They are partners, they are together.The Vatican has some deep support for Playboy. If you are repressive, you will create pornography. If you are repressive, people will start finding ways and means to go to the other extreme, because normality is not allowed. Life has been forced to be either white or black – either be a saint or be a sinner. The priests have not allowed you the possibility that there is something else too. Life really is gray; it is neither black nor white. Black and white are two extremes of gray, but life remains gray.I am teaching neither licentiousness nor repressiveness. I am simply helping you to become sane. It is your life, it is nobody else’s life. And you have to be sane about it otherwise you will miss the great opportunity, the great blessing, the great gift of existence. Don’t be repressive, otherwise one day – in this life or in some other life – you will become licentious. And don’t be licentious, otherwise in this life or in some other life you will become repressive. The pendulum goes that way. The pendulum has to stop in the middle. And have you seen? – if the pendulum stops in the middle, the clock stops.When the mind stops in the middle, time stops; when the mind stops in the middle, the world stops. And in that silence one knows existence.But listening to me – and you are all carrying a thousand and one repressions – you listen through the screen of your repressions and you interpret that it is licentiousness. Your unconscious is too full of repressions. I am not teaching anything like that, I am simply saying to be a man is enough. You need not be a saint and then you will not need to be a sinner. Be natural. Don’t interfere with your nature, don’t mold it into patterns. Don’t be ideological and don’t be always hankering to be somebody else. Don’t hanker for betterment, just be natural and relax into your being. And whatever is natural is good.This is the meaning of Tao, this is the meaning of Zen. But you have your repressed unconscious and when you hear me, naturally you hear from the repressed unconscious. That repressed unconscious immediately gives colors, changes meanings, interprets.I have heard…A Cockney was in great difficulties over which of his two girlfriends he should marry. One was called Margaret and the other Maria. The first was rich but very ugly, and the second was poor but immensely beautiful. So he was divided. The head was saying, “Marry the rich girl and then you will have no problems. And what is ugliness? You will become accustomed to it. And even beauty is so fragile – today it is there, tomorrow it may not be there. And if you get even the most beautiful woman, after a few days you become accustomed to it and the beauty disappears. It is only a question of a few days. Marry the rich girl.” But the heart was longing for the beauty. And he was going nuts.A friend said to him, “Oh Bert, why don’t you go to Lourdes?”“Lourdes?” said Bert. “Where’s that?”“It’s in France,” said his friend. “It’s a sort of shrine where people go to get cured. But maybe you could find the answer to your problem there – you know, a sort of miracle from heaven!”So Bert saved up and went over to Lourdes. A week later he was back and his friend asked him how he had got on. “Great!” said Bert. “I got the answer all right. I went into the big church – and there, up at the altar, was a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes with a big banner next to it, saying ‘Ave Maria’.”So he married Maria, the beautiful girl.When you hear, it depends on you what color you will give it to it. You are already too full of repressions, you are ready to become licentious – so when you hear me you interpret it as licentiousness. It is nothing of the sort. Be very careful with me.I have heard…It was some time since Patrick and Michael had met, so Michael was anxious to hear if there had been any additions to Patrick’s family.“Not one,” answered Patrick very sadly. “We’ve still got the four.”“Still four?” said Michael. “Are you on birth control or something?”“Not exactly,” replied Patrick. “You see, it’s all to do with this new hearing aid.”“What do you mean – this new hearing aid?”“Well, you see, when Bridget and I would get to bed, I’d say to her ‘Darling, is it sleep or what?’ And Bridget would reply ‘What?’ And we would make love. But now, with this new hearing aid of hers, when I say to her ‘Well, dear, is it sleep or what?’ she just turns on her side and says ‘Sleep’ and off she goes.”That “what”… You already have an idea, and the interpretation follows. Listen to me directly, just put your mind aside.That’s why so many therapy groups are being run here: just to help you to put your mind aside. Just to help you to see your unconscious, to help you to cathart your unconscious, to vomit it. So that you can become more and more empty and can listen to me through your emptiness. Otherwise you are carrying so much rubbish, rubbish of the ages. You have been going through so many ideals, ideologies; you have accumulated so much nonsense. And when you hear me, that nonsense comes in between.I am neither for repression nor for license, they are both aspects of the same coin. The whole coin has to be thrown into the Ganges. You have to become natural, you have to accept all that you are. In that acceptance is flowering. All is good that existence has given to you. How can it be otherwise? It is a gift from existence.So listen to me not through your thoughts, your prejudices. Listen to me without your prejudices, just put the mind aside. While listening to me don’t go on interpreting, while listening to me get en rapport with me. Don’t be in a hurry to conclude; that hurry is harmful. You are in such a hurry to conclude, you want to achieve some results so fast, that’s why you go on missing many things. There is no hurry and there is no need to conclude right now. While listening to me, first listen totally. And then later on you can think about it. If you have listened rightly, your thoughts will not be able to distort the meaning, they will not be able to distract you. Once you have listened rightly without any interpretation, without any thinking about it, then later on you can bring your whole mind to it. There will be no problem, you will have followed what I have said to you.Otherwise while listening to me you are continuously thinking by the side. While you are listening to me you are thinking – many thoughts are going, rushing in and out. They are very, very dangerous. Whatever conclusion you arrive at through them will be your conclusion, will not be mine. But it feels good to throw the responsibility on me. You have become so disrespectful toward yourself that you always throw the responsibility on somebody else. You have forgotten that you are responsible to yourself. Only you. All that happens to you and all that is going to happen to you is going to happen through you. You are wholly and solely responsible for your life. Nobody else is the savior.And you cannot throw your responsibilities on me. If you want to be licentious, be licentious. I am nobody to interfere – who am I? If you want to be repressive, be repressive. But don’t impose meanings on what I say.The fourth question:Osho,When you are gone, how can sannyas avoid becoming just another empty church? Is there anything that can be done about it besides that you will be coming back?I am not coming back. About that you must be absolutely certain: I am not coming back. That is also a hope through which you would like to postpone, through which you would like to create a future so that you can go on avoiding the present. I am not coming. If you want to have any contact with me, you have to make it this moment; nobody knows about tomorrow, I may not be here. And I am not coming back. Don’t be tricky with me. You have been tricky with Jesus and Buddha and everybody. You go on hoping that Jesus is coming, he will come and he will deliver you. Why should he come to deliver you?Can’t you stand on your own feet? Can’t you become responsible for yourself? If you are not responsible for yourself, you will not have any soul because the soul arises only by taking responsibility. Responsibility is of immense value, it gives you integration.And why are you worried? “When you are gone, how can sannyas avoid becoming just another empty church?” Why should it avoid? And how can it avoid? There is no need – when I am gone it will be an empty church.This is a trick again. You would like the empty church to still give you protection and shelter. You would like the empty church to help you believe that it is not empty. That’s what goes on. Jesus is gone; the day he left, the day he was crucified, Christianity also died with him – not only Christ. How can there be Christianity without Christ? It is a deception. How can there be Buddhism without Buddha? When the flower is gone, the fragrance is gone.You don’t ask a rosebush, “When your roses are gone, how can we make the bush go on appearing as if the roses have not gone? The bush will look empty, how can we avoid it?” Yes, you can avoid it. You can go to the marketplace and purchase plastic flowers and hang those plastic flowers on the rosebush. That’s what your popes are, plastic flowers. The rose is gone, the rose died. And all real roses have to die. Only the unreal ones don’t die. Plastic flowers can remain forever, they have a kind of eternity and permanence. Real flowers can’t have that permanence otherwise they will be plastic.The real flower is born in the morning, will have its day. Will whisper with the winds, will release its fragrance, will have a dialogue with the sun and the birds, and by the evening will be gone. And that’s how real flowers should be. It cannot go on, go on; then it will be a corpse.Why should you be worried? When Buddha is gone, Buddha is gone. When Christ is gone, Christ is gone. But there is a reason why you ask the question. You cannot be here with me, you cannot be here with me right now. You would like a promise from me that I will be coming back, that the church will remain alive. If I am not there it will still be alive. My representatives will be there, I will appoint popes and they will be there and they will go on guiding you, so that you need not worry about me. If I am gone, nothing is gone – something will be available.No, I want it absolutely clear, I want it to be recognized absolutely that when I am gone, I am gone. And the church will be empty. And I am not going to appoint anybody. How can you appoint anybody? – buddhas are not appointed. And nobody can represent me. How can anybody else represent me? I don’t represent anybody, how can anybody else represent me? The church will be empty. So if you want to have something from me, if you want the transmission from me, if you want to enkindle your life through me, if you want to partake of my fire and my passion, don’t postpone.You ask: “When you are gone, how can sannyas avoid…?” There is no need to avoid; all avoidance is dangerous. That’s what Christianity has been doing for two thousand years. Avoiding the fact that Jesus is gone, that the church is empty, putting plastic Jesuses instead. Trying to believe that he is still there. He is not there, he cannot be there.So there is no need to avoid, the church will become empty. Before it becomes empty, enjoy it. Before it becomes empty, pray in it. Before it becomes empty, drink of it, partake of it.“Is there anything that can be done about it…?” Nothing can be done and nothing should be done because all that will be wrong. That’s how religions die and become sects, that’s how everything becomes false. No more of that. I am here, you are here, why bother about the future? I am knocking on your heart: listen to it right now. And you are asking, “When you are gone, who will be knocking at my heart?” I am knocking already and you are not listening and you are planning for the future: “When you are gone who will knock at my heart?”I am knocking. Listen to it.But you want to avoid me. You see the danger so you postpone. You say, “Tomorrow. But will you be there tomorrow to knock on me? And if you are not there, who will knock at my door?” Tomorrow never comes. Only fools live in tomorrows. The wise person, the intelligent person, lives in this very moment. He knows no other time. He neither lives in the past nor in the future, he neither goes into memories nor into the imagination. He lives this small moment; and this small moment is all, it contains eternity.The fifth question:Osho,I feel stuffed with my stinginess – and still I hoard. Why?The question is from Amida. You must be feeling empty. And you are not yet courageous enough to accept that emptiness. Hence one goes on stuffing in many ways. People stuff with food, people stuff with knowledge, and people stuff with many things: money, power… Deep inside everybody is empty. And that emptiness is divine, that emptiness is God. Buddha calls it shunyata – nothingness. Sooner or later one has to come to terms with that inner emptiness.There are only two types of people, the worldly and the otherworldly. The worldly is one who goes on stuffing the emptiness. And the otherworldly is one who comes to see the point that there is no way to stuff it. It remains empty. So why not face it? Why not be it? Why not accept it? In that very acceptance, the revolution, the radical transformation, the metamorphosis.That is the whole art of meditation. But people are afraid – the emptiness looks like death. So what should I suggest to Amida? – I will suggest: stuff a little more, hoard a little more. Go on stuffing, so that you can see the foolishness of it. It seems you have not yet been able to see that the emptiness is eternal and cannot be stuffed with anything. Go on in this nightmare a little more, make it more nightmarish. People change only from the extreme.It seems Amida has been doing the thing moderately, only lukewarm. The jump comes only from the hundred-degree point. Go on stuffing as much as you can. Put your whole energy into stuffing. In that very stuffing a moment comes when you see clearly that the emptiness is eternal, that the emptiness is your very nature, that there is no way to stuff it. You can forget it for a moment by stuffing, but it remains there and asserts itself again and again.Seeing that, stuffing stops – not that you stop it. Seeing that, stuffing stops. And suddenly the benediction of emptiness spreads all over you. To be empty is to be divine. To be empty is to have come home. But do a little more.I have heard a beautiful story…A man came to see his rabbi to ask his advice. He said, “Oh rabbi, my life is so miserable. I have a small house, just one room, and it is much too crowded. There are my wife and myself, our twelve children, her old parents and mine, my deaf uncle and my crippled sister. I cannot pay for a bigger house. What to do?”The rabbi thought for a while and said, “Do you have any animals?”“Yes,” said the man. “There are five goats, three cows, ten chickens, two cats, two horses, and a dog.”Said the rabbi: “Bring them all into your house and let them live there for a week.”The man was very puzzled, but since he respected his rabbi very much he went and did as he was told. Life became a nightmare. He had to sleep while standing, it was so crowded. And it was so impossible to breathe, it was stinking. He ran to the rabbi after a week completely crazy, and the rabbi said, “I see that you have done what I told you. Very good. Now go home and take all the animals out. You will be surprised to see how much space is there now!”Amida, do that.Enough for today?

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

This Very Body the Buddha 01-10Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This Very Body the Buddha 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-very-body-the-buddha-10/

The first question:Osho,Is there any proof for God?I am. You are. Everybody is. God is nothing but the totality. The trees are, the rivers are, the mountains are. These are the proof. The sun rises in the morning and the moon is in the night and the stars. These are the proof. The flowers and the butterflies and the grass, these are the proof.God is not a syllogism. God is not a conclusion. God is an experience of beauty, of truth, of good, of consciousness. Where are you looking for the proof? Your very being is the only proof. The seeker is the sought. God resides in you as you. God is a tree in a tree and a dog in a dog and a man in a man. God is all these things. God is this whole.But you want an intellectual conclusion; you will go on missing God. There is no proof – in that sense there is no proof. There has never been a proof in that sense. And the people who have been supplying proof for God simply don’t know what they are doing. The people who have tried to argue for God are the people who don’t know God. Otherwise they wouldn’t argue. It is better to sing if you know God, it is better to dance if you know God, it is better to laugh if you know God. It is better to weep, cry, if you know God, rather than to argue.Philosophers have been arguing about God, both for and against. And philosophers are the farthest from God. Because the more you become entangled in words, the more you become obsessed with theories, systems of thought, the farther away you are from life itself. And God is life.The second question:Osho,So many dishes in the ashram kitchen contain onions. Remembering that Raman Maharshi said to avoid chilies, excess of salt, onions, et cetera, I am struck with the question: is the kitchen sabotaging our possibilities of enlightenment?That’s my whole work here: to sabotage all your possibilities of enlightenment. If your desire for enlightenment is not sabotaged you will never become enlightened.But don’t be angry at the poor onions, they are innocent people. And they are as spiritual as you are and far deeper in meditation than you can ever be. And I don’t believe that a man of the understanding of Raman Maharshi would have said this, but if he has said it then he must be joking.But the so-called spiritual people have been obsessed with such things. The so-called spiritual people are obsessed with absolute nonsense. Now, how can the onion or the chilies or the salt prevent you from becoming enlightened? Stupid idea. Rather than looking deeply into your being, and rather than facing real problems, you create false problems. These are false problems. This is a strategy of the mind so that the real problems can be bypassed. The real problem is not onions, it is greed. The real problem is not chilies, it is anger. The real problem is not salt, it is possessiveness. The real problem is not what you should eat and what you should not eat. The real problem is what you should be.To avoid real problems we create false problems. And there is something beautiful about false problems: they can be solved, easily solved. What is the problem? You stop eating onions and you become spiritual and you are enlightened because you don’t eat onions – so simple. But not to be greedy will be difficult, arduous. Not to be an egoist is going to be an uphill task, you will need immense understanding. You will need great awareness. Only in the fire of awareness will real problems be burned.You know you cannot solve those real problems. So the best way is, create false bogus problems and start solving them. This is one of the most basic tricks of the human mind.For example, India is suffering for centuries because of poverty. And Morarji Desai thinks prohibition will solve the problem. Now this is a false problem – prohibition has nothing to do with it. Prohibition or no prohibition, the poverty will remain. The poor will become even more miserable, that’s all, because through alcohol sometimes he can forget his suffering, sometimes he can drown himself. Once prohibition is there he will not have even that possibility to drown himself. Then he will be in utter suffering.Or, Morarji Desai thinks if cows are not murdered, if cows are not butchered, then all problems will be solved. These are tricks of the mind. And this is how one can go on befooling oneself for centuries.India suffers because of these false prophets. And false prophets are those who tackle false problems. First they create a problem then they start solving it. And they make much fuss about it and they seem to be too active. If they fail, certainly nothing is achieved. If they succeed, then too nothing is achieved. But one thing, they can camouflage the real problem. They can focus your attention on something false, like a toy. It looks a real problem, it is not.Now, look into it. How can onions prevent you becoming meditative? How can onions prevent you from becoming silent? There is not a problem there. But you want to be spiritual and you want to be known as spiritual, you start doing foolish things.In my new commune I am going to have a bar also and a smoking room. If tea can become a ceremony, why not smoking? If people can drink tea and make it a meditative process, so smoking can be. I am not saying you should smoke, I am not saying you should drink, but I am saying that these are not the things that prevent you from becoming spiritual. Jesus used to drink, Gurdjieff used to drink. That has not prevented them from becoming enlightened.Remember, anything that prevents you from becoming enlightened is your mind, your thought process, nothing else. And there is the real task – how to drop the thought process. Because you feel impotent there you create small problems: how to eat only once a day, how to eat without salt, how to eat without ghee, how to eat this way or that way. Jaina monks eat standing. If you eat sitting, enlightenment is sabotaged. Jaina monks eat only once a day. If you eat twice, enlightenment is sabotaged.One Jaina monk came to see me and he said, “Eating twice is not good.” I said, “Eating once?” He said, “Eating once is okay.” I told him “Half the enlightenment is sabotaged.”Enlightenment does not come in parts; either it comes whole or it doesn’t come. If twice a day is dangerous, once a day is fifty percent dangerous. You can eat thrice a day, it makes no difference. I am not saying eat thrice a day, because it is not going to help you to become enlightened either. It does not affect you this way or that; it is irrelevant.Don’t bring irrelevancies into your spirituality otherwise you will become obsessed with fads. And those fads are a kind of insanity, psychosis.But these people become mahatmas; Morarji Desai is a mahatma. He does not drink wine but he drinks his own urine. And that’s perfectly good, that helps enlightenment. He would like everybody to drink his urine, that seems to be the cure for all the illnesses of this country. I think it is time he should graduate and go to the ultimate mahatmahood, he should start eating his… And that will solve the food problem.People become faddists and it simply shows some neurosis, some psychopathology is in it. Sixty years ago he came to know that a young man, completely drunk, had tried to rape his sister. That has been his antagonism against alcohol. Now this has to be understood. Even in his antagonism against alcohol, sex is somehow involved. And drinking one’s own urine – he needs Freudian psychoanalysis. There must be some sexual repression in it; it is somehow an obsession with sexuality. And for almost fifty years he has been trying to remain a celibate. Now, too much concern creates all kinds of problems. Nothing is solved, more problems are created. But people will think he is a mahatma.I would not like you to become a mahatma. If you can become simple innocent human beings that is more than is required. Eat whatever feels good to you. Take care of the body, be respectful of the body. Be respectful how much you eat, don’t overburden the body because that is a kind of anger, violence. And violence is so subtle that you have to watch it. When a person goes on stuffing himself he is being violent with his own body, he is being destructive. Or he can go on a fast, then again he is violent. Just see the point of it: you can eat too much and you can be violent, and you can fast and you can be violent. Eating or fasting is not the question – don’t be violent.Love your body, respect your body, it is God’s shrine.But it is very easy to move from too much stuffing to fasting because the mind always easily moves from one extreme to another, from one obsession to another. First you go on stuffing your body and hurting it, loading it unnecessarily. Then one day you turn against it, you become the enemy of the body as if it has been the body’s fault. Then you start fasting, and again you start torturing your body. But it is violence. Violence is so deep in man that you have to watch it continuously, otherwise it will come from some other way.Morarji Desai goes to other countries… He is against inoculation, any kind of inoculation. Now this is violent. He can carry diseases from this country to another country and he can bring diseases from another country to this country. But he insists. And he is a nonviolent man, a great follower of Mahatma Gandhi. But this is being very violent, disrespectful to people. Now this single man can create problems for a whole country. In fact he should not be welcome in any country of the world.One can be violent in a very subtle way. Watch it.If you don’t like onions it is perfectly good, don’t eat them. But you need not condemn them. And if others like them, you need not think they are unspiritual or something. Don’t become spiritual so easily, don’t depend on such bogus things. Spirituality has only one taste and that is of awareness. Onion or no onion, chilies or no chilies, salt or no salt, spirituality has only one taste, the taste of awareness. Stick to it. And don’t get distracted by small things.The third question:Osho,I feel very joyous after your morning talk and Sufi dancing but I cannot reconcile it with the misery of the people I see when I step out of the ashram. What to do?It is there, the misery is there. But there is no need to reconcile. My whole teaching is to be total wherever you are. Listening to me if you are feeling joyous, feel totally joyous. Dancing in the ashram, participating in Sufi dance or meditating, if you are ecstatic be totally ecstatic. When you go outside and the misery is there and ugliness is there and beggars are there and poverty is there and illness is there, be totally miserable there.The only thing to be remembered is totality. Seeing a beggar, cry. If you can do something, do. If you cannot do anything you can hold his hand, you can sit by his side. You can feel, you can watch. And you can keep remembering that you should not do anything to make people poor.There is no need to reconcile. Reconciliation will mean you have found a way to console yourself. For example you can fall upon the theory of karma. You can say this man is suffering because of his karma. Now you are reconciled, now you need not worry about it, you need not go into it; it is none of your business. He is suffering from his karma. That’s what Indians have been doing down the ages. A poor man is suffering from his karma, he has to suffer, he has done something wrong in his past lives. This is a punishment; he should not do such a thing again. Then you are no longer disturbed by it, then you think you are not a part to his misery.No, I will not say that. We are all part, we are all together here. No man is an island, we make one vast continent. We are involved with each other. If you are happy, the world that surrounds you is involved in your happiness. If you are miserable, the world that surrounds you is involved in your misery. We are not separate.So, when seeing misery outside, feel miserable. Why think of reconciliation? Nothing is wrong in being miserable if you can remember only one thing: be totally miserable. Then inside the ashram or outside the ashram you will have one thing common – that is totality. And that is what is needed. When you cry, cry totally. When tears come to your eyes don’t be a miser, then don’t hold them back. Overflow in them, let them take your whole being, let them possess you. While dancing, dance totally possessed, mad. When laughing, let there be laughter. But be total.One thing more: India and the Indian people suffer because of their stupid notions. Feel sorry for them. Down the ages the so-called religious people have been preaching poverty; that is the root cause. They have been praising poverty like anything, as if poverty is a value in itself. Poverty is not a value in itself; discomfort is not a value in itself; inconvenience is not a value in itself. Illness, disease, is not a value. But down the ages the so-called Indian mahatmas have been preaching to people that poverty has a spiritual value. If you are poor, you are spiritual; if you are rich, you are materialist.That’s why Indians go on saying that Americans are materialists because they are rich. To be rich and to be materialist is synonymous to the Indian mind. And Indians are spiritual because they are poor. To be poor and to be spiritual is synonymous. This is absurd. A man can be poor and materialist, and a man can be rich and religious and spiritual.According to me, the rich man has more possibilities to be religious than the poor man. He can afford religion. The poor man cannot even think about it. The poor man is bound to be materialist. The rich man has the possibility to get out of materialism – because he has seen it all, he has experienced it all, and he has come to recognize that it doesn’t give the thing that you are searching for, that it doesn’t fulfill, that the aching heart remains aching, that the emptiness in the spirit remains the same. No riches can fill it, no riches can give you the feeling of fulfillment and flowering. Only the rich man can know the absurdity of richness. The poor man cannot know; he still hopes, he still has much to arrange.Only in a really rich world will religion become a universal phenomenon. In a poor world the only religion that can have any appeal is communism. No other religion can have any other appeal.If you look down deeply into the Indian mind you will find it absolutely materialistic. I have been watching, observing, it is one of the most materialistic minds in the world. The reason is its poverty. But the problem is that the whole heritage supports poverty, the whole heritage has been praising poverty. That’s why I am an outsider here, a stranger. There is a rift between me and the Indian mind because I don’t support his heritage. I cannot support it. I am not violent – how can I support his heritage? It is his heritage that has made him poor. I am against his past, I want him to drop his whole past. And unless the Indian consciousness is freed from its past the poverty is going to remain, the suffering is going to remain.So, the only thing you can do is to help people to understand that they have to get rid of their past. Their whole stubborn attitude has become their imprisonment. If you are against riches you will not produce riches, obviously. If you are against riches you will not create technology that can produce riches. If you are against wealth you may desire deep down to be wealthy but your very attitude will prevent you. You will go on doing things which will keep you poor. And the problem is, if you support the heritage of the Indian mind then you support his poverty. And the Indian mind will follow you.Now, look: Morarji Desai goes on saying that the only way to prevent the population explosion is to teach people celibacy. Not birth control – celibacy. Now, through celibacy the population explosion cannot be prevented. But this appeals to the Indian mind; the Indian mind will say, “This is right” because the support is there in all the scriptures for celibacy, brahmacharya.They are bound to be against me. I support birth control, I support abortion – they are bound to be against me. Abortion? A spiritual man cannot support abortion. People come to me and they say, “You support abortion? You support murder? Abortion is murder.” I say to them: “You know the soul is immortal, so how can murder happen? Have you forgotten Krishna and his Bhagavadgita? He says to Arjuna ‘You can kill all these people. Nobody is ever killed because the soul is immortal.’”Now, if I support abortion, if I support birth control, I am not spiritual. Obviously I am not, in their definition. It is not accidental that the Indian mind feels an antagonism toward me. It is very simple for me not to antagonize them, but then I will be their enemy. You see the paradox? The problem is, if I love them I have to antagonize them. But then they will not come to me. If I don’t love them then I can go on supporting their ideas. Then they will come in thousands, millions will come. But then I will be their enemy. Then I will be keeping their poverty, their suffering, their ugliness.So I know that when you go out you have to face an ugly world. Whatever you can do, do. If you cannot do anything, you can cry and weep, you can help people. That’s my message to my sannyasins: always go to the roots. I am not saying to you to give money to the beggar because that is not going to help. Money has been given down the ages, that has not helped. In fact it has made beggary rooted in the soil. I am not saying give money to the beggar, I am not saying don’t give money to the beggar. That is irrelevant. Whether you give or not, it is not going to help. Giving the money may help you – you will find a reconciliation; you have done something. You will feel good. You can go to the Blue Diamond and fall asleep feeling good, saintly, holy, that you have done something. But that is not going to help.And I am not saying don’t give money. But remember, that is not going to help. If you feel good it is perfectly good to feel good.But the real thing that is going to help is enlightened people. Help them to see why they are miserable. They have made a religion out of poverty. It is not because of their past karmas that they are suffering; it is because of their past philosophies that they are suffering. It is not that in their past life they committed murder and suicide and robbery so they are suffering. It is simply that their whole past they have been taught poverty. Poverty has been praised so much.These questions come to me. Just the other day there was a question: Why do I use an Impala car? I also think about it. Why do I use an Impala car? – because I don’t have a Rolls Royce, that’s why! I understand you feel for me.But my whole approach is different than the so-called spiritual mind. It is not spiritual to me. Life has to be lived as beautifully as possible, and poverty is not a value, and discomfort is not spirituality.But this is the problem. People who are poor would like to see me also in the same discomfort; then they will feel happy. And if I am in the same discomfort, naturally I have to praise the discomfort. That is the only way to remain in discomfort, you have to praise it. You have to make much of it, that you are doing something great.If you look healthy, if you look beautiful, if you look graceful, if you live a natural life, then people are not happy. Then what are you doing? Then you are an ordinary man. Let me repeat: to be utterly ordinary is to be spiritual. To be utterly ordinary is the meaning of spirituality to me. To try to be extraordinary is an ego trip. How you manage it, that is a different thing, but to try to be extraordinary is to be on an ego trip.Relax. Here, feel as joyous as you can. I am trying to create an alternative world, a small world. But beyond the gate the old world exists. You will be going there and you will have to encounter it. And in fact when you really start feeling joyous, you see the misery more because the contrast exists. Ordinarily you may not be so aware of the misery. Indians are not so aware of the misery – they have lived in it, they are accustomed to it. When Westerners come they feel it more.I overheard two American travelers at Mumbai’s Santa Cruz Airport. And one said to the other, “Look! They have bread too.” They must have been thinking that India is so poor that there is no bread, no butter, nothing. He was surprised to see bread. “Look! They have bread too.”When you come from the West, from affluent societies, it is natural for you to become more aware of the poverty, of the degradation that this society exists in. Then you come to me, and here the whole effort is to create a climate of celebration. You start feeling very joyous, flowing. With that joy and with your Western consciousness, moving outside is difficult, I understand. Everything hurts, everything is an eyesore.But reconciliation is not possible. We have to accept it. The only thing that is possible is, feel. Feel the misery. And help people to get rid of their dangerous poisonous past. Only then someday there is a possibility that people will not be so miserable.The fourth question:Osho,How to see what is my will and what is God's will?There is a Chinese saying: man is a puppet when he acts, a poet when he describes. All you think of as your freedom is nothing but your poetry. An unconscious man cannot be free, cannot have any freedom. Freedom comes as a consequence of consciousness, freedom is the function of consciousness. An unconscious man exists like a machine, like a robot. You may not know it, but you are continuously functioning as a robot.Somebody abuses you and anger arises. It is almost like when you push a button and a fan starts moving. Somebody pushes a button and you become angry. What kind of freedom is this? You don’t have any choice to be angry or not to be angry. If the choice is not there, there is no freedom. Freedom means freedom to choose. You can decide whether to be angry or not, then you are free. But can you decide? At the most you can decide to show your anger or not – that is another thing. But have you got any decision, any choice, to be angry or not to be angry?The moment somebody pushes your button you are angry instantly, not a single moment is lost. You may not show it, that is another thing. You may control, repress, that is another thing. But anger has flashed in your being and about that you have no choice. You function like a machine.A parable…Once upon a time there was a magnet, and in its close neighborhood lived some steel filings. One day, two or three little filings felt a sudden desire to go and visit the magnet, and they began to talk of what a pleasant thing it would be to do. Other filings nearby overheard their conversation, and they too became infected with the same desire. Still others joined them, till at last all the filings began to discuss the matter, and more and more their vague desire grew into an impulse.“Why not go today?” said one of them, but others were of the opinion that it would be better to wait till tomorrow.Meanwhile without their having noticed it, they had been involuntarily moving nearer to the magnet, which lay there quite still, apparently taking no heed of them. And so they went on discussing, all the time insensibly drawing nearer to their neighbor. The more they talked, the more they felt the impulse growing stronger, till the more impatient ones declared that they would go that day, whatever the rest did. Some were heard to say it was their duty to visit the magnet, and that they ought to have gone long ago.And while they talked, they moved always nearer and nearer, without realizing that they had moved. Then at last the impatient ones prevailed, and with one irresistible impulse the whole body cried out “There is no use waiting. We will go today. We will go now. We will go at once.” And then in one unanimous mass they swept along, and in another moment were clinging fast to the magnet on every side.Then the magnet smiled – for the steel filings had no doubt at all that they were paying that visit of their own free will.Unconscious, you don’t have any will. Unconscious, you don’t have any freedom. So don’t think about it. You ask, “How to see what is my will and what is God’s will?” You have none. God is the magnet and you are the filings.But you go on believing that you have your will, you go on believing that this is your choice. That you have chosen this woman to be your wife. Think about it again, remember this parable. Have you chosen this woman? Or was it just an accident? Have you chosen? Was there really any choice in it? Or had you been a victim of a certain impulse called love? Was it possible for you not to choose? Was it your decision? Then you will see that it has not been so. Whatever has happened in your life has happened more or less accidentally. And don’t laugh at those iron filings – that is the situation of humanity.But you can rise out of your unconsciousness. Then you will have will. But you will not be there, you will disappear. Because in consciousness you cannot remain, you can remain only in unconsciousness. Now let me make it clear: when you are, you have no will. In unconsciousness the ego exists, but there is no will. In consciousness the will exists, but the ego disappears. Then there is no point in asking “…my will and God’s will?” Then there is no distinction between you and God. You are God and God is you.The whole problem can be reduced to a simple thing: to be conscious or not to be conscious.Unconscious man exists without any will. He only dreams that he has a will. With consciousness, the ego starts disappearing on one hand, and on another hand, the will arises. But it will not be your will, it will be always God’s will. Then what is the difference between the unconscious man and the conscious man? The difference is, it is always God’s will. The unconscious man thinks, “It is my will” and the conscious man knows “I am not, only God is.”The fifth question:Osho,Is it possible to become a fool by being here for a longer period? I sometimes feel a lack of logic in my mind.It is not only possible, it is certain; you will become a fool. But foolishness has its own wisdom. You will become a fool and wise together. The so-called wise who are never foolish are not really wise because wisdom is paradoxical. Wisdom is not only serious, it is playful too. And foolishness is playfulness. Wisdom is not only intellectual knowledge, it is existential celebration. Wisdom is not cerebral – it is not of the head, it is of the total being. And the total being has emotions, sentiments, feelings, and the total being is far bigger than the poor small intellect.Whatever goes beyond intellect, the intellect says is foolishness: “Beware – don’t move, don’t take another step, otherwise you will become a fool.” So people remain confined in the intellect, they remain knowledgeable but they never become wise.A wise man is playful. He can afford to be foolish; he is so much in trust with life. He has no need to prove himself always wise, he has no need to convince others that “I am always wise.” That need exists only because you are afraid of your foolishness. The really wise is one who is relaxed. Yes, he can play like a fool, he can laugh like a fool.Just think of Christ, think of Lao Tzu, think of Bodhidharma. These people are really wise people, but they can act foolishly. Lao Tzu has said, “Everybody seems to be so wise except me.” And he is the wise man. Lao Tzu says, “Everybody seems to be so confident and I am so hesitant. Everybody seems to be so clear about life and I am so unclear, surrounded by a cloud.”What is he saying? He is saying that clarity with no clouds in it is a poor clarity, because it will not have any mystery in it. Without mist, how can you have mystery? It will be plain, superficial, hollow, it will not have any depth.Have you not heard that in ancient days every king’s court used to have a fool, for a certain reason – so that the fool keeps a balance. Otherwise all the viziers and the prime ministers are so knowledgeable they will create a lopsidedness. A fool was needed, a perfect fool was needed. The fool was a must. If modern governments behave foolishly, the reason is that the fool has disappeared. Jimmy Carter needs a fool in the cabinet, a special department for the fool must be there – who can bring people to laughter, who can disperse seriousness, who can make you like children. Who can make you aware of the mystery of life; that it is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.There is a famous story about Mulla Nasruddin. The emperor was talking to him, and the emperor said, “I have decided to destroy all untruth from my country.” Nasruddin laughed. The emperor asked, “Why are you laughing?”Nasruddin said, “This is foolish. Nobody can destroy untruth because untruth and truth exist together. If you destroy untruth, truth will be destroyed, sir. They are like day and night.”But the king was a logician. He said, “What nonsense you are talking! They don’t exist together. Truth is against untruth, they are enemies. I have decided, and you will see that I will destroy untruth. From tomorrow morning, every day I am going to hang one man who is found to be lying. He will be hanged in the marketplace so the whole capital knows. Every day a man will be hanged so that people become afraid.”Nasruddin asked, “Where are you going to find that man?”The king said, “At the city gate. I will be there at the city gate and if anybody lies, immediately he will be caught.”Nasruddin said, “Then I will see you tomorrow at the city gate.”And the first man who entered was Nasruddin on his donkey. The king asked, “Nasruddin, where are you going?”He said, “To the gallows.”Now, he has created a problem. If you send him to the gallows, he has asserted the truth and a true man has been killed. If you don’t send him to the gallows then he has asserted a lie, but you… Now what to do?Nasruddin said, “I am here, sir. Now do whatever you want. I am going to the gallows!”The king bowed down. He said, “You are true. Life is so vast that logic cannot contain it.”Don’t be afraid. Become a fool, and a totally new kind of wisdom will arise out of it that comes only to fools. Logic in itself is not very logical; reason alone is not very reasonable. Reason must have some space for unreason and logic must have some space for love. And your seriousness must be colored by playfulness. Then you have your total being. Then you are dark and light, summer and winter, life and death.That totality brings joy.The sixth question:Osho,If, as you say, one is responsible for oneself, and no path is necessary, why is it necessary for sannyasins to wear a uniform dress color, to wear a mala with your picture and to bear a name chosen by you?There is no path. If you understand that, there is no need to go on any path, my path included. But if you don’t understand that, if that revelation does not make you enlightened immediately… I am ready to make you enlightened right now. But you say, “Wait, sir. I am not ready right now. Tomorrow.” Then you will have to become a sannyasin. And then the whole nonsense follows.It is your responsibility. I am ready to make you enlightened this very moment, unconditionally. Then there is no need for the change of name and no need for the mala and no need for the orange clothes. But you say, “Tomorrow – not today. The day after tomorrow – not today, not right now.” Then I suggest: “Become a sannyasin.” And when you become a sannyasin then the whole abracadabra… But this is your decision. I was ready to declare you enlightened but you said, “No sir, I want to become a sannyasin. I want to follow a path. I don’t want to become enlightened right now.”Then it is perfectly okay; then I give you a path. It is just to console you, it is a toy. The day you understand, there will be no need – no need for anything. But those who have not taken sannyas should not start thinking that they are enlightened. Those who have not taken sannyas should not start thinking, “So, good – good that we have not taken it yet.” Then you have to become enlightened this very moment. If you don’t become enlightened and don’t become a sannyasin, then you remain wherever you are, whosoever you are.Sannyas is a bridge. The bridge is not the goal. Sannyas is a means, the means is not the end. It is better to become a sannyasin than not to become one. But if you can gather so much passion and fire that you can burn in a single moment, that you can become aflame in a single moment, instantly – then there is no need for sannyas or anything.And moreover I am a man of contradictions. I am paradoxical. One day I say one thing, another day I say just the opposite; that is my way to destroy your mind. On one hand, I say there is no path and every evening I give you the path. On one hand, I say there is no need for any belonging to anything, to any church, and every night I give you entry to the church. The reason is that I would like you to come closer and closer to me. The closer you are, the more is the possibility to understand the instantaneousness of enlightenment. The farther you are, the more difficult to understand it.The human mind works logically; then through logic, gradualness is natural. You say, “One day we will do one thing, another day something more, and then more, step by step.” You think through logic, as if life is a ladder: “So we will go one rung, another rung, another rung, that way.” But life is not a ladder, it is an abyss. And you need not step slowly, slowly, gradually. You can take a jump, a leap, a quantum leap. One step is enough if you take a jump. The remaining work will be done by gravitation; you need not do anything else.So I go on enlightening you every morning. A few people become enlightened at least for the moment; they forget again outside the gate – that is their problem. Again I have to make them enlightened, again they forget, I have to make them enlightened again. I will go on hammering you that you are enlightened, that you have never been otherwise. Some day in some ripe moment you may be able to hear it.Then what is the purpose of sannyas? The purpose of sannyas is so that you can go on hanging around me for that right moment, for that ripe moment, when a single shout from me or just a look in your eyes or just a touch of my hand will bring you back to yourself.The seventh question:Osho,Why are people so afraid of being loved?People are afraid of being loved because love brings misery; love brings lies. Love brings imprisonment, love brings slavery, love destroys freedom. That’s why people are afraid.And people cannot remain without love, because love is a necessary nourishment too. So they hanker for love, they desire to be loved and to love. They cannot remain alone. But the moment they meet the person, the other – the woman, the man – they become frightened too. They know that now they are getting into a cage.People are afraid of love because love is not yet unconditional, and because love brings so many compromises. They have to compromise so much that they almost lose their original face. That’s why people are afraid. And they cannot remain without it either because it is a necessary nourishment for the soul. In fact, because it is a necessary nourishment of the soul, people have learned to exploit it. If it was not such a necessity, there would have been no exploitation; love is such a necessity that you can exploit it, you can make conditions. You can say, “I will love you only if you do this. I will love you only if you will love only me and nobody else, ever. And I will love you only if you accept my conditions.”These are the conditions and a hungry man is bound to accept the conditions. He starts lying, he starts playing games, he starts being phony. He starts doing things which he never wanted to do, and he stops doing things which he always wanted to do. And then sooner or later he thinks it is too high a price for love, it is better not to be in love, it is better to be alone.So people go on moving from aloneness to love, from love to aloneness. When they are alone, the hunger is felt. When they are together, the ugliness of it.I have heard…The weary old priest arriving in heaven before Saint Peter said, “No more service. Rest at last.”Saint Peter: “Just choose yourself the softest cloud and sleep. You’ve earned your rest.”With a deep sigh the priest sinks himself in a woolly heavenly cloud and dozes off. But then there is no real rest. Every now and then, little bells ring and wake him up. After some hours, in a state of total neurosis, he gets up out of his cloud, runs up to Saint Peter and complains, “What do you mean by I can rest? This is hell. Hear those penetrating bells ringing every time I’m just falling asleep!”“Oh, I’m so sorry, but I can’t do a thing about it. You’ll get used to it. They are only part of the system of registering whenever a serious lie is being told down on earth. Now that you know, they won’t bother you anymore. Sleep well.”And sure as hell, Peter’s words came true. After retiring to his cloud, the priest falls into a deep sleep.But then in the middle of the night he jumps with a scream, grabs his head, goes mad in a second – thousands of bells ringing all around with thunderous noise. “Peter, Peter, save me. What’s happening?”Peter is there already and covers the ears of the poor priest with his loving hands. “Poor man, this is the hour when lovers meet and say beautiful things to each other.”Love brings a thousand and one lies into life. It is humiliating. One feels caged, imprisoned, compromised. One feels paralyzed, crippled. One feels chained in a thousand and one ways. That’s why people are afraid of love.One of my basic messages to you is never to exploit love – that will be a great religious revolution in your life. Never exploit love. If somebody loves you, don’t bring any conditions to it. If you love somebody, don’t make him a cripple. Let your love become spacious. Give more space to the person than he had when he was alone. Give him nourishment. But don’t poison his nourishment, don’t possess him. Let him be free. More free than he ever was. And then love grows into deep intimacy.When love brings freedom, love goes deepest – love makes the other feel respected not humiliated, not destroyed but enhanced. When love feels nourishing, liberating, then love goes deepest. Then love becomes prayer. It becomes the utmost, the ultimate experience of life.Don’t exploit love. Whenever you are in love, remember. And you will have to remember hard because for thousands of years man has exploited love, and it has become habitual.In the end, I would like to repeat Hakuin’s Song of Meditation.All beings are from the very beginning buddhas.It is like water and ice:apart from water, no ice,outside living beings, no buddhas.Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar. What a pity!It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst;it is like the child of a rich house who has strayed away among the poor.The cause of our circling through the six worldsis that we are on the dark paths of ignorance.Dark path upon dark path treading,when shall we escape from birth-and-death?The Zen meditation of the Mahayanais beyond all our praise.Giving and morality and the other perfections,taking of the name, repentance, discipline,and the many other right actions,all come back to the practice of meditation.By the merit of a single sittinghe destroys innumerable accumulated sins.How should there be wrong paths for him?The pure land paradise is not far.When in reverence this truth is heard even once,he who praises it and gladly embraces it has merit without end.How much more he who turns withinand confirms directly his own nature,that his own nature is no-nature –such has transcended vain words.The gate opens, and cause and effect are one;straight runs the way – not two, not three.Taking as form the form of no-form,going or returning, he is ever at home.Taking as thought the thought of no-thought,singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth.Wide is the heaven of boundless samadhi,radiant the full moon of the fourfold wisdom.What remains to be sought? Nirvana is clear before him,This very place the lotus paradise, this very body the buddha.Enough for today.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-01/

Maneesha, before I start a new series of talks on Zen called This. This. A Thousand Times This: The Very Essence of Zen, I want to devote today to a preparation for the coming Zen anecdotes – absurd yet profound, without any rationality but still as truthful as language allows.I am wearing sunglasses in the night; it is due to the courtesy of President Ronald Reagan. His poisoning has created many aftereffects. One of them is that my eyes have immensely weakened; they cannot face even the daylight. But even through my glasses I am perfectly able to see you.In this connection a practical joke:I have received an invitation from one of the most important global promoters in the election of the president of America. They want me to run for the presidency and they are ready to promote me, even though I have been prevented – illegally, unconstitutionally – from entering America for ten years. But I can certainly enter into the presidential election. The law cannot prevent me. I can remain outside of America.I have told Global Promotions to go ahead.It does not matter whether I win or lose. What matters is that it will decide how many intelligent people live in America, how many people have a sense of humor and how many people have a universal sense of humanity as one.If by chance I win the presidency, it will be really the greatest laughter in history. And it will be the beginning of a new day. I certainly hope there are people, irrespective of party or religion or prejudice, who will support me just for the sake of a good laugh.These glasses will do well, they will look good on American television sets. At least my face will be more presentable than Ronald Reagan’s.My fight continues against the illegality and the crime that has been done to me and to my commune and my people. You will be surprised that they went on delaying a decision in the Supreme Court of Oregon till they expelled me from America…I was there for five years without any entry visa. They could not tell me to go out of America; they knew I was going to fight in the courts. And every American is a foreigner – the real Americans have been killed, massacred, forced into forests, into small reservations. They have even changed their name; they are called “Red Indians.”Even Ronald Reagan is not an American; neither was Abraham Lincoln. So there is no problem: if other foreigners can be chosen to be the president of America, I am also eligible.And when they deported me… After that the Supreme Court of Oregon declared my commune to be victorious and the party named “One Thousand Friends of Oregon” was defeated, they appealed to the Supreme Court of America and the Supreme Court also gave its decision in my favor: that the destruction of the commune and expulsion of me and my people had been absolutely undemocratic, unconstitutional. This proves an old saying that justice delayed is justice denied. Now what is the point of being victorious in the court, the highest court in America, when they have crushed everything? They destroyed the commune which five thousand sannyasins had worked to create for five years – for ten hours, twelve hours per day – transforming a desert into a beautiful city.It was a great experiment of brotherhood, of love, of peace – no crime, no court, no law. And five thousand people created all the roads, transformed the whole desert into an oasis. It was not a small place, it was 126 square miles. It was almost a country.What was the fear of the American politicians? The fear was our creativity, our laughter; the fear was our joy. For the first time in the history of the world, five thousand people lived as a family. Nobody asked anybody’s country or religion or caste or race. And every year, twenty thousand people from around the world used to come to see this miracle. The American politicians became disturbed by the success of the commune.There has been great research conducted by psychoanalysts on eccentric people, and their findings are very revealing. First, that eccentric people are more intelligent, more creative, more joyous than the ordinary mediocre masses; the so-called sane people are not so creative. Secondly, in every profession the eccentric person will rise higher just because of his creativity, sensitivity, intelligence.The researchers have found that politics is the only profession where – except Abraham Lincoln – there has not been any eccentric person. It is a strange finding. The politician is very cunning, he is not clever. He substitutes cunningness for cleverness. He is not wise, because to be wise in this world is to be condemned by the masses and the politician cannot afford that.But all the great people – the poets, the painters, the sculptors, the scientists, the mystics – have all been eccentric. The finding is that eccentric people don’t bother about the masses; they are more integrated individuals. They live according to their own light, they have their own style. You may condemn them, but you cannot make them compromise.This research has given me an absolute certainty about why the American politicians became so disturbed by a commune which was joyous, intelligent – singing songs with the trees and dancing with the peacocks. They became afraid because the comparison was clear, that the commune was reaching toward higher consciousness, liveliness – higher in every possible way than the ordinary masses. The politicians were going to be asked, “Why isn’t it happening in the whole world?” If it can happen in a small commune and people can live lovingly, dancingly, joyously, then what is missing in the whole world? Why are people so miserable?Just as Jesus was crucified, my people and the commune as a whole have been crucified. Even their own constitution could not support their acts. And once something is disturbed it is very difficult to put it together again.But we are doing the experiment again and we are in a far more successful stage now. Our people are more joyous, more meditative; more intelligent, uncompromising. This is the meeting of the eccentric people – but highly intelligent. My whole effort is to spread intelligence, love, freedom – without any boundaries, without any frontiers – around the globe. It can be done only by the individual – not by religions, not by political parties, not by any other kind of organizations. The whole thing depends on the individual rising to the highest peak of his being and potentiality.I am giving you a second new meditation – because since Gautam Buddha, not a single new meditation has been evolved. This meditation will be the preface for the coming series on Zen.Zen means your very essence, your very being.I have talked about the meditation, and a group of people have done it for twenty-one days. But all of you have not been participants. At the beginning of this series, be a participant in this meditation called the Mystic Rose.It has four steps. All are designed for a particular purpose: to bring out all the poison from your being that has been injected by every generation for centuries. Laughter is the first step. One of the great writers, Norman Cousins, has written just now of his life-long experiment: that if he laughs for just twenty minutes without any reason, all his tensions disappear. His consciousness grows; the dust disappears.You will see it for yourself. If you can laugh without any reason, you will see something repressed within you… From your very childhood you have been told not to laugh: “Be serious!” You have to come out of that repressive conditioning.The second step is tears. Tears have been repressed even more deeply. It has been told to us that tears are a symptom of weakness. They are not. Tears can cleanse not only your eyes, but your heart too. They soften you, they are a biological strategy to keep you clean, to keep you unburdened.It is now a well-known fact that fewer women go mad than men. And the reason has been found to be that women can cry and weep more easily than men. Even to the small child it is said, “Be a man! Don’t cry like a woman!” But if you look at the physiology of your body, you have the same glands full of tears whether you are man or woman.It has been found that fewer women commit suicide than men, and of course, no woman in history has been the cause of founding violent religions, wars, massacres.If the whole world can learn to cry and weep again it will be a tremendous transformation, a metamorphosis.The third step is silence. I have called it “The Watcher on the Hills.” Become as silent as you are alone on the top of a Himalayan peak – utterly silent and alone, just watching, listening… Sensitive, but still.And the fourth step is let-go.At every step Nivedano will be asked to beat his drum. Yesterday he forgot himself in the meditation. I had been trying hard, but he was so much in his own gibberish. And what is the gibberish? He was fighting with Mukta! These are the two fighters here: Mukta and Nivedano. Mukta is fighting for the trees, Nivedano is fighting for the rocks.Once he had started, he did not listen. Today, he is not allowed to participate. It is your work to remember that when I say “Beat the drum,” beat it – otherwise everybody else around you will beat you! Agreed?Okay, we start our first step of the Mystic Rose Meditation. Give the beat, Nivedano![Drumbeat][Nivedano gives one resounding beat on his drum and the whole of Buddha Hall explodes into wild laughter for several minutes. Throughout the meditation, Osho appears to be weaving and conducting invisible currents of energy with his hands.][Drumbeat][Now the laughter changes to crying.][Drumbeat][Total silence descends. Not a sound, only the singing of the night birds and the creaking of the bamboos.]Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Everybody falls backwards on the floor, toppling higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, wherever they happen to fall, lying still in a deep “let-go.”]Relax.This is it…The experience…And the bamboos are giving the comment…Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back.[Everybody slowly sits up. A few moments follow of very delicate silence…]

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-02/

Osho,When Seppo was living in his hermitage, two monks came to pay their respects. As Seppo saw them coming he pushed open the gate and, presenting himself before them, said, “What is this?”The monks also said, “What is this?”Seppo lowered his head and returned to his cottage.Later, the monks came to Ganto, who said, “Where are you from?”The monks answered, “We have come from south of the Nanrei mountains.”Ganto said, “Have you ever been to see Seppo?”The monks said, “Yes, we have been to him.”Ganto said, “What did he say to you?”The monks related the whole story.Ganto said, “Alas! I regret that I did not tell him the last word when I was with him. If I had done so, no one in the whole world could have pretended to outdo him.”At the end of the summer session, the monks repeated the story and asked Ganto for his instruction.Ganto said, “Why didn’t you ask earlier?”The monks said, “We have had a hard time struggling with this topic.”Ganto said, “Seppo came to life in the same way that I did, but he does not die in the same way that I do. If you want to know the last word, I'll tell you simply: This! This!”Maneesha, I am immensely grateful that you have reminded me of Seppo. I have always wanted to bring Seppo to you because he is one of the most precious buddhas who has walked on the earth.He was unique in his own way; in his teaching, words were not important but only thisness, the utter silence of existence. The chattering of the birds are the only holy scriptures in the world. And the commentaries of the bamboos are really honest, sincere and to the point.Seppo would have loved this assembly, this moment of a silent waiting. He was not as fortunate as I am: he had few disciples. But that is very unjust of existence. Seppo should have the whole world as his disciples because what he is giving is the ultimate essence.[The chirping of birds runs through the silence of Buddha Hall.]This was Seppo. They have all gathered here. This story makes Seppo’s method of teaching clear:When Seppo was living in his hermitage, two monks came to pay their respects. As Seppo saw them coming he pushed open the gate and, presenting himself before them, said, “What is this?”The monks must have been at a loss. In fact, Seppo’s opening the gate, standing before them, was a question to be asked by them. But before they had said anything Seppo himself without being questioned, answered, “What is this?”In utter confusion those two monks said to Seppo, “What is this? We have not even asked, we have not even entered the gate, we have not even said hello to you and you open the gate, and standing before us irrationally ask, ‘What is this?’ In fact, we ask you about your behavior, ‘What is this?’”They missed the point.Seppo lowered his head and returned to his cottage.This lowering of the head of the master is a deep sadness about the misunderstanding these two monks have shown. And he returned to his cottage because there is no point in saying anything more. He has already said more than is absolutely essential. This becomes clear – that he has already said more.Later, the monks came to Ganto, who said, “Where are you from?”Ganto was Seppo’s master.The monks answered, “We have come from south of the Nanrei mountains.”Ganto said, “Have you ever been to see Seppo?”The monks said, “Yes, we have been to him.”Ganto said, “What did he say to you?”The monks related the whole story.Ganto said, “Alas! I regret that I did not tell him the last word when I was with him. If I had done so, no one in the whole world could have pretended to outdo him.”At the end of the summer session, the monks repeated the story and asked Ganto for his instruction.Ganto said, “Why didn’t you ask earlier?”The monks said, “We have had a hard time struggling with this topic.”Ganto said, “Seppo came to life in the same way that I did, but he does not die in the same way that I do. If you want to know the last word, I will tell you simply: This! This!”Ganto is saying that to ask, “What is this?” is not exactly right. Existence cannot be questioned, it cannot be a “what.” It simply is, without any question and without any answer.Simply this.This small anecdote converging in the smallest possible word, this, gives you the very essence of religiousness – the mystery of it, the beauty of it, the truth of it. You cannot answer and you cannot ask, you have simply to live; to live thisness – in Gautam Buddha’s words, suchness, tathata. Thisness is the whole of religious consciousness.Just live this moment in its totality, without wavering; neither thinking of the past, which is no more, nor projecting about the future, which is not yet.All that you have is the purity of thisness, this moment.And the glory and the ecstasy cannot be higher, cannot be deeper if you can understand the simple experience of thisness.Setcho’s commentary on it:The last word, let me tell you – Light and darkness intermingled, Living in the same way, you all know; Dying in different ways – beyond telling! Absolutely beyond telling! Buddha and Dharma only nod…Buddha and Bodhidharma – Dharma is a short form of Bodhidharma.Buddha and Bodhidharma only nod to themselves.They do not even utter the simplest word, this. They simply nod. In their nodding is said everything sayable, unsayable. In their nodding is the whole mystery of existence.East, West, North and South – homeward let us go. Late at night, seeing the snow on the thousand peaks.As I have told you before, Setcho is a great intellectual but he is not an enlightened man. Once in a while he makes a comment that is beautiful, but it is coming out of his head rather than out of his being. He is not accounted in the long line of buddhas. He remains only a commentator. And a commentator, however great, is simply repeating, paraphrasing an experience that is not his own.I don’t want you to be commentators. I want you to be in the very center of existence, of your being. That is the only way to understand this tremendous mystery that surrounds you.Seppo is also known as Hsueh-feng. Seppo once spoke of an incident that contributed to his awakening:“When I asked Master Tokusan whether I could share the experience that the ancient masters knew, he struck me, and I was like a bucket whose bottom had just dropped out.Ganto uttered a warning “Ho!” and asked, “Don’t you know what comes from without is not as good as what is produced within? If you were revealing your experience of Ch’an, or Zen or Dhyan, everything that you said or did would flow directly from the center of your innermost being, which in turn would embrace and penetrate the entire universe.”Upon hearing this Seppo suddenly was enlightened and made a deep bow to Ganto.These beautiful stories and these beautiful people have almost disappeared from the world. They were not plastic and they were not phony. They were utterly innocent, authentic. I want my people to bring those golden moments which have disappeared from the world.There is a story about one of Seppo’s disciples named Tozan:When he first went to Seppo he had hardly entered the gate when Seppo pushed him over and said, “What is this?”And Tozan was immediately enlightened. Forgetting himself he just lifted up his hands and danced around. Seppo said, “Are you behaving rationally?”Tozan said, “What has this to do with rationality?”Seppo stroked his back and confirmed his enlightenment.A dance can say much more than any philosophy. A simple shout “Ho!” can bring you to this moment. Anything that can bring you to your home is the only religion I know of. The so-called religions of the world are simply deceiving and exploiting people. People have to be awakened.Zen has become my most loved…for the simple reason that it does not create any theology. It does not bother about God because God is always “that,” God is always “there.” And the real concern is this, not that; here, not there; now, not then.Seppo was cutting trees one day with Chosei and said to him,“When you cut, cut to the heart. Then stop.”Chosei said, “I have cut and finished.”Seppo said, “Former masters transmitted the truth from mind to mind. Would you really say that you have cut and finished?”Chosei said, throwing the ax to the ground, “It is transmitted.”Seppo struck him with his stickIt is out of tremendous love and great compassion that a Zen master ever strikes anybody. This is a different language – of saying that you have got it, that you are enlightened.A master’s stick is awaited by the disciple for years because he will hit you only if he knows that his hit is going to awaken you; or he will hit only when you are awakened, as a reward. In the modern world it will not be at all understood. When, for the first time, Zen stories were translated, everybody thought that they were some kind of jokes.They are not jokes. But they were translated first by Christian missionaries, just to show to the world: “Look at the greatness of Christianity, and look at these primitive people thinking that they are enlightened!”But the whole thing misfired. These stories were translated by Christian missionaries to prove Christianity’s superiority, but in fact, these stories – if understood, experienced – simply prove that there cannot be anything superior to them. Their utter innocence… Just look at the disciple dancing because he has got it! Just look at the master hitting the disciple as a reward! This is possible only at the very heights of consciousness.Man has progressed technologically, scientifically, but man has forgotten the language of his own being. There is progress in gadgets, but man is completely lost.I want you to remember that your first task in life is to be fully, wholly aware of yourself – because without being totally aware, you will never know the beauty and the splendor of this existence that surrounds you. You will never know your birth, your death. You will never really know that you ever lived.Without being aware you are all somnambulists, walking in sleep, talking in sleep. And you have become so accustomed to your sleep that you can do even complicated things while you are completely asleep. You can be efficient in doing certain jobs while snoring within your being.The whole world thinks that in the morning they wake up, and by the evening they go to sleep again. It is sheer nonsense. Once you wake up, you never go to sleep. So the waking in the morning is just fake, very superficial. You have to learn authentic awakening.Seppo was saying goodbye to Tozan who asked him, “Where are you off to?”Seppo answered, “I am going back to Reichu.”“At that time, what road did you come by?” asked Tozan.“By Hienrei,” answered Seppo.“And by what road are you going back?” asked Tozan.“The same road,” Seppo answered.“Do you happen to know the one who never leaves Hienrei?”The road: people come and go, the road remains.Tozan is reminding Seppo: “Don’t be a coming and going, but be a remaining. There is nowhere to go, you are already there. Just realize it.”Seppo said, “I don’t know that one that remains.”“Why not?” asked Tozan.“Because the one has no personality,” answered Seppo.Tozan said, “You say that you don’t know that one – if so, how do you know that the one has no personality?”These dialogues are so totally different from the dialogues of Socrates and Plato – beautiful dialogues, very rational. But these dialogues are simply of another world, of another consciousness.Tozan is a great master, an old master. Although Seppo has understood, is enlightened… But just to be enlightened is not enough. There are many dimensions to enlightenment. Tozan is trying for Seppo to enter into another dimension. He knows isness, he knows thisness – but he is not aware.That awareness has no personality. Still it is. It has no limits to it. Isness is oceanic, it has no boundaries.It is so beautiful just to hear enlightened people tricking each other into new dimensions of being.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Is it really this easy?Maneesha, easy is not the word because it brings the idea of difficulty. However easy, it is still difficult. However close, it is still far. Your being is neither difficult nor easy. It simply is. It is not your achievement; you are it.Maneesha has asked another question:Ganto seems to be saying that Seppo became enlightened, came to life in the same way that he did. Is it true that the realization of enlightenment is the same for everyone?The ultimate experience is certainly the same. But the paths are millions. Somebody comes from the North and somebody comes from the South. One river comes from the Himalayas, another river comes from other mountains. But they all reach, big or small, to the same ocean.The ultimate experience is the same, but people differ in their uniqueness. Hence their ways of revealing themselves to themselves are different. Everybody is born in the same way but everybody does not die in the same way.Birth is not in your hands. When you awaken, you are already born. It is not a question for you to decide to be born or not to be born. But death is a different matter. You can die unconsciously, you can die consciously, you can die joyously, you can die dancingly. You can make a joke of death itself. The birth is the same but the death has to be unique.But most people are born in the same way and die in the same way. Both are unconscious. But remember: if birth and death – the two ends – are unconscious, that which is in between, life, cannot be conscious. It is a long sleep from the cradle to the graveyard.Very few are fortunate enough to reach to their grave knowingly, consciously. And the moment a person reaches to his death consciously, there is no death at all.Death exists only for unconscious people. For the conscious one, death is only a change of time and space, a change of form. But the essence remains the same.Seppo has made you serious. A little laughter before we enter into meditation.Barbara Bustline is about to undergo a minor operation. She has been prepared and wheeled along the corridor to the doors of the operating room, where the nurse leaves her to check if the surgery staff are ready.The nurse has just left, when a young man in a white coat comes up to the trolley. Lifting the sheet, he begins to examine Barbara’s naked body very carefully.Then he nods reflectively and walks away.Then a second man in a white coat comes along, lifts the sheet and examines her too.But when a third man, similarly dressed, comes along and does the same, Barbara becomes impatient.“It is all very well examining me,” she says irritably, “but when are they going to start the operation?”“I have just no idea,” replies the man, “we are just painting the corridor.”Doctor Pinchbottom, the White House medical man, is giving the president and the first lady their annual checkup. The doctor examines Ronald Reagan first, and finds him to be in good health for a man in his condition.“And how do you feel?” asks Pinchbottom.“Great,” replies Reagan, “Life is so great that even when I go to the bathroom at night, God turns on the light for me.”Doctor Pinchbottom is puzzled but does not say anything, and starts examining Nancy Reagan. When he is finished, he asks her, “Tell me, is it true about God turning on the bathroom light for Ronald at night?”“Oh, no!” says Nancy, “He is just pissing in the fridge again.”Sam Shekel, the sharp, middle-aged company director, is a great believer in efficiency.One day, he hangs up a sign in the main office, which reads: “Do it now!”Within the next few hours, the cashier disappears with the contents of the company safe; Sam’s secretary elopes with his eldest son; most of the staff take the day off; and the office boy throws a bottle of red ink into the air-conditioner and then catches the next plane to Pune.He must be here somewhere! Now it is time to have a small daily meditation.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Start gibberish.[Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, absolutely silent.Gather your energy within yourself.This is what Seppo means by “This!”This… The bamboos, as usual, are giving their commentary.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, let go.This… Even the bamboos have become silent.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-03/

Osho,Hyakujo had a unique way of guiding monks. From morning till night he kept on saying, “Work for me in the field, and I will teach for you.”He thus made his disciples work on the field all the time; but he did not seem to be prepared to give any lectures or sermons.Finally, the monks, not able to stand it any longer, went to the master and asked: “Would you please be gracious enough to give us an edifying sermon?”The master’s unwavering reply was: “Work for me on the field, and I will teach for you.”Several days passed, and the impatient monks went to the master again and urged: “Please give us a sermon.” This time, he quite readily agreed to do so.After a while all the monks gathered together in the hall. The master quietly appeared before them, walked up to the pulpit, spread out both his arms, and without a word immediately returned to his room.One day Nansen was working on the mountain with a sickle. A monk came up the mountain path and asked, without knowing to whom he was talking: “How can I get to Master Nansen?”The master raised his sickle in front of the monk, and said: “I paid thirty cents for this sickle.”The monk retorted: “I did not ask you about the sickle.”“What, then,” queried the master, “did you ask me?”The monk repeated: “How can I get to Master Nansen?”The master said, “Oh, yes! This cuts well!”Maneesha, this is the greatest sermon that has been delivered in the whole history of mysticism.Just preparing his people, he used to say, “Go and work in the field. You cannot work with the trees and with the grass and with the roses for long without yourself becoming as silent as they are.”The people who live with nature naturally find a synchronicity between themselves and the rivers and the mountains. They are closer to the earth and its heartbeat.Hyakujo first tried to bring the disciple close to nature, close to silence. Unless the disciple is prepared, the great sermon cannot be delivered. A great sermon needs great disciples, and a great disciple is exactly one who is silent.Before I enter into the tremendously beautiful story of Hyakujo I would like to tell you something about a contemporary master, George Gurdjieff. He used to use – without knowing Hyakujo – the same method, and the people who came to him were very different than the people who came to Hyakujo.Gurdjieff was working in the West. And intellectuals would come and Gurdjieff would ask them to go and dig a ditch in the field, but they would say, “We have come here to learn something, not to dig a ditch.”Gurdjieff was very hard. He would say, “First do what I say if you want to hear the answer.”In one particular case, Bennett reached Gurdjieff. Highly educated, cultivated, he had come to ask about God and the meaning of life – and the answer was the same. Gurdjieff said, “Leave these things for the moment. Just go and dig the ditch in the field.”Bennett hesitated for a moment, but then thought, “I have come from so far, let us see what happens. What am I going to lose?” He started digging the ditch; Gurdjieff came with his cigar, watched him digging, and told him, “Before sunset this certain area has to be prepared.”The sunset came, Bennett was utterly tired – an intellectual who has never worked, and particularly such work. And seeing the sun setting there was great relief: “Now, at least Gurdjieff will start having the dialogue I have come for.”Gurdjieff was walking just by the side, watching all the time.Then Bennett said, “The ditch is ready.”Gurdjieff said, “Now fill up the ditch completely. Bring it back to the state that it was. Throw all the mud back in its place.”Bennett was so tired, but he was also a man of integrity. He said, “Let us see what happens.”Without food, without rest, without even a coffee break he filled the ditch again. It was almost the middle of the night and Gurdjieff was standing the whole day just watching and smoking his cigar. The moon was full, at the highest peak of the night. It was a beautiful silence.And Bennett remembers: “I was so tired. I don’t know from where – a tremendous silence descended over me.”In his autobiography he says, “I was simply astonished.”Gurdjieff laughed and said, “Have you heard? Now go and rest.”But what was said? Nothing was said. The question is not that the master should speak. The question is that the disciple should be so silent… And he was silent because he was so tired that he could not even think. The mind became utterly empty. In that silence there is no need for the master to say anything. He can just indicate it as this, and the sermon is over.But Hyakujo even goes beyond Gurdjieff. He did not even say, “This!” He forced his disciples to work to the optimum – where their energy is completely absorbed by the work and the mind has nothing, no energy to continue its chattering.Again and again disciples reached him, but he would simply repeat, “Go and work in the field.”But one day, those who had remained with this strange man who teaches nothing, who simply says, “Go back to the field and work as hard as possible…”He was known to be one of the great masters who knows the secret. Many came, but only a few remained. He was a difficult man.When only those few remained who had become silent working in the fields, who had come to a deep harmony with nature, whose minds had settled down, he accepted the invitation.This time – after many efforts of the disciples to invite the master and getting the same reply, “Go back and work in the field” – this time, when they came and asked,“Please give us a sermon.” This time, he quite readily agreed to do so.After a while all the monks gathered together in the hall. The master quietly appeared before them, walked up to the pulpit, spread out both his hands, and, without a word, immediately returned to his room.This is known in the history of Zen as the greatest sermon. It is, because he said nothing and yet he said everything. Those two hands spread like a bird’s wings opened the whole sky to the silent disciples, a transmission without words.We have become too much accustomed to words. We don’t know the beauty of wordlessness. Even if you see a beautiful rose, immediately your mind repeats, “How beautiful,” and you have missed. If you had simply seen the rose and absorbed its beauty, felt it in your heart without uttering even a simple word – even in appreciation – you would have become enlightened.Even just a rose could have functioned as a great master to you.The question is not that you don’t know, the question is that you are too full of gibberish, you know too much. Because of your borrowed knowledge and too many words moving inside you, you cannot see the wordless beauty that can be only experienced in silence.Just listen to the bamboos, and you will find what Hyakujo has said without saying it.Zen is not an intellectual effort to understand reality, it is an intuitive approach to drown in the mystery of existence, to open your wings and fly like an eagle across the sun.Language is a very small phenomenon, limited to humanity. The stars don’t speak, nor the flowers, but they still express, they transmit their very being without any language. Zen is just a wildflower, spreading its fragrance to whomsoever it may concern. Those who have the sensitivity will understand it.Nothing is being said and everything is understood. Just drown yourself into thisness, the tremendous silence of the moment, and you will feel freedom from the mind. And that is the only freedom, the first and the last freedom – freedom from the mind.It is your own mind that is covering you like a cage. Once the mind is left behind and you are just a watcher, far away, suddenly the doors of all the mysteries open.Zen does not talk about God, it gives you God; it does not talk about paradise, it pushes you into paradise.The second story Maneesha has brought…Osho,A few minutes jabbering nonsense, a few more minutes of silence, and then just totally relaxing. This simple meditation or exercise puts me in a state of such delicious, irrational joy that for several moments I am utterly content, absolutely happy to be myself as I am, in a world exactly as it is. This is what most people spend their entire life pursuing.Presumably, this is why people take drugs, have love-affairs, marry and have children; just for this, that we renegades experience at the feet of the most dangerous man in the world. Anything to say?[Osho spreads out both his arms and remains silent.]Remember the two hands of Hyakujo. Nothing to say.Your silence is enough unto itself. It does not need anything more. It is more than you could have ever dreamt of.One day Nansen was working on the mountain with a sickle.Nansen was one of the greats. I count him with Gautam Buddha, Mahakashyap, Bodhidharma, Joshu, Hyakujo. There have been thousands of masters, but Nansen will still stand out in his beauty, uniqueness. He became so well-known to the people that the very mountain where he had a small cottage is now called Mount Nansen.One day Nansen was working on the mountain with a sickle. A monk came up the mountain path and asked, without knowing to whom he was talking, “How can I get to Master Nansen?”The master raised his sickle in front of the monk, and said: “I paid thirty cents for this sickle.”The monk retorted: “I did not ask you about the sickle.”“What, then,” queried the master, “did you ask me?”The monk repeated, “How can I get to Master Nansen?”The master said, “Ah, yes! This cuts well!”You see the effort of bringing the monk to the present. It does not matter what it is, it may be the sickle – at this moment Nansen is trying to bring the monk, the stranger, to the present moment, but he goes on asking about something far away.Zen is not a philosophy for faraway things, it is a very realistic approach to the present – and every means and method is being used to bring seekers to the moment. Ordinarily, intellectually, the story will look absurd. That’s why people like Nansen and Hyakujo have disappeared from the world. We have become too intellectual, and they were non-intellectuals – innocent, tremendously present, integrated, but always here. You cannot push them anywhere else; you cannot take them out from this moment.Now Nansen is working with the sickle. You cannot make him talk about anything else, even about himself.I hope you will understand the point. The monk missed.It is easy to miss Zen. It is so obvious that if you simply don’t start your mind, just for a moment it is in your hands. It is neither difficult nor simple. It is just the case. It is your very being. You may be acquainted with it or not. It is there, just like your shadow.But the shadow is outside; your being is your inner center. And except to be present, here and now, there is no way to it. This is the only path that leads to oneself.Maneesha is asking again:Osho,You speak so highly of the Zen masters, their ingenious and yet simple methods, and the innocence of the kind of people who could become realized through them. Yet while I do sometimes see you as a Zen master, I would not say your approach is characteristic of theirs. Is that because the kind of people you have are too cerebral, are so much out of contact with innocence and spontaneity, or is it that you have a different understanding of what is most effective? Or both?Maneesha,[Osho spreads out both his arms]Both. I am myself a category in itself. I will not stand in any queue, even with Gautam Buddha. I love my aloneness, my own spontaneity. That makes a difference.Secondly, the people I am with are totally different from the people the Zen masters had to deal with. The Zen masters, if present here, would look simply insane to you. I am trying to make their insanity as sane as possible so that you can understand.You are different, you are more in the head than the people Zen masters were dealing with. So my effort is first to bring you to your heart, and only then can I have a silent dialogue with you. I have to speak to create silence in you. It is a very contradictory way.But before you fall into a deeper silence, throbbing with the joy, peace, contentment which Maneesha has been speaking of… That is not only her experience, that is the experience of most of my people here and around the world.The bamboos will also be happy to hear you laugh a little.Seamus is leaning on the bar in the pub, when Paddy comes in with a perfect black eye.“Hey, Paddy!” says Seamus, “That’s a beautiful black eye you have there. Who hit you?”“As a matter of fact,” says Paddy, after ordering a beer, “Fergus O’Reilly hit me.”“My God!” says Seamus, “With what?”“Well, as a matter of fact,” replies Paddy, “he had a wooden stick in his hand.”“And I suppose,” remarks Seamus, “that you did not have anything in your hand?”“As a matter of fact,” says Paddy, sipping his beer, “I had in my hand Kathie O’Reilly’s left breast, an object of great beauty – but no use in a fight!”One day, Kowalski walks into the circus manager’s office and says,“I have got a great act to show you. I can do a swallow dive from one hundred feet onto solid ground.”The circus manager is skeptical but agrees to see the act. So they go into the big tent and Kowalski climbs up the ladder to the top. Then he does a perfect dive to the ground. He lands on his head with a terrific crunch, but then gets up, rubbing himself and groaning softly.The manager runs over to him and says, “That was amazing! The most incredible act I have ever seen! I will give you five hundred dollars a night!”Kowalski shakes his head. So the manager says, “Okay, just name your price and I will pay it!”“I am sorry,” replies Kowalski, “I don’t want to do it again. I had no idea it would hurt so much!”Now enter into real Zen.First beat the drum, Nivedano, and everybody gets into gibberish.[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody gets into absolute silence.No movement, gather your energy inward and look within.This is the no-word answer of Hyakujo.And this is the sickle of Nansen that cuts really well.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Please come back.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-04/

Osho,A monk said to Tozan, “Cold and heat descend upon us. How can we avoid them?”Tozan said, “Why don’t you go where there is no cold or heat?”The monk said, “Where is the place where there is no cold or heat?”Tozan said, “When cold, let it be so cold that it kills you; when hot, let it be so hot that it kills you.”Maneesha, this is the very space that I am trying to help you to reach: where there is no cold, no heat, where there is only awareness, a silence that transcends duality, cold and heat, day and night, life and death.All that is dual is transcended when you are not in the mind but at your very center – which neither feels cold nor hot; which is only a simple, pure space.Tozan is saying exactly the same as you are doing every day.A monk said to Tozan, “Cold and heat descend upon us. How can we avoid them?”It is a simple question but has a great complexity in it. You have to take the word avoid and you will see the complexity. That’s what everybody is trying to do: how to avoid – misery, agony, how to avoid pain, how to avoid life itself. That’s what all the religions have been doing – avoiding. They call it renunciation, but it is nothing but a pure, cowardly escape.So the very simple question is not so simple. In the very word avoid, all the religions of the world are reduced in a very obvious manner. Their whole effort has been in escaping from places, from people, from relationships, from the world to the mountains and to the forests; but they don’t know… Wherever you go your mind is with you, and your mind is your world. You cannot renounce the so-called outside world without dropping the mind and being utterly silent. But that can be done anywhere.You don’t have to go to the Himalayas. You have to go withinward. No outward journey is going to help. You can renounce wealth, you can renounce kingdoms, you can renounce your wife, your husband, your children… You can renounce everything possible, but you are still there. You cannot renounce yourself. And you are the problem!Avoid is the word I am against. And any religion which teaches avoidance, I call cowardly. Encounter reality. There is no point in avoiding that. Encounter it with intensity and totality, with awareness, and suddenly you will see you have reached a point within yourself where there is no heat, no cold; where there is no love, no hate; where there is no so-called life and no so-called death.Within you is the center of the universal. It is always here, you don’t have to go somewhere else to find it. Every going is going away from yourself. You have to stop going away; you have to start sinking in.In Tozan’s words – and he has expressed it with tremendous beauty and grandeur and in the language of lions…Tozan said, “Why don’t you go where there is no cold or heat?”The monk said, “Where is the place where there is no cold or heat?”This is the misery that has always happened between the master and the disciple. The master is talking about the inner space and the disciple is hearing about some place somewhere outside. The master does not deal with places, he deals with spaces.Tozan said, “When cold, let it be so cold that it kills you, and when hot, let it be so hot that it kills you.”He is simply saying, “Be total in every situation whether it is cold or hot; be so total that your ego dies, that you are no longer there.” In other words, the moment you are total you are not, but only a pure space. And that is your authentic reality.Setcho’s commentary:A helping hand, but still a thousand-fathom cliff; Sho and Hen: no arbitrary distinctions here.The ancient emerald palace shines in the bright moonlight.Clever Kanro climbs the steps – and finds it empty.A few footnotes will be helpful to understand Setcho’s commentary:A legend tells of a clever, fast-running dog, Kanro that chased a hare. Both ran so fast that eventually they fell dead of exhaustion.The monk who asked the question in the present case is being compared to Kanro.Be so total that your very totality becomes a fire in itself and burns everything that is false, phony, and leaves only the ancient emerald palace shining in the full-moon night.Sho and Hen are in reference to Tozan’s five ranks, the philosophical treatment of the relationship between the real Sho and the apparent, Hen.Philosophers have been concerned for centuries with the problem of what is real and what is apparent. Even in the beginning of this century two philosophers, Bosanquet and Bradley, wasted their whole lives writing treatises about the apparent and the real. Strangely enough, it was not only Bradley and Bosanquet; it has been discussed in China by Sho and Hen, it has been discussed in India by Shankara.The problem of what is real and what is apparent cannot be decided by philosophical discussion because to the eyes, whatever appears is appearance, and the real is hidden inside you – it does not appear on the surface. So all these philosophers, and their number is many…One of my teachers had a doctorate on Bradley and Shankara, comparing their philosophies about what is real and what is only apparent, not real. The name of the professor was S. S. Roy. He is still alive, retired. He loved me very much. I asked him, “You have got a doctorate, but do you really know what is real and what is apparent? If I was the examiner of your treatise you would have failed!”He looked at me, could not believe that a student will say this to his own professor, when his treatise has been examined by the greatest living professors inside and outside India and greatly praised.He said, “But do you know how much my treatise has been praised?”I said, “That does not matter at all. What matters is that you don’t know what is real. You are only discussing, it is not your experience. You are not a meditator, you have not come to the space of pure silence; your whole treatise is simply verbiage, maybe well written, very rationally written, but it is not your existential experience.”He said, “My God, it is good that you were not one of my examiners, otherwise I would have lost my DLitt.”I said to him, “If you are a man of intelligence, you have already lost it. I am enough to dispose of your treatise because I say to you that you don’t know yourself. I know that you are an honest man and you will realize that I am pointing at the right place which you have missed.”What Tozan is saying is that unless you burn your mind which divides things into two… Mind is always a duality; it cannot live with the non-dual. Tozan is saying, “Go beyond the dual and you will find the space where there is no heat and no cold, where only pure nothingness prevails. And that is our being.”About Tozan… This is not the Tozan who appeared in Tozan’s Three Pounds of Flax, but Tozan Ryokai, the founder of the Soto sect. Tozan visited several masters.By the way, just a few days ago I received an invitation from the Soto sect, founded by Tozan. They were celebrating a thousand-year-old tradition on a great scale. And the chief of Soto Zen must have read my books and must have heard the story that I have accepted that I am the fulfillment of Gautam Buddha’s promise that he will be coming after twenty-five centuries and that his name will be Friendliness – Maitreya.The representative of Tozan and his sect… There are only two sects of Zen; Soto is the more ancient. And you will be happy to note that the chief of Soto Zen has recognized that I have the consciousness and awareness, that I have fulfilled the promise. He asked if I can come to their ceremony, and if I cannot come, at least I should send my robe. That is an old tradition in Zen.I have sent one of my robes, with my message, to their ceremony. In the ceremony almost a million people are participating, and more than two hundred and fifty government officials are deputed by the government of Japan to be present in the ceremony.I have told my sannyasins there to go with my robe and my note and message. The chief of the sect presented my robe and my message to the whole gathering with deep love and devotion. And he has informed them that he will be coming here soon to visit me and to see my people.In fact, this is the only alive Zen assembly. In those one million people and two hundred and fifty government representatives, not a single person knows exactly the space that you are feeling every day.An anecdote about Tozan:When Tozan was with Nansen…another great master…one of Baso’s disciples…Baso is the ultimate as far as Zen is concerned…Nansen, observed the anniversary of Baso’s death and said to the assembly, “Will Baso come back to us?”Tozan said, “If there is company fit for him, he will!”Nansen appreciated the answer very much.…Because the words – Buddha or Bodhidharma or Nansen or Baso – are just names of the forms. They all represent the same space; and whenever there are people who are ready to receive, they suddenly descend there.I have received many letters saying that in the meditations a strange feeling happens – as if something is descending, a deep silence from beyond, heavy, almost tangible. In that silence Baso is present, Buddha is present. When you are absent all the awakened ones are present to you. Then this assembly becomes an eternal phenomenon.We have been here always and always. Once in a while you forget who you are, but it is immaterial: sooner or later you recognize again, sooner or later you again see your crystal clear being.Neither time matters, nor space, you are the one who never comes and never goes, the one who simply is. This!When Tozan was studying with Isan, he asked Isan about Chu Kukushi’s “Sermons by Insentient Creatures.”Isan said, “Sermons by insentient creatures are given here for us too, but few can hear them.”Do you hear the bamboos? These are the sermons referred to, sermons from insentient beings. Once you are silent, even roses start speaking to you.[The wind is blowing and the bamboos start commenting with their creaking.]Do you see? – the loud speaking of the bamboos. The deeper your silence, the louder you will be able to hear it.Tozan said, “I am not yet certain about them, would you please teach me?”Isan said nothing, but raised his stick straight up.Tozan said, “I do not understand. Would you explain it to me?”Isan said, “I would never tell you about this with the mouth given to me by my parents!”This was his way of teaching.This mouth, given by your parents is not capable of saying it; but the being is not given to you by your parents. You have come through them, they have been vehicles, but you are not part of them. Your body is made by your parents, the temple is raised by them, but the deity in the temple, the being, comes from eternity. It cannot come from mortal bodies.Isan then suggested that Tozan visit Ungan who Tozan later succeeded. Coming up to Ungan, Tozan asked, “Who can hear the sermons of insentient creatures?”“Insentient creatures can hear them,” answered Ungan.“Why can I not hear them?” asked Tozan.Ungan raised his staff straight up and said, “Do you hear?”“No, I don’t,” answered Tozan.Ungan said, “Don’t you know the sutra says, ‘Birds and trees, all meditate on the Buddha and the Dharma?’”At this Tozan suddenly became enlightened.He wrote the following verse:Wonderful! How wonderful!Sermons by insentient creatures;you fail if you listen with your ears;I repeat:You fail if you listen with your ears.Listening with your eyes, you hear them.By the eyes he does not mean the ordinary eyes, he means the eyes of an awakening clarity of your being. If you can hear in your silence, if you can see in your silence, then everything in the world is speaking, giving sermons, singing songs, dancing.Can’t you see? But these eyes and these ears won’t do. You will have to dig deep within yourself to find the right approach to see the eternal dance of existence, to hear the music and to see the beauty of it.Tozan continued practicing zazen and was ever watchful. One day while he was swimming in a stream, he saw his shadow cast on the water and experienced his great enlightenment. His verse on that occasion was:Long seeking it through others,I was far from reaching it.Now I go by myself;I meet it everywhere.It is just I myself,and I am not itself.Understanding this way,I can be as I am.Tozan has talked about two enlightenments. The second one he calls the greater enlightenment. The first enlightenment was upon hearing the sutra of Gautam Buddha, that insentient beings are not insentient. They are also living, loving. They are also singing, giving sermons. And he became enlightened; this sutra pierced his very being. But he calls it just enlightenment.The great enlightenment happened when he saw his own shadow in the river and suddenly became aware that, wherever you go to seek, to find the truth, you are going far away. Your being is with you just like your shadow. You don’t have to go anywhere; you have just to look in the mirror of your being.Naturally he calls it “greater enlightenment” because it is no longer concerned with anybody else. It is authentically his.Maneesha has asked:Osho,I understand Tozan to be saying that nothing is to be avoided, on the contrary, to meet everything head-on. And that totality is transcendence.Compared to Zen, other, formal religions, such as Christianity and Hinduism, seem to be so childish in their understanding of life – with their gods and all the psychological paraphernalia that goes with God-worship – and so insensitive to the subtle and the poetic.In fact, it seems as if either Zen is a religion and the others are not; or Zen belongs to a category all of its own. Would you please comment?There is no need of any comment. You are all experiencing Zen. It is not a religion in which you have to believe. It is an experience, like love, which you have to live, which you have to experience.In other words, Zen is the most essential religion – without anything unnecessary. Just the core, the essential. You can call it religion, you can call it science, it does not matter what name you give to it. In its pure simplicity it is experiencing your own being. And the moment you experience your own being, you have experienced the being of this whole universe because your heartbeats are part of the heartbeat of the universe.Just be silently aware, and you are filled with Zen inside and out. It is not a formal religion like Christianity or Hinduism. It is very individual, unique, a category of its own. It is only for the eccentric people, only for the very intelligent. It is not for the mediocre, for the crowd. It is only for the individual who has the guts to stand up alone and listen to his own being without being bothered about what others are saying or believing or worshipping.It is not an argument, it is not a belief. It is a pure experience, just like love or beauty or silence. It is anonymous.Before we enter into Zen, although you are already standing on the door steps of the temple, I would like you to have a few laughs because I want you to enter into the temple with laughing and dancing – joyous.Ronald Reagan is in hospital for a small operation and Nancy Reagan is standing there, watching every move the doctors make.One of the doctors approaches Reagan with his syringe.“What is that?” asks Nancy.“This is an anesthetic,” replies the doctor. “After he gets this, he won’t know a thing.”“Save your time, doc,” snaps Nancy, “he does not know anything now.”Fagin Finkelstein, the lawyer, is leaning back in his armchair in the new office he has just opened. The door creaks open and a man comes in.“Aha,” thinks Fagin, “a client already! I must try and impress him.”Fagin picks up the phone and starts talking.“No, I am extremely sorry, I am much too busy,” he says into the phone. “I cannot possibly take your case. No, not even for a thousand dollars.”He sets down the phone and looks expectantly at the man who has just come in.“And now,” says Fagin, “how can I help you?”“You can’t,” replies the man, “I just came in to connect your telephone.”Pope the Polack is seriously ill and Paddy, Seamus and Sean are drunk in the pub, discussing who will be the new pope.“I know who the next pope will be,” says Seamus, “it is going to be Cardinal Ratzoff from Russia.”“Rubbish,” says Sean, “the next pope will be Cardinal Chong from China.”“It is going to be Ratzoff from Russia,” insists Seamus.“Not a chance,” says Sean, “Cardinal Chong from China.”“Ratzoff!” shouts Seamus.“Chong!” shouts Sean.Paddy has been sitting quietly, looking at his beer.“Neither of you know what you are talking about,” he says. “The next pope is going to be Rabbi Nussbaum from New York.”“Don’t be silly,” snaps Seamus, “he is not even a Catholic.”“Ah,” says Paddy, “well I won’t even argue with you if you are going to bring religion into it.”The Angel of Death finds Rufus Rothschild and delivers him to the pearly gates.“Mr. Rothschild,” says Saint Peter looking at his files, “have you done any good in the world?”“Well,” replies Rothschild, “one time I gave a dollar to a poor man.”“I see,” says Saint Peter, writing something on his papers. “Anything else?”“Yes,” replies Rothschild thinking hard, “I once gave fifty cents to a blind man.”“Were there any other virtuous acts in your life?” asks Saint Peter.“No,” says Rothschild, “that is it.”“Okay,” says Saint Peter turning to the angel. “Give this guy his dollar fifty back and tell him to go to hell!”Now we can be…Nivedano, give the gong.[Drumbeat]And you start rubbish.Start![Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, utterly silent, no movement.This. This…Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-05/

Osho,Once there was a Zen master named Sekito, meaning stonehead, so called because he constructed a hut on a big, flat stone which he found in a mountain, and lived there.One day a young monk in training came to see him.Sekito asked: “Where have you come from?”The monk answered, “From Kosei, master.”Sekito then said: “In Kosei, the famous Zen master, Baso, lives. Have you ever seen him?”“Yes, I have,” the monk replied.The master, pointing at a big piece of firewood nearby, then asked a most extraordinary question: “Does Master Baso look like this?”Unfortunately, the monk, with whatever Zen ability he might have had, was no match for Sekito. He blinked his eyes, and could not utter a word.The astonished monk returned all the way back to Kosei, met the great teacher Baso, and told him of the story.Hearing it, Baso asked, “Was the firewood you saw big or small?”“It was very big,” the monk answered.“You are a man of great strength,” was Baso’s unexpected reply.“Why, master?” queried the monk, at a loss as to how to take it.Baso then said: “You have brought here such a big piece of firewood all the way from Sekito. You surely are a man of great strength, aren’t you?”Maneesha, before I discuss the anecdote, concerning a Zen master named Sekito, meaning stonehead, I have to answer Quick magazine in Germany. As far as Stonehead is concerned, he is standing behind you – Zen master Niskriya. Can you find a bigger stonehead?[Niskriya keeps on looking in his camera, shyly looks up for a second and returns back to his camera.]Quick magazine needs a quick reply. Because I have been talking about one world, one humanity, I knew some idiot was going to ask this question. Quick magazine has asked: “If you would offer yourself personally to be the world emperor… With eighteen hours a day sleep you could rule, but that would be in a dream.”It raises many questions. I have talked about one world, but I have never meant that I would be the emperor of this insane world. Jesus has replied for me, “My kingdom is not of this world.”There is a vast universe beyond the small mind of the politician – and those who become themselves, also become emperors of the universe. There is no competition between Baso and Buddha. At the highest peak of consciousness there is no competition, everybody is an emperor.So first, to remind Quick and its readers that I am already the emperor of my own consciousness. I don’t want to come down from my peaks to the dark valleys of your unconsciousness. But I can point the way: how you can also become an emperor. To be an emperor, an empire is not needed, but enlightenment is. That is the only empire that remains. All other empires are made of the stuff that dreams are made of.As far as I am concerned, even in my dream I would not accept being the emperor of this insane asylum you call the world.Secondly, it has to be understood that my eighteen hours of sleep are not of the same quality as your sleep, just as my waking hours are not of the same quality as your waking. I am awake even in my sleep, you are fast asleep even in your waking. Don’t forget it!My statement for one humanity, for one world, does not imply an emperor in it. The world has been tortured by people who wanted to be emperors, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Adolf Hitler. It is time to understand that the world can only be one in the hands of something like the U.N., in which every part of the earth can be represented. And the most intelligent people can be chosen from different sections of humanity to join hands together; not to choose an emperor, but to create an intelligent committee which can have artists, scientists, poets – only not including the politicians.Creative people are not interested in dominating, they want to create. Whatever is their dimension of creation… It may be science, it may be painting, it may be music, it may be poetry. It may be anything that beautifies and makes the world rich, saner, more intelligent, more comfortable – richer in every possible way.The days of individuals becoming emperors are over. Only a committee of different creative intelligences can serve the world. Even to use the word rule is not against me…If the U.N. – or any other organization – is given all the armies of the world, it will naturally have to dissolve them because for whom are you going to have such vast armies? Millions of people unnecessarily doing “Left, right” – for whom will you go on piling up nuclear weapons?In my conception of one world, there is no place for an emperor. I will refuse, absolutely, categorically, the very idea of a person being the ruler of the world – and I am included.Nobody has the right to rule over anybody else. Yes, you can serve. And I am serving in my own way. I have got my own empire, my own people, who are trying in every possible way to reach to the Himalayan peaks of consciousness.Perhaps the poor journalist who wrote this question in Quick will not be able to understand. The days of personal empires, emperors are over. The world needs all kinds of creative people to join together. Forget the very idea of a world emperor. The whole of history has been murderous, full of wars because of this insane desire to dominate.My whole teaching is just be yourself, never interfere in anybody else’s freedom. Freedom is my ultimate value, my god.Now about the Zen master Sekito, meaning stonehead… Niskriya, why have you sat down? Stand up, let everybody see what it means to have a stone head! [Niskriya stands up, turning around to the assembly, which enthusiastically applauds.]Okay, sit down.Once there was a Zen master, Sekito, so called because he constructed a hut on a big flat stone which he found in a mountain, and lived there. One day a young monk in training came to see him.Sekito asked: “Where have you come from?”The monk answered, “From Kosei, master.”Sekito then said: “In Kosei, the famous Zen master, Baso, lives. Have you ever seen him?”“Yes, I have,” the monk replied.The master, pointing at a big piece of firewood nearby, then asked a most extraordinary question: “Does Master Baso look like this?”Unfortunately, the monk, with whatever Zen ability he might have had, was no match for Sekito. He blinked his eyes and could not utter a word.The astonished monk returned all the way back to Kosei, met the great teacher Baso, and told him of the story.Hearing it, Baso asked, “Was the firewood you saw big or small?”“It was very big,” the monk answered.“You are a man of great strength,” was Baso’s unexpected reply.“Why, master?” queried the monk, at a loss as to how to take it.Baso then said: “You have brought here such a big piece of firewood all the way from Sekito. You surely are a man of great strength, aren’t you?”Baso is saying nothing about the firewood. He is talking about the thought the poor monk has carried from one mountain to another mountain. Sekito has not meant the firewood. He simply meant this. It was just by chance that there was a pile of firewood. But he was pointing to this, not to the firewood.The monk missed the point. He thought perhaps Baso might be able to explain. But again he missed because Baso said nothing about the firewood, nothing about Sekito, but about the strength of the monk – which seemed to be absolutely irrelevant.But Baso is right. He is saying, “You unnecessarily carried such a load from mountain to mountain.” Sekito has not pointed to the firewood, he has pointed to the thisness of things, the suchness of things.The whole of Zen is concerned with this…A footnote:Baso – also called Ma Tzu – was said to be a strange-looking man. He walked like a cow and looked around like a tiger. He could touch his nose with his tongue and had two rings on the soles of his feet. His chief disciples were Hyakujo…We talked about him yesterday.…and Nansen.We talked about him also.His disciples numbered in all more than a hundred.One hundred people became enlightened under Baso. He defeated even Gautam Buddha. He defeated even Bodhidharma. But his method was as unique as his style. Do you see that he walked like an animal? Signifying the natural, the innocent; signifying no head, no headiness, but only a heart that can understand without being told, that can understand without a single word being said.He was certainly one of the strangest masters who has walked on the earth. Nobody has walked like a cow; not even in ten thousand years has any Hindu – who worship cows – tried to walk like a cow.But don’t be mistaken about his walking like a cow. It shows his softness, it shows his motherliness, it shows his feminine receptivity. But he also looked around like a tiger. He was soft for those who could understand softness and he was hard for those who can understand only hardness. He was a master of many just for this reason.Baso was just a cow. Bodhidharma was just a tiger. Baso had the heart of a cow, so soft that he has written the best poetry that exists in the world. His paintings are of immense beauty. His statements contain the very truth. But if you wanted to be a disciple and you were seeking someone to chop your head, Baso was perfect, the right person. To show his strangeness, the story says: He could touch his nose with his tongue.It is very difficult. I know only one man – and I have traveled around the world – who can move his earlobes. Have you ever tried? It is absolutely impossible because there is no muscular system that reaches to your own earlobes. You cannot do anything – it is just there. Donkeys can do it, but you cannot.This man was one of my fellow students in the university. He became famous just for the act – that he could move his ears according to his will. When he was introduced to me, I said, “This is nothing because I have seen so many donkeys doing it. It is not worth anything. Just stop it.”He said, “You are the first man… Rather than appreciating, you are calling me a donkey.”I said, “That is my appreciation. Because donkeys have such big ears and move their ears so easily.”I have seen a few people who can touch their nose with their tongue; particularly if they belong to some yogic school. There is a stupid idea that if you can touch your nose with your tongue, you will become immortal! And a few idiots try for years to lengthen their tongue by hanging weights on it. I have even seen people who have cut the tongue inside, where it is joined, so it becomes looser and they can touch their nose. But by touching your nose, you will not touch eternity. Anybody can touch your nose.Just coming in, I touched Avirbhava’s nose. Anybody can pinch anybody else’s nose. The nose is not immortality. But Baso, just out of playfulness, used to touch his nose with his tongue, saying, “Don’t take religion seriously. Take it as playfully as possible.”A monk asked Baso, “What is the Buddha?”Baso answered, “Mind is the Buddha.”The monk asked, “What is the way?”“No-mind is the way,” answered Baso.What a great and beautiful answer! Because even Buddha is a thought in your mind. Even Buddha has said, “If I come on the path in your meditation, just cut my head off immediately, remove me.” That’s what Baso is saying: Buddha is mind, no-mind is the way.The monk then asked, “Are the Buddha and the way somewhat different?”Baso replied, “The Buddha is like stretching out the hand, the way is like clenching the fist.”Opening the hand or closing the hand are not two things, although they appear as two. Just let your mind be silent and settled and you have entered into no-mind.There is no difference. The difference is only of an open hand and a fist. Not much difference, not a difference that can be called difference. But yet, apparently, it is different, but only apparently.Maneesha is asking:Osho,More than any other understanding of life, Zen is uncompromising. There is no recourse to interesting explanations from the head or moving expressions from the heart. Either you get the experience or you don't. There is no middle way.Could you please comment?Maneesha, there is no way, neither middle nor extreme. Way means distance, and you are already there. I teach you the no-way. Just relax and you are there. You have not taken even a step on any way.Before we enter into thisness, the bamboos are asking for a few laughters. You cannot be hard on the poor bamboos.Old Daisy Smith dies, and shows up at the Pearly Gates. She is let in by Saint Peter. “You can just settle down anywhere you want,” he says.“Well,” says Daisy, “I would like to be with my husband who has been dead for many years.”“Okay,” replies Peter. “What is his name?”“John,” she says.“My God,” cries Peter, “we have here hundreds of John Smiths. Is there anything about him that would set him apart?”Daisy thinks for a while and then says, “Yes, there is. He told me before he died that if I was ever unfaithful to him, he would turn in his grave.”“A-ha!” says Peter, “I know him. He is the one we call Whirling Smith.”Kowalski gets a job at a big sawmill but on the first morning he calls the foreman over to where he is working and says, “Boss, one of my fingers has gone with the saw.”“Well,” demands the foreman, “what did you do wrong?”“I don’t know,” admits Kowalski, “I just touched it like this… Shit! There goes another one!”Kowalski comes home unexpectedly from work, and goes upstairs to the bedroom.He finds his wife, Gertie, lying naked on the bed looking very flushed, and with her hand clutched over her heart.“My God!” shouts Kowalski, “what is going on?”“Oh!” moans Gertie, “phone the doctor. I think I am having a heart attack!”“What?” shouts Kowalski. He turns and races downstairs to the phone and dials doctor Bones.Just then, his little daughter comes up to him and tugs at his sleeve.“Dad,” she says, “there is a man hiding, naked, in the bedroom closet.”“What?” shouts Kowalski.He drops the phone and races back to the bedroom.He opens the closet door and finds his best friend standing there without any clothes on.“George!” shouts Kowalski, “you should be ashamed of yourself. My wife is having a heart attack and here you are frightening little children.”Now, Nivedano, give your first beat for everybody to go absolutely crazy in gibberish.[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody goes into absolute silence.Gather your energy within yourself.Close your eyes, no movement.This. This. A thousand times this.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax.Just be that.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back to life.Even the bamboos are silent.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-06/

Osho,In ancient times, there were sixteen Bodhisattvas. At the monks’ bath-time, following the rule, they had baths. They suddenly experienced realization through the touch of the water.You reverend Zen students, do you understand their words? – “We experienced the subtle and clear touch, have attained buddhahood, and still retain it.”You will be able to attain this condition after seven times piercing and eight times breaking through.Maneesha, before I discuss the anecdote I have to give you the background. First, buddhahood is your nature. If you are sensitive enough, you can become aware of it through any sense: through touch, through taste, through the eyes, through the ears – because it is not outside of you, it is only a question of deep concentration. Then any sense that is predominant in you will become the revelation.Remember, everybody has different senses of different intensity. Somebody can see more, only then can he become a painter. Most people cannot see like a painter. Somebody has ears for music… Not everybody has: the subtler the music, the deeper the sensitivity that will be needed to hear it.I am reminded of a great dancer, Nijinsky, who used to jump to such heights in his dances… Which were scientifically impossible: they were going against gravitation. You can jump only to a certain limit. It was a miracle to see Nijinsky jumping – beyond gravitation, as if he has become so light and free from gravitation.Even more miraculous was his coming back to the earth. If anything comes toward the earth, it comes with a force, the gravitation pulls it. You cannot hesitate, and you cannot delay and postpone. It is not in your hands. If you fall from a height, it is not in your hands to go with lesser speed or more speed. There is no speedometer in your hands.But Nijinsky fell just like a feather, showing again that gravitation is transcended. He was asked again and again – obviously: “What is the secret?”And he said, “Don’t ask me, because whenever ‘I’ try I fail. I cannot jump that height, neither can I fall like a feather. But dancing, once in a while I forget myself and suddenly it happens. The moment I am not – the miracle! I cannot give you the secret because there is no secret in my hands.”Nijinsky was not a mystic, but he was experiencing a mystical state. He was not a philosopher; hence he could not even give an explanation. He simply said in the most authentic, sincere way, “There comes a moment in my dance that I don’t find myself anywhere. In that state whatever happens is not my doing.”You can experience buddhahood just by being silent or just by being so loving that your hands melt into love; or by being so total in any act that your “I” disappears and only isness remains.Isness is another name of buddhahood.It is always within you, the question is by which door you are going to enter in.This anecdote says:In ancient times, there were sixteen Bodhisattvas. At the monks’ bath-time, following the rule, they had baths. They suddenly experienced realization through the touch of the water…Don’t think it is just a story. If you are really alive and your touch is total, you can become enlightened just under your own shower. This anecdote is being told by a teacher to some disciples. He says,You reverend Zen students…Naturally it is not a dialogue between two masters, it is a conversation between a teacher and a student.“‘We experienced the subtle and clear touch, have attained buddhahood, and still retain it.”You will be able to attain this condition after seven times piercing and eight times breaking through.“Seven times piercing” means going through all your layers, which are counted as seven. Only then can you reach to your center. And you will have to do it eight times! It is not a question of why eight? It is simply the experience that unless you go eight times piercing the seven layers of your mind you will not know what your innermost being is.Just today I received a scientific research survey which has astonished scientists – it will astonish anyone. The survey was done on students to check their intelligence – and meanwhile there were machines detecting the activity going on inside the brain. The puzzling conclusion was that the less activity shown, the more intelligence there was. This was absolutely against the traditional idea: a more active mind has to be more intelligent.That has been the superstition up to now, even in the eyes of science. But this survey gets rid of something… The mystic has always been saying: No-mind is intelligence.Looking at the survey you can see two things: less activity, more intelligence. The natural conclusion will be, no activity, an absolute intelligence, but even the scientists who were doing the survey did not conclude in the way I am concluding.No-mind means intelligence; mind means gibberish, not intelligence. And when I am asking you for gibberish, I am simply asking you to throw the mind and all its activity out so you remain behind, pure, clean, transparent, perceptive.Another report I have received is from an institute in America. The institute trains actors for films. The director must have read me, because he forces every student in the institute to do the Dynamic Meditation, Kundalini Meditation and gibberish. And even those people who had come just to learn the art of acting have, strangely, felt a tremendous opening through gibberish – a silence from the unknown descending and overwhelming them.Setcho’s commentary:The enlightened man is master of one single thing:Stretching at ease on his bed.If, in a dream, the ancients said they were enlightened,Let them emerge from the scented water, and I would spit at them!Setcho’s intellectuality is too much. He cannot understand. He is like a blind man commenting on light.A few footnotes.“Sixteen Bodhisattvas”: in the Surangama Sutra – an ancient Buddhist scripture – there is an episode in which twenty-five Bodhisattvas relate their experiences of attaining realization. First Kyochinnyo and four others, the first five disciples of Buddha, stand up and describe their paths to realization…Kyochinnyo says, “As for my realization, seeing a sight was the primary cause of it.”If you can really see a beautiful rose or a beautiful sunset with your totality there is no need of any other discipline to become a buddha. But the seeing has to be total and ultimate and unconditional.Second, Kyogon Doji says, “Smelling a scent was the cause of my realization.”Third, Yakuo and Yakujo cite tasting as the cause of their realization.Fourth, Baddabara and the fifteen other bodhisattvas in this anecdote rise and make obeisance to the Buddha, and Baddabara says,“We formerly heard the preaching of Ion-o, the first buddha, and became monks.At the monks’ bathtime, following the rule, we entered the bathroom. We suddenly experienced realization through the touch of water.We did not wash off dirt, did not wash the body. We achieved peace of mind and obtained the state of no-possession.The aforementioned buddha named me Baddabara, saying, ‘You have experienced subtle and clear touching and attained buddhahood, and retain it.’ The answer to your question, therefore, is that touching was the primary cause of our realization.”Other Bodhisattvas in turn tell of their experiences, and finally the Bodhisattva Kannon cites the importance, in his case, of “listening to sound.”All your senses are doors, and remember, a door can open outward and the same door can open inward. It is the same sense which you use to hear outer music, with which you can hear the music of your own being. The question is simply whether to go inward or to go outward; the door is the same.Maneesha is asking:Osho,Although I am not even sure what intuition is, I suspect that there is a connection between intuition and Zen. Is that so?And if it is, can intuition be triggered through any of the senses, even through thinking?No, Maneesha. Thinking is not capable of triggering intuition. Intuition… The very word is against tuition. Tuition comes from outside, intuition blossoms like a flower from your innermost core.Thinking cannot do it, but these bamboos can do it, this finger pointing to nothing can do it, this silence pervading here can do it.Thinking is a hindrance, it cannot trigger your innermost being. In fact it is preventing the triggering.When you see a beautiful sunset, immediately, the thought! To prevent, it says, “How beautiful, what a beautiful sunset!” and it has prevented the sunset reaching and hitting your very being.If you can hear these poor bamboos without a single word arising, you have arrived home.Maneesha is asking:Could the “intuitive flash” be a cognitive quantum leap; and enlightenment, a quantum leap of the being?Intuition and enlightenment are not two things. Your innermost center is your enlightenment. It is not that you become enlightened, you are enlightened, but your thinking prevents you from recognizing it. The quantum leap is needed: from thinking to no-thinking, from mind to no-mind, from out to in, from there to here, from then to now.Before we enter into the quantum leap, the bamboos are asking for few laughs.A student demonstration turns into a riot.Suddenly, a man staggers out of the crowd, carrying a limp girl in his arms.“Here,” shouts a cop, running up to the man. “Give her to me, I will get her out of this!”“To hell with you!” replies the man. “Go and find one of your own!”A man with a weight problem goes to see his doctor.“I want to lose weight,” he says, “but it is no good giving me a diet. I have tried them before and they never worked.”“The only thing I can suggest,” says Doctor Bones, scratching his nose, “is a rather unusual Indian technique, using exercise only. No diet. So you can eat anything you like. But, what you have to do, is have wild, passionate, sexual intercourse at least four times a night. Okay? Come back and see me in a month.”A month goes by and the patient returns.“How much weight have you lost?”“About two pounds,” replies the man.“And how many times did you have sex this month?” continues Bones.“Fifteen times,” replies the patient.“My God!” cries Bones, “that is not good enough!”“Maybe not,” replies the man, “but it is pretty good for a Catholic priest in a small town!”Many people have trouble understanding what a miracle is. Paddy is one of these people and even though Father Murphy has explained the subject many times and in great detail, Paddy is still not satisfied.“Father,” says Paddy, “perhaps you could give me an example of a miracle?”“All right, Patrick,” says the priest, “turn around.”Paddy turns around and Father Murphy gives him a large boot in the backside. “Now, Patrick,” asks the priest, “did you feel that?”“I certainly did,” replies Paddy, rubbing his buttocks.“Well, Patrick,” continues Father Murphy, “it would have been a miracle if you had not.”A young sailor is washed ashore on an island inhabited by cannibals.Since the cannibal tribe is fasting for one month, the chief announces that the sailor’s life will be spared if he can pass the three-tent test.“In the first tent,” says the chief, “there is a jug full of strong liquor. You must drink it all”“In the second tent is a lion with toothache. You must take out his sore tooth.”“In the third tent is a nymphomaniac. She has already exhausted two husbands who were trying to fulfill her needs. You must satisfy her twice!”The sailor shrugs and goes into the first tent. After five minutes of silence, he wobbles out and goes into the second tent. There are screams and moans and eventually, he crawls out covered in cuts and bruises.Standing up he looks around and asks,“Now, where is that girl with the sore tooth?”Now, Nivedano, give the first drum and everybody goes into absolute gibberish. Don’t spare anything.[Drumbeat][Gibberish][Drumbeat]Everybody goes into absolute silence.Just gather your energy inward, close your eyes…This. This. A thousand times this.Even the bamboos have become silent.[A few bamboos still go on making some noise.]Just a few of them – Setchos – are still giving a commentary.[Even the bamboos become absolutely silent.]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax. Relax as if you are dead.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Now come back from the dead.Has everybody come back to life?

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-07/

Osho,There was a monk in training under Dogo called Soshin. He was a sincere young monk worthy of his name, which meant “to revere and believe.” He had become distressed, and felt it to be beyond endurance: since the time he had come to the monastery for training, his teacher, Dogo, had not given him, even once, any instructive sermon or appropriate guidance.One day Soshin, who could not stand it any longer, went to his teacher Dogo and asked: “Ever since I came to this monastery, you have not given me your gracious teaching even once. What could be the reason for this?”The master gave the least expected reply, for he said, “Why, ever since you came to my monastery, I have not, even for one moment, neglected to teach you.”“What kind of teaching have you given me, master?” Soshin asked.“Well, well! If you bring me a cup of tea, don’t I receive the cup? If you serve me meals, don’t I eat them? If you greet me with your hands pressed, don’t I return your bow?“How have I ever neglected to give you guidance?”Soshin, listening to this, hung his head deep, and for a while could not utter a word. Suddenly the master’s roaring cry, as if abusing him, fell on Soshin’s whole being. Dogo said, “When you see, see it direct! If a thought moves, it is gone!”At this, Soshin uttered an unintentional cry “Oh!” and prostrated himself before the teacher, in tears, whether of joy or sorrow he himself did not know.Maneesha, Zen is life, not a philosophy about it. It is truth, not a theology, a system of beliefs. It is direct and immediate experience. If you move just a little in your thinking – and all thinking is movement, only no-thought is still… Silent, and you will understand not only about Zen, you will understand the very essence of existence itself.Philosophers go on about and about, they have many things to think, discuss, dispute. Zen has only one thing: a direct insight, a straight encounter with yourself. All else is simply commentary.This beautiful anecdote will explain this to you. Don’t move, it is not something you have to think about; just listen directly. There is no question of believing or not believing, accepting or not accepting. Just listen as if you are listening to the sound of running water.There was a monk in training under Dogo called Soshin. He was a sincere young monk worthy of his name, which meant “to revere and believe.” He had become distressed, and felt it to be beyond endurance: since the time he had come to the monastery for training, his teacher, Dogo, had not given him, even once, any instructive sermon or appropriate guidance.Soshin’s name is beautiful, but it is not the right name for a disciple. It means reverence and belief. Neither reverence is needed nor belief is needed. Soshin has to disappear into an utter absence. Then he would not have asked the master: “I have been here, and now it is becoming unendurable. You have not given me any guidance, or any teaching, or any sermon.”That is the poor state of every human being. He is expecting someone else to give him the truth. That is the believer’s mind. Truth is available only to the receptive. The believer is never receptive. The believer has his own belief which is a barrier, a prejudice. However beautiful, a prison is a prison.And the question of reverence does not arise. You cannot touch your own feet. The authentic disciple is neither a believer nor searching to worship or revere someone. His whole effort is to inquire into his own isness. He will never be dissatisfied.There is no question of endurance, there is no need of any expectation. The truth is showering on you in each of your breaths, in each beat of your heart.Except truth, there is nothing else. You are drowned in it.One day Soshin, who could not stand it any longer, went to his teacher Dogo and asked, “Ever since I came to this monastery, you have not given me your gracious teaching even once. What could be the reason for this?”A very logical, rational question. But Zen is neither logical nor rational. It is existential. Logic, reason – all belong to your gibberish. Silence is beyond any logic and any reason. It simply is.The master gave the least expected reply, for he said, “Why, ever since you came to my monastery, I have not, even for one moment, neglected to teach you.”“What kind of teaching have you given me, master?” Soshin asked.“Well, well! If you bring me a cup of tea, don’t I receive the cup? If you serve me meals, don’t I eat them? If you greet me with your hands pressed, don’t I return your bow?How have I ever neglected to give you guidance?”Do you see the difference? There are millions of teachers in the world but very few will be able to even understand what Dogo is saying.He is saying, “If you had been present to the present, you would have seen with what grace, with what gratitude I receive the cup of tea that you bring. Even just a single moment of awareness would have made you enlightened.”Suddenly, Soshin, listening to this, hung his head deep, and for a while could not utter a word.He was ashamed of himself – not being able to understand such a compassionate master who has been teaching every moment, day in, day out. Of course, without any words, just by his presence… That signifies the greatest masters.Suddenly the master’s roaring cry, as if abusing him, fell on Soshin’s whole being. Dogo said, “When you see, see it direct! If a thought moves, it is gone!”At this, Soshin uttered an unintentional cry “Oh!” and prostrated himself before the master, in tears, whether of joy or sorrow he himself did not know.This is enlightenment. The sudden opening of all the mysteries and one is no more, so how can one know whether these tears are of joy or of sorrow? It is a tremendously beautiful story for every one of you to understand.This very morning, Devageet was working on my teeth. For the first time in years, when I left his dentist’s chair, I asked him, “Are you satisfied?” – because I could see his dissatisfaction, that he has not been able to do the work he wanted to do on my teeth.In the evening I told him to finish it because who knows about tomorrow? I may not be here, then fixing my teeth will be absolutely absurd. He did try his best but I am a master who is teaching every moment to everybody to be present. And even people who are close to me go on asking me, “Do you love me, Osho?”I cannot do otherwise. It is not a question of your qualities. My love is unconditional. But I can see the poverty of the human heart. It goes on asking, “Am I needed?” And unless you are free from the desire to be needed, you will never know freedom, you will never know love and you will never know truth.Because of this anecdote, I have to report to you: Shunyo works hard continuously, taking every care of me, but still she goes on asking, “Do you love me?” I am in the dentist’s chair under maximum gas and she is asking, “Do you love me?” And because I had promised my dentist I would not talk… But it is impossible.Because I did not say, “I love you,” she must have become so disturbed that she forgot to put the towel in my bathroom. I had to take a bath without a towel. Later on, when I asked her, she said, “I am sorry.”But it is not only her situation. It is almost everybody’s situation. And my whole teaching is that you have to be respectful to yourself. This is falling from dignity to ask – and particularly from a master whose love is already being given to you. Why be a beggar? My effort here is to make emperors of you.The day, the moment, you understand the tremendous glory of being present, nothing else is needed. You are enough. Out of that arises the great joy, “Aha! My God! I have been here and looking everywhere else.”Dogo was asked by a monk, “What is the deepest?”Dogo came down from his seat, made obeisance in the manner of a woman and said, “You have come from so far and I have no answer for you.”He has answered but he has no answer to give in words. But do you see the tremendous beauty? In Japan, men and women bow down to each other differently. Obviously, the woman’s is more loving, humble; of the heart – not just a social manner but her own being.Dogo came down from his seat, made obeisance in the manner of a woman…That is what has to be understood: …in the manner of a woman… Humble, loving, simple; there is nothing deeper than this grace. He has answered, but seeing that the monk has not understood, he says, “You have come from so far and I have no answer for you.”Again, the great compassion of a master: rather than telling the questioner, “Don’t ask stupid questions,” he rather accepts his own ignorance. He says, “I don’t have any answer,” although he has given the answer. But he has given it in existential terms. That was the greatness of Dogo.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Did you call the bamboos, “poor bamboos” last night? Aren't they the luckiest bamboos alive? – listening to one who speaks their language and knowing that our silence deepens with their every movement?Maneesha, amongst these bamboos, there are a few poor intellectuals, PhD’s, DLitt’s – I was referring to these poor people. Otherwise… Now, see: even the intellectuals are silent. Certainly these bamboos are the luckiest in the world in this moment. Just the way you are the luckiest people in the world.But a few intellectuals cannot resist. Even though they see so many silent people, they go on making statements. A few are journalists, a few are politicians. But the remaining ones are absolutely silent with you. Now do you see? Even the DLitt’s are keeping their mouths shut. But that does not mean that they are silent. Once you are silent, they will start chattering.An intellectual is incurable. He may be a bamboo… It does not matter in what form the consciousness in life has appeared.I had to call those bamboos “poor,” Maneesha, because according to me the poorest people in the world are the intellectuals, politicians, journalists, people who have nothing but power and money. These are the poorest ones because they are missing a tremendous opportunity of rejoicing in their own being and having a dance because they have found their authentic space.Before we go into our meditation a few laughs will help you. Laughter is a tremendously helpful method to shake off all dust from you, that everybody gathers without his knowing.After many years of service, Father O’Reilly realizes that his assistant Patrick MacDilly is stealing from the donation box. So the next Sunday, after hearing MacDilly’s confession, Father O’Reilly says, “Patrick, besides the sins you have already confessed, don’t you have anything else to add?”There is no reply.“Okay, Patrick,” continues Father O’Reilly, “I will ask you straight: who is stealing from the donation box?”There is silence.Father O’Reilly tries again and still he is met with silence.So then he comes out of the confession box and says to MacDilly, “Hey, I asked you a question.”“Funny,” says MacDilly, “I did not hear anything.”“Okay,” says the priest impatiently. “We will change places. I will kneel there and you sit in my place and we will check this thing out.”So MacDilly sits down and asks, “Who is screwing the young priest who just arrived?”“Funny,” says O’Reilly jumping up. “You are right, I cannot hear either.”Paddy and Sean are driving home to Dublin from an Irish wine-tasting festival and have tasted a little too much.“Paddy, are we near the city yet?” asks Sean.“Yes,” says Paddy, “we must be. We are knocking down more people.”“Drive slower then,” cries Sean.“What do you mean, drive slower?” says Paddy. “You are driving!”Archibald, the budding young artist, gets up from the couch where he has been making love to his model and starts dressing.“I will bet you do that to all your models,” says the girl breathlessly.“No,” replies Archie, “you are the first.”“Really?” asks the girl. “And how many models have you had?”“Just four,” replies Archie, “a lemon, a potato, a banana and you.”The ship is sinking fast and the captain calls the last three members of his crew to the bridge.“Men,” says the captain, “this thing about the captain going down with his ship is all rubbish. There is a three-man life raft here and I am going to be on it. So that means one of you will have to stay behind. To see who will come with me, I will ask you each a question. Whoever cannot answer remains behind, okay?”“Here is the first question: What unsinkable ship hit an iceberg and sank?”“The Titanic, Sir,” answers the first man.“Right,” says the captain.“How many people drowned?”“One thousand five hundred and two, Sir,” replies the second sailor.“Right,” says the captain calmly.He turns to the third man. “And now the third question,” he says, “What were their names?”Now, Nivedano, give the first drum and everybody goes into gibberish.[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody goes into absolute silence.No movement, either of mind or body.Just gather your whole energy in the deepest innermost being.This. This. A thousand times this.The very essence of Zen…This.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]And everybody relax as if you are dead.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back to life.Really come back to life.A few may be still dead.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Fresh, in this very moment, you are the most precious.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-08/

Osho,One night Isan Reiyu was in attendance on Hyakujo, sitting till late in the quietness of the mountain temple.“Who are you?” Hyakujo asked.“Reiyu,” replied Isan.“Rake in the fireplace,” said Hyakujo.Isan did as he was told and said, “I find no embers left.”Hyakujo took up the tongs and, raking deep down, brought up a tiny burning ember, which he showed to Isan, and said, “Just this, you see!”Isan was suddenly enlightened. He made deep bows and presented his views to Hyakujo, who said:“You have reached a crossroads on the journey. It is said in the sutra, ‘If you want to see buddha nature, you should observe time and causation.’When the time comes you will realize it, just like remembering something you have forgotten. It is not obtained from others.“Therefore, when you are enlightened it is just like when you were not enlightened – no mind, no dharma.“If only you have no delusion, and no discrimination between the buddha and the unenlightened, your original nature manifests itself.Now you have attained it, mindfully cultivate it.”Maneesha, Zen is your very heart. It is not an achievement, you already have it. It is only a recognition.This small anecdote is tremendously important compared to great religious scriptures, which say so much without saying anything. These small anecdotes say so much without even using a word. Their language is of existence, it is neither Hebrew, nor Arabic, nor Sanskrit. The bamboos understand it as much as you, it is the very language of being alive. Only dead people are deaf, and vice versa is also true: those who are deaf are dead.One night Isan Reiyu was in attendance on Hyakujo, sitting till late in the quietness of the mountain temple.You can feel the situation in which Isan was sitting, close to Hyakujo.“Who are you?” Hyakujo asked.Not that he is asking his name, he knows it. Isan has been one of his long-standing disciples. He is not asking anything concerning his personality, he knows every layer of it. He is asking directly, “Who is there in – within all these clothes, the body, the bones, the mind, the thoughts? Who is there at the very innermost core?”“Who are you?” Hyakujo asked.“Reiyu,” replied Isan.“Rake in the fireplace,” said Hyakujo.Isan did as he was told and said, “I find no embers left.”Hyakujo took up the tongs and, raking deep down, brought up a tiny burning ember, which he showed to Isan, and said, “Just this, you see!”I want to say to you also: Just this! Do you see? – the silence, the joy, the chit-chatting of the bamboos? Do you see the flame of your being?Isan was suddenly enlightened. He made deep bows and presented his views to Hyakujo, who said:“You have reached a crossroads on the journey. It is said in the sutra, ‘If you want to see buddha nature, you should observe time and causation.’When the time comes you will realize it, just like remembering something you have forgotten.”This is immensely significant – to understand that you are not lost, you have just forgotten who you are. And the most hilarious thing is that you are asking others, “Who am I?” Whatever you know about yourself is not you. The knower within you is beyond the reach of your mind, you cannot think about it. You can simply be it.And the sutra coming from Gautam Buddha says: “It is a remembering.” You must all have felt once in a while. In all the languages of the world the expression, “it is just on the tip of my tongue” exists. A name…you can even see the face, you know that you know the name, it is just on the tip of your tongue, but it is not coming out. And the harder you try, the narrower becomes the space from which the forgotten can again become a recognition.A point comes…you drop it. One can go only so far, you cannot drive yourself absolutely mad. You just go out for a morning walk, or start digging in your garden and suddenly, out of nowhere, the name is remembered. You had never forgotten it.Then what was the mechanism that was preventing it from coming to the surface? That mechanism is the whole psychology of the buddhas. The more your mind is full of thoughts, tensions, worries, the further away you are from yourself; the moment the mind is silent you are suddenly centered in your very being.And there is no other greater ecstasy, no other greater blissfulness, than to know who you are. To know the inner space is to know all. It is unlimited silence, but not dead. It is alive with songs of its own, with dances of its own.Of course they belong to a totally different stratum.You see Gautam Buddha sitting in the lotus posture – that is from the outside, a photograph. I see him from inside. He is not sitting in the lotus posture; he is dancing madly. From eternity to eternity his dance goes on and on becoming more and more juicy. More and more flowers start opening in the innermost being – even the silence is fragrant.It is not something special. Hyakujo is pointing out to his disciple that it is the most natural, simple experience. Just don’t ask to be special and it is yours, just don’t go on a journey of power and it is yours, just don’t even seek it and you have found it. It is your very nature: even if you try to drop it somewhere, throw it somewhere, it is not possible.There is no way not to be a buddha. Yes, there is a little difference, not worth even calling a difference: a few buddhas are asleep, a few buddhas are awake. Those who are awake were asleep before, those who are asleep now will – in their own time of ripening, blossoming – become buddhas. The difference is not there at all.A tremendous statement, the sutra of Gautam Buddha says:“It is not obtained from others. Therefore, when you are enlightened it is just like when you were not enlightened.”Please see the beauty of it and the depth of it.“…no mind, no dharma…“…and no discrimination between the buddha and the unenlightened, your original nature manifests itself. Now you have attained it, mindfully cultivate it.”Even if you have attained the insight, you will have to remember it again and again, just because of your old habits of judgment that somebody is enlightened and somebody else is not enlightened.A thousand and one times I have been asked, “What are the qualities of a buddha?” I am not an old, traditional Zen master, otherwise anybody who asks, “What is a buddha?” deserves a good hit on the head so he becomes awake.The Zen master Niskriya unfortunately is not here. He is the first German Zen master. And you know a Japanese hit is one thing but a German hit is bound to make you awakened! He has gone to Germany, just to make arrangements to come back here again, to help the sleeping ones.He is the reincarnation of Sekito the Stonehead. When he comes back I am going to ask him, “Would you like to change your name to your original name Sekito the Stonehead?” Just before leaving yesterday, he was hiding his head in a China cap. But hiding a stone head does not make much sense. He still had his staff.This staff came into being in the Zen tradition as a symbol that this is the only difference between the awakened and the not awakened: hit hard and everybody is going to wake up. If you cannot wake up here, where even the drums of Nivedano are becoming enlightened, then it is very unfortunate.Hyakujo is also known as Pai-chang. He became enlightened when studying under Baso together with Nansen. Baso said of him, “Zen is with Hyakujo.”Baso’s certificate is more than one can expect.It is said that he was clever and gentle and he had nothing ostentatious about him. He was invited to the great temple at Mount Hyakujo, from which he took his name. Many disciples gathered around him, among them one such as Obaku, also known as Huang-po, and Isan.Maneesha is asking:Osho,When one talks to someone it is with the assumption that the other person can hear. One would not speak to a deaf person. But you are only talking to us until we begin to hear you. Aren't you?Maneesha, it is the unfortunate destiny of every master to speak to those who cannot hear. To show this symbolically, Bodhidharma, the most famous name in the world of Zen, remained speaking for nine years facing the wall. The audience used to sit behind him, not in front of him. In front of him was just a wall. For nine years he was again and again asked, “What kind of man are you? We have heard many masters, many teachers, many preachers; they always face their audience.”With tears in his eyes Bodhidharma said, “It makes no difference. On both sides are deaf walls. This wall, at least, does not disappoint me. I know it is a wall, so there is no question of disappointment. But if I turn toward you and find you just like a wall, it will be very disappointing. I will wait for those who are open like doors and not closed like walls.”His first disciple stood behind him for twelve hours, skin deep in snow. Without saying a single word he cut off his hand, threw it before Bodhidharma and said, “If you don’t turn toward me, I am going to cut off my head!”Bodhidharma said, “Wait! You have done enough.”This one-handed man became his first disciple. It is obvious that his desire to know was keener than even to live, that his inquiry was an intense fire in which he was ready to burn himself. But that’s why I say again and again: those beautiful days were golden moments when such people as Bodhidharma existed. Not alone – hundreds of Bodhidharmas have existed, but slowly, slowly they have disappeared. Even in the Buddhist countries where these phenomenal beings appeared, Zen is now only an academic study.I want it to be declared to the world that this is the only place where Zen is not an academic study. We are trying to live it. We are trying to our utmost, to bring a great experience back to life.Maneesha’s second question is:Osho,I remember you speaking some time ago about Zen in comparison with J. Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff's work, saying – if I understood correctly – that where J. Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff worked with the active mind, Zen worked with the inactive mind. Your work, I heard you say, was to help us to go beyond both active and inactive minds, to find the transcendental, that is: consciousness.Maneesha, you have heard me rightly. Mind has two sides – it can be active, it can be inactive. But even in its inactivity it is there; in its backyard. And to be truly conscious, to be authentically a buddha, one has to go beyond both, the active and the inactive.She has also asked:When we do gibberish, followed by silence, are we experiencing the active, then the inactive mind? And is it possible that we can experience the transcendental during the let-go? Can one have moments of consciousness before being totally and irrevocably conscious?The whole method is managed in the same way you are describing it.Gibberish is to get rid of the active mind, silence to get rid of the inactive mind and let-go is to enter into the transcendental.And don’t think that it is something special, that only special people can do it. You are doing it! – you just have to recognize it. You have to realize the fact of your dignity.The whole society has destroyed you, spoiled you, undermined you, repressed every possibility of your reaching to yourself. And the whole world is against me because I am doing exactly the opposite: I am trying to bring the individual back into the world. The world has killed the individual completely.Just today, I have received an invitation from a small commune of friends in New Zealand. They have a beautiful place; they have sent pictures of a river surrounded with ancient forests, high rising mountains. You can see the whole range of mountains capped with snow. And they wanted me to come there and have my commune there. They are ready to make available as much land as possible, but they don’t understand that their government will not allow a dangerous man like me in their country. First, they should ask their government before they invite me.The politician is the enemy of man. The politician represents the past, the dead, all the graveyards; and my work is to bring even those who have been long dead out of their graves. They try hard not to come out, but I have my own means. I tell them “Gibberish, do gibberish, if you cannot do anything else! At least that will prove that you can breathe and then we can go on from there.”And remember, when I am talking about graves, I am talking about you.Before we go into these three stages… Remember, if you are doing something, do it totally; otherwise there is no point in doing it. I will prepare the ground with some laughter. That is always cleansing, strengthening; makes you aware that if you can laugh you are not dead.Fanny goes to her dentist and complains about a toothache.“Is it very painful?” asks Doctor Floss, adjusting the chair.“Yes, it is,” replies Fanny.“All right, Miss Pringle,” says Floss, turning to his assistant, “you can leave us now.”Miss Pringle goes out quietly, and the dentist and his patient are left alone.“Darling!” says Floss, embracing his patient, “we can’t go on meeting like this!”“But why not?” wails Fanny.“Because,” says Floss, “you have only got one tooth left!”Fergus Cratchit, the seventy-year-old Scotsman, hobbles into his favorite pub to shoot the breeze with his friends.Fergus has recently married a nineteen-year-old girl, and several of the men at the bar buy him drinks and ask him to tell about his wedding night.“My youngest son, Kenneth, lifted me onto the bed where my lovely bride was waiting for me,” recounts Fergus. “And the next morning, my three older sons carried me off the bed.”The men gathered at the bar scratching their heads, and then asked Fergus why it needed three sons to take him off when he needed only one son to put him on.“It is obvious,” replies Fergus, proudly. “I fought them!”Now, be ready… Nivedano, the first…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Absolute silence. Close your eyes, no movement of body or mind.Just be at the very being.This. This.This is the very essence of Zen.Just rejoice in it!Nivedano, the second…[Drumbeat]Everybody dies completely.Even if the dead go on breathing, don’t be worried. Be dead!This will give you a taste of the transcendental.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody comes back to life.Really! It is no laughing matter… A few are still dead.Nivedano, a good beat…[Drumbeat]

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 09 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-09/

Osho,Before he had realized his own enlightenment, Tokusan planned to visit the famous Zen master, Soshin, who lived on a mountain in Ryotan. When he arrived at the foot of the mountain, Tokusan found a tea house by the roadside, and thought that he might have a snack before climbing the mountain.He ordered it from an old woman at the tea house. Snack in the Chinese language is tenjin – which means literally “to light up the mind.”The old woman asked Tokusan, “What do you have in the box on your shoulders?”“I have a most valuable sutra called The Diamond Sutra in it,” Tokusan said.“Is that so?” she said. “Then I have a question to ask you. If you can answer my question, I will provide you with a snack. If, however, you should fail to give me a satisfactory answer, I am sorry, but you will have to go without a snack.”Tokusan was a proud and confident scholar. He replied, “All right. You may ask me any question.”At this the woman said, “In The Diamond Sutra it is written that past mind is unattainable; present mind is unattainable; and future mind is unattainable.” The old woman continued, “You say you are going to light up your mind. Which mind, now, are you going to light up?”Tokusan was not able to answer the old woman’s question. He had to admit his inability to give the answer, and at the suggestion of the old woman of the tea house, he was determined to study Zen under Master Ryotan.Some time later Master Ryotan and Tokusan were spending the evening together.Ryotan said, “It is getting dark. You had better return to your place.”Tokusan said, “Good night” to the master, and stepped outside. A few moments later, he returned to the master saying, “It is so dark outside!”The master lit a candle to give to Tokusan, but just as Tokusan held out his hand and was about to get hold of the candle, Ryotan vehemently blew out the flame.At this very moment Tokusan was awakened and made a bow to the master.Zen is existence, not even existential. It has to be understood because in the contemporary world only one new philosophy has come into existence and that is existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Sören Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and many great scholars and intellectuals of the modern world preach existentialism. Zen is not existentialism. It has nothing to do with any “ism” at all.Every “ism” is a mind game. Existence is not a mind game. In fact, to enter into your own existence, you will have to leave your mind behind.Maneesha, this is one of the most beautiful stories.Before he had realized his own enlightenment, Tokusan planned to visit the famous Zen master, Soshin, who lived on a mountain in Ryotan. When he arrived at the foot of the mountain, Tokusan found a tea house by the roadside, and thought that he might have a snack before climbing the mountain.He ordered it from an old woman at the tea house. Snack in the Chinese language is tenjin – which means literally “to light up the mind.”The old woman asked Tokusan, “What do you have in the box on your shoulders?”“I have a most valuable sutra called The Diamond Sutra in it,” Tokusan said.“Is that so!” she said. “Then I have a question to ask you. If you can answer my question, I will provide you with a snack. If, however, you should fail to give me a satisfactory answer, I am sorry, but you will have to go without a snack.”Tokusan was a proud and confident scholar. He replied, “All right. You may ask me any question.”At this the woman said, “In The Diamond Sutra it is written that past mind is unattainable; present mind is unattainable; and future mind is unattainable.” The old woman continued, “You say that you are going to light up your mind. Which mind, now, are you going to light up?”Tokusan was not able to answer the old woman’s question. He had to admit his inability to give the answer, and at the suggestion of the old woman of the tea house, he was determined to study Zen under Master Ryotan.Some time later Master Ryotan and Tokusan were spending the evening together.Ryotan said, “It is getting dark. You had better return to your place.”Tokusan said, “Good night” to the master, and stepped outside. A few moments later, he returned to the master saying, “It is so dark outside!”The master lit a candle to give to Tokusan, but just as Tokusan held out his hand and was about to get hold of the candle, Ryotan vehemently blew out the flame.At this moment Tokusan was awakened and made a bow to the master.There are many important things to be noted as deeply in you as possible. One is that light does not come from outside. Nobody can give it to you. Ryotan was very kind to make it clear by blowing out the candle.Outside is darkness and inside – where light is – you are not. The only way to have light is to enter into your innermost being. Hence it is called enlightenment.You have become the candle which nobody can blow out. You have found the fire that is eternal, the very flame of existence.You are all flames. It is just a question of seeing within yourselves. And the whole Buddha Hall is full of flames. Just a jungle of flames. Otherwise, outside is darkness.This prompts me to make a marginal note: the West has been searching for the light outside, where it is not. The East has been searching the light inside, where it is. But unfortunately, even the East has fallen into the hands of the West. Its whole educational system, its whole mind is no longer of the East.Now in the world, there exists only the Western mind: looking outside. It does not matter where you are; it is not a question of geography, it is a question of spirituality. Are you looking in? Then you are at the very source of light. And other than that, no light can help you to dispel the darkness that is surrounding you.Ryotan, without saying a word, made his statement and it was understood by Tokusan immediately. The blowing out of the flame was enough for Tokusan to understand that you can only have your own light, nobody can hand it over to you. Either you have it or you don’t have it. But nobody can do anything about it – only hints.This story is also important in order to understand that an ordinary old woman has as much inner light as the greatest master that may have ever lived.An old woman running a tea house at the foothills defeats the great scholar. Tokusan’s speciality was The Diamond Sutra. The old woman asked exactly what The Diamond Sutra is based upon. The Diamond Sutra says, “There is no mind. Neither past, nor present, nor future.” Mind is only a dream in a sleeping consciousness. Wake up and the mind disappears.The old woman, an ordinary woman, an anonymous woman, put the scholar to a great task. She said, “You say you are going to light up your mind” –because a snack in Chinese also means lighting up your mind.The woman, apparently ordinary, must have been extraordinary. She is asking, “Which mind? Past? It is no longer there. Future? It is not yet. And if past and future disappear, how can you have the bridge, the present?” Both the banks have disappeared; do you think the bridge can remain? With the past and future being both absent, makes it absolutely clear: there is no present mind either.You are, but you are not the mind.Tokusan was not able to answer, although he was a great, proud scholar. But as far as existence is concerned your intellectuality, your scholarship have nothing to do with it. It can only make you proud, and to be proud is to lose contact with yourself. To be proud means to be an ego. And you are just a silence. Why pollute it, why not leave it spacious, in tune with existence?Because he could not answer the old woman, he missed his snack. And the old woman said, “Rather than giving you your asked for snack, I advise you to go to the Zen master Ryotan and study with him. Don’t carry this Diamond Sutra on your back unnecessarily. You don’t understand it.”The intellectual is most prone not to understand. His intellectuality prevents him because it gives him a sense as if he knows. But “as if” is not the point. You have to experience, not as if, but this!And he understood this under Master Ryotan when he blew out the flame – a sudden transformation. At this moment, Tokusan was awakened and made a bow to the master.Maneesha has asked:Osho,The commentaries in books on Zen are so dry and scholarly. All that they do is to dissect each anecdote, giving the traditional interpretations of every phrase.But you bring an ancient understanding of life right into our lives, here and now, so that one almost expects to find Seppo sipping tea in Zorba the Buddha Restaurant, or Joshu browsing in the bookshop.Maneesha, you are absolutely right. Here, nothing other than a buddha is allowed. Listen to the bamboos. They are giving their support to my statement. And listen to your hearts and you will find all the buddhas together, silently dancing without making any noise.Before you enter into your living flame, the bamboos are asking for a few laughters. They cannot laugh, but they can hear. They can give commentaries. This series is dedicated to these bamboos.Two middle-aged ladies live together in a big house, with only a female cat for company. They are both convinced that awful things will happen to them if they get near to a male. And they even keep the cat indoors for the same reason.But finally, one of them gets married and goes away on her honeymoon. A few days later, the other lady receives a postcard from her friend. All it says is: “Let the cat out!”Little Ernie is walking downstairs behind his grandfather one morning. “Granddad,” he says, “are you still growing?”“Why do you ask, kid?” inquires his granddad.“Well,” replies Ernie, “the top of your head is coming through your hair!”Doctor Floss, the dentist, has his office on the fiftieth floor of a huge office building.One morning he and his assistant, Miss Pringle, are busy pulling a man’s tooth, when a sharp cry from outside causes them to look up. They rush to the window just in time to see a good friend of theirs go hurtling past.A couple of moments later, someone bursts into the office, shouting, “Hey, did you hear about Rufus Ramsbottom? He just jumped off the roof and fell sixty stories. He is lying down there in the street now, and he looks pretty bad!”“That’s funny,” says Floss, “we saw him go by just a minute ago and he looked fine.”At a special dinner and dance at the Shalom Retirement Home in Miami, Rubin, aged eighty-two and Florrie, aged seventy-six, meet and fall in love.They discuss their situation and decide that they can live better on two social security checks, so they get married.On their wedding night, they go to bed and consummate their marriage in three hours of energetic lovemaking.As Florrie lays back in bed afterwards, she notices that Rubin is not moving. On closer inspection, she realizes that he is dead.At the funeral, Florrie is standing with her friend, Ruthie, who has come along to comfort her.“I am so sorry,” says Ruthie. “What happened?”“Nothing much,” sniffs Florrie, “he came and he went.”Now, it is enough laughter for the moment.The first drum and you start throwing out as much rubbish as possible, with gibberish in words, in gestures. It is a cleansing, a preparation for silence.Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Become silent.Gather yourself inward.Just be.No movement.This. This. A thousand times this!This is the very essence of your being.No time, no mind, just a pure being.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Now relax.Fall dead totally.Even if the body goes on breathing, don’t bother.First you have to be dead to be reborn.The master is your death and your rebirth, both.Please die.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody comes back to life.To full life, to be a flame.A few may be cowards and are still dead.Give another drumbeat for them.[Drumbeat]No, not enough![Drumbeat][Drumbeat][Drumbeat]

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 10 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-10/

Osho,Kyogen was a scholar of great learning, and for some time, this stood in the way of his enlightenment.One day, Isan asked Kyogen, “When you were with our teacher, Hyakujo, you were clever enough to give ten answers to a single question, and hundreds of answers to ten questions.“Tell me this: What is your real self – the self that existed before you came out of your mother’s womb, before you knew East from West?”At this question, Kyogen was stupefied and did not know what to say. He racked his brains and offered all sorts of answers, but Isan brushed them aside.At last Kyogen said, “I beg you, please explain it to me.”Isan replied, “What I say belongs to my own understanding. How can that benefit your mind’s eye?”Kyogen went through all his books and the notes he had made on authorities of every school, but could find no words to use as an answer to Isan’s question. Sighing to himself, he said, “You cannot fill an empty stomach with paintings of rice cakes.” He then burned all his books and papers, saying, “I will give up the study of Buddhism. I will remain a rice-gruel monk for the rest of my life and avoid torturing my mind.”Sadly he left Isan, and took on the self-appointed job of grave-keeper.One day, when he was sweeping the ground, a stone struck a bamboo.Kyogen stood speechless, forgetting himself for a while.Then, suddenly, bursting into loud laughter, he became enlightened.Returning to his hut, Kyogen performed the ceremony of purification, offered incense, paid homage to his teacher, Isan, and with the deepest sense of gratitude said, “Great master, thank you! Your kindness to me is greater even then that of my parents. If you had explained the profound cause to me when I begged you to give me an answer, I should never have reached where I stand today.”Kyogen’s verse on this occasion runs:One stroke and all is gone,No need of stratagem or cure;Each and every actionManifests the ancient way.My spirit is never downcast,I leave no tracks behind me,Enlightenment is beyond speech,Beyond gesture;Those who are emancipatedCall it the unsurpassed.The search called Zen is not for anything other than your own self. It is not a study, hence no scholarship can do any justice to it. It is a very simple experience – great learning can be only a wall and not a bridgeLearning is not needed, what is needed is innocence, and a learned man is never innocent; he knows too much, he knows more than he knows. And he is too proud of all the words, borrowed, that he has accumulated and goes on accumulating.Zen is freedom from the word, freedom from all the advice and all the wisdom of centuries. It simply brings you back to yourself. It does not allow you to move even a little.The needle of your consciousness should point to this. Then anything can be a cause of awakening.This anecdote is simply stating the fact that even a stone striking the bamboos can be the cause of enlightenment. Nobody in the whole history of religion has been so daring as Zen, so rebellious and so existential.Just listen to the anecdote – not as if you are listening to a story or a fiction. These are facts, people have lived them and if you can understand, the same door is open to you as it was open to Kyogen.Kyogen was a scholar of great learning, and for some time, this stood in the way of his enlightenment.Every religion respects scholarship, learning, knowledge, scripture. Zen is alone and unique in its approach. It wants you to burn all the burden of scriptures, to burn all the knowledge that you have borrowed so that you can come to your simple consciousness, unscratched, nothing written on it – just a pure silence, a sky without any frontiers.Kyogen was a great scholar although he was searching for truth, but scholarship is not the way to find it. His very learning was functioning as a barrier to relax into himself. He was clinging to words, scriptures, sutras, past buddhas. It is a hilarious situation, because the buddha is within and people are holding stone statues in their temples. The essential experience is within and people are reciting the sutras of others. It is the most hilarious situation.One day, Isan asked Kyogen, “When you were with our teacher, Hyakujo, you were clever enough to give ten answers to a single question, and hundreds of answers to ten questions.“Tell me this: What is your real self – the self that existed before you came out of your mother’s womb, before you knew East from West?”At this question, Kyogen was stupefied and did not know what to say. He racked his brains and offered all sorts of answers, but Isan brushed them aside.At last Kyogen said, “I beg you, please explain it to me.”Isan replied “What I say belongs to my own understanding. How can that benefit your mind’s eye?“Your consciousness? What I know is so deep within me, and it is not a commodity that can be given to you. You will have to find it on your own within yourself.”Kyogen went through all his books and the notes he had made on authorities of every school, but could find no words to use as an answer to Isan’s question.Kyogen must have been a very honest and sincere inquirer, otherwise thousands of books are available with all kinds of answers. But there is not a single book in the world which can give you the answer that breathes, that has a heart, that can laugh, that can dance. That answer is not going to be from any other source than your own.Kyogen tried all the great scriptures, and notes he has taken while listening to great masters like Hyakujo, but he could not find the answer to the question Isan has raised: “Who are you? What is inside you? What is your center of being? What is the flame that keeps you alive?”Isan is questioning your very life source. Of course you cannot find it in any book – unless you are a stupid scholar, and there are thousands of stupid scholars around the world. The universities are full of them. They are talking around and about: about truth, about love, about being. You ask and they have answers for all your questions.I was expelled from one college because I insisted to the professor of philosophy, “First you answer whether you know yourself or not!”He tried all kinds of answers; he was a great scholar, an old man, but I was insistent: “All these answers you are giving are borrowed. What is your answer?”He became so much troubled, he threatened the college authorities: “I will leave, retire. Either I can be in this college or this student. He is making me so troubled, I cannot sleep at night. And he is so strange that even early in the morning, at three o’clock, he knocks on my door and asks, ‘Have you found the answer?’”Such questions are neither asked nor answered. The principal called me and said, “Why are you torturing that old man?”I said, “I am torturing nobody. If a man cannot answer the simplest question, then all else that he is saying is nonsense.”A truth is never borrowed. The moment it is borrowed it becomes untrue. A truth cannot be read in a scripture, a truth has to be only lived in the innermost temple of your being.Naturally Kyogen could not find the answer.Sighing to himself, he said, “You cannot fill an empty stomach with paintings of rice cakes.” He then burned all his books and papers, saying, “I will give up the study of Buddhism. I will remain a rice-gruel monk for the rest of my life and avoid torturing my mind.”Sadly he left Isan, and took on the self-appointed job of grave-keeper.One day, when he was sweeping the ground, a stone struck a bamboo.[The bamboos around Buddha Hall start creaking madly.]Do you hear the sound? The bamboos are shouting as loudly as they can.Kyogen stood speechless, forgetting himself for a while.And that is the whole secret of Zen. If you can forget yourself even for a split second you have arrived home.Then, suddenly, bursting into loud laughter, he became enlightened.Laughter is strangely connected with Zen experience. Either people have laughed before they became enlightened, or people have laughed after they had become enlightened; but laughter seems to be something very essential to the experience. Before or after, but it has to be there.It is not an ordinary laughter, it is a laughter that says, “I am searching for something which I already have!” It is a laughter about oneself. It is not pointing to anybody, to any incident or to any thing. It is simply a recognition that, “I have been stupid in searching. Rather, I should have been silent and in my silence let the flower blossom.”Returning to his hut, Kyogen performed the ceremony of purification, offered incense, paid homage to his teacher, Isan, and with the deepest sense of gratitude said, “Great master, thank you! Your kindness to me is greater even than that of my parents.”Parents can only give birth to your body. It is only the master who can trigger a process in you which brings consciousness, awareness, life at its optimum.“If you had explained the profound cause to me when I begged you to give me an answer, I should never have reached where I stand today.”This is a very special standpoint of Zen. The master has not to give you a verbal answer because the verbal answer will become knowledge, and knowledge is a hindrance. The authentic master will create the situation. It is always perhaps – perhaps you may be able to hear the bamboos, perhaps not. The master’s function is to create a situation in which you can become awake.It is very indirect work, a subtle work. It is not a Christian preacher, a missionary, a Hindu pundit or a Jewish rabbi talking about scriptures, quoting others.Zen wants you to remember not to believe in quotes. Let it be your own experience – never stop before that!It is because of this that Kyogen is thanking his master Isan: “If you had given the profound cause to me when I begged you to give me an answer I would have never received it. Because you did not give it, you simply created a quest in me: ‘Who is in?’ I have found it. All gratefulness goes to you.”Kyogen’s verse on this occasion runs:One stroke and all is gone,No need of stratagem or cure;Each and every actionManifests the ancient way.My spirit is never downcast,I leave no tracks behind me,Enlightenment is beyond speech,Beyond gesture;Those who are emancipatedCall it the unsurpassed.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Is it true to say that timing is everything…?No, it is not true to say that timing is everything because once you start thinking that timing is everything, you will stop seeking, searching. You will simply wait for the spring to come, you will become just absolutely unaware of the fact that for enlightenment no season is right or wrong, no climate is right or wrong. Every moment is right, you just have to catch hold of your own being. But it has been said even by Gautam Buddha that timing is needed.I want you to know that Gautam Buddha is simply trying to console those who cannot gather courage in this moment. He does not want to discourage them with “You will never become enlightened.” He is saying, “You will become enlightened, just wait for the time, for the ripening, for the cause.”But I say unto you, in spite of Gautam Buddha, that no timing is needed, no causation is needed, because you are already enlightened – just you are afraid to declare it, just you are afraid of what people will say. “I am enlightened? People will laugh, they will say, ‘Look at this fellow, he is enlightened.’”Every day Neelam brings news to me that somebody is creating trouble, walking naked in this place because he thinks he has become enlightened. But just by walking naked has nothing to do with enlightenment.One woman was declaring herself a master and one man was declaring his enlightenment – and both are cuckoos. So I told Neelam, “It is better to put both the cuckoos together.” The woman has been declaring herself for almost fifteen years. I said, “Neelam, tell the woman that if she is really a master and enlightened to take care of this fellow. ‘He is very new, needs care!’” And that fellow is a much bigger cuckoo.The woman was cured. She said, “I am no more… He is too much! I take back my words that I am enlightened, that I am a master. If this man has to be taken care of, I refuse. I will be simple from now onwards.”And for three, four days she has proved simple. The greater cuckoo managed to get the smaller cuckoo to be silent. Now she is asking me what to do with the remaining cuckoo. I said, “Simply wait, somebody will be coming who is bigger. Give him into his charge: ‘Here is your first disciple.’ There is no other way.”And when Anando told the enlightened man, “Either be silent and stop disturbing other people or you will be given to a greater cuckoo!” for at least one and a half days he has been behaving silently, just being afraid because here there are so many potential cuckoos! I have even told Neelam to make a special office and department where cuckoos meet and discuss their enlightenment.Enlightenment is not something that you have to shout on the streets. Enlightenment is your recognition of your silent inner flame. This will make you saner, not cuckoo; this will even help create a certain energy field around you which can trigger other people to enlightenment.But you don’t have to be a nuisance. You cannot force anybody to enlightenment. You can kill him, that is not difficult, but even dead he will remain unenlightened. Enlightenment is not something that can be done from outside.But from the outside, situations can be created, devices can be created in which suddenly you become aware of your own self. The master himself, his presence, is nothing but a situation. Those who are thirsty will draw water from the well, but the thirst has to be authentic; otherwise people go on standing by the side of the well, thirsty, but their thirst is either intellectual or just a curiosity to know what this enlightenment is. It has to be a tremendously powerful longing in you, a very life-and-death question. Then there is no barrier, then there is no timing.So even though it goes against Gautam Buddha’s statement, I will not say that you have to wait for tomorrow.Do it now. This is the time!Maneesha is asking:…or that at least it is crucial in regard to what happens between master and disciple?No, nothing is crucial. What is crucial when a stone hits the bamboo? Do you think you are going to become enlightened? People have become enlightened in strange situations. There is no way of saying. You can repeat the situation, but you will not become enlightened; the situation becomes a repetitive ritual. You have bamboos, you can try. Hit a bamboo!But it is not a question of the bamboo and the sound of hitting it; it is the stillness that happened. And this stillness is surrounding you. You just have to be aware of its value, you have to be aware that you have it always here – no cause, no reason, no timing.Maneesha is asking:Is that the real reason why you wear a watch?Now, it is a secret thing, but I will tell you if you promise not to tell anybody! I wear a watch just to see that I don’t pour too much into you so that you burst, that I don’t make you too much aflame so that you get burned. This watch is simply to keep me aware of when to leave you alone: create the situation and move out of the way.Before we enter into our daily meditation, into our Zen, I am using laughter as a preface, a foreword to the coming silence. As laughter recedes into silence… The greater the laughter, more total the laughter, the greater the silence that will follow behind it.Nobody in the past has ever used laughter as a device. But I find only in laughter are you once in a while total. Only in laughter, once in a while you forget yourself; just the laughter remains and you are not.The funeral procession is about to drive into the cemetery on top of the hill, when suddenly, the back door of the hearse swings open.The coffin rolls slowly out and falls with a crash on the road.The funeral director leaps out of the car and tries to stop the coffin, but it begins to slide down the hill.Faster and faster it goes, until it reaches the bottom of the hill, where it hits a lamppost. The lid falls off and the corpse goes flying through the air to land face up on the drugstore counter.“For God’s sake,” croaks the corpse, “give me something to stop this coffin!”Wilbur Wallace II, a yuppie Wall Street broker, falls in love with a young actress.He thinks he wants to marry her, but he decides that before proposing, he should get a private investigating agency to check out her background and activities.“After all,” thinks Wilbur to himself, “I have a growing fortune and a Wall Street reputation to protect.”Using a false name to conceal his identity, Wilbur employs Mr. E. T. Pickle from Pickle and Pepper Private Investigators, and a couple of weeks later receives a confidential report on the girl.The report states that she has a flawless reputation, and friends and family of the best nature.“The only shadow,” adds the report, “is that currently she is often seen in the company of a third-rate Wall Street broker.”Yetty and Bertha, two middle-aged women from New York, are having a vacation at the Horowitz Hotel in Palm Springs.They are enjoying a late breakfast together one morning, when Yety asks,“What are you doing tonight?”“Oh!” says Bertha, “I have got a date with that Herman Hornstein.”“What?” says Yetty, slopping her coffee, “You are going out with him? He is a sex-maniac! A complete animal! He will get you in his room, throw you on his bed, tear off your dress, and then force you to make love. What are you going to do?”“Well,” replies Bertha, “I guess I will wear an old dress.”Salvatore goes to see his doctor because his wife keeps on having children. Doctor Fig gives him a condom and tells him to follow the instructions and his wife will have no more children.A month later, Salvatore is back.“My wife-a is pregnant again!” he explains.“Did you follow the instructions like I said?” asks Doctor Fig.“Sure, Doc,” says Salvatore, “It say-a: ‘stretch-a over the organ before the intercourse.’ Well, we no gotta organ, so I stretch-a it over my violin!”Now, be ready for the real work.At the first drum you have to start with totality, saying anything that is moving in your mind, all kinds of rubbish. Throw it out.This is a moment of cleansing. Don’t hide anything because nobody is listening. Everybody is engaged in throwing out his own gibberish. In this moment to remain silent is very dangerous because all kinds of people are throwing out, and if you listen silently you will get it! So defeat everybody!Nivedano, give the first drum…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody falls absolutely silent…Close your eyes, no movement.Just be frozen, gather your energy in.This is the point.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody relax… Just be dead.Let the body breathe,but you be simply conscious and utterly relaxed, watching inward.A rare moment…This. This. A thousand times this.The very essence of your being.Force the needle into this timelessness…Deeper and deeper.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back to life, to authentic life.Just be alive, nobody special, but just be.A few are still dead. Nivedano, hit hard![Drumbeats]Wake up!

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 11 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-11/

Osho,A monk came from Joshu Osho’s assembly to Ukyu, who said to him, “What do you find in Joshu’s teaching? Is there anything different from what you find here?”The monk said, “Nothing different.”Ukyu said, “If there is nothing different, why don’t you go back there?” and he hit him with his stick.The monk said, “If your stick had eyes to see, you would not strike me like that.”Ukyu said, “Today I have come across a monk,” and he gave him three more blows.The monk went out. Ukyu called after him and said, “One may receive unfair blows.”The monk turned back and said, “To my regret, the stick is in your hand.”Ukyu said, “If you need it, I will let you have it.”The monk went up to Ukyu, seized his stick, and gave him three blows with it.Ukyu said, “Unfair blows! Unfair blows!”The monk said, “One may receive them.”Ukyu said, “I hit this one too casually.”The monk made bows.Ukyu said, “Osho! Is that how you take leave?”The monk laughed aloud and went out.Ukyu said, “That’s it! That’s it!”Maneesha, this tremendously silent assembly of seekers of truth and love is still being misunderstood by spectators – by journalists who, out of sheer compassion, we allowed in.Just today, I received from Germany the Bunte magazine’s article about us; a beautiful article because I have given good hits to the journalist. I had prevented in advance, so that no negative article should be written. “Just see the facts and report them without any prejudice covering your eyes.”The article is ninety-nine percent factual and I thank the journalist and the editor. But on a few points they could not resist showing their stupidity.I simply cannot understand how blind people are! They can’t see this silence. They can’t feel the presence of so many hearts beating together. Even the bamboos can understand, but Bunte remains German. I have to reply to a few things in the article before I take up the beautiful anecdote and discuss it.The Bunte magazine says that I speak with an Indian accent. What do you want me to speak with – with a German accent? English is nobody’s monopoly. The American speaks with an American accent, the Australian speaks with an Australian accent. The German speaks with the worst accent! What is wrong in having an Indian accent?Secondly, he says that I use gutter language. Obviously, if you have to speak with gutter journalists, you have to speak the language they can understand. Rather than feeling the spiritual climate, not a single journalist forgets that the podium is made of marble, that the Buddha Auditorium is made of marble.How poor the world is! Nobody criticizes the Taj Mahal because it is made of marble. Nobody criticizes the great palaces and temples and cathedrals. Everybody appreciates them. But anything that is connected with me…They cannot argue against what I am saying; they don’t have anything with which to oppose my understanding of things. So then they start being stupidly interested in things which prove only their poverty and nothing else.Do they come here to know whether the podium is made of marble or not? Are they some kind of experts in marble? This is all that they see. They don’t see the silence and the music and the dance and the high-rising peaks of consciousness of thousands of people.And these blind people go on spreading their stupid opinions, polluting the mind of the masses. I would like Bunte to send the same representative here again. He has missed the point.These stone walls do not matter. What matters is this precious consciousness. What matters is this cuckoo calling, the joy, the peace – a peace that passes understanding.Send at least educated, cultured representatives who have experienced something of meditation. Otherwise, please leave us alone; don’t harass. It is beyond you.I would like my German sannyasins to write letters to Bunte on every single point, hitting just as a German should do. This is an international gathering and nobody can be allowed to spread rumors, fictitious allegations. For that, the whole world is available. If you want to find crime, if you want to find murders, suicides, the whole world is available. But to this small oasis where roses are being grown, you should come with open eyes. It is not part of your world. The moment you enter the gates of this place you should be alert and aware that you are facing a new phase of humanity. You are entering into the future.And this is possible only with humbleness, with great intelligence, with great love; not with ordinary journalists who are interested only in sensationalism. The people here are not interested at all in any sensationalism. They are interested, totally, wholly and only in inquiring into their own being.Just watch! What has disappeared from the world, what has become unbelievable in the world is still breathing here. It is an alive experiment, and I will not allow anybody to say anything that is not honest, truthful.If you cannot understand, keep your mouth shut. I am not interested in your circulation, I am not interested in the whole world. Even if the whole world disappears, we are enough unto ourselves. I am not a politician who is afraid of losing his reputation. Anyway, I don’t have any reputation. How can I lose it? I am so notorious that you cannot make me more notorious. My people are working silently on a totally different plane. If you cannot understand it, just say so – that it is beyond your comprehension. But nobody wants to acknowledge his ignorance.And it is your responsibility: in whichever language, in whichever country anything appears about this place, if it is not truthful and honest, hammer it from here or from your own country. Make these people understand clearly that although all their efforts are to make me silent, they are fighting a losing battle. They can kill me, murder me, poison me – they have already done everything that they could – but truth is eternal. It will speak, and it will speak through thousands of mouths. There is no way to stop its song and its dance.I received a letter from England. One sannyasin was refused entry into India. He went to the Indian ambassador in England to ask why his application had been refused. And the answer that he received was that, “Nobody can ask me why. I’m a sovereign authority here.”These pigmy politicians which come and go as the seasons change think themselves sovereign. We have a different definition of sovereignty: only individuals who know themselves are sovereigns. The days of the kings and the queens and the emperors are finished. There are only four kings still alive – in the playing cards. And the fifth is not even a king but only a husband of a queen. And rumors are that Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, himself is a queen. I cannot guarantee… But this is all that is left: four kings in the playing cards and the fifth king who is a queen.That world is no longer here. Now the individual is arising on the horizon as a sovereign of his own being. Everybody is a sovereign, a king of his own consciousness. Here we are creating not slaves belonging to any religion, but sovereigns, knowers, individuals – free, with their wings unfettered. We are destroying their cages, howsoever precious and antique.But it is strange that I have never come across a single journalist who will report exactly what is happening here. Perhaps first they should join in the game, experience the taste of my presence, the taste of this commune, and only then write or speak anything. Otherwise, whatever they say as an outsider is going to be false. Only the insider’s view can have any validity.This is one of the most meaningful anecdotes.A monk came from Joshu Osho’s assembly to Ukyu…Both are great masters and it was almost a natural phenomenon to move from one master’s assembly to another just to see whether the same experience is happening everywhere. Ukyu was very famous, particularly because he was the first Zen master to use the stick.A monk came from Joshu Osho’s assembly to Ukyu, who said to him, “What do you find in Joshu’s teaching? Is there anything different from what you find here?”The monk said, “Nothing different.”Ukyu said, “If there is nothing different, why don’t you go back there?” and he hit him with his stick.He is making the point clear that every master has some uniqueness. The ultimate experience may be the same but the paths to it are many. According to the master, different flowers blossom on the path.“If there is no difference, then why have you come?” – and he hit him with his stick at least to make it clear that that much is different: “Your master has never hit you.”The monk said, “If your stick had eyes to see, you would not strike me like that.”The monk is not a humble man but arrogant. The hit of Ukyu was out of compassion to wake him up. Rather than being thankful, he said, “If your stick had eyes to see, you would not strike me like that.”Ukyu said, “Today I have come across a monk,” and he gave him three more blows.The monk went out. Ukyu called after him and said, “One may receive unfair blows.”You should not go this way: without answering or without asking why you have been hit.The monk went out. Ukyu called after him and said, “One may receive unfair blows.”The monk turned back and said, “To my regret, the stick is in your hand.”These were very great people and great days. This kind of dialogue is very special to Zen.Ukyu said, “If you need it, I will let you have it.”The monk went up to Ukyu, seized his stick, and gave him three blows with it.Ukyu said, “Unfair blows! Unfair blows!”The monk said, “One may receive them.”Ukyu said, “I hit this one too casually.”You were not worthy of it! The moment he said…“I hit this one too casually,”the monk made bows.Ukyu said, “Osho!”Osho is a very honorable word. It is almost always used for the masters. For example, Joshu Osho. Osho is not his name but his honor, his acceptance as an enlightened man.Ukyu said, “Osho! Is that how you take leave?”The monk laughed aloud and went out.Ukyu said, “That’s it! That’s it!”Setcho makes this commentary:Easy to call the snakes, hard to scatter them.How splendidly they crossed swords! Although the sea is deep, it can be drained; the Kalpa stone is hard, but wears away.The Kalpa stone is a mythological way of measuring time, just like light years.A footnote explains:The Kalpa stone is forty miles square. Every hundred years a nymph comes and passes the sleeve of her silken robe lightly over it. When the stone has wholly worn away, one Kalpa, or one eon or one age, has passed. The Kalpa stone will eventually cease to exist, but the achievement of Ukyu and the monk will last forever.Setcho is saying,The Kalpa stone is hard, but wears away.Old Ukyu! Old Ukyu!Who is there like you?To give the stick to another – that was truly thoughtlessness!Thoughtlessness is respected only by Zen. Everywhere thought rules supreme. Only in the world of Zen is thought just a bondage.Thoughtlessness is freedom.Ukyu was one of Baso’s outstanding disciples. After he had left Baso and was living in his own temple, two monks, Gen and Sho, came from Baso’s monastery to have an interview with him.Ukyu asked Gen, “Where are you from?”““From Kozei,” replied Gen.[Kozei was in the location of Baso’s temple].Before Gen had finished these words, Ukyu gave him a blow with his stick.Gen said, “I have heard that you treat visitors like this.”“You do not understand me,” said Ukyu, and turning to Sho, he said, “Come before me.”When Sho came forward, he was hit before he had said anything.Ukyu was one of the first Zen masters to use the stick in his teaching.What was this teaching by a stick, by hitting people? By hitting them he was showing: “Just come out of your sleep, wake up.”You are the buddha. You are the dharma. Except your isness, everything is just a dream. Only your witnessing is authentically real. Otherwise, everything comes and goes like a dream. Only the witness remains.Maneesha’s first question:Osho,Zen seems to be of the understanding that the end always justifies the means.Would you please comment?Maneesha, there is no beginning and there is no end. There is no means and there is no goal. Zen is this declaration.Your question has been discussed by the intelligentsia down the ages. What is important? – the means or the end? Can one achieve the right end through the wrong means? If you achieve the right end, is it that doesn’t it matter what kind of means you use to reach it?I can discuss your question only marginally. It has nothing to do with the anecdote we are discussing.Nobody can reach the right end without right means because the end is nothing but the ultimate flowering of the means. The goal is nothing but the road reaching to its fullness. You cannot divide the road from the goal. Otherwise, there will be an unbridgeable space.I am in absolute support of those who have, at least intellectually, accepted the idea that only the right means can bring the right end. You cannot divide them, although everybody is dividing them. Particularly, the politicians are dividing them. They are using all kinds of wrong means and they are thinking that they will reach to the right end.Theologians are making the same mistake by using rituals, worship, scriptures; they think they will reach to the ultimate essence of their being.Zen does not bother about ends and means. They are both together: the means and the end, the way and the fulfillment of the way.Maneesha’s second question is:Osho,Has a disciple only proved himself worthy as a disciple when he has gone beyond discipleship?Maneesha, in every disciple there is a deep desire somehow to go beyond it. To be a disciple seems to be humiliating. One can surround oneself with a philosophical fog that a disciple is only a disciple when he has gone beyond discipleship.As far as I am concerned, a disciple is authentically a disciple when he does not want to go anywhere – even beyond disciplehood, when he is so much deeply rooted in himself, there is no question of transcendence.In being oneself you have transcended all relationships; not only discipleship but all relationships. You are simply alone, standing like a mountain high rising into the sky – alone in its beauty, in its freedom, in its being.A disciple has not to transcend. Yes, transcendence comes but it cannot be a goal for the disciple. It is a happening. When you have reached home, there is no need of the way, and there is no need of any vehicle.When you are, everything else falls away. You stand absolutely naked under the sun in the open sky, alone in your beauty and blissfulness; transcendence has come to you. It was never the goal. It is the reward. To be a disciple so deeply, existence rewards you by transcendence. Then you are enough. There is nothing more left to be learned.The word disciple simply means: one who is learning. But there comes a point within you when there is nothing to learn. One simply is. This isness is transcendence; but it comes on its own, spontaneously, without your seeking it. Your seeking is dangerous. Your seeking will become a hindrance even to being a disciple. Your desire for transcending simply means getting rid of disciplehood.Get deeper into your own being and consciousness and transcendence will come. It is bound to come, you just have to be at home.A few laughters before we enter into our own selves…Francesco goes to the medical room to see Doctor Azima.“Mama mia!” he says, “I come-a home last night and found-a my girlfriend in bed with-a my best friend. I was about to kill-a them both when my girlfriend she say, ‘Come on-a, Francesco, we all are friends. Let’s have a cuppa coffee together.’“So we all sit down and have a cuppa coffee,” says Francesco. “The next day I find her in-a bed with another man, and my girlfriend she say the same thing. So we all have a cuppa coffee. And doctor, this-a happen every day this week!”“I see,” says Doctor Azima. “But I am a doctor, not a therapist. So why you tell-a me all-a this-a?”“Well,” says Francesco, “I am-a worried. Will it be-a bad for me, all this-a coffee?”Olga Omsky, a Russian housewife, is the envy of all her neighbors because she always has a plentiful supply of fresh vegetables and fruit.One day, one of her neighbors is visiting her.“Tell me, Comrade Olga,” asks the neighbor, “how do you manage it?”“It is quite simple,” explains Olga, “I have a parrot which I have trained to speak. Whenever I go to the market, the parrot sits on the handle of my shopping cart. I leave the cart in the middle of the market, and when the parrot starts squawking, ‘Long live communism!’ everyone throws whatever they can get their hands on at it!”Paddy gets a new job, and on the first day, the boss walks up to him and says, “What is your name?”“Patrick Murphy!” Paddy replies.“Look here,” snaps the boss, “Say ‘sir’ when you speak to me!”“All right,” says Paddy, “Sir Patrick Murphy!”Old man Finkelstein is lonely one evening, so he invites his pal, Rosenfeld, over for a game of cards.They play for a while, and then Rosenfeld looks at his watch.“What time is it?” he asks. “My watch has stopped.”“Who cares?” says Fink.“Well, look at your watch,” says Rosenfeld.“I ain’t got a watch,” says Fink.“Then look at the clock in the bedroom,” says Rosenfeld.“I ain’t got a clock in the bedroom,” says Finkelstein.“Well, how about the clock in the kitchen?” asks Rosenfeld.“I ain’t got one there either,” says Fink.“Well, don’t you ever wanna know what time it is?” asks Rosenfeld.“When I wanna know,” says Fink, “I just pick up my drum.”“Drum?” asks Rosenfeld.“I will show you,” says Fink, and he takes his drum over to the window and starts beating on it.All around the houses outside, windows go up and people start yelling, “Are you crazy? Beating a drum at a quarter to twelve?”And now, Nivedano can beat the drum.The first drum…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Be silent, utterly silent.Close your eyes, no movement.Let your whole energy be in.This…Force your needle of consciousness on the point…This.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Relax, just be dead.This. This. A thousand times this.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back to life.Really back, with your fresh consciousness like a flamewhich has burnt all that is false.Just be like the bamboos – here and now.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 12 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-12/

Osho,A monk asked Seppo, “How about when the old valley water is a cold spring?”Seppo answered, “Stare into it as you may, you can’t see the bottom!”The monk said, “What about when we drink the water?”Seppo said, “It doesn’t go in the mouth.”The monk went to Joshu and said what had been discussed.Joshu said, “If it won’t go in the mouth, it won’t go through the nostrils.”The monk then asked, “How about when the old valley water is a cold spring?”Joshu said, “How disagreeable it is!”The monk said, “What about drinking it?”Joshu said, “You will die.”When Seppo heard of this conversation, he said, “Joshu is one of the ancient buddhas,” and bowed down in respect to Joshu, from a distance. After that he answered no question himself.Zen is just like this silence. It is here but you cannot hold it in your hands. When the hand is open it is, and when the hand is closed it is not. All depends on your opening or your closing.Zen is a tremendously great task, eternally insisting on one thing: just be, and don’t ask any question because there is nobody to answer it.“There is nobody to answer it” means you are the answer, and you are being disrespectful to yourself when you ask a question. Whom are you asking?This small anecdote has to be understood as deeply as possible.A monk asked Seppo, “How about when the old valley water is a cold spring?”Seppo answered, “Stare into it as you may, you can’t see the bottom!”To anybody who does not understand the language of Zen it will all look like nonsense, but it is more than any sense can contain. It is certainly beyond the so-called sense, it is certainly not common sense – it is very uncommon.The monk has asked Seppo, the master, “How about when the old valley water is a cold spring, when the valley water becomes just solid ice?”Seppo lived near a spring. Seppo answered, “Stare into it…”Remember the words: “Stare into it as you may, you can’t see the bottom!”On the surface, to intellectuals, it may seem irrelevant to the question. It is not. Seppo is saying, “Stare deeply. However deeply you stare into a solid spring, you cannot see its bottom.” The same is your own situation: stare into yourself, you can go deeper and deeper, but you cannot find the bottom. Your depth is infinite.The monk said, “What about when we drink the water?”He cannot understand what the master is saying. He is still struggling with his question about drinking water when the spring becomes frozen.Seppo said, “It does not go in the mouth.”Ordinarily it will seem as if he is answering the monk and saying to him that, “When the spring becomes solid, ice, you cannot drink from it, it does not go in the mouth.” But that is not his meaning. He is saying: truth does not come from outside, it is already within you. It may be spring or it may be summer, it doesn’t matter.The monk went to Joshu, another master, and said what had been discussed.Joshu said, “If it won’t go in the mouth, it won’t go through the nostrils.”Why have you come here? You have been answered. You are still seeking outside; your question is pointing like an arrow from something outside – and you are the one who is holding the arrow, you are the very target. Just try to understand that by changing the master nothing is changed.“If it won’t go in the mouth, it won’t go through the nostrils.”The monk then asked, “How about when the old valley water is a cold spring?”This is the mind of man. This monk represents the mind and its obsession; it goes on asking again and again without seeing the point. The point is obvious.Joshu said, “How disagreeable it is! “Your superficiality, your question – How disagreeable it is!The monk said, “What about drinking it?”The same obsession. The question has not changed even a single inch.Joshu said, “You will die.”If you go on asking in the hope of finding an answer from the outside, there is nothing else for you: “You will die.”Only death comes from outside. Life is within. Life is; death comes and goes. Death is only an episode in an eternal journey of consciousness.When Seppo heard of this conversation, he said, “Joshu is one of the ancient buddhas,” and bowed down in respect to Joshu, from a distance.After that he answered no question himself.After this anecdote Seppo never spoke again. Seeing the futility of people’s minds, their consistent misunderstanding, not only Seppo but many mystics have remained silent. Their silence is immensely symbolic of our stupid, obsessive, continuously questioning mind. Their silence is the answer although you have not asked it. In their silence perhaps you may also become silent.I have been talking about synchronicity and it has just happened in my bathroom. I had a weighing-machine, which was as unreliable as any of you. Sometimes it showed one answer, sometimes another – you just stepped on it and again it had changed. I ordered the same kind of machine again to check it.On the first day they both gave different answers; but in the night, in the darkness of my bathroom, something must have happened. In the morning they started giving the same answers. And now for almost eight days they are giving the same answer, without wavering. Both have agreed together, have fallen in love.Being silent with a master, neither questioning nor thinking, a synchronicity happens. The same kind of consciousness that the master has starts filtering in you, filling your inner being. Soon there is no disciple and no master, but purely a dance of joy, of deep understanding and bliss.Seppo did not answer again. He is perfectly right, but still I would have asked him not to stop. One never knows, somebody may come by the way, may fall in love with you, may get the flavor of your being. In this hope all the masters have been speaking – just a hope in the darkness of some guest coming…Seppo should not have stopped, but now nothing can be done about it. I can only say to you that if you at any moment come to your inner flame, don’t stop like Seppo; share it, unconditionally, even to those who will not understand. Perhaps today they may not understand, tomorrow they will; perhaps not in this life, but in some other life the understanding is going to blossom. Trust existence.Seppo was at a fault. Just because one single human being has not understood you, it does not mean that you have to stop. It simply means you have to refine your answer. The answer is not just a verbal and intellectual thing, the answer is to go on creating situations in which awakening is possible.Seppo cannot be forgiven for being silent. He should have continued, whether one understands or not. I have been speaking for thirty-five years continuously, searching for those who will understand. It has been a long search, but I have found you all, and many more around the earth, who have started to understand a little bit.But just a little bit is more than enough. Just a cup of tea, a little taste and then you can go on your own. You know the way, you have felt it.Maneesha has asked:Osho,In the past I have heard you say that for a disciple to move from master to master is like continuously drilling holes that never go deep enough to reach the water. Yet, that seems to be just what Zen monks did – moving from one master to another, often with the same question.Trust and intimacy with the master were apparently less significant than finding the master who could create the right situation.Would you please comment?Maneesha, they were not going from one master to another master. They were moving from one teacher to another teacher in search of the master. They were moving from one monastery to another monastery to find a place from where they did not have to go anywhere else. It was a search for the master amongst thousands of teachers. One has to move to feel with whom your heart starts dancing.Today the situation is different. There are not thousands of teachers proclaiming that they are enlightened, you don’t have much choice. Still, the fact remains: don’t stop unless you have found the one who goes straight into your being – just like an arrow without missing the target.It is said of Baso that he never left his master. Although the master said, “You can move, you can go into other monasteries, there are other masters, other ways of teaching, other ways of reaching. Why don’t you move?”Baso’s answer is worth remembering. He said, “Others are moving because they have not found. I cannot move because I am already there where I want to be. I have found you, and in finding you I have found my heart’s longing. Now there is nowhere to go.”Once a disciple finds the master, the master is his whole world, his love affair.But before that, Maneesha, it is perfectly right: one should move; one should not remain with someone with whom he cannot feel the intimacy, with whom he cannot have the same wavelength of life. He may be right or wrong. That does not matter. What matters is whether you feel yourself enriched by the presence of your master, whether you feel aflame. Then there is no need to go anywhere.Her second question is:Osho,As a species we regard ourselves as the most conscious and evolved form of life, and thus able to help all other forms of life. But Zen seems to indicate another equally important truth – that all life forms, and the most mundane of activities involved in life, are all potential triggers to help us realize the ultimate consciousness.Through these evenings with you, this has become too obvious to comment on; and yet too marvelous, not to.Maneesha, even the bamboos are no longer commenting. When you are feeling it so solidly, there is no need for any comment. There are very few human beings on the earth today…at this moment, so much blessed, so much in tune with existence. This silence is just a simple proof. Why have the bamboos stopped making their commentaries? Not without reason.Before you also enter into the same silence as the bamboos… A few laughs.Paddy is in court, requesting damages for injuries to his arm, which happened in an accident at work.“Would you show me how far you can raise your arm now?” asks the defense advocate.With a great deal of effort Paddy raises his arm six inches.“And could you raise it higher before the accident?” asks the advocate.“Of course,” says Paddy, “I could raise it this high…!”This is our unconsciousness.A young policeman is escorting a drunk driver down to the prison cells at the police station.“You are going to be locked up for the night,” he explains.“What is the charge?” demands the prisoner.“There is no charge,” says the cop. “It is all part of the service.”Bertie Ballsoff, the company chief, telephones his home one afternoon. The Mexican housemaid answers.“Put my wife on the phone,” booms Ballsoff.“Senor,” replies the servant, “I am sorry to tell you this, but your wife is in the bedroom, making love to the neighbor.”“Now listen carefully,” snaps Ballsoff. “Go into my room, open the desk drawer and take out my loaded revolver. Then go and shoot them both!”“But senor!” wails the housemaid, “I can’t do that.”“You had better,” replies Ballsoff, “or I will come home, shoot them and you too!”The housemaid puts down the phone and returns a few minutes later.“Okay senor, I have done it,” she announces, “I killed them both and threw them in the pool.”“Pool?” says Ballsoff, “What pool? Hello! Is this the Ballsoff house?”Walter Wibbles, a skinny little man, is in the back of the church one day, praying to God.“Please God,” he moans, “I can’t keep up the payments on my house, my wife wants a new dress, and my car is broken down. You have got to help me!”Just then, the church door bursts open and a big black guy comes in, walks straight to the front of the church, looks up to heaven, and shouts,“Hey, God, I really dig you, man! I want a new car, a new house and a new girlfriend. And I want it now!”He then turns around and walks out.Walter can’t believe it and goes on muttering away quietly.Next week, Walter is in the same place, in the back of the church again.“Please God,” he whimpers, “my wife wants to leave me, I have just lost my job and…” But he is interrupted by the screech of brakes outside. Then the church door bursts open and the black guy walks in with a beautiful girl on his arm.They walk up to the front and the black guy shouts, “Hey, God, I really dig you, man. The car is great, the house is terrific and the chick is faaar-out!”This is too much for Walter. When the black guy has gone, he walks up to the front, raises his arms and says, “God, what is going on? You give him everything he wants, but you give me nothing! Why?”Suddenly a booming voice comes down from heaven, saying, “I just don’t dig you, man!”And now…Nivedano…Go deep!This moment…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Nivedano is absent tonight. It takes a few seconds for his substitute to respond.][Drumbeat]Although Nivedano is not there, still he has to beat the drum.Nobody is there.Just be absolutely silent.Gather your whole energy inward, just like you are coming home.This.Remember this is the ultimate reality of your being.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Fall dead, absolutely dead.Don’t be bothered about the breathing body.Be in your grave.This, this…Don’t miss it…I am offering you all the greatest peak of consciousness.Don’t miss it…Just be and you have got it.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back to life, with totality, aliveness

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 13 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-13/

Osho,A monk had come to see Kisu and after a very brief stay was making his departure.Kisu said, “Where are you going?”The monk replied, “I’m going all over the place learning the five flavors of Zen.”Kisu said, “Yes, there are the five flavors of Zen in various places, but here I have only one.”The monk asked, “And what may be your one-flavored Zen?”Kisu struck him.The monk said, “I understand! I understand!”Kisu said, “Tell me what! Tell me what!” and as the monk began to speak, Kisu struck him again.At another time, a monk asked Kisu, “What is the Buddha?”“If I tell you,” said Kisu, “will you believe me?”The monk replied, “The master’s words are so momentous, how could I not believe them?”Kisu said, “Simply, you are it.”The monk asked, “How can we maintain this state?”Kisu said, “If your eye is just a little clouded, flowery illusions are rampant.”The monk was enlightened at this.Maneesha, Zen is not what it says, but what it shows. It is a finger pointing to the moon in absolute silence. All words have to be understood as fingers pointing to the moon. It is not a philosophy, it is an indication.You have to understand these anecdotes with this background in mind.A monk had come to see Kisu and after a very brief stay was making his departure.Kisu said, “Where are you going?”These questions in Zen don’t have the same meaning as they have in common language. When a Zen master asks, “Where are you going?” he means, “There is no way to go anywhere, you are everywhere. Where can you go? Your consciousness is as wide as the whole universe: “Where are you going?”In a simple question there is the tremendous implication that you are not the body you think, you are not the mind you think, and you are not the desire you think.You are the witness which fills the whole universe.You cannot go anywhere. Wherever you go, you are swimming into yourself. This whole ocean of existence is yours. It has no boundaries, no limits.When Kisu asked, “Where are you going?” the monk replied,“I’m going all over the place learning the five flavors of Zen.”He could not understand the question. He understood the language but he could not see the indication.“I’m going all over the place…” simply indicates he believes in his “I” and he also believes that he can go somewhere. He has heard about the five flavors of Zen, but about them he is also not exactly clear. “The five flavors of Zen” simply means your five senses fully awake. Even one sense fully awake will do. If you can see without any clouds of thoughts passing through the sky of your eyes, it is enough.But nature is always a giver in abundance. A single sense would have been able to experience your being. Instead of one, existence has given you five senses – and still you have not found yourself. Five doors, and you have not entered into your own house. One would have been enough.The five flavors of Zen mean five sensitivities. One can reach to Zen, to oneself, by smelling a roseflower. If you can become one with the rose, its fragrance, if you can forget yourself for a moment and just the rose remains – just for a moment the observer and the observed are one – you have found it. The truth, the beauty – what philosophers have been discussing, what poets have been singing, what musicians have been trying to produce on their instruments.But nobody succeeds. Even the greatest poet knows the greater the poet, the more the experience that he has failed.One of the greatest poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, was on his deathbed. One of his old friends was consoling him: “Don’t be worried. Death comes to everybody and you have lived enough and lived richly. What more can one expect?”Rabindranath opened his eyes and he said, “You are right and yet… I want it to be noted for future generations that I have not sung the song that I wanted to.”He has left six thousand songs.The man was puzzled because the greatest western poet, Shelley, had only two thousand songs to his name. Rabindranath had six thousand songs which could be put to music; which are not only poetries, which can also be sung. Yet his last statement is: “These were all my failures. Six thousand times I have failed; I have been trying to say something and it eludes me.”The greater the musician, the greater the experience that the music that his being wanted to create, that his instrument…[A furious monsoon rainstorm erupts and the power briefly goes out, plunging the whole assembly into an abrupt and silent darkness. When the power returns, Osho waits a few moments before beginning again.]Do you hear the rain?If you can hear it intensely, totally, this moment can become your enlightenment.It is not a question to be discussed, it is an inquiry into your own inner space. It is stopping the mind from its wavering thoughts and coming to a stillness within you where nothing moves.Kisu has asked, “Where are you going?” I ask you, “Where are you going?” It is raining too hard outside. Even the bamboos are dancing with the rain. If you can remain here without thinking, without mind… This is the place, the space. You don’t have to go anywhere else to find it.Kisu said, “Yes, there are the five flavors of Zen in various places, but here I have only one.”The monk asked, “And what may be your one-flavored Zen?”Kisu struck him.This striking is symbolic. It says, “It is you,” as loudly as possible. You are the only flavor, just be without wavering. And if you cannot find it in this beautiful climate, where are you going to find it? In this place where so many buddhas are present, knowing or unknowing, just gather yourself and look within yourself.Kisu’s striking the poor monk was just to wake up the sleeping one. It is sleeping in everyone.The monk said, “I understand! I understand!”Kisu said, “Tell me what! Tell me what!” and as the monk began to speak, Kisu struck him again.Zen cannot be said. The moment you start saying it, you have missed it. You can have it, you can be it, you can dance it, but you cannot bring it to words. It is a wordless experience of your being.At another time, a monk asked Kisu, “What is the Buddha?”“If I tell you,” said Kisu, “will you believe me?”The monk replied, “The master’s words are so momentous, how could I not believe them?”Kisu said, “Simply, you are it.”This is the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world: to trust that you are a buddha. But whether you trust or not, you are a buddha, you cannot be otherwise. You are pure consciousness, you are pure existence.The monk asked, “How can we maintain this state?”Kisu said, “If your eye is just a little clouded, flowery illusions are rampant.”The monk was enlightened at this.But are you enlightened at this? It is so simple; you don’t need any education, you don’t need any teaching, you don’t need any culture. You are already there. From the very beginning of time, you are eternity in the moment.If you don’t become enlightened, it is simply postponement. There is no hurry – you can become enlightened tomorrow or another life. But remember, unless you become enlightened you cannot get out of your misery, your tensions, your anguish, your meaninglessness. You cannot attain the splendor that is your inheritance.It is better to do it quickly – this moment, without waiting – because you have been waiting for centuries. And the more you wait, the more you learn how to wait, the thicker and thicker your waiting becomes.There is no need to wait, not even for a single moment. In this beautiful existence…And today, this moment, it is especially beautiful. All around the dance of the rain, the commentaries of the bamboos and a silent gathering of thousands of buddhas…Don’t miss it.Maneesha has asked:Osho,I wonder, have I understood your words? Have I understood your silence? I only know that your words sound less like words these days; and that your silence feels like our silence – and that silence feels like the most familiar, the most natural of spaces.Maneesha, I don’t have a staff in my hand, otherwise I would have given you three beats. Instead, Nivedano, give three beats![Drumbeat][Drumbeat][Drumbeat]Those three beats are “yes” three times.Before the rain stops I would like to share with these clouds, this rain, not only your silence but also your laughter. A silence without laughter is dead, and a laughter without silence is superficial. When silence and laughter are together it is something phenomenal, something of tremendous importance. Just as you are silent, also share your laughter with the rain.Brother Brian, Brother Boris, and Brother Billy, three young novice monks, are about to go through their final trial before becoming fully-fledged friars.An old abbot leads them into a luxurious room and tells them to take off their gowns and tie a small bell to their organs.Suddenly, a gorgeous blonde enters the room wearing a scanty bikini, and one of the bells goes,“Ding-a-ding! Ding-a ding!”“Go stand in the showers, Brother Brian,” says the abbot.The girl starts to slip out of her bikini…“Ding-a-ding! Ding-a-ding!”“Too bad, Brother Boris,” says the abbot, “Go to the showers, too!”Finally, the girl is naked and starts writhing and dancing in front of Brother Billy. The bell remains silent.“Praise the Lord!” shouts the abbot. “Congratulations, Brother Billy. You have passed. Now go and join those weaker souls in the showers!”“Ding-a-ding! Ding-a ding!”One of the zebras in a traveling circus gets sick, and the vet suggests that he should be rested at a nearby farm until he gets well.The zebra makes a tour of the farmyard and greets all the animals.“I am a zebra,” he says, “Who are you?”“I am a chicken,” replies the chicken.“And what do you do?” asks the zebra.“I cluck a lot and lay eggs,” explains the chicken.The zebra walks on and meets a cow.“I am a zebra,” he announces, “Who are you?”“I am a cow,” replies the cow.“And what do you do?” asks the zebra.“I moo and make milk,” replies the cow.Next, the zebra meets a bull.“I am a zebra,” he says, “Who are you?”“I am a bull,” comes the reply.“And what do you do?” asks the zebra.“What do I do?” snorts the bull, “just take off those fancy pyjamas and I will show you!”Pope the Polack and Ronald Reagan die and go to heaven. They ask for an interview with God, and find him sitting in a comfortable armchair.“What have you done that you deserve to be in heaven?” God asks the pope.“Well,” replies Pope the Polack, “I kissed the ground at most of the major airports of the world; I fought the evil communists, and opposed birth control so strongly that Catholics went forth and multiplied.”“Very good!” says God. “Sit on my left side.”Then God turns to Ronald Reagan.“And what have you done,” he asks, “to deserve to be in heaven?”“Well,” replies Reagan, “I was the most fundamentalist Christian president of all time. I drove Osho’s commune out of America, and caused the Third World War, thus bringing about your “Second Coming” to earth.”“Good work,” says God, and then notices Osho standing there.“Oh!” says God, quite embarrassed, “and what have you done that you deserve to be in heaven?”“Cut the small talk,” says Osho, “and get out of my chair!”Now, go into gibberish.Nivedano…[Drumbeat][Gibberish][Drumbeat]Be silent, utterly silent, close your eyes and be in…This. This very moment is the answer to all the questions ever asked.You are the answer.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]All fall back.Let the body breathe, but you go deeper and deeper within yourself,leaving the body almost like a shell surrounding you.This.This very moment is your buddha nature.This is your eternity.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back to life, totally, intensely.Nobody should remain in his grave.If anybody is left in his gravegive a special beat for him, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]This is what Zen is all about – just a simple awareness.A flame, unwavering,a sword that cuts deep to the very core of your being.Remember, Zen is not a word but only a shadow of an experience.You are the reality.Everything else is just non-essential commentary.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 14 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-14/

Osho,Ungo Doyo was the chief disciple of Tozan. When he first met Tozan, he was asked, “What is your name?”He answered, “Doyo.”Tozan said, “Tell me transcendentally!”Ungo replied, “Speaking transcendentally, my name is Doyo.”Tozan said, “When I saw my master, my answer was no different.”Ungo remained with Tozan many years. Tozan never had less than one thousand, five hundred disciples, of whom twenty-eight were enlightened.After Ungo had realized his own enlightenment and became a master, a monk asked him a question.Ungo said, “You are a fool!”The monk said, “So are you!”“What is the meaning of fool?” asked Ungo.The monk danced.Off he went, and Ungo praised him, in his absence, saying, “After all, everybody is out to get something, though of course Zen-getting is a no-getting.”On another occasion, an official said to Ungo: “The world-honored one had a secret message. Mahakashyapa did not keep it a secret. What is this secret word of Buddha?”Ungo called to him, “Your honor!”He answered, “Yes?”Ungo said, “You understand?”“No,” he replied.Ungo said, “If you don’t understand, that is Buddha’s secret word; if you do, that is Mahakashyapa’s not keeping it a secret.”Maneesha, it will be very difficult to understand this small anecdote without going back twenty-five centuries to Gautam Buddha and Mahakashyapa.It must have been an assembly like this – utterly silent and waiting for Gautam Buddha to come. He was going to give his morning sermon, as usual – but he was late that day. Waiting became intense… Also there was some fear: “Has some accident happened? Why isn’t he on time? In his forty-two years of teaching he has never missed, even on one occasion. Why is he late?”But it was no ordinary gathering of spectators. These were people who were seeking and inquiring about their own being, and perhaps they thought, “This is one of the ways of Gautam Buddha – for us to learn how to wait silently, without asking.”And very unexpectedly, Gautam Buddha appeared with a roseflower in his hand. It was such an extraordinary event because Buddha had never come the way he came that day. He had always come with empty hands. Holding a beautiful roseflower… Everybody must have thought – if you had been present you would have thought – “Perhaps he is going to say something about the rose.”But he was not a poet. He was not a painter. What could he say about the rose? And he did not talk either. He simply sat in his place and went on looking at the roseflower, making everybody almost crazy. What has happened to him? This is the time to speak to the commune and he is looking at the roseflower without even uttering a single word. There is a point of waiting… People became very impatient. One could feel the impatience all around.At this moment, Mahakashyapa, who had never spoken a word before nor after, laughed loudly. He had been a disciple of Gautam Buddha for twenty years. He had never asked a question. He used to sit under a special tree; it had almost become his monopoly. Nobody ever sat under that tree. Everybody knew: “Mahakashyapa will be coming, his place has to be left.”But his place was very strange. He was a prince before he renounced his kingdom – just like Gautam Buddha – well educated and cultured in all the ways of religion and philosophy. But it is strange that for twenty years he had been just sitting there, not asking even a single question.And suddenly today, when everybody is impatiently waiting for Buddha to speak, this strange fellow Mahakashyapa starts laughing. He had not even laughed for twenty years.This incident is the beginning of a very special branch of mystics called Zen.Mahakashyapa was called by Gautam Buddha to come close to him. Buddha offered the roseflower to him and the sermon was over.Without a single word being uttered, something was transferred; something as beautiful as a roseflower can represent – invisible, perhaps, like the fragrance of a rose. Mahakashyapa bowed down, touched his feet, took the rose on his head and went back to his tree. And the whole audience of ten thousand monks simply watched this drama.Buddha left his seat. Ananda, who used to declare Buddha’s coming, or the subject on which he was going to speak, announced that the sermon was over.Since that day, for twenty-five centuries those who have been interested in Gautam Buddha and his teachings have been asking again and again, “What has been transferred? What was it that Buddha gave to Mahakashyapa? And why did Mahakashyapa laugh?”Mahakashyapa is accepted as the first Zen master: Gautam Buddha has opened a new dimension of search, where not words are needed, but silence; where you can say only without saying, where to say anything is to miss. Yes, you can laugh, you can dance because while you are laughing, in its totality mind stops, time stops and your whole being melts into one unity, into one organism. Otherwise you are a crowd: one hand is going to the south, your other hand is going to the north, your head is scattered into thousands of pieces…But a good belly laugh, and everything comes back, and suddenly you are united. Laughter is the beginning of Zen.And Mahakashyapa laughed at the impatience of people – because Gautam Buddha had never given as much as he was giving that day in his silence. He is simply saying: “Watch, be a witness. Don’t say a word. Just be, and this very moment you are enlightened.”After this background, it will be easy for you to understand the anecdote that Maneesha has placed here.Ungo Doyo was the chief disciple of Tozan. When he first met Tozan, he was asked, “What is your name?”Remember that in Zen, language is used in a totally different way than it is used commonly. “What is your name?” does not mean that your name is being asked. “What is your name?” means “Who are you? Are you here?” It is a question not about an arbitrary name, it is a question about the eternal consciousness within you. Have you found it?He answered, “Doyo.”Tozan said, “Tell me transcendentally!”Don’t use any words!You have to understand what is meant by transcendentally. Can you see that my finger, without saying anything, is pointing? Can you look into my eyes and see the silence of them?I am also holding the whole existence in my hand; not just one roseflower, but all the roseflowers that have ever blossomed or will ever blossom. Do you see them? Can you see in a single rose all the roses of the past and all the roses of the future?To see transcendentally means seeing not with your mind but with your being. In other words: when language stops, when mind stops and you are just a silence, a pure space, then you can do any act spontaneously, and that will be speaking transcendentally.Ungo replied, “Speaking transcendentally, my name is Doyo.”Tozan said, “When I saw my master, my answer was no different.”Ungo remained with Tozan many years. Tozan never had less than one thousand, five hundred disciples, of whom twenty-eight were enlightened.In this part of the anecdote he is saying, “You are not different from me. Just as you are unenlightened today, I was also unenlightened when I reached my master. My answer was not different from yours. It was as ignorant as yours, it was as unconscious as yours. You are still using words.”After Ungo had realized his own enlightenment and became a master, a monk asked him a question.Ungo said, “You are a fool!”The monk said, “So are you!”“What is the meaning of fool?” asked Ungo.The monk danced.Existence has to be experienced without intellectual verbalization. A dance will do because in a dance you are total. The real dancer forgets himself; only the dance remains and the dancer disappears. This is transcendence.It may happen in many ways. A singer can sing to such intensity and totality that he is no longer there, only the song… And the transcendence has happened.A poet, a painter, a musician, a carpenter – it does not matter what you are doing. But if you are doing it without your mind interfering…I have told you about one of the greatest dancers of this century, Nijinsky. He was a problem, particularly to physics and other branches of science. When he used to dance, there were moments he would jump so high that it is not possible according to physical calculations; gravity will not allow that much. It was not only that he went beyond gravitation when he danced, when he came back, he did not follow the way things fall back toward the earth. He came like a feather, very slowly, with no hurry.It seemed as if he was coming back on his own, was not being pulled magnetically by gravitation. He was asked again and again, “How do you do it?”He said, “Don’t ask me how I do it, because I am puzzled myself. Whenever I have tried it, I have not been able to do it. When I forget myself – when there is no Nijinsky and the dance takes over, the dancer melts into the dance – perhaps gravitation loses its magnetism. But I can only say this much: that whenever it has happened, I was not. And whenever I have tried, it has never happened.”This is what is meant by transcendental. Your absence is transcendental. Your egolessness is transcendental.Doyo’s answer was factual: it was his name. But names are just labels, you can change them. You are not born with a name, neither are you going to die with a name. Nameless you come, like a breeze, and nameless you disappear into the unknown. All names are arbitrary – they are good for post offices, they are good for the marketplace. They are a necessity, but the necessity is utilitarian, it is not transcendental.If you want, you can drop your name and you can say, “I don’t have any name.” There is no problem in dropping the name. It is just a fiction, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of.Tozan said, “Please tell it transcendentally!”But to say anything transcendentally is first to understand transcendence as an experience.Ungo said, “Speaking transcendentally, still my name is Doyo.”Tozan said, “When I saw my master, my answer was no different. I was as ignorant as you are, as unconscious as you are, as fast asleep as you are.”After Ungo had realized his own enlightenment and became a master, a monk asked him a question.Ungo said, “You are a fool!”The monk must have been a man of great understanding because he replied, “You are also a fool!”Innocence is not knowledgeability. The fool is closer to the experience of innocence than the man of knowledge. The man of knowledge is full of rubbish, borrowed. The fool at least is free from any borrowed knowledge; he is himself.This is the uniqueness of Zen, that it would rather like you to be a fool than to be a great scholar, knowledgeable – a rabbi, a pundit – because these people are ruling the whole humanity and its past, they have destroyed all the innocence of man.Zen would love even a fool, if he is innocent, if he can say, “I do not know” That’s what has been happening in this dialogue.Ungo said, “You are a fool!” Ordinarily, anybody would have been offended to be called a fool. But Zen speaks a totally different language. Its vibe is different, its world is different. Rather than being offended, he simply said, “So are you!” Neither I know, nor you know.Not knowing, just being, is the conclusion of Zen. Knowing is for the mind, not knowing is of the heart. And as your not knowing goes deeper, it reaches to your very being.Socrates, in the last moments of life told his disciples, “When I was young I thought I knew too much. As I became a little more mature, I became aware that my knowledge is so little and the area of ignorance is immense. But now, before dying, I can say to you that I do not know anything at all. I am dying just like a child, unscratched.”That is the meaning of Kabir’s statement: “Jyun ki tyun dhari dinhin chadariya – the way you have given me life, I am returning it back to you, unscratched, unspoiled.” The same innocence that belongs to the first day should remain your whole life, throbbing within you.Then you will know the poetry of existence, then you will know the aesthetics, the beauty that surrounds you. Then you will know that which cannot be known, which cannot be said, but still can be felt, still can be lived.Ungo asked,“What is the meaning of fool?” asked UngoThe monk danced.A very authentic answer: stop bothering with the words, now come to reality. His dance is the answer of his innocence. It is unfortunate that even poets become egoists. It is unfortunate that musicians, painters, sculptors become egoists. These are the people who should be the mystics. But rather then entering into the innocence of their poetry, their music, their dance, they also enter into the race of politics, being somebody special.Zen is for those who are ready to be nobodies, who are ready to be just a silence. But that silence opens the door to all the splendors that are hidden within you. Out of that silence your dance will have a totally different quality: your poetry will have a totally different nuance, your music will not be your music. You will become just like a hollow bamboo and the universe will sing through you.Unless you are just like a hollow bamboo and the universe can sing through you, you are just mediocre. You are just a composer of words, you are not in the hands of existence, you are afraid. You are defending yourself, you are on an ego trip. Everybody is.Somebody is riding on ladders to reach to power, somebody is accumulating money, somebody is choosing a different dimension. But the goal is the same: “I should be recognized.”You need not be recognized. You have to realize, not be recognized. If recognition comes on its own, that is another matter; that is just like a shadow. It is not your goal, it follows you. You don’t run after it.The monk danced.And off he went, and Ungo praised him, in his absence, saying, “After all, everybody is out to get something, though of course Zen-getting is a no-getting.”On another occasion, an official said to Ungo: “The world-honored one had a secret message. Mahakashyapa did not keep it a secret. What is this secret word of Buddha?”I have told you the story of Mahakashyapa. Another incident in the life of Buddha will explain this to you.He is passing through the forest, Ananda is with him. It is time for the leaves to fall. The whole forest is full of leaves, fluttering, dancing in the wind under the sun. The trees are standing naked.Ananda asked Buddha, “I did not have time to ask because somebody else was always there, and I did not want to interrupt. At this moment we are alone; I want to ask one thing. Have you said everything to us that you know? Are you keeping some secrets?”Buddha bent down, took a few dead leaves in his hand and said to Ananda, “What I have said is equivalent to these few leaves, and what I have not said is equivalent to all the dry leaves of this vast forest. But I am not keeping a secret – it cannot be said. Those who will understand what I have said, perhaps may find it themselves – they are bound to. I have only shown the way. I have not said a single word about the goal.”This occasion again comes when Ungo is asked by an official,“The world-honored one…Gautam Buddha…had a secret message. Mahakashyapa did not keep it a secret.Because Mahakashyapa laughed, shared his experience. Buddha was silent, everybody else was silent. Mahakashyapa could not resist sharing the beauty of silence, the joy of silence, and laughed loudly.Hence in Zen tradition it is said: Buddha had many secrets, but Mahakashyapa opened them to the world.Ungo called to him, “Your honor!”He was a government official.He answered, “Yes?”Ungo said, “You understand?”“No,” he replied.Ungo said, “If you don’t understand, that is Buddha’s secret; if you do, that is Mahakashyapa’s not keeping it a secret.”It is a beautiful anecdote for anybody who is really longing to know the innermost secret of one’s own being and the existence to which we belong.As far as my comment on this anecdote is concerned, I want you to know there is no secret. Everything is as open as the sky, just you are closed.A blind man can say, “The sun is keeping the light a secret.” A deaf man can say, “All these poets who have gathered here are not reciting their poetry.” Your deafness, your blindness, your unawareness, does not make existence a secret. It is shouting from every star, from every mountain peak, from every flower, in thousands of ways.It is not a secret, you don’t have to search for it. You have just to be silent within yourself and it is there, throbbing in your heartbeats. Remember, your heartbeats are the heartbeats of the whole life system. They are the heartbeat of existence itself.That is my whole work here.I don’t have any philosophy to teach and I don’t have any dogma, any creed, any theology, any religion. I am not a preacher. I am simply trying to indicate that you are it.Maneesha has asked a few questions. First:Osho,To be told that truth is a secret makes me feel that truth is an exclusive club to which one only gains entrance by having some inexplicable qualification.But I don't sense that you have some secret you are keeping from us. If anything my own secretiveness is what is in the way.Is there anything you can say that I might understand?Every moment I am giving you the rose that Gautam Buddha gave to Mahakashyapa; with my whole being, with my presence. There is no secret at all; both my hands are open, I am not holding my fists.But there are investments which would like what you call “exclusive clubs.” The Hindu pundit thinks that truth is only in the Sanskrit scriptures.One very young and alert man, Swami Ramateertha, who had gone to the West, around the world, was loved by thousands of people. He was a man of rare quality. He thought that before coming back home, it would be right for him to first go to Kashi, the capital of Hinduism. But he was not aware that a great disaster was awaiting him.In Kashi, they have the secret council of Hindu scholars. He was asked to present himself before the council, and the first question that was asked by the chairman was, “Do you understand Sanskrit?”Of course he did not. He was born near Peshawar; his whole education was Persian, Arabic, Urdu. Sanskrit was not known to him at all. But Sanskrit is not needed to know the truth, otherwise Socrates could not know it, Pythagoras could not know it.But this is the attitude of all the religions. Jesus was crucified for many reasons. One of them was that he was not a rabbi, he was not a scholarly Jew. He was just a poor carpenter’s son, and was claiming to be a prophet. The learned people have a vested interest in keeping secrets. And in their scriptures there is nothing.Just look at those scholars: in their lives there is nothing – no song, no beauty, no dance, no laughter. They are just like dry wood. Have you ever seen a pundit dancing innocently? A rabbi or a pope? They know much but they don’t know the inner space of innocence.It is not a secret, Maneesha. It becomes a secret if you are asleep. If you don’t enter into your own being it becomes a secret. Nobody can prevent you except yourself, and nobody can give it to you except yourself.Her second question is:Osho,Last night's discourse was like being aboard Noah's Ark. Your voice was an anchor as we sat so still and silent, literally in the center of the cyclone. It was an amazing example of how existence is right with us – though I have heard that one bamboo sustained multiple fractures.Maneesha, that bamboo – and one other tree which was brought by sannyasins from Brazil – were both very proud people. They needed, they deserved, multiple fractures. Otherwise, there are hundreds of bamboos around you and they were as silent with you in the rains and the thundering clouds and the winds… Nothing has happened to them.You should watch carefully. The bamboo who had multiple fractures and the tree from Brazil… It was a proud tree. But pride is not the name of the game we are playing here.It is perfectly good; we will take care of the bamboo. And I hope he has learned why he has got multiple fractures. When the winds came and the clouds thundered and the rain was too much… If a bamboo does not move with the wind and the rain and dance, it is going to get fractures. That bamboo must have stood against the rains, against the winds; and whoever stands against nature will find himself totally broken, will find himself, sooner or later, in a hospital.It is always the ego that gets fractured. Your being is untouchable. Nothing can harm your being, not even death.Before we enter into our daily meditation, the bamboos are waiting for a few laughs. They may not understand the language but they can understand your laughter.Moishe Finkelstein is dozing in his armchair in the Finkelstein Funeral Home one afternoon. The phone rings and Moishe picks up the clock and puts it to his ear.“Hello,” says Moishe sleepily.Then the phone rings again and Moishe puts down the clock and talks to the phone instead. It turns out that the Democratic Dodo Political Party has booked an entire hotel in town for their conference, and that in room 213, one of their delegates has died.Moishe throws a coffin in the back of the hearse and drives downtown.Half an hour later, Moishe calls the manager’s office to confirm that the job is done, and that the occupant of room 312 has been removed.“You idiot!” shouts the manager, “I said room 213! Was the man in 312 dead also?”“He said he wasn’t,” replies Moishe calmly, “but you know what liars these politicians are.”Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, Francois Mitterand, the French president, and Ronald Reagan from America, are sitting alone together after a conference.“I have a problem,” says Gandhi, “and I need your help. I have twenty personal bodyguards, and I know for certain that one of them is a Chinese spy. But which one?”Mitterand and Reagan nod sympathetically and then the Frenchman says, “I have a similar problem. I have twenty mistresses and I know for sure that one of them is unfaithful. But which one?”“That’s nothing,” says Ronald Reagan, “I have twenty people in my cabinet. One of them, I know, is intelligent. But which one?”Old man Finkelstein and his friend Grandpa Funkenburger are having a few drinks with their dinner. “You know,” says Fink, “when I was thirty, my erection was so strong, I could not bend it at all, even with both my hands.”Funk nods his head appreciatively.“When I reached forty,” continues Fink, “I could bend it just a little bit, but only with a great deal of effort. At fifty, I could bend it a little more. And now that I am sixty, I can easily bend it in half.”The two friends keep sipping their drinks.“It is just amazing, Funk,” continues Fink, “I wonder how much stronger my hands are going to get?”Rubin and Klopman, two old friends, meet in the street one day. “How is everything?” asks Rubin.“It could be worse,” replies Klopman, “My house burned down with everything in it.”“Oh!” says Rubin, “that is terrible”“Well, not terrible,” replies Klopman, “The insurance paid me double what is was worth.”“Why, that is wonderful,” exclaims Rubin.“Not wonderful,” replies Klopman, “My wife died in the fire.”“That is terrible,” says Rubin.“Not terrible,” replies Klopman, “You see, I married again and the new wife is much better than my old one.”“That’s wonderful,” says Rubin.“Not wonderful,” replies Klopman, “because my wife goes visiting with my neighbor who is quite a good-looking guy and she spends the night there quite often.”“That is terrible,” says Rubin.“Not terrible,” replies Klopman, “because my neighbor has a really beautiful wife who comes to stay with me!”“So things with you are wonderful,” says Rubin.“Not wonderful, not terrible,” replies Klopman, “it could be worse.”Now, Nivedano, give the first beat and everybody goes into gibberish as totally as possible.The beat…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano, the beat…[Drumbeat]Now, everybody goes into absolute silence. Close your eyes, no movement. Just be in.This. This. A thousand times this is the very essence of Zen.Catch hold of this and God is in your hands.In this moment, you all have become temples of God.Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Now, fall dead.Just let the body breathe and you simply be now and here.Go deeper, deeper.Don’t be the bamboo who got multiple fractures.Go deeper, to the very roots of your being.Now, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Come back to life.Fresh and young.Listen… Even the bamboos are happy,celebrating your silence.These blessed bamboos wait every day for this moment to be with me.In silence, the whole existence is one ocean.

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

This This A Thousand Times 01-15Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

This A Thousand Times 15 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/this-a-thousand-times-15/

Osho,Tozan said to Ungan, “Master, if someone asks me a hundred years afterwards what I thought was your deepest understanding, what should I say?”Ungan answered, “Tell him I said, ‘It is simply this.’”Tozan was silent for a time, and Ungan said, “Tozan, if you have grasped this, you must carry it out in detail!”Tozan was still silent. Ungan struck him.Some years later, when Tozan was holding a service in memory of Ungan’s deepest understanding, a monk said to him, “The dead teacher said, ‘It is simply this!’” The monk then added: “Is this the yes-saying spirit?”“It is,” replied Tozan.The monk asked, “What does this mean?”Tozan said, “At the time Ungan said that, my idea was almost entirely a mistaken one, though I understood what he meant all right.”“The dead teacher,” said the monk, “did he know it, or not?”Tozan said, “If he didn’t, how could he say such a thing? And if he did, how could he avoid saying it?”Other Zen masters expressed the essence of Zen like this…Masso said: Lichen-crusted frogs croak at moonlit mountaintops.Awaken, mind’s clear at last.Refreshing pine windsOf The Book of SongsCan’t match this.Beirei said:All patriarchs are above our understanding,And they don’t last forever.Oh my disciples, examine, examine.What? Why this? This only.And Daibai said:I’m one with this, this only.You, my disciples,Uphold it firmly –Now I can breathe my last.Maneesha, this is the last discourse on the series called, This. This. A Thousand Times This – is the essence of existence, is the essence of your being, is the essence of Zen. This.This is vast. A small word contains total, universal, eternal truth. There are no boundaries to this. It never begins and it never ends. It is always here.You can wander here and there but it is just like a fish moving in the ocean; it is the same ocean wherever it goes. You can be a child, you can be young, you can be old, you can be dead, but this remains an eternal truth of your being. Alive or dead, you cannot get rid of this.This essential point is being discussed again and again by Zen masters. In different ways they have sung their song, in different ways they have signed their signatures; but only the ways differ, all their arrows converge on this. We will see how it has been repeated and why it has been repeated – why for thousands of years those who have known, either said this, or remained silent in thisness. But whatever the case, whether they say it or not, they are pointing to this by words, by silence, by dance, by music, by just being.Remember Basho, the great master:Sitting silently,Doing nothing,And the spring comes,And the grass grows by itself.Everything is happening on its own. Only the insanity of man makes him concerned and worried, makes him almost mad running after power, position, domination. But even the richest man of the world is poorer than these bamboos surrounding Buddha Hall because these bamboos are enough unto themselves and the richest man is still hungry.Before I enter into this dialogue, I would like to tell you a small story:A beggar knocked on the doors of an emperor. Early morning… It was even a little dark; the sun had not yet come over the horizon. The emperor was coming out for a morning walk in his beautiful garden; otherwise it would have been difficult for the beggar to make an appointment with him. But there was no mediator to prevent him.The emperor said, “What do you want?”The beggar said, “Before you ask that, think twice!”The emperor has never seen such a lion of a man. He has fought wars, has won victories, has made it clear that nobody is more powerful than him, but suddenly this beggar says to him twice, “Think what you are saying, because you may not be able to fulfill it!”The king said, “Don’t be worried, that is my concern. Ask what you want. It will be done!”The beggar laughed. The emperor could not understand the laughter.The beggar said, “You see my begging bowl? I want it to be filled. It does not matter with what, the only condition is that it should be filled, it should be full. You can still say no, but if you say yes, then you are taking a risk.”The emperor’s time to laugh has come, because a beggar’s bowl… And he is being asked with a condition! He told his premier to fill the beggar’s bowl with diamonds, so that the beggar could know whom he is asking.The beggar again said, “Think twice.”And soon it became apparent that the beggar was right because the moment the diamonds were poured into his begging bowl, they simply disappeared. More diamonds, more emeralds, more rubies… The king had tremendous treasures, but within hours everything was gone and the begging bowl was empty.The word spread like wildfire in the capital; thousands of people arrived to see this miraculous incident. When the precious stones were finished, the king said, “Bring out all the gold and silver, everything! My whole kingdom is at stake, my whole integrity is challenged.”But by the evening everything had disappeared into the beggar’s bowl and there were only two beggars left – one used to be the emperor.The emperor said, “Before I touch your feet and ask your forgiveness for not listening to your warning to think twice, just please tell me the secret of this begging bowl.”The beggar said, “There is no secret. I found this begging bowl on a funeral ground. It is a human skull. I have polished it, made it look like a bowl. I am a poor man, I cannot purchase even a bowl, but because it is a human skull, you go on pouring into it – anything – and it disappears.”The story is tremendously meaningful. Have you ever thought about your own begging bowl? Everything disappears – power, prestige, respectability, riches – everything disappears and your begging bowl goes on opening its mouth for more and more. And because of this continuous effort for more, you go on missing this. The “more” takes you away from this. The desire, the longing for something else takes you away from this moment.And there are only two kinds of people in the world: the majority are running after shadows, they will never be fulfilled. Their begging bowls will remain with them till they enter their graves. And a very small minority, one in a million, stops running, just remains standing here and now, drops all desires, asks for nothing and suddenly he finds everything within himself.This is the door of the kingdom of God.Tozan said to Ungan, “Master, if someone asks me a hundred years afterwards what I thought was your deepest understanding, what should I say?”Every disciple has, once in a while, become interested to ask the master, “When you are gone, if somebody asks me, ‘What was his teaching in essence,’ what am I supposed to say?”Ungan answered, “Tell him I said, ‘It is simply this.’”This is not a word, but an existential moment. You will not find it in the dictionary, you will find it in existence.Tozan was silent for a time, and Ungan said, “Tozan, if you have grasped this, you must carry it out in detail!”Tozan was still silent. Ungan struck him.Because this cannot be more than it is. There are no details. It is the simplest silent space, nothing can be said about it. Because Tozan did not say anything, his master, Ungan, in appraisal, struck him. By striking disciples Zen masters have been saying to them, “You have understood. Have it as a prize!”Some years later, when Tozan was holding a service in memory of Ungan’s deepest understanding, a monk said to him, “The dead teacher said, ‘It is simply this!’” The monk then added: “Is this the yes-saying spirit?”“It is,” replied Tozan.The monk asked, “What does this mean?”Tozan said, “At the time Ungan said that, my idea was almost entirely a mistaken one, though I understood what he meant all right.”This is not a word, hence it cannot have any meaning. You can live it, but you cannot mean anything by it.It is simply a roseflower, unobserved, unrecognized, unpraised, unknown, opening its petals and sharing its fragrance to the winds for no other reason than this is its nature.“The dead teacher,” said the monk, “did he know it, or not?”Because it is very possible that you can repeat words which are dead on your lips. They may have been alive on somebody else’s.Tozan said something tremendously beautiful. He said:“If he didn’t, how could he say such a thing?He was such an honest, integrated being, he would not have said anything that he did not know.“And if he did, how could he avoid saying it?”This is the eternal problem Zen has faced, encountered: if you know, you cannot say it; and if you know you cannot avoid saying it. The experience is such that, intrinsically, it wants to be shared. If you don’t know, of course you cannot say it. But if you know, then too you cannot say it; at the same time you cannot avoid saying it.Lao Tzu did not say a single word to his disciples – and he had thousands of disciples. Those were the golden days: a thousand disciples sitting with Lao Tzu in utter silence, day by day, year by year – nothing is asked, nothing is answered. Everybody knows this is, and there is no need to give it an expression – because the moment you express it, it is no longer the real; it has become unreal, just a shadow, a false reflection in a mirror. Howsoever real it looks it is only appearance.Have you seen your face in the mirror? It is there, in every detail; but you know perfectly well it is not there, it is only a shadow. But to small children sometimes it happens – to very small children, as yet uncorrupted – if you bring a mirror in front of them, they look at the child on the other side, they try to grab hold of the child with their tiny hands. They go on slipping on the mirror. They cannot resist the temptation to find who is behind. They try to go back, behind the mirror to find the child. Of course there is nobody. It was their own reflection.All that has been said about truth is only a reflection in the mirror.Lao Tzu did not say anything. He did not write anything. And when he was eighty years old he left toward the Himalayas to rest in eternity, in the deepest silence of the eternal snow of Himalayan peaks.The emperor of China ordered all the guards around the country to block all the roads: “Lao Tzu should not be allowed to go out unless he writes down his experience for future generations.”He was caught hold of before he crossed the borders. Respectfully the guard said, “I am not in any way being disrespectful to you, I am simply following orders. The orders are that you have to remain in my cottage – there is no other place here – and write down your essential experience. Unless you do it, I cannot allow you out of the country, I cannot allow you to cross the borders.”The emperor himself was a disciple of Lao Tzu. Under such circumstances Lao Tzu wrote a small booklet, but the first sentence is all that he really has been not saying all his long life – for eighty years. The first sentence was, “Truth is, but the moment you say anything about it, it is no more. So please read what I am writing with the consciousness that no word can contain it – including my words.”Such sincerity, such purity, such truthfulness is very rare, and has become more and more rare.Other Zen masters expressed the essence of Zen like this…Masso said:Lichen-crusted frogs croak at moonlit mountaintops.Awaken, mind’s clear at last.Refreshing pine windsOf The Book of SongsCan’t match this.The Book of Songs is an ancient Chinese treatise, one of the most beautiful books. It can be compared only to the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon. But even The Book of Songs can’t match this.This is the only poetry, the only song, the only dance, the only answer – here, now, in your very breathing, in your very heartbeat.Beirei said:All patriarchs are above our understanding,And they don’t last forever.Oh my disciples, examine, examine.What? Why this. This only.And if you can understand this, nothing else is needed – you have come home. You have long gone astray, you have wandered through lives in many forms on many paths; this brings you suddenly back to your essential self. And your essential self is the universal self. There is no distinction between the individual and the universal. Once the dewdrop falls into the ocean, all distinctions disappear. The dewdrop becomes the ocean.And Daibai said:I’m one with this, this only.You, my disciples,Uphold it firmly –Now I can breathe my last.Every master worth the name lives only for those who can understand this. There is no other reason for an enlightened man to live – even for a single moment more. He has arrived home, but he can see many of his fellow travelers are still wandering in darkness. It will be very unkind not to give them a call.All the masters are nothing but calls to those who are wandering unnecessarily and suffering unnecessarily. This – and you suddenly open your innermost lotus.Maneesha has asked:Osho,If someone asks me a hundred years afterwards, what I thought was your deepest understanding, what should I say?Maneesha, a hundred years after or a million years after, you need not be worried, I will be answering through you. But the answer will be simply this, unadorned, just a pure silence, a space without clouds.But you need not wait for a hundred years, you need not wait for even a single moment. You have to answer this very moment. The question has been asked.Every moment, the people who are with me – it does not matter whether they are physically here or not – wherever they are, I am asking them again and again, insisting to them to come home, to be here, just be and don’t run after shadows.Is not this silence saying the same? Are not the bamboos standing in deep silence with you as fellow travelers?Before we enter into our daily meditation I would like a few laughters from the bamboos. You can also participate.Wu, a Chinaman from Hong Kong, moves to America and finds a job in San Francisco.When he gets his first paycheck, he goes to the bank to send fifty dollars to his family back in Hong Kong. The bank gives him five hundred Hong Kong dollars in exchange.The next week, when he deposits his fifty dollars, they give him only four hundred and fifty Hong Kong dollars.“Money fluctuations…” explains the bank clerk. “It goes up and down all the time.”When Wu returns the next week, he puts down his fifty dollars and is told that he will get four hundred Hong Kong dollars in exchange.“Hmmm!” says Wu. “Flucking again!”Fiona Feelgood goes to see Doctor Bones for an examination.“Get undressed,” says Bones.“Please, Doctor,” says Fiona, “turn out the lights.”“Come on now, Miss Feelgood,” says Bones, “I am a doctor.”“Turn out the lights,” snaps Fiona.So Bones turns out the lights. Two minutes later, Fiona says,“Doctor, where shall I put my clothes?”“Over here,” says Bones, “on top of mine!”A cross-eyed cop arrests three cross-eyed drunks.He turns to the first cross-eyes drunk and says,“What is your name?”And the second cross-eyed drunk says,“Miles MacDuffy.”The cross-eyed cop says,“I was not talking to you.”And the third cross-eyed drunk says,“I did not say anything!”Audrey and Marilyn, two retired schoolteachers from Chicago, save up all their money to go on safari in Africa.They are having a wonderful time going through the jungle, when suddenly a huge gorilla swings down out of the trees, sweeps Marilyn into his arms, and disappears.He takes her back to his cave, and for a week makes love to her all day and night.Finally, Audrey organizes a rescue party, and Marilyn is saved and rushed to the hospital.She is treated there for a couple of days and then her friend comes for a visit.“Oh, Marilyn!” the friend sobs, “What a ghastly experience! How do you feel?”“How should I feel?” sobs Marilyn, “He never writes, he never calls…!”Now, the first step is gibberish. Say anything, relevant, irrelevant; don’t bother, because nobody is listening. Only those who are listening are idiots.Speak Chinese if you don’t know it, speak Japanese if you don’t know it, but don’t speak the language you know. Just go crazy. Once in a while it is such a tremendous relief to go crazy.Nivedano, give the first drum the first beat. Everybody goes crazy…[Drumbeat][Gibberish]Nivedano…[Drumbeat]Everybody becomes silent, utterly silent.Just close your eyes, don’t move…Let your being settle within yourself.This. This. A thousand times this.This is the very essence of Zen.Go as deeply into this as possible.Nivedano, beat the drum…[Drumbeat]Fall dead…Let the body breathe.You simply watch suchness, thisness,this immensely tremendous moment…Die deeper, if you want to come to life.The deeper you go in death, the higher you come into life.Don’t miss this tremendous opportunity.Don’t wait for a hundred years.I am here.Nivedano, give the beat…[Drumbeat]Come back to life, fresh, radiant.A few may be still in their graves;a special beat for them, Nivedano…[Drumbeat]This is the truth.Now, can we celebrate?

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

Turning In 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Turning In 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/turning-in-01/

Osho,Ryusui said:Emptiness is a name for nothingness, a name for ungraspability, a name for mountains, rivers, the whole earth. It is also called the real form. In the green of the pines, the twist of the brambles, there is no going or coming. In the red of the flowers and the white of the snow, there is no birth and no death.Joy, anger, love, pleasure – these are beginningless and endless delusion. Enlightenment, practice, realization – these are inexhaustible and boundless. Thus, emptiness is the name for nothing else; all things are the real form. In all worlds, in all directions, there is no second, no third.Therefore, in the fundamental vehicle there is no delusion or enlightenment, no practice or realization. Even to speak of practice and realization is a relative view.In our school, from the first entry, this point should be practiced whether sitting, lying down, or walking around. When sleeping, just sleeping, there is no past or future. When you awaken, there is no sleep either. This is called the absolute host.Maneesha, Ryusui is pointing to a very fundamental question which Gautam Buddha raised for the first time in human history.The question is, is enlightenment something to be achieved, desired, longed for? If so, then there must be practices, disciplines, rituals, and the whole paraphernalia. And millions of people have gone astray in search of enlightenment. Buddha is the first human being who has said that everything is absolutely arbitrary because you need not go anywhere. Enlightenment is your very nature.It is consciousness that you are built with; this house, this body is not you. And this mind also is not you. And there is not much problem to stand aside and watch the mind and its functioning, to stand aside and watch the gestures of the body. This watcher is your reality, your truth. It is already here, so don’t go in search somewhere else. Whenever, wherever you find it, you will always find it here and now. Now is the time and here is the space. If you can be now here, you are a Gautam Buddha.I have heard a small story about a man who was a great atheist. The whole day he was arguing against religion, against all kinds of superstitions. He had written in his sitting room in big letters: God Is Nowhere.Then a small child was born to him.One day the small child was looking at the writing. He was just learning to write, learning the alphabet, so he could not manage to read God Is Nowhere; on the contrary, he read: God Is Now here – nowhere can be divided into two.The father heard it and was amazed. He had never thought about it, that “nowhere” consists of “now” and “here.”The small child changed the man’s whole approach; he started thinking about now and here. And he was puzzled…because he has never been now; his mind has been wandering in the past or in the future, but never now, never in the present.Mind has no relationship with the present.This moment, if you are here, the mind is no more.Mind needs the past as memory, and mind needs the future as projection. Without future and past, the mind cannot exist. And the present is so small, just a split second. In the present, there is no work for the mind to do – either it can do some work for the future or some work for the past, but it is absolutely impotent as far as the present is concerned.The father had defeated many philosophers, but this small child changed his whole life because he started to be here, and to be now, and he found a new area opening within himself.That area is meditation.Meditation means no mind – no past, no future, no present…just eternity, a pure mirror which reflects the whole and is not scratched by anything. Just as the sky is not scratched by the clouds moving, or the sun rising, or the full-moon night, the sky remains unscratched.You have heard the Zen haiku about the shadows of the bamboos…sweeping the temple steps, but they don’t make any noise.The moon in the sky is reflected in the smallest pond but it does not disturb the pond. It does not create even a single ripple. And the miracle is, neither does the pond want the moon to reflect nor does the moon want to be reflected. But existence manages spontaneously a beautiful phenomenon – a single moon being reflected all over the earth.In rivers, in oceans, in ponds, in lakes, in streams…even in a single dewdrop on a lotus leaf, the full moon is reflected as fully as in the biggest ocean.But everything is happening so silently on its own accord.In existence there is no effort, there is no intention. Everything is very relaxed and at ease.Gautam Buddha was the first man to say that anybody who is searching for himself is a fool. The very search is preventing you from finding. Don’t search! Don’t go anywhere, just sit down and close your eyes and be within. Forget all about past and future, forget the body and the mind – you are the host. This is only a house, a temporary caravanserai; by the morning you will have to go on. The caravan continues from one serai to another serai, so don’t get attached to the caravanserai where you happen to be right now, in this moment.Detached, aloof, just watching…and the mind disappears.Mind is your attachment with the body and through the body with the world and all its greed, anger, love, hate, jealousy. The whole world is a projection of your mind, in which you live in suffering or misery – or once in a while a little joy, a little pleasure, but very superficial, not even skin deep.But behind all this scene is hiding your buddha, your awareness, your pure consciousness – unclouded, unscratched, from eternity to eternity.To realize this is the greatest experience in the world.But all the religions have been driving people astray, searching for gods which don’t exist, praying before gods they have never met. No prayer has been responded to, but all the religions are combined in a conspiracy to take you away from yourself. These are the ways… God is far away; self-realization is going to be through arduous practices, disciplines. Everybody cannot afford it. Nobody has that much time, nobody has that much capacity for self-torture. Nobody is so much a masochist that he can become a saint.Naturally, the ultimate outcome is the present-day humanity: everybody has lost his way to himself.And it is a single step – just turning in. It is not a finding, it is not a discovery, it is not an invention. It is simply a remembrance.You can forget it, you can remember it. These are the only two things you can do about your nature, about your intrinsic consciousness.But between the two there is not much difference; the difference between sleep and waking is the only difference. And one who is awake today was asleep yesterday; one who is asleep today may become awake tomorrow, so it is only a question of timing. It is only a question of your decision, when to recognize. As far as buddhahood is concerned, it is waiting there since eternity to eternity. Whether you recognize it or not, it does not matter.If you recognize it, all your actions will change. Your world view will change. Mind will not be any more a master to you, but will be a very good and very efficient servant, a good biocomputer. But first the master has to be recognized; then the mind and the body function according to the wisdom of the master.Ryusui is a great master. He’s saying:Emptiness is a name for nothingness.In the dictionaries and encyclopedias you will find emptiness having a negative connotation.In the experience of the meditator, emptiness is not negative. It is simply that your room is full of furniture. Have you ever thought about it, that room means space? You take out all the furniture – what is left behind? Ordinarily, anybody will say that now the room is empty.Buddha was the first person to say that now the room is really a room, empty of any thing, just itself. All the junk has been removed. Emptiness in Buddha’s conception is a very positive – the most positive – quality.Buddha introduced many original viewpoints to the world; this is one of his original contributions.Emptiness and nothingness don’t really mean what you ordinarily mean by them. Emptiness simply means the pure, unclouded sky of your consciousness. And nothingness simply means “no-thingness.” Just put a hyphen and then you will see the change that happens: no-thingness. Your consciousness is not a thing, it is not an object. It is always a subjectivity. You cannot put it before yourself and examine it.That is the problem before the scientist: he cannot recognize consciousness because he cannot make consciousness an object of examination. He cannot dissect it. He cannot find of what it is constituted. He cannot pull it apart and look deeper into it, because consciousness is not a thing. It is “no-thing” – but it is. It is pure “isness.”As your mind ceases thinking and you become detached from your body, a tremendous silence descends over you and a luminous being is revealed which I’m calling the buddha.The buddha simply means the awakened one. Everyone has the potential. Very few have realized it, but everybody has the potential. If you don’t realize, nobody is responsible for it except you. And it is so close…But this is the difficulty: when things are very obvious we tend to forget them. We can see far away but we cannot see inward.In fact our whole education, our culture, our civilization, prepares us to be someone in the world, to have some great achievement. No culture teaches its children that “You don’t have to become anybody, you just go in and find out who you are.” And unless we find a culture, an educational system in the world which helps people to find their buddhahood, we will remain barbarians.Ryusui says:Emptiness is a name for nothingness, a name for ungraspability, a name for mountains, rivers, the whole earth.I would like to say, the whole universe is utterly empty – but this emptiness is not negative.Now even physicists have come to understand… New stars are born every day; old stars die every day. One can ask, from where do the new stars come…? As far as God is concerned, he started creation six thousand years ago and he did his job in six days. The seventh day he went on holiday and since then he has not been seen anywhere. Such a long holiday! One thing is certain: that the world he created must have been created in six days because it is such a mess. You cannot create a better world in six days.I have heard that when Henry Ford died he encountered God – it is just a rumor, I cannot authorize you to spread it. God asked Henry Ford, “You are a great, intelligent man; you have made such great cars. What do you think of my creation?”Henry Ford said, “Just bullshit! Your creation…”God said, “You should behave like a Christian! This is not good to use such words. And what is wrong with the world?”He said, “Everything is wrong! For example, man has no reverse gear. He cannot go back into childhood, come back again young, go forward and become old and then come back again. An ordinary, intelligent person can understand that a reverse gear would have been of great help. And you have put man’s pleasure-point in such an ugly and dirty place – between two exhaust pipes! And you think yourself a great creator…and anyway, where have you been all this time?”But I don’t know – this is a gossip.I don’t want to hurt anybody’s religious feelings.As far as physics is concerned, all the great stars come out of nothing, and all the great stars die and disappear into nothingness again. For the first time, modern physics has confirmed Gautam Buddha’s idea that everything is nothing. Sometimes it takes a form and sometimes it disappears into the ocean of existence.Just like the waves in the ocean – in the full moon night they become so tidal…and then they disappear. Just throw a small pebble in a silent lake, and it will create circles upon circles, and again those circles will disappear and the lake will be silent.We are made of the stuff “nothingness.”Nothingness is not nothingness, as it is usually understood; nothingness is the womb of everything. It gives birth to everything and ultimately it goes back to its womb.Hence, birth and death both prove only one thing: that existence consists only of nothingness. Birth and death are simply ripples.He’s saying, this is…a name for ungraspability, a name for mountains, rivers, the whole earth. And I’m adding – this will not do – it is the name for the whole universe, the universe that we have come to know through our scientific instruments, and the universe that we are not yet acquainted with, and the universe that we will never be acquainted with because it is infinite. There are no boundaries; all is like soap bubbles in a vast ocean. Our great stars, our planets, our suns, our solar systems…just soap bubbles. They may remain here for millions or trillions of years, it does not matter.In the eternity of existence, four million light years are just a small second.It is also called the real form.Nothingness is the real form because it is the only form that never changes. Everything comes and goes, only nothingness remains.In the green of the pines, the twist of the brambles, there is no going or coming. In the red of the flowers and the white of the snow, there is no birth and no death.Joy, anger, love, pleasure – these are beginningless and endless delusion.By calling them “delusion” he does not mean that they are condemned. That is a misconception which even followers of Buddha go on carrying. It is simply a description of their nature.For example, in a movie you know that on the screen there is nothing but light and shadow, a game between light and shadow projected on an empty screen. But you enjoy the drama, you enjoy the movie, the story. You will find people crying when there is a tragedy; you will find people laughing, forgetting completely that the screen is empty.That’s exactly what Buddha is saying: he is saying existence is an empty screen. On this screen many figures arise, many dramas, many tragedies, many comedies. But remember always, these are all soap bubbles. He’s not saying that you have to renounce it. What is there to renounce? One does not renounce soap bubbles…one does not renounce delusions. One simply understands that a delusion is a delusion and that is the end of it.The people who have renounced the world are going against Gautam Buddha. They should be forced to answer the question, “If the world is an illusion, where are you going? And if the world is an illusion, what is the point of renouncing it?” Why not be a little more playful? Why not be a little more nonserious?The existence is absolutely nonserious. It is so playful – otherwise what is the need of so many flowers? It is so abundantly joyful, it goes on creating thousands of species of flowers, birds and animals and stars. It is an unending play.And where can you go? Wherever you go it is the world; you will simply get caught in a new delusion – that you have renounced the world.This idea of renunciation is a great disease. What have you renounced? – in the first place there was nothing to renounce, only to understand. Buddhism is not supposed to be renunciation, it is supposed to be understanding. Just know what is momentary, delusory, and play the game – follow the rules. Just don’t be idiots.In the Russian revolution, in 1917, when the Czar was overthrown and Lenin and his Communist Party came into power, a woman started walking in the middle of the road.The traffic policeman told the woman, “Keep following the route.”The woman said, “Now we are free.”The policeman laughed. He said, “You are free, but that does not mean that you have to disturb the traffic. If everybody is free in the traffic, most of them will never reach their homes! The whole road will become a long graveyard.”That woman must have been Indian. You can see the Indian traffic. I always wonder, how do people survive? I myself never go out. Just the traffic is enough to prevent anybody from going out of their homes. Everybody is going in every direction. This is revolution!A man of understanding follows the rules of the game, knowing perfectly well that these rules are just rules; they are not truths. They can be changed.In America, you have to drive on one side, in India you have to drive on another side. It does not matter which side you choose, but you have to choose one side. Otherwise, there is going to be a chaos.Knowing that joy, anger, love, pleasure – these are beginningless and endless delusion does not mean you have to renounce them. I want you to know that you have to rejoice in them, knowing perfectly that they are a movie on an empty screen. There is no need to renounce the movie. And what are you going to gain by renouncing the movie? Just wasting your ticket…Enlightenment, practice, realization – these are inexhaustible and boundless.So don’t think that because one day you became silent and found a deep blissful state within you, your work is finished. It is simply homework. Now the work begins, because you have tasted your inner space. You can go as deep as you want. Even the Pacific is not so deep as your consciousness is. Your heart is connected with the universal heart. Certainly, the journey is inexhaustible.One does not just become enlightened; one goes on becoming enlightened every day, more and more. There comes no point which can be called the full stop. Yes, on the way you can have a few places of rest, commas, semi-colons, but never the full stop! The full stop does not exist.Thus, emptiness is the name for nothing else; all things are the real form.All things are empty.In all worlds, in all directions, there is no second, no third.It is one whole, the whole existence, and we are not separate from it. We are rooted in it. We cannot exist for a single moment without our roots in existence. Those roots are not visible, but we are breathing – these are our roots. Each pore of the body is breathing – these are our roots. They don’t show. You don’t even realize that your whole body is breathing, breathing the cosmos. If, leaving aside your nose, your whole body is thickly painted so that you cannot breathe from your body, you will be dead within three hours. The nose alone will not be enough. It is the main root, but all these branches, thousands of branches, of roots, are spread into the cosmos.Therefore, in the fundamental vehicle there is no delusion or enlightenment, no practice or realization. Even to speak of practice and realization is a relative view.In the Western world the concept of relativity was introduced by Albert Einstein, but in the East it is at least ten thousand years old. Of course Albert Einstein used it in a particular sense, but the concept of relativity has been an accepted concept in the East for centuries.Everything is relative.So when one man is unenlightened and another man is enlightened, the difference is only relative. It is not absolute. The man who is asleep can wake up any moment; you just have to throw some cold water into his eyes.That’s what happened to Chuang Tzu.One morning he woke up – a cold winter morning. He was sitting in his bed, wrapping his body with his blanket, very sad.He was not a man of sadness. In fact, in the world history of philosophy and consciousness, Chuang Tzu is a unique person, so absurd and so rational together… He was a very playful man. His disciples had never found him so serious. They asked him, “What is the matter? Are you sick or something?”He said, “The problem is so big, I don’t think you will be able to solve it. But anyway, I will tell you the problem; perhaps somebody can solve it. The problem is, while asleep, in my dream, I became a butterfly.”The disciples laughed.They said, “Don’t unnecessarily make a fuss about it. In dreams everything happens. Who cares?”Chuang Tzu said, “You don’t understand the implications! If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in the dream, then what is the problem? – the butterfly may have gone to sleep and be dreaming of being Chuang Tzu. Now the problem is: Who am I? A butterfly dreaming herself as Chuang Tzu? And if I can dream myself as Chuang Tzu, there is no reason that the butterfly cannot dream!”The disciples said, “It is beyond our comprehension. This is…we never thought about it. We have become many things in our dreams, and we never bothered.”Then his chief disciple, Lieh Tzu, who had gone to another village to preach, came back.The disciples were waiting for him…They said, “Our master is very sad, and his problem seems to be without any solution.”Lieh Tzu asked what was the problem and the disciples said, “This is the problem: he does not move from his bed. He said, ‘First I have to solve this; only then I can move.’”Lieh Tzu went to the well and pulled out ice cold water in a bucket.The disciples asked, “What are you doing?”He said, “You just wait.”And he went and poured the whole bucket over Chuang Tzu!Chuang Tzu jumped out of the bed. Lieh Tzu said, “Have I to go again and bring another bucket, or is the problem solved?”Chuang Tzu said, “It is solved! Don’t go – it is too cold! You idiot, where have you been? If by chance it had been the butterfly who was dreaming, you would have killed her. Be a little sensible!”But this is the only difference: you are asleep. A buddha becomes awakened. The difference is not categorical, the difference is relative – you can also become awakened.Hence, Buddha does not proclaim any superiority over those who are still asleep. It is their freedom: if they want to sleep they can sleep, life after life. But one day they will have to become tired and bored with sleeping. One day they will jump out of the bed and say “Enough!”That much is the difference.So there is not a question of following any practice or even speaking of realization because there is not much difference, and the difference that exists is relative.In our school, from the first entry, this point should be practiced whether sitting, lying down, or walking around. When asleep, just sleeping, there is no past or future. When you awaken, there is no sleep either.This is called the absolute host.If you have found your buddha within, you have found the absolute host, which never goes anywhere, which simply remains now and here.Mitsuhiro wrote a haiku:Beware of gnawingthe ideogram of nothingness:your teeth will crack.Swallow it whole……Don’t chew it. He’s saying: don’t think, just swallow it whole. Thinking about this great matter is bound to crack your teeth. Your mind is not capable; it is not meant to think about the absolute.All the philosophers are wrong in the sense that they are trying, through mind, to figure out something about the fundamental, the absolute – the ultimate. They don’t understand that mind is an arbitrary functioning of the body.It has come to this stage because you have to deal with reality, and the consciousness cannot deal with reality; it is simply a mirror. It can reflect; more than that it cannot do.The body has to create an arbitrary mind to function in the world. Its function is not to think about the absolute – how can it think about the absolute that it has not known? At the most it can become a parrot: it can repeat scriptures but those scriptures will not be its own realization.And unless something is your own realization, it is just an unnecessary burden.…and you have a treasurebeyond the hope of Buddha and the mind.The east breeze fondles the horse’s ears:how sweet the smell of plum.Zen is very poetic, it says things not in syllogisms but in poetry. It is symbolic.Socrates or Plato or Aristotle will talk in syllogisms, in logic. Their statements will be rational. Zen speaks through poetry. Its statements are indirect indications, fingers pointing to the moon – but the finger is not the moon.Another Zen poet says, you simply must be empty, empty of everything:Simply you must empty “is” of meaning,and not take “is not” as real.Isness is your reality, just pure isness, unnamed, with no boundaries, with no limits.But be so empty that the whole sky of your consciousness is without clouds. In that emptiness grows the ultimate understanding – what Buddha calls the Lotus Paradise. In that emptiness you become one with the cosmic soul.And without this realization your life is worthless.A poem by Sozan:A rootless tree,yellow leaves scattering.Beyond the blue –cloudless, stainless.Just a description…I will repeat:A rootless tree…The sky has no roots anywhere.…yellow leaves scattering.Beyond the blue –cloudless, stainless.This beyondness is your nature, this beyondness is your buddha. Once found, you have found the host.A question from Maneesha:Osho,Can only the eyes of enlightenment see emptiness?Maneesha, these are only different ways of saying the same thing – emptiness, enlightenment, the eyes of enlightenment, the wisdom of enlightenment, the illumination of enlightenment. These are only different ways of talking about the ultimate realization within. It is so vast that it can be described in a thousand and one ways.But this is certainly true: that without the eyes of enlightenment you cannot see emptiness. In fact they both happen together, simultaneously, the emptiness and enlightenment. They are not two things.And another question from Professor Schneider-Wessling. He has asked an immensely important question. His son is a sannyasin already, and the professor is sitting just in front of me. He is also a member of our World Academy for Creative Science, Arts and Consciousness. Now take care of him, so he returns back to Germany as a sannyasin…secretly. There is no need to proclaim it to the public. Just keep it a secret!He was worried whether to ask this question or not, because it might disturb the series of lectures on Zen.Professor, as far as I am concerned, nothing disturbs. You can ask any question and it immediately fits into my series! You will see.His question is:Osho,Why did the mind develop in a destructive direction?Man has lived almost four million years on this planet. In these four million years most of the time there were dark nights without fire, wild animals, danger all around, and every moment full of fear. Out of this fear and danger man has had to create a certain capacity to survive.You may have observed that man’s child is the weakest child in the world. He needs care for years until it is possible for him to stand on his own. The mother was continuously afraid for the child: in the deep forest – all the wild animals were in search of food just as man was in search of food. That was the basic search for millions of years – food. And even today, for millions of people, that is the basic search.Mind developed as a survival measure – how to hide yourself, how to find caves, how to make caves? How to live in darkness without being harmed, how to live in trees? It has been a difficult time for millions of years.And man’s child is so weak against any animal. You cannot fight hence you had to invent weapons as a substitute. You don’t have the claws of a tiger, you need something as a substitute. You don’t have the teeth of the lion or the crocodile; you needed to be inventive enough so that you were not too close. Because even if you had a knife in your hands – which was very difficult, the early knives were made of stone…even if you had a knife in your hand and a lion came, most probably you would tremble with fear and the knife would fall down! Just the roar of the lion and you would be frozen; you would not know what to do now.I have heard…A man with his wife and his mother-in-law had gone hunting. Suddenly they heard from a nearby cave the mother-in-law shouting, “Help! Help!” The wife was sitting on a tree and she saw that a lion was there, so she asked her husband, who was underneath the tree with his gun, “My mother is in trouble – a lion is facing her. Do something!”The husband said, “The lion got into trouble himself – why should I do anything? Your mother-in-law is enough! She finished me, she will finish the lion. Now it is his problem, not my problem.”Man had to invent arrows so that he could be far away from the wild animals and still kill them. Slowly, slowly other weapons came. All these weapons came because of the helplessness of man.When he found fire, then he was safer. When he discovered gunpowder, first in China, he became even more safe. Perhaps the Chinese became civilized before anybody else for the simple reason that they finished off the wild animals, and in finishing the wild animals a great fear, a constant fear and danger, disappeared.But the mind remained, the mind that has been created through millions of years. It is still afraid of darkness, although you know there is no need to be afraid of darkness. But the mind does not know that times have changed; millions of years’ habit still continues. The mind does not know, the mind is blind.One professor, a vice-chancellor of Varanasi University, Professor Rajnath Pandey, was staying with me, and he was very much against the way I grow trees around my house. I said, “Why are you so much against them?”He said, “These trees are enemies! If you don’t go on cutting them, if you don’t go on keeping them away, sooner or later your house will be a ruin and the trees will have overtaken it.”Man has been fighting with trees. We don’t think in that way now, but he was right, he was a man of history. I had never thought of it but he was right, that trees have killed man. We had to destroy trees to create towns, villages, and we had to destroy trees because they were hiding wild animals.Man has passed through such a struggle for survival that he cannot forget those habits. So even though now we don’t have wild animals to attack, we are preparing nuclear weapons. We don’t have any reason to fight, but we are cultivating more and more arms just out of old animal habit. Everybody knows that the Third World War is impossible, simply because the Third World War will destroy everybody. Nobody is going to be the winner and nobody is going to be the loser. All will be finished, the whole planet will be a graveyard.The whole joy of fighting is in being victorious – but there will be no victory, what is the point? It is absolutely clear. Just now there are only five countries with nuclear weapons, but by the end of this century there will be twenty-five countries with nuclear weapons. One cannot understand…for what? Already we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy this earth seven hundred times.And only one man in the whole history, Jesus Christ, got resurrected. I don’t think that he will get resurrected seven hundred times. People even suspect that he was not resurrected this one time; he never died. Because here in India, in Kashmir, we have the graves of both Jesus and Moses. And a village exists in Kashmir named after Jesus, Pahalgam, because Jesus used to call himself “the shepherd,” who had come to save the sheep. Pahalgam, in Kashmiri means the shepherd, the village of the shepherd. Strangely enough, when they were escaping from Egypt, Moses had come to Kashmir in search of the lost tribe.It took forty years of searching for great Moses to find Israel, and Jews will never forgive him. In forty years, such a long journey through the whole desert of Saudi Arabia – by the time he reached Jerusalem almost three-quarters of the original people who had come with him had died. And my own feeling is that he never found Israel. He had to say to his people…he himself was eighty years old, tired, utterly tired…he declared Jerusalem to be the holy place they were searching for.I don’t see that Jerusalem has anything holy in it.And Jews will never forgive Moses because he passed by all the oil lands, which are now really the richest countries in the world. If he had stopped in Saudi Arabia, or in Iran…But one tribe just got lost in the desert. Declaring Jerusalem was just hiding his failure.And Moses put new people in charge, who were not acquainted with him at all, because two-thirds of the original people had died. The third generation was just entering its youth and they had no respect, just as no young people have ever had respect for the older generation. This generation gap is not a new thing. Moses found an excuse: “I have to go. You manage things, I am going to search for the lost tribe.” The lost tribe had reached Kashmir, and Kashmir certainly looks like paradise.When the first great mogul, Babur, came to India, seeing Kashmir he could not believe it. People coming from the desert, seeing so much greenery, so many flowers, so many streams, such pure crystal-clear water, such beauty, eternal snows on the mountains…That lost tribe had really found paradise! So Moses remained there with his people. Kashmiris are basically Jewish; you can look at their noses…You know the nose of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru; he was a Kashmiri. You know the nose of Indira Gandhi; she was a Kashmiri. And Jesus, you should remember always, was never a Christian. He was born a Jew, he lived a Jew, he proclaimed himself as a Jewish prophet – that was his sin. He died as a Jew, but he died here in India. I have been to his grave.It is a strange coincidence that the graves of Moses and Jesus are in the same village. And the couple, the family who takes care of those two graves are still Jews. Mohammedans converted the whole of Kashmir to Mohammedanism, but they left that one family out of respect for Moses and Jesus.It seems that Jesus never died on the cross. The Jewish cross is such that it takes hours to kill a young man, and Jesus was only thirty-three. A man who is healthy and young, the Jewish cross will kill him in forty-eight hours. It is the slowest process of killing a person. Just by nailing his hands and his feet to the posts…the blood oozes slowly, slowly. It takes forty-eight hours.And there was a conspiracy between the followers of Jesus and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, that he should be put on the cross on Friday, as late as possible. So the whole process was delayed. First he had an interview with Pontius Pilate, and then Jesus was forced to carry his cross, a heavy cross; he fell three times on the road. And the place chosen for the cross was a hillock, so in every way they tried to postpone the time. The crucifixion happened nearabout two o’clock, and Jews stop working on Friday evening. All work has to be stopped by sunset on Friday because Saturday is their Sabbath, their holy day.So Jesus had to be brought down from the cross; he was still alive. He may have been in a coma, but he was not dead. And he was put in a cave, but the people who were guarding the cave were Roman soldiers, not Jews. They allowed him to escape. His friends took him out. It was dangerous to remain in Judea, and it was dangerous to go back to Judea when he was healed.The news had already reached that there was a place in India where Moses had gone, and had found the lost tribe and died. Jesus thought, “That is the only place where I will be at home.”He traveled to Kashmir and he lived a long life, one hundred and twelve years. That is all written on his grave in Hebrew. In India, nobody knows Hebrew.But the world powers are collecting nuclear weapons for ordinary people who only die once; they never resurrect.Only here do they resurrect – every night!There are enough nuclear weapons. But it is out of fear – the mind is still the old mind repeating old fears, dangers – that if you stop making nuclear weapons, the enemy is not going to stop. And the enemy is also thinking in the same terms; every country is thinking in the same terms. So seventy percent of the world’s wealth, production, genius, everything is devoted to a war which is never going to happen. Just by making it so total, you have made it out of date.Professor, the mind had to develop in a destructive direction just to save itself. But now it is no longer needed. Now the destructive energy has to be transformed into a creative energy. And a mind that can create destructive weapons like atom bombs and hydrogen bombs, and destroy cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki within seconds… And today the bombs that were thrown on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are – in comparison to American and Soviet nuclear missiles – child’s play, just toys. We have gone far in these forty years: we can destroy ourselves within ten minutes.This totality is a great blessing in disguise. This means, now we have to find ways to protect ourselves from our mind’s fear, to protect ourselves from our own weapons. Now there is no enemy to be killed; now the world war, if it happens at all, will be suicide.We have to save ourselves from our own minds. This mind was created for a certain reason: to save us from the animals. For centuries we were in danger; now we are in danger from our own destructive weapons.This is a great moment in the history of mankind, and perhaps in the whole history of the universe, because we only suspect that there are some planets where life may exist, but there is no certain proof. It may be that only on this earth has life come to such a point that a few people have become buddhas, a few people have come to know the universal secret of life. To destroy it is so idiotic, is so against the universe!The only way is to find something within you which can overpower your mind. Otherwise the mind knows nothing else except destruction; that was the function it was created for. It is not its fault, but it is continuously afraid for no reason at all. Sometimes it knows that there is no reason to be afraid; then it starts asking, “Why is there no reason to be afraid?”Mind knows only one language – that is of fear, danger, and how to survive and make yourself safe against an antagonistic universe.Even a great man like Bertrand Russell wrote about “the conquest of nature.” The same fear of the mind – we have to conquer. This idea has to be changed. The idea should be that now we have to rejoice in nature, we have to find the mysteries and secrets of nature, and we have to go beyond mind. This artifact is not our nature.That’s what we are doing in meditation.Meditation is finding something in you that is superior to the mind. Only then can the mind be prevented from destroying humanity and this beautiful planet. It was perfectly okay to be destructive up to now, but now the situation and the context is totally different.Somebody asked Albert Einstein, “What do you think about the Third World War?”He said, “I cannot say anything about the Third World War, but I can say something about the Fourth World War.”The questioner was puzzled. He said, “If you don’t know about the third, how can you know about the fourth?”Albert Einstein said, “The fourth will never happen; that much can be said. If we just let the third happen…finished.”Look at the past of the mind: Genghis Khan killed thirty million people, alone. His successor, Tamerlane, killed forty million people. We don’t know the exact numbers for Nadir Shah, but we know about Adolf Hitler; he killed thirty million. And now we are ready to kill five billion human beings, not to say anything about millions of birds, millions of animals, millions of trees – because the Third World War will be an end to all life on this planet. It is not just human beings who will be killed, it is going to be a loss to the whole universe.Scientists say that there are perhaps five hundred planets where some kind of life exists, but it is all guesswork. No certainty, no communication has been possible up to now. All we know is that in this vast infinity we are the only people alive with a potentiality of becoming eternal, of becoming immortal. In every possible way this earth should be saved – from our minds.The only way I can see is meditation.Up to now, mind has been our survival. From now onward only meditation can be our survival because meditation means going beyond mind, searching for something in your consciousness which is higher than your mind, which can dictate to the mind, which can rearrange the mind. Mind is just a biocomputer; it needs new data, that’s all. Instead of fear it can learn to love; instead of being in danger it can start enjoying the eternity of its life source.There is no death. Only forms change, life continues on and on.This is what we are trying to do here. This is what all the buddhas of the past have been doing, but in the past they were not so relevant. Today the situation is different: today either you listen to the buddha or you commit suicide. There is no other choice – meditation or suicide, global suicide. That is the simple alternative, there is no third way.In Gautam Buddha’s time there was not much difficulty – small wars, a few people killed, there was no harm. But now the destructive mind has brought us to a situation where we have to re-code the mind for construction, for creation. And if the mind can be so destructive, it can be transformed in the same way to great creativity, with the same energy. Energy is neutral: you can put it in the service of death or you can put it in the service of life.Our effort here is to put our minds, our bodies, in the service of life – in creativity, in music, in poetry, in dance. Great is the moment when we can change the mind, feed it with new information. And the same mind that brings nuclear weapons can bring great joys, plenty of food, better clothes, more health, longer life, less disease; it can eliminate old age completely.And the moment is ripe because nobody who is a little bit intelligent can be in favor of a third world war; only a few retarded politicians – and even they cannot openly say that they are in favor of a third world war. But their preparation continues. That preparation is dangerous, dangerous in many ways, because a third world war may happen accidentally: the weapons have become so sophisticated that just a push of a button…Just a few days ago I was telling you about a Soviet nuclear base which had a map of the whole world in the office showing the distance and the time, how much time it would take for its nuclear weapons to reach to this land or that land. The map also had push-buttons on it and a janitor, seeing that too much dust had gathered on the board, was dusting it. The professor in charge came in. He said, “You idiot, what are you doing?”He said, “I am simply dusting, there is too much dust…”He said, “Do you see? Where is England? You have dusted it off!”He had pushed the button.But I don’t think we would like to be dusted off in this way. It is now a question… No greater question has ever been asked, and there has never been such a parting of the ways. Those who want to commit suicide can commit suicide on their own, but they cannot be allowed to destroy the whole world!Professor Wessling, your question absolutely fits with the Zen series, because Zen is a search for no-mind, or a cosmic mind, beyond the human mind.Before we enter into our inner being, our every-evening meditation… I don’t want Professor Wessling to understand that we are serious people. We are very nonserious. We are absolutely playful; whatever happens we will sing and dance to the very last moment.On his first trip out of Poland, Kabloski finds himself sitting next to a priest in the plane. He has never seen a priest before, and asks, “Why do you wear your collar back to front?”“Because I am a father,” replies the priest, smiling.“Funny,” says Kabloski, “I’m a father too!”“Ah!” says the priest, “but I am a father to hundreds of people.”“Really?” says Kabloski, thinking for a moment. “In that case,” he continues, “shouldn’t you wear your pants back to front?”Little Rufus has been playing in the woods all day. Suddenly, he realizes that he is lost and that it is late. He hunts around for a way out, but finally gives up. Kneeling on the ground, he holds out his hands.“Please, God,” Rufus prays, “I am lost. Please show me the way out of here.”Just then a little bird flies overhead and drops a load of shit on his outstretched hands. Little Rufus examines it closely and then goes back to praying.“Oh! Please, God!” he says. “I really am lost, so don’t hand me that shit!”“I locked my husband out of the house last week for playing around with other women,” sobs young Mrs. Bedspring in the confession box. “And now he wants me to take him back. What should I do, Father?”“You must take him back,” replies Father Fungus, patting her hand through the curtain. “It is your Christian duty. But first,” Fungus continues, tightening his grip, “how would you like to get even with the bastard!”An Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian Jew are discussing the meaning of true happiness.“Coming home from work to a loving wife with a gin and tonic,” spouts the Englishman.“Ah, you English!” says the Frenchman. “Real happiness is meeting a cute little girl who spends the night with you. She entertains you and then leaves you quietly and with no regrets.”The Russian Jew is sitting, thinking.“True happiness,” he says, “I experienced a few years ago. In the middle of the night the KGB knocked on my door and shouted: ‘Herman Fingel! You are under arrest!’”The Englishman and the Frenchman look at him in alarm.“Yes!” says the Russian Jew, smiling happily. “And I shouted back: ‘Herman Fingel lives upstairs!’”Now, Nivedano…(Drumbeat)(Gibberish)Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Be silent, close your eyes.Feel your body to be completely frozen.Collect your consciousness, your life energy inward.Close all the doors and all the windows.Just be in, concentrated.Find the center of your life,because that is also the center of the universe.Finding it is the greatest blessing that man has ever experienced.Finding it you are a buddha, this very moment.To be a buddha is not a discipline, it is not a practice.It is simply a remembrance.Remember!Just a little ice-cold water on your eyes…Wake up!And this moment will become your life’s greatest moment.Drink from your inner being as much light,as much delight as you are capable of.Let it sink into every cell and nerve of your being.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Now relax.See the body as dead, there, far away from youand the mind is also part of it, a mechanism;you are just a watcher.A simple watchfulness and you reach to the beyond.You transcend life and death, you transcend duality.You come to feel the eternity, the immortality,your cosmic wholeness. You are not just a part,you are the cosmos.That is the meaning of being a buddha.This is the host we were talking about.Everything else changes,this host remains always now and here.This is your nothingness,this is your emptiness,just pure space.And out of this pure space ariseall kinds of creativity,all songs, all joys, all dances. Only this experience,if it becomes like a wildfire around the world,can save humanity from itself.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Come back – silently, gracefully,without any hurry.Keep hold of the consciousnessand the experience you have reached,because you have to keep it like anundercurrent, twenty-four hoursso that every act reflects your consciousness,your compassion, your love, your meditation.It is not something to be done for a few minutesand be finished with.It is something that has to becomeyour very breathing,your very heartbeat.Only then there is a possibilityfor a future humanity,for a new manwhose mind will not be destructive,whose earth will not be divided into nations,whose whole energy will be devoted to making lifeas rich, as blissful, as peaceful, as loving,as the poets have always dreamed of,and only a few mystics have experienced.Meditation is the way in,it is the way to wake up the masterwho can control the mind,who can chain the mind,who can use the mind in the serviceof greater valuesof truth and beauty and love and joy.Can we celebrate the ten thousand buddhas?

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

Turning In 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Turning In 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/turning-in-02/

Osho,Eno said:Good friends, in this teaching, from the outset, sitting in meditation does not concern the mind nor does it concern purity; we do not talk of steadfastness. If someone speaks of “viewing the mind,” then I would say that the mind is of itself delusion, and as delusions are just like fantasies, there is nothing to be seen. If someone speaks of “viewing purity,” then I would say that man’s nature is of itself pure, but because of false thoughts, true reality is obscured.If you exclude delusions, then the original nature reveals its purity. If you activate your mind to view purity, without realizing that your own nature is originally pure, delusions of purity will be produced. Since this delusion has no place to exist, then you know that whatever you see is nothing but delusion.Purity has no form, but nonetheless some people try to postulate the form of purity and consider this to be Zen practice. People who hold this view obstruct their own original natures and end up by being bound by purity.One who practices steadfastness does not see the faults of people everywhere. This is the steadfastness of self-nature. The deluded man, however, even if he doesn’t move his own body, will talk of the good and bad of others the moment he opens his mouth, and thus behave in opposition to the way. Therefore, both “viewing the mind” and “viewing purity” will cause an obstruction to the way.Maneesha, there is a tremendous gap between morality and religion. Most of the religions are just moralities; their function is to decide what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong. They look at man through his actions and they decide his innermost being accordingly, but this is a false approach.Sometimes a man who thinks he is doing good, and it may appear to others also that he is doing good, will do immense harm – of course unintentionally…For example, Krishna, in Shrimad Bhagavadgita, argues that his disciple Arjuna should go to war. Arjuna’s father had a brother who was blind, and he had one hundred sons – perhaps, being blind, he had nothing else to do! – and now the question was to whom the kingdom belonged. The sons had come of age. Up to now Arjuna’s father had been ruling the kingdom because the blind brother could not do that, so the question had never arisen before. But now it was a different situation.Arjuna had only five brothers, including himself, and on the other side were a hundred sons. They demanded that since their father had been denied half of the kingdom just because he was blind, now they wanted to claim the whole kingdom, “…because you are only five, and we are one hundred.”All the armies of both sides gathered near Delhi in a vast, open ground. Krishna was the charioteer of Arjuna. Seeing the situation – on both sides there were relatives; although they were fighting, they were cousin-brothers, and in every way everybody was entangled with each other – the grandfather of Arjuna, who was one of the wisest men of those days, Bhishma, had decided to be on the side of the blind son.He loved Arjuna… Arjuna was the master archer, and there was every possibility that he would win. The teacher who had taught Arjuna had also taught his one hundred cousin-brothers. Now it was such a difficult division. This master who had taught them archery had also chosen to be with the blind man. His blindness created a kind of sympathy, that he had been denied and now it was time for his sons. But the master also loved Arjuna as his best disciple.Seeing the complexity, knowing perfectly well that he was going to win but it was going to be a massacre of his own friends, family, relatives, Arjuna told Krishna, “Take my chariot to the front so I can see who is on my side and who is on the other side.”Seeing the faces, he said, “I don’t feel like fighting. The throne is not worth that much massacre, and I cannot conceive of myself on the throne with all these people dead. I have loved them, we have lived together, we have played together. Now this is very unfortunate. It is better that I should retire to the Himalayas and let my brothers rule the kingdom. Obviously, their father had been denied because of his blindness. And it was not his fault.” But Krishna was very much insistent.Krishna’s sister was married to Arjuna – he had a vested interest that Arjuna should get the kingdom, win the war. He argued for the war as an essential necessity at this moment “…because those hundred cousin-brothers are all sinners, drunkards, gamblers. It is your duty, for the sake of goodness, to fight. It is not a question only of a fight between two parties, it is a fight between darkness and light. It is a fight between God and the Devil.” But Arjuna was not convinced, and the final strategy of Krishna was one which I call very deceptive.Krishna is one of the incarnations of the Hindus, the perfect incarnation of God. There are other incarnations which are partial incarnations, but Krishna is the perfect incarnation.But if you look at him without any prejudice, he is the perfect politician! The final trump card was that he said, “As an incarnation of God, I order you to go to war. Remember, it is God’s will. Nothing happens against God’s will. Not even a leaf falls from the tree without the will of God.”Now, this was too much for poor Arjuna to fight against. Unwillingly, he went to war. He won the war. It has been five thousand years now, but it has broken the very spine of this country. After that war this country has never been interested in war, it has never invaded any country. It has been invaded by many – small countries have ruled over it for two thousand years continuously – and it has not even resisted because it has seen, in the Indian “Great War” as it is called, such a massacre of humanity – for the sake of power? For the sake of money? But Arjuna was managed by a very good argument: “Nothing happens without God’s will. How can it happen without God’s will? So don’t bring your mind in, just do what God wants.”If I had been in the place of Arjuna I would have put my arrows and my bow in the chariot and moved toward the Himalayas, saying that “This is God’s will – what can I do? Nothing happens without his will. Now this is happening!” But he got caught by the argumentation and Krishna convinced him that it was a good war.No war is good! No war can be good. Every warmonger in the world has been trying to prove the same thing, that “This war is for the good.” Adolf Hitler killed six million Jews in Germany just for God’s sake and for the fatherland. He was doing a great service to his fatherland…You cannot find any war that was fought for any other than good reasons: for God, so many crusades; for God, so many living human beings, particularly women, burned alive.Morality is concerned only with actions. And I want to say to you, Zen has nothing to do with morality. It is pure religiousness, which is a much higher point of view. It does not decide what is right and wrong, it simply wants your consciousness to have the clarity to see in every situation. The question is never of deciding. Deciding means that doubt has already arisen. Deciding means you are wavering; deciding means half of you is on this side and half of you on that side, and you are troubled about where to go.A man of pure consciousness never decides, he simply acts spontaneously. There is nothing good for him and nothing bad for him.The only thing good is to be conscious and the only thing bad is to be unconscious. Actions don’t count. This has to be understood – then Eno’s words will be very easy. He is making a very fundamental statement.Eno said:Good friends, in this teaching, from the outset, sitting in meditation does not concern the mind nor does it concern purity; we do not talk of steadfastness. If someone speaks of “viewing the mind,” then I would say that the mind is of itself delusion, and the delusions are just like fantasies, there is nothing to be seen. If someone speaks of “viewing purity,” then I would say that man’s nature is of itself pure, but because of false thoughts, true reality is obscured.The question is not of finding in your thoughts what is right and what is wrong, in your actions what is right and what is wrong. The question is of finding a consciousness so total and so intense that only whatever is right remains, and whatever is false burns out. You don’t have to decide.And when action arises out of silent meditation, it has a purity and a beauty and a fragrance. It has nothing to do with morality or immorality. Those are very low considerations of society, of the collective mass. Zen belongs to the highest peaks of the Himalayas, to the highest peaks of consciousness. From there, the vision is clear in all directions. There is no need to decide; you simply see what is right. You don’t even think about it, you simply act. You don’t think about the consequences.Out of this purity, only roses can bloom. Out of this purity, there is no possibility of anything evil arising in you.Zen’s concern is a pure religiousness – not religion, remember. Religion has become almost identified with moral conceptions, with commandments. But time goes on changing; every moment, everything is moving. You cannot decide what is right forever, you can only depend on your clarity. What is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Commandments belong to the very lowest class of morality.I remember, when God made the world and he went around selling the commandments, he asked the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and everybody asked, “First tell us, just as a sample, what are your commandments? Just tell us one.”And God thought the best would be, with no argumentation, “You should not commit adultery.”The Egyptians said, “Then what shall we do? Keep your commandment to yourself; we will find our own ways to decide what to do and what not to do. You have done enough that you have made us, now please leave us.”And just on the way he met Moses. Being a Jew, you can understand, Moses’ approach was totally different. When God had asked, “Do you want a commandment?” everybody else had asked, “What is the commandment?” Only Moses asked, “How much?”God said, “It is absolutely free, you don’t have to pay anything.”Moses said, “In that case, I will have ten.”And with those ten commandments Jews are carrying a load of mountains on their hearts. Everything becomes wrong, everything makes you feel guilty.And this is not only true about the Jews – all the religions have used the strategy to exploit man by making him feel guilty. The first thing to enslave a man is to make him feel guilty, that whatever he is doing is wrong. Then he loses his nerve. Then he is not strong enough to resist the oncoming slavery.Your so-called morality and immorality are all devices of parasites, priests, politicians… This “p” is strange – all the pigs! And you will be shocked to know that the pig is one of the Hindu incarnations of God. Avirbhava is not here; she is finding other ancient gods in the Far East; otherwise, she would have enjoyed. She has got the pig already, but she does not know that it is a Hindu incarnation.These priests have made man absolutely unthinking. They have enforced only one thing, guilt and belief. It is a double-edged sword: on one side it makes you guilty, and on the other side it makes you believe – because how are you going to get rid of your guilt? The priest is there to help you. He has become, on his own accord, a mediator between you and God.Just a few months ago Pope the Polack brought a new sin into the world; it has never existed before. The new sin, he has declared, is confessing to God directly. You have to confess through the right channel, through the Catholic priest, because if you start making direct phone calls to God, what is the purpose of the priest and what is the purpose of the pope? Their purpose is to stand in between you and God. And the problem is, there is no God; it is their invention. So naturally they have to stand in between to hide the fiction. If they remove themselves…if you remove all the priests, all the gods will disappear. They are created by man.The Bible says God created man in his own image. It is absolute nonsense. On the contrary, it can be said that man created all the gods in his own image. Just fictions. And from those gods descend paigambaras, prophets, tirthankaras, avataras, messiahs, Christs. The simple fiction of God is so reproductive that it creates a thousand and one fictions, and man is surrounded by a fictitious world in which only the vested interests are benefited. The whole of humanity is crushed, sacrificed to ideas which have no existence at all.Zen has nothing to do with any worship, any God, any religion. It has nothing to do with any morality. It is a very rare phenomenon.Eno says:If you exclude delusions, then the original nature reveals its purity.All that is needed is to put aside your delusions, and your original purity will arise, and you will have, for the first time, eyes to see and ears to hear the existential.Otherwise, these shopkeepers – Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans and Jews – never allow you to reach existence. Just on the way you meet a priest. All directions are full of priests; wherever you go you will meet a priest and he will hand over to you as many commandments as you can carry. He will give you permanent values in an impermanent world. He will give you unnatural ideas which cannot be implemented, and because they cannot be implemented they make you feel guilty.Almost all the homosexuality is produced by religions, their monasteries, where they force men and women to live apart. It was bound to happen. Where is the sexual energy going to move? You don’t give them any formula for any transformation of the energy, any alchemy. You just separate men and women, and the women become lesbians, the men become homosexuals. And now all your thousands of years of religion have produced nothing but AIDS. That is the greatest contribution of all your religions.I have been in contact with all kinds of monks – Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Christian missionaries – and I was surprised that these people are diverting people’s naturalness, their purity. A love between a man and woman has a religiousness, has a sacredness. It is natural while it lasts – although it is a beautiful delusion. But so what? Everything is delusion – why not have good delusions? Why insist on having nightmares? But in your monasteries, nightmares are created.Strange things, that are unbelievable, happened in the Middle Ages. Thousands of women were burned in the name of God; priests enjoyed it very much. A special court was made to decide whether the woman was a witch or not. And what was the criterion for a woman to be a witch? The criterion was whether she was making love with the Devil or not. They tortured the woman, and just because of the torture the woman finally had to confess that she had been making love with the Devil; otherwise they would continue to torture her. There is a limit to human patience. And once she had confessed that she was having a love affair with the Devil, the court was free to decide that she should be burned alive.Now, there are no witches to be found. It seems the Devil has become fed-up with women…or maybe he has also gone gay. One never knows about these gods and devils.Everything is so fictitious, so unbelievable that it was at one time even believed that the Devil’s prick was forked. And the women, thousands of women, confessed in the court that “Yes, it is true – he makes love in both the openings together.” Such nonsense! And great bishops and popes and cardinals and a special court, a Grand Jury, deciding these stupid things… And first the poor women were tortured so much that they found only one escape – to confess. Whatever was said, they had to accept it.Now, the Devil has no more businesses going on around the world. As a consequence, God’s own business is becoming a failure, a bankruptcy.Zen is not concerned with such gods and such devils, which are only imaginary nightmares. Its concern is to put aside all fictions of the mind and to let your natural purity have its say.That naturalness, all religions have condemned. That naturalness does not need any god. You cannot find that trees have gods, or lions have gods, or any birds have gods. The moment a man becomes natural, simple, unclouded by any fictions created by the priests to exploit and suck his blood, he simply sees that he is part of this vast cosmos and whatever is natural, whatever arises out of his own original being is the only religiousness, the only honesty.But every natural thing has been condemned. And once a thing is condemned it becomes an obsession; it becomes very desirable.I used to live in a city, Raipur, and just across from me lived a very snobbish man. He was very rich and powerful. One day he found a man pissing by the side of his garden. In India it is absolutely natural; there is no constitution, no law against it. He called his servants to beat the man.I was looking at all this and I said, “There is no need. Just make a few small signboards here and there. You have a big property, a vast garden; just write around it, ‘Don’t piss here.’”He said, “The idea is good…” And the next day when he woke up, all around the wall people had pissed! – as if the whole city became obsessed with pissing…Every negation of nature is bound to create an obsession.It almost became difficult to pass by his house without pissing…so many boards calling you forth, your bladder trickling… He was very angry with me. He said, “I thought you were a nice fellow!”I said, “I am not. I am simply an ordinary, natural human being. Nice fellows…You are a nice fellow.”He said, “I thought you were a professor of psychology, so you would give me a good suggestion. What kind of suggestion have you given?”I said, “This is a suggestion which comes directly from God!”It was God who first prohibited Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom and the tree of eternal life. It was because of his prohibition that they had to eat. Whether the Devil persuaded Eve or not, it does not matter. If he persuaded her he did a great revolutionary act; he should be worshipped for it.But my understanding is that just by giving them the order to avoid these two trees…and those two trees were nothing but apple trees, so innocent. I lived for years only on apples, just to see how much sin…Finally my doctors persuaded me, “It will destroy your health. Apples are good, but one apple only.”But one apple destroyed Adam and Eve. They became sinners. Not only did they become sinners – after them all their descendants up to now, we are all sinners because Adam and Eve disobeyed God.In fact the whole responsibility goes on God. Why did he give them this stupid idea? In a vast Garden of Eden there were millions of trees. If he had not told them, perhaps we would still be jumping from tree to tree, Charles Darwin included! No need to find out where the tail has disappeared to; it would be hanging around. No need to find out where the missing man is; there has never been any man. It is because of disobedience – I will call it rebellion – that you are here. You have to thank the Devil for provoking Eve to eat the fruit. And his argument was perfect; even Aristotle would not have been able to find any fault in his argument.He said, “God has prohibited only these two trees. Do you know why? Because if you eat the fruit of the tree of wisdom” – to me it is a metaphor, it means meditation – “and eternal life” – because meditation ultimately finds the eternal sources of life… Those two trees are joined together in their roots; it is one tree, in fact, expressing in two ways: eternal life and wisdom – God has prohibited you, according to the Devil, because he is very jealous. If you eat these fruits you will also be like gods, and then all his power-trip, his speciality, is gone. He becomes a commoner. Everybody is a god.What Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, have been doing is preventing you from becoming gods. That’s why in all these three religions there is no place for meditation, because meditation will take you to the roots of your being, where wisdom blossoms, where eternal life becomes your own life. You become part of the oceanic existence, and out of this situation, out of this state, there is no question of morality or immorality. Whatever you do, whatever you are is good, divine; it has a bliss and a grace of its own.And because it comes from your own original source it gives you a great individuality. You are no more a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist; you are no more a follower of anybody. You are simply rejoicing in your existence, dancing in tune with the trees, with the rivers, with the ocean, with the stars…with the wind blowing through the pine trees…with the rain, with the clouds. You have become one with the whole.There is no question – you cannot hurt yourself, you cannot do what is thought to be evil. It is possible only if you are kept away from your own original self.Zen’s search is not for any stupid God or any Devil. Its search is for your original face.If you exclude delusions, then the original nature reveals its purity. If you activate your mind to view purity, without realizing that your own nature is originally pure, delusions of purity will be produced.There are people who are trying to be pure. In different religions there are different superstitions about how one becomes pure.I had a friend: he was very old, but he loved me. He was thought to be the father of the Indian parliament. He remained continually, for sixty-five years, as a member of the Indian parliament. From the very beginning he was a member, until his last breath just a few years ago. But he was very puritanical.I used to stay in Delhi, in his house. He used to drink only milk, because milk is the only pure food: God himself has given the child only milk; everything else is man-manufactured. The argument seems to be convincing – but the milk had to come only from a cow. I said, “Up to that point I could reluctantly agree that it is right that the child is given only milk…but the child is not given the milk of the cow. A cow has her own children. Taking the milk of the cow is exploiting the cow.”And not only would he use cow’s milk, the cow had to be absolutely white, no black dots. I said, “My God, do you think a black cow gives black milk?”He said to me, “To be on the safer side, I want absolutely pure milk.” So that idiot, although he had many honorary DLitts, used to take a cow with him wherever he went. Behind his car would be a truck carrying a pure white cow. It was not possible that in every village – he was a politician, and he had to visit great constituencies; it was not possible…Cows you can find anywhere but sometimes they have brown patches, sometimes black patches; that makes them impure.Strange ideas… If you look without any prejudice, you can only laugh.I was born, unfortunately, in a Jaina family. It is one of the ancientmost religions. Even small children are not allowed to eat or drink in the night. You can eat only after sunrise, up to sunset. After that, even small children who may be thirsty, may be hungry…but there is no way.Up to my eighteenth year there was no way because all food would be distributed by the evening. In the night, even if you entered the kitchen you could not find anything.And the conditioning of centuries…I went for a picnic with my school friends on a nearby mountain where there was a very ancient, beautiful castle. They were all Hindus so they were not concerned about day or night. I asked them again and again, “Just think of me, too. When are you going to prepare the food?”They said, “Right now we are going to explore the whole castle. It has so many things to be explored…” There were hidden water currents, hidden swimming pools, beautiful halls, carved pillars, great statues. So I had to remain hungry the whole day, and in the night they started making food.I have never smelled such beautiful food! It was nothing much, but my hunger was so much, and I had been constantly holding back, that “I will not eat.” But my whole nature was saying that my stomach was hurting, the whole day walking over the mountain, around the castle, inside the castle…and they were all very persuasive and they said, “We are not going to tell anyone…”I said, “It is not a question of telling anyone. The question is, I know that I am eating in the night and that is a sure way to hell.” But finally they succeeded because they said, “If eating in the night is a sure way, then wouldn’t you like to come with your friends? We are also going the same way, you will not be alone.”My hunger and their persuasion, and the fragrance that was coming from the food, all conspired together, and I ate. But the whole conditioning was against it. I had to vomit the whole night, until every single grain that I had eaten was thrown out. I went to sleep only in the early morning hours.But that became a clear indication to me what a superstition can do. Nobody else vomited; everybody slept so soundly, tired from the whole day’s exploration. They were snoring and I was alone. I said to myself, “These people were saying ‘We will be with you,’ but only I am in hell! They are all enjoying a beautiful sleep – must be having great dreams – and I cannot sleep because of that food. Unless I throw it out…”Practicing purity is not true purity.Purity has to come out of your spontaneity.Anything practiced makes you a hypocrite, and all the so-called religious people are hypocrites because they are practicing religion.Whatever you want to practice you can practice – you can force your nature into the unconscious, into the collective unconscious, or even deeper, to the cosmic unconscious, but it will remain there, and any moment… You are sitting on a volcano. Your nature can explode and all your conditioning will be thrown away. It is good that the explosion happens and they are thrown away, so only your pure nature, without anybody’s conditioning, remains as the source of your words, of your actions, of your gestures.A religious man, in this sense, is a natural and original man. He does not belong to any organization. To belong to any organization is to go against nature.Just to belong to nature is enough.Purity has no form, but nonetheless some people try to postulate the form of purity and consider this to be Zen practice. People who hold this view obstruct their own original natures and end up by being bound by purity.There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are suffering from guilt because they could not manage to go against their nature, and the others who are suffering from their saintliness because they did not listen to their nature and went ahead, against it. Of course they have respectability, but their whole being is poor. Their whole being is on fire. They may have become saints by doing all kinds of stupid things that their surrounding society expects…for example here in India you will find many people standing on their heads. Even the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, used to stand on his head every morning in the garden, and he was respected for it tremendously. He did nothing for the country, but he was respected because he was following yoga.The truth is that if you stand on your head more than three minutes, you will destroy many subtle cells, and there are millions of those cells in your small skull. If you stand on your head blood comes like a flood because of gravitation, and that flood destroys the most intelligent parts of your brain.Why don’t the animals have such developed brains? – because they are horizontal. Their blood circulation is equal from the head to the tail. It is only man who stands erect, on two feet. That creates the possibility for the growth of the brain, because when you are standing the blood reaches not as a flood but in the right amounts, as much as is needed. The more intelligent a man, the more delicate and complicated system of cells he will have in his head.Albert Einstein has left his brain to be examined after his death. He himself was puzzled: “Why are other people not so intelligent? There must be something wrong with me.” He wanted to know, but anyway there was no way to convey the message to him when he was dead. Now we know what was the matter: he had twenty-six percent more of these subtle cells than the ordinary human brain. Now those cells can be cultivated, but not by standing on your head.Standing on your head is the worst thing that you can do for your intelligence, but in the Hindu conditioning that posture is very much valued. Not knowing anything about what is happening inside, people have followed it for thousands of years. It is not a coincidence that forty percent who receive the Nobel Prize are Jews; it is very disproportionate, looking at the whole world. Only three Hindus have been able to receive a Nobel Prize up to now. Such a vast country, such an ancient culture, so many practices, so many disciplines, but as far as intelligence is concerned it is very low. And yoga is one of the reasons – keeping people’s brains from growing.But any absurdity, if continuously told to you, becomes a great discipline. Every religion is against me for the simple reason that I am trying to make it clear to the intelligent people around the globe that you don’t have to practice anything, you don’t have to discipline yourself in any way, you don’t have to follow any commandments – you have only to go in and allow your own self-nature to move according to its own growth. Don’t disturb it. All that you can do is not to disturb your inner nature and you will blossom like any great flower.One who practices steadfastness does not see the faults of people everywhere. This is the steadfastness of self-nature. The deluded man, however, even if he does not move his own body, will talk of the good and bad of others the moment he opens his mouth, and thus behave in opposition to the way. Therefore, both “viewing the mind” and “viewing purity” will cause an obstruction to the way.You don’t have to be a traditionalist and you don’t have to be an anti-traditionalist. This is a great problem: it is very easy to be unorthodox, but it is changing your prisons from orthodoxy to non-orthodoxy, from traditionalism to non-traditionalism. Both are binding, both are obstructing your self-nature. Drop both, the negative and the positive, the yes and the no. Simply be, without any judgment, and in this being without any judgment have arisen the greatest peaks of consciousness man has encountered.Kyogen wrote:At one stroke I forgot all my knowledge!There is no use for artificial discipline,for, move as I will,I manifest the ancient way.Another Zen poet:The flute without holesis the most difficult to blow.…Not only difficult, it is impossible. So what the poet is saying is, the flute has all the possibility of bringing songs to the world; you just have to open all your doors and windows, all your holes. Otherwise, every bamboo will be a flute; they have the potentiality. Just a little difference – opening a few doors, a few windows, just a few holes in a hollow bamboo – and it becomes a great instrument of music. Existence can flow through it and can become a great musical wave. Existence has its own sound and its own music. We just have to be silent enough to hear the soundless sound.Basho wrote:There is nothing you seethat is not a flower;there is nothing you can think ofwhich is not the moon.Great statements, so condensed…There is nothing you see that is not a flower – it may be in the seed, it may be not yet manifest, but there is nothing that has not the potential to blossom. There is nothing you can think of which is not the moon.The moon has become symbolic in Zen because of Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha was born on a full-moon night, he became enlightened on a full-moon night, and he died on a full-moon night. Because of this coincidence the moon has become a symbol of Buddha.Wherever you are, whoever you are, you are the moon, the buddha.Maneesha has asked:Osho,I understood you to say recently that there was no sense given to us to take us inward, and hence meditation was above the natural – transcendental.What then is the urge, the energy that provokes a person to go above what is natural? And why does going in affect some people's lives, even totally change some people's lives, while it leaves others absolutely untouched?Maneesha, you have asked two questions. One is, “What then is the urge, the energy that provokes a person to go above what is natural?” Boredom.Have you ever seen a bored buffalo, or a bored donkey? In the whole of nature you will not find anybody bored except man. Boredom is a unique quality as far as man is concerned, a very high-rate quality.Man becomes bored with nature too, but first one should come to be natural. As you become natural, slowly, slowly you become bored with it. And that boredom is being discussed by the existentialists in the West, but without understanding the deeper implications the East has encountered. The existentialists stop with boredom; the East has not stopped with boredom, it has taken a quantum leap. It has gone beyond nature.But beyond nature is not against nature. Beyond nature is simply above nature, supranature, transcendental to nature.So the first thing is finding the self, the nature. There is not much trouble in it, you just have to put your delusions aside. Then soon, you will start feeling bored with nature itself because it is repetitive: waking in the morning, eating your food, going to your work, coming home in the evening, going to your bed…a circle…silent, peaceful, no more tensions of the old days, no more anguishes and worries of the old days, very content. But even contentment at a point becomes boredom, even peace at a point becomes heavy.Even enlightenment at a point has to be dropped.The moment you drop enlightenment you transcend nature. Enlightenment is the ultimate point up to which nature can take you, and then there is the cliff. Jumping into the unknown, disappearing into the universe – that is the quantum leap.So there are two jumps: one is a very small one, from delusions to nature; the other one is really The Great Matter – but boredom is the cause.Just look at the life of a Gautam Buddha – no television, no cigarettes, no cards to play, no chess, no football games, no boxing matches… What is in the life of poor Buddha? – just a silence, eternally silent, where nothing happens, no football.That’s why I say it is very difficult for Americans to become enlightened. They are so entertained that the point of boredom never comes. They go on changing their wives… In India you are bound to get bored with your wife, but in America you will simply change. Why get bored?The average time in America for everything is three years: in three years you have to change your wife, you have to change your car, you have to change your house, you have to change your job, you have to change your city, you have to change everything. This way…and seven and a half hours per day, millions of people are just sitting glued in their chairs before that idiot-box, television.Now they have started a great association, the association of TV potatoes, and people are becoming members and wearing potato badges.It is very difficult in America to become enlightened. So much is going on…It was good Buddha was born twenty-five centuries before, in India. Here, things are very much still the same. Just go into a deeper part of the country, into a village, and you will find life utterly boring – simple, but there is nothing, just simplicity. This simplicity comes to a point when you want to disappear into the universe. That is the urge to go beyond the natural.“And why does going in affect some people’s lives, even totally change some people’s lives, while it leaves others absolutely untouched?”It all depends on the receptivity of the people. You may come across a buddha, you may even shake hands with a buddha, and you may not recognize anything unusual at all. You are a bamboo without holes. You are not receptive enough.To recognize a buddha is in itself a great meditative quality. Unless you have been meditating you will not be able to see the radiance of the buddha nor his rhythmic heartbeat, nor his grace and beauty, nor the area of energy that is created around him just like a magnet. The deeper you go into meditation, the more you can recognize. So a few people who are in some way receptive – poets, dancers, musicians, creative people who are not limited by the boundaries of the knowledge given to them but are always searching for the new, always open to receive a new guest – these people will recognize the buddha immediately. But there are millions more to whom buddha is just a word. They are bamboos without holes. They will not be affected at all.It is unfortunate, but you cannot interfere in somebody’s life. You cannot start drilling holes in somebody’s life to make him receptive. You have just to wait: perhaps their time has not come. Perhaps tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow…and it does not matter in the eternity of time. Whenever it happens it is always fresh and new, whenever it happens it is always early.Now, let us drill a few holes in everybody without touching any screwdriver.Just the hands should be enough!(Osho makes tickling motions toward Anando, and sets off waves of giggles.)You should not touch…Jablonski goes to the hardware store and asks the manager for a job.“Okay,” says the manager, “you can have the job if you can sell. Can you sell?”“I guess so,” says Jablonski.“Well,” says the manager, “watch me and learn something!”A man comes into the store and asks the manager for some grass seed. “Fourth aisle over, third shelf,” says the manager.The man returns with the grass seed and the manager says, “Would you like to buy one of our new lawn mowers? They are on sale right now.”“What?” says the man. “But I don’t even have my grass yet.”“I know,” says the manager, “but you will in a few weeks and then you will need a new lawn mower. And if you buy one now, it will be much cheaper.”“I guess you are right,” says the man, and he buys the lawn mower.“So,” says the manager to Jablonski, “do you think you can do that?”“Sure,” replies Jablonski. “No problem!”“Okay,” says the manager. “I have to go to the bank. You take over – and sell!”Jablonski nods and waits for his first customer. Just then a woman walks up to him and says, “Where are the tampons?”“Fifth aisle over, fourth shelf down,” replies Jablonski, professionally.When she returns to pay, Jablonski asks, “Do you have a lawn mower?”“No. Why?” asks the woman.“Well,” says Jablonski, “you might as well mow the lawn while you aren’t doing any fucking!”Young Leonard Loophole is on vacation in the woods, and he decides to write a letter to his girlfriend. But he has no writing paper with him, so he walks to a nearby village store.Inside, he approaches the girl attendant, Molly Must, a very sexy young brunette.“Do you keep stationery?” asks Leonard.“Well,” says Molly, in a sexy voice, “I can until the last few seconds, and then I go completely wild!”Zabriski is leaving on a business trip to Poland. “I always hate to leave,” he says to his friend, Klopski. “I never trust my wife on her own. There is always this doubt…always this doubt.”“Don’t be worried,” says Klopski. “I am your best friend. While you are gone, I will keep an eye on her.”“Really?” says Zabriski. “Would you do that for me? I am so relieved. I know that I should trust my wife, but there is always this doubt…always this doubt.”“It is okay,” says Klopski. “Leave it to me.”Three weeks later Zabriski returns and meets with his friend. “I am afraid I have some bad news,” says Klopski.“Well, what is it?” asks Zabriski.“The very first night you were gone,” tells Klopski, “I watched Seamus O’Ryan sneak into the back door of your house. Your wife met him there dressed only in high-heels and red satin panties.”“Really?” asks Zabriski. “Then what?”“Then Seamus kissed your wife and he put his hand down into her red satin panties.”“Really?” asks a shocked Zabriski. “Then what?”“Then,” says Klopski, “she put her hand down inside his pants, and Seamus began kissing her breasts.”“Really?” gasps Zabriski. “Then what?”“Then,” continues Klopski, “they fell back onto the sofa. She threw off her panties, he threw off his pants, and then the lights went out – so I could not see any more.”“What? The lights went out?” shouts Zabriski. “You see? There is always this doubt!”Nivedano…(Drumbeat)(Gibberish)Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Be silent, close your eyes.Feel your body to be completely frozen.Gather yourself in.Nothing exists outside,just concentrate on the center of your being.This is the only refuge – to be in this space,you are beyond death, beyond life. You are meeting with existence.Except this meeting, all religion is simply talk.From this point you can take the jumpand disappear into the open sky. It is within youto transcend even yourself.Rejoice this moment, feel blissful.See the flowers everywhere.Look – in everything, the moon.From your space of buddhahoodthe whole existence becomes a great poetry, a great song.A great creative energy arises out of this space.This nothingness, this emptiness is the origin of the smallest grass leaf up to the biggest star.Deeper…deeper.Don’t hold anything, just go deeper.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Relax.The body is there, the mind is there,but you are not the body, you are not the mind.You are just the watcher, just the witness.Nothing has ever happened to youand nothing will ever happen to you;you are just a mirror, reflecting.This moment, this suchness is your original nature.Everything else is imposed on you.This space is purely your own.To realize this is to become a buddha.It is simply a recognition:you are already a buddha,you just don’t have the guts to recognizeand to remember it in your day-to-day work.Twenty-four hours you are a buddha;there is not even a holiday for your buddha.Just keep this consciousness as an undercurrent,flowing into all your activities,waking, sleeping…This is the only religiousness that I know. All so-called religions are political exploitations, fictions of the priests. They have taken the whole dignity of human beings; they have made them slaves, and sacrificial. You can only assert your freedom by being a buddha. Out of this, whatever you do is right, is good, is graceful.This moment, this place is so blessedthat ten thousand buddhas have melted like iceinto each other.There is only one lake of buddhahood; drink out of it.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Come back from your great experience,but bring the fragrance of it with you.Sit down like a buddha for a few seconds…collecting all that has happened in these fewmoments within you,becoming clearly aware of the road that leads toyour innermost core,because you will be going and coming on the sameway every day.This is the way toward your home,where you are the host, not the guest.Can we celebrate the buddhas?

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

Turning In 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Turning In 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/turning-in-03/

Osho,Rinzai said:What is the use of catching a dream, an illusion, a flower in the sky? There is, followers of the way, only the one who is now present here and is listening to my expounding of the dharma….All troubles exist because you are mindful of them; if you are mindless of them, how can they hold you? If you do not take the trouble to differentiate and grasp appearances, you will realize Tao in an instant. If you follow others, and succeed in learning something by keeping yourselves busy with your studies, you will finally return to the realm of birth and death. It is far better to make yourselves unconcerned, and go to some monastery where you can sit cross-legged on the corner of a meditation bed.Make no mistake: there is no dharma externally, and there is nothing that can be found internally. Do not grasp this mountain monk’s verbal words, for it is far better to put an end to all karmas and go on unconcerned. Do not allow thoughts that have arisen in your minds to go on uninterrupted, and do not allow thoughts that have not yet arisen to rise. This is much better than your ten years of journeying to call on learned teachers.According to this mountain monk’s view, there are not so many things; suffice it to be ordinary and to go on unconcerned, wearing your robe and eating your rice….There are bald-headed and blind monks who, after satisfying their hunger, immediately sit in meditation to look into their mental activities and arrest their thoughts so that the latter cannot arise again. These people hate disturbance and seek quiet; this is the way of the heretics.The patriarch said, “Those who set their minds on looking into quietness, apply them on contemplating externals, and keep them under control to quiet and freeze them in order to enter samadhi, are all in the state of mental activity.”Maneesha, there are three words to be understood perfectly well before you can understand what Rinzai is saying. He is talking about the fourth word.The three words that he is not talking about are concentration, contemplation, and meditation.In English there is no word for the fourth state of your consciousness, so unfortunately we have to translate that fourth word into the third – meditation. But it is not accurate, and it is dangerous. But if you understand that it is just to indicate something which is not contained in the English word itself, then there is no problem.The fourth word is dhyana, which became ch’an in China and in Japan it became zen.Concentration means you put all your thoughts on one object. It is a perfectly valid means for any scientific research.The second word, contemplation, means to allow your mind to move only on a certain object. In a way it includes concentration, but in another way it gives you a little more rope. For example, you are contemplating on love, its meanings, its implications… Contemplation is the method of philosophy.Meditation, in English, simply means a far more deep concentration. The first concentration is superficial: you just stay on the surface, you touch the circumference. In meditation you go to the very center of the object. But remember, all are object-oriented.The fourth word, zen, is introverted. It is going in; it is non-objective. It is neither scientific nor philosophical; it covers a totally different area. It means not to know the object but to experience the subject.Closing yourself in and finding the center of your life and consciousness is the goal of Zen.Unfortunately, nothing like Zen ever developed in the West. And because the experience never developed there was no need for any word for it. Words are needed only when there are experiences to be expressed. In the East, concentration, contemplation and meditation are all mental activities.Zen is going beyond the mind, where no object exists. And remember, the moment the object is no more there, you cannot maintain the subject; they are two sides of the same coin. On the outside the object drops, on the inside the subject disappears, and then what remains is that spotless cleanness, that silence out of which everything arises and disappears. That is dhyan in Sanskrit, jhan in Pali, ch’an in Chinese and zen in Japanese.They have all traveled from dhyan, and whenever a word moves from one language to another language it automatically takes different shapes, different pronunciations. But you have to understand it clearly, that only the words are different; the space they point to is one, where there is no object and no subject, where there is no knowledge and no knower; just pure innocence, the fragrance of pure innocence. And the flowers that blossom in that innocence are of ultimate ecstasy, of absolute bliss.The whole East has been in search, for thousands of years, for the origin of your very life, the very center of your being. It has not been concerned with the outside world; that’s why science has not developed in the East. The genius of the East was interested not in objects and things; it was interested in only one thing: who is alive in me? Who is throbbing in my heart? Who is taking my breath in and out? And once you have found this space, you cannot find anything more precious.Rinzai is one of the most famous Zen masters. Just as Bodhidharma took the lamp of dhyan away to the land of China, Rinzai brought from China – his Chinese name is Lin Chi – the same lamp, the same light, to Japan. It is a tremendous transmission from one land to another land, from one master to another master, and it is the only tradition in the world which is still breathing, still alive.So while you listen to Rinzai, remember: it is not a scripture – it is a life, a song, a dance. It is all that is the source of life.Rinzai said:What is the use of catching a dream, an illusion, a flower in the sky?According to the people who have become enlightened, the whole world becomes almost like a dream. I say “almost like a dream;” I have to give you the exact definition.A dream is something that goes on changing, and the real is that which remains always the same. Your consciousness is a reality, an eternity. Everything else around you is of the same stuff dreams are made of.When you are asleep, the dreams look so real – I don’t think anybody in the world has ever suspected while dreaming that a dream might be a dream. While you are asleep and dreaming, the dream becomes such a total reality that not even a doubt arises. And when you wake up in the morning you suddenly find that you were running after non-existential fragments of your imagination.To the awakened man, to the buddha, the whole world and all its objects become almost like dreams. Everything is fleeting fast: the young man becoming old, the old man coming closer to his grave. Seen from the heights of a buddha, everybody is digging his own grave, every day. It takes seventy years, but in comparison to the eternity of existence, seventy years are not even seven seconds.If a whole album of photographs is taken from the time you became impregnated in your mother’s womb through the whole nine months of growth, and the series of photographs of that growth is shown to you, do you think you will recognize that it is you? Even your childhood pictures, if they are presented to you in your old age…you may think, “Perhaps I used to look like this, but I cannot be absolutely certain…”Everything is fleeting. Because of this flux, buddhas have called the world a great dream.There is, followers of the way, only the one who is now present here and is listening to my expounding of the dharma.All troubles exist because you are mindful of them.The mind has a very great strategy to project responsibility onto somebody else. If you are sad, somebody else is responsible for it; he misbehaved with you. If you are angry, somebody else is responsible for it; he enraged you. Mind continually throws the responsibility on some other object.But the truth is, if you are silent and don’t allow the mind to function, there is no trouble – no sadness, no anger, no love, no hate – just a pure sky without any clouds.All troubles exist because you are mindful of them. You give too much juice to your troubles.You are in such great love with your misery that even if a clear-cut path to get out of your troubles is shown to you, you will have second thoughts.I have sometimes told a story to you…A sannyasin who had renounced the world…not my sannyasin, who rejoices in the world; that is a great difference that I’m creating in the whole tradition of sannyas. The old sannyasin was renouncing the world and at the same time saying that the world is just a dream. If it is just a dream, why not enjoy? What is the hurry to escape from a dream? The dream cannot harm you.You are quoting scriptures that say it is a dream, but you know perfectly well it is a reality. You know the woman you are renouncing and escaping from by going into the mountains…Both are a reality. Otherwise, mountains are also dreams – perhaps a little longer lasting, but that does not make any difference in the definition of dreams. A dream is that which changes.Where are you going? The old sannyasin was escaping from the world.I am introducing to humanity a new sannyas, a new way of rejoicing in the world. Why not rejoice? It is only a dream; it cannot even scratch you. It cannot spoil you – it does not exist in the first place, so what is the hurry? And wherever you go, you will find troubles. They may be new troubles, but what does it matter? Old troubles are always better. They are well acquainted with you, you know them very well.Just the old husband, for example – you know him, and all the nonsense that he will do. The old wife…the husband knows that she will nag and nag and nag, and it has been going on for years. Now it is just a broken record – who cares? The husband and wife never have any conversation. Neither the husband listens to what the wife is saying nor the wife listens to what the husband is saying. The conversation continues, and everybody knows that nobody is listening to anybody. It is better to keep the old wife, the old husband. It is simpler, less complex. With the new husband you will have new troubles; with the new wife you will have new problems.An old sannyasin, a traditional sannyasin, had become so troubled in his home-life that he renounced the world. But that does not make any difference: you cannot renounce your mind.Wherever you go, your mind is inside you.So he went deep into the mountains but he had the same mind. He was a very violent man. And a bird flew over him, dropping a great load of shit. He said, “My God, here also, the same problem! All my life I have suffered. And I thought that I had renounced the world, but even these idiot birds torture a sacred holy man!”So many incidents happened that finally he thought, “Wherever you go there are problems. It is better to commit suicide.”So he jumped into the river, but by chance, unfortunately, he knew how to swim. So he came out swimming, cursing himself: “Why did I learn swimming in the first place? And now all my clothes are wet!”So he thought to collect dry wood by the side of the river-bank to make a funeral pyre. The neighbors who lived there gathered around… ”What is happening? First this man jumped, then came out, and now he’s making a fire.”They asked, “What is the problem?”He said, “I’m going to jump into the fire, because in the river I could not succeed in committing suicide.”They said, “Please, do it somewhere else, because your burning body will stink up the whole neighborhood.”He said, “It is so difficult. You cannot allow a person either to live or to die!”That night he dreamed and prayed to God: “It is enough! Either you take away my troubles…I’m even ready to exchange because I see everybody smiling, laughing, enjoying. I’m ready to change with anybody!”A voice in his dream filled the whole sky, saying, “Everybody should collect his troubles in bags and come to the temple in the center of the city.” So he thought, “Perhaps my prayer has been heard!” He collected all his troubles…but he saw that everybody in the city was moving with bigger bags than he was carrying. Now he became afraid.He tried to look for somebody who was carrying a smaller bag, but he could not find anybody – his bag seemed to be the smallest.He said, “My God, if I have to change…My old troubles were at least well acquainted with me. New troubles…Who knows what kind of woman you will get, whether she beats the husband or not, how old she is, whether she is alive or just dead…”He became very much worried, but there was no other way. He went to the temple. Everybody came to the temple, all with big bags. A few people even had two bags. And the voice said, “Now put all your bags by the side of each pillar in the temple, and I will give you the signal – you can choose anyone’s bag you want.”The old sannyasin thought, “This is a very dangerous situation!” He looked at the bags; they appeared so big! “Only God knows what is inside.” At least his small bag…he knows what is in it.He kept himself close to his pillar, so when the time came to exchange, he could jump immediately and pick up his own bag. But he was very much surprised that everybody was doing the same! No exchange happened, because nobody wanted unknown troubles. Even the people who had two bags carried their two bags back home.And as he reached his home he thanked God, “You are compassionate and merciful that you allowed me to keep my own troubles.”There grows a kind of friendship with your own troubles. Somebody else’s headache…one does not know what kind of headache. People cling to their troubles. And by renouncing the world, nothing is gained – only a few more troubles.I don’t want anybody to renounce the world. I want everybody to revolutionize the world by revolutionizing himself.And the only revolution is not to be attached to your mind. Whatever it says, just be a witness. Don’t get caught in its net. This is the simple art of being without any troubles. And a consciousness which is without any troubles knows the greatest joy that life has kept in the very center of your being. It starts overflowing you. Its fragrance is indescribable; its sweetness one can only experience but cannot explain.All troubles exist because you are mindful of them; if you are mindless of them, how can they hold you?In fact, you are holding them – all your headaches. You are clinging to them. Without them, what are you going to do?The whole art of revolutionizing your individuality is very simple: don’t hold on to anything that mind brings to you. And remember that mind persuades you – “This is very beautiful. There is no harm, you can hold it.” But once you hold it, soon you become aware that only the appearance was beautiful; inside it is a whole hell. But now you cannot leave it either, you have become habituated to it.Mind is a great salesman. That’s why everybody is so much in trouble. Mind goes on telling you, “Hold this trouble, it is so beautiful. Go on a honeymoon. Don’t miss this point.” But as you reach the honeymoon hotel, all the romance is already finished. As you look closely at the woman, and she looks closely at you, you know: “My God!” You are carrying all the suitcases – “just married”…and it is the beginning of all misery.But this is not only about marriage; this is about everything. The problem basically is, the moment you hold something you are no more a witness. You have lost your watchfulness, and that is your authentic being. You become identified with anything you hold.If you do not take the trouble to differentiate and grasp appearances, you will realize Tao in an instant.Tao is the Chinese word for dharma, for the truth.If you follow others, and succeed in learning something by keeping yourselves busy with your studies, you will finally return to the realm of birth and death.Unless a deep meditation cleanses you of your mind completely, you are going to be born again and again and suffer again and again. It is almost a wheel which goes on moving – from birth to death, from death to birth – and you are glued to the wheel, crushed by it, but you don’t leave it. You are afraid: “If I leave it, in this vast universe I will be lost!”It happened to a man who was lost in the mountains and could not find the way back to his home. The sun was setting and he became more and more afraid and nervous. The night started coming, and everything became silent and dark.Now he started moving very slowly, because one never knows where one is going. In fact he came to the dead end of a small pathway, and he fell from that dead end, but clung to some roots.The night was cold. His hands became almost frozen, they lost the capacity to hold on anymore. He remembered his god, he remembered even other people’s gods. Somebody may help! He recited whatever he knew of the scriptures but…no way. The hands were getting colder and they started slipping from the roots.He said good-bye to the world: “I’m finished, I don’t know how deep the valley is in which I’m going to fall, or how many fractures, or how many pieces of me will be found. But that is not my problem,” he thought. “That is others’ problem.”But such tears! – and he had always thought of leaving the world because it is so troublesome. Now a good chance was there, but he was holding on.The coldness went on becoming deeper and deeper, and finally he had to let go of the roots. And just as he was surprised, you will be surprised: he was standing on the ground! All the night long, only six inches down was plain ground, his way back home.But that night he suffered almost a hell. The whole night, the coldness, the every-moment fear, that “Now it is becoming more and more difficult to hold on to the roots.” He could not believe that he would ever see another day, another sunrise.But when he fell down – just six inches – he could not believe it! He looked all around. Just nearby was his house. He said, “My God! I unnecessarily provoked all the gods, recited all the scriptures that I have memorized – for nothing! Just six inches down!”That is exactly your situation. You are holding so tight. To what are you holding? And I’m trying every day to persuade you not to hold, because just below, six inches down, is your very center of being, your eternity.But even if you die, it is a rehearsal; you don’t die really. You try…but I’m not saying to try, I’m saying to die! And people are dying so carefully. I’m puzzled…I simply keep my eyes closed in order not to see how comfortable you are making it for yourself.Just waiting for Nivedano’s drum to bring you back to life – and you have not died yet! Just one day at least try…really die! Don’t think of any comfortable position, because you will not be able to have a comfortable position in your grave. And one day you will be in a grave, so it is better to be prepared.Here, every day, ten thousand people die and within five minutes they are all resurrected. And two thousand years ago, nobody was certain that Jesus was actually dead. My feeling is that he was just as dead as you all are. Resurrection is not possible unless the death is just like your death.So he closed his eyes, rested on the cross and waited for the evening when the crowd would disperse. His friends had made every arrangement to bring him down from the cross and take him out of Judea.I don’t give you that much trouble – just five minutes’ death, because you have to get only six inches down from your mind. Your center is exactly six inches away. That much witnessing, and you are free of all troubles and for the first time you know the beauty of existence. And don’t wait – Nivedano will wake you up.It is far better to make yourselves unconcerned, and go to some monastery where you can sit cross-legged on the corner of a meditation bed.Make no mistake: there is no dharma externally, and there is nothing that can be found internally.This is a great statement. He’s saying you cannot find anything outside and you cannot find anything inside.What you find inside is not a thing. It is pure consciousness, unbounded consciousness, just pure sky. Finding it is to find the greatest treasure. And you are carrying it, and desiring small things, mediocre things, while in your innermost being you are an emperor.I want you just to be reminded of it. Once you have known the beauty and the joy and the bliss, you will not be able to forget it. It will follow you like a shadow all day long, all night long. Slowly, slowly, it will become just your breathing, your heartbeat. You don’t have to take care of it; it is always there, taking care of you.Do not grasp this mountain monk’s verbal words… Rinzai used to live on a high mountain and was known as a mountain monk.Do not grasp this mountain monk’s verbal words, for it is far better to put an end to all karmas and go on unconcerned. Do not allow thoughts that have arisen in your minds to go on uninterrupted, and do not allow thoughts that have not yet arisen to rise. This is much better than your ten years of journeying to call on learned teachers.According to this mountain monk’s view, there are not so many things; suffice it to be ordinary and to go on unconcerned, wearing your robe and eating your rice.There are bald-headed and blind monks who, after satisfying their hunger, immediately sit in meditation to look into their mental activities and arrest their thoughts so that the latter cannot arise again. These people hate disturbance and seek quiet; this is the way of the heretics.This is not the right way; this is the way all the sannyasins of all religions of the world have followed up to now.Escaping from the world is not done without any reason. The reason is that to be in the world is very disturbing. But remember, unless you want to be disturbed, nothing can disturb you. If you remain just a watcher then the disturbances will come and go. Even in a marketplace you can become a buddha. And I want buddhas to be in the marketplace, because the buddhas on the mountains have not been of much help in transforming humanity.Now we need buddhas in the marketplace – that is the only hope for a future mankind and for a better and new man: joyous, loving, compassionate and able to dance, able to sing, able to celebrate.No buddha of the past was able to celebrate. That is missing something.No buddha of the past was able even to laugh. Something is missing…Now you see our buddhas…Sardar Gurudayal Singh, being the ancientmost buddha here, leads the laughter. He’s a rare man in the world, because I have never heard of anybody laughing before the joke is told! He’s the most unique person. He trusts me – why wait for the joke?The patriarch said, “Those who set their minds on looking into quietness, apply them on contemplating externals, and keep them under control to quiet and freeze them in order to enter samadhi, are all in the state of mental activity.”It is nothing to do with what we have called dhyana. An authentic meditation has nothing to do with freezing your thoughts, repressing your thoughts. All these activities are mental activities.The only activity in you which is not mental is witnessing, because witnessing is able to witness all mental activities. It is behind the mind – just six inches behind.When you enter into meditation today, don’t cling to any roots! When it is time to die, die. When it is time to resurrect, resurrect. But don’t be in a hurry. Resurrection in a hurry does not suit a gentleman. At least while you are resurrecting, be nice fellows.Ryokan wrote:Buddha is your mindand the way goes nowhere.Don’t look for anything but this.If you point your cart northwhen you want to go south,how will you arrive?And we are all trying to arrive into our own being, but driving our thoughts in all directions.Unaware of coming and going,I turn back alone.Caught in the midnight sky,the moon silvering all.These haikus have come out of deep meditation, deep witnessing. Unaware of coming and going, I turn back alone. If you turn back inside yourself, naturally you are alone, but in that aloneness miracles happen.Caught in the midnight sky,the moon silvering all.He’s simply saying that it is so beautiful inside, as if the moon is caught in the sky and everything has become silver in its light.Obviously, inside there is no darkness. And certainly the light is not of the sun but of the moon. The light of the sun is hot. The light of the moon is cool, and inside there is such a cool breeze blowing…but you never reach to that point, to feeling that coolness.Homeo wrote:Wino, always stumbling,yet in drinkingI show most discretion.Where to wind up?Sober this eveningsomewhere on the river bankI find dawn’s moon.He’s saying that, “When I’m not drunk” – and by “drunk” he certainly means drunk on the divine – “When I’m not drunk with my own inner sources, I stumble here and there. But when I’m drunk, I show most discretion. Sober this evening, somewhere on the river bank I find dawn’s moon.”Maneesha has asked:Osho,It seems that the mind gives us the illusion of control over life, while awareness makes us responsible for our lives.Is not the turning point recognizing the difference between being in control and being responsible?Maneesha, even the word responsible is a different name for control.A man of consciousness drops both control and responsibility. That does not mean that he is irresponsible; it simply means he becomes spontaneous.The word responsibility is contaminated by the missionaries of all the religions; hence, I would like not to use the word responsible. I would like to use the word spontaneous.When the mind is dropped you function spontaneously. Your song, your dance, your silence, your words, all come out of your spontaneity. They are not irresponsible: they cannot be. But I don’t want to use the word responsibility. The word is perfectly good, but it has become contaminated in its use by religions to force things upon you: “This is your responsibility” – responsibility toward your parents, responsibility toward your children, responsibility toward society…responsibility toward everything! And they have used responsibility just to repress your spontaneity.Otherwise, the word in itself is very beautiful. If it can be cleaned off – a good dry cleaning! – then it has to be broken in two parts: response-ability. Then it will be equivalent to spontaneity.But why unnecessarily dry clean when a fresh word is available?Now, something serious…Big black Dougie goes into an all-white bar in Mississippi with three friends. He goes up to the barman and bets him fifty dollars that he can lick his own eye.“Crazy nigger,” thinks the barman. “No one can lick his own eye.” So he takes the bet.Dougie pops out his glass eye, licks it, and then bets the barman fifty dollars that he can bite his other eye too.“Two glass eyes?” thinks the barman. “This guy must be really dumb.” So he takes the bet.Dougie pulls out his false teeth and bites the other eye. The barman starts to lose his temper.“Wait!” says Dougie, calmly. “I will bet you double or nothing that I can piss into that empty glass while you slide it along the bar.”“That is impossible,” the barman thinks to himself. “No one can do that.” So he takes the bet.Dougie drops his pants, pulls out his dong, and starts pissing all over the bar and the floor. The barman starts laughing and mopping up the mess.“I knew it!” he shouts. “You really are dumb to think you could do that!”“Not so dumb,” replies Dougie, pulling up his pants. “You see, I bet those three friends of mine a hundred dollars each that I could piss all over your bar and you would wipe it up laughing!”Fergus MacFish has an embarrassing accident doing yoga, and has to have his testicles surgically removed.By chance, it just happens that the famous transplant surgeon, Doctor Slasher, has a spare pair of gorilla balls in his refrigerator.After a long and tricky operation, the gorilla nuts are successfully transplanted and Fergus makes a complete recovery.Some years pass, and one day Fergus’ wife, Phyllis, gives birth to their first child. Fergus is thrilled and asks the nurse anxiously if it is a boy or a girl.“We don’t know yet,” replies the nurse. “We can’t get the hairy bastard off the ceiling!”There is a fire at the Pig and Whistle Pub, and it is beginning to get out of control.Suddenly, Paddy’s old Ford car comes speeding around the corner, crosses the street, and drives straight into the middle of the flames.The car nearly puts out the fire, and then the doors burst open. Paddy and Seamus jump out, and start beating wildly at the flames.Ten minutes later the fire is out, and Paddy and Seamus push the old Ford out of the pub. The landlord offers the two brave men some free drinks, and gives Paddy a hundred-dollar reward.“What are you going to do with all that money?” asks Sean, who has been drinking at the bar throughout the action.“Well,” says Paddy, swallowing a large whiskey, “the first thing I’m going to do is to take my car and get those goddam brakes fixed!”Pope the Polack is getting very lonely because nobody wants to talk to him anymore, so he decides to buy himself a pet parrot. He goes into a pet shop and sees a parrot he likes very much.“How much?” asks the Polack.“One thousand dollars,” replies the shopkeeper.“Holy cow!” cries the pope. “Is he really worth that much?”“He sure is,” says the man. “You can ask the parrot himself.”So Pope the Polack asks the parrot and the parrot replies, “There is no doubt about it.”The pope is thrilled and immediately purchases the parrot. He’s very excited and runs home to the Vatican to show off his new pet. He calls everybody together and then says proudly, “This is a truly remarkable parrot.”“There is no doubt about it,” says the bird.“Quite so,” says the pope. “And what is your name?” But the parrot remains silent. “Holy shit,” says the pope. “Don’t you know your name?”The parrot just looks at him.“Can’t you say anything?” cries the frustrated Polack. But the parrot just looks bored. The pope is furious and shouts, “I must have been an idiot to buy you!”The parrot says, “There is no doubt about it!”Nivedano…(Drumbeat)(Gibberish)Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Be silent, close your eyes.Feel the body completely frozen.Gather all your life energy in.Just watch, witness the mind and the body.You are neither.You are the witness – a pure mirror.This is it.You don’t have to go anywhere to find it,it is just at the very center of your being.All the bliss, all the grandeur,all the beauty, all the truth…In this suchness arises your spontaneity.In this suchness you become a buddha.Remember it.Remember it.It is your self-nature.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Now die…don’t hold on to any roots.Without any worry, die,because after two minutes is the resurrection.Just watch the body lying there,the mind making small noises,and you are just a watcher,unmoved, untroubled, unscratched…This is your eternity.This is your buddha.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)This is the resurrection time.Slowly, gracefully, come out of the dead, fresh.As a buddha, sit down for a few seconds,remembering the experience, the space that you have visited.It is your home.It belongs to you exclusively.You can enter into this spaceany moment.It is just a questionof remembering the experience.It is so simple and so obvious.Can we celebrate the ten thousand buddhas’ resurrection?

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

Turning In 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Turning In 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/turning-in-04/

Osho,Daikaku said:This teaching is the school of the enlightened Mind. The enlightened Mind itself basically has no delusion or enlightenment. This is actually the subtle art of those who realize thusness. Even if you don’t become enlightened, when you sit once in meditation, you are a buddha for that sitting; when you sit for a day in meditation, you are a buddha for a day; when you sit in meditation all your life, you are a buddha all your life. The same is true of the future; one who can have faith in this is someone with great potential.Practicing everything without any sense of attainment is called the exceedingly profound transcendent wisdom. This wisdom can cut off the source of birth and death, like a sharp sword.To practice virtue in hopes of reward is the illusion of ordinary folk; bodhisattvas do not seek for the resulting rewards as they cultivate roots of virtue, because they cultivate goodness for the sake of impartial love and compassion, and thus it becomes sustenance for enlightenment. As for those who seek rewards as they cultivate virtue and attain the lesser reward of humanity or god-hood, this is surely the work of birth and death.Enlightenment is the way to extinction. If you take peace and quiet to be bliss, all things are afflictions; but when you are enlightened, all things are enlightenment. People of the world do not understand this basis of delusion and enlightenment. They suppress thoughts of birth and death, and think that this is the non-birth of a single thought, and also consider this mindlessness – but these are still thoughts of birth and death, not mindlessness, not quiescence. When you try to stop thought by thought, birth and death continue.Maneesha, the whole question for Zen is how not to discriminate. Mind is discrimination, division, duality. The effort of Zen is to bring you to a space where you are simply a watcher, without any judgment. At the moment you are simply a watcher, all that is false disappears on its own accord and all that is real shines forth in its absolute illumination.This is your home. In this space there is no mind; hence no desire, no jealousy, no anger, no hate. You have become just a mirror. You reflect the tremendous glory and splendor of the whole existence. For the first time you have gone beyond human conditionings. You have become universal.Obviously, in this moment, in this space, there is no darkness. And remember clearly: darkness and light are two aspects of the same coin. When darkness disappears, light also disappears. What is left is tremendously new, you have not even dreamed of it.In this clarity, in this silence, the whole existence seems to be exactly what it is, not what it is “supposed to be.” Your enlightenment becomes, suddenly, the enlightenment of the whole universe.This is one of the most important points that Daikaku is making. And there is a second important point which he is making, which is very rare. Perhaps nobody else has ever made this statement before, but it is absolutely true. While you are in meditation, in silence – even for a single moment – you are a buddha. You can come out, and you can again forget.You can sit in meditation for one hour, or if meditation becomes your undercurrent of consciousness, you can remain a buddha for twenty-four hours. In other words, whenever you are aware and silent and whenever you feel the whole existence to be enlightened, you are a buddha. You can forget it – it is your freedom to forget or to remember.A very rare genius, Daikaku, makes this statement: “Ordinary masters will not enter into the lion’s den.” It is a very strange statement, with no precedent. But I can say to you, it is true: every day you become a buddha. I see you coming back from your home, resurrecting. You are a totally different man – so silent, so peaceful, so fragrant, such a beauty to see.But I know you will forget. Forgetfulness has been your habit for millions of years. So this one moment of buddhahood will become a beautiful memory, and then the forgetfulness comes like a flood of old habit and the whole moon disappears behind the black clouds. But the moon is there; we will discover it again. There is no harm in discovering your buddhahood again and again.One can hope, one can trust that one day these old habits will become weakened and your buddhahood will become a simple matter, just like breathing.But nobody except Daikaku has made the point – that even for a single moment, if you are silent and push aside all your thoughts and habits, clearing the space of the mind which has been occupying it for centuries…even though it may only remain for a single moment, you are a buddha. Perhaps you will have to remember again and again till the old habits start dying out. They will die because they don’t have any roots. Unless you support and nourish them, they cannot exist.It is a strange story that man supports his misery, nourishes it, takes care that it does not leave him, because it is his only companion. People magnify their miseries, if they cannot magnify anything else.In the university where I was a professor, a woman was also a professor. Her husband was a very prominent advocate of the High Court. Because I used to pass by where they lived, coming from the university or going to the university, the woman was always waiting there for a lift. The husband saw it once or twice and the third time he came to see me in the university and he told me, “I am worried about you.”I said, “What is the matter?”He said, “You are giving my wife a lift every day. Don’t believe her – she is such a hypochondriac. Just a small cough and immediately she says, ‘I am suffering from tuberculosis.’ Don’t listen to what she says! It is her habit to enjoy her misery. She paints it as deeply as possible, she is almost a creative artist – suffering and suffering.”I said, “You don’t have to tell me. I enjoy her and I am not worried about her tuberculosis. She is not an exception, she is the rule.”Everybody is trying to magnify his sufferings, his miseries. It is a very sad condition that rather than jumping out of this vicious circle, you go on weaving around yourself more and more of the same stuff. But there is a very deep pay-off in it: it brings sympathy to you. It is not for no reason at all that people magnify their misery. It simply shows that they have not received love.I told the husband, “You think that your wife is wrong. I want to say to you that you have not loved her enough. Seeking shelter in misery comes only when nobody loves you; you can always fall upon your misery as an old friend. When you are miserable everybody is sympathetic to you, when you are not miserable nobody cares about you.”The whole psychology is upside-down. People should pay attention to others when they are looking radiant, joyful, blissful. That will be giving nourishment, because attention is nourishment. Never give attention to misery, because you are nourishing the misery. You are forcing the person to remain miserable because sympathy is so sweet – but it is a sweet poison. It is not, and cannot be, a substitute for the joy of love.But people settle at the minimum. If love is not coming their way and they don’t know how to get it, immediately the alternative seems to be misery. Then people pay attention to you. So I told the husband, “Just try to be a little more loving.”He said, “My God, I hate to go home, and you are telling me to be loving to that woman? As I enter the house she starts her tirade of imaginable and unimaginable illnesses. And she goes on reading medical encyclopedias, finding out what kind of misery would be good. She knows great names. In the beginning she used to freak me out, that ‘My God, I have never heard of this disease!’ And she would give the whole description of what was happening. Only later on I found the encyclopedia and the exact description, and she had marked it. At first I used to take it seriously and take her to the doctor. And every doctor said, ‘This misery has just been discovered. This disease is only just in the periodicals; only experts know about it. Your wife is a real genius! Even ordinary practitioners, physicians, doctors, will not understand what kind of disease she is talking about!’”He said, “I remain in the court as long as I can, then in the court library. And then I go to the bar, because I can tolerate that woman only when I am drunk. I wanted to warn you because you are giving her a lift every day – you may end up in my situation!”I said, “Don’t be worried. I never sympathize, I simply enjoy. She talks as you are saying and I encourage her to talk more, because I love such details. And she looks at me with very weird eyes: ‘…A strange fellow. I am suffering from cancer, I say to you!’”I told her, “Suffer! Just tell me the details – I love it. You know so much about cancer. Obviously, you must be suffering, even cancer experts may not be able to defeat you, but please give me all the details. I love it so much!”In three days I stopped her. She would sit completely silently, keeping her face looking out of the window. And I would go on poking her: “Please tell me something. You are so great, you are carrying such a burden of the whole world. You are almost an encyclopedia of medicine.”She stopped asking for a lift. I had to go inside their house and ask her husband, “Where is she? – because I enjoy her so much.” She was such a nice woman, so knowledgeable! And I am absolutely ignorant about these great diseases. It was just a great teaching on the way – for one hour coming, one hour going; for two hours every day I would become an expert!I have been in touch with thousands of people – they have all been victims of a wrong psychology. Their parents have paid attention to them when they were sick. Nobody bothers about a child when he is not sick. This is a very dangerous phenomenon: you are forcing the child to be sick because you are giving attention, and attention is a subtle food.I had a gardener, an authentic gardener, who really loved flowers, who loved the plants. And I would see him sitting by the side of the roses and other flowers. Sometimes I heard him talking to the flowers. At first I thought he looked a little crazy, but every year he was winning the first prize in the city for growing the biggest flowers. He was with me for almost twelve years.I asked him, “What is your secret?”He said, “Nothing, I am just a little crazy. When there is nobody around, I talk to the flowers: ‘Don’t let me down this time. The time for the exhibition is coming close – grow as big as you can.’ And I have been winning for twenty years continuously. No flower has ever let me down.”Just the attention, just a loving attention to a flower, makes him immensely happy. There is someone who will be happy: the flower will do everything for him to make him happy. There is someone who is watching and waiting for his growth; he is not alone, he is not unneeded.This whole world looks so miserable for the simple reason that we have chosen to give attention to the wrong things, things which should be taken care of but without any sympathy.You can love somebody, but please don’t love her headaches. Just make sure that she goes and gets some Greek aspirin. More than that is destroying the person. But when she is laughing, enjoy her, don’t even ask the question, why is she laughing? When she is dancing, dance with her; don’t ask, “What is the occasion?”Pay attention to the right things and you will see a transformation happening in the person. You can help not only yourself in discovering your buddha, you can also help everybody else who is in contact with you. If you give right attention, right nourishment to his hidden treasure, to his hidden splendor, you can help buddhahood to be spread like a wildfire.And we need it! We have always needed it, but we need it more than ever now. We need a silent, peaceful, loving, at-ease and relaxed humanity. Enough of all those Genghis Khans and Tamerlanes and Nadir Shahs and Adolf Hitlers and Stalins and Mussolinis. If educationists of the world are a little aware, they should simply drop these people from the history books; there is no need to give attention to them. It is the same thing. You give too much attention to these terrible barbarians…you provoke the same barbarians around you, and somebody else starts becoming a Nadir Shah or a Tamerlane.Just drop all that nonsense, that garbage. Why not talk about the buddhas? Why not talk about the beautiful painters? Why not talk about the great dancers, the musicians, all kinds of artists? Let people’s minds be filled with creativity, and it will be very easy for a creative person to find the buddha. The destructive person has gone too far away; to bring him back to his buddhahood is very difficult.I am reminded of Alexander the Great, who is one of the most terrible specimens of all those barbarians. While coming out of Greece, on the boundaries, he met one of the most beautiful men. No history book bothers about that beautiful man, and so many pages are wasted on Alexander.He met Diogenes.Diogenes lived naked; the climate was good, his health was good. All that he possessed was a lamp. He used to keep it lit even in the daytime. Alexander had heard many stories about Diogenes. But by chance, while he was moving, somebody told him that Diogenes was just nearby, living by the side of a river. So Alexander stopped his army and he said, “I will have to see the man. I have been thinking to see him but he was so far away; I cannot miss this opportunity.”So he went to see Diogenes. Diogenes was having a sunbath by the side of the river, on the sand in the early morning sun – a cool breeze, birds singing all around, his lamp by his side. Alexander had seen many beautiful women, many beautiful men, but nothing could be compared with the beauty, the radiance of this naked fakir. He could not believe his eyes that a man could be such pure gold that he need not be hidden behind clothes.What is of importance, in reference to Daikaku, is the question that Diogenes asked Alexander: “Where are you going? – because I hear armies going by my side, day and night, thousands of soldiers. Where are you going?”Alexander said, “I want to conquer the world.”Diogenes said, “That’s good. What will you do after that?”Nobody had ever asked that. For a moment there was silence.Alexander said, “After that I will relax.”Diogenes said, “You must be stupid, because I am relaxing already without conquering the whole world. If you want to relax afterward, why take the trouble? Why not relax now? This river bank is big enough – we can both share it. Just throw your clothes away and lie down. And we can even share the lamp.”Alexander said, “Logically you are right.” He understood logic because he was a student of Aristotle, the father of Western logic.He said, “I can understand the logic. It looks stupid after taking so much trouble to kill and massacre, and then afterward just to relax. Why not relax now? You are right. But I have gone too far. It is just a question of a few months more and my conquest of the world will be over. Otherwise, even relaxing by your side, I will go on remembering that it was only a question of a few months more. I will not be able to relax. I can relax only after I conquer the whole world.”Diogenes said, “It is up to you. I was even ready to share my riverside. I was even ready to share my lamp, my only property.”Alexander was continuously watching the lamp. In the day? – what was the point of keeping the lamp burning?He asked, “Forgive me, I have no right to ask, but why do you carry this lamp even in the full daylight? The sunlight is there, and you go on carrying this lamp, naked.”Diogenes said, “I am searching for an authentic man. Who knows at what time he will meet me? I want to see his face, the original face. This lamp is just symbolic.”It is said that when Diogenes was dying, somebody from the crowd asked, “What happened to your great search for the original man?”He said, “I could not find him. But this much I must say in favor of humanity: that my lamp has not been stolen, it is still with me. More than that I cannot say.”History should teach more about these people. And there have been thousands around the world; they will provoke a longing in the people’s minds.Just today Shunyo was telling me that Anando is compiling a book on all the saints that I have spoken on. She has already found three hundred names. She was puzzled; she said, “I never could imagine that there have been three hundred buddhas.”I said to her, “This is just a sample. Humanity is kept completely unaware of their greatest masterpieces, of their real original people who are the very salt of the earth.”The natural effect is that everybody goes on becoming more miserable. Every generation is more miserable than the previous one.I have been hearing from California that even six-year-old children have been found, in thousands, to be taking drugs. A six-year-old child taking drugs? An eight-year-old child murdering? A nine-year-old child trying to rape a girl…? But when you emphasize so much murder, drugs and rape on the television, you are teaching these things. All these governments and all these corporations are emphasizing the wrong kind of people on their television and radio, not knowing at all that they are creating an urge in millions of viewers to imitate them. These crimes should not even be mentioned.Pay attention to the right, to the beautiful, and you will be nourishing it.So your work is not only to be a buddha, your work is also to help others who are asleep, by throwing a little cold water in their eyes! In the beginning they will be irritated. Everybody is irritated with me. It is not acceptable to disturb somebody’s sleep; and a sleep which has lasted for centuries…to disturb it, you are certainly a nuisance. But I want you to be a nuisance. As your own experience deepens, don’t be worried, spread it, even to those who are annoyed; it does not matter. Perhaps just being annoyed may take them out of their nightmares.Daikaku said:This teaching is the school of the enlightened Mind. The enlightened Mind itself basically has no delusion or enlightenment.Every statement has to be listened to very carefully. He is saying the enlightened Mind has neither mind nor enlightenment; it is simply a pure consciousness. Don’t cling to enlightenment either: that clinging shows that you have destroyed the enlightenment, reduced it into some kind of thing – respectability, reputation. It is none of these.Enlightenment is so silent a joy…it does not even make ripples in the lake, it just reflects the moon. It is so silent, just like the bamboo shadows sweeping the temple steps. No sound, no footsteps.The enlightened Mind itself basically has no delusion or enlightenment.There have been thousands of enlightened people who have said that the enlightened Mind has no delusion, but they have forgotten to add that it has no enlightenment either. It is just like a disease: you have a disease, you carry a medicine with you. The disease is cured – do you still think to carry the medicine? You just donate it to the Lions Club!So when you become enlightened just donate it to the Lions Club! Perhaps somebody may need it. But don’t carry it with you; otherwise enlightenment itself becomes a new imprisonment. Do you see the immense significance of his statement? This actually is the subtle art of those who realize thusness.Even if you don’t become enlightened, when you sit once in meditation, you are a buddha for that sitting.So when I say to you after your meditation that now we should celebrate the ten thousand buddhas, I am not joking. I am making a certain point again and again to you that you may forget after a few minutes, and rush to a party somewhere in a hotel! Buddhas are not supposed to do that! But times have changed – modern buddhas always do that. After having a good experience they celebrate it in many ways. And where to go to celebrate, to have a real Italian party?Nothing is wrong in it if you go on remembering that you are a buddha. Nothing is wrong in the world if your remembrance remains there in the background.He is making a really great statement, never before made.…when you sit once in meditation, you are a buddha for that sitting…at least; …when you sit for a day in meditation, you are a buddha for a day; when you sit in meditation all your life, you are a buddha all your life. The same is true of the future; one who can have faith in this is someone with great potential.Sitting in meditation should be understood clearly: you cannot sit twenty-four hours in meditation, but you can be twenty-four hours in meditation. That is what is called “sitting in meditation.” Don’t take it literally. It does not mean that you have to sit twenty-four hours in meditation. It simply means that whatever you do, do with the remembrance, with the same silence and the same benediction, with the same grace and the same ecstasy.Whatever you are doing, it does not matter: carrying water from the well, chopping wood, anything. But just do it with your buddha alive within you, conscious within you, and your whole life becomes a “sitting in meditation.”Practicing everything without any sense of attainment is called the exceedingly profound transcendent wisdom.If somebody asks you what is the purpose of your meditation…it is not a purposeful act. It is not a commodity, it does not produce anything marketable.That’s why most of the people in the world have remained ignorant of their hidden treasure, because that hidden treasure can open up only when you are sitting without any desire of attainment. Attainment creates tension, worry… Attainment creates impatience – when is it going to happen? whether it is going to happen or not? Attainment creates jealousy: somebody is claiming that it has happened to him, how can it be that it has not happened to me?Sardar Gurudayal Singh is laughing. And he does nothing, he just remains a buddha the whole day. You can find him in any position, but he will be the buddha. He has been with me for thirty-five years. Hitting him again and again, I have awakened him so much that now it is difficult for him to sleep! So he goes on waking up other people. What else to do when you cannot sleep? You cannot allow anybody else to sleep, it is too much.The desire for attainment is a barrier to meditation. Even the desire to attain enlightenment is a barrier. One has to drop all desires for attainment. Now, nothing can be done about it; this is how nature functions.You can’t ask any scientist, “Why is water made of only two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, H2O? Why?” The scientist has to shrug his shoulders, because you cannot ask nature why. It is just the way nature moves. It is not in our hands.Meditation is far deeper. Its basic condition is that you should not desire any attainment. Now you cannot ask why. You can ask why but you will remain out of the world of meditation.This is the nature of meditation, that it cannot function if your mind is occupied with some attainment. That attainment functions like a rock. Only a man who has nothing to attain, who is simply sitting for the joy of it, reaches to enlightenment so easily that it almost seems as if no effort has been made. In fact every effort shows that there is some attainment which you have to push aside. If there is no desire for attainment, immediately you are enlightened.For the first few days you may walk among other people showing your enlightenment just like a peacock showing all its colored feathers. But for how long? And anyway, nobody takes any notice, because to understand enlightenment you need enlightenment.In the world of blind people, if you have eyes you can go on and on moving around – nobody is going to recognize your eyes. To recognize somebody’s eyes you need eyes.Enlightenment is a third eye, the eye that looks inward. It can be recognized only by those who have looked a little inward, who may have been, for a few minutes, a buddha but have forgotten all about it in the mundane activities of the world.Practicing everything without any sense of attainment is called the exceedingly profound transcendent wisdom. This wisdom can cut off the source of birth and death, like a sharp sword.You will not be born again and you will not die again. In fact you will not be anymore. Your small energy will disappear into the oceanic energy of existence. That is true relaxation. That is total rest. You are no more there to have any anxieties.To practice virtue in hopes of reward is the illusion of ordinary folk; bodhisattvas do not seek for the resulting rewards as they cultivate roots of virtue, because they cultivate goodness for the sake of impartial love and compassion, and thus it becomes sustenance for enlightenment.Enlightenment has many doors. It is not open only to the so-called saints. An artist deep in his art, painting so totally that he disappears and only the painting remains – whether he knows it or not, for that moment he has become a buddha. A singer with his totality disappears in his song.Enlightenment is not the monopoly of the saints: that is one of the basic points I want to make clear to the world. There are a thousand and one doors. Only one single quality should be there – that you are rejoicing in doing it, for no attainment. When a singer sings, if he is singing for some reward he cannot be total.I am reminded of one of India’s greatest singers, Tansen. Even today, in Gwalior, there is his samadhi and singers from all over the country go there on his birthday to pay their respects to that great genius. He was in the court of a great emperor, Akbar, and Akbar could not conceive that music could go higher or deeper than Tansen’s. But it became a continuous question in his mind: Is it possible to transcend Tansen? Can somebody do something more than he is doing?Finally he asked Tansen himself: “This question has been torturing me. I know that there is no one who can go so deep and create such beautiful music. Thousands of musicians have come to the court; they know the technique, but their totality is not in it.”Tansen said, “Please forgive me. You don’t know my master – I am not even dust under his feet. You don’t know what totality in music is.”Akbar said, “Then invite your master to the court. We will give him all the respect that is possible.”Tansen said, “That is the difficulty; that’s why I have never mentioned him.” He lived just near to where the Taj Mahal now stands. “He is a very silent, poor man, but he never sings on demand. That is the difficulty. You cannot call him and ask him to sing or play his sitar. When it comes spontaneously to him, then it is a totally different world – you will not be able even to compare me with him.”Akbar said, “You are creating trouble. If he cannot be asked, then how am I going to listen to him?”Tansen said, “I know perfectly that at three o’clock, early in the morning almost every day, he plays his sitar. What can be arranged is that we should hide behind the trees where he lives in a hut by the side of the Yamuna and just listen as thieves. There is no other way. If he becomes aware that somebody is there, he may stop. So be very quiet.” And perhaps never in the history of man has any emperor like Akbar gone to listen to a beggar.His name was Haridas. In the middle of the night they were hiding behind the trees like thieves. At three o’clock exactly, Haridas started playing on his sitar, and Akbar wept for the first time. Returning home, his tears continued.Tansen said to him, “Now we are coming close to the palace. Wash away your tears! Why are you weeping?”Akbar said, “I am weeping because now my whole idea that you are the greatest singer, the greatest musician in the world, is shattered. Your master is miles beyond. But what is the reason that you cannot manage to be the same as your master?”He said, “The reason is clear: I sing and play for reward; he sings and plays out of spontaneity, for no reward, with no desire even that somebody should listen to it. Just out of his fullness, out of his abundance he pours out music. I cannot do it. I am a court poet, a court singer, a court musician: I do my best, but deep down there is a desire for reward. And you have been rewarding me, you have filled my house with gold. You have raised my position to being the world’s greatest musician, but I know the greatest musician is a beggar who was my master.“I had to sit by his side for thirty years, because there was no other way. He would not teach you anything – if you could learn that was your business. He would play only when it came to him. You could watch, you could see the tremendous splendor that suddenly happened. Haridas disappeared, only the music remained.”In those moments, when Haridas disappeared, he was a buddha whether he knew it or not. The activity may be in any direction, any dimension.I want everybody to know that if you can do something without any desire of reward or attainment, you are in meditation. You will blossom into enlightenment. Out of your abundance will come love and compassion, and for a few days you may walk differently from others. But soon you will realize that others cannot recognize it – that is one thing.And a second thing: it is ugly on your part, mean, to show your enlightenment, to show your light to the people who are blind. It is not compassionate. Soon the enlightened man forgets about his enlightenment. That is The Great Matter – forgetting even enlightenment. The whole world is gone and enlightenment too. Nothing remains behind, you have become part of the universe.This is rest. This is relaxation.Enlightenment is the way to extinction. If you take peace and quiet to be bliss, all things are afflictions; but when you are enlightened, all things are enlightenment. People of the world do not understand this basis of delusion and enlightenment. They suppress thoughts of birth and death and think that this is the non-birth of a single thought, and also consider this mindlessness – but these are still thoughts of birth and death, not mindlessness, not quiescence. When you try to stop thought by thought, birth and death continue.You cannot stop thought with thought. You cannot control mind with mind itself. You have to be aloof, out of the mind, just watching it.Perhaps for a few days it may make a little fuss, that “You have deserted me!” Just go on watching. It will disappear because its nourishment is your identification with it. Now that you are no longer identified, it cannot last long. It will shrink, it will die out, it will disappear like smoke in the sky, and only the watcher remains.But when there is nothing to watch, even the purpose of the watcher is not there. When there is nothing to watch, the watcher has committed suicide without knowing it. That’s why he is saying, Enlightenment is the way to extinction.You will be extinguished, completely dissolved into the whole. Only then will you find…you will not be there, but only peace, but only light, but only joy, but only dance… The flower has disappeared, leaving behind only fragrance.Tekkan wrote:No mind, no buddha, no being.Bones of the void are scattered.Why should the golden lion,seek out the fox’s lair?No mind, and you find the buddha – but that buddha has also to disappear. No buddha, and you find the ultimate being of the universe – even that has to disappear. When everything has disappeared and you are completely erased, you have found the cosmic truth.It is not your truth, it is not my truth, it is simply Truth.A Zen poet:All is harmony, yeteverything is separate.Once confirmed,mastery is yours,long I hovered on theMiddle Way,today the very ice shoots flame.He is saying, All is harmony, yet everything is separate. Once confirmed, mastery is yours. Long I hovered on the Middle Way… Buddha’s path is called The Middle Way; no extremes, just keep in the middle.Today the very ice shoots flame. “I have come to the point where ice and fire are in harmony, where everything is in harmony.” A better word for harmony would be synchronicity – everything is in a deep synchronicity, all hearts have become one heartbeat.Another haiku runs:Ever onward to where thewaters have an end:waiting motionless for when thewhite clouds shall arise.Ever onwards where the waters have an end: waiting motionless for when the white clouds shall arise.Meditation is just like the rivers running toward the ocean: when they meet the ocean, they will disappear. They are running so fast to their extinction.Buddhism did not appeal much to the Indian priesthood, the brahmins, for the simple reason that for centuries they have been praying to God for rewards. All the Vedas are full of asking God for this or that. The whole mind of India was not prepared to accept Buddha. The conditioning was, you pray, you make fire rituals, you sacrifice, and God will give you great rewards. You do virtuous acts and in paradise you will be paid a thousand times more.This idea had been cultivated in India for thousands of years when Buddha said that this is not true religion, this is sheer business, this is not an authentic search for existence. You are still hankering for rewards. Because of this he had chosen the word nirvana for his ultimate point.Nirvana actually means blowing out a candle. When you blow out a candle, can you say where the flame has gone? Can you find the flame anywhere? It must have gone somewhere, but you know it is impossible to find it. It has disappeared in the universe.Buddha used the word nirvana, which we are translating as enlightenment; but the word enlightenment does not carry the same flavor of extinction. It still gives the idea of attainment. Nirvana means seeking extinction, blowing out the candle in the cosmos.Naturally, hundreds of times in his forty-two years of preaching, great Hindu scholars, priests and philosophers approached Buddha and asked him, “What is the point in striving for something in which you will disappear?”Maneesha has asked a similar question:Osho,Nobody in their right mind would want to be extinguished. So who or what is it inside us that feels a pull toward obliteration?It was absolutely right to ask Buddha, “Your teaching is strange: meditating seems to be the ultimate suicide. Why should one desire extinction?” But Buddha’s answer was very clear, although it was not received by the Indian mind.His answer was very clear. He said, “Because you are the problem; hence extinction is the only solution.”It is not that you have problems; this has to be understood very clearly. It is not that you have problems, so problems can be solved separately and you can be saved. If that were the situation, then Buddha would have been wrong. But this is not the situation. You are the problem. You cannot be without problems.Just think that one morning you wake up and you don’t have any problems – you will be in such grief. You will say, “My God, what am I going to do? No problems at all!”You cling to problems because problems give you personality. They give you a certain identity.Without problems, you are no more. You are just a collection of problems. That’s why Buddha is right, that meditation is the extinction not only of problems but of you too, because you were nothing but a collection, a name for a collection of problems. When all the problems are gone, you are gone…you are not separate from your problems. Buddha’s greatest contribution to the world was the realization that man himself is the problem. You may go on changing problems – that is possible – but you cannot exist without problems. There is no need! If you don’t have any problem, what is the point of existing?Psychologists now say that after retirement, people lose almost ten years of life. If they had remained working they would have lived ten years more, but because they got retired…They had been hankering for years to be retired so they could go on a world tour or visit ancient palaces, castles, the Himalayas. They will enjoy, life will be fun. Up to now life has been just work, work, work. After retirement they can enjoy life as fun.But after retirement they find that life has become absolutely useless. Nobody needs them. Their children are grown up, they have gone their way. And even if they tour around the world…I have seen tourists with all kinds of cameras and bags and machinery covering both their sides, but look at their faces! They know that they are unnecessarily running from the Taj Mahal to Ajanta, from Ajanta to Ellora. They know perfectly well that all this is useless; they are simply keeping themselves engaged in something which is futile. Now death seems to be the only release. Naturally their life span shrinks.What Gautam Buddha is saying is a very ultimate answer to man. He says that you are the problem. It does not matter what shape the problem takes – unless you are ready to extinguish yourself, the problem will go on coming in new forms. Youth has its problems, childhood has its problems; the child wants quickly to grow up.I have been talking to small children. They all want to grow up quickly because they see that others are enjoying – smoking cigarettes, going to the movies, having girlfriends. They want to grow as quickly as possible.Once I used to live by the side of a post office, and I used to go early, at three o’clock in the morning, for a walk. One night I saw a little boy. It was a full-moon night, so I could figure out who he was; he was the postmaster’s son. And seeing me, he hid himself behind a tree.I got hold of him and I asked, “What is the matter? Why are you hiding? Just come out.”He said, “I will come out, but don’t tell my daddy.”I said, “What is the problem, that you are trying to hide?”He was hiding an artificial mustache, and a cigarette. He was pretending to be his father. He was walking the same way as his father walked… He said, “Just don’t tell him, otherwise he will give me a good beating.”I said, “What is the hurry? Someday the mustache will grow, and then you can smoke cigarettes also. It is too soon.”He said, “I have been waiting and waiting and everybody seems to be enjoying and I have to go on playing with toys. Whenever I make a fuss my father brings another toy. How long do I have to be with toys? I want real things!”I said, “You can have real toys.”He said, “I have! I can show you in my house, you come with me. I have a beautiful girl who opens her eyes and if you lie her down she closes her eyes. But after all it is only a toy! – it is not a real girlfriend.”I said, “That’s true!”Small children have their problems. When they grow up, they have their problems. The same girlfriends, the same boyfriends that they had wanted become a nightmare, nagging each other, torturing each other, doing everything nasty to each other and still holding together. It is very difficult to get rid of your torturer, because deep down you also feel alone if nobody tortures you.The Hindu shastras say that you have to beat your woman once a week absolutely; otherwise she will think you don’t love her. I think there is something in it! If you don’t beat your girlfriend, she will beat you. It is up to you to choose.George Bernard Shaw used to say that giving women equality is impossible. When asked why he said, “My lifelong experience” – and nobody has lived so long as he has lived, he almost made a century – “My experience is, either you keep the woman down with force or she will keep you down. Equality is not possible. Either you are superior or she is superior. One of you has to be inferior at any cost.”Equality is impossible, according to George Bernard Shaw, and I can see the point. It is always difficult.So when you are young you have your troubles and you want to get out of this troubled age quickly, but problems remain.As old age starts coming one becomes afraid, because old age means death is not far away. And old age means the younger generation around you is no longer interested in you. You are too old, too out of fashion. You cannot mix with the younger generation, they avoid you. You are finished; just understand the point that you are finished. All your false teeth won’t help.There are people around who have everything false, and they are thinking to deceive younger people. But how long can you deceive? – in the night you have to take out your false teeth. One day you may not be observed, but the second day…while sleeping your false hair falls from your skull, and the woman who is lying beside you cannot believe that you have been deceiving her! But everything seems to be false.There is an age where false things are needed; otherwise you are out-of-date. But what are you doing here? Just go to your graves! Meditate there! The world has left you alone. Old age…and death seems to be knocking at any moment on your door, and the fear of the unknown…Your whole life is a problem.From the very birth the child resists coming out of the womb because he has lived for nine months in a most comfortable, most luxurious place. No work, and every need is automatically provided – why should he leave this place? And who knows what is outside? That is why women have so much trouble giving birth to a child: the child clings, the child does not want to come out. From that moment, up to when you are put on a funeral pyre, you are just trouble – to yourself and to others.Maneesha, that is the need, to desire ultimate annihilation, dissolving into the universe – so that you don’t have any personal needs, any personal problems; so that you don’t have any burden, not even of being, because being is also a burden.Buddha’s insight is so great that he is still ahead of his time. Even though twenty-five centuries have passed, he has not yet found his contemporaries, because what he is saying is so ultimately true that it hurts, that one wants not to see it, to close one’s eyes.It was for this reason that Buddhism could not grow in India – because India’s mind was, for centuries, cultivated with the idea that prayer, meditation, yoga, everything is for a reward.And Buddha says, “If you have any idea of reward, you will miss. The very idea of attaining something will prevent you from merging into existence.” It was so contrary to people’s minds that only a few very intelligent people followed him. And after he died, within three hundred years…just three hundred years after his death, not even a ripple remained. In India, Buddhism has completely disappeared.Three hundred years later Alexander the Great came to India. He wanted to meet some Buddhist saints, but he could not. He could not find any. Why did it disappear so quickly, such a great insight? The reason is, the Indian mind is basically greedy. It talks about renunciation, but even renunciation is for a reward. It talks about charity, but charity is also for a reward. Everything is business.Buddhism managed to grow its roots in China, in Korea, in Japan, in Thailand, for the simple reason that they were not so-called religious people. China was under the great impact of Confucius, who did not believe in God, who did not believe in any heaven or any hell. Buddhism found the right ground where people were not asking for attainment, even after death. And Japan was even more fertile a land; they did not have the Indian greed.It is very strange that India continues to claim to the whole world that it is the only spiritual land. It is all cow dung. I have lived for half a century, and I have watched the Indian mind from all sides – they are more greedy than any people in the world, but they have made even their greed spirituality.Buddha could not make his roots here for the simple reason that the Indian mind was already prejudiced and prepared for having great pleasures beyond death. It could not lose those pleasures. And naturally, to the mind, the question that Maneesha is asking arises.“Nobody in their right mind” – that is true…”Nobody in their right mind would want to be extinguished.”But who is there who is in their right mind? In fact, when you are in your right mind, you would love to be extinguished. Only the insane want to continue. What is the point? Just think for a moment: before you were born, do you think there was something missing in the world? And think again: when you will be dead, do you think something will be missing in the world? Millions of people have come and gone – the world continues.Buddha is saying: Birth is pain, youth is pain, old age is pain, death is pain – why do you want to continue? For what? His meditation is a search for dissolving oneself back into the cosmos. It is total rest, rest from yourself; total freedom, freedom even from yourself.This is one of the reasons I am not part of India. Those who have come to me from all over the world are not greedy people. They really want to understand that life is a problem, that mind is a problem. In fact, to be is to be a problem. Then why not be courageous and not be?You will find very few Indians here; they are all against me. Again they find another buddha teaching annihilation, extinction, teaching ultimate death. But only very intelligent people can understand it. Buddhism is for the most sophisticated, for the most intelligent. It is not for the ordinary people, for the mediocre. They will go on suffering, but they will never understand that their very being is suffering. Non-being is the freedom from suffering.A few laughs before you disappear, die, extinguish…and this time really go. At least for a few moments you will be a buddha, and there is no harm if you don’t come back. We will still celebrate – it is a promise.Dilly and Dally, two salesmen, are standing together at the bar, talking about football. At the other end of the bar an old drunk is having trouble holding himself and his drink upright at the same time.Suddenly Dilly notices a very unpleasant smell.“Hey, Dally!” he says, “do you smell shit?”Dally sniffs the air, nods and starts to hold his nose.“I think it’s coming from that old drunk over there,” he says.“Excuse me,” says Dally to the old guy, “but there is a terrible smell around here. Did you shit in your pants?”The bleary-eyed drunk lifts up his head and stares at Dilly.“Yup,” he slobbers, “what about it?”“Well,” says a shocked Dilly, “why don’t you go to the bathroom and wash yourself?”The old drunk stares back, blinking, and then says, “Because I haven’t finished yet!”Three secretaries, Betty, Boopsee and Barbara, are working in the same office for the same boss, the famous male chauvinist tyrant, Dumford Porkeye.“He is so mean,” says Betty to Boopsee and Barbara on their coffee break, “so yesterday I put salt in his sugar bowl just to watch his face when he drank his coffee.”“That’s nothing,” says Boopsee. “I found a pack of condoms in his desk drawer and took a pin and put holes in the ends of all them!”At that moment, Barbara fainted.Donald Dixteen is touring Spain. He is looking at the boats in the harbor of a small fishing village, when Old Carlos comes over to him and asks, “How many boats do you see there in the water?”“About twenty-five,” replies Donald.“Twenty-eight, in fact!” says Carlos. “And I built every one of them with my own hands! But do my neighbors call me Carlos the boat builder? They do not! How many houses do you see on the hillside over there?” continues Carlos.“Thirty-two,” replies Donald.“Correct!” agrees Carlos, “all built by me. But do my neighbors call me Carlos the house-builder? They do not!“Well, what do they call you?” insists Donald. “Carlos the what?”“What do they call me?” exclaims Carlos, eyeing a nearby hen lovingly.“You wouldn’t believe it,” explains Carlos, “just because of that one little chicken I fucked!”Nivedano…(Drumbeat)(Gibberish)Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Be silent, close your eyes.Feel your body to be frozen.Gather your consciousness inward,deeper and deeper…This silence, this peace, this blissfulnessdiscovers the buddha within you.For these few moments you are a buddhaand it is up to you, if you can remember –then you can be a buddha twenty-four hours.“Buddha” simply means silent awareness.And the silent awareness is not something dead,it is full of joy,it is full of juice,it is full of dance.It has a music of its own.To make it more clear, Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Relax…Relax into the universe.Drop yourself, with all your problems.Just don’t be!This is transcending even the buddha.This is entering into the cosmos itself,losing all your personality, individuality.The dewdrop slipping from the lotus leafinto the ocean…This is the most blissfuland ecstatic moment of your life.Continue to remember it.It is your own nature.It is not something uncommon,it is not something extraordinary,it is just pure nature, simply very ordinary,without any claim to anything.This brings so much light and so much delightthat it starts overflowing in you.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Come back, but don’t come backleaving your experience behind –bring it with you.Slowly, gracefully resurrect.Sit for a few seconds as buddhas,collecting,remembering where you have been…the experience…so that it becomes an undercurrent in your lifetwenty-four hours a day.It can change all your gestures, activities –not only yours, it can change people around you.It is infectious.Share it, don’t be a miser!Can we celebrate the ten thousand buddhas?

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

Turning In 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Turning In 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/turning-in-05/

Osho,Daikaku said to his assembly of monks: “Sitting meditation is the method of great liberation; all the teachings flow forth from this; myriad practices are mastered this way. Supernormal powers, knowledge, wisdom and virtue, all arise from here. The path of life of humans and gods opens herein; all the buddhas have entered and left by this door. Bodhisattvas practicing it have entered this door. Disciples and self-enlightened ones are still only halfway there, while outsiders, though they practice, do not enter the right path. Whatever esoteric or exoteric schools do not practice this, do not have anyone who realizes the way of buddhahood.”A monk then asked Daikaku, “What does it mean that sitting meditation is the root source of all the teachings?” Daikaku answered, “Meditation is the inner no-mind of the enlightened ones; discipline is their outer character; doctrine is their speech; buddha-remembrance is the invocation of the Buddha’s name. All come from the enlightened no-mind of the buddhas; therefore, it is considered fundamental.”The monk asked again, “The method of meditation is formless and thoughtless; spiritual qualities are not obvious, and there is no proof of seeing reality – so how can we believe in this?”Daikaku said, “Your own no-mind and the enlightened no-mind are one – is that not spiritual quality? If you don’t know your own no-mind, on whom can you call for witness and proof? Other than the identity of no-mind and buddha, what proof do you seek?”Maneesha, Daikaku is making some very important statements for those who are on the path; not for those who are seeking knowledge, respectability, reputation. Daikaku is a master only if you are a seeker. Unless your whole life depends on a single point of finding your own center, the very source of your being, you will not be able to understand what Daikaku is saying.But this assembly is no ordinary crowd. This assembly is of the bodhisattvas, who are essentially buddhas, and their urge to explore their inner reality to its totality has brought them from all corners of the world. This is the right assembly for a man like Daikaku.Daikaku said to his assembly of monks:“Sitting meditation is the method of great liberation.”It is very strange that just by silently sitting, watching your thoughts moving here and there as if they do not belong to you – you don’t have to do anything about them, not even make a judgment – just sitting silently not doing anything, and the door opens. Your ultimate reality is not something to be sought in the outside world; it is hidden in the seeker himself. The moment you start looking for it here and there, you are going far away, far away from yourself. There is no need to go anywhere. Just sit down, settle down. The mind is just like dust in water. If you are patient enough, the dust will settle and the crystal-clear water will be there reflecting the full moon.Zen does not preach any discipline, any doctrine, any practice. It is one of the greatest blessings to humanity that Zen has made the search for oneself so obvious and so simple.“Sitting meditation is the method of great liberation; all the teachings flow forth from this; myriad practices are mastered this way. Supernormal powers, knowledge, wisdom and virtue, all arise from here. The path of life of humans and gods opens herein; all the buddhas have entered and left by this door.”These sentences have to be remembered. While sitting silently you will come across a door within you, just an opening. If you remain in this opening, still, many things will start happening to you: knowledge, wisdom, some miraculous powers, great virtue – but this is only the door.A few are sitting outside the door; they can sit as long as they want. They are exoteric people who cannot look in, who always look out. They have become obsessed with the outside reality. They are also sitting by the side of the door. But their back is toward the door, not their face.The disciple is also sitting, but his face is toward the door. But this is only a door to a tremendous phenomenon of existence. You are not to stop here, although it will allure you with great wisdom, miraculous powers, virtues. It will bring you peace and silence.But Daikaku says, All the buddhas have entered and left by this door.There is something more beyond this door. The buddhas have entered and left the door behind. They have gone beyond.What is beyond knowledge? – innocence. What is beyond wisdom? – just a sense that “I know nothing.” What is beyond miracles? – no buddha has done a miracle.Buddha did not walk on water and did not turn water into wine and did not make any Lazarus come back to life. Compared to Jesus he has not done anything, but he is far beyond Jesus. Jesus is only at the door; he has not entered into the ultimate reality. Buddha cannot do any miracle for the simple reason that he is no more. He cannot be knowledgeable because he has dropped himself, like a dewdrop from the lotus leaf into the ocean. His let-go is so total that a tremendous energy field is created around him in which anything may happen; but he is not the doer.I would like to show you the difference. Lazarus died – he was a friend of Jesus, and a follower. His sisters were followers of Jesus. They wouldn’t allow the town’s people to bury the dead man. Jesus was informed; he was far away. It took four days, and when he came, the dead body of Lazarus was being kept in a cave in the mountains. He called, “Lazarus! Come out!” and Lazarus came out. This is thought to be the greatest miracle of Jesus.A similar situation arose before Buddha, but the story is totally different. A woman was going to drown herself, but people saved her somehow. Her husband had died but she had a small child, so she thought to live for the child. But then the child died; now there was nothing for her to live for. People said, “Don’t be worried, Buddha is in the town. You come with us, bring the dead body of the child. And if he cannot make him alive, then nobody can do anything.”The woman came crying, weeping, carrying the body of the dead child. Buddha said, “Leave the child here. I will bring him back to life on one condition: you have to bring some mustard seeds from a house where nobody has ever died.”The poor woman could not understand the logic of it. She thought, “What a great opportunity! This is not difficult” – because mustard seed was the principal crop in that village. “There must be some house where nobody has died.” She went from house to house.And they said, “How many mustard seeds do you want? We can bring many carts full if your child can be revived. But it won’t help, because not only one person but thousands of people must have died in this house, in this family. And you are unnecessarily wasting your time – you cannot find a house where nobody has died.”But she went on searching – perhaps…a hope against hope. By the evening it became clear that everybody who is born dies, and she could not find the required mustard seeds. But her tears disappeared, and instead of tears a great awareness arose, that “Life and death exist together. And what does it matter if my child dies today or tomorrow? He would have to die, and it is good that he has died before me. If I had died first he would have been an orphan, a beggar. This is a great blessing.”By the time she reached Buddha the sun was setting, and Buddha said, “Where are the mustard seeds?”She fell down at Buddha’s feet and she said, “I have brought myself, not the mustard seeds. I want to be initiated into the search for that which never dies.”Now you can see the difference between the two stories. In one Lazarus is resurrected, but he will have to die again. What was the point of resurrecting him? He has not been transformed. He has not gained any insight, he has not become awakened. But this woman in a similar situation with a great master, encounters the very basic problem: how to transcend life and death? How to get beyond this circle of life and death?Buddha initiated her, and he said, “For this reason I had to send you – so that the understanding arose on your own that everybody dies. Now the question is, is there something that never dies? And I am happy that you have come back with that understanding. Your initiation is not an imitation, your initiation is out of understanding.”Christian missionaries continuously go on saying that except for Jesus, nobody – neither Buddha nor Bodhidharma…there have been thousands of masters, but Jesus is unique because of his miracles. But buddhas will laugh.The real miracle is that the woman has come to an understanding that she wants to enter into herself. From the outside you may not think it a great miracle. To resurrect the body is not the question – he will die again, you are simply giving him another chance to die.Even Christian scholars are finding all the miracles of Jesus unfounded. They have been added three hundred years after Jesus, to give him a glamour that he is really the son of God. All pure fiction!Now there is a great controversy going on in Christian circles: can we accept Jesus if his miracles are proved fictitious? Take away the miracles and Jesus is nothing. But take anything away from Gautam Buddha, he is still a Gautam Buddha. You cannot take away anything from him because nothing is added. He has remained simply himself, no fiction, no mythology. This is a real miracle, that a man who influenced the whole East also managed that nobody added any mythology, any fiction to his life. His life has remained a pure flame without any smoke.All the buddhas have entered and left…This is only a door. It is not a place to live, it is simply a passage to pass through… and left by this door.“Bodhisattvas practicing it have entered this door. Disciples and self-enlightened ones are still only halfway there, while outsiders, though they practice, do not enter the right path.”If you are doing some practice outside, that means you are doing some yoga exercise, distorting the body this way and that way, standing on your head. And nobody ever thinks, “Is self-realization a certain posture of the body?” You can go on standing on your head for your whole life but still you will not become enlightened; you will just become a very fat head. All the blood will accumulate in your head, your hands and legs will slowly start shrinking. Certainly you will not be a human being anymore, but just a big football with small hands and legs. It is a miracle, but what can you do with such a miracle?This statement, Disciples and self-enlightened ones are still only halfway there… They have not even reached the door.It will be a little difficult to distinguish between the enlightened one and the self-enlightened. The self-enlightened is only imagining that he is enlightened. Nobody can prevent you from imagining any kind of thing you want. And nobody can refute you, because there is no way to refute and there is no way to argue for or against.I have heard about a madman who got the idea that he was dead. Madness was not enough, he added something more. He would say, “I know that I am dead.”People said, “Don’t say such things; you are talking, you are walking, you are eating.”He said, “So what? That does not prove that I am not dead. I have seen many dead people doing the same thing. What do you think about yourself?” Then people thought that this was very dangerous: if their families heard that this fellow thought that everybody is dead, and talking and eating and walking do not matter; you are dead and it can continue… They took him to a psychiatrist who said, “Don’t be worried. I will cure him.”They said, “We are not worried about him, we are worried about you – because he has cured many people. A few of his friends have started having another thought, that perhaps they are dead. He is very convincing, a very logical and rational person.”The psychiatrist said, “You go and leave him with me.”To the madman the psychiatrist said, “Have you heard that dead men don’t bleed?”He said, “Yes, when I was alive I had heard it, I remember.”Then the psychiatrist said, “The matter is settled.”He took out his knife and cut a little on the mad fellow’s hand and blood came out. The madman said, “Aha! That means that proverb is wrong: dead men do bleed. Now give me the knife, I will try it on you.”The psychiatrist said, “You will try it on me?”He said, “I have to know whether you are alive or dead. Now it is proved that dead people bleed. If you are dead, you will bleed. If you are still alive you will not bleed. Just give me your hand.”He said, “My God, your family was right.”The madman took his hand and made a good cut and said, “Look! We both are dead. Everybody is dead. I have not come across a single person who is alive. But everybody is deluded – what can you do?”The psychiatrist said, “Please don’t tell anybody else that I am dead. You just go home.”He said, “Which home? I am coming with you. Behave like a dead man – graceful, silent, friendly. I can help your practice very much: every day I can have a table in your office. Difficult patients that you cannot treat, I can treat within a minute. It just has to be proved that they are dead. And a dead person cannot worry, a dead person cannot dream; they are just befooling themselves. A dead person needs no psychiatry.”Daikaku is saying, Bodhisattvas practicing it have entered this door.They have not stopped at the door, they have passed through it. There is every allurement to remain at the door because you suddenly feel immensely powerful, capable of doing miracles.But a real seeker is not in search of miracles, he is in search of the source of his life from where everything arises.Bodhisattvas practicing it have entered the door, left the door behind, become buddhas. Their miracle is their love, their miracle is their compassion. Their miracle is to spread buddhahood like a wildfire.Making wine out of water is not a miracle, it is a crime. Don’t do any such thing here. If Jesus had made wine into water, that was perfectly natural, there was no crime in it. But making wine out of water is certainly dangerous. But whether dangerous or not, it is trivia, not a miracle.The only miracle is to be authentic, honest, yourself. And then anything that follows around you, in your field, is not your doing. So those who are of great understanding that their ultimate aim is to search for the buddha within, they have entered the door.“Disciples and self-enlightened…”– this is a category of mad people –“…are still only halfway there,while outsiders, though they practice, do not enter the right path.”Those who are outside can go on doing austerities, self-torture, fasts and all kinds of things, but they will not enter. And those who have only half entered will remain clinging to the door. And the door is not the reality; you have to pass through it, beyond…In other words, the door is the mind and the beyond is the no-mind – and that is the only miracle worth calling a miracle.“Whatever esoteric or exoteric schools do not practice this, do not have anyone who realizes the way of buddhahood.”All esoteric schools are just hallucinatory, playing on the imagination of man with all good intentions, but they are not the path to know the truth, to know the source of life. And the exoteric who are doing outward things… For example, they drop their clothes, and they think because they have become naked they have attained great virtue.One cannot imagine the blindness of man. All the animals are naked – except for a few English dogs. Some old ladies in England still cover their dogs. When they take the dog for a walk they go on pulling their leashes, particularly to keep him from making any tree or lamppost a toilet. Or he may come across a girlfriend…to prevent him from enjoying a love affair, they go on pulling the leash. And the dogs have to be covered, because naked dogs remind them of pornography. These women are really pornographic! England has a few specialties; one of these specialties is these old women. Even today they are afraid to leave their dogs, or even their chair legs or table legs naked, because that is pornographic. Now, who is pornographic? – these women, in their imagination.I have heard about three old men, great friends, all retired. One was sixty-five, another was seventy-five, and the third was eighty-five. One evening when they were meeting in the park, a daily routine, they found the youngest, the sixty-five-year-old, looking very sad. They asked, “What is the problem? You can tell us. We have been friends for years.”He said, “I am so ashamed. But I have to tell you that I was looking through the keyhole of the bathroom when a beautiful woman, who was a guest in my house, was taking her bath.”The other two laughed and said, “You idiot, everybody has done that. It is nothing special.”The man said, “You have not heard the whole story. I was caught red-handed and my mother slapped me.”Those two old fellows again said, “Don’t be worried – every child does it. And it is very rare to find a mother who does not slap.”That sixty-five-year-old man said, “You don’t understand – it is not a question of childhood, it happened today!”They said, “Then it is certainly serious, but not much to be worried about.”The seventy-five-year-old then said, “My problem is more difficult. Whenever I make any approach to my wife, she simply turns over and says, ‘I am suffering from a great headache. Don’t bother me!’ Years have passed. I have already forgotten how to make love.”The third man laughed. He said, “You are also of the same category. Think about my problem. This morning my wife started beating me.”They said, “This is serious. What happened?”He said, “I was just preparing to make love, and she started beating me and told me, ‘You idiot! The whole night, three times, you have already made love. Neither do you sleep nor do you allow me to sleep.’”The other two fellows laughed and said, “It seems he is losing his memory. Otherwise at this age, four times…unbelievable!” They said, “You consult some psychologist. You are simply losing your memory.”The only grown-up-ness is not of age: you may be eighty-five and still an old goat. Goats don’t grow wiser, they simply grow older. The only path to wisdom goes inward.That’s why no other animal except man can know himself, because no other animal has any idea at all of the inner. Everything is outer. You become a man when you become aware that there is something inner. And it has to be searched for vigorously, because life is not certain – at any moment death may destroy the opportunity.A monk then asked Daikaku, “What does it mean that sitting meditation is the root source of all the teachings?”It looks very simple; that’s why it creates questions. Just say to somebody, “Sit silently and everything will happen,” and he will think you are mad: “You have to do something for something to happen.”One great American writer, Napoleon Hill, has written a book, Think and Grow Rich – just think. I thought, he seems to be a Zen master, because they say, “Sit and find the buddha.” This fellow is saying, “Think and grow rich.” Just think, with closed eyes, that a Lincoln Continental is standing in your porch: if you think really hard, you will find it.He seems to be a very articulate writer, very convincing, that this whole world is your idea. Whatever you think happens. Think of money and money will start coming; think of a beautiful woman and you will hear a knock on the door, but the basic requirement is first to believe. If you don’t believe, nothing is going to happen. That condition is tricky. If the Lincoln Continental does not arise in your porch, you know your belief is not strong enough to pull that big a car. If instead of a very beautiful woman a very ugly woman knocks on the door you know that Napoleon Hill is right, but your belief staggered, wavered; and this ugly lady is the result.It happened that the day Napoleon Hill’s book was published – in America the writers promote their books – he was standing in the bookstore where the book was released and he was signing books for the first buyers. By chance, Henry Ford came to look for some books and he saw this fellow autographing. He asked the owner of the shop, “Who is this fellow, and what is he doing here?”He told him, “He is a great writer and his book is selling like hot cakes. It is a great book. Just seeing the name, you will be surprised. Think of purchasing it. It is called, Think and Grow Rich.”Henry Ford was a very clever, cunning fellow. He went to Napoleon Hill, looking at him from up to down, from down to up, and asked, “Have you come in your own car or on a public bus?”Napoleon Hill said, “What kind of question is that? I am answering questions about my book.”Henry Ford said, “It is about your book.”He said, “I have come on the public bus.”Henry Ford said, “That shows that your book is a fraud. You don’t even have your own car. Can’t you think? I am Henry Ford and this is my address. So when you have your own car, come to me and I will purchase your book. But get the car by thinking, not by any other means.”Poor Napoleon Hill was so shocked, and could not say anything in answer.There have been many movements like this in the world, particularly in Christian countries. There is a movement called Christian Science which believes that whatever you believe happens – just believe it totally. They have their churches in all the great cities where they meet and read their literature, and enforce each other’s belief, nourish each other with their own experiences, encourage each other to believe and it will happen. People return from their meetings full of joy, “Now I am going to really believe and really think for something great to happen.”The movement died, by and by; it had to die because it was so stupid.One young man was encountered by an old woman who asked, “Your father is a regular member of our church, science and Christianity combined, but I have not seen him for two or three weeks. Where is he?”The young man said, “He is sick, very sick.”The old woman said, “All nonsense! He simply believes that he is sick. Just tell him to think, ‘I am healthy. Who says I am sick?’ Go home immediately!”The boy was not a Christian Scientist; he giggled at this old woman. His father was really sick, but he said, “I will tell him your message.”After a few weeks again they met and again the old woman said, “What happened? Did you tell your father?”He said, “I told him, but now he thinks he is dead. It has been almost one week – everything is finished. We all tried, and he tried to think that everything is going great…”By thinking you cannot reach anywhere. That’s why in Zen the question arises again and again.A monk asked Daikaku, “What does it mean that sitting meditation is the root source of all the teachings?”Daikaku answered, “Meditation is the inner no-mind.”By sitting he does not mean that you sit and think about a Lincoln Continental. Sitting in Zen means simply sitting and doing nothing, not even thinking, not even chanting a mantra; creating a silent space where even you are not, just a pure mirror reflecting nothing.“Meditation is the inner no-mind of the enlightened ones; discipline is their outer character.”What you see as discipline is really their manifestation of meditation in the outside world. A buddha walks in a certain way, talks in a certain way, looks in a certain way. All his gestures have a quality of buddhahood, of awareness.But you cannot reverse the sequence: you cannot first discipline yourself and hope that by disciplining yourself you will become a buddha. First you have to become a buddha; discipline comes on its own accord. And that discipline which comes spontaneously is the only right discipline. Otherwise, everything is torture.“Discipline is their outer character; doctrine is their speech.”Whatever they say comes from the very source of life. The source is not the great scriptures, the source is their own experience. Hence, whatever they say is their doctrine.“Buddha-remembrance is the invocation of the Buddha’s name.”There have been many Zen masters who would wake up in the morning and the first thing they would ask… For example, Obaku used to ask every morning, “Obaku, are you still here?”And his disciples would say, “If outsiders listen to it they will think you are mad. Why do you do it?”And he would say, “Because in the night I forget completely…a silent mind with no dreams, no thoughts. When I wake up I have to remind myself again that Obaku is still here. Who can I ask? I can ask only myself, ‘Obaku are you still here?’”And he himself would say, “Yes, sir.”One has to have a deep respect toward oneself. It would be a good discipline for you. Rather than repeating the names of Rama and Krishna, it would be a great discipline for you just to ask yourself your own name: “Devageet, are you still here?” Don’t bother that Raj may be listening. And say, “Yes, sir.”And all of you, if you can do this much, you will be surprised what a great silence follows when you say, “Devageet, are you still here?” and you yourself say, “Yes, sir.” Then there follows a great silence. And it is also a remembrance of your own being, also a respectfulness, a gratitude that one day more is given to you, that again the sun will rise, that again for one day at least, you will be able to see the roses blossom.A man of no-mind, a man of meditation, finds himself so grateful for each moment that life gives to him. There is no reason – you don’t deserve it, nobody deserves it. It is a sheer gift of life. You cannot ask to extend your life even by a single moment. You cannot say, “I am worthy, so let me have a few more years; I deserve it.”Nobody deserves. But life goes on pouring in you out of its abundance.“All come from the enlightened no-mind of the buddhas; therefore, it is considered fundamental.”The monk asked again, “The method of meditation is formless and thoughtless; spiritual qualities are not obvious, and there is no proof of seeing reality – so how can we believe in this?”Daikaku said, “Your own no-mind and the enlightened no-mind are one – is that not spiritual quality?”What Daikaku is saying is that your mind, minus your thoughts, is the no-mind of the buddha. And do you think it is not a spiritual quality? Because out of this no-mind will arise truthfulness, integration, compassion, all kinds of virtues and love.If you do not know your own no-mind, on whom can you call for witness and proof?Nobody can be a witness to you. Nobody can enter into your no-mind, and you cannot have any proof except the transformation of your character.Other than the identity of no-mind and buddha, what proof do you seek?Daikaku is throwing the question on the monk. The monk was asking, “How can we be certain that somebody is a buddha?”You cannot be certain about somebody being a buddha, unless you are a buddha. Only a buddha can recognize another buddha. The buddha can recognize even the potential buddhas. When I call you bodhisattvas, that’s what I mean – you are potential buddhas. The next moment you may awake, this moment you may be snoring. It is your right to snore, to sleep, to dream, to get out of all of this vicious circle. But whether you are asleep or awake, your inner quality does not change; the source remains always pure.Yakusai wrote:A deafening peal,a thief escaped my body.What have I learned?The lord of nothingnesshas a dark face.He is saying, “I had been trying to get rid of my mind – finally the thief left.” When for the first time your mind stops functioning, you encounter enormous darkness. Up to now you have been accustomed to the light of the small mind; now the light is so great that it is blinding. And one feels, in the beginning, that he has fallen into utter darkness. But slowly, slowly, he becomes accustomed and starts seeing that the darkness was too much light.You may have seen it happening: coming in from outside on a sunny day – entering your home it looks dark, but after an hour it is no more that dark. Your eyes are flexible. When you go out, if there is too much sun, the lenses of your eyes shrink. They don’t allow that much light in. And when you come home with those shrunken lenses of your eyes, it seems dark. You need your lenses to be larger again. It takes a little time, but soon the whole house is full of light.The same is true about the inner eye – the first encounter is of great darkness. But darkness turning into light is a great experience. Then you know that they are not two, but two faces of the same coin.A haiku by Sodo:In my ten-foot bamboo hutthis spring,there is nothing:there is everything.Just visualize poor Sodo, a master in his own right, in his ten-foot bamboo hut. The spring has come; there is nothing and there is everything…The ultimate experience of meditation is of both: on the one hand there is nothing; on the other hand there is the whole universe.You lose your old identity; that’s why it feels there is nothing. But you gain a new identity with the oceanic existence – then you feel there is everything. But both are authentic experiences.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Sitting in front of you and facing nothingness for a few minutes each evening is one thing, but quite another when it confronts one during the other twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes of the day. It seems easier either not to even know such a space exists, or to go into it totally through sitting in meditation all day.The third way – of going through the motions of daily life, while walking around feeling empty inside – is really weird. Yet you seem to do it so beautifully. Can you give us some tips?Maneesha, it certainly looks weird if you are utterly silent, not angry, and trying to show anger. It looks weird because you feel the split, and your anger has not that heat. Inside you are nothing and outside you are showing love; your love is bound to be lukewarm, not even lukewarm. And you will be feeling a strange split; that creates the weirdness.But look at it from this point: actors on the stage, do they feel weird? They know perfectly they are not what they are pretending to be. But knowing that it is only acting, there is no conflict. So this is the only tip I can give to you: your whole life should be just an acting – deep inside, eternal silence; on the outside, whatever is the requirement, act it. But that action does not create any split because you know it is acting.The weirdness comes only when your action becomes identified with you, and at the same time you are pulling yourself into nothingness, and the action is pulling you toward the outer world. Then you are in a weird space. Otherwise silence, nothingness, can remain untouched.You can do anything, whatever you feel. See with your clarity what is needed and do it totally. But remember, the outer world is the world of drama. Never forget for a moment that the outside is only drama. Then inside you can remain at peace, carrying on every kind of work without any weirdness.Before we enter into our daily meditation, just a few tips so that nobody goes weird. Just become a buddha and come out! Go in from the same door and come back out from the same door.It is a fateful day in the kingdom of Kwatz! Three notorious criminals – Gunn, the German; Andre, the Frenchman; and Sagar, the Proper – are all being brought up to the guillotine for execution.Gunn, the German, climbs the long stairs, and the black-hooded executioner asks him, “How do you want to go, face-up or face-down?”The German stiffens up proudly and shouts, “I am the bravest of Germans, I vill vatch it coming – put me face-up!”He is placed on the block face-up and the executioner pulls the lever. The blade comes hurtling down, and at the very last moment screeches to a halt, just millimeters from the German’s neck.“Hurray!” shouts the crowd. “It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle! Set him free! Set him free!” and Gunn, the German, is set free.Then Andre, the Frenchman, is brought up.“Which way do you want to go?” asks the black-hooded executioner, “face-up or face-down?”“I am a man of zee earth!” exclaims Andre. “I will go face-down!”The Frenchman is placed face-down on the block. The huge guillotine blade is slowly raised into position. There is a tense hush over the crowd. Then the lever is pulled and the blade plunges with tremendous force toward the waiting Frenchman’s neck – but at the last moment it screeches to a grinding halt.“Another miracle! Another miracle!” screams the crowd. “Free him, too! Let him go!” And the Frenchman is set free.Then Sagar, the Proper, carefully mounts the stage stairs. Adjusting his crystal necklace, combing his hair and removing some dust off his shirt, he stands ready before the executioner.“So what will it be for you?” asks the executioner, removing his hood to reveal himself as the master of masters, Osho. “Face-up or face-down?”“Are you kidding?” says Proper Sagar, bowing to touch the master’s feet. “I’m not going near that thing until you get it fixed!”Balonski is totally drunk and he staggers into a fairground. He goes up to the rifle range and says, “Give me ten shots!”“That will be two dollars,” laughs the attendant.Balonski fumbles around, pays the money, grabs the gun, and fires ten quick shots, each of them a perfect bull’s-eye.The attendant is shocked and amazed as he hands Balonski the grand prize, a twelve-inch, live turtle.Some time later the drunk returns, dropping his bottle of vodka on the counter. He plops down two dollars, grabs the gun and fires another ten shots – again, all of them perfect bull’s-eyes.Flustered, the attendant sweeps his arm across the prizes and says, “Choose anything you want.”Balonski looks around blinking and then says, “Just give me another one of those crunchy sandwiches!”On their tenth wedding anniversary, Herman and Hettie Horowitz decide to make a trip around Europe. They fly from LA to Paris and rent a car.A week later they are driving through the Austrian Alps when they see a small signpost which reads: “Wishing Well – first turn left.”Herman is a little skeptical but he follows the signpost and stops the car next to an old, stone well. The couple get out of the car and go over to the well.Herman leans over the well, and following the instructions he throws in a coin, then silently makes his wish.Then Hettie does the same, but she leans too far, loses her balance and falls head-first into the well.“Wow!” shouts Herman, stepping back. “It really works!”Nivedano…(Drumbeat)(Gibberish)Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Be silent, close your eyes…feel your body to be frozen.Collect all your life energy inward,move toward the center.This is the door we have been talking about.Don’t get stuck with the door, look beyond.Even a few steps beyond the door will bean immense experience.Going beyond the door,you are moving in the oceanic reality.You are no more.The door was your boundary – you have gone beyond it.These are the most blissful moments of your life…This is your buddhahood.To make it more clear, Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Relax, leave the body aside, the mind aside…and you stand just aloof…a watcher, just a witness.This is the heart of the buddha.This is his great contribution to humanity –that just by watching, witnessing,you can enter into the eternal.Drink as much as you canfrom your original source.It will refresh you, it will resurrect you,it will give you a new character.And without any effortyou will find yourself changing every day.Your whole life will become a dance, a song.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Come back, but bring with you the fragrance, the silence,the beautitude that you are experiencing.Sit down for a few moments just reminding yourselfthat you are the buddha,that eternity is yours,that you are beyond life and death,that you are part of this immense universewhich is always here.Can we celebrate the gathering of the ten thousand buddhas?

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

Turning In 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Turning In 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/turning-in-06/

Osho,Hakuin said:My humble advice to you distinguished persons who study the profound mystery of the buddha-dharma is this: Your close examination of yourself must be as urgent as saving your own head were it ablaze; your efforts to penetrate into your own original nature must be as tireless as the pursuit of an indispensable thing; your attitude toward the verbal teachings of the buddhas and patriarchs must be as hostile as that toward a deadly enemy.In Zen, he who does not bring strong doubt to bear upon the koans is a dissolute, knavish good-for-nothing. Therefore it is said: “Underlying great doubt there is great satori; where there is thorough questioning there will be a thorough-going experience of awakening.”Do not say, “Since my thoughts are always flying about in confusion, I lack the power to apply myself to genuine concentration on my koan.”Suppose that, among the dense crowd of people in the hurly-burly of the marketplace, a man accidentally loses two or three pieces of gold. You will never find anyone who, because the place is noisy and bustling or because he has dropped his pieces of gold in the dirt, will not turn back to look for them. He pushes any number of people about, stirs up a lot of dust, and weeping copious tears rushes around searching for his gold. If he doesn’t get it back into his own two hands, he will never regain his peace of mind. Do you consider the priceless jewel worn in the hair, your own inherent, marvelous Tao, of less value than two or three pieces of gold?Maneesha, Zen is the only revolutionary religion in the world. All the other religions are traditional, orthodox, superstitious, fundamentally based on belief. Any religion that is based on belief is a fiction, because belief simply means a repressed doubt.Zen is an exception: it does not believe in anything – not even in the scriptures, not even in the sutras of Gautam Buddha. Belief, as such, is denied completely. I agree with it, without any condition; that has been my own whole approach.Truth has to be experienced, not believed. Once you believe in it you will never experience it. Truth has to be searched for. Out of necessity, you have to doubt all the theories and ideologies propounded by the scriptures and others. If you don’t doubt them, you will be in a sheer confusion. If you believe in them you will stop there, at your belief. Your god will be a belief, not a truth. Your own very self will be just a belief, not something that you have lived, not something that you have danced, not something that you have touched. All beliefs take you away from yourself.To find out the truth, you have to learn the art of disbelief.Hence Zen has a very special position. Atheists also disbelieve, but they stop at their disbelief, just as theists stop at their belief. The atheist’s disbelief is only negative belief; it is nothing different. But when Zen talks of disbelief or doubt, it simply means a challenge to explore; not something to settle at, but to begin from there. You have discarded and eliminated all beliefs, all disbeliefs: then your pure consciousness asserts itself on its own accord. And the beauty of spontaneous flowering is the only beauty in the world.Hakuin says:– and Hakuin is one of the masters to be listened to very carefully –My humble advice to you distinguished persons who study the profound mystery of the buddha-dharma is this: your close examination of yourself must be as urgent as saving your own head were it ablaze.He is saying that your inquiry should be so intense and total…as if it is a question of life and death. If you don’t find it, your life is futile and fruitless. Unless you find it, you cannot blossom and dance and sing in joy. There will not be any rejoicing, any celebration, any festivity in your life. Your life will be a dark, unending night where the sun never rises.Your efforts to penetrate into your own original nature must be as tireless as the pursuit of an indispensable thing; your attitude toward the verbal teachings of the buddhas and patriarchs must be as hostile as that toward a deadly enemy.This can be said only by a great master, a buddha himself. He is saying that Your attitude toward the verbal teachings of the buddhas and the great masters must be as hostile as that toward a deadly enemy. The implication is that you should not believe in the word, but look for the experience. The word may be coming from the greatest master, but still, it is a word. And howsoever Buddha may have found himself, his nourishment is not going to be your nourishment. If he has quenched his thirst, all that he can say is, “Water has helped me to quench my thirst.” You can go on repeating “H2O” as a mantra but your thirst will not be quenched.Zen says: Think of all the great words and great teachings as your deadly enemy. Avoid them, because you have to find your own source.You have not to be a follower, an imitator. You have to be an original individual; you have to find your innermost core on your own, with no guide, no guiding scriptures.It is a dark night, but with the intense fire of inquiry, you are bound to come to the sunrise. Everybody who has burned with intense inquiry has found the sunrise. Others only believe. Those who believe are not religious, they are simply avoiding the great adventure of religion by believing.In Zen, he who does not bring strong doubt to bear upon the koans is a dissolute, knavish good-for-nothing. Therefore it is said: “Underlying great doubt there is great satori; where there is thorough questioning there will be a thorough-going experience of awakening.”This is a unique quality of Zen. It says that hidden behind a great doubt is your satori, your enlightenment.What exactly is doubt? Doubt means eliminating anything that is borrowed. It is not saying that something is not true, it says that “It is not my truth. And unless something is my truth, I am not going to discontinue my search.”Doubt means a great love for truth, which never compromises for any cheap beliefs which are available in the marketplace, in every temple, in every church, in every synagogue. All the religions are telling you just to believe and you will be saved. This is pure nonsense, because millions of people have believed and nobody seems to be saved.Millions of people are believing today, but the world is a mess. Their belief does not change the world, their belief does not change them, their belief makes no difference at all in their character. It does only one thing: it functions as an umbrella. It keeps them hiding from a great inquiry that is our basic right. They go on repressing the inquiry with belief, saying, “What is the point of knowing the truth? – Krishna has known it. Just read Shrimad Bhagavadgita every day, and that’s all.” Why should you bother to inquire yourself?Or they say that Buddha has found it and he has told it: now there is no need for you to find it again.This is what belief means. It takes your individual inquiry away from you. But remember, with the inquiry gone, the individuality is also gone. All the religions together have conspired to take away the dignity of man, because they have taken man’s individuality. They have made people into a crowd, a crowd of believers.Zen wants you to be an individual seeker. Throw away all the scriptures, burn all the scriptures, never take anybody’s word as your truth. It is a great challenge, and it needs strength, it needs integrity, it needs a love for truth at any cost. Only those who gamble everything for truth are the blessed ones.The world of religion is not the world of the businessman. It is the world of the gambler, who risks everything on the unknown – he does not know what is going to happen.I am reminded…A Japanese actor earned much money in Hollywood, and after earning so much money he thought to go back home and relax: “Enough is enough – there is no point to going on earning. There is a little time before death knocks on the doors, and it will be good to rest.”But before returning to Japan he thought he should go around the world to have a look before he settled in Japan. He went to Paris, and in a gambling place he risked everything that he had earned – millions of dollars, just in one go. Even the owner was trembling, every gambler there was perspiring: “My God, what kind of man is this?”He did not save a single dollar, he gambled everything, and lost. And then he went to his room and went to sleep.The next morning, in the newspapers, there was news that a Japanese man had jumped from the seventh floor of a building and had killed himself. In the hotel everybody thought that it must be the Japanese who risked everything, but in this hotel there were not seven stories. And he had gone to his bed, so they went and knocked on the door. The man opened the door. Those people were shocked to see him – he was perfectly alive. They said, “Have you seen the morning newspaper?”He said, “Yes, I see that some Japanese has committed suicide from a seventh floor. And I knew you all would think I was going to commit suicide, but I’m not the one to accept defeat. I will earn money again, and I will come back to this hotel to put down just as much money – more than this time!”And he went back to Hollywood. When he came back after earning enough money, more than the first time, that gambling place had closed. It was too risky. The man said, “What is the matter? Just a day before you were open and now you are closed.”They said, “You can gamble somewhere else. There are many gambling places in Paris, but don’t frighten us. You are a man of strange steel.”A man who can gamble everything for the unknown result – that’s exactly the situation of a religious man. You are renouncing all the scriptures and all the great masters’ words, and you are going into your own inner world without any guide, without any map, without any companion, alone, on a path never walked by anybody. Your inner path is your path; nobody else can walk on it.But if one can doubt totally, denying all that is not his own, it creates an immense purity and creates great power, it gives a tremendous freedom – all which are absolutely necessary to inquire into your own being. What is there? Nobody can say it. Only you have to go there, and only you can go there.Hakuin is saying that there will be a thorough-going awakening where there is thorough-going questioning.Go on questioning everything that the religions have been telling you to believe. Belief is the greatest barrier to the religious man. But just the contrary has been preached: faith and belief are praised by all religions. And the world that we see is the result of this stupid teaching – believing and having faith. Out of a thousand years of believing what have you gained? Where are you? The world has never been in more of a mess than it is today. If you want to get out of the mess, please throw out all that you have believed up to now.Be utterly naked of belief, and the truth is not very far away. Just turn in and it is there. It does not come by faith, it comes by turning in. Faith is outside, belief is outside. Only turning in brings a transformation in being.Do not say, “Since my thoughts are always flying about in confusion, I lack the power to apply myself to genuine concentration on my koan.”Suppose that, among the dense crowd of people in the hurly-burly of the marketplace, a man accidentally loses two or three pieces of gold. You will never find anyone who, because the place is noisy and bustling or because he has dropped his pieces of gold in the dirt, will not turn back to look for them. He pushes any number of people about, stirs up a lot of dust, and weeping copious tears rushes around searching for his gold. If he doesn’t get it back into his own two hands, he will never regain his peace of mind.Hakuin is saying that the loss of even two or three pieces of gold is enough to make you look for them, but you don’t know what a treasure is hidden inside you, what a splendor you are carrying.Do you consider the priceless jewel worn in the hair, your own inherent, marvelous Tao, of less value than two or three pieces of gold?You never bother about who is hidden inside you, what is the source of your being.Those who have known the source, they are unanimously in agreement that it is the most precious experience that can happen in this world. It is the most universal which gives you a deathlessness, and which gives your life a tremendous freshness, and in each moment a radiance, a grace, a beauty. Your whole life becomes a celebration.And this is something that nobody can steal away. This is something that nobody can destroy. Even death is incapable of touching it. It is your eternal treasure. From eternity to eternity, it is yours – but you never look at it.Dangai wrote:Earth, river, mountain:snowflakes melt in air.How could I have doubted?Where isNorth? South? East? West?Once you know, doubt commits suicide on its own accord. Never believe; let the doubt die. That is a totally different situation. When you believe, doubt remains alive – in fact, very forcibly alive.One Christian missionary, Stanley Jones, said to me, “My faith in Jesus Christ is absolute!”I said, “You simply analyze your own statement. Is not faith enough? Has it to be absolute? What is the purpose of the word absolute? Faith is enough, if it is there. But it is not there. Just by the side of faith are disbelief, unfaith, doubt – all are there. To cover them up you have to bring a bigger umbrella. Absolute faith simply shows that your doubt is very great. Ordinary people have small doubts; their faith is small. You are a learned scholar, a world-famous scholar – naturally your doubt is going to be very great.”He said, “I had never looked from this angle, but perhaps you are right.” He was a very honest man. He said, “I will have to think it over.”When somebody says to somebody else, “I love you absolutely,” then you have to be aware. Don’t get caught in absolute love affairs – just temporary is good. Absolute is going to be a constant murder!The real lovers don’t even say “I love you.” They will not use the word love for their great experience. The word is very small and used too many times; it has lost its freshness. It is my experience that when love starts disappearing, people start saying to each other, “I love you very much.” It is only when love starts disappearing, when they become aware that love is no more there, now only words can continue the misery that they used to call love. Now they have to repeat it continuously.But if you know, then the moment you have dropped all belief, including disbelief; when your doubt is total, suddenly there is an explosion, as if the fire of your being, which was hidden, has come to its fully-fledged form. Its flames are even reaching out of you. You are on fire! In this case there is no question of doubt and there is no question of belief. You simply know.Once a Western journalist asked Shri Aurobindo, “Do you believe in God?” It is a very common question. Shri Aurobindo said, “No.”The man was very much puzzled. He had come to see him from far away just because he had heard that he was a man of God. So the journalist was not going to just leave Shri Aurobindo at that.He asked, “What do you mean by saying no?”Aurobindo said, “When you know something, you do not believe. Do you believe in the sun? Do you believe in the starry night? Do you believe in the roses? You see they are there: there is no question of belief.”Belief arises only in darkness, when you don’t know. And belief keeps you in darkness – because of belief you never try to discover on your own what is the truth.A haiku:Butterflies setting outto cross the sea,have disappeared:my self comes back to me.He is saying that all our thoughts are nothing but butterflies trying to cross the sea: they will disappear somewhere. Have you watched your thoughts? If you have lived forty or fifty years, how many million thoughts have crossed the sea and disappeared? Every day, you go on creating new thoughts and they go on disappearing into the dust. Only one thing remains with you, and that is your am-ness. Only you remain.As a Zen poet has said, “Clouds come and go and the sky remains.” It never goes anywhere, it never comes from anywhere. You are the sky. Anything that happens in this sky is just a traffic – no need to be concerned about it, no need to be identified with it.Maneesha has asked a question:Osho,I have understood you to encourage us to keep the ability to doubt always alive. Is there no point at which doubt is no longer needed? A point when it is no longer helpful?Yes, there comes a point when you know the truth, when doubt simply dies. It is no more useful, no more helpful. It is just a shadow that disappears, as when you bring light into a house and all the darkness disappears.Doubt is part of the dark night. It is useful when the night is there to give you an impetus, a persistence, a perseverance to search for the rising sun. But once you have reached the rising sun the darkness disappears, and with it the doubt too.Now, a few really serious things…Zabriski and Klopski are sitting around the Smoking Senorita pub, enjoying a few beers.“Hey,” says Zabriski, “you won’t believe it, but I came home last night and found my wife sprawled on the couch making love to some other guy.”“Really?” coughs Klopski. “I hope you knew how to handle it.”“I sure did!” exclaims Zabriski. “I fixed them. I turned out the lights so they could not see what they were doing!”Little Ernie is studying the properties of electricity in his class.“We are going to learn about some of the practical uses of electricity,” says Miss Goodbody. “So tomorrow I want everyone to bring some electric tool to show us.”The next day there is much excitement as the kids bring their electric bulbs, hair dryers, irons and all kinds of things. When Ernie arrives he is sweating and carrying a huge artificial lung on his back.“Ernest!” says a surprised Miss Goodbody, “where in heaven’s name did you get that electric lung?”“I took it from grandpa’s room,” says Ernie, smiling.“And he didn’t mind?” cries Miss Goodbody.“I don’t think so, teacher,” replies Ernie. “He just said, ‘Glrrrrrr…’”On a Lufthansa flight from Berlin to New York, Harry Jablonski is sitting next to a beautiful young woman.“Hello,” says Harry, casually eyeing the pretty girl. “Are you German?”“Ja,” says the girl.“How nice,” says Harry, his eyes twitching slightly. “May I ask your name?”“Ja, okay,” she replies. “My name is Hilda Brombeck.”“Well hello, Hilda,” Harry says, loosening his tie. “Is this your first trip to New York?”“Ja, it is,” replies Hilda. “I’m going on business.”“Really?” inquires Harry. “May I ask what kind of business?”“Ja, sure,” says Hilda. “I’m going to the International Congress of Nymphomaniacs.”“Really?” exclaims Harry, beginning to perspire. “Uh…that is fascinating. May I ask, what do you do at this congress?”“Ja,” says Hilda. “We discuss important issues like which men have the longest, hardest pricks. And which men can screw for the longest time. Things like that.”“Really?” squeaks Harry, taking off his coat. “May I ask which men do have the longest pricks?”“Ja,” says Hilda. “Those sweet Jewish men have those long pricks.”“Really?” splutters Harry. “And may I ask, which ones can screw the longest time?”“Ja, sure!” replies the beautiful girl. “It is the American Indians who give the longest screw.”“Really?” cries Harry, grabbing off his glasses.“Ja!” smiles Hilda. “And by the way,” she continues, “you have not told me your name.”“Oh, my name?” gasps Harry, his eyes bulging out, “my name is Running Bear Goldstein!”Nivedano…(Drumbeat)(Gibberish)Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Be silent, close your eyes.Feel your body to be frozen.Gather all your life-energy like an arrow,going deeper and deeper into your being,to the very roots.Here is the source not only of your life,but of all life.Here are the roots connecting youwith the universal source of life.In this space, you are the original man.In this space, you are the buddha.This is your home.You can go out, but never forget the home.This is your nourishment, your consciousness,your very life energy.Keep it pure and flowing, and it will changeyour character, your lifestyle, your actions.It will bring grace and compassion and love,just as flowers come to the rosebush.Anything that comes out of this space is yours.It will make you feel independent, individual, on your own.There is no question of doubt or faith – you know it.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Relax, just to make it clear thatthe body is lying, the head is lying,and you are simply watching.Just be a watcher, a witness.This is the greatest miracle in the world –to be a witness…You can remain a witness twenty-four hours,doing all kinds of things.You can also remain watchful, alert, aware.The day you are for twenty-four hours aware,without any effort, spontaneously, naturally,you have come home.You have become a buddha,which was your destiny.Right now you are only a seed, a bodhisattva.When the seed becomes a flower,the bodhisattva transforms itself into a buddha.It is all your potentiality,you don’t have to seek it anywhere else.I call it the miraclebecause we are searching everywherefor just two or three gold coins,and an eternal treasure is available to us…the whole gold mine!Every one of you is a splendor, a majesty,a magic, a miracle.If you can just remember your buddhahood,the journey is complete.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Come back, all the buddhas.Slowly, silently, gracefully,remembering the experienceand the space you have been in.Sit down for a few moments,just being a buddha,a pure sky, a silent lake, an empty mirror.Can we celebrate the gathering of the buddhas?

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

Turning In 01-08Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Turning In 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/turning-in-07/

Osho,Bankei said:What I tell people about is nothing special; it’s the unborn, enlightened, no-mind innate in everyone. What is it about?While you are all here listening to my sermon, when a dog barks outside the temple, you know it is a dog, and when a crow caws, you know it is a crow. And also you can distinguish the colors black and white, and see the difference between men and women.Even though you are not thinking about hearing dogs and crows, or seeing black, white, men or women during the talk; nonetheless, right here you can see and hear them all, before conceptually discriminating them. Then even if a thousand or ten thousand people should tell someone that a dog’s bark is a crow’s caw, that person would hardly be deceived by them.Isn’t this enlightened no-mind, with its inconceivable qualities of clear awareness, something to be grateful for?Because people don’t know that everyone has such wonderful qualities and powers, they get confused by one thing and another. That confusion ultimately arises from self-importance.Self-importance means, for example, that you get angry and upset when you hear your neighbor criticize you, and only dislike and maltreat that person. Also, when you hear your neighbor praise you, you think well of that person, and act nicely; this too is because of self-importance.Considering the root source of this self-importance, when people are born they have no bad thoughts of hatred or liking for anyone. It is just that, as they grow up, they learn and cultivate various bad things and bad thoughts by seeing and hearing them, piling them up into mental habits. Always putting these mental habits to use, various kinds of confusion and error begin.Maneesha, before I discuss the very important man of Zen, Bankei, and his remarkable statements, I have to introduce Avirbhava’s new gods for the museum. Before I do it, I will say something to you about insects, which are worshipped by many people as gods.This museum is going to be a hilarious phenomenon. It is going to be a mirror for you of what humanity has been doing – its priests, its so-called wise men, all driving humanity into different directions of stupidity. But when religious garbage is poured on anything, poor people, the poor masses believe in it. And this is not only in the ancient world; man has worshipped almost anything, and is still worshipping almost anything, without considering at all that it is very undignified, that you are destroying your own humanity.My researchers have found that certain creatures of various insect species have been considered to be expressions of God since the earliest times.“According to the legends of the Teton Indians in America, the spider was the first creature in life to attain maturity. Particularly the gray spiders were heralded as the patron saints of traveling. The Indians would stomp on a spider before setting out on the trail and pray to its spirit for a safe journey.”A good idea! Released from the body, now the spirit can guide.I have told you before that there is a species of spiders: when the male and female spiders are making love, the male spider becomes so drunk, so orgasmic, his long legs trembling…and the female spider starts eating him. By the time his orgasm is finished, he is finished.Somebody has informed me that there is another spider which is a little more intelligent. First he brings a fly as a present to the girlfriend, so while he is making love, she is eating the fly – just to save his own life. She has to eat something. Certainly it is an intelligent step.You also bring ice cream and roses and sweets and chocolates; the reason is the same. If you don’t give the woman something to eat, she will eat you! Just let her chew something and she will not chew you.“These spiders have also been considered to be incarnations of the spirit of fertility in certain primitive societies, including those of Polynesia and the Philippines.Butterflies were worshipped as family gods in Samoa, and were considered to be the incarnations of the bushman god, Kay-gon.Beetles have been considered holy since ancient times. In Egypt, the scarab, or dung beetle, was worshipped as a direct descendant of the god Ra. Ra is the greatest god of the Egyptian religion” and his direct descendant is the dung beetle!“Even today, in Southern Africa, the Hottentots sacrifice live sheep and cows to the glorious beetle.”But remember also that in India, in the times of the Rig Vedas, horses were sacrificed, cows were sacrificed, even man was sacrificed to please the gods. And who are the gods? Somebody is a monkey, somebody is an elephant…and man is sacrificed, killed and eaten by the priest as a prasad, as the god’s gift. And this is being done to praise the gods so they don’t become angry.Before I ask Avirbhava to bring her new additions to the museum, a little joke:Two cockroaches, Clod and Crunch, are enjoying dinner on a pile of garbage in Pune.“Do you know,” says Clod, “that they have just built a new apartment building on Burning Ghats Road?”“Really?” says Crunch, munching on an old banana peel.“Yes,” says Clod, “and the kitchen is so clean there is not a speck of dust anywhere. In the refrigerator everything is spotless. In fact, there is not a crumb of dirt in the whole place.”“Please, please!” says Crunch, spitting out his banana peel, “not while I’m eating!”Okay, Avirbhava, bring your things.– Three huge butterflies start dancing around the podium, humming wildly. A large moth flies up to the roof of the auditorium, while a spider and a caterpillar parade past.Osho is chuckling in his chair, and everyone is going crazy with laughter, enjoying the show tremendously.)Bankei said:What I tell people about is nothing special.That makes it special, because ordinarily people who are saying ordinary things think that they are very special. Only a man who has attained to buddhahood can make such a statement: What I tell people about is nothing special; it is just simple and ordinary. The desire to be special is the desire of the ignorant; the desire to be simple is the desire of the conscious. It is only the unconscious mind which creates the ego of being special. When the unconscious mind is gone, everything simply is. There is nothing extraordinary in it.He is saying,…it’s the unborn, enlightened, no-mind innate in everyone.Whatever I am saying is to provoke the sleeping buddha in everyone. It is everyone’s inherent nature – how can it be special? It is another matter that millions have decided never to look in; that is why we have very few buddhas in the world. But even then, it does not become a special thing.Those who are closing their eyes, keeping their backs toward themselves, can turn in a single moment. In a single moment the whole world can become a buddhafield.While you are all here listening to my sermon, when a dog barks outside the temple, you know it is a dog, and when a crow caws, you know it is a crow. And also you can distinguish the colors black and white, and see the difference between men and women.Even though you are not thinking about hearing dogs or crows, or seeing black, white, men or women during the talk; nonetheless, right here you can see and hear them all, before conceptually discriminating them. Then even if a thousand or ten thousand people should tell someone that a dog’s bark is a crow’s caw, that person would hardly be deceived by them.What he is saying is that one who has known his buddhahood, even if ten thousand people try to convince him that it is not so, he cannot be convinced. It is indubitably certain for him that his self-nature is eternal and ultimate.But the point is that it should not be a belief, it should be an experience. If it is only a belief, then anybody can criticize it: a better argument, a better intelligence, can destroy it completely. But if it is your experience then the whole world can be on one side, and still you will say that “I am experiencing it, hence it does not matter how many people are against me. No argumentation can destroy my confidence in my own experience.”Philosophy is more concerned with argument, and following philosophy, religions have created theology; that is the argument for God. That is exactly the meaning of theology: logic for God. But nobody has ever been able to prove the existence of God logically. Great treatises and very intelligent people have been involved in it.Zen has never made any theology or any philosophy. It is an existential approach, not intellectual; you have to experience it, no belief is needed. Once you know it, no argument can destroy it. Knowing is very simple, getting from mind to no-mind is within your reach. Becoming a witness of your thoughts is the simplest thing in the world, even without knowing you are witnessing them. When you say, “I am feeling anger,” what do you mean? If you don’t witness anger, then how can you say, “I am feeling anger,” or “I am feeling a headache?” Who is feeling the headache? There must be a witness beyond the head. There must be a witness beyond all your feelings – love, anger, hate – beyond all your thoughts, beyond all your beliefs. This witness is simply the miracle of Zen.Zen has pointed to the very central fact that transforms man and brings him into a totally new world of eternity where death does not exist, where misery has never been heard of, where suffering is unknown. On the contrary there are only blessings; there is only blissfulness, only benediction, and a tremendous gratitude as a prayer to the whole existence in thankfulness.Isn’t this enlightened no-mind, with its inconceivable qualities of clear awareness, something to be grateful for?Because people don’t know that everyone has such wonderful qualities and powers, they get confused by one thing and another. That confusion ultimately arises from self-importance.All your confusions are arising out of your desire to be important. You try to show that which you are not. You say things which you don’t know. You advise people although you don’t follow the advice yourself.Kahlil Gibran has a story: In a big city there were many dogs, and one dog was a philosopher. Rarely does such a disease happen to dogs, but once in a while, for a change, there are exceptions. He continuously preached from morning till night to every dog, “Because of your barking our whole doghood loses its dignity; otherwise we are the highest animals in the world. Just stop barking unnecessarily.”The dogs were always very thankful for his advice, but said, “What to do? A strange urge arises – seeing a postman, or a sannyasin, or a policeman, anybody in uniform.” Dogs are very much against uniforms. They seem to be very free thinkers. They don’t want people to be in a crowd, they want everybody to be individual, themselves.Everybody respected the philosopher dog. He was thought to be the wisest ever born of their species. He never barked. But one night, a dark night, the other dogs decided, “He has been preaching for years and nobody listens; it makes us so ashamed. At least to give him peace, one night we should try to stop barking – just for one night. It is going to be difficult, but we will hide in dark corners of streets, in dark groves and keep control. It is only a question of a few hours and in the morning we will be free to bark.”The philosopher went around and he could not meet any dog. He could not believe: “Where have all the dogs disappeared to?” And there was such a silence and nobody for him to teach, and suddenly a great urge to bark arose in him. Now he knew why he was not barking – because from morning to night, all his energy was involved in teaching; there was no time nor energy to bark. And in front of everybody else how could he bark – against his own philosophy?But now there were no other dogs, so the question of preaching was not there. Neither was there any witness that he was barking against his own wisdom. So he walked and barked as much as he could, because it was a lifelong repressed feeling. Nobody had ever heard such barking; he went almost crazy. All the dogs of the city who were hiding here and there slowly, slowly gathered by his side. And when they saw that their philosopher himself was barking there was an explosion: thousands of dogs were barking. And for the first time the philosopher felt his humbleness – that he too is a dog, and he was unnecessarily harassing others and harassing himself.The religions have done the same to man: they have harassed themselves and their followers into all kinds of self-torture, into all kinds of unnaturalness. They have given them the greed to be great saints. They have given them the greed that they will be a beloved of God if they follow certain principles. Nobody follows! All people have back doors in their lives.At the front door you will meet one person, and at the back door you will meet somebody else – at the back door he will be more natural. At the front door or in the sitting room the person is a gentleman, or a lady, hiding everything natural. But Zen wants you to be natural and not split; the front door and back door should not be two doors.You should have only one face, your own original face. And you should be grateful that nature has given you a tremendous opportunity to be creative, to be loving, to be silent, to be able to know the ultimate source of life. Nothing more can be asked. And everything is so easy if you simply drop your egoistic idea of being special.Self-importance means, for example, that you get angry and upset when you hear your neighbor criticize you, and only dislike and maltreat the person. Also, when you hear your neighbor praise you, you think well of that person, and act nicely; this too is because of self-importance.A man of simplicity will neither feel gratified by anybody’s praise nor will feel angry at anybody’s anger. Those are their problems – why are you unnecessarily taking them? Somebody is angry, he is burning in his own anger, in his own fire – why do you immediately jump in? Somebody is praising you and you immediately accept it knowing perfectly well that nobody is going to praise you unless he has some purpose. The moment somebody says to you, “You are so beautiful, so intelligent,” beware! That person wants to exploit you in some way or other. Otherwise who has time to praise you – and why?So whenever somebody says to you, “You are so beautiful,” immediately say, “Shut up! It is my problem, not your problem.”Neither accept praise nor accept anger, and just remain attuned to your simplicity.Considering the root source of this self-importance, when people are born they have no bad thoughts of hatred or liking for anyone. It is just that, as they grow up, they learn and cultivate various bad things and bad thoughts by seeing and hearing them, piling them up into mental habits. Always putting these mental habits to use, various kinds of confusion and error begin.Every child is born a buddha. Then slowly, slowly he starts imitating others; as time passes he forgets his simplicity, his buddhahood. He is lost in the crowd, which is a vast jungle in which he will meet all kinds of people but not a buddha. He will imitate all kinds of people and will not think for a single moment, “Is life just imitation?” And can imitation give you any joy, just being a carbon copy?Unless you are original, simply yourself, you can never have joy enough to dance and sing, joy enough to be grateful to existence.But every child is driven into conditioning. You should ask your conditioning what you are doing and why you are doing it. Why are you smoking? – just because others are smoking. Why, in a hot country, are you wearing a tie? – because every gentleman…When I was a professor in the university I was continually amazed. The city I was in was exactly in the center of India, very hot, and the professors were putting on ties and shoes and wearing coats, and perspiring. And I would say, “Who is telling you to do all these things? If you want to perspire, you can go to a sauna bath. But why? To have a twenty-four-hour sauna bath is not good.”But the people who had been ruling India for three hundred years had come from cold countries, and they had brought their habits. And the ruling party becomes an example: whoever is ruling must be right. The British people even living in India never dropped their habits.Knowing perfectly that this is a hot country, carrying habits which they had cultivated in England is absolutely stupid. Not only did they carry them, but they taught their habits in every school, college and university, to every bureaucrat, to all people in important posts in the government – and nobody took note that this is a hot country.One of my friends, a scholar of Tibetan, wanted to go to Tibet. I said, “You will not be able to survive.”He asked, “Why?”I said, “You are such an orthodox and stupid brahmin” – both things go together – “that unless you take a cold bath before sunrise and then do your puja, your worship, you can only then take even a cup of tea. Before taking a bath, you cannot do anything. And do you know that in the Tibetan scriptures it is said that everybody should have a bath at least once a year? And that, too, people don’t follow. Who follows scriptures? But when this is written in the scriptures, that means that, all things considered, at least one bath per year is not too much.”He said, “You unnecessarily create confusion. I am completely ready to go.”I said, “I will see you back after three days.” And on the third day I received him at the airport. He looked very shy, and I said, “What happened?”He said, “You were right. It is too cold, and without taking a bath I cannot do my puja, and I cannot even take my breakfast; there is no question of lunch and dinner. The first thing is a bath before sunrise.”Friends in Tibet tried to help him: “This is a different climate, totally different. You are in the land of eternal ice, everything is frozen since eternity. Do you want to kill yourself?”In three days he had double pneumonia; he rushed back home. He said he would not have reached back alive if he had stayed longer. Scholarship is one thing, but your life…I said, “It is good. In the morning you had gone wrong, in the evening you have come home. But now learn another lesson: why do you go on wearing the tie and the coat and the hat – because you are a professor?”When I went to the university in my lungi and a shawl, they were so shocked that nobody had the courage even to ask, “What is the matter?” Finally the vice-chancellor called me to his room. He closed the door, because he knew that I might say something which might become troublesome. And he said, “This is too much.”I said, “What is too much? I am being paid for my teaching, not for my clothes. And you cannot decide what I should wear. And if you insist I will not wear anything.”He said, “Wait! Something is good, better than nothing. You can do as you like, but do at least one thing, just to please me – don’t use these wooden sandals, because they disturb the whole university. Wherever you go, for miles it can be heard that you are arriving.”I said, “It is a question of principle; it is a question of religion.”“A question of religion? I never thought of that. I have myself been a professor of philosophy and religion.”I said, “You don’t know much. In India for thousands of years, all the monks – Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist – have used wooden sandals for the sake of being non-violent. Because shoes are made of leather, some animal has to be killed. It is not that I am mad; I am simply following a long tradition of all the greatest men born in this country.”He said, “That’s good. But do something so that they don’t make so much noise.”It is because of him that I had to change from wooden sandals to rubber and velvet. But I have consistently been true to the idea that leather shoes show your indifference to life. They are anti-life. And I have used a special design for my shoes which keeps the feet completely open, so in the heat there is no need for me to perspire.Every child, if left and helped to grow according to his own sensibilities, will bring something beautiful into the world, some unique personality. Right now everybody is a copy of everybody else.This very vice-chancellor, when for the first time I entered the university, looked at me and asked, “Why are you growing a beard?”I said, “I am not growing it, it is growing. Don’t ask nonsense questions. On the contrary, I can ask why you are cutting your beard.”He said, “Settled. I will not ask anything and you will not ask anything.”I said, “No. You can ask anything, but you have to have the courage to receive the answer. You have to say that you asked a wrong question. I am not growing it, I am not pulling my hairs every day so that they grow; I am not watering them. You are shaving twice a day. My hairs are natural and you are unnecessarily becoming a woman.”He said, “What?”I said, “It is so easy to understand. Do you think a woman would look good with a beard? The same is true about you – without a beard, you look just like a woman. A little weird, but…”He said, “I promise never to disturb you, but don’t spread these ideas in the university, that I look like a woman, a little weird.”I looked as I wanted. I lived as naturally as I wanted. That has given me a tremendous sense of peace and integrity. There is no regret. There is no complaint against life, only deep gratitude.I want every one of you to live only according to your own consciousness. And as your meditation grows deeper, your consciousness will become wider. Live according to you, according to your consciousness, even if it goes against the whole world. Only then can you feel a sense of reality, a sense of solidarity, a sense of individuality.Basho wrote:I am a man who breakfastswith a view of morning gloriesopening in the dew.He is saying that he lives in nature. I am a man who breakfasts with a view of morning glories opening in the dew.In a very indirect way, in a poetic way, he is saying he is a natural man.Another Zen poet wrote:Among the greatest treasuresto be found on earth,being of nothingnessis the greatest.Just be nothing, and you have the greatest treasure in existence. Meditation slowly, slowly makes you nothing. Nothingness is your original face, and the miracle is that in nothingness you find everything, the whole world is yours.Maneesha has asked:Osho,Could it really be that one day enlightenment is seen as “nothing special”? Could children live simply through awareness, rather than conditioning, so that they pop off into nirvana almost as soon as they pop out into life?Maneesha, hope for the best…and expect the worst.Seamus is only five feet tall, but his girlfriend, Glenda, is six foot three. One night, when the two shy lovers are walking by the barn, Seamus asks for a kiss. Glenda consents, so Seamus stands on an old tractor engine and gives her a little kiss.They walk on a couple of miles down the country lane, and Seamus plucks up courage and asks Glenda for another kiss.“No!” Glenda replies haughtily. “I have given you all the kisses you are going to get tonight.”“Okay, then,” says Seamus in disgust, “in that case I am not going one step further with this son-of-a-bitch engine!”He was carrying the engine with him! Wherever chance arose…Seamus O’Ryan is feeling especially romantic, so he buys his girlfriend, Peggy, a bunch of roses. Peggy takes one look at the roses, smiles with a sly grin, and takes Seamus by the hand. She leads him slowly up the stairs to the bedroom, throwing off one piece of clothing at a time until she is completely naked. Then she lays seductively on the bed, strokes herself lightly, and opens her legs.“This,” she purrs sexily, “is for the roses.”“Don’t be silly,” replies Seamus. “They will last much longer in a vase!”It is supper time for Jesus, his cousin, Irving, and the twelve apostles. They are dining at the deluxe Pork and Pie restaurant, and everyone is having a gay time.Vintage Arab wines are flowing like water. The fellows are stuffing themselves as the waiters bring course after course of exotic dishes.The party is reaching a crescendo as the orchestra strikes up a hot number, and three dancing girls come in carrying a huge, two-hundred-pound stuffed pig.At this point Peter raises his cup of wine and shouts, “A toast to Lord Jesus!”“Yes, yes!” yells Thomas, jumping up, “a toast to Lord Jesus!”Everyone raises their cups and shouts in unison, “To the Lord Jesus!” – and they all drink.Curious, cousin Irving turns to Jesus and says, “How do you inspire such faithfulness in your men?”“It is fucking simple,” replies Jesus, pulling out his credit card. “It is either that, or every Jew for himself!”Now, Nivedano…(Drumbeat)(Gibberish)Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Be silent, close your eyes.Feel your body to be frozen.Collect all your life-energy inside,and move this inner forceas deeply as possible, like an arrow,to reach the very sourcefrom where you have sprungand from where everything has sprung.Deeper and deeper, without any fear.Be drowned…in the source of your being.It will resurrect you, it will give you a rebirth,it will bring new qualities to blossom:more awareness, more silence,more blissfulness, more ecstasy.You have to carry this experience aroundfor twenty-four hours.This is the buddha, the original man.Let this experience sink intoevery cell of your being, every nerve of your body.Once you know your buddha,it starts radiating through your mind,through your body,all around you, like an aura.A silent and peaceful light, a cool breeze,follows you in every activityjust like your shadow.To make it deeper and to feel it more clearly, Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Relax. Let go. The body is there, the mind is there, but they are not you.You are the watcher, you are the witness.This witness is the highest growth of consciousness.There is nothing beyond it.To remain a witness, awake or asleep,is the whole process of meditation;because once you are full of awareness, witnessing,you cannot do anything that is wrong.You don’t have to decide what is right, what is wrong – you simply do the right.It happens always to be the right.It is your spontaneity that blossoms like roses.Nivedano…(Drumbeat)Come back, but come back like buddhas.Silently, peacefully, gracefully, sit down for a few moments,relishing and grateful for the experience.Even if for a single moment you can touch your buddhahood,you have done a miracle.That single momentsoon will become your whole life.Can we celebrate the gathering of the buddhas?

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-01/

AumTasya nishchintanam dhyanam.AumMeditation is the constant contemplation of That.There are some points to ponder over before we step into the unknown. The unknown is the message of the Upanishads. The basic, the most foundational, always remains unknown; that which we know is always superficial. So some points must be understood before we can go deep into the realm of the unknown. These three words – the known, the unknown and the unknowable – must be understood first, because the Upanishads are concerned with the unknown only as a beginning. They end in the unknowable. The known realm becomes science, the unknown is philosophy and the unknowable belongs to religion.Philosophy is the link between the known and the unknowable, between science and religion. Philosophy is totally concerned with the unknown. The moment something becomes known it becomes part of science; it no longer remains a part of philosophy. So the more science grows, the more philosophy is pushed ahead. The field that becomes known becomes science, and philosophy is the link between science and religion. So as science progresses, philosophy has to be pushed ahead – because it can only be concerned with the unknown. But the more philosophy proceeds ahead, the more religion is pushed ahead – because religion is basically concerned with the unknowable.The Upanishads begin with the unknown; they end with the unknowable. That’s how misunderstanding arises. Professor M. G. Ranade has written a very deep book on the philosophy of the Upanishads, but it remains only a beginning, it cannot penetrate the deeper valleys of the Upanishadic mystery because it remains philosophical. The Upanishads begin with philosophy, but that is only a beginning. They end in religion, in the unknowable. When I say “unknowable,” I mean that which cannot be known.Whatsoever the effort may be, howsoever we may try, the moment we know something it becomes part of science, the moment we feel something as unknown it is part of philosophy, the moment we encounter the unknowable – only then is it religion. When I say the unknowable, I mean that which cannot be known but which can be encountered; it can be felt, it can even be lived. You can be face to face with it. It can be encountered, but still it remains unknowable. Only this much is felt – that now we are deep in a mystery which cannot be solved. So before we enter this mystery some points have to be understood, otherwise there will be no entrance.One is: how to listen, because there are different dimensions of listening. You can listen with your intellect, with your reason, mm? – that is one way of listening to a thing: the most common, the most ordinary and the most shallow, because with reason you are always either in defense or in attack. You are always fighting with reason, so whenever someone tries to understand something through reason he is fighting with the thing. At the most a very rudimentary understanding is possible, just an acquaintance is possible. The deeper meaning is bound to be missed because the deeper meaning needs a very sympathetic listening.Reason can never listen with sympathy. It listens with a very argumentative background. It can never listen with love; that is impossible. So listening with reason is good if you are trying to understand mathematics, if you are trying to understand logic, if you are trying to understand any system which is totally rational.If you listen to poetry with reason, then you will be blind. It is as if one is trying to see with one’s ears or to hear with one’s eyes. You cannot understand poetry through reason. So there is a deeper understanding – the second type of understanding – which is not through reason but through love, through feeling, through emotion, through heart.Reason is always in conflict; reason will not allow anything to pass in easily. It must be defeated; only then can something penetrate. It is an armor around the mind; it is a defense method, a defense measure. It is alert every moment that nothing should pass it unawares, and that nothing should be allowed in – unless reason is defeated. And even when reason is defeated the thing is not going into your heart, because in defeat you cannot feel sympathetic.The second dimension of listening is through heart, through feeling. Someone is listening to music; then no analysis is needed. Of course if you are a critic, then you will not be able to understand music. You may be able to understand the mathematics, the meter, the language, everything about music – but never the music itself, because music cannot be analyzed. It is a whole. It is a totality. If you wait for a single second to analyze it you have missed much. It is a flowing totality. Of course paper music can be analyzed, but never real music when it is playing. So you cannot stand aloof, you cannot be an observer; you have to be a participant. If you participate, only then do you understand.So through feeling…the way of understanding is through participation. You cannot be an observer, you cannot stand outside. You cannot make music an object. You have to flow with it, you have to be deeply in love with it. There will be moments when you will not be and only music will be there. Those will be the peaks; those moments will be the moments of music. Then something penetrates to your deeper being. This is a deeper way to listen, but it is still not the deepest.The first way is through reason – rational; the second is through feeling – emotional; and the third is through being – existential. When you listen through your reason, you are listening through one part of your being. Again, when you listen through your feeling, you are listening through one part of your being. The third, the deepest, the most authentic dimension of listening, is through your totality – body, mind, spirit – as a whole, as a oneness. If you understand this third way, only then will you be able to penetrate the mystery of the Upanishad.The traditional term for the third listening is “faith.” So we can divide through reason, the method is doubt; through feeling the method is love, sympathy; through being the method is faith, trust – because if we are going into the unknown, how can you doubt? You can doubt the known, but that which is not known at all – how can you doubt it?Doubt becomes valid if it is concerned with the known. With the unknown, doubt is just impossible. How can you love the unknown? You can love the known; you cannot love the unknown, you cannot create a relationship with the unknown. Relationship is impossible; you cannot relate with it. You can dissolve into it – that is another thing – but you cannot relate with it. You can surrender to it, but you cannot relate to it. Surrender is not a relationship. It is not a relationship at all. It is just dissolving the duality.So with reason the duality remains: you are in conflict with the other. With love the duality remains: you are in sympathy with the other. But with being the duality dissolves: you are neither in conflict nor in love, you are not related at all. This third is known traditionally as faith, trust – shraddha. As far as the unknown is concerned, faith is the key.If someone says, “How can I believe,” then he misunderstands, then he misses the very point. Faith is not belief. Belief is, again, a rational thing. You can believe, you can disbelieve. You can believe because you have arguments for believing, you can disbelieve because you have arguments for disbelieving. Belief is never deeper than reason. So theists, atheists, believers, nonbelievers, they all belong to the most shallow realm. Faith is not belief because for the unknown there is no reason for or against. You can neither believe nor disbelieve.So what remains to be done? You can either be open to it or you can be closed to it. It is not a question of believing or not believing, it is a question of being open or being closed to it. If you trust, then you open. If you distrust, then you remain closed. This is just a key. If you want to open to the unknown then you will have to be in trust, in faith. If you do not want to be open to it you can remain closed – but no one is missing except you, no one is at a loss except you. You will remain closed like a seed. When I say it, I mean it.A seed has to break, has to die, only then is the tree born. But the seed has never known the tree. The dying of the seed can happen only in faith. The tree is unknown, and the seed will never meet the tree. The seed can remain closed in fear, in fear of death – then the seed will remain a seed and ultimately will die without being reborn. But if the seed can die in faith that the unknown may be born out of its death, only then does it open. In a way it dies, in a way it is reborn – reborn into greater mysteries, reborn into a richer life. The same is the phenomenon with faith. So it is not belief: never misunderstand it as belief. It is not feeling. It is deeper than both. It is your totality.So how to listen with one’s totality? – with neither reason functioning in antagonism nor feeling functioning in sympathy, but with the totality of one’s being. How can the totality function? – because we know only functions of the parts, we do not know how the totality functions. We know only parts – this part functioning, that part functioning; intellect working, the heart functioning, the legs moving, the eyes seeing…. We know only parts functioning. How does the totality function? The totality functions only in a deep passivity. Nothing is active, everything is silent, you are not doing anything. You are just here – just presence – and the doors open. Only then will you be able to understand what the Upanishad’s message is. So your simple presence is needed – no doing on your part, no functioning. That is what is meant by “total functioning” – just your presence.I must make it more clear what I mean by “just presence.” If you are in love with someone, then there are moments when you are not doing anything. You are just present by your lover’s or beloved’s side: just present, totally silent; you are not even loving each other – just present. A very strange phenomenon happens. Ordinarily our existence is linear. We exist in a line, in a sequence – my past, my present, my future; this is a line. I move on my track, you move on your track. We have our tracks, linear tracks. Really, we never meet. We are parallel lines – no meeting. Even if we are crowded there is no meeting because you are on your track and I am on my track. You belong to your past, I belong to my past; my present is born out of my past, your present is born out of your past. Your future will be a causal sequence of your past and present, and mine will be of mine.So we move on tracks – linear tracks, one-line tracks. There is no meeting. Only lovers meet because suddenly, when you are just present with someone, a different time comes into existence. You both meet in a single moment, and this moment neither belongs to you nor to your lover. This is something new. This is neither out of your past nor out of your lover’s past. Time moves in a different dimension – not linear, not from the past to the future, but one present to another present. There is a meeting between two present moments – a different dimension. This dimension is known as the dimension of eternity. So lovers have said that one moment of love is eternity unto itself. It never ends. It has no future, it has no past. It is just present, here and now.This is what I mean when I say you can listen in such a totality that in your present moment only your presence remains: not with your past, not with your future. Then this very moment is enough – silent, passive, just present here and now, then a different dimension will open. The Upanishadic message can penetrate only in that dimension.That is what is meant when it is said that the essence of the Upanishads is eternal. It does not mean permanent, it only means a different dimension of time in which there is no future and no past. So you will have to move in a different way – in your inner time. And with that inner change, words begin to take a different shape and a different significance is born out of them.We use similar words. Everyone uses the same words, but with a different mind the words have a different meaning. For example, a doctor asks a patient, “How are you?” and at a casual meeting on the street you ask someone, “How are you?” and a lover asks a beloved, “How are you?” The words are the same, but is the meaning the same? When a doctor asks a patient, “How are you?” does it mean the same as when a lover asks a beloved, “How are you?” A different significance comes into being.The Upanishads cannot be understood in an ordinary way. That is how scholars miss the whole point, linguists miss the whole point. Pundits miss the whole point because they work with language, with grammar, with everything that is pertinent, but still they miss. Why do they miss? The missing happens because their inner time is linear. They are working with their intellect, not with their being. Really, they are working on the Upanishad, they are not allowing the Upanishad to work upon them. That is what I mean when I say to just be present, then the Upanishad can work upon you – and that can be a transformation. That can transport you to different planes of existence.So the first thing to remember is how to listen just by your presence. Absorb through your faith and trust – drink! Do not fight with reason, do not feel with feeling. Just be one with your being. This is the key – the first thing.The second thing is that the Upanishads use words – they have to – but they stand for silence. They talk and they talk continuously, but they talk for silence. The effort is absurd, paradoxical, contradictory, inconsistent – but this is how it is possible, this is the only way. Even if I have to provoke you toward silence I have to use words. They use words, but they are completely against words and language; they are not for them. This must be remembered continuously, otherwise it is very easy to be lost in words.Words have their own magic, they have their own magnetism, and each word creates a sequence of its own. Novelists know, poets know: they say sometimes they only begin their novel. When it ends, they cannot say they have ended it. Really, the words have their own sequence. They begin to be alive in their own way, and then they go on.Tolstoy has said somewhere, “I begin, but I never end, and sometimes my own characters say things that I never wanted to say.” They begin to have their own life and they go on their own tracks. They become free from the author, from the novelist, from the poet. They become as free as children become free from their parents. They have their own life.So words have their own logic. Use a word, and you are on a track. And the word will create many things. The word itself will create many things, and one can be lost. But the Upanishads are not for words. That is why they use as few as possible. Their message is so telegraphic that not a single word is used unnecessarily. The Upanishads are the shortest treatises; not a single word is used unnecessarily, because words can create a hypnotic sequence. But words have to be used, so be aware that you are not lost in words.Meaning is something different. Even more than “meaning” – it would be good to use the word significance. The Upanishads use words as signs, as symbols, as indications. They use words to show something, not to say something. You can say something by your words, you can show something by your words. When you show something, then the word must be transcended, must be forgotten; otherwise words come in the eyes and they distort the whole perception.We will be using words, but with this caution: go on remembering that not only are meanings given, but some indications. The words have been used symbolically – just like “a finger pointing to the moon.” The finger is not the moon, but one can cling to the finger and one can say, “My teacher showed me – this is the moon!” The finger is not the moon, but the finger can be used to show. The word is never the truth, but words can be used to show. So always remember that the finger has to be forgotten. If the finger becomes more significant and important than the moon then the whole thing will be perverted.Remember this second point: words are just indicators to something else which is wordless – something which is silent, something which is beyond, something which transcends.This forgetting that words are not realities has created much confusion. There are thousands and thousands of commentaries, but they are concerned with words, not with the wordless reality. They go on discussing…. For centuries, millennia, pundits have discussed what this word means and what that word means and they have created much literature. But so much search for meaning – and totally meaningless! They have missed the point: the words were never meant to be realities, only pointers towards something else totally different from words.Thirdly: I am not going to comment on the Upanishad, because commentary can only be something concerned with intellect. Rather, I am going to respond, not comment. Response is a different thing – altogether different. You whistle in a valley or you sing a song or you play on a bamboo flute and the valley echoes, re-echoes, re-echoes. The valley is not commenting: the valley is responding.A response is a living thing; a commentary is bound to be dead. A response means that the Upanishad will be read here – I will not comment on it, I will just become a valley and give an echo. It will be difficult to understand it because even if the echo is authentic you may not be able to get the same sound back. You may not be able to find out the relevance because when a valley responds, when it echoes something, that echo is not just a passive echo; it is creative. The valley adds much, the nature of the valley adds much. A different valley will echo differently. That is how things should be. So when I say something, it is not meant that everyone is bound to say this. This is how my valley echoes it.I am reminded of Stevens’ lines. They look like a Zen poem: “Twenty men crossing a bridge into a village, are twenty men crossing twenty bridges into twenty villages.” When I read some-thing, my valley echoes in a certain way; it is not passive; in that echo I am also present. When your valley re-echoes it, it will be a different thing. When I say “a living response,” I mean this.Sometimes it may look absolutely irrelevant because the valley will give it a shape, a color of its own. This is natural. So I say that commentaries are criminal; there should only be responses, no commentaries – because the commentator begins to feel that whatsoever he is saying is absolutely true. A commentator begins to feel that other commentators are wrong, and he begins to feel a self-imposed duty to criticize other commentators because he feels his commentary can be right only when other’s commentaries are wrong. But that is not the case with a response. Multi-responses are possible, and every response is right if it is authentic. If it comes from your depths, then it is right. There is no outward criterion of what is right and what is wrong. If something comes out of you from your depths, if you become one with it, if it vibrates through your whole being, then it is right. Otherwise howsoever clever and howsoever logical, it is wrong.This is going to be a response. And when I say “response,” I mean it will be more like poetry and less like philosophy. It will not be a system. You cannot create systems through responses. Responses are atomic, fragmentary. They have an inner unity, but to find that inner unity is not so easy. The unity is just like a mainland and an island: between an island and a mainland there is a unity, but deep down, deep down in the depths of the sea, the land is one. If that is understood, then no man is an island. Deep down things are one. The deeper you go, the more you reach to the oneness. So if a response is authentic then any response, even the opposite response which may look absolutely contradictory to it, cannot be different. Deep down there will be a unity.But one has to go deep, and commentaries are superficial things. So I am not going to give you a commentary. I will not say what this Upanishad means. I will say only what this Upanishad means in me. I cannot claim any authority, and those who claim are really immoral. No one can say what this Upanishad means. All that can be said is what this Upanishad means in me – how I echo it.This response can create a responsiveness in you also if you are just present here. Then whatsoever I say will echo in you also, and if it can echo, only then will you be able to understand it. So just be like a valley, be in a let-go, so that you can echo freely. Be concerned with yourself being a valley rather than with the text of the Upanishad or with what I am saying. Be concerned with yourself being a valley and all else will follow. No tension is needed, no strained effort is needed to understand me – that can become a barrier. Just relax, just be silent and passive and let whatsoever happens echo in you. Those vibrations will transport you to a different perspective, to a different vision.Lastly: I am not a Hindu, neither am I Mohammedan nor a Christian…a homeless wanderer. So I do not belong to the tradition of the Upanishads outwardly, I have no investment in them. When a Hindu comments or when a Hindu thinks about the Upanishads he has investments. When a Mohammedan writes about the Upanishads he has anti-investments; they cannot be true and authentic. If one is a Hindu he cannot be true about the Upanishads; if one is a Mohammedan he cannot be true about the Upanishads, he is bound to lie. But the deception is so subtle that one may not even be aware.Man is the only animal who can lie to himself and can live in deceptions. If you are a Hindu and are thinking about the Upanishads, or a Mohammedan and thinking about the Koran, or a Christian and thinking about the New Testament, you will never be aware that you cannot be true. Your being a Christian is the barrier. You cannot be true! One must not belong, only then is the response true. Belonging disturbs, perverts the mind, distracts and projects things which are not or denies things which are.So to me that is not a problem, and for you also I would suggest that when you are reading the Koran, listening to the Upanishads or to the Bible, do not be Hindus, Christians and Mohammedans at all – just being is enough. You will be able to penetrate deeper. With concepts, with dogmas, you are never open, and a closed mind can create deceptions of understanding, but can never understand.So I belong to no one, and if I am responding to this Upanishad it is simply because I have fallen in love with it. This, one of the shortest Upanishads, “Atma Pooja,” is a rare phenomenon. So something about this rare Upanishad, why I have chosen to talk about it.Firstly, it is the shortest, it is just seedlike – potent, pregnant, with much in it. Every word is a seed with infinite possibilities, so you can echo it and re-echo it infinitely, and the more you ponder over it, the more you allow it to go in, the more, newer significances will be revealed. These seedlike words show that they were found in deep silence. Really, this looks strange, but this is a fact. If you have less to say, you will say more. If you really have something to say, you can say it in a very few lines, few words – even a single word may be enough. The less you have to say, the more words you will have to use. The more you have to say, the fewer words you can use.Now it has become a known fact to psychologists that words are used not to say but to hide. We go on talking because we want to hide something. If you want to hide something you cannot be silent because your face may say it, your silence may indicate it. The other may become suspicious that you are hiding something. So a person who has to hide something will go on talking continuously. Through words you can deceive; through silence you cannot deceive.The Upanishads really have something to say, so they say it in seed form – in sutras, in aphorisms. This Upanishad has only seventeen sutras. They can be written on a half page. This whole Upanishad can be written on one postcard – on one side! But it has a very potent message, so we will take each seed word and try to penetrate it, to be in a living response with it. Something may begin to vibrate in you, and it can begin, because these words are very potential, they have much. If their atoms could be broken much energy would be released. So be open, receptive, in a deep trust, and let the Upanishad work.Now we enter into the Atma Pooja Upanishad.Aum. Meditation is the constant contemplation of That.Aum: this word aum is very significant – significant as a sign, as a symbol, as a secret key. So first we must decode it.Aum has five matras, five steps. The first step is a, the second is u, the third is m. These are gross steps. When we utter aum, a, u, m – these are three words. But utter a-u-m, and in the end the m resounds – mmm. That is a half step – the fourth. Three are gross and can be heard. The fourth is half gross. If you are very aware only then is it heard, otherwise it is lost; and the fifth is just never heard. When the sound of aum vibrates and the vibrations go into the cosmic emptiness, when the sound has gone and a soundlessness remains, that is the fifth. You utter the word aum, then a-u-m is heard very clearly, then a lingering sound of mmm – half a step – and then soundlessness. That is the fifth. These five steps are just signs towards many things.First: The Upanishads know that human consciousness has five steps. We know the three gross ones – the waking, the dreaming and the sleep. These are three gross – a, u, m. The Upanishads call the fourth turiya. They have not named it because it is not gross. The fourth is that in which one becomes aware of deep sleep also. If you have been deep in sleep, in a deep, dreamless sleep, if in the morning you can say, “I have been in a deep, deep sleep,” then someone in you has been aware and remembers somehow that there has been a very deep, dreamless sleep…but a witness was there. That witness is known as the fourth. But the Upanishads say that even the fourth is not the ultimate because to be a witness is still to be separate. So when the witness also dissolves – if only the existence remains, without a witness – that is the fifth. So this aum is a sign for many things, for many things – for five bodies in man. The Upanishads divide them into anamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vigyanamaya and anandamaya – five sheaths, five bodies.This aum is a cosmic sign. This is just a sign, but it is also a symbol. What does it mean when I say it is also a symbol? When someone goes deep into existence, to the roots, to the very roots, then thoughts are no longer there, the thinker is no longer there, objectivity is no longer there, subjectivity is no longer there – but, still, everything is. In that thoughtless, thinker-less moment, a sound is heard. That sound resembles aum – just resembles it. It is not aum; that is why it is a symbol. We cannot reproduce it, this is the approximate resemblance. That is why it has been likened to many sounds, but it is always nearer to aum.Christians and Mohammedans have represented it as “amen.” That sound which is heard when everything is lost, and only a sound vibrates, resembles aum. It can resemble amen. In English, there are many words – omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. That “omn” is the sound. Really, “omniscient” refers to one who has seen the aum, and aum is a symbol for all. “Omnipotent” means one who has become one with aum, because that is the potentiality of the whole cosmos. “Omnipresent” means one who is present in the sound of aum, and that sound surrounds all; it overflows all.The omn in omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, is aum. Amen is aum. Different seekers, different persons, have come with different resemblances, but they always somehow resemble aum. This is a symbol – a symbol of a universal sound. Modern science thinks in terms of electric particles as the foundational units of existence, but the Upanishads think not of electrical particles but of sound particles as the basis.Science says that sound is a modification of electric vibrations; sound itself is nothing but electricity. The Upanishads say electricity is nothing but sound modifications. One thing is certain – that somehow sound and electricity are convertible. Which is basic? Science says electricity is basic; the Upanishads say sound is basic. I think this difference is simply because of their approaches. The Upanishads reach to the ultimate reality through sound, through mantra. They use sound to reach sound-lessness. By and by, the sound is dropped; by and by, soundlessness is achieved. Ultimately, when they reach to the bottom, they hear a cosmic sound. It is not a thought, it is not a created sound. It is just in the very nature of existence that it sounds.That sound they have called aum. They say that when we say aum it is just a resemblance – a very far, far-off copy. It is not true, it is not that which is known there, because it is created by us. It is created by us! It is just like a photograph of something; it simply resembles. My photograph simply resembles me; it is not me.I have heard about the Dutch painter, van Gogh. A sophisticated lady met van Gogh on the street and said, “I have seen a portrait of you, and it was so lovely and so beautiful that I kissed it.”Van Gogh asked, “Did the portrait reply?”The lady said, “No. How can the portrait reply?”So van Gogh said, “Then it was not me….”A photograph can resemble; it is not real, mm? Nothing is wrong with it, it is enough that it resembles, but one should not mistake it for the real. So aum is just a symbol – a symbol of something it resembles – like a photograph.Aum is also a secret key. When I say a secret key, I mean because it resembles the ultimate sound. If you can use it and, by and by, go deep with it, you will reach to the ultimate door because it resembles, and it will resemble more if you do certain things with it. For example, if you utter aum then you have to use your lips – your body mechanism is to be used. Then it will resemble less because a very gross mechanism has to be used and it perverts. It changes aum into a gross thing. Do not use your lips. Create the sound of aum in yourself only through your mind, do not use your body. Then it will resemble more, because now you will be using a more subtle medium. It will give a finer photograph, more close to the real.Do not even use mind: first use the gross body, then drop it. Then use your mind – just create the sound of aum inwardly. Then even stop that and let the sound echo itself. Do not make any effort: it comes. Then it becomes ajapa – then you are not creating it, you are just in the flow of it. Then it goes even deeper and it becomes even more real. You can use it as a key. When it becomes effortless – when it is not with your body, nor with your mind, but when the sound just flows in you – you are very near.Now only one thing has still to be dropped – the one who is feeling this aum. The “I,” the ego, that feels “Aum is surrounding me.” If you drop this also then there is no barrier and the copy, the photograph, drops into the real, the original. So it is also a secret key.This aum is miraculous. It is as foundational to mystics as Einstein’s formula of relativity is to physics. That formula is three things: a sign, a symbol and a secret key – and aum is also three things. But basically it is a secret key. Unless you open the doors it is useless to go on thinking about it, futile, wasting time and life and energy. Unless you are ready to open the door, what is the use of talking about the key? Even if you understand all the implications, all the philosophical implications, it is meaningless. So aum is always put in the beginning and it is always put in the end. The Upanishads always begin with aum, they always end with aum. This is the key.If you enter the house, the first thing to be used is the key; and again, when you come out, the last thing to be used is the key. So enter! Use the key! But if you begin to contemplate on the key and continue sitting at the door, then the key is not a key for you but a barrier. Throw it! ? because it is not opening anything. Rather, it is closing. And you are constantly thinking about the key.One can go on thinking about the key without using it. There are many who have pondered, thought and contemplated about what aum means. They have created structures, big structures on it, but they have never used the key, they have never entered the palace. It is a symbol, it is a sign, but basically it is a secret key. It can be used as a method to enter into the cosmic, as a method to drop into the oceanic. The subtler it becomes, the deeper, the nearer it goes to the real; the grosser, the less.Meditation is the constant contemplation of That.This is the first sutra.We live in a world of three dimensions. One dimension is I-it – the world of things. I and my house, I and my furniture, I and my wealth: this is the realm of I-it. A world of “it” surrounds me.Then there is another dimension, I-thou: I and my beloved, I and my friend, I and my family – a world of persons. This is the second realm.Then there is a third realm, I-That: I and the universe. The Upanishad says: Meditation is the constant contemplation of That – neither of it, nor of thou, but of That. “That” means the whole. It is not a thing, not a person, it is a That. But why use That? Whenever we say “That,” it means something that transcends, something that is beyond, something that is not where we are – neither in our relationships with things nor in our relationships with persons…. That, without any name, because if you give it a name – for example, if you call it God – it becomes an I-thou relationship. If you call it father or mother, then you bring it to the second dimension. If you say there is no God, then you have to live in a one-dimensional world, I-it.That is not a thing. Theists are ready to say it is not a thing, but they say it is a person. The Upanishads are not even ready to call it a person, because to make it a person is to limit it and to make it a person is to make it finite. They simply use the word that. They say, “It is all, but we cannot name it because it has no form, no limitation. It is the allness.” So what to call it? They do not call it God, they do not call it divine, they do not call it lord – they do not call it by any name. No form, no name, they simply use the word That, and continuous contemplation of That is meditation.If you can remember That continuously, then you are in meditation. When you are with things, remember That. When you are with persons, remember That. Wherever you are, remember That – the all. Never see the limited as limited: always look deep and feel the unlimited. Never see the form as the form: always look deep and see the formless in it. Never see the thing as the thing: go deep, feel it, and the That will be revealed. Never see any person caged in his personality. Penetrate deep and feel That which goes beyond – the within beyond.The continuous contemplation of That is meditation – no ritual, no method, no technique, simply continuous contemplation. But it is arduous, because one has to remember continuously with no gap, no discontinuity, not even a single moment’s forgetfulness. Remembrance – continuous, constant, without any gap. It is the most arduous thing to remember continuously. We cannot remember continuously even for a few seconds. Just begin to count your breaths, and remember how many breaths you can count while continuously remembering, constantly remembering the process of breathing – the incoming, the outgoing breaths. Remember, and count. You have counted three or four, and then you miss. Something else comes in and you have forgotten. And then you remember, “Oh, I was counting, and I have counted only three and I missed.”Remembrance is the most difficult thing, because we are asleep. We are deeply asleep. We are walking in sleep, talking in sleep, moving, living, loving, doing everything in sleep, in a deep somnambulism, a deep, natural hypnosis. That is why there is so much confusion and so much conflict, so much violence and so much war. It is really a miracle how the human race has survived – so much sleep, and still we manage somehow!But we are asleep. Our behavior is not a behavior which can be called alert, attentive, aware – we are not. For a single minute we cannot be aware of ourselves. Try it, and then you will feel how much asleep you are: “If I cannot remember myself continuously for one minute, for sixty seconds, how deeply asleep I must be! Two or three seconds, and then sleep comes and I am not there, I have moved. The consciousness has been dropped, the unconscious has come in. There is a deep darkness, and again I remember that I was trying to be aware.”P. D. Ouspensky was working with Gurdjieff on his method of self-remembering. The first time he met Gurdjieff he said, “What do you mean by self-remembering? I remember myself: I am P. D. Ouspensky.”Gurdjieff said, “Close your eyes and remember that you are P. D. Ouspensky, and when you forget, tell me. Be frank.”Only three or four seconds passed and Ouspensky opened his eyes and he said, “I began to dream. I forgot that I am P. D. Ouspensky. I tried three or four times. I said within myself, ‘I am P. D. Ouspensky, I am P. D. Ouspensky, I am P. D. Ouspensky,’ and then a dream broke in and I was not aware.”So Gurdjieff said, “This is not self-remembering – that you are P. D. Ouspensky. Firstly, you are not P. D. Ouspensky, and secondly, this is not remembering. When the remembering comes you will be the first to deny that you are P. D. Ouspensky.”For three months Ouspensky tried hard, very hard. The more you try, the more you become aware how hard it is. The more you try, the more you begin to feel that “I have been asleep all my life.” This is just a mechanical awareness that we have. We can move with it, do the routine, but can never go deep. For three months, when he tried and tried and tried and then became aware, a new pillar of consciousness came into existence. When he could feel and be aware constantly, then Gurdjieff asked him to come with him and to move on the street. So Ouspensky said, “For the first time, on the street of a big city, I became aware that everyone is asleep, everyone is moving in sleep. I had moved in the same street but was never aware, and I saw every man asleep – just with open eyes.” He became so afraid that he said to his teacher, “I cannot go further; I must go back. Everyone is so asleep that anything can happen here. I cannot move.”Just sit by the side of the street and look at people’s eyes moving, then you will become aware that everyone is closed within himself. He is not aware of what is happening around him. Someone is talking with himself, someone is moving his hands, making gestures; he may be in some dream. Lips are moving, everyone is talking within; no one is aware of what is happening around him. All are moving just automaton-like. They are going to their homes; they need not even remember where their homes are – they just move automatically. Their legs move, their hands move their car wheels, they reach their homes, but this whole process is just a sleep, a mechanical routine. Tracks are there, and on those tracks they go on moving. That is why we are always afraid of the new – because then we have to create new tracks. We are afraid of the new because for the new the routine will not do and for some time we will have to be a bit alert. We are always fixed in our dead routines and are, in a way, dead. A sleeping person is really dead. He cannot be said to be alive.Only for moments, for a few moments in the whole life, do we become aware, and those moments are either in deep moments of love, which are rare…. It happens only to a few people, to very few. When it happens everyone else will feel “That man has gone mad” because he becomes so different, because he comes to see things in a different color, with a different music, with a different light. He begins to look around and he sees a different world. Of course for us he has gone mad, so we can forgive him because “He is mad. He is in a dream.” Really, the contrary is the case: we are asleep, and for a moment he has become aware of a deeper reality. He is alone, but that awareness cannot continue because it is just an accidental happening.It is not by his effort that he has attained it. It has just happened. It is an accident. He will go to sleep again, and when he goes to sleep then he will feel that he has been betrayed by his lover or beloved because that magic is no longer there. That magic came because he became aware of a different world – in this world there are different worlds. He became aware and now he is asleep again, so he feels he has been betrayed. Every lover feels that he has been betrayed. No one has betrayed him, only in a sudden awakening he has seen a different world, with a different beauty, with different sounds, and now he is again asleep. That glimpse is lost and he feels he has been betrayed. No one has betrayed him, it is only that suddenly he became aware.One becomes aware either with love or with death. If you are suddenly in the grip of death you will be aware. In sudden accidents – the car speeding uncontrollably down the hill – you will become aware, because there is no future and the past has ended. Only the present moment – this moment of dropping down the hill – is all. Now a different dimension of time opens. You are here and now for the first time. Dreams are not possible because there is no future. You cannot think about the future; the past is just ending. Between these two, for this moment, in this calamity, you have become aware. So love and death are the only moments when we become aware, but they are not in our hands. They are not.So when the Upanishad says: …the constant contemplation of That, it means that if you can remember continuously, constantly in everything, in every event, that whatsoever is, is That – inside, outside, if everything becomes just a symbol for the remembrance of That – then the consciousness will explode, the sleep will not be there, you will become conscious and aware. That consciousness, that awareness, is meditation.There are two more things. “Continuous” means without any gap – not a single moment’s gap. But this is difficult, because then your life will be impossible. If you go on continuously remembering the divine how can you live, how can you move, how can you eat? That problem arises if you begin to remember his name, if you begin to remember Rama, Jesus, or something else. If you begin to remember his name, if you give some name to him and begin to repeat “Rama-Rama-Rama,” then your life will become impossible, because either you can remember Rama or you can move on the street.A soldier was brought to me, a very sincere man, a very devoted one. He was trying continuously to remember Rama. Someone, some guru, told him to remember Rama continuously. He became so much absorbed with that repetition that outward life became impossible – impossible! He could not sleep because he had to remember Rama. If you are repeating “Rama-Rama-Rama” inside you cannot go to sleep, this constant activity will not allow it. He could not move on the street because someone may be honking a horn and he could not hear. He was surrounded by his own repetition, closed. He became insensitive. He was a military soldier, so his captain brought him to me and said, “He cannot even listen. I say, ‘Left turn!’ and he is standing and he is looking. He is absent. What is he doing?”The captain told me, “It has become impossible. This man has to be hospitalized.”I asked the soldier, “What are you doing?”He said, “I can tell you but not my captain. My guru has given me a mantra to repeat continuously, so I am repeating ‘Rama-Rama-Rama.’ Now the repetition has gone so deep – for three years I have been repeating continuously – that I have lost sleep. I cannot see what is happening, I cannot hear what is happening around me. A great barrier has come between myself and the world. I am enclosed within my repetition of ‘Rama.’” He asked me, “How can I do both? If I have to repeat it continuously then I cannot do anything else. So tell me what to do. If I do anything else then this repetition breaks. Gaps are bound to come there.”This is not meant here. That is why the Upanishad is not giving any name, any form, but is simply saying That. It is possible to remember That continuously, because you are not to remember his name. Rather, you have to feel That in everything you are doing…just carrying water from the well….One Zen monk, Bokuju, was asked, “What do you do continuously?”He said, “I don’t do anything continuously. Whatsoever I am doing, I am doing it totally. When I am carrying water from the well, I am carrying water from the well. When I am chopping wood, I am chopping wood. When I am sleeping, I am sleeping.”The questioner asked, “Then what are you doing?”Bokuju said, “I am not doing anything. When I am chopping wood, the divine is chopping wood. When I am carrying the water, he is carrying the water. He is the water which is being carried, and he is the wood which is being chopped. Now he is and I am not! So everything has become a worship and everything has become a meditation.”This whole Upanishad is concerned with how to make your whole life a worship. This Upanishad is absolutely anti-ritualistic. No ritual is needed, only a different attitude, a remembering of That – doing, nondoing, but remembering That. When I say “remembering That” it is not a mental remembering. You are not to remember, “Okay, this stone is That.” If you have to remember in this way, that “this stone is That,” then it is not remembering because two still exist – this stone and That. When the Upanishad says, …constant contemplation of That, it means the stone must drop. Only That is. That is a deep realization, a constant realization.Begin to feel. Do not touch a thing without feeling the That; do not love anyone without feeling That; do not move, do not even breathe without feeling That. It is not that you have to impose That on everything, you have to discover That in everything, mm? The distinction must be clear. You are not to impose That on everything. You can impose; that will be just a trick. You have to discover. Seeing a flower, you can impose and can say, “Oh, that flower is That.”No, do not impose, do not say anything. Just remain silent near the flower. Look at it; be in deep sympathy with it, in a deep communion with it. Forget yourself. Just be a passive awareness there, and the flower will flower into That. The That will be revealed.So go on discovering That. That is what is meant by constant contemplation. And constant contemplation of That is meditation.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-02/

Osho,You said last night that those who have become void, valley-like,do not react but they respond, and that the responses of thesedifferent enlightened ones will be different – that the valley willre-echo in its own unique and individual way.Now a question arises whether those who become absolutely void,nothingness, still have a personality and individuality.If so, then please explain how this becomes possible.This is one of the paradoxes of spiritual life: the more one dissolves into the divine, the more unique one becomes. The dissolution is not of the individuality but of the self: the dissolution is not of the uniqueness but of the ego. The more you are an ego, the more you are like others, because everyone is an egoist.The ego is the most ordinary thing in the world. Everyone is an egoist; even a newborn child is an egoist – a perfect egoist. So it is not anyone’s achievement; it is not extra-ordinary. Really, it can be said that to be just ordinary is the most extraordinary thing possible – because no one feels just ordinary. So to feel oneself extraordinary is just the most ordinary thing. Everyone feels like that. So ego is not something unique.If you have an ego, it is not something unique. Really, egolessness is the most unique thing, the most uncommon, rare. It happens only sometimes. Centuries pass, and rarely the event happens that someone becomes egoless – a Buddha, a Jesus. But when we say that someone becomes egoless, it does not mean that he is not. Really, for the first time, now he is – authentically grounded into the very being. He is no longer an ego.So take it from a different root: ego is a false phenomenon – just an appearance, not a reality. It is not something grounded in the being – just a dream, a thought, just a mental construction. So the more you belong to the ego, the less you belong to the existence. The more you concentrate on your ego, the less and less you are authentic. You become false – an existential lie.When we talk about becoming empty, nothing, valley-like, we mean that there is no ego – but you are! Let me say it in this way: I say “I am,” but when the ego dissolves there remains the pure “am-ness.” The “I” is no longer there, but “am-ness” is there, and for the first time pure, total, uncontaminated. The ego contaminates it.The word personality and the word individuality must not be confused, they are totally different. They do not mean any similar entity; they are not the same at all. Personality belongs to the ego, individuality to the being. Personality is just a facade. The ego is the center and the personality is the circumference. It is not individuality at all.This word personality is very meaningful. It is derived from the Greek word persona. “Persona” means a mask. In Greek drama, the characters, the actors, will use masks to hide their faces so the real face is hidden and the masked face becomes the reality. “Personality” means a mask – that which you are not but only appear to be.So we have many faces; really, no one has one personality, mm? – we have multi-personalities. Everyone has to change faces the whole day. You cannot remain with one face. It will be so difficult because every time you face someone else you have to use another face. Before your servant you cannot have the same face as you have before your master. Before your wife you cannot have the same face as you have before your beloved. So we have a flexible system of continually changing faces.For the whole day, the whole life, we are continually changing faces. You can be aware of this. You can feel when you change a face and why you change it and how many faces you have. So, really, a personality means a system of flexible faces, and when you say that someone has a great personality it only means that he has a more flexible system. He is not a fixed man: he has a more flexible system. He can change very easily. He is a big actor.This is personality; you have to construct it every moment. So no one can be at ease with his personality, it is a constant effort. So if you are tired, your personality will lose its luster. In the morning your personality has a luster, in the evening it is lost. The whole day of utility: it is constantly changing. So when I use the word personality, I mean a false appearance which you have created around yourself.Individuality is something else. Individuality does not mean something constructed and created by you, but the very nature of your being. Again, the word individuality is very meaningful. It means that which cannot be divided, which is indivisible. We have an inherent intrinsic nature which cannot be divided, which is indivisible. Carl Gustav Jung chooses the word ‘individuation’ as one of the deepest phenomena. He said individuation is the way towards truth, towards the divine – individuation: being an individual.The Indian term “yoga” means the same thing as individuation. The term “yoga” means to conjoin again that which has become divisible, to join again that which has become divided, to come again to the indivisible. So when translating “yoga” into English, it would be better if we call it “the way to individuation.” This individuality remains and becomes more penetrating, becomes more sharp. The moment you lose the ego, the moment you discard your personalities, you become individual.This individuality is a unique phenomenon. This is unrepeatable. A Buddha cannot be repeated; a Gautam Siddharth can be repeated. A Jesus can be repeated, but not Jesus Christ. Jesus means the personality; Jesus Christ means the individuality. Gautam Siddharth is just ordinary; he can be repeated. Anyone can be Gautam Siddharth, but the moment Gautam Siddharth becomes enlightened and becomes the Buddha, now the phenomenon is unrepeatable. It is unique. It has never been before and it will never be again. This buddhahood, this peak of realization, is so unique that it cannot be repeated.So when I said to be just like a valley, and when I said that every valley will echo differently, I meant that every valley has its own individuality. Buddha has his own, Jesus his, Krishna his. So, really, this will be good to understand.Why do Krishna, Christ and Buddha differ so much? They differ! They differ as much as there is any possibility to differ, but still they are, in a very deep way, one. As far as individuation is concerned they are one; as far as individualities are concerned they are different. They have come to “the undivided.” They have realized the undivided, the basic unity of existence, but because of this basic unity and its realization, it does not mean that now they are not unique. Now they are really unique. That’s why I say this is one of the paradoxes.Two ordinary persons can differ, but their difference can never be total, absolute – never! Even in their difference they have similarities. Really, their difference is always of degrees. Even if they are totally contrary to one another, their difference is of degrees. A person who is a communist and a person who is anti-communist – even they are different only in degrees. The person who is anti-communist is still communist to a lesser degree, and the person who is a communist is still a capitalist to a lesser degree. The difference is always of degrees. And they can change, they can change camps very easily; there is no problem. Ordinarily, they change. The difference is just like that of cold and heat – only of degrees. But a Buddha and Krishna, a Christ and Mohammed, and a Lao Tzu and Mahavira – their difference is not of degrees. They can never meet. This is the paradox: they have come to oneness, and yet they can never meet. The difference is not of degrees. The difference is of their uniqueness. What do I mean by this uniqueness?We can conceive of “oneness” very easily. A drop of water drops into the ocean and becomes one with it. But that oneness is just dead – a dead oneness. The drop lost itself completely; now it is nowhere. A Buddha is not dropping in that way. His dropping is in a different way. If you put a flame before the sun the flame becomes one with the sun, but the individuality is not lost, it still remains itself. If we burn fifty flames in this room they will create one light, but every flame will be a flame unique in itself. So this dissolution into the cosmic is not a simple dissolution. It is very complex. The complexity is this: the one who dissolves, remains. Rather, on the contrary, for the first time he is.This individuality echoes differently, and that is the beauty of it. It is beautiful! Otherwise it will be just ugly: just think, if Buddha responds in the same way as Jesus, the world will be poorer for it, very poor. A Buddha responds in his own way, a Jesus in his own way. The world is richer for it and there is beauty. The world is freer and you can be yourself.But this distinction must be remembered: when I say that you can be yourself, I do not mean your ego. When I say you can be yourself, I mean your nature, your Tao, your existence. But it has an individuality. That individuality is not personality. So if I say they belong to the same existence, yet individually; they respond from the same depth, but individually; no sense of ego is there – but the uniqueness remains.This world is not just a colorless unity; it is not monotonous. It has multi-colors; it is multi-tonal. You can create music with one note also, but then it will be just monotonous and boring. It cannot be lively, it cannot be beautiful. A more subtle and complex harmony is achieved through many notes – multi-phonal. A harmony runs through, but it is not a monotonous thing and each note has its own individuality. It contributes to the total harmony, and it contributes only because it has its own individuality.A Buddha contributes only because he is a Buddha, and a Jesus contributes only because he is a Jesus. He gives a new note, a new vibration. A new harmony is born because of him, but that is possible only because he has an individuality. This is not only for deeper things. Even for very trivial and small things a Buddha and a Jesus differ. A Buddha walks in his own way; no one else can walk like that. A Jesus looks in his own way; no one else can look like that. Even their eyes, the very gestures, the very words they use, are unique. The other cannot even conceive….This world is a harmony of unique notes, and the music is richer for that – every valley echoing in its own way.All those well-wishers who try to impose a dead unity and who try to wash out individuality from everywhere – who say that the Koran means the same thing as the Gita, who say that Buddha teaches the same thing as Mahavira – are not really aware of what nonsense they are talking. If they could win, the world would become just a poor world. How can the Koran say the same thing as the Gita? How can the Gita say the same thing as the Koran? The Koran has its own individuality – no Gita can say that. No Koran can repeat the Gita because Krishna has his own aura, Mohammed his own. They never meet. Yet, I say, they stand on the same ground. They never meet, this is the beauty – and they will never meet. They will be just like parallel lines running to infinity.They will never meet! This is what I mean by uniqueness: they are like peaks. The higher the peak goes, the less is the possibility of meeting with another peak. You can meet when you are on the ground – everything is meeting – but the higher you go, the more of a peak you become, and the less is the possibility of any meeting. So they are like Himalayan peaks, never meeting. If you try to impose a false unity over them, you will just destroy the peaks.They are different, but their difference need not be inimical, their difference need not be a conflict. The conflict arises only because we are not ready to accept differences. Then we try to find similarities. Either we must have similarities or we will have conflict. Either we must speak the same thing or we must be enemies. We have only two alternatives – and both are wrong. They belong to one attitude. Why should they not be different? – altogether different, meeting nowhere? What is the need of conflict? Really, different notes create a beautiful harmony. Then there is a deeper meeting – no meeting in the notes, but in what the notes create; in the harmony there is a meeting.One must begin to feel that harmony. If one only knows a jarring note – a Mohammed, a Jesus, a Buddha are just notes – no harmony is felt.The universe is a harmony. If you can begin to feel the gaps and the underlying unity and the soaring peaks meeting nowhere, and if you can see this whole in a totality, in a comprehensive unity, then you accept both – the individuality and the common harmony. Then there is no problem. There is not!Osho,Can this also explain why Mahavira and Buddha,who were contemporaries, never met – never physically came across one another?They cannot meet – even physically. They came, so many times, very near meeting. Once they were both staying in one sarai – an inn. In one part was Mahavira and in another part Buddha – but there was no meeting. They passed through the same villages. Their whole lives they were confined to Bihar, a very small area. They visited the same villages; they remained in the same villages; they talked to the same audiences. Their followers went on coming from Buddha to Mahavira and from Mahavira to Buddha. There was much controversy, there was much conversion, but they never met.They cannot meet! Their very beings are now such peaks that the meeting is not possible. The meeting has become intrinsically impossible. Even if they just sit side by side they can never meet. Even if to us they appear to be meeting and embracing each other, they can never meet. Their meeting has become impossible. They are so unique, they are so peak-like, the inner meeting is impossible. What is the use of meeting outwardly? It is useless, it is meaningless.This seems inconceivable to us. We think that two good persons should meet. For us, the non-meeting attitude is something bad. But really, there is no non-meeting attitude – there is impossibility. It is not that Buddha would not like to meet Mahavira. It is not that Mahavira is resistant. No, it is simply impossible; it just cannot happen. There is no attitude about it. So, really, this is miraculous. They remained in one village, they stayed in one sarai, but never, neither in Buddhist literature nor in Jaina scriptures, is there any reference to anyone suggesting that they should meet – not a single reference. There is not even any reference that it had been suggested it would have been better if they had met. This is miraculous, surprising. Neither has denied the other. Neither Buddha nor Mahavira has said, “I will not meet.” Why didn’t they meet? It is a sheer impossibility. It is not possible.For us who stand on the ground it looks strange, but if you stand on the peak then it will not look strange. Why not ask a Himalayan peak to meet another? They are so near – so near! Why can’t they meet? Their very being, their very peak-hood, creates the impossibility. So it is not a question of why they never met – they cannot, they will never. The very door is closed. Yet I say they are one: howsoever one peak may differ from another, in their very roots they are one. They may both belong to the same part of earth, but only in the roots are they one.There is another point to be pondered over: because they are so much one in the roots, there is not even any necessity to meet. Only those who are not one in the ground will try to meet, because basically they know there is no meeting.Many people have asked me why I have not tried a great synthesis of all the religions. Gandhi has tried; many others – Theosophists have tried. They have tried for a great synthesis of all the religions. I say that, if you try, you show that you know there is no synthesis. The effort shows that you feel that somewhere religions are divided. I do not feel this at all. In the roots they are one, and in the peaks they are divided and they must be divided. Every peak has its own beauty – why destroy it? Why try to create a false thing which is not there? A peak must be a peak – an individual. In the earth they are one.So the Koran must remain purely the Koran. Nothing should be imposed, infiltrated from the Gita or the Ramayana or anything else. No interpolation, no mixing. The Koran must remain in its purity the Koran. It is a peak – a beautiful peak. Why destroy it? This is possible only if you are aware of a deeper unity in the ground, in the roots.Religions are one in their roots, but never in their expression – and they should not be. So as the world progresses more, as human consciousness becomes more conscious, more integrated, there will be more religions. Not less – more. Ultimately, if every human being becomes a peak, there will be as many religions as there are human beings. Why should anyone follow Mohammed if he himself can become a peak? Why should he follow Krishna if he himself can become a peak?This is unfortunate – that one has to follow anybody. This is just a necessary evil. If you cannot become a peak, only then do you have to follow, but follow in such a way that the sooner you can become a peak the better. We can have a beautiful world, a greater world with a greater humanity, with everyone as a unique peak. But that peak can come only through individuation, through dissolving the ego and the false personality and remaining centered in your nature, in your pure being. Then you become like a valley, and then there are echoes.Osho,Yesterday you explained about three types of listening: first, listening though the intellect; second, through emotion, sympathy and love;and third, through the whole being, through faith.Considering the first two types of listening, how does one arrive at the third type of listening – that is, through the whole being, through faith?And are the intellect and emotions included and involved in the third type of listening?Intellectual listening means that when you are listening you are simultaneously arguing with it. A constant argument is going on. I am saying something to you, you are listening, and constantly there is an argument inside whether this is right or wrong. You are comparing with your own concepts, your own ideology, your own system. So constantly, when you are listening to me, you are comparing whether I confirm your ideas or not, whether I am according to you or not; whether you can concede to me or not, whether I am convincing or not. How is listening possible in this way? You are too full of yourself, so it is miraculous that within this constant inner turmoil you are capable of listening to something. Even then, whatsoever you have heard will not be what I have said. It cannot be – because when the mind is full with its own ideas it goes on giving colors to everything that comes to it. It hears not what is being said, but what it wants to hear. It chooses, it drops, it interprets, and only then does something penetrate – but that has a completely different shape. So this is what is meant by intellectual listening.If you want to go deeply into understanding what is being said, this inner turmoil must stop. It must cease. It must not continue. Otherwise you are in your own way, and constantly destroying the very possibility of something which can happen to you. You can miss; and everyone is missing much.We live enclosed in our own minds, and we carry that enclosure with us everywhere. So whatsoever we see, whatsoever we hear, whatsoever happens around us, it is never transmitted to the inner consciousness directly. The mind remains in between, always playing tricks. One must be aware that this is happening. This is the first thing, in order to go deep.This is the first thing for the second stage of listening – to be aware of what your mind is doing to you. It is coming in between. Wherever you move, it moves before you. It is not like a shadow which follows; you have become a shadow to it. It goes, and you have to move. It moves before you and colors everything. So you are never in contact with the facticity of anything. The mind creates a fiction.You must be aware of this phenomenon of what the mind is doing. But you are not – because we are identified with the mind, we never think that the mind is doing something. When I say something and it does not tally with your thought, it is not that you will think that your mind is not tallying with the thought. You will think, “No, I am not convinced.” You do not have a gap between you and your mind. You are identified – and that is really the problem. That is how the mind can play tricks with you.You are identified with a thought or with a thought process. This is strange because, only two days before, this thought was not yours, you heard it somewhere; now you have absorbed it and it has become your own. Now this thought will say, “No – this is not right, because this is not according to me.” You will not feel the difference that this is mind speaking, memory speaking, the mechanism speaking. You will not feel that “I must remain aloof.”Even if you have to compare, even if you have to judge, you must remain aloof – aloof from your memory, from your mind, from your past. But there is a subtle identification: “My mind is me.” So you say, “I am a Communist” or “I am a Catholic” or “I am a Hindu.” You never say, “My mind has been brought up in such a way that my mind is Hindu.” This is the fact: you are not Hindu. How can you be a Hindu? It is only the mind. If you are the Hindu, then there is no possibility of any transformation.The mind can be changed, and you must remain capable of changing it. If you become identified with it then you lose your freedom. The greatest freedom is to be free of one’s own mind. The greatest, I say – to be free from one’s own mind – because it is a subtle bondage, so deep that you never feel it as a bondage The very prison becomes your home.Be constantly aware that your mind is not your consciousness, and the more you are aware, the more you will feel that consciousness is something totally different. Consciousness is the energy, mind is just the thought content. Be the master of it. Don’t allow it to be the master; don’t allow it to just go ahead of you everywhere. Let it follow you, use it, but don’t be used by it. It is an instrument, but we are identified with this instrument, mm? So break the identification. Remember that you are not the mind.Really, so-called religious persons always remember: “We are not the body.” They never remember: “We are not the mind.” And body is not a bondage at all. Mind is the bondage. Your body is not a bondage at all, your mind is. Really, your body comes from nature, from the divine, and your mind from the society. So body has a beauty, but never the mind. Mind is always ugly. It is a cultivated thing, a false construct. The body has a very beautiful realm. If you can drop the mind, then you will not feel any conflict at all with the body. The body becomes just a door to the greater, to the infinite expanse. There is nothing ugly in the body – mm? – it is a natural flowering, but the so-called religious people are always against the body and always for the mind. They have created such a nuisance. They have created such confusion. They have destroyed all sensitivity, because body is the source of all sensitivity. If once you begin to be against your body you will become insensate.The mind is just an accumulation of past knowledge, information, experiences. It is just a computer. We are identified with it. One is a Christian, one is a Hindu, one is a communist, one is a Catholic, one is this and that, but one is never oneself…always identified somewhere with something. Remember this: be aware, and create a distance between you and your mind. Never create any distance between you and your body. Create a distance between you and your mind – you will be more alive and more childlike and more innocent and more aware.So the first thing is to create a distance: that is, not to identify. Remember you are not the mind, then the first listening will change into the second.The second is emotional – deeply felt, sympathetic. It is a love attitude. You are hearing some music or seeing a dance, so you don’t just remember the intellect, you begin to participate. When you are seeing a dance, your feet begin to participate. When you are listening to music, your hands begin to be participants; you begin to be part of it. This is a sympathetic way of listening, deeper than intellect. That’s why, whenever you can listen with your heart and feeling you feel elated, you feel transported to somewhere else. Then you are not in this world. Really, you are in this world, but you feel that you are not in this world. Why? Because you are not in the world of the intellect. A different realm opens – you begin to be actively in it.Intellect is always an onlooker standing out – never in. So the more intellect grows in the world, the more we become just passive observers, in everything. You will not dance, but you will watch others dancing. If this goes on as it is going on, day by day, soon you will not be doing anything, you will just be looking at others doing. This will be possible some day: you will not love – it has become possible, it is there now – you will just watch others loving. What are you watching in a film? – others loving. You are just an onlooker – a dead, passive, onlooker. You are watching others playing. You are watching others singing, others dancing.Somewhere one of Camus’ characters says, “Love is not for me. My servants will do it for me” – love! A really rich man – even love has to be done by his servants. Why should he do it? The logic is the same. If servants can play music for you, if servants can do prayer for you, why not love? A servant is doing worship for you in the temple, so why not love? If a servant can be used in between you and the divine, why not between you and your lover or beloved? What is wrong in it? The logic is the same, really. Soon those who are rich will not do their loving themselves because servants can do it. Only poor ones will do their own loving and will feel very miserable because of it. Everything can be deputed. You can be just an onlooker, because intellect is basically an onlooker, never a participant. If we create a world around intellect then it is going to happen.The second center is more involved; you begin to participate. I say you will understand more if you begin to participate, because the moment you are sympathetic your mind is open, more open than when you are in a constant fight. It is open, receptive, inviting.This is how one can listen through feeling, but still there is a depth even deeper than feeling, and that depth I call total listening, with your full being – because feeling is again a part. Intellect is a part, feeling is a part, the source of action is another. There are many parts in your existence, in your being. You can listen with feeling better than with intellect, but still it is only a part. When you are listening with your feeling the intellect will just go to sleep; otherwise it will disturb. It will just go to sleep.The third is to listen totally – not even participating with it, but being one with it. One way is to watch dance through intellect, another is to feel dance and begin to participate in it. Sitting in your seat, the dancer is dancing. You begin to participate; you begin to keep the beat. The third is becoming the dance oneself – not the dancer, but the dance. The total being is involved. You are not even out to feel it: you are it!So remember that the deepest knowledge is possible only when you become one with something. This is “by faith.”How to come to it? Be aware of your intellect; be unidentified with the mind. Then come to the second – feeling. Then be aware that feeling is just a part and your whole being is just lying dead. The whole is not there, so bring the whole into it. When you bring the whole in, it is not that the intellect is denied or feeling is denied, they are in it, but now in a different harmony. Nothing is negated. Everything is there, but now in a different pattern. The whole being is participating, is in it – has become it.So when you listen, just listen as if you have become the listening. When I am saying something, let it go into you not with a fight, not with a sympathy, but with a totality. Be it! Let it go. Vibrate – with no resistance, with no feeling, but with totality. Experiment with it, and you will begin to experience a new dimension of listening. That goes not only for listening, it is for everything. You can eat that way, you can walk that way, you can sleep that way – you can live that way.Kabir sends his son, Kamaal, to the field one day. Kabir’s cows have no food that day, so he sends Kamaal to cut some grass from the field. Kamaal goes, and has not yet returned. The afternoon has come and the evening has come, and Kabir is just waiting and the cows are hungry. Where has Kamaal gone? So Kabir goes to find out.Kamaal is standing in a grass-field. The sun is setting, the wind is blowing, the grass is moving like waves, and Kamaal is standing there moving wave-like, just with the grass. The whole day has passed like that, and Kabir comes and says, “Have you gone mad, Kamaal? What are you doing?”Suddenly Kamaal is brought back to a different world and he says, “Oh, I had forgotten that I am Kamaal; I became just grass. I was not. I became just grass. I moved with it, I danced with it, and I forgot what I had come here for. Now tell me, what had I come for?”Kabir says, “To cut the grass!”So Kamaal laughs and says, “How can one cut oneself? Today it is not possible. I will come again and try, but I cannot promise because I have known a different realm. A different world has opened before me.”Kabir, on this day, named him Kamaal. Kamaal means “a miracle.”This is the miracle. If you can be totally in anything the miracle happens, and this is not only for listening, it is for everything. Be total! Move totally. Don’t divide yourself. Never divide yourself. Any division is just wasting your energy, any division is just suicidal. Don’t divide! If you love, love totally – don’t withhold. If you listen, listen totally – don’t withhold anything. Just move totally.Only this total movement can bring you to a realization where ego cannot be found. It can be found with intellect, it can be found with feeling, but never with your total being. It can be found with intellect, because intellect has no center of its own. It will not allow the center of the total to come into operation, so the intellect has to create its own center – it becomes the ego. Feeling will not allow the total, so feeling has its own center – it becomes the ego.That’s why men and women have different types of egos, because man’s ego is intellect-centered and woman’s ego is feeling-centered. They have different qualities of ego. That’s why a man can never understand a woman, a woman never understands a man. They have different types of centers and different languages.When intellect says yes, it means yes. When emotion says yes, it does not necessarily mean yes. When emotion says no, it may mean yes; it may just be an invitation to be persuaded more. If you take a woman at her word you will be in difficulty, because her word is not an intellectual assertion. It has a different way of movement, a different quality. Intellect has a direct, mathematical ego. You can understand it easily. So to understand a man is not very difficult because the logic is straight: two and two make four. To understand a woman is different because the logic is not straight, it moves in circles, so two and two never make four. They can make anything, but never four – the logic moves in a circle. Emotion moves in a circle; logic and intellect move in a straight line.When something moves in a circle, you can never be certain because it may mean just the contrary. Soon it will move in a circle, and it will be the opposite of its own assertion. So with a woman one has to be aware not of what she has said but of what she means. The actual assertion is not to be given much importance, but what she means, and the meaning may be something very different.So it has always happened that very intellectual persons have never been at ease with their wives – never. Socrates, a very intelligent person, an intellectual genius, knew every nook and corner of logic, but was never at ease with his wife, Xanthippe – never. He could not understand what she was saying. That is, he understood what she was saying, but he never understood what she meant. He was so logical that he always missed the point. He went direct, straight, and she went in circles.Intellect has its own ego – direct, straight. Emotion has its own ego – circular. They both have egos. The totality has no ego. The totality has individuality. So when you reach totality, you are neither man nor woman. You are both and you are neither. You transcend and comprehend both. That is what is meant by ardhanarishwar – half-man, half-woman: a deep communion inside happens. You have become total, one, with no division.One thing you must note: this is not a fixed arrangement. When I say that a man has an intellectual ego, it is not a fixed arrangement. In some moments he may just regress to an emotional ego; in some moments a woman may come up to an intellectual ego. Then things are more confused. When a man is in difficulty, he will just regress to an emotional ego. He will begin to weep and begin to talk in ways which are not even comprehensible to him, and later on he will say, “I cannot say what happens. In spite of myself I begin to weep, I begin to act in ways in which I would not like to act.” A very strong man, in a particular situation, may begin to behave in a very emotional way. A very emotional woman, in a particular situation, may begin to behave very “man-like.” In a different setting the ego may change from one center to another. That creates even more difficulties – but one has to be aware.With feeling or with intellect, the ego is bound to be there. Only with totality is there no ego. So this I give you as a criterion: If you are, and you don’t feel any “I,” you are total. You are sitting here: listen as if there is no “I” in you. Ears are there, a listening process is there, your consciousness is there, but no “I”; then you are total. How can you be divided without an “I”? Without an ego, how can you be divided? The ego is the division.Just as I said that there are many personalities, there are also many egos. Each center has its own ego. Intellect has its own, emotion has its own, the sex center has its own ego, its own “I.” If you go deep down into the bio-structure of the body, each cell has its own ego. That is the division. If you are without an ego, if you just are, with no “I”-feeling anywhere, then you are total. In that totalness – even if for a single moment you are total – you will be suddenly awakened. Then anything can awaken you – anything.A Zen nun is carrying an earthen water-pot from the well. For thirty years she has been in this monastery – working continuously, meditating, making every effort to achieve a tranquillity, a state of stillness where the truth can reflect, but it has not come.Suddenly the water-pot falls and is broken, shattered. She stands there, sees it shatter, and the water flows out – and she is awakened. Suddenly she achieves the enlightenment. She runs, she dances, goes into the temple. Her master comes and touches her feet and says, “Now you are a buddha, you have achieved.”But the nun asks, “Tell me, how did this happen? – because I tried and tried and tried continuously for thirty years and it was not happening. This morning I decided that this seems just absurd and it will not come, so I left every effort. So why, this day, has this happened?”The master says, “Because for the first time you were total and without an ego. Effort creates an ego. The very effort was the barrier. Now, without any effort, without any motive, without any ambition, you were just carrying a water-pot and suddenly the pot falls – bang! The pot has fallen and broken and suddenly you become aware, with no ego. The very listening, the very breaking of the pot, the shattering, the noise, the flowing of the water and you there without any ego, listening totally – the thing has happened.”So when I say listen totally, I mean this.Osho,What are the characteristics and indications that show whether one has reached the authentic and real, cosmic sound aum?It is a difficult question – difficult because the happening is always inside, in a way private, and you cannot know of it or about it from the outside. You can never decide from the outside whether someone has achieved the cosmic sound aum. The deeper you go, the more private is the happening. The public world from where you can decide is just the outside. So how to decide whether one has achieved the cosmic sound, whether one has gone to the deepest ground, has known?You cannot decide it from the outside; that is one thing. Of course, many things which can be known from the outside will begin to happen through the person who has reached, but still the feeling that he has reached the cosmic ground will just be an inference – an inference from his behavior. Behavior can be false; behavior can be imitated. Buddha walks a certain way; Buddha sleeps a certain way; Buddha talks a certain way. You can imitate it without being a buddha. Sometimes it happens that you can imitate better than Buddha – mm? – because Buddha is just unaware: whatsoever is happening is just happening. So you can imitate it in a better way, you can practice it, you can become an expert, and Buddha may not even be able to compete with you because he may not ever have repeated anything.So from the outside imitation is possible – very easily possible. To achieve the authentic is arduous; to imitate is easy, very easy, because inside you remain the same. You can just create it outside. So it is difficult, it is difficult to say from outside, what has happened inside. One thing – you cannot decide from outside. But from inside, if you ask, “How can I know whether I have achieved the cosmic sound aum or not?” – if you ask this, then I will say that when you achieve it you know it. If someone asks, “How can I know whether I am alive or dead? How can I know?” What will we say to him? We will say that even if you can think this much – whether you are alive or dead – you are alive.When you come to the cosmic sound, to the very ground of being, when you hear the aum – not uttered by you, not uttered by anyone, but just as a cosmic sound all around – you know. The phenomenon is so real that, really, the question never arises whether this aum, this sound, is real. The question arises whether I am real now or not. You fade, you become just unreal. You become just a phantom, a ghost. Now your reality is not like it has ever been. The real is all around.But it may even be a dream. You also feel in a dream that everything is real, so how to decide whether this sound that you are hearing is a dream or a reality? The decision comes from a certain source. You will never be the same again – the before and after. This hearing of the sound will be a discontinuity in your existence. You will never be the same again. You will not even be able to connect yourself with your past, it will just drop. You will only remember it as if it belonged to someone else. Your memory will not be yours now. After this experience you will be reborn, and your rebirth will be the evidence. You will never be the same again. The old has dropped; you cannot find the old man again. It is nowhere now. It was there, it is now not there. For you, this will be the evidence that you have heard.I think there is a third implication also. One can go on repeating aum, so how will one find out whether the aum one is repeating and the aum one has come upon are different or just the same? You will feel it because you are the center of the aum that you utter, and then it vibrates outside, mm? – this is the dimension. You create it just as you throw a stone into a silent lake. The stone becomes the center, and then there are waves which go outward towards the banks. When you say aum you create a center in yourself: you drop a stone, and then the sound goes out and out and out, far off from you. This is the dimension, the direction.When you hear the sound aum, the cosmic sound, it is different. It comes; it never goes. It is not a going away from you, it is a coming to you, and the center is nowhere to be found. It just goes on coming and coming and coming and coming. You are overflowed with it. You see the difference? You are not the center, rather, you are the bank, and from some unknown center the sound waves come to you. They go on coming, they never stop. So this direction – the sound center, you, and the waves going outward – is aum uttered by you. You, not as the center, and sound waves coming and coming and coming from somewhere – the center is never known and will never be known….Someone asked Jacob Boehme, “Where is the center of God? Where is the center of the universe?”He said, “Either everywhere or nowhere.” Both mean the same.So when you begin to feel that the aum is coming to you…. Let me say it in a different way. Ordinarily seekers go towards the divine, but until the divine comes to you, remember, you may just be in a fantasy, just in a dream. The seeker going to the divine, to God, to find the center – you will go on searching, but you will never find it.How can you find the center? The center can only come to you. So it is always a false relationship – the seeker going towards God. The real relationship is completely different – godliness coming to the seeker. When you are ready, he comes. When you are open, he becomes the guest. When your invitation is valid, total, he is there. It is always a coming, never a going. So really there is not a phenomenon of man in search of God, but rather it is God in search of man.But you are hiding, escaping, so he cannot find you. Wherever he comes, you escape. You are a closing, never an opening. He goes on knocking and your doors are shut. So when this aum begins to come, when it is a coming to you, you are just filled, you are just bathed in it – and the source is not found. If you can find the source, again it may be that someone is creating the sound from outside – and it is coming! Someone may be playing aum on some instrument, and it is coming.There is no source of it. That’s why mystics have always said that God is the sourceless one. There is no source. It comes as if from nowhere – just out of the blue – and it is here. When you feel this, then you know that the aum is now cosmic. It doesn’t belong to you.In Zen they use koans – puzzles, absurd puzzles – as meditation objects. Rinzai always gave to his disciples the koan of hearing the sound of one hand clapping. It is impossible. How can you hear the sound of one hand? So whenever seekers would be there he would say, “First go and find out what is the sound of one hand clapping. Hear it, and then come to me and tell me.”It looks absurd, but when a man like Rinzai would say this to someone the person would go, close the door, sit down in meditation, and he would think. Then he would come within hours and say, “What nonsense you have asked. How can it be?”Rinzai would say, “I have heard it, so you go and try again. I also said to my teacher, ‘How is this possible?’ but he said, ‘I have heard, so you try.’ I tried, and now I have heard. So you try – and it will come.”The person would go on coming. Every morning he would have a darshan – go to see his teacher – and then the teacher would ask, “Have you heard?”He would say, “No, I have not heard yet.” The teacher would tell him to try harder. So he would begin to imagine, because it is very frustrating to go every day with nothing to show to the teacher. So he would say, “Oh yes, I have heard it. It is just like wind passing through leaves.”But the teacher would say, “No, it is not, because wind and leaves are two things. It must be of one. Wind passing through leaves is just an ordinary sound. Two things can create friction, so it is still of two hands. You cannot befool me! Wind passing through the trees – it is of two hands. Never come again unless you hear the sound of one hand.”He would come, and again and again he would say, “I have heard this and that, or I have heard the sound of the water-drops falling on the roof.” He would come with so many things, and he would be denied. This would go on for months.Then suddenly one day Rinzai asked, “Where is that man? He has not come and it has been so long. Go and find out what he is doing.”He was found in his cell or under some tree, just lost, and he was brought to the teacher, and the teacher said, “Now you have heard. Haven’t you heard?”He said, “I have heard! I have heard!”What sound has he heard? There is only one sound, that is the sound of the cosmic aum which is without friction – not two things, but simply the sound. It is not created by any clapping.The moment someone says, “I have heard,” he will be a different person. You cannot be the same again, mm? The difference will always be: sound coming to you from nowhere – sourceless sound, uncreated. Then it is the cosmic aum.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-03/

Sarva karma niraakaranam aawahanam.Cessation of the cause of all actionsis aawahanam – the invocation.Religion is not ritual. Really, when a religion dies it becomes ritual: the dead body of a religion becomes the ritual. But ritual is to be found everywhere. If you go to find religion you will find ritual. All these names – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian – these are not the names of religions, they are names of particular rituals. By “ritual” I mean the belief that “something done outwardly can create the inward revolution.” This belief, that something done outwardly can create an inward revolution, creates rituals.Why does this belief come into existence? It comes because of a very natural phenomenon. Whenever there is inward revolution, whenever there is inner mutation, whenever there is some inner transformation, it is followed by many outward things and signs – it is bound to be, because the inward exists in relation to the outward. Nothing can happen inside which will not affect the outside also. It will have effects, consequences, shadows on the outside behavior also. If you feel anger inside, your body begins to take certain postures. If you begin to feel silence inside, your body will take certain other postures. When there is silence inside, the body will show it in many ways. The silence, the inner peace, the stillness will be shown by the body in many ways, but this is always secondary. The inner is basic and the outer is secondary. It is a consequence, not a cause.Whenever this happens, for example, if a buddha happens to be here, we cannot see what is happening inside him, but we can see, we will see, what is happening outside. For the buddha himself, the inner is the cause and the outer the consequence. For us, the outer will be the first thing to be noticed and then the inner will be inferred. So for onlookers the outer, the secondary, becomes the basic, the primary.How can we know what has happened in the buddha’s inner consciousness? – but we can observe his body, his movements, his gestures. They are related to the inner, they show something, but they are related not as causes but as consequences. So you cannot go back; the vice versa will not be true. If the inner is there, the outer will follow, but the vice versa is not true: if the outer is there, there is no necessity that the inner should follow – there is no necessity.For example, if I am angry, then my body will show anger, but I can show anger in my body without being angry at all. An actor is doing that. He is expressing anger through his eyes, through his hands; he is expressing love without feeling anything inside; he is showing fear, his whole body is trembling and shaking, but there is no fear inside.So the outer can be without the inner, we can impose it. There is no reason, there is no basis, no necessity, no inevitability, that the inner should follow the outer. The outer always follows the inner, but never the vice versa. Ritual is born because of this fallacy.We see a buddha sitting in a silent posture – in siddhasan, the most relaxed posture for the body. This posture is a consequence of an inner quietude because the consciousness has become so still that the body follows it, and the body spontaneously takes the most relaxed posture. But for us the body is the first thing to be noticed. We see the body first, so we say that Buddha achieved liberation in this posture. Really, quite the reverse is the case: because Buddha achieved liberation, this posture followed. This posture is not a cause. So you can practice the posture, you can become efficient in the posture – but don’t wait for the liberation to come. The posture will be there, but liberation will not come.Someone is praying. His hands are raised or his head is surrendered unto some unknown feet. This is an outward posture. When surrendering really happens inside, this posture follows. When surrendering happens inside, when one begins to feel a nothingness, when one begins to feel to just dissolve into the infinite, this posture follows. You can imitate the posture, but surrendering will not follow.When I say this posture follows, I don’t mean that it is bound to follow for everyone. With every individual there will be differences. It will depend on the culture, on the upbringing, on the climate, on many things. There is no intrinsic necessity for the posture to follow. What will follow will depend on many many things. For example, if a buddha is not born in India but in a culture, in a society, where no one sits on the ground, do you think enlightenment will not come to him? It will come on a chair! Of course, when he is sitting in a chair he will sit in a different way. When enlightenment comes to him he will totally relax, but that relaxation will be different, outwardly, from a siddhasan.Mahavira achieved liberation in a very strange posture. It is known as goduhasan, the posture of a cowherd milking a cow – the same posture as a cowherd milking a cow. In that posture Mahavira was enlightened. Never before and never afterwards has anyone achieved liberation in that posture. He was not milking a cow! Why did this happen? It must have something to do with Mahavira’s own bodily habits; it might be concerned with his past incarnations. Nothing is known about why this happened.The basic thing is that outward things follow some in-ward happenings. They, too, are not fixed laws. From individual to individual they differ. It depends; it depends on many things. But the society begins to feel a necessary connection, a cause-effect connection, between outward things and inward. Then the ritual is born. “Ritual” means that we will do something outward, and the inner will follow. This is the most fallacious thing possible. This fallacy destroys every religion, and every religion ultimately becomes just a ritualistic nonsense.In this Upanishad, this ritualistic understanding is denied totally, but denied in a very positive way. So one thing must be understood very distinctly and clearly.The Upanishads were born in a very revolutionary period as far as the Indian mind is concerned: there was a great rebellion against the Vedas. When I say against the Vedas, I mean the ritualistic structure that was built around the Vedas. It was a dead ritual; everything was a ritual. Religion was not something deep, not something concerned with consciousness and its transformation, rather, it was just concerned with doing something: “If you do this, then you will get this; if you do that, then you will get that.” Every ritual was fixed as if it was a science: “Do this prayer and there will be rain; do this prayer and the enemy will be killed; do this prayer and you will be victorious – do this and this will follow.” This was proposed as if it was a science.This ritualistic structure killed the very progressive spirit of the Indian mind. A revolution followed; it was bound to follow. It took two shapes. One was negative – Jaina and Buddhist. These two currents of thinking took a very negative turn. They said, “Rituals are meaningless, absurd, so all rituals should be abolished.” This was an absolutely negative attitude. The Upanishads were also against rituals, but they took a very positive attitude. They said, “Ritual is not absurd, but you misunderstand the meaning of it.”This sutra is concerned with a yagna ritual, aawahanam – invocation. The word aawahanam – invocation – means that before you begin any worship, any yagna, any prayer, first invoke the deities, first call them. “Aawahanam” means: invite them, invoke them. As far as it goes it is good. How can you pray unless you have invited? How can you surrender unless you have invoked?So these are the ways. The negative way will be first: that it is useless because there are no deities. Second: they have no names even if there are. Third: even if they have names they will not respond because whatsoever you are doing is just bribery, just flattery. Do you think that by your flattery, by your prayers, by your briberies, you will be able to invoke them? If you think that you can invoke them and call them and invite them, then they are not even worth it – because if you can bribe them, then they are just like you. The language is the same and the level also, so they are not worth it.Buddha has said: “There are no deities, and even if there are they are not higher than human beings. They are not higher. You can persuade them, you can bribe them through your flattery – stuti. You can force them to do something or not to do something, so they are not higher than you. They can be just forgotten.”The Upanishads take a very different attitude. They say that deities are there and invocation is possible, but they give a much deeper meaning to invocation. They say:Cessation of the cause of all actions is invocation.They don’t deny anything. They give a new meaning, and the ritual becomes nonritualistic. They say, of course invocation is possible, but by invocation is meant Cessation of the cause of all actions….They say the same thing the Buddha also says. Buddha denies. He says, “There is no invocation. The only path is to be desireless, so don’t ask for any help from anyone, no one can help you. Just be desireless and you will attain nirvana, bliss, peace, the ultimate. So don’t ask anyone’s help, don’t invoke anyone, just be desireless.”This becomes even more pertinent because a person who is invoking a deity is invoking him because of some desire. He wants something – money, prestige, victory, anything. He is invoking the deity, praying for something. So Buddha says, “You are just running from one desire to another, and this running after desires is the dukkha – is the misery. No one can help you unless you become desireless.”Cessation of the cause of all actions…means to be desireless.What is the cause of action? Why are you involved in so much action? Why this constant running? What is the cause? Desire is the cause. So in a very poetic way the Upanishad denies the ritual and yet not the term; denies the ritual, yet not the spirit.Buddha failed because a negative mind cannot really succeed for long. He can be very appealing, because negativity strikes hard. He can be very logical, because to say no is the very spirit of logic – of being logical. Really, whenever you want to say no you need logic. If you want to say yes logic is not needed, reason is not needed. You can say yes without any reasoning, but you cannot say no without any reasoning. The moment you say no logic will be required, so no is always logical.A modern logician, De Bono, says that the purpose of logic is really to say no in a reasonable way, in a rational way. The very purpose of logic is to say no and then to adduce reasons, proofs, for saying no. Buddha said no; it appealed. His approach was logical, rational, everything was perfect – but yet he couldn’t get roots in the Indian soil. He was soon uprooted. This is a very strange fact: that he could get ground in China, in Japan, in Burma, in Ceylon, everywhere in Asia except India. The secret is that the Buddhist monks learned their error when they left India. The no was the error, so they never used negative attitudes anywhere else. They became positive. In China they began to say yes: in Ceylon they have said yes. Then everywhere they succeeded, because yes has a very magical secret of success.It may not appeal to reason: it appeals to the heart. In the end heart wins – never reason. Really, reason never wins in the end. You can silence someone with logical reasoning, but you can never convert him, you can never change him. Even if he cannot say anything against you, he will still be convinced of his own mind. Unless the yes is evoked, he cannot be converted. So Buddha tried hard, but with a no – everywhere no. Whatsoever he was saying was the same as the Upanishad is saying, it was not a bit different. Only the methodology he chose was negative, and the reason might be that he was a kshatriya – a warrior – and a warrior lives with a no.The Upanishads came through brahmins. They were beggars, and a beggar lives with a yes. Even if you deny him, a real beggar, an authentic beggar, will bless you. He lives with a total yes, that is his secret. He cannot use no. A warrior, a kshatriya, can use yes only when he is defeated, and then too from his heart he will never say yes, he will continue to say no. All the Jaina tirthankaras were kshatriyas. Buddha was a kshatriya. They both took negative attitudes.The Upanishads are based on a positive yes. They are yea-sayers. Even if they have to say no, they will say it in such a way that yes is used. Really, this Upanishad is saying there is no aawahanam, no invocation, but no is not used at all. They turn it into a yes. They say, Cessation of the cause of all actions is the invocation. It is not related at all with the invocation of the Vedas, with the priests. It is not related at all. It is related to the same rebellious teaching which says that being desireless is the ultimate state of purity. Unless you are pure, how can you invite the divine?Really, being pure is the invitation. No other invitation is needed. The moment you are pure, the moment the heart is pure, the divine comes. Just being pure is the invitation; so don’t call, don’t cry for the divine, just be pure and he will come.How can this purity be achieved and why are we impure? What is the reason? The Indian genius has always been thinking in terms of desire and desirelessness. Really, everything that we are can be reduced to desire; whatsoever we are is because of our desire. If we are miserable, if we are in bondage, if we are ignorant, if we are in darkness, if life is just a long death, it is because of desire.Why is there misery? Because your desire is frustrated. Unless you have a desire, how can it be frustrated? So if you want to be frustrated desire more, then you will be more frustrated. If you want to be in misery then expect more, desire more, be ambitious for more, and you will get more misery. If you don’t want to be miserable, then don’t desire.So this is the mathematics of inner workings: desire creates misery. If desire fails, it necessarily creates misery, but even if desire succeeds, it again creates misery – because the moment you succeed your desire has gone ahead, it is asking for more. Really, the desire is always ahead of you. Wherever you reach it will be ahead of you, and you will never reach the point where you and your desire can meet; that is impossible. Desire means something always in the future, never in the present. You are always in the present and desire is always in the future. Wherever you are, you will be in the present and desire will always be in the future.It is just like the horizon. You see just a few miles to where the sky is touching the earth, and it looks so real, but go ahead and find the place where the sky touches the earth, and the more you go ahead, the more the horizon goes ahead. The distance remains always the same because, really, it never touches anywhere. The touching, the contact line, is just false. So when you go to seek the horizon you will never find it, but it will always remain there, just you will never meet, and you can continue to be in the illusion that the horizon is there – a little more distance to be traversed. You may go around the whole earth and come back to your home never meeting the horizon anywhere, but the illusion can continue.Desire is just like the horizon. It seems to meet, it seems to be fulfilled soon, the distance is not much: “Just a little more effort, just a bit of fast running and it is just near,” but you never reach it. It is always just near and the distance remains the same. Howsoever you run, the distance remains the same.Has any desire ever been fulfilled? Don’t ask others, ask yourself. Have you realized any desire, ever? But we don’t even wait to think about it. We have no time to think about the past; the future obsesses us. We are in such a hurry to reach the horizon, who will think that we have missed this horizon so many times? There is no time to think – the hurry is such, and life is so short, and one has to run and go on running. Have you achieved anything through any desire or does frustration always come? Aren’t ashes always in the hand and nothing else? But one never sees the ashes in the hand, one never sees the frustration. The eyes are always again fixed on the far-off horizon.This fixation with the horizon is the cause of all actions, and no action reaches a fulfillment – because our actions are just mad. If the horizon itself is not there, then your running is mad. So desire is the cause of all actions and of all misery, of all impurity and of all ignorance.Cessation of the cause – cessation of desiring – is the invocation. If you cease to desire, then there will be no running – no running after anything, no movement inside, no ripples – just a silent pool of consciousness, a silent pool without waves, without ripples. No movement! The Upanishads say this state of consciousness is the invocation.But does it mean that all actions cease when desire ceases? – because we have seen a Krishna moving, doing many things. We have seen a Buddha doing many things even after the enlightenment. So what does cessation of the cause of all actions mean? It doesn’t mean cessation of all actions, it means the cause, the desire, ceases. When there is no desire, actions begin to take an altogether different quality. When there is no desire, then action becomes just a play – with no madness in it, with no insanity behind it, with no obsession. It becomes just a play, a playfulness.Really, the modern psychiatrists say that this is a criterion as to whether someone is insane or sane – an insane person cannot play. An insane person cannot play; even if he plays he will become so serious about it that the play will become a work. Real sanity consists in transforming even work into play. When there is no desire you can play – and if nothing comes out of it, there is no frustration because nothing was expected. The play in itself was enough. That is the difference between work and play.Work is never enough unto itself, it is always meant for some result. The result has a real value, the end, and work is only a means. You work to achieve something; no one works for work’s sake. So work is in the present and the result is always in the future, and it all depends on the result. Work in itself is just a burden to be carried somehow, because it is the end that is to be achieved. If you can achieve the end without the work, you will never work.Play has a different dimension – altogether different, diametrically opposite. There is really no result to be achieved. Play is for play’s sake, but we have become so insane that we cannot even play for play’s sake. So even through play we try to achieve some result, to win something – prestige, medals, anything, but something must be there as an end to be achieved. So, really, grown-ups never play; only children play – with nothing beyond. That’s why the play of children has an innocence and a beauty; the thing is enough unto itself.When a child is playing he is totally absorbed in it – not a single desire out of it, running and going somewhere; not a bit of consciousness beyond it, everything is in it. The child has become just the play – totally involved, committed to this moment here and now; nothing exists beyond it. This is action, but without the cause, without desire.That’s why we have called this world not really a creation of the divine but a leela, a play of the divine, because “creation” is not a good word, it is ugly. It is ugly because you create something for something. No, the divine is only playing – just playing like a child with no result in the mind. The play itself is blissful. So to say: Cessation of the cause of all actions is invocation, means to be just like a child – innocent, pure, without any desire. Then you have invoked the divine. Then you have called, invited.Now your invocation cannot be denied, it is so authentic and so sincere. Really, now you need not even invoke and the divine will be there, you need not even call and the divine will be there – because you have created the situation. The divine will flow, come down. You have created the situation – the purity of the heart. This is the only invocation. All else is again just desire, action.Jesus says that unless you are like a child you cannot enter into the kingdom of the divine. “Like a child”: what does it mean? It means that you are capable of playing, that you are capable of action without desire.For us it is inconceivable. How can we act without desire? Take the opposite case: can you desire without action? You can desire, you can desire without action, so desire can exist alone without action – mm? – everyone is desiring, there are many, many desires without any actions. So desire can be without action: this is our experience. Why not the opposite? Can actions be without desire? If desire can be severed from action, why not action from desire? That too is possible. When desire is not there, action doesn’t cease; it becomes different. The flavor is different, the intrinsic quality is different – the madness is not there and this very moment, the present, has become meaningful and not the future.So take this to heart: if the future is very meaningful to you, you cannot invoke. If the present is the only significance and the future doesn’t exist at all, then you have invoked. The future is the bondage, because without the future you cannot desire. Desire needs space in which to move. It cannot move just in the present; the present has no space. It cannot move. How can you desire for just now? You can desire only in the tomorrow. Really, the future is created because of our desiring – there is no future, the future doesn’t exist.Ordinarily we say that time has three divisions – past, present and future. Really, time has only one, and that is the present. The past is that which is not; the future is that which is not yet. They both are not. Past only means desires that are dead, and future means desires that are still alive – and the present is untouched by your past and by your future.So, really, past and future are not divisions of time, but parts of mind. Time is the present; mind is the past and future. Mind has two divisions, past and future; and time has only one, the present. That’s why mind and time never meet. They cannot meet, because mind has no present, and time has no past and no future. If there were no mind on the earth, would there be any future or past? There would be only the present. Flowers, of course, would flower, but in the present. Trees would, of course, grow, but in the present. There would be no past and no future. With men, or rather with mind, comes past and future. Really, if you look into a child he has no past. How can he have? That’s why he is never burdened – because the past becomes a burden.An old man is always burdened. There is a past, a long past – so many dead desires, so many frustrations, so many horizons never found, so many rainbows just broken. He has a long past and he is just burdened. An old man is always thinking about the past, remembering, going again and again into the memory. An old man, by and by, begins to forget the future, because now the future only means death and nothing else. So he never tries to look into the future, he begins to look back. A child is always looking forward, never back, because there is nothing to look back to. For an old man there is only death to look to in the future and nothing else.A young man is in the present, so a young man cannot understand children and he cannot understand old men. They both look just foolish – both! Children look foolish because they are unnecessarily wasting their time, unnecessarily playing with toys. An old man just looks dead, just unnecessarily worried. A young man cannot understand really, because he cannot see what has happened to an old man – that he is now only the past. This happens.But every young man will become old, and every child will become young, and every old man was once young and once a child – because the mind moves, it goes on moving. In children it has a vast expanse to move. With an old mind it has no expanse to move further. But this is movement of the mind, not of time.Really, we think that time is moving. No, we are moving. We just go on moving: time is not moving at all. Time is the present; time is always here and now. It has always been here and now, it will always be here and now. We go on moving. We move from past to future, and for us time is just a bridge to move from the past into the future – from one desire to another desire. Time is just a passage. For us, time is just a passage to move from one desire to another. If desires cease, then your movement will cease, and if your movement ceases, you will meet with time here and now – and that meeting is the door. That meeting is the door, that meeting is the invocation.But when the Upanishad says, Cessation of the cause…does it mean to say, “Do not desire”? It is very natural for our minds to translate things like that. If the Upanishad says, Cessation of the cause of all actions…it means a state of desirelessness. Remember it: a state of desirelessness. But our minds will translate it as “Do not desire.” You have missed the point if you translate it as “Do not desire,” because even if you do not desire, you will desire. Your “Do not desire” will imply desire. You may desire to invoke the divine, you may desire to be purified, to be pure, to be innocent, childlike, to reach that realm of play. So your mind can say to you, “If you want to enter the kingdom of God, do not desire.”This is a desire. This is how desire works: “If you want to get into the kingdom of God, if you want enlightenment, if you want a meeting with the divine, do not desire.” So this is the logic of desire. “Do not do this if you want that; do this if you want that.” So when I say a state of desirelessness, I don’t mean a commandment which says, “Do not desire!”Then what do I mean? It becomes difficult, complex to understand. Then what do I mean when I say “a state of desirelessness”? It means: understand desire, understand the fallaciousness of desire, understand the absurdity of desire, the futility of it, the nonsense of it. Just understand what desire has done, what desire can do, what desire is doing. Just understand desire, and if you understand it totally you will be desireless. That desirelessness will be just an outcome of your understanding. It cannot be anything out of your action. That “do not” is again an action.This translation of things creates many unnecessary problems. So I have seen people who say, “Do not be greedy if you want to achieve the divine,” but they never feel that this is greed – and a greater one. This is a most extraordinary greed, rare. One wants to achieve the divine, so one must not be greedy. What does greed mean? Not to be greedy means not to desire, not to want. But you are wanting the divine, moksha, so: “Don’t be greedy. If you want to possess the divine, then don’t possess anything else. Be nonpossessive. Renounce, if you want to get!” This renouncing becomes just a step, so it is just a methodology for getting – but you are still for getting.Really, unless you cease this craving to get you will never be mature. So look at it in this way: a child is born and the first state of mind is one of getting. The child is getting everything – the milk, the food, the love. He is not giving anything: he is just getting. This is the most immature state of mind – just getting. When an old man is also trying to get, he has remained just an immature person. It is okay for a child to be in a state of constant getting, he is getting everything. The child cannot even conceive of what giving means. So when you say to a child, “Give your toy to this boy,” he cannot even conceive of what you mean. The language is unknown, the language of giving is unknown. He can only get.You have to train the child according to his language. So you say, “Give this toy to this boy, then I will give you more love.” Now you have to translate even giving into getting. “If you don’t give, then we will not give you love.” So a child begins to learn that if you want to get you will have to give. This giving becomes just a stepping-stone to get more. This is the state of our minds always; then we remain just immature. We are in a state of getting; if sometimes we have to give, it is only to get something else.This purity of heart means quite the opposite of getting – just giving. That is the most mature mind. A child, the immature mind, is always concerned with getting. A Buddha, a Jesus, is always giving. That is the other extreme – giving not to get something, but giving because giving is a play, a bliss in itself. When I say understand desire, I mean understand getting, under-stand giving. Understand that your state is just of getting, getting and getting, and you will never be fulfilled – mm? – because there is no end.Understand this: What have you got through this constant, eternal getting? What have you got? You are as poor as ever, as much a beggar as ever – rather, more. The more you get, the more you become a greater beggar, the more is the desire to get. So you only learn by getting, more getting. Where have you reached? What have you found? What is there which you can say is the achievement of this constant, mad getting? Nothing!If you can understand this, the very understanding becomes a transformation; the getting drops. The moment getting drops a new dimension opens; you begin to give. This is the paradox: you have not got anything through getting – but when you give, you get. But that “get” is not concerned with your getting at all. The giving itself is a deep achievement, a deep fulfillment.When I am saying this, I am afraid you may again translate it. You may say, “Okay. So to achieve that fulfillment we must leave this constant desire to get.” Understand this; don’t translate it. Your mind can distort anything. It has distorted everything. It distorts a Buddha, it distorts a Krishna, it distorts a Jesus, it distorts a Zarathustra – it goes on distorting. They say something, you translate it, and then it is something else altogether different – diametrically opposite even.The understanding of desire becomes desirelessness; the knowing of desire is the cessation of desire. So know deeply, understand deeply. Don’t take any hurried step, and then a purity is discovered which is always there, which has always been there. The heart is pure already, but only covered with desires, with smoke, and you cannot look deeply.This is invocation: if you are pure you have invoked. So be pure and the divine will be invoked. Nothing else is needed, not even a belief in the divine is needed. You need not believe that there is divine energy. You need not believe that there is someone – no need. Just be pure, and you will come to know. The divine is not a belief, it is a knowledge, a knowing.When I say “purity” you may again misunderstand me, because for “purity” we have very moralistic connotations. We say a man is pure because he is moral, a man is pure because he is not a thief, a man is pure because he is not dishonest, a man is pure because he lives under the rules and regulations of his society; but if the society itself is impure, then by living according to its rules and regulations how can you be pure? If the society itself is dishonest, then by following it how can you be honest? If the whole foundation and structure is just immoral, then to adjust to it is the most immoral act possible.So what really happens is that the more moral a person is, the more he goes against the society – because he cannot adjust. A Jesus has to be crucified: he becomes “immoral” because the whole society is immoral. A Socrates has to be poisoned. Why? Because a really moral man cannot exist in an immoral society.Whenever an immoral society pays respect to someone and says that he is moral, it means only that he is adjusted and nothing else – adjusted to the society. Whatsoever the society has said, he follows. Really, he may be just dead. He may have no conscience of his own; he cannot assert anything. He is not – he just follows. He becomes very moral. So for “purity” we have a very moral connotation.No, purity means innocence, and all those persons we call “moral” are very cunning, they are not innocent at all – because if you think that to be a thief is bad, or to be a thief is not respectable, or to be a thief you will have to suffer in hell, or by not being a thief you are going to gain heaven, then you are very cunning and calculating. You are not a thief because of your calculations and cunningness, and it may be that the person who is a thief and suffering imprisonment is less cunning and less calculating. That’s why he is suffering – he has become a thief. You are more cunning, more calculating, so you are moral and honest – but not pure.Purity means innocence; innocence means a noncalculating mind. I don’t mean that he will be a thief. How can an innocent person be a thief? If he cannot calculate, how can he be a thief? – mm? To be a thief one needs calculation; not to be a thief, one again needs calculation. An innocent person is neither moral nor immoral, he is just innocent. That innocence is purity.Jesus has been condemned for many things which his society thought immoral – because a prostitute invites him to come to her home and he goes. Then the whole village begins to be filled with rumors: “Jesus has gone to a prostitute’s house. Why should he go? A moral man can never go to a prostitute’s house.” This is what you would have thought also: “Why should Jesus go there? What is the need? Not only has he gone, he has remained the whole night.” He has slept there, and in the morning, of course, whatever can happen in a “moral” village happens. Everyone is against him. Even his friends are not with him now, even his followers have escaped, and the village encounters him and asks him, “Why did you go to a prostitute’s house?” and Jesus says, “Who is not a prostitute, tell me? How do you decide and how do you judge? What are the criteria?”This is a noncalculating person. He says he cannot judge who is a prostitute and who is not. He cannot judge. How can he judge, and who is he to judge? Here is an innocent man, a pure man, but he is to be crucified because you cannot think that he is innocent, you cannot think that he is pure. How can he be pure when he has slept in a prostitute’s house? Our minds are really so immoral and so impure that we cannot conceive of a different dimension of purity. And this same prostitute is the only person who remains when Jesus is crucified. Everyone has escaped; no one is there. Only this prostitute, Mary Magdalene, is standing there – the only person! No apostle is there; no follower is there. They have all escaped because it is dangerous to be there, even they can be crucified. Only this prostitute is standing there, and this prostitute helped to take Jesus’ dead body down from the cross. So it seems pertinent to ask “Who is not a prostitute?” Was it good for Jesus to stay with this prostitute or not? – because only this poor woman remained with him in the end.What is moral and what is immoral? As far as religion is concerned, innocence is moral and cunningness is immoral. To be innocent is enough. That childlike innocence is the purity. That purity becomes aawahanam – invocation.We have distorted everything, every word. Every word has become just ugly. When you say that someone is pure what do you mean? Just find out the meaning and you will find very ugly things. By “someone is pure,” what do you mean? Innocence? Never – because innocence can be dangerous. Innocence may not fit into your pattern. Really, it will not fit. How can it fit? You cannot persuade it, you cannot force it, you cannot bribe it – and the society depends on force, on bribery, on persuasion, on punishment, on appraisal, on fear, on greed. So we say that if you do this, you will get this.Many, many have asked Buddha, “If we follow you, what will we get?” and Buddha says, “Nothing.” So how can you follow this man? He says, “Nothing.”We are always out to get something. Even from a Buddha we want to get something, promises: “If you promise us this, then we can do this.” Then it becomes logical to us, relevant. Buddha says, “Be pure, and you get nothing.” Then why be pure? Then it is better to be impure, at least then we are getting something. Buddha says that you have not got anything. You are only in the illusion of getting and you will never get.So I say just be pure and forget getting, because unless you forget getting you cannot be pure. If you have to get something, you have to be cunning and calculating. You have to be violent, you have to be greedy, and you have to be always in the future, never here. Then you can never remain at home. You are always abroad, somewhere else, always on a journey.To be desireless, pure, is to have a deep understanding of the futility of all that we have been doing, of all that we are. The moment this purity is there, invocation happens. Then you have called, then you have asked and invited. Then, in the very deepest core of existence, your invitation has penetrated. Now, suddenly you feel that you have been taken over, someone has come into you. Now you are possessed by something else which is more than you. Something infinite, something more vital has come. You have been taken over, you are flooded – for this flooding is the invocation.Of course you have to be open, otherwise this flooding will not happen. An innocent mind is always open; a cunning mind is always closed. A cunning mind is always in defense. A cunning mind always thinks in terms of enmity, competition, because if you are to get something then you have to be a competitor. Everyone is. Everyone is out to get, and you also have to get. Then you have to be a competitor, and this is a very tough competition. So you have to be violent, cunning, closed, defensive. Then you cannot be flooded by the divine. You are so narrow, so closed, that the flood cannot come to you.A pure heart, a desireless heart, is not competitive, not concerned for the future, not against anybody, not for anybody, with no calculations, with no desire to get, with no achieving mind. A pure heart is here and now; open, with no defense. When I say with no defense, I mean that even if death comes it is open. If you are not open for death, you will never be open for the divine. If you are afraid of death, you will be afraid of the divine.But this is strange, because whenever we are afraid of death we always go to the divine to pray. So all those who are praying in mosques, in temples, in churches, are really not praying, they are just afraid of death. They are making arrangements with the divine in order that they should not be afraid. Their prayer is based on fear and their gods are just created out of fear.If the mind is innocent, you can be like a child playing with a snake. Now he is open for both. Death can come and he is open; he can play with death. The divine can come and he is open; he can play with the divine. Death and the divine are, in a subtle way, one. If you are not open to death you will never be open for the divine, and a person who is concerned with desires is always afraid of death.You must see the relationship. A person who is concerned with desires is desirous, is out to get something – is always afraid of death. Why? Because desire is in the future and death is also in the future, and it may be that death comes first and desire is not fulfilled. Remember this: desire is never in the present; death is also never in the present. No one has died in the present. Can you be fearful of death here and now? No, because either you are alive or dead. If you are alive here and now, there is no death; and if you are already dead, there is no fear. So you can only fear death in the future. Desires have a planning for the future and death may disturb everything, so we are fearful of death.No animal is afraid of death because no animal has plannings for the future. There is no other reason than this: no plannings for the future. The future is not, so death is not! Why be afraid of death if there is no planning for the future? Nothing is to be disturbed by death. The more you have planned, the greater the plans, then the greater the fear. Death is not really a fear that you will die, but a fear that you will die unfulfilled. It may not be possible to carry desires to their fulfillment, and death may come any time.If I am to die unfulfilled, of course there is fear: “I am as yet unfulfilled. I have not known a moment of fulfillment and death may come, so I have lived in vain. I have been a futility, just a uselessness. I have lived without any fulfillment, without any peak, without any moment of truth, beauty, peace, silence. I have just lived in futility, meaninglessness, and death may come any moment.” Then death becomes a fear.If I am fulfilled, if I have known that which life can allow one to know, if I have felt what living really is, if I have known a single moment of beauty and love and fulfillment, where is the fear of death? Where is the fear? Death can come; it cannot disturb anything, it cannot destroy anything. Death can only destroy the future. For me, the future is now nothing. I am fulfilled this very moment. Then death cannot do anything. I can accept it; it may even prove to be a bliss.So one who is open to death can be open to the divine. Openness means fearlessness. Innocence gives you openness, fearlessness, a vulnerability with no defense arrangements. That is invocation.If you are just in that moment when even death can come to you and you receive it, embrace it, welcome it – then you have invoked the divine. Now death will never come, only the divine will come. Even in death, death will not be there now, only the divine.Marpa, a Tibetan mystic, is dying. Everyone is weeping and Marpa shouts, “Stop! On such a moment of celebration, why are you weeping? I am going to meet the divine – he is just here and now.” He laughs and he smiles and he sings the last song, and everyone goes on weeping because no one can see the divine there – everyone is seeing death.Marpa says, “The divine is here and now. Why are you weeping? Such a moment of celebration. Such a moment of festivity. Sing and dance and enjoy – because Marpa is going to meet the friend. The divine is here just now. I have waited long and now the moment has come. Why are you weeping?” Marpa cannot understand why they are weeping; they cannot understand why Marpa is singing. Has he gone mad? Of course, for us he has gone mad. Death is there and it seems that he has gone mad. Marpa is seeing something else. Marpa was really one of the most open flowerings of humankind.When Marpa comes to his teacher, the teacher says, “Faith is the key.”So Marpa says, “Then give me something to try my faith. If faith is the key, then give me something to try my faith.”They are sitting on a hill and the teacher says, “Jump!” and Marpa jumps. Even the teacher thinks he will die. Many, many followers are there and they think that he is just mad, that they will not even find a piece of his bones.They rush down, and Marpa is sitting there singing and dancing. The teacher asks, “What has happened?” It seems like a coincidence. The teacher thinks silently in his mind that it is just a coincidence: “Why? This is impossible! How did this happen? It is a coincidence, so I must try him in some other ways.” Then many ways are tried.The teacher tells Marpa to go into a burning house. He goes, and he comes out without even being touched by the flames. He is ordered to jump into the ocean, and he jumps. There are many, many trials, and the teacher cannot say now that this is just a coincidence, so he asks Marpa, “What is your secret?”“My secret?” says Marpa. “You told me faith is the key, so I took your word for it.”The teacher says, “Now stop because I am afraid. Anything may happen.”Marpa says, “Now anything can happen because I just took your word. Now if you yourself are wavering, I cannot take it. I thought faith was the key, but now it will not work. So please don’t order me again. Next time I will die, so don’t order me again.”This is purity – childlike purity. In Tibet, Marpa is known as Marpa the Faithful – just childlike faith.So the story is told that Marpa became the teacher of his own teacher, and his teacher bowed down and said, “Now give me the key of faith because I don’t have any. I was just talking, I have only heard that faith is the key so I was just talking. Now you give it to me.” So Marpa became the teacher of his own teacher.The purity, the innocence, the noncalculating mind…. There is not a single moment of calculation and cunningness – not even to see how deep the abyss is. Not asking, “Am I to take it verbally, or is it just a metaphor, or are you just saying something in mystical language? Am I really to jump, or do you mean some inner jump?” With no calculation, no cunningness, he jumps. The teacher says, “Jump,” and he jumps; there is no gap between the two. A single moment’s gap, and there is calculation. A single moment’s gap, and you have calculated.This purity opens you; you become an opening. That is the invocation.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-04/

Osho,Last night you said that desires move between the dead past andthe imaginary future.Please explain how and why this dead past proves so dynamic and powerful that it compels a person to flow into the process of endless desire.How can one be free from this dynamic past, the unconscious andthe collective unconscious?The past is not dynamic at all: it is totally dead. But still it has a weight – a dead weight. That dead weight works. It is not dynamic at all. Why the dead weight works has to be understood.The past is so forceful because it is the known, the experienced, and mind always feels fearful of the unknown, the unexperienced. How can you desire the unknown? You cannot desire the unknown. Only the known can be desired, so desires are always repetitious. They repeat, they are circular. You always move in the same pattern, in the same circle. The mind becomes just a groove of repetitions, and the more you repeat a particular thing the more weighty it becomes, because the groove goes deep.So the past is important not because it is dynamic; it forces you to do something and to desire not because it is forceful, powerful, alive, but only because it is a dead groove. The past has been repeated so many times, that to repeat it has become easy and automatic. The more you repeat a particular thing, the more easy and convenient it becomes. The basic convenience is this: that if you are repeating a thing, you need not be aware.Awareness is the most inconvenient thing. If you are repeating a particular thing, then you need not be aware. You can be just deeply asleep and the thing can be repeated automatically, mechanically. So it is convenient to repeat the past because you need not be aware. You can go on sleeping and the mind will repeat itself.That’s why those who say that desirelessness is the state of bliss, also say that desirelessness is synonymous with awareness. You cannot be desireless unless you are totally aware. Or, if you are aware, you will find that you are desireless, because desires can have a repetitive force upon the mind only when you are not aware. So the more asleep the mind is, the more repetitive and mechanical. The past has the grip only because it is a repetition and because it is the known. How can you desire the unknown?For the unknown there can be no desire; the unknown is inconceivable. That’s why, even when we begin to desire God, we are not desiring the unknown. By “God” we must mean something which is known. So go deep: what do you mean by “God”? – particularly your God. What do you mean by it? You will find under the garb of “God” something known, something experienced.It may be eternal pleasure. So the so-called religious persons go on saying, “Why are you wasting your life in desires which are momentary? Come to us. Here is the fulfillment. Here is the possibility to achieve permanent, eternal pleasure.” The language can be understood. You know the momentary pleasure, so you can desire permanent pleasure – but under the garb of “God” there is pleasure.You may be seeking God only because you are fearful of death. Then, under the garb of “God,” you are really asking for immortality, to not ever die, an eternal life. You know this life – that is your experience – now you want to make it eternal. So whenever we talk about God, the divine, liberation, moksha, don’t be deceived by the words because the words may be hiding something totally different – and they are hiding, because how can you desire the unknown? How can you conceive of it? How can you ask for it?Really, the phenomenon is quite different. When you are not in desire the unknown comes to you – you cannot desire it. When you are desireless the unknown comes to you. You cannot desire it. The state of desirelessness is the opening for the unknown to come. You cannot desire it because the very desire will become the hindrance.So mind goes on repeating; it is a mechanical thing. So the dynamism is not in the mind – mind is just a dead, mechanical thing – the dynamism is in your consciousness, and if your consciousness is identified with the mind then the dead mind becomes dynamic. The dynamism belongs to your energy, it is not part of your mind. You are the dynamism behind it. If you are identified with the mind, if you think that you are the mind, then the mind begins to be dynamic. If you are not identified with the mind, then the mind is just dead – just a dead weight, just a mechanical accumulation.It is a long accumulation – millennia of evolution, many, many, many lives are accumulated there. It is not only that your mind belongs to this life, it belongs to life as such. It has evolved, so it has deep grooves. It is not only that you fall in love: your father and mother have fallen in love, their fathers and their mothers, and theirs and theirs – they have all fallen in love. The mind has a deep groove of falling in love, so when you fall in love don’t be deceived that you are falling in love. The whole humanity is behind you; the whole humanity has made the groove. It is in your bones, it is in your cells, it is in your very metabolism. Every cell has a sex part in it, and every cell has a groove, and every cell has a mind, memory – long memories, beginningless memories. So if you are identified with this mind it becomes a force – a dynamic force. You give the energy; but the dead machine begins to move, you pedal it.So remember: energy belongs to you, dynamism belongs to you. Mind is a mechanical thing produced by millennia of evolution, but it has deep grooves, and if you are identified then you will have to flow through those grooves. Then there is no escape.So the first thing is how not to identify, how to remember constantly that mind is one thing and you are something else. It is difficult, it is arduous, but it is possible. It is not impossible. If you once have even a moment’s glimpse of unidentified existence, then you will never be the same again. Once you come to know that mind is not the force: “I am the force, the vitality comes from me,” if even for a single moment you have the glimpse of your mastery, then mind will never be master again. Only then can you move into the unknown.Mind cannot move into the unknown: it is produced by the known. It is a product of the known, so it cannot move into the unknown. That’s why mind can never know what truth is, what the divine is. Mind can never know what freedom is, mind can never know what life is, because intrinsically mind is dead. It is dead; dust accumulated through centuries and centuries – just dust, memory dust.It seems that mind forces you. It doesn’t force you really, it only gives you the easiest grooves. It supplies you with only the repeated, routine tracks and you fall victim to convenience, because to break a new route and to create a new track and to move in a new groove is very difficult and inconvenient. That is what is meant by tapa – austerity. If you begin to move in some new grooves which are created not by the mind but created by consciousness, then you are in tapascharya – in austerity. It is arduous.Gurdjieff had many exercises. One exercise was to sometimes deny the mechanism. You are hungry: just deny and let your body suffer. You be just calm and quiet, and remember that the body is hungry. Don’t suppress it; don’t force it not to be hungry. It is hungry. You know, but at the same time say to it, “I am not going to fulfill this hunger today. Be hungry, suffer. Now, today, I am not going to move in this supplied groove. I will remain aloof.”Suddenly, if you can do this, you begin to feel a gap. The body is hungry, but somewhere there is a distance between you and it. If you try to occupy your mind then you have missed the point. If you go to the temple and begin to do kirtan and sing just to forget the hunger, then you have missed the point. Let the body be hungry. Don’t occupy your mind to escape from hunger. Remain hungry, but just tell the body, “Today I am not going to fall in the trap.” You remain hungry, you suffer.There are persons who are doing fasts, but meaninglessly, because whenever they fast they try to occupy the mind so that the hunger should not be known and should not be felt. If the hunger is not felt, the whole point is missed. Then you are playing tricks. Let the hunger be there in its totality, in its intensity. Let it be there; don’t escape from it. Let the fact of it be there, present. Remain aloof and tell the body, “Today I am not going to give you anything.” There is neither conflict nor suppression nor any escape.If you can do this, then suddenly you become aware of a gap. Your mind asks for something: for example, someone has become angry, he is angry with you, and the mind begins to react, to be angry. Just tell the mind, “I am not going to fall in the trap this time.” Be aloof. Let the anger be there in the mind, but be aloof. Don’t cooperate, don’t be identified, and you will feel that the anger is somewhere else. It surrounds you, but it is not in you, it doesn’t belong to you. It is just like smoke around you. It goes on, goes on, and waits for you to come and cooperate.There will be every temptation. This is what is really meant by temptation – mm? No devil is there to tempt you, your own mind tempts you, because that’s the most convenient way to be and to behave. Convenience is the temptation; convenience is the devil. The mind will say, “Be angry!” The situation is there and the mechanism is just on. Always, whenever this situation was there you have been angry, so the mind supplies you again with the same reaction.As far as it goes it is good, because mind makes you ready to do something you have always been doing. But sometimes just stand off, off the track, and tell the mind, “Okay, anger is there outside. Someone is angry with me. You are supplying me with an old reaction, a stereotyped reaction, but this time I am not going to cooperate. I will just stand here and observe and see what happens.” Suddenly the whole situation changes.If you don’t cooperate the mind falls dead, because it is your cooperation which gives it dynamism, energy. It is your energy, but you only become aware when it is used by the mind – don’t give it, and the mind will just fall down as if without a backbone, just a dead snake with no life. It will be there, and for the first time you will become aware of a certain energy in you which doesn’t belong to the mind but belongs to you.This energy is pure energy, and with this energy one can move into the unknown. In fact, this energy moves into the unknown if it is not associated with the mind. If it is associated with the mind, then it moves into the known. If it moves into the known, then it takes the shape of desire. If it moves into the unknown, then it takes the shape of desirelessness. Then there is sheer movement – a play of energy, a sheer dance of energy, an overflowing energy moving into the unknown.Mind can only supply the known, and if you can be detached from your mind, this energy will have to move, because it can-not remain static. That is what is meant by energy: it has to move! Movement is its very life. Movement is not a quality of energy, movement is the very life. It is not that energy cannot be without movement – no. It is the very life, intrinsic.Energy means movement, so it moves. If mind supplies it with grooves, then it moves into the grooves. If there is no supply of grooves and if you have just put off the mind, then too it moves, but now the movement is into the uncharted. This movement is the play, the leela, this movement is creative, this movement is spiritual, and it is desireless. It is not because there is some desire that you move. It is because you cannot do anything else but move: you are energy and movement. So see the difference.When mind works, it works as a dead weight, a mechanical weight, through the past. It pushes you towards the future.…Because the past is pushing towards the future, the past again projects its own desires. So first understand the repetitiveness of desires.There are not so many desires. Really, there are very few, you go on repeating them. Just count how many desires you have. They are not many – very few. You will not even be able to find enough to count on your fingers. How many desires do you have? Very few! Really, if you look deeply, you may even find that there is only one desire. There are modifications of it, but really only one desire, and the same desire is being repeated continuously. Life after life it is being repeated. You go on repeating and then it begins to seem, it begins to appear, that you are helpless, that the wheel is moving and you cannot do anything. It is not so. You are helpless only because you have forgotten totally that the energy by which the wheel is moving is given by you.The future is just a repetition because of the past. It is the projected past. You desire the same thing again, and you go on again and again. That’s why I said that past and future are parts of mind, not parts of time. Time is just here and now, the present. If mind is not working, then energy will be here and now, in the moment. lt will move because it is energy, but now the movement will be into the unknown. The “known” is not there at all. Mind is not, so the known is not.Someone asked Hui-Hai, “How did you achieve? How did you attain?”Hui-Hai said, “When I became a no-mind then I achieved, then I attained.”We are minds. That means, tethered to the past. If we can become no-minds, that means untethered to the past. Then the moment is free, fresh, and energy moves – not for something but because it is energy. Remember the difference exactly: it moves not for something; it moves because it is energy.A river is moving; ordinarily we think it is moving for the sea. How can it know? It is not moving for the sea, it is moving because it is energy. Ultimately, the sea happens to be there; that is another thing. So when you move into the unknown, ultimately you reach to the divine – it happens to be there. If your movement is pure, you reach it.The river goes on moving without knowing, without any map. The past cannot supply the map because the river is not going to move on the past tracks again, so every step is into the unknown and where it is going there is no way to know. It is not moving because of any desire, it is not moving for something. The future is unknown – just unknown, dark. It moves. Why does it move? It moves because it is energy.A seed is moving, a tree is growing, stars are moving. Why do they move? Have they to reach somewhere? – no. They move because they are energy; pure energy is moving. Because pure energy cannot do anything else, it moves. So when you become just pure energy – not mind, but no-mind energy – you move; and then every step is just into the unknown. Then life becomes a bliss, it becomes ecstatic, because the old is never repeated again. Never again will the morning be the same, never again this moment. Now it is a sensation, a thrill every time. This thrill creates Meera’s dance; this thrill creates Chaitanya’s singing; with this thrill, every moment something new is bursting, exploding. A buddha is never bored. He looks fresh.Maulingaputta came to Buddha. He was a very inquiring young man, a great scholar, one who knew all that can be known from scriptures, a great pundit. When he came to Buddha he began to ask many questions. The second day again he asked many questions. The third day again he asked many questions. Ananda, another disciple of Buddha’s, was just bored. He asked Buddha, “Are you not bored? He is repeating the same questions again and again.”Buddha asked Ananda, “Has he repeated? Has he repeated a single question?”Every moment is so new for a buddha-conscious mind. For a buddha-like mind everything is so new, how can you repeat the old question again? Even the questioner does not remain the same. How can you ask the same question you asked yesterday? The Ganges has flowed so much, so how can you ask the same question again? You will never be the same again yourself.Buddha said, “Even if he is asking the same questions he is not asking the same person. So how can I say he is repeating? He must have asked someone else. Yesterday where was I? The energy has moved.”Someone was very angry, insulted Buddha; then felt sorry, and the next day came to ask Buddha’s forgiveness. Buddha was just bewildered, and he said, “You are a strange man! You insult one person, and then you ask pardon from somebody else.”The man said, “What are you saying? Am I strange, or are you strange? I came yesterday and insulted you. I felt very sorry, and I couldn’t sleep.”Buddha said, “That’s why you are still repeating. But I could sleep and now I am a different man. The river has gone on and it is not again the same bank; I will never be the same, so now you are in difficulty because you cannot ask pardon of a man you will never meet. If I ever meet him I will tell him whatsoever you have said to me.”This energy moving into the unknown is fresh, young, so a buddha can never be old. The body, of course, will become old, but a buddha can never be old. He will remain young. That’s why we have never pictured Rama, Krishna or Buddha as old. They became old, but we have no pictures of Krishna’s old age, of Rama’s old age, of Buddha’s old age, of Mahavira’s old age. We have no pictures.It is not that they never became old – the body has to follow the common lot – but by not creating pictures of their old age something more is meant. Really, they were never old because they were so moving – so moving and so young. For such persons death is not an end, it is again a further movement. It is not an end at all.So mind is not dynamic; mind is mechanical. It can become dynamic if you cooperate with it. Don’t cooperate with it! Remember your aloofness, create a distance. Be aware, and then the mind will be there but you will be outside.The English word ecstasy is very beautiful and meaningful. You may not have even conceived of what this word means – ecstasy. It means “to stand outside,” the word means to stand outside. If you can stand outside of yourself, if you can be outside of yourself, you are in ecstasy. Someone has suggested that to translate samadhi as “ecstasy” is not good because the word samadhi doesn’t mean to stand outside. Really, samadhi means to stand inside. So someone has suggested a new word, he has coined a new word. Instead of ecstasy he says it is better to translate samadhi as “instasy” – to stand inside.Really, these two words mean two different things, but in a certain way they mean the same. If you can stand out of your mind, then you will be able to stand in your Self. If you can stand outside yourself – the so-called self – then you will be, for the first time, inside. So ecstasy is “instasy.” Then you will be in your center.If you are out of your mind, then you will be centered in your Self. So going out of the mind is going into consciousness. That’s why mind has to be understood as mechanical, as a mechanism, as accumulation, as the past. Once you feel it, you are out of it, but we go on, we continue to identify ourselves with it.Whenever you say, “This is my thought,” you are identifying. Change the language – and sometimes it helps very much if you can just change the language. Language has such a deep grip. Say, “This belongs to my past mind,” and feel the difference. When you say, “This is my thought,” you are identified. Say, “This belongs to my mind, my past mind,” and feel how only a change of language creates a distance.For example, we say, “My mind is tense.” Then you are identified. We even say, “I am tense.” Then there is even more identification. When you say, “I am tense,” there is no gap. When you say, “My mind is tense,” there is a little gap. If you can say, “I am aware that the mind is tense,” then there is a greater gap. The greater the gap, the less will be the tension.When we say, “I am tense,” it looks as if someone else is responsible. So psychology suggests never to say “I am tense,” because subtly it makes someone else responsible. They say that rather than to say “I am tense,” one should say, “I am tensing.” Then the responsibility is yours.So break the old habits of language, mind, thoughts, and then your energy will move. Once the mind is not there, you are free for the first time.Osho,There is a story in the life of Paramahansa Ramakrishna, and we have heard it from you more than once, about his lust for food which Sharada Devi told about.Doesn't it indicate that desire is intrinsically related to living, to life itself?Desire is related with life, but life can be desireless also. But then bodily life will become impossible. Really, desire is the link between life and body. If all the desires drop, then the body cannot continue anymore because body is just an instrumentality for desires to be fulfilled. Now biologists say that we have developed the senses because of desires, and if you can desire persistently, then your body will develop new senses.It is only because of desires that we have eyes. Ordinarily we think that because there are eyes we see. No! Biologists say that because there is a desire to see, eyes develop. If the desire is not there to see, then eyes will just drop. The whole body comes into existence because of desires.Buddha lived for forty years after his enlightenment, so there was a question: If desires have stopped totally, then Buddha must die – how is he alive?The body has a momentum. If you are running and want to stop suddenly, you cannot stop. Your mind has stopped, you have decided to stop, but you will have to run a little more because of the momentum. You have been pedaling a bicycle, and now you have stopped pedaling but the wheels have accumulated momentum. They will run on, and it will take a little more time for the bicycle to stop completely. That’s why I always say that if the bicycle is going uphill, then it will soon stop. If you have stopped pedaling and the bicycle is going uphill, then it will soon stop. It may even stop the same moment you stop pedaling. But if it is going downhill, it may go on much longer.So if enlightenment happens before the age of thirty-five the body may die soon. If it happens after thirty-five, then it is downhill, it may continue more. So a Shankara soon dies. He was just thirty-three, and he became enlightened at the age of twenty – so it was rare. And he had to die. He couldn’t complete the thirty-fifth year, he couldn’t reach even to the middle. If the enlightenment happens after thirty-five then you are downhill, then the body can continue.With desires stopping totally, really you have stopped being a body. Now the old momentum will work, and it will depend on many things.Buddha died because of food poisoning, and he could not be cured; not because the food poisoning was so dangerous – it was very ordinary – but he had no bodily link, so he couldn’t be helped. So now medicine accepts this: that if you have a lust for life, medicines will he more helpful. If you don’t have any lust for life, then medicines may not prove helpful at all.So now there are many experiments. Two persons are ill, just on their deathbeds. One is more serious, and there is no hope for him – but he is hopeful and he wants to live longer. Medical science is not hopeful, doctors are not hopeful, but he himself is hopeful. Another is not in such a serious state. Everyone is just hopeful: “He will survive; there is no problem.” But he himself is hopeless. He doesn’t want to survive. Suddenly, inside, something has dropped from the body. Now medicine cannot help, he will die – and the seriously ill man will survive. Medicine can help him.Body and consciousness are related by desires. That’s why, if a person dies without desire, then he will not be reborn; because now there is no necessity, no causality to create a body again.I have seen one person who cannot go to sleep because he is fearful of death. Death may occur in sleep, then what can he do? So he is afraid, he cannot sleep. I think his fear is valid, his fear has a significance – because he has no desire to live. He is not desireless, he just has no desire to live. Rather, he has a desire to die, and if a person has a desire to die, he can die in sleep very easily.You can get up in the morning again, not only because the morning has come, but because you have something which forces you to get up. This person has nothing; nothing forces him to get up. So he cannot sleep because of the fear, and in the morning he doesn’t feel at all like getting up. There is nothing. Still, I say, he is not desireless. He is just frustrated; all his desires have become frustrations. When all desires are frustrated you create a new desire – a desire to die.Freud, in his old age, stumbled upon a new thing of which he had never dreamed. For his whole life he worked on “libido” – the desire to live. He based his whole structure of thinking on this force of libido – this sex, this desire for life – and in the end he stumbled upon a second desire. The first desire he calls “Eros” and the second he calls “Thanatos.” Thanatos means the death wish, a desire to die. Freud began to feel that if there is no desire to die, how can a man die? There must be hidden somewhere a desire to die; otherwise, biologists say that the body itself can continue – even forever. There is no necessary reason why a man should die so soon, because the body has a built-in process to renew itself. It can continue renewing – but there are many things….The body is born, as we have always said, because of some desire to live, mm? Really, Freud is right. A second desire is needed to complete the circle. A desire to die must be hidden there. That death-desire helps you to die, and the life-desire helps you to be reborn. That death-desire comes many times to everyone. Many times you become suddenly aware of it. Whenever something is frustrated – you have lost a lover or beloved – suddenly the death-desire comes up and you want to die. Not because you have become desireless, but because your most longed-for desire is now impossible. So you begin to desire death.This difference has to be noted, because many religious persons are really not religious, they are only desiring death, they are suicidal. It is very easy to change the desire from life to death. It is very easy, because life and death are not just two things, they are two aspects of one phenomenon, so you can change.So it happens that the persons who commit suicide are really those who are very, very deeply attached to life…because they are so much attached to life, whenever they are frustrated they cannot do anything else but commit suicide. A person who is not too much attached to life cannot commit suicide. Suicides can be committed in two ways: they can be long-term and they can be short-term. You can take poison just now, or you can go on dying slowly for many years. It depends how much courage you have.Sometimes it happens that you have no courage to live and you have no courage to die, then you have to die slowly. Then a long-term suicide is chosen. Then one just goes on dropping by and by – dying, dying, dying. Then death is a long, delayed process – by degrees.This death wish is also there, and there are many things, many implications in it. Bernard Shaw, in his later life, left city life and went to live in a small village. Someone asked him, “Why have you chosen this village?”He said. “I was just passing by the cemetery and I came upon a stone on which it was written: ‘This man died at the age of one hundred and ten – the death was untimely.’ So I thought this village is worth living in. If people here think that one hundred and ten is untimely, then it is good to be here.” And, really, he lived very long.Psychologists say it is a fixation. If the whole country thinks that seventy is the maximum, then it becomes a fixed mind-attitude. If the country thinks that one hundred is the maximum, then one hundred will become the maximum. If the country begins to think as a whole, collectively, that there is no need to die so soon and that a man can live three hundred years, if the whole country becomes fixed with three hundred years as the maximum, then the body can live for three hundred years. It is just a collective hypnosis.We know a person is going to be old at a particular age, everyone knows. The child becomes aware of when one becomes old. The young man knows when youth will be gone. Everyone knows. And it is so repeatedly known, it is so suggestive, that everyone knows that seventy, or eighty at the maximum, is going to be the limit. We die at eighty because we believe that eighty is the limit; if you can change the limit, there is no need! Basically, there is no need for the body to die so soon. It is a self-regenerating process. It goes on regenerating, it can continue.This collective hypnosis and the death wish become conjoined, they both become one. But if life needs desires, then death also needs desires. That is why we never say that Krishna died – never. We say that he entered samadhi. We never say Buddha died – mm? – it was nirvana, deliverance. We never say that they died because, really, for them, how can death be possible when life has become impossible? Understand the implication: if life has become an impossibility for a buddha, then how can death be possible? A person who cannot desire life, how can he desire death? If he has become so desireless that life is impossible, then death will also be impossible. So we never say that a buddha dies. We say only that he enters a greater life. We never say that he dies.How is it that we die? We die because we live, because we are attached to life. We have to be detached from life, broken. When a buddha lives, he lives as a momentum. He is in the car, and the car is going downhill. Wherever it stops, he will not have any grudge – wherever. At the very moment the car stops he will get down. Not for a single moment will he feel something wrong. He will not feel anything is wrong; it is as it should be. He can live as if not living; he can die as if not dying. But if you want to continue, then some desire has to be there.Ramakrishna tried to be alive for some time just to give the message to a right person. He felt that if there was no desire left and no momentum either, then the body would just drop. So he cultivated, he created, he forced a desire to be there. He continuously tried that at least one desire would be alive until the moment he could deliver the message to a right person. It never happened to a Buddha; it never happened to a Mahavira. Why did it happen to Ramakrishna? Really, it is not a question of why it happened to Ramakrishna. It is a question concerned not with Ramakrishna, but with our age.At Buddha’s time it was never impossible to find persons – never. There were so many, and at any moment the message could be delivered to anyone. But for Ramakrishna it was such an impossibility to find a person. So for the first time Ramakrishna alone is the man, in the whole history of mankind, who tried forcibly to be alive a little more – just to get the right man.When Vivekananda came to him for the first time Ramakrishna said, “Where have you been? I have waited so long. I have waited so long!” And when Vivekananda for the first time achieved the first glimpse of samadhi, Ramakrishna stopped him. He said, “Now no more, because then you will also have the same difficulty. So just remain here, don’t go further. Just remain here until the message is delivered. Now I will take your keys with me so you will not have to suffer the same as I have suffered. First I achieved something, then I had to be rooted in the earth and it was very difficult, very difficult. So now I will take your keys with me, and these keys will be given to you only before your death – three days before.”Vivekananda remained without having the glimpse again. Then he couldn’t achieve. This happening, what Ramakrishna had said, became the barrier. He couldn’t cross the barrier. He crossed only before his death – three days before.Life is desire – mm? The life we know is desire. But there is another life which is desirelessness – the life we don’t know. This life is through body; that life is through pure consciousness – direct, immediate. This life is through body, through mind, through instruments. That’s why it is so dim and faint. It is not an immediate thing.When something reaches you through many mediums it is distorted. It is bound to be. You have never seen the light. Your eyes see the light, then the light is transformed into chemicals, into electric waves. You have never seen those electric waves, you have never seen those chemicals. Those chemicals carry the message, then they are decoded in your mind. They are just codes. Then they are decoded, and the mind gives you the message that you have seen the light. Then you begin to say, “I have seen the light; the sun has risen.” You have never seen the sun rising. It is just a chemical process that reaches you, never the sunrise. It is only the picture that is again decoded.Our whole experience is like this – indirect. I touch the hand of my beloved, of my lover, of my friend. I have never touched them, I cannot, because touch remains at my fingertips. Then, just through my system, an electric wave comes to my mind. That wave is decoded and I say, “How beautiful.” This touch can be created if my eyes are closed. This touch can be created by a mechanical device, and if the same wave frequency can be created as is created by my beloved’s touch, I will say, “How beautiful.”No touch is even needed if the message-carrying system in the mind can be stimulated by an electrode. Again I will feel, “How beautiful.” Just an electrode can be put in your skull, and if we know what the frequencies of your experiences are – when you feel love, what frequency waves you receive – then we can push the buttons and the same frequency is created by the electrode in the mind and you begin to be in love. What frequency do you receive when you interpret it as anger? The electrode can create the same frequency, and you will begin to be angry.What are you living in life? What have you known? You have known nothing, because everything is through so many mediums that only an indirect message reaches you.There is another life without the body, without the mind. Then the experience is immediate, without any medium. It is direct, there is nothing in between. If the light is there, there is nothing in between, then for the first time you are filled with light, not with a coded message. That experience is the experience of the divine.I can say it in this way: if you are experiencing existence through mediums, it is the world. If you are experiencing the existence without any mediums, it is the divine. That which is experienced is the same: only the experiencer is experiencing in different ways.One way is through something else. I give you a message, then you give it to somebody else, then he to somebody else. Then it reaches to whomsoever it was to be given – to whom it may concern. Then it reaches – and it has changed. Every time it is given to someone it is changed. With our eyes we don’t see alike. We cannot see alike because in a subtle way every instrument is different. So when I see light I feel it in a different way. When you see light you feel it in a different way.When a van Gogh sees the sun, certainly he sees it in a different way because he will become just mad, begin to dance, cry, scream. He will just be mad when he sees the sun. For one year van Gogh continually painted only sun pictures. He would not sleep; he was just mad. And in Arles, where the sun is very hot, for one year continuously the sun was beating down on his head and he was in the field painting – painting for one year continuously. He went mad. For one year he had to be put in a madhouse, and the only reason was that he couldn’t stand so much sun.But no one goes so mad. He committed suicide and he wrote a letter, and in the letter he had written, “Now there is no need to live because I have painted all the faces of the sun. I have painted all the faces possible. I have known the sun in every mood, now there is no need to live. Now I can drop dead.” Certainly he must have seen the sun in a different way. No one goes so mad after the sun. Why this madness?He must have had a different message system. Now psychologists say he must have had some different chemicals, built-in chemicals. It is possible that soon we will come to a conclusion that poets have a different quantity of certain chemicals, and only because of that do they begin to be mad after flowers, after clouds. For all others it is just nonsense. It is okay that there is a flower, but it is nonsense to go on painting it, creating poetries and living for it. Certainly something like LSD must be a built-in chemical with them. A dancer has a different chemistry. It seems that the bioenergy works in a different way.So when I say that life is bound with desires, I mean this life, not that. This life is bound with desires. So the more desires you have, the more you will have the feeling of this life, mm? That’s why those who are after desires, running and running, seem to us to be very much alive; we say they are very much alive. What are you doing? Run! Everyone is running and everyone is so alive. Are you just dead?But there is another life also – greater, deeper, more vital, more immediate and direct. We have a word for it, aparokshanubhuti – immediate experiencing. God must be seen, but not by eyes. He must be heard, but not by ears. He must be embraced, but not by hands, not by the body. But how can it happen?We know only two things: life of desires and death of desires. We don’t know another dimension: desireless life and desireless liberation. But if we become aware of the very mechanism of desire we can create a gap, and the moment the gap is created, life begins to move into another life.Osho,With growing desirelessness, sometimes the person becomes outwardly inactive.Is it lethargy and dullness? Why does it happen?Many things are possible, and it will depend. Certainly many desires will drop and many actions also. Those actions which were just caused by desires will drop. If I was running for a particular desire, how can I run if the desire has dropped? My running will stop. At least the same running on the same route will stop. So when a person becomes desireless, at least for an interim period, for an interval – and how long it will be will depend on the individual – he will become inactive. The desires will have dropped, and all the actions that he had been doing were concerned with desires, so how can he continue? They will drop.But by dropping desires and actions, energy will be accumulated, and now energy will begin to move. When it moves, how it moves will vary from individual to individual, but now it will move. There will be a gap, an interim period, an interval. This I call a pregnancy period. The seed is born, but now it will gestate for at least nine months. It may seem strange, but it happens. This nine months period is meaningful. Nearabout this, eight months or ten months, will be the interim period, and you will just become inactive. This inactivity will also vary. Someone may become so inactive that people may think that he has just gone into a coma. Everything stops.It happened like that for Meher Baba. For one year he was just in a coma. He couldn’t even move his limbs. Action was far off, he couldn’t stand up because even the desire to stand had gone. He couldn’t eat, he had to be forced. He couldn’t do anything. For one year continuously he became just helpless – a helpless child. This was a pregnancy period, and then suddenly a different man was born. The man who became inactive was no more. A new energy – energy accumulated.Lives and lives of dissipated energy create this gap – because you do not have enough energy. When desire is not there to invoke, provoke, stimulate, you just drop. Your energy is not really energy, but just a pushing and pulling. Anyhow, you go on running because the goal seems just nearby. A few moments’ endeavor more and you will reach. You pull yourself on; somehow you carry yourself and run. But when the goal is dropped, when there is no desire, you will drop. An inactivity will be there. If you can be patient in this inactivity period, after it you will be reborn. Then energy will begin to move without desires.But I say it depends. It may happen suddenly as it happened for Meher Baba: that was a sudden case. It happened in Bombay. It happened by a kiss from an old lady, Babajan. Meher Baba was just passing, coming back from his school. Babajan was an old Sufi mystic, an old lady who was just sitting under a tree for years and years and years. Meher Baba was just coming, and Babajan called him. He knew this old lady. She was sitting for years under the tree, and he had passed by that street daily on his way towards his school and towards his home. She called and he came near. She kissed him, and he dropped as if dead, just there. Then he had to be carried home.For one year continuously the kiss remained on him and he was in a coma. It may happen suddenly like this – mm? This was a great transfer, and Babajan died afterwards because she had just been waiting for this moment to give someone the whole energy. This was her last life, and there was not enough time even to explain what she was giving. Also, she was not the type to have explained, she was a silent mystic. She had not touched anybody for years. She was only waiting for this moment when she was to kiss someone, and the whole energy was to be transferred in a single transfer. Before this she had not even touched anyone, so this touch was to be total.This child was simply unaware of what was going to happen. He was ready – otherwise this transfer would not have been possible – but he was not aware. He had worked through his past lives. He was just coming up. He might have become aware later on, but just now he was completely unaware. This happened so suddenly that he had to go again through a second pregnancy. For one year he was as if not. Many medicines were given, many, many doctors and physicians tried to help, but nothing could be done, and the woman who could do something, she disappeared, she died. After one year he was a different man – totally different.If it happens so suddenly, then it will be a deep coma. If it happens through some exercises, then it will never be so deep a coma. If you are doing awareness exercises, meditation, then it will never happen so suddenly. It will come so gradually, so gradually, that you will never even become aware of when it has happened. By and by, inactivity will be there, activity will be there, and very gradually everything inside will change. The desire will drop, the activity will drop, but no one will ever feel that you have been lethargic or that you have become inactive.This is the gradual process. So those who follow yoga or any method will not feel the suddenness. There are also methods in which sudden happenings become possible, but one can be prepared. Babajan never prepared this boy, she never even asked his permission. It was a one-way affair. She just transferred the energy.Zen monks also transfer, but before transferring they prepare the ground. A person can be made ready to receive the energy, then this reaction will not be there. He may feel lethargy for some days, for some months, but no one will feel outside that inside everything has become inactive. But that needs preparation and that can happen only in schools, and when I say “school,” I mean a group, working.Babajan was alone, she never made anyone her disciple. There was no school, there was not a following in which she could have prepared anyone. Also, she was not the type. She was not the teacher type; she couldn’t teach. But she had to give to someone, to whomsoever passed and she felt: “Now is the moment, and this one will be able to carry it,” so she could just deliver it.So it depends. Inactivity is bound to be there – more or less; but it will be there, a period will be there. Only then can you be reborn because the whole mechanism has to change completely. The mind drops, old roots drop, the old habits drop, the old association of consciousness and desires, consciousness and mind, drops – everything old drops and everything has to be new.A waiting is needed, patience is needed, and if one is patient, one has not to do anything. Just to wait is enough. The energy begins to move by itself. You just sow the seed and then wait. Don’t be in a hurry, don’t go every day to pull the seed out and see what is happening. Just put it inside and wait, the energy will take its own course. The seed will die, and the energy will sprout and will begin to move. But don’t be impatient. One has to wait.The greater the seed, the greater the possibility, the potentiality, of the tree that is going to be, the more will be the waiting. But it comes. It comes! The deeper the waiting, the sooner it comes.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-05/

Nischal gyanam asanamNonwavering knowingis asana – the posture.Man is neither a body nor a mind alone – he is both. Even to say that he is both is wrong in a way because body and mind are separate only as two words. Existence is one. Body is nothing but the outermost core of your consciousness, the grossest expression of consciousness, and consciousness, on the other hand, is nothing more than the subtlest body, the most refined part of the body. You exist in between.These are not two things, but two ends of one thing. So whenever knowing becomes nonwavering, the body is also affected; nonwavering knowing creates a nonwavering body. But vice versa is not true. You can impose nonwavering on the body, but the knowing will not become nonwavering. It can help – a very little. It can be helpful, but not much.Body posture became very important because we are body-oriented. Even those who say that we are not bodies think in terms of body. Even those who say, “We are not bodies,” their thinking, their mind, remains tethered to the body. Even they begin with body postures. Asana means giving your body a posture in which the body becomes nonwavering, still. It is supposed that if the body is still, then the mind will go into stillness.This is not true – the contrary is true. If the mind becomes still, then the body becomes still. And then a very mysterious phenomenon happens: if the mind is still, you can go on dancing but your body will remain still. If your mind is not still, you can be just dead but still the body will be wavering, because the mind wavering creates subtle vibrations which come to the body and the body goes on wavering inside. Try it: you can sit just like a statue – dead, stone-like. Close your eyes and feel. Outwardly, no one can say that your body is wavering, but inwardly you will know that it is. A subtle trembling is there. Even if it cannot be detected from the outside you can feel it from the inside.If your mind is totally still, then even if you are dancing you will feel from inside that the body is still. A buddha is still even when he is walking, and a non-buddha is not still even when he is dead. The vibrations come from your center, they originate from you, and then they spread towards the body. The body is not the originator, it is not the source, so you cannot stop them from the periphery. You can impose, you can practice, but inside there will be turmoil – and this imposing will create more conflict than stillness.So this sutra says that to practice meditation, a posture, a still posture, is needed. But what do we mean by a posture? This sutra says that a nonwavering knowing is the posture. If the mind is nonwavering, then you are in the right posture. In that right posture everything can happen.So don’t deceive yourself by creating bodily imitations. You can create them; that is very easy. To impose stillness on the circumference, on the periphery, is very easy, but that is not your stillness. You remain in turmoil, you remain wavering. It is from the center that the waves must not come.What is this nonwavering knowledge? It is one of the deepest secrets. To understand it we will have to go deep into the very construction of mind, so let us begin.Mind has many types of thoughts. Every thought is a wavering, every thought is a wave. If there are no thoughts, then the mind will be nonwavering. A single thought, and you have trembled. A single thought, and you are not still. And a single thought is not a single thought, it is a very complex phenomenon. A single thought is created by many waves; even a single word is created by many waves. So only when there are many waves in the mind is a single word created, and a single thought has many words. Thousands and thousands of ripples create one thought.Thought is the outermost, but waves have preceded. You become aware only when waves become thoughts because your awareness is so gross. You cannot be aware when waves are pure waves, still in the formation of becoming a thought. The more you will become aware, the more you will feel that thought has many layers. The thought form is the last. Before thought there are seed waves which create the thought, and before the seed waves there are still deeper roots which create seeds.Seeds create thought. At least three layers are very easily visible for a conscious mind. But we are not conscious, we are asleep. So we become aware only when waves take the grossest form – thought. As far as we know, thought seems to be the most subtle thing. It is not. Thought really has become a thing. When there are pure waves you cannot even detect what is going to happen, what thought is going to be created in you. So we become aware only when waves become thought.A single thought implies thousands of waves, so we can conceive how much we are wavering – continuous thinking, not a single moment of no thought, one thought followed by another constantly, no gap. So we are really a wavering phenomenon, a trembling phenomenon. Søren Kierkegaard has said that man is a trembling – just a trembling and nothing else. He is right in a way. As far as we are concerned, man is a trembling. A Buddha may not be, but then Buddha is not a man.This thought process is the process of wavering. So non-wavering means a no-thought state of mind. Really, the sutra says nonwavering knowing – mind is not even mentioned. So, first, three layers of mind have to be distinctly understood.One is the conscious mind, and one type of thought belongs to the conscious level. These thoughts are the least important. They constitute moment-to-moment reactions, reflexes. You are on the road and a snake passes and you jump. The snake gives you a stimulus, and you respond. So one type of thought is like this: stimulus outside and a response from the periphery. Really, you don’t think, you just act. A snake is there, you act; you become aware and you act. You don’t go inside to ask what to do. The house is on fire and you run. This is a peripheral reaction.So one type of thought is the moment-to-moment reflex type. Even a buddha has to react in this way. This is natural; nothing is wrong with it. If you react moment to moment, then nothing is wrong with the mind – but that is not the only layer.Then there is a second layer. This second layer is the subconscious. Religions call it “conscience.” Really, this second layer is created by the society; it is a society in you. Society penetrates everyone, because society cannot control you unless it penetrates you; so it becomes a part of you. The upbringing, the education, the parents, the teachers – what are they doing? They are doing one thing: they are creating the subconscious mind. They are giving you thoughts, structures, ideals, values. These thoughts belong to the second layer. They are helpful, they have their utility, but they are harmful also. They are instruments to move easily, conveniently in the society, but they are barriers also.This second layer has to be understood more. This second layer consists of ideas within – fixed ideas, fixations. So whenever your peripheral mind is working moment to moment it is not pure. Only a child is pure, innocent – he is working moment to moment. There is no subconscious to interfere.You are not working moment to moment, the subconscious is constantly interfering. It is giving you choice: what to choose, what not to choose. Every moment it is making you narrow. You just become unaware of many things because of the subconscious. It will not allow you to be aware of everything. And about many things you become too much aware because this subconscious mind forces you constantly to be aware of them.Every society creates a different type of subconscious, so really being a Hindu or a Christian or a Jaina belongs to the subconscious mind. As far as the peripheral mind is concerned, everyone reacts in the same way; it is natural. But the subconscious mind is not natural, it is a social product, so we behave in different ways. You see a church. A Hindu can pass it without even becoming aware that there is a church. He need not be aware. But a Christian cannot pass without becoming aware that there is a church. He may even be anti-Christian – consciously he may even be like Bertrand Russell, who can write a book called Why I Am Not a Christian – but he will become aware. The subconscious is working there.A brahmin, he can intellectually understand that the problem of untouchability is just violent, cruel, and intellectually he can think that it is not good, but this is the conscious mind. The subconscious is working there. If you ask him to marry a sudra girl, he is struck somewhere deeply. He cannot conceive of it. Even to eat with an untouchable becomes difficult. Intellectually he understands nothing is wrong in it, but the subconscious goes on projecting and pushing. And he cannot react naturally: the subconscious distorts, perverts.This subconscious is constantly supplying you with many ideas which you think are your own. They are not. They have been fed to you just like a computer is fed. You can get information out of a computer only if you have previously fed it. The same is also the case with man, with mind also. Whatsoever you are getting out is just because of what has been fed in before. Everything has been fed in. This is what we mean by education, the so-called education – feeding information, so it is ready in the unconscious every moment. It is so ready, really, that even when you don’t need it, it comes up. It constantly overfloods your mind and it becomes a constant wavering, a constant trembling. This subconscious mind is the root cause of so many social evils.Really, the world could be one if there was no subconscious mind. Then there would be no distinction between a Hindu and a Mohammedan. The distinction is of the subconscious feeding, and it goes so deep that you cannot even feel how it works. You cannot go behind it. It goes so deep that you always remain in front and you feel helpless. But the society is also helpless. It is a substitute – a poor substitute, but a substitute. Unless man becomes totally aware, the society cannot dispense with the subconscious.For example, if a man becomes totally aware he cannot be a thief. But man, as he is, is not aware at all, so society has to create a substitute for awareness, it must put a strong suggestion inside that theft is bad, evil, sin; that you must not be a thief. This idea must be put deep in the subconscious so that when you begin to think of theft the subconscious comes up and says, “No, this is sin,” and you are stopped. This is a social substitute for awareness, and unless man comes to awareness the society cannot dispense with the subconscious because it has to give you some rules. Unless you are so aware that rules are not needed at all the subconscious will have to be maintained.So each society has to create a subconscious. I call that society good – remember it – I call that society good which creates a subconscious that can be dispensed with very easily. And I call a society bad which creates such a subconscious that it cannot be dispensed with – because if it cannot be dispensed with, then it becomes a hindrance when you try to be aware. And, really, now no such good society exists which gives you a dispensable substitute, a dispensable subconscious, which gives you a subconscious as a utilitarian instrument so that the moment you become aware you can throw it away.To me, the society which gives you an inherent freedom about the subconscious is good and religious. But no society gives it, so no society is really religious. Every society is totalitarian, and every society takes your mind in such a way that you become just an automaton – and you go on thinking and deceiving yourself that your thoughts are yours. They are not! Even the very language we use is contaminated, the words we use are contaminated. We cannot use a single word without the subconscious being there. It comes suddenly. Society uses it very cunningly, and then your reactions, your reflexes, are not spontaneous.You are passing along the road and in the distance you see a woman coming out of a shop. Your mind begins to feel and say that she is beautiful, and then suddenly you recognize that the woman is your sister. Now, suddenly, she is not a woman at all. What has happened? The word “sister’ has come in. Now she is not a woman at all. And with the word ‘sister’ the subconscious has many, many deep associations. Suddenly something has happened. What has happened? The woman is not a woman now, because a sister is not a woman. How can a sister be a woman? Nothing has changed outwardly, but a word has dropped in.Then you recognize that you were deceived by the dress, she is not your sister. Again something else comes up: she is not your sister! Now she again becomes beautiful. How can a sister be beautiful? And when you say beautiful, you mean now you are sexually interested. Now she can potentially be a sexual object. The possibility grows.Even the words we use are loaded with the subconscious. That is why, in the hospitals, for nurses we use the word sister – just so that they cannot be made objects for sexual interest. Otherwise it will be difficult for them and more difficult for the patients. Nurses are constantly moving here and there. If they constantly become sexual objects, then it will be very difficult for the patients also. So we just play a trick: we call them sisters. The moment they are sisters they are not women. The very word is loaded.This subconscious mind is constantly working, day and night. The mind’s working is double. One working belongs to your conscious mind. It is concerned with how to control the subconscious consciously, constantly. Then the subconscious is controlling the conscious mind. It is working to control your reactions, your actions, your reflexes, everything; whatsoever you are doing must be controlled. This is the society’s grip on you. You are just moving in society’s hands. No value is yours. How can it be? How can a value be yours when you are not at all aware? Only awareness can give you authentic, individual values.All these values are supplied. If the society is vegetarian, then you have vegetarian values. If the society is nonvegetarian, then you have nonvegetarian values. If the society believes in this, then you are a believer in it. If the society doesn’t believe, then you are a disbeliever. But you are not; only society is there.This is a double control: one control is on your conscious mind, your behavior. Another control is more deep and more dangerous, and that is the control on your instinctive nature. The first part is conscious, the second is subconscious. The subconscious is created by society. And the third is the instinctive, which is given by biological nature: that which you really are biologically, that which you are born with. That’s a third part, the deepest: the biological, instinctive nature.This second, subconscious mind is controlling outward behavior and also controlling inward instincts. Nothing should be allowed to come up to the conscious mind from your instinctive nature if the society is against it. Nothing should be allowed to come up – even up to your consciousness. So this subconscious creates a great barrier for the instinctive nature.For example, sex is an instinct, the deepest, because without it life cannot exist on earth. So life depends on sex. It is not easily dispensable; obviously it must not be, otherwise life will become just impossible. So it has a deep grip. But the society is anti-sex; it is bound to be. The more a society is organized, the more it will be anti-sex – because if your sex instinct can be controlled then everything can be controlled, and if your sex instinct cannot be controlled then nothing can be controlled. So it becomes a fighting ground.You must be aware that whenever a society becomes sexually free, that society cannot exist. It is defeated. When Greek culture became sexually free, Greek civilization had to die. When Roman civilization became sexually free, it had to die. Now America cannot exist anymore. America has begun to be sexually free. The moment a society becomes sexually free, the individual is not in its grip. You cannot force him.Really, unless you suppress sex you cannot force your youth to war. It is impossible. You can force your youth into war only if you suppress sex. So the hippie slogan is really meaningful: “Make love, not war!” So society has to suppress the deepest instinct. Once it is suppressed, you can never rebel. Many things have to be understood about it.Children, when they mature sexually, begin to be rebellious – never before. The moment a boy is mature he will begin to be rebellious against his parents, never before – because with sex comes individuality. With sex he really becomes a man, never before. Now he can be independent. Now he has the initial energy with him because he can propagate, he can reproduce. Now he is complete.At fourteen a boy is complete, a girl is complete. They can be independent of their fathers and mothers, so rebellion begins to take shape. If the society has to control them, sex must be suppressed. All instincts have to be suppressed because we have not yet been able to create a society in which freedom is not against all, in which one individual’s freedom is not against all. We have not yet been able.We are still primitive, not yet civilized, because a society can be called civilized and cultured only when each individual grows to his total potentiality, is not suppressed. But politics will not allow it, religions will not allow it, because once you give total freedom to instinctive nature, then churches and temples and the so-called religious business cannot continue. Religion will be there, more authentic, but religions cannot continue, because if you cannot create fear, then no one will go to this religious business.People come because of fear; and if you suppress their instincts they become fearful – fearful of themselves. A child feels existential fear for the first time when his sex is suppressed. He feels guilty. He begins to feel that something is wrong, and he also begins to feel that “No one has this evil that I have inside. I am guilty.” You create guilt; then you can control. Then he feels inferior inside, afraid. This fear is then exploited by religious heads, by political leadership, because they all want to dominate.You can dominate only when people are fearful. How can you create fear? If you can convince them that something which is constantly within them is sin, they will be fearful. They will be fearful! Sex will be there all the time and they will become afraid – afraid of themselves, and guilty. Then they cannot enjoy anything. Then their whole life becomes a frustration. Then they go on seeking help somewhere, guidance; someone to take away their responsibility, someone to lead them to heaven, someone to protect them from hell.This third instinctive layer is the unconscious. The subconscious is controlling it every moment, and it controls so fanatically that everything is destroyed, or at least distorted. We never feel from the third layer what real instinct is. We never feel. Everything is distorted. From this subconscious mind – the most suppressed, the most distorted, the most destroyed – come all the miseries. All the miseries, all the paranoia, all the schizophrenia, all mental diseases, they come from this third layer.These three – conscious, subconscious and unconscious – these are the three types of thoughts. The deeper the layer the thought comes from, the more irrelevant it looks. So if you just write down your thoughts as they happen, you will feel that you are just mad. What is going on in your mind? What type of thinking is going on? Most of it looks irrelevant. It is not! It is relevant, only with missing links, because the subconscious will not allow everything to come up. Something escapes and comes to the mind, and the gaps are there.That’s why you cannot understand your dreams, because even in dreams the subconscious is always alert not to allow everything and so the unconscious has to try symbolic routes. It has to change everything just to escape the censor of the subconscious. So it goes on giving you messages in symbolic, pictorial forms.Your mind is flooded: first, with outward reactions and reflections which are natural; second, by subconscious thoughts which have been produced by the society; and third, by instinctive nature which has been totally suppressed. These three constantly flood the mind. And because of these you are constantly wavering – constantly wavering and trembling. You cannot even sleep. Dreams will continue; that means mind will continue wavering. The mind is just a mad thing going round and round and round twenty-four hours a day.In this state of affairs, how can you be still? How can you attain “the posture,” the nonwavering mind? How can you achieve it? And when the rishi says that Nonwavering knowing is the posture – the right posture – he means that unless these layers are broken and the contents released, you will never be in a state of pure knowing. The mind will not be cleansed; you will not attain the purity of perception. So what to do? What to do to achieve this nonwavering knowing?Three things: one, whenever you are living moment to moment, don’t allow your subconscious to constantly interfere. Sometimes, just drop the subconscious and live in the moment. It is not needed. Sometimes it is needed: when you are driving the subconscious is needed, because the skill of driving becomes a part of the subconscious. That’s why you can talk and you can smoke and you can think and you can drive. The driving is now not a conscious effort, it has been taken over by the subconscious. So it is good to use it whenever it is needed, but when it is not needed just drop it, put it aside. Without any murmur, just put it aside and be in the moment.There are many moments when the subconscious is not needed, but you only go on using it because of old habit. You have come back from the office and you are sitting in your garden – why should the subconscious come in now? You can listen to the birds, just as once you listened when you were a child without a subconscious.Relax in these moments, and just be there with the reality. Don’t allow your subconscious mind to come in. Just put it aside. Play with children – put the subconscious aside.A father who cannot play with his children as their equal cannot really be a right father, because no communication is possible unless you are equal to them. A mother cannot really be a mother unless she can become a child again with her child. Then there is a rapport. Then both become equal. Then there is a friendship. Then a different quality of love comes in. So, really, a child never feels independent, free, at liberty with his parents – never. He begins to feel freedom for the first time when he goes to his chums – not with his parents.So remember constantly that whenever you can relax your subconscious, relax it. It is not needed that it is there every moment.There are many moments when it is not needed, but you will not relax it even in your bed. You have gone to sleep and it is working. You want to sleep and it will not allow you. It says, “I have much work to do.” It goes on thinking, it goes on working. You can put off the light – mm? – that means you stop the first, the peripheral mind. Now there will be no light, you will not be able to see. You can close the doors. Now there will be no noise, no sound. You have completely closed yourself off from outside stimuli. That means now you need not react, so the first layer of the mind is relaxed.But what to do with the second layer? You put off the light, close the doors, close your ears, close your eyes, but it goes on working, because you have never allowed it not to work. Really, a man is not the master of his mind unless he achieves this: that when he wants to work with the mind he works, when he doesn’t want to work with the mind he doesn’t. And the second capacity is the greater.I am reminded:Lieh Tzu was asked by a Chinese emperor, “I have heard many, many miracles about a particular saint. I have heard that he can walk on water and fly in the sky, that gravitation has no effect on him and he can produce things from out of the blue. So I want to ask, Lieh Tzu, can your Master Lao Tzu also do such miracles?”Lieh Tzu said, “Yes, he can do them. He is capable of doing any miracle.”Then the emperor said, “But I have never heard that he has ever done any. Why is he not doing them?”Lieh Tzu said, “He is also capable of a greater miracle. That is, he is capable of not doing also. He is capable of doing a miracle, and he is even capable of not doing it.”The second is greater, because to do a miracle is, of course, a power. But when you have the power, then not to use it is a greater power. It is really impossible; the second miracle is really impossible! And because of that second miracle, Buddha never did any miracle, Mahavira never did any miracle – because of that second capacity. That is greater.You think that a miracle is a miracle, but if you can be in a nonthinking state it is an even greater one. It needs only the breaking of an old habit. But you have never tried it, you have used your subconscious constantly; your subconscious mind doesn’t have any memory of when you have allowed it not to work. So the first thing to do is to allow your subconscious mind to be put aside sometimes. Don’t use it, and soon you will have a less-wavering mind. You can become capable of this, and it is not difficult. You must only become conscious of your subconscious workings. Don’t allow – just relax sometimes and tell your subconscious mind: Stop!One thing more to remember: never fight with it, otherwise you will never be capable of this nonwavering. Never fight with it, because when a master begins to fight with his servant he accepts equality. When a master begins to fight with a servant he has accepted him as the master. So please remember: never fight with the subconscious mind otherwise you will be defeated. Just order it – never fight.Know the difference – that’s what I mean when I say just order it. Just say to it, Stop! and begin to work. Never fight with it. This is a mantra, and the mind begins to follow it. Just say, Stop! – nothing more, nothing less. Say, Stop totally! and begin to behave as if the mind had stopped. Soon you will become capable, and you will be just wonder-struck at how this mind stops by just saying, Stop! It is because mind has no will.You might have seen someone in a hypnotic trance. What happens? In a hypnotic trance, the hypnotist simply goes on giving orders and the mind follows – the man follows. Absurd orders, and the man begins to follow, the hypnotized subject follows them. Why? – because the conscious mind has only been put to sleep, and the subconscious mind has no will of its own. Just tell it to do something and it will do it.But we are not aware of our own capacity, so rather than ordering we go on begging, or at the most we begin to fight. When you fight you are divided. Your own will begins to fight with you. The subconscious mind has no will at all. So if you want to stop smoking, don’t try. Just order and stop. Don’t try at all. If you fall in the trap of trying you will never win, because you have accepted something which is not there. You just have to say to the mind, “I stop now, this very moment,” and soon you will become aware that things begin to happen. It is natural. Nothing is strange about it, it is just natural. You have to be aware of it just once, that’s all. So just put the subconscious mind aside and begin to live in the moment.Then the second thing you have to do is: when you have become capable of putting the mind aside when something outside is working as a stimulus, then try the other way – when some instinct is coming up, just put the subconscious mind aside. It will be a bit difficult, but when the first thing has been achieved it will not be difficult at all. Just see now that again sex is coming up, that anger is coming up, and just say to the subconscious mind, “Let me face it directly. Don’t come in – let me face it directly. You are not needed.” Just order the mind and face the instinct directly. Once you begin to encounter your own instincts directly, you will be the master without the need of any control.When you need control, you are really not the master. A master never needs control. If you say, “I can control my anger,” you are not the master because a controlled thing can erupt any moment, and you will remain constantly in fear of that which you have controlled. There will be a constant fight. In any weak moment you will be defeated. So please don’t control. Be a master – don’t control. These are two completely different dimensions.When I say be a master, this mastery comes only when you encounter your nature, your biological nature as it is, in its purity. I wonder, have you ever seen your sex in its purity without moral teachings coming in, without the gurus and mahatmas dropping in, without the scriptures? Have you seen your sex instinct in its purity, in its pure fire? If you have seen it, you will become the master of it. If you have not seen it, you will remain a cripple and you will remain a defeated one. Howsoever you try to control, you will never be able to control it. That is impossible.Control is impossible; mastery is possible. But mastery has a different root. Mastery means knowledge; control means fear. When you fear something, you begin to control. When you know something you become the master; there is no need to control. And knowledge means direct encounter. Instincts should be known in their purity. Drop the subconscious, because it is a constantly disturbing factor. It goes on distorting things, it will never allow you to see things as they are. It will always put the society in between, and you will see things through the society – as they are not.Really, this is the miracle of the subconscious mind – that if you look through it things begin to be as you see them. The subconscious mind can impose any color, any shape on things. Just put it aside; face your biological nature directly. It is beautiful. It is wonderful. Just face it directly. It is divine. Don’t allow any moralistic nonsense to distort it. See it as it is.Science observes things, and the basis of its observation is that the observer must not come in, he must remain just an observer, and whatsoever the thing reveals should be allowed. The observer must not come in to disturb and destroy or distort or give a shape or a color. A scientist is working in his lab: even if something comes up which destroys his whole concept, his whole philosophy, his whole religion, he must not allow his mind to come in. He must allow the truth to be revealed as it is.The same goes for inner working, inner research; allow your biological nature to reveal itself in its pure being. Once you know it you will be the master, because knowledge means mastery, knowledge means power. Only ignorance is weak. Through control there is no knowledge, because the whole concept of control is brought in by the subconscious, by the society.So if you can do two things with your subconscious: one, allowing the fact of the outside existence to come to you directly; and then, two, allowing the facticity of the inside existence to be realized in its purity, in its innocence. Then a miracle happens. It is a miracle, and that miracle is this: that the subconscious and the unconscious drop. Then mind is not divided in three. Then mind becomes one. That oneness of mind, undivided oneness, is what the Upanishads call “the knowing” – because even the knower is not there. When these three divisions have dropped, when even this division of knower is not there, then only pure knowing, only mirror-like knowing remains.With this knowing you have two centers: one, the outside periphery where you unite with the universe; and another, the inside where again you unite with the universe. And this knowing joins both the inner and the outer – the atma and the brahman.This pure knowing is without any trembling. This pure knowing is “the posture,” the right posture in which enlightenment happens, the realization happens, in which you become one with truth. This is the door – but how to cleanse…? It is not simply a theory, it is not a theoretical statement at all. It is just a scientific procedure, it is a process. Do something to dissolve the divisions of the mind. And if you want to dissolve the mind, concentrate on the subconscious, the middle portion of the mind, which is society. Drop it!It is, of course, necessary for a child to be brought up in a society. It is necessary. So the subconscious is a necessary evil: the society has to teach him many things, but they should not become fetters. That’s why I say that a better society, a real, moral society, will also teach, side by side, how to break this subconscious. A better society will give its children the subconscious, with a conscious methodology of how to drop it when it is not needed and how to be free of it.It is needed up to the point when you become aware, when you achieve an awakened state of mind. Until then it is needed. It is just like a blind man’s staff. A staff cannot be a substitute for eyes: it is just a groping in the dark. A blind man needs it, and it is helpful. But a blind man can become so much attached to his staff that when his eyes are healed and he has begun to see, he still cannot throw away his staff and goes on groping. Because groping is easier when the eyes are closed, he remains with closed eyes and goes on groping with his staff.This subconscious is like a blind man’s staff. A child is born, but he is not born aware. The society has to give him something so that he can move and grope – some values, some ideals, some thoughts. But they should not become the eyes. What I am saying is: if you drop the divisions and create more awareness within yourself you will have eyes, and with those eyes this staff is not needed.But it is a related thing. If you drop the subconscious you will become aware; if you become aware then the subconscious will drop. So begin from anywhere. You can begin by being more aware, then the subconscious will drop – mm? This is a samkhya process, this is a samkhya methodology: just be aware, and by and by the subconscious will drop. The yoga process is a second way – the other, the contrary – drop the subconscious, and you will become more aware. Both are related.So wherever you want to begin, the important thing is to begin. Begin from anywhere, either from being more conscious or from being less obsessed with the subconscious, and when these divisions drop, you will have a pure knowing. That pure knowing is “the posture.” With that pure knowing, with that nonwavering knowing, your body will achieve a stillness you have not known at all.We are not aware, that’s why we don’t know how disturbed we are in our bodies. You cannot sit still, and if you try to sit still, then for the first time you will become aware of subtle movements in the body; the leg will begin to say something, the hand will begin to say something, the neck will begin to say something, every part of the body will begin to give you information. Why? It is not that when you sit still the body begins to move, it is moving every moment. It is only because you are otherwise occupied that you are not aware. There are subtle movements continuously; your body is constantly moving and moving. This constant wavering really doesn’t belong to your body, it belongs to your mind. The body only reflects. You cannot even sleep in a nonmoving posture. The whole night you are moving this way and that, moving and moving and moving.Now we have pictures from some American “sleep labs.” They have taken pictures, movies – movies of sleeping persons. If you could see your own movie, how much you move in the night, you will see that the whole night you are disturbed. By your body movements it can be seen that much is going on inside – much! There are so many facial gestures, so many gestures of the hands, fingers – the whole body. This shows that much is happening inside. A madman must be inside, otherwise these gestures are impossible. But you are never aware of what is happening to you. No one is aware. Everyone is asleep; no one is aware. So you don’t know what you are doing in your sleep with your body. But that doing is because of the mind. A disturbed mind is reflected by the body.A buddha sits just like a statue. It is not that he has forced his body to be still. The mind is still, and the body need not reflect because there is nothing to reflect.Once Buddha stayed outside a big capital with his ten thousand monks. The king became interested. Someone said, “You must come to see this man.” The name of the king was Ajata Shatru. The name means “someone whose enemy is not born at all.” Mm? – ajatashatru means one who has no enemies in the world; no enemy is born, no enemy can be born. But this Ajata Shatru was very fearful of enemies. He became interested because so many people came and said, “You must come. This is something strange, this man is something strange. Come and see.” So he came.He reaches the grove, the garden. The evening has fallen. He asks his courtiers, “You said that he is staying with ten thousand monks, but no noise is heard – are you deceiving me?” He pulls out his sword. He thinks that there is some deception, that they have brought him to this forest and now someone is going to kill him. “You say ten thousand monks are staying just beyond these trees? – and there is not a bit of noise.” The forest is absolutely silent, and Ajata Shatru says, “I have seen this forest many times, it has never been so silent before. Even when no one was staying here it has never been so silent – even the birds are silent. What do you mean? Do you want to deceive me?”They say, “Don’t be afraid. He is staying here. That’s why the forest is so silent and even the birds are so silent. You come.”But he puts his sword in his hand. He is afraid and trembling. When he reaches the forest, Buddha is sitting under a tree and ten thousand monks are also sitting under trees – everyone just like a stone statue. He asks Buddha, “What has happened to all these people? Are they dead? I have become afraid. They look like ghosts – no one moving, not even eyes moving. What has happened to them?”Buddha says, “Much has happened to them. They are not mad now.”Unless one can be so silent, one can never feel what existence means, what life means, what the bliss of it is, the benediction. Only in such silence does life descend. You become aware of the music, of the nectar. You begin to feel it, but only in silence. That silence comes only when you are nonwavering. If you are wavering, if the mind is just wavering and there is trembling inside, you cannot feel that silence.You cannot attain silence directly: you have to attain nonwavering, then silence comes as a shadow. If nonwavering comes, then silence comes. So Buddha says, “Much has happened to these fellows. They are not mad now. They have become silent and now they are one with these trees, with this earth, with this sky” – because you can be divided only by noise. Silence never divides, silence joins you.For example, if we are sitting here and everyone becomes so silent that not a thought has any existence, not a single ripple is there in the mind, everyone silent, totally silent, will you be different from anyone else? Will you be different from your neighbor? How can you be different? The feeling of difference is a thought. Do I mean you will feel one with them? No, because the feeling of oneness is a thought. You will simply be one, not a feeling. Really, there will be no one here – just silence.So Buddha says, “They are now one with the trees, with the earth, with the sky. Really, they are not here. Only silence prevails, and that’s why even birds have caught the infection.” Ten thousand people so silent that even the birds in the trees have become aware! They have felt – the silence has become infectious. “So you are right, Ajata Shatru,” Buddha says, “that you might have passed through this grove many times and it has never been so silent. It will never again be so silent because, for the first time, silence is present here in ten thousand minds.” So silence has become ten thousandfold, and everything is affected. Even trees are afraid to move. Even birds are afraid to tremble, to make noise. It is evening, they are coming back, and when birds come back they create much noise – but not a single ripple.When you begin to be silent you begin to be in deep communion with existence. Thoughts and thoughts are noises. Waves and waves are thoughts and tremblings inside. They create a barrier, they disrupt – they make you alone. Then you begin to be alone in this whole universe, and that loneliness creates meaninglessness. The more lonely you are, the more you will feel meaningless, futile, useless, and then you will begin to fill yourself with more noise. You will try to fill yourself with radio, television, with anything to be occupied. You run from here to there, from this club to that club. Go on running, don’t leave any gap in which you might become aware of your loneliness! So this whole life just becomes a running from one point to another. This is madness, and the whole earth has become a madhouse.So attain to this posture – and don’t begin with the body. Begin with the subconscious mind, and then your body will reflect what is happening within. Even now it is reflecting what is happening within. The body is a mirror, it is transparent. Those who have eyes, they know that the body is transparent. You enter here and I know what is happening inside you, because you cannot enter without showing it. You look at me, and I know what is happening inside your eyes – because how can you raise your eyes without expressing that which is within? It is being shown every moment.Every moment is an indication. It is related; nothing is irrelevant. Your body is showing every moment, but you don’t know the body language. The body has a language of its own, and it shows everything. You cannot deceive. You can deceive with your language, but not with your body. You can smile, but your lips will say that there is no smile within. You can show something by your face, you can try, but still the face will give hints that this is false.This body is just giving information every moment. You cannot change it. You can try, but you cannot change it. And even if you succeed in changing your body, you can succeed only in deceiving others, not yourself, because the inside cannot change by the outside changing. It is not basic. You can cut a tree by the roots, but not by the leaves. If you cut the leaves, new leaves will come up again and one leaf will be replaced by two. Cut two, and four leaves will come out of that spot. The tree will take revenge, the roots will take revenge. They will say, “You are cutting one leaf – we will put two. We are capable of constantly supplying – infinitely.”So don’t be bothered by leaves. And the body has only leaves: roots are deep within. Cut the roots, and the leaves will wither away by themselves. When there are no roots to feed the leaves will drop by themselves. Your body will change. Change the mind and the body will change. Mind is the root.Attain a nonwavering knowing and the door will be open, and you will be able to have a glimpse into the unknown. The unknown is not far off; only you are closed. The unknown is here, but you are running. The unknown is here, but you are in such a hurry and in such speed that you cannot look at it.Stand still! I don’t mean your body. Let your mind stand still, your consciousness, and suddenly you will become aware of something which has always been there. You have been seeking for it, seeking and searching, running after for lives and lives – and it was here. It is so near, and that’s why you have missed it. It is just by the corner, and you have sought it everywhere except this place where you are standing.Nonwavering reveals to you the here and now. That standing still in consciousness reveals to you the presence which is here.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-06/

Osho,Considering the example of sensual instinct, kindly explain the practical ways to encounter the unconscious mind, and how can one know that one has become free from it?The unconscious is not really unconscious. Rather, it is only less conscious. So the difference between conscious and unconscious is not of polar opposites, but of degrees. The unconscious and conscious are related, joined, they are not two. But our ways of thinking are based on a particular false system of logic which divides everything into polar opposites.Reality is never divided like that; only logic is divided. Our logic says either yes or no; our logic says either light or darkness – and there is nothing in between as far as logic goes. But life is neither white nor black. It is, rather, a great expanse of gray. One extreme becomes white, another extreme becomes black, and life is a great expanse of gray, degrees of gray. For logic, white and black are realities and there is nothing in between – but life is always in between these two. So, really, every problem should be understood not as a logical problem, but as a life problem – only then can you do something with it. If you are too fixed with this false logic, then you will never be able to solve any problem.Aristotle has proved to be one of the greatest menaces, blocks, to the human mind, because he created a system – which became dominant all over the world – that divides everything into two opposites. Really, this is a strange fact. We have nothing for the in-between reality – not even words.De Bono, a modern non-Aristotelian logician, has created a new word – po. He says that we have only two words, yes or no, and there is no neutral word. Yes is one opposite, no is another – there is no neutral word. So he has coined a new word – po. Po means, “I am neither for nor against.” If you say something and I say, “Po,” it means, “I have heard you, I am neither for nor against. I am not making any judgment.” Or, to say, “Po,” means, “Perhaps you are right, perhaps you are wrong. Both are possible.” Or, the use of the word po means, “This is also one point of view. I need not be on the yes side or the no. It is not a compulsion.”De Bono has derived this word from words like hypothesis or potentiality. This po is a neutral word, not loaded with any judgment, condemnation or appreciation. Just use the word po and you will feel the difference. You are not taking any standpoint in the polar opposites.So when I say conscious and unconscious, I don’t mean the Freudian opposition. For Freud, conscious is conscious and unconscious is unconscious. The difference is that of white and black, yes and no, life and death. When I say unconscious, I mean less conscious. When I say conscious, I mean less unconscious. They overlap each other.So what to do to encounter the unconscious? As far as Freud is concerned the encounter is impossible: because it is unconscious, how can you encounter it? The question means the same as if someone says, “How to see in darkness?” Mm? The question is irrelevant, meaningless. If you put it in this way, “How to see in darkness?” and if I say, “With light,” then the question has not been answered at all, because you ask, “How to see in darkness?” and if there is light, then there is no darkness – you are seeing light.So, really, in darkness no one can see. When we say “darkness” we mean that now seeing is not possible. What do you mean when you say “darkness”? You mean that now seeing is not possible. What do you mean when you say “light”? You mean that now things can be seen. Really, you have never seen light, you have only seen light reflected in things which you can see. You have never seen light itself, no one can see it. We see only things, not light, and because things are seen we assume, infer, that light is there.You have not seen darkness; no one has seen it. Really, darkness is just an inference. Because nothing is seen, you say there is darkness. So when someone asks, “How to see in darkness?” the words look meaningful, but they are not. Language is very deceptive, and unless one becomes careful in using language one will never be able to solve any problem. Ninety-nine percent of problems are just linguistic problems, but if you don’t know how to penetrate the garb of language you will never be able to tackle the real problem.If you ask Freud how to encounter the unconscious, he will say, “It is nonsense, you cannot encounter it. If you encounter it, it will become conscious, because encountering is a conscious phenomenon.” But if you ask me how to encounter the unconscious, I will say, yes, there are ways to encounter it – because for me, the first thing to be noted is that “unconscious” means simply “less conscious.” So if you grow more conscious, you can encounter it – so it depends.Secondly, unconscious and conscious are not fixed boundaries. They change every moment – just like the retina of the eye. It is changing constantly. If there is more light, it is narrowed down. If there is less light, then it widens. It is constantly making an equilibrium with the light outside. So your eye is not really a fixed thing, it is constantly changing. Your consciousness is just like that. Really, to understand the phenomenon of consciousness by the analogy of the eye is very relevant, because consciousness is the inner eye, the eye of the soul. So, just like your eye, your consciousness is constantly expanding or shrinking. It depends.For example, if you are angry you become more unconscious. The unconscious is now more spread, and only a very minor part of you remains conscious. Sometimes even that part is not there either, you become completely unconscious. But in a sudden accident – you are on the road and suddenly you feel that there is going to be an accident and you are on the verge of death – suddenly you become conscious and there is no unconscious at all. The whole mind is conscious. And this change is continuously taking place.So when I say conscious and unconscious, I don’t mean any fixed boundaries. There are none, there are no fixed boundaries. It is a fluctuating phenomenon. It depends on you to be less conscious or more conscious. You can create consciousness; you can train and discipline yourself for more consciousness or for less consciousness. If you train yourself for less consciousness, you will never be able to encounter the unconscious. Really, you will even become incapable of encountering the conscious.When someone has taken some intoxicant, he is training his mind to be totally unconscious. When you go into sleep, or if you can be hypnotized, or if you can auto-hypnotize yourself, then you lose consciousness. There are many tricks, and many of those tricks which help you to be more unconscious are even known as religious practices. If you do any monotonous, repetitive thing – for example, if you go on continuously saying “Rama-Rama-Rama-Rama” in a very monotonous tone, you will become less conscious. And this constant repetition of “Rama-Rama-Rama” in a monotonous tone will be just auto-hypnotic. You will go to sleep: it is good for sleep.If you can create monotony then you will be less conscious, because a bored mind cannot remain conscious. The boredom is too much, and the mind would like to go to sleep.We know, every mother knows, how to put a child to sleep. A lullaby does nothing but create boredom. Every mother knows how to put a child to sleep. With a lullaby – a constant repetition of certain words – the child is bored, so he goes into sleep. This lullaby can be created by movement, by anything which is monotonous – by anything. Just move the child monotonously, rotate the child monotonously, and he will go to sleep because he feels bored. Even if you put the child’s head near your heart he will go to sleep, because your heartbeat is a very boring thing. So put the child near your heart, and he will feel bored because of the constant repetition of the heartbeat. The child knows it very well because he has heard it continuously for nine months. Even old persons can use the tick-tick of a clock for going into sleep, and the reason is only the resemblance to the heartbeat. So if you feel that sleep is not coming, just concentrate on your clock and feel the beat, and soon you will drop into sleep.You can create unconsciousness by creating boredom. By taking any intoxicant, by taking any drug, any sedative, any tranquilizer, you can create unconsciousness. Consciousness can also be created, but then quite different methods have to be used.Sufi mystics use whirling dances. With such vigorous whirling you cannot sleep, it is impossible. How can you fall asleep when dancing? Someone seeing your dance may go to sleep, for him it may become a boring thing, but you cannot go. So Sufis use dance to create more activity inside, more vitality, so that consciousness spreads. These dances are not really dances. They look like dances. The Sufi who is doing the dance is constantly remembering every movement of the body. No movement should be done unconsciously. Even if a hand is raised, then this hand must be raised with full consciousness that you are raising the hand – now the hand is raised; now you are dropping it again. No movement should be allowed unconsciously. You are whirling around, dancing vigorously; no movement is to be made unconsciously. Every movement must be done consciously, with full alertness.Then suddenly the unconscious drops, and after three months of continual dancing, for hours, you encounter the unconscious. You penetrate deep, deep, deep, and suddenly you become aware of everything that is inside. That is what I mean by encountering the unconscious. Nothing remains which is not in clear vision. Your totality, all your instincts, all your suppressions, your whole biological structure, everything – not only of this life, but of all lives – is suddenly revealed. You are thrown into a new world which was hidden or, rather, to which you were not alert. It was there, but you were asleep – or your consciousness was so narrowed down that it escaped.Your consciousness is just like a torch – narrowed. You enter darkness with a torch; you have a light, but it is a narrow, focused light. You can see something, but all else remains in darkness. When I say that nothing unconscious remains, I mean unfocused consciousness – unfocused. A focused consciousness will always choose something to see and choose many things not to see; it is a choice. So I use the similarity: just like a torch, narrowed down. One point will become very clear, but everything else will be in darkness. This is what we ordinarily do through concentration.The more you concentrate, the less you will be able to encounter the unconscious. You will be able to know something very definitely, at the cost of not knowing many things. That’s why experts, by and by, become just ignorant, ignorant of the whole world, because they have narrowed down their minds to a particular thing in order to know more about it. So it has been said that an expert is a person who knows more and more about less and less. In the end he remains focused only on a point, which he knows at the cost of ignoring everything else.This is how concentration works. So through concentration you can never encounter the unconscious. You can encounter the unconscious only with meditation – and this is the difference between concentration and meditation. Meditation means your mind working not as a torch but like a flame: everything is enlightened around it – everything. It is not narrowed down, the light is diffused. It is not moving in one direction, it is moving in all directions simultaneously so the whole is enlightened.How to do it? I said Sufis use dance as an active meditation and then they can encounter the unconscious. Zen monks in Japan use absurd problems to encounter it. You face some problem which cannot be solved – which cannot be solved at all! Howsoever you try, the problem is such that it cannot be solved. They call such problems, koans – absurd problems.For example, they will say to some seeker, “Find out what your original face is.” And by “original face” they mean the face you had before you were born, or the face you will have after you die – the original face. “Find out how your original face looks.” How can you find it out? One has to meditate on it. The problem is such that you cannot solve it by intellect, by reason. You have to ponder over it, meditate over it, go on meditating and searching: “What is my original face?” The teacher will be there with his staff, and he will look around to see if someone is going into sleep. Then the teacher’s staff will be on your head. You cannot sleep; sleep is not allowed at all. You have to be constantly awake.So a Zen teacher is a hard taskmaster. You have to meditate before him, and he will not allow you to drop into sleep because the moment when you are dropping into sleep is the moment to encounter the unconscious. If you can remain out of sleep, then the unconscious will be revealed – because that is the line. The very line from where you drop into sleep is the line where you can enter into the unconscious.You can try this. You have been sleeping every day, but you have not yet encountered sleep. You have not seen it – what it is, how it comes, how you drop into it. You have not known anything about it. You have been dropping into it daily, coming out of it, but you have not felt the moment when sleep comes on the mind, what happens. So try this, and with three months’ effort suddenly, one day, you will enter sleep knowingly. Drop on your bed, close your eyes, and then remember, remember that sleep is coming and “I am to remain awake when the sleep comes.” It is very arduous, but it happens. In one day it will not happen, in one week it will not happen. Persist every day, constantly remembering that sleep is coming and “I am not to allow it without knowing. I must be aware when sleep enters. I must go on feeling how sleep takes over, what it is.”One day, suddenly, sleep is there and you are still awake. That very moment you become aware of your unconscious also, and once you become aware of your unconscious you will never be asleep again in the old way. Sleep will be there, but you will be awake, simultaneously. A center in you will go on knowing. All around will be sleep, and a center will go on knowing. When this center knows, dreams become impossible, and when dreams become impossible, daydreams also become impossible. Then you are asleep in a different sense, and then you will be awake in the morning in a different sense. That different quality comes by the encounter.But this may look difficult, so I suggest to you a more simple exercise to encounter the unconscious. Close the doors of your room and put a big mirror just in front of you. The room must be dark. Then put a small flame by the side of the mirror in such a way that it is not directly reflected in it. Just your face is reflected in the mirror, not the flame. Then constantly stare into your own eyes in the mirror. Do not blink. This is a forty-minute experiment, and within two or three days you will be able to keep your eyes unblinking.Even if tears come, let them come, but persist in not blinking and go on staring constantly into your eyes. Do not change the stare. Go on staring into the eyes, your own, and within two or three days you will become aware of a very strange phenomenon. Your face will begin to take new shapes. You may even be scared. The face in the mirror will begin to change. Sometimes a very different face will be there which you have never known as yours.Really, all these faces belong to you. Now the subconscious mind is beginning to explode. These faces, these masks, are yours. Sometimes even a face that belongs to a past life may come in. After one week of constant staring for forty minutes your face will become a flux, just a film-like flux. Many faces will be constantly coming and going. After three weeks you will not be able to remember which is your face. You will not be able to remember your own face, because you have seen so many faces coming and going.If you continue, then any day, after three weeks, the most strange thing happens: suddenly there is no face in the mirror. The mirror is vacant, you are staring into emptiness. There is no face at all. This is the moment: close your eyes, and encounter the unconscious. When there is no face in the mirror just close the eyes – this is the most significant moment – close the eyes, look inside, and you will face the unconscious. You will be naked, completely naked – as you are. All deceptions will fall.This is the reality, but the society has created many, many layers in order that you will not be aware of it. Once you know yourself in your nakedness, your total nakedness, you begin to be a different person. Then you cannot deceive yourself. Then you know what you are. And unless you know what you are you can never become transformed, because any transformation becomes possible only in this naked reality: this naked reality is the potential for any transformation. No deception can be transformed. Your original face is now here and you can transform it. And, really, just a will to transform it will effect the transformation.But you cannot become transformed. You cannot transform your false faces. You can change them, but you cannot transform them: by “change” I mean you can replace them with another false face. A thief can become a monk, a criminal can become a saint. It is very easy to change, to replace the masks, the faces. These are not transformations at all. Transformation means becoming that which you really are. So the moment you face the unconscious, encounter the unconscious, you are face to face with your reality, with your authentic being.The false societal being is not there, your name is not there, your form is not there, your face is not there. The naked forces of nature are there, and with these naked forces any transformation is possible – and by just willing it! Nothing is to be done. You just will, and things begin to happen. If you face yourself in this nakedness, just will whatsoever you like and it will be.In the Bible it is said: God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. In the Koran it is said: God said, “Let there be the world,” and there was the world. Really, these are parables – parables of the willpower which is hidden within you. When you encounter your naked reality, the basic, elemental forces, you become a creator, a god. Just say, utter a word, and it happens. Say, “Let there be light,” and there will be light. If you try to transform darkness into light before the encounter, it is not possible. So this encounter is basic, foundational, for any religious happening.Many, many methods have been invented. There are sudden methods, there are gradual methods. I have told you about a gradual method. There are sudden methods, but with a sudden method it is always very difficult, because with a sudden method it can happen that you may simply die. With a sudden method it can happen that you may suddenly go mad because the phenomenon is so sudden that you cannot conceive of it. You just drop, shattered.This happened in the Gita. Arjuna is forcing Krishna to reveal his cosmic form. Krishna goes on talking about other things, but Arjuna is persistent and he says, “I must see. I cannot believe unless I see. If you are really a god, then reveal to me your cosmic form.” Krishna reveals it, but it is so sudden, and Arjuna is not prepared at all. He begins to cry and says to Krishna, “Close it. Close it. I am scared to death!”So if you come to it through some sudden method it is dangerous. There are sudden methods, but they can be practiced only in a group, in a group where others can help you. Really, ashrams were created for these sudden methods because they cannot be practiced alone. A group is needed, adepts are needed and a constant vigilance is needed, because sometimes you may drop unconscious for months continuously. Then if there is no one who knows what to do you may be taken for dead. You may be buried or burned. Many times Ramakrishna happened to go into deep samadhi. For six days or for two weeks he had continually to be forcefully spoon-fed because he was just as if unconscious. A group is needed for sudden methods, and a teacher becomes an absolute necessity.Sudden methods dropped from Indian practices because of Buddha, Mahavira and Shankaracharya, because they insisted that monks should travel continuously. They didn’t allow monks to be in ashrams. They were not to remain anywhere for more than three days. There was a need for this because at the time of Mahavira and Buddha, ashrams became just exploitation centers; they became just big businesses. So Mahavira and Buddha both insisted that a sannyasin shouldn’t remain anywhere more than three days. Three days is a very psychological limit, because in order to be attuned with some place or with some people you need more than three days.In a new house, you cannot feel at ease unless three days have passed. This is a psychological attuning time. If you remain in a house for more than three days then the house begins to look as if it is yours, so a sannyasin must not remain anywhere more than three days. Buddha and Mahavira insisted, but because of their insistence ashrams were destroyed and school methods dropped out of practice, because a wandering monk cannot practice sudden methods. He may be in a village, but no one may know anything about it, and if he practices a sudden method and the happening happens then he will be in danger, he will have to die.So Mahavira, Buddha, and later on Shankaracharya, all these three insisted that monks go on wandering continuously. They must not remain in one place, they should be homeless wanderers. So it was good in one way, and it proved bad in another. It proved good because establishments were destroyed, but it proved bad also because with establishments certain very, very significant practices, methods, just went into oblivion.Sudden methods require the constant vigilance of a group. A teacher becomes a necessity. So Buddha could say, “You can know even without me,” but a Patanjali cannot say that. Krishnamurti can say, “No teacher is needed,” but a Gurdjieff cannot say that. The real reason for these differences is their methods: Gurdjieff has school methods and Krishnamurti belongs to the tradition of wanderers – no school methods, so no teacher is needed.With gradual methods you can proceed alone because there is no danger. You have to proceed inch by inch, and as far as a one-inch happening is concerned, you can control it yourself. But if you have to take a jump with no steps in between, then you will need someone who knows where you are going to fall, who knows what can happen. A teacher is not really needed to show you the methods, he is really needed afterwards, when the method has done something and you have moved into the unknown.So there are sudden methods, but I will not talk about them. I have given you one gradual method, and there are many. I will not talk about the sudden methods because it is dangerous to talk about them. If someone is interested, then he can be led. But talking is impossible. That’s why school teaching has always insisted that nothing should be written, because once you write something it becomes public and anyone can do it. Anyone can become just a victim of his own curiosity, and then no help will be coming. So even when something is written about sudden practices, a basic link is always missing.So those who begin practices through scriptures are always in danger, and many times it happens that they just go mad – because a missing link is always bound to be there. That missing link is always supplied by word of mouth from the teacher to the disciple, and it is a private and secret process, the missing link, because that is the key. No scripture is really complete and no scripture can ever be really complete because those who know can never write a thing completely. Something must remain hidden as a key, so no one can use it. You can read about it, you can comment on it, you can write a thesis upon it, but you cannot practice it because a certain key is not given in the scripture itself. Or, if it is given, it is given in such a way that you cannot decode it; the technique for decoding it is not given in it.So nothing about sudden practices – but you can do something gradually. This mirror meditation is a very powerful method, very powerful – to know one’s own abyss and to know one’s own naked reality, and once you have known it you become the master. Then just say something, and things begin to take shape. In that encounter, if you say, “I must die this moment,” you will die that very moment. If you say, “I must become a buddha this very moment,” you will become a buddha that very moment. Time is not required at all, just a will.You may begin to think that then it is very easy, but it is a difficult problem. First, to reach it is difficult, though not so difficult, but to will in that moment is very difficult. Such a vital silence takes you over you cannot even think. Your mind cannot even move. You are in such awe, everything stops – even breathing. A very still moment, totally silent, and will becomes impossible. So one has to train oneself how to will in that still moment – how to will without words, how to will without thoughts. That is possible, but one has to practice for it.You are looking at a flower: look at the flower, feel the beauty of it, but don’t use the word beautiful, not even in the mind. Look at it, let it be absorbed in you, reach to it, but don’t use words. Feel the beauty of it, but don’t say, “It is beautiful,” not even in the mind. Don’t verbalize, and gradually you will become capable of feeling a flower as beautiful without using the word.Really, it is not difficult: it is natural. You feel first; then the word comes. But we are so habituated with words that there is no gap. The feeling is there, and suddenly the word comes and you have not even felt it. So create a gap: just feel the beauty of it, but don’t use the word.If you can dissociate words from feeling, then you can dissociate even feeling from existence. Then let the flower be there and you be there as two presences, but don’t allow the feeling to come in. Don’t even feel now that the flower is beautiful. Don’t feel. Let the flower be there and you be there, arrowed, in a deep embrace without any ripple of feeling. Then you will feel beauty without feeling. Really, then you will be the beauty of the flower. It will not be a feeling; you will be the flower. Then you have felt something existentially. When you can do this, you can will. When everything is lost – thought, words, feeling – then you can will existentially.To help this will, many things have been used. One is that the seeker must constantly go on thinking, “When the thing comes, when that happening happens, what am I going to be?” The sutras of the Upanishads – like aham brahmasmi, I am the brahman – are not meant as literal statements. These sutras are not meant as statements, they are not meant as philosophical theories, they are meant to engrave a deep will in the very cells of your being. So when that moment comes you don’t need your mind to tell you, “I am the brahman.” Your body begins to feel it, your cells begin to feel it, your every fiber begins to feel it: aham brahmasmi. This feeling does not need to be created by you, it will have gone deep into your existence. Then suddenly, when you encounter the unconscious and the moment of will has come and you can become a creator, your whole existence begins to vibrate: aham brahmasmi. The moment your existence begins to vibrate aham brahmasmi, you become brahman – you become! Whatsoever you can feel, you become.This should not be known as metaphysics – it is not. It is an experience. So you can know it only through experiencing. Do not decide whether it is right or wrong; do not think in terms of yes and no. Just say, “Po,” and make some effort. Just say, “Okay. It may be.” Don’t decide – because we are very hasty deciders. Someone will say, “No, it is not possible.” Really, he is saying, “I am not going to try”; he is not saying it is not possible. He is deceiving himself. He is saying, “I am not going to try,” and because of this “I am not going to try,” how can it be possible? He is rationalizing for himself.Someone else says, “Yes, it is possible. It has happened to many. It has happened to my guru, to my teacher, it has happened to this one and that.” He is also not going to try because he is making it a trivial fact: “It has happened to many, so it is not a thing which one has to try for.” He feels, “It can also happen to me.” No, don’t say yes or no. Just take it as an experiment, a hypothesis to be worked out. Religion is not a given thing; one has to create it in oneself. It is not something which is given to you or which can be given; it is something which you have to uncover in yourself.So don’t decide unless you experience, don’t decide unless you know. Never decide beforehand, otherwise you can go on continuously listening to things, thinking about them, and doing nothing – because thinking is not doing; thinking is just an escape from doing.Osho,Is your technique of fast breathing a sudden technique or a gradual one?It is gradual. Really, sudden techniques cannot be given publicly. They cannot be given. For sudden techniques one has to put aside, bracket the whole life out, because for sudden techniques your totality will be needed. For gradual techniques your totality is not needed. You can do them for one hour and then remain in the world for twenty-three hours. But for sudden techniques your totality will be needed, you cannot be allowed to do anything else. So the whole life has to be just bracketed out, and you have to be totally for the technique. The whole consciousness must be prepared for it because even a single part remaining unprepared will prove dangerous – and anything can prove dangerous because the moment is so potential. The moment is so potential, you must be purified of all that goes on around you. So you have to eliminate, bracket everything out. With gradual methods, religion can be one thing among others. For sudden methods, religion has to be totalitarian; nothing else can be allowed.When someone would go to Gurdjieff, he would ask, “Are you ready to die for it? – nothing less will do. Are you ready to die for it?” That means, “Are you ready to leave everything for it?” Total consciousness is needed. It is not necessary to die, but one has to be ready to die for it.For gradual methods, such is not the requirement. You can go on living and doing something. By and by, the doing will gradually become greater; and without even becoming aware, some day you will become ready to die for it. But this growth is like the growth of a pregnancy: by and by. Even the mother is not aware of what is going on, of what is happening. The child goes on growing and growing and growing. After nine months the child has grown so much that now the mother is not needed at all, that’s why he comes out. The mother feels so much pain. The reason is not only physical: deep down it is psychological. It is because her own child has grown so much that it is leaving her. This is the first betrayal. Now many betrayals will follow. This is the first birth pain; now many will follow. When the child becomes sexually mature he will again leave his mother – for some other woman.So birth is a constant process. A mother has to go through many pains, and if she cannot understand it, then she unnecessarily creates troubles. She creates them! Even when the child is going to be born the mother creates trouble, she contracts her whole body. That’s why the pain is created; otherwise bodily pain is unnecessary. It is really a conflict. The mother is not ready to give up and the child is forcing to come out. That’s why many children have to take their birth in the night – eighty percent, more than eighty percent – because when the mother is sleepy she resists less.Now there are scientific methods and psychological ones also. If a mother can be persuaded to cooperate there is no pain. In Paris, Dr. Leboyer has worked with many, many methods – psychological, persuasive methods. He has delivered thousands of births, helped mothers, and there was no pain at all – not at all. The method is to cooperate with the child coming out – not to resist, but to cooperate; to help the child, to feel that you have to help the child to come out.Leboyer may persuade many mothers, but there is a still greater problem when the child goes to another woman. He will have to persuade the mother not to feel hurt. Rather, she should help the child to go to someone else. She should help, cooperate, because it is a second birth and she is troubled unnecessarily.With gradual methods you grow like a pregnancy – by and by. Then suddenly one day you are reborn. With sudden methods it is different, totally different. One needs to give up everything for sudden methods. Sannyas, in the old days, began with sudden methods. That’s why it was necessary to leave everything. Particularly in India, we emphatically pressed the point that no one should leave for sannyas unless he was very old. There is a psychological reason: when you are so old, you can leave life totally. Then total renunciation becomes easy – because in a subtle way life is renouncing you, so you can renounce life. You have become a dry leaf; now you can leave the tree without hurting the tree or any hurt to yourself. The tree will not even know when the dry leaf has dropped. Pull out a young leaf that is fresh and green, and the tree is hurt and the leaf also. The wound may remain forever. So for sudden methods, it was decided that a man should leave only when life itself was leaving him. Then he could leave totally. With gradual methods, it was not necessary.Now, in the world, sudden methods have become impossible because there are really no authentic schools, no communities, intimate communities, where you can practice sudden methods. So it is not necessary for someone to renounce the world and go to the hills or the forest. Now you can remain wherever you are and practice gradual methods. The achievement is the same; only more time is needed for gradual methods, less time for sudden methods.Osho,What type of society can develop individuals in whom the subconscious mind is utilitarian and easily dispensable?It is a complex problem, multi-dimensional, but some basic points can be understood. One: a good society is possible only if children are not taught the antagonism, the dichotomy, between body and consciousness. The first thing is that they must not be taught this. It must not be said to children, “You are in the body”; it must not be said, “You possess the body.” It must be said, “You are the body.” When I say that it must be said, “You are the body,” I don’t mean a materialist conception. Really, only out of this can a spiritual being be born. The unity must not be disturbed.The child is born as a unity, but we separate him in two. The first separation comes between body and consciousness. We sow the seeds of schizophrenia. Now he will never be able to regain the lost unity easily. The more he grows, the more the gap will grow, and a person with a gap between himself and his body is a person who is not normal. The greater the gap, the more insane he will be, because, again, “body and mind” is a linguistic fallacy. We are psychosomatic – body-mind both, simultaneously. It is not possible to bifurcate the two. They are not two – one wave.So for a good society the first thing is not to create schizophrenic minds, not to create divided minds, because the first division comes between body and mind, then other divisions follow. Then you have taken a route for divisions. Then mind will again be divided and body will again be divided.This is a strange fact. I wonder whether you feel that you are divided into consciousness and body. Then the body is divided into upper and lower, and the lower is “bad” and the upper is “good.” From where does the upper begin and from where does the lower begin? We are never at ease with our lower bodies, never. That’s why there is so much nonsense about clothes – so much nonsense. We cannot be naked. Why? Because the moment you are naked the body becomes one. We have two sorts of clothes – one for the lower part, another for the upper part. This division of clothes is basically connected with the division of the body. If you are standing naked, which is lower, which is higher? And how do you divide? You are one!So those who divide man are not ready for man to be at ease with his nakedness – and this is only a beginning, because there are more nakednesses inside. If you are not ready to be naked about your body, true, then you cannot ever be true for other, deeper layers. How can you be? If you cannot face even your body’s nakedness, how can you face your naked consciousness?This clothing is not just clothing. It has a philosophy, and a very insane one. Then the body is divided, then the mind is divided, then the conscious, unconscious, subconscious – and divisions go on growing. In the beginning a child is born as a unity, and the same child dies as a crowd – as a crowd! totally a madhouse! Everywhere he has been divided, and between these divisions there is constant conflict, struggle, and the energy is dissipated. You never really die; really you kill yourself. We are all committing suicide, because this dissipation of energy is suicide. So it is rare that a person dies – rare! Everyone has killed himself, poisoned himself. The methods are different, the tricks to kill oneself are different, but the beginning is the division.So a good society, a moral society, a religious society, will not allow its children to be divided. But how do we create a division? How do we begin? When does the division come in?Now psychologists are very well aware that the moment the child touches his genitalia, his sex organs, the division begins. The moment the child touches his sex organs the whole society becomes aware that something wrong is going to happen. The parents, mother and father, brothers, the whole family, everyone begins to be aware of it. In their eyes, in their gestures, by their hands, they all say, “No, do not touch.”The child cannot conceive of this. He is a unity, she is a unity. He cannot conceive why he cannot touch his body. What is wrong? He doesn’t know that man is born in sin. He doesn’t know the Bible, he doesn’t know any religion, he doesn’t know any teachers, moral teachers, he doesn’t know any mahatmas. He cannot feel how a part of the body is just to be avoided.The problem becomes greater because sex organs are the most sensitive part of the body and the most pleasant. To touch them is the first experience of pleasure for the child, the first experience of his own body – that the body can give pleasure, that the body is pleasant, that the body has a value. Now psychologists say that even a three-month-old baby can create orgasm – the deepest. He can feel his sex organs to their climax, and his whole body begins to vibrate. This is the first experience of his body, but it becomes poisoned because parents will not allow it. Why can’t they allow it? Because they were not allowed. There is no other reason: because they were not allowed.With this the body is divided, and the mind and body are divided. The child becomes afraid, fearful, and guilt is born. He will touch, but now he has to hide it. So we have made a small child a criminal. He will do it because it is natural, but now he will be afraid whether someone is looking or not, whether mother is present or not. If no one is there then he will touch, but now this touch will not give the same pleasure that it could have given because there is guilt. He is afraid. He is fearful.This fear continues for his whole life. No one is at ease with his sex experience. The fear continues. Then he will go many, many times into the sex act but never will he feel the fulfillment and the deep ecstasy of it. He will never feel it; it has become impossible. You have poisoned the very root and he will feel guilty.We feel guilty because of sex; we are “sinners” because of sex. So you have created the division, the basic division that in the body you have to choose: some parts are “good” and some parts are “bad.” What nonsense. Either the whole body is good or the whole body is bad, because nothing is separate in the body. The same blood goes through the whole body; the same nervous system is there. Everything is one inside, but for the child now there is a division. And another thing: you have poisoned his first joy. Now he will never feel joyful.Daily, people come to me and I know that their basic problem is not meditation, their basic problem is not religion, their basic problem is sex. I feel very helpless as to how to help them, because if I really want to help them then they will not come to me again. They will become afraid of me because they are afraid of sex. So sex must not be talked about! Talk about God, talk about something else – never talk about sex. Their problem is not God at all. If the problem was of God then it could be easily helped, but God is not the problem. Their basic problem remains sex, and they cannot enjoy anything because they cannot enjoy the first gift that was given by nature, by divine forces. They do not have the first gift of bliss, so they cannot enjoy.I have felt so many times that a person who cannot enjoy sex cannot go deep in meditation because wherever there is happiness he becomes afraid. The association goes deep. So you have created a barrier. Now he will also divide the mind because he cannot accept the sex part of the mind. Sex is both body and mind. Everything is both. In you, everything is both – remember it constantly. Sex is both body and mind, so the mind part of sex has to be suppressed. That suppressed part will become the unconscious. The forces, the thoughts, the moralistic preachings which will suppress it, will become the subconscious. A very small portion of the mind which is conscious will remain in your hands. It is useful only for the day-to-day routine, not for anything more; at least it is not useful to live deeply, you can exist, that’s all. You can vegetate, you can earn, you can build a house, make a living, but you cannot know life because, of the whole mind, nine parts out of ten are just denied. You can never be total, and only a whole man is holy. Unless you are whole, you can never be holy.So the first, elementary thing to be done to create a new society, a better society, a religious society, is not to create division. This is the greatest sin – to create division. Let the child grow as a unity. Let him grow as a oneness, at ease with everything that is inside him, and soon he will be able to transcend all: he will be able to transcend sex, he will be able to transcend the instinctive nature. But he will be able to transcend them as a unity, never as a division. That is the point. He will be able to transcend them because he is so whole, so powerful, so undividedly one, that he can transcend anything.Whatsoever becomes a disease, he can just throw it out. Whatsoever becomes just an obsession, he can just throw it away. He is forceful, one. A great energy is undividedly his – he can change anything. But a divided child cannot do anything. Really, in a divided child the conscious mind is a minor part and the unconscious is the major. For his whole life, a divided child is fighting a major energy with a minor one. He is bound to be continuously defeated. And then he feels frustrated. And then he says, “Okay, this world is just a misery.”This world is not a misery – remember it well. You are divided, so you create misery out of this world. You are fighting with yourself, so you become miserable.So the first thing: do not create divisions. Let the child grow as a unity. And the second thing: let the child be trained more for flexibility than for fixed attitudes – flexibility. What do I mean when I say flexibility? Don’t train him in solid, watertight compartments; never say that this is bad and that is good, because in life it is a flux. The thing which is good this moment may be bad the next moment, and the thing which is bad in this situation may be good in another.So train the child to be more aware, to find out what is the case. Never fix labels. Don’t say a Mohammedan is bad because he is a Mohammedan and a Hindu is good because he is a Hindu. Don’t say things like that, because bad and good are not fixed things. Don’t give fixed attitudes. Train him to be more aware, to find out who is good and who is bad. But it is difficult; and it is easy to give labels. You live with labels and categorized divisions. You put someone in a category: “Okay, he is a Hindu. He is bad or he is good. He is a Mohammedan, and he is good or he is bad.” The matter is decided without looking at the individual. The label decides. Don’t give fixed attitudes, give flexible awareness. Don’t say this is bad, don’t say this is good. Just say that one has to find out constantly what is good, what is bad. Train the mind to find out, to inquire.This flexibility of attitude has many dimensions. Don’t fix the child into “monogamous” attitudes. Don’t say to the child, “Love me because I am your mother.” It may create an incapacity in the child, and he will not be able to love anyone else. Then it happens that grown-up children – I call them grown-up children – continue to be fixed. So you cannot love your wife because deep inside you can love only your mother. But your wife is not your mother and your mother cannot be your wife, so you continue to be fixed – a mother fixation. You continue to be fixed! You go on expecting things from your wife as if she were your mother – not consciously. If she does not behave like a mother, then you are not at ease. And the problem becomes more complex: if she begins to behave like a mother, then too you are not at ease because she must behave like your wife.A mother should never say, “Love me because I am your mother.” She must make her child love more persons. The more the child is “polygamous,” the more abundant his life will be. He will never feel fixed. Wherever he moves he will be able to love. Whomsoever he comes in contact with he will be able to love. Don’t tell him that a mother is to be loved or a sister is to be loved or a brother is to be loved. Don’t tell him: “He is a stranger, so you need not love him. He doesn’t belong to our family, he doesn’t belong to our religion, he doesn’t belong to our country, so don’t love him.” You are crippling the child. Tell him, “To love is bliss – so go on loving. The more you love, the more you will grow.” A person who can love more is more enriched.We are all poor. We are all poor because we cannot love. This is a fact: that if you love more persons, you become capable of loving anyone. If you love only one person, in the end you will not be capable of even loving that one, because your capacity to love will be so narrowed down that it will freeze. It is as if we are telling a tree to cut all the roots and let there be only one root. If you tell the tree, “Let there be only one root for your love. Let this be your only love – get everything from this root,” the tree is going to die.We have created a monogamous mind, not loving. That’s why there are so many wars, so much cruelty, so much violence, in many, many names – religion, politics, ideology. Any nonsense will do as long as you find something to be violent about. And then see how people become sharp: their eyes look brilliant when there is war, when everyone is just freed from the taboo against killing. Then you can kill anybody. So you feel more joy when you kill someone – you never feel joy when you love someone.Go and see in Bangladesh how joyful they are. Go and see anywhere where there is much killing: see the joy. And when there is no killing, see the limpness, the sluggishness, the lusterless eyes. No one is at ease; life is just meaningless. Create a situation for somebody to kill someone, and everyone is alive. Why? – we have atrophied the capacity to love. A child is capable of loving anyone, a child is born to love the whole world, a child is born to love everything, a child is born to love the whole universe – with such a big capacity that if you narrow it down then the child has begun to die from that very moment.But why this monopoly? Why this possessive attitude? It is a vicious circle: the mother is not fulfilled herself. She has not loved, she has not been loved, so now she becomes possessive of her child. At least she must turn the child’s love totally to herself. It must not go anywhere. She must break all possible roots. The child must belong totally to her. This is violence, this is not love. Psychologists say that the beginning seven years are the most basic. Once something has been done it is next to impossible to undo it again – really impossible to undo it, because it has become the basic structure, the foundation of the child. Now he will do everything based on this structure; this structure will have come to be the basis of his life. So allow everyone to be nonpossessive, loving more – without any conditions, without any qualifications.This should not mean that because someone is lovable then love him. Rather, the emphasis should be: you be loving. Love in itself is beautiful and very deeply fulfilling – so love. Whatsoever you feel, wherever you feel, love. This fluidity of love will make you conscious of greater life, and that greater life leads you to the divine.Love is the foundation of prayer. Unless you have loved and loved abundantly, how can you pray? How can you feel grateful? For what can you feel grateful? What is there to feel grateful about? If you have not loved, what is there to feel grateful to existence for? So life is the beginning, love is the peak, and if you have loved, suddenly you become aware of a very love-filled universe. If you have not loved, then everywhere there is hate, jealousy. But up to now our emphasis has always been: you must get love. So everyone feels frustrated when he is not getting love, and no one feels frustrated when he is not giving love. The real emphasis must be you must give love, not get love. Everyone is trying to snatch love from somewhere. It cannot be snatched. You can just give. You can just go on giving. And life is not indifferent, if you give, life returns thousandfold. But you must not be concerned with returning; you must go on giving.So every child should be trained more for love and less for mathematics and calculations and geography and history. He must be trained more for love, because geography is not going to be the peak, neither is mathematics going to be the peak, nor knowing history, nor technology. Nothing is comparable to love. Love is going to be the peak. If you miss love but everything else is there, you will be just a vacant waste, just emptiness. Then anxiety is created.So the second thing I say: love must be deeply ingrained. No effort should be avoided which can lead a child to be more loving. But our structure will not allow it because we are afraid. If a person begins to love more, then what will happen to marriage? What will happen to this and that? We are concerned. Really, we never think of what is happening to marriage. What is marriage now, or what has it ever been? – just a painful suffering, a long suffering, with false smiling faces. It has simply proved to be a misery. At the most it can be just a convenience.When I say this, I don’t mean that if you can love more people you will not go into marriage. As far as I see, a person who can love more will not go into marriage only for love. He will go into marriage for deeper things. Please understand me: if a person loves many people, then there is no reason to marry someone only because of love – because he can love many people without marriage, so there is no reason. We have forced everyone to go into marriage because of love. Because you cannot love outside it, so we have unnecessarily forced love and marriage to be together – unnecessarily. Marriage is for deeper things – even more deep: for intimacy, for a “co-inherence,” to work on something which cannot be done alone, which can be done together, which needs a togetherness, a deep togetherness. Because of this love-starved society, we fall into marriage out of romantic love.Love can never really be a great base for marriage because love is fun and play. If you marry someone for love you will be frustrated, because soon the fun is gone, the newness is gone, and boredom sets in. Marriage is for deep friendship, deep intimacy. Love is implied in it, but it is not alone. So marriage is spiritual. It is spiritual. There are many things which you can never develop alone. Even your own growth needs someone to respond, someone so intimate that you can open yourself totally to him or her.Marriage is not sexual at all. We have forced it to be sexual. Sex may be there, it may not be there. Marriage is a deep spiritual communion, and if such a marriage happens then we give birth to very different souls, very qualitatively different souls. When a child is born out of this intimacy, he can have a spiritual base. But our marriages are just sexual – just a sexual arrangement – and out of this arrangement, of course, what can be born? Either our marriages are a sexual arrangement or they are for momentary romantic love.Really, romantic love is ill; because you cannot love many, you go on accumulating the capacity to love. Then you are overflooded with it. Then whenever you find someone and the opportunity, this overflooded love is projected. So an ordinary woman becomes like an angel, an ordinary man becomes divine, looks divine, like a god. But when the flood has gone and you have become normal, then you see that you have been deceived. He is just an ordinary man and she is just an ordinary woman.This romantic madness is created by our monogamous training. If a person is allowed to love, he never accumulates tensions which can be projected. So romance is possible only in a very diseased society. In a really healthy society there will be no romance; there will be love, but no romance. If there is no romance, then marriage will be on a deeper level more intimate togetherness – for an I-thou relationship, so that you can and it will never be frustrating. And if marriage is not only for love but for both grow not as “I”s but as a “we” – then marriage is really a training for egolessness. But we don’t know about that kind of marriage at all. Whatsoever we know is just ugliness, just painted faces and everything dead within.And finally: a child must be trained positively, never negatively. A positive emphasis must be there in everything, only then can a child really grow and become an individual. What do I mean by “positive emphasis”? Our emphasis is always negative. You say, “I can love someone, but I cannot love all.” This is a negative training. On the contrary, you should be able to say, “I can love all, only not this one.” The loving capacity must go for many. Of course there are individuals you cannot love, so don’t force yourself to love them. But your emphasis now is that “I can love only one.” Majnu says, “I only love Laila. I cannot love anyone else.” This is negative. The whole world is denied. A positive attitude will be this: Positively, “I cannot love this one, but I can love the whole world.”Always think of greater positiveness in every realm. If I am negative in my attitudes, then I am surrounded by my own negativities, I see negations everywhere: “This man is not good because he lies” – but even if he lies, he is not just lies. He is more than that. Why not look to the greater part? Why be emphatically concerned with lies? And we say, “That man is a thief” – but even if a man is a thief, he is more than that. Even a thief can have positive qualities, and, really, he has them – because without some positive qualities you cannot even be a thief. So why not be emphatically concerned with his positive qualities?A thief is courageous, so why not be concerned with his courage? Why not appreciate courage? Even a person who speaks lies is intelligent, because you cannot speak lies if you are not intelligent. Lies require a deep intelligence which truth never requires. You can be just an idiot and you can speak the truth, but to speak lies you need intelligence, a cleverness and a wider range of consciousness – because if you speak one lie you will have to speak a hundred, and then you will have to remember them all. So why not be concerned with the positive qualities? Why emphasize negatives!But our society has created negative minds. You can find negativity in anyone. It is bound to be there because life cannot exist only with positives. Negatives are needed: they balance. So there are negatives, and if you train children for negatives, they will live their entire lives in a negative universe. Everyone will be bad, and when everyone is bad you begin to feel egoistic – only you are good.So we train our children to find faults with everything. Then they begin to be “good.” We force them to be good, and then they feel that everyone is bad. But how can someone be good in a bad world? It is not possible. You can be good only in a good world. A good society can only have a positive mind. So bring out the positivity of the mind. Even if there is something negative, always try to see something positive in it – there is bound to be. And if a child becomes capable of seeing the positive even in the negative, then you have given him something. He will be happy. If you have given him a negative mind and he becomes capable of finding the negative in everything positive, you have created hell for him. His whole life he is going to be in hell.Heaven is to live in a positive world; hell is to live in a negative world. This whole earth has become a hell because of negative minds. The mother cannot say to her child, “That woman is beautiful.” How can she say it? Only she is beautiful; no one else is. A husband cannot say to his wife, “Look! That woman passing on the street – how beautiful.” He cannot say it. He says it, but inside. If the wife is with him, he is even afraid to say it inside. A husband moving with his wife is really afraid to look here and there. He cannot look. That’s why he is never ready to move with his wife, it is such a hell. But why? If someone is beautiful why not tell it?A mother cannot listen to her child reporting that someone is beautiful. She will try to make him feel that only she is beautiful and the whole world is ugly. Ultimately the child will find that his mother is the ugliest, because how can you create beauty in an ugly world? So a father goes on training him, a teacher goes on saying, “Only I am the possessor of truth.”Someone was here only two days ago and she told me. “I want to listen to you, but my guru says: ‘This is sin. You belong to me, so how can you go anywhere else? When I can give you the truth, what is the need?’” Sooner or later this guru cannot remain a guru, cannot remain a teacher, because he is teaching negativity. This negativity is bound to rebound on him ultimately.In Zen, teachers will send their disciples to their opponents. Someone will remain with a teacher for one year, and when he is ready the teacher will say, “Now you go to my opponent – because I have said something, he can say the remaining, the other part. So you go.”This teacher will always be remembered as a teacher; you can never disrespect him. How can you disrespect him? He sends you to his opponent just so you can find the other part: “I have told you something, but this is not the whole.” No one can tell the whole – mm? – the whole is so big.So create a positive attitude, and a better world can come out of it. But this is very rudimentary – this is a very complex subject, so sometime we will discuss it more.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-07/

Unmani bhaavah paadyamThe upward flow of the mindis paadyam – the water for divine worship.The mind is the bridge between matter and consciousness, between without and within, between the gross and the subtle. When I say mind is the bridge, I mean many things. Man comes to the world through mind; man comes to the body through mind; man comes to desires through mind. So wherever you reach, the reaching is always through the mind. If you create a hell for yourself, you create it through mind. If you create a heaven, that is also through mind.One of the Zen patriarchs, Hui-Hai, has said, “Mind is heaven and mind is hell.” So whatsoever you are or whatsoever you can be, it will depend ultimately on how your mind works. This working can create something for you which is not; this working can reveal to you that which is. So a mind can create a very illusionary world around it: it is capable. It can dream, and its dream can be so real that you cannot even detect that whatsoever is seen and perceived is not real.So mind has a projective force; it can project. Mind can create that which is not, and because mind can create that which is not, it can forget that which is. It can just be in such a state that the reality is never in any contact with it; and whatsoever happens, it depends only on the mind. So the mind has to be taken as the root of everything that one can experience. Even if one has to know the divine, one has to go through mind. Of course, that “going” is difficult, because that “going” implies the dropping of the mind. Even if dropping of the mind is needed, it is through mind. Unless you drop the mind you will never be able to know the truth.Mind is everywhere, either positively or negatively. Whatsoever you are doing – creating an illusory world or discovering the real, creating a madness for yourself or creating a meditative state – it is all through mind. Wherever you go, you go through the bridge of the mind. Even if you have to come to your Self it will be through mind. Of course, the coming will be negative; you will have to negate mind. You will have to come back, and the same steps will have to be taken, only the direction will be different. If I go from my home, there are steps which lead me away from it. If I am returning, the same steps will lead me back – only the direction will be different. So if you can understand how mind goes out, you know that the same path has to be followed back.Secondly, in Indian symbology, “upward” is synonymous with “inward,” and “downward” is synonymous with “outward.” When we say upward we mean inward; they both mean the same. The more inward you go, the more upward; the more outward you go, the more downward. These two are different symbols. The Chinese mind has always used “downward” as synonymous with “inward,” and “upward” as synonymous with “outward.” So whenever Lao Tzu would speak he would never use upward; he would say, “Come downward,” and by down he means come within. So the within for Lao Tzu is just like an abyss: you fall in.Indian symbology is different. We use upward for inward. For us the inward is not like an abyss, it is like a peak. Both can be used because symbols are just symbols, they indicate; more than that is meaningless. So it has always been a problem. The Upanishads always talk of upward, and the symbol is fire – fire constantly running upward. For Lao Tzu and Taoists, water is the symbol – water running downward, finding out the most downward position possible. It can rest only when the deepest abyss has been found. But fire will rest only with the sun. It will go upward, upward, to the invisible upwardness.There is no contradiction. Really, whenever persons like Lao Tzu or Zarathustra or Jesus speak, they may use contradictory terms but they are never contradictory. They cannot be, that is impossible. So if their words are contradictory that only shows their type, their choice, their individuality, their way of saying things, nothing more. But pundits, scholars, can make much out of these apparent contradictions. Whenever we are talking about the absolute, the ultimate, one thing must be understood very clearly: you can use either of the extremes to express it, and each extreme is as valid as the other.For example, the Upanishads use for the divine the word absolute. This is one extreme, that of positivity – the perfect, the absolute. Buddha uses for that same state and the same realization “nothingness” – the other extreme. Totally opposite as far as words go, but as far as the realization is concerned they both mean the same. But it created much confusion.Buddha appeared to be absolutely contradictory to the Hindu mind. He was not. He was one of the purest Hindus possible, but he used a negative word. That was his liking, and it is good not to discuss likings, because one is as valid or as invalid as the other. Both can be used. Either you say “the infinite” or you say “the zero” – both are infinite. If you take it in the beginning, it is zero. If you take it in the end, it is infinite. Both mean the same thing.Just like this, Buddha and Mahavira, both contemporaries, used very contradictory language. Mahavira says, “To know the Self is the ultimate knowledge, the wisdom. To know the Self is the wisdom.” And Buddha says, “To believe in the self is the only ignorance.” Mahavira says, “Only the Self is,” and Buddha says, “Only the self is the deception, the most false thing.” Nothing can be more contradictory – so Jainas and Buddhists have been fighting constantly for twenty-five centuries. But the whole conflict is based just on linguistic fallacies – because Mahavira uses the word “Self,” negating everything of the ego in it. He says, “You become the Self when there is no ego.” So really, “Self” becomes just like “no-self.” If there is no ego, the Self becomes just like no-self. And Buddha uses the “self” as the ego and he says the self means the ego, so the most perfect ego means “the self.” Then the meaning becomes clear. So both are right. When Buddha says, “To believe in a self is to be ignorant,” he is right. Mahavira is also right when he says, “To know the Self is the ultimate wisdom.” The contradiction is just apparent.Lao Tzu says, “To go down to the last is to reach the basic existence.” He begins from the beginning: “Drop down back to the very beginning, to the original source. The original source is deep down.” The Upanishads say, “Go up to the last where the peak is achieved.” Lao Tzu says, “Go down to the original source,” and the Upanishads say, “Go up to the ultimate possibility, to the very end. Achieve the potentiality to the very end; make the potentiality absolutely actual.” The beginning and end are not two separate things. Really, no end can end unless it reaches again to the beginning, and the beginning begins only where the end ends.Life moves in a circle, so if you begin a circle, the point of beginning will also be the point of the ending. Life moves in a circle, so you can say the same point is both the beginning and the end. So the upward is not contradictory to the downward. The Lao Tzu-an downward and the Upanishadic upward – both mean the same. Only the words differ.If we can penetrate to the meaning beyond the words, only then can we conceive of and comprehend these minds. These minds are living in such experiences which cannot really be expressed through ordinary words. But they have to use ordinary words, so they can use only ordinary words with a very different meaning, with a very different connotation. So one thing more: when the Upanishads say upward, remember, it is the same as inward. The more you go in, the more up, and vice versa: the more up you go, the more in. What is this upwardness or inwardness? Why should the sutra say that this upward flow of the mind is the only water by which you can worship the feet of the divine? So many things are implied. One is that it is useless to use just water – it is useless!Al-Hillaj Mansoor, a Sufi mystic, was killed. When his hands were cut off, blood began to flow, and he used that blood as Mohammedans use water for wazu – cleaning the body before going to the worship. They use water, but Mansoor used blood. When he made the gesture of wazu, someone asked from the crowd, “Mansoor, have you gone mad? What are you doing?”Mansoor said, “For the first time I am doing wazu, cleaning myself with my own blood – because how can you clean yourself with water?”He gives a deeper significance. Really, he means that unless you die, how can you purify yourself for the prayer? Wazu, through blood, means dying. Only dying can be a real cleansing, a real purity. And when you die, you become able to pray. Unless you die, you cannot pray. So the courage to die becomes a basic requirement for prayer.This sutra says, “The upward flow of the mind is the water for the divine feet.” No other water will do. It goes even deeper than Mansoor’s blood, because blood is not so deep, it is only skin-deep. You can do wazu with your blood; it is not so deep yet. But the upward-flowing mind is the deepest possibility, for two reasons: because, basically, the mind is downward flowing; basically, the trend is to flow downward because it is easy. The downward flow is always easy. The upward needs effort, the upward needs a fight with the gravitation, the upward means austerity. You cannot flow upward unless you change your nature completely. It is a transformation. The downward flow is but natural, it is in the very nature of things. So mind naturally has a downward flow.Think of it in this way: if you want to think and concentrate on the divine you will feel much difficulty. The mind will be wavering constantly. You will not be able to concentrate even for a single moment, really. It will be going here and there. Concentration will not be possible, contemplation will not be possible, meditation will not be possible. Mind will not be ready. Even with much effort you will find it is not coming to the divine, towards the divine. But think of sex, and mind is absorbed. No need to concentrate – it concentrates. No need to make any effort, mind flows easily.Really, we don’t know anything else except sex by which we can understand what concentration means. So it always happens that whenever a person can concentrate on any other thing, sex will not be a problem for him – whenever! Even if he is just a scientist, a research-worker working in his lab, if he can concentrate on his work then sex will not be a problem in his life at all. But if you cannot concentrate on anything else, then your mind will constantly be flowing through the channel of sex.One thing must be understood: when you are thinking about sex you are totally absorbed, there is no wavering. You even forget that you are thinking about sex. You may remember afterwards. Even this much wavering is not there. You forget that you are different and that this procession of sexual thoughts and images is different, you become one with them. This is what is meant when bhaktas say, “The constant remembering of the divine – without “you,” without “I.” The same phenomenon occurs, only the object changes. It is not sex now; the object becomes the divine. And unless the divine becomes as absorbing as sex naturally is, you cannot flow upward.So the upward flow is an effort: you have to pull yourself together for it. The downward flow is easy. That’s why, whenever you feel tense, sex becomes a relaxation, a relief – because every tension means that you have been pulling yourself together towards something which is not natural. Then if you can relax to the downward flow you will feel a relief. So in the West particularly, sex has become just a relief, just a relief from tensions. It is, and it is because when you flow downward no effort is needed. So sex is used by many – really by ninety-nine percent of people – as a tranquilizer. If you move in sex then you can sleep well. Why? – because when the mind is flowing downward your whole body is relaxed. Unless you are relaxed in the same way when your mind is going upward, you are not a religious person at all.That is the difference between a secular mind and a religious mind. A secular mind is at ease with downward flowing, relaxed. A religious mind is only relaxed when upward flowing. Whenever a religious mind has to flow downward it becomes tense. Ultimately, when the upward flow is achieved, the same effort will be needed to flow downward – even more effort, because upwardness, even when arduous, is still upwardness, and downwardness, even with no effort, is downwardness. And when one has to come down with effort, the effort becomes a thousandfold more arduous.For a person like Ramakrishna, even to eat is an effort. For a person like Buddha, even to move is an effort, even to be in the body is an effort. This effort means that the whole nature has become transformed. That which was downward before has now become upward, and that which was upward before has become downward. A religious mind flows upward as if the upwardness has just become downwardness. Meera is at ease when she is dancing and singing for Krishna, but when her husband Rana is there she is not at ease, because now Rana is a downward flow. This upward flow is bound to be an effort for us. Unless you will it, you will not achieve it.Now again, you will find a conflict between Tao and the Upanishads. Lao Tzu says, “Effortlessness is the means,” and the Upanishads say, “Effort, total effort, is the means.” When Lao Tzu says “effortlessness,” he means be so still that there is not a single movement, because any effort is a movement, any effort is a tension, any effort means that you are outside. So when Lao Tzu says “effortlessness,” he is using it to mean an absolutely relaxed state of mind – do not do anything.It is not so easy. It is as difficult as the upward flow – rather, even more difficult, because we can understand terms which imply doing, but we cannot understand terms which imply nondoing. Nondoing is for us more arduous, but both are arduous and both try through different ways to achieve the same point. If you become totally effortless, you achieve your innermost center – because you cannot move! When there is no movement you will drop down, down, down to the center. Every peripheral event is an effort. When there is no effort, you will be down in your ultimate center.The Upanishads again use a different way which is, of course, in logical relationship with their concept of upwardness. They say, absolute effort is needed. When you make an absolute effort you will become more tense, more tense, more tense, and there will come a moment when you will be nothing but tension. You will be nothing but tension! Then there is nothing further. The ultimate has been achieved. Now you are just a tension. When this climax comes, suddenly you will fall from the climax. You cannot go further; you have come to the last limit. The tension has come to its ultimate, the maximum, it cannot go further. When tension comes to a total climax you suddenly relax and you reach the point which is meant by Tao, by Lao Tzu – effortlessness. You come to the center.So there are two ways: either relax directly as Tao implies, or relax indirectly as the Upanishads say. Create the tension to its ultimate, and then there will be relaxation. I think the Upanishads are more helpful because we are tense and we understand the meaning, the language, the ways of tension. Tell someone suddenly to relax and he cannot. Even relaxation becomes a new tension for him. I have seen a book which is entitled You Must Relax. The very “must” will create tension. The word is anti-relaxation – “must.” It becomes hard work: you must relax. So try now to relax, and your very effort to relax will create more tensions. The title should rather be You Must Not Relax – if you want to relax.Relaxation cannot come directly to us. We are tense, so tense. Relaxation doesn’t mean anything; we have not known it. Lao Tzu is right, but to follow him is very difficult. He looks simple. Always remember – whenever something looks very simple it must be very complex, because in this world the most simple is the most complex, and because it looks simple you may deceive yourself. So I can say, “Just relax!” – it will not happen.I was working for ten years continuously with Lao Tzuan methods, so I was continuously teaching direct relaxation. It was simple for me, so I thought it would be simple for everyone. Then, by and by, I became aware that it is impossible. I was in a fallacy: it was not possible. I would say, “Relax” to those I was teaching. They would appear to understand the meaning of the word, but they could not relax. Then I had to devise new methods for meditation which create tension first – more tension. They create such tension that you become just mad. And then I say, “Relax.”When you have come up to the climax your whole body, your whole mind, becomes hungry for relaxation. With so much tension you want to stop, and I go on pushing you to continue, continue to the very end. Do whatsoever you can do to create tensions, and then, when you stop, you just fall down from the peak into a deep abyss. The abyss is the end, the effortlessness is the end, but the Upanishads use tension as the means.So be effortful to flow upward. Really, to use the word flow is not good because flow means downward. How can you flow upward? You have to struggle. To flow upward means a struggle, constant struggle. A moment is missed and you will find you are downward. You stop the struggle for a moment and you will be flowing downward. It is a constant struggle against the current. So now understand what the current is and against what current you have to struggle upward.Your habits are the current. Long habits, habits generated by many, many lives; not only human lives – animal lives, vegetable lives. You are not isolated, you are part of a long succession, and every habit is just ingrained. You have been flowing downward continuously for millennia, so it has become a deep habit. Really, it has become your nature. You don’t know any other nature. You know only one nature which goes down and down and down. This downwardness is the current, and every cell of the body, every atom of the mind, is just part of a long, long succession of habits. They are so deep that we don’t even remember from where they came.Now Western psychology has come to discover many, many new things. For example, now they have discovered that whenever you feel violence, your violence is not in the mind alone, it is deep in your teeth and in your nails. So if you suppress violence, your teeth will absorb it and your jaw will become diseased because animals, whenever violent, use teeth and nails. Our nails belong to animality, our teeth belong to animality – a long animal heritage. So when someone is violent and suppresses it, the teeth become loaded.Now they say that many diseases of the teeth are just because so much violence is suppressed – many diseases of the teeth. So a violent man has a different type of jaw. Just by seeing his jaw you can say that he is violent. A person who has suppressed many, many violent fevers, upheavals, will begin to have a particular type of jaw – the violence will be there. One psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, would just push your teeth by his hands, press your teeth by his hands, and suddenly your whole body would become violent.Wilhelm Reich had to be continuously guarded against his patients because he would push, manipulate and reactivate hidden violences just by touching. He became an expert. Simply by touching a particular part in the jaw and teeth he would bring many, many violences back to you which even you would not remember. You would begin to scream, attack. He would say, “Now I have touched a built-in program. A built-in program has been touched and reactivated.”Sometimes it happened, when Reich would push particular spots – and he became aware of them by continuously working for forty years on jaw spots, he became aware that every spot had a particular type of violence hidden in it – so he would push a particular spot, a particular chakra in the jaw, and a particular violence would come out. He became capable of pushing you back so much that you would become just an animal. Sometimes it happened that the patient would again not be a human being at all. He would fall back, be reduced to an animal. He would begin to roar like an animal, attack like an animal.This is the current. When you are violent, you alone are not violent; your whole history is violent. When you are sexual, you alone are not sexual; the whole history is sexual, the whole succession. That’s why it has so much force. You are just a dead leaf in a big current. So what to do so that you can go upward against the current? What to do?Three things to be done: one, whenever mind begins to flow downward become aware of it as early as possible – as early as possible! Someone has insulted you. For you to become angry, a little time is needed because it is a mechanism. You will get angry, but after a gap. Things will happen like a flash. First you will feel insulted. The moment you feel insulted, the second current will begin to flow; you will become angry. At first the anger will not be conscious; at first it will be just like a fever. Then it will become conscious. Then you will begin to express or suppress it.So when I say, “The earlier the better,” I mean when someone insults you become aware as soon as you begin to feel that you have been insulted. Whenever you become aware, just make an effort to stop. Don’t fall into the automatic track even for a single moment. Even a single moment’s stop will help much. Longer stops will help even more.When Gurdjieff’s father was dying he called his boy. He was just nine, and Gurdjieff remembered the incident all his life. The father called him. He was the youngest child and the father said, “I am so poor I cannot give you anything, my boy. But one thing I can give you which my father gave to me. You may not even be able to understand what it means now, because I myself was not able to understand what it meant when my father gave it to me. But it proved the most precious thing in my life, so I am just giving it to you. Preserve it. Sometime you may begin to understand it.”So Gurdjieff just listened. The father said, “Whenever you feel angry, never reply before twenty-four hours. Reply, but let there be a gap of twenty-four hours.”Gurdjieff followed his dying father’s advice. It became deeply impressed in his mind the very day his father died, and Gurdjieff said, “I have practiced many, many, many spiritual exercises, but that was the best. I never could be angry in my life, and that changed the whole flow, the whole current, because I had to stick to the promise. Whenever someone would insult me I would create something, some situation. I would just tell him that I would come back after twenty-four hours to reply, and I have never replied because it proved such nonsense to reply.” Only a gap was needed, and the whole life of George Gurdjieff became something different.So even if you can begin with one thing in the current, you will begin to change the whole. Really, this is one of the basic truths of esoteric religion: that you cannot change a part unless you change the whole. It works both ways. Either you change the whole, then the part will change; or you change even a single part totally and the whole will follow, because they are so integratedly related.So begin anywhere. Find out your chief characteristic. Find out the chief characteristic for you: that which is most forceful, which you cannot resist, that which tempts you and causes you to go down. It may be sadness, it may be anger, it may be greed, it may be anything. Find out your chief characteristic, your weakness. And begin with the stronger one, then the weaker ones can be won very easily. Begin with the strongest. If anger is the strongest, begin with anger. First, when you feel that you have been insulted, you have been rejected, you have been hindered – anything which creates anger – just when you feel that “Now the first step has been taken and I am feeling insulted,” stop for a moment. Don’t breathe: just stop the breath wherever it is. If it is out, let it be out. If it is in, let it be in. Stop breathing for a moment, then release the breath. Go in, and find out whether you have missed the thing or it is still there.You will have missed it. The connection is missed. You will have given a gap to the automatic working. Somewhere you have disjoined the mechanism, and breathing is wonderful to disjoin anything. Just stop breathing, and there is a disjoining inside. Your feeling insulted and the mechanism of anger will not be joined. If they are missed even for a single moment, they are missed. Your mechanism will never know that you have been insulted.The earlier this happens, the better. There are even earlier stages: they belong to the other, not to you. When the other is insulting you, before feeling insulted, look at him and feel that he is angry. Stop your breath and look at him again, and you will not be insulted. He will insult you, but you will not be insulted. You will not feel insulted because again there comes a gap. This gap is between him and you. Now he cannot cross this gap; he cannot insult you. He will insult, but somewhere he has missed you, you are not the target now. For him you are the target, but actually you are not. You can laugh, and if you laugh it is better.So first create a gap. Second: do something which is ordinarily never done in such situations. When someone is insulting no one laughs, no one smiles, no one thanks, no one hugs, embraces. Do something which is never done. Then you are against the current, because the current is always that which is done, that which is usually done. This is what the current means. Be unusual. Someone is beating you: laugh and feel the difference – not only in those who are beating you, but within yourself. If you can laugh you will feel totally different. Try it – something absurd. Then you disconnect the whole mechanism, you confuse the whole mechanism, because the mechanism cannot understand what is happening. A mechanism is just a mechanism. It may be very deep-rooted, but it is mechanical, it has no consciousness. So confuse your animal. Don’t allow him to push and pull and manipulate. Confuse the animal! The more you confuse him, the less powerful he becomes – and by “animal” I mean your past.This is a rare experiment: to do something which is never done. When you are happy, do something which is never done in happiness – be sad, act sad, be angry, act angry. Confuse the mechanism. Just don’t allow the mechanism to know everything that is to be done. Don’t allow, and within a year your mechanism will be at a loss. Someone will be insulting, and your mechanism will not know at all what to do. You have broken from your past. So try. Every moment can be an experiment, and you will feel a sudden change in your consciousness. When someone is insulting you, laugh and feel what is happening inside – something new you have never known.I am reminded of a Zen monk, Rinzai. He is sleeping in his poor hut. A thief comes in at midnight, it is a full-moon night and a thief comes in. The light of the moon is coming in, the doors are open. There is no need to close the doors because he has nothing. He has only one blanket, in which he is asleep. So the thief goes around the hut and finds nothing.Rinzai is awake. He feels very sorry for the thief because there is nothing. And he doesn’t want to disturb him either, because he can give the blanket – that is the only thing – but the thief will be disturbed, he may even run. So he suddenly laughs. The thief is stunned. Rinzai throws the blanket over him and runs away. The thief follows. What has happened? The whole thing has become just a confusion. So the thief follows him, catches him by the hand and asks him, “What are you doing?”He says, “I am just confusing my mechanism. You are not concerned at all, don’t worry. It was just a coincidence that you came in. I was just experimenting with myself.”What to do? Traditional answers are always ready. Use your fantasy, use your imagination, because your mechanism is the least imaginative thing – the least imaginative. It is very much traditional and orthodox. Understand what I am saying: it is orthodox, traditional. You have been angry the same way, always. Innovate something, use your imagination, be creative, and confuse the current. The more you are capable of confusing the current, the more you will transcend it.So the second thing: use unusual expressions. Don’t allow the routine. The more you allow it, the more powerful it goes on becoming.The thief I was mentioning just fell at the feet of Rinzai and he said, “If you can use such things, allow me to use them myself also. You ran like a thief, and you are the master of the house. You confounded me. I have been in many, many situations, but never like this. You have hypnotized me also. You are the first man who has not behaved with me as a thief, who has not thought about me as a thief, so I cannot leave you now. Everyone has tried with me that I should leave this profession, and I had my own reactions. But with you I change. Now initiate me into your path.”Rinzai said, “How can I initiate you? Really, when I laughed, in that moment I became enlightened. When I laughed, I became enlightened. I was trying and trying and trying; I had been meditating for years and nothing had happened. But in that moment of laughter something broke down, something exploded, I became disconnected from myself. So you are my teacher, really – you have initiated me.”Use something absolutely absurd such as Zen monks have been using. If you go to a Zen teacher, you can never conceive what his answer will be. If you go to a Hindu teacher, a Hindu guru, your question can show you what the answer is going to be, the answer is predictable. Whenever the answer is predictable it is useless – it is useless because it is routine. So if you go to a teacher you can know that if you ask “this,” he will answer “this.” But you can never know with a Zen teacher. Everything is possible, and nothing is impossible. He may answer, he may not answer. He may answer in such a way which is not at all connected with your question – not at all.You may have asked, “Is there a God?” and a Zen teacher might answer, “Look. The sun has gone down. The evening is to come” – not related at all. Someone may ask, “What is a buddha?” and a Zen teacher might just beat you or throw you out of the window. Why? Really, they are not answering you. They are just trying to create a gap between your questioning mind and the answer – a gap.If you ask, “Is there a God?” and I throw you out of the window, how can you relate these two? – no relation. If I answer, “There is no God,” it is related. If I say, “There is a God,” it is related. My theist answer, my atheist answer – all are related, they don’t create the gap. But if I begin to beat you or I just begin to dance, I just begin to laugh, just a mad laugh, it is not related. And if you can be unrelated, unhitched from your routine track, if you can be derailed from the track, something has happened. It has happened many times that the seeker is thrown out of the window and he comes back to touch the feet of the master and say, “Much has happened, and I never dreamed about it. My question was not even related, but you have replied to me.”The first Zen teacher from India, Bodhidharma, went to China. He introduced Zen there. “Zen” is really the Chinese form of dhyan, meditation. “Dhyan” is Sanskrit, and the equivalent of dhyan in Pali, the Buddhist language, is zhan. So zhan in China became ch’an, then zen in Japan.When Bodhidharma reached China, the Emperor Wu came to receive him. When he entered the boundary where he was to be received, there were many thousands of monks. No one could conceive that Bodhidharma would enter in such a way: one foot was naked; on one foot there was a shoe and another shoe was on his head. He entered with a shoe on his head.The Emperor Wu was just bewildered: “What type of man is this? Is he mad?”Wu became worried, and Bodhidharma laughed. Bodhi-dharma said, “You must be thinking the man is mad. I can predict you, but you cannot predict me: that is the difference. You must be thinking I am mad. You have not said so, but I can predict you. You cannot predict me: that is the difference.”Become unpredictable: this is the second thing. If you are predictable you are a thing, not a person. The more unpredictable, the more you are not a thing – not just a thing among things – you become a person. So the second thing: against the current; be unpredictable. Sometimes be absurd. Just don’t try to be logical, because the current is logical. Remember this: the current is very logical – strictly logical. Everything is related. You insult me – I am angry. You appreciate me – I am happy. You call me good and I am one way; and you call me bad and I am different. Everything is predictable, it is logical.Really, if you are angry and I don’t reply to you with anger you will feel something strange has happened, you will not be at ease. You will not be at ease because something illogical has come in. We live in a logical world. This current is very logical, mathematical; everything is fixed. Unfix it! Disturb it! Create a chaos. Create an inner anarchy. Only then can you throw the animal heritage. Animals are predictable and animals are very logical. To transcend them you must have the courage to be illogical, and that is the deepest courage – to be illogical.Jesus says, “Those who have will be given more, and those who have not, even that will be taken away.” This is illogical. This is absolutely illogical. What does he mean? He is using some Zen words. If you look in the words of Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu, you will find that they are not logical. If you ask a buddha, “I will be good, virtuous, I will follow – what will I gain?” he will say, “Nothing! You will not gain anything – nothing.”This Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma, “I have donated millions for the purpose of Buddhism. I have opened many monasteries, ten thousand monks are fed daily in my palace, so what will be the result? What will I gain?”And Bodhidharma said, “Nothing. And if you insist more, you may even fall down into hell. If you insist more, you may even fall down into the deepest hell.” It looks illogical.Even the ten thousand monks were just afraid: “What is he saying? He may destroy the whole business” – because they were trying to persuade the emperor that he will get into a high heaven, that he will be just by the side of the divine emperor, the divine throne. He will be just by the side, and he will have a palace there. And whatsoever he is giving here, he will get back ten-thousandfold. But this man is destroying everything. He says, “Nothing.”Bodhidharma is illogical; Wu is logical. Wu again asked, “Are you joking? – because I have done so much. Is it not holy?”And Bodhidharma said, “There is nothing holy. The word holy is just empty. And if you insist more, you will fall down into a deep hell.”The Emperor Wu said, “We have no communication between us. What you are saying I cannot understand, and what I am saying I think you are not hearing.”Bodhidharma said, “Yes! How can there be communication between me and you? Either you come up or I must come down, only then can we meet somewhere. And I am not ready to come down; you try to come up.” But it didn’t happen, so Bodhidharma remained outside the empire and the emperor went back to his palace.After ten years, when he was dying, the emperor remembered. When death came, every logical system was shattered. Then he became afraid of whether anything was going to happen because “I have fed these bhikkhus, and I have made so many temples and viharas and so many monasteries, but this death is there.” Then he remembered the monk, Bodhidharma, and he asked, “Bring him back. If he is found anywhere bring him back soon, because I am dying and death has shattered all my logic and rationality. Now only that man can help.”But Bodhidharma was dead. He had died one year before, but he had left a message for the Emperor Wu and said to his disciples, “One day when he faces death he will remember me because I was just a death to him, to his whole expectation, to all his desires, to his whole fantasy about the other world. I was just a death to him. When death comes and when death shatters his hopes, he will remember me.” So he had left a message for Wu. That message was given. In the message it was written again, “You cannot predict me, but I can predict you. When you die you will remember me. I can even predict what you will remember when you die, because death is illogical.”Really, if you can understand: life is illogical, death is illogical, love is illogical, God is illogical, and all that is logical is just marketplace. In this life everything that is meaningful, significant, deep, ultimate, is illogical. So create an illogical-ness inside. Don’t be too logical – then you can break…logic is the foundation of your old mind, your traditional mind. Illogic should be the beginning of the new mind.And, thirdly, whenever you feel convenience, comfort, easiness, be alert, the mind is flowing downward. So don’t ask for inner comfort, otherwise you will be lost. Don’t ask for inner convenience, otherwise you will be lost. Whenever you feel everything is okay be alert, you are flowing downward – because nothing is okay really. So whenever you feel that everything is okay, nothing is to be done and everything is just flowing, everything is good, remember, you are flowing downward. Be aware of inner conveniences. When I say “comfort and convenience,” I mean inner ones. Outwardly it makes no difference, you may be in comfort outwardly – but inwardly never allow comfort to set in.That’s why no one remembers religion when he feels happy. When you feel sorrow, when you feel sadness, when you feel misery, you begin to think about religion. Inconvenience inside must be used. So two things: first remember always that the downward flow is very convenient. Don’t be a victim to it. Always create some inner inconvenience. This is tap – inner inconvenience. This is tap – this is austerity. What do I mean by inner inconvenience?You are sleeping, relaxed: create an inner inconvenience. Let the body relax, but don’t relax the alertness. Sufis have used vigil, night vigil, as an inner inconvenience. The whole night they will be on vigil. In India, sleep was never used, really – food and hunger were used as inner inconveniences. The hunger is there: don’t take food. The hunger is there: remember it, be aware of it, and yet be away from it. An inner inconvenience is created. The mind has a habit of falling for the convenience, so create any inner inconvenience. And always go on changing, because if you are fixed to one thing it will not be an inconvenience for long.You can even become fixed to your fasting. Then it becomes a convenience rather than an inconvenience, because to take food may begin to appear as an inconvenience. Once you know that the body can run without food – the body begins to feel more light, the body begins to feel more alive, the body begins to feel more vital; and the body has a built-in process so that for at least three months you can be without food, without any food – after seven or eight days, to take food will be inconvenient. So use fasting as an inconvenience, and when fasting begins to settle, use food.Gurdjieff was strange in this. He would give you such strange foods, such strange foods as you have never eaten. The whole stomach would be disturbed, and he would create inconvenience. Such strange foods – Chinese foods, Indian foods, Caucasian foods – he would use them in New York. Whenever he was traveling, a whole truck of strange foods would follow with him.His followers were very much afraid because he would force them to eat so much that it became a torture. From eight in the night up to twelve – four hours would be for eating, and he would be there. He would go on forcing; no one could say no. He would force so much alcohol that ordinarily it would just make you deadly unconscious, but he would go on. He would create inner inconvenience and he would say, “Let the inconvenience be there. Remember. Be awake.” He would go on pouring alcohol, and he would say, “Remember! Remember, and be awake!”Tantrics have used alcohol, and a real tantric can take any amount of it without being affected at all. They say, and they say rightly, that alcohol creates the deepest inconvenience inside. To fight with it and remain aware is the most arduous thing. When the alcohol goes in and every body cell becomes lethargic and the chemical begins to work and the mind begins to lose consciousness, then to be aware is the most arduous tap – austerity – possible. But it is possible, and once it happens you will never be the same again.So create any inner inconvenience. The current always helps you to be convenient: that is the trick, then you begin to flow with it. So the third thing for the upward flow of the mind is to create inward inconvenience continuously, and go on changing. You can make anything a habit – go on changing. When something becomes convenient, leave it; create something new. Then, by these inconveniences, you create a crystallization inside. You become integrated, one. For this oneness, this integration, this chemical crystallization, alchemists use the word gold. Now the baser metal has been changed into higher. Now you are gold. This integration is the third point to remember.So continuously be aware that some integration must take place. No moment should be missed in which you have not tried to integrate yourself. You are walking: a moment comes when your legs give way and they say, “Now you cannot move.” That is the point to move. Now move! Now don’t listen to the legs and you will become aware of a subtle force, because the body has two force reservoirs. One is just ordinary, for day-to-day use. Another, a deeper one, is infinite. It is not for everyday use, it only comes into operation when there is some emergency.You are walking: you have walked twenty miles, and now you know very well, your logic says, your mind says, every fiber of the body says that now no movement is possible, you will just drop dead. A single step more, and you will drop dead. This is the moment: now move! Don’t listen to the body. Now run! Don’t listen to the body, and suddenly there will be an upsurge of energy again. Within moments you will feel a new energy, and now you can walk for miles together. This energy comes from the reservoir, and this reservoir is connected only when the day-to-day energy source is just empty. If you listen to the body then this reservoir is never used.You are feeling sleepy, and now you cannot even open your eyes. This is the moment. Stand! Open your eyes! Stare! Don’t blink! Forget sleep and try to be awake, and within seconds a sudden upsurge of energy will overflow. There will be no sleep. You will be fresher than you have ever been in the morning. A new morning, an inside morning has happened. A deeper source energy has come. This is how to integrate your mind and how to let it be arrowed continuously upwards.The rishi says, The upward flow of the mind is the water for divine worship – mm? No other water will do. This constant upward flow, by this and only by this can you worship the feet of the divine.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-08/

Osho,You said last night that to have an upward flow of the mindone has to make a constant effort against past animal habits. Please explain what the difference is between effort against habits,and suppression.Transformation of the mind is a positive effort. Suppression of the mind is negative. The difference is that when you are suppressing your mind you are positively concerned with being against something. When you are transforming your mind you are not directly concerned with being against something. You are positively concerned for something: the effort is for something, not against something.For example, if you are fighting directly with sex, then it will be suppression. But if your positive effort is for transformation of sex energy, your positive effort is for something else, then it will not be suppression. Suppression means you have blocked the natural door for the energy, you have blocked the natural outflow, and you have not opened anything else. It is just a blockage. You are against anger, so you block anger – but where will the energy go? The energy that you have suppressed will create inner complexities. It will even be more perverted. So to be natural is better than to be perverted. Perversion is disease; to be natural is healthy.Of course, just to be healthy is not the end. One can go even beyond health. So these are three things: suppression, being natural and transcendence. Just being natural is just being healthy. If you suppress and there is no positive outlet, no creative outlet for your suppressed energy, then you will become perverted. You are not healthy; you become diseased, you become a “dis-ease.”Don’t be concerned negatively. Change the energy, the door, the path, the outlet, positively, and when there is a creative change, the energy that was flowing into sex will not flow. Whenever you can open a higher passage for it, it will flow through it. Whenever you can create something which is better than nature itself, then there is no suppression. This difference must be understood.Only man can fall below nature; no animal can fall below nature. There are no abnormal animals. Sometimes animals also become abnormal, but only when they are with men, never alone. A dog can become abnormal, a horse can become abnormal – but never alone, never in their natural state. They can become abnormal with man, with man’s society. They can become abnormal in a zoo.Man can fall down below nature. This may seem unfortunate. It is not, because this capacity comes with another capacity: man can transcend nature. No animal can transcend nature. The higher than nature you can go, the lower you can go also – in the same proportion. Every possibility is a double possibility. Every possibility opens two doors that are diametrically opposite. Unless you can fall below nature you cannot transcend above it. If you have the capacity to transcend nature you will have the capacity to fall below it also.Animals are just natural; they are neither perverted nor are they transformed. Never do they become sub-animal, and never super-animal. They are just animals. Man is a flexible potentiality: he can fall below nature, can be perverted, can become mad. He can transcend nature, can become superhuman, can become a buddha.Another thing: animals are born with their nature. In a way they are born perfect. An animal is born developed. Man is born without any nature and is not developed at the time of birth; he develops, then many possibilities open, and there is a great range of possibilities. Man is born undeveloped – not only mentally, but even bodily he is born undeveloped. No animal child is born with an undeveloped body; the body is complete. That’s why, when the animal child is born, he is capable of living even without parents.But man’s child is born undeveloped, and even in the physiological structure many things develop only after he is born – and it takes years. In the mother’s womb he is not completely developed, and because of that the “mother” is born – because mothering continues. If the child were born completely developed then there would be no mothering. The whole institution of the family developed – and consequently the whole society, the whole society was born – because the child is born undeveloped. He has to be looked after, taken care of. Only after twenty years will he really be out of the womb. In these twenty years he will need a family, loving care, a society in which to develop. This will be a greater womb.Even when he is physically complete, mentally he is not. He will have to develop his mind. Really, the average mind is never beyond fourteen years of age. The average mind, the average mental age, is thirteen and a half. A person who is physically seventy, is mentally thirteen and a half. The mind remains in such a primitive, primary state. Body becomes complete, mind remains incomplete, and spirit is not even touched. Man dies without ever having evolved any spirit.Whenever someone asked Gurdjieff, “Have we souls?” he would say, “No. Sometimes it happens that a man has a soul. Only sometimes does it happen.” Gurdjieff would say, “Only sometimes, rarely does it happen that a man has a soul. You are not even complete minds, so how can you have a soul?”A body incomplete cannot have a mind, a mind incomplete cannot have a soul, and a soul incomplete cannot realize the divine. Really, body works as a womb for the mind, and mind works as a womb for the spirit, then spirit works as a womb for godliness. So man is not born fixed, complete. He is born only as a multi-potentiality, and he can fall down – below nature. He can be more animalistic than any animal and he can be a superhuman being also, he can be just divine. There is this range of possibilities.Now you can do two things. If your mind becomes negative, suppressive, you go on fighting things which are not “good.” So you fight sex, you fight anger, you fight greed, you fight jealousy, you fight violence – you go on fighting. But when a person is fighting violence he will never be nonviolent, because to fight violence one needs to be violent.You cannot fight violence without being violent, so your so-called nonviolent saints are all violent – deeply violent. Of course, their violence is not against others, their violence is against themselves. So no one objects; you can even applaud them. They are against themselves – very violent. You cannot fight violence. How can you fight violence without being violent? How can you fight anger without being angry? The very attitude to fight anger is a subtle anger. The very fight means you are angry. You are not at ease with your anger.You can take a negative attitude, and you can go on fighting with things which are there. The more you fight them, the more you become like them. A person fighting sex will become sexual, his every gesture will become sexual. His sitting, his standing, his walking, will become sexual. He will be so much obsessed with fighting it that everything will take the tinge and color of sex.When you fight with something, you have to use the techniques of your enemy. If you want to win, you have to use the same techniques that your enemy is using. So even if you win in the end, you will not win because the techniques will be the same. Really, you will have been defeated. Fight with anger, and if you are defeated then there will be anger. If you win, then there will also be anger. Only anger wins against anger.This negative fight will narrow down your consciousness more and more and you will become afraid of everything. A negative mind is always in fear. Everything becomes a sin and everything creates guilt and everything creates fear. You are just in a deep escape from everything. Your consciousness will be narrowed down; it will not expand. You will become so much afraid that you will just hide within yourself and everywhere, all around, will be the enemies. You have created them, because you became negative.This is suppression, and you will end up in a madhouse. Everything that you have suppressed you will have to suppress continuously. The fight will be so continuous that you will not be able to do anything else. If you are fighting sex, then it will be enough – your whole life will be just a fight. If you are fighting greed, then it will be enough; even greed itself will not take as much energy as the fight with greed. Sex will not take as much energy, it will not dissipate as much energy, as fighting with sex – because sex is just natural, and the fight creates negativity. Whenever you are negative you only dissipate energy. Nothing is gained, nothing creative is achieved. You become self-destructive.So always remember never to be negative; then there will be no suppression. But I have told you that to go against the current is the way for the mind to flow upward. What do I mean by going against the current? The difference is very subtle, but once felt, you can never lose the track.For example, you are swimming in a river against the current. The possibilities are two: one, you are just fighting the river, just fearful of being taken away by the river – taken down, taken in the flow – just afraid, trembling, fighting against the river. You will be defeated, because this very attitude of fear of being taken away and this trembling mind cannot win. The defeat has set in. How long will you be able to fight the current? The whole attitude is negative, the river is very much positive, life-like, and you are just fear and trembling. How can you win? Sooner or later you will dissipate energy in the fight and the current will take you away.There is a second point, another dimension: you are not fighting the river because you are not fearful of it.The first thing: fight is created because of fear. Remember, fight means fear; fear comes first, then you begin to fight. Your fear creates fight, your fear creates the foe. So basically, fear is at the root.The second point: you are not fighting the river because you are not fearful of the river. You are not fearful of the river because you know that this is just natural, that the river flows downward. Even if you flow downward there is no guilt, it is natural. Even if you flow downward it is not a defeat. It is a defeat only if you fight – then it becomes defeat. It is just natural: the river flows downward and you flow with it. You can even enjoy it. You can feel the bliss of the flowing river – without any effort, just moving with the current, and the current takes you away. You can even conserve energy by flowing down naturally.So the first thing: don’t be fearful of a downward flow, don’t be fearful. Remember, it is natural, and it is better to flow with the current than to be defeated and taken away because then the whole thing will lose the bliss that is possible naturally. So the first thing: to be natural is not a sin. Remember, because only then can the whole effort become positive; otherwise it will be negative.To be natural is not a sin. Of course, it is not enough – mm? – that is another thing. But it is not a sin. If you are flowing naturally, that is okay. As far as it goes, it is okay. It is not a sin, it is not a guilt, it is not immoral, it is just healthy. But I say it is not enough. It is not enough because your possibilities are still more. They are not just to be healthy. You can be holy also.So don’t be in fear – first thing. Don’t be in condemnation of nature, and then the negative attitude will not be there.Now don’t fight the current – play with the current. You are not fighting the river really, you are just training yourself to go upward. Feel the difference: you are not fighting the river, you are just filled with an abundance, you are just filled with energy and training the energy to go upward. Now the river is not an enemy. Rather, it is a friend, because it gives you the opportunity to go up, to play with it. Now the fight is not a fight at all. It is a game, it is a play. The river is not your enemy it is a situation. Life is a situation, it is not an enemy. Nature is a situation, it is not an enemy. It is an opportunity.So try to train your inner energy to flow upward. You are not really concerned with the river going downward, you are concerned with a different river of energy going upward. Your mind is basically concerned with the inner energy, which can go upward.Feel thankful for the river because it gives you a background, it gives you an opportunity, it helps you, it cooperates with you. You can weigh yourself only through its current. You can feel yourself only because the river is going downward. The feeling that you can go upward even when the river is flowing down gives you a very different quality of confidence – you can go up-ward. Now, even if you relax and flow with the river, you know very well that you can go upward. Now, even this downward flow with the river is not a defeat. You have known something – something different from nature.If you have glimpsed something different from nature even for a single moment, then you have known your potentiality. You may achieve it, you may not achieve it, but now you are not just part of the downward flow, the upward flow is possible. Now it will depend on you. You will be the decisive factor, not the downward current. Now there is no enmity. If the river flows downward, it is okay. You need not flow, you need not fight, you need not be in fear. You can go up.Ultimately, there is another possibility which tantra has gone into very deeply. Tantra says there is a possibility that you flow downward with the river and still you flow upward. Then only your body is carried away. How can the river carry you away? – it can carry only the body. Tantra tried to create many downward rivers. So go into the river, feel the downward flow, flow with it, and remember constantly that you are not flowing.I was saying that by fighting with sex you may be obsessed with sex totally. There is another possibility: even going deeply in sex, you may not be sexual at all. But that possibility opens only when your effort becomes positive. This is what I mean by positive effort against the current. It is not really against the current; it is for the consciousness. The current is being used just as an opportunity – just to weigh yourself, just to find yourself out. Just to feel the upward, the downward is needed. The more forceful the current, the more forceful will be the feeling of the upward. So use nature as an opportunity, not as an enemy. Use instincts as friends, not as enemies. They are friends. Only through your ignorance can you make them enemies. They are friends.When someone reaches the original source – the peak of the river from where the river comes down – when one reaches the original source one is just thankful – thankful towards the river, grateful towards the river, because it is only through the river that he could achieve the source. So when someone reaches the peak of consciousness, he is thankful to every instinct because they all helped, they all created the situation, they all created the opportunity. And they were flowing in the opposite direction. So their opposite flow is not really against you; the river is not against you. You can be against the river, and if you are against the river then you will never win. The greater possibility is that you may become perverted.So use nature to transcend it. When you see there is anger, don’t fight anger directly: weigh yourself, feel the energy, transcend the anger. Anger is there: remain silent, feel anger and feel yourself and weigh yourself – begin to flow upward. Take it as a play. Don’t be serious. Seriousness is a disease. lf you take everything negatively then you will be serious. Then everything disturbs you: “Why is there anger? Why is there greed? Why this? Why that?” Everything disturbs you, and you become serious.But our so-called saints are very serious. Really, I cannot conceive how a saint can be serious, he can only be playful. The seriousness shows he has been fighting. A soldier, of course, is bound to be serious. A saint need not be, must not be. Really, it disqualifies him from being a saint. A saint must be playful because nothing is against him – everything is for him and he can use everything for himself.When I say: “effort against the current,” I mean play against the current – play. Try – see what you can do. The current is flowing downward. Can you flow upward? The anger is there, someone has insulted you, the button has been pushed. Can you remain non-angry? Just play, play with the situation; don’t be serious. The moment you become serious, you have become angry, really. Anger is very serious. Be playful, laugh, and see that the anger has been switched on, that the conditioned mind has been switched on. The anger is boiling there – now, swim against the current. Take it as a play, and see whether it is possible that someone has insulted you – the anger has been created in the metabolism – now, can you still swim beyond it? Don’t fight it.That’s why I say the difference is very subtle. Standing on the bank you cannot feel the difference. Unless you have been in the river and experienced both…. You are standing on the bank, and someone is fighting the river and someone is just playing with the river, going upward. What difference can you see from the bank? Only one: one will be serious and the other will be playful, nothing else.One who is in fear, afraid, fighting, will be serious, deadly serious. How can he laugh? How can he play? If the current pushes him he will feel defeated. The other one who is playing will not be serious at all. He can laugh: he can laugh with the river, he can laugh with the waves, and if the current pushes him down he will not feel defeated, he will try again. He will not be serious. Rather, he will begin to love the river because it pushes. He will begin to love the river. The difference will be inner, qualitative.Suppression is a serious disease. Transforming oneself is a play – it is not serious at all. It is sincere, but never serious. It is authentic, but never serious. The quality of playfulness always remains there; it is the very spirit. With positivity you are creating something inside. The outward is just an opportunity; the inside creation is the thing. The emphasis is on something else. It is not on fighting the river, the emphasis is on the upward flow.For example, I am writing something on a blackboard. I use a blackboard, but I write with white chalk because on a blackboard the white chalk becomes clear in contrast. I can write on a white wall also; the writing will be there, but it will be as if it is not because the contrast will not be there. So the blackboard is not against the white chalk. It is not the enemy, it is the friend. Only against it do the white lines become more white. On a white wall they will just lose themselves, they will be nowhere.So who is the enemy – the white wall or the blackboard? Who is the enemy? The white wall is the enemy because you lose. The blackboard is not the enemy; really, it is the friend. On it, the white becomes more white and clear and apparent. But when I am writing on a blackboard my emphasis, my intention is not to destroy the blackboard. Rather, my intention is to make the white lines clear. If you are trying to destroy the blackboard, then the blackboard is the enemy. See the difference: if you are trying to destroy the blackboard by whitewashing it, then you will feel the blackboard as the enemy.You can whitewash it; then there will be a fight. But when you are writing something on it, your emphasis is not on the blackboard. Really, you never remember it, you need not remember it. It is not even in your awareness, it is only on the fringe. You write: the emphasis is on writing, not on destroying the blackboard. You remember what you are writing, and the blackboard helps. It never obstructs you.So your emphasis must be on what you are trying to achieve, not on what you are against. If you are trying to achieve love, then be positively concerned with love, not with destroying hate. You can never destroy it. You will not be able to destroy hate, but the moment love is there, the whole energy is transformed. It begins to flow “lovewards.”Don’t be negative about your energies, instincts, about anything. Be positive, and when you are positively creating something, be playful. It is your nature, why fight it? You have created it. It is your effort. You wanted to create it, so you have created it. You have chosen it; it is your freedom. If you are angry it is your choice – so why be against it? It is your choice. For lives and lives you have used anger, so it is there. Why be angry against it? No one has chosen it except you. So whatsoever you are, you are your own creation.So it is nonsense to think in terms of negativity. Rather, feel that if you can create such a madman inside of you, then really you are capable of many things – if you can create such a hell, why not a heaven? But don’t be concerned with the hell. Be concerned with heaven and begin to create it. When the heaven is created you will not find the hell. It will have disappeared completely because it exists only as a negative, it exists only as an absence.Because there is no heaven, hell has to be. Because there is no love, hate has to be. Because there is no light, darkness is there. Don’t fight with darkness; create the light, be concerned with the creation of light. When the light is there, then where will the darkness be? But you can fight directly – don’t think about the light at all and begin to fight darkness directly. Whatsoever you do, the darkness will never be destroyed. On the contrary, you may be destroyed in the fight. How can you fight darkness directly? It is an absence. Darkness only means that the light is not. So, please, create light.The river is flowing downward, and you are flowing with it because you don’t know the upward flow. You have not known it; that is the only thing. Once you know it, let all the rivers flow downward, but you cannot flow downward. Then go with the river to the very sea, and you will not go downward.It is difficult to sense the difference. That’s why so much suppression is in the world. No one has taught it – everyone has understood it. No one has taught it – neither a Buddha nor a Mahavira nor a Jesus nor a Krishna has taught it. This is a miracle. No one has taught suppression because no one can. It is absolute nonsense! But everyone has suppressed, and everyone is suppressing – because the difference is so subtle that whenever transformation starts, suppression is understood.Whenever a teacher is born who begins to talk about transformation, followers gather who begin to understand about suppression – because it is so delicate, so delicate, that unless you experience it there is every possibility you will misunderstand it. So try to experience it. The primary requirement: don’t be against anything – be for. Be for something. Don’t be against something.Really, when you are against something your future is not open. Only when you are for something does your future open. When you are against something you are clinging to the past. You can never be against the future. How can you be against the future? You can only be against the past. So let it be under-stood in this dimension also: when you are against, you are against the past. You are fighting with death. The past is no more, so why fight it? Create the future; be for something. Then you become positive.There are two types of freedom: one is from something and one is for something. A young man is fighting with his parents to be free; he becomes a hippie. Then for some time the fight continues. The parents cannot do anything, and they forget. Then for the first time the boy begins to feel, “What to do?” because he was only against. The freedom was from the parents. It was not leading anywhere; it was not for something. It was just against something.This not only happens to individuals; it happens to races, to nations. It has happened always. You fight for freedom against the British or against someone else…ultimately you achieve the freedom, and then you begin to feel vacant, empty. What to do? You were never fighting for something, so your force dies with your enemy.One young man came to me, very educated. He was madly in love with a girl, but his parents were not for it, they didn’t belong to the same religion. He was saying, “Whatsoever the future may be, even if I may be just begging on the street, I am going to marry this girl. But my father is determined to disown me if I marry this girl.”His father is a rich man, so I asked the boy, “Are you really in love with the girl or just angry with your father? Decide this – because these are two different things. Are you really in love with this girl or is this love just a by-product and you are really against your father and using this love as a fighting point, as a front?”He hesitated. He said, “Let me think about it. I have not thought it over. But why do you ask such a question? Really, I am in love.”I said, “You just go and think it over.”He came and said, “No, I am in love.”I just looked into his eyes and he became uneasy. I remained silent and continuously looked in his eyes, stared.He became uneasy and said, “What are you doing? Do you think I am not in love?”I was still silent.He said, “What do you mean? Why are you so silent? Do you think that I am falsifying, or that I am rationalizing?”I remained silent.He said, “It seems you have read my mind. The more I think about it, the more I feel that I am against my father. But still I am going to marry.”So I said, “Okay, marry!”After five years he committed suicide. He wrote a letter to me: “You were right. The moment I married the whole love died, because with marriage the fight with my father ended. I was disowned and there was no relationship. Everything ended, and in that very moment the romance was not there. It was really a fight against something, it was not for something.” And he said, “Now I am committing suicide because life is so boring.”Life will be a boredom if you are always against and never for. Never be against, always be for. So when I say “against the current,” I mean for something, for the peak. Sex is not bad, but the peak is better. So never think in terms of bad and good. Always think in terms of good and better – mm? The bad must be thrown out, it must not be given any status in the mind. Always think in terms of good and better and better. Life is that.Once you create good and bad, soon the good will drop, and bad and worse and worse will follow. So nothing is bad, but better things are possible. Always remember, and struggle for better things. Then you have a positive flow.Osho,How can one know when one has become completely freeof animal instincts, especially from sensual instincts?One thing: when you really become free, when you really become free, you cannot even feel freedom. It is always felt against slavery. So when you really become free you neither feel freedom nor slavery. Then you are free. If you feel freedom, it means some slavery is still there. Freedom is felt only against slavery. When you enter the real freedom you enter an existence which is lived moment to moment, neither as unfree nor as free.But the very formulation of the question carries our mind with it – the very formulation: “When shall we be free?” – we are against something. “When shall we be free?” – and especially from sensual things. But why? The old mind, the old preachings, the morality, the religions, they all teach that as long as there is sensuality you will never be free. They say that as long as sensuality is there you can never be free. Sensuality must go; then you will be free. That’s why we ask.Really, as far as I am concerned, sensuality will not be there but you will be more sensuous when you are really free. You will be more sensitive, and your every sense will become so cleansed that you cannot even conceive what these senses can give. But there will be no sensuality. Sensuality is something else: it is not sensuousness. Sensuality means a hankering; it means a constant obsession.For example, one who is constantly thinking about food cannot meditate, he cannot pray, he cannot study. Whatsoever he is doing, the food is an obsession inside, he will go on enjoying food in his imagination. Even if he begins to think about heaven he will think about food: “What type of food will be available in heaven?”So such persons have said that in heaven there is a kalpa-vriksha – a tree under which you sit and think anything and it is supplied instantaneously, immediately. You think of food and the food is there. You think of a woman and the woman is there. You think of wine and the wine is there. It is a wish fulfilling tree. Those who imagined this tree must have been very, very deep in sensuality. In the Koran it is said that in heaven there are rivers of wine. So whosoever has thought this must have been deeply sensual – a hankering, such a hankering, that even in heaven….When Islam was developing in Arabian countries homosexuality was just an accepted norm, so only in the Mohammedan heaven is homosexuality allowed – in no other heaven. It is said that not only beautiful girls, but beautiful boys will be available. This is sensuality. You cannot even conceive of heaven without your lusts.I don’t say that there will not be…I am not saying that. Maybe – but why do you think about it? I am not at all concerned with what is there or not, but why can your mind not conceive of anything except that which you are after? You have to make provisions and you have to make pre-arrangements, plannings…this is sensuality.And this is the paradox: the more sensual you are, the less you will be sensuous, sensitive, because sensitivity is always in the present and sensuality is always in the future. So if a person is constantly thinking of food, when the food is given to him he will not be able to feel the bliss. Really, on the contrary, he will be taking food and thinking of other food. A person who is constantly thinking of sex will not be able to go deep into sex. When he is going into sex he will be thinking of other women or other men, and then there is a vicious circle.The less he enjoys, the more he goes after thinking, and everything becomes cerebral, mental. He eats with mind, not with the body. His sex becomes cerebral, his everything be-comes cerebral. In everything his mind takes over, and mind cannot do anything except thinking. So mind goes on thinking and thinking. Really, such a guard is created around the mind that he becomes less and less sensitive. The senses lose life, and the mind exploits everything from the senses, usurps everything. The mind cannot do anything, it can only think – and thinking cannot give you contentment.So the more you feel discontent, the more you think. Then you are in a vicious circle, and ultimately you become absolutely incapable of feeling anything through the senses. This is sensuality: senses prostituted by the mind, or mind having taken all the senses into itself. This is sensuality.A really free consciousness will not be sensual, but will be sensitive – deeply sensitive and sensuous. Really, when a Buddha sees a flower he sees the flower in its totality, in its total beauty, in its total aliveness. The color, the fragrance – everything Buddha sees in its totality. He will never think again about this flower – he will never be sensual. He will not hanker again to see it more and more, repeatedly. He will never think again about this flower – not because he is not sensuous, but because he is totally sensuous and he has lived this experience so deeply that there is no need to repeat.The need to repeat comes because you cannot live any moment totally – so you eat, and again you have to think to repeat it; you love, and you have to think to repeat it. You are less concerned with living than you are concerned with repetition. This repetitive hankering is sensuality.A Buddha is not sensual in this sense – he is deeply sensuous. His every sense-door is clear, transparent. He feels everything, he lives every moment totally, he loves every moment totally and he experiences it so totally that there is no need to repeat, so he never thinks about it. He goes on and on, and every moment is so rich that there is no need to repeat any old moment. There is no need. The need is created because you are incapable of living in the moments which are present. You are incapable, so you go on.If I pass through this city and think, “No, London is better, I must be there,” it means only that I am not capable of experiencing this city. That is why the memory comes. Otherwise, if I can live in this city, there is no need. And remember that this type of mind, when it goes to London, will not be able to live there either because this type of mind cannot live in the moment that is there. This mind will think about Tokyo, about Calcutta, about other places – and we go on missing. Live!So a totally free mind will not even be aware of freedom – first thing. It will be so free that it cannot be aware of freedom and it will not be aware of any bondage. It will be aware only of a life which is moving, moving moment to moment. This movement is unmotivated – mm? – that is what is meant by freedom. This movement is unmotivated. If you move with a motivation, then you are bound.If I am saying something with some motivation then I am not free, the motivation is my bondage. If I am just saying it with no motivation…not even this much – that you may understand or may not understand it. Not even this much – I must make you understand it – then it has a freedom, unmotivated. Then it is a bliss in itself to have talked, to have said, to have expressed. It is enough. If there is no motivation beyond it, then it is a free movement. So in freedom you will not live through motivation you will live directly, immediately. That immediate living is freedom. But there is no awareness of it because you cannot feel it. You can feel it only against some bondage.Sensuality will not be there, but senses will be there – and more acute, more alive. This is as it should be. A Jesus can love more. Really, only a Jesus can love – unmotivated. His very being is love. Senses are there, really, for the first time; without the disturbance of the mind, they function totally. Eyes see as they should see. They see without any thought, they see without any prejudice. They see that which is; nothing is projected. Ears hear that which is said with no distortion, because the mind is not there. Hands touch that which is with no desire, with no lust, with no motivation, with no longing. Hands just touch – then touch becomes pure, total. With no disturbance they simply touch, then touch goes deep. Then the soul is touched even by a hand; the hand becomes a passage.Senses are there – more purified, more acute, more authentic – but sensuality is not there because such a man lives so deeply that he never wants to repeat. And even if something is repeated, he never feels it is repeated because everything is so new.The less you live, the more you have to substitute for it by your dreaming mind. The less you live, the more the mind has to substitute for it. The more you live, the less is the need of the mind to substitute.When you live totally, mind is not needed. When you are in love, why should the mind be needed? When you are eating, why should the mind be needed? When you are walking, why should the mind be needed?You can move without the mind. You can eat without mind coming in, with no thought process. You can touch someone, you can kiss someone, you can embrace someone without the thought process coming in. Then you live totally, and you will never long for any moment that is lived totally to be repeated, because you long only for something which has remained in-complete. The mind goes on back again and again to complete it. The mind is a very great perfectionist – everything must be perfect. So if something is left incomplete the mind goes back again and again.It is just like when one of your teeth falls out and then you continuously touch the spot with your tongue to feel the absence, the whole day long. You will be bored – but again, unaware, you will touch the absence. You know now that the tooth is not there, but why does this tongue now go constantly to the spot and it has never done so before? When the tooth was there this tongue never touched it. Why, when the tooth was there, was the tongue not concerned at all with touching it? When the tooth is not there the tongue goes on, goes on, goes on – it becomes mad. Why? Because now the tongue feels something incomplete, some gap, and the gap calls again and again.So with any experience lived totally you will never go again to feel it in the mind. If you have really loved someone there will be no memory – memory in the sense that the mind is going constantly to it again and again. If you have not loved, then the absence is felt. You feel guilty and you feel that something has been missed, so it must be substituted – then the mind goes on thinking.The freer you are, the less is the need to substitute with mental activity. Sensuality is substituting – you understand me? Sensuality is substituting something that you are missing. So when consciousness is really transformed and becomes free, there is no feeling of freedom. When consciousness is transformed and becomes holy, there is no feeling of holiness. So a real saint is one who doesn’t know that he is a saint. Only sinners know that they are saints. Only sinners know!A really good man never knows that he is good; only bad ones know they are good. How can you feel your health? Only an ill person, a diseased person, begins to think about health. When you are healthy, you are just healthy. Really, you never remember that you are healthy. You begin to feel about the body only when you are ill. So if someone goes on talking about health, be confident that he is ill.It happens that ill persons will go on creating many theories about health. Ill persons will constantly talk about health and will become experts. It happens daily, that if you are ill and cannot get beyond your illness, sooner or later you are going to be a naturopath. If medicines are not going to help, what to do? Constant thinking and reading about health will make you a naturopath. So naturopathy is good in one way because every patient becomes a doctor. If you are really healthy, then there is no need. And the same applies everywhere. When you are free, you don’t feel it; when you are good, you don’t feel it; when you are moral, you don’t feel it.Secondly, when you are free you will live moment to moment, totally. This can be said in a general way. We can never be particular because it will depend…. For example, Mohammed married, and he married nine women. We cannot conceive the same about Mahavira, we cannot conceive the same about Buddha. Buddha was married and he left his home, but Mohammed married nine women. So if you ask a Jaina, he cannot say that Mohammed is a realized soul – how can he be? And the same is the case with Mohammedans. They cannot conceive how these “escapists,” Mahavira and Buddha, were realized souls – because whenever someone is realized he is not afraid. He can marry nine women, and this Buddha leaves even one, escapes. Why?Jainas cannot conceive that Krishna was an enlightened one because he was just so ordinary, doing such ordinary things. Love is one of the most ordinary things, and he was loving and singing and dancing and fighting and doing everything, so how can he be enlightened? Jainas think that Krishna died and went to the last hell – the seventh hell. According to them, he is now in the seventh hell. He was the greatest sinner possible because he seduced Arjuna into fighting, for the war. They say Arjuna was just on the verge of being a mahatma. He was just trying to escape when this fellow Krishna seduced him and forced him to fight. So in Jainas’ eyes this man Krishna is the most violent person – and he is suffering in hell.This happens, this is natural. This is natural because we become obsessed with types. Then we cannot allow another type to have freedom, enlightenment. This depends! The type, the individuality, goes to the very end, to the very peak. It becomes purified, but it goes on. So a Buddha may feel that now he need not be attached with any woman. It depends on him. It depends – and he is free to move in his way. A Mohammed may think quite differently, and he is free to move in his own way. Everyone moves, when free, in his own way. You cannot force a type.For example, Mohammed was not at ease with music at all. He could not be; that was his type. But the Mohammedans think that anyone who loves music is just a sinner, so in a Mohammedan mosque you cannot play music. But Mohammed loved perfume very much, so Mohammedans continue to love perfumes. A very poor Mohammedan, particularly on religious days, will sometimes also use perfume. Perfume is as sensuous as music – even more. So what is the difference? Perfume is music for the nose and nothing else, and music is perfume for the ears and nothing else. But it depends on the type.When Mohammed became free, totally free, enlightened, his “type” began to move freely in his own way, and a sudden burst and a sudden feeling for perfumes came – unmotivated. But when followers come, they create motivations. They begin to think that there must be some reason. Nothing is there as a reason. It is simply the freedom of a type.Meera goes on singing and Chaitanya goes on dancing from village to village. Mohammed cannot conceive: “What nonsense are you doing? Dancing – how is it related with divine realization?” A Chaitanya cannot conceive how you can remain without dancing when that friend comes. How can you remain without dancing? A Chaitanya cannot conceive how a Buddha likes sitting when the divine has come to the door: “How can you go on sitting like that when the light has descended? You must go dancing! You must become mad!” But these are types, and one must be aware to allow every type to be there. Then the world is richer.So I cannot say what will happen to you when you are free – what senses will become more purified, what senses will begin to be expressive of your soul. No one can say; it is unpredictable. One thing is certain, sensuality will not be there. Senses will be there – more perfect, more pure – and purer will be their experience and deeper. The sensitivity will be there, but no sensuality.Osho,Seeing the dialectical facts of life, can one practice both the path of relaxation and the path of effort simultaneously?No, it is not possible. You cannot practice both simultaneously because both are diametrically opposite. They lead to one point, but they don’t pass through the same road, through the same route, through the same realms. They are quite diametrically opposite.You cannot practice both, just like you cannot go to one place simultaneously following two roads. Two roads may be going…you are going to the station and two roads may be going to the station, but you cannot follow both the roads simultaneously. If you do follow them, you will not reach the station. Both roads go, but then you will not reach, because then you will have to go ten steps on one, then come back, follow the other, then come back, follow the first one…. Then you can follow much, but you will reach nowhere.Every way is a particular way. It has its own route, its own steps, its own milestones, its own symbols, its own philosophy, its own methodology, its own vehicles, its own mediums of movement. It has its own everything. Every way is a perfect way. So never be in two minds, it will simply create confusion. Follow one! When you reach to the end, you will know that even if you had followed the other you would have arrived. When you have arrived, you can try just as a play to go on the other, that’s another thing, just to know whether this road also reaches or not. But don’t follow two simultaneously, because every path is so scientifically perfect that this will only create disturbance.Really, in the old days, even to know about the other path was prohibited because even that knowing creates disturbance. Our minds are so childish and so curious, and foolishly curious, that if we hear about something else or read about something else we begin to amalgamate. We don’t know that anything which is meaningful on a particular path may be just harmful on another. So you cannot amalgamate. Some part in one car may be meaningful, useful – so useful that the car cannot move without it. But the same part can become a hindrance in another car. Don’t use it, because every part is meaningful only in its own pattern, in its own gestalt. The moment you change the whole, the part becomes a hindrance.So much confusion has come into the religious world be-cause now every religion is known to everybody, every path is known, and you are just confused. Now, to find a Christian is difficult, to find a Hindu is difficult, to find a Mohammedan is difficult, because everyone is just something of a Hindu, something of a Mohammedan, something of a Christian, and that creates very much danger. It is dangerous. It may prove suicidal.So purity of path is a basic necessity for one who has to follow. If one has just to think about it then there is no need for any purity, you can go on thinking. But if you are to travel, then purity of the path is very essential and you must be aware not to confuse anything and not to bring any alien, foreign element in it.It doesn’t mean that the other is wrong. It only means that the other is right only on the other’s path. You need not take the other conclusion that “Only I am right and the other is wrong.” The other is right in its own way. If you have to follow another path, just go to the other’s way leaving your way completely.That is why the old religions – and there are only two basic religions, Hindu and Jewish – were never ready to convert anyone. And the only reason was this, that they knew a very old, very deep tradition – that to convert is to confuse. If someone has been brought up as a Christian and you convert him into a Hindu, you will just confuse him because now he cannot forget that which he has known. Now you cannot just wash it out. It will remain there, and on that foundation whatsoever you give him as Hinduism will not mean the same because his old foundation will always be there. You will just confuse him, and that confusion will not make him religious, cannot make him.So the old religions – really, there are just two old religions, the Jewish and the Hindu, and all other religions are just branches of those – have remained very dogmatically nonconverting. The Hindu concept was disturbed by Dayananda. Because his mind was working in a political way, not in a religious one, he began to convert. But that concept has a beauty of its own. It doesn’t mean that other religions are bad; it doesn’t mean that others are not right. It doesn’t mean anything like that. It only means that if you have been brought up in a particular concept, it is better to follow that. It has gone deep in your bones and blood, so it is better to follow that.But now it has become impossible, and it will never again be possible because now the old patterns have broken. Now no one can be a Christian, no one can be a Hindu. That is not possible now, so a new categorization is needed. Now I don’t categorize as Hindu and Mohammedan and Christian. That categorization is not possible now. It is just dead and must be thrown away. Now we must categorize every path.For example, there are two basic divisions – the path of relaxation and the path of effort; the path of surrender and the path of will. This is a basic division, then other divisions will follow, but these two are basic and quite diametrically opposite. The path of relaxation means surrender just here and now with no effort. If you can, you can. If you cannot, you cannot – there is no go. The path of surrender is very simple: Surrender! If you ask how, then you are not for this path, because the “how” belongs to the other path – mm? “How” means by what effort, by what technique: “How am I to surrender?” If you ask, “How I am to surrender?” then you are not for the path of surrender. Then go to the other.If you can just surrender without asking how, only then is it possible. So it seems simple, but it is very difficult, very arduous, because the “how” comes instantaneously. If I say “Surrender,” you have not even heard the word and the “how” comes up – “How?” – then you are not for this path. Then the other path is of will, effort, endeavor. Then every “how” is supplied – how to do it. Then there are many ways.So surrender has only one way, and there are no branches, there cannot be. There cannot be different types of surrender. Surrender is simply surrender. There are no types. Types belong to techniques. There can be different techniques; but because there is no technique, surrender remains the purest path, without any division.Then the second: the path of will. It has many divisions. All the yogas, methods, belong to the second. The second says, “You cannot relax just now, so we will prepare you, a preparation is needed. So follow these methods and a moment will come when you will drop.”They look difficult – they are not. They look difficult because they say preparation, methods, years of training and discipline are necessary. So they look difficult, but they are not – because the more time is given to you the more simplified the process becomes. Surrender is the most difficult process because no time is allowed. They say, “Just here and now.” If you can, you can. If you cannot, you cannot.Basho, a Zen monk, would say to whosoever would come, “Surrender.” If the person asked, “How?” he would say, “Go elsewhere.” His whole life he used only two statements continuously – never a third. He would say, “Surrender.” If you would say, “How?” he would say, “Go somewhere else.”Sometimes some persons came who would not ask, “How?” and would surrender. But this phenomenon is becoming rare. As our modern mind progresses surrender will be rare, surrender will be difficult, because surrender means an innocence, a trusting mind, an absolute faith. It doesn’t need effort, it needs faith. It doesn’t ask for the method and the way and the bridge, it takes the jump. It doesn’t ask for the steps – it doesn’t ask anything.But the other path is of effort, tension. Many methods are possible, because to do something there are many techniques. There are many techniques for how to create the ultimate tension so that you explode. But never follow both. You cannot – you can just go on thinking about both. And don’t confuse. Determine clearly, exactly, which is for you.Can you trust? Are you ready without any “how” to take the jump? If not then forget relaxation, then forget surrender, then even forget the very word – because you cannot understand it. Then effort…and this Upanishad is talking about effort: upward effort, a continuous arrowing of the mind towards the peak.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 10 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-09/

Sadaamanskam arghyamMind constantly arrowed towards Thatis arghya – the offering.What can man offer? What can the offering be? We can offer only that which belongs to us. That which does not belong cannot become an offering, and man has always offered that which does not belong to him at all. Man has sacrificed that which is not his at all.Religion becomes a ritual if you offer something which is not yours. Religion becomes an authentic experience if you offer something which really belongs to you. Rituals are really methods to escape from authentic religiousness. You can find substitutes, but you are deceiving no one except yourself – because how can you offer something which is not yours? You can sacrifice a cow, you can sacrifice a horse, you can offer properties of land, but nothing belongs to you. So, really, this is theft in the name of religion. How can you offer to the divine that which is not yours?So the first thing is to find out what is yours, what belongs to you. Is there anything which belongs to you? Are you the master of anything of which you can say, “This belongs to man and I offer it to the divine”? This is one of the most difficult questions: “What belongs to man?” Nothing seems to belong, and when nothing seems to belong to you, then you can only say, “I can offer myself.” But even that is not right, because do you yourself belong to you? Is your being yours? Are you responsible for your being? Are you responsible to be?Man comes from somewhere, some unknown source. He is not responsible for his being here. Kierkegaard has said, “When I look at man, I feel that he has been thrown here.” He is not even responsible for his own being; the being is grounded in the divine. Look at it this way, can a tree say, “I offer myself to the earth”? What does it mean? It is meaningless because the tree is rooted in the earth, the tree is just a part of the earth. The tree is just earth and nothing else, so how can a tree say, “I offer myself to the earth”? It is meaningless. The tree is already a part. It is not different, so offering is not possible. So, first: you can offer something which belongs to you. Second: you can offer if there is a distance, a separateness.The tree cannot offer itself because it is not different from the earth. Or, think of it this way: a river cannot say, “I offer myself to the sea.” The river is not rooted in the sea, it is separate. But, still, the river cannot say, “I offer myself to the sea.” Why? It cannot say this because it is not the river’s choice. The river has to flow to the sea, there is no choice left. The river is just helpless. Even if the river wants to choose not to offer she cannot choose it, so offering is inevitable. When the offering has no choice it is meaningless.The river cannot say, “I offer myself to the sea” because she has to come. This coming is just part of nature. The river is not coming to the sea by choice because there is no choice on the river’s part. The river is just helpless, she cannot do otherwise. So a third thing: you can offer something only when you can do otherwise. If you are capable of not offering, only then do you become capable of offering. Then this is your choice.Man is rooted just like a tree. Man is a tree, only with moving roots – rooted in being, rooted in existence. Man is not separate; deep down there is no separation. Man is not responsible for his own being; he has to return helplessly, just like a river falling into the sea. So where is the choice? How can you offer? Your death will be a merging whether you choose it or not. Who are you? Where do you stand and where can the offering become possible?This sutra is very deep. This sutra says:Mind constantly arrowed towards That is arghya – the offering.You cannot offer yourself, but you can offer your mind – that belongs to you and that is your choice. If you do not offer it, the divine cannot force it to be offered. You are not helpless, it is not like a river falling into the sea. Mind has a choice. You can go on denying the divine and the divine cannot force you. Your being is rooted in the divine, but not your mind. You cannot deny the divine as far as existence is concerned. You are part of it.You can deny the divine as far as consciousness is concerned. You can deny so much that you can live in a consciousness in which there is nothing like the divine. So to say, “God is” or “God is not,” can be your choice. Even if there is no God you can create one, you can believe. Even if there is God you can deny, and nothing can be forced upon you. So the only choice is with the mind, the only freedom is with the mind. Your being is rooted, but your mind is free.Of course, your mind comes out of your being, but still it is free, free in the sense that a tree is rooted in the earth – the tree is rooted, the branch and the root, every flower is rooted – but the fragrance of the flower can be free and can move, unrooted. So you are just a tree, but your mind is fragrance. It may be offered, it may not be offered, it depends on you.Man’s freedom is man’s mind. Animals are not free only because they do not have a choice; they are just what they are meant to be. They have no choice. They cannot go against nature. Man’s mind is man’s freedom. So one thing, the basic one to be understood, is that because the mind is a freedom it can become an offering. You can offer your mind, but you can resist also, you can go against also, and even God cannot force you – that is the glory, that is the beauty of human existence. So man is the only animal who is in a certain way free. This freedom you can use or you can abuse.Mind constantly arrowed towards Thatis arghya – the offering.If your mind can be arrowed constantly, continuously towards That, you have offered yourself. But because mind has a freedom it is very difficult to tether it somewhere. The very nature of it is freedom, so the moment you try to tether it, it rebels, it becomes rebellious.It may follow you if you are not trying, but if you try, then it is bound to rebel because the very nature of mind is freedom. The moment you try to fix it somewhere, it rebels. This is natural. You can offer the mind, but it is not easy. It is the most difficult thing to offer the mind, and when I say, “Mind means freedom,” it becomes more difficult. You are trying to put your mind against its nature.Concentration is against mind because you are trying to narrow it down somewhere – exclusively somewhere. But the mind is freedom, movement, a constant movement. It lives only when it moves. It is only when it is in movement. It is a dynamic force, so the moment you try to fix it you are trying something impossible. So what to do? The religious man has always tried to fix the mind towards the divine, and the more he tries to fix it, the more the mind goes to the Devil.Jesus comes to meet the Devil. The Devil is nowhere except in the effort of Jesus to be constantly arrowed towards the divine. The Devil doesn’t exist. It is just that when you force your mind to be tethered somewhere, it creates the opposite in order to move. So you must understand the law of reverse effect. With the mind, that law is foundational. Whatsoever you try to do, the reverse will be the result. The reverse, the very reverse, will be the result. So try to arrow your mind towards God and you will come to face the Devil. The effect will be the reverse. Try to steer your mind and your mind will become anarchic, you will be encountering turmoil.The more stillness is sought, the more unstill the mind becomes. The more you try to make it silent, the more noise it creates. The more you try to make it good, the more sins become tempting. This is the foundational law for the mind. It is as foundational with the mind as Newton’s Law is with physics: the law of reverse effect.So whatsoever you are trying to force you will never achieve. You will achieve the reverse, and then a vicious circle is created. When you achieve the reverse, you begin to think that the reverse is so powerful that “I am to fight more.” The more you fight, the more powerful will be the reverse, the opposite. The opposite is not. You create it only because you try to tether your mind. It is a by-product – a by-product which comes only because you do not know the law. So what to do to offer the mind to the divine? If you choose the divine against something, you will never be able to offer.There is only one way: choose the divine as the all; choose the divine as the whole; choose the divine everywhere in everything. Even if the Devil comes to face you, realize the divine in it. Then you have offered – and then the offering can be continuous with no break, with no gap, because now no gap is possible. That’s why the Upanishads don’t use the word God. They use That, because the moment you say God, the Devil is created. They don’t use any word really, they use just a finger. They say That, and this That is comprehending all – everything everywhere. So if you can conceive of the divine as the all, then you can offer. Otherwise the contrary will be created – you will offer to God and the offering will go to the Devil.All the religions have faced the problem, the dichotomy – Christianity, Judaism or Mohammedanism. All the religions born out of India have accepted the dichotomy. They have accepted the God-and-the-Devil dichotomy. So if you see the history of these religions you will become aware of a very strange phenomenon. Jesus stands for God, but the Devil goes on tempting him also. Whatsoever Jesus stands for, his Church stands quite against it – diametrically against. So Christianity is least concerned with Christ. Rather, Christianity is his enemy, because whatsoever the Church has done, it cannot be said that it is God’s work. It can be said that it is the Devil’s work. But this had to be due to the law of reverse effect.Once you accept the dichotomy, the opposite will be the result. Christ preaches love and the Church stands for hate. Christ says, “Don’t resist even evil,” but the whole history of the Church is a long war. So Nietzsche is right when he says, “The first and the last Christian died on the cross” – the last also! After Jesus there has been no Christian. But, really, St Paul and others are not so much responsible as they appear to be. The real responsibility goes to the ignorance concerning the law of reverse effect.If you choose a part as divine and a part as non-divine or anti-divine, then the mind will move. The mind has its own tricks for moving. It can justify evil in the name of good, it can rationalize war for peace, it can kill and murder because of love. So the mind is very cunning and clever in moving to the opposite, and when it moves it gives you every reason to believe that “I am not moving.” So if you choose God as something apart from the world or anti the world, you will never be able to offer the mind. And a partial offering is no offering, this must also be remembered.A partial offering is mathematically wrong. It is just like a partial circle – which is not a circle. A circle is a circle only when it is full, complete. You cannot call a partial circle a circle. It is not. Either offering is total or it is not. How can you offer partially? That is intrinsically impossible. How can you love partially? Either you love or not, no compromise is possible. No degrees of love are possible. Either it is there or it is not there. All else is just deception.Offering is a total phenomenon. You give up, you surrender, but you cannot say, “I partly surrender.” What do you mean? A partial surrender means that you are still the master and can even take it back. The part which has remained behind can take it back, can say no tomorrow. So a total surrender is that in which nothing has been left behind; no withholding, so you cannot go back. There is no return possible, because then no one remains behind to go back. So the offering is total.But if you divide the world, if you divide existence into polar opposites, then you will be in a very deep dichotomy and your mind will move to the opposite. The more you resist, the more attractive it becomes. Negatives are very attractive. When you insist so much on “don’ts,” the attraction becomes unbearable. “No” is a very enchanting invitation. So whenever you try to force your mind towards something, the other – which you are trying not to go towards – will become inviting. Sooner or later you will be bored with the part you have chosen and the mind will move. It always goes on moving.Chinese philosophy says that the yin goes on moving into the yang and the yang goes on moving into the yin, and they make one circle. They are in a constant movement of one into the other. The man goes on moving into the woman and the woman goes on moving into the man, and they make one circle. The light goes on moving into the darkness and the darkness goes on moving into the light, they make one circle. When you are bored with the light you are attracted by darkness, and when you are bored by darkness you are attracted by light.You go on moving between the opposites. So if your God is also a part of the opposite world, part of the logic of opposites, you will move to the other extreme. That is why the Upanishad says That. In this That everything is implied, nothing is denied. The Upanishads have a very life-affirmative concept, a very life-affirmative philosophy.Really, this is very strange. Albert Schweitzer has said that Indian philosophy is life-negating, but he has really misunderstood the whole thing. In his mind, when he says “Hindu philosophy,” he must have been referring to Mahavira and Buddha. But they are not really the main current, they are just rebellious children. Hindu philosophy is not life-negating. On the contrary, Albert Schweitzer is a Christian, deeply Christian, and Christian philosophy is life-negating! Hindu philosophy is one of the most affirmative.So it is good to go deep in this life-affirmation; only then will you be able to understand the meaning of That, because this is one of the most affirmative words – not denying anything. “Life-denying” means that your God is something against life. Jainas are life-denying. They say that this world is sin; you must leave it, deny it, renounce it! Unless you renounce it totally you cannot achieve the divine. So the divine becomes something you can achieve only conditionally – if you renounce the world. It is a basic condition.For Buddhists also it is a basic condition: “You must renounce everything; you must choose death. Death must be the goal, not life. You must struggle not to be born again. Life is not of any value, it is of non-value. It exists only be-cause of your sins, it is a punishment, and you must somehow go out of it, not be born again.” But this is not the Hindu concept. The Upanishads are not concerned with this at all.The same life-denying attitude is of Christianity also: “Life is sin and man is born in sin.” History begins in sin. Adam has been expelled from heaven because he has sinned. He has disobeyed, and now we are born out of the sin. That’s why Christians have been insisting that Jesus was not born out of sex, that he was born out of a virgin girl – because if you are born out of sex you are born out of sin, and at least Jesus must not be born out of sin. So everyone is born in sin; mankind lives in sin. So a deep renunciation is needed to reach the divine.Christianity is also death-oriented. That’s why the cross became so meaningful. Otherwise, the cross should not be so meaningful, it is a symbol of death. Hindus cannot conceive how the cross can become a symbol – and even Jesus became so significant and important because he was crucified. If you don’t crucify Jesus and he is just ordinary, Christianity would not be born.Really, those who were death-oriented became attracted towards Christ because he was crucified. The death of Jesus became the most significant historic moment. So really, Christianity was born because Jews foolishly crucified Jesus. If he had not been crucified, there would be no Christianity. So Nietzsche is again right. He says Christianity is not really Christianity but is “crossianity” – cross-oriented.Schweitzer says that Hindus are life-negating. He is wrong because he is thinking about Buddha; Buddha was as much Hindu as Jesus Christ was Jewish, but just this much. He was born a Hindu as Jesus Christ was born a Jew. But Hindus really have their essence in the Upanishads which precede Buddha, and Buddha has said nothing which is not already in the Upanishads. They are of life-affirmation, total life-affirmation. And what do I mean when I say total life-affirmation…?You cannot conceive of Jesus dancing, you cannot conceive of Jesus singing, you cannot conceive of Buddha dancing or singing or loving, you cannot conceive of Mahavira fighting, you cannot. Only Krishna can be conceived of as laughing, dancing, loving, even standing in a war, with no denial – with no denial!The whole life is divine. So to choose God is not to renounce the world. To choose God means to choose God through the world. That is the meaning of That. When you choose God through the world, not against the world, then there is no opposite. Only then can you escape from the law of reverse effect. When you choose That through this, there is no opposition, there is no polarity. And when there is no polarity, mind has no layer in which to move. It is not that it is tethered, it is not that it is in bondage, it is not that you have forced it here. Now there is no possibility for it to move. The opposite is not.Understand it clearly. When the opposite is not, the mind is free to move, yet it moves not – because where can it move? If it can move, it will move because movement is its nature, and if you create dichotomy then it will move to the opposite, it will rebel against you. If there is no duality, if the opposite is not and if you have comprehended the opposite also in the divine, then where can the mind move? Then wheresoever it moves, it moves only to That. So if Krishna is dancing with a girl, he is dancing with the divine because the girl is not excluded, the divine is not against the girl. If the divine is against the girl, then the girl will become the Devil. Then the girl will tempt, and there is bound to be difficulty.Christ cannot laugh – he lives in a constant tension. Krishna can laugh because there is no tension at all. When everything is divine, and when through all he has been giving the offering, then where is the tension? Then there is no need. Then Krishna can be at ease anywhere. Even in hell he can be at ease, because even hell is That.I was telling you that Jainas have put Krishna into hell because he was responsible for the Mahabharat, the great Indian war. They have put him into the seventh hell – the deepest hell for the greatest sinners. But when I close my eyes and begin to think of him in hell, I cannot conceive of him except as dancing. He must be dancing there. Even if he is there he must be dancing, because even hell is That. And he will not be in any hurry and he will not pray to be put out of hell. He will make no effort, because the That is present everywhere. You need not go anywhere and you need not think of conditions, that only in certain conditions is the divine possible. He is possible in every condition. He is unconditionally present.When you can conceive of the divine as being unconditionally present, then it becomes the That of the Upanishads. Then it is even in poison; then it is even in death; then it is even in suffering. And you cannot move anywhere. Or, wherever you move, you move to That. So That must be conceived of through this, otherwise the law of reverse effect will begin to work. Every religious person has to fall into this law of reverse effect.Unless you understand totally, unless you begin to feel that this law is working everywhere, never create any polar opposites in the mind otherwise you will be a victim of your own nonsense. The moment you choose something as opposite to something, you have created the ditch where you will fall. You will be hypnotized by the opposite.We are all hypnotized by the opposite. A society becomes sexual if you say that sex is sin. Then sex becomes romantic, it begins to have a mysterious aura around it. A very simple fact of life, only because it is called sin, becomes the ditch – only because it is called sin! Call anything sin, and you have created a point by which you will be hypnotized. Auto-hypnosis is now possible. Deny something, and you are in the trap.Lao Tzu says, “An inch’s distinction between earth and heaven, and everything is set apart. An inch’s distinction between good and bad, and everything is set apart.”No distinction should be made. That’s why religion is not morality. Religion is beyond it because morality cannot exist without distinctions, religion cannot exist with distinctions. Morality cannot exist without creating the other. It depends on polar divisions – good and evil, and so on. So God and the Devil are not part of religion but of morality. The concept of God as opposite to evil, the Devil, Satan, is not really a religious concept. It is a moral concept.When the Upanishads were translated into western languages for the first time the scholars were at a loss because they were not anything like the Ten Commandments which say, “Do this, don’t do that!” There was nothing like the Ten Commandments, and without the Ten Commandments how can there be a religion? How? – the West couldn’t conceive of it. So these books were “not really religious,” because there was no discussion about what is good and what is bad and what should be done and what should not be done.They were right in a way. If we conceive of religion as a morality, then the Upanishads are not religious. But if the Upanishads are not religious, then nothing is religious – because morality is just a convenience, and morality can differ from nation to nation, from race to race, from geography to geography, from history to history. It will differ, because every race, every nation, creates its own conveniences. Religion is not a convenience, and it cannot differ from race to race. It is not dependent on geography and it is not dependent on history. Really, it is not dependent on human thinking. It is dependent on the very nature of reality. So religion is, in a way, eternal.Moralities are always temporal. They belong to some age and to some time and to some space – then they change. When time changes, they change. But religion is eternal because it is the very nature of reality. It is not dependent on your thinking. This religion belongs to nonpolar reality. But reality is divided into polarities: as we see it, it is divided, because the very seeing divides it, just like a ray of light, a ray of sun, is divided through a prism.When the mind looks at things, they are divided into polarities. The moment we look we have divided. We cannot remain in undivided reality for a single moment. I see you and I have divided: beautiful – ugly, good – bad, white – black, mine – not mine. The moment I see you, division sets in. The mind works as a prism, and the prism divides reality. And if you go on choosing, then you will be a victim of your mind. The good and bad are divided as such by the mind.Don’t choose the good against the bad, otherwise you will ultimately fall into the bad against the good. Choose good through bad; know bad through good. They are one: feel this undivided oneness. See life through death, see death through life, not as opposites, but as one – as two ends of one thing. This is what is meant by That. And the sutra says, “Mind constantly arrowed towards That is the offering.”Mind must be flowing towards That constantly, continuously, without any gap. How can the mind flow if you make your God separate from the world? You will have to eat and then you will forget; you will forget your God. You will have to sleep, and then you will forget; you will forget your God. You will have to do many, many things, and God will be coming constantly as a conflict. So a religion which lives with a God against “the world” creates much anguish, and so-called religious persons are not constantly arrowed towards God, but are just constantly arrowed – tense. They live in anguish. Everything becomes against God, so anguish is bound to be there. How can they laugh? How can they sing? Everything comes in between. Wherever they go to find God, something comes as a hindrance.The whole world becomes inimical. Friends are not friends. They come in between, they become enemies. Love becomes poison, because it comes in between. Everything goes on coming in the way. You are hindered from everywhere. How can you live in peace? – you cannot. Even a very ordinary man, a worldly man, can live in more peace than you. If your God is something opposite to “the world” you cannot live in peace. You will be in a constant torture.Of course, when the torture is self-imposed, the ego is fulfilled and strengthened so you can enjoy it. When someone begins to enjoy his own imposed tortures he is mad, insane. Now he is not in his senses. So you may become a martyr to your own nonsense, and you can even be worshipped by others, because there are persons who feel very happy when someone tortures himself, they enjoy it. They are sadists; and you begin to be a masochist. You torture yourself. You can torture yourself continuously, and you will torture yourself when the whole world is against God. Then life is bound to be a constant torture. Everything is sin, and everything will create guilt and fear and anxiety, and you will be constantly in a chaos.You will torture yourself and become a masochist. And whenever there is a masochist, sadists will come around and worship. There are people who feel good when someone is suffering. They would like to make you suffer, but you have even saved them the trouble, you are torturing yourself. They feel very good.So out of one hundred, ninety-nine so-called saints are just ill, existentially diseased; they are masochists. You can worship them, but they will lead you into a hell. And this is not religion at all. Religion is basically to create an ecstatic life, a life which is a benediction, which is absolute bliss. So how is this anxiety and bliss related? They are poles apart.The Upanishads say, “Offer your mind to That through this, through everything.” Don’t create any hindrance, don’t create the opposite. Whatsoever is, is That. And, really, a miracle happens. When I say, see good through the evil, evil disappears. When I say, see That through this, this disappears; it becomes transparent and only That remains. “The world” is not there, but we are not yet capable of knowing the That which is there.“The world” disappears. That’s why Shankara could say it is an illusion. By illusion or by maya it is not meant that the world is not. Only this much is meant: that the world is not a reality, but only a transparency. If you can look deep, the brahman is revealed and “the world” disappears.If you cannot see That, then the world becomes very real. This reality comes because you cannot find the real. The moment you find the real, “the world” disappears. That doesn’t mean there will not be houses and there will not be nations and there will not be roads; this is not what is meant. When Shankara says that the world is an illusion and it disappears when That is revealed, it is not meant that it will disappear like a dream – no! It will disappear in a very different sense.It will disappear when the hidden is revealed, when the total is revealed. The gestalt changes, the whole gestalt changes. You begin to look differently, in a new pattern. The same tree for a woodcutter is one thing, and the pattern, the gestalt for a painter is something else. For a woodcutter it may not be green at all because he is concerned with the wood, with the texture of the wood – whether the wood can be used in furniture or not. This mind has a gestalt; in that gestalt, in that pattern, the tree may not be green at all. He may not have seen the greenness of it.A painter is standing nearby. For him the tree is green, and I wonder whether you know or not that when a painter looks at a tree it is not just green, because there are a thousand types of greens. When you look ordinarily, every tree is green, but no two greens resemble each other. Two greens are two colors. Every green has its own greenness. So for a painter, it is not simply green. It is green A, green B, green C – many shades, many individualities.A lover who is sad, who has lost his beloved, may not look at the tree at all – the green may look very sad and will have a different color and shades. He cannot feel the texture, or it may even or it may even be that he will remember the body of his beloved, not the texture of the tree. And a child playing there and an old man dying there ? are they looking at one reality? Their gestalts are different. A different tree evolves, a different tree is there.Is it not possible for a Shankara not to see the tree at all but only the That – not the texture of the tree, not the greenness of the tree, not the sadness of the lover, not the play of the child, not the sorrow of the dying man – nothing? Isn’t it possible for a Shankara not to see the tree at all, but only the That? Then the tree becomes transparent. In a new gestalt the tree disappears and the brahman is revealed. This is what is meant when I say, look, find out, penetrate everywhere for That, and when you begin to feel That everywhere your mind cannot move – the opposite is not.Then the offering – only then. Then you have been, then you have given. You cannot give yourself, you can give only your mind because you can take away your mind. You are in That, but your mind is not. It can be! – and you are free, the choice is yours. So you will be responsible, no one else. The responsibility is yours; so to be religious or not is your decision. Don’t go into unnecessary things – whether God is or not. It is your decision! It is meaningless to go on discussing whether God is or is not, it is your choice. You can say he is not, but by saying that you are denying a greater reality and the opening towards it. You can say he is, and, by saying that, you are open to a greater reality.This cannot be proven – whether God is or not. This cannot be proven as a scientific fact, because if it is proven then there will be no freedom. Then offering will be impossible. If it becomes a fact, as secular as any, if it becomes a fact like the moon or the sun or the earth, if it becomes a common, objective fact, then you will not be free to choose. So God can never become a scientific fact, and it cannot be proven he is or not. Only this much can be said: if you choose him you become different; if you don't choose him you will be different again. If you don't choose him you will create a hell for yourself; if you choose him, then you can create an ecstatic existence.He is irrelevant. It is your choice that counts. Whether God is or is not is meaningless. It is not even worth discussing. The basic, relevant thing is that if you choose you become different, if you don’t choose you are again different. It depends on you. It depends on you whether you want an existence which is just a trembling and a fear, just an anguish and death, just a long suffering – or a bliss, a moment-to-moment opening into greater and greater bliss. So it is not a question of whether God is or not. It is a question whether you want to be transformed and transported into another existence or not. It will always be your choice.If the whole world says God is, and you deny, you can deny and it cannot be forced on you. That’s why it is an offering. It is an offering! You can offer; you can withhold. You are offered already, so that is not the question, but your mind is not offered, and this is the riddle – that you live in That, but you suffer. You are in That, but you suffer. Why? Because your mind is not in That. Really, your mind suffers – not you. You have never suffered, you cannot suffer. You have never died, you cannot die. But your mind suffers, your mind dies and is born, and it dies and suffers and goes on suffering. This mind is an “overgrowth.” Offer it to That and you will come to the point where you have always been. You will come to realize that which is your nature.Buddha was asked, “What have you achieved?” When he had achieved nirvana, achieved enlightenment, he was asked, “What have you achieved?”Buddha said, “I have not achieved anything, only that which was always with me. Rather, on the contrary, I have lost something. I have not achieved anything. I have lost the mind that was with me, and I have achieved That which was always with me, but because of that mind I could not penetrate to it, could not see it.”It is our choice. The screen on reality is our choice. The covering on reality is the mind. This life of misery is our decision, and no one else is responsible. And you can continue for lives together – you have continued, and you can continue still for lives together. No one can break through and no one can pull you out, because that is your freedom. Only you can jump out of it, and you can jump the moment you decide. So don’t think in the terms “Because I have lived for so many lives in this ignorance, how can I jump in a moment? When I have lived for so many, many lives in ignorance, how can I?” You can jump in a moment, because all these lives were your decision. Change the decision and the whole thing changes.It is just like this: if there has been darkness in this room for years, will you say: “How can we light a candle this very moment? The darkness has been so long! It has been here for years, so how can a candle burned at this moment dispel it? We will have to struggle for years and years, and the candle will have to struggle for years and years. Only then can the darkness be dispelled because the darkness has a past, a history. It is long, deep-rooted.”But add the flame and the darkness is not there. Darkness really has no time, it has only duration. But by “duration” I mean that it is not piled one upon another, so it cannot become thick. So one moment’s darkness is as thick as one year’s or one century’s. It cannot be any thicker. It cannot be piled one upon another; it is not being piled up every moment. It cannot become thick and dense so that candlelight cannot penetrate it. It remains the same. It has only duration – a simple duration without any thickness being gathered.Ignorance is just like darkness – a duration. You can be in it for centuries, for millennia, and in a single moment’s decision it is not there. It is just like light. The moment light is present the darkness is not there. The darkness cannot say, “This is not as it should be. I have been here for many, many centuries and this is not good. I have a hold on this place and I have the possession; I have been in possession.”Nothing can be said. When the light is there, darkness simply drops. The enlightenment comes just like this, the offering comes. You can offer any moment – you decide. But the offer must be total, and it can be total only if you do not divide reality. Affirm life as divine; affirm both the polar opposites as That. Then, if you move or don’t move, you cannot go anywhere. Or, anywhere you go you will encounter That. This is a continuously arrowed mind, and this, the Upanishads say, is the only offering. All others are just false substitutes.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 01-10Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 1 11 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-1-10/

Osho,In reference to the subject of offering to the divine, please explain what is the significance of will and surrender?What are the similarities and differences between will and surrender?The end is always the same, but the beginning differs, and all the differences belong always to the beginning. The nearer you reach, the less is the difference between paths.In the beginning will and surrender are diametrically opposed. Surrender means absolute will-lessness. You have no will of your own, you feel helpless, you feel you cannot do anything. You are so totally helpless that you cannot even say that will exists, the very concept of will is illusory. You have no will. Rather, on the contrary, you have destiny, not will, so you can only surrender. It is not that you surrender; rather, it is that you cannot do anything else.So surrender is not an act. Rather, it is a recognition. It is not an act. How can surrender be an act? How can you surrender? If you surrender, then how will you call it surrender when you remain the master? If you surrender, then you remain the “willer,” the surrender has been willed. They are diametrically opposite. You cannot will surrender. So surrender is not an act; rather, it is a recognition – the recognition of the phenomenon of will-lessness. There is no will, so you cannot will.You cannot do anything, everything is just happening. You have happened, and all else that has followed has just been a happening. To feel this, to know this, is a recognition. Suddenly you become aware of the fact that there is no will in you. With this recognition ego disappears, because the ego can exist only if there is will.So ego means the totality of willed acts. If there is will, then you can be. If there is no will, you disappear. Then you are just a wave in a great infinite ocean and you cannot will anything. You are as a happening; you will not be as a happening. What can a wave do in an infinite ocean? It has been “waved” by the ocean. It is not, it only appears to be.If you feel this, and this feeling is a deep search, digging down deep in yourself – is there any will? – then you find you are just a dead leaf blown by the wind. So sometimes you go north and sometimes you go south – and the dead leaf may begin to think that it is going south – only the wind is blowing and the dead leaf is following. If you go deep down in yourself you will become aware of a total will-lessness. The recognition of it is surrender. It is not an act. And if you surrender, if the surrender happens, there is no need to offer, you cannot.So really, on the path of surrender, offering is not possible, because offering is really based on will: you offer, you are there. On the path of surrender offering happens, but the surrenderer never knows. He cannot know. He cannot say, “I have offered my mind to the divine.” Really, he cannot speak in terms of acts, he can only speak in terms of happenings. So at the most he can say. “The offering has happened.”Without a will you cannot have an ego, and without an ego you cannot talk of anything as an act. So “happening” is the phenomenon on the path of surrender. Surrender itself is a happening.But on the path of will there is a different process. The moment I say “the path of will,” the will is taken for granted. You do something. This is a fact on the path of will, taken for granted. It is never questioned, because those who follow the path of will say that even to question a thing is to accept will. Even to question a thing means the will is there. To question is an act, to answer is an act, to doubt is an act, to say no is an act. So the will cannot be questioned. On the path of will, the will cannot be questioned. That is a basic hypothesis.On the path of surrender, will-lessness is the basic hypothesis. You cannot question that. So this must be understood: on every path something is a hypothesis. It is bound to be, because you have to begin somewhere and you have to begin in ignorance. Because of these two factors a hypothesis is needed. Even in science you begin with a hypothesis – something assumed which cannot be questioned – and if you question it, the whole edifice falls down.For example, one of the most accurate, scientific dimensions is geometry, but you begin with a hypothesis. You begin with something taken as an assumption which can neither be proved nor disproved, because only that thing can be disproved which can be proved. So to begin with, you take something in ignorance, in faith. So, really, science is not as scientific as it looks. If you go back to the beginning every science begins with a hypothesis, and if you question the hypothesis, no answer is possible…and this is as it should be, because you cannot begin from nowhere.Look at it in this way: if I come to a strange city and I ask someone where the person A lives, he may say, “A is a neighbor of B.” But I say, “This is not an answer at all because I do not know B either. So where does B live?” Then he says, “B is a neighbor of C.” But I say, “I am in a strange land. I don’t know anything about C or D or E, so please tell me in such a way that I can understand. Everything is unknown to me, so from where to begin?”If he says, “D, E, F, G,” they are all hypothetical. So from where to begin? A beginning can only be possible if I assume one thing as known which is not really known, otherwise no answer is possible. This is the situation, this is how we are in this world: everything is unknown, so from where to begin? If you say we must begin with knowledge, then how can you begin? When everything is unknown, how can you begin with something as a known fact? Then you cannot begin. If you begin with an unknown fact, then too you cannot begin.A hypothesis means an unknown fact taken in faith as known. A hypothesis means an unknown fact knowingly taken as known. Then you can begin. So a hypothesis cannot be questioned – nowhere, not even in mathematics.So on the path of will, will is the hypothesis, and on the path of surrender, will-lessness is the hypothesis. So if one path appeals to you, you will not be able to comprehend the other, because both have opposite hypotheses. If will-lessness appeals to you, then will does not have any appeal, then it is absurd. If will appeals to you, then surrender is meaningless.With will, it is taken for granted that you can do. So now the question is: What to do? You can do something which leads you away from the divine and you can do something which leads you nearer to him. And you are responsible – I have discussed that yesterday. How can you will eventually to be near and, ultimately, totally with That? But remember this fact: that will is taken as a hypothesis. Once you take it as a hypothesis you go on willing; ultimately you will totally – that is, your mind is arrowed totally towards That. In that total tension, on that climax and peak, will dissolves, because perfection is death. The moment anything is perfect it dies.That is why Lao Tzu says, “Never be perfect. Stop halfway – never go to the end.” If you go to the end, success will become failure and life will become death. If you go to the very end love will turn into hate, friendship will be reduced to enmity, because perfection means death. And when something dies, it dies into the polar opposite.When will is perfect, when mind is wholly arrowed, will dies. The will disappears because perfection is the point of evaporation – just like water evaporates at a hundred degrees heat. The hundred-degree limit is the perfection. As far as water is concerned, the heat has come to its peak. Now if the heat continues to be, the water will not be there, and if the water wants to be there, then the heat must not come up to the peak. So when you are a hundred percent will you are on the verge of explosion; you will die, your will will die. The very phenomenon of will disappears. When will disappears, you come to the same point where one who begins with will-lessness comes. Now it is will-lessness.So either zero or perfection: both bring the same ending. It will depend on you, on your type of mind. If you can conceive of will-lessness, then there is no question, but that is difficult. Not only difficult, in a certain way it is impossible. It is inconceivable. It happens, sometimes it happens. But that happening also has a long, long effort of will. Many, many lives lived according to the will give you the experience that you have been dreaming of – and one who has willed for a long time and yet reaches nowhere, may come to a point where suddenly he becomes aware that he is working with something which is not.Buddha, for example: he reached the ultimate through will-lessness. But in this life he worked very arduously on the path of will for six years. He went to every teacher, inquired about every path, endeavored his best, tried everything that was taught and said. He did everything that a human being can do, and with every teacher he worked hard. No teacher was able to say, “You are not achieving because you are not working,” because he was working even more than the teacher. So every teacher had to say to him, “I cannot say that you are not working – you are working hard, impossibly hard – but now this is all I can teach you. You must go somewhere else.”So he went around to every teacher, worked on every method. In those times Bihar was a very potential place. Such great peaks have happened only twice. Once it was in Athens, in the Greek civilization. Athens was a very potential city, a very potential situation happened there. And another time was in Bihar; it happened that Bihar became the peak of all that mind can do. In Bihar, in Buddha’s time, every method had been evolved and every method had its own teacher, its own master, and Buddha worked with every one. He worked so hard and so sincerely that every teacher had to ask him to leave because he had worked totally and nothing was coming out of it.Really, he was not the man meant for the path of will. Mahavira, a contemporary of Buddha, reached through the path of will and achieved. But Buddha could not achieve. Frustrated, after working hard in every way, in a sudden moment of helplessness…. He felt helpless. He had done everything and nothing was achieved, and he remained the same with no transformation. A total frustration set in, and one day he left everything.Previously, he had left “the world”: that was the first renunciation. But the second one, which is not mentioned in the scriptures, was greater. The Buddhists don’t talk about it. A second, greater renunciation happened: Buddha left the path of will after six years of tortuous effort. He said, “I feel helpless – and it seems that nothing is possible, nothing can be done, so I leave all efforts.”That was a full-moon night and he was sitting under a tree. He had left the world; now, on that evening, he left all religions, all philosophies, all techniques. He relaxed under the tree. For the first time, after lives and lives, he could relax…because somehow or other we are always working, doing, achieving. But on that evening there was no achieving mind in him. He was so totally helpless that time ceased, future dropped, desires became meaningless. Effort was not possible; will was not found at all.So he was dead, really dead – psychologically dead. He was alive only in the sense that a tree is alive – with no desires, with no future, with no possibility. He was just like the tree he was lying under. Conceive of it. Try to conceive of it. If there are no desires and no future and no morning to follow, and nothing is to be achieved and everything has been just absurd and the thought that “I cannot do” penetrates deeply, then what is the difference between you and the tree? No difference. He was as relaxed as the tree. He was as relaxed as the river flowing by.He slept. This sleep was strange – there was not even a dream, because dreams belong to desires, effort, will. He slept as trees sleep. The sleep was total. It was just like death – no movement of the mind, no motivation inside. Everything stopped. Time stopped.In the morning at five o’clock he opened his eyes. Rather, it would be good to say that the eyes opened, because there was no motivation. Just as the eyes dropped in the evening, in the morning they opened. Refreshed by the night, refreshed by relaxation, refreshed by a deep desirelessness, Buddha opened his eyes. The last star was disappearing in the sky, and it is said that just by seeing the last star disappear Buddha became awakened. He realized.What happened?…because there was no effort; effort had ceased. There was not even desire. Now there was not even frustration – because frustration is part of desire and expectation. If expectations really cease, there is no frustration. He was not asking, he was not praying, he was not meditating, he was not doing at all. He was just there, empty. When the last star disappeared, something disappeared in him also. He became just space, he became just nothingness. This is surrender, with no feeling of surrender – because who is to surrender to whom? But this also happened as a culminating peak of long efforts.This is what I mean to say: one has to begin with will. Begin with will. If you are the type who can reach to perfect will, you will just disappear from that peak. If you are not the type, then you will reach a perfection of frustration, and from that peak of frustration you will disappear. If the first is the case, will will be known as the path; if the second is the case, then surrender.But begin with will. You cannot begin with surrender, because surrender cannot have any beginning. Action can have a beginning, but how can a happening have a beginning? You can begin with action; you cannot begin with happening – that is the difference. You can begin with something to do, but how can you begin with surrender?So begin with will and put your whole being into it. Only then will you be able to know whether this path can work for you or not. If it can work, then it is okay. Then you reach to the most perfect ego, and when the ego is perfect the bubble bursts. Or, if you are not of that type, then you will go round and round and round and round…and frustration and frustration. Then you reach another peak, the peak of frustration, and surrender happens.So even for surrender don’t think that you don’t have to do anything – remember this. Don’t think – otherwise mind is very cunning and the mind can say, “Surrender is our way, that means I am not going to do anything. Surrender is my way.” This is a cunning deception. If surrender is your way then surrender can happen this very moment, because surrender needs no time. There is no tomorrow necessary for it. If you say, “Surrender is my way,” then don’t wait for tomorrow, because surrender can come just here and now. No effort is needed in surrender, so no time is necessary.If it is not coming just this moment, then know very well surrender is not your way. Mind is deceiving; mind is just trying to postpone effort. And mind can do everything. Mind can rationalize: “There is no need to will because there is no will, so I am ready to be on the path of will-lessness.” But remember well that your “readiness” will not do. Your readiness is not really a readiness: your preparedness is not really a qualification for surrender. Your total helplessness is the qualification. Really, are you totally helpless? Have you felt it, that nothing can be done? If you feel it, then surrender can happen this very moment.Surrender cannot be postponed; will can be postponed. So with will you can take time, lives, and you can go on working slowly. But with surrender there is no go, and you cannot think of the future – future is not allowed. So if you say, “Surrender is my way and someday it will happen,” you are deceiving yourself. If surrender is your way, then surrender would have happened already.Someone asked Mozart, “Who is your teacher? From whom have you learned your music?”Mozart said, “No one is my teacher. I have learned it myself, alone.”So the questioner said, “Then tell me, can I also learn it?”Mozart said, “But I never asked anybody this question. Even to know this you have come to ask me, so it will be difficult for you to learn music by yourself. Even this you have to ask someone else – whether you can learn music without any teacher. A teacher is even needed to decide this. So you will not be able.”The man persisted. He said, “Why? When you are able, why am I not?”Mozart said, “If you were capable of it you would have done it already.”So if surrender can happen, and if you are really ready for it, it would have happened. You cannot choose it. Choose will, because will has an affinity with choice. With surrender, choice has no affinity. Choice needs will, so choose will, work hard. There are only two types. Either you succeed or you fail, but work so hard that if you succeed you succeed totally, or if you fail you fail totally, and that totality will decide.Mild efforts and mediocre efforts lead nowhere, because you can never decide what your type is with mediocre efforts. With mild, lukewarm efforts you can never decide what your type is. You can never know. Work hard! Either succeed totally or fail totally. Both the ways you will reach the same point. If you succeed totally, then will disappears. Being perfect, it dies. If you fail totally, then will-lessness becomes a recognition and surrender follows.All efforts are on paths of the will. When someone tries with his whole heart and fails, then the other path opens. It is a sudden path! It is like an emergency door. In any air crash you have emergency doors. You may not even be aware of them. You need not be. Ordinarily, you open, you enter and you come out of the common, the usual door. The emergency door opens only when there is an emergency and total failure. Now the usual door will not do.Surrender is an emergency door. You begin with the usual – the will. When will fails totally, the emergency door opens and you are out of it. If you succeed, then there is no need for the emergency door to be opened, you may not even become aware of it. You may reach your destination without the awareness that there was a door, an emergency door, which could have opened any moment.So you cannot begin with surrender – no one can. Everyone has to begin with will. The only point to remember is: be total in it so that you can decide either way.Osho,You have often described mind as a collection of past experiences and memories which are all dead.Even its apparent vitality is not its own; it is supplied from the source of the being.Last night you said that mind was the only thing which one can offer to God. But is it worth offering?Three points to be understood. First, mind has two meanings: one – the content; another – the container. When I say “content,” I mean thoughts, memories, the dead past, the accumulation of it. But that is only the content. If the whole content is thrown out, then the container remains. That container you can offer. These thoughts, memories, the past, are really worthless, not worth offering – but the container is. Mind has two meanings, so whenever mind is written with a capital M it means “the container. That container you can offer, and that is the meaning of the sutra: The mind constantly arrowed towards That – the container.Constantly arrowed towards That means “now the container has no other contents than That” – no thought, no memory, no past, no desires, no future, nothing. Now the mind, as container, has only one content – That. This is the offering.These contents are really dead, because your mind absorbs them only when they are dead. For example, your mind either moves in the past or in the future. When it moves in the past, it moves among the dead – everything has died, nothing is alive. The past is nowhere except in your memory.Where is the past? It is nowhere. You cannot find it anywhere. It is only in your memory. If I have some memory that is private, secret to me, and if it is just my memory and no one knows about it, then if I die where will that memory be? It will not be anywhere. What will be the difference? Whether it ever was or not – what will be the difference? Whether it ever existed or not, there will be no difference.The dead past is only in the memory, it is nowhere else, and because of this past the future becomes projected. Future is there only because of past. I loved you yesterday, so I want to love you tomorrow, I want to repeat the experience. I heard your song, so I want to hear it again, I want to repeat. The past wants to repeat itself, the dead wants to be born again, so the future is created.These are the contents of the mind: past and future. If both these contents drop and your mind becomes just vacant, thoughtless, contentless, then you are just here and now, in the present, with no past, with no future, and That is present here and now. That is present in everything, simultaneously. When your mind is not – I mean when your past and future are not – you become aware of That, and in that awareness the experience of the That is the only content. This is what is meant by Mind constantly arrowed…is the offering: nothing should be a content of the mind except the universal existence.When I say “offer the mind,” I mean the container – because you can offer the contents, but they are meaningless, they are dead. When you offer the container – the living mind, the living capacity to know, the living capacity to be – when you offer that, it is an offering. And it is not ordinary: it is rare because it is arduous. It is worth offering, and whenever there is a happening, whenever a Buddha or a Krishna or a Christ offers himself, offers the mind to the divine, it is not only that a Buddha or a Jesus is enriched, the divine is also enriched.This will be very difficult to understand. When a Buddha is offered to the divine, the divine is enriched also – because even in Buddha the divine flowers, even in Buddha the divine reaches to a peak. So the divine is not something set apart. It is not something which is not in us. So offering is not something made to someone else. It is to the common pool of consciousness, it is to the common existence, the common being. So when a Buddha is offered, Buddha is enriched because Buddha becomes the total. But the total is also enriched, because through Buddha a peak has been touched.The divine lives through you, so when you fall the divine falls, when you rise the divine rises, when you laugh the divine laughs, when you weep the divine weeps – because he is not something set apart. He is not an observer sitting far off in heaven just looking, he is in you. So every act, every gesture is his. So whatsoever is done, is done with him, through him, by him, to him.There are stories…they are beautiful, they are poetic, and they show much. It is said that when Buddha achieved enlightenment the whole universe became blissful: flowers were showered from the sky, deities began to dance around him, Indra himself – the king of all the devas – came down with folded hands, he surrendered at Buddha’s feet. Trees began to flower out of season; birds began to sing out of season. The whole existence became a celebration.This is poetic. lt has never happened like that, but in a deep sense it has happened. It is symbolic – because it is how it should be. When someone somewhere achieves buddhahood, how is it possible that the whole existence is not enriched? The whole universe will become happy, it will feel the vibrations. So a fact has been shown through poetic symbols.But there are foolish, stupid minds who go on thinking that either this should be a historic fact, or otherwise it must be a lie. They have only two alternatives. They say, “This must be a historic fact, so where is the proof that flowers came upon the trees out of season? Where is the proof? Historic proof is needed, and if it is not there then it is a lie!” They don’t know that there is a realm beyond fact and beyond lies – the realm of poetry that expresses many things which cannot be expressed otherwise. It is just an indication that the whole world became a celebration. It must be so, it has to be so, it has been so.So when this mind is offered, the contentless mind, simply the container – purified, pure, empty – when this container is offered, it is worth offering. Even the divine is enriched, because the divine becomes more divine. So another thing: “God” is not a static entity, it is a creative force, a dynamic force. So it is not only that man is evolving, God is also evolving. For those of us who are confined to ordinary logic God cannot evolve, because to us, if he evolves, then he is not perfect. How can perfection evolve? Ordinary logic cannot conceive that something can be more perfect than perfect. It cannot conceive – it looks illogical.But life is not confined to your logic, and there are possibilities that a perfection can be more perfect, more enriched. A perfection can evolve. It is perfection at every moment; still, it is not static. For example, a dancer: every gesture is perfect. Every moment, every gesture, is perfect. Still there is a dynamic movement, and the total is more perfect than the parts. Each dance is perfect; still, another dance can be more perfect.Mahavira has a very beautiful concept. He says that there are infinite perfections, multi-perfections, so God is evolving. To me, God is an evolving force; otherwise there can be no evolution. Through evolution God evolves; if he is not evolving, then there is no evolution anywhere. This is the concept of That: if there is a flower, then he is flowering there; if there is a man, then he is “manning” there. So whatsoever happens, it happens to him; and nothing can happen without him, outside of him. So when Buddha happens, the total becomes more.Buddha says, “Do not go to any deity to worship. Be enlightened, and they will come to worship you,” and he shows and he says it not as a theory – he knows it. Deities have come to worship him. This has been an experience. So this is something to be pondered over. Only Buddhists and Jainas have said this, that when you are enlightened the deities will come and worship you because, they say, deities are not without desires, and when you are enlightened you are desireless.Even an Indra is not without desires. Deities may be living in heaven, but they are with desires. So with Buddha and Mahavira, human dignity was raised to its ultimate. If you can become desireless then everything will worship you, because the desireless consciousness is one with That. That contentless mind is not only worth offering: the divine needs it, the divine waits for it. When a child returns enlightened, the father is enriched, the home is enriched.Really, when a child returns enlightened, when the father sees his child enlightened, the father cannot be the same. So when a buddha flowers, the whole universe flowers with him. He shows the potentiality, the peak possibility. Now you may not attain it, but you may rest assured that you can attain it. The whole universe becomes confident with a buddha happening. The whole universe becomes a promise, a certainty. The same can happen to each particle, to each “monad,” to each mind – and now it is up to you.When Buddha was dying, Ananda said to Buddha, “When will you be back?”Buddha said, “It is impossible. I will not be back again.”Ananda began to weep.Buddha asked him, “Why are you weeping? You have been with me for forty years continuously. If you are yet not profited by me, why do you ask for my next coming?”Ananda said, “It is not for me that I am asking. Even if we have not attained to That, you have attained, and we have become certain. And it is more than enough. We have become certain! Now this certainty cannot be lost. I am asking for others who have not seen you. So when will you be coming back? Because if they get a glimpse of such a certainty as you, only then can they proceed on the path.“I am not asking for myself. For lives together I may wander, but this certainty cannot be lost. I have seen you, and I have seen the peak possibility. So it is not for me, but for others. When will you be coming back? Because you are the only certainty – we look at you and doubts drop. We look at you – we may not be capable of doing the same and following you – but in that moment of looking at you, we are you in a sense. So when will you be coming back?”So the offering is not only worthwhile; it is being awaited. The divine waits, the total waits for you to come back enriched, to come home with your potentiality actualized, for the seed to come not as a seed but as a full manifestation. But with a “content-full” mind, offering is worthless – you are offering rubbish.Something more about the first question:In reference to the efforts regarding meditation, what is meant by the state of total will?What state of meditation will be called the total-will stage of the final success?The first meaning of “total” is that you are in it without any part outside – with no withholding, with no division. So any method of meditation will do. If you are totally in it, absorbed, not a part standing outside, if you can just cry “Rama” totally with not a part as an observer in you, if you become the cry and not even a part is observing that you are crying “Rama,” if you become the cry – then it is total, and then a single cry is enough. There is no need to go on repeating “Rama-Rama-Rama” – there is no need. One total cry in which nothing is left is enough. So only you can decide whether you are total in something or not.The second meaning of totality is that whatsoever you are doing, whatever technique of meditation, your doing must be without any doubt. A very minute doubt will make it partial; a very small doubt will not allow it to be total. But that also you can decide – whether there is any doubt. We go on doing things with doubts inside. Those doubts kill every effort. lt is not so much that you are not reaching because of not enough effort. It is more because of your doubts standing behind. So whatsoever you do, that skeptical part of the mind goes on denying, goes on waiting to be skeptical. Even if you achieve something, the doubting mind will create doubts. Totality means there is no doubt. Effort becomes total.Thirdly, we have many layers of energy, so you may be making a total effort on the first layer and you may not be aware of the second layer at all. All the layers should become committed, involved, then it becomes total. So when you are doing with one layer and you feel you are doing totally, don’t be deceived so soon. Go on doing, and when you feel that “Now nothing can be done, I have done everything and there is no energy left,” continue. This is the moment: continue! Soon you will become aware that a sudden rush of energy is coming to you from the second layer. A new earth has been broken. Then go on doing this…. And when you are totally involved with all the layers, how will you know?There are signs. One sign is that when all the layers have been broken and your total energy is involved, total energy is involved, you will never feel exhausted. You will never feel that the point has come when “I cannot do more.” That feeling always comes when one layer is exhausted. When the second layer is exhausted, that feeling will come again. There are seven layers. When the seventh is broken, that feeling will never come again – never. You will not feel that “Now I cannot do more.” You will go on doing more and more and more, and you will feel that still more is left. Then you are total in it.The total is never exhausted, remember. Only the part is exhausted, the total is never exhausted. You cannot empty it: the more you empty it, the more it is filled. So whatsoever happens with your totality cannot be exhausted. If love happens with your totality, then love cannot be exhausted. If meditation happens with your totality, then meditation cannot be exhausted.I am reminded of Bokuju, a Zen patriarch who realized, who became enlightened when he was twenty years of age. But he continued meditating.His teacher came and said, “Bokuju what are you doing? Now there is no need. I see you have become enlightened.”But Bokuju said, “But how can I end meditation? No end is coming. I go on and on and on and I am not exhausted. So how can I end it? How can I come out of it? I see no end to it.”The teacher said, “When one falls into the infinite there is only a beginning, there is no end. Come out of it. Come out and move! Of course, I know you cannot come out of it now, but move! It will be with you. Don’t go on sitting.”He was continuously sitting for seven weeks after his enlightenment. He was just sitting. For his teacher, for the monastery, there were seven weeks. He became enlightened, there was light all around, he was transformed. Everyone became aware that something had happened. His teacher came and went, came and went every day. He waited for when Bokuju would open his eyes and he would talk about it, but he was not opening his eyes. Then ultimately the teacher had to stop him and ask him to come out.Bokuju said, “But how can I come out? It is not ending at all. There is no end to it. They say, ‘You have been sitting here for seven weeks continuously, it is so long!’ But I don’t remember. I feel as if not a single moment has passed. There has been no time for me.”So when the total energy is there working, there will be no end to it and time will drop. You cannot feel time. You will feel time only with partial energy because it is exhausted. Time is felt only with something limited; otherwise time cannot be felt. Time is really a feeling of limitations. So whatsoever has a limit, you will feel time around it. It is relative.So this strange phenomenon happens: if your whole day has been vacant without any events, just empty, nothing of any note, nothing worthwhile, if the whole day just passed by, then time will seem to be more when it is passing. Unoccupied time will look very long. You will feel that the day is not going to end at all, that it has become so lengthy. But that is only when it is passing. If you remember afterwards, then the day will look very small – because later on you cannot feel the time without events, so the day will look very short.We feel time around certain things. So when you are on a holiday and many things are happening, on that day the day will look short – because it was so filled it becomes comparatively small. But if you remember your holiday when you are back home it looks very long – because each event spread in a sequence becomes very long.Bokuju said, “I don’t know about time. What has happened to time? It stopped.” Mahavira says that the basic element that changes totally when one enters samadhi is time – there is a stopping of time.Someone asked Jesus, “What will happen in your kingdom of God?” and he said, “There will be time no longer.” This is a basic indication that time will stop, because time can be felt only with partial energies.That’s why a child feels time less, because he is more full. An old man feels time more, because he is now empty, emptying. So with an old man time becomes a problem. With a child, time is not a problem at all; he lives in a timelessness. The same happens with civilization. Whenever a civilization becomes over-conscious of time it means the civilization is going, by and by, towards death. Whenever a civilization is absolutely unaware of time it means it is in its childhood – innocent. It is not old. Time consciousness means death is coming near. So the more death you feel, the more time you will feel.In India, we have not felt time so much because we have a conception of a circle of continuous births. So each time you die it is not death – again you are reborn. So, really, India destroyed the concept of death totally. It is not a death at all if you are reborn again. That’s why India never became time conscious. We are so lethargic, and we can waste time so easily. The reason is that death is not there in the Indian mind; after death there is birth. So time is infinite, and there is no hurry.But the American mind, the Western mind, has become very time conscious, and the reason is Christianity – because once you say that there is only one life and that this death is going to be the final one, that there is no rebirth, then death becomes very meaningful. Everything has to be taken in reference. If death is so final and occurs only once, time becomes very valuable, it cannot be lost. Then a strange phenomenon happens: the more you become conscious of time the less you can use it, you can only hurry and run…because you are in such a hurry the less you can use it. To use time you need a very, very patient attitude, a very slow-moving attitude; then only can you use it.So when your mind is in a total effort of will, there will be no time and there will be no end to the energy coming. But these are all inner subjective feelings. You can ask, “Can we be deceived?” Yes, deception is possible. But whenever there is deception you will become aware. The awareness will come in this form: in any inner feeling, any inner realization, if you become doubtful whether it is true or imaginary, then it is certainly imaginary – because the truth is so self-evident that you cannot doubt it. The doubting mind just disappears.So sometimes someone comes to me and says, “Tell me whether my kundalini has risen or not. My teacher says my kundalini has risen, so tell me.” So I tell them that unless it becomes self-evident to you, do not believe anyone. When that phenomenon happens you will not go to ask anyone whether it has happened or not. If someone comes and asks you, “Tell me whether I am alive or not,” what will you say to him? Certainly he is dead! If even this has to be asked, then certainly he is dead.Life is a self-evident fact; no proof is needed. How do you feel your life? Do you have any proof of it? Is there any proof? How do you feel your life, how do you know you are alive? Is there ever a doubt whether “I am alive or not”?Descartes began in that way. He began to seek some indubitable fact which cannot be doubted, so he went on: God can be doubted, heaven and hell can be doubted, everything can be doubted. Then ultimately he stumbled upon himself, and he began to think. “Can I doubt myself? Can I doubt about myself? Can I say I am or I am not?” Then he stumbled upon a self-evident truth, and he said, “Even if I say I am not, I am; so I cannot doubt this fact.” This fact begins to be his foundation. So he says, “Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. Even if I doubt, I think, therefore I am. So I cannot deny it.”Life is a self-evident fact, you cannot doubt it. The same happens when more life happens to you. When you enter more life, when you enter total life, it is self-evident, no proof is needed, no witness is needed. Even if the whole world denies it you can laugh. The whole world may think you are mad, but you can laugh.These are self-evident realizations, so I can describe them. But when they happen, you know; when they are there, you know. The knowing is evident in itself; it needs no outer proof, no outer witness. Your knowing becomes the only evidence.That’s why mystics sometimes seem to be arrogant. They are not. They are the most humble people possible, but they look arrogant, and the arrogance is felt by us because they are so self-evidently true. They won’t give you any proofs, they won’t give you any arguments, they won’t give you any reasons. They say, “I know.”This looks to us like arrogance, but the same is so, if I ask you, “How do you know you are alive?” What can you say? You can say only, “I know.” Is that arrogance? It is a simple fact. How can you express it except by saying, “I know and I know it self-evidently. Even for me there are no reasons why I am. I simply am.”These Upanishads are such self-evident statements. They won’t argue with you. They go on saying, “This is this.” You cannot ask why, you can only ask how. They can tell you how you can achieve this. You cannot ask, “Why? Why is this this?”So the moment you happen to be in totality, in that totality you will know it. It is such a phenomenon that you can doubt everything except it. You can doubt the whole world – except it. If the whole world stands against it as a witness, even then your feeling of its being true cannot be shaken.That’s how a Jesus can die, a Mansoor can be killed. They can be killed, but they cannot be changed, converted. They cannot be converted. You can kill a Mansoor, you cannot convert him. He will go on saying the same thing. Mansoor was saying, “I am the God.” In Mohammedan eyes that is kufr – heresy, egoism. It is not a religious expression. A religious person must be humble, and this Mansoor goes on saying, “I am the God – Ana’l haq, aham brahmasmi – I am the brahman.” So they killed him. They thought that when they began to kill him he would come back to his senses, but he went on laughing, and someone asked, “Mansoor, why are you laughing?” Mansoor said, “I am laughing because you cannot kill a God. You cannot kill a God. Aham brahmasmi! Ana’l haq! I am the God!”Jesus says as his last words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He asked the divine to forgive all those who were crucifying him because, “They do not know what they are doing.”But Mansoor and Jesus, they are very arrogantly certain. That certainty comes from the self-evident-ness of truth. And everything can be doubted, but never a feeling that comes in your totality.If you are a total will, then you will come to know something self-evident. If you are total surrender, then also you will come to know something self-evident. Even if you are a total doubter, then also you can come to something which is self-evident. But totality is everywhere a basic condition. You must be total in it, whole in it.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-01/

Chidagni swaroopam dhoopah.To create the fire of awareness in oneself is dhoop – the incense.For philosophy, many are the problems, infinite. But for religion there is only one problem, and that problem is man himself – not that man has problems, but man is the problem. And why is man the problem?Animals are not problems. They are so unconscious, blissfully unconscious, so ignorant, that there is no possibility of there being any awareness of problems. Problems are there, but animals are not aware. There are no problems for gods, because they are totally conscious. When the mind is a total consciousness, problems simply disappear like darkness. But for man there is anguish. The very being of man, the very existence of man, is a problem, because man exists between these two realms: the realm of the animals and the realm of the gods.Man exists as a bridge between two infinities: the infinity of ignorance and the infinity of knowledge. Man is neither animal nor divine. Or, man is both – animal and divine. That is the problem. Man is a suspended existence, something incomplete, something which is still to be, a becoming, not a being.Animals have beings; man is a becoming. He is not, he is only becoming. Man is a process. The process is incomplete. It has left the world of ignorance and it has not reached the world of knowledge. Man is in between. That creates the problem, the tension, the anguish, and the constant conflict.There are only two ways to be at peace, to be without problems. One is to fall back, to regress, to fall back to the world of animals. The other is to transcend, to go forward, and to be a part of the divine being. Either to be animals or to be gods, these are the two alternatives.To fall back is easy, but it is going to be a temporary thing, because once you have grown you cannot fall back permanently. You can regress for a moment, then you are again thrown forward, because there is no way to go back, there is no possibility of falling back. You cannot be a child again if you have become young, adult, and you cannot become young again if you have become old. If you know something, then you cannot fall back to the state when you were ignorant. You cannot go back. But for a moment you can forget the present and relive the past – in your memory, in your mind.So man can regress to the animal. It is blissful, but temporary. That is the reason intoxicants, drugs, alcohol, have such appeal. When you are unconscious through any chemical thing, you have fallen back, for a moment. For the time being you are not man, you are not a problem. You are again part of the world of animals, the unconscious. You are not a man. That’s why there are no problems.Humanity has been constantly finding things – from soma rasa to LSD – to forget, to regress, to be just childlike, to regain the animal innocence, to be without problems: that is, to be without humanity, because to me humanity means to be a problem. This falling back, this regression, is possible, but only temporarily. You will come back again, you will be a man again, and the same problems will be standing and waiting for you. Rather, they will be more acute. Your absence is not going to dissolve them. They will become more complicated and complex. Then a vicious circle is created.When you are again back, conscious, you have to face problems which have become more complicated because of your absence. They have grown. Then you have to forget yourself again and again. And every time you forget and regress, your problems are growing, and you have to face your humanity again and again. One cannot escape that way. One can deceive oneself, but one cannot escape that way.The other alternative is arduous. That is to grow, to become, to be a being. When I say “regress,” I mean to be unconscious, to lose the small consciousness that we have. And when I say “to be a being,” I mean to lose unconsciousness and to be totally conscious.As we are, only a part is conscious, only a very small fragment of our being is conscious, and the remaining whole continent is just dark. A small island is conscious, and the whole continent, the mainland, is under darkness. When this small island also becomes dark you have regressed, you have fallen back.This ignorance is blissful because now you are not aware of the problems. Problems are there, but you are not aware. So at least for you there are no problems. This is the ostrich method: close your eyes and your enemy is not there. Because when you cannot see, this childish, juvenile logic says that when you cannot see something, it is not; unless you see something, it is not. So if you cannot feel problems they are not there.And when I say “to be a being, to transcend humanity, to become divine,” I mean to be totally conscious – not only an island, but the whole continent. This awareness will also lead you beyond problems, because problems are there basically because of you. Problems are not objective realities, they are subjective phenomena. You create your problems. And unless you are transformed, you will go on creating problems. You can solve one, but, really, in solving that one you will create many, because you remain the same. Problems are not objective things, they are part of you. Because you are such, you create such problems.Science tries to solve problems objectively, and science thinks if there are no problems man will be at ease. Problems can be solved objectively but man will not be at ease, because man himself is the problem. If he solves some problems, he will create others. He is the creator. You create a better society: problems will change, but problems will remain. You create better health, better medicine: problems will change, but problems will remain.Quantitatively, there will be as many problems as ever, because the man remains the same, only the situation changes. You change the situation: old problems will not be there, but there will be new problems. And new problems are more problematic than any old problems, because you have become accustomed to old problems. With new problems you feel more inconvenience. That’s why in our times we have changed the whole situation, but problems are there – more settled, more anxiety creating.That’s the difference between religion and science. Science thinks problems are objective, somewhere outside, somewhere there – that they can be changed without changing you. Religion thinks problems are somewhere here inside, in me – rather, I am the problem. Unless I change, nothing is going to be different. Shapes will be different, names will be different, but the substance will remain the same. I will create another…another world of problems. I will go on projecting new problems.This man, unconscious to his own being, is the creator of problems. Unaware of himself, not knowing who he is, what he is, without any acquaintance with himself, he goes on creating problems – because unless you know yourself, you cannot know for what you are existing and living, you cannot know where you have to move, you cannot feel what your destiny is, and you can never feel any meaning. You will go on doing many things, but everything will ultimately lead you to frustration, because without knowing why you are, for what you are, if you do anything, it is not going to give you a deep contentment. It is irrelevant. The very point is missed, your effort is wasted.And, ultimately, everyone is frustrated. Those who succeed are more frustrated than those who are not successful, because those who are not successful can still hope, but those who are successful, they cannot even hope. Their case becomes hopeless. So I say nothing fails like success.Religion thinks in terms of subjectivity, science in terms of objectivity: “Change the situation – don’t touch the man.” Religion says, “Change the man – situation is irrelevant.” Whatsoever the situation, a different mind, a transformed being, will be beyond problems. That’s why a buddha can exist in absolute peace as a beggar, and a Midas cannot exist and live at peace even when he has the alchemical miracle with him: whatsoever he touches becomes gold. The situation with Midas has become golden, everything he touches becomes gold. But this doesn’t change anything; rather, Midas is in a more complicated, problematic situation.Now our world has created, through science, a Midas situation. Now we can touch anything and it becomes gold. A buddha living as a beggar lives in such a deep peace and silence that emperors become jealous of him. What is the secret? The emphasis, the man, the inside of man, is significant, not the situation. So if you change the inside of man…and there is only one change. If you grow in your awareness, you change, you mutate. If you fall down in your awareness, again you change, you mutate. If your awareness is lessened, you fall down towards animals. If your awareness is increased, you fall up towards godliness.This is the only problem for religion: how to increase awareness. That’s why religions have always been against drugs. The reason is not moral or ethical, no. And the so-called moralist puritans have given a very wrong color to the whole thing. For religions, it is not a question of morality that someone takes drugs. It is not a question of morality at all, because morality begins only when I come in contact with someone else.If I take alcohol and become unconscious, it is no one else’s affair. I am doing something with myself. Violence is a question for morality, not alcohol. Even if I give you a promise to meet at a particular time and miss, it is immoral because somebody else is involved. Alcohol can become a moral question only if someone else is involved, otherwise it is not a moral question at all. It is something you do with yourself. But for religions it is not a question of morality at all. For religions it is a deeper question: it is a question of decreasing or increasing awareness.If once you get in the habit of falling down in unconsciousness, it will be more and more difficult to increase your awareness. It will become more and more difficult, because your body will not support you in increasing awareness. It will support you in decreasing it. The very metabolism of your body will help you to be unconscious. It will not help you to be conscious. And anything that becomes a barrier in being more aware is a religious problem, not a moral problem.So sometimes it happens: you may find an alcoholic a more moral person than a nonalcoholic, but never a more religious person. An alcoholic may be more compassionate than a nonalcoholic; may be more loving than a nonalcoholic, may be more honest, but never more religious. And when I say “never more religious,” I mean never a more aware and conscious person.This growth into awareness creates the anguish.It will be good to understand the old biblical story of Adam and Eve. They were expelled from Heaven, they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. It is a very deep psychological story. God allowed them to eat anything they liked, they desired, except one fruit. One tree was not to be touched at all, and that tree was the tree of knowledge.This is strange, God forbidding his children to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. This looks very contradictory. What type of a God is this, and what type of a father, who is against his children being wise and knowing? This story has troubled many minds. Why should God prohibit knowledge? We value knowledge very much, but it was forbidden.Adam and Eve existed in an animal world. They were blissful, but they were ignorant – they were blissful, but they were ignorant. Children are blissful, but they are ignorant. And children, if they have to grow, must grow in knowledge. There is no other way for growth. And if you are ignorant, you may be blissful but you cannot be aware of your blissfulness.That has to be understood: you can be blissful when you are ignorant, but you cannot feel your blissfulness, you cannot be aware of your blissfulness. The moment you begin to feel your blissfulness, you are out of ignorance. Knowledge has entered, you have become a knowing one. So Adam and Eve existed just as animals, absolutely ignorant – blissful, but remember, this blissfulness, too, was not a known fact to them. They were just blissful without knowing it.The story says the Devil tempted Eve to eat the fruit. And the reason the Devil could tempt Eve was this, that “If you eat this fruit, you will be like God.” This is very meaningful. “Unless you eat this fruit of the tree of knowledge you can never be like God, you will remain animals.” And that’s why God had prohibited, forbidden them, to touch this tree. They were tempted.This word devil is very beautiful, and for Indians particularly it has a different shade and significance than for Christians, because devil comes from the same word, from the same root, from which deva, devata comes. Devil and divine both come from the same root. So it seems the Christian story is a misrepresentation, somehow incomplete. One thing is known: the Devil himself was a rebellious god, a rebellious angel who rebelled against God. But he was a god himself.Why am I saying this? Because to me there are not two forces in the world, God and Devil. That dichotomy is false. There is only one force. And the dichotomy is not of two enemies but of two polarities of one force: God-and-Devil, one force working as two polarities – because unless a force works in two polarities it cannot work.So to me this biblical story takes on a new meaning: God prohibited because you can tempt only if you prohibit. If the tree of knowledge was not mentioned at all, it seems improbable that Adam would ever have thought of or imagined this particular tree. The Garden of Eden was big, there were infinite trees. We don’t even know the name of any other tree.This tree became important because it was prohibited. This prohibition became an invitation, this denial became the temptation. It is not really the Devil who tempted. In the first place, God himself tempted. This was the temptation: “Don’t go near the tree of knowledge! Don’t eat the fruit of it. Only one tree is prohibited, otherwise you are free.” Suddenly this one tree becomes the most important in the whole Garden.And to me devil is just another name for the divine – the other polarity. And the Devil tempted Eve because “Then you will be like God!” This was the promise. And who would not like to be like God? Who would not like it?Adam and Eve were tempted, and then they were expelled from Heaven. But this expulsion is part of the process. Really, this Heaven was an animal existence, blissful, but ignorant. Because of this eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve became human beings. Before that they were not human beings at all. They became human beings – when I say this I mean they became problems.It is reported that the first words Adam asserted just coming out of the gate of the Garden were this: “We are living in a very revolutionary time.” It was a revolutionary time. Never will the human mind know such a revolution again: this expulsion from the animal world, this expulsion from a blissful, ignorant existence. The times were really revolutionary. Other revolutions are just nothing – the greatest revolution was that, that expulsion.But why were they expelled? The moment you know, the moment you become aware, you cannot live in bliss. Problems will arise. Even if you are in bliss, this problem will come to your mind: “Why am I in bliss? Why?” And you cannot feel bliss unless you begin to feel anguish, because every feeling is possible only with its polar opposite. You can feel happiness only if you begin to feel unhappiness, and you can begin to feel a healthy wellbeing only when you begin to feel illness. You cannot be aware of life unless you become afraid of death.Animals live, but they are not aware that they are alive because they are not aware of any death. Death is not a problem, so life passes through them, but they are not alive in the same sense as man is. Man becomes alive, aware of his being alive, only because of death. With knowledge the polarity comes into existence, and with polarity the problems. Then every moment is a conflict. Then every moment you are suspended into two. Then never again will you be one. You will be continuously divided, in conflict, in inner turmoil.So, really, that was a revolution, the revolution, rather: Adam and Eve turned out, expelled. Really, this story is very beautiful. No one expelled them, no one ordered them, no one said, “Go out!” They were out. The moment they became aware, they were not in the Garden at all. This was automatic. Think about this: a dog sitting here suddenly becomes aware of the whole situation…he is expelled! No one expels him, but he is no longer an animal. He is thrown out, and he can never again be the same.Adam and Eve tried again and again to enter, but they have not yet found the gate again. They go round and round, but the gate is always missed. There is no gate. The expulsion is total and ultimate. They cannot enter again because knowledge is a sweet and bitter fruit – sweet and bitter both. Sweet because it gives you power and bitter because it gives you problems. Sweet because for the first time you become an ego, and bitter because with the ego every disease will be yours. It is a double-edged sword.Adam was tempted because the Devil said, “You will become like God. You will be powerful.” Knowledge is power, but if you know, you have to know both sides of the coin. You can feel more life, but you will become aware of death. You will be more blissful, you can be more blissful, but in the same proportion you will have to suffer anguish.This is the problem, this is what man is: a deep anguish, a deep division between two polarities.You can feel life, but when death is there everything is poisoned. When death is there every moment, everything is poisoned. How can you be alive when death is there? How can you feel blissful when suffering is there? And even if a moment of happiness comes to you, it is fleeting. And when the moment is there, even then you are aware that somewhere behind, the unhappiness is there, the misery is there, hiding. It will come up soon – sooner or later. So even a moment of happiness is poisoned by your consciousness that somewhere unhappiness is hidden, is coming near. It is just by the corner and you will have to meet it.Man becomes conscious of the future, conscious of the past, conscious of life, conscious of death. Kierkegaard has called this consciousness anguish. You can fall back, but that’s a temporary measure. Again you will come up. So the only possibility is to grow – to grow in knowledge to such a point from where you can jump out of it, because the jump is possible only from the extreme. One extreme we have: to fall back. We can do it, but it is impossible because we cannot remain in it. We are thrown forward again and again. The other possibility is that if we grow in awareness, there comes a point when you are totally aware…you transcend.We have known, now we must know something beyond knowledge. We have come out of the Garden because of knowledge, and we can enter this Garden again only when we throw this knowledge. But this throwing is not possible by regression. That gate from which Adam was expelled we can never find again. We can find another gate from which Christ was invited, or a buddha is invited. We can throw this knowledge, we can throw awareness, but only from the extreme point where we are totally aware.When one becomes totally aware, then even this feeling that “I am aware” is thrown. Just like animals are happy and blissful – they don’t know. When you are totally aware, you become godly. And if that awareness is total, you are simply aware without knowing that you are aware.This simple awareness will begin the entry, will be the entry. You will be again in the Garden – not now as animals but as gods. And this is an inevitable process. This expulsion of Adam and the entry of a Jesus is an inevitable process. One has to be thrown out of one’s ignorance; this is the first step. And then one has to be thrown out of one’s knowledge; that is the second step.This sutra is concerned with awareness:To create the fire of awareness in oneself is the incense.To create the fire of awareness in oneself… Three things have to be understood. First, what is meant by awareness? You are walking, you are aware of many things: of the shops, of people passing by you, of the traffic, of everything. You are aware of many things, only unaware of one thing: yourself. You are walking on the street, you are aware of many things, only you are not aware of yourself. This awareness of the self Gurdjieff has called “self-remembering.” Gurdjieff says, “Constantly, wherever you are, remember yourself.”For example, you are here. You are listening to me, but you are not aware of the listener. You may be aware of the speaker, but you are not aware of the listener. Be aware of the listener. Feel yourself here. You are here. For a moment a glimpse comes, and again you forget. Try!Whatsoever you are doing, go on doing one thing inside continuously: be aware of yourself doing it. You are eating: be aware of yourself. You are walking: be aware of yourself. You are listening, you are speaking: be aware of yourself. When you are angry, be aware that you are angry. In the very moment when anger is there, be aware that you are angry. This constant remembering of the self creates a certain energy, a very subtle energy in you. You begin to be a crystallized being.Ordinarily, we are just a loose bag. No crystallization, no center really, just a liquidity, just a loose combination of many things without any center, a crowd, constantly shifting and changing, with no master inside. By awareness is meant, be a master. And when I say “be a master,” I don’t mean to be a controller. When I say “be a master,” I mean be a presence, a continuous presence. Whatsoever you are doing or not doing, one thing must be constantly in your consciousness: that you are.This simple feeling of oneself, that one is, creates a center: a center of stillness, a center of silence, a center of inner mastery, an inner power. And when I say “an inner power,” I mean it literally. That’s why this sutra says the fire of awareness. It is a fire. It is a fire. If you begin to be aware, you begin to feel a new energy in you, a new fire, a new life. And because of this new life, new power, new energy, many things which were dominating you just dissolve. You have not to fight with them.You have to fight with your anger, your greed, your sex, because you are weak. So, really, greed, anger and sex are not the problems. Weakness is the problem. Once you begin to be stronger inside – and with your feeling of inner presence, that you are, your energies are concentrated, crystallized on a single point – a self is born. Remember, not an ego but a self is born. Ego is a false sense of self. Without having any self, you go on believing that you have a self. That is ego. Ego means a false self. You are not a self, and still you believe that you are a self.Maulingaputta, a seeker of the truth, came to Buddha. Buddha asked him, “What are you seeking?”Maulingaputta said, “I am seeking my self. Help me.”Buddha asked him to give a promise that whatsoever is said will be done by him. Maulingaputta began to weep and he said, “How can I promise? – because I am not. I am yet not, how can I promise? I don’t know what I am going to be tomorrow. I don’t have any self which can promise, so don’t ask me the impossible. I will try. At the most this much I can say: I will try. But I cannot say whatsoever you say I will do, because who will do it? I am seeking that which can promise and which can fulfill a promise. I am yet not.”Buddha said, “Maulingaputta, to hear this I asked you that question. If you had promised, I would have turned you out. Had you said that ‘I promise, I will do it,’ then I would have known that you are really not a seeker for the self.”Because a seeker must know that he is not yet. Otherwise, what is the purpose of seeking? If you are already, there is no need. You are not. And if one can feel this, then the ego evaporates. Ego is a false notion of something which is not there at all.Self means a center which can promise.This center is created by being continuously aware, constantly aware. Be aware that you are doing something: that you are sitting, that now you are going to sleep, that now sleep is coming to you, you are falling. Try to be conscious in every moment, and then you will begin to feel a center is born within you, things have begun to crystallize, a centering is there. Everything now is related to a center.So we are without centers. Sometimes we feel centered, but those are moments when a situation makes you aware. If there is suddenly a situation, a very dangerous situation, you will begin to feel a center in you, because in danger you become aware. If someone is going to kill you, you cannot think in that moment, you cannot be unconscious in that moment. Your whole energy is centered and that moment becomes solid. You cannot move to the past, you cannot move to the future. This very moment becomes everything. And then you are not only aware of the killer: you become aware of yourself, the one who is being killed.In that subtle moment you begin to feel a center in yourself. That’s why dangerous games have their appeal. Ask someone going to the top of Gourishankar, Everest. When for the first time Hillary was there, he must have felt a sudden center. When for the first time someone was on the moon, a sudden feeling of a center must have come. That’s why danger has appeal. You are driving a car and you go on increasing your speed, and then the speed becomes dangerous. Then you cannot think; thoughts cease. Then you cannot dream. Then you cannot imagine. Then the present becomes solid. In that dangerous moment, when any moment death is possible, you are suddenly aware of a center in yourself. Danger has appeal only because in danger sometimes you feel centered.Nietzsche somewhere says that war must continue, because only in war sometimes a self is felt, a center is felt, because war is danger. And when death becomes a reality, life becomes intense. When death is just near, life becomes intense and you are centered. But in any moment when you become aware of yourself, there is a centering. However, if it is situational, then with the situation it will disappear.It must not be just situational. It must be inner. So try it in every ordinary activity. Sitting on your chair, try it: be aware of the sitter. Not only of the chair, not only of the room, of the surrounding atmosphere, be aware of the sitter. Close your eyes and feel yourself, dig deep and feel yourself.Herrigel was learning with a Zen master. He was learning archery for three years continuously, and the master would always say, “It is good. Whatsoever you are doing is good, but not enough.”Herrigel himself became a master archer. His aim became one hundred percent perfect and still the master would say, “You are doing well, but it is not enough.” With one hundred percent perfect aim!So Herrigel asked, “What is your expectation? Now how can I grow more? With hundred percent accuracy, what more do you expect?”The Zen master is reported to have said, “I am not concerned with your archery and your aim, I am concerned with you. You have become a perfect technician, but when your arrow leaves the bow you are not aware of yourself, so it is futile. I am not concerned with the arrow reaching the target, I am concerned with you! When on the bow the arrow is arrowed, inside also your consciousness must be arrowed. And even if you miss the target, it makes no difference – but the inner target must not be missed, and you are missing that. You have become a perfect technician, but you are an imitator.”But to a Western mind or, really, to a modern mind – and the Western mind is the modern mind – it is very difficult to conceive. It appears nonsense. Archery is concerned with a particular efficiency in aiming.Herrigel became disappointed by and by, and one day he said, “Now I am leaving. It seems impossible, it is impossible! When you are aiming at something, your awareness goes to the aim, to the object. And if you are to be a successful archer, you have to forget yourself, to remember only the aim, the target. Forget everything. Forget yourself. Let there be only the target.”And this Zen master was consistently forcing him to create another target inside: “This arrow must be double-arrowed – pointing towards the target outside and continuously pointing towards the inside, the self.”Herrigel said, “Now I will leave. It seems impossible. Your conditions cannot be fulfilled.”The day he was leaving, he was just sitting. He had come to take leave of the master, and the master was aiming at a target. Someone else was learning, and for the first time Herrigel was not involved. He had just come to take leave. He was sitting. The moment the master was finished with his teaching, he would take his leave and go. For the first time he was not involved.And then suddenly he became aware of the master – and the double-arrowed consciousness of the master. The master was aiming. For three years continuously Herrigel had been with the same man, but he was more concerned with his own effort. He had never seen this man, what he was doing. For the first time he saw, and he realized. And suddenly, spontaneously, with no effort, he came to the master, took the bow from his hand, aimed at the target, released the arrow, and the master said, “Okay, for the first time you have done it. I am happy.”What had he done? For the first time he was centered in himself. The target was there, but he was also there, present.So whatsoever you are doing, whatsoever, no need of any archery, whatsoever you are doing, even just sitting, be double-arrowed. Remember what is going on outside, and also remember who is inside.Lin Chi was lecturing one morning and someone suddenly asked, “Just answer me one question: Who am I?”Lin Chi got down, went to the man. The whole hall became silent. What was he going to do? It was a simple question. He should have answered from his seat. He reached the man. The whole hall silent…Lin Chi standing before the questioner, looking into his eyes. It was a very penetrating moment. Everything stopped. The questioner began to perspire. He was just staring into his eyes.And then Lin Chi said, “Don’t ask me! Go inside and find out who is asking. Close your eyes! Don’t ask ‘Who am I?’ Go inside and find out who is asking, who is this questioner inside. Forget me. Find out the source of the question. Go deep inside.”And it is reported that the man closed his eyes, became silent and suddenly he was an enlightened one. He opened his eyes, and he laughed, and he touched the feet of Lin Chi, and he said, “You have answered me. I have been asking everyone this question, and many answers were given to me, but nothing proved to be an answer. And you have answered me.”“Who am I?” – how can anyone answer it? But in that particular situation – a thousand persons silent, a pin-drop silence – Lin Chi coming down, staring in the eyes, and then just ordering the man, “Close your eyes. Go inside and find out who the questioner is. Don’t wait for the answer. Find out who has asked.”And the man closed his eyes. What happened in that situation? He became centered. Suddenly he was centered, suddenly he became aware of the innermost core.This has to be discovered, and awareness means the method to discover this innermost core. The more unconscious you are, the farther away you are from yourself. The more conscious, the nearer we reach to our self. If the consciousness is total, we are at the center. If the consciousness is less, we are near the periphery. When we are unconscious, we are on the periphery; the center is completely forgotten.So these are the two possible ways to move. You can move to the periphery; then you move to unconsciousness. Sitting at a film, sitting somewhere listening to music, you can forget yourself. You are on the periphery. Even listening to me you can forget yourself, then you are on the periphery. Reading the Gita or the Bible or the Koran you can forget yourself, then you are on the periphery. Doing whatsoever, if you can remember yourself, then you are nearer the center. And someday, suddenly, you are centered. Then you have energy.That energy this sutra calls “the fire.” The whole of life, the whole of existence, is energy, is fire. Fire is the old name; now they call it electricity. Or man has been labeling it with many many names, but fire is good. Electricity looks a little dead; fire looks more alive.This inner fire, the sutra says, is the incense. When someone is going to worship, you take some incense, dhoop, with you. That dhoop, that incense, is useless – unless you have come with your inner fire as the incense.This Upanishad is trying to give inner meanings to outer symbols. Every symbol has an inner counterpart. The outer is good in itself, but it is not enough. And it is only symbolic, it is not the substance. It shows something, but it is not the real. You must have seen incense; it is burning everywhere in temples. It is good in itself, but an outer symbol. An inner fire is needed. And just like incense gives a perfume, so does the inner fire also.It is said that wherever Mahavira moved, everyone would feel his presence as a subtle perfume. That has been said about many persons; that’s possible! The more you are centered inside, the more your whole presence becomes a perfume. And those who have the receptivity, they will feel it.So enter a temple not with outer incense but with inner incense. And this inner incense can be achieved only through awareness. There is no other way. Act mindfully. It is a long, arduous journey. It is difficult even to be aware for a single moment. The mind is constantly flickering, but it is not impossible. It is arduous, it is difficult, it is not impossible. It is possible. For everyone it is possible. Only effort is needed, and a wholehearted effort. Nothing should be left; nothing should be there inside left untouched. Everything should be sacrificed for awareness. Only then is the inner flame discovered. It is there.If one goes to find out the essential unity between all the religions that have existed or that may exist ever, then this single word awareness will be found.Jesus tells a story:The master of a big house has gone out, and he has told the servants to be constantly alert, because any moment he can come back. So for twenty-four hours they have to be alert. Any moment the master can come – any moment. There is no fixed moment, no fixed day, no fixed date. If there is a fixed date, then you can sleep, then you can do whatsoever you like. On that particular date you will be alert: the master is coming. But the master has said, “I will come any moment. Day and night you have to be alert to receive me.”This is the parable of life. You cannot postpone. Any moment the divine guest may come; any moment the master may come. One has to be alert continuously. No date is fixed; nothing is known about when that sudden happening will be there. One can do only one thing: be alert and wait.Rabindranath has written a poem, The King of the Night. It is a very deep parable.There was a great temple with one hundred priests, and one day the chief priest dreamed that the divine guest was to come that night – for whom they have been waiting and waiting. For centuries the temple has been waiting for the king to come, the divine king to come. The deity of the temple was to come. Many laughed: “It is just a dream. Why pay so much attention to it?”Even the chief priest was in doubt: “It may be just a dream. And if it is just a dream then everyone will laugh. But who knows, it may be true. It may be just a true intimation.”So first he brooded in the morning, whether to tell it to others or not. Then he became afraid. It may be true – then? So in the afternoon he told it. He gathered all the priests, closed the doors of the temple, and said to them, “Don’t go out and don’t tell anyone. It may be just a dream – no one knows. But I have dreamed, and the dream was so real, that the deity, the king of this temple, says, ‘I am coming this night. Be ready.’ So we have to be ready and alert. This night we cannot go to sleep.”So they decorated the whole temple, they cleaned the whole temple. They made every arrangement to receive the guest. And then they waited. Then, by and by, doubts began to arise. Then someone said, “This is nonsense! This was just a dream, and we are wasting our sleep.”Half the night passed, then doubts began to arise more. Then someone rebelled and he said, “I am going to sleep. This is nonsense. The whole day wasted, and now we are waiting. No one is going to come.” And many supported him.Then even the chief priest yielded and he said, “It may be just a dream, how can I say that it was real? We may be just stupid, foolish, following a dream.”So they said, “Only one person should wait at the gate and all else can go to sleep. If someone comes, he will inform us.”Ninety-nine priests went to sleep, and the one priest who was appointed, he said, “When ninety-nine think that it is just a dream, why should I waste my sleep? If the divine Guest is to come, let him come. And he will come in a great chariot, so there will be much noise and everyone will be awake.” He closed the doors. He also fell asleep.And then the chariot came. The wheels of the chariot created much noise. Then someone in his sleep said, “It seems the king is coming. It seems the wheels of the chariot are making much noise.” Then someone else said, “Just go to sleep. Don’t waste time. No one is coming. This is not a chariot, these are just clouds in the sky.”And then the guest came, and he knocked at the door. Then someone else again said in his sleep, “It seems someone has come and is knocking at the door.”So the chief priest himself said, “Now go to sleep. Don’t go on disturbing again and again. No one is knocking at the door; it is just the wind.”In the morning they were weeping and crying because the chariot had come in the night. There were marks on the street and the divine guest had come up to the door and knocked. There were footmarks in the dust on the steps.There are many parables. Buddha has told, Mahavira has told, many stories with only one essential idea: that the enlightenment is possible any time, any moment. It can happen any moment. One has to be alert and conscious and aware.This parable, this King of the Night, is not just a parable, it is real. We all are interpreting things in that way, and all our interpretations are just rationalizations of our sleep and for our sleep: “It is nothing but the wind, it is nothing but the clouds.” Then we can sleep at ease. We go on denying religion, we go on denying anything that will break our sleep. We rationalize: “There is no God, there is no religion, there is nothing – nothing but wind, nothing but clouds.” Then we can sleep at ease, comfortably.If there is godliness, if there is divinity, if there is a possibility of something higher than we are, then we cannot sleep so conveniently. Then we will have to be alert and awake and struggling, and making efforts and endeavoring. Then transformation becomes our immediate concern.Awareness is the technique for centering in oneself, for achieving the inner fire. It is there, hidden. It can be discovered. And once it is discovered, then only are we capable of entering the temple – not before, never before.But we can deceive ourselves by symbols. Symbols are to show deeper realities to us, but we can use them as deceptions. We can burn an outer incense – we can burn, we can do, we can worship, with outer things, and can feel at ease that we have done something. We can feel ourselves religious without becoming religious at all. That’s what is happening; that’s what the earth has become. Everyone thinks they are religious just because they are following outer symbols, with no inner fire.Make efforts. Even if you are a failure…you will be. In the beginning you will fail again and again, but even your failure will help. When you fail to be aware for a single moment, you feel for the first time how unconscious you are.Walk down the street, and you cannot walk a few steps without becoming unconscious. Again and again you forget yourself. You begin to read a signboard, and you forget yourself. Someone passes and you look at him, and you forget yourself.Your failures will be helpful. They will show you how unconscious you are. And even if you can become aware that you are unconscious, you have gained a certain awareness. If a madman becomes aware that he is mad, he is on the path toward sanity.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-02/

Osho,After eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve, for the first time, became aware of their nakedness and felt ashamed. What is the deeper meaning behind this feeling?And, secondly, it has been said that the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge is knowledge of sex. What is your view about this?Nature in itself is innocent, but the moment man becomes aware of it many problems arise, and what is natural and innocent is interpreted. And when it is interpreted, it is neither innocent nor natural. When humanity becomes aware of it, man begins to interpret it, and the very interpretation begins to produce many concepts – of guilt, of sin, of morality, of immorality.The story of Adam and Eve says that when the fruit of the tree of knowledge was eaten, for the first time they became aware of their nakedness and felt ashamed. They were naked, but they had never been aware of it. The awareness, the very awareness, creates a gap.The moment you are aware of something, you begin to judge. You are different from it. For example, Adam was naked. Everyone is born naked like Adam, but children are not aware of their nakedness. They cannot judge it, whether it is good or bad. They are not aware, so they cannot judge. When Adam became aware that he was naked, judgment entered: “Now, is this nakedness good or bad?”Every animal was naked around him, but no animal was aware of his nakedness. Adam became aware, and with this awareness he became unique. Now to be naked was to be like an animal, and Adam, of course, would not like to be an animal. No man likes it, although every man is.When for the first time Darwin said that man is a growth, a growth from certain animals, he was opposed vehemently because man has always been thinking himself a descendant of God, just a little bit lower than the angels. And to conceive of the ape as the father was very difficult, in a way impossible. God was the father, and suddenly Darwin changes it: the God is dethroned and apes are enthroned, the ape becomes the father. Even Darwin felt guilty about it; he was a religious man. This was a misfortune that the facts were saying that man has come through animal evolution, he is part of the animal world, he is not something different from animals.Adam felt ashamed. That shame came because he could now compare himself with animals. In a way he was different, because he was aware. Man clothed himself just to differentiate between animals and himself. And then we are always ashamed about something which looks like animals. The moment someone is doing something like animals, we say, “What are you doing? Are you an animal?” We can condemn anything if we can prove that “this is just like animals.” We condemn sex because it is animalistic. We can condemn anything if somewhere it can be linked with animals.With awareness came the condemnation, condemnation of the animal. And this condemnation has produced the whole body of suppression, because man is animal. He can go beyond it – that’s another thing – but he belongs to animals. He can transcend, but he comes from the animals. He is an animal. He may not be one day; he can go beyond, but he cannot deny the animal heritage. It is there.And once this thought came to the human mind, that we are different from animals, then man began to suppress everything in him that was part of his animal heritage. This suppression has created a bifurcation, so every man is two, double. The real, the basic, remains the animal; and the intellectual, the cerebral, goes on thinking in terms of celestial things, abstract, divine. So only a part of your mind is identified by you as yourself, and the whole is denied.Even in the body we have divisions. The lower body is something condemned. It is not only lower, it is lower in terms of values also. The upper body is not only upper, it is higher. You will feel guilty about your lower body. And if someone says, “Where are you located?” you will point to your head. That is the locus – the cerebral, the head, the intellect. We identify ourselves with the intellect, not with the body. And if someone presses us more, then we will identify ourselves with the upper body, never with the lower. The lower is something condemned.Why? The body is one. You cannot divide it, there is no division. The head and feet are one, and your brain and your sex organs are one. They function as a unity. But to deny sex, to condemn sex, we condemn the whole lower body.This shame came to Adam because for the first time he could feel himself different from other animals. And the most animalistic thing – I use the word animalistic in a purely factual way, with no condemnatory tone – the most animalistic thing is bound to appear to be sex, because sex is life and the origin and the source. Adam and Eve became conscious of sex. They tried to hide it – not only outwardly: they tried to hide the very fact even in inner consciousness. That created the division between the conscious and the unconscious mind.Mind is also one, just like the body is one. But if you condemn something, then that condemned part will become unconscious. You condemn it so much that you yourself become afraid of knowing it, that it exists somewhere within you. You create a barrier, you create a wall, and throw everything that is condemned by you beyond the wall, and then you can forget it. It remains there, it goes on working from there, it remains your master, but yet you can deceive yourself that now it is no more.That condemned part of our being becomes the unconscious. That’s why we never think that our unconscious is ours. You dream in the night: you dream a very sexual dream, or a violent dream, and you murder someone – you murder your wife. In the morning you feel no guilt; you say it was just a dream. It is not just a dream. Nothing is just something. It was your dream, but it belongs to your unconscious. And in the morning you identify yourself with the conscious, so you say, “It is just a dream. It doesn’t belong to me. It just happened. It is irrelevant, accidental.” You never feel associated with it. But it was your dream and you created it. It was your mind and it was you who did the act. Even in the dream it was you who murdered, who killed or who raped.Because of this condemnatory phenomenon of consciousness, Adam and Eve became afraid, ashamed of their nakedness. They tried to hide their bodies – not only their bodies, but later on their minds also. So we are also doing the same thing. What is good, what is taken as good by our society, you put it in your conscious; and what is bad, what is condemned by our society as bad, you throw into the unconscious. It becomes a rubbish bag. You go on throwing things into it – it remains there. Deep down in your roots it goes on working. It affects you every moment. Your conscious mind is just impotent against your unconscious, because your conscious mind is just a byproduct of the society, and your unconscious is natural, biological. It has the energy, the force. So you can go on thinking good things, but you will go on doing bad things.Saint Augustine is reported to have said, “My God, this is the only problem for me: whatsoever I think is worth doing I never do, and whatsoever I know is not to be done I do always.” This is not a problem only for Augustine – it is for everyone who is divided between conscious and unconscious.With the feeling of shame, Adam was divided into two. He became ashamed of himself, and that part he became ashamed of was cut loose from his conscious mind. Since then man has lived a bifurcated, fragmented life.And why did he become ashamed? There was no one, no preacher, no religious church, to tell him to be ashamed. The moment you become aware, ego enters in. You become an observer. Without awareness you are just part, part of a great life; you are not different and separate. If a wave in the ocean can become aware, the wave will create an ego different from the ocean that very moment. If the wave becomes aware that “I am,” then the wave can never think itself one with the ocean, one with other waves. It becomes different, separate; ego is created. Knowledge creates the ego.Children are without egos because they are without knowledge. They are ignorant, and ego cannot come up in ignorance. The more you grow, the more you grow towards ego. Old men have very strengthened, deep-rooted egos. It is natural. Their egos have existed for seventy or eighty years. They have a long history.If you go back in memory and remember your childhood, you may be surprised to know why you cannot remember, you cannot regress beyond your fourth or third year. You can remember, ordinarily we remember, facts which belong to our fifth year or fourth year, at the most the third year, but the first three years are just vacant. They were there, and many things happened, but why can we not remember? Because the ego was not there it is difficult to remember – because, in a way, you were not, so how can you remember? If you were there you would remember, but you were not. You cannot remember.Memory exists only after the ego has come into existence, because memory needs a center to hang on. If you are not, where will the memory hang? Three years is a big thing, and for a child every moment is an event. Everything is something phenomenal, nothing is ordinary. So, really, he should remember more of the first years, the first days of life, because everything was colorful, everything was unique. Whatsoever happened was new. But there is no memory of it. Why? The ego was not there and memory needs an ego to hang on.The moment the child begins to feel himself as separate from others, he will begin to feel shame. He will begin to feel the same shame that came to Adam. He found himself naked – naked like animals, naked like everyone else. You must be different and unique, you must not be like others, only then can you grow in ego.The first act was to hide the nakedness: he became suddenly different. He was not an animal. Man is born. With Adam, and with Adam’s shame, with Adam’s feeling of shame, man is born. A child is not a man. He becomes a man only when he begins to feel himself separate, different from others, then he becomes an ego.So, really, it is not religion which gives you the feeling of guilt, it is your ego. Religion exploits it; that’s another matter. Every father exploits it; that is another matter. Every father is saying to his son, “What are you doing, behaving like animals? Don’t laugh, don’t cry! Don’t do this, don’t do that; don’t do this before others! What are you doing? – behaving like animals!” And the child feels that if he is an animal, his ego is hurt. To fulfill his ego he follows, he falls in line.To be animal is very blissful, because there is a freedom, a deep freedom, to move, to do. But it hurts the ego, so one has to choose. If you choose freedom, then you will be like animals, condemned. In this world and in the other world to come, you will be condemned. You will be thrown into hell. “Be a man. Don’t be like an animal.”The ego is fed. One begins to live around the ego. Then one begins to act according to what is ego-fulfilling. But you cannot deny nature absolutely. It goes on affecting you. Then one begins to live two lives: one, the pre-Adam life; the other, the after-Adam life. So one begins to live two lives, one begins to live a double-bind existence. Then a face is created to show to the society. One is a private face and one a public face. But you are your private face. And everyone is Adam, naked, animal-like, but you cannot show it to the public. To the public you show the after-Adam face: everything clean, everything fitted to the social norm, everything to show for the others, not the real but the desired, not that which is but that which should be.So everyone has to go continuously from one face to another. From private to public you are changing every moment. This is a great strain. This dissipates much energy. But what am I saying and what do I mean? I don’t say be like animals; you cannot be now. The forbidden fruit cannot be returned. You have eaten it; it has become your blood and bones. There is no way of throwing it. There is no way to return it and go to God the Father and say, “I return this – this forbidden fruit of knowledge. Forgive me.” There is no way. There is no way to go back. Now it is our blood.We cannot go back, we can only go forward. There is no going back. We cannot go below knowledge, we can only go beyond knowledge. Only a different innocence is possible – the innocence of total awareness.There are two types of innocence. One, below knowledge: the childlike, the pre Adam-like, animal-like, below knowledge. You are not, the ego is not, the troublemaker is not. You exist as part of the cosmic whole. You don’t know that you are part. You don’t know that there is a cosmic whole. You know nothing. You exist without knowing. Of course there is no suffering, because suffering is impossible without knowledge. One has to be aware of suffering to suffer it. How can you suffer if you are not aware?You are being operated upon, a surgeon is operating on you. You suffer if you are conscious. If you are unconscious, there is no suffering. The leg is cut completely, thrown; there is no suffering, because suffering is nowhere recorded, nowhere known, you are unconscious. You cannot suffer in unconsciousness. You can suffer only when you are conscious. The more conscious, the more you will suffer. That’s why the more man grows in knowledge, the more he suffers.Primitive people cannot suffer so much as you can suffer, not because they are better but because they are ignorant. Villagers, even today, villagers who are not yet part of the modern world, live in a more innocent way. They don’t suffer so much. Because of this, many fallacies have come to the thinkers, to philosophers. For example, Rousseau or Tolstoy or Gandhi: they think because villagers are more blissful it would be good if the whole world became primitive again, went back to the jungle, back to the forest, back to nature. But they are wrong, because the man who has lived in a civilized city will suffer in a village. No villager has suffered that way.So Rousseau goes on talking about “back to nature” and continues to live in Paris. He himself will never go to the village. He talks about the poetry of village life, of the beauty, of the innocence, but he himself will never go. And if he goes, then he will know that he will suffer as no villager has suffered, because once consciousness is attained you cannot throw it – because it is you. It is not something that you can throw. It is you – how can you throw yourself? Consciousness is you.Adam suffered shame; he felt his nakedness. Ego is the reason. Adam attained a center, though false, but still a center. Now Adam was different from the whole cosmos. Trees were there, stars were there, everything was there, but Adam was now an island, separate. Now his life was his life, not part of the cosmic whole. And the moment your life is your life, struggle enters. You have to fight inch by inch to exist, to survive.Animals are not in a struggle. Even if they appear to us, to a Darwin, to be in a struggle, they are not in a struggle. They appear to Darwin to be in a struggle because we go on projecting our own ideas. They cannot be in a struggle. They appear to us to be in a struggle, because for us everything is a struggle. With the ego everything is a struggle. They seem to be fighting to be. They are not fighting to be: they are just flowing in the cosmic unity. Even if they are doing something, there is no doer behind it. It is a natural phenomenon.A lion killing some victim for his food…there is no doer, there is no violence. It is a simple phenomenon: just hunger after food. There is no hungry one: simple hunger, a mechanism finding the food, no violence. Only man can be violent because only man can be a doer. You can kill without hunger. A lion can never kill without hunger, because hunger kills in a lion, not the lion. A lion can never kill in play. There is nothing like hunting for a lion, it exists only for man. You can kill in play, just for fun. If a lion is satisfied, there is no violence, no play, no game, nothing. It is a hunger phenomenon. The doer is not there.Nature exists as a deep cosmic flow. In this flow Adam becomes aware of himself, and he becomes aware because he has eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Knowledge was forbidden: “Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge” was the commandment. He disobeyed it, he couldn’t go back. And the Bible says every man will suffer for Adam’s rebelliousness because in a way every man is an Adam again.You cannot suffer for it – how can you suffer for something someone else did somewhere? But it is a continuous history repeated every day. Every child has to pass from the Garden of Eden to the expulsion. Every child is born as Adam and then he is expelled. That’s why there is so much nostalgia in poets, in painters, in literary persons, in all those who can manipulate to express. There is a nostalgia always. The golden age was childhood.Everyone thinks that childhood was something golden, utopian, and everyone longs to go back to it. Even an old man, just on the deathbed, thinks with nostalgia of childhood: of the beauty, of the happiness, of the bliss, of the flowers, of the butterflies, of the dreams, of fairies. Everyone in his childhood is in a wonderland, not only Alice, everyone. This shadow follows….Why is childhood so beautiful, so blissful? Because you were still a part of the cosmic flow, with no responsibility, with absolute freedom, with no conscience, with no burden. You existed, as if it was not something to be done by you. It was there, taken for granted. And then comes the ego, and then comes the conflict, and the struggle. Then everything becomes a responsibility, and every moment is a bondage, no freedom.Psychologists say that religions only reflect this nostalgia to be again in childhood. And they go even further: they say ultimately everyone longs to be again in the womb of the mother, because then you were really part of the cosmos. The cosmos was even feeding you. Even to breathe was not for you to do; the mother was breathing for you. You were not aware of the mother, you were not aware of yourself. You were there with no awareness.The womb is the Garden of Eden. So every man is born as an Adam, and everyone has to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge, because the moment you grow, you grow in knowledge. That is inevitable. So it is not that Adam rebelled. Rebellion is part of growth. He couldn’t do otherwise: he had to. Every child has to rebel, has to disobey. Life demands it. He has to go further away from the mother, from the father. He will long for it; again and again he will desire and dream, but still he will go further away. This is an inevitable process.It is asked: “What is the deeper meaning behind this feeling?” This is the meaning: knowledge gives you ego, and ego gives you comparison, judgment, individuality. You cannot think of yourself as an animal, so man has done everything to hide the fact that he is an animal. He has done everything! We are doing things every day to hide the fact that we are animals. But we are. And by hiding the fact, the fact is not destroyed; rather, it becomes a perverted fact.So whenever that hidden perversion erupts, man proves to be more animalistic than any animal. If you are violent, no animal can compete with you. How? No animal has known anything like Hiroshima, Vietnam. Only man can create a Hiroshima. There is no comparison. All the animals in all the history are just playing with dolls in comparison to Hiroshima. Their violence is nothing. This is accumulated violence – hidden, accumulated. We go on hiding and then we are accumulating. And the more we accumulate, the more ashamed we feel, because we know what is hidden inside. You cannot escape it.A certain psychologist was experimenting with hidden facts, which, howsoever you try, you cannot hide. For Example, if someone says that he is not attracted to women, he can practice it. He can practice it and he can convince himself and others also that he is not attracted. But Adam is bound to be attracted to Eve, Eve is bound to be attracted to Adam. That is part of their nature, unless one goes beyond, unless one becomes a buddha.But then Buddha never says, “I am not attracted to women,” because even to say that, you have to think in terms of attraction and repulsion. He will not say, “I am repelled by women,” because you cannot be repelled by anything unless you are attracted. If you ask him he will simply say, “Men and women, both have become irrelevant to me. I am neither. If I am man, then woman will be there hidden somewhere. If I am woman, then man will be there hidden somewhere.”One psychologist just recently experimented with a man who said, “I am not attracted to women.” And he was not, as far as outward things go. He was never seen to be attracted to anyone. Then this psychologist showed him some pictures, ten pictures, of different things, only one picture of a naked woman.The psychologist was not seeing what picture the man was seeing. He was just looking in his eyes; the back of the picture was in front of the psychologist. He would show a picture to the man and just look in his eyes. And he said, “If you are not attracted…. I will tell you when you are seeing the naked woman just by seeing your eyes. I am not seeing the pictures.”The pictures were shown, and with that very picture the psychologist said, “Now you are seeing the naked woman,” because the moment a naked woman is there, the eyes extend. And that is involuntary; you cannot control it. You cannot do anything. It is a reflex action. Eyes are made that way biologically. The man says that “I am not attracted,” but this is only his conscious mind. The unconscious is attracted all the same.And when you hide certain facts and they go on manipulating you, you become more and more ashamed. The higher a civilization, the higher its culture, the more ashamed the human being will be – the more ashamed. Really, the more ashamed you are about sex, the more civilized you are. But then civilized man is bound to be insane, schizophrenic, divided. This division starts with Adam.“And, secondly, it has been said that the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge is knowledge of sex. What is your view about this?”Of course, it is. But not only that: sex is the first knowledge and sex is also the last knowledge. When you enter humanity, the first thing you begin to feel and be aware of is sex. And the last thing, when you go beyond humanity, is again sex – the last thing and the first. Because sex is the most foundational, it is bound to be the first. It is the alpha and the omega.A child is just a child unless he becomes sexually mature. The moment he becomes sexually mature, he is a man. With sexual maturity, the whole world becomes different. It is not the same world, because your approach, your outlook, your way of seeing things, changes. When you begin to be aware of the woman, you begin to be a man.Really, in old biblical texts, knowledge is used in the Hebrew language with a sexual meaning. For example, in such sentences: “He didn’t know his wife for two years,” or, “She didn’t know her husband for two years,” it means there was no sexual relationship for two years. “He knew his wife for the first time on that day”: it means there was a sexual relationship for the first time. Knowledge in Hebrew is used for sexual knowledge, so it is right that Adam became aware of sex then.Sex is most foundational. Without sex there is no life. Life exists because of sex and life disappears with sex. That’s why Buddha and Mahavira say unless you go beyond sex you will be born again and again. You cannot go beyond life, because with a sexual desire inside you will be born again. So sex is not only giving birth to someone else; ultimately, it is giving birth to yourself also. It works in a double way. You reproduce someone through sex, but that is not so important. Because of your sexual desire, you are reborn; you reproduce yourself again and again.Adam became aware of his sex; that was the first awareness. But with sex it is only a beginning. Then everything else will follow.Really, psychologists say that every curiosity is sexual in a way. So if a person is born impotent, he will not be curious about anything – not even about truth, because curiosity of any type is basically sexual. To discover something hidden, to know something which is not known, to know the unknown, is sexual. Children will play with each other to find out the hidden parts of the body. That is the beginning of curiosity and the beginning of all science: to find out that which is hidden, that which is not known.So really it happens that the more sexual a person is, the more inventive he can be. The more sexual a person is, the more intelligent. With less sex energy, less intelligence exists; with more sexual energy, more intelligence, because sex is a deep search to uncover, not only bodies, not only the opposite sex body, but everything that is hidden.So if a society is very sex-condemnatory, it can never be scientific, because then you condemn curiosity. The East could not be scientific because of so much antagonism toward sex. And the West also could not be scientific as long as Christianity retained its hold. It was only when the Vatican disappeared, when Rome was not significant at all, only within these three hundred years when the palace of Christianity came down and disappeared, that the West could be scientific. The release of sexual energy also became a release into research. A sexually free society will be scientific, and a sexually prohibitive society will be nonscientific.With sex everything begins to be alive. If your child, when he attains maturity, sexual maturity, begins to behave rebelliously, forgive him. It is but natural. With a new energy coming into his veins, with new life running, he is bound to be rebellious. That rebellion is just part of it. He is also bound to be inventive. He will invent new things, new ways, new styles, new manners of life, new societies. He will dream new dreams, he will think about new utopias. If you condemn sex, then there is no rebellion of youth. All over the world, the rebellion of youth is part of a sexual freedom.In the old cultures there was no rebellion because sex was so much condemned, the energy was so much suppressed. With that energy suppressed, every rebellion is suppressed. If you give freedom to sex energy, every rebellion will be there, every type of rebellion will be there.Knowledge in itself has a sexual dimension, so it is right in a way that Adam became aware of sex, the dimension of sex. But with that dimension of sex he became aware of many other things also. This whole expansion of knowledge, this explosion of knowledge, this probing into the unknown, this going to the moon and to other planets, it is a sexual thirst. And the West will go further and further into knowledge, because now the energy is released, and now the energy will take new shapes, new adventures.With sex and the awareness of sex, Adam started on a long journey. We are on it, everyone is on it, because sex is not just a part of your body – it is you. You are born of sex and you will die of sex, exhausted. Your birth is the birth of sex, and your death is the death of sex. So the moment you feel that the sexual energy is waning, know that death is coming near.Thirty-five is the peak age. Sex energy is at the peak, and then everything declines, then one begins to be old, on the downward path. Seventy will be the death age. If fifty can be the peak of sexual energy, then a hundred will be the death age. The West will soon attain a hundred years as a normal, average age, because now a fifty-year-old man is behaving like a boy. It is good, it shows an alive society. It shows that now life will be lengthened.If a hundred-year-old man can behave like a playboy, then life will be lengthened to two hundred years – because sex is the energy. Because of sex you are young and because of sex you will be old. Because of sex you are born and because of sex you will die. And not only that: Buddha and Mahavira and Krishna, they say that because of sexual desire you will be born again. Not only is this body run by sex, but all your bodies in continuity are run by sexual desire.Of course, when Adam became conscious for the first time, he became conscious of sex. That is the most foundational fact. But this was misinterpreted by Christianity, and then much nonsense followed. It was said: Because Adam became aware of his sex and felt ashamed, sex is bad and a sin, original sin. It is not. It is original life. He became ashamed, not because sex is bad: he became ashamed because he saw that sex is an animal affair and “I am not an animal.” So sex has to be fought, cut, and thrown. Somehow one has to become without sex. This is a misinterpretation, the Christian interpretation of the parable: “So fight against sex.” Religion became just a fight against sex. And if religion is a fight against sex, then religion is a fight against life.To me, religion is not a fight against sex. Rather, it is an effort to go beyond, not against. If you are against, you will remain on the same level with sex. Then you can never go beyond. So Christian mystics and saints, they are fighting to their deathbed against sex. And the temptation comes, and every moment they are tempted. There is no one to tempt them…their own suppression. Their own suppression is the creation of their temptation. They live in a very tortured world of inner mind where they are constantly fighting with themselves.Religion is to go beyond, not against. And if you want to go beyond, you have to step, to use sex energy to transcend it. You have to move with it, not fight with it. You have to know it more. To be ignorant now is impossible – you have to know it more. Knowledge is freedom. If you know it more and more and more, and a moment comes when you are totally aware, sex disappears. In that total awareness, the energy is transformed, mutated. You now have a different dimension of the same energy.Sex is horizontal. When you are totally aware, sex becomes vertical. And that vertical movement of sex is kundalini. If sex moves horizontally, then you go on reproducing others and reproducing yourself. If the energy begins to move upward, vertically, you just go out – out of the wheel of existence, as the Buddhists say, out of the wheel of life. It is a new birth: not in a new body, but in a new dimension of existence. This Buddhists have called nirvana, or moksha, or whatsoever you like to call it you can call it. Names don’t mean much.So there are two ways. Adam becomes aware of his sex. He can suppress it; then he will move horizontally, fighting with it, in a constant anguish, always knowing the animal is hidden inside and always pretending that it is not there. This is the anguish. And one can move horizontally for lives together, reaching nowhere, because it is a repetitive circle. That’s why we call it a wheel, a repetitive circle.You can jump out of the wheel. That jumping will not be through suppression; it will be through more knowledge. So I will say: you have eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree – now eat the whole tree! That is the only way. Now eat the whole tree. Don’t leave even a single leaf. Let there be no tree. Eat it totally. Only then will you be freed of knowledge, never before.And with that, when I say eat the whole tree, I mean: now, when you have become aware, be aware totally. Fragmentary awareness is the problem. Either be totally ignorant or be totally aware. Totality is bliss. Be totally ignorant – you are in bliss. You will not be aware of it, but you will be in bliss. Just as we are when we are deep asleep, not even dreaming, simply asleep, with no movement of the mind – you are in bliss, but you cannot feel it. You can say in the morning that the night’s sleep was very blissful, but it was not felt when the sleep was there. It is felt only when you have come out of it. When knowledge enters, awareness comes, you can say the night was very blissful.Either be totally ignorant, which is impossible, or be totally knowing, which is possible. With totality there is bliss. Totality is bliss. So eat the tree, root and all, and be aware. This is what is meant by an awakened man, a buddha, an enlightened man: he has eaten the whole tree. Now nothing is left to be aware. A simple awareness exists.This simple awareness is a re-entry into Eden. You cannot find the old gate again; it is missed forever. You can find a new gate; you can enter again. And, really, whatsoever the Devil promised to Adam will be fulfilled: you will be like gods. He was right in a way. If you eat the fruit of knowledge, you will be like gods.We cannot conceive this in this state of mind, because we are just in a hell; because of this Devil’s temptation, we are in a hell. We are as if suspended in between two things, always divided, in agony, in anguish. It seems that the Devil deceived Adam, deceived us. This is not the whole thing; the story is incomplete. You can complete it, and only then can you judge whether whatsoever the Devil said was right or not. Eat the whole tree, and you will be like gods.A person who has become totally aware is divine, he is not human. Humanity is a sort of disease. I say dis-ease, a continuous dis-ease. Either be like animals, you are healthy; or be like gods, you are healthy – healthy because whole, a wholeness.The English word holy is good. It doesn’t mean only pure; really it means to be whole. And unless you are whole you cannot be holy. Be whole. And there are only two types of wholeness: one, the animal type; the other, the godlytype.Osho,You said that awareness creates centering and crystallization, but I personally feel that awareness brings a feeling of deep void within me. Please explain the relationship between centering and inner void.As man is, he is without a center, without a real, authentic center. He has a center, so to speak, but the center is false. He only thinks that he has a center. The ego is a false center. You feel that it is there, but it is not. If you go to find it, you will not find it at all.Bodhidharma reached China one thousand years after Buddha. He was a buddha himself. The Emperor Wu came to receive Bodhidharma. The emperor, when no one was there, asked Bodhidharma, “I am very, very disturbed. My mind is never at ease, so what can I do? Tell me. Make my mind at peace, at ease. I am a deep conflict, an inner struggle, continuous, so do something!”Bodhidharma said, “I will! Come in the morning, early, at four o’clock – but remember to bring your self.”The Emperor Wu felt that “Either this man is mad or I have not understood what he is saying.” He said, “Of course, when I come I will come with my self.”Bodhidharma still insisted, “Don’t forget! Bring your self with you. Otherwise, whom am I going to make at ease?”The whole night Emperor Wu couldn’t sleep. It was such a strange thing. It looked weird. What does this man mean? And then he began to feel doubtful whether to go or not, and at this early hour, four o’clock in the morning. And Bodhidharma has said, “Come alone! Only let your self be with you, no one else. So no one knows what he is going to do, and he looks mad. It is even dangerous.” But, still, he was tempted. This man was really a different type of being. He attracted, he was magnetic.So he couldn’t stay at home. He came. When he was coming near, Bodhidharma said, “You have come, but where is your self?”Wu said, “You make me puzzled. The whole night I couldn’t sleep. What do you mean by ‘my self’? I am here.”So Bodhidharma said, “Give me your self. I will make it silent, at peace, at ease. Close your eyes and find out where it is, your self. Point it out to me and I will make it totally disappear, and there will never be any problem again.”So Emperor Wu closed his eyes, sat before Bodhidharma. The morning was absolutely silent. No one was there. He could hear his own breath, he could hear his own heartbeat. And Bodhidharma was there constantly telling him, “Go in and find out where it is. If you cannot point it out, then what can I do?”And he searched and he searched and he searched, for hours together. Then he opened his eyes…he was a different man. He said, “I don’t find it anywhere. It is all void. There is no self.”Bodhidharma said, “Then, if there is no self and all is void, are you disturbed now? Is someone at dis-ease inside? Now where is the anguish you were talking about, so much talking about? Where is it?”So Wu said, “Nowhere, because the person has disappeared, so how can the dis-ease exist without him? I tried and tried, but it is nowhere to be found. Really, I was myself in a deception. I always thought I am inside. I tried to find it and it is not there. There is simply a void, a shunya, emptiness, a nothingness.”So Bodhidharma said, “Now go home, and whenever you feel that something is to be done with your self, first find out where it is.”It is a false entity. Because we have never searched for it, it seems to exist. Because we have never gone in, we go on talking about the I. It is not there. So the first thing to be understood is: if you meditate, if you become silent, you will feel a void, because you cannot find the ego. The ego was all the furniture; now the furniture has disappeared. You are just a room – rather, a roominess. Even the walls have disappeared; they were part of the ego. The whole structure has disappeared, so you will find a void.This is the first step. When the ego disappears…. It is a false entity. It is not there. It only appears to be, or you go on thinking that it is there. It belongs to your thinking, not to your being. It belongs to your mind, not to your existence. Because you think it is there, it is there. When you go to find it, it is not found. Then you feel the void, emptiness. Now persist in this emptiness, remain in this void.Mind is very cunning. He can play games. If you observe this voidness, and if you begin to think, you will fill it again. Even if you say, “This is void,” you are out of it, already out of it. The void has disappeared, you have come in. Remain with the void, remain void. Don’t think. It is difficult, very frightening. One gets dizzy. It is an abyss, an infinite abyss. Falling down and falling down, and with no bottom to reach, one gets dizzy…one begins to think. The moment you think, you have found the ground again. Now you are not in the void.If you can be in the void without escaping it by any thinking whatsoever, suddenly the void will also disappear, as the ego has disappeared – because, really, it is because of the ego that it looks like a void. Ego was the thing which was filling. That was the furniture, and there was no void. Now the ego has disappeared; that’s why you feel it as a void. This feeling of emptiness is just because something that was always there is not there.If you see me in this chair, and suddenly you don’t find me in the chair, the chair will look empty – not because the chair is empty, but simply because someone was there filling it and now he is no longer there. So you see the void, not the chair. You see the void because the absence of something looks like emptiness. You are still not seeing the chair. You were seeing a person there, now you are seeing the absence of the person, but the chair is still not seen.So when the ego disappears, you feel the void. This is only a beginning, because this void is also the negative part of the ego, the other aspect. This void also must disappear.It is reported about Rinzai, a Zen master, that when he was learning with his teacher, the teacher always insisted on attaining the void, the nothingness, the shunya. So one day he came: he had attained it. It was a long effort; to dissolve the ego is a long effort. It was a long journey, difficult, sometimes virtually impossible, but he had attained it. So he came, laughing, dancing, happy, in ecstasy. He fell down at his master’s feet and said, “I have attained. Now the void is there!”The master looked at him very unsympathetically and said, “Now go and throw this void out too. Don’t bring it here. Throw this void out too. Throw away this nothingness.”Because if you have nothingness, it becomes something again. Even a void is something. If you can feel it, it is something. If you can know it, it is something. If you can observe it, it is something. Even nothing becomes a something if it is in your hands.The master said, “Throw this void out. Only come to me when even nothingness is not there.”So Rinzai wept.Why couldn’t he see it himself? If void is an attainment, it is something. If you have achieved nothingness, nothingness becomes a thing. When you go deep in the void, without any thinking, without any vibration in the mind, if you remain in this, suddenly the void just disappears – and then the self is known. Then you are centered. Then you have come to the real center.The false center, the absence of the false center, and then the real center. By “centering” I mean the ground, the very ground of being. It is not your center, because you are the false; so it is not your center, it is the center, just the center of being, the very existence centered in it.You are the false center, you will disappear. But even in your disappearance, if you begin to feel fulfilled with the void, the ego has returned in a very subtle way. In a very subtle way it has come back. It will say, “I have attained this void.” It is still there.Don’t allow it to come back. Remain in the void. Don’t do anything with the void – not even thinking about it, not even feeling about it. The void is there. Be at ease, let it be there. It will disappear. It is just a negative part. The real thing has disappeared; it is just the shadow. Don’t catch the shadow, don’t cling to the shadow, because the shadow can remain only if the real thing is somewhere near. Only then can the shadow remain.The void disappears ultimately, and then there is centering. Then for the first time you are not and you are, not as you but as pure being, rather, as the all. And this point must be noted carefully: that it is not your center, it is the center of all.Forget your false center. Go in, dig for it – it dissolves. It is never found. It is not, so you cannot find it. Then a more arduous thing befalls you: then you encounter the void. It is very silent. Compared to the ego world, it is very silent, very silent. You are in a deep peace. But don’t be satisfied with it. It is false, because it is part of the ego. And if you feel satisfied the ego will re-enter, it will come back. A part of it was still there. That part will bring it back again, whole.Remain with the void without any thinking. That is just deathlike. One is dying before one’s own eyes, everything dissolving, a great abyss. And soon you will disappear, only the abyss will be there – not even the knower of the abyss, not even the observer of the abyss, just the abyss. Then you are centered, centered in the cosmic center. It is not your center, but for the first time you are.Now language will have a different meaning. You are not and you are. Here, no and yes lose their traditional difference, the customary meaning. You are not as you, you are now as divine, as the cosmos itself. This is the existential centering, centered in existence.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-03/

Chidaditya swaroopam deepah.To be established in the sun of awareness is the only lamp.One day a lady came to Mulla Nasruddin’s school with her small son. The lady asked the Mulla to frighten the boy. He had become unruly and he would not listen to anyone. He needed to be frightened by some big authority. Of course, Mulla was a big authority in his village. Mulla took a very frightening posture, with eyes bulging, fiery, and he began to jump. The lady felt that “Now it seems impossible to stop the Mulla. He may even kill the boy!”The lady fainted, the boy escaped, and Mulla became so frightened of himself that he had to run out of the school. He waited outside. When the lady came back he entered, slowly, solemnly, seriously. The lady said, “Mulla, it is strange. I never asked you to frighten me.”Mulla said, “You don’t see the real fact. It was not only you that was frightened – I myself was frightened of myself. When fear takes over, it strikes all. To start it is easy, but to control it is difficult. So I was the master when I started, but soon fear took over and it became the master and I was just a slave. I couldn’t do anything. And, moreover, fear has no favorites. When it strikes, it strikes all.”This is a beautiful parable, one which shows a very deep insight into the human mind. You are conscious in everything just in the beginning, and then the unconscious takes over. The unconscious takes charge and the unconscious becomes the master. You can start anger, but you never end it; rather, the anger ends you. You can start anything, but sooner or later the unconscious takes charge; you are relieved of your duty. So only the beginning is in your hands, never the end. And you are not the master of the consequences that follow.This is natural because only a very small fragment of the mind is aware. It works just like the starter in your motor car. It starts, and then it is of no use; then the motor takes over. It is needed only to start. Without it, it is difficult to start. But don’t go on thinking that because you start a certain thing you are the master.This is the secret of this parable. Because you start, you begin to feel that you are the master – because you started. You think you can stop. You could have not started, that’s another thing. But once started, soon the voluntary becomes nonvoluntary and the conscious becomes unconscious, because the conscious is just the upper layer, just the surface of the mind, and the whole mind is unconscious. You start, and the unconscious begins to move and work.So Mulla said, “I am not responsible for what has happened. I am not responsible. I am responsible only for starting, and it is you who told me to start it. I started to frighten the boy, then the boy was frightened, then you fainted, then I was frightened, and then everything was a mess.” Everything is a mess in our life also.This conscious starting and this unconscious taking it over every time, if you don’t feel it, if you don’t realize it, this mechanism, you will always be a slave. And the slavery becomes more convenient if you go on thinking that you are the master. It is difficult to be a slave knowing that you are a slave. It is easy to be a slave when you go on deceiving yourself that you are the master. Your love, your anger, your greed, your jealousy, your violence, your cruelty, even your sympathy, your compassion – I say “your” – are yours only in the beginning, just for a moment, just a spark. Then your mechanism is started. And your whole mechanism is unconscious.Why is this so? Why this conflict between the conscious and the unconscious? And there is a conflict, because you cannot predict even yourself. Even you, your acts, are unpredictable to you, because you don’t know what is going to happen, you don’t know what you are going to do. The next moment what you will do even you are not aware of, because the doer is deep in darkness. You are not the doer. You are only a starting point. Unless your whole mechanism becomes conscious, you will be a problem to yourself, and a hell, and nothing but a long misery.Only in two ways, as I have been emphasizing every day, can one become whole. Either lose this fragmentary consciousness, throw this fragment of the mind which has become conscious into the dark unconscious, dissolve it, and you are whole…. But then you are just like an animal, and that is impossible. Whatsoever you may do, it is not possible. It is only conceivable, but not possible. You will be thrown forward again and again.That small part which has become conscious cannot now become unconscious. It is just like an egg which has become a hen: now the hen cannot move back to be an egg again. A seed which has sprouted, has begun the journey to be a tree, now cannot go back and regress and become a seed. The child which has come out of the womb of his mother now cannot go back, howsoever pleasant the womb may be, but there is no backward-going.Life moves always in the future, never in the past. Only man can think of the past. That’s why I say it is conceivable, but it cannot be actualized. You can imagine, you can think to go back, you can believe, you can try to go back, but you cannot go. That is an impossibility.One has to move forward. Knowingly, unknowingly, one is moving every moment. If you move knowingly, then the speed is accelerated. If you move knowingly, then you don’t waste energy and time. Then the thing can happen even in one life which will not happen in a million lives if you just move unknowingly, because if you move unknowingly you move in a circle. Every day you repeat the same, in every life you repeat again the same. And life becomes just a habit, a mechanical habit, a repetition. Knowingly if you break the repetitive habit, there is a breakthrough.So the first thing to know towards awareness is: you are aware in such a small measure that your awareness works only as a starter. Unless you have more awareness than unawareness, more consciousness than unconsciousness, the balance will not change. And what are the hindrances? Why is this the situation? Why this facticity? Why this conflict between conscious and unconscious? We should consider it.It is natural. Whatsoever is is natural. Man has evolved through millions of years. This evolution has created you, your body, your mechanism. This evolution has been a long struggle, millions and millions of experiences – of failures, of successes. Your body has learned much; your body has been continuously learning things. Your body knows much, and its knowledge is fixed. It goes on repeating its own ways of behaving. Even if the situation has changed, the body remains the same.For example, when you feel anger you feel it in the same way as any primitive man, you feel it in the same way as any animal, you feel it in the same way as any child. And this is the mechanism: when you feel anger your body has a fixed routine ritual, a routine work to do. The moment your mind says “Anger!” you have glands which begin to release chemicals into the blood. Adrenaline is released into the blood. It is a necessity, because in anger you will have to strike or you may be struck by your opponent. You will need more blood circulation; this chemical will help more circulation. You may need to fight, or you may need to escape from the situation, to run away. In both cases, this chemical will help.So when some animal is angry, the body begins to be ready to fight or to take flight. And these are the two alternatives: if the animal feels that he is stronger than the opponent, he will fight; if he feels that he is not the stronger one, he will escape. And the mechanism works very smoothly.But for man the situation has become totally different. When you feel anger, you may not even express it. That is impossible for the animal. It depends on the situation. If it is your servant, then you may express it. If it is your master, then you may not express it. Not only that: you may even laugh, smile; you may even persuade your master, your boss, that not only are you not angry, but you are very happy. Now you are confusing the whole mechanism of the body. The body is ready to fight, and now you are smiling. You are creating a mess in the body. The body cannot understand you: “What are you doing? Are you mad? Do two things which are natural: fight or escape.”This smiling is something new. This deception is something new. The body has no mechanism for it, so you have to force the smile without the chemicals flowing in which help to smile, which help to laugh. No chemicals to laugh…you have to force a smile, a false smile. And the body has released chemicals into the blood – now what will the body do? The body has a language that it understands very well, but you are behaving in a very mad, insane way. Now there is a gap created between you and your body.This mechanism is unconscious, this mechanism is nonvoluntary. Your volition, your will is not needed, because will takes time and there are situations when no time can be lost. A tiger has attacked you: now there is no time for mentation. You cannot contemplate what to do. You have to act without the mind. If mind comes in you are lost. You cannot think. You cannot say to the tiger, “Wait! Let me think about it, what to do.” You have to act immediately, without any consciousness.So the body has a mechanism. The tiger is there: the mind just knows the tiger is there – body begins to work. That working is not dependent on the mind, because mind is a very slow worker, very inefficient. It cannot be relied upon in emergency situations, so body begins to work. You will run away. You are frightened, you will escape.But the same thing happens when you are standing on a platform to address a big audience. There is no tiger, but you are frightened by the great gathering. Fear takes shape; the body is informed. That information is automatic, that you are in fear. The body begins to release chemicals – the same chemicals it will release when a tiger attacks you. There is no tiger, there is no one who is really attacking you. But an audience is a deep attack: everyone, really, is aggressive. That’s why you have become afraid.Now the body is ready to fight or take flight, but both the alternatives are closed. You have to stand there and speak. Now your body begins to perspire, even on a cold night. Why? Because the body is ready to run or to fight. The blood is circulating more, heat is created, and you are standing there. So you begin to perspire, and then a subtle trembling takes over. Your whole body begins to tremble.It is just the same if you start a car and press the accelerator and the brake both, simultaneously. The engine will be heated, raced, and you are braking also. The whole body of the car will tremble. The same happens when you are standing on a platform. You feel fear. The body is ready to run, the accelerator is pushed, but you cannot run. You have to address the gathering. You are a leader or something; you cannot run. You have to face them, and you have to be there standing on the platform. You have to take the floor.Now you are doing two things simultaneously, very contradictory. You are also pressing the brake: “Don’t run!” And the body is ready to run. You begin to tremble, heat is created. Now your body feels, “How are you behaving?” The body cannot understand you. A gap is created. The unconscious goes on doing something else and the conscious goes on doing something else. You are divided. This gap has to be understood deeply. In our every act this gap is there.You are looking at a film, an erotic film: your sex is aroused. Your body is ready to explode in a sexual experience, but you are just seeing a film, just sitting in your chair – and your body is ready for a sexual act. And the film will go on accelerating, it will go on pushing you. You are aroused, and you cannot do anything. The body is ready to do something and the situation is not. A gap is created. You begin to feel yourself different, and there is a barrier between you and your body. Because of that barrier and because of this constant arousal and suppression simultaneously, this acceleration and braking simultaneously, this constant contradiction in your existence, you are diseased.Either fall back, be an animal…which is impossible. Then you will be whole and healthy. This is a strange fact: animals are not ill in their natural state, but put them in a zoo and they begin to imitate human diseases. No animal is homosexual in its natural surrounding and state. Put animals into a zoo and they begin to behave absurdly – they begin to behave homosexually. No animal goes insane naturally, but in a zoo animals go mad.It has never been reported in the whole history of human understanding that any animal ever committed suicide, but in a zoo animals commit suicide. This is strange, but not strange really, because the moment man begins to force animals into a life which is not natural, they become divided inside. A division is created, a gap is created, the wholeness is lost.And man is divided. Man is born divided. So what to do? How not to create this gap and how to bring awareness to every cell of the body, to every nook and corner of your being? How to bring awareness? That’s the only problem for all religions, for all yoga, and for all systems of enlightenment: how to bring consciousness to your total being so that nothing is unconscious.Many methods have been tried, many methods are possible, so I will talk about some methods for how even the very cells of your body can become aware. And unless you as a total being become aware, you cannot be in bliss, you cannot be at peace. You will continue to be a madhouse.Each cell of your body affects you. It has its own working, it has its own learning, its own conditioning. The moment you start, the cell takes over and begins to behave in its own way. Then you are disturbed: “What is happening? I never intended this. I never thought about this.” And you are right! Your desires may have been completely different. But once you give your cells, your body, something to do, it is going to do it in its own way, in its own learned way. Because of this, scientists, particularly Russian scientists, think that we cannot change man unless we change the cells.There is a school, a behavioristic school of psychologists, which thinks that Buddha is a failure, that Jesus is a failure: “They are bound to be failures. There is nothing strange in it, because without changing the very structure of the body, the chemical structure of the body, nothing can be changed.”These behaviorists – Watson, Pavlov, Skinner – they say, “If Buddha is silent, it only means that somehow he has a different chemical constitution and nothing else. If he is silent, if peace surrounds him, if he is never disturbed, never angry, it only shows that somehow the chemicals are lacking which create disturbance, which create anger.”So Skinner says, “Sooner or later we will be able to create buddhas chemically. There is no need of any meditation, there is no need of becoming more aware. The only need is to change chemicals.”And in a way he is right, but very dangerously right, because if certain chemicals are put out of your body, your behavior will change. If certain hormones are introduced into your body, your behavior will change. You are a man and you behave like a man. It is not you who behave like a man, it is only the hormones in you which behave like a man. If those hormones are changed and other hormones are introduced which belong to the feminine structure, you will behave like a woman. So really it is not your behavior, it is hormonal behavior. It is not you who are angry, but a certain hormone in you. It is not that you are silent and meditative, it is a certain hormone in you.Skinner says, “That’s why Buddha is a failure, because he goes on talking about things which are irrelevant. You say to a man, ‘Don’t be angry,’ and he is filled with chemicals, hormones, which create anger.” So for a behaviorist, “It is just like a person has a high fever, a hundred-and-six-degree fever, and you go on saying beautiful things to him. You say, ‘Be silent, meditate. Don’t get feverish.’ It looks absurd. What can the man do? Unless you change something in his body, the fever will remain. Fever is created by a certain virus, certain chemical things. Unless that is changed, unless the proportion is changed, he will remain feverish. And there is no need to talk…it is absolutely absurd!”It is the same with anger for Skinner, for Pavlov; the same is with sex. “You go on talking about brahmacharya, celibacy, et cetera, and the body is filled with sex energy, sex cells. That sex energy is not dependent on you; rather, you are dependent on that energy. So go on talking about brahmacharya – nothing is possible with these talks.”And they are right in a way, but still only in a way. They are right: if the chemicals are changed, if every sex hormone is thrown out of your body, you will not be able to be sexual. But you will not become a buddha. You will be simply impotent – simply impotent, incapable. You will lack something.Buddha is not lacking something. Rather, on the contrary, something new has come to his life. It is not that he has no sex hormones – they are there. So what has happened to him? His consciousness has deepened, and the consciousness has entered even the sex cells. Now the sex cells are there, but they cannot behave independently. Unless the center orders them to act, they cannot act. They will remain inactive.In an impotent person sex cells are not there. In a buddha they are there, and more strong than an ordinary person’s – stronger because never used, unused. Energy is accumulated in them, bubbling with energy, but consciousness has penetrated into the cells. Now the consciousness is not only a starting point but it has become the master.Skinner may prevail in the coming days. He may become a very great force. Just like Marx suddenly became a great force for the outer economy of society, just like Marx, any day Pavlov and Skinner can become a very central force for the inner economy of the human body and the human mind. And they can prove it: whatsoever they say they can prove. But the phenomenon has two aspects.You see an electric bulb. If you destroy the bulb, the light will disappear – not that the electricity has disappeared. You put off the current, the bulb is there, intact, but the light will disappear. So the light can disappear in two ways. Destroy the bulb: electricity will be there, but because there is no medium to express it, it cannot become light. If your sex cells are destroyed, sexuality will be in you but with no medium to express. This is one way.Skinner has experimented with many animals. Just by operating on a particular gland, a ferocious dog becomes buddhalike. He sits silently, as if in meditation. You cannot tempt him to be ferocious again. Whatsoever you do, he will look at you without any anger – not that the dog has become a buddha, not that the inner mind has disappeared. It is there the same, but the medium is absent through which the anger can be expressed. This is impotency. The medium has disappeared, not the desire. But if the medium is destroyed, when the bulb is not, you can say, “Where is your light and where is your electricity?” It is there, now hidden.Religions have been working from the other corner…not to destroy the bulb. That is stupid, because if you destroy the bulb then you will not even be aware of the current running behind. Change the current, transform the current, let the current move in a new dimension, and the bulb will be there intact, alive, but with no light.Skinner, I say, can prevail, because he shows a very easy way. You are angry? You can be operated upon. You feel sexual? You can be operated upon. Your problems will be solved, but not by you – by a surgeon, by someone else. And whenever a problem is solved by someone else, you have missed a very great opportunity, because when you solve it you grow. When someone else solves it, you remain the same. The problem can be solved through the body; there will be no problems, but you will also no longer be a human being.The religious emphasis is on transformation of the consciousness. And the first thing is to create a greater force of awareness inside so that that awareness can spread.This sutra is beautiful. It says:To be established in the sun of awareness is the only lamp.The sun is very, very far away. The light takes ten minutes to travel to the earth, and the light travels very fast – 186,000 miles per second. It takes ten minutes for the sun to reach the earth; it is very, very far. But in the morning the sun rises, and it reaches even to the flower in your garden. The word reach has a different meaning; just the rays reach, not the sun.So if your energy becomes a sun deep inside at the center, a solar center, if you become aware, centrally aware, and if your awareness grows, then your rays of awareness reach to every part of the body, to every cell. Then your awareness penetrates every cell of the body.It is just like when the sun rises in the morning and everything begins to be alive on the earth, suddenly. Suddenly there is life. Sleep disappears, the monotonous night disappears. Suddenly everything begins to be reborn. The birds begin to sing and they are again on the wing, and the flowers flower, and everything is alive again. Just the touch, just the warmth!So when you have a central consciousness, awareness in you, it begins to reach to every pore, nook and corner; to every cell it penetrates. And you have many, many cells – sixty trillion cells in your body. You are a big city, a big nation. Sixty trillion cells, and now they are all unconscious. Your consciousness has never reached them. Grow in this consciousness and every cell is penetrated. And the moment your consciousness touches a cell, it is different. The very quality changes.A man is asleep. The sun rises, and the man is awakened. Is he the same man who was asleep? Are sleep and awakening the same? There was a bud, closed, dead, and the sun has risen, and the bud opens and becomes a flower. Is this flower the same? Something new has penetrated. The aliveness, the capacity to grow and blossom, has appeared. The bird was just asleep, as if dead, as if just dead matter. Now the sun has come up and the bird is on the wing. Is it the same bird? It is a different phenomenon. Something has touched…and the bird has become alive. Everything was silent, and now everything is singing. The morning is a song.The same phenomenon happens inside the cells of a buddha body. It is known as buddhakaya, the body of the buddha. It is a different body. It is not the same body as you have, not even the same body as Gautama had before he became Buddha.Buddha is just on the verge of death and someone asks him, “Are you dying? Then where will you be?”Buddha says, “The body that was born will die. But there is another body – buddhakaya, the body of the buddha – which is neither born nor can die. But I have left that body that was given to me, that came to me from my parents. I have left it long ago. Just as a snake leaves the old body every year, I have left it. This is a buddhakaya, a buddha body.”What does this mean? Your body can become a buddha body. When your consciousness reaches to every cell, the very quality of your being changes, is transmuted, because then every cell is alive, conscious, enlightened. And now there is no slavery. You have become the master. Just by becoming a conscious center, you become a master.This sutra says: To be established in the sun of awareness is the only lamp. So why are you taking this earthen lamp to the temple? Take the inner lamp. Why are you burning these candles on the altar? They will not help. Kindle the inner candle, become a buddha body – let your every cell become conscious. Don’t allow any part of your being to remain unconscious.Buddhists have preserved some bones of Buddha. People think that they are just superstitious. They are not, because they are not ordinary bones. They are not. The cells, the particles, the electrons of those bones, have known something which happens rarely. In Kashmir, in a mosque, one hair of Mohammed is preserved. That is no ordinary hair. It is not just superstitious – that hair has known something.Just try to understand it in this way: a flower which has never known any sunrise, and a flower which has known, encountered the sun, are not the same, cannot be the same. The flower that has never known a sunrise has never known a life arise in it, because it arises with the sun arising. That flower is just dead – a potentiality. It has never known its own spirit. A flower which has seen the sun rise has also seen something rise in itself. It has known a soul. Now the flower is not just a flower, it has known a deep stirring inside. Something has stirred, something has become alive in it.So the hair of Mohammed is a different thing; a different quality it has. It has known a man, it has been with a man who was an inner sun, an inner light. This hair has taken a deep bath in something mysterious, which rarely happens.To be established in this inner light is the only lamp worth taking to the altar of the deity. Nothing else will do. How to create this center of awareness? I will discuss one or two or three methods. Because I was talking of Buddha and buddhakaya, it will be good to start with Buddha. He invented a method, one of the most wonderful methods, most powerful methods, to create an inner fire, an inner sun of awareness. And not only to create it, but the method is such that simultaneously that inner light begins to penetrate to the very cells of the body, to your whole being.Buddha used breathing as the method: breathing with awareness. The method is known as anapansati yoga, the yoga of incoming and outgoing breath awareness. You are breathing, but it is an unconscious thing. And breath is prana, breath is the Bergsonian élan vital, the vitality, the very vitality, the very life – and it is unconscious. You are not aware of it. If you need to be aware of it, you may drop dead any moment because then it will be very difficult to breathe.I have heard about certain fish which cannot sleep for more than six minutes, because if they sleep more they die – they forget to breathe. If their sleep is deepened, they forget to breathe, so they die. Those particular fish cannot sleep for more than six minutes. They have to live in a group, always in a group. Some fish is sleeping, other fish have to be constantly alert not to allow that fish to go more into sleep. When the time is over, they will disturb the sleep; otherwise the fish will just go dead. She will not come back again.This is a scientific observation. It will be a problem with you also if you have to remember it, if you have to do breathing. Then you will have to remember constantly to do it, and you cannot remember anything even for a single moment. One moment missed and you are no more! So breathing is unconscious; it doesn’t depend on you. Even if you are in a coma for months together, you will go on breathing.Really, just by the way, I would like to tell you those fish are rare. And some day science may come to know that they have a certain deep awareness which even man lacks, because to breathe consciously is a very difficult thing. Those fish may have attained a certain awareness which is not with us.Buddha used this breath as the vehicle to do two things simultaneously: one, to create consciousness; and the other, to allow that consciousness to penetrate to the very cells of the body. He said, “Breathe consciously.” It is not a pranayama; it is just making breath an object of awareness – with no change, no need to change your breath. Just as it is, natural, let it be as it is. Don’t change it. Do something else: when you breathe in, breathe consciously. Let your consciousness move with the breath going in. When the breath goes out, move out. Go in, come out…consciously, move with the breath. Let your attention be with the breath, flowing with it. Don’t forget even a single breath.Buddha is reported to have said that if you can be aware of your breath even for a single hour, you are already enlightened. But not a single breath should be missed. One hour is enough. It looks so small, a fragment of time. It is not. When you try awareness, one hour will look like millennia, because you cannot be aware, ordinarily, for more than five or six seconds, and that too a very alert man. Otherwise, every second you will miss. You will start: breath is going in, and breath has gone in, and you have gone somewhere else. Suddenly you remember again: the breath is going out, the breath has gone out, you have moved somewhere else.To move with the breath means no thought should be allowed, because thought will take your attention, thought will distract you. So Buddha never says to stop thinking. He says, “Just breathe consciously.” Automatically, thinking will stop. You cannot do both, think and breathe, consciously.A thought comes to your mind, your attention is withdrawn. A single thought and you become unconscious of your breathing process. So Buddha used a very simple technique and very vital. He would say to his bhikkhus, “Do whatsoever you are doing, but don’t forget a simple thing: remember the incoming, outgoing breath. Move with it, flow with it.”The more you try, the more you endeavor, the more you can be conscious. It will increase by seconds and seconds. It is arduous, a difficult thing, but once you can feel it you are a different man, a different being in a different world.This works in a double way: when you consciously breathe in and out, you come to your center, by and by, because your breath touches the center of your being. Every moment…the breath goes in, it touches your center of being.Physiologically, you think that breath is just for the purification of the blood, so it is just a function of your heart. It is – bodily it is a function of your heart, just a pumping system to refresh your blood circulation, to give to your blood more oxygen which is needed, and to throw out carbon dioxide which is excreta, used stuff, to throw it out, and renew it and replace it. But this is only physiologically.If you begin to be aware of your breath, by and by you will go deep – deeper than your heart. And one day you begin to feel a center just near your navel. That center can only be felt if you move with the breath, continuously, because the nearer you reach to the center, the more you will lose consciousness. You can start when the breath is going in, just touching your nose, you can start being very alert. The further inward it moves, the more and more difficult consciousness will become. And a thought will come or some sound, or something will happen, and you will move.If you can go to the very center, where for a subtle moment breath stops, there is a gap. The breath goes in, the breath goes out: between these two there is a subtle gap. That gap is your center. When you move with the breath, then only, after a very long effort, you will become aware of the gap – when there is no movement of the breath, breath is neither coming nor going. Between two breaths there is a subtle gap, an interval. In that interval you are at the center.So breath is used by Buddha as a passage to come nearer and nearer and nearer to the center. When you move out, be conscious of the breath. Again there is a gap. There are two gaps: one gap inside, one gap outside. The breath goes in and goes out…there is a gap. The breath goes out and goes in…there is a gap. The second gap is even more difficult to be aware of.Look at this process. Your center is between the incoming breath and outgoing breath. There is another center, the cosmic center; you may call it godliness. When the breath goes out and comes in, there is again a gap. In that gap is the cosmic center. These two centers are not two different things, but first you will become aware of your inner center and then you will become aware of an outer center. And then ultimately you will become aware that both these centers are one. Then out and in lose meaning.Buddha says move with the breath consciously and you will create a center of awareness. And once the center is created, awareness begins to move with the breath into your blood, to the very cells, because every cell needs air and every cell needs oxygen and every cell, so to speak, breathes – every cell! And now the scientists say that it even seems that the earth breathes. And because of the Einsteinian concept of an expanding universe, now theoretical scientists say that it seems that the whole universe is breathing.When you breathe in, your chest expands. When you breathe out, your chest shrinks. Now theoretical scientists say it seems that the whole universe breathes. When the whole universe is breathing in, it expands. When the whole universe breathes out, it shrinks. In the old Hindu puranas it is said that creation is Brahma’s one breath, the incoming breath; and destruction, pralaya, the end of the world, is the outgoing breath. One breath, one creation.In a very miniature way, in a very atomic way, the same is happening in you. When your awareness becomes so one with breathing, your breathing takes your awareness to the very cells. Rays now penetrate and the whole body becomes a buddha body. Really, then you have no material body at all. You have a body of awareness.This is what is meant by this sutra: …be established in the sun of awareness – this is the only lamp.Just like Buddha’s method, it will be good to understand another method, one method more. Tantra has used sex. That is again another very vital force. If you want to go deep, you have to use very vital forces, the deepest in you. Tantra uses sex. When you are in a sex act, you are very near to the center of creation, to the very source of life. If you can go into a sex act consciously, it becomes meditation.It is very difficult, more difficult than breath. You can breathe consciously in a small measure, of course, but you can. But the very phenomenon of sex requires your unconsciousness. If you become conscious, you will lose sexual desire and lust. If you become conscious, there will be no sex desire inside. So Tantra has done the most difficult thing in the world. In the history of experiments with consciousness, Tantra goes the deepest.Of course, one can deceive oneself. And with Tantra deception is very easy, because no one other than you knows what the fact is, and no one else can know. But only one in a hundred can succeed in a tantric method of awareness, because sex means unconsciousness. So a tantrica, a tantric disciple, has to work, just like with breathing, he has to work with sex, sex desire. He has to be conscious of it; actually going into the sex act, he has to be conscious.Your very body, the sex energy, comes to a peak to explode. The tantric sadhak comes to this peak consciously, and there is a method to judge. If sex release happens automatically and you are not the master, then you are not conscious of it. Then the unconscious has taken over. Sex comes to a peak, and then you cannot do anything but release. That release is not done by you. You can start a sexual process, but you never end it. The end is always taken over by the unconscious.If you can retain the peak, and if it becomes your conscious act to release it or not to release it, if you can come back from the peak without release, or if you can maintain that peak for hours together – if it is your conscious act, then you are the master. And if someone can come to a sexual peak, just on the verge of orgasm, and can retain it and be conscious of it, suddenly he becomes aware of the deepest center inside, suddenly. And it is not only that he is aware of the deepest center inside of himself, he is also aware of the center of his partner, the deepest center.That’s why a tantra practitioner, if he is a man, will always worship the partner. The partner is not just a sex object. She is divine, she is a goddess. And the act is not carnal at all. If you can go into it consciously, it is the deepest spiritual act possible. But the deepest is bound to be virtually impossible.So either breath or sex.Mahavira has used hunger. That again is a very deep thing. Hunger is not just hunger for your taste or for something else – it is for your very survival. Mahavira used hunger, fasting, as a method of awareness. It is not austerity. Mahavira was not an ascetic. People have misunderstood him completely. He was not an ascetic at all. No wise man ever is. But he was using fasting, hunger, as a vehicle to awareness.You might have stumbled upon the fact that when your stomach is full, you begin to feel sleepy, you begin to feel unconscious. You want to go to sleep. When you are hungry, fasting, you cannot sleep. Even in the night you will turn this way and that; you cannot sleep. On a fast, why can’t you sleep? Because it is dangerous to life. Now, sleep is a secondary need. First need is food – get food! That’s the first need. Sleep is not a problem now.But Mahavira used it in a very, very scientific way – because you cannot fall asleep when you are fasting, you can remember things more easily, consciousness comes to you more easily. And Mahavira used this very hunger as an object of consciousness. He would stand continuously. You might have seen Buddha’s statue sitting; Mahavira’s statues are, more or less, all standing. He was always standing. You can feel your hunger more when you are standing. If you are sitting you will feel it less; if you lie down you will feel it even less.When you are standing, the whole body begins to be hungry. You feel the hunger all over the body. The whole body flows, it becomes one river of hunger. From head to foot you are hungry. It is not only the belly that feels it; the whole body feels hunger. And Mahavira would stand silently watching, moving with hunger – just like moving with breath, moving with hunger. It is reported that in his twelve-year period of silence, he fasted, now and then, more or less, for eleven years. Only for three hundred and sixty days in twelve years did he take food. Hunger was the method.Now, food and sex are the deepest things, just like breath is. When you go on, go on, go on being conscious of your hunger, doing nothing, just being conscious, suddenly you are thrown to your center, to your being. Because first hunger moves from the surface. If you don’t feed the surface, then deeper layers become hungry. If you don’t feed the deeper layers, then still deeper layers become hungry. And it goes on and on and on. Ultimately, the whole body begins to be hungry. When the whole body is hungry, you are thrown to the center.So when you feel hunger, that is a false hunger. Really, that is more or less a habit, not hunger. If you take your lunch at a particular time, at one o’clock, then at one o’clock you begin to feel hunger. This is a false hunger, not connected with the body at all. If you don’t take food at one o’clock, at two o’clock you will feel that the hunger has disappeared. If it was natural, it would have grown more. Why should it disappear? If it was real, then you would feel it more at two and more at three and more at four. But it has disappeared. It was just a habit, a very superficial thing.If you fast for three weeks, then only a well-fed man can come to a real hunger. Then for the first time you will know what real hunger is. Just now, you can never feel that hunger is as forceful as sex. It is more forceful – but real hunger. So it happens if you are on a fast that your sex desire will die, because now a more foundational thing is at stake.Food is for your survival, sex is for the survival of your race. It is a distant phenomenon, not related with you. Sex is food for the race, not for you. You will die, but through sex humanity can live. So it is not really your problem; it is a racial problem. You can even give it up, but you cannot give up food, because that is your problem, it is concerned with you. So if you go on a fast, by and by sex will disappear; it will become more and more distant.Because of this, many people are just befooling themselves. They think that if they take less food, they have become celibate, brahmacharins. They have not. The problem has only been shifted. Give them proper food and the sex desire will come back – more forcibly, more fresh, more young.If you fast even further than three weeks, then your whole body hungers. Each cell, every cell of your body, begins to feel the hunger. Then for the first time not only is your stomach hungry, your whole body is hungry. You are surrounded by a deep fire of hunger. Mahavira used this as a method to be aware; so he would be hungry, fasting, and be aware.A man can live without food for three months, a healthy man, of course. A normally healthy man can live for three months without food – for three months! If you go on fasting for three months, then suddenly one day you will be just on the verge of death. This is a conscious encounter with death. And that encounter comes only when you are on the verge of leaving your body and jumping to your center inside. Now the whole body is exhausted. It cannot continue. You are thrown back to your source. You cannot live in the body. By and by, you have been thrown by the body inside, inside, inside.Food takes you outside, fasting takes you inside. A moment comes when the body cannot carry you any further – you are thrown to your center. In that moment the inner sun is released.So Mahavira would fast for three months, even for four months. He was extraordinarily healthy. And then, suddenly, he would go into the village to beg for food. It has been so far a secret why suddenly, after three or four months, he would go into the village to beg for food. Really, whenever he came to the verge where even a single moment could prove fatal, only then would he go to beg for food. He would again enter the body, and then again he would fast, again go to the center, enter the body, go to the center….Now you can feel the process: just breath coming in, going out; life coming into the body, life going out of the body, life coming into the body, life going out of the body. And Mahavira would be aware of this process. He would take food, he would be back in the body, so to speak, and then he would fast again. This he was doing continuously for twelve years. This was an inner process.So I discussed three things: breath, sex, hunger – very primary, very basic, foundational things. Be conscious of any one of them. Breath is the easiest. It will be difficult to use a tantra method. The mind would like to use it, but it will be difficult. It will be difficult to use the hunger method, the mind will not like it. These two are very difficult. Whether you like them or not, they are difficult. Only the breath process is simple.And for the coming age, I think Buddha’s method will be very helpful. It is moderate, easy, not very dangerous. That’s why Buddha is known always as the originator of the middle path, majjhimnikaya, the golden mean. Sex and food, between these two, breath is the golden mean, the exact middle – the exact middle.And with any method – there are many more – any method, you are established into the inner light. And once established, your light begins to flow to your body cells. Then your whole mechanism is refreshed: you have a buddha body, an enlightened body.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-04/

Osho,Man's partial consciousness is a stage in the grand evolution of life. What could be the significance of his volitional efforts in its growth?Please also explain the role that the buddhas, the enlightened ones, play in the expansion of human consciousness.Evolution is unconscious. No volition is needed, no conscious effort. It is just natural. But once consciousness evolves, then it is a totally different matter. Once the consciousness is there, evolution stops. Evolution is only up to consciousness; the work of evolution is to create consciousness. Once consciousness is there, evolution stops. Then the whole responsibility falls upon consciousness itself. So this has to be understood in many ways.Man is not evolving now. Since long, man has not been evolving. Evolution has stopped as far as man is concerned. The body has come to its peak; now the human body has not evolved since long. The most ancient bones and the most ancient human bodies that have been found are not basically different from our bodies; there is no basic difference. A human body which is one hundred thousand years old, if it can be revived and trained, it will be just like you. There will be no difference at all.The human body has stopped evolving. When did it stop? When consciousness comes in, evolution’s work is over. Now it is up to you to evolve. So man is static, not evolving, unless man himself endeavors. Now, beyond man, everything will be conscious. Below man everything is unconscious. With man a new factor has entered – the factor of awareness, the factor of consciousness. With this factor, evolution’s work is over. Evolution is to create a situation in which consciousness evolves. Once consciousness enters in, now the whole responsibility is on consciousness. So man will not evolve now; naturally, there will be no evolution.Consciousness is the peak of evolution, the last step, but it is not the last step of life. Consciousness is the last step of evolution, of all animal heritage. It is the last step, the climax, the peak. But for further growth, it is to be the first step. And when I say evolution has stopped, I mean that now an inner effort is needed: unless you do something, you will not evolve. Nature has brought you to a point which is the last for unconscious growth. Now you are aware, now you know. When you know, you are responsible.A child is not responsible for his acts, but an adult is. A madman is not responsible for his acts, but a sane man is. If you are under an alcoholic intoxicant, if you are not behaving consciously, you are not responsible. With consciousness, with the faculty of knowing there, you become responsible for yourself.Sartre has said somewhere that responsibility is the only human burden. No animal is responsible. Evolution is responsible for all that an animal is. The animal is not responsible for anything. Man is responsible. So whatsoever you do now will be your responsibility. If you create a hell and go down, it is up to you. If you evolve, grow and create a blissful state of being, it is up to you.Existentialists make a very fine distinction, and a beautiful one, and meaningful also. They say for animals essence is first and existence is a later growth. This is difficult to understand, but try. They say for animals, for trees, essence is first and existence follows. There is a seed: the seed is, in essence, the tree. The essence is there, the existence will just follow. The essential thing is there; it just has to be manifested, expressed. The tree will follow. The tree is not going to be a new thing; in a way it was already there. So, really, the seed has no freedom – the tree exists in it. And the tree is also without freedom – it is destined by the seed. This is what is meant: essence is first, below man, and then existence follows.With man, the whole thing is just the opposite: existence comes first and then essence follows. You are born with no fixed future, you will have to create it. You are born, so you have an existence, simple existence, with no essence. Now you will create the essence. So man creates himself. A tree is created by nature, man creates himself.Man is simply born as an existence, with no essence. Then whatsoever you do will make your essence; your acts will create you. And the freedom is multidimensional. A man can become anything, or he may not become anything. He may remain just an existence without any essence; he may just remain simply a body without any soul. The soul is, in a way, to be created.Gurdjieff used to say that you have no souls, you are without souls. Unless you create it, how can you have it? It looks contradictory to all the teachings of religions – it is not. When religions say that everyone has a soul, it only means that everyone can have a soul. That’s a possibility. You can grow to be a soul. If you already have a soul, then there is no distinction between a seed and you. And if you are growing like a seed into a tree, if you are growing just like a seed into a man, then there is no difference between man and all that exists below man.Man is a freedom – freedom to be. He can be many things, he can be anything. And it may be that he remains just a possibility without being anything. That creates a dizziness and that creates fear.Kierkegaard has given a concept of dread. He says that man lives in dread. What is that dread, the fear? This is the fear: you are simply a possibility, nothing else. You have only existence, no essence. You can create it, you may miss it. The responsibility is yours.This is a very dreadful state. Nothing is certain, man is insecure. Every moment many directions open, and you have to move in some way, somewhere, without knowing where you are moving, without knowing what the result will be, without knowing what you will be tomorrow.Your tomorrow will not come automatically out from your today. The tomorrow of a seed will come automatically from its today. The death of an animal will be the automatic result of his life – not so with you. That’s the difference. Your death will be your achievement: you will be responsible for it. And that’s why every man dies in a specific way. No man’s death is similar to anyone else’s. It cannot be.Dog A, Dog B, Dog C, they all die in one way. Their death is just part of their life. They are not responsible for their life, they are not responsible for their death. So when someone says that he will die a dog’s death, it means that he will die without being evolved, without being an essence. He will die just a possibility. Two dogs die similarly – never two men. They cannot die similarly. And if they do die similarly, that means they have missed the opportunity to evolve.With consciousness entering, you are responsible for everything, no matter what. This is a great burden and a deep anguish and it creates fear. You are just over an abyss. This is what I mean when I say: man now needs a conscious effort. To be man means entering a field of conscious evolution. Millions and millions of years have created you, but now nature will not help. This is the peak for natural growth. Now nature cannot do anything for you. It has done already all it can.Because of this, there is bound to be a deep inner tension. Every moment man is in a tension. It is natural, and it is good. Don’t try to forget it. Use it. You can try to forget it, then you miss the opportunity. So any effort to forget your tense state of mind is erroneous, dangerous. You are falling back. Use this inner tension to grow, to move further. Now you cannot move further in the body. The body has come to a dead end, a cul-de-sac. There is no further movement.The body moves in a horizontal way. It is just like this: an airplane is running on the earth, on the ground, on its track, to take off. There is a moment when the horizontal running will stop. It will have to run for a mile or two or three miles, just to gather momentum. Then a moment comes when no horizontal running is of any use. And if an airplane goes on running on the ground, it is not an airplane; it is behaving like a car. When the momentum comes, the airplane leaves the ground and a vertical, upward movement takes place.This is what has happened with man. Evolution has been running, up to man, on the ground, so to speak, horizontally. Now man is the momentum. Now with man, an upward, vertical movement is the only movement. If you miss this point and if you think that “Because for so many million years we were just running on the ground, so we are to continue running on the ground,” you miss the whole thing. Because this whole running was just for this moment, so that you can take off.Animals are running toward man, trees are running toward animals, matter is running toward trees – everything on this earth is running toward man. For what can man run? Man is the central focus. Everything is growing toward man. Horizontally, for man there is no movement. And if you continue horizontally, then your life will not be really a human life. Your life will consist of many layers which are not human.Sometimes you may behave like an animal, if you go on horizontally, and sometimes you may just vegetate, and sometimes you may just be dead matter, but never a man. So look deep down inside your life. It has not taken the vertical thrust. Then what are you doing? Think about every act, and then you can know that this act belongs to the animal world, that act belongs to the vegetable kingdom…. Consider your activity, your life, and then you will know. Something is just like dead matter, something is just like a vegetable growing, something is just like animals. Where is the man?With the upward thrust, man comes into existence – and that is up to you. Conscious evolution is now going to be the only evolution. That’s why religion will become more and more significant every day. Every day, every moment, religion will become more and more significant, because now scientists feel that there seems to be no movement.Of course, horizontally there is no movement. You cannot progress any further; everything has stopped. So science goes on just adding to your senses. Your eyes have stopped, so now you can use instruments to see. Your brain has stopped, so now you can use computers. Your legs have stopped, so now you can use cars. Whatsoever science is giving is just additional instruments for a growth that has stopped. Man is not growing, only new instruments are growing.Every instrument, of course, increases your power, but you don’t grow through it. Rather, on the contrary, cars have added much in speed, but they have destroyed your legs. This is unfortunate, but this is going to happen. If computers replace man’s mind – and they will replace it because man’s mind is not so efficient as a computer can be – if computers replace man’s mind they will do much, but ultimately they will destroy your mind, because whatsoever is not used is destroyed.So science feels now that whatsoever is being done is just giving a false notion of evolution. If we go back to the past, the highest speed was horse-speed, twenty-five miles per hour. Now we have come to two thousand miles per hour speed. Speed has evolved from twenty-five miles per hour to two thousand miles per hour. Not man, but speed has evolved. Not man – man remains the same. Rather, on the contrary, he has regressed, because a man riding a horse is a stronger man than a man flying in an aircraft. Speed has progressed, evolved, and man has regressed.A certain group of scientists thinks that man is regressing, not evolving. It may be so, because in life you can never be static. If you are not evolving, you will regress. There is no static moment in life; you cannot remain at one point. You cannot say, “If I am not growing, then I will remain whatsoever I am. I will maintain the status quo.” You cannot maintain it. Either you go further or you fall back down.A certain group of scientists thinks that man is, day by day, regressing, that there is an infantilization. Man is behaving more like children than like adult men everywhere on the earth. If we look, many things become clear and obvious. One thing: it was always the old man, the evolved man, who was predominant in society, but our society is the only society in the world where children have become predominant. They dominate everything – every trend, every fashion, everything! They are the models. Whatsoever they do becomes religion, whatsoever they do becomes politics, whatsoever they do sets a trend all over the world.If we go back, a thirty-year-old person was behaving in a mature way. Now that’s not the case. Even a thirty-year-old person is behaving in infantile ways, juvenile – the same tantrums, the same childish attitudes. What is a childish attitude? A child thinks that he is the center of the world and his every wish is to be fulfilled immediately. It is fulfilled! When he is hungry milk is given, when he weeps everyone pays attention. The whole family is centered around him.Children become dictators. They know how to dictate to the whole family. A very small child dictates to the whole family. The father persuades him, the mother bribes him. Even if guests come in the home, he dictates everything. A child thinks he is the center of the world: he is to be supported, helped, by everyone, without any cost. He is not to give love, he is only to demand. Of course, we cannot expect from a child that he should love. He demands, and demands everything. And if a demand is not fulfilled he gets violent, angry. Then he is against the whole world; he will smash things.Now this has happened with everyone. This is always so with children, but this is now with everyone. Our so-called revolutions are nothing but childish efforts. Our so-called rebellions are nothing but everyone thinking himself to be at the center and his every desire should be fulfilled immediately. And if you are not going to fulfill them, he is going to destroy the whole world.Student revolts in the universities all over the world, they just show immature, juvenile minds. What does it mean, students throwing stones at the university windows, setting fire to the buildings, destroying? What does it mean? They have no sense of maturity at all. And if you begin to think about it, then not only students, children, boys and girls: if you look at our modern man, even a father, a mother, they are just behaving childishly. If you look at our politicians, they are just behaving childishly, with no maturity at all.What has happened? Really, man’s growth has stopped; evolutionary growth has stopped. And now we have taken just a substitute for this growth: scientific accumulation. Man has stopped, things grow. Your house goes on becoming bigger and bigger, and you remain the same. Your wealth grows, and because of this growth you feel that you are growing. Your knowledge grows, your information grows, and because of that you think you are growing.Of course, obviously, a Buddha knows less than you, but that doesn’t mean that you are more grown-up. A Jesus knows less than you, he knows less than any Catholic priest, because he was never trained, never educated: just a carpenter’s son, uneducated, with no information of the world. But, still, you are not more evolved than him. A Mohammed is just illiterate, a Kabir just a nobody, but they are more evolved. But then that evolution is something else: evolution of consciousness, not of things.You can substitute having for being. Being is a different dimension of growth, vertical; having is horizontal. Things go on and on, and you have so many things, so much information, so much knowledge, so much wealth, so many degrees, so many honors…everything. But this is accumulation, horizontal. There is no upward thrust. You remain the same. But you cannot really remain the same, because if you are not growing you begin to behave childishly, you regress. This is one of the greatest problems humanity is encountering today.Science can give you only things. It can give you moons and planets, and it can give you the whole universe. Religion can give you only one thing: an upward movement, a vertical growth, a conscious methodology to grow into being. It is not important what you have; it is totally irrelevant for your growth. The only significant thing is what you are. And this growth for being is a responsibility because it is a freedom. You are not forced by evolutionary forces to grow now – you are at liberty.Evolution is not goading you. It is goading animals, it is goading trees, it is goading everything except man. Evolution is pushing hard so that you may grow, but with man the thing is finished. Now you have become conscious, so do whatsoever – whatsoever you want to do.Sartre says man is condemned to be free – condemned to be free! The whole of nature is at ease because there is no freedom. Freedom is a great burden. That’s why we don’t even like freedom. Howsoever we may talk about it, no one likes freedom. Everyone fears freedom. Freedom is a dangerous thing. In nature there is no freedom; that’s why there is so much silence. You can never say to a dog, “You are an imperfect dog.” Every dog is perfect. You can say to a man, “You are not a perfect man.” It is meaningful. But to say to a dog, “You are not a perfect dog,” is absurd. Every dog is perfect – because a dog is not free to be. He is goaded by evolution. He is made, he is not a self-creator.A rose is a rose. Howsoever beautiful, it is not free, it is just a slave. Look at a rose: beautiful, but just a slave, goaded. There is no freedom to flower or not to flower. There is no problem, there is no choice: a flower is to flower. The flower cannot say, “I don’t like flowering,” or, “I refuse.” It has no say, no freedom. That’s why nature is so silent, a slave. It cannot err, it cannot go wrong. And if you cannot go wrong, if you are always right, and if your “right” is not in your hands, then it is just goaded by eternal forces.Nature is a deep slavery. With man, for the first time, freedom enters. Man is free to be or not to be. Then there is anguish, fear, whether “I may be capable…” whether “I may be or may not be. What is going to happen?” There is a deep trembling. Every moment is a suspended moment. Nothing is fixed and certain, nothing is predictable with man. Everything is unpredictable.We talk about freedom, but no one likes freedom. So we go on talking about freedom, and creating slavery. We talk about freedom and then create a new slavery. Our every freedom is just a change of slavery. We go on changing from one slavery to another, from one bondage to another. No one likes freedom because freedom creates fear. Then you have to decide and choose. We ask, we want that someone should tell us what to do – the society, the guru, the scripture, the tradition, the parents. Someone should say what to do, someone should show the path, then we can follow. But we cannot move by ourselves. There is freedom and there is fear.That’s why there are so many religions. So many religions – they are not because of Jesus and Buddha and Krishna, they are because of a deep-rooted fear of freedom. You cannot be just a man. You have to be a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian. Just by being a Christian you lose your freedom, by being a Hindu you are no longer a man, because now you say, “I will follow a tradition. I will not move in the uncharted, in the unknown. I will move on a well-trodden path. I will move behind someone. I will not move alone.”“I am a Hindu” means “I will move in a crowd, I will not move as an individual, because if I move as an individual, alone, there is freedom. Every moment I have to decide, every moment I have to give birth to myself, every moment I am creating my soul. And no one else will be responsible. Only I will be responsible, ultimately.”Nietzsche has said, “Now God is dead and man is totally free.” If God is really dead, then man is totally free. And man is not so afraid of God’s death; he is much more afraid of his freedom. If there is a God, then everything is okay with you. If there is no God, then you are left totally free – condemned to be free. Now do whatsoever you like and suffer the consequences, and no one else will be responsible.Erich Fromm has written a book, The Fear of Freedom. You fall in love and you begin to think of marriage. Love is a freedom, marriage is slavery. But it is difficult to find a person who falls in love and will not think of marriage, immediately. Because love is a freedom, there is fear. Marriage is a fixed thing; there is no fear. Marriage is an institution, dead. Love is an event, alive. It moves, it may change. Marriage never moves, it never changes.Because of this, marriage has a certainty, a security. Love has no certainty, no security. Love is insecure. Any moment it may disappear into the blue, as it has appeared from the blue. Any moment it may disappear. It is very unearthly; there are no roots in the earth. It is unpredictable. So, “Better get into marriage. Then roots are there. Now this marriage cannot evaporate into the blue. It is an institution.”Everywhere – just as in love – everywhere, when we find freedom, we transform it into a slavery. The sooner the better. Then we are at ease. So our every story ends with marriage: “They were married, and after that they were always happy.” No one is happy, but it is good to end the story there because then begins the hell. So every story ends with the most beautiful moment. And what is that moment? Freedom turning into slavery.And this is not only so with love but with everything. So marriage is an ugly thing; it is bound to be. Every institution is going to be ugly, because it is just a dead corpse of something which was alive. But with anything alive, uncertainty is bound to be there. Alive means it can move, it can change, it can be different. I love you; the next moment I may not love you. But if I am your husband or I am your wife you can be certain: the next moment also I will be your husband, your wife. It is an institution. Dead things are very permanent. Alive things are momentary, changing, in a flux.Man is afraid of freedom, and freedom is the only thing which makes you man. So we are suicidal, destroying our freedom, and with that destruction destroying our whole possibility of being. And then having is good, because having means accumulating dead things. You can go on accumulating; there is no end to it. And the more you accumulate, the more secured you are.When I say now man has to move consciously, I mean this: that you have to be aware of your freedom and also aware of your fear of freedom.How to use this freedom? Religion is nothing but an effort toward conscious evolution, an effort to use this freedom. Your volitional efforts are significant. Whatsoever you are doing nonvolitionally is just part of the past. Your future depends on your volitional acts. A very simple act done with awareness, volitionally, gives you a certain growth, even an ordinary act.If you go on a fast, not because you have no food – you have food, you can eat it; you have hunger, you can eat – you go on a fast because it is a volitional act, a conscious act. No animal can perform this. An animal will go on a fast, sometimes, when there is no hunger. An animal will have to fast when there is no food. But only man can fast when there is hunger and food both. This is a volitional act. You use your freedom. The hunger cannot goad you. The hunger cannot push you and the food cannot pull you.If there is no food, it is not a fast. If there is no hunger, it is naturopathy; it is not a fast. Hunger is there, food is there, and you are on a fast. This fasting is a volitional act, a conscious act. This will give you much awareness. You will feel a subtle freedom: freedom from food, freedom from hunger – really, deep down, freedom from the body, and still more deep down, freedom from nature. And as your freedom grows, your consciousness grows. As your consciousness grows, your freedom grows. They are interrelated. Be more free and you will be more conscious; be more conscious and you will be more free. They are interdependent.But we can deceive ourselves. A son, a daughter, can say, “I will rebel against my father so that I may be more free.” Hippies are doing that. But rebellion is not freedom, because it is just natural at a particular age to rebel against parents. It is not freedom, it is just natural. A child who is just coming out of the womb of his mother cannot say, “I am leaving the womb.” It is natural.When someone is sexually mature, it is a second birth. Now he must fight his parents, because only if he fights with his parents will he move further away from them. And unless he moves further away from them, he cannot create a new family nucleus. So every child will go against his parents. This is natural. And if a child is not going against his parents, it is a growth, because then he is fighting nature.For example, you get married. Your mother and your wife are going to be in a conflict, which is natural – which is natural, I say, because for the mother it is a great shock. You have moved to another woman. Up to now you were wholly and solely your mother’s. And it makes no difference, because deep down no one is a mother and no one is a wife. Deep down every female is a woman. Suddenly you have moved to another woman, the woman in your mother will suffer, will become jealous. Fight and conflict is natural. But if a mother can still love you, it is a growth. And if your mother can love you more than she ever loved you now that you have moved to a new woman, it is growth, it is conscious growth. She is going above natural instincts.When you are a child, you love your parents. That is natural – just a bargain. You are helpless and they are doing everything for you. You love them and you give them respect. When your parents have become old and they cannot do anything for you, if you still respect and love them, that is a growth. Anywhere that natural instinct is transcended, you grow. You have taken a volitional decision. Your being will grow and you will attain essence.The old Indian culture tried in every way to make life such that everything becomes a growth. It is natural for a small child to respect his father. It is unnatural when your father has become just old, dying. He cannot do anything for you, is just a burden to you, then to respect him is unnatural. No animal can do that; the natural bond has broken. Only man can do that. And if it is done, you grow. It is volitional.Any volitional act, simple or complex… I will tell you a story:In the Mahabharata, Bhishma’s father fell in love with a girl. He was very old, but even when you are old to fall in love is natural. Even on the deathbed you can fall in love. The girl was ready, but the girl’s father made a condition. He said, “You have your son, Bhishma” – Bhishma was young, just to be married – “and Bhishma will inherit your kingdom, so make it the condition to me that if any son is born from my daughter to you, he will inherit the kingdom, not Bhishma.”It was so unnatural for the father to tell Bhishma this, because he was an old man, he can die any day. But he was worried, he became sad, so Bhishma asked him, “What is the matter? Something is on your mind. What can I do, tell me?”So he fabricated a story. Old men are very efficient. He said, “Because you are the only son, only one to me, and no one can trust nature, if you die or something happens, then who will inherit my kingdom? So I have talked with wise men and they say, ‘It is better you marry again so that you can get another son.”So Bhishma said, “What is wrong in it? Marry.”Then the father said, “But there is a difficulty. I want to marry this girl, but this is the condition of her father that ‘Your son Bhishma should not inherit the kingdom – my daughter’s son should.’”So Bhishma said, “It is okay with me. I give you my promise.”Bhishma went to the man whose daughter was going to be married to his father. He said, “I promise you, I will not inherit the kingdom.”But that man was just a fisherman, very ordinary. He said. “I know, but how can you promise me? Your sons may create trouble. And we are just fishermen, very ordinary people. If your sons create trouble, we will not be able to do anything.”So Bhishma said, “I promise you I will never marry. Okay? Then the whole thing is finished.”This was very unnatural. A young man, and he never married. He never looked at a woman with any carnal desire. This became a growth. This created a subtle being, an integration, a crystallization. Then there was no need for any other sadhana. Only this fact was enough. He was crystallized. This promise was enough. He became a different man. He began to grow vertically. The natural, horizontal line stopped. With this promise, everything stopped. There was no biological possibility now. Everything natural became meaningless.And Bhishma is rare: with no spiritual practice, with no spiritual effort, other than this, he attained the highest peak possible.So any act, simple or complex, which you decide on your part – without any instinctive goading behind, without any natural force forcing you to decide – if it is your decision, through that decision you are created. Every decision is decisive for your birth. You grow in a different dimension.So use every act, very ordinary acts. You are sitting. Decide that “Now I will not move my body for ten minutes.” You will be surprised that the body was not moving before, but now the body forces you to move. You begin to feel many subtle movements in the body you were not even aware of. Now the body will revolt – millennia of past habit. The body will say, “I will move.” The body will begin to tremble and there will be subtle movements, and you will feel many temptations to move. The legs will go to sleep, they will go dead, and you will feel somewhere to scratch, and many things. And you were sitting without any movement previously, but now you cannot sit. But if you can sit, even for ten minutes without moving, you will not need any other meditation.In Japan they call “just sitting” the only meditation. Their word for it is zazen. Zazen means just sitting. But then sit. Then don’t do anything else. A seeker will come to a Zen master and he will say, “Just sit. Sit for hours together.” In a Zen monastery you will see many many seekers sitting for hours together, just sitting, not doing anything. No meditation is given, no contemplation, no prayer. Just sitting is the meditation.A seeker will sit for six hours without any movement, and when every movement falls down, withers away, and there is no movement – not only no movement, but no desire to move inside – you are centered, you are crystallized. You have used a very ordinary act, of sitting, for your volition, for your will, for your awareness.It is very difficult if I say to you, “Just close your eyes and don’t open them.” Many temptations will be there. And then you will find it is very uneasy not to open them, and you will open them. And you can deceive even yourself that “I am not opening them. Suddenly they opened themselves, eyes opened themselves. I was not aware.” Or you can just deceive: you can have a small glimpse, a little glimpse, and then close your eyes.But even if you can keep your eyes shut as a volitional act, that will help. Anything can become a medium to grow. So contemplate your habits, and whatsoever you do, do volitionally. Anything, any habit can be used, any mechanical action can be used. Do otherwise. Change it. And then once you decide, do it, otherwise it may prove fatal. It does.If you decide something and then don’t do it, it is better not to decide, because that will give your will a very deep shock. And we are all doing that. We go on deciding and not doing. Ultimately, we lose every possibility of a will, and we begin to feel a deep will-lessness, a deep impotency, a deep weakness. And you decide about very ordinary things.Someone decides, “Now I am not going to smoke,” and the next day he is smoking. You may think, “What is wrong in it? It was my decision and I am the master of my decision, so I have changed it.” You are not. You have changed because you are not the master. Smoking proves to be the master, not you. Smoking is more powerful than you. Then it is better not to decide – go on smoking. But if you decide, then let this decision be final. Then never move from it. That will give you growth.Of course, every habit will fight with you. And your mind will say, “What are you doing? What is wrong with it?” Your mind will rationalize in many, many ways. I don’t say smoking is wrong. I say: deciding not to smoke and then smoking is wrong. Even vice versa: if you decide to smoke, then smoke. Then don’t stop. Then whatsoever happens, cancer happens, let it happen. Then if the whole world goes against it, let the whole world go against it. If you have decided to smoke, then smoke! Even at the cost of life, go on smoking. That will give you growth.So it is not a question of cigarette or no cigarette, smoking or no smoking. Deep down it is a question of following a decision, a will, a voluntary act. Whatsoever the object is, it is irrelevant, but decide. And with small decisions you can create a great will, with very small decisions.Just “I will not look out of the window for one hour.” A very, very small decision, with no meaning, meaningless. Who bothers whether you look out of the window or not? And nothing is happening out of the window. But the moment you decide not to look out of the window, your whole being will revolt and would like to see, and the window will become the focus of the whole world, as if you are missing everything – something is going to happen there.One day Mulla Nasruddin decided not to go to the market. Just in the morning, early morning, at five o’clock. There was no question of the market, but he decided not to go to the market. Then he began to think about the market. And he had decided not to go because in the village there was market day once a week: “And every market day I go to the market uselessly – nothing to sell and nothing to buy.”He was a poor man: “Nothing to sell and nothing to buy – why do I go to the market unnecessarily? Because everyone goes, it is marketday, a festivity in the village? Why should I go? So today I am not going. It is marketday.” He decided early, at five o’clock.Then he began to think about it: “If something happens there? In case something happens there…”So he worked it out, and he fidgeted inside. And then, by six o’clock, he was at the market. It was four or five hours still till the market would open and people would gather. He was at the market sitting under a tree, just in the center of the market.Someone asked Mulla Nasruddin, “Why are you sitting here so early?”Nasruddin said, “It is market day, and I thought if something happens and a large crowd is there I may not get to the right point. So I am just sitting here in the center. If something happens, I will be the first. And who knows? In this world everything is possible.”The marketplace became very significant, the center of the world. And it became tempting just from the decision that “I am not going to the market, because every week I go uselessly. I have nothing to sell and nothing to purchase.”The moment you decide, you will be tempted, and to transcend temptation is growth. To transcend temptation is growth. It is not suppression, remember. It is not suppression, it is transcendence. The temptation is there. You don’t fight it, you acknowledge it: “Okay, you are there, but I have decided.” Try it for your meditation.You are sitting, and when you sit for meditation many thoughts will come, uninvited guests. They never come ordinarily. When you meditate, only then do they become interested in you. They will come, they will crowd, they will encircle you. Don’t fight with them. Just say, “I have decided not to be disturbed by you,” and remain still.A thought comes to you. Just say to the thought, “Go away!” Don’t fight. By fighting you engage, by fighting you will prove weaker. Just say, “Go away” and remain still. And you will be surprised: just by saying to a thought, “Go away,” it goes away.But say it with a will. Your mind must not be divided. It must not be something like a feminine no. It must not be like that because a feminine no, the more forcefully it is said, the more forcefully it means yes. It must not be a feminine no. If you say, “Go away,” then don’t mean inside, “Come nearer.” Then let it be, “Go away!” Mean it, and the thought will disappear. If you are angry and you have decided not to be angry, don’t suppress it. Just say to the anger, “I am not going to be angry,” and the anger will disappear.There is a mechanism. Your will is needed because anger needs energy. If you say no with full energy, there is no energy left for the anger. A thought moves because deep down a hidden yes is there. That’s why a thought moves in your mind. If you say no, that yes is cut from the root, the very root. The thought becomes uprooted. It cannot be in you. But then the no or yes must mean what you say. Then no must mean no and yes must mean yes. But we go on saying yes meaning no, saying no meaning yes. Then the whole life becomes confused. And your mind, your body, they don’t know what you mean, what you say.This conscious effort to decide, to act, to be, is now going to be the evolution for man. A buddha is different from you because of this effort and nothing else. Potentially there is no difference; only this conscious effort makes the difference. Between man and man, the real difference is only of conscious effort. All else is just superficial. Just your clothes are different, so to speak. But when you have something conscious in you, a growth, an inward growth, which is not natural but goes beyond, then you have a distinct individuality.Buddha passes through a village, and many people have come to insult him. He says, “You have come late. You should have come ten years ago, because now I have become conscious. Now I cannot react. You abuse me, you insult me – it is okay with me. I am not going to react. You cannot force me to react.”When someone abuses you he is forcing you to be angry, and when you become angry you are just a slave to him. He has made you angry. And we go on saying, without understanding what we are saying we go on saying, “That man made me angry.” What do you mean? “He said something and he made me angry.” So he is your master. He can say something, he can manipulate, he can push a button, and you are angry and you get mad. So your button can be pushed by anyone and you can be made mad.Buddha says, “You have come late, friends. Now I have become master of my own self. You cannot force me to do something. If I want, I do. If I don’t want, I don’t do. You will have to go back. I am not going to reply to you.”They are puzzled because this man is behaving very unpredictably. When you abuse someone, he is insulted, he feels angry. He must react in some way or other, but this man simply refuses to react.And Buddha asks them, “I am in a hurry to reach the other village. If you are finished, then allow me to move. If you have something more to say, when I come back, be ready and tell me.”This is transcendence. Something natural has been transcended. Reaction is natural, action is growth. We all react. We have no actions, only reactions. Someone appreciates you and you feel good, someone abuses you and you feel bad, someone will do this and this will happen. You are predictable.A husband returning to his house knows what his wife is going to ask. Not only that: he prepares the answer. He has not reached yet, but he prepares the answer. And he knows that his wife is not going to believe it. The wife knows what she is going to ask and what her husband is going to answer…everything predictable. And every day this will happen, and this will continue for the whole life. The same questions, the same answers, the same suspicions, the same doubts, the same tricks, the same games – and people go on playing. These are just reactions.Someone asked Mulla Nasruddin for some money. He said, “This is the first time you have asked, so I will give it to you.”He gave the money. It was a small sum. Then Mulla Nasruddin thought, “This money is not going to come back.” But the man returned it; after seven days the man returned it. Mulla was surprised.Then later on, after a week, the man again came to ask for some money. Mulla said, “Now you cannot deceive me again. You deceived me last time!”The man said, “What are you saying? I returned your money.”Mulla said, “But you deceived me, because I was thinking that you were not going to give it back. It was decidedly so. Then you deceived me by giving it back. Now you cannot deceive me again! I am not going to give you the money.”If someone behaves unpredictably, it surprises us. We are so predictable. Everyone knows what one is going to do. You do this, and this will follow. It is a mechanical response.Go beyond mechanical responses. Transcend natural forces. Create a will. That is the path beyond human evolution. Below human there is a natural growth, but that is not for man now.And the second part of the question is: “Explain the role that the buddhas, the enlightened ones, play in the expansion of human consciousness.”Buddhas play a role because human consciousness is not only individual, it is also collective. It is in you, but it is also outside of you. In a way, consciousness is in you and you are in a greater consciousness, just like a fish in the sea. The fish is in the sea and the sea is also in the fish.We exist in a great ocean of consciousness. And whenever a buddha is born, whenever someone attains buddhahood, becomes enlightened through his efforts, through his conscious evolution, a wave in the ocean rises. With that wave everything in the ocean is affected. It is bound to be so because a wave in the ocean is part of a great pattern.When a buddha rises to a height, the whole ocean is affected in multi, multi ways, because now this height will be echoed all over. You throw a stone into a lake: a small circle is created. Then it goes on expanding, and the whole lake will be affected ultimately. A buddha is a stone in the lake of human consciousness. Now humanity can never be the same again as it was before a buddha.Christians have made it a very significant point. They divide history into “before Christ” and “after Christ.” This is very significant. Really, history is different: before Christ and after Christ there is a gap. Because a Christ is born, humanity can never go back again to the same primitive state of mind. Everything is affected. We rise with buddhas, we fall with Hitlers, but this rise and fall, for you, is a natural thing. A buddha is born: everyone rises with him. But this is not a conscious effort on your part.You can use this opportunity. A buddha is there: a possibility has flowered into its essence, one consciousness has become a peak. Now this is a very good moment for your conscious effort. You will take less time, you will need less effort. It is as if the whole history is flowing toward a height. You can swim easily. But if you don’t use the opportunity, you will go to a height and you will come down, because with a buddha you will go high, with a Hitler you will come down. You will go on moving down and up. This coming up and down will be a natural force for you. For a buddha it is a conscious effort, for you it will be a natural force.You can use it. Man can use it in two ways. When a buddha is there, now to rise is easy. The whole consciousness is open toward the peak. The peak is there. Deep down in you there are echoes of it. The music is heard deep down. You can follow it. If you make a small effort, you can attain buddhahood very easily.There is a story, very meaningful:Buddha attains the ultimate, then he remains silent for seven days. He has no feeling to say what he has attained. The silence seems total, unbreakable. Then Brahma becomes afraid he may not speak, and it happens rarely that someone attains buddhahood.So the story says Brahma came to Buddha, bowed down at his feet and said, “You must speak. Don’t remain silent, you have to speak!”Buddha said, “It seems useless, because those who can hear me and can understand me will understand even without me. And those who will not hear me, even if they listen, cannot understand me, will not understand me, even if I speak. So there seems to be no need.”Brahma said, “But there are a few more you are leaving out. There are a few more who are just on the verge. If you speak, they will hear and take the jump. If you don’t speak, they may even fall back. They are just on the border. They will hear you and will take a jump.”A buddha is there. This is a possibility to take a jump. You are affected whether you take the jump or not. You will be affected. But this being affected, without your conscious will, will be a natural force. And when a Hitler comes up, you will go down. If you go higher with Buddha, you will go down with anyone – because it is not your achievement, this going up. With a rising wave you go up, then with a falling wave you go down. But you can use the opportunity. When you are rising high, if you will it, then with a very small effort, you will attain more. So with a buddha, thousands of souls become buddhas.I wonder whether you know it or not, that within five hundred years everything great, as far as religion is concerned, happened. Within five hundred years. Buddha – Gautama the Buddha – Mahavira, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Moses, Zarathustra, Jesus, they all happened within five hundred years, in a particular period, when everything was rising high. Every great religion was born within those five hundred years.Something mysterious was afoot, something very mysterious. Just in Bihar, in a very small place, in a very small province, when Buddha was there, there were eight persons of Buddha’s height. Just in small Bihar, eight persons! Mahavira was there, Buddha was there, Ajit Keshkambal was there, Belattiputta was there…eight such persons. And these are the known persons.Someone asked Buddha, “You have ten thousand bhikkhus, ten thousand monks, with you. How many of them have attained buddhahood?”Buddha said, “So many I cannot count.”The questioner asked, “Then why are they silent? Why don’t we feel them? Why are they not famous?”So Buddha said, “When I am speaking, there is no need for them to speak. And, moreover, when for the first time I attained buddhahood, I myself tried in every way to be silent. It was Brahma who asked me and persuaded me to speak. They have become silent. No one will know about them; even their names will not be known.”One day Buddha came to his assembly of monks with a flower in his hand. He was to speak, but he would not speak. He just sat, and he continued for a long time. Everyone became puzzled and disturbed, and then they began to whisper in each others’ ears, “What is the matter? Why is he not speaking today?” He was just sitting there with a flower in his hand, a lotus flower, looking at it, totally absorbed in it.Then someone said, “Are you not going to speak today?”Buddha said, “I am speaking. Listen!” And he remained silent.Then someone else asked, “We cannot understand what you are doing, sir. You are just looking at the flower and we have come to hear something from you.”So Buddha said, “I have said many things to you which could be said. Now I am saying something which cannot be said. If someone understands, let him laugh.”Only one person laughed, Mahakashyapa. He was not known before; no one knew about him. This is the only incident that is known. Mahakashyapa was his name.Ananda is a known, very well-known disciple, Sariputta is a very well-known disciple, Maudgalyan is a very well-known disciple – Mahakashyapa was an absolutely unknown disciple. Neither Sariputta nor Ananda nor Maudgalyan could laugh. A very unknown man, no one knew about him, he laughed.Buddha called him and said, “Mahakashyapa, come to me.” Buddha gave the flower to Mahakashyapa and said, “Whatsoever I could say I have said to others, and what I cannot say I say to you. Take this flower.”This is the only incident known about Mahakashyapa, the only mention of his name.But when Bodhidharma reached China seven hundred years after Buddha, he said, “I am a disciple of Mahakashyapa. Buddha was the first teacher, Mahakashyapa was the second teacher, and in that line I am the twenty-eighth.”The Zen tradition in Japan says, “Mahakashyapa is our originator – the man who laughed and the man to whom Buddha gave the flower.”In the night when everyone dispersed, everyone had gone, Ananda asked, “Who is this Mahakashyapa? We never knew about him – a very unknown and strange one.”Buddha said, “How can you know about him? He has remained silent for years. And only he could laugh because he remained so silent. Only he could understand. It was a transmission without words, a communication without words. Only he could understand.”When a buddha is there, with a very small effort of your will you can achieve much. When a buddha is not there, you are fighting against a current. When a Hitler or a Genghis Khan is there, much effort will be needed. Even then, success is very difficult.Buddha is reported to have said, “Choose a right moment to be born” – choose a right moment to be born. “Choose a moment when a buddha is there.”

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-05/

Paripoorn chandra amrit rasaiki karanam naivedyam.Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon is naivedya – the food offering.You must have heard about the Taoist concept of yin and yang, the concept of polar opposites into one reality. Reality exists through polar opposites – through the positive and the negative, through the male and the female, through yin and yang.Reality is a dialectical process. And when I say “dialectical process,” I mean it is not a simple process, it is very complex. A simple process means one element working; a dialectical process means two polar opposites working in one direction. And though they appear as opposites, they create a symphony, they create a musical harmony. And that harmony is reality.Man and woman, they create humanity. Man alone is not humanity, neither is woman alone humanity. Human being – the music, the synthesis we call human being – is a dialectical phenomenon. Man and woman, they both work to create humanity, they both help to create humanity. And the way of their creating it is dialectical. They exist as polar opposites, and the inner tension between the two creates the energy for movement, for process, for further growth.It is the same on every plane. If we go deep down with the physicist to the atom’s structure, inner structure, then again we find two polar opposites working there: the negative electricity and the positive electricity. Because of these two polar opposites, matter is created. If there is only positive electricity, the world will disappear immediately. If there is only negative electricity, there will be nothing. But negative electricity and positive electricity create an inner tension, and because of that inner tension matter exists.It is the same in the inner being of man also. This sutra is concerned with that. We discussed how awareness creates an inner sun. Now this sutra talks about the creation of an inner moon. Sun is symbolic of the inner positivity and moon is symbolic of the inner negativity. Sun is the inner male and moon is the inner female. These words are symbolic, and for Indian yoga, particularly, they are very meaningful. So by sun is not meant the outer sun, nor by moon the outer moon. Those two words are used for the inner universe, sun and moon.Indian yoga divides man into two parts: the sun part and the moon part. Even one breath is known as the sun breath and another breath is known as the moon breath. And one of the deeper findings is that if you stop the moon breath, and just breathe through the breath that is known as the sun breath, your body will become hot. And such great heat can be created, simply by using only one kind of breath, that it seems inconceivable in physiological terms. In Tibet there exists a heat yoga which uses only the sun breath, not using the moon breath at all – because the breath is continuously changing.Western medical science has not yet taken note of it. Breathing is not a simple process; it is a dialectical process. You are changing your nostrils every hour, approximately every hour, forty minutes. Somewhere between forty and sixty minutes your nostril changes, you begin to take the breath from the other nostril; then again it changes. When you need more heat in the body – if you suddenly get angry – your sun breath starts. Yoga says that when you are angry, if you use your moon breath and stop the sun breath, you cannot be angry at all, because the moon breath creates a deep coolness inside.The whole body is also divided between sun and moon, and the mind is also divided between sun and moon. So don’t take man as one, because nothing can exist as one. Everything exists through duality. You are divided in two: you have a negative part and you have a positive part. The positive is known as sun in Indian symbology, and the negative as moon. The negative is cool, silent, still. The positive is hot, vibrant with energy, active. The sun is the active part in you and the moon the inactive part in you.And if the active and the inactive both come to a deep equilibrium, you are enlightened suddenly. If one is more emphatic, you have an imbalance; if both are of equal force they balance each other, they negate each other; and the moment both are of equal force, your inner balance is regained and you reach to a different reality – the reality of the nondual. That one, the nondual, can be felt only when both these dualities in you are balanced and you transcend them.In the world we exist as duality. Beyond the world we exist as nonduality, one. You can think of yourself as a triangle: two angles exist in the world and the third angle exists beyond the world. Two angles belong to this, this world, and one angle belongs to that, the world of the brahman. But if these two are in an imbalance, you cannot go beyond them. You go beyond them only when they regain balance.This balancing is nirvana, this balancing is moksha, this balancing is the centering. How does awareness work to balance this duality? And the moment this duality is balanced, you cannot be reborn again – you disappear from the world. You can be born again and again only if there is an imbalance. If the balance comes to totality, the balance becomes total, it is impossible to be born again. You disappear from the world. The body cannot exist then. Then you cannot re-enter a body again.So first we will try to understand what this inner sun is and what this inner moon is, and then how they are balanced.This sutra says:Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon is naivedya – the food offering.You need a full moon in you to offer to the divine as food. Only that can be the food for the divine, a full moon inside.Awareness works in a double way: it creates a sun and it creates also a moon. We talked about how it creates a sun inside. When you become aware of whatsoever is happening in you, the innermost unconscious activities become enlightened. The very cells of your body become conscious. Your light, your consciousness, reaches to the very pores of your body. Just like the rays of the sun reaching to the earth, your inner sun, once awakened, begins to work on every cell of the body, every fiber, every nerve of the body. Your whole being is filled with light.But this is only one part of awareness, this is one process of awareness: rays from your center going to your periphery, to the circumference. The more your rays go to the circumference, the cooler your center begins to be.I don’t know whether you have heard of a particular theory about the sun, the outside sun. I don’t know whether it is right or not, but it is meaningful in helping to understand the inner reality. They say the sun at its deepest center is the coolest spot in the solar system. It is not hot. The heat is only on the periphery, just the circumference, not in the inner center of the sun. Because of helium gas around the sun, the heat is created; because of the helium and its chain explosion of atoms, the heat is created. And then the heat spreads to the solar family.The sun has a body: it is the center, the solar family is the body. Our earth belongs to its body as a cell. The heat goes to the solar family, it spreads. But the sun in itself is a cold thing, absolutely cold, and its deepest center is the coldest spot in existence. It should be so, because reality exists in a polarity. If the sun is the hottest thing, it must have something inside it which balances its heat.Just like a wheel moving on the street: the wheel moves, but in the center the hub on which it moves remains still. The movement must have something unmoving, nonmoving in the center, otherwise movement will not be possible.In this world of manifestation, everything exists with its polar opposite. You are alive because you have death inside. You cannot be alive if you have no death inside. So don’t think that one day it suddenly happens and death comes to you. It is an inner growth; it is not something coming from the outside and happening to you. It is not something that you meet, that you encounter, no; it is something you are daily growing. One day the growth is complete and you are dead. It is an inner phenomenon. You are alive with a death center. You cannot be alive without a death center. Nothing exists without the polar opposite. Life and death are just two positive and negative realities.So it looks logical, dialectical also, but it is not yet proved that the sun has a center which is the polar opposite to its heat on the circumference: a cold spot, an absolutely cold spot. It may be true, it may not be; that is irrelevant. But inside it is absolutely true.When you become aware, the heat begins to travel towards your circumference. Each cell of your body will become heated, warm, because of the awareness penetrating. The second thing, the counterpart will be: your center of being will become cooler and cooler and cooler. That is the moon. This is the sun, this warmth spreading, this light spreading.And you must know that light has two qualities: light and warmth. Heat is just concentrated light; light is nothing but heat dispersed. So when light travels to your body, every cell will become warm, enlightened, aware. Sleep is a cold thing, night is a cold thing. That’s why we sleep in the night; it is a cold thing. In the morning, with the rising sun, everything becomes warm, alive. Then it is difficult to sleep, it is easy to be awake.When your circumference is cold, when your every body cell is cold, asleep, your center will be a hot spot. Because of that hot spot in the center you will be sexual, you will be angry, you will be greedy, and everything. Your center will be in a fever. When this heat begins to travel…of course, when the heat leaves your center it spreads. And the more it spreads, the less it is heat and the more it is light.The sunrays on the earth are life-giving. They have traveled much. If you go nearer and nearer to them, they will become death-giving, because then they will not be warm, then they will be just pure fire.If the heat is accumulated in the inner center, as it is, the whole body structure is just cold. You feel heat only in anger, in sex, in desire, in passion. But that is not light, simply heat, a feverish phenomenon. Because of this, sex is felt as a release – because you lose a certain quantity of heat and you are relieved, you lose a certain quantity of fever and you are released.Because of this, militaries have not allowed their soldiers any sexual freedom – because if you allow sexual freedom to soldiers, they cannot fight. Their inner fever is released. Don’t allow them sexual freedom, then their inner fever is accumulated. That accumulated fever begins, automatically, to be violent.That’s why a very deep phenomenon, a great riddle of history, can be solved. Whenever a society is affluent it begins to be sexually free. Only poor societies can be sex suppressive. Whenever a society is affluent, rich, you cannot suppress sex – because the food problem is solved, much energy is released. What to do with it? So the affluent society will become sexually free.And the affluent society means a society which has progressed much technologically. Whenever any civilization comes to a point of affluence, sexual freedom is bound to be there, and then any less civilized society can win over this higher civilized society. So this has been always a riddle in history: a greater civilization will always be defeated by a barbaric, uncivilized society.India was defeated continuously because of its affluence. Tartars, Berbers, Huns, Moghuls, Turks, they were all uncivilized societies – poor, poverty-stricken, sexually suppressed. They had much violence in them. You can see this in a modern phenomenon, in Vietnam. Americans could never win. Their youth is sexually free, they are less violent – they could not win in Vietnam. No affluent society can really win over any poor society. It can fight for longer periods, but cannot win. You can kill – kill the whole country – but you cannot win, because the very fighting spirit is not there.America is now one of the most sexually free societies in all history. America cannot fight. Fighting is part of a suppressed sex. The inner fever must be accumulated in such quantities that you begin to be violent. Suppress sex and you will be violent. That’s why so-called saints are very violent in their behavior – angry, violent – because of suppressed sex. Then that fever has to be released in some way.In sex you are releasing a particular amount of energy. They say in one sexual act you release one hundred and twenty calories of heat – one hundred and twenty calories you release in one sexual act! It is the same if you run for one mile, fast; you will release the same amount of calories, one hundred and twenty. That’s why there is much talk about whether sex can help heart disease. It can help. It releases energy. For persons who are well fed, it helps to delay heart disease. It releases energy, but it is not a solution. It is just a temporary arrangement, just creating a leakage in your system from which energy is released every day.When you are angry your whole body is heated, becomes feverish. The center releases energy; it comes to the periphery. Ordinarily it is cold. The periphery is cold ordinarily and the center is hot. The reverse will be the case when awareness happens to you. When you meditate, go deep inside, when you become aware of every activity, everything will take a turn, an about-turn. Your periphery will become heated – not in anger, not in sex, not in greed, not in passion. It will lose its coldness, sleepy coldness. It will become warm, alive and aware. And because this energy is released to the periphery continuously, twenty-four hours a day, then you don’t need any anger, any sex.A buddha doesn’t need anger. It is absolutely useless for him, because the very energy system has changed. Now he is using his heat for light, but you are using your light for heat. The same fuel can be used to burn your house and the same fuel can be used to light it. The fuel is the same, but the direction changes. The inner fuel, the inner energy, becomes fire, suicidal, burns you down, and ultimately you are just ashes. In the end, when death comes nearer you, you are just ashes, everything burnt out. You used your energy not as a light but as a fire.It becomes fire if it is concentrated into the center and only temporarily released when it is overflowing. In a sudden shock, it comes to the periphery and is released. This is a very chaotic state. You go on accumulating it inside, then it is overflowing, then one day you have to throw it.We go on rationalizing ourselves. When you get angry, you think someone has made you angry. No, really, you were ready, you were overflowing inside. You don’t know because you are not aware. You are overflowing with a certain amount of energy which needs to be released. Someone abuses you, insults you, and you get angry, you think, “This man is creating anger in me.”No, this man is simply giving you a situation, an opportunity, to release the overflowing energy. In a way, he is your friend and a helper. If he is not there, you will be in a very difficult situation. If no one is giving you any opportunity to throw your energy, you will project, you will imagine something, and you will get angry with anything whatsoever.People get angry with their shoes; they will throw them away. They can get angry with the door; they will be violent with it. They can be angry with anything. When no opportunity is given, they can get angry with themselves. They will begin to hurt themselves, harm themselves, or they will create some substitutes. We have created many.Someone is just smoking. We think it is a simple thing – it is not. Now psychologists say it is a deep violence. You take the smoke in and then throw it out, you take the smoke in and then throw it out. It helps to release anger, violence, sex. We have many, many things. Persons who are violent will eat more; just by destroying the food they are releasing violence.You may not have observed, but observe it: when you are loving you cannot eat more, when you are happy you cannot eat more, when you feel blissful you cannot eat more. Ordinarily it should not be so. It looks opposite: when one is happy we think one must eat more. No, a happy person will not eat more, cannot eat more, because eating is part violence. A happy person is not violent. When you are in love, you cannot eat more.Two persons, when in love, unmarried, will not eat more – married they will begin to eat more, because love has disappeared. Now it is a violence. It is related with many deep things, because violence is expressed through teeth in animals and we are part animal. When an animal is violent, angry, the energy comes to the teeth and to the nails, because these are the instruments for an animal to be violent with.The same happens still with us. When you are violent, your teeth, your fingers, your nails, are filled with heat, with energy. Now you have to release it. You can eat, you can use gum, you can smoke, you can take pan, now you need something to crush. So there are people who are crushing pan the whole day…the violence is released.Even by continuously talking, violence is released. Women talk more than men, because men can be violent in other ways also that women cannot be. That is the only reason they talk more. They talk continuously, they talk madly, because man has other possibilities to be violent: in the office, with the car. Have you observed an angry man driving his car? He is releasing his anger through the accelerator. The car will speed up. He is releasing; the car is just a medium. Fifty percent of car accidents are not because of cars but because of drivers, not because of traffic but because of mental tension.But women cannot release in so many ways. They have only one way: to go on talking. Doing something with the teeth and the lips much is released. An angry woman will break more saucers, more cups, unknowingly – unknowingly. Even she may be surprised why today everything is just breaking. Unconscious mind. Energy is in the hands: the energy wants to destroy something. So it is good to have breakable things in the house, it helps. Then before the husband is back, the wife is released. If you make everything unbreakable, it will break up families. Breakable things help families to continue. Now these are proved facts.If you have feverish energy in the center, not transformed to the periphery, not used as light for the whole body and for your whole being, this is bound to happen. Every day you will accumulate energy, and then you will have to throw it. And this is nonsense! Your whole life you are doing this: accumulating, throwing; accumulating, throwing. What are you doing daily, twenty-four hours a day? Accumulating energy to throw. When energy is there, then the only problem is how to throw it: in sex, in anger, in greed – how to throw it? When energy is thrown, then the only problem is how to accumulate it.What sort of life is this? A vicious circle. With awareness, the whole mechanism changes. With awareness, every moment your inner center is sending its energy to every pore of your body. And your body is not a small thing, it is a miniature universe. As above, so below: everybody is a small universe. And when I say “small” I feel guilty because, really, it is not small. It is as vast as the universe. But because of our language, there are problems. The universe appears vast and your body appears small.What is the difference between the two? They say that if we can throw out all space from the earth, if we can compress it, and all the space, the vacant space in it, is thrown out, our earth will just be like a small ball. If we can throw out all the empty space from the Himalayas, it can be put into a matchbox. The material is not much, matter is not much, matter is very small. Only the emptiness in it…So how to judge a thing, whether it is big or small? A very small thing can be blown up to any size if we put space in it. If we put as much space in your body as there is in the earth, you will be one earth. So all the differences are of spaces, empty spaces, no differences really.But when I say “a small universe,” I mean only this: that everything that exists in the universe exists in you also. Whatsoever the measure may be, but exactly everything exists in you also.So when your solar center, your sun, releases energy…and it releases only in two ways. Either you are unconscious: then it releases into sex, anger, greed and other diseases. Or, if you are conscious, through this consciousness, this heat is transformed into light: then it releases as light. Then you are under a shower of light continuously. Your every pore, your every cell, is bathed – a continuous shower of light. When this happens, your inner center begins to be cool and cool and cool and cooler, and ultimately it becomes the coldest spot.Hindus have a myth that Shankara lives on Kailash. Kailash is the coldest mythological spot, the coldest peak, the highest peak, always covered with snow. This is just a symbolic way of saying you also have the coldest spot, the Kailash, in you. But you can know it only when the heat is transformed into light, never before. And the more you become aware, the more the heat is transformed into light. Then you begin to feel a moon inside. You begin to feel a cool, silent pool.This sutra says:Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon…In the beginning, of course, you will feel it and miss it. It is just like the first-day moon, the second-day moon, the third-day moon: you feel it and it is gone. And then it grows…then comes the full-moon night. Just like this, this inner spot of coolness grows. As your consciousness grows, as your heat is transformed into light, as your periphery becomes enlightened, as your each and every cell is filled with light and becomes aware and awake, this inner moon grows.Sometimes you feel it and sometimes you miss it. Sometimes suddenly there is an inner cool breeze. You know something has happened inside. You feel it, but you miss it again. Then it goes on growing. Ultimately, when in you there is no unconsciousness left, when your total energy has become light, you come to know the full moon.This full moon Buddha has talked about in negative terms, because it is the negative pole. So Buddha says when this inner silence is achieved, it is nirvana. The word is very meaningful in reference to this sutra. Nirvana means cessation of the flame – a lamp is burning and then the flame disappears. When your heat is transformed totally into light, there is no flame. That’s why the moon symbol is used: the moon has light, but no flame. That’s why its light is cool, with no flame, with no fire. Light is there without any flame. The flame has disappeared.When first one becomes acquainted with the sun, the light becomes like a flame, burning hot. So if you analyze the life, the inner life, of a Buddha, or of a Jesus, or of a Mahavira, many things will become apparent which are hidden ordinarily. For example, whenever a person like Buddha is born the early life will be very revolutionary, because the moment one enters inside the first experience is a fiery flame. The older Buddha grows, the more the inner coolness is felt, the more perfect the moon becomes. Revolution is lost; then Buddha’s words are not revolutionary.Jesus couldn’t get this opportunity. He was killed when he was still a revolutionary. That’s why, if you compare Buddha’s sayings with Jesus’ sayings, there is a clear-cut distinction and difference. Jesus’ sayings look like those of a young man, hot. Buddha’s early sayings are also like that, but he lived to be eighty. He was not killed.There are reasons. And one reason is this – India knew it always, that this happens – whenever a person goes in, the first expression is fiery, revolutionary, rebellious. That’s why India never killed anyone. That’s why India could never behave as Greeks behaved with Socrates and Jews behaved with Jesus. India knew much. It had known many, many such persons. It knew. It is natural: whenever a buddha enters into himself, the first experience will be revolutionary. He will burst open, explode into a fiery flame. But then the flame will disappear and ultimately there will be only a moon, silent, cool, with no fire but only light.Jesus was killed. That’s why Christianity still remains incomplete. Christianity was based on the early Jesus – Jesus when he was just a flame. That’s why Christianity has remained incomplete. Buddhism is complete. It has known Buddha in all the stages. It has known Buddha’s moon in all the stages, from the first day to the full-moon light.This is a misfortune for the West. This has proved one of the greatest misfortunes in history, because Jesus was killed when he was thirty-three, just a flame. The flame would have turned into moonlight, but the opportunity was not given. And the reason was only this: the Jews were not aware of the inner phenomenon.India knew many, it had known many buddhas. And it is always the case: whenever someone enters in, first one feels the fire, the flame; the revolutionary spirit comes up. If one goes on in and in, it dissolves, and then there is only silence, a moonlight silence.This sutra says: Accumulate the nectar of the inner full moon…This silence, this cool silence of the moon, Hindus have called nectar, the amrit, the elixir. It is not to be found somewhere else, it is in you. The nectar is in you. Once you are established in this nectar, once you are in this pool of cool moonlight, when you are a full moon inside, you have known both the polarities. You have known life, you have known death. You have known the sun, you have known the moon. You have known both the polarities, life and death. And once you have known both you have transcended both. That’s why it is called the nectar, amrit.Now you will not die. Now you are drunk with elixir – you cannot die. But you will not be alive in the old sense either. You have died in the old sense, you are born into a new meaning. Now death will not be a death and life will not be a life. Now you will be beyond both.I have heard about Tanka, a Zen master, who one day declared before his disciples, “Buddha was never born. This whole story is just false, this whole Buddha legend is just false. He was never born.”The disciples were just perplexed. “What does it mean? It seems he has gone mad. Every day he himself has been teaching the life of Buddha, the birth and everything, and suddenly one day he says, ‘This whole thing is nonsense. He was never born.’” And he left the platform and went into his hut.The disciples gathered around his hut and they asked, “What are you saying? So what about that which you were teaching to us always, your whole life?”Tanka said, “Tanka is no more. He was never born, so the whole legend is false. The teaching of Tanka and your listening to Tanka is just false. Someone has created a fiction. Don’t be deceived.”Then they were even more perplexed: “It may be that Buddha was not born, but Tanka is there, already standing before us.”Tanka laughed and said, “That which is born, that which was born, was not Buddha.”In India we have two names: Gautama Siddhartha is the name given by the parents. Then one day he becomes enlightened, his consciousness flowers, blooms. Then he uses another name: Gautama the Buddha. Buddha means the enlightened one. This second name doesn’t belong to Gautama at all. Gautama is just a situation in which this buddha happened. And this buddha has not happened really today – it has been always there. It has been recognized today. Gautama has come to recognize today something that was already and always there, that buddha.This inner phenomenon is beyond birth and death. This is never born and never will it die, because that which is born can die, that which is not born cannot die. Death needs birth as a prerequisite, a necessary prerequisite. You cannot die if you are not born. With this inner phenomenon – when sun and moon are balanced, when the dialectic is finished, when the synthesis is complete – you come to feel in yourself something which is eternal.That’s why the sutra says: Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon is naivedya… Now you have become food yourself. Now you can offer yourself to the divine. Now you are the food. But now you are eternity.And why is it called food, naivedya? Because when you are eternal, you can become the food of the eternal. And by food the ordinary meaning also is implied. When you take food, it becomes one with you. It becomes your blood, it becomes your bones, it becomes you. You are your food.So when you have come to know this inner reality, the eternal reality, you can offer it as food to the universe, to the existence. It is meant thereby that now you can become bones of the universe, you can become blood of the universe. Now you can be one with it, just like food becomes one with you. The meeting is complete. Become food for the divine, then you are naivedya, then the offering can be accepted.But you cannot offer your body as the food. It will be food, but for the vultures, not for the divine. This cannot be offered as food for the divine. Your body comes out of the earth and goes back to the earth. It can only be eaten by the earth again: dust unto dust to return. This body cannot be offered to the divine.One young seeker comes to Gautam Buddha. He says, “I have come to offer myself to you. Accept me.”Buddha asks him, “What are you offering – your body? But that is already offered, and the earth will claim it, so how can you offer it to me? What are you offering? Tell me exactly.”The man is confused. He says, “Whatsoever I have, I offer to you.”Buddha asks him, “What do you have? What is it that belongs to you? Do your thoughts belong to you? They belong to the society, your mind belongs to the society. Your body belongs to your parents, to the earth, to the sky, to water, to fire, to many things – to the five elements. What do you have that you can offer to me?”The man cannot answer because he has nothing else, he cannot think of anything else. So Buddha says, “Don’t offer now. First find it out, what you are. And the moment you find it, it is already offered. Then there is no need to offer.”This inner balance that is known from finding the sun and from finding the moon, when you know them both, they balance, and in that balance you escape from the duality. In that balance only do you escape from the duality. And then the third angle of the triangle is touched. For the first time you are above yourself, the overself. Now you can look down at yourself, at your sun, your moon, your body, your soul, your positivity, your negativity, your male, your female. Now you can look down at yourself, at the whole world of duality, multidimensional duality – and now you can become naivedya, the food offering.Now there is no need even to offer: you are already offered. Now there is no need to ask to be accepted: you are already accepted. You are one. Just as food becomes one with ourselves, we become one with the divine. And by divine I mean the whole, the totality, everything, the very existence.So what to do? Transform heat into light – that is the mantra. Transform heat into light. Don’t use heat as heat, use it as light. When you think anger is coming to you, close your eyes and meditate on anger, what anger is. Dig deep inside; find out the source from where it is coming.What we are doing ordinarily is just the opposite. When we get angry we begin to think about the object of anger, who has created it, not the source of anger, from where it is coming. When you get angry, close your eyes. This is the right moment to meditate. Close your eyes, go in, and find out from where this anger is coming. Follow it to the very source. Go deep, and you will come to the source of heat from where the accumulated energy is bursting forth to go out.Observe it. Don’t indulge in it, because if you indulge in it, it will be thrown out – without being transformed. And don’t suppress it, because if you suppress it it will be thrown back again to the original source which is overflowing. It cannot absorb it. It will be thrown back again with a more forceful movement. So don’t suppress it and don’t indulge in it. Just be conscious. Move inward to the source.This very movement slows down the process. This very observation transforms the quality of anger, because this calm observation is an antidote. Anger and this calm observation are different phenomena. When this calm observation enters into anger, it changes the energy, the very chemical composition of it, and the heat becomes light. That is the change: heat becomes light.Then this anger is neither thrown back to the original source – which cannot contain it because it is overflowing – nor is it thrown to the object, which is just a wastage, a foolish wastage. Then this energy is neither moved out to the object of anger, nor is it suppressed back to the original source. With observation, this energy becomes diffused. It moves to the periphery of your body as light; diffused, it moves as light. And the very anger becomes ojas, the very anger becomes light, inner light.So don’t be disturbed and don’t be disappointed if you have much anger. That only shows you have much energy. A person born without anger cannot be transformed; he has no energy. So be happy that you have energy, but don’t misuse it. Energy can be misused, it can be transformed. Energy in itself is neutral. It will not tell you what to do with it – you have to decide. This is the secret science of inner alchemy: to change heat into light, to change coal into diamonds, to change baser elements into gold.These are just symbols. Alchemists were not really concerned with changing baser metals into higher metals, but they had to hide and they had to make an esoteric, secret symbology, because it was very difficult in those days to talk about the inner science and not to be murdered and killed. Jesus was killed – he was an alchemist. And the Christianity that developed, that followed Jesus, went quite against him. The Christian church began to kill and murder those who were again trying alchemy.This word alchemy is very beautiful. Our chemistry is born out of alchemy. The word chemistry comes from alchemy, but alchemy itself is a very deep and significant word. Alchemy comes from Egypt. The old name of Egypt was Khem and Al Khem means “the secret science of Egypt.” And the Egyptians were really deeply in the alchemy of inner transformation, how to transform the inner chemistry.Many Egyptian mummies are preserved. They are the oldest, most ancient mummies, and still scientists are not capable, not able, to probe into how they are preserved, why and how. Why were they preserved? But that why we can guess – our so-called history is nothing but a guess. And about esoteric things it is always a fallacious guess, why they were preserved.But more problematic is the how, by what chemical process they were preserved. They are still fresh, as if the man has just died. If there were any outer chemical process, our chemistry could know it; we are more developed chemically than old Egypt. But the real thing is that these bodies were preserved, not by any outer chemical process, but by this inner alchemy.If your sex energy, which is the source of life, can be transformed inwardly, then your body can be preserved for any length of time very easily. If your sex energy is transformed, then your body can be preserved for a million years. If the cells of your body lose sex, then the body can be preserved, because birth comes through sex and death comes through sex. Your freshness, the youngness of the body, comes through sex, and then the deterioration comes through sex.And they were preserved, the kings, emperors preserved themselves – not because man has always been thinking in terms of ego to preserve himself, as historians say, or as Egyptologists say. That is not the case. Totally different is the secret. They were preserved only so they could recognize themselves.When a man is born again in another body, if his old body is preserved it helps further inner progress. But it is useful to preserve the old body only if it was transformed alchemically; otherwise it is of no use. Because if you change your body inwardly, the body becomes a laboratory, it is a lab. It is not then just a body. You have been working inside, experimenting inside. You know this body from the inside, not only from the outside.We know our bodies only from the outside. Whatsoever the mirror tells is our only knowledge, not from the inside. Our knowledge is just like someone comes around this house and looks at it and goes, then he says, “I know it.” He has never come in; he has never looked from the inside. We look at our bodies from the outside, never from the inside.If you begin to transform your anger, your sex, you will begin to look at your body from the inside. Then your body is a great experiment, a great laboratory, very complex, and you would like to preserve it for further growth. When you enter another body, you can learn much from your old body. It was a great experiment, you did many things with it. You were successful in some things, you were a failure in some things.Now you have again a new body, a new laboratory. If the old is preserved you will not have to begin from ABC. If the old is preserved, this is a record. Death interrupted, now you can proceed. You are not to proceed from the beginning again, you can proceed from the point where death stopped in the last life.So only Egyptians and Tibetans, they have preserved bodies for this reason, but only those bodies which were experimenting deep down inside. Otherwise it is useless to preserve your body. You will not even be able to recognize it.Lenin’s body is preserved in Moscow, but he cannot even recognize it. If he is born again, he cannot recognize it, because the body was never used as a laboratory. He never knew it. He was just acquainted with it in the mirror, never with this body itself.This process is alchemical. Observe anger, and anger is transformed into light. Observe sex, and sex is transformed into light. Observe any inner phenomenon which creates heat – any inner phenomenon which creates heat, observe it – and through observation it becomes light.And if your every heat phenomenon is transformed into light, you will come to feel the inner moon. And when there is no heat left, then you have accumulated the nectar of the full moon. And through this nectar you become immortal. Not in this body, not with this body: you become immortal because you transcend life and death both. Then you are naivedya, then you are a food offering to the divine, to the total.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-06/

Osho,What are the reasons why very few persons in the world are interested in transforming their inner heat into spiritual light? Do you feel that the present generation is capable of creating enlightened ones like Krishna, Lao Tzu and Christ?Man is freedom, absolute freedom. So spirituality is a choice. There is no force compelling you to be spiritual. There is no cause forcing you to transform. If there is any cause forcing you to transform, then no spirituality is possible.Causality is materialism. You seek food because hunger is there. It forces you, there is no choice. You cannot choose whether to seek or not – you have to. Spirituality is not that type of seeking. No one is forcing you. You alone have to choose.Spirituality is a choice. It is not causality. Everything else is causality: there is a cause and the effect follows. The effect has no freedom. It is caused. Spirituality is beyond causality. It is not caused by anything, it is your inner choice. You can choose, you may not choose. For lives together you may not choose it – no one is going to force you.This has to be understood. And this is a very significant thing, because if everything is caused, then I say there is no spirituality. Then science can cause you to become spiritual. If the cause is present, then the effect will follow. Then a buddha can be caused: we can create the cause and then you will be a buddha.But we cannot create any situation in which you can become a buddha. And we cannot create any situation in which you can be stopped from becoming a buddha. You are free. Any moment you can choose to be, and you may not choose for lives together.This has been a long discussion between materialism and spirituality. This is the basic debate, not whether God exists or not. That is not the basic debate, because one can be spiritual without any God. Buddha never believed in any God, Mahavira denies any existence of God, but no one is as spiritual as Mahavira or Buddha.So God is not the most significant thing, even the soul is not the most significant thing. Buddha says there is no self, no soul, and he is spiritual par excellence. Then what is the basic thing in spirituality? It is the concept of freedom: whether man is free to go beyond humanity or not.If everything is caused, then there is no freedom for you. You have a certain body because of certain causes: a certain father, a certain mother, a certain country, a certain climate, a certain heredity. You have a certain body; it has been caused. You have a certain mind because of a certain country, a certain culture, a certain education. You have this mind because of certain causes. You speak a particular language because it has been caused. If you were born in China and were never taught to speak any other language than Chinese, it is difficult to conceive that you could speak any other language. Language is caused. Certain factors are needed, then you will speak a certain language.So there is no freedom in these things. Only spirituality is uncaused. And that is the debate between science and religion, because science says, “Nothing is possible which is uncaused. Everything has a causality. You may know it, you may not know it; that is another thing. The causal factor may be unknown, but everything is caused.” This is the contention of the scientific approach toward life: “Everything is caused. The cause may be known or not known, but everything is caused.”If everything is caused, then there is no freedom. Then if a buddha is a buddha, it is not any achievement of his. He was caused! And anyone else in his situation, X, Y, Z, will become a buddha. Only the situation has to be there.So Buddha is replaceable then. Anyone, if put into the same situation, will become a buddha – just like water boils at a particular degree, any water. So the water is irrelevant, which water: from the Ganges or from the Godavari or from anywhere, any water will boil at a particular degree, evaporate at a particular degree. At a hundred degrees water will evaporate, in any country, in any climate, in any age. So which water is irrelevant: at one hundred degrees heat, evaporation is caused. So use any water, A, B, C.Science says it is the same with Buddha: “Put any man, A, B, C, in the same situation. Given the same situation a buddha will be caused. We don’t know the situation yet; that’s another thing. We will know one day. And it is absurd to teach someone: ‘Be a buddha!’ No one can be. But create the situation. If you say to water, ‘Evaporate!’ water cannot evaporate, but create the situation and the water evaporates.”Water has no freedom to choose. The situation is the significant factor. If the situation is there, automatically water will evaporate.Science says, “Man’s situation is very complex. It is not so simple as creating heat for the water to evaporate. It is complex, but still everyone is caused, everything is caused.”If this is the case, then there is no freedom. Really, in this century, this thought has become very deeply rooted in the human mind. Because of this, now psychologists say, “No criminal is a criminal – he is caused. And no buddha is a buddha – he is caused.” Everyone is just a slave; there is no responsibility. With the concept of freedom gone, there is no responsibility.So when you ask me why people are not interested in transforming their life, their inner energy, into spiritual light, the why is irrelevant, cannot be asked. With freedom, why disappears. You can ask why this water is not evaporating; then you have to find out, in the situation, why. Go deep down in the situation, and you will find out the answer why this water is not evaporating. Some factor is missing. Bring the factor in and the water will evaporate.Why is this man ill? Diagnose, and something will be found, and the answer will be there. Why is this man not spiritual? The question is not valid, because with the question why you assume that somewhere in the situation something must be there which is obstructing the process. There is no factor. If you want to be spiritual, you can be. If you don’t want, it is up to you. It is up to you.Even all the situations given, a buddha cannot be produced, cannot be manufactured. Really, in the life of Buddha, there are many things which will help us.Buddha was born. He was the only son to his father, and he was born when his father was very old. The father asked the astrologers, “What is going to be the fate of my son?”The astrologers said, “There are two possibilities: either he will become a great emperor, a chakravartin, emperor of the whole world, or he will become a sannyasin, a renunciate.”The father asked, “What type of astrology is this? Tell me certainly what he is going to become!”They said, “This is the only possible thing we can predict. Either he will become a sannyasin, or he will become a chakravartin.”These are polar opposites: emperor of the whole world and a sannyasin, a monk, a beggar on the street. Everything else comes in between. These are the polar opposites.So the father was worried and asked the pundits of the court. He called a great meeting of all the wise men of his capital and asked them what to do so that his son would not become a sannyasin, so that he would live in the world and would not leave the world. “What type of situation should be given to him and what type of education so that he never feels any urge toward spirituality?”This was a great experiment, an experiment in causing a person to be a particular thing: “He must be a great emperor. And both the possibilities are open, so how to close one possibility and how to help only one possibility for his growth?”They decided. They must have been very scientific. Never was such an experiment done before and never after, a very great experiment in human destiny. So they planned the whole thing. The childhood of Buddha was a planned childhood, absolutely planned. What he should eat, what he should do, with whom he should talk, who should teach him, where he should move, everything was planned.There were great, wise old men. They said, “He must not see any suffering. He must not see any old man, he must not see any diseased man. He must not see illness, poverty. He must not become aware of the great suffering life is. He must be in a world of dreams, utopia, euphoria. He must live in illusions so real that he never feels the urge to leave the world.”So three palaces were built for him, one for each season. In his gardens not even a dry leaf was allowed. In the night everything dying would be thrown away. He never saw a flower dying. He would see only flowers that were young and fresh. No old man was allowed to move wherever Buddha was, Gautama was. No old man was allowed to move there, only young, beautiful, healthy men and women.All the beautiful girls of the capital were brought for his service; they would serve him. And there was music and song, and his whole life was just a singsong, just a dreamy life. Absolute planning was possible because he was a king’s son. When he became young he had not seen any old man, any ill man, any dead man. He didn’t know that death existed. Of course, when there is no death, no old age, no suffering, where is the question of becoming a renunciate? Why renounce the world? The world is as beautiful as you can wish.He lived in this dreamland…and then suddenly everything shattered. You cannot go on like this. It is such a false thing, you cannot continue in it. One day or another, something will enter in and will shatter the whole thing. And it happened that because of this planning, I say because of this planning, when he came to know the facts of life, it was a great shock. It is not such a great shock to us; we are accustomed. He was not accustomed at all, so when for the first time he saw an old man, he asked, “What has happened to this man?” When he saw for the first time a dead body, the whole dreamworld disappeared.We see these things every day. We become insensitive, accustomed. But he was not accustomed, so he asked, “What has happened to this man?”He had to be answered, and death was such a shock, great shock. There was such a big gap between his life and the fact of death, that he is reported to have said, “If this man is dead, then the whole life is meaningless. Then I am also going to be dead? Then everything is useless. If death is the end, then life is meaningless. So I must go and find that which is deathless, if there is such a thing. And if there is not such a thing, then we are living only in dreams, wasting time, wasting energy, wasting ourselves.”The father had had a plan in his mind. He had been trying to cause, he was trying to force, a particular alternative. But the result was quite the contrary, because when you force a particular thing, the inner freedom begins to rebel. Buddha’s life was a manufactured life, artificial, false, unreal. And because everything was forced upon him, the inner freedom must have revolted. Because of that inner freedom he moved into quite the opposite polarity. Buddha’s father was just unable to understand what had happened. He had done everything in his power, and then the whole plan failed.You cannot cause man to be something. And if you can cause man to be something, then there is no humanity. Man is the uncaused factor in the world. So I cannot say why, because if I can say, “Because of this, man is not spiritual, so provide the factor and man will be spiritual,” then spirituality becomes just part of a great economics. Supply this and the demand will be fulfilled. I create a demand and the supply will be there.No, no such thing can be done with man. Spirituality is not a commodity. And because of this, because spirituality means freedom, so few people become spiritual – because you never use your freedom. Rather, on the contrary, you go on fettering yourself into slaveries, because slavery is convenient, very convenient. Slavery is convenient, comfortable. Freedom is inconvenient, uncomfortable.When everyone is a slave, you can exist with everyone if you are a slave. If you begin to act as a free agent, you become maladjusted. The whole world has progressed only through maladjusted individuals. The adjusted ones are always orthodox, traditional. They always do what all the others are doing. They are adjusted.Freedom means you begin to move in a direction no one is moving in. Fear grips you. You begin to feel uneasy. You cannot be certain because no one is moving there. Because freedom is such a responsibility, and such a dangerous responsibility, you go on deceiving yourself. At the most you choose one slavery over another, you go on substituting slaveries.One Hindu becomes a Christian, one Christian becomes a Hindu: they change slaveries. One man belongs to this party, and then he leaves it and thinks, “I am free,” and begins to belong to another party. We simply change bondages. A new bondage is not a freedom. Freedom means with no bondage, moving with no bondage. That means moving moment to moment without any certainty, moving into insecurity. We are always interested in securities.Only two or three days ago, one old lady was here. Her husband is doing meditation, deeply. Now she has become worried because he has become more silent. She came to ask me, “My husband has become more silent, and I fear that if this goes on he may become a sannyasin. He may leave us, he may renounce us, so stop my husband from doing meditation!”I asked her whether he has become a worse man than he was before. She said, “No, he has become good. He is not angry now as he was before. He is more loving, more compassionate. But the whole family has become disturbed, a fear that he may leave us.”This fear is not only the fear of the wife. I asked her husband also. He said, “I myself have become uneasy, because the silence is going in and as the silence is going in everything has begun to look different. My family doesn’t look at all as if it is mine – as if it is someone else’s family. I feel more compassion for the children, but now they are not mine. I am doing everything for them, and I will go on doing it, but it is as if I am doing it in a play, in a drama. I am not involved. So I myself have become afraid. If this goes on, then anything can happen. Any day I may leave them.”This fear of the unknown! A fixed pattern was there, now a new factor has entered in. And that new factor is so alive it will change everything. So he asked me, “If you tell me to, I will stop meditation. And in my family, everyone will be happy if I stop it.”You are afraid of your freedom. Everyone else is also afraid of your freedom. So we have a society of slaves, and in slavery we have such deep investments. That’s why we don’t move toward freedom.Every moment you can choose. You can choose spirituality every moment, or you can choose old habits. But to be with old habits is easy. You know them, you have lived them, nothing is new. With the new you are in the unknown, in the dark. You have to learn again. So a person who is moving in freedom has to be a learner every moment. And he cannot rely on the past. The past will not help.And we are all past-oriented only because the past helps. We are habit-oriented. This is the mechanism of the inner mind. Whenever you know something, you need not bother about it. When you know something as a habit, it is transferred from your consciousness to your robot mechanism inside; to the mechanical part of your being it is transferred. Then you need not bother about it. The mechanical part will go on doing it.If you are a driver, you go on talking, you go on thinking, you can go on singing, or you can put on your radio, and drive. You are not driving – the robot part, the mechanical part, is driving. You will be needed only when something new happens, some accident, suddenly; then you will be required. Otherwise you are not required at all. You can be at ease somewhere else. You need not be in your car at all.When you are driving mechanically, you are not there. You may have reached the destination already; only the robot part, the mechanical part, is driving. Your soul can fly to the stars or to the clouds, anywhere…the robot part is doing everything. This gives you a feeling of convenience. So with everything routinized, you feel convenient. With anything new, you have to be conscious, aware. When you are learning to drive, what is the problem? Why do you feel so much discomfort in learning? Because you have to be conscious.Unconsciousness is such a drug. Consciousness is such an effort. When you learn something, you have to be conscious every moment. That consciousness is felt as strain. It is not, but because we are always finding something mechanical, it appears to be. The person who is thinking of spirituality must think in terms of awareness, more and more awareness. That is the reason. Awareness comes only when you go on facing new factors.Biologists say that animals live in a world where awareness is not needed, a routine circle. They perform acts that are exactly alike. One animal’s birth is not different in any way from another’s – death not different, sex not different. Everything is similar, because everything is done by instinct. One bird making a nest, another bird making a dam, another bird making something else: they make through instinct. No learning is needed, they never are taught. It is just their robot part, inherent in their cells. They go on doing….Even if a bird is hatched without its parents there, and no other birds are allowed to meet him, when the time is ripe he will begin to make a nest. And the nest will be the same, exactly the same, as for centuries and centuries his parents have been making. No one has taught him, no awareness is needed. It is just in the cells, instinctive, a mechanical thing. He will do it.With man, that’s the difficulty. Man has to be taught everything, everything. Now biologists say that soon, after this century, we will have to teach sex, we will have to train, because now even sex is not as instinctive as it was. So you may see an eruption, an explosion, of sex books all over the world. Just as there are books on how to learn driving, now how to love – books entitled How to Love, How to Achieve Perfect Sex.No animal needs anything to know about sex. Why man? With man everything has to be learned. Why? Because the robot part in man is secondary, and consciousness has come in which has become primary, the central force. You have to learn everything. Then choice comes in. You have to choose what to learn and what not to learn.Spirituality will be your greatest choice. It is up to you. You may choose to look at the world in a spiritual way, you may choose to look at the world in a materialist way. And no one will tell you, “Don’t choose.” No one can force you. And if you choose the materialist outlook you will have a different life. If you choose the spiritualist outlook, you will have a totally different life. This is freedom.Biologists say that this consciousness came into human life because long ago, at least ten million years ago, some apes, the forefathers of man, came down from their trees and began to walk on two legs, not on four. Instead of on four, they began to walk on two legs, and the two hands were released.With these two hands released many things happened, and the greatest that happened was that the factor of awareness came in. Because when apes were on their trees, they were not in any danger. They were secure in their trees. No lion could kill them, no tiger could attack them. They were secured in their trees. They were moving in the trees from one tree to another, and that was a mechanical thing, inherent, hereditary.Then, it is an unknown factor yet, x, why certain apes came down to earth. Many reasons are possible. It seems either there was a sudden population explosion and they were so many that they had to find somewhere new to live – trees were less and they became more – or suddenly there were no rains for many years and trees died and became dry and they had to come down. But whatsoever may have happened, these are all guesses.Someone has suggested just now, a great scientist, he has suggested that it seems that humanity was born out of illness. Some apes became so ill because of an attack of a certain virus, a certain illness, these apes became so ill that they could not live by hanging on the trees. They became so weak that they had to come to the earth. It is possible. But whatsoever may have been the basic cause, this much is certain: when apes came down to the earth they had to be more alert. Their mechanical habits wouldn’t do. Their inherited instincts wouldn’t do. They had to walk on an unknown territory. The very walking, the stature, the posture, was so new; their bodies were not accustomed to it. With two legs walking, they became bipeds from quadrupeds. In their cells there was no knowledge about it.That’s why still, when a man is born, a child is born, he has to learn to walk – still! It is not instinctive. A horse is born, he can run. A calf is born, he can run. No need to learn to walk. But man has to learn to walk. And if you put a small child somewhere where no one walks and he cannot imitate, he will not walk for his whole life.In certain wolves’ caves, some children have been found who have grown up with wolves. They cannot walk. Just four or five years back, in a forest in U.P., one boy of fourteen was found in a community of wolves. They must have taken him from the village, and then he was brought up by them. Fourteen years old! He couldn’t walk, he was not a biped, he was still a quadruped. He would walk on all fours, and he would walk like a wolf, not like a man.Walking is still an effort, so when a child walks parents are so happy. This is the reason, because this is something valuable, an achievement. We have in our language many things which show this attitude. We say someone is standing on his legs: “He is standing on his own legs.” Something valuable, something worthwhile, something to be appreciated. We condemn someone when we say, “You are still not standing on your own legs.”Because man came into a new situation, from the trees to the earth – everything was new, and the robot would not work, and the instinct would not help – that’s why intelligence came up. He had to be aware, and he had to be aware every moment. There were many dangers all around. He was surrounded by enemies, and he was weak because no instinct would help now. This dangerous situation was the first spurt of alertness. He had to be alert.Now we have again created a very, very secure state of affairs, so you can be just like a robot. There is no need to be alert. That’s why the sharpness, the alertness, the awareness, has to be chosen again, and you have to put yourself into new dangers. Not that you move into a jungle or you begin to live with wild animals; that is not real danger. You can accustom yourself to it, it can become a robot part. The only danger now for man is to live moment to moment without the help of the past, to live moment to moment in the present, alert, aware, conscious. This is going to be your choice, with no cause.Look at it in one other way. Science is causal; that means past-oriented. If something is to be found, science will go to the past. If you are ill, science will go to your past history, case history, to see why this illness happened. Science cannot move to the future; it moves always to the past. If you are blind, science will go to your past, to your parents’ past. It moves to the past. It goes to find out the cause, then the effect can be explained.Religion is future-oriented, not past-oriented, so why cannot be answered in scientific terms. It is future-oriented. Can you understand it? It is difficult. It is not because something is causing you to be spiritual; rather, something is calling you to be spiritual – not causing you but calling you. Spiritual persons have always said, “A certain call has come to me.” The call comes from the future, not from the past. It is end-oriented, not origin-oriented.The freedom is there to choose. What is going to be your destiny, you can choose it. What you are going to achieve and to be, you can choose it. You feel hungry, you seek food: this is caused. If you feel inner tensions and then choose meditation, this is caused. Then your meditation is a scientific effort. If you say, “I don’t know why, but there is a certain calling, a call to me. I have to move in this direction. I feel an unknown fragrance. It is not coming from my past, but something from the future, inviting me, something unknown inviting me. I will move. It is dangerous, because I don’t know what is going to happen. I cannot be sure what the consequence will be. I move….” It is a jump.And, remember, this is not so only in this age. This has always been so and this always will be so.You ask me: “Do you feel that the present generation is capable of creating enlightened ones like Krishna, Lao Tzu and Christ?”Spirituality is not concerned with time at all, time or age. A Lao Tzu is born not because of a particular time; a buddha is born not because of a particular age. There were so many in Buddha’s age, but only one became the Buddha. The age was the same to all, the time was the same to all.Time is irrelevant for spirituality, because spirituality exists in eternity, not in time. Any moment is as good as any other. You can be a buddha this very moment. Time is absolutely innocent. Time neither helps nor hinders. It will not say, “What are you are going to do? It cannot happen. This is the twenty-first century. This cannot happen in this century.” Time has no determining capacity for spirituality. For other things it has.For example, you cannot fly in the sky in an airplane in Buddha’s age. You will have to move in a bullock-cart, because only after a certain evolution is the airplane possible. Now you can move in an airplane, but you cannot go just now to other solar families. Whatsoever you do, you cannot just go now. We have gone to the moon only. It will take at least twenty centuries to go to another solar system; to go beyond the family of this sun, it will take at least twenty centuries. It is a gradual process. Many things will have to be developed, only then. A bullock-cart will become an airplane, but many steps will have to be taken.So you cannot do certain things in Buddha’s age as far as the outside world is concerned. But as far as the inside world is concerned, any moment, any moment, any time, is as good as any other, because when you move inside time disappears. This has to be understood.A buddha is meditating, deeply gone inside. There is no time. Time ceases. He is not even aware of time. Time stops. If you move inside, time will stop. Buddha meditating twenty-five centuries ago will drop out of time; you meditating just today, you will also drop out of time. And there will be no difference between you and Buddha, because all differences are time differences.You wear certain clothes Buddha cannot wear, you know many things Buddha cannot know. You belong to a different world, different education, different culture; Buddha belongs to a different world. But when you move in, you move outside culture, you move outside society, you move outside education. When you go in, you go into a different world uncreated by the society. Any day you can move.And this is a human tendency, to think that “Our own age is bad, evil. Our own time is bad.” This is a human tendency. And this is not only so with us: this has always been so. The most ancient record has been found in Babylon. It is at least seven thousand years old. And if you publish it in any of tomorrow morning’s daily newspapers as an editorial, it will do. You need not change anything in it.It says: This is the age of darkness. This is the age of corruption. This is the age of immorality and sin. Everything good has disappeared, everything wise has disappeared. Youth has become rebellious. The wife will not listen to her husband, the son will not listen to his father. The teachers are no longer respected by their disciples. This is a seven-thousand-year-old document!Every age thinks that this is the worst one. Why? Because we are only aware of our own age and everything around, and we begin to compare our neighbor with Buddha. You don’t know that the neighbors were always just like these ones. Buddha was not your neighbor; Buddha is one in millions. So we compare the best one of the past with the worst one of the present. That’s the problem. That’s why every age appears to be the age of sin.We think of Jesus, we don’t think of Judas. We think of Rama, we don’t think of Ravana. We think of Buddha, we don’t think of Devadatta. He was Buddha’s cousin-brother and he tried many times to murder Buddha. He was jealous, simply jealous that “Why should this man be honored and respected so much?” He was just a cousin-brother to him, nothing more.When he felt that this would not do, he renounced the world. Devadatta renounced the world because “It seems that people honor only that one who has renounced the world.” So he renounced the world, he went into deep austerity. He practiced meditation, yoga, everything, just to get higher than Gautama.That also won’t do, because you cannot force yourself to be a buddha, you cannot imitate. But Devadatta is forgotten, Buddha remains. The whole age is forgotten, only Buddha remains. Everything has disappeared, only Buddha remains. And then we compare Buddha with our whole age. Because of that this problem arises: whether Buddha or Jesus can be born today. It looks impossible. How is it possible? In this age of darkness, corruption, immorality, how is this possible?Another factor also enters in. Whenever a person is dead for twenty centuries, we forget how we behaved with him when he was alive. Jesus was crucified, not because he was a great teacher or a great enlightened one, but only because he was immoral, undisciplined, against the code and against the tradition. His behavior was not that of a respectable man.And when he was killed, it was a unanimous resolution. Few, very few, were with him, and the whole country was against him. He had only twelve disciples, and they too left. When the moment came and he was to be crucified, they all left. They also were doubtful inside: “When everyone is against him, something must be wrong.”Jesus was crucified as a hippie, as a vagabond. You may be surprised: he was crucified but there is no record. Jews have not even recorded the incident. It was such a minor incident that no Jew has recorded it in their history. Romans have not recorded it. If you go to find any historical record that Jesus existed, you cannot find one. There is nothing. The Bible recorded by his disciples is the only record.So there have been certain persons who have doubted the very existence of Jesus. They say he never existed. They say, rather, “This Jesus Christ was a drama which was played in every village. There was only a drama, not a real historical fact.” And later on, by and by, people forgot that this was a drama and it became history.Because there is no record! – if the Bible is lost, there is no record that Jesus ever existed. If he was a very significant, prominent person, if the age was influenced by him, then this is impossible to conceive why there is no record. He was not. He was unknown, no one knew about him. Later on only, when disciples gathered and created an organization, by and by he became known. Otherwise he was an unknown carpenter’s son.If Jesus meets you, you will not recognize him. If Buddha meets you somewhere suddenly, and no one introduces you to him, you will not recognize him. Because this inner flowering is such a subtle, such a hidden force, that unless you are also a fellow traveler, unless you are also moving in that dimension, you cannot recognize him.So when you ask whether it is possible now, in this age, for a Buddha to be or for a Christ to be, you again ask a meaningless question. Any day, in any time, Christ is possible, Buddha is possible, because the possibility belongs to the innermost realm of your being, not to the procession of events which we call history. It doesn’t belong to history, it doesn’t belong to time. It belongs to the innermost realm of being which is eternity, not time. You can be a buddha – take the jump and you will be. And time will not hinder you so that you cannot take the jump.This factor, that time is irrelevant, must be deeply understood and pondered over, because we are very cunning and very self-deceiving. If someone says that in this age it is not possible…and there are religions, and in a way every religion says it, that in this age this is not possible. Any organized religion will say this, that “Jesus was born once. He is the only begotten Son of God, and now you cannot be a Jesus again. You can only be a Christian, not a Christ.”Jainas say, “You cannot be a tirthankara, you cannot be a Mahavira. The quota is finished. Only twenty-four persons can be tirthankaras. There can be no twenty-fifth.” Mohammedans will not allow you to be a prophet, a paigambara, because “Mohammed is the last paigambara, and he has brought the complete and the final message from God. No alteration is possible now, and there is no need.” Every organized religion will tell you that “Now you need not bother to be a Mohammed or a Mahavira. Just follow Mohammed or Mahavira. You can only be a follower.”Why? Why do they say this? For two reasons. You like it very much, deep down: then the responsibility is not upon you. “The time is bad. If you are not a Jesus, it is not your responsibility. In this kaliyuga, in this age of sin, no one can be a Christ, so you are not. It is not your responsibility. It is the very time which hinders you; otherwise you would flower as a Jesus at any moment. You are ready, but the time is not helpful.”Everyone likes this deep down, appreciates it. Then you can be whatsoever you are. There is no burden on you to flower into a buddha. Because of this deep satisfaction and deep cunningness, deception, we are happy. “We can only be criminals, we can only be weak human beings. That’s what the age allows.”And, secondly, every religion thinks that if buddhas are going to be born again and again, then you cannot have an organized church for Buddha, because every other buddha will disturb the whole thing. Christians cannot allow anyone to be a christ again, because then he will disturb the whole Christian kingdom, because such persons are bound to be nontraditional, such persons are bound to be nonsectarian, such persons are bound to be absolutely free, independent. They will destroy any organization if they are born.So no religion would like and appreciate Jesus to be there again, in any form. “The pope is the representative and he is enough. Jesus is no longer needed.” So every religion goes on insisting that nothing can be done at this moment. “What can be done is you have to follow – worship and follow. Just be a follower in the crowd. Don’t try to be an individual.”Buddha was an individual, he was not a Buddhist. He was born a Hindu, and then the organization couldn’t contain him. No organization can contain such a person. See: Jesus was born a Jew, he died a Jew. He was not a Christian. But because the Jews could not contain such a seed, he could not be contained. They threw him out. Because he was thrown, the seed sprouted into Christianity.Buddha was a Hindu. He lived as a Hindu, he died Hindu. He was not a Buddhist. But Hindus couldn’t absorb him, because if you want to absorb a buddha you will have to transform the whole society. He couldn’t be absorbed, he was thrown out.If a buddha is born now into a Buddhist society, he will be thrown out. If a Jesus is born now in a Christian society, he will be thrown out. Because it is not that Jews or Hindus are against buddhas and christs: any organization will be against them, even their own organization, because organization lives in traditions, exists because of tradition, and these persons are absolutely anti-traditional, traditionless. They move every moment in freedom. You cannot say what they will do.That’s why it is very difficult to create a sect with a living enlightened person. It is very difficult. You are never at ease: “What is he going to do? What is he going to say?” When the teacher is dead, a sect can be created. Now you know what the teacher wants, how he behaves. Now you can categorize everything. Now you can separate, divide, analyze. Now you can make a doctrine and principles out of it. Now the creed is possible.Only a dead teacher will allow a creed to be there. With a living teacher, he is every day growing, changing, transforming, moving into the unknown. You are never certain with him, you are never certain. So only with dead teachers are creeds born. And when creeds are born, you begin to think in high terms of Jesus and Buddha. They were never thought of so highly in their own day.So remember these two things. Religion is a continuous process; it never stops in any age. Spirituality is an individual phenomenon. If you decide for it, it will happen to you; no one can bar it, but it needs a total decision. And buddhas and christs are not bound to any age. At this very moment there are persons who are enlightened, but you cannot recognize them. It will take hundreds of years for the society to recognize them. When they are long dead then society will come to feel that they were rare, that something unique had happened in the past.I will tell you a story. Nietzsche has written one of the most wonderful books in the world, Thus Spake Zarathustra. In this book he has given a parable:A madman comes to the market and asks everyone, stares in everyone’s eyes and asks, “Have you seen God? Where is God? I am searching, I am seeking. Where is God?”Everyone laughs. Of course, they are all believers, but, as believers are, it is a formality with them. They think that this man has gone mad. “Of course, there is God and he created the world. Now he is finished with us and we are finished with him. Why are you seeking? For what purpose? Are you insane? These things are good to talk and write about – that God is, seek him – but are you really seeking him?”And that man stares in everyone’s eyes and he says, “Have you heard anything about God? Where is he?”Then the whole crowd gathers around him and they tell him, “We have not heard about him since long. You go somewhere else. Don’t disturb the market.”The man says, “I have come to deliver some news to you. I am not seeking him; I have come only to know whether you have heard anything lately about him. Do you know he is dead?”Now they feel certainly he is mad. “He was mad when he was seeking – he is still mad if he says God is dead. We believe in a dead, alive God – dead so that he may not touch us and alive so that we can worship him on Sundays. But this man is mad. Either he thinks God is so alive that he can be found, or he thinks he is dead.” So they ask, “Who has told you?”He says, “I have seen it for myself. And the more mysterious thing is this, that you have killed him. But it seems that the news has not yet reached you. It will take time. You yourselves have killed him. He is dead. But it seems the time is not yet ripe and I have come early. The news has not yet reached the marketplace – and you have killed him! So I must go back to the hills. The time is not ripe and I have come early. The news will take time to reach you.”Even sunrays take time, the stars’ rays take time to reach you. There is thunder and lightning in the clouds. It takes time to reach you even when you have seen it, because there is a gap. Light travels faster than sound. When there is thunder and lightning in the clouds, you have seen the lightning, but you will hear the thunder later on.So the madman says, “He is dead, and you have killed him, but it seems the news has not reached you yet. It will take time.”It takes time. To recognize that a buddha is a buddha, it takes time. And it takes so much time that when Buddha is no more you recognize him, when a Jesus is no more you recognize him. And when he is, you not only do not recognize him: if someone says that he is, you will deny it. It takes time. This is one of the most unfortunate tendencies of the human mind, because because of this we miss much.There are stories…. People would come to ask Buddha, “Someone says that you are an enlightened one. Are you? Really? Have you attained that unattainable?”If the Buddha says, “Yes, I have attained,” they will go and say that he is an egoist. If he says, “I have not attained,” they will say, “We knew it already.” If he remains silent, they will say he knows nothing.Hundreds and hundreds of stories… Pilate asks Jesus, “Really, you think that you are the Son of God? Really, you think so?” If Jesus says, “Yes, I am the Son of God,” he is a madman. If he remains silent, he is afraid. If he denies, then they think, “We knew it already that you were not.” So what can a Buddha say? What can a Jesus say?But if he has been dead for twenty or twenty-five centuries you cannot go to him and ask, “Are you an enlightened one? Really? Don’t you think you are deceived by yourself? Are you not in some self-deception?” You cannot ask. And this long gap…over this long gap you cannot reach him. You begin to recognize it, but then it is useless. Then it is useless, because that recognition will not help. And if Buddha comes amidst you, you will again raise the same questions.Why is this so? When someone is present amidst you, he looks just like you. He lives like you, he eats like you, he falls ill like you, he dies like you. How can you think that “a person just like me is enlightened and I am not”? It is humiliating. It is deep down hurtful to the ego. Because it hurts the ego, because you feel humiliation, you deny. When you deny, you feel good.So I will say to you that whenever you are in contact with someone where you begin to feel the tendency of the mind to deny, remember this: because of this tendency you have missed many buddhas, and because of this tendency you will never be able to recognize. And unless you recognize something which has happened in someone, it is not going to happen in you, because when you go on denying that anyone is a buddha, ultimately you will come to believe that you cannot become one yourself. When no one can become, when no one is, how can you become?When you recognize buddhahood in someone, deep down you have recognized your own buddhahood in the future. To recognize a buddha in the present is to recognize your own future, your own future possibility, your own destiny.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-07/

Nischalatwam pradakshinam.Stillness is pradakshina – the movement around That for worship.Silence is meditation, and silence is basic for any religious experience. What is silence? You can create it, you can cultivate it, you can force it, but then it is just superficial, false, pseudo. You can practice it, and you will begin to feel and experience it, but your practice makes it auto-hypnotic. It is not real silence. Real silence comes only when your mind dissolves, not through any effort but through understanding, not through any practice but through an inner awareness.We are filled with sounds, outside and inside. In the outside world it is impossible to create a situation which is silent. Even when we move to a forest, deep in a forest, it is not silence – only new sounds, natural sounds. In the middle of the night everything has stopped, but it is not silence, only new sounds you are not acquainted with – more harmonious, of course, more musical, but still sounds, no silence.A modern musician and composer, John Cage, has said many times that silence is impossible. You can have musical sounds, you can have nonmusical sounds; you can have sounds you like and sounds you don’t like. When you don’t like sounds, they become noise; when you like noise, it becomes music. But you cannot have silence – Cage says you cannot have silence.He reports one incident. He thought previously, before this incident, that silence is a possibility, but he had not meditated over it. Once he entered a hall in Harvard University built particularly for some scientific engineering purposes. The hall was absolutely soundproof and anti-echo, absolutely. He entered the hall. He has an ear for sound, he is a great musician, one of the greatest of this century. In that hall he began to hear two sounds: one a high sound, the other a low sound.He asked the engineer-in-charge, “You say this hall is absolutely soundproof, you say it is anti-echo, but I hear two sounds: one high and one low.”The engineer said, “The high sound is your nervous system working and the low sound is your blood in circulation.”Cage says, “That day I became absolutely certain that, unless I die, silence is impossible.”Silence is impossible in the outside world. And your nervous system is part of the outside world, not of the inside. And your blood circulation is part of the outside world, not of the inside. The real inside is absolutely silent. If you allow me I will say: the absolute point of silence is the inside.Sound is outside, silence is inside. Silence and inside are synonymous. If you move out, then you move in sound. If you move in, then you move in silence. And unless you reach a point where no sound is…or, as the Zen masters say, the soundless sound, or as the Hindu yogis have always called it, anahat nada, the uncreated, soundless sound. But one need not use these paradoxical words. It will be easy to understand with simple words. Outside is sound, inside is silence, soundlessness.But Cage is right. If you are thinking in terms of objective silence, there is no possibility. There is no possibility if you are thinking of silence somewhere other than your inner center – then there is no possibility. But you can create a pseudo silence very easily. You can cultivate it, you can practice it.For example, you can use any mantra. Constant repetition will give you a pseudo-feeling of silence, a false feeling of silence. Constant repetition of a mantra hypnotizes you. You begin to feel dull, your awareness is lost, you become more and more sleepy. And in that sleepiness you can feel that you have become silent. It is not silence. Silence means: mind dissolved through understanding. The more you understand your mind, the more you become aware about its mechanism and working, the more you are disidentified from your mind. It is identification which creates inner noise.Anger is there in the mind: you are identified with it. You don’t see it as an object, anger there, somewhere outside you. You begin to feel angry, you begin to become one with it. Then you will miss your inner center, you have moved. Many thoughts are flowing in the mind continuously; the thought process is on. You are identified with each and every thought. Any thought is yours; you become one with it. Then you have moved.Not only with thoughts do you become one but also with things still further from your center. Your house is not only your house: you have become your house. Your possessions are not just your possessions: you are identified with them. When your car is damaged, your inside is also damaged. When your house is on fire, you are also on fire. If all of your possessions are just taken away, you will die.We are identified with our possessions, we are identified with our thoughts, we are identified with our emotions, we are identified with everything, except ourselves. Except the innermost center, we are identified with everything. Because of this identification, noise is created, conflict, a continuous anguish, tension.It is bound to be there because you are not your house. There is a gap and you have forgotten the gap. You are not your wife, you are not your husband. There is a gap – you have forgotten the gap. You are not your thoughts, your anger, or your love, or your hatred. There is a gap. When you begin to feel this gap, you are always out, a witness, not involved in. Anything you are not involved in, you are outside it.If John Cage, as he reports, heard his own sounds – the nervous system working, the blood circulating – then two things are there. The awareness, the knowledge, the knowing, the consciousness, and a point is there inside which becomes aware that two sounds are there. But Cage is aware only of two sounds. He is not aware of the center which is aware of these two sounds.If he becomes aware of this center of alertness, then those two sounds are just far away. There is a gap. And the moment your focus of consciousness is transferred from objective sounds to the soundless center of awareness, you are in silence. So I would like to say: you are silence, and everything else except you is sound. If you are identified with anything, then you will never attain this soundlessness.This sutra says:Silence, stillness is pradakshina – the movement around That for worship.You go to a temple and then you move around the altar of the deity seven times. This is a ritual of worship, but every ritual is symbolic. Why seven rounds? Man has seven bodies, and with each body there are identifications. So when someone moves in, he has to leave seven bodies and the identifications with each body. There are seven rounds; when these seven rounds are complete, you are in the center.The altar in the temple is not something outside you. You are the temple and the altar is your inner center. If your mind moves around your center, comes nearer and nearer and nearer and, ultimately, is established in the center, this is pradakshina. And when you happen to be at your center, everything is silent.This silence is achieved through understanding: understanding your anger, your passion, your greed, your sex, everything – understanding your mind. But we are identified with our minds. We think we are our minds. That is the only problem: how to be detached from our own minds, how to be divorced, so to speak, from our own minds. I am reminded:Mulla Nasruddin applied for a divorce. The whole village gathered in the court. Everyone was just surprised, because Mulla Nasruddin was eighty-seven and his wife seventy-eight. The judge was also surprised. He said, “Nasruddin, what is your age?”Nasruddin said, “My age is just eighty-seven.” Just eighty-seven!“And what is the age of your wife?”He said, “Just seventy-eight.”“And how long have you been married and how long have you lived together, Nasruddin?”Nasruddin said, “My lord, not more than sixty-five years – only sixty-five years!”The magistrate said, “I am surprised. When you have lived for sixty-five years continuously together, what is the reason to apply for a divorce now?”Mulla Nasruddin said, “My lord, enough is enough!”With our mind also a point must be reached when you can say, “Enough is enough.” We have lived with our minds for lives together, for millennia, but still the point has not been reached when we can say enough is enough. We are still not aware that our whole misery, the whole hell that we call life, is because of our mind and the identification with it.There is no need to leave the world. The only religious requirement is to leave the mind, because the mind is the world. Sometimes we get bored, frustrated, fed up – not with mind, but with a particular mind. Then we change it, but the change is not for no-mind. The change is again for another mind.And that very thing happened with Mulla Nasruddin. His divorce was allowed, it was granted, and he was thinking, “When I am freed from my wife I will be free at last, and then I can sleep at ease.” But he couldn’t sleep that night at all. He was so excited – not that the divorce was such an excitement, but the moment the divorce was allowed he began to think of marrying again.This is how we go on. He was fed up with this wife, but not fed up with being a husband, not fed up with woman. He was fed up with this woman, not fed up with the mind which creates all these relationships and suffers. And within a week, the rumor was afoot that he was going to marry a girl of seventeen. Everyone became disturbed, the whole village. He had sons, a sixty-five-year-old, grandchildren and children of grandchildren.His eldest son, who was sixty-five, approached him and said, “Dad, it doesn’t look good to advise you, but to marry a seventeen-year-old girl at the age of eighty-seven, it is just absurd. And the whole village is against it. And, moreover, it is not good for health. It may even prove fatal to life.”Nasruddin said, “You don’t bother about it. If this girl dies, I will marry again!”This is how mind goes on working. It is always changing things outside, somewhere else on the periphery, never changing itself.Our mind is the problem, and the mind is always looking outside, never in. A divorce is needed – not with a particular mind, not with this or that mind, but with mind itself. With minding itself a divorce is needed, and only then do you enter silence.So what is to be done? You can do two things. One is very ordinary and is done everywhere, that is: don’t try to change this mind but use some technique to drug this mind as it is. Use some technique to drug this mind as it is. No transformation is needed. A mantra is given to you, a method, a certain technique. You do it – with this very mind.You are capable of dulling it and drugging it; then it will be less active on the surface, but it will be more active in the deeper realms. It may become absolutely inactive on the surface, and you may be befooled by it, but the activity will continue inside. Use a mantra, go on repeating Rama-Rama, Krishna, or any name, and then the surface mind will become silent. But you can feel inside activity. Just below the surface mind much activity is going on. Thinking continues in subdued terms, in subdued tones. Everything continues – it just goes underground.This is very easy. That’s why mantra yoga is a very prevalent thing. It has appeal. Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation is just this sort of self-deception. It is just a trick; you can play it. It will help in the beginning, and for a few days you will feel very much edified, elevated. And then everything stops. A plateau is reached. When the surface has become a little bit silent, then you cannot do anything with this technique. And then, by and by, the subdued notes will become again clear.This is simple autohypnosis. Even if you continue to think, “I am silent, I am silent, I am getting more silent every day,” you will begin to feel a certain silence, but that feeling is just thought-created. Stop thinking and it will evaporate. Coué’s method or suchlike: just go on thinking repetitively, continuously, that you are silent, you are silent inside, you are getting day by day more and more silent. Go on continuously repeating this. Constant repetition will befool you. You will begin to think that, of course, now you are silent. This is self-deception and it leads nowhere. You remain the same. There is no transformation.This sutra is not concerned with such stillnesses. This sutra is concerned with the authentic silence, which comes not through techniques but through understanding. And what do I mean by understanding? Don’t fight with your mind. Try to understand it. Anger is there: don’t be angry against anger, don’t fight the anger. Rather, try to understand what anger is: “What is this energy? Why does this come? What is the cause of it and what is the origin of it and where is the source?” Meditate on anger. And the more you become aware of it, the less and less anger will come to you. And when there is no anger, you are thrown into your inner silence.Sex is there. Don’t fight it: try to understand it. We are fighting with ourselves. Either we are identified with the mind or we are fighting with the mind. And in both the cases we are the losers. If you are identified, then you will indulge – in anger, in sex, in greed, in jealousy. If you are fighting, then you will create anti attitudes, then you will create inner divisions, then you will create inner polarities. And you are divided, no one else, because the anger is your anger.Now if you are fighting it you have double the anger: anger and this angriness against the anger. And you are divided. Now you can go on fighting, but this fight is just absurd. It is as if I am trying to fight my right hand with my left hand. I can go on fighting. Sometimes my right hand will win, sometimes my left hand may win, but there is no victory. You can play the game, but there is neither defeat nor victory.I have heard a story about D. T. Suzuki. He was a guest in a certain family. Suzuki was a great thinker; he introduced Zen to the West. He was himself deep in meditation. He was staying with a certain family, and because of him the family had invited many guests to meet him. They discussed many, many philosophical problems. The discussion was prolonged up until midnight. It was a long, three, four, five-hour discussion. Everything was discussed – without any conclusion, as it happens always in philosophical discussions.When the guests had left, the host asked Suzuki, “It was a long discussion and we enjoyed it, but there was no conclusion. It is frustrating.”Suzuki laughed and said, “I like philosophy because of this, because you can go on fighting. There is no victory, no defeat. This is a very refined game, in which no one is defeated and no one ever wins. This is not a vulgar game in which someone wins and someone is defeated. This is such a game that you go on playing it – no one ever wins and no one is ever defeated. And the beauty, moreover, is this: that everyone thinks that he has won. This is the beauty of it – it is so.”The same happens inside also if you begin to fight with yourself, because you are fighting from both the sides. No victory is possible because there is no one except you. You are playing with yourself, dividing yourself.This fight, inner fight, is the curse of all religious persons, because the moment they become aware of the hell their mind has created, they begin to fight it. But through fight you will never move anywhere. Many reasons are there.When you fight with your mind, you have to remain with it. And when you fight with your mind, it shows ignorance – because the mind is there only because you have a deep cooperation with it. If the cooperation is withdrawn, the mind dissolves. Then there is no need to fight. The mind is not your enemy; it is just the accumulation of your own experiences. It is your mind because you have accumulated it, and you cannot fight with your experiences. If you do, then the greater possibility is this: that your experiences may win. They are more weighty than you. This happens every day. If you fight with your mind, your mind wins in the end – not ultimately, but it wins and you have to yield.Real, authentic stillness is not achieved through fight. Fight is suppressive, repressive. And whatsoever is repressed has to be repressed again and again. And whatsoever is repressed will try to rebel against you. You will become a madhouse – fighting with yourself, talking with yourself, taking revenge upon yourself, yielding to yourself, being defeated by yourself. You will become a madhouse.Don’t be in a fight with the mind. And this fight will create such noise that even ordinary persons are not so filled with inner noise as religious persons are. Ordinary persons are not even bothered. They go on, they take it easy. They know it is a hell, but they accept it. A religious person knows it is a hell, denies it, fights with it – a double hell is created.You cannot create heaven by fighting hell. If you want to transcend, fight is not the way. Awareness, knowing what this mind is, is the way. So what is to be done? Be aware of suppressive methods. Only one thing is essential, that whatsoever you are doing, do it with full awareness. If you are angry, then be angry with awareness.Gurdjieff used to speak and create situations. For his disciples he would create situations. You have just come into the room and Gurdjieff will create a situation in which you are insulted. Someone says something very abusive about you, someone else says something else…you begin to get angry. And the whole group will help you to get angry, and you are unaware of what is happening. Gurdjieff will push you into more and more anger, and then suddenly you will burst, you will explode, you will be mad.And then Gurdjieff will say, “Now be angry with full awareness. Don’t go back, don’t fall back – be angry!” Then it is not easy to fall back. And he will say, “Now be alert inside and see what is happening in you. Close your eyes and see what is happening. From where have these clouds of anger come? From where is this smoke coming? Find the inner fire inside from where this smoke is coming.”Gurdjieff was always creating situations. He was of the opinion that if we want a more silent world, we must teach our children how to be angry, how to be jealous, how to be filled with hate, how to be violent. We must teach them. We are doing quite the opposite: we say, “Don’t be angry.” No one says what anger is. No one teaches that if you are going to be angry, then be angry in a tactful way, then be angry efficiently, then be a master of anger. No one is teaching this; everyone is against anger and everyone is saying, “Don’t be angry!” The child is even unaware of what anger is, but we tell him, “Don’t be angry,” and we go on making commandments: “Don’t be this, don’t do that!”A child was asked what his name was. He said, “‘Don’t,’ because whenever I do anything, either my mother or my father cries, ‘Don’t!’ So I think this is my name. I am always called Don’t.”This creates a fighting attitude. Without knowledge, you are against certain things. And if you are ignorant you cannot win, because knowledge is power. Not only scientifically in the outside world, but inwardly also knowledge is power.There is electricity in the clouds. It has always been there, but we were ignorant. Electricity in the clouds used to create only fear in us and nothing else. Now we know about it, now the electricity has become our slave. There is no fear. Otherwise, the Vedas say that when God is angry with you, he will send thunder, he will send storms, lightning – when he is angry with you. That was “God’s anger.” Now we have channeled it. Now it is no more “God’s anger”; it is no more at all related with God. We are manipulating it. Knowledge becomes power.Anger inside is also just like electricity, lightning. Previously it was “God’s anger,” the lightning in the clouds. Then we came to know about it. Knowledge became power. Now there is no “God’s anger” in the clouds. Your anger is again an electricity, inner. The moment you know about it, there will be no anger inside you. And then you can channel your anger – it becomes your servant.A person who has no anger, really, will be impotent. Anger is energy. If you don’t know about it, it becomes suicidal. If you know about it, you can transform the energy. You can use it. Then it is just your slave.And the same goes for everything. Your thoughts: they are energy, they can be used. If you can become silent, you become the master of your thoughts. Right now you have thoughts but no thinking, many thoughts and no thinking. When you have no thoughts you have become the master of your process of thinking, you can think for the first time. Thinking is energy, but then you are the master.With the discovery of the inner stillpoint, you become the master. Without that discovery, you will remain a slave to your instincts, to anything. Knowledge will lead you in, so make yourself a laboratory. You are a universe. Find out what your energies are – not your enemies – what are your energies?Choose the chief characteristic. Remember this: choose the chief characteristic. Is anger your chief characteristic, or sex, or greed, or jealousy, or hate? What is your chief characteristic? Find out first, because if you go on without knowing the chief characteristic, it will be a difficult process to go in – because the chief characteristic has your energy in it. It is the central thing. Everything else is just secondary to it, subsidiary to it.If your anger is the chief characteristic, then all else will be just a support to it. Find out the center of your energies, and then begin to be aware about it. Then forget everything else. If greed is your chief characteristic, then be aware of greed and forget everything else. When greed is solved, everything else will be solved. And remember this: don’t imitate anyone else because their chief characteristic may be a different thing.Because of this imitative tendency, we create unnecessary problems. For example, Buddha had one thing to transform, Mahavira had another thing, Jesus something else. If you blindly follow Jesus, then you will begin to fight with the chief characteristic of Jesus, not your own, and that will misguide you. If you blindly follow Buddha, then again you are misguided. Understand Buddha, understand Jesus, but find out your disease, and concentrate your awareness on that particular disease. If the main disease is solved, minor diseases will dissolve by themselves.We go on fighting with minor diseases. Then you can waste lives together. You change one minor disease and another minor disease will be created, because the source of energy, the central source of your disease, remains intact. So if you are working with minor diseases you can only change a disease. We are even afraid to find out what our chief disease is.Many many persons come to me, and I am surprised, always surprised, that whatsoever they say is their problem is never the case. They even deceive about their problems. When I work with them, when I observe them, and when they become more frank, more naked, then new problems arise.One man was here, an older man, fifty-eight, fifty-nine. He would always come and talk about meditation and how to do it. He said, “I have been interested in meditation continuously for twenty-five years. That is my only interest.” But that was not the case at all. Meditation was not his interest at all.By and by, it became apparent to him also that he was not interested in meditation. He was interested in a reputation that he is a great meditator. Reputation was his interest, ego was the problem. And he would always say, “Ego is not my problem. I am a humble man. But too many thoughts is my problem, so how to dissolve these thoughts?”The chief characteristic was only one thought – the thought of ego was the problem. And he was always avoiding the chief disease.So you can go on cutting the leaves of a tree, and the tree will again put out new leaves. You cut one and the tree will supply two, and the tree will be greener for your effort, more green for your effort. You cannot cut leaves, you can only cut roots. And leaves and roots are different things. When I say “the chief characteristic” I mean the root. When I say “minor problems” I mean leaves. And the problem becomes more difficult to solve because leaves are apparent and roots are underground. They are the source of all the leaves. You cut the whole tree, and a new tree will come out because the roots are intact. You cut the roots, and the tree will disappear automatically. Then there is no need to be bothered with the tree.But roots are underground. Your chief characteristic will always be found underground. So whatsoever you say is your problem is never the case. It can be taken for granted that that is not the case. Rather, quite the opposite may be the case, because we go on hiding our inner weaknesses. And just to distract the mind, just to forget the problem, we create minor problems.One day a man came to Mulla Nasruddin. He was the old man in the village – wise in everything, wise in all worldly ways. The man had been suffering from a cold for a long time. He was very ill and he had tried every medicine, but to no avail. So he asked the Mulla his advice, what to do.Mulla said, “You go to the lake at midnight.” The night was ice cold and the lake was just freezing. “You take a bath, then be naked and run around the lake.”Winds were blowing fast. The man said. “What are you suggesting? I am suffering from a cold. I may get even more ill, – I may get pneumonia!”Mulla Nasruddin said, “If you can get pneumonia, I have the medicine for you. But for a common cold there is no medicine. If you get pneumonia, then I can help you.”In our inner world, we go on avoiding problems which we cannot solve. We try to forget problems which we cannot solve, and we begin to focus our mind on problems which we can solve. Because of that, your chief diseases go underground. Ultimately, you are not even aware of them, and you go on fighting with phony problems which are not real problems. These phony problems take much energy and dissipate your energies, destroy them, and you remain the same because you go on fighting with the leaves.So the first thing toward inner stillness is to find out what the root of your problems, of your conflicts, of your tensions, is – what is the root? Don’t think how to solve it, because if you think of solving you will be scared. Don’t think of solving it. First simply find out: “What is the chief characteristic of my mind? What is the center of my mind?” No question about solving it, no idea about changing it, a simple inventory: “What is the chief problem to my mind?”Don’t go on escaping from the chief characteristic, and don’t create phony problems. They will not help. Even if you solve them, they will not help. Once you know the chief characteristic of your mind, now be aware of it: how it works, how it creates inner nets, how it goes on working inside and influencing your whole life. Just be aware. Still don’t think how to change it, because the moment you begin to think of how to change it you miss the opportunity of being aware.Anger is there, greed is there, sex is there: don’t think of changing, don’t think of transcending them. They are there: be aware. Transcendence is not a result, it is a consequence. Remember this difference. The difference is subtle. Transcendence is not a result, it is a consequence. What do I mean? You cannot think of transcendence. You cannot think, “How to go beyond mind?” You will never go. If I say, “Be aware,” I don’t mean that by awareness you can go beyond mind.Someone was here just the other day. He is struggling to be in meditation, to be silent. But he is in such a hurry that that hurry becomes the obstacle. Whenever he comes he asks, “How many days more will it take? I have been doing meditation for three months, and yet nothing has happened.”So I told him, “Unless you leave this constant hankering – when will it happen? – it is not going to happen at all.”The man said to me, “I can leave it. I will not hanker after the result. But tell me, if I leave this, when will it happen? I can leave this – even this I can leave. I will not bother you again. But tell me, if I leave this, when will it happen?”So if I say, “By awareness you will transcend,” don’t think that awareness is a method, and because you want to transcend, of course, “If awareness is the method, then I am going to practice it because through it I will transcend.” You will never transcend. If awareness is attained, transcendence happens. That is a consequence, not a result. It comes. If awareness is there, transcendence will come. You will go beyond your mind, you will reach the inner center of stillness. But you cannot desire it.That’s what I mean when I say it is not a result. A result can be desired, but a consequence follows. It cannot be desired. A result can be manipulated, planned, but a consequence cannot be manipulated, cannot be planned. If you are really aware, you will transcend. Awareness is not a method of transcendence, awareness is transcendence.This constant awareness of your mind dissolves, by and by, your greed, your anger, your sex, your hate, your jealousy. They dissolve automatically. There is no effort to dissolve them, not even any intention to dissolve them, not any longing to dissolve them. They are there, so rather than the intention to dissolve them, acceptance is more helpful.Accept your anger – it is there. Accept it and be aware of it. These are two things: acceptance and awareness. And you can be aware only if you accept totally. If you don’t accept me, you cannot look at my face. If you don’t accept me, you will try to avoid me in subtle ways. Even if I am present in the room, you will look in some other direction, you will think of something else. If you don’t accept me, if you reject me, your whole mind will try to avoid me. If you reject anger, you cannot be aware. You cannot encounter it face-to-face. And when anger is encountered face-to-face, it dissolves. When sex is encountered face-to-face, the energy is released into a different dimension. Encounter your mind and accept it.The negative teachings, the condemnatory teachings, teachings which are based on struggle, have created this, our so-called world. The whole earth is a madhouse, and everyone is just on the verge of being mad.Now psychologists say there are two types of madness: one, normal madness; the other, abnormal madness. Normal madness means everyone is like that. Abnormal madness: you have gone a little further. There is no difference really of quality, it seems the difference is only quantitative, only of degrees. And when you are angry, really, you are temporarily mad. You have gone from the average madness to the abnormal madness. When one is filled with passion, mad passion, he is not the average, normal man. He is a different man altogether. And in a twenty-four-hour day, many times you touch the abnormal madness.That’s why when someone commits a murder we begin to think, “That man was not such a man. We knew him, but we knew him only in his average madness.” Someone commits a crime, and we cannot believe it: “That man was not such a man, but we knew him only in his average madness.”The nonaverage, the abnormally mad, is always there. Any time the abnormally mad mind can get hold of you, any moment.William James visited a madhouse, and for thirty-seven years afterwards he couldn’t sleep well, because in the madhouse for the first time he became aware that “Whatsoever has happened to others can happen to me any moment.”He saw a madman who was beating his own head, beating his head against a wall. He came home; he couldn’t sleep that night. His wife was disturbed and she asked, “What happened?”He said, “I am disturbed, very much disturbed. That which has happened to that man can happen to me also.”His wife laughed and she said, “Why are you unnecessarily worrying? You are not going to be mad.”William James said, “Only a few days ago that man was not mad either, and now he is mad. I am not mad now – tomorrow I can be. What is the guarantee?”There is no guarantee, of course, because it is only a question of degrees. There is no guarantee. You may be just on the verge. Something happens and you are pushed. Your wife dies or your house burns down, or something, and you are pushed a degree ahead. This situation, this mad situation of humanity, is a byproduct of constant struggle with one’s own mind.Sanity is always based on acceptance. This is the secret. If a madman can accept his madness totally, madness will disappear. Whatsoever you can accept totally, a new phenomenon happens inside with it. Through acceptance, conflict is dissolved. And the energy that was being dissipated in any conflict is not dissipated now. You become stronger. With this strength, and awareness, you go higher than your mind.Acceptance of the mind and awareness of the mind – and the third thing: moving in this world, living in this world, not from the periphery but from the center.Someone abuses you. He is saying something against your name. The man who lives from the periphery will think, “He is saying it against me.” The man who lives from the center will say, “He is speaking against the name, and I am not the name. I was born without any name. The name is just a label on the periphery, so why get disturbed? He is saying something, not against me but against the name.”If you are identified with the name, then you are disturbed. If you can feel the gap between the name and you, between the periphery and you, then the periphery is hurt, but the hurt never reaches to the center.One Hindu sannyasin, Swami Ramateertha, was in America. Someone abused him – he came laughing. He told his disciples, “Someone was abusing Rama very much. Rama was in a great difficulty; they were abusing him, and he was in a great difficulty.”So the disciples asked, “About whom are you talking? Rama is your name.”Ramateertha said, “Of course, it is my name – but not me. They don’t know me at all. How can they abuse me? They know only my name.”Even if your action is abused, it is not you, only the action. If you can maintain a gap – and that’s not difficult; with awareness it is the most easy thing – if you can maintain a gap, then the periphery is touched but the center remains untouched. If the center remains untouched, sooner or later you are bound to discover the point of deep stillness, which is not only your point, but the point, the central point, of the whole existence.I was reading a story just this morning. It is one of the most beautiful stories:One young seeker, after a long and arduous journey, reached the hut of his master, the master of his choice. It was evening, and the master was just sweeping fallen leaves. The seeker greeted the master, but the master remained silent. He asked many questions, but there were no replies. He tried in every way to get the attention of the master, but the master was there as if he were alone. He went on sweeping the fallen leaves.Seeing no possibility of getting the attention of the master, the disciple decided to make a hut in the same forest and to live there. He lived there for years. After a time the past dropped, because you have to go on creating something daily, you have to create your past again and again daily. But in the forest everything was silent. No man was there; only the master was there who was just like no man. No communication – he would not even reply to your greetings, he would not even look at you. His eyes were just vacant, an emptiness.So after a time the past dissolved. The disciple continued to be there. Thoughts were there; then by and by they slowed, because you have to feed them daily. If you don’t feed them, they cannot continue forever. Nothing to do, he would relax, sit silently, sweep the fallen leaves.After many years, one day when he was sweeping the fallen leaves, he became enlightened. He stopped everything. He ran to the master’s hut. He went there – the master was sweeping fallen leaves. The disciple said, “Thank you, sir.”Of course, the master never replied. But this thank-you is beautiful. He went to the master and said, “Thank you, sir.” Because only because of this master not replying to him, not giving any intellectual answers, not even looking at him – he was so silent, the master was so silent – did he learn something from the master. He learned this silence. He learned this living in the center without being bothered by the periphery.Someone is greedy. This is a peripheral matter; let him be greedy. Someone is asking something. This is a peripheral matter; let him ask. The master remained undisturbed. He went on sweeping his dead leaves. He didn’t say anything, but he showed a way. He didn’t reply, but he answered. He was the answer. Such a silence the disciple had never known. Such absent presence he had never witnessed. It was as if the man was not there at all – a nothingness, not a man; a nobodiness, not a man.Without saying anything, the master had said much. Rather, he showed much, and the disciple followed. Only one lesson, but a very secret one: remain in the center and don’t be bothered by the periphery. For years together, he remained in the center, tried to remain in the center, not being bothered by the periphery. One day, sweeping the fallen dead leaves, he was awakened. Years had passed…but such gratefulness. He stopped everything and ran to the master and said, “Thank you, sir.”Just by following a hidden answer! But it depends on you. Someone else in his place might have felt humiliated, insulted, might have felt this man was mad, might have got angry. Then he would have missed a great opportunity. But he was not negative, he took it very positively. He felt the meaning of it, he tried to live it, and the thing happened. It is a consequence, it is not a result. He could have imitated – this was not imitation. He never came again. He was in the same forest, but he never came again. Only twice: first he came to greet, and then to thank.What was he doing for all these years? A simple lesson, one secret, but the most basic. He tried not to be bothered by the periphery. He accepted himself. Not bothering with the periphery, not being bothered by the periphery, he remained aware. He was so aware, really, that it was as if these twenty years were not there. And when the thing happened, when the happening was there, he ran as if nothing had happened within these twenty years. Twenty years before, the master had shown him a way, but it was as if these twenty years were not there. He reached the master to thank him – as if just a moment before he had shown him the way.If silence is there, time disappears. Time is a peripheral matter. If silence is there, you become grateful to everything – to the sky, to the earth, to the sun, to the moon, to everything. If the silence is there, any moment the old world disappears. The old you is no more there, the old man is dead, and a new life, a new energy, is born.This sutra says this is pradakshina. If you can enter into the center of your being, into this stillness, where there is no sound, only then have you entered the temple, have you worshiped the deity, have you encircled, have you done the ritual. We can go on in a temple continuously doing the ritual without ever being aware of what this ritual means. Every ritual is a secret key. Ritual in itself is childish. If you don’t know that a key is a key, you can play with it, you can even throw it away. And in the end you will come to think, “This is meaningless.” because you don’t know the lock. And you don’t know that this is a key and something can open with it.These are secret languages, rituals are secret languages. Through them something has been communicated. Books can be destroyed, languages can become dead, the meanings of words go on changing. Because of this, whenever there has been an enlightened man he has created certain rituals. They are more permanent languages. When scriptures disappear, when religions become dead, when old languages cannot be understood, or can be misinterpreted, rituals continue. Sometimes a whole religion disappears, but the rituals go on. They become transplanted into new religions. They enter new religions without anyone being aware of what is happening.Rituals are a permanent language, and whenever one goes deep in them the secrets are discovered. This Upanishad is basically concerned with the ritual of worship, and every act is meaningful. In itself it looks childish. It is stupid to go into a temple and make rounds around the altar or the image of the deity– it looks stupid. What are you doing? In itself it is. We have forgotten that the key is a key. Its meaning is in knowing the lock, its meaning is in opening the lock. These seven rounds around the altar are concerned with seven bodies, and the altar is concerned with the innermost center.Move around your center, go on moving inwards, and a moment comes when every movement stops. There is no sound. You have entered silence. This silence is divine, this silence is bliss, this silence is the aim of all religions, and this silence is the purpose of all life. And unless you attain this silence, whatsoever you may attain is useless, meaningless. Even if you can attain the whole world, it is of no use.If you attain this inner silence, this center, and you lose the whole world, even then it is worth attaining. No bargain is bad – even if everything is staked, sacrificed. When you achieve the inner silence, you know whatsoever you have paid for it was nothing. What you get is invaluable. What you lose for it was just rubbish.But the rubbish to us is wealth, the rubbish is to us very valuable. And I will repeat again: if you think that you can purchase with this rubbish, then you will never be able to get to the center. The center cannot be a result. If you throw this rubbish, you attain to it – that’s a consequence.Stillness is pradakshina – the movement around That for worship – around That – the inner center, the innermost center. This is the periphery, That is the center. So go on leaving this and go on moving towards That – this is all that sadhana consists of, this is the path.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-08/

Osho,Last night you explained inner stillness through the dimension of inner silence. Please explain inner stillness from some other dimension.Stillness has many dimensions. One is silence: that is the polar opposite of sound, soundlessness. The second dimension is no movement: that is the polar opposite of movement. Mind is movement, just as mind is sound. Sound travels, mind also. Mind is in constant movement, never standing still. You cannot conceive a still mind. There exists no such thing, because when stillness is, mind is no more; when mind is, it is movement. So what is the movement of mind? Through it we can conceive the second dimension of stillness, no movement.Outside we know what movement means: moving from one spot to another, from one place to another, from A to B. If you are at A and then move to B, movement has taken place. So outside the mind, movement means changing places in space. If there is no space, you cannot move. You need space to move outside.Inside movement is not in space but in time. If there is no time, you cannot move inside. Time is inner space. So from one second you move to another second, from this day to another day, from here to somewhere else, in time, from now to then. Time is inner space. Analyze your mind, and you will always be moving from past to future, from future to past. Either you are moving in the memories, past memories, or you are moving into future desires. Memory or desire, past or future…When you move from the past to the future or from the future to the past, only then do you use the present moment, just as a passage. For the mind, the present is nothing but the dividing line between past and future. For the mind, the present is not really existential. It is just a dividing line from where you can move to the past or to the future. Mind is never in the present, because in the present you cannot move.So understand this: in the present you cannot move – then there is no time. The present is always a single moment. You are never given two moments together; only one moment is given to you. You cannot move from A to B, because only A exists; there is no B.Understand this quality of time in the present: you are given always a single moment. Whether you are a beggar on the street or an emperor, it makes no difference. Your time wealth is the same: one moment at a time. You cannot move in it. There is no place to move, and mind exists only in movement. So mind never uses the present, it cannot use it; it goes back to the past. Then it has many points to move to. A long memory, your whole past is there.Or it goes to the future. Again you can imagine. The future is also, basically, the projected past. You have lived, you have experienced many things. You desire them again, or you desire to avoid them. That is your future. You loved someone; it was beautiful, blissful. You desire it again, you project it into the future, to repeat it. You were ill, you suffered. You want to avoid it in the future; you project not to be ill again.So your future is just projected past, and you can move in the future – endlessly. And mind is not satisfied only with the future which belongs to this life: it projects heaven, it projects future lives. It is not satisfied with such a small future. Beyond death also mind creates time.Past and future, they are vast territories. You can move easily. With the present you cannot move. No movement means to be in the present. That is the second dimension of stillness. If you are in the moment, just here and now, you will be still. You cannot do anything else. Then no other possibility exists but to be still.Live in the now and movement stops, because mind stops. Don’t think of the past and don’t project the future. That which is given to you is all and all. Stick to it, remain in it, be content with it. This very moment is the only real existential time. Past is just a memory, nowhere else. It is just in your mind – accumulated dust, accumulated experience. There is no past in existence, there is no future in existence. Existence is the present.If man is not on this earth, there is no past and no future. Flowers will flower, of course, but in the present. And the sun will rise, but in the present. The earth will not know anything of the past, will not dream anything of the future. There will be no past, no future. The past is in the mind, in the memory, and because of that memory it is projected into the future.Ordinarily we divide time into three parts: past, present, future. But, really, past and future are not parts of time at all. They are parts of mind, not parts of time. Time has only one division, if you can call it division: that is the present. Time is always the present. These three divisions are not divisions of time. Past and future belong to the mind, not to time at all. Only the present belongs to time, but then it is difficult to call it “the present” because to us, linguistically, present means something between past and future. It refers to the past, it refers to the future. If there is no past and no future, then the word present loses all meaning.Eckhart is reported to have said that there is no time but only eternal now. It is an eternal now and an infinite here. When we say there, it is only in reference to us; otherwise it is only here. If I am not here, then what point will be here and what point will be there? In reference to myself, the nearer place I call here, and that which is not near I call there. Where does the here end and where does the there begin? You cannot demarcate the line. Really, it is all one hereness – infinite here.Because of the mind we divide time. Then that which we have experienced becomes past, that which we expect to experience becomes future, and that which we are passing through becomes present. But if there is no mind, then it is again an infinite now, eternal now. Here plus now is the reality. There and then are parts of mind, not parts of reality.To conceive stillness from this second dimension means making an effort to live moment to moment – and you will be still, you will be silent. There will be no trembling inside, no wavering inside, no movement. Everything will have become a pool of deep silence.Why does this mind move into past and future? Buddha has given it the names tanha, trishna – desire. Buddha says because you have experienced something, you desire it again. Because you desire, you move into the future. Don’t desire and there is no future. It is difficult, because when mind experiences pleasure it wants to repeat it, and when mind feels displeasure it doesn’t want to repeat it. It wants to avoid it. Because of this, a very natural thing, future is created, and because of future we go on missing the present.You are listening to me. You can either just listen…then you will not have any mind at all. It will be a mindless listening. But if you are listening and trying to understand, then you have moved into the future. If you are thinking about what is being said to you, you have missed what is being said to you; you have moved to the future. And the present is such a subtle, delicate thing, and such a minute, atomic thing that you can miss it in a single movement of the mind. Just a jerk – you have missed it.If you are listening, then just listen. Don’t think about what is being said, don’t try to find out the meaning, because you cannot do two things in the present. You cannot do two things. Listening is enough. And if you are simply listening, then you are in the present and even listening becomes a meditation.Mahavira has said that if you can just listen rightly, you need not practice anything else. Just by being a shravaka, a right listener, you will achieve everything that can be achieved – just by being a shravaka, a right listener – because just listening is not just listening; it is a great phenomenon.And once you know the secret, you can apply it everywhere. Then just eating will be meditation, just walking will be meditation, just sleeping will be meditation. Then anything with which you are in the present, without any movement into the future, will be meditation.But we don’t know any activity in which we are in the present. Either we begin to think of the past or of the future. The present is continuously missed. That means the existence is continuously missed. And then it becomes a chain process, then it becomes a habit.One evening, Mulla Nasruddin was walking down a street. The street was lonely and suddenly he became aware of some horsemen, some troops coming towards him. His mind began to work. He thought they may be robbers, they may kill him. Or, they may be soldiers of the king and he may be pressed into military service, or something. He made himself frightened. Then the horses and their sounds came nearer. He bolted, ran away, jumped into a cemetery, and just to hide from them he lay down in an open grave.Seeing this man suddenly running away, those horsemen became aware. “What has happened?” They were just innocent travelers. So they ran after Mulla Nasruddin, they jumped, they came near his grave. He was lying there with closed eyes, as if dead. So they asked, “What has happened? Why did you suddenly become so frightened? What is the matter?”Then Mulla Nasruddin realized that he had unnecessarily frightened himself. He opened his eyes and then said, “It is a very complicated thing, very complex. If you insist on asking why I am here, I will tell you. I am here because of you, and you are here because of me. This is a vicious circle.”If you desire, you have moved into the future, and this will create a vicious circle. Every time when that future becomes a present, you will again move into the future. Today I will think of tomorrow; this will become a habit. And tomorrow never comes. It cannot come; that is impossible. When it comes it is again a today, and I have created a habit of moving always from today to tomorrow. So when tomorrow comes it comes as a today; I again move for the tomorrow.This is a chain. And the more you do it, the more you become efficient in doing it. And the tomorrow never comes. Always what comes is today, and with today you have no relationship. You have a mechanism: because it is a today, you move. This is a very long habit – not only of this life but of lives together. One has to break it, one has to come out of it.Whatsoever you are doing, remember only one thing: remain in the present while you are doing it. It is difficult, arduous, and you cannot succeed immediately. A long habit is to be broken. It is going to be a tough struggle, but try. The very effort will create a gap. And the very effort will give you, sometimes, some moments of the present. And once you know the taste, you are on the path.We don’t know even the taste of the present. We have never tasted it, we have never lived in it – never, I say. And it is always here. It is the very life. It is all that is in life.Jesus says that we are just dead, not alive.He is passing by a fisherman. It is just in the morning, the sun is about to rise. The fisherman has thrown his net into the lake. Jesus puts his hand on the fisherman’s shoulder and says, “Are you going to destroy your whole life just catching fish? I can show you something better to catch. I can make you a fisherman of life.”The fisherman looked at Jesus as if some magnet was working on him. He threw his net and followed, went with Jesus.When they were just going out of the village, someone came running and told the fisherman, “Your father is dead. He has just died, so come home. Where are you going?”So the fisherman asked permission. He said to Jesus, “Allow me to go home. Soon I will come back. I have to bury my dead father.”Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their dead. You need not go – you follow me. There are many dead men in the village. They will bury the dead.”For Jesus, we are dead men because we have never tasted life, never tasted the present, the existential. We live in the dead past, and we go on projecting the dead past into the future. This is what Shankara calls maya, illusion. Shankara has been very much misunderstood. When Shankara says the whole world is an illusion, he means this, that man’s world is an illusion, not the world.We don’t know anything about the world. We have created our own mental world. Everyone has his own world – this world of past and future, this world of memories and desires. This world is false, illusory. So when Shankara says the world is false, it means your world, not the world. And when your world is no more, you will come to know the real world. And Shankara says that is brahman, that is the truth, the absolute truth.It is as if we are living in a dreamworld, everyone surrounded by his own dreams, the mist, the cloudy mist of dreams. Everyone is moving surrounded by his own dreams, and because of these dreams he cannot see what is true, what is real. The real is hidden behind our dreams.This dreaming mind is the unstill mind. The nondreaming mind is the still mind. But desires create dreams. You dream in the night because you desire in the day. If you don’t desire in the day you cannot dream in the night.A Buddha cannot dream because dreams are desires and desires are dreams. When they are in the day you call them desires, when they are in the night you call them dreams. But every desire is a dream. Why? Because every desire is in the future, which is not. Every desire is a future desire, which is not. The future is not.We go on dreaming. This dreaming must be broken. This dreaming is a movement, continuous movement. You are filled with dreams – broken, burnt, newly created. We have to throw out old ones every day and create new ones.Any moment, in any activity, try to be here and now. Even the effort is a barrier, but one has to begin. In the beginning you will have to make an effort. Even effort is a barrier because effort again moves into the future. But in the beginning one has to make an effort. Then in the second stage one has to make an effortless effort. And then in the third stage effort disappears and you are in the present.You are walking on the street. Just try to walk, don’t do anything else. It looks simple – it is not. It looks as if we are all doing it – it is not so. When you are walking, your mind is doing a thousand things. Move with every step. Just walk. Buddha has said: When you are walking, just walk. When you are eating, just eat. When you are listening, just listen. Be in the act totally. Don’t allow your mind to move somewhere else.And this is a wonderful experience, because suddenly the present will break in. Into your world of dreams the world of reality will penetrate. And if even for a single moment you have the glimpse, you will be a different person. Then you will know something which is just here and now, around you, and you are missing it. You are missing it only because of a mechanical habit, and one cannot do anything other than try to be nonmechanical. Sometimes, with awareness, miracles happen.I was reading that in Russia, in the old days before the revolution, in a small provincial town, a drama was enacted. Suddenly the manager became aware that one person was missing who was essential in the last act. One man was needed in a particular role in which he had to stutter. The man was missing, so they tried to find someone to replace him. Then someone suggested: “It will be difficult to practice just now, but in our village there is one boy who is just perfect. He does not need any training – he stutters.”So the boy was brought. Many doctors had tried to cure him, many medicines were tried, but the stuttering had continued. The boy was called and given the role. There was no need for him to practice. But when the boy entered on the stage, he tried to stutter and he couldn’t. He began to speak as faultlessly as anyone. The more he tried, the more impossible it was.What had happened? For the first time a mechanical habit, of stuttering, was broken by awareness. Now he was doing it with full alertness. He was trying to do it, he was conscious. And the disease disappeared. It was a mechanical habit – the very effort to do it consciously made it impossible.I was in a town. A professor was brought to me. He was a professor in a college, a very learned, sensible, rational man. But he was suffering – suffering much because he had imbibed the habit of walking like a woman. And that was a problem for him, particularly in a college. Everyone would laugh. He was psychoanalyzed, treated, hospitalized, but nothing would result from any effort. And the more he tried, the more he willed himself not to do it, the more puzzling the thing became, and he became confused.He was brought to me. I told him, “Don’t fight with the habit. Rather, do it consciously. When you walk on the street, walk like a woman – try to walk like a woman.”He said, “What are you telling me? I am already in so much trouble, and if I myself try to walk that way, then it will be even worse.”So I told him, “You have tried continuously for twenty years not to walk like a woman. Now try quite the contrary. Stand here. Just walk in this room before me.”Very shy, still he tried. He couldn’t do it. He said, “What has happened? What are you doing? Have you done something? It is a miracle! I am trying, and I cannot walk like a woman.”I told him, “Go, and continue doing it. Go to your college. Try in every way to walk like a woman.”In the evening he came. He was just ecstatic. He said, “How can I thank you? It seems impossible, but a miracle has happened. The trick has worked. I cannot walk like a woman. If I try to, I cannot. What has happened?”The moment you bring your alertness to any mechanical habit it stops, because a mechanical habit feeds on your unconsciousness. So willpower won’t do. Awareness will do. And remember the difference: in willpower you begin to fight with the habit. And if you try to fight with the habit, you have accepted the habit. No, when I say do it consciously, I am saying don’t fight with it. Give it your full support, don’t be anti it.You are walking on the street: give your full support to your walking. Be one with it. Be aware of what is going on. Now the left leg, now the right, is moving. Feel every moment consciously. Remain with the moment; don’t allow your mind to move anywhere else. If the mind moves because of old habits, bring it back again. Don’t get frustrated. If the mind moves, then don’t say, “It is impossible, I cannot do it” – no. Bring your mind back again. Try again. And sooner or later you will begin to feel some moments, rare they are, when you will taste the feeling of the present, what it is to feel the present. And once you feel the present, you are just near the door of existence. You can enter it.Stillness in this dimension means no movement of the mind into past and future. No movement in past and future…just remaining in the present. You can understand it intellectually, you may even feel that it is okay, but intellectual understanding will not help. Rather, it may be a deception; it may prove to be a deception. You will have to do it. Thinking is of no help.You are lying on your bed, you are just going to sleep. Feel this state of lying on the bed. Feel the touch of the bed, the touch of the bedsheets, the sounds all around, the traffic sounds, or whatsoever is going on there. Feel it. Be there. Don’t think, just feel. Just feel and be in the present, and in that feeling state fall into sleep. You will have fewer dreams that night, you will have a deeper sleep. In the morning, you will have a fresher awakening.When in the morning you feel for the first time that now sleep has broken, don’t just jump out of the bed. Remain there for five minutes. Feel again the sheets, the warmth, the coldness; or the rain is falling on the roof, or the traffic has begun again, the world is awakening, the noise, the birds singing, feel it again for five minutes. Don’t rush into the day just now. Be in the morning. Otherwise your sleep is broken and you have rushed, you have moved into the future. You have gone to your market or to your office. You have rushed, you have moved.For five minutes just be there. Don’t move so fast. There is no hurry. These five minutes will become meditative. And these moments in the morning and in the night are the best moments. It is very easy to get the feeling of the present in these moments.Just falling into sleep is a very vulnerable moment. Be sensitive to everything around. Don’t think – feel. Because feeling is always in the present and thinking is never in the present. And then in the morning, when the mind is fresh after the night’s sleep, and the body is relaxed, and you have new energy to work with, again feel for five minutes, and then come out of your bed. But be alert that you are coming out of the bed. Take every step with full awareness. And in the morning it is very easy. In the afternoon it will not be so easy. In the evening it will become more difficult.Go to your bath, take a shower – feel. Feel the shower falling on you, feel every drop falling on you. Forget everything else. Remain under this shower and feel the present. The morning bath can become a deep meditation. When water is falling on you, you have a deep communion with nature. Remain there for a few moments, and then try to continue this feeling.You are taking your breakfast or you are eating your food – try to continue it. It will be more and more difficult, but go on trying. Soon a day will come when you can move throughout the day in the present, remaining in the present. And once this happens, you will know what stillness is.This is the second dimension. There is a third dimension also, and it will be good to know something about it. First is silence as against sound. That one is soundlessness. Second is stillness as against movement. That is nonmovement, no movement. And third is nonbeing as against ego – egolessness. The third is the deepest.Buddha has said, “Unless you cease to be, you cannot be still. You are the problem, you are the noise, you are the movement. So unless you cease completely you cannot attain perfect stillness.” Because of this, Buddha is known as anatmawadi – one who believes in no-self.We go on thinking that we are: “I am.” This I is a very false thing. And because of this I, many diseases are created. Because of this I, you go on accumulating past. Because of this I, you go on thinking of repeating past pleasures. Everything else hangs on this I – the past, the future, the desires.Buddha came to know through deep meditation that we can leave the desires of the world, but if the I remains then it begins to desire moksha, ultimate liberation, freedom, to be one with existence, to be one with brahman. If this I remains, desires will be there whatsoever their direction and whatsoever their object.Buddha says, “Drop this I-centered existence.” How to drop it? Who will drop it? If there is no I, who will drop it? Who will think to drop it? By dropping is meant: go inside and find this I, search for it, where it is, whether it is or not – because those who have gone in and those who have searched for it have never found it. It is only those who have never gone in, never searched for it, who believe in it, that it is there. No one has found that anything like I exists inside.When I say, “I am,” the am is the reality, not the I. When you go in you feel a certain amness, a certain existential feeling is there. You know something is there, but it is not you. There is no feeling of I. A diffused amness, existence, is felt, with no I.So the third thing, to enter into the third dimension: whenever you have time, whenever… You need not go to a temple. If you go it is good, but you need not. You are just traveling in the train: close your eyes and try to find out where this I is. In the body? In the mind? Where is it? Go with an open mind. Just find out where it is. Just sitting in your car, or just lying in your bed, whenever you have a few moments to close your eyes, close them and just ask one question: “Where does this I exist? Where is it? Where am I?”Ramana Maharshi has given a meditation. He calls it the “Who am I?” meditation. Buddha would say this will not do, because when you ask “Who am I?” you have already supposed that you are. That is not questioned. If the only question is “Who am I?” then “I am” is settled already. You have presupposed it. Now you are just asking, “Who am I?” The I is not questioned. Buddhist meditation says, “Ask where am I?” not who, but where.Go to every nook and corner inside, search with an open mind, and you will not find yourself anywhere. You will find a silent existence, but with no I. And don’t think that this is very difficult. It is not. Even if you just close your eyes here and try to find out “Where am I?” you will not find it. You will find many other things. Your heart will be beating, your breathing will be there, you will find many thoughts floating in the mind. You may find many things, but you will not find any I, any ego there.Buddha says ego is a collective noun – just like society, just like nation, just like humanity. You cannot find them anywhere. We are sitting here. We can call it a class, but we cannot find it. If we go to search for it, we will find individuals, not any class. No group will be found, only individuals. Group was just a name for the collectivity – just like we call many trees a forest. There exists no forest, only trees and trees and trees. If you go in, then you will find trees and the forest will disappear.This I is just a collective name. You are a group. The Buddhist word is sangha, just a compound, a collective thing. You are many things, but not I. Go in and find out. Buddha says, “Don’t believe me – go in and find out. Dig and find out.” It is never found.So in this third dimension of nonbeingness or egolessness, when one finds that one is not, one is still. Stillness happens. You cannot be tense, you cannot be nonstill, you cannot be in a deep inner noise, if there is no ego. The whole show is withdrawn.But what are we doing? We are every moment doing things to feed this I – to give it more strength, to give it more energy, to give it more fuel. We are every moment trying to sustain it. It is a false notion, but it can be sustained and maintained. You can go on believing in it and creating situations in which it becomes easier and easier to believe in it. I is a belief. It is not a fact.Everyone is a believer in the ego. People will ask, “Where is God? Unless we find him we cannot believe in him.” Even those persons will go on believing in their egos without trying to find out whether any such things exist. This is a miracle. We can doubt God, but we cannot doubt ourselves. And unless we doubt ourselves, we cannot move into stillness. With that doubt everything is shattered. A religious man is born by doubting in his ego, doubting himself.We have taken it for granted; we never ask about it, whether it is there or not. And if someone makes us aware that it is not there, he is our enemy. Friends are those who help us to be stronger egos. Our family, our society, our nation, they all help us to be centered in our egos.Religion dethrones you. You are brought down from your pedestal. You are not, and if you are not you will be in a deep abyss of stillness – bottomless, infinite – because this I is the disturber, this I is the disease, this I is the nuisance. What is the problem?Tanka is staying in a village. Someone comes and he asks, “Help me. Teach me, initiate me. I want to be free. I want to attain moksha.”Tanka says to him, “I cannot make you free. I can dissolve your you, but I cannot make you free. I can dissolve your you.”There is no freedom for the I. There is only one freedom and that is freedom from the I. There is no moksha for I, no liberation for I. There is only one liberation, that is from the I, not for the I.So what can you do? You can ponder over it without any preconception. Just whenever you have time, close your eyes, go in, and find out where you are. And soon you will stumble upon the fact that you exist as part of the infinite existence, not as a separate island. No man is an island, we are parts of an infinite continent. I’s give you the false notion of being islands, and then every trouble is created. I is the troublemaker. Every violence, every war, every crime, every madness, is created by this I. And we cling to it, we go on clinging to it. This clinging must be stopped. You must be uprooted from your own I’s.No one else can do this, and no yoga practice will help, because if without searching for this I you go on practicing, whatsoever the practice, this I will be strengthened by every practice. If you meditate, this I will say, “I am meditating.” If you renounce the world this I will say, “I have renounced the world.” If you become a sannyasin this I will say, “I have become a sannyasin – I have attained this, I have attained that.” In this world or in that world, this I will go on being strengthened by your efforts.So it happens that a person who has practiced much austerity becomes an egoist more subtly. He becomes more an island rather than becoming part of the great mainland, the great continent. He becomes a peak of ego. This is possible for everyone. So it is not only wealth or prestige or worldly things and possessions that will become food for the I – I can convert anything into its food.So before entering on the spiritual path, Buddha’s advice has to be remembered always. He has said that before you enter any path, first find out whether this I exists or not. Only then will your path be spiritual. Otherwise, whatsoever the path may be, it will ultimately prove worldly, because this I will exploit it.Once Mulla Nasruddin came back from the capital to his village. The whole village gathered around him to ask the news about the capital, “What is happening there?” And in those days of no newspapers it was a big event for the village: one man has been to the capital and has come back. And no ordinary man – Mulla Nasruddin himself, the only literate man in the town.When everyone is gathered, Mulla is just silent, very serious. He has come back from the capital. The whole village is just mad, crazy to know what has happened. Then Mulla said, “At this time I will not tell you much, only one thing. I met the emperor. And not only that – he has spoken to me. But the details later on….”The village dispersed. The whole village became agog over only one thing: Mulla Nasruddin has met the emperor. And not only that – the emperor has spoken to him!But one man still remained there and persisted, “What has he said? Tell me, Mulla, otherwise I am not going to leave. I cannot sleep now I am so excited. What has he said? Just a little, don’t go into details, but just the essence.”So Mulla said, “There are not many details. When he saw me standing there he said, ‘Get out of my way!’ This is the only thing he has said.”But the villager was satisfied because these were no ordinary words – spoken by an emperor. Exactly the same words spoken by an emperor he has heard! He was satisfied and he said, “It is so fortunate to be born in your village, Mulla. I have heard the same words spoken by an emperor. He himself said to you, ‘Get out of my way!’”Nasruddin said, “He himself. He came near me and said it. And not in a whisper, he said it in such a loud voice that everyone heard: ‘Get out of my way!’ He cried; really, he screamed.”Mind is such, the ego is such, that it tries to fulfill itself in each and every way. Subtle are its ways, even foolish but subtle. If you do something towards spirituality, the ego may poison it. Before going into that dimension, remember that you are not an ego. Find it out. Once this ego is not there, everything becomes spiritual and every path becomes a spiritual path. Then wherever you go, you will go to the divine. Then every path leads to the divine.With the ego, no path leads to the divine. With the ego, go to Mecca or go to Jerusalem or go to Kashi, you will reach hell. You cannot go anywhere else because the ego is the hell. Without the ego, go anywhere, even to hell, and you will find heaven there – because without the ego everywhere is heaven. The ego is the root cause of all misery.These are the three dimensions of stillness: silence as soundlessness, silence as no movement of the mind, silence as egolessness. Start with any one and the other two will follow, by and by. Or, you can start working on all the three, then the whole work will be speeded up. But don’t go on thinking, because thinking is a movement, thinking is a noise, and thinking is a process of the ego.Stop thinking and start doing. Only doing helps, only doing can make you existential. Only through doing is the jump and the explosion.Osho,Modern man, in this industrialized age of speed, hurry, activity and tensions, feels completely exhausted after a day's work. In this situation, it becomes difficult for him to have inner silence and stillness.Please explain what the reasons are and what the way is.The situation appears so. It is not. Rather, the situation is quite the vice versa. You are not exhausted because of the industrialized age and the work and the tensions et cetera; you are exhausted because you have lost the contact with your inner stillness. The work is not the problem: you are the problem. Neither is the age the problem: you are the problem.Don’t go on thinking that modern man is more burdened with work. He is less burdened. A primitive man is more burdened. Mechanization, industrialization, they all help to save time. That’s what they are for, and they have saved much time. But because you have time but no stillness, because you now have time and no use for it, that creates problems. A primitive man is less in problems, not because he is silent and still, but because he has no time – no time to create troubles for himself. You have more time and you don’t know what to do.This time can be used for an inner journey. And if man cannot use it for that inwardness, he is done for. Then there is no hope, because now more and more time will be saved. Soon the whole world will be under automatic mechanization. You will have time and you will not know what to do, and for the first time in history man will have achieved the utopia always longed for, desired. Then he will be at a loss as to what to do with it.You have time, more than any other age. And you are not exhausted because of the work, you are exhausted because you have lost the contact, or you don’t know how to go deep in yourself and be revitalized. You have even lost sleep. That was the natural method to go in; then you are fresh in the morning, recharged, revitalized. But now we have even lost the sleep, and we have lost the sleep because of the mechanical revolution, because now your bodies are not forced to work. Because of less work you are less exhausted, and because of less exertion you cannot sleep.A villager still sleeps deeply; because his body is so exhausted, he falls deep into sleep. Your body is not exhausted; that’s why you go on turning in your bed. Machines have replaced labor. You are less exhausted, remember this, and then you cannot sleep. And then even the natural source of inner touch is lost. In the morning you are more exhausted than in the evening, and then the whole day begins again. You feel again exhausted.We are living an exhausted life. It is not that we are exhausted just in the evening, in the morning we are also exhausted. What has happened?Man needs continuous contact with the inner source. So don’t ask me how an exhausted man can meditate. It is like asking me how a diseased man, an ill man, can take medicine. He needs it, and only he needs it. You are exhausted – meditation will be a medicine to you.And don’t say that you have no time. You have much time, much that you can use. And everyone is wasting time in so many ways. People are playing cards. Ask them and they say, “We are killing time.” The cinema halls are packed. What are they doing there? Killing time. Hotels, clubs…what are they doing there? Killing time! But you cannot kill time, only time kills you.So no one is now without time. And don’t think that time is a limited quantity. Don’t think that every day consists of twenty-four hours, no. It is up to you, it depends on you. How many hours you put into it, it depends on that.Someone asked Emerson, “What is your age?”He said, “Three hundred and sixty years.”It was unbelievable, and the man said, “Pardon me, it seems I have not heard you rightly. Tell again how many you are saying.”Emerson repeated loudly, “Three hundred and sixty years!”Then man said. “I cannot believe it. This is impossible. You look not more than sixty.”Emerson said, “That’s right, you are right. My actual age is sixty, but I have lived six times more than you. I have used my sixty years in such a way that they have proved to be three hundred and sixty years.”The man was nearabout fifty and Emerson said, “If you say that you are fifty, the same will be the problem for me. I cannot believe it, because you look to me not more than thirteen. You have simply wasted, you have not lived. Wasting is one thing, living is another.”So every day is not a fixed thing. A buddha can use it in such a way that it becomes a life. It is not how much it is, ultimately it depends how much you put into it. You are a creator. We create our time, we create our space, we create our milieu, through living. So whatsoever your position in life and whatsoever your work and whatsoever your worldly situation, don’t make it an excuse. You can meditate all the same. And meditation doesn’t need time, it needs a deep understanding, not time.And meditation is not in conflict with other things. For example, if you are eating, eat with awareness. No extra time is needed. Rather, on the contrary, you will save time because you will eat less. With awareness you will eat less, with awareness you will become more efficient. You will save time. With awareness you will lose less energy, you will dissipate less energy. And even after a whole day’s work, you will be as fresh as in the morning. Because it is not work that exhausts you, it is the attitude.You walk to your office – a two-mile walk – you go to your office, and that exhausts you. But if it is Sunday and you are just walking for pleasure, and you walk to your office and come back, then it is just a play and it is not going to exhaust you. Rather, it will refresh you. If you are doing a certain thing as work, it will exhaust you. If you are doing the same thing as play, it will refresh you. It is not the work, it is the attitude. The mind which lives in meditation transforms all work into a play, and the mind which is not meditative will transform even a play into work.Look at people who are playing cards – tense. They are not playing; it has become work. Now it is a problem of life and death. It is not a play. If they are defeated, they will not be able to sleep in the night. And even if they win, they will not be able to sleep in the night. Either way they are going to be excited. It is not a play, it will not refresh them. It will only exhaust them.Look at children: they are doing more work than you but they are never exhausted, always bubbling with energy. Why? Everything is a play – everything is a play. Because of industrialization, and sooner or later because of totally automatic processes coming in, man will have only one dimension, that is the dimension of play. Work will be useless then, and all the old teachings that “work is divine” will be nonsense; that “work is duty and work is divine and one must do work,” they all will become nonsense.Leisure, pleasure, fun, festivity, play, will be the key terms for the future. Seriousness will be taken as a disease, playfulness will become the symbol of sanity. Because time will be saved more and more, and even old men will have to be like children playing. Only then will they be able to exist; otherwise they will commit suicide.The whole of human history up to now has been work-oriented. From now on it will be play-oriented. And meditation gives you a new childhood, a new innocence, a new festivity. Then the whole life becomes a ceremony. It is not work.So don’t make excuses. They may look valid – they are dangerous. And meditation is not in conflict with anything. You are going to your office, go meditatively. You are doing work in your office, do it meditatively, do it relaxedly. You will not be exhausted. Take everything as a play and you will not be exhausted. Rather, the work will become a pleasure.Meditation gives you a new quality of mind. So it is not a question of whether you have time or not. I am not saying that you have to meditate for three hours daily, so take three hours out of your life, out of your worklife – no. If you can take, it is good. If you cannot take, don’t make it an excuse. Then try to turn and change and transform your work into a meditative act.You are writing something, write with full awareness. You are digging a hole in the earth, dig it with full awareness. Whether you are working on the street or in the office or in the market, do it with full awareness. Remain in the present and then see: you will not be exhausted. You will have more time, more energy, less dissipation; and ultimately it will become possible that your whole life becomes just a play.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 12 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-09/

MOUNAM STUTIHI "SILENCE IS THE PRAYER." "SILENCE is the prayer." By prayer we always mean a communication, something said to the Divine, but the Upanishads say that whatsoever you may say will not be prayer. Prayer is not something to be done. You cannot do it. It is not an act; it is not your doing. So, really, you cannot "do" prayer, you can only be a prayer. It is not related with any of your doings. It is a certain state of your being. So the first thing to be understood is that man has two dimensions in Existence: one is his being, the other is his doing. Prayer is not part of the second. You cannot do it, and the prayer that is done will be false, inauthentic. You can be: prayer belongs to the dimension of being. The body cannot do prayer, cannot be in prayer. The mind cannot do prayer, cannot be in prayer. The body is meant to do something; it is the vehicle of action. The mind is also a vehicle of action. Thinking is doing: it is action. So you cannot do anything with your body which can become prayer, neither can you do anything with your mind which can be called prayer, because these are both parts of the dimension of doing, action. Prayer happens beyond body and mind. So if your body is in total inactivity, passive, and your mind is nullified, empty, only then is prayer possible. This sutra says, "Silence is prayer." When mind is not working, when body is not active, it is silent. One thing to be understood is that silence is not part of mind. So whenever we say, "He has a silent mind," it is nonsense. A mind can never be silent. The very being of mind is anti-silence. Mind is sound, not silence. So when we say, "He has a silent mind," it is wrong. If he is really silent, then we must say that he has no mind. A "silent mind" is a contradiction in terms. If mind is there. it cannot be silent; and if it is silent, it is no more. That is why Zen monks use the term "no-mind", never "silent mind". No-mind is silence! And the moment there is no-mind you cannot feel your body, because mind is the passage through which body is felt. If there is no-mind, you cannot feel that you are a body; body disappears from consciousness. So in prayer there is neither mind nor body -- only pure Existence. That pure Existence is indicated by silence -- mouna. How to attain to this prayer, to this silence? How to be in this prayer, in this silence? Whatsoever you can do will be useless; that is the greatest problem. For a religious seeker this is the greatest problem, because whatsoever he can do will lead nowhere -- because doing is not relevant. You can sit in a particular posture: that is your doing. You must have seen Buddha's posture. You can sit in Buddha's posture: that will be a doing. For Buddha himself this posture happened. It was not a cause for his silence; rather, it was a by-product. When the mind is not, when the being is totally silent, the body follows like a shadow. The body takes a particular posture -- the most relaxed possible, the most passive possible. But you cannot do otherwise. You cannot take a posture first and then make silence follow. Because we see a Buddha sitting in a particular posture, we think that if this posture is followed then the inner silence will follow. This is a wrong sequence. For Buddha the inner phenomenon happened first, and then this posture followed. Look at it through your own experience: when you get angry, the body takes a particular posture, your eyes become blood-red, your face takes a particular expression. Anger is inside, and then the body follows. Not only outwardly: inwardly also, the whole chemistry of the body changes. Your blood runs fast, you breathe in a different way, you are ready to fight or take flight. But anger happens first, then the body follows. Start from the other pole: make your eyes red, create fast breathing, do whatsoever you feel is done by the body when anger is there. You can act, but you cannot create anger inside. An actor is doing the same every moment. When he is acting a role of love, he is doing whatsoever is done by the body when love happens inside -- but there is no love. The actor may be doing better than you. but love will not follow. He will be more apparently angry than you in real anger, but it is just false. Nothing is happening inside. Whenever you start from without, you will create a false state. The real always happens first in the center, and then the waves reach to the periphery. That is why this sutra says that prayer is silence. The innermost center is in prayer. Start from there. But that is very difficult. The difficulty arises for so many reasons. The first is that you have never known silence, so the word is meaningless really. You have heard the word, you know what it means, but you do not really know what the experience of silence is, so it connotes nothing. The word falls on our ears; we believe that we understand, but nothing is understood. The actual word is unknown to us as far as experience is concerned, only the sound of the word is known. Mulla Nasrudin was practising silence in a mosque with three other friends. It was a religious day, and they had taken a vow to be silent for twenty-four hours. This was to be their prayer. "Silence is prayer": they had heard this. Just five or ten minutes after they started, the first man said, "I wonder whether I have locked my house or not!" The second one said, "What are you doing? You have broken the silence and now you will have to start again!" The third one said, "You fool! You have also broken it." Mulla Nasrudin was the fourth. He said, "Praise be to Allah! I am the only one who has not broken the silence yet." They have heard the word "silence". They have heard that silence is prayer. Why does this happen? When someone else was breaking the silence everyone was aware, but when someone was himself breaking it he was not aware. Why? Because to them, to talk, to utter something, was breaking the silence. Really, you never hear whatsoever you say. When someone else says it, you hear it. You are so accustomed to your own sound and voice, you do not know what you are saying, that you are talking. Another difficulty is that you are constantly talking inside, so when you utter something outwardly there is no difference for you. Inwardly, you were already talking. Now you have uttered something outwardly, but as far as you are concerned nothing has changed, nothing has happened. But when someone else utters something, for you something new has happened. He was silent before and now he has uttered something. If you yourself are talking within, then when you utter something you will not be aware. Someone else may become aware that now you have broken silence. You are aware of others because inwardly you are constantly talking with yourself. A monologue, a continuous monologue is there. Awake or asleep, you are continuously talking. This continuous talk has become such a habit that you have not known any interval. When you are not talking inwardly, when you are talking with others, you feel relieved, relaxed, because when you are talking with others you are relieved of the duty of talking to yourself. And that is such a boring thing -- to talk with oneself. You already know what you are going to say, and still you have to continue. No one else can be such a bore to you as you yourself are. You have told a particular thing to yourself millions of times, and again and again you are telling it. You are not very inventive. You go on in circles saying the same thing again and again. Watch! Watch for twenty-four hours and note down what you are saying to yourself. Then you will feel a weird feeling and strange, to see that you have been saying the same thing continuously all your life. Even in a single day, you go on repeating yourself. This has become just a habit, deep-rooted. And when something becomes a deep-rooted habit, you are not aware of it. It becomes automatic. The robot part of your body takes it and continues it. That is why silence is very difficult, because silence really means breaking the monologue within. It is not a question of not talking to someone else. mouna, silence, is not really concerned with others. Deep down it is concerned with your own monologue. Not to talk with yourself is very difficult, so we will have to Find out reasons why we talk with ourselves. Why do we go on talking with ourselves in the first place? If you observe, then you can find out the cause. The cause is that nothing is complete in our lives; everything is incomplete. You were eating, and then you were thinking about your office. So eating will not be satisfied; it will not be fulfilled; you will not feel content. It remains incomplete. You eat hastily. You fill your stomach and you run to your office. A process has remained incomplete. Then when you are in your office, you begin to think about your wife, about your children, about a thousand things; then you are not in the office. The whole day, you have been there and still you were not there. The work in the office has remained incomplete, and now you have come to your house. Now you are thinking about your office. You are with your wife, but you are not -- you are absent. It is a rare phenomenon that a husband is present with his wife -- rare! And it hurts much because the wife can feel it. The husband also feels that the wife is not present. No one is present; everything is incomplete. The mind has to continue the thing which you have left incomplete, and so many things are incomplete. So mind goes on continuously in circles, completing things that you have left incomplete. Do you remember anything which you have completed? Do you have any moment in your life, any experience, which you can say is complete, total? If you have any experience which is complete, the mind will never go back to it. There is no need. There is no need! It is absolutely useless. The mind simply tries to complete everything. The mind has a tendency to complete. And this is necessary; otherwise life will be impossible. So this constant monologue within is really a part of your wrong living -- incomplete living. Nothing is finished, and you go on making new beginnings. Then the mind goes on becoming piled up with incomplete things. They will never be completed, but they will create a burden on the mind -- a constant burden, a growing burden, an increasing burden -- and that creates the monologue. That is why the older you grow, the more the monologue grows with you. And old men begin to talk aloud Really, the burden is so much that the control is lost. So look at old men. They will be sitting, and their legs will be working, and they will be talking, and they will be making gestures. What are they doing? You think they have gone crazy, that they are old and now they have become stupid. No, that is not the case. They have had a long incomplete life, and now death is coming nearer and mind is in haste, trying to complete everything. And it seems impossible! So if you really want to break this monologue, which means silence, then try to complete everything that you are doing. And do not start new things -- you will go crazy. Finish whatsoever you are doing, all the very small things. You are taking a bath: make it complete. How to make it complete? Be there! Your presence will do it. Be there, enjoy it, live it, feel it. Be sensitive to the water falling on you, be saturated. Come out of your bath doing it completely, totally. Otherwise the bath will follow you. It will become a shadow; it will go with you. You are eating: then eat! Then forget everything! Then nothing exists in the world except your present act. Whatsoever you are doing, do it so completely so unhurriedly, so patiently, that the mind is saturated and becomes content. Only then leave it. Three months of continuous awareness about doing your acts completely will give you some intervals in your monologue. Then, for the first time, you will become aware that this monologue was a by-product of incomplete living. Buddha has used the term "right living". He has shown an eight-fold path. In those eight principles, one is "right living". Right living means total living; wrong living means incomplete living. If you are angry, then be really angry. Be authentically angry; make it complete. Suffer it! There is no harm in suffering because suffering brings much wisdom. There is no harm in suffering because only through suffering does one transcend it. Suffer it! But be authentically angry. What are you doing? You are angry and you are smiling. Now the anger will follow you. You can deceive the whole world, but you cannot deceive yourself, you cannot deceive your mind. The mind knows very well that the smile was false. Now anger will continue inside; that will become a monologue. Then whatsoever you have not said you will have to say within. Whatsoever you have not done you will imagine as done. Now you will create a dream. You will fight with your enemy, with the object of your anger. The mind is helping you in completing a certain thing. But that, too, is impossible because you are doing other things. Even this can be helpful: close your room -- you were not angry; the situation was such that you could not be -- close your room and now be angry, but do not continue the monologue. Act it out. There is no necessity to act it out on someone: a pillow will do. Fight with it, act your anger out, express it, but let it be authentic, real. Let it be real, and then you will feel a sudden relaxation inside. Then the monologue will drop, it will break. There will be an interval, a gap. That gap is silence. So the first thing: break the monologue. And you can do it only if your living becomes a right, complete living. Never be incomplete. Release the inner madness. Not only one whole life: many whole lives that were incomplete is our situation. When you love, you are doing a thousand things simultaneously. Then love becomes false. Now psychologists say that if you are loving someone and a thought crosses your mind, you have missed love. You are far away from your love object. There is a gap; the communion is broken. When two lovers are really in love, there is nothing else, simply love -- nothing else! They are playing with each other's bodies, absolutely absorbed in it. The whole world has dropped out of their consciousness; nothing is there. Then love is complete. And then they will not become sex maniacs. Then their minds will not be perverted minds. Psychologists say that Don Juans like Byron, or others who go on changing their love objects, are really incapable of love. It is reported that Byron loved sixty women in his life, and his life was very short. And these are known cases. No one knows how many really. He was expelled from society because everyone became afraid. And he was such a beautiful person -- but why this madness? One may think that he was a great lover. That was not the case. He was not a lover at all! Psychologists say he was not a lover at all. He was a maniac, just a perverted mind. He could not complete any love, and before any love could be consummated, completed, he had started another. It is reported that he was forced to marry a girl. Of course, he was forced because he was not ready. How could he marry? The next day he would run after another woman. After he was forced, he was coming out of the church -- the bells were ringing and the guests were still there -- he was coming down the steps with his wife's hand in his hand, and suddenly he stopped; he let go of-the hand. A woman was crossing the street. His eyes followed the woman. Being an honest man in a way, he said to his wife, "Now you do not mean anything to me. That woman has become everything." He suffered, because love is a growth. Love is a long growth. It grows, and the more it grows, the deeper it goes. Butterfly minds cannot grow in love. That is impossible because the love never acquires roots. Before the love can acquire roots, they have moved. This type of mind will suffer, because it cannot love and it cannot get love. Nothing is ever completed; nothing ever becomes ripe. Then the whole life will just be lived in wound -- incomplete wounds -- and this happens in every field. You have never loved, you have never been angry, you have never acted spontaneously. You have not really eaten, you have not slept totally, you have not done anything with your total being in it, with your total involvement in it. You have always been doing something else simultaneously. Bokuju was asked, "What is your SADHANA? (spiritual practice)? What are you doing here in this lonely forest? What are you doing?" Bokuju said, "I have no sadhana; I have no method. When I feel hungry I eat; when I do not feel hungry I fast. When I feel that the hut has become cold, I move out into the sun. When the sun is too much to bear, I move into the shadows of the trees. But wherever I am, I am total. When I feel sleepy, I drop down into sleep. This is all I am doing here." The man said, "But this is nothing. Everyone is doing the same!" Bokuju said, "If everyone were doing the same, the world would be quite a different place -- silent, peaceful, loving. Then there would be no need to ask for Liberation. This very world would be a MOKSHA." No one is doing it. Bokuju's answer seems very simple, but it is not. It is very arduous. It is difficult just to sleep and not dream, because dreaming means there has been an incomplete day. It is now being completed in the dream. Whatsoever you have left incomplete in the day will be completed in the dream. So if you have been a good man, if you have tried to be a good man and the goodness was not natural to you, not something spontaneous but something forced, then in the dream you will move to the other extreme. If you have been honest with effort, then in the dream you will deceive someone. Then everything is complete. Now psychologists say that if dreaming stops you will go mad, because dreaming releases much nonsense which you have left incomplete. And unless it is completed, it cannot evaporate: it cannot evaporate from your being. They say dreaming is the daily catharsis. So if you have not slept well, you will feel uneasy. It is not because you have not slept, it is because you could not dream. Now they say sleep is not so essential. A man can live without sleep for many days, even for months and years. They say it is not so necessary. Dreaming is necessary, and you cannot dream without sleep; that is why sleep is needed. So sleep is needed only for dreaming. But why is dreaming needed? You wanted to kill someone and you have not killed: you will kill him in your dream. That will relax your mind. In the morning you will be fresh: you have killed. I am not saying to go and kill so that you will not need any dream. But remember this: if you want to kill someone, close your room, meditate on the killing, and consciously kill him. When I say "kill him", I mean kill a pillow; make an effigy and kill it. That conscious effort, that conscious meditation, will give you much insight into yourself. Remember one thing: make every moment complete. Live every moment as if there is no other moment to come. Then only will you complete it. Know that death can occur at any moment. This may be the last. Feel that "If I have to do something, I must do it here and now, COMPLETELY!" I have heard a story about a Greek general. The king was somehow against him. There was a court conspiracy, and it was the general's birthday. He was celebrating it with his friends. Suddenly, in the afternoon, the king's manager came and he said to the general, "Excuse me, it is hard to tell you, but the king has decided that this evening, by six o'clock, you are to be hanged. So be ready by six o'clock." Friends were there; music was there. There was drinking, eating and dancing. It was his birthday. This message changed the whole atmosphere. They became sad. But the general said, "Now do not be sad, because this is going to be the last part of my life. So let us complete the dance we were dancing and let us complete the feast we were having. I have no possibility now, so we cannot make it complete in the future. And do not send me off in this sad atmosphere, otherwise my mind will long again and again, and the stopped music and the halted festivity will become a burden on my mind. So let us complete it. Now is no time to stop it." Because of him, they danced, but it was difficult. He alone danced more vigorously; he alone became more festive. But the whole group was simply mot there. His wife was weeping, but he continued to dance, he continued to talk with his friends. And he was so happy that the messenger went back to the king and he said, "That man is rare. He has heard the message, but he is not sad. And he has taken it in a very different way -- absolutely inconceivable. He is laughing and dancing and he is festive and he says that because there moments are his last and there is no future now, he cannot waste them: he must live them." The king himself came to see what was happening there. Everyone was sad, weeping. Only the general was dancing, drinking, singing. The king asked, "What are you doing?" The general said, "This has been my life principle -- to be aware continuously that death is possible any moment. Because of this principle I have lived every moment as much as was possible. But, of course, you have made it so clear today. I am grateful because until now I was only thinking that death is possible any moment. It was just a thinking. Somewhere, lurking behind, the thought was there that it was not going to be just the next moment. The future was there, but you dropped the future completely for me. This evening is the last. Life now is so short, I cannot postpone it." The king was so happy, he became a disciple to this man. He said, "Teach me! This is the alchemy. This is how life should be lived; this is the art. So I am not going to hang you, but be my teacher. Teach me how to live in the moment." We are postponing. That postponing becomes an inner dialogue, an inner monologue. Do not postpone. Live right here and now. And the more you live in the present, the less you will need this constant "minding", this constant thinking. The less you will need it! This is there because of postponing, and we go on postponing everything. We always live in the tomorrow which never comes and which cannot come; it is impossible. That which comes is always today, and we go on sacrificing today for tomorrow which is nowhere. Then the mind goes on thinking of the past which you have destroyed, which you have sacrificed for something which has not come. And then it goes on postponing for further tomorrows. That which you have missed, you go on thinking you will catch somewhere in the future. You are not going to catch it! This constant tension between past and future, this constant missing of the present, is the inner noise. Unless it stops you cannot fall into that silence which is prayer. So the first thing: try to be total in every moment. The second thing: your mind is so noisy because you always go on thinking that others are creating it, that you are not responsible. So you go on thinking that in a better world -- with a better wife, with a better husband, with better children, with a better house, in a better locality -- everything will be good and you will be silent. You think you are not silent because everything around is wrong, so how can you be? If you think in this way, if this is your logic, then that better world is never to come. Everywhere this is the world, everywhere these are the neighbours, and everywhere these are the wives and these are the husbands and these are the children. You can create an illusion that somewhere heaven exists, but everywhere it is hell. With this type of mind, everywhere is hell. This mind is hell! One day Mulla Nasrudin and his wife came to their home, to their house, late in the night. The house had been burglarized, so the wife began to scream and cry. Then she said to Mulla, "You are at fault! Why didn't you check the lock before we left?" And by then the whole neighbourhood had come around. It was such a sensation! Mulla's house had been burglarized! Everyone joined in the chant. One neighbour said, "I was always expecting it. Why didn't you expect it before? You are so careless!" The second said, "Your windows were open. Why didn't you close them before you left the house?" The third one said, "Your locks appear to be faulty. Why didn't you replace them?" And everyone was pouring faults on Mulla Nasrudin. Then he said, "One minute please! I am not at fault" So the whole neighbourhood said in a chorus, "Then who do you think is at fault if you are not?" Then Mulla said, "What about the thief?" The mind goes on throwing the blame on someone else. The wife throws it on Mulla Nasrudin, the whole neighbourhood on Mulla Nasrudin, and the poor man cannot throw it on anyone present, so he says, "What about the thief?" We go on throwing the blame on others. This gives you an illusory feeling that you are not wrong: someone else somewhere is wrong -- X-Y-Z. And this attitude is one of the basic attitudes of our mind. In everything someone else is wrong, and whenever we can find a scapegoat we are at ease, then the burden is thrown. For a religious seeker, this mind is of no help: this is a hindrance. This mind is the hindrance. We must realize that whatsoever the situation is, whatsoever the case is with you, you are responsible, no one else. If you are responsible, then something is possible. If someone else is responsible, then nothing is possible. This is a basic conflict between the religious mind and the non-religious mind., The nonreligious mind always thinks that something else is responsible. Change the society, change the circumstances, change economic conditions, change the political situation, change something, and everything will be okay. We have changed everything so many times, and nothing is okay. The religious mind says that whatsoever the situation, if this is your mind, then you will be in hell, you will be in misery. You won't be able to attain silence. Put the responsibility on yourself. Be responsible, because then something can be done. You can only do something with yourself. You cannot change anyone in this world: you can only change yourself. That is the only revolution possible. The only transformation possible is one's own, but that can be considered only when we feel that we are responsible. Why are you so noisy within? Why so much anxiety within? You are responsible. This is the first step. Then you cannot go and change the causes. The cause must be within; only then can it be changed. In a similar situation to one which makes you uneasy, someone else may not be uneasy at all. A Buddha in the same situation will pass through it differently -- unscratched. Why? Why are you so disturbed by such situations? You were ready. You were just waiting for the situation. Someone is angry against you; you also become angry. You say it is because he did something. You say, "He created the stimulus; I only heard it. I was not angry: he made me angry." But religious analysis is different. Religion says that anger is always yours. There was anger there to be stimulated. He stimulated it, of course, but something was within you -- the energy, the tendency, the habit to be angry was there. That is why he could stimulate it. If there had been no energy, no stored up anger, no repressed anger, no habit, then whatsoever he was doing would not have touched you at all. It touched you because you were ready to be touched. You were ready to explode; he simply created the situation and helped you. He was your helper! If there had been no one to create the situation, you would have created it yourself. You needed it! You needed it very badly! Remember this when you become angry again. Analyze the whole thing, meditate on it, and then you will know that you were already getting ready. You were prepared and you were waiting, and this man who aroused your anger simply gave you a chance. There was a case against Mulla Nasrudin in a court. Suddenly, without any reason, he had beaten his boy and then gone out of the house. So the magistrate asked, "What was the reason? Why did you do this suddenly? There was no fight; there was nothing. Why suddenly did you do this?" The Mulla said, "I was standing by the door, and the door was open, and the street was vacant and there was no traffic. The stick was just handy, and the wife was looking toward the house, so I thought I should not miss the opportunity." You will create opportunities if they are not given to you. You will not miss them: you will create them. If you become aware of this phenomenon, then something can be done. Then it is within your control to do something. The source is within, but you go on projecting it outside. Then you cannot do anything. If you go on projecting the causes outwardly, then you are helpless. What can you do? If someone stimulates you, creates anger in you, what can you do? You are just a helpless victim. The second thing: remember, you are responsible for whatsoever you are. Even if someone gives you a chance, he gives you a chance to express yourself. It is always you who is ultimately, finally, responsible. Why this emphasis on one's own responsibility? Because if I am responsible, I will stop reacting. You do something, I react. Reaction is really a slavery. You are manipulating me. You can make me happy, you can make me miserable: then you are my master, I am your slave. If you smile at me, I am happy. Just a glance of angry eyes at me, and I am miserable. Then you are my master. If I think that you are responsible, then you remain my master and I remain your slave. If I am responsible, then you may go on smiling or you may do whatsoever you like. I will not react according to you: I will act according to me. Mulla was sitting at a prayer-meeting in a mosque. His shirt was rather short and the man behind him thought it looked unseemly, so he pulled it down. Suddenly, immediately, Mulla pulled the shirt of the man in front of him. The man asked, "What are you doing?" He said, "Don't ask me. This man behind me started the whole thing. I am not responsible. I have simply reacted. If this is the way a mosque prayer is done, I have to follow." You go on doing things because someone is doing them to you. You go on passing them on. You may not be aware of it. Are you aware that when you are telling something to your children you are simply repeating whatsoever was told by your father to you? This is Mulla Nasrudin. Are you aware of it? The way you are behaving with your wife is the way you saw your father behaving with your mother. You are just passing things on. You are no one -- just a passage. What are you doing? When you are with your servant, have you observed the way you behave? Is this not the way your boss behaves with you in the office? What are you doing? You are just a part of a long chain. Then you cannot be silent. How can you be silent? You are being pulled and manipulated from everywhere, and you are just vulnerable to everything, every nonsense. If someone is angry, you say, "I simply reacted. Why was he angry with me?" Why? He was angry; it was his business. How are you related? But now you feel it a duty, and whatsoever is being done to you, you will do the same religiously. Remember, you are not a slave and no one has imposed this slavery on you. It is self-imposition. Throw it! Be a master! Only then can you be silent. Only a master can be silent. And when I say "master", I mean a person who acts from within -- who is not reacting. We are always reacting; there is no action in our lives. The moment you can act, you will feel a deep silence within -- because now you have become a master. No one can disturb you. Now you are not helpless. Buddha is passing. Someone abuses him. He listens to it, and then he turns to Ananda and says, "Ananda, this was a long debt. Now it is paid. In some life I must have abused him. Now no more chain. Thank you, friend," Buddha said to that man. "Now the account is closed. I am not going to react." Buddha says, "Reaction is rebirth. If you react, you will have to be born again and again because you are in a chain. Accounts are not closed. Everything is open." The day Buddha died, he gathered all his monks. Ten thousand monks were there. He said, "Now this body is to drop, so do you want to ask anything? Because now, no more can I be. No more will I be in this world!" So someone asked, "Why? Why are you leaving us?" Buddha said, "Now everything is paid. The whole account is closed. I was waiting only for the account to be closed completely. Now nothing is left; I am a master. I have transcended the chain. Now I am no more amidst you." So a third point: become a master. Whatsoever you are doing, do it as an action, never as a reaction. Resist the temptation to react. That is the only evil, the only sin -- to react. Laugh if you feel to laugh, but do not laugh as a reaction. Weep if you are feeling to weep, but do not weep as a reaction. Stop reactions! Act! If these three things are there, you will drop into the silence which is prayer. This sutra says, "Silence is the prayer -- mounam stutihi." When you are silent, with no monologue within, no anxiety within, no reactions within, with nothing incomplete or suspended, everything complete and finished, you become a space, just a space -- infinite, because all the boundaries are your reactions, all the boundaries are your anxieties, all the boundaries of your being are just your madhouses. When you are silent, you are infinite space. But why does this sutra call it prayer? Why bring prayer in? Better to call it meditation. Why call it prayer? When you are silent, it is meditation. Why bring prayer in? It is not brought unnecessarily -- because when you become an infinite space, the Divine descends in you. You have called, you have invoked. When you are totally silent, you have become a host. Now the Divine guest can come. And only in this emptiness, in this silence, in this nothingness, can the Divine guest come. This is the only invitation, the only invocation. This is the only prayer. Prayer means asking for the Divine to come, asking the Divine to be a guest to you. Words won't do, invitations won't do. Whatsoever you do -- cry, weep -- it won't do. First become a host. Silence is becoming a host. Now you are ready. Now there is no need to pray, now there is no need to request. No invitation is needed -- the Divine descends. When you are silent the Divine is there. It will be better to say it in other terms: the Divine is always there, but you cannot feel it because you are not silent. The guest is there, but the host is asleep. The guest is there, but the host is unaware. The guest has already come before the host, but the host is wandering somewhere else. That wandering is the mind. Have you observed that your mind is a wandering? Mind means wandering. You are not here: that is what mind means. You are somewhere else. If you are here, then there is no mind, then there is no wandering. Mind cannot be in the present: it can only be in the past or in the future. Mind can never be here-now. It can only be there-then. It is a wandering. When you are a mind you are wandering somewhere else, but the guest is present always. Buddha was asked when he became Enlightened, "What have you gained?" He said, "Nothing -- because whatsoever I now feel as a gain was already there, only I was unaware. So it would be better to say, I should say, that I have not gained anything. Rather, I have lost much. I have lost my 'self' which was there too much really -- which was there TOO MUCH! I have lost my self and I have gained that which was always, eternally present." One has to come back to his home. This homecoming is silence, this returning to your home is silence. And the rishi says that it is prayer, because when you are silent the invitation has reached. You have invoked. You have prayed! And in prayer many things are implied. If you pray, and if it is really a prayer, then there is no gap between your prayer and the answer to your prayer. If there is a gap, it means that the prayer was false. If you are silent, the Divine is there; there is no gap. If you are silent and you find that the Divine is not there, remember, you are not silent. Even this thought that "the Divine should come to me", creates disturbance. Buddha has said that even the longing for the Divine is a disturbance. Then you are not totally silent. You are asking, and you have moved. You have wandered, you have gone away. If you are asking for freedom, for eternal life, for immortality, for Heaven, for anything, if you are longing, you have wandered. Total silence means total acceptance of whatsoever is -- of that which is. So the last thing to be understood: silence basically means total acceptance. Non-acceptance creates noise in the mind, in the being. Whenever you say no to anything, your mind begins to move and work. Whenever you say yes, your mind stops. "No" is the starter, "yes" is the stopper. astik means a theist. In Sanskrit the word astik, theist, means one who has said a total and final yes to everything. Now he will never say no. Now this yes is ultimate. No going back! Acceptance means you accept whatsoever is the case. If there is anger, you accept it. If there is suffering, you accept it. If there is lust, greed, you accept it. If there is anxiety, worry, you accept it. You accept everything! and, then, how is it possible to be disturbed? When one accepts everything, disturbance is impossible. So in the last analysis, silence means total acceptance. Buddha has given it a name: he calls it TATHATA -- suchness. He says that whatsoever is, is. Whatsoever is, IS! Accept it, and then you are silent. Say no, deny, reject, try to change, and you have created disturbance. This silence is prayer and this silence cannot be created, cannot be forced. In life, all that is valuable, all that is of any value at all, is always a consequence of many, many things. You cannot approach it directly. For example, happiness: you cannot approach it directly. And those who try to achieve happiness directly will become most unhappy -- and only because of their effort. When you are doing something, totally absorbed in it, happiness happens. A painter painting: he has forgotten himself completely in the act. He is totally there. He is no more, really. Really, a great painter never paints. Painting happens! Just as we say it rains, "it paints". Van Gogh was asked once, "Which of your paintings is the best?" And Van Gogh said, "But I have never painted anything. I cannot say. and if you insist, then I can say only this one which is being painted JUST NOW! But I am not the painter: the painting is happening. The painter is not there. The painter has ceased!" Van Gogh can have a happiness not of the world. A singer, a dancer, can have a happiness which doesn't belong to this world. But that is really a consequence of something else. Silence is also a consequence of many things -- of right living, of right action, of right acceptance, of being a right host. Then suddenly, silence happens. It is there -- it has always been there.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 13 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-10/

Soham bhavo namaskarah.The feeling of I am That – So-aham – is the salutation.Existence is one, or, rather, existence is oneness. Al-Hillaj Mansoor was crucified because he said, “I am the beloved, I am the divine, I am That which created the world.” Islam was totally unacquainted with this type of language. This language is basically Hindu. Wherever man has contemplated, man has come to duality: God, the creator, and the world, the created. Hinduism has taken the boldest jump by saying that the created is the creator and there is no basic difference.To Islam, or to other dualistic thinkings, this looks like sacrilege. If there is no difference between God and the world, between man and God, then for dualistic thinkers it appears there is no possibility of religion, no possibility of worship, no possibility of salutation. If you are divine, then whom are you going to worship? If you are the creator, then who is superior to you? Worship becomes impossible.But this sutra says this is the only worship, this is the only salutation:The feeling of I am That – So-aham – is the salutation.Ordinarily, this sutra is absurd, contradictory – because if there is no higher power than you, if you are the highest, then whom are you going to salute? To whom are you going to pay your respects? This is the reason Mansoor was murdered, killed and crucified. This is heresy! He was thought to be a heretic, a nastik, an atheist. If you say you are God, you deny godhood. Then you are the supreme.For a dualistic way of thinking, this is egoistic. The division must be maintained. You must come nearer and nearer, but you must not become the flame itself. You must become intimate with the divine source, but you must not become one with it. Then respect is possible, worship is possible.So you can reach to the divine feet, but you cannot become one with the divine flame. How can the creature become the creator? And if the creature becomes the creator, that means the creature was not a creature at all. And if the created becomes the creator, that means there is no creator.This is one type of religious thinking, the dualistic type. It has its own reasoning and it appeals to our ordinary minds. So, really, even those who are born Hindus are not Hindus unless they can come to conceive the attitude of being one with the creator. One may be born a Hindu, but there is no basic difference between the Hindu, the Mohammedan and the Christian attitude: the actual attitude – the attitude we live and the attitude we behave by.A Hindu is really a deep absurdity, because he takes the impossible jump: the created becomes the creator. And this sutra says this is the only salutation. If God is there high above and you are here low down, if in you something is not divine already, there is no bridge possible. You cannot be related. You can be related only if you are already related; otherwise there will be an unbridgeable gap. God remains God and you remain just a creature.Because of this, a third attitude developed – the attitude of the Jainas. They deny God altogether because they say: If there is a God as a creator and we are just created beings, we can never become gods. How can something created by you become you? The created will remain the created.And the creator will always have the capacity to destroy you, because creation means also the capacity to destroy, the capacity for destruction. If God has created the world, he can destroy it this very moment. He is not responsible to you. You cannot ask why, because you have never asked why he created the world. So this very moment, just a whim in the divine mind, and the world can be destroyed. With all your holy men, with all your sinners, the world can be destroyed this very moment.So if there is a God, Jainas say, then man is not really a spirit – just a created thing, not a soul, because then you don’t have any freedom. If God is the creator, then man is not free. And then everything becomes meaningless: whether you are good or bad, it is meaningless. The God remains the supreme power. He can do anything, he can undo anything.And he is not responsible to you. You have created a mechanical device, you can destroy it. You are not responsible to your mechanical creation. A painter creates a painting; he can destroy it. The painting cannot say, “You cannot destroy me.”And if God is the creator and man is just a created thing, how can the created thing evolve and become divine? That is impossible. So Jainas say there is no God. Only then can man become divine, because only then is man free. With a God we are slaves, with no God we are free.Nietzsche has said, without knowing that Mahavira has said this before him, “Now God is dead and man is free.” The same was the problem for Mahavira: if God is there, then man is not free. God’s being is man’s slavery, God’s nonbeing is man’s freedom. So Mahavira says there is no God – only then can you become divine.Mohammedans, Christians, Jews, they say God is, man is, but man is just a created being. He can worship the divine and come nearer. The nearer he comes, the more he will be filled with divine light, bliss, ecstasy. But you cannot become one with the divine, because if you can become one with the divine that shows you were potentially already one with the divine, because nothing can happen in this world which is not already in the seed. A tree evolves because the tree was in the seed. If you can become divine, you were already divine.So Jews, Christians and Mohammedans say if you are already divine, then religion becomes meaningless. If you are already divine in the seed, then there is no real evolution, then there is no growth. And whatsoever you do or don’t do, you will remain divine.Christians, Mohammedans and Jews say religious growth is possible only if man is man and God is God. You come nearer and nearer, and that coming nearer is a growth. It is your choice. You may not come near, you may go far away – this is your freedom. But if you are already divine, then, Jews, Mohammedans and Christians say, then there is no real growth. All growth becomes illusory, just a dream growth. You were bound to become divine because in the seed you were already divine. So the whole thing becomes hocus-pocus, they say; the whole evolution becomes meaningless.Hindus take a standpoint just between these two standpoints. They agree with Jainas that man is divine and they agree with Christians, Mohammedans and Jews that there is God as the creator. And still, they say, there is growth, there is evolution. Not only that: they say only then is growth possible. But to them growth means just unfoldment. A seed grows, and the growth is real, authentic, because a seed may not grow and may remain a seed forever; there is no inner necessity to grow. But a seed grows only to be a particular tree because that tree is already potential in it.Man can remain man, or man may even fall down and become animal, or man can grow to be divine. This is choice. This is freedom. But this possibility, that man can become divine, shows that somewhere deep down in the seed form man is already divine. So it is an unfoldment. Something hidden becomes actual, something potential becomes actual, something that was just a seed becomes a tree.So, in a way, the Hindus’ God is totally different from the Mohammedans’ and the Christians’ God, because for Hindus man can become God. And they say that if you cannot become God, then even the concept of coming nearer and nearer is false – because if you cannot jump into the flame, what does it mean to come nearer and nearer? Then what is the difference between you and someone who is not near? If you can come nearer, then the logical conclusion will be: more near, more near, more near, and ultimately you become one. If you cannot become one, then there is a limit, a boundary, and beyond that boundary and limit there will be a gap between you and the divine. That gap cannot be tolerated. And if there is a gap which it is not possible to bridge, the whole effort is useless.Hindus say unless you become the divine itself, the urge will not be fulfilled. And the nearer you are, the more you will feel the gap, and the more you will suffer. And when you come to the boundary line from where no growth is possible, you will stagnate and you will die, and the suffering will be unbearable, absolutely unbearable.Man can become divine because he is already divine, and Hindus say you can become only that which you are already. You cannot become that which you are not already; you cannot grow to be something else. You can grow to be yourself only. This attitude has many dimensions, and we will try to understand.One, God as the creator. We can think of him as a painter, but Hindus have not thought that way. They say the creator is not a painter but a dancer – hence Shiva the dancer. In dance the dancer is creating something, but the creation is not something separate from the creator. In painting the painter and painting are two things. The painter can die and the painting may remain. And the moment the painting is complete, it is independent of the painter completely. Now it will take its own course.Hindus say God is a creator like a dancer. A dancer is there dancing: the dance is the creation, but you cannot separate it from the dancer. If the dancer dies the dance will die, and if the dance continues the dancer will be there.One thing more, basically important: the dancer can exist without the dance, but the dance cannot exist by itself. The dance cannot exist without the dancer, but the dancer can exist without the dance. Hindus say this world is a creation in this way: God is dancing, so whatsoever is created is part and parcel of it.Another thing: a painter paints – he can complete the painting and then go to sleep. But a dance is a constant creation. The God cannot go to sleep. So the world was not created on a particular day. It is being created every moment. Christians think the world was created on a particular day and date, and before that there was no world. In a week – in six days, to be exact – the God created the world, and on the seventh day he rested. Now, even if he exists, he is needed no longer. He may have died in the meantime. The painter can die and the painting can continue. The painter may have gone mad, the painting remains as it was.Hindus say the world was not created: it is being created every moment. It is a constant flux of creation, it is a continuum of creation. So, really, if you see it in this way, then God is not a person, God is energy. Then God is not something static; it is movement, dynamic, because a dance is a dynamic movement. You have to be in it every moment, only then can it exist. Dance is an expression, a living expression, and you have to be in it continuously.The world is a dance, not a painting. And everything is part of this dance, every gesture is divine. So Hindus say a very beautiful thing. They say: If everything is not divine, then nothing can be divine. If everything is not holy, then nothing can be holy. If everything is not God, then there is no possibility of any God.This is one dimension, to see this oneness. They never say it is oneness, they always say it is nondual – because Hindus think that to say that the world is one, existence is one, gives you a feeling that one can exist only if something else also exists.One is a number, and one can exist only if other numbers exist – two, three, four. If there are no other numbers, one becomes meaningless. Then what do you mean by one? Because there are nine digits, from one to nine, one is meaningful. It is meaningful in a pattern of digits, numbers. If there is only one, you cannot say it is one. Then numbers become meaningless.Hindus say that existence is nondual, not one. They mean it is one, but they say it is nondual, they say it is not two. This is a noncommittal statement. If you say “one” you have made a commitment, you have committed yourself in many ways. If you say one, you are saying that you have measured it. If you say one, you are saying it is finite.Hindus say existence is nondual. They mean it is one, but they say it in a roundabout way. It is very meaningful. They say it is nondual, it is not two; this way they only indicate that it is one. It is never said directly, only indicated: it is not two.This is also meaningful, because when we say the dancer and the dance are one, then there will be many difficulties. If the dance ceases, the dancer will cease – if they are one. Hindus say instead they are not two. The dancer will be there even if the dance ceases, but the dance cannot be there if the dancer ceases.This nondualness is hidden, the duality is manifest. Manyness is manifest, oneness is hidden. But this manyness can exist only because of that hidden oneness. Trees are different, the earth is different, the sun is different, the moon is different, but now science says that deep down everything is related and one. The trees cannot grow if there is no sun. But we have come to know only this one-way traffic. We know trees cannot grow and flowers cannot flower if the sun ceases to be. But Hindus say it’s true, trees cannot grow if there is no sun, but if there are no growing trees, the sun cannot exist either. This is a two-way traffic: everything is related.Jainas say if there is God, then man will be a slave. Mohammedans say if man declares, “I am God,” then the God is dethroned and the slave pretends to be the master. Hindus say there is neither independence nor dependence: existence is interdependence – interdependence. So to talk in terms of dependence and independence is meaningless. The whole exists as an interdependent whole. Nothing is high and nothing is low, because the high cannot exist without that which you call low.Can the peak exist without the valley? Can the holy man exist without the sinner? Can beauty exist without that which you call ugliness? And if beauty cannot exist without ugliness, then it depends on ugliness. And if the peak cannot exist without the valley, then what is the meaning of calling the peak something high and calling the valley something low?Hindus say the lowest is the highest and the highest is the lowest. By declaring this, they mean that this whole world is a deeply interdependent pattern. And all religions are arbitrary: they are good for thinking, for analyzing, for understanding, but basically they are false. And this is the longest jump.The rishi says:Soham bhavo namaskarah.The feeling of I am That – So-aham – is the salutation.Unless the lowest can feel that he is the highest, he cannot be at home in this universe. But this is not a declaration, this is a feeling. You can declare that “I am God” and that may not be a deep feeling at all. That may be just an egoistic assertion. If you say, “I am God,” and you say, “No one else is God,” then you have not felt it. When it is a feeling, it is not a declaration on your part – it is a declaration on the part of the whole existence.When the rishi says, “I am God, I am That,” he is saying everything is God, everything is That. With him the whole existence declares it. So it is not a personal statement. Al-Hillaj was crucified because Islam couldn’t understand this language. Al-Hillaj said, “I am God.” They thought, “Al-Hillaj is saying that ‘I am God.’” It was not al-Hillaj at all; it was simply that al-Hillaj became vocal on the part of the whole existence. It was the whole existence, through al-Hillaj, speaking, declaring. Al-Hillaj was no more – because if he is, then this declaration becomes personal. This is the second dimension.Man exists in three categories. One, when he says “I am” without knowing who he is. This is the ordinary existence of everyone: “I am” – without knowing who I am. The second stage is when he comes to know “I am not” – because the deeper you ponder over this I-amness, the more you dig, the more you will find you are not, and the whole phenomenon of “I” disappears. You cannot find it. So there is no question of making it disappear; you simply don’t find it, it is not there.If you exist without any inward search, then you go on feeling “I am.” If you begin to search, you will come to know that you are not. This is the second state: when man comes to know that “I am not.” First he was probing deep into the phenomenon of “I am”; now he will have to probe into the second phenomenon of “I am not.”This is most arduous. The first is difficult, very difficult. Even to come to the second is a long journey. Many stay at the first. They never probe into “Who am I?” Only very few go into a deep search to know who it is that says “I am.” Then amongst those few, very few will go again on a new journey to know what this “I am not” is, what this feeling that “I am not” is. “Still I am, but now I cannot say ‘I am.’ I feel as if there is a deep emptiness.”Hindus have said the first is “I-amness.” The second is simply “amness.” The I has dropped, but my existence is there. Even if I am empty, nothing, I am. This they call amness. The first they call ahankar, ego; the second they call asmita, amness. If someone goes deep into ahankar, the ego, he comes to asmita, amness. And now, if someone goes again deep into this amness, he comes to divineness. Then he says, “I am That – aham brahmasmi – I am godliness.” Through emptiness one becomes all. Through nonbeing one becomes the very ground of being. Dissolving, one becomes all.This sutra, Soham bhavo namaskarah, is the feeling of the third state. When man has dissolved completely, ego has disappeared. Even amness is not a finite thing now. One has come to the very source, as if you were just a gesture in a dance – just a gesture in a dance. You probed deep, and now you have come to the dancer. Now, a gesture of dance is, “I am the dancer.”This going in…first you go into yourself, but you are related to the universe. So if you continue, then you are stepping down into existence. If you keep on continuing, then from the periphery one day you will come to the center.A leaf in the wind has its own individuality. If the leaf begins to travel inwards, sooner or later it will go beyond itself: it will enter into the branch. If it goes on, then sooner or later it will not be the leaf, it will not be the branch: it will become the tree. If it goes on, sooner or later it will not be the tree: it will become the roots. And if it still continues, sooner or later it will become the existence: it will go beyond the roots.But a leaf can remain with itself without moving in. Then the leaf can think, “I am.” This is the first state. If the leaf moves, sooner or later it will find, “I am not the leaf. I am more: I am the branch.” Then, “I am not the branch. I am even more: I am the tree.” And then, “Not even the tree, I am more: I am the roots, the hidden roots.” And if the journey goes on, from the roots also it will take a jump – it will become the whole existence.So this is a feeling, a realization. And this is the more difficult part, because intellectually your ego would like to declare that you are God, you are divine. Intellect tries always to be on high, at the peak. The very effort of the ego is to be something supreme. So this can appeal to you, this can appeal to the ego: “Okay this is right – I am God.”But this sutra says this is the salutation. Salutation is a deep humility, a humbleness. It is not to put yourself on the peak, because then there is no one whom you can salute. That was the problem before Islam when al-Hillaj declared. He was declaring himself God. “This is not humbleness – this is the climax of being egoistic!” So those who killed him, killed him very righteously, in good faith. This was the peak of ego.This sutra is contradictory. It declares, “You are That – this is the salutation.” If this is felt and realized, then the peak will salute the valley, because now there is nothing other than the divine. And now the peak will realize that it is dependent on the valley. Then light will salute the darkness and life will salute death, because everything is interdependent, interrelated.At this peak of realization one becomes humble, because this declaration that “I am God” is not against anyone. It is for all: “Now, through me, everything is declaring its divinity.”Many people were there when al-Hillaj was killed, many were throwing stones. He was laughing, he was prayerful, he was loving. There was a Sufi fakir also present in the crowd. The whole crowd was throwing stones, and the Sufi fakir, just to be one with the crowd, to not let them feel that he didn’t belong to them, threw a flower. He couldn’t throw a stone, so he threw a flower – just to be with the crowd, so everyone would feel that he was amongst them, belonged to them.Mansoor began to weep. When the Sufi’s flower hit him, he began to weep. The Sufi became uneasy. He came nearer and he asked Mansoor, “Why? They are throwing stones and you are laughing and you are praying for them? And I have thrown only a flower!”Mansoor said, “Your flower hits me more because you know. And this is not a declaration of me; I have declared for you – and you know, so your flower hits me more. Their stones are just like flowers, because they don’t know – that this has been a declaration for them. If Mansoor can be divine,” said Mansoor, “then everything can be divine. If even Mansoor can be divine, then everything can be divine.” Mansoor said, “Look at me! I was no one and yet I declare I am divine. Now everything can be divine.”This is a declaration, not from the ego: this is a declaration from the nonego realization. When one begins to feel that one is nothing, only then can one come to this. Then it is humble. Then it is the most humble possibility. It becomes a salutation – a salutation to the whole existence. Then the whole existence has a divinity.Mystics have denied temples, mosques, churches, not because they are meaningless, but because the whole cosmos is a temple. Mystics have denied statues, not because they are meaningless, but because the whole existence is the divine image. But to understand their language is difficult. They appear to us as anti-religious – denying statues, denying images, denying temples, churches, denying scriptures, denying everything that we believe to be religious. But they are denying only because the whole is divine. You cannot make a part of it divine. And if you insist on the part, that shows you don’t know about the whole.If I say, “This temple is divine,” just by saying this, I have said that the whole universe is not divine. If this temple is just part of a greater temple, then it is a different thing. But if this temple is against the whole, against other temples – not only against other temples: if this temple is against any ordinary house even, if this temple says that houses are not holy and only temples are holy – it is a denial of the whole.For the whole, mystics have denied the parts. But for us there is no whole. We don’t know anything about the whole. So even when the part is denied, it is uncomfortable, because that’s all we know. And if someone says, “There is no temple!” it is enough for us that he is not religious. He may be saying only this: “Because everything is a temple, don’t make anything in particular a temple. Don’t say anything in particular is divine, because everything is divine.” This is the salutation.We are also worshiping. We go to the temples, to the mosques, to bow. We bow down, but the ego remains standing. It is only a bodily movement. The inner ego remains unmoved. Rather, it may become even more straight – because you have been to the temple, you have been to the tirth, you have been on a holy pilgrimage, you have been to Kaaba. Now you are no ordinary person: you are religious! So you bowed down, but it was a bodily gesture. Your ego is more strengthened. It has been a food for your ego. It has been vitalized, it is not dead.That’s why so-called religious persons will always be more egoistic than ordinary, worldly persons. They have something more that you don’t have. They are religious: they pray daily. When you go to a cinema hall your ego may not be strengthened, but when you go to a temple it is strengthened because you can never feel in a temple that you are guilty.You may feel in a cinema hall that you are guilty, you may feel in a hotel that you are guilty, but you can never feel in a temple that you are guilty. You feel superior, you become more respectable. You gain something in terms of ego. Look at the faces of persons coming out from the temple, observe: their egos are more straightened. They are coming out with some gain. This has been a vitamin!You can bow down without bowing down at all – and that is the problem. Bowing must be inner. And if then the body follows, it is a deep experience; even in the body it is a deep experience. If you are bowing inwardly because everything is divine, so that wherever you bow down you are at the feet of the divine, if with this feeling your body moves, then your body will also have a deep experience. And you will come out of it more simple, more innocent, more humble.But what to do? Many things man has invented – they have not helped. And man’s ego is so subtle and so cunning that it can deceive you in such subtle ways that you cannot detect them. If there is a God somewhere in the heaven you can bow to him and you can still behave egoistically with the whole existence – because “this world is not divine.” Your divinity, your God, is somewhere high in the heaven. To this world you can go on behaving as you were behaving, and you can behave even worse because now you are related to the supreme authority. Now you have a direct link. You can dial any moment to the supreme authority; you can tell him to do anything.Jesus is passing through a village. The village is antagonistic. They will not shelter the disciples or Jesus; they have refused. They will not give any food, not even water, so they have to move to another village.The disciples say to Jesus, “This is the moment. Show your miracle: destroy this village! Such irreligious people should not exist.” These are the disciples who later on created the whole of Christianity. “Destroy this village this very moment. This is the time, show your miracle!”They are saying to Jesus, “Now prove that you are the Son, the Only Begotten Son. Now tell your Father who is high in the heavens to destroy this village this very moment.”Why this arrogance? Why this anger? And they were prayerful people. They were praying daily, they were living with Jesus. Why this arrogance? If there were some ordinary people in their place… Because the villagers have only refused to give food. This is not a sin. This is up to them. If I come to your house and you refuse me food, okay; it is up to you. Why this arrogance?And the whole village has not denied them. There were small children and old men: they had not denied them – only a few people. But the disciples say, “Destroy this whole village. This whole village must be destroyed this very moment.” The trees have not denied them shelter, but they are asking Jesus to destroy everything that belongs to that village. Why?Through prayer, through salutation, through worship, they have become more arrogant. They are not humble people; humility is far from them. And if they are not humble, how can they be religious? But why did this become possible? Because of this attitude: “God is in heaven. The person who has denied me food is not divine, the village is not divine. God is somewhere in heaven and we are God’s chosen people. These people are anti-God – destroy them!”Real humility is possible only when God is not far away. It is your neighbor every moment. Wherever you are, it is your neighbor. To put God somewhere else, far away, is very easy, convenient, because then you can behave as you like with your neighbor and God is always on your side.I was reading:One French general was talking to an English general after the Second World War. The French general said, “We were continuously defeated and you were not defeated. Why is this so?”The English general said, “This is because of prayer. We pray – before we start any fight, we pray.”The French general said, “But that we also do.”The English general said, “That’s okay, but we pray in English and you pray in French. From where did you get this idea that God knows French? He cannot know it.”This is how the so-called religious mind becomes arrogant. Sanskrit is the “only sacred language.” You can laugh at this anecdote, but now laugh: “Sanskrit is the only sacred language and the Vedas are the only scriptures written by God himself. The Koran – how is it possible? From where did you get the idea that God knows Arabic? He knows only Sanskrit!” Then “God is always on my side. Or, if he insists not to be on my side, I can change my god. That is always within my capacity. So because of that fear he always remains on my side. It is my god – he has to follow me!”This attitude is created because of the idea that the whole existence is not divine. If the whole existence is divine, then the divine even understands the language of trees – not only Sanskrit and Arabic, but even the language of the stones. And then it is not a problem of language at all, then language is irrelevant. It is not prayer which is meaningful now, it is a prayerful mind. And a prayerful mind is something totally different from a praying mind.This sutra says this is the only salutation, the only humbleness possible, but in a very paradoxical way: “I am God – to feel this is the salutation.”We would like to say, “You are God,” and then it is easy to salute. But this sutra says, “I am God – this is the only salutation.” We will ask to whom….There is no need really to salute. There is no need to salut – it is not an activity, it is not something you have to do. If the whole existence is divine, then whatsoever you are doing, it is a salutation.Kabir was asked…because he continued to work as he was working before his enlightenment. He was a weaver, he continued weaving. Disciples would come from far, very, very faraway places, and they would say, “Why? – you are an enlightened one, you are now a buddha – why do you continue weaving?”Kabir would say, “This is the only prayer I know – this is the only prayer I know. I was a weaver, so I know only this way to salute him.”Someone asked Kabir, “But Buddha, when he became enlightened, left everything.”Kabir is reported to have said, “He was a king. He knew only one way: to be a king. But I am a weaver, a poor weaver, so I know only one way. This is my prayer. When I am weaving these clothes, I am weaving them for the divine.”And then Kabir would go to the market to sell them. So someone asked him, “But you go to the market to sell them. You say these are for the divine, then go to the temple and put them at the divine feet?”Kabir said, “I put them always at the divine feet, but my gods are waiting there in the market – my Rama is waiting there. And I believe in living gods.”This attitude needs no salutation. This is not now an act to be done; rather, it is a way to live. Your prayer can be just a part of your act, just one act among many. But to persons like Kabir it is not an act, it is a way to live. So Kabir says, “Whatsoever I am doing is prayer – whatsoever I am doing is prayer!”It can be, but then the whole existence must be divine. Then whatsoever you are doing…then if you are eating, it is prayer because it goes to the existence. Then it is not you who are eating, but the existence through you. Then you are moving or walking – it is prayer, because it is existence moving through you, walking through you.Then you are dying… it is prayer, because it is existence taking back: that which was given, manifested, becoming unmanifested. Then you are not in between. You are no more. You are just an opening – just an opening for the existence, a window. Existence moves through you, in and out. You are nowhere in between.At this moment of nothingness, man can say, “Aham brahmasmi, I am the absolute, I am That.” This is not an egoistic assertion. This is one of the humblest of assertions, but it looks very paradoxical.Life is such a complexity that if you have to assert simple truths you have to be paradoxical. If you are asserting complex truths you need not be paradoxical; you can be very logical. This has to be understood: only very simple truths are difficult to express, because the more simple they become, the more nondual. And when it comes to the very center, then the statement has to imply all dualities.Look at it in this way: the Upanishads say the absolute is near and the absolute is far away. If you say it is only near, it is false; if you say it is only far away, it is false – because that which is near can become far and that which is far can become near. You can move, you are already moving. It is everywhere. This simple truth has to be expressed in a very paradoxical way. It is the nearest and the most far. It is the minutest and the greatest. It is the seed and the tree. It is the birth and the death, because if it is life then it must be both birth and death.But why not simply say that he is life? Because in our minds life is against death. So this simple truth, that he is life, cannot be asserted in this way. It has to be asserted in a paradoxical way: he is birth and he is death. He is both. He is life only because he is both. He is the friend and the foe, because the foe can become a friend and the friend can become a foe. He is both! We would like him to be the friend and never the foe, but our likings are not truths. Really, unless our likings and dislikings cease we cannot come to the truth, because we go on choosing and projecting.This statement is again a paradox. The first part of it – the feeling that I am divine, I am That – is the peak. And the second – the salutation – is the valley. Valley and peak both! The most egoistic assertion possible: I am That. And then, falling down unto the feet of everything: the salutation. These are two extremes, two polar opposites, and many things are implied.If you feel that you are inferior and then you bow down, it is not a salutation. If you feel that you are inferior and then bow down, it is not a salutation, it is just part of your inferiority. If you say, “I am superior and cannot bow down,” then you are not really superior, because one who cannot bow down is dead. He cannot be superior. And one who cannot bow down is still afraid somewhere for his superiority, afraid that “If I bow down I will not be superior.” Only one who is at ease with his superiority can bow down. Only one who has gone beyond his inferiority can bow down. And this is the highest peak possible – I am That – and then bowing down.Buddha has told his past-life memoires. In one he says, “I was just ignorant.” Buddha says, “I was just ignorant. Then a buddha, a person who had become enlightened, passed through my village. I went to touch his feet, I touched his feet, but then suddenly I became aware that he was doing something. He was bowing down and he touched my feet. I became afraid and I said, ‘What are you doing? I should touch your feet – that is as it should be – but why are you touching my feet?’”That enlightened one said to Gautam Buddha, “You are touching my feet because I am a buddha. I am touching your feet because you are a buddha also.”Gautam Buddha, in his past life, said to him, “But I am not. I am ignorant. I am no one.”The enlightened one said to him, “Because you don’t know what you are, you don’t know what you can become. You are bowing to a present buddha, I am bowing to a future buddha. I have become manifest, you will become manifest. It is only a question of time.”This bowing down of an enlightened man is the secret of this sutra. He was a peak, and he is bowing down to an ignorant man. Now from his peak he can see another peak which is hidden in ignorance. It is not hidden for him; to him it is as clear as anything.You can bow down to this ordinary existence only when you feel that you are That. To say it in another way: unless you become godly you cannot salute, unless you become a god you cannot be humble, unless you become godly you cannot be innocent. That innocence is expressed through this sutra. Salutations we know. We know about godliness, we know about salutations. But this sutra is very difficult, impossible to conceive of. It makes you godly, and it makes this being godly a basic condition for salutation. For us, we always salute to the higher, higher than us. This sutra makes you the highest, and that the basic condition for salutation. Whom to salute now? You are the highest – now salute to the lowest.From the lower, the salutation towards the higher is just ordinary. There is nothing in it. It is the ordinary mind working, the political mind, the ambitious mind working to salute to the higher. But when you are the highest, the mind will say, “Now you need not salute anyone. Now the whole existence must salute you. You are the highest; now let the whole world come to you to salute. Now let the whole existence bow down to your feet.”This will be your feeling. If you take it as you are, if you begin to follow this sutra, this will be the feeling: “Now let the whole world come and salute me.” But this sutra says: this is the basic condition for you to salute the divine.When you are no one, ego feels starved. When you feel inferiority, you want that someone should salute you. This is a hunger – hunger for food. This shows that you are still just at the first stage of the mind, “I am.” And below this stage there is nothingness, so whatsoever you put in this “I am” goes deep into the abyss, and the “I am” remains always vacant.One day a seeker came to Mulla Nasruddin to ask him how to find the truth. Nasruddin said, “There are many conditions to be fulfilled before I can accept you as a disciple. So come with me. I am going to the well to fetch some water.”He went there. On the way he said to the future disciple, “Don’t ask any questions, because I have not accepted you yet as a disciple. When I accept you, you can ask. Just observe. Don’t ask anything. If you ask anything before I am back at my home, you disqualify yourself.”The future disciple thought, “It is not such a difficult thing, just going to the well, fetching a bucket of water and then coming back. I will remain totally silent.”So he kept silent. But Mulla was doing such absurd things that it was impossible to keep silent. He had two buckets: one bucket to pull water from the well and another, a bigger one, to fill with water. But the bigger one had no bottom at all, so he would pull the water and throw it into the bigger one with no bottom. The water would go out, then he would drop the bucket again.So the future disciple said, “What are you doing?”Mulla said, “Now you disqualify yourself. Now no more questions. Leave me. It is not your business. Who are you to ask me?”The future disciple said, “I am going. And there is no need to tell me to go because there is no need to stay with you. But some advice – I am leaving, but some advice to you: you can labor on this bucket your whole life and it will never be filled.”So Mulla said, “I am concerned with the surface, not with the bottom. I am looking at the surface. When the surface is okay, I will go back to my home. To consider the bottom is irrelevant.”The future disciple left, but in the night he couldn’t sleep. “What type of man is this?” He began to brood and there was no sleep, so he thought about many, many clues: “What is the secret of it?” By and by, he mystified himself. And then he thought, “It may be that he was just examining me, testing me, just seeing whether I can keep silence in a situation where it is impossible to be silent.”So in the morning he ran back, came to Mulla Nasruddin, and said, “Pardon me, excuse me. I was at fault, it was my fault. I should have kept silent. But what was the secret of it?”The Mulla said, “Because I am not going to accept you as my disciple I can let you know the secret. The secret is this: that bucket was nothing but the first state of man’s mind. You go on filling it, but it will never be filled. But no one is concerned with the bottom; everyone is concerned with the surface. You go on filling it with prestige, respect, wealth and everything. You are concerned with the surface. One day your ego will be filled. No one is concerned with the bottom, whether this bucket has any bottom at all!”The disciple began to weep and said, “Accept me. You are the right man.”Mulla Nasruddin said, “It is too late. This bucket is so helpful to me. Whenever someone turns up with the mind to be a disciple, this bucket disqualifies – anyone! It has disqualified many and it has saved me much labor. Because this bucket will not disqualify a person only if he has come to feel that his mind is a bucket without a bottom. Then he is qualified to be my disciple, because all disciplehood is from ‘I am’ to ‘I am not.’”If you drop from the bottom to the abyss, to the second layer of the mind, that is what every discipleship is for. Then there is nothingness. And beyond that nothingness is the feeling of “Aham brahmasmi – I am That.”

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 14 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-11/

Osho,“So-aham – I am That,” or “Aham brahmasmi – I am the brahman,” or “Ana'l-haq”: all these statements seem to be that of a gyani, one who is on the path of knowledge. Last night's sutra says: “I am That – so-aham – is the salutation.” The second part seems to be that of a bhakta, one who is on the path of devotion, whereas the first part seems to be that of a gyani. This is a rare combination. Please explain why the statements of gyana and bhakti have been put together.In this reference, please explain the difference between a gyani and a bhakta.How do gyanis like Rishi Kapil and Shankara differ from bhaktas such as Chaitanya and Meera?Why have great bhaktas preferred to keep themselves separate from bhagwan, the divine, such as Meera from Lord Krishna?Does bhakti culminate into gyana or gyana culminate into bhakti?The ultimate is one, but it can be viewed from many angles. It can be looked at from various points of view. It is one, but when it is expressed the expression can take multi-shapes. It is one, but when one reaches towards it the paths differ. And whatsoever is said from a particular path is just one aspect of the reality. It is not the total reality.Experience of the total is possible, but expression of the total is not possible. Expression is always partial. You can feel and realize the total, but the moment you express it, it is only a viewpoint, it is never the total.There are two basic divisions of approach: the path of knowing and the path of love. Man’s mind is divided between these two aspects. These are not divisions of the ultimate reality: these are divisions of the human mind. The mind can look at the truth as a knower or as a lover. That depends not on the ultimate reality but on you. If you look through a lover’s eyes, then your experience will be the same as when you look through the knower’s eyes, but the expression will differ. When you look through love, your expression will be totally different.Why this difference? Why this total difference? Because love has its own language. Knowledge has its own language, love has its own language. Those languages are quite contradictory. For example, knowledge always strives towards one, and love is impossible if there are not two. Love is possible only when there is a duality. But I must make haste to say that love is a very mysterious experience: it is oneness between two. The two must be there, but just the two being there doesn’t mean that love is there. When the two begin to feel a deep oneness, then love happens.So love has a double reality: oneness in two. The duality must be there and at the same time oneness should be felt. And the language of love will retain this duality, because the lover and the beloved, these are the two polarities. Between these two polarities oneness has been felt, but that oneness cannot exist without these two polarities.The lover will say, “I have become one with my beloved. The beloved is in me.” But he cannot speak the language of knowledge, he cannot say that duality has disappeared. He can only say that duality has become illusory: “We are two and yet we are not two.” This paradox, “We are two, yet we are not two,” is love’s language. It is not mathematical; it cannot be. It is the language of feeling.You can feel oneness without becoming one. There is no need to become one; that is irrelevant. You can feel oneness without merging, without dissolving. You can remain two outwardly, inwardly you can become one. And the path of devotion, the path of love, says that if oneness means dissolution of the two, that oneness will be just flat. That oneness will have no poetry in it, that oneness will be dry. It will be a mathematical oneness.Love says that oneness is more alive. It is not a mathematical unity. The lover and beloved remain, and yet they begin to feel they have dissolved. The twoness remains, but it becomes more and more illusory. Oneness is felt as more real than twoness, but twoness remains.The seeker on the path of love says that this is the beauty, and the experience is richer for it. A mathematical unity means the experience is not a rich one. In a flat way, two things have disappeared and there is one. It is less mystic. Lovers say, “We remain two and yet we are not two,” and they go on talking in terms of this nonduality in duality, oneness in twoness. The oneness is basic, but on the surface the beloved is the beloved and the lover is the lover and there is a gap. Deep down, the gap has disappeared.Love is a poetic approach towards existence, and minds differ.I remember one anecdote about a British scientist, a Nobel prizewinner, Dirac. A friend of Dirac’s – another scientist, a Russian scientist, Kapitsa – gave him one of the most highly praised novels of Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. Kapitsa said to Dirac, “Go through this novel and then tell me your impression.”When Dirac returned the book he said, “It is nice, but there is one fault, one error in the book. The writer says that the sun rises twice in the same day – on the same day the sun rises twice.” In the story somewhere Dostoyevsky has made the error: the sun rises twice on the same day in the novel. So Dirac said, “That is the only error, and I have nothing more to say.”This was the only thing he said about Dostoyevsky’s great novel, Crime and Punishment, and he is no ordinary man. But the approach, the approach of a mathematician, it is not the approach of a poet, of an artist, of a lover. It is the approach of an impartial observer, mathematical. Only this he had to say, “There is one error: the sun cannot rise twice in the same day.” About such a great creation, such a great piece of art, Crime and Punishment, only this struck his mind.Why? The training of the mind, impartial observation, mathematical observation… No one had ever detected this error. He was the first man. Many have felt a deep insight in Dostoyevsky’s book, a depth psychology, a great poetry, a great drama, but no one has detected this error.It depends on how you look at the world. A lover looks with different eyes. When the lover comes to the ultimate experience, he knows now everything has become one. But he says that if this oneness is simply oneness, just oneness, it is dead. It is an alive oneness, it is an alive, dynamic phenomenon. It is a constant movement between the two shores. It is a constant unity, a movement, a live process. It is not a dead unity. And reality can be looked at with quite contradictory outlooks.The mathematical mind, the mind of an observer, a detached observer – that is the path of knowledge, knowing – he will say either the duality exists or oneness, but both together are impossible. This is a logical approach: “How can you say that oneness exists while two are still there? Either dissolve the two, then there is oneness; or don’t talk of oneness, talk of two.” And he is right also in his own way. It is his approach.He says, “Either you have achieved oneness…then there is neither the lover nor the beloved. Both have disappeared. There is no distinction. You cannot talk about the beloved, of the divine. You cannot talk of the devotee. It is nonsense. Stop! Or, if you are still continuing to talk in terms of duality, then you have not come to oneness – because both cannot exist simultaneously.”This is just a mathematical approach. But mathematics is not life, and life allows even the opposite, even the contradictory. So I will explain it in a different way. It will be easier.This century has seen one of the greatest revolutions in science, and that is the dethronement of mathematics. With the discovery of the electron, the old rationalistic approach became absurd, out of date.You might have heard about Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher. He had two cats. One was a smaller one, the other was a bigger one, and both the cats would sleep with him. But there was a difficulty. Sometimes they would not come in time, and Kant was very particular about time. He would move just by the clock. So he would have to wait for the cats; only then could he lock the door.So one day he called his servant and told him, “Bring a carpenter and make two holes in the door – one for the smaller cat and one for the bigger one – so they can come at any time and I can go to sleep easily.”The servant thought him mad, crazy, because the cats could come through just one hole. There was no need for two. But mathematically Kant is right; practically he is just foolish. Mathematically he is absolutely right. But the servant thought that one hole would do, so one hole was made.When Kant came back from his university, he saw that there was only one hole, for the bigger one, so he said, “From where will my small cat get in? Where is the other hole?”The servant said, “She can get in through this hole. She is not such a big philosopher. Cats are very practical, they are not theoretical, so don’t you bother.”But it was inconceivable for Kant, so he waited. When he saw with his own eyes that both cats were coming through one hole, then only was he at ease.We can laugh at this, but a more crazy thing has happened now. With the discovery of the electron, everything has become muddled in physics – because one electron thrown at a screen, shot at a screen, with two holes will pass through both the holes simultaneously. One electron shot at a screen with two holes will pass through both the holes simultaneously. One electron should pass through one hole. If you are thrown out of the window you cannot pass through two windows simultaneously, but an electron does.When for the first time this was observed, the electron seemed absolutely impractical. And the whole thing seems weird. How can one electron pass through two holes simultaneously? But it does, and electrons are not philosophers. So what to do and how to interpret this phenomenon?Science had to develop a new concept. Now they say the electron is both a particle and a wave. So when you throw it at a screen, it passes through two holes simultaneously – because a wave can pass through two holes simultaneously, not a particle. A wave can pass through two holes simultaneously, but a particle cannot. When you look at it, it is a particle, but it behaves as a wave.Now old mathematics, old geometry, the old Euclid, will not be ready to concede this, because a wave is not a particle and a particle is not a wave. A point is not a line and a line is not a point. So they had to throw out the whole Euclidian geometry and now they say, “We cannot force mathematics on reality. We will have to change our mathematics; there is no other way. If reality behaves nonmathematically, we cannot say to reality, ‘Behave mathematically, behave logically.’”Physics has discovered a very weird world where all our laws are blurred. It is both. If you observe it, it appears as a particle, as a point. If you observe its behavior, it appears as a wave, as a line.The same has happened with the ultimate truth. If you look at it through love’s eyes, it behaves like a wave. If you look at it through a knower’s eyes, it appears to be a particle. Through a knower’s eyes it appears to be one, and through a lover’s eyes it appears to be two. It depends on the onlooker: it is both and it is neither.Because of this, if one goes on emphasizing one’s own standpoint too much, then that standpoint will look contradictory to the other. If someone says, “The electron is a particle, I have observed it myself,” he is right, nothing is wrong, but then he will exclude the other. Then the other becomes wrong by itself. If he says, “Because I am right, then you are wrong. Because I have observed the electron to be a particle, it cannot be a wave,” then you are rejected outright. Then there is contradiction.And the same can be done by the other who has observed it behaving as a wave, who has seen it with his own eyes passing through two holes simultaneously. He will say, “It is not a particle at all, because a particle cannot behave like a wave.” Then they go on insisting. Then they create sects, exclusive sects.This sutra is rare – it combines both. It says: When you know you are That, this is the salutation. The first part belongs to the path of knowledge and the second part to the path of devotion, to the path of love. This is to say, in other words, that when you know that you are one, only then do you know that you are two. Or, when you come to know that you are two, you can feel the inner unity, the oneness.This twoness and oneness belongs to you, not to reality. Reality is both or neither. Before a lover’s eyes it behaves like two; it is divided between the lover and the beloved. Before the knower’s eyes it behaves as a particle, one. There is no contradiction, real contradiction, but they will laugh at each other. The seekers on the path of knowledge will always feel that the devotee is missing something, he cannot achieve the ultimate. And they are right in a way, because from their standpoint this is so.I will tell you one story. I have heard:One day, just in the morning, the sun is yet to arise, one earthworm, half-awake, still sleepy, is just relaxing around a stone. Then the sun begins to rise, the mist disappears, and this earthworm feels the presence of some other earthworm. He looks around the stone. Just by the other side, another earthworm is approaching. He falls in love, as it is the habit of men and earthworms to fall in love at first sight. And when the preliminaries of courtship are over, the first earthworm says to the other, “Baby, I am in deep love. And now I cannot live without you, so marry me.”The other has remained silent up to now. Now the other laughs and says, “You fool, I am your other end!”On the path of knowledge, devotees look foolish. They are talking to their own other end. They are calling, “Beloved. God! Divine!” but they are talking to their own other end. They look foolish. But they are good people – they accept it.Saint. Francis is reported to have always called himself “God’s fool.” They are good people – they can laugh at themselves. Saint. Francis says, “I am a fool, but let me be a fool. I don’t want to be wise because I have seen wise ones. I may be mad, but let me be mad. This love between me and the divine is enough.”Devotees are fools, but with a method. They are mad, but with a method. They say, “This madness is the only wisdom possible. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love. Let it be the other end, but love is so good and love is so beautiful that even if one has to divide oneself in two for love, one should divide.”That’s why bhaktas, devotees, lovers, have said, “This world is a play, a leela. Radha is also Krishna – disguised. the divine loving itself through so many disguises.” So bhaktas, devotees, are not very serious. They say, “We are fools, we are mad people, but we are happy about it. And we don’t want your knowledge – dry, dead. Of course, it is exact, but dry and dead. Our madness is alive.”Those who are on the path of knowledge, for them love is inconceivable because they say, “If you love you cannot know, because love gives partiality. You cannot be detached. A seeker must be detached; he must not be involved. He must stand aloof, indifferent. He must observe as an outsider. He must not be in the process himself.”A lover cannot be detached. You cannot ask Majnu to be detached about Laila; that is impossible. He will say Laila is the only beautiful woman, not only of this time but of all times. This is absurd, but he is in love. Love creates this feeling. He is authentic – whatsoever he is saying he feels, but this feeling is that of an involved man, committed. He is not an outsider. He cannot look at Laila detachedly.So the followers of the path of knowledge will say, “Majnu can never come to truth. He will always live in his own illusions. Whatsoever he is saying is a subjective feeling. It is not objective truth.” They will say, “Bhaktas go on talking about their own illusions. If you want reality, then be objective. Then love will not do. Really, love is the hindrance, because it colors everything.”In Sanskrit, we have the word rag. Rag means attachment and rag means color. Every attachment gives a color to the object. It is a projection. The path of knowledge says, “Be absolutely unattached – veetrag, no attachment, no love, no thought of devotion – only then can you come to the real.”This dialogue can continue infinitely, because on every point they will differ. And I would insist they are right as far as they are concerned. Whatsoever they say about themselves is right, but they become wrong when they begin to say something about the other. When these followers of knowledge say something about the devotees, it becomes wrong because that is not their experience at all. Whatsoever they know of love is one thing. Whatsoever a devotee comes to know of love is absolutely different.For the devotee, for the path of love, it is not a projection because the lover says, “I am no more. Who can project? I have no expectations, no demands, no desires, so how can one project without desires, without expectations, without ambitions?” The bhakta says, “I have nullified myself just to become a space for the divine to descend, and now the divine has entered.”This love, this communion, is not a projection, because projection is always through desires. So if you are desiring something by your communion, it will be a projection. If you simply desire communion and nothing else, it cannot be a projection. So bhaktas have said, “We don’t want your moksha. Baikunth, heaven, we don’t want. We don’t want any punya, any merit. We don’t want your heaven, we only want you!”And bhaktas say, “Those who are following the path of knowledge, they want liberation, they want moksha, they desire heaven, they desire purity, they desire freedom. Their effort is ambitious.” Bhaktas say, “If baikunth is there, heaven is there, and your feet are here, we will choose your feet.” They have never asked about moksha, liberation, freedom – nothing.One bhakta has sung, “Let me be a dog in Vrindavan, or let me be just dust in the streets of Vrindavan. That’s enough. And I will wait for your feet for eternity – nothing else.”Really, in a deeper way, bhaktas seem to be less ambitious than gyanis. But they cannot understand each other; that is difficult. You cannot make them understand. The dialogue seems impossible because they use different languages, they use different realms, they give different meaning to their words. Bhaktas say that love is the only freedom. For the path of knowledge, knowledge is freedom, not love. Love is a bondage, because the moment you are in love you are in a bondage. And the bhaktas say love is freedom, and if you know that love is bondage you have not known love at all. So they are talking in different languages and there is no meeting.Only sometimes, rarely does it happen, that a person is both. It is a very rare phenomenon. Centuries and centuries pass…only then does someone happen to be both. But then his language will become more difficult for you to understand. Because look at this: a bhakta cannot understand the language of a gyani; a gyani cannot understand the language of a bhakta; but if a person is both, the masses will not understand him at all. In itself each language is difficult. And when both languages become one within someone, it becomes impossible to understand him.That man can understand both the bhaktas and the gyanis, but the masses cannot understand him at all because he will appear to continuously contradict himself. Whenever he speaks the language of the path of knowledge he will say one thing, and whenever he speaks the language of love he will speak in contradictory, absolutely contradictory terms. He will go on contradicting himself, and you will simply be confused. What does he mean? This is rare, and whenever it happens that man is misunderstood completely.This Upanishad belongs to such a man who is both. You may not have noticed, but the very name of the Upanishad is Atma Pooja – worship of the self. It is absurd – the title is absurd, contradictory. Worship of your self? Worship is always of someone else! Worship of your self: so you are the worshiper and you are the worshiped. Worship loses all meaning.And he is continuously speaking in paradoxes. Every sentence belongs to both. He will use the symbols of the bhaktas and then will give the meaning of the knowers, not of the lovers. The whole Upanishad is doing this consistently. The symbology is of devotees, worship, but the meaning given to it is that of the knowers.In this sutra also the same is the case: if you know you are That, this is the salutation. Because of this consistently inconsistent attitude, consistently contradicting himself and using double language, mixing two different realms, this Upanishad was neglected. No one has commented upon it. It is one of the most neglected Upanishads, and one of the most beautiful ones.To comment on it will be difficult, because commentators are again of two types. Those who believe in the path of knowledge, for them the whole language is of the other camp. And the followers of the path of love, for them the whole meaning belongs to the other camp. So this rishi of the Atma Pooja Upanishad really belongs to no camp. And because of this, this Upanishad has remained neglected, uncommented upon.So the first thing: these are two languages. Love has its own language, knowledge has its own language. And they cannot meet superficially. They can meet only in a person, not in a dialogue. One person can attain such a state, but this happens rarely. And why rarely? Because when you have come to the goal by one path, who bothers about the other paths? There is no need. You have reached the goal by one path.Ramakrishna tried this. He was the only experiment in this age. He would reach to a particular state of consciousness and then he would stop. Then he would begin to travel by another path, then by another. And he would stop only when he reached to the same state by so many paths. He tried Sufi ways, he tried Buddhist meditation, he tried Hindu paths. He tried…. Deeply he was a devotee, basically he was on the path of love, but then he tried Vedanta, the path of knowledge. It was very arduous, because it is not so easy to change from being a devotee to the path of knowledge. Then everything has to be contradicted.He was learning with Totapuri, one of the greatest Vedantins of his time. And Totapuri was absolutely a Vedantist, a follower of the path of knowledge. So he would laugh at Ramakrishna and would say, “You are foolish! What are you doing with this weeping, crying, dancing, praying? There is no one. To whom are you praying?’Then Ramakrishna became a disciple. And this is one of the rarest phenomena, because Ramakrishna had achieved whatsoever Totapuri had achieved. This is humbleness. He became a disciple of Totapuri and he said, “Teach me now. By your path I will travel.”Totapuri became the teacher, and he was a very rough teacher, a taskmaster. And he would teach him in the same way as he would teach anyone else, from ABC. So Ramakrishna was in a mess because Totapuri would say, “Throw this image of your goddess Kali. Throw this, destroy this. Cut it into pieces!” Ramakrishna would begin to weep. Then Totapuri would say, “This childishness won’t do.”So one day Ramakrishna said, “It is difficult – it is impossible. Whenever I close my eyes, the goddess is there and I am bowing down to her divine feet. You go on telling me, ‘Throw, cut, destroy!’ How can I do it? How can I destroy the divine image? It is so beautiful and the experience is so lovely and I am in such a high state of mind. I am not in this world at all.”Totapuri said, “This is all illusion, your projections. Take a sword in your hand and cut the goddess in two. Kill her.”So Ramakrishna said, “From where can I get the sword?”Totapuri said, “From the same source where you got this image. From where have you got this image inside? Imagination – so get one sword through imagination. And if you are not going to destroy this, I am going to leave. You have taken a vow to follow me, to be my disciple, so do whatsoever is told; otherwise I leave this very moment.”So Ramakrishna closes his eyes. He is weeping, tears are falling down, and Totapuri is laughing and saying, “What foolish things you are doing! Why are you weeping? No one can reach truth through weeping. Be a man and kill the goddess.”And then he brings a piece of glass, Totapuri brings a piece of glass, and he cuts Ramakrishna’s forehead with that glass. Blood begins to flow. And then he says, “As I am cutting your forehead, just inside cut the image.”And Ramakrishna destroyed the image. This was very arduous. No bhakta has ever done this. This was the first time. But no bhakta will travel this path. There is no need.And then Ramakrishna said, “The last barrier has fallen away.” That was the last barrier on the path of knowledge.So Totapuri was at ease, happy, and he said, “You have achieved. Now you are liberated.”And the next day Ramakrishna is in Kali’s temple, and weeping. He himself has said that the last barrier has fallen, and now again he is weeping and crying and dancing.Then Totapuri leaves and he says, “You are incurable.”But this was not a case of incurability. He was just trying to reach to the same point by so many paths. He became a Mohammedan for six months. Then he would not enter the Kali temple, because how can a Mohammedan enter? So he would come just outside; he would inquire about his goddess, “How is she?” and then he would go back. Then he would sleep in a mosque and he would do Sufi methods. For six months he was a Mohammedan.Then, one day, he came laughing into the temple and he said, “Now I am back. Mother, I am back! I have reached to the same through Mohammedan methods.”Sometimes only, this has been done. This Upanishad belongs to someone who knew both, and knew deeply. So he goes on changing his track from one language to the other. And those languages are contradictory. If you understand this, then there will be no confusion.Osho,You said that life exists in polar opposites – birth and death, good and evil, peace and violence, kindness and cruelty, beauty and ugliness. It seems that these polar opposites are inevitable and are bound to be there. Then what do we strive for through religion? Then what is meant by spiritual transformation?Saints and prophets try to create a spiritual society and culture. Does it not mean that they want to change the natural state of things? And if we succeed in creating a healthy spiritual society, then what will be the situation of the other polar opposites like cruelty, violence and ugliness?This is one of the most significant problems, and much confusion exists about it. So first, know it well that religion is not ethics, religion is not morality. Morality goes on endeavoring against that which is evil, bad, immoral, that which is sin. So morality is a conflict, a struggle, against that which is evil. Morality is trying to create a moral world where no immorality should exist. That is impossible.You can only change, but the balance remains the same – because this is one of the deepest laws of nature, that it exists as polar opposites. If you destroy one, the opposite will also be destroyed. In a world where there is nothing bad, nothing will be good. Where there is no sinner, there will be no saint. The saint exists as a polar opposite to the sinner; they are interdependent.So moral effort cannot create a world where only good exists. This is a hope, unfulfilled, and it will remain unfulfilled. It cannot come to happen because it is denying the basic law.Now physicists say matter exists only because there exists something like anti-matter. A parallel world of anti-matter exists. Nature is a balance; you cannot destroy the balance. If you go on emphasizing one polar opposite, really, two things are possible. Either you will be able to make it stronger, then the other polar opposites will become stronger; or you may be able to destroy the other, then the one you were trying to make stronger will be destroyed.Life is a balance, so morality is a futile effort. When I say this, I don’t mean don’t be moral. I don’t mean don’t be moral, because then again you destroy the balance. Be whatsoever you can be.Religion is a totally different realm, so religion is not after creating a good world against the bad. Religion is after a balanced world, not against anything. Where good and bad balance, they negate each other. And the man who is neither a saint nor a sinner, this man becomes a sage. This is a balanced person: neither a sinner nor a saint, just a deep balance, an inner balance, between the polar opposite forces.When two polar opposites are balanced, you transcend them. Look at it in this way. Sometimes you feel you are healthy: this is an imbalance. Sometimes you feel that you are ill: this is again an imbalance. Sometimes you don’t feel yourself either ill or healthy: this is a balance. To feel that you are healthy, it means you have moved to the other extreme. Now you will fall ill.Remember this: whenever you begin to feel you are healthy, you are on the verge – you will fall ill. This happens every day but you are not aware of it. Whenever you feel, “I am happy,” happiness ends. Whenever you become aware of anything, it means you have moved very far. Now come back – balance must be regained. And to regain the balance you will have to move to the opposite.It is just like a nata, an acrobat, walking on a rope. He is continuously moving from left to right. But have you observed: whenever he has moved too much to the left, then suddenly he will have to move to the right – to balance. When he feels now he will fall if he goes further to the left, to balance this he will have to move to the right.We are all natas, acrobats, moving on a rope continuously – from good to bad, from bad to good, from health to illness, and illness to health – continuously. A sage is one who has come down from the rope. Now he is not bothered about going from left to right, he has gone beyond.Religion is a transcendence. Knowing this, that the bad cannot be destroyed because it is a balance, that the good cannot remain alone…they are both necessary. Through these polar opposites, existence exists. Seeing this, realizing this, the sage simply balances himself between the two. There is no choice. He is not choosing good against bad. If you choose good against bad, sooner or later you will have to choose bad against good, because you have moved in one direction. Now you will have to move in the other.So saints are always moving towards sin, and sinners are always moving towards sainthood. Saints have their sin moments and sinners have their saint moments. In each saint the sinner exists as a possibility, and whenever the saintliness is too much, the sinner brings the balance. So they say – those who know, they say – you cannot be a saint twenty-four hours a day. You have to have some holiday. You cannot be. It is too much. Then it is boring and heavy and one has to escape. So saints have their own tricks to escape from their sainthood.You cannot be a full-time sinner. It is difficult, impossible. You will fall down, you will die. You will have to move. So it happens that sometimes sinners will do such saintly acts that you cannot even conceive saints doing them. Sometimes sinners are so saintlike that it seems unbelievable. But they balance.Religion is not concerned with good and bad, with choice. Religion is a choiceless transcendence. Realizing this polarity of existence, the sage, the one who knows this polarity, just leaves choosing. Then he never moves to the right, never to the left. He remains in between. Buddha has called this majjhim nikaya, the middle path. Buddha says, “I will not choose. I will remain in the middle, just exactly in the middle.”When you don’t choose, you transcend.It is possible – it may be, it may not be, but it is possible – a world is possible in which we have transcended this constant wavering between right and left, between sinner and saint, between good and evil, and the whole world is balanced. That will be a religious world. It will not be moral, it will not be immoral. It will be religious.So this constant confusion between religion and morality must be discarded. Religion is not morality. Morality is a choice against something and for something.I will tell you a story:Once Mulla Nasruddin was a listener to a very learned scholar. He was listening to him. The scholar was a religious man, a great religious teacher also. So in the end, when the discourse was just over, the religious scholar asked everyone present, “Raise your hands those who want to go to heaven?” So everyone raised his hand except Mulla Nasruddin, and he was sitting just in the front row.This was happening for the first time. This teacher has asked the same question in many villages, many cities and towns, and never has he seen anyone just sitting there without raising his hand for heaven. So for the first time he had to ask the other question. He had never asked this, but he asked, “Those who want to go to hell, now they should raise their hands.”No one raised a hand, not even Mulla Nasruddin. Then the scholar asked, “Are you hearing me? Are you deaf? Where do you want to go? I asked for heaven – you remained silent. I asked for hell – you remained silent. Where do you want to go?”Mulla Nasruddin said, “Just in between. I don’t want to go anywhere. Not to heaven, because I have seen those who go to heaven fall down into hell. I don’t choose hell either, because from hell where can you go? You can only go to heaven. So please allow me, if it is possible, to be just in between. Only then can I be at peace, otherwise it is impossible. In heaven, hell becomes an attraction. In hell one is hankering after heaven. So if it is possible, allow me to be in between.”This is the attitude of no choice. Religion is no choice, choicelessness. But we go on thinking in terms of morality and confusing it with religion. Morality is a day-to-day necessity, and through morality you have not been able to create a moral world. Really, the more man becomes conscious of morality, the more immorality is found. Everyone talks about the fact that the world has become immoral. The real case is this, that you have become too morality conscious. The world has not gone immoral, man has become too conscious of morality. That’s why the world looks so immoral. It is a balance.Now we are condemning war everywhere. Now war looks like total immorality. But are you aware that never in history, never before, have we condemned wars? We have fought them, we have never condemned them. For the first time we are condemning war and we are creating atom bombs. We never condemned war because we never created atom bombs. They create a balance. The more fatal, suicidal war becomes, the more we will be against wars. The more we are against, the more fatal war will become.So whatsoever you deny you also create. The world was never so poor – when I say this I mean that the world was never so conscious of poverty. It has always been poor, more poor than it is now. The world has always been poorer. The further back we move, the poorer a world we find. But poverty was taken for granted; it was not immoral. Now to be rich is immoral. One feels guilty, and the poor man by your side is your sin. For the first time we have become so moralistic that to be rich is guilt-creating, and to have poverty around is a sin committed by you.This is one thing: too much consciousness, too much awareness, too much morality.And then, simultaneously, the poorer have become more poor. Economically they are not, but now they feel poverty heavy on them. So whatsoever we do it goes in two directions simultaneously, it develops, and a balance is always achieved.Religion is not for a richer world, because a richer world can exist only with a deep poverty, great poverty, in every dimension. You can change circumstances, you can change names, and then again the same thing will become apparent with a new face.Religion is for a balanced world, neither rich nor poor. Try to understand this: neither rich nor poor, a balanced world – where no one is conscious of poverty, no one is conscious of richness. That’s why a religious world is a very difficult affair. It seems to be the impossible revolution.These polar opposites are there and they will always be there. All that you can do is to go beyond them.Look at it, for example, from some other direction. Man has been fighting with death continuously. The whole history of science is nothing but a fight against death. The history of medicine, the history of the human mind, is a fight against death. Now we have prolonged life. Man is living the longest now, but no human society was so much afraid of death as we are afraid of death. Now, in the West, they have achieved the longest life on earth.We hear, and we go on saying, that in the old, golden days man lived to be a hundred. That is not fact, a simple fiction, but it has a reality behind it. Everyone felt that he had lived a hundred years, because no one ever counted. Counting is a new thing, birthday is a new thing. But remember, when you remember a birthday, then the deathday will be continuously before you.No animal is afraid of death because no animal is aware of birth. Primitive societies are not afraid of death, but they are not aware of birth either. Death happens as birth happens, and there is no counting how long you have lived. The more precise your counting becomes, the more afraid you become of death.Now America is in the grip of death; everyone is, but America is more in the grip of death because time consciousness has come to a peak. Everyone is aware. The longer life becomes possible, the more black death becomes. Why? It is a deep balance. If you go on prolonging life, you are prolonging your death also. If you live long, your death will also be a long, spread out affair. Both grow continuously and simultaneously. You cannot escape – you cannot choose.Really, we have found every possibility for fighting diseases. But man is ill, more ill than ever. With all the scientific growth in medicine, man is ill more than ever. Why? Why does your progress in medicine also create somewhere a progress in illnesses, in diseases?Carl Gustav Jung proposed a very fantastic idea. He called it synchronicity. He said whatsoever is being done, there is also a parallel world growing. And you cannot do anything. If knowledge grows, ignorance will deepen. If health grows, illnesses will explode. If you become good, somewhere someone may become bad. And nothing is wrong about it: it is simply a balance. The world cannot exist with good people only. It will be such a boring world. Can you conceive a world of only mahatmas? The whole world will commit suicide, because even to exist for a single day will be such a tedious affair. All around mahatmas! – you will simply die of them.No, life is a constant polarity. The richness comes from the polar opposites. They exist together.Religion is not a choosing between these two. Religion is just understanding this polarity, and then remaining in a nonchoosing attitude. A religious man lives without choosing. If he is healthy, he is healthy. If he is ill, he is ill. When he is ill, he is at ease with his illness. He is not longing for health. When he is healthy, he is at ease with his health. He is not conscious of it. He moves easily between these polar opposites without any choice. And, by and by, these movements are slowed down. They become shorter and shorter and shorter, and a moment comes when there is no wavering.This nonwavering comes through nonchoosing. If you choose, you will waver. If you choose, you will create the opposite. This looks very paradoxical, but I would like to say: don’t try to be good, otherwise you will be bad. Don’t try to be something, otherwise you will become quite the contrary. Just remain in a nonchoosing attitude. Whatsoever happens, let it happen, allow it to happen.This is very difficult. If anger happens, allow it to happen –don’t choose. If love happens, allow it to happen – don’t choose. And soon a day will come when neither love will happen nor anger will happen. If you choose, then you are in the grip, then you are in the wheel, and then the grip is automatic. Then you go on changing from one to the other, and this is a constant, repetitive process. The whole life becomes just wavering from one point to another. Don’t be an acrobat on the rope – just come down.Look at it in this way: you are walking on the ground. You can walk even on a very narrow strip. We can make a chalk strip, a white strip on the ground. You can walk on it without any movement to right and left. Why? Now the same strip is stretched between two houses’ roofs. Now walk on it! You cannot walk. Why? The same strip on the ground you can walk very easily balanced, but the same strip, the same size, hanging between two roofs – now you cannot walk a single step. You begin to waver. Why?Now you have become aware you may fall down. Now you have chosen not to fall down. Now you have chosen something. Now you are not walking at ease. It is a choice not to fall down. You have chosen. Because of this choice, every step is toward falling down, so you will have to move right and left to balance.Life is just a rope, a very narrow rope. If you choose, you have chosen wavering. Neither good nor bad – that is the only good. Neither this nor that – this is the only religion. The Upanishads have said: Neti, neti – not this, not that. We don’t choose. It is an effortless understanding. It is simple understanding.Osho,In neo-sannyas, what are you doing – balancing the present irreligious state of the world or are you creating another opposite pole?No opposite pole is to be created because neo-sannyas is not a choice. It is not against the world. If sannyas is against the world, it is a choice; then, if your sannyas is against the world, you will create a very worldly society. We have done this in India. These five thousand years in India were a conscious choice for sannyas, renunciation. Renunciation was the goal. And look at the Indian mind: the most worldly in the whole world. Why? We have tried to create an absolutely unattached society, and look at the Indian mind – the greediest. We have been saying, “Wealth means nothing. It is simply mud! Nothing!” And look at our society: wealth is everything.Why did this happen? This was a conscious choice. We were against the world. Through that conscious choice, we moved to the other extreme. So now we go on talking against the world and we go on being worldly.The same in the reverse order will become possible in the West. They have chosen the world, and now their children are going against the world, against society, against the establishment, against whatsoever has been held as valuable. America stood for wealth, and now their children are hippies, they are against wealth. America was a clean society, cleanliness was held just next to godliness, and now hippies are just going against this – the most unclean.Why? When you choose, something will happen to balance. If you choose wealth, your children will be against wealth. If you choose some other world, your children will belong to this world, they will choose this world.Neo-sannyas is not a choice. It is a deep acceptance, not a choice. It is not against, neither is it for. It is a deep understanding, remaining in between. Not choosing – living; not choosing – flowing. If you can flow with a deep acceptance inside, sooner or later the day will come when you will transcend both. To me, sannyas means not renunciation but transcendence.

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

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 01-15Category: THE UPANISHADS

The Ultimate Alchemy Vol 2 15 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-ultimate-alchemy-vol-2-12/

Mounam stutih.Silence is the prayer.Silence is the prayer. By prayer we always mean a communication, something said to the divine. But the Upanishads say that whatsoever you may say will not be prayer. Prayer is not something to be done. You cannot do it. It is not an act. It is not your doing. So, really, you cannot do prayer, you can only be a prayer. It is not related with any of your doings. It is a certain state of your being.So the first thing to be understood is: man has two dimensions in existence. One is his being, the other is his doing. Prayer is not part of the second. You cannot do it. And a prayer that is done will be false, inauthentic. You can be – prayer belongs to the dimension of being.The body cannot do prayer, cannot be in a prayer. The mind cannot do prayer, cannot be in prayer. The body is meant to do something; it is the vehicle of action. The mind is also a vehicle of action. Thinking is doing, it is action. So you cannot do anything with your body which can become prayer, neither can you do anything with your mind which can be called prayer, because these are both parts of the dimension of doing, action. Beyond body and mind, prayer happens. So if your body is in total inactivity, passive, and your mind is nullified, empty, only then is prayer possible.This sutra says: Silence is the prayer. When mind is not working, when body is not active, there is silence.Second thing to be understood: silence is not part of mind. So whenever we say, “He has a silent mind,” it is nonsense. A mind can never be silent. The very being of mind is anti-silence. Mind is sound, not silence. So when we say, “He has a silent mind,” it is wrong. If he is really silent, then we must say that he has no mind.“Silent mind” is a contradiction in terms. If mind is there, it cannot be silent. And if it is silence, it is no more. That’s why Zen monks use the term “no-mind” never “silent mind.” No-mind is silence! And the moment there is no-mind you cannot feel your body, because mind is the passage through which body is felt. If there is no-mind, you cannot feel that you are a body. The body disappears from consciousness.So in prayer there is neither mind nor body, only pure existence. That pure existence is indicated by silence, moun. How to attain to this prayer, to this silence? How to be in this prayer, in this silence?Whatsoever we can do will be useless; that is the greatest problem. For a religious seeker this is the greatest problem, because whatsoever he can do will lead nowhere – because doing is not relevant. You can sit in a particular posture: that is your doing. You must have seen Buddha’s posture. You can sit in Buddha’s posture; that will be a doing. For Buddha himself this posture has happened. It is not a cause for his silence but, rather, a byproduct.When the mind is not, when the being is totally silent, the body follows like a shadow. The body takes a particular posture, the most relaxed possible, the most passive possible. But you cannot do it the other way round. You cannot take a posture first and then make silence follow. Because we see Buddha sitting in a particular posture, we think that if this posture is followed then the inner silence will follow. This is a wrong sequence. For Buddha the inner one has happened first, and then this posture has followed.Look at it through your own experience. When you get angry, the body takes a particular posture: your eyes become blood-red, your face takes a particular expression. Anger is inside and then the body follows. Not only outwardly: inwardly also the whole chemistry of the body changes. Your blood runs fast, you breathe in a different way, you are ready to fight or take flight. But anger happens first, then the body follows. Start from the other pole: make your eyes red, take fast breaths, do whatsoever you feel is done by the body when anger is there. You can act, but you cannot create anger inside.An actor is doing the same thing every moment. When he is acting a role of love, he is doing whatsoever is done by the body when love happens inside, but there is no love. And an actor may be doing better than you, but love will not follow. He may be more angry, apparently, than you are in real anger, but it is just false. Nothing is happening inside.Whenever you start from without, you will create a false state. The real always happens first in the center, and then the waves reach to the periphery. That’s why this sutra says prayer is silence. This is the innermost center in prayer. Start from here. But that’s very difficult. The difficulty arises for so many reasons.The first: we have never known silence, so the word is meaningless really. We have heard the word, we know what it means, but we don’t know really what the experience of silence is, so it connotes nothing. The word falls on our ears, we believe that we understand, nothing is understood. The very word is unknown to us as far as experience is concerned. Only the sound of the word is known.Mulla Nasruddin was practicing silence in a mosque with three other friends. It was a religious day and they had taken a vow to be silent for twenty-four hours. This was to be their prayer. Silence is prayer: they had heard it.Just five or ten minutes after they started, the first man said, “I wonder whether I have locked my house or not!”The second one said, “What are you doing? You have broken the silence and now you will have to start again!”The third one said, “You fool! You have also broken it.”Mulla Nasruddin was the fourth. He said, “Praise be to Allah! I am the only one who has not broken his silence yet.”They have heard the word silence. They have heard silence is prayer. Why did this happen? When someone else was breaking his silence everyone was aware, but when someone was himself breaking it he was not aware. Why? Because to them, to talk, to utter something, was breaking the silence. Really, you never hear whatsoever you say. When someone else says it, you hear it. You are so accustomed to your own sound and voice you don’t know what you are saying, that you are talking.Another difficulty is: we are constantly talking inside, so when you utter something outwardly there is no difference for you. Inwardly, you were already talking. Now you have uttered something outwardly. As far as you are concerned nothing has changed, nothing has happened. But when someone else utters something, for you something new has happened. He was silent before and now he has uttered something. You yourself are talking within, so when you utter something you will not be aware. Someone else may become aware that now you have broken silence.We are aware of others because inwardly we are constantly talking with ourselves. A monologue, a continuous monologue is there. Awake or asleep, we are continuously talking. This continuous talk has become such a habit that you have not known any interval when you were not talking inwardly. When you are talking with others, you feel relieved, relaxed, because when you are talking with others you are relieved of the duty of talking to yourself. And that is such a boring thing, to talk with oneself. You already know what you are going to say, and still you have to continue.No one else can be such a bore to you as you yourself are. You have told these things to yourself millions of times, and again and again you are telling them. We are not very inventive. We go on in circles saying the same thing again and again. Watch – watch for twenty-four hours and note down what you are saying to yourself. Then you will just feel a very weird feeling, strange, that this you have been saying continuously your whole life. Even in one day, you go on repeating yourself.This has become just a habit, deep-rooted. And when something becomes a habit, deep-rooted, you are not aware of it. It becomes automatic. The robot part of your body takes it and continues it. That’s why silence is very difficult, because silence really means breaking the monologue within. It is not a question of not talking to someone else. Moun, silence, is not really concerned with others; deep down it is concerned with your own monologue.Don’t talk with yourself. This is very difficult, so we will have to find out reasons why we talk with ourselves. Why in the first place – why do we go on talking with ourselves? If you observe, then you can find out the cause.The cause is that nothing is complete in our lives; everything is incomplete. You were eating, and then you were thinking about your office. So eating will not be satisfied, it will not be fulfilled, you will not feel content. It remains incomplete. Hastily you eat, you fill up your belly, and you run to your office. A process has remained incomplete.Then when you are in your office, you begin to think about your wife, about your children, and a thousand things. Then you are not in the office. The whole day you have been there, and still you were not there. The work in the office has remained incomplete. Now you have come to your house, and you are thinking about your office. You are with your wife, but you are not. You are absent.It is a rare phenomenon that a husband is present with his wife – rare! And it hurts very much because the wife can feel it. The husband also feels that the wife is not present. No one is present. Everything is incomplete. The mind has to continue the thing which you have left incomplete. And so many things are incomplete, so the mind goes on continuously in circles completing things you have left incomplete.Do you remember anything which you have completed? Do you have any moment in your life, any experience, of which you can say, “It is complete, total”? If you have any experience which is complete, the mind will never go back to it. There is no need. There is no need – it is absolutely useless. The mind simply tries to complete everything. The mind has a tendency to complete. And this is necessary, otherwise life will be impossible.So this constant monologue within is really part of your wrong living, incomplete living. Nothing is finished and you go on starting new things, you go on making new beginnings. Then the mind goes on being piled up with incomplete things. They will never be completed, but they will create a burden on the mind, a constant burden, a growing burden, an increasing burden. And that creates the monologue.That’s why the older you grow, the more the monologue grows with you. And old men begin to talk aloud. Really, the burden is so much that the control is lost. So look at old men: they will be sitting, and their lips will be working, and they are talking, and they will be making gestures. What are they doing? You think they have gone crazy, that they are old and now they have become stupid. No, that is not the case. They have had a long, incomplete life, and now death is coming nearer and the mind is in a haste, trying to complete everything. And it seems impossible.So if you really want to break this monologue, which means silence, then try to complete everything that you are doing. And don’t start new things – you will go crazy. Finish whatsoever you are doing, very small things.You are taking a bath: make it complete. How to make it complete? Be there. Your presence will do it. Be there, enjoy it, live it, feel it. Be sensitive to the water falling on you, be saturated. Come out of your bath doing it completely, totally. Otherwise the bath will follow you, it will become a shadow, it will go with you.You are eating, then eat. Then forget everything else. Then nothing exists in the world except your present act. Whatsoever you are doing, do it so completely, so unhurriedly, so patiently, that the mind is saturated, becomes content. Only then leave it.Three months of continuous awareness about doing acts completely will give you some intervals in your monologue. Then, for the first time, you will become aware that this monologue was a byproduct of incomplete living.Buddha has said “right living.” He has shown an eightfold path; of those eight principles, one is “right living.” Right living means total living, wrong living means incomplete living. If you are angry, then be really angry. Be authentically angry. Make it complete! Suffer it! There is no harm in suffering, because suffering brings much wisdom. There is no harm in suffering, because only through suffering does one transcend it. Suffer it, but be authentically angry.What are you doing? You are angry and you are smiling. Now the anger will follow you. You can deceive the whole world, but you cannot deceive yourself, you cannot deceive your mind. The mind knows very well that the smile was false. Now anger will continue inside. That will become a monologue. Then whatsoever you have not said you will have to say within. Whatsoever you have not done you will imagine doing. Now you will create a dream. You will fight with your enemy, or with the object of your anger. The mind is helping you to complete a certain thing. But that, too, is impossible because you are doing other things.Even this can be helpful. Close your room – you were not angry; the situation was such that you could not be – close your room and now be angry. Don’t continue the monologue, act it out. There is no necessity to act it out on someone; a pillow will do. Fight with it, act your anger out, express it, but let it be authentic, let it be real. And then you will feel a sudden relaxation inside. Then the monologue will break. There will be an interval, a gap. That gap is silence.So the first thing: break monologues. And you can do it only if your living becomes a right, complete living. Many things incomplete create the inner madness. And our situation is a whole life – not only one whole life, but many whole lives – incomplete.When you love, you are doing a thousand things simultaneously. Then love becomes false. Now psychologists say that if you are loving someone and a thought crosses your mind, you have missed love. You are far away from your love object. There is a gap, the communion is broken.When two lovers are really in love, there is nothing else, simply love – nothing else. They are playing with each other’s bodies, absolutely absorbed in it. The whole world has dropped out of their consciousness; nothing else is there. Then love is complete. And then they will not become sex maniacs. Then their minds will not be perverted minds.Psychologists say the Don Juans like Byron and others, who go on changing their love objects every day…. It is reported that Byron loved sixty women in his life, and his life was very short. And these are the known cases; no one knows how many really. He was expelled from society because everyone became afraid. And he was such a beautiful person, but why this madness?One may think that he was a great lover. That is not the case. He was not a lover at all; psychologists say he was not a lover at all. He was a maniac, just a perverted mind. He couldn’t complete any love. And before any love could be consummated, completed, he had started another.It is reported that he was forced to marry a girl. Of course, he was forced because he was not ready. How could he marry? – because the next day he would be running after another woman. When he was forced and he was coming out of the church – the bells were ringing and the guests were still there – he was coming down the steps with his wife’s hand in his hand, suddenly he stopped, left the hand. A woman was crossing the street. His eyes followed the woman and he said – he was an honest man in a way – he said to his wife, “Now you don’t mean anything to me. That woman has become everything to me.”He suffered, because love is a growth. Love is a long growth. It grows. And the more it grows, the deeper it goes. Butterfly minds cannot grow in love. That is impossible because the love never grows roots. Before the love can grow roots, they have moved. This type of mind will suffer, because he cannot love and he cannot get love. Nothing is ever completed, nothing becomes ripe ever. Then the whole life will just be wounds, incomplete wounds. And this happens in everything.You have never loved, you have never been angry, you have never acted spontaneously. You have not really eaten, you have not slept totally. You have not done anything with your total being in it, total involvement. You have always been doing something else also.Bokuju was asked, “What is your sadhana? What are you doing here in this lonely forest? What are you doing?”Bokuju said, “I have no sadhana, I have no method. When I feel hungry, I go to beg. When I don’t feel hungry, I fast. When I feel that the hut has become cold, I move out into the sun. When the sun is too much to bear, I move in the shadows of the trees. But wherever I am, I am total. When I feel sleepy, I drop down into sleep. This is all I am doing here.”The man said, “But this is nothing. Everyone is doing the same!”Bokuju said, “If everyone is doing the same, the world will be quite a different place – silent, peaceful, loving. Then there will be no need to ask for liberation. This very world will be moksha.”No one is doing that! Bokuju’s answer seems simple – it is not. It is very arduous, very difficult, just to sleep and not dream, because dreaming means an incomplete day is now being completed in the dream. Whatsoever you have left incomplete in the day will be completed in the dream.So if you have been a good man, if you have tried to be a good man and the goodness was not natural to you, not something spontaneous but something forced, then in the dream you will move to the other extreme. If you have been honest with effort, then in the dream you will deceive someone. Then everything is complete.Now psychologists say that if dreaming stops you will go mad, because dreaming is releasing much nonsense that you have left incomplete. And unless it is completed, it cannot evaporate – it cannot evaporate from your being. They say dreaming is the daily catharsis. So if you have not slept well, you feel uneasy. It is not because you have not slept, it is because you couldn’t dream.Now they say sleep is not so essential. A man can live without sleep for many days, even for months and years. They say it is not so necessary. Dreaming is necessary, and you cannot dream without sleep. That’s the problem. That’s why sleep is needed. So sleep is needed only for dreaming.But why is dreaming needed? You wanted to kill someone and you have not killed him – you will kill him in your dreams. That will relax your mind. In the morning you will be fresh; you have killed. I am not saying to go and kill so you don’t need any dream. But remember this: if you want to kill someone, close your room, meditate on the killing, and consciously kill him. When I say, “Kill him,” I mean kill a pillow; make an effigy and kill it. That conscious effort, that conscious meditation, will give you much insight into yourself.Remember one thing: make every moment complete. Live every moment as if there is no other moment to come. Then only can you complete it. Know that death can occur any moment. This may be the last. Say, “If I have to do something, I must do it here and now completely.”I have heard a story about a Greek general. The king was somehow against him. There was a court conspiracy, and it was the general’s birthday. He was celebrating it with his friends. Suddenly, in the afternoon, the king’s messenger came and he said to the general, “Excuse me, it is hard to tell you, but the king has decided that this evening, by six o’clock, you are to be hanged. So be ready by six o’clock.”Friends were there, music was there. They were drinking, eating and dancing. It was his birthday. This message changed the whole atmosphere. They became sad, but the general said, “Now don’t be sad, because this is going to be the last part of my life. So let us complete the dance we were dancing and let us complete the feast we were having. There is no more possibility now, so we cannot make it complete in the future.“And don’t send me off in this sad atmosphere, otherwise my mind will long again and again. This stopped song and this stopped festivity will become a burden on my mind. So let us complete it. Now there is no time to stop it.”Because of him they danced, but it was difficult. Only he danced more vigorously, only he became more festive. But the whole group was just not there. His wife was weeping, but he continued to dance, he continued to talk with his friends. He was so happy that the messenger went back to the king and he said, “That man is rare. He has heard the message, but he is not sad. He has taken it in a very different way – absolutely inconceivable! He is laughing and dancing and he is festive. And he says, ‘Because these moments are the last and there is no future now, we cannot waste them, we must live them!’”The king himself came to see what was happening there. Everyone was sad, weeping. Only the general was dancing, drinking, singing. The king asked, “What are you doing?”The general said, “This has been my life’s principle – to be aware continuously that death is possible any moment. Because of this principle, I have lived every moment as much as was possible. But, of course, you have made it so clear today. I am grateful because I was thinking death is possible any moment, but it was just a thinking. Somewhere, lurking behind, the thought was that, ‘It is not going to be just the next moment. There is a future,’ but you dropped the future completely from me. This evening is the last. Life now is so short, I cannot postpone it.”The king was so happy he became a disciple to this man. He said, “Teach me. This is the alchemy. This is how life should be lived, this is the art. So I am not going to hang you, but be my teacher. Teach me how to live in the moment.”We are postponing. That postponing becomes an inner monologue. Don’t postpone. Live right here and now. And the more you live in the present, the less you will need this constant minding, this constant thinking – less you will need. This is because of postponing, and we go on postponing everything. We always live in the tomorrow which never comes, and which cannot come. It is impossible. That which comes is always today.We go on sacrificing today for tomorrow which is nowhere. Then the mind goes on thinking of the past, which you have destroyed, which you have sacrificed, for something which has not come. And then it goes on postponing for further tomorrows. That which you have missed, you go on thinking you will catch somewhere in the future. You are not going to catch it.This constant tension between past and future, this constant missing of the present, is the inner noise. Unless it stops, you cannot fall into that silence which is prayer. So the first thing: try to be total in every moment.The second thing: your mind is so noisy because you always go on thinking that others are creating it, that you are not responsible. So you go on thinking that in a better world – with a better wife, with a better husband, with better children, with a better house, in a better locality – everything will be good and you will be silent. You are not silent because everything around is wrong, so how can you be?If you think in this way, if this is your logic, then that better world is never to come. Everywhere this is the world, everywhere these are the neighbors, and everywhere these are the wives and these are the husbands and these are the children. You can create an illusion that somewhere heaven exists, but everywhere is hell. With this type of mind, everywhere is hell. This mind is hell.One day Mulla Nasruddin and his wife came to their home, to their house, late in the night. The house had been burgled, so the wife began to scream and cry. And the wife said to Mulla, “You are at fault! Why didn’t you check the locks before we left?”By then the whole neighborhood had come around. It was such a sensation. “Mulla’s house has been burgled!” And everyone joined in the chant.One neighbor said, “I was always expecting it. Why didn’t you expect it before? You are so careless.”The second said, “Your windows were open. Why didn’t you close them before you left the house?”The third one said, “Your locks appear to be faulty. Why didn’t you replace them?” And everyone was piling faults on Mulla Nasruddin.Then he said, “One minute, please! Am I alone at fault?”So the whole neighborhood said in a chorus, “Then who do you think is at fault if you are not?”The Mulla said, “And what about the thieves? What about the thieves?”The mind goes on throwing the blame on someone else. The wife is throwing it on Mulla Nasruddin, the whole neighborhood is throwing it on Mulla Nasruddin, and the poor man cannot throw it on anyone present – they are all stronger now, particularly in this situation – so he says, “What about the thieves?”We go on throwing the blame on others. This gives you an illusory feeling that you are not wrong. Someone else somewhere is wrong, X, Y, Z. And this attitude is one of the basic attitudes of our so-called mind. In everything someone else is wrong. And whenever we can find a scapegoat, we are at ease. We are at ease – then the burden is thrown.For a religious seeker this mind is of no help. This is the hindrance. This mind is the hindrance. One must realize that whatsoever the situation is, whatsoever the case is with you, you are responsible, no one else. If you are responsible, then something is possible. If someone else is responsible, then nothing is possible.This is a basic conflict between the religious mind and the nonreligious mind. The nonreligious mind always thinks something else is responsible. Change the society, change the circumstances, change economic conditions, change the political situation, change something, and everything will be okay. We have changed everything so many times, and nothing is okay.The religious mind says that whatsoever the situation, if this is your mind, you will be in hell, you will be in misery. You cannot attain to silence.Put the responsibility on yourself. Be responsible because then something can be done, because only you can do something with yourself. You cannot change anyone else in this world; you can only change yourself. That is the only revolution possible. The only transformation possible is one’s own. But that becomes conceivable only when we feel that we are responsible.Why are you so noisy within? Why so much anxiety within? You are responsible. This is the first step. Then we can go and change the causes. But the cause must be within, only then can it be changed.In a similar situation someone else may not be uneasy at all. A buddha in the same situation will pass differently, unscratched. Why? Why are you just destroyed by a certain situation? You were ready. You were just waiting for the situation. Someone is angry at you – you also get angry. You say, “It is because he did something. He created the stimulus; I only reacted. I was not angry: he made me angry.”But the religious analysis is different. Religion says anger is always yours. Anger was there to be stimulated. He stimulated it, of course, but something was within you – the energy, the tendency, the habit to be angry was there. That’s why he could stimulate it. If there had been no energy, no stored up anger, no repressed anger, no habit, then whatsoever he was doing would not have touched you at all. It touched you because you were ready to be touched. You were ready to explode. He simply created the situation and helped you. He was your helper! If there had been no one to create the situation, you would have created it yourself. You needed it – you needed it very badly.Remember this when you get angry again: analyze the whole thing, meditate on it, and then you will know that you were already getting ready. You were prepared and you were waiting, and this man simply gave you a chance.There was a case against Mulla Nasruddin in the court. Suddenly, without any reason, he had beaten his wife and run out of the house. So the magistrate asked, “What was the reason? Why suddenly? There was no fight, there was nothing. Why suddenly did you do this?”The Mulla said, “I was standing by the door, and the door was open, and the street was vacant, and there was no traffic. The stick was just handy, and the wife was looking towards the house, and I thought I should not miss the opportunity.”You will create opportunities. If they are not given to you, still you will not miss them. You will create them.If one becomes aware of this phenomenon, then something can be done. Then it is within your control to do something. If you go on projecting causes outside – the source is within, but you go on projecting it outside – then you cannot do anything. Then you are helpless. Then what can you do if someone stimulates you, creates anger in you? What can you do? You are just a helpless victim.Second thing: remember, you are responsible for whatsoever you are. Even if someone gives you a chance, he gives you a chance to express yourself. It is always you who are ultimately, finally, responsible.Why this emphasis on one’s own responsibility? Because if I am responsible, I will stop reacting. You do something, I react. Reaction is really slavery. You are manipulating me. You can make me happy, you can make me miserable. You are my master, I am a slave. If you smile at me, I am happy. Just a glance, an angry glance at me, and I am miserable. You are my master.If I think that you are responsible, then you remain my master and I will remain a slave. If I am responsible, then you may go on smiling or you may do whatsoever you like, but I will not react according to you. I will act according to me.Mulla was sitting at a prayer-meeting in a mosque. His shirt was rather short and the man behind him thought it looked unseemly, so he pulled it down. Suddenly, immediately, Mulla pulled the shirt of the man in front of him. The man asked, “What are you doing?”He said, “Don’t ask me. This man behind me started the whole thing. I am not responsible. I have simply reacted. If this is the way in this mosque prayer is done, I have to follow.”You go on doing things because someone is doing them to you. You go on passing them on. You may not be aware of it. Are you aware when you are telling something to your children that you are simply repeating whatsoever was told to you by your father? This is Mulla Nasruddin! Are you aware? The way you are behaving with your wife is the way you saw your father behaving with your mother. You are just passing things on. You are no one – just a passage. What are you doing?When you are with your servant, have you observed the way you behave? Is this not the way your boss behaves with you in your office? What are you doing? You are just a part of a long chain. Then you cannot be silent. How can you be silent? You are being pulled and manipulated from everywhere, and you are just vulnerable to everything, every nonsense. If someone is angry you say, “I should be angry. Why was he angry with me? Why?” He was angry – it is his business. How are you related? But now you feel it a duty and you will do the same, religiously, as whatsoever is being done to you.Remember, you are not a slave. And no one has imposed this slavery on you. It is self-imposition. Throw it! Be a master! Only then can you be silent. Only a master can be silent. And when I say “a master,” I mean a person who acts from within, who is not reacting. We are always reacting; there is no action in our lives. The moment you can act, you will feel a deep silence within – because now you have become a master. No one can disturb you. Now you are not helpless.Buddha is passing by. Someone abuses him. He listens to it, then he turns to Ananda and he says, “Ananda, this was an old debt – now it is paid. In some life I must have abused him. Now there is no more chain. Thank you, friend,” Buddha says to that man. “Now the account is closed. I am not going to react.”Buddha says, “Reaction is rebirth. If you react, you will have to be born again and again, because you are in a chain. Accounts are not closed, everything is open.”The day Buddha died, he gathered all his monks. Ten thousand monks were there, and he said, “Now this body is to drop, so do you want to ask anything? Because now no more can I be. No more will I be in this world!”So someone asks, “But why? Why are you leaving us?”Buddha says, “Now everything is paid. The whole account is closed. I was waiting only for this account to be closed completely. Now nothing is left. I am a master. I have transcended the chain. Now I am no more amidst you.”This is the third point: become a master. Whatsoever you are doing, do it as an act, never as a reaction. Resist the temptation to react. That is the only evil, the only sin – to react. Laugh if you are feeling to laugh, but don’t laugh as a reaction. Weep if you are feeling to weep, but don’t weep as a reaction. Stop reactions! Act!If these three things are there, you will drop into silence which is prayer. This sutra says: Silence is the prayer. Mounam stutih.When you are silent, with no monologue within, no anxiety within, no reactions within, nothing incomplete, suspended, everything complete and finished, you become a space, just a space – infinite. Because all these boundaries are your reactions, all these boundaries are your anxieties, all these boundaries of your being are just your madnesses. When you are silent, you are infinite space.But why does this sutra call it prayer? Why bring prayer in? Better to call it meditation – why call it prayer? When you are silent, it is meditation. Why bring prayer in? It is not brought unnecessarily, because when you become an infinite space the divine descends in you. You have called, you have invoked. When you are totally silent, you have become a host. Now the divine guest can come. And only in this emptiness, in this silence, in this nothingness, can the divine guest come. This is the only invitation, invocation. This is the only prayer.Prayer means asking for the divine to come, asking for the divine to be a guest to you. Words won’t do, invitations won’t do. Whatsoever you do – cry, weep – it won’t do. First become a host. Silence is becoming a host. Now you are ready. Now no need to pray, now no need to request, no invitation is needed…the divine descends. When you are silent the divine is there.It will be better to say it in other terms: the divine is always there, but you cannot feel it because you are not silent. The guest is there, but the host is asleep. The guest is there, but the host is unaware. The guest has already come before the host, but the host is wandering somewhere else. That wandering is our mind.Have you observed that mind is a wandering? Mind means wandering. You are not here: that is what mind means. You are somewhere else. If you are here, then there is no mind, then there is no wandering. Mind cannot be in the present. It can be in the past, in the future. Mind can never be here-now. It can be there-then. It is a wandering. When you are a mind you are wandering somewhere else. The guest is present always.Buddha was asked when he became enlightened, “What have you gained?”He said, “Nothing, because whatsoever I now feel as a gain was already there. I was only unaware. So it would be better,” he said, “that I should say I have not gained anything. Rather, I have lost much. I have lost myself who was there too much, really – who was there too much. I have lost myself and I have gained that which was always, eternally present.”But then one has to come back to his home. This homecoming is silence, this returning to your home is silence. And the rishi says it is prayer, because when you are silent the invitation has reached. You have invoked, you have prayed. And in prayer many things are implied. If you pray, and if it is really a prayer, then there is no gap between your prayer and the answer to the prayer. If there is a gap, it means the prayer was false.If you are silent, the divine is there. There is no gap. If you are silent and you find that the divine is not there, remember, you are not silent. Even this thought that “the divine should come to me” creates disturbance.Buddha has said that even the longing for the divine is a disturbance. Then you are not totally silent. If you are asking, you have moved, you have wandered, you have gone away. If you are asking for freedom, for eternal life, for immortality, for heaven, anything – if you are longing, you have wandered.Total silence means total acceptance of whatsoever is, of that which is.So the last thing to be understood: silence basically means total acceptance. Nonacceptance creates noise in the mind, in the being. Whenever you say no to anything, your mind begins to move and work. Whenever you say yes, your mind stops. No is the starter, yes is the stopper. In Sanskrit the word astik, theist, means one who has said a total and final yes to existence. Now he will never say no. Now this yes is ultimate, no going back!Acceptance means you accept whatsoever is the case. If there is anger, you accept it. If there is suffering, you accept it. If there is lust, greed, you accept it. If there is anxiety, worry, you accept it. You accept everything. And then how is it possible to be disturbed? When one accepts everything, disturbance is impossible. So in the last analysis, silence means total acceptance.Buddha has given it a name. He calls it tathata, suchness. He says that whatsoever is, is. Whatsoever is, is. Accept it, and then you are silent. Say no, deny, reject, try to change, you have created disturbance. This silence is prayer. And this silence you cannot create, you cannot force.In life, all that is valuable, all that is of any value at all, is always a consequence of many, many things. You cannot approach it directly. For example, happiness: you cannot approach it directly. And those who try to achieve happiness directly will become most unhappy, and only because of their effort. Whenever you are doing something, totally absorbed in it, happiness happens.A painter painting: he has forgotten himself completely in the act. He is totally there. He is no more, really. Really, a great painter never paints. Painting happens like we say it rains – it paints!Van Gogh was asked once, “Which of your paintings is the best?” And van Gogh said, “But I have never painted anything. I cannot say. And if you insist, then I can say only this one which is being painted just now. But I am not the painter – the painting is happening. The painter is not there. The mind has stopped.”Then Van Gogh can have a happiness not of this world. A singer, a dancer, can have a happiness which doesn’t belong to this world. But that is really a consequence of something else.Silence is also a consequence of many things: of right living, of right action, of right acceptance, of being a right host. Then suddenly, silence happens. It is there – it has been always there.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-01/

We tried reasoningour way to him:it didn’t work;but the moment we gave up,no obstacle remained.He introduced himself to usout of kindness: how elsecould we have known him?Reason took us as far as the door;but it was his presence that let us in.But how will you ever know him,as long as you are unableto know yourself?Once one is one,no more, no less:error begins with duality;unity knows no error.The road your self must journey onlies in polishing the mirror of your heart.It is not by rebellion and discordthat the heart’s mirror is polished freeof the rust of hypocrisy and unbelief:your mirror is polished by your certitude – by the unalloyed purity of your faith.Break freefrom your chains you have forged about yourself;for you will be free when you are free of clay.The body is dark – the heart is shining bright;the body is mere compost – the heart a blooming garden.Hakim Sanai – this name is as sweet to me as honey, as sweet as nectar. Hakim Sanai is unique, unique in the world of Sufism. No other Sufi has been able to reach to such heights of expression and such depths of penetration. Hakim Sanai has been able to do almost the impossible.If I were to save only two books from the whole world of the mystics, then these would be the two books. One would be from the world of Zen, the path of awareness, Sosan’s Hsin Hsin Ming. I have spoken on it; it contains the quintessence of Zen, of the path of awareness and meditation. The other book would be Hakim Sanai’s Hadiqatu’l Haqiqat, The Walled Garden of Truth, in short, the Hadiqa, The Garden. This is the book we are entering today.The Hadiqa is the essential fragrance of the path of love. Just as Sosan has been able to catch the very soul of Zen, Hakim Sanai has been able to catch the very soul of Sufism. Such books are not written, they are born. Nobody can compose them. They are not manufactured in the mind, by the mind; they come from the beyond. They are a gift. They are born as mysteriously as a child is born, or a bird or a roseflower. They come to us, they are gifts.So first we will enter the mysterious birth of this great book, the Hadiqa, The Garden. The story is tremendously beautiful.The Sultan of Ghazna, Bahramshah, was moving with his great army toward India on a journey of conquest. Hakim Sanai, his famous court poet, was also with him, accompanying him on the journey of this conquest. They came to the side of a great garden, a walled garden. That is the meaning of firdaus, the walled garden. And from firdaus comes the English word paradise.They were in a hurry. With a great army the sultan was moving to conquer India. He had no time. But something mysterious happened and he had to stop; there was no way to avoid it.The sound of singing coming from the garden caught the sultan’s attention. He was a lover of music, but he had never heard anything like this. He had great musicians in his court and great singers and dancers, but nothing to be compared with this. The sound of singing and the music and the dance… He had only heard it from the outside, but he had to order the army to stop. It was so ecstatic. The very sound of the dance and the music and the singing was psychedelic, as if wine was pouring in; the sultan became drunk.The phenomenon appeared not to be of this world. Something of the beyond was certainly in it: something of the sky trying to reach the earth, something from the unknown trying to commune with the known. He had to stop to listen to it. There was ecstasy in it, so sweet and yet so painful – it was heart-rending. He wanted to move, he was in a hurry; he had to reach India soon, this was the right time to conquer the enemy. But there was no way. There was such a strong, strange, irresistible magnetism in the sound that in spite of himself he had to go into the garden.It was Lai-Khur, a great Sufi mystic, but known to the masses only as a drunkard and a madman. Lai-Khur is one of the greatest names in the whole history of the world. Not much is known about him; such people don’t leave many footprints behind them. Except this story, nothing has survived. But Lai-Khur has lived in the memories of the Sufis down the ages. He continued haunting the world of the Sufis because never again was such a man seen.He was so drunk that people weren’t wrong in calling him a drunkard. He was drunk twenty-four hours, drunk with the divine. He walked like a drunkard, he lived like a drunkard, utterly oblivious of the world. And his utterances were just mad – this is the highest peak of ecstasy, when the expressions of the mystic can only be understood by other mystics. For the ordinary masses they look irrelevant, they look like gibberish.You will be surprised to know that the English word gibberish is based on a Sufi mystic’s name, Jabbar. It is because of Jabbar’s utterances that the English word gibberish has arisen. But even Jabbar was nothing compared to Lai-Khur. To the ignorant, his utterances were outrageous, sacrilegious, against tradition and against all formalities, mannerisms and etiquette – against all that is known and understood as religion. But to those who knew, they were nothing but pure gold.He was available only to the chosen few because only very few people can rise to such a height where he lived. He lived on Everest, the Everest of consciousness, beyond the clouds. Only those who were fortunate enough and courageous enough to climb the mountain were able to understand what he was saying. To the common masses he was a madman. To the knowers he was just a vehicle of existence, and all that was coming through him was pure truth – truth and only truth.He had made himself deliberately notorious. That was his way of becoming invisible to the masses. Sufis do that; they have a very strange method of becoming invisible. They remain visible, they remain in the world, they don’t escape from it, but deliberately they create a certain milieu around themselves so that people stop coming to them. Crowds, curious people, stupid people, simply stop coming to them. The Sufis don’t exist for them, they forget all about them. This has been an ancient method of the Sufis so that they can work with their disciples.You can see it happening here – you are my Sufis. I am almost invisible to the people who live in Pune. I am here and not here. I am not here for them; I am here only for you. I am invisible even to the neighbors here. They see and yet they don’t see, they hear and yet they don’t hear.Lai-Khur had made himself deliberately notorious. Now, can you find a more notorious man than me? And it is so good: it keeps the foolish away. He was now visible only to the perceptive. A master, if he really wants to work, if he means business, has to become invisible to those who are not authentic seekers.That is what Gurdjieff used to do. Gurdjieff must have learned a few things from Lai-Khur. Gurdjieff lived with Sufi masters for many years before he became a master in his own right. And when I have finished this story you will see many similarities between Gurdjieff and Lai-Khur.Lai-Khur called for wine and proposed a toast, “To the blindness of the Sultan Bahramshah.”Now, first the great mystic called for wine. Religious people are not supposed to drink wine. It is one of the greatest sins for a Muslim to drink wine; it is against the Koran, it is against the religious idea of how a saint should be. Lai-Khur called for wine and proposed a toast, “To the blindness of the Sultan Bahramshah.”The sultan must have got mad. He was furious – calling him blind? But he was under the great ecstatic impact of Lai-Khur. So although he was boiling within, he didn’t say a thing. Still, those beautiful sounds and the music and the dance were haunting him, they were still there in his heart. He was transported to another world. But others objected, his generals and his courtiers objected.When objections were raised, Lai-Khur laughed madly and insisted that the sultan deserved blindness for embarking on such a foolish journey. “What can you conquer in the world? All will be left behind. The idea of conquering is stupid, utterly stupid. Where are you going? You are blind, because the treasure is within you,” he said, “and you are going to India. Wasting time, wasting other people’s time. What more is needed for a man to be called blind?”Lai-Khur insisted, “The sultan is blind. If he is not blind then he should go back to his home, forget all about this conquest. Don’t make houses of playing cards; don’t make castles in sand. Don’t go after dreams; don’t be mad. Go back! Look within!”The man who has eyes looks within; the blind man looks without. The man who has eyes searches for the treasure within. The man who is blind rushes all over the world, begging, robbing people, murdering, in the hope that he will find something that he is missing. It is never found that way because it is not outside that you have lost it. You have lost it in your own being; light has to be brought there.Lai-Khur insisted that the sultan is blind. “If he is not, then give me the proof. Order the army to go back. Forget all about this conquest, and never again go for any other conquest. This is all nonsense.” The sultan was impressed, but wasn’t capable of going back.It must have been the same situation as had happened before, when Alexander the Great was coming to conquer India. Another mystic, Diogenes, laughed and he asked, “Why? For what are you going on such a long journey? And what are you going to gain by conquering India or by conquering the whole world?”Alexander said, “I want to conquer the whole world so that finally I can rest and relax and enjoy.”Diogenes laughed and said, “You must be a fool, because I am resting now.” And he was resting, relaxing on the bank of a small river. It was early morning and he was taking a sunbath, naked on the sand. He said, “I am resting and relaxing now, and I have not conquered the world. I have not even thought of conquering the world. So if you are conquering the world and trying to become victorious just to rest and relax, it looks absolutely meaningless because I am resting without conquering anything. And the bank of this river is big enough, it can contain both of us. Rest here. Throw away your clothes and take a good sunbath and forget all about conquering.“And look at me, I am a conqueror without conquering the world and you are a beggar.”The same must have been the situation with the Sultan Bahramshah and Lai-Khur, again the same type of man. In this world there have been only two types of people: those who know and those who don’t know. It is the same drama played again and again, the same story enacted again and again. Sometimes it is Alexander the Great who is playing the blind person and it is Diogenes who tries to wake him up. Some other time it is Lai-Khur who is trying to wake Sultan Bahramshah.Alexander said, “I am sorry. I can understand your point, but I cannot go back. I have to conquer the world; without conquering it I cannot rest. Excuse me. You are right, I concede.”And the same happened with Bahramshah. He was sad, ashamed, shy. But he said, “Excuse me, I have to go, I cannot go back. India has to be conquered. I will not be able to rest or sit silently until I have conquered India.”Then a toast was called, “To the blindness of Hakim Sanai” – because he was the next most important person with Bahramshah. He was his adviser, his counselor, his poet. He was the wisest man in his court, and his fame had penetrated into other lands too. He was already an accomplished poet – a great, well-known wise man.Then a toast was called, “To the blindness of Hakim Sanai” – which must have given the great poet a considerable jolt. There were even stronger objections to this on the grounds of Sanai’s excellent reputation, his wisdom, his character. He was a man of character, a very virtuous man, very religious. Nobody could have found any flaw in his life. He had lived a very, very conscious life, at least in his own eyes. He was a man of conscience.More objections were raised because maybe the sultan was blind, he was greedy, he had great lust, he had great desires to possess, but that couldn’t be said about Hakim Sanai. He had lived the life of a poor man, even though he had been in the court. Even though he was the most respected man in Bahramshah’s court, he had lived like a poor man – simple, humble, and of great wisdom and character.But Lai-Khur countered that the toast was even more apt, since Sanai seemed unaware of the purpose for which he had been created. And when he was shortly brought before his maker and asked what he had to show for himself he would only be able to produce some stupid eulogies of foolish kings, mere mortals like himself.Lai-Khur said that it was even more apt because much more is to be expected from Hakim Sanai than from Sultan Bahramshah. “He has a greater potential and he is wasting it, wasting it in making eulogies for foolish kings. He will not be able to face his God; he will be in difficulty, he will not be able to answer. All that he will be able to produce will be this poetry, written in praise of foolish kings like this blind man, Bahramshah. He is more blind, utterly blind.”And listening to these words and looking into the eyes of that madman, Lai-Khur, something incredible happened to Hakim Sanai – a satori, a sudden enlightening experience. Something died in him immediately, instantly, and something was born, something utterly new. In a single moment, the transformation had happened. He was no longer the same man. This madman has really penetrated his soul. This madman has succeeded in awakening him.In Sufi history, this is the only case of satori. In Zen there are many cases; I have been talking to you about those cases. But in the world of Sufism this is the only case of satori, sudden enlightenment. Not methodological, not gradual – in a shock it happened.Lai-Khur must have been a man of tremendous insight. Hakim Sanai bowed down, touched the feet of this madman and wept tears of joy that he had arrived home. He died and was reborn. That’s what a satori is – dying and being reborn. It is a rebirth.He left the sultan and went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The sultan wasn’t willing; he wasn’t ready to allow him to go. He tried in every way to prevent him; he even offered his only sister in marriage and half the kingdom to Hakim Sanai. But now all was meaningless. Hakim Sanai simply laughed and he said, “I am no longer a blind person. Thank you, but I am finished. This madman has finished me in a single stroke, in a single blow.” And he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Why?Later on, when he was asked he said, “Just to absorb, just to digest what that madman had given me so suddenly. It was too much! It was overflowing, I was overwhelmed. It had to be digested. He had given me more than I was worthy of.”So he went to Mecca on a pilgrimage to meditate, to be silent, to be a pilgrim unknown to anybody, to be anonymous. The thing has happened, but it has to be absorbed. The light had happened, but one has to get accustomed to it.And when he became accustomed to the new gestalt, to the new vision, he came back to Lai-Khur and presented him this book, the Hadiqa. That’s what he wrote on the way back from Mecca.He poured his experience, his satori. These words are saturated with satori. This is how this great book was born – like a child is born, mysteriously; like a seed becomes a sprout, mysteriously; like a bird comes out of the egg, mysteriously. Like a bud opens early in the morning and becomes a flower, and the fragrance is spread to the winds.Yes. This book was not written, this book is a gift from existence. This book is a gift from existence, and is gratitude from Hakim Sanai to that strange madman, Lai-Khur.Now the sutras:We tried reasoningour way to him:it didn’t work;but the moment we gave up,no obstacle remained.Hakim Sanai was a man of character, a religious man. He had tried hard; he had tried all possible ways to reach God. And he was a very intelligent man, knowledgeable, was known as a wise man. He was a very capable, rational person.He had tried in every possible way to reach to God through reason. But nobody has ever reached God through reason. That is not the door to him; that is the wall that prevents. Reason is perfectly capable of knowing the superficial, but it cannot dive deep into the depths. It knows only how to swim on the surface. Reason is perfectly good as far as the outward journey is concerned, but it is utterly impotent as far as the journey inward is concerned.Reason is good and adequate if you want to know about matter, but it is utterly incapable if you want to know anything about consciousness. Reason can measure, but consciousness is immeasurable. Reason can weigh, but consciousness has no weight. Reason can see, but consciousness is invisible. Reason has the five senses as its servants, but consciousness is behind the five senses. You cannot touch it, you cannot smell it, you cannot taste it, you cannot hear it, you cannot see it – it is behind.These five windows of the senses open toward the outside. You can see the sunlight, but you cannot see your inner light with your eyes. You can hear the birds singing, but you cannot hear your own heart singing.Reason is capable of measuring; that’s how the word matter came into existence. Matter means that which can be measured; measurable is the meaning of the word matter. Reason measures, so whatsoever can be caught in the trap of reason is matter.But there are things which are immeasurable. How to measure love? How to measure consciousness? The immeasurable is there, but if you insist that you will use only reason to know, then you will remain ignorant of the immeasurable; then you will remain ignorant of God.Hakim Sanai says: We tried reasoning our way to him: it didn’t work… It cannot work, it is intrinsically inadequate. Logic cannot conclude about the unknowable. Logic moves in the world of the known; logic cannot take a quantum leap into the unknown.Have you not observed it? Your mind can think only about the known. How will you think about the unknown? If it is unknown, there is no way to think about it. Thinking is based on the known. That’s why thinking is repetitive, it moves in a circle. Yes, it can go on refining the known, it can go on refining it more and more; it can go on polishing the known, but it can never come to know the unknown.At the most, it can guess about the unknown. But guesswork is guesswork; it can never become a certainty. It will never give you faith, it can’t become trust, because deep down you know it is a guess – it may be so, it may not be so. It cannot become a rock on which the temple of life can be raised. No, it remains doubtful.Every guess is rooted in doubt – perhaps it is so, perhaps it is not so. And there are three layers of existence. One is the known: a very small, lighted part; a lighted spot, very small, that we have come to know. Then surrounding it is the infinite unknown, a great night of darkness. But about the unknown we can have a few guesses, we can infer, because the known and the unknown are not qualitatively different. That which is known today was unknown yesterday, and that which is unknown today may become known tomorrow. So the known and the unknown correlate; they are of the same family.Science lives in these two worlds: the known and the unknown. You base your reasoning, your guess, your inference, on the known, so that you can deduce something of the unknown, and you can reach into the darkness and light a little more of the territory.But there is something else, the third realm – the unknowable. Logic can function perfectly in the known; it functions only partially in the unknown as guessing; it cannot function in the unknowable at all. The unknowable is beyond logic, beyond reasoning, beyond knowledge, beyond mind. And that unknowable is God.Remember, God is not unknown. If God is unknown, then science one day will know him. God is unknowable. Yes, God can be experienced and lived but cannot be known, cannot be reduced to knowledge, cannot be reduced to a hypothesis, cannot be reduced to a formula like H2O.God remains a mystery. Even to those who have experienced it, God remains a mystery. In fact, the deeper you go in him, the deeper becomes the mystery. The more you penetrate into him, the more and more you disappear. God is not known one day; on the contrary, the knower disappears. Just like a dewdrop slipping into the ocean, the knower dissolves.In the world of science, the unknown is constantly transformed into the known. And it is hoped that one day the unknown will disappear completely and all will be known.In the world of religion, it is just a totally different story, diametrically opposite. The unknown does not disappear, but the knower disappears. And one day all becomes unknowable: unknowable is unknowable, unknown becomes unknowable, and the known also becomes unknowable. Then the mystery is total and absolute.We tried reasoning our way to him: it didn’t work; but the moment we gave up, no obstacle remained. God happens in a state of let-go, in surrender. You cannot seek and search God. All searching will remain rational, all seeking will be based in mind. Mind is the great seeker, and all search, inquiry, seeking, is based on curiosity, in curiosity.And deep down behind all your search is the ego: “I want to become a knower.” It hurts not to know, it hurts to remain ignorant. The ego wants to gratify itself. And the ego cannot know God because ego is the barrier. We are not separate from existence, and the ego has given us the illusion of being separate. The ego simply means the illusion of being separate from existence.Surrender is dropping the illusion of separation. Let-go means, “I am no more.” Let-go means, “I dissolve.” Let-go means, “I drop all searching, seeking, inquiring.” Let-go means, “I will be just passive and available.” And then it happens.That’s how it happened to Sanai. Looking into the eyes of that man, Lai-Khur, listening to his strange words, listening to his strange music, feeling his presence, it had happened. Sanai had worked his whole life and he hadn’t reach any closer. And then out of nowhere, in the presence of the master Lai-Khur, it just happened of its own accord.He must have been in shock when Lai-Khur said, “Hakim Sanai, you are blind!” Nobody had said that to Hakim Sanai. He was respected and thought to be wise. Even kings and emperors used to ask his advice. And this madman, a beggar, calls him blind! He must have been shocked. In that shock his mind stopped. It was almost like an electric shock.If you are available to the master’s energy, it is an electric shock. It can shatter your mind. It can create a chaos, a beautiful chaos, a chaos out of which stars are born. And such a chaos was created by the impact of Lai-Khur.Sanai disappeared. For a moment he wasn’t there. Only the master and his presence and those great waves coming from the master… He was drowned. It was a moment of let-go. And God came in the form of Lai-Khur. God came through the flute of Lai-Khur.…but the moment we gave up,no obstacle remained.He introduced himself to us…When you are in a let-go, God comes. It is never man who reaches God. This is one of the fundamentals of Sufism – it is always the God that reaches man.God is constantly trying to reach you but you don’t allow it. You are so closed, you never leave your windows open. You are very tightly closed, nothing can enter you; you are closed, airtight. God is trying in every way to reach you, like a mother tries to search for the child, but you are not available, you are not present. You are so afraid and so defensive.It happens almost every day. When I initiate you into sannyas I try to reach you. But very rarely does somebody turn up who is available, very rarely. Very rarely can I find a way to reach your heart. But whenever it happens, immediately you are no longer the same. It happens sometimes: a person is available and open, is not defending, and drops the armor that we all carry always.We are so afraid of people, we are so afraid of love, we are so afraid of others, that we keep a distance. It becomes a habit. When you come to a master, that habit is there.Just two nights ago, there was a young sannyasin going back home. I asked him, “When are you leaving?” And he wouldn’t answer. And I asked him, “When will you be coming back?” And he wouldn’t answer. Then I asked him to “Come close, so I can touch your head.” He wouldn’t even come close to me Utterly closed, he didn’t give me any opening.These are just ways to find an opening. It does not matter when you are leaving, today or tomorrow. I ask you only so that you can give me a little opening. I start communication so that I can change it into communion.But he wasn’t ready to say anything. Nothing is wrong if you don’t want to say anything; it is perfectly good. Silence can be immensely beautiful. But silence has to be open, only then is it beautiful; otherwise it is the ugliest thing. He was afraid to say a thing, he was afraid to utter a word, because if he said a word I would find an entry. At least to utter that word he would have to open himself a little bit.It wouldn’t have been so wrong if it had been an open silence; it would have been tremendously beautiful. But it wasn’t an open silence, otherwise he would have come close. I was calling him to come close, and he wouldn’t come. I wanted to touch him because if words cannot reach him, maybe my presence can reach. But he wouldn’t allow that either.God is trying to reach you. And when you are in the presence of a master, God is trying very hard to reach you.He introduced himself – says Sanai – out of kindness… Sanai wasn’t going to search for God. He was going on a journey of conquest with the king. It happened from nowhere, out of the blue. That singing, that dancing, Lai-Khur’s music – he was caught unawares. Just see – there were many people. The sultan was there but he missed; he wasn’t open. Hakim Sanai got it. He was open, he allowed it to happen, he didn’t resist.He introduced himself to usout of kindness…Remember it – God does not come to you because you are worthy. What worth can you have? Not because you have earned it, not because you deserve it, but only because he is kind. He is Rahim, he is Rahman, he is compassionate: these are the Sufi names of God. Rahim means compassionate, Rahman again means compassionate, merciful, kind. He comes to you out of his kindness. It is not out of your efforts that he comes; he comes out of your surrender.…how elsecould we have known him?Sanai says, “Now I can say that there was no way to know him. I had tried hard in every possible way; I had searched for him in every rational way.” If you cling to reason, you are bound to become an atheist sooner or later – or you will become a hypocrite. These are the people around you.Those who are trying to reach God through reason and the mind are bound to fall into these two categories: either they become hypocrites, the so-called religious… These people you will find in the churches, temples, mosques and gurdwaras, reading the Koran and the Gita and the Bible. These are the so-called religious, the hypocrites. They are dishonest; they have not found, but they are not even ready to accept that they have failed. They are not ready to accept the failure of their ego, hence they have started believing. They have not found, but they still believe. This belief is false; this makes a person pseudo.That’s why all so-called religious people are pseudo people, ugly – one thing on the surface, and something totally different deep down. Deep down, a thousand and one doubts, and on the surface just a painted belief. It does not come out of their being; it is not part of their life. It has not grown in them; it is not based in existential experience. It is out of fear they have believed, it is out of frustration they have believed. It is because they couldn’t carry the inquiry further. They were tired, they lost courage, they were disheartened. And they are not authentic either to say, “We tried and we have not found. So maybe he is not.”That is the other category, the atheist. The atheist is at least true; he is at least sincere and honest. The theist is not even honest. The theist is in a double bind: he believes in honesty, but he is based in dishonesty.Now all around the world, your churches, your priests go on teaching you to be honest and to believe in God. And have you ever thought that these two things together are not possible? Be honest and believe in God: this is a double bind, you are creating a contradiction. If the person has to be honest he cannot believe in God, because what will belief mean to an honest person? Either you know or you don’t know. If you know, there is no need to believe; you know it already. If you don’t know, how can you believe?If the person has to be honest, he cannot believe, he need not believe. And if the person has to believe, he cannot be honest. Now you have created a contradiction in the person’s being. This is what reduces everybody into a hypocrite. Then you become two or even many. Then you lose integrity. You become dual: you say one thing, you do another; you do one thing, you mean another. You are never one. And when you are not one, you are never blissful. Bliss is the by-product of oneness.Reason cannot find him. Reason is not the only door in your being; there are deeper doors in your being. Are you not aware of the heart? Can’t you feel the beat of the heart? Have you not seen anything happening through the heart? When you look at a lotus flower and you feel the beauty, is it reason? Can reason prove that the flower is beautiful?Reason has not even been able to define what beauty is. For the rational mind there is no beauty. But you know beauty is, and when you see it you are overwhelmed by it. The rational mind says there is no beauty; this is just an illusion, a projection, a dream.The full-moon night – is it just an illusion? The hypnotic splendor of it – is it just a projection of your mind? It can’t be so because even the ocean, which has no mind, is affected; it can’t be so. When the sun rises even birds are affected. It can’t be just the mind and its projection.Beauty is, but reason has no way to approach it. It is felt from the heart. Have you not felt beauty? Love is, that too is not through reason, that too is felt from the heart. When you fall in love, can you justify it rationally? Can you say what love is? Nobody has yet been able to.God is all these experiences together: the experience of beauty, the experience of good, the experience of love, the experience of truth – all these experiences which happen. But don’t try to reach them through the reason, they happen through the heart. All these experiences that come through the heart, the totality of them is called God. God is not a person somewhere sitting high in heaven.In the East, satyam, shivam, sundaram has been the definition of God. Satyam, he is truth. Shivam, he is good. Sundaram, he is beauty. These are the experiences that stir your heart. And God is the ultimate experience through the heart.Knowing the real through the heart is the meaning of experiencing God. Knowing the real through the mind is the experience of matter.The reality is one. Never fall into the fallacy of thinking that there are two realities – matter and consciousness, God and the world. No, the reality is one. That which is, is one. But that “one” can be approached in two ways; you have two possible approaches. You can reach through the head – then it is matter, then the interpretation of reality comes in materialistic terms. Or reach it from the heart, and then it is consciousness or God.These are our interpretations. And certainly the interpretation that comes from the heart is higher, is deeper, is more profound. And it transforms your life, it transports you into another dimension of bliss, of benediction.He introduced himself to usout of kindness: how elsecould we have known him?Reason took us as far as the door;but it was his presence that let us in.And remember one more thing, Sufism is not against reason. That is the difference between the Zen approach and the Sufi approach. Zen is irrational. It says, “Drop reason, drop it utterly.” Sufism is not irrational, it is supra-rational. It says, “Use reason, but it takes you only to the door. It cannot take you inside the temple, it takes you up to the door. Use reason, but don’t be caught by it, don’t be stuck with it.”That’s how it happened to Sanai – he had used his reason to its ultimate potential. In fact that’s why it was possible for Lai-Khur to take him inside the temple. The sultan missed because he had not even used reason to its optimum. Others were also there, they all missed the point. Only Sanai got it. He had used his reason to its optimum. He had seen that it comes to a certain extent, it takes you to a certain point, and then it is stuck, then it is exhausted. And the reality goes on spreading beyond it, so the reality is bigger than reason. Use reason as far as it can take you, but then don’t remain there. Go beyond it.Zen is irrational, Zen is absurd; that is its beauty. Sufism is supra-rational, it is not absurd; that’s its beauty. Both are right doors to the divine. But Zen is negative; it says, “Drop reasoning.” Sufism is positive; it says, “Use reasoning but always remember there is something beyond it. Never forget the beyond.”Zen is via negativa, Sufism is via positiva. Sufism is utterly positive. So people who have a leaning toward positivism will find it easier to have an affinity with Sufism, and people who have a negative approach and are attuned to and enjoy the negative, will find it easier to follow the path of Zen. One has to decide. One has to watch one’s leanings, one’s characteristics.Reason took us as far as the door; but it was his presence that let us in. Use reason, reach to the door; remember that the real is still to happen. Wait – wait in tremendous openness. Remain vulnerable. Don’t become closed, don’t start having a conclusion. A conclusion means you are becoming closed. If reason can give you a conclusion, this way or that, for or against God, you are finished; then there is no beyond. See the point that reason is inconclusive, and remain inconclusive and wait. You have come to the door, now his presence will take you in.That is the meaning of the great maxim that, “When the disciple is ready, the master appears.” It is possible that Lai-Khur was singing, dancing and playing music only for Hakim Sanai. The ways of existence are mysterious. The trap was ready for Hakim Sanai – that man was ready, he had come to the door.The same happened to Omar Khayyám, another great Sufi. He was a mathematician, a great mathematician, a genius. He had used his reason to its uttermost, and then he was taken in. And the great mathematician became a drunkard, and the great mathematician started talking of wine, of drunkenness, and the great Rubaiyat was born.One cannot believe, reading Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, that he was a great mathematician. One cannot conceive of what kind of mathematician he was because his poetry is so pure. How can a mathematician attain to such purity of poetry? A mathematician is a logician; he functions through syllogism. He is very practical, he is very objective. He does not allow his subjectivity to enter his observations; he is very detached. And mathematics is the only perfect science in the world. All other sciences are so-so; mathematics is the only perfect science. How can a perfect scientist become a Sufi? But now you can understand how it happened.When you come to the extreme point of your reason, and if you are still available, not closed – if you have not concluded this way or that way, if you have not yet become a theist or an atheist, if you still have the awareness that reason remains inconclusive – then you will be taken in by his presence.He will appear as a master and will take you in. And then it can happen in a single moment. When one is standing on the boundary, then in a single moment one can enter into the unknowable.But how will you ever know him,as long as you are unableto know yourself?God can only be known if you have known yourself. And where are you? You are not in your head, you are in your heart. The head can fall into a coma, you will still be alive. There are people who fall into comas and remain so for years. Once a woman was brought to me who, for nine months had been in a coma, utterly unconscious. The mind wasn’t functioning anymore, she was almost vegetating. But she was alive because the heart was still beating. Once the heart stops then all stops.So your life is somehow rooted in the heart, not in the head. The heart seems to be the contact point between you and the universe. It is through the heart that you are plugged in with the universe. And one has to know one’s heart, that is self-knowledge, that is the meaning of “know thyself” – because it is only through knowing your heart that you will know the contact with the universe. Entering your heart, you will become able to enter the ultimate.Once one is one,no more, no less:error begins with duality;unity knows no error.You have many minds but you have only one heart. Have you observed this fact? You don’t have one mind; you are multi-psychic, you have many minds. They constantly change; every moment your mind changes. One moment it is full of doubt, another moment it is full of belief, and another moment again it is full of doubt. One moment it wants to take the jump, another moment it escapes. One moment you are so full of love, another moment so full of anger and hate.Watch it – you have a thousand and one minds and they go on rotating. There is a kind of rotation system in your head. For a moment one mind becomes the master and in that moment you decide something and you think you will be able to do it. You will not be able to because the next moment the monarch is gone. It is a rotation system: another mind has come up, now another spoke of the wheel has come up, and this mind knows nothing of the decision that the other mind has taken. This self knows nothing of the other self; it will destroy whatsoever you have decided.One moment you decide never to smoke again, another moment you are pulling out your cigarette packet. And you are surprised – just a moment ago you had decided, and the decision seemed so total, so trustable. And now it is all gone, gone down the drain, nothing of it is there and you are perfectly willing to smoke again. And again that old mind will come back and torture you, and you will repent and think that you are guilty. But this will go on changing.Mind is a flux, it is a continuum of many minds. And that’s why those who live in the mind live a disintegrated, fragmentary life.The heart is one, it is always one. The heart means the watching consciousness in you. Who is the watcher of the head? Try to meditate over it. Anger comes – who is watching? You know perfectly well that there is anger; you know perfectly well that it is coming and growing, you know perfectly well that soon you will be overwhelmed by it. And then it is going, receding, disappearing, you know it is gone. Gone, gone, gone, it is no longer there. Who is watching? Love comes and goes. Misery comes, happiness comes, everything comes and everything goes. Who is watching? The watcher remains.Only one thing in you is constant, and that is the watcher. Everything changes, only the watcher abides. It is always there – even while you are deeply asleep it is watching the dreams; even when there are no dreams it is watching the deep sleep. When you are awake it is watching the world, when you are asleep it is watching your inner world, but the watching continues. Not even for a single moment does the watching stop. That is the only eternal thing in you, nontemporal – your heart. Sufis call it the heart and that is one. And to know the one is to go beyond all errors.Once one is one, no more, no less: error begins with duality; unity knows no error. This unity is called unio mystica. This is the mystic unity. This is the integration, the individuation, the centering of the soul. And then you can remain centered even when there is a cyclone raging around you. Then you are the center of the cyclone. Then you can remain in the world and not be of the world.All errors arise out of duality. And you are not only dual, you are a multiplicity. So there are errors and errors and errors… You have become divided into so many fragments. You are a crowd, that’s your problem, and the crowd is constantly fighting. It goes on fighting. You are a civil war, and hence your life loses all joy, all bliss, all grace.Be one and suddenly grace is attained. And suddenly you become elegant, with no effort. Then your life has a beauty of its own. It is exquisite. It is no longer that ordinary life – ugly, vulgar, mundane. Now it is the holiest of the holy. It is sacred, it is divine.The road your self must journey onlies in polishing the mirror of your heart.What is the meaning of …polishing the mirror of your heart? More and more, make your heart your center. Fall into your center more and more. Whenever you remember, move to the heart, come down from the head.Be watchful, be wakeful. But your wakefulness has to be very loving, otherwise your wakefulness can also become only a part of the mind. If it is loving wakefulness, if it is heart wakefulness, then it will be from the center of your being.So when you are aware, be loving too. Let love and awareness meet and mingle; let your awareness be suffused with love. You can watch a flower without love – watchfulness will be there, but without love it will be a dry phenomenon. This watchfulness is possible even through the head; then it will not polish the mirror of your heart.Watch and yet be loving. Watch lovingly. Slowly, slowly, your watchfulness and your lovingness become one – they are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Then it is polishing of the heart. Love is the method to polish the heart. Awareness helps you to reach the heart, and love helps you to polish it. And the more it is polished, the better it reflects the reality.The road your self must journey onlies in polishing the mirror of your heart.It is not by rebellion and discord…You need not fight with yourself, you need not force anything upon yourself, you need not be in a conflict. You have to fall into accord, not discord. Hence Sufism knows nothing of asceticism. The ascetic is a masochist; he is not a real religious person. He does not love himself, he hates himself. The Sufi loves himself, the Sufi loves all, the Sufi is love.It is not by rebellion and discordthat the heart’s mirror is polished freeof the rust of hypocrisy and unbelief…Remember, I told you the possibilities are two if you move from the mind. One is hypocrisy, the so-called religious person: the Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jaina, Jew – the so-called religious person: the hypocrite. That is one possibility.The other possibility is unbelief, atheism: “There is no God. I have searched, I have searched to the very limits of my reason, and I have not found God. There is no God.”Both are foolish attitudes. One should remain nonconclusive. One should remain on the border of reason without any conclusion – just silent, passive, available. Then the presence of God takes you in.…your mirror is polished by your certitude –by the unalloyed purity of your faith.There is a certainty that is arrived at through reason, but that certainty is always based on doubt. Doubt cannot be destroyed by reason because reason feeds on doubt, reason begins in doubt. Reason begins in questioning, reasoning is basically skeptical. So even if it comes to a conclusion it is only hypothetical, it is only for the time being. If some new facts are revealed, the conclusion will have to be changed.That’s why science can never say, “This is the truth.” Science can only say, “Up to now, whatsoever we know, this seems to be the truth.” It can only say, “Hitherto, up to now, this appears to be the truth. We cannot say anything about tomorrow. New facts will be coming, new facts will be revealed, then we will have to change.”Now Newton is out of date; soon Albert Einstein will be out of date. But Buddha is never going to be out of date, Lai-Khur is never going to be out of date, Jesus is never going to be out of date because whatsoever they have said is not based in doubt. It is not through reasoning; it is concluded through the heart. And the heart knows the eternal because the heart is in contact with the eternal. The head only contacts the temporal, the momentary.So there is a certitude that is arrived at through love, not through logic. There is a certitude that is arrived at not by the head, not through the head, not by any syllogism but by a singing heart, a dancing heart.Have you ever felt any conclusiveness, certainty, certitude, arising out of your love? Then you will understand the meaning. When you say, “I love this woman” have you arrived at this conclusion through reason? If you have arrived through reason, it may disappear any moment.That’s why, in the West, love has become a very momentary phenomenon. Even love is arrived at through the head. You conclude, “This seems to be the most beautiful woman among the women I have known up to now.” Who knows about tomorrow? A woman with a longer nose, a woman with more beautiful hair, a woman with deeper shining eyes… Who knows? Nothing can be said about tomorrow. This woman may become out of date; you can always come across a better person.If the conclusion is through the head, then love will never become deep and intimate. Then it will be momentary, then it will be just arbitrary. That’s what is happening in the world. Love has become very arbitrary, for the moment; it is just an arrangement for the moment. But this is not the way to grow deeply in love.Love needs intimacy. Love needs a certitude that is not arrived at by the head but from the heart. When certitude is arrived at from the heart, it is forever and forever. It knows no change. Blessed are those few people who can still have some certitude from the heart in their love. Very rare they are now on the earth; that tribe is disappearing, that species is disappearing. And that is a great calamity.Now, if you come to me, and listening to me, finding me logical, appealing to your logic and your reason, you become a disciple, that is not going to go very far. Tomorrow I may say something that may contradict, that may puzzle you. That will create doubt.But if it is a heart relationship – not hearing what I say but seeing what I am, not listening only to my words but listening to my silences; not listening to the philosophy that I teach but the presence that I shower upon you – then there is a certitude which is faith, which is trust, which is forever.If you arrive through your reason, it is just arbitrary. And you will never be in a let-go, you will always be there, watching from the corner of your eye; if something goes against your head then I am not for you. Then I have to be always fulfilling your expectations – which I cannot do, which no master can ever do. And whatsoever I say, you will always interpret it in your own way.Just a few days ago a woman was here. She was very serious, and she asked me, “What to do about my seriousness?” And I talked to her, saying that seriousness is a kind of illness, “You are serious because you think seriousness is something valuable. It is not, it is just stupid. Be playful.”And what did she conclude… Do you know? She took sannyas, went back home, and wrote from there, “I have listened to you, and I am trying to follow you in my own way. I have dropped sannyas because I think one should be playful, although I have not been able to drop anything else; I am still serious.”Now look – she could drop only one thing, and that was sannyas! If she had dropped all seriousness, then it would have been okay to drop sannyas too. But the mind is cunning. So now she has interpreted it in her own way, that one shouldn’t be serious about sannyas; about everything else she is the same. She has not understood me. In fact to be a sannyasin simply means that you will take your whole life playfully. Dropping sannyas means you have dropped the idea of playfulness. But this is what is going to happen to many people who only connect with the head. Beware of it.The heart mirror is polished by your certitude –by the unalloyed purity of your faith.Break freefrom your chains you have forged about yourself;for you will be free when you are free of clay.The body is dark – the heart is shining bright;the body is mere compost – the heart a blooming garden.Become disidentified with your head and become disidentified with your body. Remember that you are nothing but your watchfulness. And this does not mean that you have to be against the body. Sufis are not against the body either; they love the body because the body is the compost. It can become fragrance, it has to be transformed.…the heart a blooming garden. The body has to function as compost in the garden of the heart. One has not to be against the body or against the head. Use the head up to the door; use the body so that it becomes the soil.But remember always, the flower of heartfulness, the flower of heart-wakefulness, has to bloom in you. And it can bloom any moment. All that is needed is to drop your chains that you have forged around yourself: your defenses, your armor, your protections.Break free from the chains you have forged about yourself; for you will be free when you are free of clay. We have become too identified with the earth, with the body, with the clay. We have become too identified with matter; we have forgotten that we are nothing but witnessing. That witnessing is your ultimate reality. Let it also become your immediate reality, and you will become the garden of the heart and you will bloom. And unless you bloom into a great lotus, into a great golden lotus, your life is in vain.That’s what Lai-Khur told Sanai, “Don’t waste your life in writing eulogies to foolish kings. God will soon encounter you, and you will not be able to answer. Don’t remain blind any more. Do something – open your eyes!”Sanai listened and was transformed. Listen to me – you can also be transformed.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-02/

The first question:Osho,Today I looked at you and I felt myself so shallow and phony and false. There doesn't seem to be anything deeper inside of me. Do these feelings show that I don't have a center yet? It also shocks me that this seems to be my face at the moment.Nobody can exist without a center. Life is impossible without a center. You may not be aware of it, that’s another matter. It has not to be created but only rediscovered. And remember, I am not saying discovered, I am saying rediscovered.The child in the mother’s womb remains perfectly aware of the center. The child in the mother’s womb is at the center, vibrates at the center, pulsates at the center. The child is the center in the mother’s womb, he has no circumference yet. He is only essence, he has no personality yet.Essence is the center, that which is your nature, that which is given by existence. Personality is the circumference, that which is cultivated by society; it is not given by existence. It is by nurture, not by nature.As the child comes out of the womb, he comes for the first time in contact with something outside of himself. And that contact creates the circumference. Slowly, slowly, the society initiates the child into its own ways. The Christian society will make the child a Christian; and the Hindu, a Hindu, and so on and so forth. Then layer upon layer of conditioning is imposed on the child.Basically, if you enter a well-developed personality you will find these three things. First, a very thin positive layer – positive but phony. That is the layer which goes on pretending; that is the layer where all your masks are contained. Fritz Perls used to call that layer the “Eric Berne layer” – where you play all kinds of games.You may be crying within, but on that layer you go on smiling. You may be full of rage, you may like to murder the other person, but you go on being sweet. And you say, “How good of you to come. I am so happy. Glad to see you.” Your face shows gladness – that is phony.But to exist in a phony society you will need a phony layer; otherwise you will be in as much difficulty as Socrates was, Jesus was, I am. That phony layer keeps you part of the phony society. You don’t fall apart. It is a false world, what in the East we have called maya. It is illusory, it is all false and phony.The other person is also smiling falsely as you. Nobody is smiling. People are carrying wounds, but they have decorated their wounds with flowers, they are hiding their wounds behind flowers.Parents are in a hurry to give this layer to the child. They are in a hurry because they know the child has to exist as a member of a false society. It will be difficult for the child to survive without it; it functions as a lubricating agent.This is a very thin layer, skin-deep. Scratch anybody a little and suddenly you will find flowers have disappeared, and rage and hatred and all kinds of negative things are hidden behind it. That is the second layer, negative but still false.The second layer is thicker than the first. The second layer is the layer where much work has to be done. That’s where psychotherapies come in. And because there is a great negative layer behind the positive, you are always afraid to go in. Because to go in means you will have to cross that ugly phenomenon, that dirty rubbish that you have gathered, year in and year out, your whole life.Where does the second layer come from? The child is born as a pure center, innocence, with no duality. He is one. He is in the state of unio mystica; he does not yet know that he is separate from existence. He lives in unity, he has not known any separation. The ego has not arisen yet.But immediately the society starts working on the child. It says, “Don’t do this. This will not be acceptable to the society – repress it. Do this because this is acceptable to the society, and you will be respected, loved, appreciated.So a duality is created in the child; on the circumference a duality arises. The first layer is the positive that you have to show to others, and the second layer is the negative that you have to hide within yourself.The child is innocent. He is innocent in his love; he is innocent in his anger. He does not make a distinction. When he is in love he is in love, and he is totally in love. And when he is angry he is totally angry, he is just pure anger, hence the beauty of the child. Even when he is angry he has a superb beauty, grace – even in his anger, because the totality is there. Grown-ups, even when they are in love, are not so beautiful because the totality is missing.We create a division in the child, each child. Our society has lived up to now in a kind of schizophrenia. The real humanity has not yet been born. The whole past has been a nightmare, because we divide the person into two: the positive and the negative; yes and no; love and hate. We destroy his totality.These two layers are our split. The first layer is positive and false; the second layer is negative and false. They are false because only the total can be real. The partial is always false because the partial denies something, rejects something, and the denied part makes it false. Only in total acceptance does reality arise.The center is there in you, but you will have to go digging through these two layers, the positive and phony, and the negative and phony. And then you will fall into that oceanic oneness, the total, the whole. Then suddenly great bliss arises – that is satori. It is not to be created, it is already there. It is not even to be discovered, it has only to be rediscovered. You had known it before, hence the search. Otherwise the search was impossible.Why do people go on searching for bliss? – because they must have known it. Somewhere deep down, the memory still persists of those sweet moments in the mother’s womb when all was quiet, still, when all was one, when there was no worry, no responsibility, when there was no other. It was paradise. It is the meaning of the symbol of the Garden of Eden. The womb is the Garden of Eden.But you cannot live in the womb forever; sooner or later you have to come out of the womb. And the moment you come out of the womb, the society is bound to educate you. The society and the education are not yet human. It is neurotic, it is very primitive because it does not help the child to grow in his center. It does not help the child to grow remaining alert of the center. On the contrary, it tries in every way so that the child forgets the center and becomes identified with a false personality that the society is providing to the child.The society is not interested in the child; the society is interested in maintaining its own structure. The society is not interested in the individual; it is against the individual, it is all for the collective. And the collective has been neurotic, and the collective has been ugly. But the society is past oriented and the individual is future oriented. The individual has to live in the future, and the society knows only the past in which it has lived. The society has no future; the society consists of the past. It goes on imposing that past on the child.In my vision, in a real human society, nothing will be imposed on the child – nothing at all. Not that the child will be left all alone to himself. No, he will be helped, but nothing will be imposed. He will be helped to remain whole; he will be helped to remain rooted in the essence. He will not be forced to shift his consciousness from the essence to the personality. The future education will not be an education in personality, it will be an education in essence.And that is the meaning of a religious education. Up to now there is no religious education. And whatsoever you call religious education is either Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; that is indoctrination, not religious education. Religious education will help the child to remember what is already there inside him, not to forget it.A real education will make the child more meditative, so he never loses contact with his inner being. There is every possibility to lose because he will be moving with others, he will start imitating others. He will have to learn many things from others. Let him learn, but let him become aware that he is not to become an imitator.But that is just what is being done, and has been done down the ages. We teach children to become imitators: “Be like Jesus. Be like Socrates. Be like Buddha.” The child can only be truly himself and nobody else – ever. And whatsoever he will try to become will be false and phony.You ask me, “Today I looked at you and I felt myself so shallow and phony and false.”It is good. It is immensely beautiful that you felt it. This is the beginning. If you become aware of the phony, you cannot remain unaware long of that which is real. Because to be aware of the phony means that somewhere you have started becoming aware of the real. Maybe it is very vague, cloudy, not yet clear, not yet transparent, muddy. But the beginning has started. To know the false as false is the beginning of knowing the real as real. This is a good beginning, an auspicious beginning.You say, “There doesn’t seem to be anything deeper inside me.” To become aware of this, that “There is nothing deeper inside me,” is the first step toward depths. Millions of people go on thinking that their shallow personality is their soul. Their shallow personality has depth, they think. They go on believing it and believing it, they go on missing their reality.My function here is to make you aware of the false and the phony and the unreal and the superficial. And when for the first time it dawns that you are phony, it hurts, because you have always believed just the opposite. You have always remained with the idea that you are very, very real and deep, that you have heights and depths – and you have nothing.Right now as you exist, you don’t have any depth, you don’t have any height. You exist as persona; you are not yet aware of the essence. And only the essence can have heights and depths. But to become alert that “I am shallow” is good, tremendously important, significant. Don’t forget it again, remember it. It will hurt, it will become a pain in the heart, it will become a wound. It will be like an arrow going deeper and deeper, and it will become more and more painful.That is the journey that every seeker has to go through. That is the pain which is needed for your rebirth. Don’t forget it, and don’t start believing again in the old phony personality.You are not that which up to now you have been thinking you are. You are something totally different. You are not this body. You are in the body but not the body. And you are not this mind either; the mind is there, but you are far beyond the mind. You are the witness.You say, “I felt myself so shallow…” Who has felt it? Remember that. Shallowness itself cannot feel that it is shallow. It will have no idea of depth. How can it feel it is shallow? Misery itself cannot feel that it is misery; somebody else is needed, somebody who has known states of bliss. Only that one can become aware of misery. Disease cannot feel itself as disease, only health can feel disease as disease. Remember that.Who has become aware that “I am shallow, I am false and phony, and that there seems to be no depth in me?” Who is this? This witness is you. This is your center; your center is arising out of the chaos of your personality. This is a great moment, a moment of great blessings. Don’t lose track of it. Howsoever painful the journey, one has to go through it because the end is utterly blissful.This is the sacrifice that each sannyasin has to do – the sacrifice of the phony on the altar of the real.The second question:Osho,Why is it so difficult to be silent? My words are so mechanical and used, a continuous repetition of histories: the same old past which doesn't exist anymore. How am I still not tired of it?It is difficult to be silent because in silence one disappears. You can exist as an ego only in noise. Noise is the food for you to exist as an ego. You live on it, you thrive on it, hence the difficulty of becoming silent.When people start thinking of becoming silent, they have the idea that when silence comes they will be there and they will enjoy the silence. That idea is utterly wrong; you don’t have any notion of real things. When silence comes, you will not be there; you and silence cannot exist together. You are the noise. So when silence comes there is only silence.There is nobody who is silent; there is nobody who can be there enjoying silence. Silence is not an experience because there is no experiencer. It is utter silence; there is nobody. Sufis call it fana, dissolution. Buddha has called it nirvana, extinguishing of the candle. All is gone and there is only nothing, a kind of no-thing-ness.You will not be able to find yourself as a self; hence the difficulty. You will have to die to become silent – and who wants to die? We want silence also as a decoration, as a medal, so we can brag that “Not only have I got money, I have also got meditation”; so that we can brag that “Not only am I rich outwardly, I am rich inwardly too.” The first interest in searching for silence arises out of the ego, and the ego itself is the barrier.So when you come in contact with a master or with an energy field, with a school where things are being done – really being done, not only thought about – then the fear arises. Then you become aware of the phenomenon that with the noise disappearing, you will also disappear. Are you ready to risk that much?You say, “Why is it so difficult to be silent?” – because you are invested in noise. “My words,” you say, “are so mechanical and used, a continuous repetition of histories: the same old past which doesn’t exist anymore.” Mind is nothing but the past. It is just the records of the past; it is a recording mechanism. It is your history, it is that which is no more, it is memory. But that memory keeps you alive as an ego. And you have to go on repeating that memory again and again; it helps, it supports. You have to go into your past again and again to revive your ego; this is the way you nourish it.If you drop your past completely… Just think for a moment, if by a magic wand your past is dropped completely – this moment, who will you be? Will you be able to say “I”? The past disappearing… The I would have disappeared with it. You will be, but you will not be able to say “I.” You will be just a silence, an empty canvas, a meditation, a peacefulness, a stillness, but there will be no I.Just think, slowly, slowly, in a minute eliminate the past. Drop your past and then think, what remains? Nothing remains. Or, only nothing remains. That nothing is you. That nothing is your reality, your essence.So this is a mechanism to keep the ego going. You will have to repeat, you will have to go again through the same words and the same memories and the nostalgia again and again. And you will improve and polish on those memories. You will invent things which have never been; you will make your past look very beautiful golden, which it wasn’t. You will drop all that is ugly, and you will go on and on projecting.People go on inventing their past too. They make it as beautiful and as rich as possible because that is where their ego exists. Everybody thinks that their childhood was very beautiful. The childhood was beautiful, but that childhood you don’t remember at all. The womb was beautiful, but that you don’t remember at all. And after birth, the first two, three years were beautiful, but that too you don’t remember at all.The childhood that you remember is after the fourth year, and that has not been beautiful at all. That was one of the most difficult times in your life because you were being forced, pulled and pushed into the social structure. You were cut this way and that; you were being adjusted to the machine. You were almost destroyed. You were manipulated. No child likes it. Every child resists, becomes angry, rebels, but is helpless. And finally the parents win and the society wins.Those days were ugly, remember again. There is nothing golden in them. But later on, everybody thinks those days were beautiful. That is your invention. People not only project the future, they project the past too. They go on coloring it, polishing it, touching it again and again. And slowly, slowly, they make a fairyland of their past. And then they feel very good. The ego is supported by their beautiful past. The ego becomes beautiful through a beautiful past.Just look into the autobiographies that people write. In autobiographies you will not find anything truthful. Or, if sometimes you find something truthful it will be about others, not about the person who has written the autobiography. It will be about others but not about him.All autobiographies are a species of fiction. People invent them. Autobiographies should be counted as fiction, nothing else, because you write about your childhood later on. That childhood is just an invention. With all your experiences, with all your knowledge, with your whole life lived, you create a childhood. You create the childhood you would have liked to live. It is a beautiful fiction.And one has to repeat it. Remember one thing – lies have to be repeated again and again, otherwise you will forget them. That’s why it is said that if you want to lie you need a good memory. A man who speaks the truth need not have a good memory. There is no need; the truth is truth. The person who is constantly lying will need a really good memory. Lies have to be repeated, only then can they live; otherwise they disappear.You ask me, “Why do I go on mechanically into the same past again and again, repeating old habits?” – because this is the way you can keep it alive; otherwise it will disappear on its own.And this is something to be understood. If you stop participating with your past, if the past repeats like a mechanical habit, watch it, don’t cooperate with it – you will see you have taken the energy out of it. Slowly, slowly, watching, it starts dropping. Once your watching has become total, the past disappears.And the disappearance of the past is satori – because your personality, your I, your ego, your self exists in the past. With the past they all disappear, and you are thrown back into the very center of your being. Again you are innocent, again you are a child. That’s what Jesus means when he says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my Kingdom of God.”What kingdom is he talking about? He is talking about the kingdom that is within you: the center, the essence, or you can call it whatever you want to call it. A rose is a rose is a rose; it doesn’t matter by what name you call it.That childhood can be regained, rediscovered. That innocence, that beautiful innocence, can be yours again. And it will be far richer than it was because now you will be fully alert of it. You will be conscious too. To be consciously a child is to be a saint.There is a story of a little boy of six years of age together with his girlfriend of five year of age who approach his mother with the news that they are going to get married.“And what are you going to do for money?” the mother asked.“Well,” said the little boy, “I get ten cents a week allowance and Mary gets five cents a week allowance.”“And where will you and she live?”“Well, we thought that one week we would live at our house and the next week we would live at Mary’s.”“What,” asked the mother, “are you going to do when you have children?”“Well,” the little boy replied, “touch wood – so far we have been very lucky!”That innocence is still somewhere in you. That totality, that beautiful ignorance, is still somewhere in you, hidden behind so many layers of the personality. And those layers go on repeating themselves.Watch the repetitiveness of your mind. Even if sometimes it changes words, it goes on repeating the same thing. Even if it sometimes changes habits – you may stop smoking, then you start chewing gum. It is the same thing, the same game played with different toys. Watch the utterly unoriginal nature of your mind. Consciousness is original, mind is always repetitive, unoriginal.A telegram arrived at the army barracks. Corporal Jones’ mother had died. That evening on the parade ground the sergeant major bellowed at the men, “Attention! Jones, your mother is dead. Okay, men dismissed.”Poor Corporal Jones collapsed, distraught. Next morning the commanding officer called the sergeant major to his office. “Now, sergeant major, a word about death. When one of the men’s parents passes on, goes beyond to meet his maker as it were, I think it would be better for morale if you broke the news with a little more kindness. Be a bit more subtle. Know what I mean? Different approach – know what I mean? There’s a good chap, off you go now.”Now it happened that one month later, poor Jones’ father also passed away. The sergeant major, remembering what his officer had said, thought, “Right, now – different approach, subtle, bit of kindness!”That evening he called to the men, “Attention! All those with a father take one pace forward. Jones, where the hell do you think you are going?”It does not make much difference. Mind is repetitive, mind is just an old gramophone record. You can change words, you can change habits, it remains the same. The worldly man becomes the otherworldly, but it remains the same.I have watched so many of your saints, and I have not seen any difference at all. They are still in the marketplace, although they live in the monastery. They have only changed forms, superficial forms, but the mind is exactly the same, no difference at all. They are playing the same games with new names and they are utterly satisfied.I have always felt deep compassion for your so-called saints; they are really pitiable. Whenever I see a so-called saint, deep down I say. “Poor man” – because he is thinking he is a changed being. He is not. First he was running after money, now he is running from money, but the running continues. First he was continuously hankering for this woman and that, now he is continuously afraid of women. But he remains obsessed with the same idea – for or against makes no difference. He is focused on the same target. First he was in lust, now he is anti-lust, but the object of lust or anti-lust is the same.So whether you desire the world or you renounce the world will not make much difference, unless you understand the ways of your mind, how it functions repetitively. Watch. Nothing else has to be done – just watch. Watch all the subtle ways the mind moves into old grooves; just go on watching. Slowly, slowly, the watcher arises, the watcher on the hills, and the mind is left far behind.Deep down in the valley it continues; it goes on playing the tape. But you are no longer it, you are no longer in it. You can use it whenever it is needed, and you can forget all about it whenever you don’t need it.Talking to you I have to use the mind; there is no other way. But the moment I have gone into my room I put it off. It is just a question of putting it on and off. It is a good mechanism, it can be used beneficially. The problem arises only when it becomes the master and it starts using you.And that’s what is happening. The mind has become the master, and the consciousness is completely lost. Regain your consciousness, become more alert attentive. And the best thing to be attentive of is your own mind. Just watch its subtle and delicate methods, how it goes on playing games.And I am not saying change those games, because if you become interested in changing, you will forget watching. That’s why I don’t say to my sannyasins, “Leave the world.” I say, “Live wherever you are.” Sometimes it looks very strange…Just a few months ago, there was a French prostitute here. She wanted to take sannyas but she was also afraid. She was afraid that if I came to know that she was a prostitute I might not give her initiation. But she was really a sincere soul, she couldn’t hide it. And that’s what I call saintliness. She said, “I should not hide it from you, I have to tell it that I am a prostitute. Can you still initiate me into sannyas?”I said, “I may have rejected you before, but now I cannot reject you. Your innocence, your sincerity – nobody was asking you, you have told it on your own. This is beautiful. I will initiate you.”Then another problem arose in her mind. When after a few months she was going back, she asked, “Now what am I supposed to do? I am a prostitute and that is the only profession I know. Now what am I going to do? Will you give me some indication?”I said, “Who am I to give you any indication? Just go, and go on doing whatsoever you have been doing. Just be watchful from now onward.”She said, “Do you mean that I can continue to be a prostitute?”I said, “That is not the point, whether to continue as a prostitute or not to continue as a prostitute. Even if you leave and you become a nun, your mind will be the same of the prostitute. It is not a question where you are – in a monastery as a nun or in the marketplace as a prostitute; that is not the point at all. The point, the whole point, consists of one thing – wherever you are, watch your mind. Now become alert. Let this light of watching always be there. And if some transformation happens through that watching, that is another thing. That is going to happen.”And it did happen. But that is not renunciation, that is not renouncing anything. Something simply withers away, something becomes utterly stupid and drops. Something simply falls; you cannot hold it anymore because it is so stupid.My sannyasins have to remain in the world as they are. All that I teach is to become more alert, aware, watchful. And if something happens out of that watchfulness, it is good. It is not your choice, it happens choicelessly.You say, “Why is it so difficult to be silent?” – because you are still clinging to your ego, afraid to die. You say, “My words are so mechanical and used.” Everybody’s words are mechanical and used. You say, “…a continuous repetition of histories, the same old past which doesn’t exist anymore.” Yes, that is the case with everybody. Don’t be worried about it. You are not suffering from anything special. It is just the ordinary disease of man, the ordinary disease called mind – very ordinary, normal.You say, “How am I still not tired of it?” – because you are still inventing it. How can you be tired? You go on improving upon it. You go on painting here and there a little bit more, decorating refining. You are still working on it; this is your creation. The painting is not finished yet, it is on the way. That’s why you are not bored with it. And you will not be bored if you continue working on it, improving upon it, refining it, making it more and more delicate and beautiful. You will never be bored.Stop cooperating with it. And the way to stop cooperation is to become alert. Then immediately cooperation disappears. Just try it. There is anger; become aware of the anger. I am not saying stop anger, drop anger – just become aware. See that the anger is there and watch that it is arising, that you are surrounded by it, that it is clamoring all around like a cloud and you are suffocated by it. Go on watching, without doing a thing.The moment you do something you have lost your watchfulness. Doing means you become engaged, doing means you become cooperative. And there are two types of cooperation: you can either be for or you can be against. Both are cooperative. In both ways you become entangled.Avoid being for or against. Don’t be for anger, don’t be against anger. It is there, a fact. Just watch without any judgment and you will be surprised, soon you would have found a golden key. Watching, slowly, slowly it disappears. And it disappears without leaving a trace on you. Then you have the key; then use it for all kinds of thoughts.One day you have become alert of the secret process of watching, that watching destroys the mind, disconnects you from the mind. Watching puts the mind off. And once you have risen above the mind like a Himalayan peak, you are the master. That is the goal of being a sannyasin.The third question:Osho,How is one to know that sannyas is good?Sir, the proof of the pudding is in its tasting. Become a sannyasin – there is no other way. It is an experience; you have to know it by your own experience. And it is such an interior experience that nothing can be said about it from the outside. And it is of such depth that no word is capable to express it.It is as if you have a pain in the heart – only you know. Or you have a headache – only you know. You may have come across people who have no experience of headaches. I know one person. He is sixty years old and he has never had any headache. It is impossible to explain to him what a headache is. The more you explain to him, the more he seems puzzled. He has never had any experience. How can you convey it?Sannyas is a very deep experience. It goes to your very roots. It shakes you out of your sleep; it starts transforming you from within. It is not something on the outside. The orange clothes and the mala and the new name are not sannyas. That is just an indication, a gesture; that is just a beginning, the first step. And everything else that happens then is very interior.And you say, “How is one to know that sannyas is good?”The mother ran into the nursery when she heard her five-year-old son howling. His baby sister had been pulling his hair.“Don’t mind the baby,” his mother said. “She doesn’t know that it hurts you.”A few minutes later, the mother ran back to the nursery. This time it was the baby doing the screaming.“What’s the matter with the baby?” the mother asked.“Nothing much,” her five-year-old son replied. “But now she knows.”But that is the only way to know. So please let me pull your hair! Become a sannyasin and you will know – it is good. It is immensely good, there is nothing like it.The fourth question:Osho,When I dropped my job as a political reporter in order to come to Pune, some of my friends who are engaged in the struggle against atomic war, atomic power, destruction of the environment, the dismantling of democratic freedoms, etcetera, called me an escapist.Sometimes I wonder if they are right. Are they?They are right, but they are right in a totally different sense, of which they are not aware. One can escape from reality, one can also escape to reality. And the second is the case. When you move into meditation or into sannyas it is escaping to reality, not from reality, because the realest thing in you is your own center. The farther away you are from your center, the farther away you are from reality.And the struggle that they are continuing against “…atomic power, destruction of the environment, the dismantling of democratic freedoms, etcetera…” is not going to succeed their way. It is not possible that way.We are not struggling against anything like that here because we are cutting the very roots. They are struggling only against the leaves. Where does atomic power come from? Who has created it, and why? Where does war come from, and why? Who has destroyed the environment, and why? Where does all this destructiveness come from? Why is there not democracy in the world? Why is there not individual freedom in the world? Who has done all this? Do you think you can make some party, some class, some section of the society, responsible for it? Then you will be utterly wrong.It is the human mind that is responsible. The way the human mind has existed up to now is somehow wrong. The human mind has not yet learned how to be creative, hence there is destruction. And there will be destruction unless we change the very foundation of the human mind.Struggling against war is not going to help because that is again another war. Have you not seen the pacifists and their processions, and how they howl and scream and how angry they are? And they are pacifists! And every pacifist procession ends in destruction. They start looting the shops and burning the buses and throwing stones at the police. And they had come to propagate peace. This is an old stupidity. All wars are fought in the name of peace; all the wars have always been fought in the name of peace. Can’t you see the point? – man wants to fight. Any excuse will do, and peace is a beautiful excuse.All politicians talk about peace and prepare for war. And if you ask them why, they will say, “How can we protect peace? We have to be strong, otherwise peace will be destroyed. So we have to prepare for war in order to have a peaceful world.” And when the preparation has gone on long, then you have to do something, because otherwise the preparation becomes heavy.For example, a person has been continuously exercising and getting ready to fight, just in order to be ready. Then one day he is ready. Now he hankers to fight; now his whole preparation forces him to fight. And he wasn’t exercising alone. The neighbor was also going to the gym and also getting muscular, and he is also becoming a Muhammad Ali. And each walks in front of the other’s house in a very aggressive way and both are afraid of each other. And then finally somebody has to begin the fight.Machiavelli said the best way to defend is to be offensive, the best way of defense is to be offensive. Then somebody has to start because it becomes heavy, it becomes a tension, and the tension has to be released.Now, when you go on piling up arms and bombs, how long can you go on piling them up? One day you have to start selling them; it is dangerous to go on piling them up. Then, somewhere or other, there has to be a war; it becomes an economic necessity.Big world wars are fought once in a while, and between two big wars small wars go on – sometimes in Israel, sometimes in Korea, sometimes in Vietnam, sometimes Bangladesh, Kashmir. They go on because the great powers are creating bombs and they need a market. So the stupid Indians and the Pakistanis will fight; they will become the market. Then the Israelis and the Arabs will fight, and they will become the market.Just see the whole point. If Israel gets arms from America, then the Arabs will get arms from Russia: both need a market. If India gets arms from Russia, then Pakistan gets arms from America; they both are in need. And they are improving their arms every day, so what to do with the out-of-date arms? They are useless. Either you destroy them, dump them in the ocean, but then all that you have put into them is lost. Sell them to backward countries sectarian – for them, they are great things.For Russia and America they are out-of-date, useless, but for India and Pakistan they are just the last word. They are primitive as far as American technology and Russian technology are concerned; they are of no use. If Russia and America go to war they will not be of any use; there is no point in keeping them. So this whole game continues: we go on talking of peace and we go on creating war.We have to understand the human mind; the human mind has to be changed from the roots. If the human mind remains ambitious, then there is no possibility of a world without war. Ambition is war. If the human mind remains sectarian – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan – there is no possibility of any peace because those sects will divide people, and any division is the beginning of war.You have not escaped from reality, you have escaped to reality. We are not talking about peace; there is no point in talking about it. We are creating the foundation of it. We are not pacifists and we are not marching on the streets and going for a long walk to the capital – a pacifist procession and slogans and shouting. We are not doing all that nonsense, it is pointless! It simply helps a few people to throw out and cathart their destructiveness, that’s all. They enjoy it. I know these people, they are always in every protest march.I lived in Jabalpur for many years, and I had been watching every kind of thing that went around. So whenever there was a protest march or anything, I would go and watch. I was surprised. I found one man in all protest marches, all kinds: communist, socialist, jansanghi, Hinduites, arya samajis, anybody! He was always there. I was puzzled – he is congressee, he is a communist, he is a socialist, he is a jansanghi.One day I caught hold of him and I asked him, “You puzzle me very much. I see you in every procession, every protest, and you shout the best!”He said, “I am also puzzled because I see you always watching, and you never participate! How do you manage? And I was afraid that one day or other you were going to ask me,” he said, “because you see me in every protest. I enjoy shouting. I don’t care for whom I am shouting or against whom I am shouting; I enjoy shouting! It is such a good exercise, and I feel so thrilled and excited, and it always gives me a good appetite. And it brings some excitement; otherwise life is boredom.”If you don’t believe me, you can ask Astha. Her father and mother have both been of this type their whole life, just protesting. It does not matter against whom – who cares? Those are just excuses.We are not doing anything like that here. So those who are doing such things will think that this is an escape from reality because they think what they are doing is reality. It is not.And naturally, sitting silently here, meditating, dancing; with closed eyes doing vipassana, watching, being alert; certainly for them it is an escape. It is an escape, but in a different sense.You are going to the very root of all diseases. And we are trying to cut that very root. We are trying to create a new kind of human being – without ego, without ambition, without any desire to succeed in the world. We are trying to create a human being who wants to dance, sing, love; who wants to celebrate life. We are trying to create a creative human mind.And remember, only a no-mind is a creative mind. When the so-called mind disappears and there is just pure emptiness, virgin emptiness, out of that virgin emptiness arises creativity. A thousand and one flowers bloom in that emptiness.That is the garden Hakim Sanai is talking about – the hadiqa, the garden. We are trying to create that garden. We will make our bodies a compost, we will make our minds a compost, so that the golden flower can bloom in you. This is not an escape from reality, this is escaping into reality.The fifth question:Osho,In so many ways you make us understand, but still we do not understand. Why don't we understand? When will we understand? How will we understand?Understanding is not something that knows any when. It is not of time, so it is not predictable. I cannot say today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. It can happen right this moment, it may not happen for lives together. It is unpredictable. It is unpredictable because it cannot be caused. It happens when it happens; understanding comes to you. All that you can do is not to create it; you cannot create it. And the understanding that is created by you will not be much of an understanding, either. So don’t ask how; there is no “how” to it.“How” means some technique, some method, to create understanding. Understanding is not a thing that can be manufactured. Then what is it? – it is already the case. You understand, but the understanding goes against your investments. Whatsoever I am saying is so simple that it is impossible not to understand it. I am not talking about difficult things, I am not talking philosophy. I am making simple statements just like “two plus two is four.” You need not be a great genius to understand it.And you understand it perfectly well. It is not that you don’t understand it; the question is something else. You don’t want to understand it. You understand it, but you don’t want to understand it. You want to avoid it, you want to postpone it; hence you ask, “When?” “How?” Those are tricks, strategies, to postpone for tomorrow.I say, “Now!” Don’t ask when. And don’t ask how, because “how” brings the future in. Then you say, “I will practice; it can’t happen just now. I will practice tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and slowly, slowly, gradually, one day it will happen.” And meanwhile you remain the same. It is a trick.What I am saying is so obvious, but it goes against your investments. You have invested too much in your ignorance. Your whole life up to now has been lived by an utterly wrong kind of mind, and you have invested all that you had, your whole life. Now suddenly you see the point; you become afraid. Seeing it means that you have been a fool up to now. Seeing it means that up to now all has been futile, that up to now you have not really lived. This is too much, you cannot swallow it. You create a new trick. You say, “I will try to understand.”You have understood. It is already there. Now please don’t play games. And remember, if you cannot live this understanding that is happening to you today, you will not be able to live it tomorrow either because tomorrow the investment would have become even more. You will have invested one more day in your wrong attitudes, wrong structures; it will become more and more difficult. That’s why it becomes difficult. The older you are, the more difficult it becomes.Why do you see so many young people coming to me? The reason is their investment is not that big. They can still hope to change their life and live. When old people come, their investment is too big. Unless they are very courageous and really young inside, they will not be able to take the jump. They have lived their whole life in one way; now suddenly I am showing them a different path to be followed. It is so new; it will be uncomfortable, inconvenient, insecure. And now not much time is left. They are getting old, death is coming. To risk in such a moment becomes difficult. They understand perfectly well, but they don’t want to understand. They want to go on dreaming, they want to continue the dream.Mulla Nasruddin one night dreamt that Khidr, the Sufi hidden master, was standing before him and asked, “What do you want, Nasruddin?”Poor Nasruddin couldn’t ask much. That’s how people are. If God suddenly appears and asks you, “What do you want?” Just think, what comes to your mind? A house, a car, a bank balance… You cannot even ask for something worthwhile.Mulla said, “A hundred-rupee note.” Poor man, that was the last thing that he could imagine.But Khidr is also something; he said, “I will give you one rupee. Two.”Mulla said, “No, a hundred!”“Three.”And this way it continued, this haggling continued, in the dream. It came to ninety-nine, and Khidr was very adamant. He said, “I will not give a single pai more. Ninety-nine? Take it or leave it!”And Mulla said, “I will take a hundred! And how miserly you are! Just for one rupee? Why not make it a hundred?”And the fight became so hot that Mulla awoke himself and opened his eyes. Khidr disappeared, and the notes disappeared. The wife was sitting by his side because he was talking so loudly that she had become awake and she was listening. Great haggling was going on and talk about money, and she was also interested. And she didn’t want to disturb him; something great was happening. “Eighty, eighty-one, eighty-two…” And it went on “…ninety-nine.” And Mulla said, “Ninety-nine, no! Hundred! I will take only a hundred.”And then suddenly he opened his eyes, and the wife said, “What is happening?” And Mulla said, “You keep quiet!”He closed his eyes again and said, “Okay, give me ninety-nine.” But now the dream is gone; now there is no Khidr, nobody.And he said, “Okay, ninety-nine I say! Where are you? Ninety-eight! Ninety-seven!” And he started coming down but nobody now was there, and not even one rupee. And he was very angry and said, “How foolish I am! I should have accepted ninety-nine. Just for one rupee… This Khidr is a miser. And I am also a foolish man; now I cannot find him.”That’s the situation. If you understand me, the dream will be broken. And you are always nearabout ninety-nine. It is just going to happen tomorrow. One more day, a little more effort… And the hundred-rupee note is just hanging there in front of you like a carrot.You say to me, “Wait, Osho. Just let me try a little more. And you can go on telling me, you can go on teaching me, but tell me when and how.” And you go on working hard to get this hundred-rupee note which is always there around the corner but is never in your hands. It will never be in your hands. And you are not ready to awake from your sweet dream.It is not a question of understanding; it is so simple. But you have lived a certain life, your habits have become fixed, your structure has become frozen. Even when you understand, your mind is cunning enough to distort it, to create meanings in it which are not there. It can project its own ideas in it.What I am saying is simple, utterly simple. Anybody with an innocent mind can understand it. But the problem is you have prejudices, you have your own ideas. You would like to understand it accordingly, according to your own prejudices.The good Father came upon Pat, the town disgrace, in a highly inebriated condition, tacking skillfully from telephone post to gate, and back again.“Pat, Pat, drunk again?”“Are you? So am I, Father.”“Tut-tut, this is no time for levity. You in this beastly condition, Pat, after faithfully promising me two weeks ago that you would nevermore drink again – and after taking the pledge. It’s a burning shame to you, and a sin against God and the Church, and sorry I am to be obliged to say so.”“Father Daly,” said Pat, in a tone half tipsy, half laughing, “do you say you are sorry to see me so?”“Yes, indeed I am.”“Are you sure you’re very sorry?”“Yes, very, very sorry.”“Well, then, Father Daly, if you’re very, very sorry, I’ll forgive you.”This is how it goes. I say one thing, you manage it to mean something else. And you are doing it and you know that you are doing it. It is not a question of when and how – either now or never.A young Scotsman of good family and good social position had a great fondness for drink. His family and his friends had done almost everything to break him of the habit, with no success. A friend suggested that they try giving him a severe shock. As a means to this end, they produced a coffin, and the next time he came home under the influence, they dressed him like a corpse, darkened the room, placed a few lighted candles around the coffin, and left a friend there to watch him.He awoke shortly and appeared greatly puzzled by the surroundings, when, catching sight of somebody in the room, he remarked, “Where am I?”“You’re dead,” was the solemn reply.“Dead?” he exclaimed. “How long have I been dead?”“Three days.”“Well, well,” he mused. “Are you dead as well?”“Aye, I’m dead as well,” said his companion.“That’s funny. How long have you been dead?”“Three weeks,” replied the other sadly.The bibulous one brightened up considerably and said, “Well, if you’ve been dead three weeks, and I’ve only been dead three days, you must know the place better than I do. Where can we go and get a drink?”The old mind, the old structure, the old habits, go on persisting. They will follow you even in your death. That’s exactly what happens – you change only your body, your mind continues. Your mind enters another womb, with all its rotten past. And again you start living the same repetitive life.Don’t ask me when you are going to understand me. You have understood me. Now please don’t postpone it anymore. It has already happened. It is such a simple thing; I am not giving you puzzles, I am giving you bare, naked truths. And there is no question of how.Listening to me, not interfering with what I am saying, not distorting what I am saying, the understanding will arise on its own. It is arising but it is going to be against your investments, that is true. And unless you dare, you will not be able to come out of your old past; you will not be able to come out of your old ego.Great daring is needed; not understanding – understanding is already happening – courage. And what is courage? Courage simply means a readiness to risk the known for the unknown. If the known has not given you anything, why be afraid of the unknown? Let’s try it. You are not going to lose anything because you don’t have anything. Why not try it? Either you get something or you don’t lose anything; anyway you are not going to be a loser.But people think they have. They think they have lived a tremendously beautiful life, a life of richness. These are just your beliefs. You have been just dragging along. Your life has been drab and flat; no poetry has ever happened in it, no dance. You have not known anything of the beauty and the grandeur of existence. You have not touched even for a moment the divinity of this beautiful universe.You have not known anything of godliness, and only that is what matters. Only that is what gives richness, only that is what means life. If you have not touched the divine, if you have not been touched by the divine, if you have not been moved by the divine, if you have not been penetrated by the divine, if you have not allowed godliness to happen to you, all that has happened is just a dream.Seeing it, one jumps out of the dream. This is courage – to jump out of the known dream into the unknown. It is a risk. Who knows what is going to happen in the unknown? But one thing is certain – by changing from the known to the unknown you will grow, you will become richer.The last question:Osho,What would you do if, by some crazy twist of fate, you became prime minister of India?I would resign immediately.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-03/

He doesn’t know his own self:how should he know the self of another?He knows only his hands and feet,how should he know about God?This is beyond the sage’s grasp:you must be a foolif you think that you know it.When you can expound on this,you will know the pure essence of faith;till then,what have faith and you in common?It is better to be silentthan to talk nonsenselike one of the learned;faith is not woveninto every garment.You were made for work:a robe of honor awaits you.How is it that you are satisfiedwith mere rags?How will you ever have richesif you are idle sixty days a month?Knowing what you know,be serene also, like a mountain;and do not be distressed by misfortune.Knowledge without serenityis an unlit candle;together they are honeycomb;honey without wax is a noble thing;wax without honey is only fit for burning.Leave this abodeof birth and decay;leave this pit,and make for your destined home.This heap of dust is a mirage,where fire seems like water.A Sufi story:The philosophers, logicians and doctors of law were drawn up at court to examine Mulla Nasruddin. This was a serious case because he had admitted going from village to village saying, “The so-called wise men are ignorant, irresolute and confused.” He was charged with undermining the security of the state.“You may speak first,” said the king.“Have paper and pens brought,” said the Mulla. Paper and pens were brought. “Give some to each of the first seven savants.” They were distributed. “Have them write separately an answer to this question, ‘What is bread?’” This was done. The papers were handed to the king, who read them out.The first said, “Bread is a food.”The second, “It is flour and water.”The third, “A gift of God.”The fourth, “Baked dough.”The fifth, “Changeable, according to how you mean bread.”The sixth, “A nutritious substance.”The seventh, “Nobody really knows.”“When they decide what bread is,” said Nasruddin, “it will be possible for them to decide other things. For example, whether I am right or wrong. Can you entrust matters of assessment and judgment to people like this? Is it or is it not strange that they cannot agree about something which they eat each day, and yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?”Yes, that is the situation of your so-called philosophers, theologians, doctors of law – the learned people. They are parrots. They have not even known themselves yet. What else can they know? They are not even acquainted with themselves. How can they be acquainted with others? They have not unraveled the mystery that they are.The closest mystery is your own. If even that is not known, how will you know the mystery of the others? Those mysteries are farther away from you, they are distant. The easiest to approach, the most easily approachable, is your own mystery. The journey has to begin from there.The learned people – the pundits, the scholars, the professors – are only better informed. But information makes no one wise. Yes, it helps you to pretend wisdom. It becomes a camouflage; it is a facade behind which you can hide your ignorance. But the ignorance is not destroyed by it; on the contrary, it is protected.Your knowledge becomes a defense; it is a security for your ignorance. It is nourishment. You become fully unaware that you are ignorant; that is the purpose of your so-called knowledge. And this is dangerous. If you are unaware that you are ill, then there is no possibility of searching for health. If you become oblivious of the fact of your fundamental ignorance, how are you ever going to become enlightened?If you have forgotten that your interior is full of darkness, you will not search for light; you will not work to create light. If you have already accepted that you know, then what is the point of going on an adventure of knowing?And that’s what your so-called knowledge goes on doing. It does not change the ignorant person into a knowing person; it only gives an illusion of knowledge. It is a mirage. It is a dream in which you become wise. But in reality you remain the same.The difference between the ignorant and the so-called learned is only of quantity. No qualitative difference at all exists between them. The ignorant is less informed, less polished, less educated. The learned is more informed, more educated, has read more, has listened to more people. The difference is of language. The learned is more articulate, knows many more words. But they are mere words – remember. There is no meaning in them, there cannot be any meaning in them because meaning comes through experience.You can learn all the great words there are in the dictionaries. That’s how you go on using words. When you use words like God do you know what you are saying? Do you know what you mean? What is God? It is a mere word for you, and it will remain a mere word. But behind the word there is a danger; you may start believing that you know because you know the word.Knowing the word God is not knowing God. Knowing the word love is not knowing love. Knowing the word fire is not knowing fire. Remember, words are mere symbols. Unless you pour existential meaning into them they will remain empty. There is no meaning in the words; the meaning is in the individual and his experience.If Krishna uses the word God it is not a mere word. It is meaningful, it has significance. The significance comes from Krishna’s life; the significance is poured from Krishna’s consciousness.When Jesus uses the word God it is of utter import, it is pregnant with great meaning. The meaning is in Jesus, not in the word God, because the word God has been used by rabbis, down the ages, with no meaning at all. Jesus poured meaning into it. He transformed an empty word into a significant, meaningful, alive thing; it started pulsating. When Buddha touched any word it became alive, it grew wings. Suddenly there was a metamorphosis.But the learned is only full of dust, the dust that he has gathered from books, scriptures. Beware of such learning; it is more dangerous than simple ignorance. Why is it more dangerous than ignorance? – because ignorance has a purity. It has innocence in it and it has an authenticity. It is true and from truth there is a possibility to go further. Knowledge, the so-called knowledge, is untrue. From untruth you cannot go on a journey of truth.Remember, there is no actual difference between the learned and the ignorant, except that the learned believes that he knows, and the ignorant knows that he does not know. But then the ignorant is in a better position.An American lady who speaks no French takes her little daughter to the Paris zoo. They stop in front of a cage with porcupines inside and read a sign that says, Porcupi Africain, Porcupi Australian.This puzzles them because the porcupines all look just about the same. So the mother goes up to the guard who is standing nearby and says, “Monsieur, do you speak English?”The guard touches his cap and says, “Madame, I speak only very little English. What is it Madame wishes to know?”“Would you tell us please what is the difference between the Australian porcupine and the African porcupine?”“It is this, Madame, the prick of the African porcupine is longer than the prick of the Australian porcupine.”The lady is horrified and rushes off with her daughter until she finds the superintendent of the zoo.“Monsieur,” she says, “do you speak English?”“Madame,” says the superintendent, “I have been speaking English for many years. I have studied at Oxford and in fact I can speak as well as you. What does Madame wish to know?”So she tells him with great indignation the awful thing that the guard has just said in front of her and her little girl.“Madame must not be offended,” says the superintendent. “You see, what the guard is trying to say is that the quill of the African porcupine is longer that the quill of the Australian porcupine. For as a matter of fact, Madame, their pricks are the same size.”There is not much difference between the so-called learned and the unlearned. Maybe the difference is of words, of language, but not of any quality. Their inner quality remains the same.This is one of the fundamentals of Sufism to be understood – knowledge is futile if it has not arisen in your own experience. Knowledge is an utterly unnecessary burden if it is not part of your own life. If it is added to you from the outside, drop it. Don’t unnecessarily carry it. It is useless, it is harmful, it is poisonous and a burden. It will not allow you to move quickly and fast. And the more you gather knowledge, the less is the possibility of your movement.Hence your learned people live like stagnant pools, they are no longer rivers. The learned people go on talking about beautiful words, spinning, weaving great philosophies around them. But if you go into their words and penetrate deeply, you will always find emptiness and nothing else.Great books are written about God by people who have no inkling. Great books are written about heaven and hell, even maps of heaven and hell have been drawn by people, and they don’t know a thing. They have not even penetrated their own world of emotions, feelings; they have not contacted their own inner consciousness. And they are talking about distant things – afterlife, life after death. And they are clever people; they know how to talk, they know how to prove, they know how to argue. And they argue in such a beautiful way that anybody can be deceived.If you go into their argument you will find it very valid. But the validity of the argument is irrelevant. The question is whether the person knows or not. Sometimes it happens that a person knows but cannot argue or argues faultily. A person sometimes knows but has no language to express it or uses wrong language, but still what he says is true. His argument may be false, his language may not be adequate, but still what he says is true.And on the other extreme there are people whose language you cannot find fault with, their argument is perfect, they are accomplished logicians. You cannot argue with them, they will immediately silence you. Still, what they are saying is utterly stupid. It does not make any sense. It is just in their minds. Their hearts are utterly untouched by it; they themselves are not moved by what they are saying. When they talk about God there is no juice flowing in their being. When they talk about love you will not see any sign in their eyes, and when they talk about poetry there is no poetry in their presence. They talk about grace but you will not see any grace anywhere.But they can create a great turmoil of words; they can create a great smoke of words. And if you also live in words there is every possibility you will be deceived. That’s how millions of people are lost – the blind are leading those otherwise blind. The articulate blind are leading the inarticulate blind; the informed blind are leading the uninformed blind.And whenever a man of eyes is born – a Jesus, a Buddha, a Bahauddin, a Hakim Sanai – all those scholars and learned people are immediately in agreement about one thing, that Jesus is wrong. They may not agree about what bread is, they may not agree about anything else, but about one thing they immediately agree, that Jesus is wrong.They may be Hindus, they may be Mohammedans, they may be Jews, they may be somebody else. But when there is a man like Jesus they immediately all fall into agreement because they all see the risk; if Jesus is right, then they are all wrong. Jesus has to be proved wrong. And if they cannot prove him wrong – and they cannot – then Jesus has to be destroyed. If they cannot prove him wrong then the only way is to remove Jesus from people’s lives.And once Jesus is killed, the same people who killed Jesus will become Jesus’ followers, popes, bishops and priests. Again they are there to philosophize. With Jesus there is trouble, but with Jesus’ words there is no problem. They can spin and weave around any word; whether it is from Moses or Jesus makes no difference to them. Now Jesus becomes their center of philosophizing.Buddha became the greatest source of philosophers. A strange phenomenon, unbelievable – because Buddha was utterly against philosophy. He remained absolutely anti-philosophy his whole life. He never talked about any philosophical subject. He was down-to-earth; he was a pragmatist, a practical man. If you had asked him about God he would have immediately pushed the question aside and would have told you, “How is it going to transform you? Talking about God is meaningless; don’t waste time. Think about meditation, think about compassion, think about things which can transform you. What can God do?”If you had asked him about the afterlife he would have immediately stopped you, “Don’t talk nonsense. You are alive, and you don’t know what life is, and you are thinking about the afterlife? You don’t know what you are right now and you are asking, ‘What will I be after death?’ This is utter stupidity. Rather, go into yourself and see who you are. And if you have known yourself, then there is no problem. When you die you will know whether you survive or not. Why make much fuss about it right now?”And how can it be decided? There is no way of deciding. Even if the whole world says that you will survive the bodily death, still the doubt will persist. Who knows? Everybody will be wrong – because the whole world used to believe that the earth was flat, and the whole world was wrong. The earth is not flat; now we know. The whole world has believed, down the ages, that the sun moves around the earth. Now we know the earth moves around the sun, not vice versa.So it is not a question of how many people believe in it. Truth is not decided by the majority, it is not a question of voting. Even if a single man knows truth, and the whole world is against him, he is still true, and the world is still wrong.You cannot be convinced that you will be when you are dead; there is no way of convincing you. You can believe it if you want to believe; if you want to believe, you can believe anything. But it is because you want to, not that you are convinced. You are afraid of death; you would like to remain after death, and you want to believe it, so you believe it. But you know that it is your belief; it may not be so. Deep down, the doubt will persist.And Buddha wouldn’t have answered any question that you can think belongs to philosophy. He used to say, “Even if I say something about the beyond, you will misunderstand it. You don’t have any experience of the beyond; communication is not possible.” And you can see how difficult it is to communicate. I say one thing, you will understand another. People will understand according to their level of understanding.A playboy who had squandered a fortune was asked what he had done with all his money. He answered, “Some went for liquor and fast automobiles, and most went for women. The rest I spent foolishly.”Words don’t mean the same thing to everybody. It is according to your understanding.“Your continual unfaithfulness proves you are absolutely worthless!” yelled the outraged man who had just caught his wife for the tenth time with another man.“Quite the contrary,” came the cool reply. “It merely proves I am too good to be true.”It all depends on you.On a foreign business trip, after working hours, a man found himself hampered by the fact that he didn’t know the language. He was delighted, therefore, when a gorgeous woman sat down at his restaurant table.“Can you speak English?” he ventured hopefully.“Just a little,” she said with a smile.“Just a little, eh?” he repeated. “How much?”“Twenty-five dollars,” was the prompt reply.Communication is one of the most difficult problems in the world. When you use a word you give your meaning to it. When it reaches the other person, it is bound to take his meaning. And between the transfer everything is lost.So Buddha said, “I will not talk about the beyond. And don’t ask anything about the beyond. Be more scientific and realistic; go into that which is. Don’t talk about truth. Go into that which is, go into that which you are, and that is the way to know truth.But once Buddha died, great philosophical schools arose. It had never happened in the whole world as it happened in India after Buddha. The man, who for his whole life was against philosophy and philosophizing, became the source of the greatest philosophical endeavor ever. Thirty-six schools of philosophy were born when Buddha died, and the people that he had always condemned all gathered together to philosophize about him.And see the beauty, all the irony. They started philosophizing why Buddha kept silent. Why didn’t he say anything about the beyond? That became their philosophy! They started talking about why he kept silent about the beyond. And there were as many answers as possible.Somebody said, “Because there is no beyond.” Now one philosophy has taken roots. Another said, “The beyond is, but it is inexpressible. That’s why he kept silent.” Now another school, and so on and so forth.Even the silence of Buddha became a problem, and people started discussing the silence. Nobody tried to become silent; people started talking about the silence.Beware of this trap; the mind is very cunning. If I say something about meditation, I am saying it so that you can meditate. But you start thinking about meditation, what meditation is. How many kinds of meditation are there? What is the difference between them? Why are they antagonistic to each other?And then you can go on ad infinitum, and there will not be any time when you will ever meditate. You will become more and more confused. You will become so confused finally that you will not know how to start meditation because there are so many directions opening. Where to go? What to choose? You will simply be paralyzed.The mind always does that. And only a few people who are really alert are capable to get out of these traps of the mind. The mind is a great philosopher. And life is not a philosophy, life is a reality. Philosophy is an escape from reality; philosophy means thinking. Life is – there is no question of thought. You can simply jump into it.The ancient ponda frog jumps inthe sound…Just like that, you can jump into this ancient pond of life. You can know it only by jumping into it. There is no other way to know life. Thinking about it is the surest way to miss it.The sutras:He doesn’t know his own self:how should he know the self of another?But this is what everybody is doing. You think you know the woman you love. You think you know your husband. You think you know your child. Just because you had carried the child in your womb for nine months, you think you know? You only believe that you know. The child is a mystery; you don’t know a thing about the child. The child is as mysterious as the whole existence.You don’t know the woman you love. How can you know the woman? – because you have not yet known yourself. The woman may be close to you, but she can never be so close as you are to yourself.Hence I say if you don’t love yourself you will not be able to love anybody else in the world, and if you don’t know yourself you will never be able to know anybody else in the world. Love or knowledge, all start from your own center. The first ripple has to rise there, then it can go on spreading. Then it can go on spreading to the unbounded boundaries of existence. But first it has to start at the very core of your being. He doesn’t know his own self: how should he know the self of another?And what is the problem? Why don’t you know your own self? This should be the easiest thing in the world, and it has become difficult, the most difficult. It has become almost impossible to know oneself. What has gone wrong? You have the capacity to know. You are there, the capacity to know is there; then what has gone wrong? Why cannot this capacity of knowing turn upon itself?Only one thing has gone wrong, and unless you put it right you will remain ignorant of yourself. What has gone wrong is that a split has been created in you. You have lost your integrity. The society has made you into a divided house against yourself.The strategy is simple; once understood, it can be removed. The strategy is that the society has given you ideals how you should be. And it has enforced those ideals so deeply in you, implanted those ideals so deeply in you, that you are always interested in the ideal: how I should be – and you have forgotten who you are. You are obsessed with the future ideal, and you have forgotten the present reality.Your eyes are focused on the distant future; hence they cannot turn inward. You are constantly thinking what to do, how to do it, how to be this. Your language has become that of shoulds and oughts, and the reality consists only of is. Reality knows no should, no ought.A roseflower is a roseflower, there is no question of its being something else. And the lotus is a lotus. Neither the rose ever tries to become a lotus, nor the lotus ever tries to become a rose, hence they are not neurotics. They don’t need the psychiatrist; they don’t need any psychoanalysis. The rose is healthy because the rose simply lives its reality.And so it is with the whole existence except man. Only man has ideals and shoulds, “You should be this, that.” And then you are divided against your own is. Should and is are enemies.And you cannot be anything else than you are. Let it sink deep into your heart – you can only be that which you are, never anything else. Once this truth sinks deep, “I can only be myself,” all ideals disappear. They are discarded automatically. And when there is no ideal, reality is encountered. Then your eyes are herenow, then you are present to what you are. The division, the split, has disappeared. You are one.This is the beginning of being one with existence. First be one with yourself. This is the first step of unio mystica – be one with yourself. And then the second step, and the last is – be one with existence. The second is easy. The first has become difficult because of so much conditioning, so much education, so many civilizing efforts. The first has become difficult.If you have taken the first step of just accepting yourself and loving yourself as you are, moment to moment… For example, you are sad, this moment you are sad. Your whole conditioning says to you, “You shouldn’t be sad. This is bad. You shouldn’t be sad, you have to be happy.” Now the division, now the problem. You are sad – that is the truth of this moment. And your conditioning, your mind says, “You shouldn’t be like this; you have to be happy. Smile! What will people think of you?”Your woman may leave you if you are so sad, your friends may desert you if you are so sad, your business will be destroyed if you remain so sad. You have to laugh, you have to smile, you have to at least pretend that you are happy. If you are a doctor, your patients will not feel good if you are so sad. They want a doctor who is happy, jolly, healthy, and you are looking so sad. Smile – even if you cannot bring a real smile, bring a false smile, but smile. At least pretend, act!This is the problem – you pretend, you act. Smile – you can manage, but you have become two. You have repressed the truth; you have become phony. And the phony is appreciated by the society. The phony becomes the saint, the phony becomes the great leader, the phony becomes the mahatma. And everybody starts following the phony. The phony is your ideal.That’s why you are unable to know yourself. How can you know yourself if you don’t accept yourself? You are always repressing your being. What has to be done then? When you are sad, accept the sadness – this is you. Don’t say, “I am sad.” Don’t say that sadness is something separate from you. Simply say, “I am sadness. This moment, I am sadness.” And live your sadness in total authenticity.And you will be surprised that a miraculous door opens in your being. If you can live your sadness with no image of being happy, you become happy immediately because the division disappears. There is no division anymore. “I am sadness,” and there is no question of any ideal to be anything else. So there is no effort, no conflict. “I am simply this,” and there is relaxation. And in that relaxation is grace and in that relaxation is joy.All psychological pain exists only because you are divided. Pain means division, and bliss means no division. It will look paradoxical to you that if one is sad and accepts one’s sadness, how can one become joyous? It will look paradoxical, but it is so. Try it.And I am not saying try to be happy; I am not saying, “Accept your sadness so that you can become happy.” I am not saying that. If that is your motivation then nothing will happen; you are still struggling. You will be watching from the corner of your eye. “So much time has passed and I have accepted even sadness, and I am saying ‘I am sadness,’ and joy is still not coming.” It will not come that way.Joy is not a goal, it is a by-product. It is a natural consequence of oneness and unity. Just be united with this sadness, for no motivation, for no particular purpose. There is no question of any purpose. This is how you are this moment; this is your truth this moment. And next moment you may be angry – accept that too. And next moment you may be something else – accept that too.Live moment to moment, with tremendous acceptance, without creating any division, and you are on the way toward self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not a question of reading the Upanishads, and sitting silently and reciting, “Aham brahmasmi, I am God.” These are all foolish efforts. Either you know you are godly or you don’t know it. You can go on for your whole life repeating, “Aham brahmasmi, I am God.” You can waste your whole life in repeating it; you will not know it.If you know it, there is no point in repeating it. Why are you repeating it? If you know, you know. If you don’t know, how can you know by repetition? Just see the whole stupidity of it. But that’s what is being done in this country and in other countries also, in monasteries and ashrams. What are people doing? – parrot-like repetition.I am giving you a totally different approach. It is not by repetition of the Koran or Bible or Vedas that you will become a knower – no. You will only become knowledgeable. Then how does one come to know oneself? – drop the division.The division is the whole problem. You are against yourself. Drop all ideals which create this antagonism in you. You are the way you are. Accept it with joy, with gratitude, and suddenly a harmony will be felt. The two selves in you: the ideal self and the real self, will not be there to fight anymore. They will merge and meet into one.It is not really sadness that gives you pain. It is the interpretation that sadness is wrong that gives you pain, that becomes a psychological problem. It is not anger that is painful; it is the idea that anger is wrong that creates psychological anxiety. It is the interpretation, not the fact. The fact is always liberating.Jesus says, “Truth liberates,” and that is of tremendous import. Yes, truth liberates, but not knowing about truth. Be the truth, and it liberates. Be the truth, and there is liberation. You need not bring it, you need not wait for it; it happens instantly.How to be the truth? – you already are the truth. You are carrying false ideals; they are creating the trouble. Drop the ideals. For a few days be a natural being. Just as the trees and animals and birds… Accept your being as you are, and a great silence arises. How can it be otherwise? There is no interpretation. Then sadness is beautiful, it has depth. Then anger is also beautiful; it has life vitality. Then sex too is beautiful because it has creativity.When there is no interpretation, all is beautiful. When all is beautiful, you are relaxed. In that relaxation you have fallen into your own source, and that brings self-knowledge. Falling into one’s own source is what is meant by “Know thyself.” It is not a question of knowledge, it is a question of inner transformation.And what transformation am I talking about? I am not giving you any ideal that you have to be like; I am not saying that you have to transform from what you are and become somebody else. You have simply to relax into whatsoever you are, and just see.Have you heard what I am saying? Just see the point – it is liberating. And a great harmony, a great music is heard. That music is of self-knowledge. And your life starts changing. Then you have a magic key which unlocks all the locks.If you accept sadness, sadness will disappear. How long can you be sad if you accept sadness? If you are capable of accepting sadness you will be capable of absorbing it in your being; it will become your depth.And how long will you be able to be angry if you accept anger? Anger feeds on rejection. If you accept it, you have absorbed the energy. And anger has great energy in it, vitality, and when that energy is absorbed you become more vital. Your life then has a passion to it, it is a flame. It is not a dull, insipid life; it has intelligence and passion and sharpness.And if you have accepted sex, one day sex disappears too. And it releases great creativity in you because sex is the potential of creativity. And then you become a creator. Great paintings may arise through you, great poetry may come, great songs may be born, or music. Anything and everything is possible then – you participate with existence.Sex is the lowest form of creativity, just the seed of creativity. Once the seed has broken, has dissolved, has been absorbed, your whole being becomes creative. And to be creative is to be blissful, to be creative is to be one with God. When you become a creator you participate in God.And I am not saying that unless you paint and write poetry you will not be a creator. Buddha didn’t paint, has not written any poetry, but his whole life was of creativity. Whosoever he touched was transformed. Whosoever was courageous enough to come close to him was reborn. He created a great energy field, a buddhafield, and whosoever entered in that field was never the same again. That is his creativity.He didn’t write any visible poetry, but the way he walks is poetry, the way he looks at people is poetry. He never danced. But if you watch, silently sitting underneath the bodhi tree there is a great dance happening in him. It is an invisible dance; it is subtle, it is not gross. It is not of the physical, it is a spiritual dance. He is not separate from existence. He is dancing in the trees in the wind, and he is dancing with the stars and he is dancing with the whole. He is not separate anymore.Do you understand the difference? If you try to drop sex, all creativity will disappear from your life. That’s what happened in this unfortunate country. People have tried to drop sex; people have tried to somehow impose celibacy on themselves. And they all became uncreative; they all became dull, they lost intelligence. You can go around and see Indian mahatmas, and you will not see such dull and stupid people anywhere else in the world. Their whole life consists of living in a very uncreative way; they are praised for uncreative things.Somebody fasts, that’s why he is praised – not for any dance. Somebody sleeps on a bed of thorns, that’s why he is praised. Now, he has not done anything creative in the world. He has not made the world a little more beautiful than he found it. He will leave the world as ugly as it was before, or even uglier. But he is praised because he lies on a bed of thorns. What is the point of it?If you repress sex, creativity disappears. If you accept sex, sex is transformed into creativity. If you accept anger, it releases in you great vitality and passion in you. Your life becomes a passionate life. Then it is a life of involvement, commitment, participation. Then you are not just a spectator. Then you are in the thick of it – the dance of life, part of it. You are involved each moment. Then you are not an escapist. You live joyously and totally. Then you contribute something to existence. Then you are not futile, then you have some meaning. But anger has to be accepted. Then the anger’s energy is absorbed.Whenever you reject something, you have rejected some energy. You have said, “I don’t want to absorb this energy.” But this is your energy. And the rejected energy will keep you poor. Reject anger, and you have rejected the possibility of being vital. Now you will be dull. Reject sex, and you have rejected the possibility of being creative. Now no poetry, no song, no dance is going to happen in your life. You will just be a dead man walking. Your life will be an empty gesture – impotent.If you have rejected sadness then you will not have any depth. You will remain shallow. Your laughter will also be shallow because it will not have any depth. That sadness can only be released through acceptance. Your laughter will be just on the surface.That’s what I mean when I see people and call them phony. A phony person is one who is only pretending to live but not really living, is afraid of life. And this phoniness comes through rejection. Go on rejecting everything. Keep an ideal in the mind that you have to become a Buddha, that you have to become a Jesus. You will never become one; on the contrary, you will lose all possibility of ever becoming anything.Forget all about Buddhas and Krishnas and Christs; they are not ideals to be imitated. Don’t have any ideals, be a destroyer of ideals. This is rebellion and this is religion too. And when there are no ideals haunting you, torturing you, you fall into harmony with yourself. And when you don’t reject anything, all energies are yours, you are enriched. Then you have tremendous energy. And that tremendous energy is joy, that energy is delight.And falling into your own source, you become a knower. And the moment you know yourself, you have known all, because it is the same. That which is in me is in everybody. Only forms are different, houses are different. It is the same consciousness.That in me which says, “I am” also says the same in you, “I am.” This I-am-ness is one. It is the same in the trees – unspoken. It is the same in the rocks – fast asleep. But it is the same I-am-ness. And to know this is to know the meaning of, “Aham brahmasmi, I am God.”He doesn’t know his own self:how should he know the self of another?He knows only his hands and feet,how should he know about God?You know only your hands and feet. This is the abode, this is the house. You are acquainted only with the temple. When are you going to be acquainted with the deity of the temple? Who is this who lives in this house? Who is embodied in the body? What is this consciousness?You are listening to me, you are listening through the ears. You are seeing me, you are seeing through the eyes. Certainly you are not the ears and you are not the eyes. The eyes and ears are windows – somebody is hidden behind, standing behind the windows.Just watch – your eyes are windows. When you are looking at me you are looking through the eyes. But who are you? Who is this who is looking at me? Who is this who is hearing? What is this consciousness?Don’t reject anything, otherwise you will never be able to know this consciousness. Accept all that you are. If you reject anything you recoil from your own energies. You create fragments. Don’t recoil from your energies. When anger is there, accept it. When sadness is there, accept it. This is your energy, this is the gift of existence. Absorb it, digest it. It is you.And when you are not recoiling from anything, when you don’t have any interpretations of good and bad, when you don’t condemn anything, when you forget all about judgment, when you are not a constant judger, assessor, condemner, evaluator, when all these things have disappeared and you are simply a tremendous acceptance of all that is – knowing happens. And in that knowing, God is known.This is beyond the sage’s grasp:you must be a foolif you think that you know it.Even the so-called sages find it beyond their grasp. So the learned people, the pundits and the scholars, if they think that they know God, that they know themselves, they must be fools.God is beyond any grasp; even the grasp of the sage is not capable of holding God in two hands because God is never the sought, but the seeker. God is not there that you can grasp it. God is the one who is trying to grasp. How can you grasp the grasper? That will be absurd.That’s why you cannot see your own face, you cannot see your own eyes. You can see them in a mirror but you see only the reflection of your eyes, not your eyes. The eyes cannot see themselves.How can God grasp himself? If I try to grasp my hand with the same hand, it is going to be maddening. It will drive you crazy. It will be like a dog trying to chase its own tail.This is beyond the sage’s grasp – because it is beyond grasp. Why is it beyond grasp? Not that it is far away, but because it is the very energy that is trying to grasp it. The knower is the known. The knowledge is not going to be of something else; it is self-knowing. There is not going to be any object of knowledge that you will grasp. You are the subject and you are the object. You are all that is. Consciousness is all.When you can expound on this,you will know the pure essence of faith;till then,what have faith and you in common?You can’t know what faith is; what you call faith is only belief. Belief is of the head, it is part of knowledge. Belief is false and phony. Belief means somebody else has said something and you have believed it; it is borrowed. Belief is never original. Faith is always original. It arises in you; it is the growth of your own consciousness.…you will know the pure essence of faith – only when you know yourself – till then, what have faith and you in common?So don’t deceive yourself that you are a believer. Don’t pretend and don’t think that you know, and don’t think that you think original thoughts. No thought is ever original. Only experience is original.After little Lori had a tussle with a neighborhood friend, the girl’s mother scolded her. “Remember, Lori,” said the mother, “that it was the Devil who suggested to you that you pull little Alice’s hair.”“I suppose so,” said Lori. “But kicking her in the shins was my own idea.”People go on thinking that something is “my own idea.” It gives a good feeling to the ego. But no idea is yours. Only consciousness is yours.Alfred Tennyson says:But what am I?An infant crying in the night?An infant crying for the light?And with no language but a cry!Knowledge is not going to help. A cry may be of more help. Weeping, crying, tears, love – something authentic, something true, something that arises in your being in this moment, may be of more help. It will give you some taste of reality. Otherwise your faith is only borrowed, dead.That’s how there are so many Mohammedans and Hindus and Christians and Jews, but you don’t find religious people anywhere. Religious people have disappeared from the earth. Yes, Christians are there, Hindus are there, but where are the religious people?Religion consists of faith, not of belief. Behind the belief there is always doubt. Belief is rooted in doubt. It is because of the doubt, it is to repress the doubt, that you put a belief upon yourself. It is as if you hide a wound behind a roseflower but the wound remains there.Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum decided the only solution to their marital problems was in divorce, so they went to see the rabbi.The rabbi was concerned about the three children and was reluctant to see the family broken up. He thought that if he could stall the couple maybe they would work it out together.“Well,” said the rabbi, “there’s no way of dividing three children. What you’ll have to do is live together one more year. You’ll have a fourth child, and then it will be easy to arrange a proper divorce. You’ll take two children, and he’ll take two.”“Nothing doing,” said Mrs. Mandelbaum, “Rabbi, if I had depended on him, I wouldn’t even have had these three!”Just on the surface, things appear one way. Deep down it is totally different. On the surface, people show trust, confidence in each other. Deep down, there is doubt. On the surface, love – deep down there is hatred. On the surface, people are so nice; deep down, they are really bitter, poisonous. This duality has to be dropped. Faith arises only when you have become one. Faith is the fragrance of oneness, of integration, of individuation.It is better to be silentthan to talk nonsenselike one of the learned;faith is not woveninto every garment.It is better to be silent, says Hakim Sanai, because at least in silence you will not be lying to anybody. And you will not be lying to yourself either. In silence at least you will be ignorant; you will not pretend knowledge.If a person can remain silent for a few hours every day he will become aware of his whole phoniness because he will see his real face again and again. If you continuously talk and continuously relate with people you forget your original face because you have to wear masks continuously. For twenty-four hours you are talking, using words, and when you continuously use words, slowly, slowly you start believing in those words, in the sound of those words.Words have a hypnotic power. If you use a certain word again and again, it hypnotizes you. If you use the word God again and again, slowly, slowly you start thinking that you know what you mean, that you know what God is. It is very dangerous to repeat words.But people go on talking. They don’t give any gap in which they can simply be silent and be. If you are silent at least one hour every day, you will be aware continuously that what you say is nonsense. And then ninety-nine percent of your talking will start disappearing. What is the point of talking nonsense?But then why do people talk? They talk just to hide themselves behind the noise. Whenever you are nervous you start talking. Now it is a known fact – if people are forced to live in solitude, after three weeks they start talking to themselves. They cannot bear silence, it becomes intolerable, so they start talking to themselves. They have to talk; words somehow keep them clinging to their personality. Once words disappear, they start falling into the impersonal, and they are very much afraid of the impersonal. And the impersonal is your reality and you are afraid of it; you are clinging to the illusions that words create.You were made for work:a robe of honor awaits you.How is it that you are satisfiedwith mere rags?People are satisfied with mere words; they are rags. Sanai says, “It is unbelievable. How are you satisfied with mere rags?” You were made to work your way through this darkness of existence. This is a task to be done, this is a way of growth. To be here on the earth simply means that existence has given an opportunity to you to grow. This earth is a challenge. Accept the challenge, encounter life – don’t escape.A few people escape in words, a few people escape into monasteries, a few people escape into politics, a few people escape into money; these are all escapes. A few become learned people, a few become rich, a few become very powerful in the world, a few become very respectable, moral and virtuous, but the real work is not done.What is the real work? Sufis call only one thing real work, and that is self-remembrance. Gurdjieff also learned the word work from the Sufis. He used to call his teachings “the work.” He also learned the word zikr, self-remembering, from the Sufis. The work is to remember oneself. The only work worth doing is to remember oneself.You were made for work:a robe of honor awaits you.How is it that you are satisfiedwith mere rags?How will you ever have richesif you are idle sixty days a month?This is a very strange expression, sixty days a month. It contains a great insight. The man who remembers himself has sixty days in one month: thirty are his inner, and thirty the outer. He lives in a double way. His life has not only one dimension, the horizontal; his life has two dimensions, the vertical is also there.Thirty days he lives outside through the senses in the world. Thirty days he lives within himself in silence, in his innermost core. He has sixty days. This is a beautiful expression. The really rich life cannot be only horizontal, it cannot be linear, because the line cannot have any depth and the line cannot have any height either. The real life has to be both: horizontal and vertical. Then there is all that is needed.You meet God outside, you meet God inside. You move between the outer God and the inner God – that movement is real richness. Wherever you go you find God. You open your eyes, and the tree… God is the green in it and God is the gold in it and God is the red in it. And you close your eyes, and the pure consciousness, the silence… And God is the silence there. God is in you and in the other. Life becomes multidimensional.Once a man asked Emerson, “How old are you?”Emerson was around sixty, but Emerson said, “I am three hundred and sixty years old.”The person who had inquired was very much puzzled; he couldn’t believe his own ears. Three hundred and sixty years? He thought he must have heard wrongly, so he said, “Pardon me, sir, can you repeat that again? How old are you?”And Emerson said again, “Three hundred and sixty.”The man said, “You must be joking.”Emerson said, “No. Comparatively speaking, in sixty years I have lived six times more than other people live. In sixty years I have lived six times more, hence I count my age as three hundred and sixty years.”And there have been people, and there are people, who live so intensely that their single moment is equivalent to eternity.Knowing what you know,be serene also, like a mountain;and do not be distressed by misfortune.Knowledge without serenityis an unlit candle;together they are honeycomb;honey without wax is a noble thing;wax without honey is only fit for burning.Knowing what you know, be serene also… The real test is in serenity. The man who is simply knowledgeable is not serene, that has to be used as a criterion. The knowledgeable man is not calm and quiet and serene. His heart is constantly in turmoil; his head is continuously in a kind of insanity. Deep down in him there is a constant traffic of thoughts. There is no serenity, no stillness.Sitting by the side of such a man – a learned man, a pundit, a scholar – you will feel a kind of uneasiness arising in you. You will not be surrounded by his serenity, you will not have any taste of his grace. He has none.Sanai says: Knowing what you know be serene also… Knowledge alone is not enough. In fact, knowledge without serenity is not true knowledge. True knowledge is born out of serenity, silence and meditativeness. First one falls into deep silence inside, and out of that silence arises knowing. Then it is true knowing. It does not arise out of scriptures; it arises when you open the book of your own being.…be serene also, like a mountain; and do not be disturbed by misfortune. The man of serenity is not disturbed by anything because he accepts. Sadness comes, he accepts it; joy comes, he accepts it. He has no preference; he has no choice. He lives in a choiceless consciousness. Whatsoever happens, happens, whatsoever is, is, and he is totally open to it. He drinks it, he absorbs it. He has no likes and dislikes, no preferences, no choices. He is not against sadness, he is not against anger, he is not against sex, he is not against love. He is neither against nor for; he is simply serene.If you choose, immediately you are disturbed. Watch it – whenever you choose you will be disturbed. Choice brings disturbance because choice means alternatives: to be this or to be that, to be or not to be. Choice means you are standing on a crossroad, now which road to follow? If you go to the right, who knows? It may just lead you into a cul-de-sac. Maybe the left was the right choice. Who knows? How to decide? The moment you choose, you become disturbed.And you always choose against yourself, against a part of yourself. One part says, “Choose this,” another part says, “Choose that.” Now you have to decide, and in that decision you will be divided. The part that was saying “Don’t choose this” has been denied, has been rejected. That rejected, denied part will take revenge. Sooner or later it will say, “Now see what happened, now repent. I had told you beforehand don’t choose this, this was wrong, but you didn’t listen to me.” And the same would have happened if you had chosen the other. The man who chooses remains disturbed.Serenity means a state of choicelessness. Just like a mirror, it simply reflects, with no choice. An ugly man comes, it reflects. A beautiful man comes, it reflects. It has no choice; there is no question of choice – just reflecting.Sadness comes, and the man of serenity says, “I am sadness. This moment, this is how I am. This moment, this is my reality.” He does not compare either. “The last moment was better, I was joyous. Now I am sad.” He never compares two moments. He never hankers for something else in the future. Whatsoever is, he is totally relaxed with it. This is serenity – and out of serenity comes real knowing. Knowledge without serenity is an unlit candle…And what is the point of an unlit candle? There will be no light. That’s how the knowledgeable people are: great knowledge, candles and candles and candles, but all unlit. They stink of wax but no light comes out of them.Knowledge without serenity is an unlit candle; together they are honey-comb… Together they are beautiful. Honey without wax is a noble thing…Even if there is only serenity, it’s better. Without knowledge, serenity is better; it is still a noble thing. …wax without honey is only fit for burning.But knowledge without serenity is of no use, it is worthless.Leave this abodeof birth and decay;leave this pit,and make for your destined home.This heap of dust is a mirage,where fire seems like water.Here, you are deluded in many ways. Ignorance pretends to be knowledge, fire appears like water, poison is labeled as nectar. You are living in a very, very delusionary world. Unless you wake yourself up, you will continue to move from one mirage to another mirage, from one dream to another dream.Leave this abode – this abode of illusions and mirages. Leave this abode of past and future, imagination and memory, of birth and decay. Leave this abode of time, of beginnings and ends.…leave this pit and make for your destined home. Where is the destined home? It is within you. It is what I am calling falling into your own source, relaxing into your own being.Be the truth that you are, and you will be liberated; you will be liberated from all illusions, from all mirages. Be the truth each moment that you are. This is the message of all the buddhas and all the Sufis – be the truth each moment that you are. Don’t hanker for anything else, don’t desire for anything else. Don’t try to become, just be the moment you are. Relaxed, serene, utterly at home – this is the destined home.This heap of dust is a mirage, where fire seems like water. Beware! You are surrounded by many things which are not what they appear to be. Don’t be deceived by appearances. And time is slipping by, each moment an opportunity is wasted.There is a Sufi saying:Don’t be inattentive to the beloved,not even for the blink of an eye;for perhaps in that moment she will lookand you will have missed her.Sufis call God “the beloved.” They think of God as “she,” as their woman, as their beloved.“Don’t be inattentive to the beloved, not even for the blink of an eye…” No moment has to be missed because who knows what moment the destined home may have arrived? Who knows in what moment she will look at you? And if you are inattentive and lost in your imaginations of the future – how and what you would like to be – and you are lost in past memories, you will go on missing.God can be contacted only in the present moment – this moment, now and here, and only now and here. And time is fast slipping by; you lose every moment some tremendously valuable opportunity.As the young bachelor sat having coffee with a friend’s stunning wife, she announced, “I think I’d better warn you, my husband will be home in an hour.”“But I haven’t done anything wrong,” responded the bachelor, somewhat surprised.“I know. I thought you’d want to know how much time you have.”There is not much time, you don’t have much time. Don’t postpone, this is the moment. Don’t say, “Tomorrow” – tomorrow is a mirage. Be alert now, be awake now, this moment, and there is serenity and there is calmness. And suddenly one is relaxed, and the source is contacted, and one has arrived home.This is the home you have been searching for so many lives. But your very methodology of search has been wrong. You had made it a goal, and it is not a goal; it is the source.God is not where we are going, God is from where we are coming. God is not there, God is here. God is not then, God is now.What I have been telling you this morning is of immense value. This is my message to my sannyasins, to my Sufis – accept yourself in tremendous gratitude. Whatsoever is, is, and it can’t be otherwise, so don’t fight with it.No fact ever creates any psychological pain. It is the interpretation that brings pain to you. Pain is your creation because it is your interpretation. Change the interpretation and the same fact becomes pleasant. Drop all interpretations and the fact is simply a fact, neither painful nor pleasant. Don’t choose, don’t have any preferences. Just be watchful, accepting and watchful, and you have the secret key in your hands.This will create the first unity in you, unity with yourself. And then the second unity happens of its own accord; you need not worry about it. You do the first step, the second step is taken by God himself. You move half, he moves half.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-04/

The first question:Osho,Buddha did not have a master, Jesus did not have a master, you did not have a master. Why do we need a master?Because you are not yet capable of allowing life to be your master; because you don’t know how to listen, how to learn; because you are incapable of learning, that’s why you need a master.The need arises out of your insensitivity, out of your unintelligence. If you are intelligent, then life is enough. Then there are sermons in the stones, and every leaf of a tree is a message, and the river going to the ocean carries all the scriptures with it. You need not go to the Vedas, to the Koran and to the Bible, there is no need. The whole existence is singing the song of the divine every moment. But you are not able to listen to it. You are not yet capable of opening yourself to it; hence the need of a master.The master is only a beginning. He will teach you how to listen, he will teach you how to be open. He will give you love so that you can warm up; you have become too cold. Once you are warmed up a little, there is no need for a master, then the whole of life is the master. The master simply becomes a jumping board.You say, “Buddha did not have a master…” That is wrong; Buddha had many masters. His last master was Alar Kalam, a very rare man.You say, “Jesus did not have a master…” You don’t know. He was a disciple of a great master, John the Baptist; he was initiated by him. Buddha had many, Jesus had one, and I had millions. I have been learning from all possible sources – from men, from women, from trees, from mountains. I cannot show you a particular master because there have been so many. I have been constantly learning and listening.And you ask, “Why do we need a master?” Your very question shows the need. If you cannot answer this simple question you will need a master. Why do you ask me? Why can’t you answer it yourself? Even this question has to be answered by somebody else; the need is there.But why has this question arisen? The need is certainly there, otherwise why should you be here? The need is there, but the reluctance to surrender is also there, although you have become a sannyasin. But deep down you are not yet surrendered, hence the question. You would like to not be a disciple. It hurts the ego, it is humiliating. You would like to be the master yourself; that is ego satisfying. The question has arisen not because you don’t need a master. The need is there, the very question says the need is there, but somewhere deep down there is resistance. You don’t like it; you don’t like surrendering yourself, you don’t like to be bowing in trust to somebody. That hurts, that is painful.To be a disciple needs guts. To be a disciple means one is courageous enough to dissolve oneself. It is no ordinary matter. And unless you are capable of becoming a disciple, you will never become a master.The very word disciple is beautiful; it comes from a root which means learning. The disciple is one who is courageous enough to accept the fact, “I don’t know, so I am ready to learn. Then from wherever the light comes, I am open to it. I will not close my windows and my doors. I will allow the wind and the sun and the rain to come in. I am ready to go on this voyage of the unknown; it is uncharted territory.”A disciple simply means one who has decided to learn. It is a great commitment to learning. And it is natural that one should start from somewhere; the journey has to start from some point – from A, from B, from C.Let me be the point from where the journey starts. The master is not the point where the journey ends; the master is the point from where you start the journey of the unknown. He will go with you only to the point till he feels now you can go alone. Then he will leave you on his own accord.And that is the criterion of a true master. You will not need him to leave; he will leave you on his own accord. If you leave, it will be a wrong step. If the desire to leave arises in you, that simply means you have not yet learned, you have not yet known the master. When you know the master there is no question of leaving him because there is nobody found whom you can leave. There has never been anybody from the very beginning.When you enter the being of the master you will find utter emptiness – a presence, certainly, but not a person whom you can leave. The disciple can never leave the master. First, he cannot leave because he is not yet capable to walk on his own, to be on his own. Secondly, even when he becomes capable of going on his own, he cannot leave because there is nobody to leave. Now he knows.But the master leaves on his own accord. He starts dropping out of your existence. He starts disappearing more and more and more because now you are ready to go on your own.The mother is happy when the child can walk without her support. If the mother tries to go on supporting the child forever, then she does not love the child. Then she is pathological and neurotic. She is crippling the child; she will be a paralysis to the child.Such is the case with a master. If a master wants you always to remain dependent on him, then he is not a true master, he is pseudo, phony. The master does not need you. If he needs you in some way, if he depends that you should depend on him, that means he needs you. That means somewhere your dependence on him is fulfilling his ego. He feels good, “Look how many disciples I have got.” He goes on counting his disciples, “I have so many disciples, I am a great master.”Certainly he will not allow you to leave. He will prevent you from leaving, because your going means one prop to his ego disappearing. He will be dependent on you. And how can the master who is dependent on you help you? He himself needs help; he himself is in confusion, in darkness. He himself is not yet capable to be alone. He has not arrived home.But the true master will always watch when to leave you. He will be always ready to leave you whenever you are ready to be on your own. He will not leave you before you are ready, that is true. And only he can know when you are ready; you cannot know it.Just the other day, a sannyasin had written me a letter saying that now he feels he is capable to be on his own, that now he can go all alone, and he wants to drop out of sannyas. I said, “That’s perfectly okay.”Now he wants to see me. I said, “Why?” He wrote a letter to get last instructions from me. Now, what kind of readiness is this? If you still need instructions from me, then what kind of readiness is this to be on your own?When you are ready I will tell you that you are ready. And the paradox is, I will tell you, “Drop the sannyas!” and you will not drop it. How can you drop it? It is the sannyas that has brought you so far.When Sariputra became an enlightened person in his own right, Buddha told him, “Now there is no need to bow down to me. You are in the same exalted state as I am.” But Sariputra continued to bow down the same, no difference. Just as he had come for the first day years before and had touched Buddha’s feet, he continued to touch Buddha’s feet. And Buddha would say to him again and again, “Sariputra, now there is no need!” And he wouldn’t listen.One day Buddha asked him, “Why don’t you listen to me?” Sariputra said, “Now I am a buddha in my own right. Why should I listen to you? This is something tremendously beautiful. And how can I stop bowing to you and touching your feet? It is a sweet nostalgia, it is sweet memory. It is through these feet I have come to this point; it is sheer gratitude.”Buddha sent Sariputra away. He told him, “Now go. There are millions of people stumbling in darkness – help them.” Sariputra was crying and he said, “No, don’t tell me to go anywhere.”And Buddha said, “Now you are a buddha in your own right, and it doesn’t suit a buddha to cry. You are capable of going on your own.”And Sariputra said, “There are no conditions on a buddha; he can cry, he can laugh. There are no conditions on a buddha, his existence is unconditional.”But he had to go, the master was insistent. He went, but every day wherever he was, he would bow down in the direction where Buddha was. Every morning, every evening, his disciples would ask, “To whom are you bowing down?”He said, “Buddha must be there in the east. I have information that he must be in that certain town today, so I am bowing down in his direction.”This is becoming a buddha in your own right. Now here you are, you write to me that, “I have come, I have arrived. Now I can move on my own.”So I said, “Okay, move!” Now why should you need last instructions from me? And if you still need instructions, then dropping sannyas is not because you are ready, but just because you are going back. For four months you were here; it is easy to be in orange here.Now this sannyasin is going back to Germany; it will be difficult there. And there must have been a cunning strategy behind it. You must have planned it already before you took sannyas, that the four months while you are here you will be a sannyasin. And when you are leaving you can always say, “Now I am ready to be on my own, so I can leave.”Then why the need for last instructions? When a disciple is ready I will tell you, “Now you move on your own.” You need not tell me; your telling me is pointless.You ask me, “Why do we need a master?” There must be some pain inside. Just the idea that you are a disciple, that you have to be in somebody else’s hands, totally surrendered, is against the ego. And that’s why you need a master. The master is a device so that you can drop your ego. The master is just a strategy, a situation. It will be very difficult to drop the ego on your own. Who will drop whom? How will you drop your ego on your own? It will be almost impossible.The master is just a device. You can trust the master in deep love, and you can put the ego aside. Otherwise you don’t have anything else than the ego. If you put that aside, you will fall into utter emptiness. And you will not be able to fall into that abysmal, bottomless emptiness. You will become very afraid. You will again cling to anything that you can find around you. And the ego is the closest.It will be impossible for you to go into nothingness unless somebody is there calling you forth – from your very nothingness, somebody calling you forth, “Come on! Don’t be afraid.”Once you have learned that dropping the ego is not death, once you have learned and tasted that dropping the ego is real life – real life begins only when the ego is dropped. Once you have tasted, there will be no need of the master. But it will not be so easy to leave the master.How can you leave somebody who has been such a transformation to you? The very idea is stupid. And there is nobody to leave; nobody is clinging to you. In fact, between the master and the disciple, the relationship is one way. The master has no relationship to you. Listen well – don’t be shocked. The master has no relationship with you.It is only you who need a relationship, it is just in your mind that the master exists; otherwise there is nobody there. One day when you will know the truth, the master will have disappeared.The disciple disappears when he surrenders to the master, and when he knows nothingness, the master disappears. There’s nobody to leave and nobody to leave. In that utter purity is nirvana, is enlightenment. But it is painful; growth is painful, and the greatest pain comes when you have to drop your idea of the self.A parable:Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, “I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress.”And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, “Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without.”At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, “Yes, you are well and whole, but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty.”The disciple is in a deep pain because the ego is to be dropped and it is not easy. The ego is not like a garment that you can put off easily. The ego is like your skin, it has to be peeled and it is painful.You have lived with the ego for so many, many lives. You have changed bodies many times, but the ego is the same. It has persisted as a continuous thing in you, it is very ancient. To drop it is not easy; it is arduous, it is great agony. But only out of this agony is ecstasy born – a pearl of exceeding beauty, a state of consciousness of utter benediction. But in the beginning you will feel, “I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress.”And those who don’t know the pain of disciplehood will tell you, “Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without.”You can go around… There are millions of people who have no idea what it means to be a disciple, who have never tasted anything of disciplehood, who have never surrendered to anybody, who have never loved somebody so deeply that they are ready to die for him, who have never loved anybody so intimately that they disappear into that intimacy, that they melt into that intimacy.They will tell you that you are a little bit abnormal, “There is no need to be a disciple, and there is no need to be a master. Look at us! We are whole, within and without. We don’t need a master, so why should you need a master?”And yes, they are whole within and without, and healthy. But their health is valueless, and their wholeness is of a very lower order; their wholeness is very mundane. And one who wants to attain to the sacred realm will have to pass through pain: the pain of losing the mundane, the pain of being nowhere, the pain of being in limbo, the pain of losing that you know and yet not gaining that which you desire to know. When you are just in the middle, that’s where the disciple is. He is dropping that which is known, perfectly known, and trying to enter something of which he is absolutely unaware what exactly it is.He is going into the unknown – dropping the secure for the insecure, dropping the safe for the unsafe, dropping the so-called sanity and becoming insane. That’s what Sufis say, unless you become mad for God, you will not attain to him. Madness is a must.The disciple is mad. He has fallen in love with a master, and love makes one mad. Now nobody is going to understand you; you will be utterly incapable of logically proving to somebody what you are doing. And it is not that you don’t know logic…My sannyasins are one of the most educated classes of the world. We have all kinds of people – artists, painters, professors, scientists, psychologists, therapists, doctors, engineers – all well educated. It is not that they don’t know how to argue. They are very clever in arguing, but now something has happened which is beyond argument.And talking about your master and about the love that has arisen in you, you will look almost foolish before anybody. It is painful, but only through this pain does growth happen. This is a growth pain, and a growth pain is far more valuable than the health which does not allow growth. To be abnormal and mad is far better if growth comes through it than to be normal and sane if no growth comes through it.The whole point is growth. You should not remain what you are. You shouldn’t remain the seed; you should burst forth into thousands of flowers. But before that the seed has to die in the soil.The master is just a climate, a soil, in which the disciple dies. Trusting, he falls into the soil and dies. There is no way of guaranteeing your future, what will happen. How can you guarantee a seed that “It is absolutely certain that a sprout will come when you are gone; and there will be great foliage and greenery and red flowers, and there will be great joy when you have died?”But the seed will say, “How can I be convinced of it? I will not be there to witness it. What guarantee is there? Who knows, I may simply die and nothing may happen.”What can be said to the seed? It is impossible to convince the seed. But the seed falls in love with a tree which has already become… That which was hidden has become manifest. The seed falls in love with the flowers and the fragrance of the tree, and the seed asks, “What is the way? How can I become like you?”That’s the meaning of being a disciple. You come close to a buddha and you see the flowers and the fragrance, and you ask the buddha, “How can I become like you?” And the buddha says, “I died, that’s how I became. You die also.” And seeing the buddha and the fragrance and the silence and the calmness, a trust arises, a love arises. And the seed risks, the seed dies by the side of the great tree. And one day there is a sprout. But there is no logical way to convince anybody, unless you are already convinced through your love.So it is not a question of my convincing you to become disciples; there is no way to do that. It is by your being convinced through your own love that you become a disciple. And yes, it is painful, but all growth is painful.Go through this pain. Let this ego be gone completely, howsoever painful it is. It is better to be miserable in insecurity than to be miserable in security because one who is miserable in security will not grow. And growth is the highest value there is because man is potentially godly. Godliness has to be realized.And much will have to be dropped. Much will have to be unburdened, only then can you reach to that sunlit peak. The higher you go, the more will have to be dropped because everything will become a weight on you and a hindrance on the journey. You can reach the peak only when all that you were has been dropped on the way.You will reach to the peak only as a nothingness, a nobody. It is painful, and I know it. And I’m trying to create a climate here, an energy field, so that you can go through the pain as joyously as possible.The second question:Osho,Tell me the way from sexuality to love.Sex is beautiful, sexuality is ugly, and the difference has to be understood. Sex is a natural phenomenon. Sexuality is unnatural, abnormal and pathological. When sex becomes cerebral, when sex enters in your head, it becomes sexuality.Now, the head is not the center for sex. It is getting into confusion, it is getting upside down, it is getting deranged. Sex is not the function of the head, but when sex enters through the head it becomes sexuality. Then you think about sex, then you fantasize about sex. And the more you think, the more you fantasize about it, the more you will get into trouble because then nothing real will ever satisfy you because there is no limitation on fantasy, and reality is limited.For example, if you start thinking too much about sex you can create beautiful women – women which are only your fantasy; you will never find them anywhere in the world. Or men… You will never come across them. No real woman or man will ever satisfy you because of the fantasy. No real man or woman can fulfill your expectations of fantasy. Fantasy is fantasy; it is a dream.You can fantasize a woman who does not perspire, whose body has no body odor. You can fantasize a woman who is always sweet and never bitter. You can fantasize a woman who is always loving and warm and welcoming and never nags you and is never angry, never throws pillows at you. You can fantasize a woman who never ages, who remains always stuck at eighteen years of age – who is always fresh, always young, always beautiful, never falls ill, never makes any demands on you, never betrays you, never looks at any other man with longing, with desire. You can fantasize to no limit, but you will not find this woman anywhere. Now you have created a problem – you are no longer naturally attuned to your sex.Nature is perfectly capable of being fulfilled, but fantasy cannot be fulfilled. You may find your woman in girly magazines, in pornographic books, but you will not find her in reality. And whosoever you will find in reality will fall short.That is the problem the West is facing – it has fantasized too much about sex. The West has become sexual through fantasy; the East has become sexual through repression. Both have become sexual and both have lost the natural capacity of enjoying sex. Both have become pathological through different routes. The West has become pathological by fantasizing sex as being the ultimate goal of life, and the East has become pathological by thinking that sex is the ultimate barrier between God and man.Sex is neither: neither is it the ultimate goal nor the ultimate barrier. Sex is a simple phenomenon as hunger or thirst; there is nothing more to it. Neither is it what the Eastern mind has been thinking about it. The Eastern mind is too afraid of sex. Out of fear, sex has moved into the head; through the door of fear it entered into the head.So the Eastern so-called saints are simply fantasizing about sex because they have repressed it. And that which you repress goes on coming up again and again. It cannot be destroyed; nothing can ever be destroyed by repression. Repression makes sex, pathological sexuality. This is one extreme.The West has moved to another extreme. The other extreme is, fantasize about it. Sex is all, everything else is secondary, so have as much sex as you can. But you cannot have too much sex. There are limitations to the body, but you can fantasize as much as you want, there is no limitation to it. So, pornography exists, blue films exist, girly magazines exist, and people are being fed on these illusory mirages. Then no woman, no real man will ever satisfy you.These are both pathological states. Sexuality is pathological; whether you come to it through greed or fear does not matter. The East has become ill through fear; the West has become ill through greed. Greed and fear are two aspects of the same coin. So, on the surface it looks very different, that the East and the West are poles apart. They are not. Those who know, those who can see, can see that it is the same foolishness, the same stupidity. They have arrived to the same stupidity from different doors, that is true, but they have entered into the same place. And both have to be awakened, and both have to be made more enlightened about sex.Don’t make much fuss about sex either way, that is the first fundamental. If you want sex to become love, the first fundamental is to accept sex as an absolutely natural phenomenon. Don’t bring your metaphysics to it, don’t bring your religion to it. It has nothing to do with religion or metaphysics, it is a simple fact of life. It is how life produces itself. It is as simple as the trees bringing flowers and fruits – you don’t condemn the flowers. Flowers are sex; it is through the flowers that the tree is sending its seeds, its potentiality, to other trees.When a peacock dances, you don’t condemn it, but the dance is sex; it is to attract the female. When the cuckoo calls, you don’t condemn it; it is sex. The cuckoo is simply declaring, “I am ready.” The cuckoo is simply calling forth the woman. The sound, the beautiful sound, is just a seduction; it is courtship.If you watch life you will be surprised. The whole of life is through sex. Life reproduces itself through sex. It is a natural phenomenon, don’t drag unnecessary rationalizations into it.This is the first thing to be understood if you ever want any transformation of sex energy. The first thing is don’t deny it, don’t reject it, don’t repress it. Don’t be too greedy about it, don’t think that it is all – it is not. There is much more to life. And sex is beautiful. Still, there is much more to life, sex is only the foundation, it is not the whole temple.Repressed, it becomes sexuality. Fantasized, it becomes sexuality. One is an Eastern way of transforming sex into pathology, the other is a Western way. But nobody, either in the East or in the West, accepts that sex is a simple natural phenomenon. Neither the saints nor the sinners – nobody accepts sex to be a simple natural phenomenon. Both are obsessed with it, hence I say the two are not different. Sex accepted, respected, lived, becomes love.It is just as I was saying to you the other day, when sadness is there, accept it – it is you. Don’t say, “I am sad.” Say, “I am sadness.” Don’t say, “I have sadness.” Simply say, “I am sadness.” When you say, “I am sad” it seems it is something accidental. When you say, “I have sadness” it seems as if you are separate, and sadness is something that you have. Simply say, “I am sadness.” That moment there is no division between you and what you call sadness. In that moment you are sadness. The next moment you may be peace, and still the next moment you may be joy.Life is change. Life knows only one thing as permanent, and that is change. Only change is unchanging; everything else changes except change. That means only change has eternity. It is a continuum; you are not a fixed thing. And it is good that you are not a fixed thing, otherwise you would have been a thing, a commodity in the marketplace. You are a no-thing. You are not a fixed phenomenon; you are a constant opening, you are change.One moment there is sadness, and the river takes a turn. Another moment there is joy, and the river takes still another turn and there is peace. And it goes on and on. The moment has to be accepted in its totality – it is you. When there is sex, there is sex – it is you. Don’t say, “I have a sexual desire.” That is a way of dividing yourself, that is a way of creating a split.If you have a sexual desire, then there are two possibilities. If you are against it, repress it – that is the Eastern way of becoming mad, insane and pathological. The other way is, “I have sex desire, how to enhance it? How to make it more intense? How to enjoy it to the optimum?” That is the way of greed, the Western way. But the end is the same, the end product is the same – both become obsessed with it.Just let it be, whatsoever it is. It is you. You don’t have a sex desire; if you have a sex desire then something can be done to the sex desire. If you are it, nothing can be done about it because there is nobody else to do – you are it.This has to become the meditation of all my sannyasins – you are it, there is no division. Just see the beauty of it. When there is no division, there is no conflict. When there is no division, there is no fear, no greed. It is division that brings fear and greed. Greed and fear are your interpretations of the division, but the division is first and then come your interpretations.When the sex desire is there, you take it as something separate that is happening to you. It is like a thing in your hands. Now you have to decide whether you want it more or less, as if it is something that you can have more or less. It is as it is; there is no more, no less.Simply live it, be it, love it. This is your moment, this is the truth of the moment. And never compare, because one moment ago it wasn’t there. So don’t start comparing because comparison again brings a split. Next moment it may be gone again. Don’t compare. Life is change. That’s what Buddha has said, “Life is change.” That’s what Heraclitus said, “You cannot step in the same river twice.” Life, the river, is constantly moving.Deep down you want life to be static. Why? – because with a static and dormant life you will be more safe, more secure. But life is not dormant, only death is dormant. Life is dynamic, flowing – the more flowing, the more alive you are. Life is not a stagnant pool, it is a river. It is the Ganges, coming from the Himalayas, going to the ocean, coming from the heights, going to the depths. And again from the ocean the Ganges will evaporate from the depths to the heights, and again the clouds will gather on the Himalayas, and again the river will be born. It is a beautiful perfect circle. That’s how you move.Each moment has to be accepted as it is, with no condemnation, with no evaluation. And when you can accept sex as natural, it stops being cerebral. It drops from the head, it goes to the sex center where it belongs. If sex remains in the sex center, it is beautiful. If it goes to the head, it is ugly.Eating is beautiful. You are hungry and you eat and it is needed; it is nourishment. But then there are two types of people. A few people eat too much. Eating too much means the head has entered. When you are eating, the body is always sane. The body always says to you, “Stop now.” It immediately gives you an indication, a signal, “It is enough, now stop! No more is needed, my needs are fulfilled.” But the head says, “It is so tasty, it is so delicious – have one more plate.” It is the head, it is not the body. The body is recoiling, the body is saying, “No!” The body is always sane.And this is one of the fundamentals I would like to tell you about. Down the ages, your so-called saints have been telling you that the body is your enemy. It is not; the body is always your friend. If there is an enemy, it is the head, never the body. The body is always sane.Watch. I am not talking philosophy, I am simply stating a fact. Watch yourself – if you are ill the body says, “Don’t eat.” But the head says, “If you don’t eat you will become weak. So many vitamins are absolutely needed. You will become pale, you will not be strong.” This is the head. The body is saying, “You are ill, and to eat will be unnecessarily burdening the system. The system needs rest; it is better not to eat.”And that’s what animals do. No animal will eat when he is ill; he simply stops eating. That’s what children do, no child will eat then. But grown-ups will force them. They will say, “Eat, otherwise you will become ill, you will become weaker. You need it.” They force them. You can see small children crying and their mothers forcing them, “Eat a little more.” It is the head that creates the trouble.And then there are people who will fast when there is no need for fasting. The body is hungry, but if you are a Jaina and the paryushana, your religious days have come, you have to fast. The body is hungry and the body wants food, but you cannot eat because unfortunately you are a Jaina and the religious days are there, and if you eat you will be thrown into hellfire. It is the head interfering. The body says, “Eat,” but unfortunately you are a Mohammedan and it is the month of Ramadan and you have to fast. Now this is the head interfering.The head interferes in two ways: either it makes you indulgent or it makes you repressive. Again, one is the Eastern way, another is the Western way. Eat more than is needed – this is indulgence. Don’t eat when the body needs food – this is fasting, this is repression. It is always the head that interferes. It interferes in your food, it interferes in your sex, it interferes in your sleep, it goes on interfering in everything!Remember the Zen master, the great Zen master, Bokuju. Somebody asked him, “What is your discipline?”He said, “No discipline at all. When I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel sleepy I sleep. And no other discipline.”The man said, “But this is what we all do.”And Bokuju said, “No. It is very rare to find a person who does it, because one who does it becomes a buddha. Only a buddha can do it truly.”You don’t eat according to the needs of the body, you don’t sleep according to the needs of the body. You go on imposing your heads needs on the body. That interference makes everything pathological. That’s how sex is disturbed and becomes sexuality. If sex is accepted, respected, lived, it becomes love.You ask, “Tell me the way from sexuality to love.” First, the way is sexuality has to come back to sex. Directly. There is no way, no route; from sexuality to love there is no route. There is simply no route, nothing can be done about it. From sexuality to love there is no route because sexuality is in the head, and love is a heart phenomenon.From sexuality, come back to the sex center. From sex to love there is a direct route; they are bridged. In fact nothing is needed to be done. Just live your sex moments with utter joy, silence, peacefulness, with celebration. Live your sex moments meditatively, and meditation transforms sex into love. It is not only that sex becomes love. One day it becomes prayer, worship. It goes higher and higher. The highest form is prayer, the lowest form is sex. Between the two is love – love is the bridge. Sexuality is abnormal, it is pathological, it is ill. So whether you have chosen a path of being pathological like the Eastern people or like the Western people, it doesn’t matter.Accept your life as it is, and let the acceptance be as total as possible. When you don’t fight with yourself your energy starts falling into a subtle harmony. And that harmony brings you to love. And when the harmony becomes more and more refined, it brings you to prayer.Remember, unless sex has become prayer, the goal has not been achieved.The third question:Osho,Why do the Sufis say that man is a machine?Man is a machine, that’s why. Man as he is, is utterly unconscious. He is nothing but his habits, the sum total of his habits. Man is a robot; man is not yet man. Unless consciousness enters your being, you will remain a machine.That’s why Sufis say man is a machine. It is from the Sufis that Gurdjieff introduced the idea to the West that man is a machine. It is very rare that you are conscious. In your whole seventy years’ life, if you live the ordinary so-called life – healthy and whole within and without, with no pain of growth, with no pain within you of a growing pearl of exceeding beauty – then you will not know even seven moments of awareness in your whole life. And even if you know those seven moments or less, they will be only accidental.For example, you may know a moment of awareness if somebody suddenly comes and puts a revolver on your heart. In that moment, your thinking, your habitual thinking stops. For a moment you become aware because it is so dangerous; you cannot remain ordinarily asleep. In some dangerous situation you become aware; otherwise you remain fast asleep. You are perfectly skillful at doing your things mechanically.Just stand by the side of the road and watch people, and you will be able to see that they are all walking in their sleep. All are sleepwalkers, somnambulists – and so are you.Two bums were arrested and charged with a murder that had been committed in the neighborhood. The jury found them guilty and the judge sentenced them to hang by their necks until dead, and God have mercy on their souls.The two bore up pretty well until the morning of the day set for the execution arrived. As they were being prepared for the gallows, one turned to the other and said, “Damn me if I ain’t about off my nut. I can’t get my thoughts together. Why, I don’t even know what the day of the week is.”“This is a Monday,” said the other bum.“Monday? My God! What a rotten way to start the week!”Just watch yourself. Even to the very point of death, people go on repeating old habitual patterns. Now there is going to be no week; the morning has come when they are to be hanged. But just the old habit… Somebody says it is Monday, and you say, “Monday? My God! What a rotten way to start the week!”Man reacts. That’s why Sufis say man is a machine. Unless you start responding, unless you become responsible… Reaction comes out of the past, response come out of the present moment. Response is spontaneous, reaction is just old habit.Just watch yourself. Your woman says something to you, and then whatsoever you say, watch and ponder over it. Is it just a reaction? And you will be surprised, ninety-nine percent of your acts are not acts because they are not responses; they are just mechanical – just mechanical.It has been happening again and again. You say the same thing and your woman reacts the same way, and then you react, and it ends into the same thing again and again. You know it, she knows it, everything is predictable.I have heard:“Pop,” said a boy of ten, “how do wars get started?”“Well, son,” began Pop, “let’s say America quarreled with England.”“America’s not quarreling with England,” interrupted Mother.“Who said she was?” said Pop, visibly irritated. “I was merely giving the boy a hypothetical instance.”“Ridiculous!” snorted Mother. “You’ll put all sorts of wrong ideas in his head.”“Ridiculous, nothing!” countered Pop. “If he listens to you he’ll never have any ideas at all in his head.”Just as the dish throwing stage approached, the son spoke up again. “Thanks Mom, thanks Pop. I’ll never have to ask how wars get started again.”Just watch yourself. The things that you are doing, you have done so many times. The ways you react, you have always been reacting. In the same situation you always do the same thing. You are feeling nervous and you take out your cigarette and you start smoking. It is a reaction; you have done it whenever you have felt nervous.You are a machine. It is just a built-in program in you now. You feel nervous, your hand goes into the pocket and the packet comes out. It is almost like a machine doing things. You take the cigarette out, you put the cigarette in your mouth, you light the cigarette, and this is all going on mechanically. This has been done millions of times, and you are doing it again.And each time you do, it is strengthened; the machine becomes more mechanical, the machine becomes more skillful. The more you do it, the less awareness is needed to do it. This is why the Sufis say man functions as a machine. Unless you start destroying these mechanical habits…Sufis have many methods to destroy them. For example, they teach many devices. They say, “Do something just the contrary to what you have always done.”Try it. You come home, you are afraid, you are as late as ever, and the wife will be there ready to quarrel with you. And you are planning how to answer, what to say – that there was too much work in the office, and this and that. And she knows all what you are planning, and she knows what you are going to say if she asks. And you know if you say that you are late because there was too much work she is not going to believe it either. She has never believed it. She may have already checked; she may have phoned the office, she may have already inquired where you are. But still this is just a pattern.Sufis say, “Go home today and behave totally differently.” The wife asks you, “Where have you been?” And you say, “I was with a woman making love.” And then see what happens. She will be shocked! She will not have any way to find words even how to express and what to say. For a moment she will be completely lost because no reaction, no old pattern is applicable.Or maybe, if she has become too much of a machine, she will say, “I don’t believe you!” – just as she has never believed you. “You must be joking! Every day you come home…”I have heard about a psychoanalyst who was telling his patient – must have been giving a Sufi device, “Today when you go home…” Because the patient was complaining again and again, “I am always afraid of going home. My wife looks so miserable, so sad, always in despair that my heart starts sinking. I want to escape from the home.”The psychologist said, “Do something. Maybe you are the cause of it. Do something – today take flowers and ice cream and sweets for the woman, and when she opens the door hug her, give her a good kiss. And then immediately start helping her. Clean the table and the pots and the floor. Do something absolutely new that you have never done before.”The idea was appealing and the man tried it. He went home. The moment the wife opened the door and saw flowers and ice cream and sweets, and this beaming man who had never been laughing hugged her, she couldn’t believe what was happening! She was in utter shock; she couldn’t believe her eyes. Maybe this is somebody else! She had to look again.And when he kissed her and immediately started cleaning the table and went to the sink and started washing the pots, the woman started crying. When he came out he said, “Why are you crying?”She said, “Have you gone mad? I had always suspected one day or other you will go mad. Now it has happened. Why don’t you go and see a psychiatrist?”Sufis have such devices. They say, “Act totally differently, and not only will others be surprised, you will be surprised.” And just small things… For example, when you are nervous you walk fast. Don’t walk fast, go very slow and see. You will be surprised that it doesn’t fit, that your whole mechanical mind immediately says, “What are you doing? You have never done this!” And if you walk slowly you will be surprised – nervousness disappears because you have brought something new.These are the methods of vipassana, zazen. If you go deeply into them, the fundamentals are the same. When you are doing vipassana walking, you have to walk as slowly as you have ever walked, so slowly that it is absolutely new. The whole feel is new, and the reactive mind cannot function. It cannot function because it has no program for it; it simply stops functioning.That’s why in vipassana you feel so silent watching the breath. You have always breathed but you have never watched it; this is something new. When you sit silently and just watch your breath – coming in, going out, coming in, going out. The mind feels puzzled, what are you doing? Because you have never done it. It is so new that the mind cannot supply an immediate reaction to it. Hence it falls silent.The fundamental is the same. Sufi or Buddhist or Hindu or Mohammedan is not the question. If you go deep into meditation’s fundamentals, then the essential thing is one – how to de-automatize you.Gurdjieff used to do very bizarre things to his disciples. Somebody would come who had always been a vegetarian, and he would say, “Eat meat.” Now, it is the same fundamental. This man is just a little too much of his own… A little eccentric. He says, “Eat meat.” Now, watch a vegetarian eating meat. Now the whole body wants to throw it out and he wants to vomit and the whole mind is puzzled and disturbed, and he starts perspiring because the mind has no way to cope with it.That’s what Gurdjieff wants to see – how you react to a new situation. To the man who had never taken any alcohol, Gurdjieff would say, “Drink. Drink as much as you can.”To the man who had been drinking alcohol Gurdjieff will say, “For one month stop. Completely stop.” He wants to create some situation which is so new for the mind that the mind simply falls silent; it has no answer for it, no ready-made answer for it.The mind functions in a parrotlike way. That’s why Zen masters will sometimes hit the disciple. That is again the same fundamental. Now, when you go to a master you don’t expect a buddha to hit you, or do you? When you go to a buddha you go with expectations that he will be compassionate and loving, and he will shower love and put his hand on your head. And this buddha gives you a hit – takes his staff and hits you hard on the head. Now, it is so shocking – a buddha, hitting you? For a moment the mind stops. It has no way, no idea what to do; it does not function. And that nonfunctioning is the beginning. Sometimes a person has become enlightened just because the master did something absurd.People have expectations, people live through expectations. They don’t know that masters don’t fit with any kind of expectations.India was accustomed to Krishna and Rama and people like that. Then came Mahavira. He stood naked. You cannot think of Krishna standing naked; he was always wearing beautiful clothes, as beautiful as possible. He was one of the most beautiful persons ever; he used to wear ornaments made of gold and diamonds. And then suddenly there is Mahavira. What did Mahavira mean by being naked? He shocked the whole country; he helped many people because of that shock.Each master has to decide how to shock. Now, in India they have not known a man like me for centuries. So whatever I do, whatever I say is a shock. The whole country goes into shock; a great shiver runs through the spine of the whole country. I really enjoy it because they cannot think…I have just received a letter, “We had always thought that you are above politics. Then why have you started speaking on politics?” – that’s why, because I am above it. Who else can speak about it? Those who are in it, they cannot speak about it; they are partisans.The man who is on the hilltop has a far better vision of the valley down below. The bird on the wing can see all that is happening on the earth; he has more perspective, more vision. I can see in a better way because I am no longer part of the valley. I can see what is happening in the valley, I can see what is happening in New Delhi because I am far above it. But the Indian mind has its accustomed expectations. A saint is not supposed to speak about politics. But a saint in fact never follows anybody’s expectations.I am not here to fulfill your expectations. If I fulfill your expectations I will never be able to transform you. I am here to destroy all your expectations; I am here to shock you. And in those shocking experiences your mind will stop. You will not be able to figure it out and that is the point where something new enters you.So once in a while I say something which Indians think shouldn’t be said. But who are you to decide what I should say and what I shouldn’t say? And naturally, when something goes against their expectations they immediately react according to their own conditionings. Those who react according to their old conditionings miss the point. Those who don’t react according to the old conditionings fall silent, get into a new space.I am talking to my disciples. I am trying to hit them this way and that. It is all deliberate. When I criticize Morarji Desai, it is not so much about Morarji Desai; it is much more about the Morarji Desai in you because everybody has the politician within. Hitting Morarji Desai I have hit the Morarji Desai in you, the politician within you.Everybody has a politician. The politician means the desire to dominate, the desire to be number one. The politician means ambition, the ambitious mind. And when I hit Morarji Desai, if you feel hit and you start thinking, “This man cannot be a really enlightened person, otherwise why should he be hitting so hard on Morarji Desai?” you are simply rationalizing. You have nothing to do with Morarji Desai. You are saving your own Morarji Desai inside; you are trying to protect your own politician. I have nothing to do with Morarji Desai. What can I have to do with poor Morarji Desai? But I have everything to do with the politician within you.Sufis say man is a machine because man only reacts according to the programs that have been fed to him. Start behaving responsively, and then you are not a machine. And when you are not a machine you are a man – then the man is born.Watch, become alert, observe, and go on dropping all reactive patterns in you. Each moment try to respond to reality – not according to the ready-made idea in you, but according to the reality as it is there outside. Respond to the reality. Respond with your total consciousness, but not with your mind.And then when you respond spontaneously and you don’t react, action is born. Action is beautiful, reaction is ugly. Only a man of awareness acts, the man of unawareness reacts. Action liberates; reaction goes on creating the same chains, goes on making them thicker and harder and stronger.Live a life of response and not of reaction.The fourth question:Osho,I am so terribly ugly, and I have suffered much because of it. What should I do?Become a politician!Just the other day, Subhuti sent me the report of a survey done in a London school of researchers, the London Polytechnic. The survey says that ugly and stupid looking people have more poll appeal. They have researched, and this is a very strange conclusion – strange but true. Ugly people, stupid looking, unintelligent people have poll appeal.Why? – because the masses think they belong to them. They look so like the masses. The beautiful person, the intelligent looking person, immediately is felt to belong to the aristocracy. Naturally – he is not of the masses, he belongs to the leisured class. The masses feel him as the enemy.Now you ask, “I am so terribly ugly….” Use it, this is a great opportunity – become a politician. And particularly in India, you can see all kinds of ugly people. It is very rare to find a politician who is intelligent looking, beautiful, handsome, who has some grace and charm. No, the uglier you are, the more is the possibility of your becoming the representative of the masses because the masses will feel some affinity with you, a deep affinity, accord. You belong to them, they belong to you. You are one of them.Maybe that is one of the reasons Indira Gandhi lost the last elections. She has charm, she has a subtle beauty and grace. She was the only politician in India who looks graceful and intelligent; she has been replaced by very ugly people. But this may be the psychological reason – she is aristocratic. And the revolt that has happened in India may be a proof for this survey being done in the London Polytechnic.Her father was a beautiful man, one of the most beautiful men in the world. He dominated Indian politics; then she came into power. She is aristocratic. And slowly, slowly the masses started feeling as if the country still is not ruled by them, by their people. Now they have chosen very dull, placid people, old, rotten. And they have chosen them for a certain reason. They fit perfectly well with the masses, they are exactly like the masses. Now, they are not going to help this country because a country can be helped only by intelligent people.But remember, always in the world the more socialism has been talked about, the more all kinds of aristocratic people have lost their grip on world affairs. They could have helped. Remember, there are many kinds of aristocracies. It is not only a question of riches and birth. The person who has a higher IQ belongs to an aristocracy of intelligence. And if the idea spreads that everybody is equal, when in truth nobody is equal… There are people who have very low IQs and there are people who have high IQs, and they are not equal; they are as far apart as people can be.There are ugly people and there are beautiful people; these again are aristocracies. And if the idea spreads… Which it has; it has gone into the world.Marx created one of the greatest myths, the myth of equality. People are not equal. But once the idea spread then there was great jealousy. Whoever is above you has to be pulled down; he has to be made equal because all are equal. And if they are not, they have to be made equal.The world is, by and by, slowly, slowly becoming dominated by lower intelligence. It is happening all over the world. And the lower intelligence cannot solve the problems. The lower intelligence is incapable of solving the problems, the problems are too big. It needs intelligence to solve them, it needs great intelligence to solve them. The problems are very complicated. It is not a question of equality. The world will have to listen to the intelligent people, the world will have to listen to the people who have visions, who can create a future.But whenever somebody wants to create a new future, it goes against the habits of the masses, their old traditions, their old superstitions. So whosoever is ready and willing to accept those superstitions and traditions will easily become the dominant politician, will become powerful.That’s how it has happened in India, that’s how it is happening all over the world. The people who can easily accommodate themselves with the superstitious masses and who look like the masses will have more power – but that is very dangerous. But that seems to be happening more and more, and the world is coming closer and closer to a catastrophe. It can be avoided only if intelligent people are listened to.If people who have some grace, who have some silence in them, who have tasted something of the no-mind, are listened to, the world can be saved, humanity can be saved; otherwise it cannot be saved. It is really a difficult problem to tackle because they will not listen. The masses will feel that they are against them.For example, I cannot be listened to in this country. What I am saying can open doors of great riches to this country. What I am saying can transform all its miseries and problems into opportunities. But what I am saying goes against the superstitions, what I am saying goes against the traditions. If they listen to me they will have to go against their superstitions, which is difficult. If they listen to their traditions and their superstitions they will follow Morarji Desai and people like that. But those people cannot solve the problems.That’s where Indira got into trouble, she tried to solve the problems. She dared to do something drastic to change the situation of this country. But then it was too much against the people and their tradition and their superstitions. It was too much against their old mind. They rebelled against her.You ask me, “I am so terribly ugly, and I have suffered much because of that. What should I do?” What I said – I was just joking, please don’t become a politician. There are ugly people, so many ugly people – enough. You need not worry about them.You ask me, “What should I do?” Ugliness is nothing to do with your body; neither has beauty much to do with the body. The beauty and the ugliness of the body are very superficial; the real thing comes from within. If you can become beautiful within, you will become luminous. It has happened many times. Even an ugly person, when he becomes meditative, starts looking beautiful. This I have watched continuously, year in, year out.When people come here they have totally a different face. When they start meditating, when they start dancing, when they start singing, their faces relax. Their tensions drop. Their misery, which had become part of their face, slowly, slowly wears off. They become relaxed like children. Their faces start gleaming with a new inner joy, they become luminous.Physical beauty and ugliness is not very important; the real thing is the inner. I can teach you how to be beautiful from within, and that is real beauty. Once it is there, your physical form won’t matter much. Your eyes will start shining with joy; your face will have a gleam, a glory. The form will become immaterial. When something starts flowing from within you, some grace, then the outer form is just put aside. Comparatively it loses all significance. Don’t be worried about it.And whatsoever I have been saying was just a joke. Don’t become a politician because if you become a politician you will become uglier. It works both ways: ugly people become politicians, and politicians become uglier. It will be impossible for you not to become uglier because the whole world of politics is of continuous quarrel, continuous violence, continuous competition. It will make you tenser, it will make you more graceless, it will make you more and more insipid and dull because only dullards can succeed in the world of politics.I will suggest to the researchers of the London Polytechnic that this is only half the story. Please work on the other half too. One half is that political success is more possible to ugly and unintelligent looking people. The other half is that those who become politicians become more and more ugly, more and more unintelligent looking. They have to, because whatsoever makes you successful, you have to practice it more – naturally, obviously. Whatsoever helps you to succeed will become your very style of life. That is the other half of the story, that politicians become ugly.You meditate, love, dance, sing, celebrate here with me, and the ugliness will disappear. Bring something higher in you, and the lower will be forgotten because it is all comparative, it is all relative. If you can, bring something higher in you.It is as though there is a small candle burning in the room. Bring a bigger light in the room and the small candle simply loses all significance. Bring the beauty of the within, which is easier. The outer beauty I cannot help much. I am not a plastic surgeon. You can find some plastic surgeon who can help you, but that will not help in any way. You may have a little longer nose, better shaped, but that will not help anything much. If you remain the same inside, your outer beauty will simply show your inner ugliness; it will become a contrast. Bring some inner beauty.That’s what we are doing here. Sannyas is the science of bringing inner beauty, inner beatitude, inner benediction. Let existence shower on you, and the body is completely forgotten. The body becomes compost, and your whole life becomes a garden, and great flowers, golden flowers bloom in you.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-05/

The pure man unitestwo in one;the lover unitesthree in one.But I am frightenedlest your ignorance and stupidityleave you stranded on the bridge.He is the providerof both faith and worldly goods;he is none otherthan the disposerof our lives.He is no tyrant:for everything he takes,he gives back seventy-fold;and if he closes one doorhe opens ten others to you.He treasures you morethan you do yourself.Rise, have done with fairy tales;leave your base passions,and come to me.You have to realizethat it is his guidancethat keeps you on the path,and not your own strength.Life exists through duality. The very process of life depends on polar opposites. Life is like a river: for the river to exist, two banks are needed. The river cannot exist without two banks to support it, just as the bird cannot fly without two wings and you cannot walk without two legs.Life needs duality. Everywhere you will find it, till the ultimate arrives. The ultimate, the absolute, or call it God, transcends duality. But then life disappears. Then you become invisible. Then you have no form, no name. Then you have gone beyond – that is nirvana.These two things have to be understood. Life cannot exist without polar opposites. Life is a dialectical process between man and woman, between darkness and light, between life and death, between good and bad. Life cannot exist without this duality. Manifestation is not possible without duality.Hence, another vision becomes possible to be understood. If duality disappears, life as you know it disappears. Life in time and space disappears. Then another door opens. You move to another plane – the plane of the invisible, the plane of the mysterious, the plane where there is no form, no name. All remains, but unmanifest. That is called nirvana, moksha, the ultimate state of samadhi where all disappears.If duality is the way of life, then nonduality is the way of religion – because religion is nothing but an art of transcending the manifested form and going into the unmanifest, going to the original source from where we come and for which we long – because we belong there. Wherever we are, we cannot feel at home; something remains unfulfilled. We go on missing the original source because rest is only in the source.Today’s sutras are of immense value. Meditate over each word:The pure man unitestwo in one;the lover unitesthree in one.The Gnostic tradition says there are two paths to transcend duality, to transcend multiplicity, to transcend this constant conflict between life and death. The first path is called via purgativa by the Gnostics, “through purity”; and the second path is called via unitiva, “through unity.” The first is the path of meditation, the second the path of love. The first is Zen, the second is Sufism.On the path of meditation, one has to eliminate, one has to empty oneself totally. On the path of love, just the reverse process has to be followed – one has to become more and more full. One has to become so full that one starts overflowing. On the path of meditation, one has to become so empty that nothing remains within, one is just a pure nothingness.That’s why Buddha says that there is no soul. He says in the ultimate experience nothing is found; only nothing is found. It is utter emptiness, a state of no-self, anatta, hence he has called it nirvana. Nirvana means “putting out a candle” – the ego just disappears as if you have put out a candle; nothing remains. Only when nothing remains is there purity. If something is there, that is impurity. When on the mirror there is nothing, then the mirror is pure: no reflection, no dust, no content in the consciousness. Nothing remains to be known – then one is pure. This is via purgativa, go on eliminating.The Upanishads say “Neti, neti” – this is not that, that too is not that; neither this, nor that. Go on denying, go on negating, go on eliminating until nothing remains. And when you have arrived to that utter emptiness, that is the goal. Then all is peace, all is silence. One has moved beyond duality, beyond multiplicity.In this state, the observer becomes the observed; there is no distinction between the observer and the observed. Hence J. Krishnamurti’s famous statement, “The observer is the observed.” It is the very essence of meditation. Then there are not two: neither the knower nor the known – no subject, no object. Only one is there. But you cannot even call it one, because there is nobody to call it one. One is there, but utterly quiet and calm. One is there, but there is nobody to declare it. One is there, but as if all is absent, not present.This is what Hakim Sanai says: The pure man unites two in one… The observer and the observed. The pure man means the man of meditation. The pure man means one who has been trying the path of via purgativa; who has been simply emptying himself of all that is foreign, and who goes on eliminating all that is not his essential self. And then nothing is left in the hand.Zen people say that man is like an onion. You go on peeling, layer upon layer; go on peeling and finally nothing is left. But that’s what the search is. When the hands are empty, nothing is left – you have arrived. Now there can be no misery because there is nobody to be miserable. Now there can be no pain because there is nobody to feel pain. Now there is neither knowledge nor ignorance because there is no knower. Now there is neither bondage nor liberation because there is nobody to be bound or to be liberated. All is gone, all has disappeared. You have fallen back into the source.The manifest is no longer there. You have become unmanifest. In this state you are neither man nor woman. In this state you are neither happy nor unhappy because those are all parts of the dual world: happy–unhappy, man–woman, beautiful–ugly, good–bad are all gone. You are neither good nor bad. There is no Devil now, and no God – that is part of duality, the same duality. And in duality there is always tension, in duality there is always conflict. In duality there is always the other.The Zen people will agree with Jean-Paul Sartre when he says, “The other is hell.” The Zen people will also say, “Yes, the other is hell, the other has to disappear. But the other can disappear only if you also disappear.” I and thou exist as two aspects of the same coin. If thou disappears, I disappears; if I disappears, thou disappears. They cannot exist separately; they are part of one phenomenon. So there is neither I nor thou.That’s why Buddha wouldn’t say anything about the soul or God. His is the purest path of meditation. And this has been a very confusing thing to others who don’t understand the path of purity. Buddha called it vishuddhi marga. That has exactly the meaning of via purgativa, the path of purity.Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans cannot understand what Buddha is trying to say. No God, no soul – then what is religion? And Buddha says this state of no God, no soul is religion. Christians or Mohammedans or Hindus cannot conceive of what kind of religion he is talking about because we think of religion as something centered on the idea of God. Without God how can there be a religion?But there is a religion, Jainism; it is without God. Jainas agree so far with Buddha that there is no God. But when Buddha says there is no soul, even Jainas don’t agree. They say, “Without a soul, how can there be a religion?” Christians, Hindus Mohammedans say, “Without God and the soul there can be no religion; those two are essential.” And Buddha says, “Unless those two are dropped, you don’t enter the world of religion. Those two are the barriers.”Jainas say, “God can be dropped, it is an unnecessary hypothesis. Just purify yourself, that’s all. There is no need for God, there is no need for prayer, only meditation will do. You go on purifying.” They agree with Buddha halfway and they also agree with Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians halfway.That’s why in India, Buddhism and Jainism were born together, but Hindus destroyed Buddhism completely. They didn’t destroy Jainism. They allowed it to exist side by side because Jainism seems to be agreeing at least to one basic ingredient – the soul.Buddha goes too far in Hindu eyes, in that he denies both. But he has a point there, if God is not, then the soul cannot be. I and thou can only be part of a pair. They exist as a couple, they cannot be divorced. What will the word I mean if there is no thou? It won’t mean anything. It will be meaningless; the meaning is given only through the other. What will light mean if there is no darkness? And what will life mean if there is no death?Just see the duality of language. All language is dual; the meaning comes from the opposite. It looks very strange that the meaning should come to a word from the opposite word. Light has meaning only because of darkness, love has meaning only because of hate, compassion has meaning only because of anger, and the saint has meaning only because of the sinner. The monastery is meaningful because of the marketplace. This is strange, but this is how it is. Words depend on its opposite.If you look in the dictionary of the philosophers and you inquire, “What is matter?” you will find the answer, “Not mind.” And if you inquire, “What is mind?” you will find the answer, “Not matter.” This is very absurd. You define matter by saying, “Not mind” and you define mind by saying, “Not matter.” And it seems you don’t know what matter is and what mind is. Nobody knows.Language depends on duality, as the whole of life depends on duality. Language arises out of life experiences; it is utterly rooted in life experiences. That’s why truth is inexpressible.Lao Tzu is right when he says, “The moment you utter the truth it becomes a lie. Say it, and you have falsified it. The Tao that can be said is not the true Tao. The truth that can be expressed is no longer truth, the God that can be formulated and defined is no longer God.” What he is saying is that language is rooted in duality, and truth is transcendental duality. Nothing can be said about it.That’s why Buddha has not said anything about truth, not even yes or no. He will not even nod his head this way or that. If you ask about truth he remains like a stone statue. No response comes from him – no response, negative or positive, as if he has not heard what you have asked. He has heard it, but to say anything will be wrong. Anything will be wrong. Even to say that nothing can be said about it will be wrong because you have already said something. “Nothing can be said about truth” is already a statement which defines it, which gives a meaningful expression.Buddha is the most misunderstood man in the world. And the reason? – he has chosen the path of the negative, the path of emptying oneself, the path of elimination. He is the purest form of meditation, where two become one. And when two become one, nothing can be said. He cannot even dance because that will be a statement. He cannot even sing because that will be a statement. He cannot even give you any indirect indication, not even a gesture. He is utterly quiet. He is just pure silence. If you have the eyes to see, you will be able to see. If you have the heart to understand, you will understand. But he is utterly unavailable in the world of language and communication.The pure man unites – says Sanai – two in one; the lover unites three in one. But, he says what about the lover? His unity is far richer because he unites three in one: the lover, the beloved and love. His unity is a kind of trinity. That is the second path – the path of the devotee, the bhakta, the Sufi, the lover. And Sanai says it is far richer than the path of purity. Because of the unity of three, it has richness, it is far juicier. And because it is a path of love, it does not negate, it affirms.The path of the meditator says neti, neti: neither this nor that. The path of love says iti, iti – this too, this too. It accepts, it affirms. It welcomes, it is positive. It does not empty oneself; rather, it fills oneself with the beloved. It invites God, it becomes a host to God. And there arises a unity which is not the unity of the disappearance of the observer into the observed, or the observed into the observer. It is not a unity of disappearance; it is an orgasmic unity. It is like when two lovers move to the height of their passion, when they dissolve into each other but they are – and far more so than they have ever been.Have you observed it? If somebody takes your hand very lovingly in his hand and presses it with warmth and love and caring, suddenly your hand becomes alive. It pulsates with new joy. Just a moment ago you may not have even been aware of your hand. Now the hand is alive, more alive than any other part of your body. The hand stands out; it becomes warmer and warmer. It feels the joy of the other in greeting you, it feels the love of the other pouring in you; it starts responding, it vibrates, it pulsates, it streams.The psychologists say that a child who has not been hugged by the parents remains somehow dead. His body never comes to be alive. The child needs to be hugged; the child needs to be hugged again and again, caressed, kissed. Otherwise the child will never know the life pulsating in his body. He will remain literally cold because he will never know warmth pouring into him. And when warmth is not pouring into him, he cannot respond by his own warmth. His warmth has to be challenged, provoked, seduced.But our world has become more and more non-loving, non-caressing, non-hugging. People keep apart, people live at a distance. Even if they are standing side by side in a train, touching each other’s body, still they keep themselves distant and aloof. That touch has to remain cold because if the touch becomes warm, the other may feel offended. You have transgressed, you have entered his territory – and how dare you! The bodies may be touching, but the souls shouldn’t touch. The bodies may be touching, but they should touch as corpses touch; they shouldn’t become warm, they shouldn’t respond. This has created a much encapsulated man who lives in a kind of grave, who lives in a cold, cold world, dark and cold.When somebody hugs you and the hug is not just an empty motion, an empty gesture, when the hug is real and authentic and he pours his love into you, your love energy rises to the occasion. Your body becomes alive; you feel a totally different kind of life. You start moving toward the optimum. Otherwise, people live at the minimum. They live a dull life; their life has no sharpness. It can’t have without love.I am saying, observe your body when you are lovingly holding somebody – what happens? The part of the body that is in touch with the other’s love and is feeling the other’s love becomes more alive. Love gives a life that nobody else can give.The meditator is cold. It is no accident that Buddha is the first man of whom marble statues were made. He is the first man, and the marble fits with him perfectly. He is cold as marble and of course as silent as marble. But he is more a statue than a man.You cannot make a statue of a Sufi because the statue will not express his dance, the statue will not express his song, the statue will not express his love, his prayer, his gratitude. His ecstatic madness will not be expressed by the statue. Statues can be made only of a meditator. The meditator is a statue – cold, silent, empty. Emptiness has a purity, that is true, but something is missing in it. Richness is missing in it, life is missing in it, orgasmic joy is missing in it.And that is what happens to the people who move through the path of via unitiva; their path is of orgasmic unity. Just as two lovers embrace each other, penetrate each other – not only physically but spiritually too, become dissolved and a kind of unity arises. Two individuals become one. And when these two individuals become one, in fact there are three things becoming one: the lover, the beloved and the love.Love is a very solid phenomenon to the lovers. In fact the lover and the beloved are nothing compared to the reality of love. The love is far more real than their existence separate from each other. So when lovers meet, three things meet.To symbolize this, in India we have created a beautiful sacred place, Prayag, where three rivers are said to meet. Two are visible, the third is invisible. One is the Ganges, very visible; another is Yamuna, very visible; and the third is Saraswati, nobody can see it. It is there, it just has to be believed in; it is invisible.To the scientific mind it looks absurd. How can there be an invisible river? Nobody has ever seen it, but Hindus go on saying that there is a meeting of three rivers: two are of this world and the third is of the other. Two belong to the earth and the third belongs to the beyond.This is really a metaphor of love. When two lovers meet, three things meet, three energies meet: two are of this earth, one is of the beyond. Two are visible – you can see the lover and the beloved – but you will not be able to see love, which is far more valuable than both. In fact it is because of the third that the two are meeting, it is in the third that the two are dissolving. But when the two dissolve, the third also dissolves – but again, it is a totally different phenomenon.Bahauddin is totally different from Buddha; Hakim Sanai is totally different from Sosan. And the difference is that Buddha will be utterly empty, Bahauddin will be utterly full. Buddha will be cool and cold, aloof, detached, silent; Bahauddin will be dancing in tremendous ecstasy. Buddha will just be peace, Bahauddin will be bliss also – peace will be secondary, bliss will be primary. In Buddha, peace will be primary, bliss will be secondary. In Buddha, peace will be visible, bliss will remain invisible. In Bahauddin, bliss will be there dancing, very visible, tangible, you can almost touch it, but peace will remain hidden. Peace will be just a shadow, you can only infer it; you can guess, but you cannot touch it. In Sosan you will find purity but emptiness, and in Sanai you will find fulfillment, utter fulfillment, overflowing.These are two ways to meet the beyond: either disappear completely like Buddha, or become total like a Sufi or a bhakta. The pure man unites two in one; the lover unites three in one.That’s why Sanai calls his path “the path of the garden.” The path of the meditator is a kind of desert. The desert has its own beauty. If you have been in the desert in the night, it has a coolness you will never find anywhere else, and it has an immense silence, a huge enormous silence, and it has infinity. It has a taste of its own. Under the starry sky, if you have been in a desert alone, you will never find that aloneness anywhere else.No other place on the earth is as full of solitude as a desert. And there is no variety, so you cannot be distracted. It is the same for miles and miles – as far as you can see up to the horizon it is the same. There is nothing to see; if you have seen one desert you have seen all. It is the same. The same scene goes on stretching farther and farther away. There is no distraction.That’s why many meditators have moved to the desert. Down the ages, many people have moved to the desert. The attraction has been the silence and the beauty of a nondistracting situation. Nothing distracts, nothing moves, all is utterly quiet. Only death can be as quiet as the desert. It has a beauty of its own, but it lacks richness and variety.The garden has variety: many trees, much green foliage, flowers, many colors, birds singing, streams flowing by, the sound of running water and the wind passing through the pines. And there are a thousand and one things happening together. The garden is full; the desert is empty.The inner being of a meditator becomes like a desert, and the inner being of a lover becomes like a garden. Hence, Sanai has called these sutras the Hadiqa, The Garden.Still, it depends on you. One may like the desert more than the garden, then that is his path. Nothing is wrong in it, one should go on that path. One has to look within oneself and see one’s potential, one’s possibilities, one’s leanings.It is possible the desert may be a garden to you or the garden may be a desert to you because one man’s food is another man’s poison. It is Sanai who says the lover’s world is far richer. It is a lover talking about his world, remember.But I am frightenedlest your ignorance and stupidityleave you stranded on the bridge.Sanai says, “But remember one thing…” Each and every master has said it because the problem is there on both paths. The problem is that one can be stranded on the bridge. The meditator may become so addicted to meditation that he may be stranded on the bridge. The lover may become too addicted to love, then he will be stranded on the bridge. Love is a bridge, meditation is a bridge. And you have to go beyond the bridge.In the ultimate state, the meditator has to drop his meditation, and the lover has to forget all about his love. Otherwise you will just be close to the door but you will not be able to enter the temple. The method has to be forgotten.Buddha has said that each method is like a raft, like a boat. Use it to go to the other shore but then leave it there and forget all about it and go on your way. There is no need to carry the raft on your head. If you carry the raft on your head you are just stupid. But this is what is happening – millions of people become too addicted to their method. And the method can be addictive because it gives such beautiful experiences.The last barrier is the method, the last barrier is the bridge. Just see the point – it is very paradoxical. The bridge takes you to the other shore. Certainly it is a help, and you should be grateful to it and you should be thankful to it, but it can become a problem. You may fall in love with the bridge and you may make your house on the bridge. And if you start living on the bridge, you are neither of this shore nor of that shore; you are in a kind of limbo. And many so-called religious practitioners live in a kind of limbo – they are neither of this world nor of that. They have become addicted to the bridge.And the bridge is beautiful; hence the fear of Sanai. Sanai says, “I am afraid.” I am frightened lest your ignorance and stupidity leave you stranded on the bridge. This has to be told to every disciple in the beginning, “One day the method that has helped you so far has to be dropped. When its work is finished, don’t carry it, not even for a single moment more. When your illness is gone you have to drop the medicine. If you continue the medicine, then it will become your illness.”All methods are methods, all means are means. And if you want to reach the end you will have to drop all means and all methods. That is the only way to enter the ultimate. The lover will have to forget all about love, and the meditator will have to forget all about meditation. Yes, there comes a moment: when the meditator does not meditate because he has become meditation himself, now meditation is not a separate activity; when the lover does not love because he is love himself – there is nobody else than love, love has become his being, he has forgotten all about it.A great Indian Sufi, Kabir, says:Since the day when I met with my Lord,there has been no end to the sport of our love…I see with eyes open and smile,and behold his beauty everywhere.I utter his name, and whatever I see,it reminds me of him; whatever I do,it becomes his worship…Wherever I go, I move round him,all I achieve is his service:when I lie down, I lie prostrateat his feet…Whether I rise or sit down, I cannever forget him; for the rhythmof his music beats in my ears.Slowly, slowly, gradually all that you do becomes your prayer, your worship. All that you are becomes your meditation.Kabir says: “I see with eyes open and smile, and behold his beauty everywhere. I utter his name, and whatever I see, it reminds me of him; whatever I do, it becomes his worship… Wherever I go, I move round him, all I achieve is his service.”Each act of the devotee or the meditator becomes suffused with his meditation or love. Slowly, slowly, there is no doer left. Just as trees are blooming unself-consciously, the meditator is in meditation unself-consciously, and the lover is love unself-consciously. But man’s stupidity can create trouble…The Sufi master Najmaini dismissed a student with these words, “Your fidelity has been tested. I find it so unshakeable that you must go.”The student said, “I shall go, but I cannot understand how fidelity can be a ground for dismissal.”Najmaini said, “For these years we have tested your fidelity. Your fidelity to useless knowledge and superficial judgments is complete. That’s why you must go.”Fidelity to the useless is stupidity. Fidelity is not always good, not unconditionally good. Fidelity to the useless is a dangerous thing. And there are people who are very faithful to their stupidity, who are very faithful to their prejudices, who believe tremendously in their ignorance, who are very much attached to all that they have gathered. It is useless. It may even be harmful, it may be poisonous. But whatsoever people have, they cling to it; they cannot let it go.What to say of beautiful experiences, spiritual experiences? People are even addicted with their misery; they cannot even drop their misery. They go on suffering but they cannot drop it. They cannot detach themselves from their misery, so what to say about ecstatic experiences of meditation and love? The danger is there.If one can become so attached to pain, one can easily become attached to those pleasant, utterly pleasant experiences that happen on the path of meditation and love. One can become stranded on the bridge, remember!No method is so valuable that you have to cling to it. Use it, but use it wisely. Use it when it is helpful, use it when it helps your growth. Stop using it the moment you see that now you have used it enough and it is no longer helping your growth and it has to be dropped.A master is needed for many things. This is also one of the needs, a very essential need of the disciple – to tell the disciple in the right moment, “Now stop, it is enough. You have used this method, it has been of great help to you, but carrying it anymore will become detrimental.”People live with such tremendous stupidity that if you watch their life you will be surprised – how do they manage? How do they go on befooling themselves?I have heard…Two Irish Catholic laborers were repairing the underground cables in the street opposite a well-known house of prostitution. While they had the advantage of seeing the street, they couldn’t be observed.Along came a rabbi who carefully looked in all directions to make sure he wasn’t being observed and quickly ducked into the house. Pat turned to Mike, “Look at that dirty no-good Jew going into that evil house!”A few moments later they saw the Methodist minister look carefully about him before he too entered this house. Again Pat turned to Mike, “Look at that heathen bastard sneaking into the evil house.”And about one hour later who should appear on the scene but the parish priest who also looked carefully in both directions before entering the house. Pat turned to Mike, “Poor Father O’Toole, I wonder who happens to be sick at that place?”Now it is different. Now it is your own priest, the whole interpretation has changed. This is stupidity. Not being able to see one’s prejudices, clinging, attachments, addiction is stupidity. And man is really very stupid.The “est” people illustrate it with a little parable. They use the parable that if you release a rat into a cage which has many rooms, and in room number seven you always put a little piece of cheese, the rat will go around, he will search in all the rooms and will find the cheese in room number seven. Once, twice, thrice, you do it, then the rat immediately goes to room number seven. He knows where the cheese is.When he becomes accustomed to going to room number seven you change it; you put the cheese in room number three. He will rush to room number seven, will look around, will not find it, will be a little puzzled, will run around the house and will start searching in other directions. Once or twice he will go into room number seven, again hoping. But sooner or later he will find the cheese in room number three, and he will stop going into room number seven.Not so with man. He will continue going to room number seven his whole life! Even if the cheese is no longer found there, that is not the point. His fidelity, his devotion to room number seven, his consistency – how can he change?The Christian goes to the church whether the cheese is available there or not. The Hindu goes to the Hindu temple – the cheese has disappeared thousands of years ago. The Buddhist goes on worshipping Buddha. Yes, there has been cheese, but since then twenty-five centuries have passed. Now the cheese is here!Man is like that. Man is the most stupid animal on the earth. No other animal is so stupid. All animals are clever in that way, intelligent in that way. You cannot expect the rat to go on and on forever and ever, whether the cheese is there or not. At least he is alert. If the cheese is not there – finished! Why go on reciting the Koran if you don’t find any cheese there? But because your fathers were reciting it… And they were also not finding the cheese, but they were reciting it because their fathers were reciting it. Now look, not only will you go to room number seven, your children will also go, and your children’s children and it will continue. This is stupidity!A wandering dervish ran to where a Sufi master sat deep in contemplation and said, “Quick! We must do something. A monkey has just picked up a knife.”“Don’t worry,” said the master. “So long as it wasn’t a man.”When the dervish saw the monkey again he found, sure enough, that it had thrown the knife away.Animals have a very intrinsic intelligence of their own. No animal is as stupid as man is. And the reason is because no animal lives through the head. Animals live through their experience, you live through your head. You make a ready-made program for your life and you go on following the blueprint. And if you don’t follow it you feel guilty. If you don’t go to the church, you will feel guilty.Many people come to me and they say, “We pray, we meditate.” And I ask them, “Have you been growing through it?” They say, “Nothing is happening. But if we don’t pray then we feel guilty.”Do you think the rat will feel guilty because this time he has not gone to room number seven? What does he care about room number seven? All that he cares about is cheese. You go on praying. You start feeling guilty because your father told you to pray, your mother told you to pray, and if you don’t pray you feel as if you are betraying your father and mother.You are betraying your own intelligence! And that is the only betrayal to be worried about. Never betray your intelligence. Remain alert that you don’t betray your intelligence, otherwise you will be stranded somewhere or other – on the bridge – because the bridge is immensely beautiful. You have not known anything like it. If you start moving into the world of meditation you will come across beautiful psychedelic experiences – so utterly mysterious that you are bound to be caught by them.For example, one day you find great energy rising in your spine and it feels so cooling. Suddenly you feel transported to another world. You feel so alive, tingling with life. And as the energy moves higher and higher on the spine, you are moving higher and higher. You are no longer here on the earth, you have moved somewhere else. And it is so beautiful, so gratifying, so pleasant, that a thousand sexual orgasms are nothing. Just a single penetration of the energy through the spine to the head, and a thousand sexual orgasms are nothing. Then you will sit every day and wait for it and pray for it and work for it. You will try somehow to help the energy to move.Do you know how Indian yogis started standing on their heads? – because of this experience. It is a natural inference that it will be easier for the energy to move toward the head if you are standing on your head. Naturally gravitation will work, it will pull your energy. When you are sitting upright the energy finds it difficult to go up because it has to be pumped all the way up, pulled all the way up, against gravitation. Stupid people devised the idea of standing on their heads, so it will simply pour without any effort.And sometimes it happens that standing on your head, it goes easier. But you are caught, stranded. And the experience is so beautiful, so otherworldly, so superb and so independent. Now you are not dependent on a woman or on a man. You are utterly independent, you are free and enjoying all that no love affair can ever give to you. You are stranded.That’s how people become addicted to drugs. These are inner drugs; these are also part of your body chemistry. There is nothing spiritual in kundalini; it is as physiological as your blood. It is really the electricity of your body gathering at the base of the spine. And when really too much of it is there it starts rising upward in the spine, and the very movement of the electricity makes you stoned. But this is not different really. Whether you take LSD or you try some method of Yoga posture to create that inner drug, it is the same. It can happen through fasting. It can happen through certain exercises of breathing because when you exercise in a certain way it changes your body chemistry. Certain glands are pressed and it changes your inner chemistry. When you breathe in a certain method, with a certain process, more oxygen goes in, more carbon dioxide goes out, and the balance changes inside you.And I am not saying that you shouldn’t enjoy these things. Just remember that these are beautiful experiences, but you should not be stranded. The bridge is immensely psychedelic, and as you will reach more and more close to the other shore, the experiences will become more and more ecstatic and outlandish. Beware because the more ecstatic they are, the more possibility there is for you to think, “I have arrived.”He is the providerof both faith and worldly goods;he is none otherthan the disposerof our lives.He is no tyrant:for everything he takes,he gives back seventy-fold;and if he closes one doorhe opens ten others to you.Sanai says, “Remember, when these spiritual experiences, so-called spiritual experiences, start happening, remember that you are not the doer of them; it is again his gift. Then you will not become addicted.”If you think, “I am the doer; I have become a siddha and I have achieved, and now I am capable of creating these experiences,” then you are caught. Your ego has come back in from the back door. It used to feel strengthened by having more money, by having a bigger house, by having a beautiful woman, this and that. Now, the same ego is enjoying another trip of spiritual experiences.Sanai says, “If you become egoistic in any way about your experiences that happen on the way, you will become addicted and be stranded on the bridge.”Then what has to be done? Remember: He is the provider of both faith and worldly goods; he is none other than the disposer of our lives. He is no tyrant: for everything he takes, he gives back seventy-fold; and if he closes one door he opens ten others to you.Remember that all comes from him. This is possible only on the path of love. On the path of meditation you are left alone. There is more danger of ego arising on the path of meditation than on the path of love, because you are utterly alone. There is no God. You cannot surrender yourself to anything. You cannot use God to protect you from your own self. But on the path of love, that beautiful help is available.Remember: He is no tyrant… Why? – another thing you need to be reminded of. When these beautiful experiences happen, simultaneously many painful experiences will also happen because you are being uprooted from your identity, old identity, and there will be pain.Whenever you move into the new reality there will be great bliss, and whenever you are uprooted from the old there will be great pain. There will be nights and days, there will be pain and pleasure moments. Don’t take those pleasure moments as your creation; surrender them to God. He is the provider of all; he is the giver of life itself.And when pain comes and agony comes and you are in a great chaos, confusion, a dark night of the soul, don’t be worried. Remember: He is no tyrant… How can he be? He is the source of your life. He is your mother, your father.…for everything he takes, he gives back seventy-fold… Remember it. Yes, it happens exactly like that. If you have to suffer a little bit, remember, seventy-fold will be given to you. Whatsoever is taken away, much more will be given to you. Because that which is taken away from you is illusory, and that which is going to happen to you is going to be far more real.On each step this will be so, on each step you will become richer and richer. But you will have to be ready for one thing; you will have to pass through many fires. Each experience of passing through the fire is a new growth experience. Passing through the fire will be pain, utter pain, but the moment you are out of it you will see the point that it had to be gone through. Now you will be on a higher plane, and far superior joys will become available to you.It is by passing through fire that one becomes pure gold. Remember: He is no tyrant… That will help you. He is not a sadist, he does not enjoy torturing you. If you feel the torture, that is your interpretation. He is simply making more and more joys available to you, but you have to drop your toys, and dropping your old toys is painful. The pain is created by your attachment to the toys. We believe immensely in our toys. And we know they are toys and still we believe in them, our foolishness is such. We know that money is a toy and it will be taken away when death comes. All will be taken away.But still we go on gathering, and hoping meanwhile: “This happens to everybody but this is not going to happen to me. I am special, I am an exception.” Nobody is an exception. All will be taken away from you. But we go on playing, we go on believing in our fantasies, we go on projecting.A French mouse and an elephant go to the magistrate and ask for a special license to be married right away. The magistrate shakes his head and says it is impossible because elephants and mice just don’t mix. And the little mouse looks up with tears in her eyes and says, “But please, monsieur magistrate, we’ve got to.”People go on believing in absurd things. Now the little mouse thinks she is pregnant. “We’ve got to.” Now there is no way of avoiding it.Look at your own absurdities. Look at your own life, at what you go on doing. It is so ridiculous, the way people live, the way people waste their life. And when these toys will be taken away – and they have to be taken away, otherwise you will never become mature – there will be pain.On the path of love, God is available to you. He is no tyrant: for everything he takes, he gives back seventy-fold; and if he closes one door he opens ten others to you.But there is a trouble with the human mind. The human mind becomes focused on certain things. For example, if you have become accustomed to going through one door, you create a kind of tunnel vision; you cannot see any other doors. You only see that door, you become oblivious of other doors. And when that one door closes you are in a panic because of your tunnel vision.The man who is searching for God has to learn how to drop tunnel vision, how to remain alert and available to all possibilities. If one door closes, ten doors are immediately opened for you. This is not a philosophical statement; this is simply a fact. But you only look through your past. You are so obsessed by the past that you cannot see that other doors are opening. You cannot even believe that there are other doors. You know only one door, you have become familiar with it. You can go out and in from that one door mechanically, with no awareness – there is no need, you have become habituated to it.Now it closes, and there is great pain and great fear and great agony. The agony is not happening because the door is closed, the agony is happening because you have tunnel vision. You cannot see anywhere else, you only have a focused vision. Let your eyes be a little wider.And remember, Sanai says that he never closes a door unless he has already opened ten for you. So just look around and you will find them. And this is my experience too, working with thousands of meditators. It comes every day. Whenever one door closes… And old doors have to be closed, otherwise how are you going to grow and move upward? If you always go on moving through the same door then there is no transformation possible. Doors will have to be closed so that you are forced to move from a new angle, in a new dimension.The master tries in every way to close your old doors. And that’s the fear of the master too – that’s why people keep at a distance, they keep a certain distance so they can escape. If things become too much, unbearable, they can always escape.And it hurts whenever a door is closed. You ask for growth, but whenever a door is closed it hurts. You become angry, you are in a rage. And you don’t understand simple arithmetic. If you desire growth, you will have to be always ready to move through new visions, new territories, new planes. And the old is safe and the old is secure and convenient – that I know and every master knows. But if you remain with the old, you remain the old and you remain dead.Life is with the new. Each moment has to be a death and a resurrection. Die to the past each moment. And that is where the disciple is tested; that is the fire test. When a door is closed, the disciple believes ten others must have been opened. He forgets about the closed door and he starts looking around for the doors that must have been opened. This is trust.Trust life, trust God, trust existence.He treasures you morethan you do yourself.Remember, God has created you. You cannot be unnecessary, you cannot be accidental. And God has created you so unique, so individual, that there is no other you like you. You are the only one! He has never created a person like you before, and will never create another person exactly like you. See how much respect he has paid to you.God is not like an assembly line that Ford cars go on coming out of the assembly – the same Ford cars, millions of Ford cars, all alike. God is a creator, not an assembly line. Each individual has been made not according to a mold, not according to a certain fixed pattern; but each individual has been paid individual attention. He has painted you individually, he has cut you in a certain way, given you a certain shape, a certain being. You are unique, you are original, you are not a copy. He treasures you more… And certainly you are his creation. If you are lost, it is his loss. He treasures you more than you do yourself. And that’s a very obvious fact.People don’t love themselves, they don’t respect themselves; on the contrary, they condemn themselves. You are all self-condemners. That’s how you have been taught by the priests again and again, everywhere in the world. You have been conditioned to condemn yourself. And you go on condemning yourself. You don’t think yourself of any worth. And this is one of the barriers, greatest barriers.Love yourself, respect yourself and you will be giving respect to God – because to respect the painting is to respect the painter, and to love the poetry is to love the poet. And you are the poetry and you are the painting. You are the music created by him. You are the visible proof that God is; creation is, the visible proof that the creator is. Love the creation, relish it, celebrate it. This is the only way to celebrate God. And you are the closest creation.The man who condemns himself cannot love anybody else either. And the man who condemns himself condemns the whole existence. The world is full of these condemners, they have poisoned everybody. And the first thing that a master has to do with the disciple is to take all this poison out of his being. The greatest problem is how to make you respectful of yourself, how to make you aware that you are precious, that you are incomparable, that you have a great potential in you, that buddhas are hidden in you, that you are seeds of buddhas.Rise, have done with fairy tales;leave your base passions,and come to me.Sanai says, as every master has always said, “Come to me!” But you will have to leave a few things, only then can you come to the master. If you cannot leave those few things you will remain with the priests and you will never find the master. And the priests are the enemies of all the masters.The priest is never the master, and the master is never the priest. They don’t belong to the same dimension. The priest has nothing to do with God. The priest has made a business out of God. He is exploiting the hypothesis of God. The priest is so ugly that he cannot leave even the idea of God unexploited.According to one story, when God created the world and saw that it was good, Satan joined him in his appreciation and exclaimed, as he gazed from one wonder to another, “It is good! It is good! Let us make it an institution!”Now, that is the priest. The priest makes everything a business; the priest makes everything an institution. Every insight of the great buddhas is finally reduced to an institution, to a church. The priest is in the service of Satan.Rise, have done with fairy tales… And it is the priest who keeps feeding you on fairy tales. He talks about God and he talks about heaven and hell and the angels and the rewards that the virtuous ones will be given, and the punishments that the sinners will have to suffer. These are all fairy tales.The priest goes on feeding you fairy tales. And because you remain attached to fairy tales you remain childish, you remain stupid, you never mature. Beware! The priest is a salesman in the service of Satan. And the priest’s whole work consists in decorating fairy tales. He goes on inventing more and more fairy tales. He is not concerned about truth; in fact he is very much afraid of truth.So whenever there is a man like Buddha, the priest is against him. When there is a man like Jesus the priest is against him. Immediately the priest becomes alert, there is danger – because these people like Buddha and Jesus are against fairy tales. They will destroy all the childish nonsense that goes on in the name of religion. And the priest lives on it, and down the ages he has become really skillful. The priest is the greatest salesman in the world.A man came into a grocery store and asked for five cents’ worth of salt. The proprietor asked, “What kind of salt do you want?”“What kind of salt do I want? I want salt, plain and simple. How many kinds of salt are there?”“Ha ha!” chuckled the storeowner. “What you don’t know about salt! You come with me.” And he took him downstairs and showed him a cellar that contained no less than forty or fifty barrels of salt. The customer was amazed.“All these are different salts?” he asked.“Yes, they’re all different. We have salt for all kinds of prices and uses.”“My goodness, you are a specialist. I suppose, if you have all these barrels of different kinds of salt, you must sell one hell of a lot of salt. You must really know how to sell salt!”“Oh,” said the other, “me? I’m not so good at selling salt, but the guy who sold it all to me, boy, can he sell salt!”The priest is continuously inventing fairy tales. And he invents them for all kinds of people, for all sorts of minds. That’s why there are three hundred religions on the earth. That means three hundred kinds of fairy tales, available in all sizes, available at all prices, available according to everybody’s need. Otherwise, what is the need for three hundred religions on the earth? There are not three hundred sciences on the earth. Science is one because the scientific approach is one and the fundamental of science is one.Religion will be one if priests disappear, and only Buddhas and Bahauddins and Sanais and Sosans are there – there will be only one religion. There will be a kind of religiousness in the world, not any religion in fact – a kind of religiousness.You will have to drop your fairy tales: Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. Rise, have done with fairy tales; leave your base passions, and come to me. There are base passions: money, power, sexuality, greed, anger, possessiveness, and so on and so forth. And man lives only in those base passions. Nothing is wrong in them, they are the foundation of the temple of life. But if there is only the foundation, and no temple, then the foundation is utterly useless. It is useful in the context of the temple; if the whole temple is built then the foundation is useful. But if the temple is never built and you go on building only the foundation forever and ever, it is utterly futile, pointless, a wastage of life and energy.Sigmund Freud remained concerned with the base passions, that is his fault. And because of that, psychoanalysis has not yet been able to become a temple. It is only a foundation, a bare-naked foundation; it is not yet a house where you can live. He wrote once to a friend, “I have always confined myself to the ground floor and basement of the edifice called man.” Aldous Huxley once said Freud should have said “the basement basement.”Man has a basement, that is true, but he also has an attic. Man is unconsciousness, true, but man also has the potential for superconsciousness. And unless you start searching for the superconscious you will remain in the basement or even the basement basement. You will remain crawling on the earth – and you have the capacity to fly. You can become a butterfly, and you are not opening your wings because your attachment to the earth is too much. That attachment has to be transformed. You have to start looking at the stars.That’s what Sufis call adab, to be in the presence of the master. Hindus call it satsang. To be in the presence of the master means to look at the stars, to become aware of the attic, that something higher is possible in you. Be thrilled that you are not finished as you are, that you can have wings, that you can fly as high as you desire, that even the sky is not the limit.Rise, have done with fairy tales; leave your base passions, and come to me. There are two kinds of people in the world. The worldly people remain in the basement; they remain concerned with the base passions. And the so-called otherworldly, the religious, they become concerned with fairy tales. And both are lost.The real seeker will drop two things. First he will drop fairy tales – that’s why Sanai mentions first, Rise, have done with fairy tales… The first thing is to drop fairy tales – inventions of the priests. And then the second thing is watch your base passions because in your base passions a great energy is hidden. If released, it will become the bridge which will join the earth and the sky …and come to me.You have to realizethat it is his guidancethat keeps you on the pathand not your own strength.But again Sanai reminds you that on the path of love this has to be remembered continuously. Don’t forget it even for a single moment: You have to realize that it is his guidance… Always remember that if you start moving toward God, it is he who has chosen you. Don’t for a moment think, “Look! I am a great seeker of God. I am no ordinary man, I am not worldly; I am not like these worldly creatures. I am a spiritual man; I search for God. I don’t seek and search for money or power.” You have fallen again; again you have fallen into the basement. The ego is back. Never for a single moment think that it is you who is searching for God.On the contrary, on the path of love, remember it must be he who has called you – otherwise how could you have searched for him? It must be he who has chosen you; it must be he who is pulling you. It must be he in some unknown, mysterious way taking you farther away to some unknown existence. It is he who has taken possession of you. You have to realize that it is his guidance that keeps you on the path…And never for a single moment think, “It is because of my strength that I am on the path.” No. If it is because of your strength on the path, you have already gone astray. You have already become an egoist. You have created the separation between you and God. “It is he who keeps me on the path. It is he who keeps reminding me not to go astray.”Plato used a beautiful word for truth. The word is althea, it means non-forgetting, not forgetting. It means remembering, it means constant remembering. Truth is a constant remembering. Truth is not forgetting for a single moment that God is, that only God is; that “He has given me life,” that “He has given me the desire to search for truth,” that “He has chosen me to search for him,” that “He must have called me in some mysterious way – otherwise how could I have moved in his direction?”The lover keeps on reminding himself, “It is the beloved who is functioning like a magnet. I am being pulled, I am being drawn. It is not my work, it is his grace.” And if you can remember this, that it is his grace, the ego will not arise, and slowly, slowly the ego will be dropped.And when the ego is dropped you have arrived. Then the three are one: then the lover and the beloved and the love are one. You have entered into the garden, the hadiqa.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-06/

The first question:Osho,What is creativity?Action is not creativity, inaction also is not creativity. Creativity is a very paradoxical state of consciousness and being; it is action through inaction. It is what Lao Tzu calls wei wu wei. It is allowing something to happen through you. It is not a doing; it is an allowing. It is becoming a passage so the whole can flow through you. It is becoming a hollow bamboo, just a hollow bamboo. And then immediately something starts to happen because hidden behind man is God. Just give him a little way, a little passage, to come through you. That is creativity, allowing God to happen is creativity.Creativity is a religious state. That’s why I say that a poet is far closer to God than a theologian, a dancer even far closer. The philosopher is the farthest away because the more you think, the greater the wall you create between you and the whole. The more you think, the more you are. The ego is nothing but all the thoughts accumulated in the past.When you are not, God is. That is creativity.Creativity simply means you are in a total relaxation. It does not mean inaction, it means relaxation, because out of relaxation much action will be born. But that will not be your doing; you will be just a vehicle. A song will start coming through you. You are not the creator of it; it comes from the beyond. It always comes from the beyond. When you create it, it is just ordinary, mundane. When it comes through you it has superb beauty. It brings something of the unknown in it.When the great poet Coleridge died he left thousands of poems incomplete. Many times in his life he was asked, “Why don’t you complete these poems?” – because a few poems were missing only one line or two lines, “Why don’t you complete them?”And he would say, “I cannot. I have tried, but when I complete them something goes amiss, something goes wrong. My line never falls in tune with that which has come through me. It remains a stumbling block; it becomes a rock, it hinders the flow. So I have to wait. Whosoever has been flowing through me, whenever he again starts flowing and completes the poem it will be completed, not before.”He completed only a few poems, but those are of superb beauty, of great mystic splendor. That has always been so. The poet disappears, then there is creativity, then he is possessed. Yes, that is the word, he is possessed.To be possessed by existence is creativity.Simone de Beauvoir has said, “Life is occupied both in perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself. If all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”And the man who is not creative is only not dying, that’s all. His life has no depth. His life is not yet life but just a preface. The book of life has not yet started. He is born, true, but he is not alive.When you become creative, when you allow creativity to happen through you, when you start singing a song that is not your own… A song that you cannot sign and you cannot say, “It is my own,” on which you cannot make your signature – then life take wings, it upsurges.In creativity is surpassing, otherwise, at the most we can go on perpetuating ourselves. You create a child; it is not creativity. You will die and the child will be here to perpetuate life. But to perpetuate is not enough unless you start surpassing. And surpassing happens only when something of the beyond comes in contact with you. That is the point of transcendence – surpassing. And in surpassing, the miracle happens – you are not, and yet for the first time you are.The essence of wisdom is to act in harmony with nature. That is the message of all the great mystics – Lao Tzu, Buddha, Bahauddin, Sosan, Sanai – to act in harmony with nature. Animals act unconsciously in harmony. Rocks and plants and stars act unconsciously in harmony with nature. Man has to act consciously in harmony with nature because man has consciousness. Man can choose not to act in harmony, hence the great responsibility.Man has responsibility; only man has responsibility, that is his grandeur. No other animal is responsible; he simply acts in harmony, there is no way of going astray. The animal cannot go astray; he is not yet able to go astray. There is no consciousness yet. He functions as you function in deep sleep.In deep sleep you also fall in harmony with nature. That’s why deep sleep is so rejuvenating, so relaxing. Just a few minutes of deep sleep and you are fresh and young again, and all the dust that you had gathered and all weariness and boredom disappear. You have contacted the source. But this is an animal way to contact the source. Sleep is an animal way to contact the source.Animals are horizontal, man is vertical. When you want to go into sleep you have to fall into a horizontal position. Only in a horizontal position you can fall asleep. You cannot fall asleep standing; it will be very difficult. You have to go back again, millions of years back, just like an animal. When you are horizontal, parallel to the earth; suddenly you start losing consciousness, suddenly you are no longer responsible.It is because of this factor Sigmund Freud chose the couch for the patient. It is not for the comfort of the patient, it is a strategy. Once the patient is horizontal he starts being irresponsible. And unless he feels utterly free to say things, he will not say unconscious things. If he remains responsible and vertical he will be continuously judging whether to say something or not to say it. He will be censoring.When he is lying horizontal on the couch, and the psychoanalyst is hidden behind – you cannot see him – suddenly he is again like an animal. He has no responsibility. He starts babbling things to a stranger which he would never have said to anybody. He starts saying things which are deep in his unconscious; those unconscious things start surfacing. It is a strategy, a Freudian strategy, to make the patient utterly helpless like a child or like an animal.Once you don’t feel responsible, you become natural. And psychotherapy has been of great help. It relaxes you. All that you have repressed surfaces, and from surfacing, it evaporates. After going through psychoanalysis you become less burdened, you become more natural, you are more in harmony with nature and with yourself. That is the meaning of being healthy.But this is going back, this is regression. This is going to the basement – what I was talking about the other day. There is another way to surpass, and that is going to the attic – not the way of Sigmund Freud, but the way of Buddha.You can surpass yourself by being in contact consciously with nature. And that is the essence of wisdom – to be in harmony with nature, with the natural rhythm of the universe. And whenever you are in harmony with the natural rhythm of the universe you are a poet, you are a painter, you are a musician, you are a dancer.Try it. Sometime sitting by the side of a tree, fall in tune consciously. Become one with nature, let boundaries dissolve. Become the tree, become the grass, become the wind – and suddenly you will see, something that has never happened to you is happening. Your eyes are becoming psychedelic – trees are greener than they have ever been, and roses are rosier, and everything seems to be luminous. And suddenly you want to sing a song, not knowing from where it comes. Your feet are ready to dance; you can feel the dance murmuring inside your veins. You can hear the sound of music within and without. This is the state of creativity. This can be called the basic quality – being in harmony with nature, being in tune with life, with the universe.Lao Tzu has given it a beautiful name, wei wu wei, action through inaction. You can call it creative quietude – a process that combines within a single individual two seeming incompatibles: supreme activity and supreme relaxation.That’s the paradox of creativity. If you see a painter painting, certainly he is active, utterly active, madly active; he is all action. Or you see a dancer dancing; he is all action. But still, deep down there is no actor, no doer; there is all silence. Hence I called creativity the state of paradox. All beautiful states are paradoxical. The higher you go, the deeper you go into the paradox of reality.Supreme action with supreme relaxation – on the surface great action is happening; in the depth nothing is happening or only nothing is happening. Creative quietude is the supreme action, the precious suppleness, simplicity, spontaneity and freedom that flows from us, or rather through us, whenever private egos and conscious efforts yield to a power not their own.Yielding to a power not of your own, surrendering to a power that is beyond you, is creativity. Meditation is creativity. And when the ego disappears, the wound in you disappears; you are healed, you are whole. The ego is your dis-ease. And when the ego disappears you are no longer dormant, you start flowing. You start flowing with the immense flow of existence.Norbert Weiner has said, “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves; whirlpools of water in an ever-flowing river.”Then you are not an ego but an event or a process of events. Then you are a process, not a thing. Consciousness is not a thing, it is a process; and we have made it a thing. The moment you call it “I” it becomes a thing – defined, bounded, dormant, stagnant. And you start dying. The ego is your death. And the death of the ego is your real life. And real life is creativity.You need not go to any school to learn creativity. All that you need is to go within and help the ego dissolve. Don’t support it, don’t go on strengthening and nourishing it. And whenever the ego is not, all is truth, all is beautiful, and then whatsoever happens is good.And I am not saying that you will all become Picassos or Shakespeares, I am not saying that. A few of you will become painters, a few of you will become singers, a few of you will become musicians, a few of you dancers – but that is not the point. Each of you will become creative in his own way. You may be a cook, but then there will be creativity. Or you may be just a cleaner, but then there will be creativity. There will be no boredom. You will become inventive in small things. Even in cleaning there will be a kind of worship, a prayer. So whatsoever you do then will have the taste of creativity.We don’t need many painters. If all turn out to be painters, life will become very difficult. We don’t need many poets. We need gardeners, we need farmers, and we need all kinds of people. But each person can be creative. If he is meditative, egoless, then God starts flowing through him. According to his capacities, according to his potential, God starts taking forms.And then all is good. You need not become famous. A really creative person does not care a bit about becoming famous; there is no need. He is so tremendously fulfilled in whatsoever he is doing, he is so content in whatsoever he is and wherever he is, that there is no question of desire. When you are creative, desires disappear. When you are creative, ambitions disappear. When you are creative, you are already that which you always wanted to be.The second question:Osho,I have always thought that you were against politicians, so I was very much surprised to know that you have blessed Indira Gandhi. Would you like to say something about it?I am against the political mind. The political mind means the cunning mind; the political mind means the murderous, violent mind. The political mind means the mind that is only interested in dominating others, that is only interested in being in such a position where millions of people’s lives are in his hands, this way or that. The politician’s mind is the mind of the perfect egoist.I am certainly against the political mind. I would like a world which does not go round and round the political mind. I would like a world which has the religious quality, not the political quality. At least I would like the political quality of the mind to recede back into the background.At the center should be the creative mind; politics is destructive. But this cannot happen right now. For millions of years politics has been in the center, so this cannot happen right now. A great meditative energy has to be released first.If millions of people become meditators, then slowly, slowly the structure of the energy on this earth will change – will start moving from the political mind to the religious mind. I am against the political mind, but I know that this cannot happen right now. It may take thousands of years. The beginning has to happen right now, the seed has to be sown right now, but the fruits will come only later on. You can become a nonpolitical person right now, and your life will have the flowering. But as far as the whole earth is concerned, it is going to take time. What are we going to do meanwhile?I have blessed Indira Gandhi because to me she seems to be the least political among the Indian politicians. It will again look strange to you because whatsoever has been said about her, spread about her, rumored about her, is just the opposite. But my own observation is this, that she has the least political mind.And why do I say so? – these are the reasons. First, had she really been a politician and only a politician she wouldn’t have tried to do anything that goes against the Indian tradition. The politician never goes against the tradition. He always follows his own followers. That’s a mutual arrangement. Particularly in a democratic system, the politician cannot afford to go against the traditions, because after five years there will be the elections. If you go against people’s traditions – right or wrong, that is not the point – if you go against their traditions, they will take revenge.So real politicians only talk about change, but they never try to change anything. They only talk. The talk is okay, it hurts nobody. Even the masses enjoy the talk. Talk about revolution but don’t try to do it, because when you try to do it then many of the traditions and superstitions of the masses will have to be destroyed. And then those people will be angry and in a democratic set-up their anger can be dangerous.Indira Gandhi tried to do something, sincerely tried to do something. In fact that’s what created trouble for her. She was trying to help the poor against the rich. She angered the rich, the people who are powerful; she angered the vested interest. No politician will afford it, no politician can afford it. Talking about great things is allowed. Nobody is worried what you talk about – just don’t try to do anything. Go on creating beautiful ideas, but never practice them.She annoyed the rich people of this country because she was doing something for the poor, and she annoyed the poor because whatsoever she did went against their traditions. For example, she imposed birth control. The Indian masses cannot tolerate it. For thousands of years they have thought that it is God who gives children, and who are you to prevent it? It is a gift from God – that has been their idea. Now the gift is becoming very dangerous. The gift is becoming so dangerous that it is almost suicidal. No politician would have tried that. Let the country go to its death – who bothers?Since Morarji Desai came into power, all the programs for birth control have been put aside. And that is the only hope for this country. If this country can survive, the only hope is to reduce your population. Already there are too many people. Seventy-five percent of the people are living below human standards. Fifty percent of the people are almost starving. Within twenty-five years, by the end of this century, the whole country will be starving. But that is not the point.The politician thinks only of his power now. He will be here as prime minister for five or ten years at the most. Who cares what happens later on? Why should he risk his power and position? Indira risked it. Hence I call her the least political person in Indian politics.Secondly, she started succeeding in her programs. That is dangerous; you shouldn’t succeed. If the man in power fails, all other politicians are happy. Because the man in power is failing – that is their chance. If the man in power succeeds then there is no chance for them ever to come into power. And she was the first Indian prime minister who was succeeding in bringing a certain order in the country, in creating some discipline out of chaos. She was succeeding in raising people’s standard of life. She was succeeding in helping people to be more productive and less destructive. She was succeeding in many, many ways.But that angers other politicians. Now what is their chance? Other politicians live only on the failure of those who are in power. One shouldn’t be successful. There is nothing more dangerous than to succeed.This is strange, but this is a fact in the history of man. If somebody succeeds, his own success is going to boomerang on him. If she had failed, there would have been no trouble. Then the politicians who were against her would have remained divided, and if they were divided there was no danger for her. But she started succeeding, and their chances to come into power started becoming less and less. They all joined together; they had to join. It was a question of life and death for them – now no question of ideologies.A strange phenomenon has happened in India, very strange. Morarji Desai is a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, and is in power through the help of those who had murdered Mahatma Gandhi. Strange bedfellows! But when it is a question of life and death, who cares about ideologies? Ideologies are good as playthings, toys. All the Indian politicians of different attitudes, approaches, diametrically opposite ideologies, gathered together became one force against Indira Gandhi. Why? How did it happen? She was succeeding.Politicians only pretend; they never really do anything. But she was sincere; she really tried to do something for this country. That’s why this country can never forgive her.Thirdly, Indian bureaucracy is the worst in the world. No work ever happens. Files just go on moving from one table to another table for years and years.I knew a man who fought a single case in the courts his whole life – for almost fifty years. All the judges died. Whosoever tried his case died: all the lawyers for and against. And finally he himself died, but the case was unfinished. Not only the judges and lawyers died, even the government changed. In 1947 India became independent. The case was started by the British government. Even the government died, another government came into power but the case continued.If you want to do something in this country, it is impossible with such a bureaucracy. You have to force this bureaucracy to do things. The bureaucracy was angry. It was really the bureaucracy who deceived Indira Gandhi. She was given false reports. She was given false reports that her position was perfectly okay, she could allow an election, she was going to win. She depended on the reports of the bureaucracy. Those reports were false. The bureaucracy was absolutely against her. Nobody has ever forced them to do anything, and she was forcing them to do things.Since Morarji came, the bureaucracy is perfectly happy. Again things are moving at such a slow pace that nothing ever moves. Morarji himself is a bureaucrat; he started his life as a deputy collector. He knows how the bureaucracy functions; he does not interfere. If you are just there to be in power – that is the mind of a politician – you don’t interfere. You don’t make so many enemies.The rich people were against Indira because she tried to bring the poor people a little higher from their mire. The poor people were angry because she imposed birth control on them forcibly, and it can be imposed only forcibly – otherwise it is not possible. The bureaucracy was against her because she forced the bureaucracy to do things, to implement things, and fast. The whole country was angry. Had she been a politician, this wouldn’t have happened.Fourth, she imposed an Emergency. She was straightforward. Had she been a politician she would have done everything that is done through an Emergency without imposing the Emergency. That’s what is being done now. Everything is being done just as it was done in the Emergency, but without declaring it. The cunning politician always works indirectly, not directly. He is not straightforward.Morarji Desai said in one of his interviews to the BBC… He was asked by the BBC reporter, it was particularly deliberately asked for you and the work that is happening here, “Will you allow us freedom to make films in your country?” He said, “I will allow it, unless it is dangerous to our defense.”Now, how are my sannyasins dangerous to the defense of this country? Doing Dynamic and Kundalini and dancing and singing, how can they be dangerous? And if there is something that Morarji thinks is dangerous he can simply tell the BBC people and all the other TV agencies that have asked to film the ashram, “Make your film, but your film will have to go through the censor board.” So simple! If you feel that something is going to be against your country, you can cut it. But this is a cunning political mind. Talk about freedom, just talk about freedom, that’s all – and go on creating more and more bondage for people.Indira was straightforward, she declared the Emergency. She was honest. The Emergency was needed. This country can only be changed if things are to be taken very seriously, as if the country is at war. Unless things are taken in that proportion and that intensity, as if the country is at war, nothing is going to happen. And the war is there.The war is with the population explosion. It is far more dangerous than to be in a war with Pakistan or China because China cannot destroy you, neither can Pakistan destroy you. Maybe China can take a few miles of land, but the population explosion is the real enemy. The children that are going to come will destroy you. Things are in a dangerous situation. It is the greatest crisis that India has ever faced in the past; it knows no way to tackle it. Things have to be taken seriously.That was the effort behind imposing the Emergency. But imposing an Emergency in a democratic country is dangerous. It can be done only by a nonpolitical mind. It can be done only by one who really wants to change the situation, whatsoever the cost. She risked her power, her prime ministership, to change the course of the history of this country.This Emergency angered the journalists and other media people. And no politician will ever like to anger the journalists because much depends, too much depends on them. It can be safely said that fifty percent of Indira’s fall was made possible by the Indian journalists. They were getting angry and angrier. They weren’t allowed to gossip, they weren’t allowed to make rumors, they weren’t allowed what they call “freedom of the press.” So when the Emergency was removed, they took great revenge. It is how the human mind functions. A politician would have been alert about it.Fifth, her son, Sanjay Gandhi, entered politics. A real politician, a cunning politician, would have allowed him to enter only from the back door; otherwise, others become jealous. She allowed him to enter from the front door, and the whole country became jealous.There is no reason to prevent anybody from entering politics. Even though the person happens to be the son of the prime minister, he has every right to enter into politics like anybody else. And Sanjay Gandhi has a certain potential. There was nothing wrong in it, but to allow him through the front door is a nonpolitical thing. She functioned more as a mother and a human being than as a cunning politician.Her own father never allowed her from the front door; he was more cautious. Again and again, he was asked, “Who after you?” He never mentioned Indira Gandhi – never. Once to a friend he mentioned, “I cannot tell you the name of the person who will succeed me because if I tell you the name then there is no possibility for the poor person to succeed me. Just by mentioning it I will anger all the other people who are competitors, and they will join together against him.” There is every possibility he meant “her” not “him.” He was a more seasoned politician than Indira Gandhi; he knew the ways of politics.Indira Gandhi herself came from the back door. But she is more a mother than a politician; she allowed Sanjay Gandhi to enter from the front door. That was dangerous; that became one of the most important causes of her fall. And it was more dangerous because Sanjay has the potential. Sooner or later, he is going to become a prime minister. He has the potential and the guts. It cannot be prevented. But Indira was functioning very nonpolitically.Morarji Desai is more cunning. His son is also there, but always behind him. And those who are even more interested in power, they go even further. The chief minister of Haryana, Devi Dayal, has disowned his son and saved his seat – saved his power and disowned his son. This is how a politician functions.Indira Gandhi risked her power and tried to save her son. That is not the way of a politician – maybe the way of a mother, of a human being.Sixth, the greatest error that a politician can commit, a very fundamental error and very obvious – Indira Gandhi forced all the political parties into jail together. That is so absurd! Even a man like me, who has nothing to do with politics, can see that it is absolutely absurd. If you put all the enemies in jail together, you are forcing them to be united against you.She should have studied Machiavelli a little more. It is so simple; a politician would never do that. Keep at least half the enemies out of prison, and half the enemies in prison. Keep them fighting, keep them separate, because that is the only way to rule – to divide. This is utterly stupid – putting all your enemies together in jail you have almost imposed unity on them; they cannot avoid it. Now you are the enemy of all of them.They became friendly, and they saw the point that if they can become friendly and if they can come together, then Indira is gone. This they had not seen for thirty years; for thirty years they had remained divided. Suddenly Indira brought them together, and they became aware that “It is so simple. If we join together then Indira is gone.” The Congress Party had ruled for thirty years because the enemies were divided. Indira functioned as a non-politician.And seventh, after the Emergency, immediately after the Emergency, and after a great effort to impose birth control on the people – when rich people, poor people, the journalists and everybody was annoyed and angry – immediately after the Emergency declaring a general election, again that is incomprehensible.If she had asked me, I would have told her, “Wait at least for one year. Remove the Emergency, wait for one year.” That one year would have done it. The journalist’s steam would have been released. People would have forgotten the imposition. People’s memories are very short. And in one year the enemies, all the political enemies, would have again fallen into their old habits, and would have started quarreling with each other again.Immediately declaring a general election for the country was utterly unpolitical. That’s how she was defeated.Because of these errors, I say she is the least political of all the Indian politicians, hence I have blessed her. I have blessed her, and I bless her again.The third question:Osho,What do you say about sex education for young children?Truth is truth, and nobody should be debarred from it. Just because children are young, do they have to be fed on lies? Is truth only for grown-ups? Then does it mean truth is dangerous to the delicate consciousness of the child?Truth is never dangerous, untruth is dangerous. And if you tell an untruth to a grown-up he may be able to defend; it can be forgiven. But never say an untruth to a child because he is so helpless, so indefensible. He depends so much on you, he trusts so much in you – don’t betray him. It is betraying. Telling any lie means you have betrayed the child. And finally you will be in trouble. Sooner or later, the child will discover that you have been telling lies. That very day all trust in you will disappear.If young people start rebelling against the parents, the responsibility is not on them, the responsibility is of the parents. They have been telling so many lies. And now, by and by, the children start discovering that they were all lies. If you have been telling so many lies, even the truth that you have told to them becomes suspicious. And one thing is certain, they lose trust in you. You have betrayed, you have deceived, you have become ugly in their consciousness. Your impression is not good anymore. In fact, they will never be able to trust anybody.That’s the problem I am facing every day. When you come here and become sannyasins, the problem that you have with your parents starts being imposed on me. You cannot trust me either. In a subtle way I become your father figure. And because your parents have deceived you, who knows? If even your parents deceive you, then I am a stranger and if even parents cannot be relied upon, then how can you rely upon me?You will never be able to trust the woman you love, the man you love. You will never be able to trust the master you surrender to. You will never in your life be able to regain your trust. And for what has your trust been destroyed? For such foolish things…What is wrong? Sex is a simple fact. Tell it the way it is. And children are very, very perceptive. Even if you don’t tell them, they will discover it on their own. They are very curious people.Carl was assigned to write a composition entitled, “Where I came from.” When he returned home from school, he entered the kitchen where his mother was preparing dinner.“Where did I come from, Mama?” he asked.“The stork brought you.”“And where did Daddy come from?”“The stork brought him, too.”“And what about Grandpa?”“Why, the stork brought him too, darling.”Carl very carefully made notes on what Mama had told him, and the next day he handed in the following composition:“According to my calculations, there hasn’t been a natural birth in my family for the past three generations.”Children are very perceptive. They go on watching, they go on seeing what foolishness you are saying. And how long can you deceive them? Life is there, and life is sexual. And they are watching life. They will see animals making love, they will see birds making love. And you may go on believing that they have never seen you making love; you can go on believing it, but children know that their parents make love. In the beginning they may think they are fighting or something, but sooner or later they discover that something is going on behind their back.Why create these suspicions and doubts? Why not be true? Truth is always good, truth is always divine. Let them know things as they are.I know a friend of mine who was determined to have it out with his older boy and spent several hours painstakingly explaining sexual physiology to him. At the conclusion, feeling utterly exhausted and knowing that he didn’t want to go through it again with his younger son, he said, “Billy, now that I’ve explained it to you, can I count on you passing it on to Bobby?”“Okay Dad,” said young William.His elder son went out in search of his younger brother at once. “Bobby,” he said when he found him, “I just had a long lecture from Dad and he wants me to pass on what he told me to you.”“Go ahead,” said Bobby.“Well, you know what you and I were doing with those girls behind the barn last month? Dad wants me to tell you that the birds and the bees do it too!”Don’t be foolish, let things be as they are. Truth can never be the enemy, sexual or otherwise. Befriend truth.And children are very understanding. They immediately accept the fact. They have no prejudices, they have no notion of right and wrong. If you tell them the truth, they understand it is so and they forget all about it. And it will create a great trust in you. You never deceived them.It is sex education which is one of the fundamental causes of the rift between the generations. The day the child discovers that the parents have been deceiving him, he loses all roots in trust. That is the most devastating shock you can give to that delicate system.Go on telling the truth as it is and don’t try to philosophize about it, and don’t go on round and round. Tell it the way it is.Why is there so much fear about it in you? – because your parents have not told it to you, so you feel a little shaky, nervous, afraid, as if you are moving in some dangerous territory. Be very simple, direct. And whenever a child inquires about anything, if you know about it, tell it. If you don’t know about it, say that you don’t know. There are two wrongs that you can do: one is saying something as it is not – one danger; another is saying something which you don’t know.For example, the child asks, “Who created the world?” and you say, “God.” Again you are leading him into some mischief. You don’t know; you are pretending that you know. Soon the child will discover that you know nothing, your God is bogus.And the problem is not that your God is proved bogus, the problem is that now the whole concept of God is proved bogus. You have destroyed a great possibility of inquiring into God. You should have said, “I don’t know. I am trying to know. I am as ignorant as you are. If I find out before you do, I will tell you, if you find out before I do, please tell me.”Your son will respect you forever for this sincerity of the heart, for this equality, that you never pretended, that you never tried to show, “I know and you don’t know,” that you were never egoistic.Saying to the child, “God created the world,” without knowing it, is nothing but just an ego trip. You are enjoying at the cost of the child’s ignorance. But how long can you enjoy this knowledge?Never tell the child that which you yourself are incapable of doing. Don’t tell the child, “Be truthful, always be truthful” – because once he catches you red-handed being untruthful, you have destroyed something immensely valuable. And there is nothing more precious than trust.How long can you hide the fact? One day somebody knocks on the door, and you say to the child, “Tell him Daddy is not at home.” And now the child knows that to talk about truth is one thing, but it is not meant to be followed and practiced. You have created a duality in him of saying something, pretending something, and being something else quite the contrary of it. You have created a split.If you know something, if the child asks about sex or how children come into the world, and you know – then simply say it as it is. Make it as simple as possible because the child is not asking about the physiology or about the chemistry or about the inner mechanism of sex. He is not asking about all that nonsense; that is not his interest. Don’t start telling him about physiology – because what they do in schools in the name of sex education is teach only physiology. And the child is simply bored; he is not interested.He simply wants the truth. How do children come, where do they come from? Just say it. And never try to give him more information than he needs and he asks for, because that will be too early. Particularly in the West that too is happening, where the idea has become prevalent that children have to be given sex education. So parents are in a hurry. Even if the child has not inquired, they go on pouring their knowledge that they have acquired from books. Children simply feel bored. Unless the inquiry has arisen in the child, there is no need to say anything. When the inquiry has arisen, there is no need to hide anything.It is not a question of age at all, so don’t ask about young children. Whom do you call young? What is the age limit? Is seven years old young? Or is nine years old young? It is not a question of age. Whenever the child inquires, he is ready to be given the information. He may be four, he may be five, he may be seven. The more intelligent a child is, the earlier he will inquire, that much is certain. The stupid, the mediocre child may not inquire when he is twelve, and at fourteen he may inquire. But the intelligent child is bound to inquire; life is such a mystery that from the very beginning the child becomes aware that something is happening. All around, life is happening, life is perpetuating itself.He sees the eggs of the birds in the garden, and then one day the eggs are broken and the birds come out. He goes on seeing his mother’s belly growing bigger and bigger, and he certainly becomes curious. What is happening? Is his mother ill or something? And then one day she comes from the hospital with a child. And where has the child come from? It has been brought by the stork. And he sees the belly is not big anymore. Now he is puzzled. What happened to the belly?Don’t create unnecessary puzzles for children. Life is puzzling enough as it is. Life is so mysterious, the inquiry is bound to be there. But remember, the more intelligent a child is, the sooner he is going to inquire. So if your child inquires early, don’t think that he seems to be dirty from the very beginning. He is not dirty, he is intelligent. If anybody is dirty, you are dirty. He is simply intelligent.Tell him things as they are and tell him the way he can understand. Don’t philosophize, don’t go indirectly round and round; go directly to the point. Make it as clear as two plus two is four.And you will be surprised, once the fact has been told the child goes away and starts playing. He is not interested anymore; he never brings the question again. If you falsify, he will bring the question again and again – from this side, from that side, any excuse and he will bring the question because he wants to know the fact, and unless the fact is given he is not going to be satisfied.Only facts satisfy. Falsifications can postpone but they cannot satisfy.The fourth question:Osho,Why do I continue to take myself and life in general so seriously?Everybody takes life seriously because everybody is so empty. By being serious you hide your emptiness, by being serious you pretend. By being serious you are just escaping from the loneliness that is there inside you, the nothingness that is inside you.You cannot laugh, you cannot be at ease, because whenever you are at ease you become aware of the emptiness within. You have to remain serious. Serious, you remain clinging to the surface. Relaxed, you start diving deep into your being – and there is fear.People are serious for a certain reason. The reason is they don’t want to face themselves. And seriousness also gives a certain dignity; it is ego fulfilling. If you are serious everybody thinks you must be important. Seriousness has a connotation of importance. Important people are very serious – you don’t see saints laughing. Christians say Jesus never laughed. They can’t be right. I know Jesus far better; they must be wrong. But they indicate a certain attitude. How can Jesus laugh? He must be serious, utterly serious.All the Christian paintings about Jesus are ugly and false because the face is made so serious. And the painters were doing something great; they were thinking it had to be serious because Jesus is the savior, and how can the savior laugh and tell jokes? You don’t expect a savior of the world to tell jokes; he has to be serious. He has a great burden, he is carrying the greatest burden: the burden of the whole earth, of the whole of humanity, of the original sin of man, and other unoriginal sins too. There are millions of people and he is carrying the sins, the burden of all. He is the savior.Because of this idea, Christians cannot believe that Krishna can dance and sing and play on the flute. Krishna seems to be very nonserious. How can you play on the flute when so many people are suffering from so many sins? Everybody is bound for hell, and you are playing on the flute? Is this the time to play the flute? And you are dancing – and with so many girlfriends! This seems to be very irresponsible. A savior dancing with his girlfriends under the full-moon night, and the whole world in such a misery!Krishna should open a hospital or at least a primary school to educate people. He should do some missionary work. What is he doing under the full moon when the whole earth is drowning deeper and deeper into sin? He looks frivolous. Jesus is serious.You ask me, “Why do I continue to take myself and life in general so seriously?” It gives gratification to your ego that you are a serious person, that you are not ordinary, you are special; that you are not the so-called people who go to the movies and laugh and talk nonsense and gossip. You are a serious person. You only meditate, you only read the Bible or the Koran. You only remain with great, high things; you are not interested in the mundane.Seriousness supports the ego, seriousness is the climate in which the ego can thrive. Nonseriousness is the death of the ego. I teach you nonseriousness.And because of this seriousness you make mountains out of molehills. Just small things, and you make mountains… Somebody smokes cigarettes, and he is very serious, as if by smoking cigarettes he is going to hell. He thinks he is committing a great sin. Don’t be so stupid. Just by taking smoke in and out you cannot commit any sin. It may show that you are stupid but it doesn’t show that you are a sinner.And I don’t think that people are sent to hell for stupidity; otherwise, the whole earth would have been in hell. Why are people here? All the stupid people are here in the world. But you make mountains… You cannot bear small things, you have to be with big things.They tell the story of the lady who went to confession and told the priest a long story about her sexual activities and as a result, for penance, the priest told her to go into the next room, say twelve Hail Marys and wash her sins away by washing her hands in the holy water which was contained in a basin on the table.As she was busy in the next room saying her Hail Marys and washing her hands in the basin of holy water, in walked another young lady who took one look at the scene and exclaimed, “Please take your damn hands out of that water! Don’t you realize I have to gargle with it!”You think you are committing great sins? There are other people who are far more serious. You must remember one thing: even in hell you will not be the first. You will be standing in a long, long queue. Wherever you are, you will be standing in a long, long queue. Forget all about being the first, even in hell.George Bernard Shaw once said – somebody asked, “Where would you like to go, to heaven or to hell?”He said, “Wherever I go, I would like to be the first. I am even ready to go to hell, but I want to be the first. And if I have to be the second in heaven, I don’t care for heaven at all.”The ego wants to be the first everywhere. The ego wants to be the greatest saint. If that is not possible, then the greatest sinner – but the greatest. Why can’t you be ordinary? And to be ordinary is immensely beautiful, and to be just human is divine.Forget ideals and goals; those ideals and goals keep you neurotic. And people go on changing their goals. First they used to have paradise as the goal, saintliness or God-realization or enlightenment. They change… Now they have to attain total orgasm. Now no smaller orgasm will do – total orgasm. And what is total orgasm anyway? And how are you going to know this is total orgasm? Is there any way to measure it? So you will remain in misery. The total orgasm will never be achieved.Now there are people who are continuously hankering for peak experiences, now they want a peak experience every moment. They go nuts. If one moment is passed without a peak experience then life is lost, then one moment is wasted. Where is the peak experience? They want to remain on the peak for twenty-four hours continuously. These things keep people insane.Life should be lived more sanely. And what do I mean when I say life should be lived more sanely? One should be able to accept the ordinariness of it. And there is tremendous joy out of ordinariness, and that joy is not something like a peak experience, it is more diffused. It is not a peak because peaks only exist with the valleys. If you want a peak experience then you will have to fall again and again into the valley.You will have to repeat the myth of Sisyphus. He takes a rock to the peak, and the moment it reaches the peak, the peak is so small and the rock is so big that it rolls back down the other side. He has to rush back into the valley. Then he starts the journey again, again he hankers for the peak experience. And by the time he reaches to the peak, just reaching, just reaching – and finished! Flat, back to the valley.And that’s what happens to you. Each peak experience is momentary. It is the repetition of the myth of Sisyphus. Forget all about it. Rather live a more ordinary life. That is the life of a Zen disciple, that is the life of a Sufi disciple – ordinary.I have heard:An American inquirer came to Dacca, to Bangladesh. He had heard about a great Sufi master. He was in a hurry to meet the master. He asked many people but nobody had heard of him. At the airport he went from one person to another, nobody had heard of him. He became suspicious and he became very depressed. He had come so far and had heard so much about the Sufi master who lives in Dacca, Bangladesh, and nobody even knows his name!But as a last try he asked a taxi driver. And the taxi driver said, “Sit in the taxi and I will take you to him.” He couldn’t believe it. So suddenly… Because nobody knew about the master. He had asked but nobody knew.The taxi driver said, “Don’t be worried. I know him. In fact I am him.”And that’s how it turned out to be. He was the Sufi master but he was working as a taxi driver – just an ordinary life.Sufis function that way. Somebody is a weaver, somebody may be a potter, somebody may be making carpets. Do you know what Gurdjieff used to do in the West? His business was selling carpets. He was a carpet salesman, that was his business. If you had seen him, you would have never recognized that there was a great master. That’s how Sufis have existed down the ages. They don’t stand out, there is no need.It is always the ego that hankers for the peak, and it is the ego that does not allow you to live in constant joy. And constant joy is not a peak, remember. In fact it is more like peace than like bliss, more like peace. Bliss is there, but like fragrance; you cannot catch hold of it. It is there, but very indirect, very subtle, very delicate. It is not a peak, certainly. It is very plain, simple.You are serious because you are afraid to know your ordinariness. And that is the truth, and truth is never ordinary. Once you have accepted the ordinariness, in your very ordinariness arises extraordinariness. Your ordinariness becomes luminous, radiant. Then each moment is a gift, and each moment brings its own joy, its own peace, its own beatitude.But never hanker after peaks. The idea of the peak is an ego projection. And don’t become serious, and don’t make mountains out of molehills. There is nothing to be serious about. Laugh a little, live a little and be playful, and you will know what life is. It comes in laughter, not in seriousness.A serious person is a closed person, a serious person is an unavailable person. A serious person exists with all the windows and doors closed. A serious person is encapsulated in himself. He never makes any bridges with people. He closes doors, he never makes any bridges.Laugh because laughter is a bridge. Love because love is a bridge. Enjoy small things because life consists of small things, and enjoying small things is a bridge.That’s why Zen people have made even drinking tea a meditation. Just drinking tea – who thinks of it as something religious? But it can be transformed; it is your attitude. You can drink tea so meditatively, sip meditatively, taste and smell the flavor. First listen to the samovar, the song of the samovar, the dance of the vapor inside, and the subtle fragrance that starts arising. Live it, be with it, make it a prayerful moment, and then just ordinary tea is transported into something divine. And if this can be done with tea, this can be done with everything else.To live religiously does not mean to live seriously; it means to live meditatively. And meditation has nothing to do with seriousness. Meditation is playfulness.That’s why my insistence here is more and more on dancing, on singing. I have put vipassana and zazen in the background because they can create seriousness in you, and you are already serious, and it is dangerous. First your seriousness has to be destroyed. Only then will you be able to enjoy vipassana without becoming serious.First you have to dance, so in dance your armor drops. First you have to shout in joy and sing, so your life becomes more vital. First you have to cathart, so all that you have repressed is thrown out, and your body is purified of toxins and poisons, and your psyche also is purified from repressed tumors, traumas, and wounds.When this has happened and you have become able to laugh and you have become able to love, then vipassana. Now vipassana will not drive you to seriousness, will not drive you in any way to an ego trip. Now you can sit silently, now sitting silently is not serious.That is the special quality that I am trying to create here in vipassana. It does not exist anywhere in the world. My whole effort here is to bring Tantra to the twentieth century and make it Neo-Tantra, to bring Tao to the twentieth century and make it Neo-Tao, and to bring Zen to the twentieth century and make it Neo-Zen, and so on and so forth. Neo-Sufi and Neo-Yoga…Centuries divide you from these beautiful things; those centuries have to be dropped. And those centuries can only be dropped if you drop what has been done to you in those centuries. You have become too serious. Modern man is very serious. It has never been so before. And this seriousness is creating a distance from existence, from the whole.Go into your seriousness and see what you are hiding behind it. You are alone, you are empty, and you are not capable of facing it. It has to be faced because emptiness is not bad, emptiness is immensely beautiful. If you escape from it, then it becomes ugly. If you go into it, it becomes silence and quietude. And if you disappear into it, it becomes creativity.And aloneness is beautiful. It is only a person who is alone who becomes capable of love. Those who cannot be alone cannot be in love at all, because their love remains a kind of need.Love can be of two types. One is when you say to somebody, “I need you, I really love you.” This is ugly love because it is based in need. You say, “I need you.” You want to use the other. You are not yet able to be alone. You want to be together with somebody; you want to cling to the other. The other keeps you occupied. Without the other you become afraid of your own aloneness. And this is what people say, and lovers enjoy it very much. When somebody says to you, “I need you, I really love you,” you feel you are entering something beautiful – you are not. You are entering something destructive. This is the wrong kind of love. And this is the love that exists in the world.Everybody is afraid of his loneliness and clings to the other, uses the other as a means to cling to. And when you use the other, the other is reduced to be a thing. He is no longer a person, he becomes a husband or a wife. Freedom is lost. You cannot allow the other to be free, because if you allow freedom then you will have to face your loneliness and that you don’t want to do.So you cling, you hold the other, you possess the other. Even if it means being possessed by the other, you are ready to lose your freedom. You become mutual slaves, mutual imprisonments to each other.Love as a need creates what the other day I was calling “tunnel vision.” You become focused on one person and you are afraid that if the other person leaves you, you will not be able to live at all. The very idea of the other leaving you gives you immediate thoughts of committing suicide. Your life will not have meaning. This is tunnel vision. One is willing to admit only a narrow range of sensations; all else is regarded as insignificant.When such expectations fail, then one feels life is not worth living. And they always fail because nobody can really be possessed. How can you possess a presence, a person? It is not a thing, you can never be the master. The other will go on asserting its freedom. The other will go on sabotaging your efforts to possess. The other is trying to possess you, and you are trying to possess the other. Nobody wants to be possessed, and everybody wants to be the possessor. Now, this is doomed to fail.Sooner or later you will start feeling life has no meaning. This kind of love is pathological, and it is the only kind that exists and is available in the world. It drives people neurotic, psychotic. It should be changed into love, not as a need but as a state. Then one can love life in more richness. Then one can love and yet allow the other freedom. Then love is nonpossessive. But that love is possible only when you have learned how to live with your aloneness. When you can be alone and perfectly happy and you don’t miss the other at all, only then you can love.But now a totally different kind of love arrives – even to think of it will shock you. Then the lover says, “I don’t need you, I love you.” It will be almost incomprehensible, a lover saying to somebody, “I don’t need you, I love you.” It will look contradictory because you have always heard, “I need you, I love you very much.” You are acquainted with that approach.But this is true love, the other is destructive. It destroys both people, it destroys the whole possibilities of growing. This is true love, this is creative love, when you can say, “I don’t need you, I simply love you.”Just meditate over it. Repeat it silently within yourself, “I don’t need you, I love you” and a totally different dimension opens up. Now there is no need to possess, now there is no need to reduce the other to a thing, now there is no need to destroy his or her freedom, now there is no need to allow the other to destroy your freedom. Now love can exist with freedom.When love exists with freedom it has tremendous beauty; it has something of the ultimate in it. But now it is pure sharing, now it is a luxury, it is no longer a need.I teach you love as a luxury, not love as a need. It is just an overflowing. You have so much that you cannot bear it anymore, you have to give it to somebody. And from where are you getting so much? It comes if you learn how to live in your aloneness; if you learn how to live in your aloneness, enjoy it and celebrate it, how to be empty without any desire to fill oneself up, to stuff oneself with anything – food, love, money, power. When you are not in any way interested in stuffing your emptiness, then suddenly emptiness changes its color, its quality is transformed.You relax into it. Then you don’t feel, “I am empty.” You feel, “I am emptiness and if I am emptiness, I am emptiness.” And the purity of emptiness is tremendous. In emptiness not even a particle of dust can collect. Emptiness cannot be polluted by anything; its purity is total, absolute. That emptiness is always virgin. Out of that emptiness, living in that emptiness, great joy and great peace arises wells up.This is what I call creativity. It can become a song, it can become a painting, it can become a dance, it can become love, it can become all kinds of things. But one thing is similar – it overflows. This overflowing love is a state, a luxury, a sharing for the sheer joy of sharing. This love is celebration.And you have been avoiding your aloneness, you have been avoiding your emptiness. If you go on avoiding it you will never come to know this love, this creative love. And this is the greatest experience there is. You are avoiding your own great possibility and potential.Don’t be serious please. Drop it. It is not going to give you anything except more and more misery.Meditate on these words of Kahlil Gibran:Sing and dance together and be joyousBut let each of you be aloneEven as the strings of a lute are aloneThough they quiver with the same music.Stand together, yet not too near together,For the pillars of the temple stand apart,And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.Be alone, that is meditation. And in aloneness love wells up, that is creation. Then love can do miracles.But the person who remains serious remains unavailable to his own sources, his own juice, remains unavailable to his own soil and roots. The person who is serious goes on moving round and round outside his being. Drop your seriousness.Laugh a little, love a little, and you will know what godliness is.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-07/

A ruby, there, is just a piece of stone:and spiritual excellence the height of folly.Silence is praise – have done with speech;your chatter will only bring you harm and sorrow –have done!Belief and unbeliefboth have their originin your hypocrite’s heart;the way is only longbecause you delay to start on it:one single stepwould bring you to him:become a slave,and you will become a king.The dumb find tongues,when the scent of life reaches themfrom his soul.Listen truly – and don’t be fooled –this is not for fools:all these different shadesbecome one colorin the jar of unity;the rope becomes slenderwhen reduced to a single strand.Your intellect is just a hotchpotchof guesswork and thought,limping over the face of the earth;wherever they are, he is not;they are contained within his creation.Man and his reason are just the latestripening plants in his garden.Whatever you assert about his natureyou are bound to be out of your depth,like a blind man trying to describethe appearance of his mother.While reason is still tracking down the secret,you end your quest on the open field of love.The path consists in neither words nor deeds:only desolation can come from these,and never any lasting edifice.Sweetness and life are the wordsof the man who treads this path in silence;when he speaks it is not from ignorance,and when he is silent it is not from sloth.The Sufi is not an escapist, that is not his climate. He is utterly against escapism. He believes in celebrating creation, celebrating existence, celebrating life. It is the very fundamental of Sufism that the creator can be reached only through the creation. You need not renounce his creation to get to him. In fact if you renounce his creation you will never get to him. Renouncing his creation, indirectly you have renounced the creator himself.But renunciation still happens. Not that the Sufi renounces the world, but that he attains to God – and the moment God is attained, the world disappears. There is nothing to renounce, then only God is.The Sufi does not escape from the world, but a moment comes when the world disappears, dissolves. The Sufi lives in the world, and one day he finds that there is no world, only God is.The Sufi is not an ascetic. He does not believe in inflicting pain on himself, he is not pathological. The Sufi lives life in an utterly normal way, with no perversions, with no obsessions, although slowly, slowly, the quality of his life goes on changing. Not that he tries to change it; his whole effort consists in remembering God, not in changing himself.Let it sink deep in you. If you miss this point you will miss the whole point of Sufism. The Sufi concentrates on only one thing – remembrance of God, zikr. As that remembrance deepens, his obsession with the world lessens. As he comes closer and closer to the ultimate reality, the ordinary reality is no longer attractive. It starts receding because when you find the real gold, how can you go on carrying the unreal gold? When you have found the real diamonds you will automatically drop the stones, the colored stones that you have been carrying all along.The escapist says, “Renounce your colored stones so that you can get to the real diamonds.” The Sufi says just the contrary. He says, “Get to the real diamonds and that which is not real will drop out of your life on its own accord.”To know the real is enough; the unreal is renounced in that very knowing. And because the unreal is renounced in that very knowing, it leaves no scars and wounds on you. The ascetic suffers from great wounds. He wasn’t ripe yet, otherwise the fruit would have fallen without leaving any scar on the body of the tree. If the fruit is unripe and you pluck it, it hurts the tree, it hurts the fruit. Both will remain wounded.Have you not seen the beauty of a ripe fruit fallen on its own accord? Silently, spontaneously… The tree may not even have become aware that the fruit has disappeared. The fruit may not have become aware that the tree is no longer there.Sufism is the simplest way possible. The Sufi lives a simple life. But the simplicity is not cultivated because a cultivated simplicity is no longer simplicity; it is already complex. When you cultivate something, there is motivation, there is desire, there is longing. You are hankering for something. By cultivating something, you are trying to become something. Becoming is desire. And how can desire be simple? So cultivation is never simple. A practiced sannyas, a practiced simplicity can never have beauty. In the first place it is not simplicity at all.You can go and see so many saints in this country or in other countries – their simplicity is cultivated, calculated, motivated. They are desirous of God, they are greedy for God; hence they are ready to pay the price.The Sufi says, “God is available, it is already available. All that you need is an uncomplicated mind; all that you need is a state of no-motivation. All that you need is to fall into the silence of this moment – not trying to achieve something tomorrow.” And what is your afterlife? It is the prolonged shadow of tomorrow. So those who are thinking to attain to heaven or to nirvana after death are very greedy people, they are not religious at all.Sufism does not believe in any fairy tales of the other world, of heaven and hell. And it is not that heaven does not exist, but that is not the concern of the Sufi. The Sufi lives totally in the moment. His simplicity comes out of his understanding, not out of cultivation; he does not practice it. Seeing life, he becomes aware of the austerity of a roseflower, how simple it is and the beauty of its austerity. He becomes austere like a roseflower; it is not poor, the roseflower is simple and rich. What more richness can there be? The roseflower is simple and in utter luxury. What more luxury can there be?The Sufi lives in the moment, blooms in the moment like a roseflower, simple yet rich. The poverty is not imposed; he is poor in spirit. And what does it mean to be poor in spirit? It simply means there is no ego, that’s all; not that he is attached to poverty. Beware of that. There are people who are attached to wealth and there are people who are attached to poverty. But it is the same attachment.I have heard…The story is told of a dervish who went to visit a great Sufi master. Seeing his affluence, the dervish thought to himself, “How can Sufism and such prosperity go hand in hand?” After staying a few days with the master, he decided to leave. The master said, “Let me accompany you on your journey!”After they had gone a short distance, the dervish noticed that he had forgotten his kashkul, the begging bowl. So he asked the master for permission to return and get it.The master replied, “I departed from all my possessions, but you can’t even leave behind your begging bowl. Thus, we must part company from here.”The Sufi is not attached to wealth or to poverty; he is simply not attached to anything. And when you are not attached to anything, you need not renounce. Renunciation is the other side of attachment. Those who understand the foolishness of attachment don’t renounce; they live in the world but yet they are not of the world. To willfully insist upon being in poverty is still an attachment – remember it. And to willfully insist upon anything is again an ego trip.The Sufi lives simply, the Sufi lives without any will of his own. If it happens to be a palace, he is happy; if it happens to be a hut, he is happy. If it happens to be that he is a king, it is okay. If it happens to be that he is a beggar, that too is perfectly okay. He has no preference. He simply lives the moment, whatsoever existence makes available to him. He does not change anything.This has to be understood, because for centuries religions have been teaching you renunciation. For centuries religions have lived with a great inclination toward escapism. The Sufi has a totally different approach, far healthier, far more whole, far more human, far more natural. Because whenever you escape from something it is out of fear, and out of fear there is no transformation ever.When something drops on its own accord – not that you drop it, but simply that it has become nonessential, unimportant – then there is freedom. Freedom is never out of fear, freedom is out of great awareness. The Sufi lives in the world, mindful of God. He lives in the world, but he remembers God. He moves in the marketplace, but his heart is throbbing with a certain remembrance. The zikr continues. He does not become forgetful in the world; that is his work.Escape or no escape, if you are forgetful you will miss God anywhere you are, in the marketplace or in the monastery. If you are not forgetful, if you are mindful, alert aware, then God is everywhere – as much here as anywhere else, as much now as then. There is no question of going anywhere. One can simply relax here – fall into a kind of watchful silence. And then life is simple and uncluttered. Yes, that is what simplicity is – not a cultivated character, but a life which is uncluttered by the nonessential, by the unimportant, by the mundane, by the trivial.Let me repeat that the Sufi does not believe in any fairy tales, so there is no question of being motivated. He does not believe in tomorrows. All that he knows of time is now, all that he knows of space is here.These sounds of the birds are divine for him. There is no other God separate from his existence. The dancer is in the dance, so he has no idea of a personal God sitting somewhere above the clouds. His God is an impersonal presence.Feel it now, this very moment. The presence is here, as it is everywhere else. All that is needed is you falling in a kind of attunement, you to falling in a kind of at-one-ment. Then the crowing of the crows and the cuckoo calling from far away… All is silent. And in that silence you start becoming aware of the impersonal presence that surrounds you.A young bank clerk stole five thousand pounds from the bank and was unable to reimburse it when caught. In despair he went up to the cliff with the intention of committing suicide.As he was about to jump he was tapped on his left shoulder, and upon turning around he spied an especially ugly lady who claimed to be his fairy godmother and granted him three wishes.His first wish was to replace the five thousand pounds, which was granted. His second wish was to be the owner of a large mansion, and his third, the owner of a Rolls Royce. All these were granted to him by his fairy godmother.Feeling very pleased with himself, he turned back to make his way home to get the five thousand pounds, the mansion and the Rolls Royce. His fairy godmother stopped him and requested that he too grant her a single wish. He was only too happy to oblige, whereupon she asked him to make love to her.He was repelled by her, but obliged because of the wishes she had granted him. He made love to her in a great hurry and pulled his trousers up and was about to leave when she stopped him yet again.This time she asked, “How old are you, young man?”His reply was, “I am thirty-five years of age. But why do you ask?”She said, “You still believe in fairy godmothers?”The person who believes in a personal God is still immature. There is nothing like that. That personal God is nothing but your idea of the father, projected and magnified. You are childish. When you pray, if you think you are praying to a personal God, you are simply being stupid. There is nobody listening to your prayer. And yet God is. But God is not a person, God is an impersonal presence.God is this whole, the totality of all that is. Hence prayer can only be a silence. You cannot address God. Prayer can only be an utter silence.If you are silent now, it is a prayerful moment. This is what prayer is all about. When everything stops – no thought moves in your head, your breathing slows down, a moment comes when there is almost no breath. In that state of silence you connect, you are plugged in with reality. You are no longer separate; you are one. That oneness is prayer.Now the sutras:A ruby, there, is just a piece of stone…Where? What does Hakim Sanai mean by “there”? – the silence that I was talking about. When you are utterly silent, in prayer, in samadhi: a ruby, there, is just a piece of stone… Your whole way of looking at things changes. When there are desires clamoring in your mind, even an ordinary stone can look like a ruby. You can project your desire on an ordinary stone. You can create an illusion that it is very precious.Otherwise, when you are not possessed by desires, what is a ruby? – an ordinary stone. All diamonds are nothing but ordinary stones. Just think, if one day the Third World War happens and the whole of humanity disappears from the earth, will there be any difference between a stone and a diamond? Will there be any difference at all between the great Kohinoor and the pebble by the side of the road? There will be none. That means the difference is created by man, is projected by man. It is a manufactured difference. It is something in man’s mind. If man disappears, then there will be no rubies and no pebbles, then they all will be the same. Then the Kohinoor cannot demand a special privilege.It happened once, a Zen master used to live in a forest, and the king of the country came to pay a visit to him. The king had brought many presents, a beautiful robe studded with diamonds – very valuable, the most valuable robe that he had. He presented the velvet robe.The master accepted it, but then immediately gave it back and said, “Please take it back.”The king felt offended. He said, “This is a present from me. Will you not oblige me by accepting it? I will feel very rejected.”The master said, “It is not the question of my obliging you. If you insist, I can keep it here. But I must tell you one thing. I live here all alone, there are no human beings. So who will appreciate this robe? I live here with the deer and peacocks, and sometimes the lion comes, and all those animals will laugh at me. Don’t make me a laughingstock, please take it back. They will all laugh; they will think that now in this old age I have become foolish.“I have all my companions, the birds and the beasts, and they won’t understand these diamonds and their value. Please take it back; please oblige me by taking it back. This is perfectly good where human stupidity prevails, but here it is meaningless.”It is man who has created the distinctions and categories, otherwise all is one. But there is no need for the Third World War to happen to understand this. The moment you drop your mind, you will immediately be able to see. The mind drops, and the world is transformed – because the mind has created a certain kind of world. Once you are no longer a mind, that whole world disappears. It was a dream. And then you are awake, and then you see things as they are in themselves.A German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, used to say, “You cannot see things as they are in themselves.” Philosophically he is right. If you work through the mind you cannot see things as they are, because the mind will always be there to distort, to improve, to change, to project, to color this way or that with all its prejudices. The mind will be there. The mind won’t allow you to see things as they are in themselves because whatsoever reaches to you will go through the mind. In that way, Immanuel Kant is right.I have heard…An Englishman and an Irishman went to the captain of a ship bound for America and asked permission to work their passage over. The captain consented, let the Englishman go on board, but told the Irishman he must bring references. The Irishman went ashore and got them, but the discrimination angered him and he was determined to get even.One day, when the two were aiding in washing down the deck, the Englishman went to the railing, roped bucket in hand, and let the bucket down into the water. He was just leaning over to pull it up when a great wave came aboard, caught him up and pulled him overboard.The Irishman stopped scrubbing and went to the railing. He peered into the water. No sign of the Englishman.Righteously indignant, the Irishman took himself up to the captain’s cabin.“Captain, perhaps you remember, when I shipped aboard this vessel you asked me for references and let that Englishman come on without them?”“Of course I remember. You aren’t complaining at this late date, are you?”“Complaining, Captain? Not the likes of me. I’m just here to tell you that your trust was betrayed. You know, Captain, them English…”“Whatever do you mean, ‘betrayed’?”“Sure, and that Englishman’s gone off with your pail!”If you are carrying a certain prejudice in your mind, you will see only through the prejudice. And the mind is nothing but prejudices and prejudices. The mind means your whole past, and anything that enters you will have to go through your whole past. It will be distorted, it will be colored, it will be changed so much by the time it reaches you that you will not be able to know what is really the case.Immanuel Kant is only right philosophically. But he is not aware of the world of meditation, he is not aware of the Sufis and the Zen people and the Taoists. Otherwise there is a way to know things as they are in themselves – just put the mind aside. Look with empty eyes and then there is no interference with reality.And suddenly you will see the pearl is no longer a pearl, the ruby is no longer a ruby, the diamond is no longer a diamond. Then all distinctions, differences, evaluations and judgments have disappeared. Then suddenly things are there without any labels, names and categories.A ruby, there, is just a piece of stone:and spiritual excellence the height of folly.And to those who have tasted something of meditation, the world is no longer significant to them. They don’t renounce it, it is simply no longer significant – not even worth renouncing. It has no value at all.When you renounce the world you are giving it value. You are saying, “It is so valuable that if I don’t renounce it I will be caught in it.” When you escape from the world, you are afraid of the world. Otherwise why escape? Your very escape shows that you are obsessed by things. You are too attached and afraid that if you live here you will be drowned by things. This simply shows your impotence. The escapist simply shows his cowardice and impotence.Sufis say, “Don’t be worried, attain to meditation. Attain to that uncultivated silence. Relax into your being, just be and then see.” And there is nothing to renounce. There is nothing to indulge in and there is nothing to renounce. Both those polarities have disappeared.A ruby, there, is just a piece of stone: and spiritual excellence the height of folly. And not only worldly things disappear, your so-called otherworldly experiences also become stupid. All claims become foolish. This is the criterion of a real Sufi – he will not claim any excellence, he will not claim any spiritual experience. He will live so ordinarily; he will live without claim. How can he claim anything? – because deep inside he has come to know that there is nobody to claim, it is all emptiness. He has come to see the state of fana; he has dissolved. Who is there to claim? He cannot claim worldly power, and prestige; he cannot claim spiritual excellence.Sanai says that is: …the height of folly. Why? – because one who claims “I have riches of the world” can be forgiven. He is a fool but he can be forgiven. But the person who claims spiritual riches cannot be forgiven. This is the height of folly. You are still carrying the same categories of the world. You are still bragging about yourself.The really spiritual person simply becomes anonymous.A strange story is told of a Zen master that when he attained to samadhi, for the first time, birds started coming to him. They would sit on his shoulders, on his head, they would play in his lap, they would sit around him, as if he was also a bird.Great fame spread. His disciples started claiming, “See, this is a real master. This is what a real master should be. There is no other master like our master; he has attained to such heights of samadhi that birds no longer fear him. He has attained to such love and compassion that even birds understand it.”Then one day a very strange thing happened. The birds stopped coming, they disappeared. For days the disciples waited, but the birds weren’t coming anymore. They were puzzled. They asked the master and he said, “Now something has really happened. The birds were coming because there was some claim inside me that ‘I have attained.’ Now even that claim has disappeared, so the birds also have forgotten all about me.“Now I am anonymous. Now even the birds know that I am anonymous, I am a nobody. They used to come because I was still somebody. Now they don’t come now that the ultimate has happened. Now they don’t come because they don’t see anybody here – it is just absence.”This is fana. This is what Sufis call dissolution. In this state you cannot claim spiritual excellence or anything. Always remember, any spiritual claim becomes a barrier.Silence is praise…And now there is not even any prayer. Words won’t do; all your prayers are nothing but words. Now silence is praise, just to be silent is enough.…have done with speech;your chatter will only bring you harm and sorrow –have done!If you really want to be in a state of prayer, have done with words. You have been taught as Christians, as Hindus, as Mohammedans, how to pray, what words to use, what is proper prayer. All prayers are false. The real prayer has nothing to do with words, formalities. The real prayer is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian. How can silence be Hindu or Mohammedan? Silence is silence. Words can be Hindu and words can be Mohammedan; hence words create conflict, hence words create violence in the world. It is not that people are fighting for realities – they are fighting for words.Thousands of wars have been fought, not for any real thing, but just for mere words. One believes in the Koran and one believes in the Gita – enough to kill millions of people. And both are words; neither the Koran is a reality nor the Gita is a reality.Have you seen people killing each other for a roseflower or for the moon or for the sun? These are realities. But they can kill even in the name of the moon. If somebody claims, “The moon is our God,” then he has imposed a word, God, on the moon. And then somebody says, “You are a fool. The moon is not the real God, the real God is the sun.” And the fight starts and the quarreling starts.Words have been the cause of all wars – religious wars, political wars. Ideology is the root cause of all violence. And now there are people who try to bring peace to the world, and again they create another ideology.For example, the followers of Mahatma Gandhi think that this ideology will bring peace to the world. You have not learned a single lesson from history. No ideology can ever bring peace to the world. All ideologies bring wars to the world in their wake.Do you think Mohammed has knowingly given an ideology to the world to bring war? The name that he gave to his religion is Islam. Islam means peace. But the ideology didn’t bring peace, it brought thousands of wars.Jesus is a man of peace. Who else can claim more peaceful attitudes toward life than Jesus? But Christianity, the ideology that was created around Jesus, has been a calamity.All ideologies are bound to bring war, even ideologies based in peace and for peace. Then how can peace come? Peace can come only if man understands the stupidity of all ideologies and drops them. If man simply starts living without any ideology, there will be peace; otherwise there cannot be any peace.And remember, you can make an ideology out of it also, “This is our ideology, that we will not believe in any ideology.” Then war will come again. Then those who won’t believe and won’t agree with you will start fighting with you.I am not saying to you that you have to make this an ideology, that no ideology is needed. I am simply saying, try to understand what has happened through ideologies, words, theories, philosophies. Just see the point, and seeing it, let it drop. Don’t make a new ideology against ideologies. Just see the point – drop it, let it drop, be finished with it.…have done! Sanai is right. He says, “…have done!” and then live without ideology. Live without any theories of how to live. Live without any ideals, live without any shoulds and oughts.Every fact sooner or later becomes an ought and then it becomes dangerous. Every truth sooner or later becomes an ideology and then it is harmful and poisonous.Can’t man live without any ideology? I don’t see that there is any problem. Man can live without ideology if birds and animals and trees can live without ideology. Have you seen any Catholic tree or any communist peacock? If the whole existence can live without ideology, why not man?And the moment a man lives without ideology he is prayerful. Then his whole life is prayer, then he is religious. The man who has an ideology is political; all ideologies are political.The religious person lives without any ideology. He simply lives moment to moment, responding to reality – not through words, not through disciplines, not through certain attitudes, conclusions. No, he simply responds to whatsoever is the case and whatsoever is right in the moment, not according to some idea.Certainly a religious person will have to be very alert so that he can respond. The man who has a certain ideology need not be alert; he can remain asleep. He has a certain ideology. If any situation arises he has a ready-made answer for it. What is the need for him to be aware? That’s why people are living in sleep – there is no need to be alert. You have been given ready-made answers for everything.If you have to search for the answer each moment on your own, how can you live in sleep? Reality goes on creating challenges, and if you don’t have any ready-made answers you will have to be alert, watchful.The moment one drops words and ideologies, suddenly one becomes very, very aware. And that awareness is prayer. Silence is always full of awareness, and the chattering mind is always unconscious.Belief and unbeliefboth have their originin your hypocrite’s heart…See the revolutionary statement in these words: belief and unbelief both have their origin in your hypocrite’s heart. Where does belief come from? And where does unbelief come from? They are not different. They come from the same source – the hypocrite’s heart.You can see hypocrites in the temples, mosques, churches. You can see them in so many shapes and so many sizes, with so many different kinds of words, but it is the same source – hypocrisy.Why is hypocrisy the source of belief and unbelief? A man says, “I believe in God” without knowing anything about God. Without having ever experienced God, without having ever tasted God, he says, “I believe in God.” From where is this belief coming? It is hypocrisy. He is pretending. He is deceiving others, he is deceiving himself.If you have not known on your own, how can you believe in God? But your father has told you, your mother has told you, you have been taught by the priest, by the state. They go on giving you beliefs. If you are born in a Catholic country, the Catholic belief will be given to you. If you are born in a communist country, the communist belief will be given to you.Before the child becomes aware, he is already conditioned, already poisoned. And then his whole life he will repeat the belief that has been put into him, and because of this belief he will remain a hypocrite.The man who says, “There is no God” – has he known? Has he inquired? Has he explored the whole of existence and found that there is no God? No, he has not. This again is out of hypocrisy.So remember, belief and unbelief, howsoever contradictory they look – the theist and the atheist, howsoever antagonistic they look, are the same. They come from the same source. Without knowing anything, without experiencing anything on their own, they go on believing, they go on declaring.That’s what hypocrisy is all about, to say something that you don’t know, to utter something that is not your own authentic experience. To live in borrowed knowledge is hypocrisy. Deep down you are one thing, on the surface you pretend something else. This is hypocrisy.Sanai’s statement is tremendously revolutionary because he puts the believer and the unbeliever in the same category.The religious person is neither a believer nor an unbeliever, because he is not a hypocrite. He will say only that which he knows, he will not utter a single word that he does not know. He will say if he does not know, he will say that he does not know.Socrates is a religious man because he says, “I know only one thing, that I don’t know anything.” This is religiousness. This is sincerity of the heart, this is simplicity, this is humbleness.…the way is only longbecause you delay to start on it…And …the way is only long because you delay to start on it… Otherwise it is not a long way. Between you and God there is only one step to be taken, just one step. But people go on postponing and they can postpone because they have beliefs; beliefs help them to postpone.The so-called religious man knows that God is there; without knowing, he knows that God is there. “So what is the hurry? Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, I will go and have a dip in the Ganges.” Or, “I will go to Kaaba and pray there.” Or, “At the last moment when I am dying I will remember him. He is there, so why be worried and why be in a hurry?” It can be postponed. Because of belief, there is no need to explore, inquire, investigate.And for the one who says, “There is no God,” there is no question of investigation either. If there is no God, what is the point of investigating and inquiring? Both are finished with inquiry.And the man who is not in constant inquiry will go on missing – although the distance is not very long, the distance is just of a single step. And what is that step? – from hypocrisy to sincerity, that is the single step.Drop all that you don’t know but you go on pretending to know. Let all borrowed knowledge disappear and just be true to one thing, to your own experience. Only that which is your own experience is going to help, and everything else is a hindrance. Just see the point. Sanai is really making tremendously significant statements.…one single stepwould bring you to him…From hypocrisy to sincerity – and this is not a long, long journey. You can do it right now this very moment. You already know what is your experience and what is not your experience, or don’t you? Everybody knows. The believer knows, “I believe, but I don’t know.” The unbeliever knows, “I don’t believe, but I don’t know – maybe God is.” The believer goes on doubting, “Maybe he is not.”You are perfectly aware about borrowed knowledge, but why do you cling to it? – because it gives a good decoration to your ego. It gratifies your ego; you can pretend that you are knowledgeable. You can walk upright; you can tell to people, “I know, and you don’t know.” You can go on carrying that holier than thou face. You can enjoy this trip because you can recite the Gita like a parrot and because you know the Koran like a computer. This is not knowing. Have done with all this. And one single step is enough……would bring you to him:become a slave,and you will be a king.The moment you move from hypocrisy to sincerity, suddenly your whole ego will disappear because it is hypocrisy that helps your ego to remain there. If you drop all that is borrowed, you have taken away all the props of the ego. Your ego will fall flat. And in the fall of the ego is the beginning of a real life. When the ego falls you are in a state of surrender, you become a slave.Remember, this word slave has a tremendously different connotation in the East than it has in the West. The West knows only one kind of slave, one who has been forced. That’s why in any Western language the word slave is ugly.One day I gave sannyas to a young man and I gave him the name Deva Dasyo, divine slave. Immediately I could see on his face that he was feeling offended. “Slave?” Although he didn’t say anything to me that moment, next day he wrote a letter saying, “Beloved Osho, I have inquired. If the word slave can simply mean servant it will be more appreciated – not slave but just servant. Can I make it mean just servant? I have inquired and people said yes, both meanings are possible.”So much fear of the word slave – because it only has a one-dimensional meaning in the West, when the slavery is imposed on somebody. And similar is the case with the word surrender. In the West it does not have a beautiful connotation. In the East slave has two meanings. One, that you know, is forced slavery, which is ugly; Another is willfully accepted slavery, which is beautiful – voluntarily accepted. Seeing that “I am only a part and not separate from the whole. How can I be a master?” one surrenders. This is a totally different meaning of surrender. It is utterly blissful.It is not that you are forced to surrender. If you are forced, then it is not surrender. You do it on your own, seeing that you are just a part, a wave in the ocean and the wave surrenders to the ocean because “I am not separate, so why go on pretending that I am separate? The ocean is the master, the total is the master, and I am just a wave in the ocean. I am surrendered. Let the ocean have its say.”That’s what Jesus says on the cross, “Let thy kingdom come, let thy will be done.” That is surrender, that is becoming a slave. In that moment Jesus dropped his last remaining shadow of the ego. …become a slave, and you will be a king.And this is the miracle, that when you become a slave you become the king. Why? And how? When you surrender to the ocean as a wave, you become the ocean. Separate from the ocean you are just a wave, continuously fighting and afraid of death. Separate from the ocean you are just a worry, an anguish, and nothing else.One with the ocean, there is no question of death. The wave will disappear, but you will remain in the ocean forever and forever. Now there is no worry and now there is no goal either. Wherever the ocean is going is right; that is the only place to go. Now there is no private destiny, so no worry.Even disappearance is no longer disappearance because you have already seen the point that you are not separate. When you are, you are in the ocean. When you are not, you are in the ocean, and the ocean remains. Only waves come and go. The wave was only a form. Forms come and go but the substance remains. When the wave becomes one with the ocean – or remembers that it is one with the ocean, becomes aware of the oneness – it is no longer a slave, it is the king. It has attained to the deathless, to the eternal.The dumb find tongues,when the scent of life reaches themfrom his soul.And when this happens, even those who have been dumb find tongues. Even those who have not said a single word before, whose life was only of prayer, whose life was only of silence, suddenly start singing. Their silence becomes a song.The moment the slave disappears and the king arrives – the wave disappears and the ocean takes over – there is great creativity. Your life is no longer ordinary, mundane. Now it has the flavor of the divine, of the sacred.The dumb find tongues… Those who have never spoken anything start speaking things which are unbelievable, things which are incredible, words which are radiant, pregnant. Their gestures have a power now. If they touch you, they will transform you by their touch. If they look in your eyes, you will never be the same man again …when the scent of life reaches them from his soul.The great Sufi master, Jalaluddin Rumi, wrote these three lines as his own epitaph:Not more than three words,My whole life is condensed in these three words:I was raw, now I am cooked and burned.This is the death that brings resurrection. “I was raw, now I am cooked and burned.” Jalaluddin, the greatest Sufi, says, “These three words contain my whole life.”If you are separate you are raw. If you join together with existence you are cooked. And if you disappear absolutely, without leaving even a shadow of the ego, you are burned.Patanjali has called the state when the seed is burned, nirbeej samadhi, seedless samadhi. Now there will be no more misery, no more coming and going, no more the constant change of form. Now you will abide in the eternal as eternal.Jalaluddin also says:Listen to the reed. It is complaining.It tells of separation, saying,“Ever since they tore me from the reed bed,My lament has moved man and woman to tears.Everyone who is left far from his sourceWishes back to the time of union.“Listen to the reed…. Everyone who is left far from his source wishes back to the time of union.” We are all searching for our source. We are all like reeds searching for the reed bed from which we have been torn.Jalaluddin had a special love for the reed flute. “Don’t ask why God created the flute,” goes a folk song. “He wanted the people to understand Rumi.” Otherwise how would people have understood Rumi? – that’s why he created the flute.When a man attains to the ultimate he becomes a flute. A song is born, a song that goes on and on. Buddha sang it for forty-two years – day in and day out, year in and year out, for forty-two years he continued a song. Mahavira did the same and Mohammed and Bahauddin and Jalaluddin. And this song that we are listening to and going into right now – Hakim Sanai.Where does this song come from? It comes out of silence, it is silence condensed. It comes from your absolute emptiness. You become just a passage to existence, a hollow bamboo, a flute, and existence starts singing through you.All the great scriptures of the world are songs of the divine. But you will understand them only if you have understood silence. Not by going into the scriptures will you understand them, but by going into your own silence. When you are in the same state as Krishna, you will be able to understand the Bhagavadgita. Bhagavadgita means the divine song, the celestial song. But how can you understand the song if you have not even understood silence, where it comes from? It consists of silence, it is condensed silence.You will not be able to understand the Koran unless you attain to that state of fana where the Koran descended in Mohammed. Only then will you be able to understand the Koran. And the beauty is that if you understand the silence of your being, you will be able to understand simultaneously all the great scriptures of the world, and you will not find any contradictions in them.But right now if you start reading the Koran and the Bible and the Gita, you will be very puzzled and confused. You will find contradictions and contradictions and nothing else. What to say about the Gita and the Koran? – if you read the Gita itself you will find thousands of contradictions in it. There is no question of comparing it with the Koran; just go on reading the Gita with a critical eye, and you will be puzzled – Krishna goes on contradicting himself. You will not be able to understand at all. Understanding arises only out of meditation.And when you have attained to meditation, even your words will have the sweetness of the Koran and the Gita – even your words. You who have always been dumb will suddenly start speaking, which will not only surprise others, which will surprise you too, because you will not be able to understand from where they are coming. They come from the beyond, you are just a receptacle.The dumb find tongues,when the scent of life reaches themfrom his soul.Listen truly – and don’t be fooled –this is not for fools…And when in silence something starts speaking to you, listen truly – don’t be fooled… What does Sanai mean by listen truly? Don’t bring your old mind in, don’t start interpreting it, otherwise you will have missed. Just listen to whatsoever happens. Forget that you have to interpret it. Forget the very idea that you have to understand it. Forget absolutely that you have to bring your intellect into it. Just listen as you listen to the sounds of the birds or the sound of running water or the wind passing through the pines.How do you listen? Do you try to decipher the meaning? How do you listen to somebody playing on the guitar? You don’t bring your intellect in, you listen from the heart. You only listen, for no other purpose. Just listening is so tremendously joyful. You start swaying with the music, you feel like dancing with the music. This is the right way of listening, when the infinite starts passing through you, when those sources from the beyond start pouring into you.Please beware, don’t be a fool. If you bring your mind in, you have disturbed the whole process. Then you will hear something which has not been told, and you will talk about something which you have not heard. So the greatest preparation is silence – the silence of a no-mind. And only when the silence is absolutely ripe will you be able to listen. The music is still going on, but you are not able to listen because you are not tuned to silence.It is not that one day suddenly, twenty-five centuries ago, underneath a bodhi tree, existence spoke to Buddha. Or that fourteen centuries ago, suddenly on the mountains, existence poured itself to Mohammed.No, it is not so. Existence is pouring every moment. And when I say this to you, I am saying it as an eyewitness. It is pouring every moment. It cannot stop pouring, it is helpless; that is its way of being. The Koran is being poured in you every moment, the Gita is just showering all around you, but you are not tuned. You are like a pot put upside down – it goes on raining but the pot remains empty.It is as if the sun has risen but you are sitting with closed eyes. Any moment open your eyes, and for you it may appear that the sun has just risen because you have opened your eyes. It is not so, the sun has always been there. Existence cannot be absent for a single moment because if it is absent the whole world will collapse.Listen truly – and don’t be fooled – this is not for fools… And who are the fools? You will be surprised. The pundits, the scholars, the learned people – they are the fools because they are so full of knowledge that they will not be able to listen. Even if existence starts pouring in them, they will correct. They will have to correct; it is impossible for them not to interfere. If somebody is a follower of the Gita and existence speaks through him, he will make existence fit with his Gita. That is what proves him a fool.Existence always speaks in a new way. It is always original and fresh; it need not repeat the old. It spoke once in the way of the Gita. Now it will never speak the same way again. Once it spoke as a Buddha in the Dhammapada. Now it will never speak the same way again. And this is how man goes on expecting.I receive thousands of letters and the basic thing in those thousands of letters is, “Why don’t I behave like a Buddha?” But why should I behave like a Buddha? They have a fixed expectation. If they see anything that I am saying which goes differently from Buddha, they are immediately alert, alarmed. They are afraid. Something has gone wrong.But do you know? – Buddha had spoken in his way; he wasn’t repeating Krishna, not at all. And people must have been coming to him too, saying, “Why don’t you speak like Krishna?” And Krishna has spoken in his own way and he wasn’t repeating Rama either. And people must have been coming to him too, “Why don’t you speak like Rama? Why don’t you live like Rama?” These are the fools – and these are learned fools. They know much about scripture but they know nothing about life. Life is always new.When a roseflower comes on the rosebush, it is not a repetition of any roseflower that has proceeded. It is unique, incomparable. And that’s how it happens every time existence pours itself through somebody – it is always unique. It never fits with its own past expressions. It always goes on transcending its own past, it goes on surpassing. It is never confined and contained by the past because it is not dead.If existence speaks to you like it spoke through Krishna, that means that in these five thousand years he has not grown up at all. Then these five thousand years he has been dead. Then there is no need of him; a His Master’s Voice record will do.Remember it. If you feel something in you that fits with the Bible, that fits with the Gita, that fits with anything else – beware! It may be your mind which is playing tricks on you. Existence never fits with anything; it is always unique. The song is always new.Listen truly – and don’t be fooled –this is not for fools:all these different shadesbecome one colorin the jar of unity…And if you have listened well, you will be surprised …all these different shades become one color… The Koran and the Gita and the Bible and the Dhammapada and the Tao Te Ching, suddenly all become one color. All the shades dissolve into one color. The whole spectrum of seven colors disappears and all become one color, white. Hence the color white has always been a symbol for unity, for oneness, for purity.…the rope becomes slenderwhen reduced to a single strand.This is the mystic union, unio mystica. When you have dissolved yourself with the whole, then all differences disappear. Then everything is separate and yet not separate, different yet not different. Then the songs are different but the melody is the same. This is unity in multiplicity and this is the richness of life. All songs are different but the melody is the same.Your intellect is just a hotchpotchof guesswork and thought,limping over the face of the earth…Beware! Your intellect is the root cause of your going astray. It is all a hotchpotch of guesswork and thought.The intellect can never give you truth. It can at the most guess, infer, but truth is not an inference and it is not guesswork. It is not a question of guessing. Either you know or you don’t know.And how can you guess about the unknown? You may guess about the known, but you cannot guess about the unknown. The unknown simply means that you have no idea about it, no idea at all. How are you going to guess about it? How are you going to think about the unknown? The known can be thought. So thinking is a repetitive process, it goes on moving in a circle. It never leads you to new truths; it never leads you to discoveries.And this is not only so in religion, it is so everywhere, even in science. All the great discoveries of science have been done not by the process of thinking. All the great discoveries of science have happened through no-mind. And now scientists are becoming aware of the phenomenon.For example, Madame Curie discovered something. For three years she was working hard on a problem. She had tried all possible clues but the problem remained. One evening she was utterly tired and finished, and she thought, “Now it is enough. Enough is enough!”The same way as it happened to Buddha one night. Six years he had tried and tried to know who he is, and failed and failed again and again. There is a limit. That evening he decided, “It is finished. There seems to be no way, all is futile.” He dropped the whole idea, went to sleep and by the morning he was enlightened – because in that night’s sleep something surfaced.There was no effort now; effort he has done and he was done with it. That night he was relaxed, totally relaxed. Not even a single dream disturbed him because when all desires are dropped, dreams disappear. Dreams are the shadows of your desires.That whole night was just a peaceful prayer. A meditation that he had not been able to attain through effort happened that moment. It always happens when your efforts have failed, when you have reached the optimum of your efforts. Remember, it can’t just happen now.If you go there… The tree is still there in Bodhgaya. You can go and lie down underneath the tree the whole night – nothing will happen. You will simply dream about your girlfriend or boyfriend and you will have nightmares. And your night will be your night, it will not be Buddha’s night. You have not yet done anything to attain to that.The attainment is paradoxical. First one has to do all that one can do and then one has to drop that doing. Then it comes, then it comes rushing.The same happened to Madame Curie. Their worlds are totally different. Buddha was searching for “Who am I?” Madame Curie was searching for a mathematical conclusion of a certain problem. She was a mathematician, a scientist. That night she was tired, finished. There seems to be no hope, she was hopeless. She dropped the idea. “Those three years were wasted,” she decided, “And now no more. From tomorrow morning I will start some new project.”Now there was a gap. Tomorrow morning she would start a new project, and the old project was gone. And this night, these eight or ten or twelve hours are in a gap. And in the night it happened. Silently something penetrated into her consciousness from the deeper layers. From intuition to intellect, something penetrated.In her sleep she walked to her table and wrote the answer in her sleep, went back and fell asleep again. In the morning she found the answer scribbled in her own handwriting. She couldn’t even remember immediately that she had done it. Then slowly, slowly she remembered that yes, there had been a dream. In a dream she saw that she was going to the table and writing something. Now she knew it wasn’t a dream, it had really happened and the answer was there. And for three years she had tried and the answer had remained elusive.What happened? It is the same phenomenon. Intellect cannot reach to the unknown, the unknown is available to intuition. Intellect can work only in the world of the known. So it is good, but it has limitations.Your intellect is just a hotchpotchof guesswork and thought,limping over the face of the earth;wherever they are, he is not…And wherever thoughts are there, wherever your intellect is there, God is not. Your intellect does not allow him entry, it keeps you occupied. He comes, he comes again and again; he knocks on the door, but he never finds you unoccupied, available, vulnerable. You are constantly engaged with your intellect. He has to go back.…they are contained within his creation.Your thoughts, your mind, your intellect, are contained within his creation. How can the part know the whole? Can your hand know your totality? Can a hair of your head know your totality? It is impossible.And the intellect is a very small phenomenon in this immense existence. What is your intellect? And it is trying to do the impossible. It is trying to grasp the whole. The whole effort is futile.Once you have understood it, that the whole effort is futile, you relax. And then the miracle happens; that which cannot be grabbed becomes available. But you cannot grab it. On the contrary, when you are silent it possesses you, it grabs you.Man and his reason are just the latestripening plants in his garden.Whatever you assert about his nature,you are bound to be out of your depth,like a blind man trying to describethe appearance of his own mother.It is like a blind man trying to describe something that he has never seen. Although he has come from the mother, he has lived in the mother’s womb for nine months, he still cannot describe the mother because he has no eyes.We have lived in God, we are living in God. It is our womb; from eternity to eternity we never leave his womb. Still we cannot describe him, we still don’t have the eyes which can see him, hence the symbol of the third eye.These two eyes can see his world, these two eyes can see the without. These two eyes can see the duality of day and night, summer and winter, life and death, man and woman, positive and negative, yin and yang – these two eyes can see all kinds of dualities. Two means dual.The third eye means one single eye. That one single eye is still hidden in you, nonfunctioning. It is a metaphor; remember, it is not that there is some third eye as a fact. It is a metaphor, and of tremendous value, of great significance. It signifies one. Only one can know the one; two will always know the two.Behind these two eyes there is one eye. The two go outward, the one goes inward. Unless that eye arises in you, you will not be able to know God. Belief is of no help, it is hypocrisy. Disbelief is of no help, it is hypocrisy again.Don’t be a theist and don’t be an atheist, be an inquirer. Move with great passion into this inquiry of God. Don’t say he is, don’t say he is not. How can we say anything without knowing and seeing?Go into this existence. And the beginning has to be from your very inner core. That one eye is created by meditation, by silence.While reason is still tracking down the secret,you end your quest on the open field of love.Such a beautiful statement! And you will be surprised one day. Your two eyes were searching and searching and were not finding, and suddenly one day the third eye has opened and you have found it. Your intellect was searching and searching for the secret, and one day intuition has ripened, and the heart has known.The intellect goes on thinking and thinking, and never knows. And the heart never thinks, it only knows. The heart is the faculty of real knowing. In the world of the heart, knowing means being. There is no difference between knowing and being.The scientist knows the object there, separate from himself. The mystic knows God not as an object but as his own subjectivity – here, in himself, as himself.Hakim Sanai says: The pure person, the meditator, knows the unity of two. And the lover knows the unity of three: of love, of the lover, and of the beloved. There comes a point in you where all is integrated. Thoughts keep you fragmentary, divided. When all thoughts have disappeared, how can you be divided, how can you be fragmentary? Integration arises; you are centered, you are one. And in that oneness, you have known; you have already known.The heart comes to know, and then the heart informs the intellect, “Now there is no need, don’t worry about it, it has happened. Now no need to inquire and search – stop! I have come to know.”It is always the heart that knows, remember – hence, the emphasis on trust, on surrender. When you come to a master you have to be joined with the master through the heart, not through the intellect. If you join through the intellect then it is not much of a bridge because the intellect does not know how to create a bridge; it knows how to create walls. Then just small things will be enough to create walls.A few days ago a woman took sannyas, and just the other day she wrote a letter to me saying, “Your criticism of the priests is ugly.” Now, she does not know that she is creating a wall. Now it will be difficult for her to feel me. She has brought her own mind in. And she has only been here for a few days. Wait a little. If I have criticized the priests, there must be some reason. Wait a little, be patient, listen to what I am saying and why I am saying it. Don’t be in such a hurry, otherwise you will start creating walls.And if you create walls then there is no possibility of my being contacting your being. Then I cannot find where you are. You will be hiding behind walls. I will come and knock, but you will not hear me – and for unnecessary reasons.Now, what do you have to do with priests? Why should you be concerned about priests? Have you come here just to listen to me praise your priests? You have come here to be transformed. Now what has that got to do with the priests? And just a small thing!And that woman has also written saying, “Whenever you use the word ugly it appears to me that the very use of the word is ugly.” Now, if you are in such a state of mind that my use of the word ugly looks ugly to you, then you are not here. Then you are far away on some other planet. You are in your intellect. What is ugly in the word ugly? It is very expressive and beautiful. Even the woman herself has to use the word ugly. She says, “Your use of the word ugly is ugly.” It is expressive; and that is the function of a word, that it should be expressive. And it really expresses, it fulfills its function.But are you here to decide about my words? Are you here like some examiner? Then you are just functioning stupidly. Then you are the fool Hakim Sanai is talking about, then you will miss. You will miss the whole message. Then you are more concerned with unnecessary things. And there must be a great ego behind this, who knows and who believes – knows in a better way.You will not be able to surrender, you will not be able to trust at all. And it is the heart, the trusting heart, which comes to realize reality; it is not the doubting mind.The path consists in neither words nor deeds:only desolation can come from these…Hakim Sanai says that there are three paths: gyana yoga, the path of knowledge; karma yoga, the path of action; and bhakti yoga, the path of love. He says: The path consists in neither words nor deeds…So neither the path of knowledge is going to help you, nor the path of action is going to help you, because action will come out of your mind, and knowledge will come out of your mind. Only the third thing can help you, love and silence, which are not part of your mind.The path consists in neither words nor deeds:only desolation can come from these,and never any lasting edifice.Sweetness and life are the wordsof the man who treads this road in silence……neither words nor deeds… But utter silence… And then your very life becomes a sweetness, and your very life becomes expressive. Then your existence has a grace. And that is the song, that is your sermon.Sweetness and life are the words of the man who treads this road in silence… And one who penetrates into this inner silence, one who comes to know how to be in love and how to be in prayer and how to be in silence, and who drops the entire mind and its ways, then the sweetness of his life is his expression. The aliveness of his life, the radiance of his life are his words.…when he speaks it is not from ignorance,and when he is silent it is not from sloth.And such a man speaks sometimes, but his speech does not come from ignorance. Your speech comes from ignorance. You speak just to hide your ignorance, you speak to show your knowledge.Now this woman has written to me, “Your criticism of the priests is ugly.” Now she is trying to show her knowledge about priests. She thinks she knows better than me. She is advising me.When you speak, remember, it shouldn’t be to show your knowledge, because any effort to show your knowledge is nothing but covering your ignorance. Such a man who has known what silence is and what love is, speaks not from ignorance; he speaks because he has known. “He speaks” is not really a right expression – existence speaks through him. He is no more. He is not the speaker – just a vehicle, a medium.…and when he is silent it is not from sloth. And when you are silent it is out of sloth, laziness, tiredness. When he is silent it is not out of sloth; he is silent out of prayer, out of love. He is silent, but tremendously alive in his silence. He is not dull; his silence is not unintelligent, his silence is not lazy, his silence is not mediocre.His silence is full of songs, very pregnant. His silence is like a seed, and when he uses words, those words are like flowers that come out of the seed. His silence is beautiful, his songs are beautiful, because those songs come from silence and those songs carry some fragrance of the silence.When words speak in such a way that they carry silence, then you have come to know how to use words. Then you are no longer dumb. The dumb find tongues, when the scent of life reaches them from his soul. But it all comes from him, from the beyond.Buddha, Bahauddin, Kabir, Christ, Mohammed, Mahavira, Sosan and Sanai don’t speak on their own. They are hollow bamboos, flutes. They sing a song that comes through them but is not their own. The signature on their songs is that of God.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-08/

The first question:Osho,Can cowardice and hypocrisy also be beautiful? Can I accept even my cowardice, my hypocrisy, my miserliness and a tendency toward privacy that you yourself have called “idiocy”? And if I accept such tendencies, all of which tend to bottle me up, how will I get free?Ashoka, the very desire to be free keeps one unfree. Every desire is a chain, a bondage, an imprisonment. No desire can ever be fulfilled. By dropping the desire, its fulfillment happens.The greatest desire in the world is that of inner transformation. The desire for money is nothing; the desire for more power, prestige, is nothing. The greatest desire is the so-called spiritual desire. And once you are caught in that desire you will remain miserable forever.Transformation is possible, but not by desiring it. Transformation is possible only by relaxing into that which is, whatsoever is. Unconditionally accepting yourself brings transformation. We will have to go deeper into this phenomenon because this is not only Ashoka’s question, it is everybody’s.Man is in misery, man is in anguish; hence everybody is searching for a state of bliss, a state of unity with existence. Man feels alienated, uprooted; hence the desire is natural – how to get roots into existence again, how to be green again, how to be blossoming again?These few things have to be meditated upon. First, to establish that perfect unity, consciousness must first unify itself in terms of all its personal aspects by rejecting nothing which is experientially real in itself. This is the first thing to be understood.You feel fear. Now the fear is an existential reality, an experiential reality; it is there. You can reject it; by rejecting it you will be repressing it. By repressing it, you will create a wound in your being.You feel cowardice. You can manage not to look at it, but it is a fact, a reality. Just by not looking at it, it is not going to disappear. You are behaving like an ostrich. Seeing the enemy, seeing the danger of death, the ostrich hides its head in the sand. But by hiding his head in the sand, by closing his eyes, the enemy does not disappear. In fact the ostrich becomes more vulnerable to the enemy. Thinking that now there is no enemy because nobody is seen, thinking that seeing is the existence of the enemy, now the ostrich is relieved of the fear, but he is more in danger. The enemy is more powerful because it has not been noticed. Something can be done if the ostrich does not hide its head.And that’s what people are doing. You see cowardice, you try not to notice it, but it is a fact. By not noticing it, you have created a part of your being which you will not be able to see. You have divided yourself into segments. Then one day there is something else, anger, and you don’t want to accept that there is anger in you. You stop looking at it. Then some other day there is greed, and so on and so forth. And whatsoever you stop looking at remains. But now you go on shrinking. Many more parts of your being become separate from you. You have separated them on your own. And the more fragmentary you are, the more miserable you will be.The first step toward bliss is to be one. That’s what Hakim Sanai is insisting again and again, “To be one is to be blissful, to be many is to be in hell.” So whatsoever is experientially real, accept it. You cannot do anything by denying it. By denying it you create the problem, the problem becomes more complex. It was simple.You feel a coward – so what? So “I am a coward.” Just see the point, if you can accept cowardice you have already become brave. Only a brave person can accept the fact of being a coward; no coward can do that. You are already on the way of transformation. So the first thing: nothing that is experienced as a fact has to be denied reality.Second, in order to accomplish that, consciousness must first disidentify from all fixed conceptual selves with which it has identified itself. Because if it holds to being some fixed and enduring conceptual self, there will be no tolerance for those experiential realities which are in contradiction with this fixed, conceptual, official self.If you have a certain idea of how you should be, then you cannot accept the experiential truths of your being. If you have the idea that you have to be a brave man, that bravery is a value, then it is difficult to accept your cowardice. If you have the idea that you have to be a Buddha-like person – compassionate, absolutely compassionate – then you cannot accept your anger. It is the ideal that creates the problem.If you don’t have any ideals, then there is no problem at all. You are a coward, so you are a coward. And because there is no ideal of being a brave man, you don’t condemn the fact. You don’t reject it, you don’t repress it; you don’t throw it into the basement of your being so that there is no need for you ever to look at it. Anything that you throw into your unconscious will go on functioning from there; it will go on creating problems for you.It is like a disease that you have pushed inward. It was coming to the surface, and from the surface there was a possibility that it might have disappeared. If a wound comes to the surface it is good, it is on the way to being healed. Because it is only from the surface that it will be in contact with fresh air and the sun and it will be healed. If you force it inward, if you don’t allow it to come to the surface, then it is going to become a cancer. Even a small disease, repressed, can become a dangerous disease. No disease should ever be repressed.But the repression is natural if you have some ideal. Any ideal will do. If you have the ideal of being a celibate man, a brahmachari, then sex becomes the problem. You can watch it if you don’t have the ideal of becoming a brahmachari, a celibate; then sex is not rejected. Then there is no division between you and your sexuality. Then there is communion and that communion brings joy. Self-communion is the base of all joy.So the second thing to remember is, don’t carry ideals. Just imagine that you have the ideal that you have to have three eyes. The problem immediately arises because you have only two eyes, and the ideal says you have to have three eyes. If you don’t have three, something is missing. Now you hanker for the third. You have created an impossible problem for yourself. It will not be solved. At the most you can paint a third eye on your forehead. But the painted third eye is just a painted third eye; it is hypocrisy.Ideals create hypocrisy in people. And now see the absurdity: people have the ideal of not being hypocrites, and hypocrisy comes through ideals. If all ideals disappear, there will be no hypocrisy. How can hypocrisy exist? It is the shadow of the ideal. The bigger the ideal, the bigger the hypocrisy. Hence, in India you will find more hypocrites than anywhere in the world because India has lived for centuries with great ideals. Strange, berserk ideals…For example, a Jaina muni cannot be satisfied unless he is capable, like the mythological Mahavira, to eat only once in a while. It is said that in twelve years time Mahavira ate for only one year. That means once in twelve days – one day eating and twelve days fasting. Now if this is your ideal you are going to remain in great misery. If this is not your ideal, then there is no problem.See it – the problem arises from the ideal. Now a Christian monk is not puzzled by this; he has no problem about it. But the Jaina monk is continuously suffering because he cannot attain to the ideal; he falls short. If you are really pure – that is the Jaina idea – your body will not perspire. Now you have a stupid idea there. The body will continue to perspire, and you will continue to suffer.The more ideals you have, the more you will suffer and the more will be your hypocrisy because if you cannot fulfill the ideals then at least you can pretend. That’s how hypocrisy comes in.The world will not be hypocritical at all if we accept experiential facts without any judgment. Whatsoever is, is. If we live with the isness of existence and not with the oughts and the shoulds, how can hypocrisy arise?Just the other day, somebody asked, “Osho, are not you a hypocrite? You live comfortably, you live in a beautiful house, you drive a beautiful car, you live like a king.” Now, he does not understand what the word hypocrisy means. This is my whole teaching – to live as beautifully as possible. I am not a hypocrite. In fact I am living the way I am teaching. If I was teaching to live in poverty and I was living in a palace, that would be hypocrisy. But I am not teaching to live in poverty. Poverty is not my goal.You can go and tell Morarji Desai that he is a hypocrite. Or tell Sanjiva Reddy, the president of this country, “You are a hypocrite.” You cannot say that to me. You can say to the president, Sanjiva Reddy, “You are a hypocrite because you teach about Gandhism and you still go on eating meat. You talk about nonviolence and you go on eating meat. This is hypocrisy – pure hypocrisy, unpolluted hypocrisy!”But you cannot say that to Jesus. He eats meat, but he has never propounded vegetarianism. He has never talked about that kind of nonviolence. You cannot say that he is a hypocrite. Jesus drinks wine. You cannot tell him that he is a hypocrite unless he teaches otherwise.My whole approach toward life is that of total acceptance, is that of celebration, not of renunciation. How can you say to me that I am a hypocrite? I may be the only person on this earth who is not a hypocrite because I have no ideals.The first necessity for the hypocrite is to have ideals. I have none; I am a non-idealist. I live naturally and it is very natural to live in comfort and convenience. It is simply stupid not to, if comfort is available. If it is not available, that is another thing. Then whatsoever is available, live in it comfortably, manage to live in it comfortably. I have lived in many kinds of situations but I have always lived comfortably.When I was a student I used to walk four miles to the university every day. But I loved it. I walked those four miles every day with great comfort; I enjoyed it. When I was a teacher I used to ride a bicycle to the university; I enjoyed that too. Whatsoever has been the situation, whether I had only a bicycle or a Mercedes Benz, it doesn’t make any difference. I have lived in comfort.Comfort is an attitude of the mind. It is an approach toward life. I have lived in very, very poor houses. When I became a teacher in the university, I started living in one single room with no windows, no ventilation. The rent was just twenty rupees per month, but I loved it, I enjoyed it; it wasn’t a problem at all.Whatsoever the moment allows, I have squeezed the moment to its totality. I have drunk of the moment fully. I have never repented and I have never desired something else. If something else started happening I enjoyed that too.You can never say to me that I am a hypocrite. It is impossible for me to be a hypocrite because I have no ideals to fulfill – no oughts, no shoulds. The “is” is all that is, and I live in it.So the second thing to remember is, don’t have certain ideas about yourself. You must be carrying many ideas of how you should be, hence the problem arises. “Can cowardice and hypocrisy also be beautiful?” Now if you have the idea to be a brave man, then it looks ugly to be a coward. But cowardice is a fact, and the ideal is just an ideal, a fantasy of the mind.Sacrifice fantasies to reality, drop all ideals and then life starts becoming integrated. All the rejected fragments start coming back home, the repressed starts surfacing. For the first time you start feeling a kind of togetherness. You are no longer falling apart.For example, if I hold myself to be a kind person, I will not be able to permit myself to recognize and accept angry feelings when they arise in consciousness, because kind people just don’t get angry. Therefore, to bring about a personal unity in consciousness, I must first take my stand as being nothing fixed or enduring, but hold myself to be only the moment-to-moment experiential reality which arises in consciousness. Thus some moments I am angry, then some moments I am sad, then some moments I am jealous, then some moments I am joyful. Moment to moment, whatsoever happens is accepted. Then you become one. And this oneness is the most fundamental thing to understand.The master must help the disciple to confront and integrate with those rejected experiential aspects of self which he actually is at any given moment, instead of trying to help him actualize its compensatory opposite, or what the disciple feels that he ought to be, or that which he is trying to protect, enhance or affirm about himself.My purpose here, my function here, is to take all the ideals away from you. You have come here with ideals; you would like me to enhance your ideals, you would like me to support you and help you to become that which you want to become. That may be your motivation of coming here but that is not my work.My work is just the opposite – to help you to accept that which is already the case and to forget all about your fantasies. I want you to become more realistic, pragmatic. I want to give you roots in the earth, and you are hankering for the sky, and you have completely forgotten the earth.Yes, the sky is also available, but only to those whose roots have gone deep into the earth. If a tree wants to rise high in the sky and whisper with the clouds and play with the winds and have some communion with the stars, then the tree will have to send deeper and deeper roots into the earth. The first thing is sending roots into the earth. The second thing happens on its own accord. The deeper the roots go, the higher the tree goes. There is no need to do anything else.My effort here is to send your roots deep into the soil of truth, and the truth is that which you are. Then suddenly things will start happening. You will start rising. The ideals that you have always tried and have never been able to achieve will start happening on their own accord.If a person can accept his reality as it is, in that very acceptance all tension disappears. Anguish, anxiety, despair all simply evaporate. And when there is no anxiety, no tension, no fragmentariness, no division, no schizophrenia, then suddenly there is joy, then suddenly there is love, then suddenly there is compassion. These are not ideals, these are very natural phenomena. All that is needed is to remove the ideals because those ideals are functioning as blocks. The more idealist a person is, the more blocked he is.As peculiar and contradictory as it may sound, peace is to be found only in the midst of pain and never by struggling against or running away from what is considered to be the negative or painful.Yes, cowardice gives you pain, fear gives you pain, anger gives you pain – these are negative emotions. But peace can be attained only by accepting and absorbing the painful, not by rejecting it. By rejecting it you will become smaller and smaller and smaller, and you will have less and less power. And you will be in a constant inner war, a civil war, in which one hand will fight with the other, in which you will simply dissipate your energy.A very fundamental thing to be remembered: only communion with psychological pain opens the door for its liberation and transcendence, only communion with psychological pain. All that is painful has to be accepted. A dialogue has to be created with it. It is you. There is no other way to go beyond it. The only way is to absorb it.And it has tremendous potential. Anger is energy, fear is energy, so is cowardice. All that happens to you has great momentum, a great quantity of energy hidden in it. Once you accept it, that energy becomes yours. You become stronger, you become wider, you start becoming more spacious. You have a bigger inner world then.Only a yielding, letting be or full acceptance is its ending. The psychological pain ends only by accepting it in its totality. Psychological pain does not exist just because of the mere presence alone of some stimulus or reality termed “painful.” Rather, the pain is produced by the interpretation of the fact or reality which produces the tendency to avoid or resist that fact.Try to understand it. Psychological pain is your own creation. Cowardice is not painful, but your idea that cowardice is wrong, your interpretation that cowardice shouldn’t be there. Ashoka must be saying to himself, “Ashoka, and you a coward? No. How can you be a coward? You are a brave man.”You have a certain ego and that ego goes on condemning cowardice. It is because of that condemnation and interpretation that pain arises. And the cowardice is there, so it becomes a wound. You cannot accept it and you cannot destroy it by rejecting it. Nothing is destroyed by being rejected. Sooner or later you will have to cope with it. Again and again it will erupt; again and again it will disrupt your peace.Only when the mind recoils from a fact or reality is there pain. You are recoiling from the facts of cowardice, fear, anger, sadness. Don’t recoil. Recoiling from a fact creates pain.Psychological pain is part and parcel of the process of escape and resistance. Pain is not inherent in any feeling but arises only after the intent to reject it arises. The moment you decide to reject something, pain arises.Watch it inside yourself, become a lab of great experimentation. Just see – you are feeling fear. It is dark and you are alone, and for miles there is nobody. You are lost in a jungle, sitting under a tree in a dark night, and lions are roaring, and the fear is there.Now there are two possibilities. One is, reject it. Hold yourself tight so you don’t start trembling because of the fear. Then the fear becomes a painful thing, it is there and it hurts. Even when you are holding yourself very tight, it is there and it hurts.The second is, enjoy it. Tremble. Let it become a meditation. It is natural – lions are roaring, the night is dark, danger is so close by, death can happen any moment. Enjoy! Let the trembling become a dance. Once you accept it then trembling is a dance. Cooperate with the trembling and you will be surprised, if you cooperate with the trembling, if you become the trembling, all pain disappears.In fact, if you tremble, instead of pain you will find a great upsurge of energy arising in you. That’s exactly what the body wanted to do. Why in fear does trembling arise? Trembling is a chemical process; it releases energy, it prepares you for fight or flight. It gives you a great sudden upsurge. It is an emergency measure. When you start trembling you start warming up.That’s why when it is cold you tremble. There is no fear, so why do you tremble when it is cold? The body automatically trembles in the cold so that it becomes warm. It is a kind of natural exercise of the body. The inner tissues start trembling to become warmed up so they can face the cold.Now, if you repress trembling when you are feeling cold, it will become painful. That is exactly the case when you are in fear. The body is trying… It is releasing chemicals into the blood; it is preparing you to face some danger. Maybe you will need to have a fight or maybe you will have to run away – flight. Both will need energy.See the beauty of fear, see the alchemical work of fear. It is simply trying to prepare you for the situation so that you can accept the challenge. But rather than accepting the challenge, rather than understanding fear, you start rejecting it. You say, “Ashoka, you are such a great man, a great sannyasin, and you are trembling? And remember what Osho used to say, that there is no death, that the soul is immortal. An immortal soul, and trembling? Remember what Krishna said, ‘Death cannot destroy you, fire cannot burn you, weapons cannot penetrate you.’ Remember! And don’t tremble; hold yourself in control!”Now you are creating a contradiction. Your natural process is that of fear, and you are bringing in an unnatural process to contradict fear. You are bringing ideals to interfere in the natural process. There will be pain because there will be conflict.Don’t bother whether the soul is immortal or not. Right now the truth is that fear is. Listen to this moment and let this moment take you totally, allow this moment to possess you. And then there is no pain. Then fear is a subtle dance of energies in you. And it prepares – it is a friend, it is not your enemy. But your interpretations go on doing something wrong to you.Essentially, the feeling of psychological pain is created by the attempt to separate consciousness from itself, the splitting of the unity of consciousness into the duality of a conceptual observing entity which tries to run away from, distort or overpower the rejected feeling and the observed feeling itself. If consciousness in duality is the cause of the pain, then only consciousness in unity can be the elimination of the pain. In unity is the ending of pain.This split that you create between the feeling – the fear, the anger – and yourself… You become two. You become the observer and the observed. You say, “I am here, the observer, and there is pain, the observed. And I am not the pain.” Now this duality creates pain. You are not the observed, you are not the observer – you are both. You are the observer and the observed, both.Don’t say, “I am feeling fear.” That is a wrong way of saying it. Don’t say, “I am afraid.” That also is a wrong way of saying it. Simply say, “I am fear. In this moment I am fear.” Don’t create any division.When you say, “I am feeling fear” you are keeping yourself separate from the feeling. You are there somewhere far away, and the feeling is around you. This is the basic disunity. Say, “I am fear.” And watch – that’s actually the case! When the fear is there, you are fear.It is not that sometimes you feel love. When love is really there, you are love. And when anger is there, you are anger. This is what Krishnamurti means when he says again and again, “The observer is the observed.” The seer is the seen and the experiencer is the experience. Don’t create this division of subject and object. This is the root cause of all misery, of all split.Thus, one must not judge good or bad. One must not label or have any kind of desire or goal in regard to what arises in consciousness. There must be no sense of avoidance, resistance, condemnation, justification, distortion or attachment in regard to what arises, but only a choiceless awareness, and self-communion is established.A choiceless awareness – that is the ultimate key to open the innermost mystery of your being. Don’t say it is good, don’t say it is bad. When you say something is good, attachment arises, attraction arises. When you say something is bad, repulsion arises. Fear is fear – neither good nor bad. Don’t evaluate, just let it be. Let it be so.When you are there without condemnation and justification, then in that choiceless awareness all psychological pain simply evaporates as dewdrops in the early morning sun. And left behind is a pure space, left behind is virgin space.This is the one, the Tao, or you can call it God. This one that is left behind when all pain disappears, when you are not divided in any way, when the observer has become the observed, this is the experience of God, samadhi or whatever you will.And in this state there is no self as such because there is no observer, controller, judger. One is only that which arises and changes from moment to moment. Some moments it may be elation, other moments it may be sadness, tenderness, destructiveness, fear, loneliness, etcetera.One shouldn’t say, “I am sad,” or “I have sadness,” but “I am sadness” – because the first two statements imply a self separate from that which is. In reality there is no other self to whom the particular feeling is happening. There is only the feeling itself. Meditate over it – there is only the feeling itself.There is no Ashoka feeling fear; Ashoka is fear in a certain moment. In certain other moments Ashoka is not fear, but Ashoka is not separate from the moment, from that which is arising. There is only the feeling itself. Thus, nothing can be done about what is experientially arising in the moment. There is nobody else to do anything.This communion with pain does not bring greater pain but actually yields liberation and joy. In fact, consciousness in communion with anything, not just psychological pain of course, yields peace and joy. Be the truth and the truth will set you free.I will repeat the question again, “Can cowardice and hypocrisy also be beautiful?” Everything that is, is beautiful – even ugliness. “Can I accept even my cowardice, my hypocrisy, my miserliness, and a tendency toward privacy that you yourself have called ‘idiocy’?”Whatsoever is, is, whether you accept it or not. Your acceptance or rejection makes no difference at all. That which is, is. If you accept it you have joy arising in you; if you reject it you have pain. But the reality still remains the same. You may have pain, psychological pain. That is your creation because you weren’t able to accept, absorb something that was arising. You rejected truth. In rejection you become a prisoner. The truth liberates, but you rejected it. Hence you are in chains. Reject truth, and you will remain more and more imprisoned.The truth remains; it does not matter whether you reject it or accept it. It does not change the fact; it changes your psychological reality. And there are two possibilities: either pain or joy, either dis-ease or health. If you reject it there will be dis-ease, uncomfort, because you are cutting a chunk of your being away from you. It will leave wounds and scars on you. If you accept, there will be celebration and health and wholeness.“And if I accept such tendencies, all of which tend to bottle me up, how will I get free?” They are not bottling you up. It is your interpretation. No truth ever binds anybody; that is not the quality of truth. But when you reject it, in your rejection you become closed, you are bottled up. In that rejection you become a cripple, you become paralyzed.“And if I accept such tendencies,” you say, “all of which tend to bottle me up, how will I get free?” That very idea of getting free is again an ideal. Freedom is not an ideal, it is a by-product of accepting whosoever you are. Freedom is a by-product; it is not a goal of your endeavor and effort. It is not arrived at by great effort, it happens when you are relaxed.And how can you be relaxed if you cannot accept your cowardice? If you cannot accept your fear, if you cannot accept your love, if you cannot accept your sadness, how can you be relaxed?Why can’t people relax? What is the basic cause of their constant chronic tension? This is the basic cause. Down the centuries, your so-called religions have been teaching you to reject and reject. They have been teaching you to renounce, they have been teaching you that all is wrong. You have to change this, you have to change that, only then will you be acceptable to God. They have created so much rejection, so what to say about God? You are not even acceptable to yourself, you are not acceptable to the people you live with. How can you be accepted by God? God already accepts you, that’s why you are in existence; otherwise you wouldn’t have been here.This is my basic teaching to you – God already accepts you. You don’t have to earn it, you are already worthy. Relax. Enjoy the way God has made you. If he has put cowardice in you, then there must be something in it. Trust and accept it. What is wrong in being a coward? And what is wrong in being afraid? Only idiots don’t feel fear; imbeciles are not afraid.If a snake comes on the path, you will jump immediately. Only the imbecile, the stupid, the idiot, will not be afraid of the snake. But the intelligent… The more intelligent you are, the faster you will jump. This is part of intelligence. This is perfectly good. This helps your life, it protects you.But stupid ideologies have been given to man. And even when you are here, you go on persisting in your old patterns. You don’t listen to me, to what I am saying. I am saying, “Whatsoever you are, unconditionally accept it. And acceptance is the key to transformation.”I am not saying, “Accept yourself” to be transformed – otherwise you have not accepted at all because deep down the desire is for transformation. You say, “Okay, if this brings transformation then I will accept.” But this is not accepting it. You have missed the whole point. You still desire transformation. That’s why in the end you ask, “How will I get free if I accept?”You are asking me, “Can you guarantee that if I accept, it will bring freedom?” If I guarantee it to you, and you accept because of the guarantee, where is the acceptance? You are using acceptance as a means. The goal is to be transformed, to be free, to attain to God, to nirvana. Where is the acceptance?Acceptance has to be unconditional, for no reason at all, without any motivation. Then only does it free. It brings tremendous joy, it brings great freedom, the freedom does not come as an end. Acceptance is itself another name for freedom. If you have truly accepted, if you have understood what I mean by acceptance, there is freedom – immediately, instantly.It is not that first you accept yourself, practice acceptance, and then one day there will be freedom – no. You accept and there is freedom because psychological pain disappears immediately.Try it. What I am saying is experimental. You can do it, it is not a question of believing me. You have been fighting with your fear. Accept it and see what happens. Just sit silently and accept it, and say, “I have fear, so I am fear.” In that very meditative state, “I am fear,” freedom starts descending. When the acceptance is total, freedom has arrived.The second question:Osho,I am very suspicious of my wife, although I know that she is innocent. What can I do to drop my suspicions?There must be something in you that you are really suspicious of. Unless you can trust yourself, you cannot trust your wife or anybody else. If you mistrust yourself, you will project your mistrust on people who are around you. The thief thinks that everybody is a thief. It is natural because he knows himself and that is the only way of him knowing others.What you think about others is basically a declaration of what you think about yourself. You know that if your wife is not constantly watching you, you will do something. You will start flirting with some women – you know it. Hence the fear, “If I am in the office, who knows? The wife is flirting with the neighbors.” You know perfectly well what you are doing with the secretary; that is creating the problem.That’s why you say, “Though I know my wife is innocent, still I am suspicious.” You will remain suspicious till something in you drops. It is not a question about your wife. All questions, when they arise, are really about you.A traveling man went on the road for a short trip, but kept staying away longer. Every few weeks he’d send his wife a wire saying, “Can’t come home, still buying.” Every wire was the same, “Can’t come home, still buying.” This went on for three or four months, when his wife finally sent him a wire that said, “Better come home, I’m selling what you’re buying!”That’s how things happen in life.The hungover couple talked about the wild party they held the night before.“Darling, this is rather embarrassing,” said the husband, “but was it you I made love to in the library last night?”His wife looked at him reflectively and asked, “About what time?”The basic mistrust must be about you. You are suspicious of yourself. Maybe you are repressing too much. And whenever somebody represses something in him, he starts projecting it on others. It almost always happens that the man who has a murderous instinct in him is always afraid that others are thinking to murder him; he becomes paranoid. The person who is very violent is always afraid, “Other people are very violent, and I have to be constantly on guard.”Because people don’t trust themselves, hence they can’t trust anybody else: wife, friend, father, mother, son, daughter. People are living in chronic suspicion. But the basic cause is that you have not been able to accept the facticity of yourself.I would like you to ponder over what I was just saying to Ashoka. Accept whatsoever you are. In that very acceptance you will accept others too. And yes, there is a possibility if you sometimes become interested in seeing a woman… Nothing is impossible, your wife may become interested in some man. But if you understand yourself and accept yourself, you will accept your wife too. If you can accept that “Sometimes I become attracted to a woman,” then nothing is wrong, then your wife can also become attracted to some man.But if you reject it in your own being, if you condemn it in your own being, you will condemn it in others being too.My criterion of a saint is one who is able to forgive all and everybody because he knows himself. But your saints are incapable of forgiving. Your saints go on inventing more and more technologically perfect hells. Why? They have not yet been able to accept themselves.There is a story about the young good-looking attorney who claimed there never was a woman with whom he couldn’t make it. One day the office hired a very good-looking secretary that for weeks every male tried to make and failed in the attempt.The young attorney boasted that if enough money were bet, he would succeed with her. When they questioned how he would prove it, he said he would record the entire action on his tape recorder, which he would hide under the bed.When all the betting was made, he proceeded to make a date with her, and by the end of the evening, not only was she in his apartment but eventually in his bed, whereupon he reached under and turned on the tape.In a few moments, in support of his reputation, the secretary was in a state of violent lovemaking, and at its height cried out loudly, “Keep kissing it honey, keep kissing it!”Whereupon the attorney in his best courtroom manner leaned under the bed and dictated into the recorder, “Please let the record reflect, the lady indicated her left breast.”The mind of an attorney – constantly suspicious. Now he must have become afraid, “Keep kissing it honey, keep kissing it!” What? The record will not say anything and there may be suspicions.But this is the mind of everybody. Mind is cunning, calculating, suspicious. Mind lives constantly in a kind of distrust, in doubt. Mind’s whole climate is that of doubt.So it is not a question of how to trust your wife, it is a question of how to trust. Mind lives in the climate of doubt, it feeds on doubt. And unless you know how to put the mind off when it is not needed and descend into the heart, you will not know how to trust.The climate of the heart is trust. Mind cannot trust; mind is incapable of trusting. And we have all become hung-up in the head. Hence, even though we say that we trust, we don’t trust. We insist that we trust, but our very insistence shows that we don’t trust. We want to trust, we pretend to trust, we want the other to believe that we trust, but we don’t trust. The head is impotent as far as trust is concerned. The head is the mechanism to doubt. The head is constantly a question mark.You will have to know how to come down to the heart, which has been bypassed by the society. The society does not teach you the ways of the heart; it only teaches you the ways of the mind. It teaches you mathematics and logic and it teaches you science, etcetera, etcetera, but they are all the cultivation of doubt.Science has grown through doubt. Doubt has been a blessing as far as science is concerned. But as science has grown more and more, man has shrunk. Humanity has disappeared, love has almost become a myth. Love is no longer a reality on the earth. How can it be a reality? The heart itself has stopped beating. Even when you love, you only think that you love; it comes through the head, and the head is not the faculty to love.Start meditating. Start putting off the constant chattering of the head. Slowly, slowly the mind becomes quiet. Get into things where the mind is not needed – for example, dancing. Dance, and dance to abandon because in dance the mind is not needed. You can lose yourself in a dance. In losing yourself in a dance, the heart will start functioning again.Drown yourself in music. And slowly, slowly you will see that there is a totally different world of the heart. And in the heart there is always trust. The heart does not know how to doubt, just as the mind does not know how to trust.The third question:Osho,What is sexual perversion? Why do strange sexual habits evolve, and from where? For example, sadomasochism.Man is not what he appears to be; he is far bigger. We know about man only in a very partial way.There are five words you will have to understand. The first is the conscious mind. The conscious mind is a very tiny mind, just a little bit of you, which can reason, think, rationalize, go through logical processes and is a little bit alert. It is a very tiny part of you, and we know man only from that tiny part. We have looked into the great palace of human consciousness from a very tiny hole, maybe the keyhole, and whatsoever we have seen through the keyhole is not the whole reality.Man is vast. Hidden just behind the conscious mind is the unconscious mind. That is the great contribution of Sigmund Freud to humanity. The unconscious mind is nine times bigger than the conscious mind. It contains all your instincts, it contains all your inner functioning, body mechanisms, emotions, feelings. Except logic, it contains all of you. But it is deep in darkness.Freud has defined psychoanalysis as an effort to make the unconscious conscious, so that your consciousness becomes a little bigger. More light has to penetrate the darkness of the unconscious because the unconscious is nine times more powerful. Whatsoever you decide with the conscious cannot be materialized unless it reaches the unconscious.That’s why hypnosis goes far deeper than any other methodology. Hypnosis works directly on the unconscious. You may try for years to drop a certain habit and you will not be able to, because you will try only from the conscious mind. And the conscious is very small; it has no power before the unconscious. It has no way to know what the conscious is thinking.But the hypnotist can help you to drop the habit within seconds or at the most in a few sessions, because he will put the conscious to sleep and will start communicating directly with the unconscious. If the unconscious agrees to drop the habit, then the habit is dropped; then there is no way for the conscious to carry it any longer.All realities change from the unconscious. But the unconscious itself is also only a part. There is, still hidden behind, a collective unconscious which contains your whole past. And that is not a small thing. Because once you have been a lion and once you have been a snake and once you have been a tree.The Eastern idea of passing through eighty-four million births is significant. It may not be exactly accurate but it is significant, it is meaningful. Eighty-four million births before you became a man, and all those births and their experiences are contained in the collective unconscious. It is almost the whole of history, from the very beginning, if there had ever been a beginning.It is to Karl Gustav Jung’s credit that he brought the idea of the collective unconscious and introduced it to the world of psychology. But these are all only parts, even the collective unconscious is only a part.Western psychology still has not started moving upward. This is going downward; the conscious, below it the unconscious, below that the collective unconscious.Above the conscious there is the superconscious, nine times more than the conscious. Parallel to the unconscious, there is the superconscious, above the conscious. And still above the superconscious there is the cosmic mind. You can call it the divine mind or God mind, Tao – that means the ultimate in consciousness. All has become conscious and you are as big as the cosmos. If you go deeper than the conscious you will be entering darkness. If you go above the conscious you will be entering light.So there are five minds in you, and you are aware only of the small tiny part, the conscious mind.Now, from the unconscious and from the collective unconscious many things go on arising. Many things happen in your dreams, and sometimes you feel very puzzled as to what kind of dream you had. You cannot make any end or tail of it, you cannot figure out what it was, the whole thing seems to be so absurd. It was from the collective unconscious that something arose and surfaced into the unconscious, and you had the dream.But sometimes things start filtering from the collective unconscious into the conscious too. Then they are very bizarre, they are perversions. They only look like perversions; they are not really perversions. They are as natural as anything else, but they are very abnormal. “For example” you ask, “sadomasochism.”There are people who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who enjoy torturing themselves, and particularly in relation to lovemaking. There are people who would like to torture the beloved person, or people who would like to be tortured by the beloved.Sadism comes from the name of de Sade. He was incapable of being sexually aroused unless he beat a woman, so he used to carry a box with him, just like a doctor’s box, with all the instruments of torture. And he was a very rich man, he was a duke, so all the women of his territory were available to him. Wherever he would see some beautiful woman he would simply make a gesture and she had to come to his torture chambers; they cannot be called love chambers. And he had all kinds of instruments there in his chamber. The woman would immediately be made naked and he would beat her and do things to her which were very perverted. Unless blood started flowing from her body he wouldn’t get sexually aroused. Now, this is perversion.From where is it coming? It is coming from the deep, deep collective unconscious, from those eighty-four million lives. Because there are animals… For example, there is a certain African spider that is eaten by the woman while he is making love. He is just on top of the woman, the lady spider, and he is in great ecstasy, total orgasm, and abandoned. He has completely forgotten everything – and the lady starts eating him. And he has not yet even finished his… By the time orgasm is finished, the spider is also finished! So he can make love only once. It is not perversion there, it is natural.Just like de Sade, there was Masoch, from whose name the word masochism has been made. He was just the reverse of de Sade. He would force the woman to hit him, to beat him, to whip him. And unless he was whipped and beaten he wouldn’t be sexually aroused.Now, these people are suffering from the collective unconscious. Something is coming from the collective unconscious. Something goes on surfacing into their conscious. They can’t understand from where it comes. These are not criminals, they need treatment.De Sade had to be forced to live in jail his whole life. That is ugly, that is unjust. He needed some deep hypnotic treatment. We should start feeling compassion for these people. They are sufferers from their past.These things happen to everybody, but they come only to the unconscious in dreams. These other people are freaks. There is some passage between their unconscious and conscious that opens so easily that things start floating in their conscious and then they are possessed by them. They cannot avoid it.If you look into the habits of millions of animals you will be surprised. Do you know, elephants make love in a certain way? The courtship continues for years. Now, if somebody has been an elephant in a past life, somewhere in the unconscious, collective unconscious, then the courtship can continue for years, on and on.The woman elephant makes love only twice in a decade. Now, you will find many women who have that idea – twice in a decade! But it is natural as far as elephants are concerned because the woman elephant will have to carry the pregnancy for twenty-two months. And it is some pregnancy! Twenty-two months carrying an elephant in your womb. She becomes so afraid of the whole nonsense of lovemaking that for two or three years no playboy can persuade her to go into that trip again. Only after three, four, five years, when the memory fades, can she be persuaded. So the courtship has to be very long.And all these things are there inside in the collective unconscious. One thing may not be unnatural in a certain animal, but will become unnatural to man. That’s how perversions arise.Do you know? There are such strange practices among animals that if you read about them you will be thrilled! You will not be able…what is going on in nature. You know the common bedbug? The lady bedbug has no genitalia – no genitalia. Each time the male bedbug has to make love to the woman he has to drill a hole. She has no entry. Now this is dangerous! But nature has given indications – there is a line on the belly of the lady bedbug, because if you drill anywhere else you will kill her! She can be drilled only on a particular line. You can turn over any lady bedbug and you can know whether she is a virgin or not, or how many times she has been made love to because those holes will be there, scars will be there.But if this type of thing surfaces in somebody’s mind, if he starts drilling a hole into a woman, it will be a perversion. But this is how it is. There is a great collective unconscious of millions and millions of lives, and all kinds of experiences are stored there. Buddhists call it alaya vigyan, the storehouse of consciousness. It is infinite.You ask me, “What is sexual perversion?” It is something surfacing from the collective unconscious. “And why do strange sexual habits evolve, and from where?” They evolve from the collective unconscious. And a few people have openings; those openings are freak openings. It is like a child is born with six fingers or a child is born blind; these are exceptions – so are perverted people.Just the other night I was reading a book on Satya Sai Baba. The name of the book is Lord of the Air. It is written by people who have lived with Satya Sai Baba for many years, based on their personal experience. They say that he is not only a homosexual, he is also a hermaphrodite. A hermaphrodite is a person who has the genitalia of both the male and female.Now, there are animals in which it is not a perversion, it is natural. There are earthworms which have both genitalia; you cannot decide whether one is male or female because each has both genitalia. So when earthworms make love it is a double-way affair. One functions as a male to the other, and also as a female; one makes love to the other in both ways. The meeting has two points, so it is difficult to decide who is male. Both are male and both are female. So A makes love as a male to B’s female parts, and B makes love as a male to A’s female parts. It is a circular love affair, and both will become pregnant.Nothing is wrong for earthworms, but if it is so with Satya Sai Baba then there is difficulty. And the way he walks, it seems these people are right. Rarely it happens, there is nothing to condemn. What can Satya Sai Baba do about it? There are a few children born with both genitalia, very rarely, but they live a very fearful life, afraid, hiding themselves. Nobody should know about it.Man is not yet so enlightened, otherwise there is nothing wrong in it. In fact Satya Sai Baba is far richer than anybody else because he can enjoy love both ways, as a man and as a woman.Perversions can be in the body, perversions can be in the mind, but they both arise from the deep collective unconscious. And they can both be settled, but for that a tremendously deep hypnosis will be needed. No ordinary hypnosis will do; ordinary hypnosis can lead you only to the unconscious. To go to the collective unconscious a very deep hypnosis will be needed.In the new commune I am going to give you methods to go to the deep collective unconscious. But it is a very dangerous trip, and great arrangements are needed before somebody can enter the collective unconscious because there is so much there – millions of experiences – and they will suddenly explode.A commune is needed. A closed commune is needed, the closed Garden is needed. Because it is not a question of the ordinary masses knowing about it; they will not be able to understand. That’s why if something reaches to the masses, some naked photographs reach to the masses, they are immediately against me. They cannot understand what is happening here.We are trying to penetrate the deepest layers of consciousness. But this is an alchemical lab. The ordinary masses will not be able to understand it. And if they understand, they will understand it according to themselves.I am waiting for the new commune. Much more has to be done. But then things will become much more bizarre, and you will need a field, an energy field that surrounds you like a soothing energy, that keeps you anchored with me and you are not lost in the collective unconscious. Only then can the doors of the collective unconscious be opened. They can be opened and it is tremendously helpful if they are.If you can know your whole past, you will be freed from it. Knowing something is to be free from it; knowing the truth liberates. If you can be allowed to go into your past, to the very end, you will be finished with everything. Because millions of times you have accumulated wealth and each time you have failed. If you can remember your past lives, and you can see that millions of times you have been playing the same stupid game, to no point at all, then how can you go on playing in this life? It will be impossible. If you can see all your sexual experiences, it will be so ridiculous to still go on playing the same game.But for that, a totally secluded atmosphere and a great trust, an absolute trust will be needed. Hence I am trying to create a commune which will be a world apart and where we can go into the deepest possible experiments that have ever been done.And once you have gone backward, you become capable of going upward and forward because the process is the same. Backward, it is easier because it is a known path. You have forgotten about it, but it is still a known path; you can go backward.Going upward to superconsciousness and the cosmic mind is an unknown path. If you become capable of going backward you have learned how to go… You have learned how to penetrate the dangerous realms of your being. And then the next step higher can be taken. You can move from the conscious to the superconscious.It is the superconscious in which all the experiences of angels and devatas and gods and kundalini and chakras and lotuses opening happen; they are all contained in the superconscious. It is a beautiful world, it is psychedelic. Beyond that is the world of the cosmic mind where all experiences disappear, neither ugly nor beautiful. Where the experiencer is left alone – total, absolute aloneness. And that is the ultimate goal of consciousness. Evolution is moving toward that goal.But before you can take that quantum leap into the world that is above you, you will have to get deeper into the roots; into the dark roots, into your unconscious and your past experiences.Both Buddha and Mahavira tried; they did great experiments. Those experiments are called jati smaran, remembering the past. And the past is vast – if you go on remembering it, it goes on revealing secrets. The man who has gone to his whole past will come back absolutely healthy, psychologically whole. He will not have any perversion. His whole life will be transformed just by going there and coming back. He can see that all that he can ever imagine to do he had done many times, and it was all futile, it was all in vain.That very understanding, and all starts changing. And when you are free from the past you are capable to move into the present. You can dive deep into the now and here.After some months of marriage, a girl wrote the following letter to her doctor.Dear Doctor,Since I got married, my husband seems to have gone mad. He is after me at breakfast, coffee break, lunchtime, even teatime and then all night, every few hours. Is there anything I can do or give to help him? I await your kind reply.P.S. Please excuse my shaky handwriting.So the husband is still after her. There are many animals who make love that way. Now, something surfacing from those animal worlds…A woman went to her doctor to complain that her husband’s sexual feelings for her seemed to have declined.The doctor, being an old friend of the family, gave the woman some pills to slip into her husband’s tea so that at least the man wouldn’t get a complex about being a bit underpowered.Two days later, the woman was back in the doctor’s office.“What happened?” asked the doctor. “Did the pills work?”“Fantastic!” replied the woman. “I was so eager to see their effects on my husband that I tipped three of them into a cup of coffee, and within seconds of drinking it he got up, kicked the table and pulled me down on the floor and ravished me.”“Oh!” said the doctor. “I hope you weren’t too surprised?”“Surprised?” said the woman. “I’ll never be able to set foot in that restaurant again!”That’s how animals make love. You can lose your consciousness and you can behave like an animal. Perversion means you are losing your consciousness. You are behaving like something below human beings. Man has the capacity to fall below the animals and to rise above the gods. That is the glory of man and his misery too. That is the agony of man and his ecstasy too. Man is the only animal in the world, the only being, who is capable of reaching the deepest hell and rising to the highest heaven.Perversion simply means you are falling backward. Conversion means you are moving upward, falling upward. And if one is not converted toward the upward journey, one remains perverted. Maybe your perversion is not very strange, and you can adjust to it. Maybe it is a normal perversion, everybody has it. Then it is okay, it can be tolerated. But a few people have exceptional perversions, private perversions, their own, and they cannot adjust with the society. But remember, there are only two kinds of people: the perverted and the converted. There are only two categories: the perverted and the converted.Be the converted, start rising above humanity. But the only way to rise above humanity is to accept all the animality that still exists in you and lurks in you. One who is capable of accepting all that he is, becomes capable of receiving that which he can become.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 09 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-09/

For the wise manevil and goodare both exceeding good.No evil ever comes from God;whenever you think to seeevil proceeding from him,you were better to look on itas good.I’m afraid that on the way of faith,you are like a squinter seeing double,or a fool quarreling with the shape of a camel.If he gives you poison, deem it honey;and if he shows you anger, deem it mercy.Be contented with your lot;but if you have any complaints,go and take them to the Cadi,and obtain satisfaction from him.– That’s how the fool’s mind works!Whatever befalls you,misfortune or fortune,is unalloyed blessing;the attendant evila fleeing shadow.“Good’” and “evil” have no meaningin the world of the Word:they are mere names, coinedin the world of “me” and “you.”Your life is just a morsel in his mouth;his feast is both a wedding and a wake.Why should darkness grieve the heart?– for night is pregnant with new day.You say you’ve unrolled the carpet of time,step then beyond life itself and reason,till you arrive at God’s command.You cannot see anything, being blind by night,and by day one-eyed with your foolish wisdom!What is wisdom? It certainly is not knowledge. Knowledge is a pretender, it is a false coin. It looks like wisdom and because it looks like wisdom it is very dangerous. One can be easily deceived by it.Knowledge comes from without, wisdom arises within. Knowledge is a commodity, you can purchase it in the marketplace; it is sold, it is bought. Wisdom is not a commodity, you have to risk your life to find it. It is not a bargain, it is gambling.Knowledge consists of all that you have known in the past. Wisdom has nothing to do with the past at all, it is of the present. It has nothing to do with the past and it has nothing to do with the future either because the future is nothing but a projection of the past – modified, decorated here and there, a little changed, polished, painted, but it is the same old thing, renovated.Knowledge exists in time. Time consists of the past and the future. Wisdom knows nothing of time, wisdom only knows of eternity. Eternity consists only of now, this moment, the present. Eternity does not come, does not go, it is always here.Wisdom brings peace, knowledge brings anxiety. Howsoever alike they appear, they are diametrically opposite. Wisdom brings contentment, utter contentment. Knowledge brings more and more discontent, because mind exists only in the desire for more. Mind is nothing but another name for the desire of getting more and more and more. It is a constant hankering for more. If you have money, it desires more money; if you have power, it desires more power; if you have knowledge, it desires more knowledge. It is the same process. Objects differ but the process remains the same.Wisdom knows nothing of “more,” it is utter contentment. And when the “more” is there surrounding you, you are in a constant tension, a chronic tension because nothing seems to be enough. You live in despair and anguish.Knowledge gratifies the ego. In wisdom, ego simply disappears, it is not found at all. Knowledge knows of distinctions, knowledge depends on distinctions: this and that, here and there, now and then, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, the Devil and God. Knowledge is dualistic – I and thou – that’s its form. It divides reality. Knowledge is schizophrenic, wisdom unites.Wisdom means unio mystica. Then there is no God and no Devil, only one is. What name you want to give to that one is just an arbitrary choice. You can call it God, but remember it is not God as opposed to the Devil. The God of wisdom is not opposed to the Devil; it contains the Devil in himself. You can call it Tao, you can call it dharma, you can call it Logos, or whatever you will. But remember one thing, it contains the opposite. That is the essential thing to be remembered. When a wise man asserts the word God, the Devil is contained in it.Do you know the origin of the word Devil? It comes from a Sanskrit root dev, the same root from where the Sanskrit word devata comes; they both come from the same root. Devata means God, Devil means Satan, but they originate in the same root, dev. It is from dev that the English word Devil comes, and also the English word divine. The divine and the Devil are not two things.Existence is one, utterly one, it is an organic unity. So when the wise man uses the word God it contains the Devil. When the wise man uses the word light, it contains all that is dark in it. It is comprehensive, it is inclusive, it does not exclude anything.But when the man of knowledge uses the same words, his connotation is different. When he uses the word God, it is against the Devil. When he uses the word I, it is against thou. When he uses the word life, it is against death.Wisdom knows no distinctions. All distinctions have to be dropped; only then does one become wise. The distinctions that morality creates, the distinctions upon which our mundane life exists and is built upon, all those distinctions have to be dropped. The distinction between man and woman is superficial, just on the surface. The distinction between matter and mind is also superficial, just on the surface. Matter is mind asleep, mind is matter awake. The distinction between the body and the soul is superficial. The body is only the visible part of the soul, and the soul is the invisible part of the body; they are not two. Wisdom knows nothing of the two.And this wisdom is not accumulated by accumulating information. It does not happen sitting in a library or in a university. It happens when you dissolve into your own core. It happens by going withinward, it happens when you have touched your rock bottom. When you have touched your very ground it explodes. All distinctions disappear, suddenly life is one. Everything is connected with everything else, everything is dependent on everything else, everything is a member of everything else.Then you don’t see the tree as separate from the earth – it is not. Then you don’t see the tree as separate from the sun, because it is not. Then the tree is joined with the sun by subtle rays. Without the sun the tree will disappear; it will not be green anymore, no flowers will come to it. And without the earth there will be no juice in it, it will not be alive; and without the ocean it will also die. If you go deep into the tree you will find it contains the whole existence.Alfred Tennyson is right when he says, “If you can know a single flower, root and all, you would have known the whole existence.” Why? – because even a single flower contains all. It has been part of the sun, part of the moon, part of the millions of stars. They have all poured themselves into this small flower. It has been contributed to by all: by the earth, and by things which you don’t see connected at all. A child playing by the rosebush has helped the rosebush to grow; without the child playing around it the rosebush would have been different.Now there are scientific ways to know about this, that when a child is dancing around the rosebush, happy and singing, there is a connection with the rose. The rose feels the dance, the vibe, grows faster. Now it is a well-established fact that if roses hear music, they grow faster, they become bigger. If plants hear music they grow faster, they bring bigger fruits, and they bring fruits sooner than they would have done otherwise. If they are fed with noise, not with music, not with harmonious notes but with discordant noise, their growth suffers. They remain stunted. Flowers come, but not to their optimum; something remains retarded.So everything contributes to everything else. You are whatsoever you are because existence is whatsoever it is. You are an intrinsic part in this existence. Once you enter your own being, you will become available to the whole and the whole will become available to you. You will be able to see in a new perspective.So wisdom is not knowledge. Then what is it? Wisdom is meditation, wisdom is silence, wisdom is quietude, wisdom is wu wei. Wisdom means a state of utter silence in absolute communion with existence. It is an orgasmic experience of being in tune with the whole.The knowledgeable man is just like a donkey carrying the load of the past – of the scriptures, of theories, philosophies and theologies. He cannot answer a single real question, although he can answer millions of unreal questions.A Jew driving a small cart drawn by a donkey came to a toll bridge. The toll collector came out of his house and said, “Here you’ve got to pay a toll before you can cross this bridge.”“What! Pay a toll?”“Yes, five cents to cross the bridge.”After an argument the Jew paid the five cents and went on. In the afternoon he came back again, but this time he had the donkey sitting on the seat and he was dragging the cart himself.The toll man came out and said, “Here you know you’ve got to pay five cents.”The Jew shook his head, and pointing to the donkey said, “Don’t talk with me – ask the driver.”The pundit, the scholar, the academician, is just like a donkey sitting in a cart pretending to be the driver. He is not a driver; he knows nothing. Although he has gathered much knowledge, still he knows nothing.Knowing is a totally different phenomenon than knowledge.The archbishop said once he was visiting a small Catholic parish in a mining district for the purpose of administering confirmation. During the course of the exercises he asked one nervous little girl what matrimony was.“It is a state of terrible torment which those who enter are compelled to undergo for a time to prepare them for a brighter and better world,” she said.“No, no,” remonstrated her rector. “That isn’t matrimony. That’s the definition of purgatory.”“Leave her alone,” said the archbishop. “Maybe she is right. What do you and I know about it?”Knowing is through experiencing; knowledge is not your own experience. You can know millions of things without knowing them, but then don’t depend on it. It cannot be in communion with truth, it cannot reveal to you the mystery of life.Two ladies in Boston heard the bishop give a rousing sermon on the beauties of married life. The ladies left the church feeling uplifted and contented.“It was a fine sermon His Reverence gave us this morning,” observed one.“That it was,” agreed the other, “and I wish I knew as little about the matter as he does.”There is a way of knowing without knowing at all – that is knowledge. There is a way of knowing by really knowing – that is the way of wisdom. Wisdom is existential, knowledge is intellectual. In knowledge only part of your mind is involved, in wisdom your totality is immersed. And the difference is tremendous, the difference is incredible, immeasurable.To know about reality is not really to know it. The “about” takes you round and round, but never to the point. It is beating round the bush. You can go on beating round and round, but it is almost futile.Wisdom needs a direct approach. Wisdom needs to jump into the center of the thing, not going round and round. Going round and round, you can become acquainted, but to be acquainted is not to know. In the ordinary sense, whatsoever is called knowledge is a misnomer because it is nothing but memory. It is not knowledge. Memory is not knowledge, it is parrotlike.Knowledge is real only when you are an eyewitness to it – seeing is believing. But the people in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques, they say just the opposite. They say, “Believing is seeing.” How can believing be seeing? Believing can only be deceiving. Believing can create a kind of hallucination around you. If you really believe too much in something you may start seeing it. But it is not there, it has been created by your mind; it is just your projection.Never start with belief, otherwise you will never know the truth. Go empty into the search, with no belief, with no disbelief either. Just go open, not knowing this way or that. Go innocent, utterly naked.Only one thing is needed for the disciple and that is openness, vulnerability – not belief. The real disciple is an agnostic. He says, “I don’t know. I am ready to know but I don’t know, and until I know I am not going to believe. For or against, I am not going to believe either way. I will remain open to the truth to come and knock on my door. I will search.”But great courage is needed to search without belief, without disbelief. The mind hankers to believe because it can cling to the belief; it gives it great consolation. It starts feeling, “I know, a little bit at least, but I know. I am not utterly ignorant.”The disciple needs the courage to be utterly ignorant. In that ignorance innocence arises. In that innocence you cannot find any ego in you. Ego needs beliefs or disbeliefs, which are nothing but negative beliefs. One believes in God, one does not believe in God, but both are stubborn and dogmatic. Both have crutches to lean upon.Throw away all your crutches. Only then is there a possibility to know the truth. And that is what I mean by “another kind of knowing,” by being the reality, not getting information about it.Know love by being love, then it is wisdom. You can go to the British Museum and you can find all that has been written about love, and you can write a great PhD thesis about love, but you will not have known anything about love. You will not have tasted anything of love, not even a drop on your tongue. You may become very, very clever about love, you may be able to talk about it, but you will be incapable of living it. And unless you are capable of living it, remember, you don’t know it. The real knowing is by being that reality, by being one with or in unity or identity with that reality in its self-luminous state.It is said in Zen that if you want to paint a bamboo, first go to the bamboo grove. Live with the bamboos in all kinds of seasons – let there be summer and winter and rains. And live with the bamboos so that you can feel how the bamboos feel. When it is dark and the night is silent and the stars are above, feel how the bamboos feel it. When the sun rises, and there is great wind and the bamboos sway and dance, feel how the bamboos feel it. And when it is raining and the bamboos are delighted, let that delight enter in your being.First become a bamboo if you want to paint a bamboo. Unless you have known the bamboo from its inside, unless you have become utterly identified with the bamboo, whatsoever you paint will be only a photograph, not a painting. That’s the difference between a photograph and a painting. No camera will ever be able to do something like van Gogh; no camera can do that.Just the other night, a famous painter, Kelly, took sannyas. He has painted a painting of me without ever seeing me but he has caught the feel. It may not be exactly true of my face because he had not seen me when he painted it, but it has the quality of my being.He has painted me sitting surrounded by mountains. Not only has he caught my quality but even the mountains that are surrounding me have the same quality: the same meditativeness, the same stillness, the same calm, that same coolness. There is a tremendous harmony between me and the mountains. No camera can ever do it.When for the first time the camera was invented, it was thought that now painting would soon become out of date, portraits would become out of date. What happened is just the opposite. Painting has taken a new dimension because of the camera. All the bogus painters have disappeared because their work can be done by camera. Now only the true and authentic painters can exist.Before the camera, the technician who knew how to paint the face in exact proportion was thought to be a great painter. Now that can be done by the camera, and more accurately. So that kind of technician-painter is no longer needed. Now only a meditative painter is needed – one who can function not from without but from within.The other day, giving initiation to Kelly, I could feel he has that quality inside him which can participate with something, which can fall in tune with something. I have given him a new name, Anand Nado, blissful soundless sound.That is the quality of meditation. There is no sound, it is soundlessness, yet there is great melody – unheard, unhearable, but the melody is there. There is no specific color there, but it is very colorful. That state is a paradox. You are and you are not, and both are true. You are in fana and yet you are in baqa. You are utterly absent, fana, and you are utterly present, baqa. You are both together simultaneously.Nado has that quality. Seeing him, looking into his eyes, I could see how he was able to paint me. From far away in America, without ever seeing me, he could catch the spirit. He must have fallen in a deep participation from that faraway land – a distance of thousands of miles, but he could commune with me.Knowledge is about and about; it is not a communion. Wisdom is communion. That’s why I say again and again that the artist is far closer to the mystic than the scientist, than the technician, than the professor; the artist is far closer. And in some moments the artist is almost a mystic – although they are only moments; they come and disappear, and he falls back to the mundane.The mystic lives on the heights, he has made his house there. The artist sometimes reaches to those heights; in some very precious moments he rises and soars. But he is not capable of living on those heights; he falls back. I hope Nado has the capacity of reaching those peaks and will now become a permanent resident there.That’s what sannyas is all about. There is no need to come back to the mundane, one can remain in the sacred twenty-four hours. That is wisdom. And that state is self-luminous. Whenever you are able to commune, if you can commune with bamboos swaying and dancing in the wind and in the rain, that experience of communion has a self-luminosity in it. It is self-evident, you need not have any other proof.If you can commune with a human being – your woman, your man, your friend, your child – that communion is self-evident. It is so powerful, it is so overwhelming, that you need not have any other proof. It is enough unto itself. That’s why the whole world goes on saying there is no God, but when Jesus comes to that communion he is ready to risk his life, but he is not ready to say that there is no God.The whole world says to Mansoor, “Stop declaring yourself a God!” The risk is great; Mansoor is made alert of it again and again. Even by his own master, Mansoor was told, “Stop asserting ‘Anal haq, I am God, I am truth’ because people are fanatical, they will kill you.”Mansoor said, “That is acceptable, they can kill me. But what is happening in me is so self-evident – even with the whole world against me it won’t make any difference at all. I will still declare ‘Anal haq, I am truth’ – because I am.” It is a self-luminous state. Wisdom is self-luminous. Knowledge is not self-luminous, knowledge needs support.Many times I receive letters from professors, academicians pundits, saying, “In your books, why don’t you give footnotes or an appendix, so one can know where these quotations have been taken from, on what authority?”What I am saying is self-luminous. It needs no footnotes, it needs no appendixes, it needs no support. I am enough unto myself. What I am saying is being said on my own authority. I am not trying to prove any hypothesis by supporting it with footnotes, by arguments, by collecting data in support of it.The Upanishads don’t have any footnotes, the Koran is unaware of footnotes. Buddha has not given his sources – from where, on what authority he is saying. Whenever truth arrives, it is self-luminous.It is untruth that needs proof – remember. It is doubt inside you that collects proof. Your statement is not a statement which can stand on its own; it needs props. Knowledge gathers much information, data, arguments.Wisdom is simply there – nude, innocent, available for all those who are ready to drink it. In those moments of self-luminous wisdom there is the distinct realization that objects as such are never really directly related to or known, but rather it is only the knowledge of objects, as it takes place in consciousness, that is ever experienced or known. Therefore, all objects are essentially only objectifications of, and reducible to, pure consciousness, the one and only reality.In other words, what is known is not essentially different from the process of knowing or awareness of the known, and knowing is not essentially different from the knower, so that one realizes that the world is essentially the knower himself or pure consciousness, and so all is one.When you are in that state of wisdom – self-luminous, silent, utterly relaxed, absolutely at home – this realization arises that consciousness is all, because whatsoever is known is known through consciousness. Whatsoever is known is nothing but a reflection in consciousness; whatsoever is known is nothing but a formation in consciousness. All forms arise in the ocean of consciousness and disappear, but the consciousness remains, abides, it is eternal.For example, when in the day you open your eyes after the deep sleep of the night, you change from one world to another. Just a moment ago you were completely unaware of this world – the house, the wife, the children, the people, the neighborhood. You were lost in another world, the world of dreams, and you had completely forgotten this world.Now you open your eyes. The world of dreams starts disappearing. Within seconds it is gone and you become fully alert of this world, the waking world. The whole day you will live in it. In the night again you will fall asleep and this world will disappear. The dream world will unfold itself. In the day you forget all about the dream world. In the dream world you forget all about the waking world.But one thing remains permanently there – the consciousness, the one who watches the waking world, the one who watches the dreaming world. Only one thing remains constant. That constant thing is called your supreme self, atma, I-am-ness. It is not the ego, because the ego itself is a formation that comes and goes.There are moments when you don’t feel the ego. If you are watching a beautiful sunset, you forget all about the ego; you are there as a pure witness, with no idea of the ego. Listening to music you forget all about your ego; you don’t remember who you are, you become oblivious to it. But still the watcher is there.In deep love, particularly in the peak moments of orgasmic release, you forget all about your ego. You are just a throbbing energy, a great pulsating energy, with no ego at all. But the witness is there. Your mirror goes on reflecting whatsoever is happening.Wisdom means to know this mirror that reflects all. It reflects the good, it reflects the bad; it reflects the ugly, it reflects the beautiful. But once you have understood that all those are reflections and you remain the same behind all the reflections, then what is the difference between the ugly and the beautiful, the good and the bad? They are both reflections in you; they are both formations in you; they are both waves in you. One wave you call ugly, another wave you call beautiful, but both waves are your waves. It is just consciousness dancing. This realization liberates. It liberates from duality and makes you capable of becoming one with the nondual.Now the sutras:For the wise manevil and goodare both exceedingly good.No evil ever comes from God;whenever you think to seeevil proceeding from him,you were better to look on itas good.For the wise man, evil and good are both exceedingly good. For the wise man, one who knows that all is one, how can there be a distinction between good and bad, between the saint and the sinner? There is no possibility of distinction.The moment you make a distinction you have already become a chooser, you have fallen back into the world of choice. You are no longer a choiceless awareness – and that’s what wisdom is all about.…whenever you think to see evil proceeding from him… The whole consists only of God, how can there be anything evil? But if sometimes you think that evil is happening: …you were better to look on it as good. Because you must be wrong somewhere. It must be your interpretation.For example, somebody is dying. Now death looks evil. Death is not evil, and if it looks like evil it is your misunderstanding, just your misunderstanding. You don’t know what death is, hence it looks evil.Death is nothing but a change of garments. If somebody is throwing away his old garments because he has got new ones, will you call it evil? You know that he is getting new garments and that’s why he is throwing away the old ones. You will really congratulate him. You will not start feeling sorry for him. You will feel happy that the poor man at last has got new garments – the old were getting really rotten.Exactly so is the case with death. The body is a composite phenomenon: one day it is born, one day it is young, one day it becomes old, and one day it has to die. It is just a preparation. Death is a preparation for a new birth. Those who know it will not say that death is evil. It is good, exceedingly good – but all depends on your interpretation.It was a typical Holy Roller revival service, and the minister had just appealed to the pent-up audience to “hit the sawdust trail.”One buxom old dame who had been quivering convulsively all evening suddenly sprang to her feet and yelled, “Last night I was in the arms of the Devil, but tonight I am in the arms of the Lord!”A voice from the rear of the tabernacle called out, “Have you got a date for tomorrow night, sister?”People have their own attitudes, choices, understandings, interpretations, inferences. They listen through that thick layer of many, many thoughts. They see things through many, many colored glasses, and then things look colored. And those colors are just projected by their glasses.An Irishman at work on a building missed his footing on a scaffold, and fell from the ninth floor. He struck a telephone wire on the way down, whirled around, struck a clothes line, and landed in a pile of hay put there to feed the horses.The doctor who arrived decided that, by a miracle, no bones were broken. As the Irishman came to, the doctor was holding a glass of water to his lips to aid in reviving the patient.“What the devil happened? Did the building fall?”“No, but you did, my man. You had a very narrow escape from death.”“What’s that you’re giving me to drink?”“Water to revive you,” answered the doctor.“Giving me water, after falling nine stories! Faith, and how far would I have to fall to get a drink of whiskey?”Just look inside yourself. You have expectations, you have prejudices, you have fixed, a priori ideas, and you are always looking through them.The wise man drops all his thoughts, drops all his a priori conclusions. The wise man is one who lives without any conclusion. And once you can see reality without any conclusions, you will be surprised how much you have been missing. It is tremendously beautiful, it is absolutely good. It is satyam, it is truth; it is shivam, it is good; it is sundaram, it is beautiful – satyam, shivam, sundaram.But we go on seeing that which is not the case.I’m afraid that on the way of faith,you are like a squinter seeing double,or a fool quarreling with the shape of a camel.If he gives you poison, deem it honey;and if he shows you anger, deem it mercy.Sanai says, “Don’t be like a squinter who goes on seeing double, and don’t be like a fool who quarrels about the shape of a camel.” There are people who think that the camel could have been made in a better way, more shapely. The camel is perfect as it is, the world is perfect as it is. Don’t get into unnecessary arguments.There are people who go on thinking that, if they had made the world, it would have been a better world. If they had made the world, they would have done this and they would have done that. There would have been no disease, there would have been no death, there would have been no ugliness, there would have been no stupidity. And it looks so logical: “Yes, if there is a world where no disease exists, how beautiful won’t it be.”But do you know? – if there is no disease, there will be no health either. Do you know? – if there is no ugliness, there will be no beauty either. Do you know? – if there are no thorns, there will be no flowers either. Do you know? – if there is no death, there will be no life either. You cannot have a life without death. And if you can have a life without death it will be utterly boring. There would be no way to get rid of it.The story is told of Alexander the Great when he came to the East… He had heard that in the desert there was a certain cave he was going to pass, where there was a small pond of nectar in the cave. If you drank that nectar you will become immortal.The story is beautiful. Alexander reached the cave. He entered. He was so tremendously happy. Just think of his happiness if you had been in his place. The nectar was there; just a moment more and he would be immortal. He cupped his hands, and just as he was going to drink, a crow that was sitting on the rock said, “Wait just a minute!”Alexander was surprised – a crow speaking? He asked, “What do you want to say?”The crow said, “Just one thing – that’s why I am sitting here. I have drunk from this pool. Now I am here for millions of years. I want to die. The only idea that persists in me twenty-four hours a day is that of death. I want to get rid of this rotten body, but I cannot. I have tried, but nothing succeeds. I have taken poison but it does not work. I have fallen from the mountains, it does not do. I have entered fire, it won’t burn. Now there is no way to die, and I am tired.“Just think, for millions of years I have to go on doing the same repetitive nonsense every day. And there is no hope even in the future. I will never be able to die, I cannot commit suicide, and I am tired of life! So now this is my mission. I sit here to prevent other people.”And it is said Alexander thought for a moment, dropped the idea of drinking the nectar, and rushed out of the cave – afraid that he may be tempted to drink it.Without death, life would be an impossibly unbearable burden. Death relieves. And it is because of disease that you have the feeling of health. It is because of the dark night that the morning looks so beautiful.Existence is dual and existence is imperfect. But it is because of imperfection that there is growth. Just think, if everybody was perfect then there would be no growth. Then the world would be a graveyard; nothing would ever grow.There are some modern paintings which are very horrible. They paint life as if life is something made of cement and concrete, as if all has stopped, nothing is growing. Just think of the nightmare if all stops, no tree grows, no child grows. If time stops and there is no growth ever and everybody is stuck, that will be the state of a perfect world. It will be very, very stale and dull, and it will be unlivable.Life is imperfect; hence it has possibilities for growing. If you watch deeply, if you observe deeply, you will drop that foolish idea of improving upon it. It is good as it is.This is the testimony of all the wise people of the world, “The world is perfect in its imperfection, you cannot improve upon it.” But our minds go on thinking that we are cleverer. Our minds are cunning and we think we can use that cunningness to improve upon the very quality of life.Our cunning minds succeed in the world, in the marketplace; they succeed in the universities, in the scientist’s lab. But they cannot succeed in the world of meditation.Muldoon was a man who lived by his wits, and his most famous talent was getting free drinks in strange pubs.One night he went into a pub on the other side of town. The barman said, “What will you have?”“A small whiskey,” said Muldoon.He got the whiskey, drank it but refused to pay for it. The barman called his boss but Muldoon said he had not asked for a drink. The barman had asked him what he was having. The boss, realizing he was dealing with a smart aleck and not wishing to have any trouble, told the barman to let Muldoon get away with it but to see that it didn’t happen again.Some months later, Muldoon again visited the pub.“You’re the fellow who got a drink here one night,” said the barman, “and wouldn’t pay for it.”“Oh no, it wasn’t me.”“Then,” said the barman, “you must have a double.”“Thanks very much. I will,” said Muldoon.Your cleverness may do in your world that you have created, but your cleverness will not do in the world that God has created. Your knowledge will be helpful to you in the man-made world, but in God and his world only wisdom can penetrate.Knowledge is clever, wisdom is innocent. I’m afraid that on the way of faith, you are like a squinter seeing double, or a fool quarreling with the shape of a camel. If he gives you poison, deem it honey; and if he shows you anger, deem it mercy.Those who are following the path of faith, of trust, of love, will know that if God gives poison then it must be honey, it can’t be otherwise. We may not understand it right now because our understanding has limits. We may not be able to see the point of it right now because our vision is very small, our perspective very narrow. And existence is vast, and everything is linked with everything else.Our situation is like those five blind men who went to see the elephant, and each touched a part of the elephant and each thought that he knew the whole of it, and they all started quarreling. That’s how philosophers go on quarreling with each other. Nobody has seen the elephant, and each seems to be very, very certain about his standpoint. And in a way he has seen a part, he has at least felt a part. Somebody has touched the legs and feels that an elephant is like a pillar. And he is not absolutely wrong – true. He is partially right, but whenever any partial truth starts claiming to be the whole, then there is danger – and then it is more dangerous than a lie.But that’s what philosophical systems go on doing. Knowledgeable people are blind people; they have not seen the elephant. They have only specialized in a certain way. All those five blind people were specialists, experts. One had touched the leg, another had touched the ear, still another had touched the trunk. They were all specialists, only with a part…And this is the situation today. The chemist only knows about chemistry, and the physicist only knows about physics, and the psychologist knows only about the mind, and so on and so forth; there seems to be no meeting ground. And there is a great quarrel among all these blind experts. The physicist does not know anything about chemistry, and the chemist knows nothing about poetry, and the poet knows nothing about music, and the musician knows nothing about mathematics, and they are all quarreling. The quarrel is coming to bigger and bigger proportions. Each branch of knowledge is becoming so specialized, so narrow, that it seems almost impossible for any person to have contact with other specializations.It is very difficult to find a man who is a poet and a mathematician and a physicist and a philosopher and a mystic; it is very difficult. And we need such people. Without such people, man will fall apart. Without such people there will be no possibility of a synthesis. Who will these people be? Is it possible for a man, is it feasible for a man, to know all that physics knows and chemistry and biology and geology and so on and so forth? It is humanly impossible. Nobody can know all the branches of knowledge that are available today.Oxford University teaches three hundred and fifty subjects, and each subject has a tremendous amount of knowledge that has accumulated down the ages. They say the specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less. And the greatest specialist is one who knows nothing or who knows all about nothing.This is a very strange situation humanity is facing for the first time. Then who will become the bridge? Only the wise man can become the bridge. The wise man is not one who will know all these branches. The wise man will be one who goes deep into his own being and knows the consciousness out of which all these branches have arisen. The wise man will get to the roots, will understand the roots. And by understanding the roots, all the branches and all the foliage and all the fruits and all the flowers are understood.The lover has died and left bothbelief and unbelief.Burning in love of the flame,the moth does not distinguishbetween the light of the mosqueand the light of the monastery.This is a Sufi saying, “Wisdom arises when you die, when the ego disappears.”“The lover has died and left both belief and unbelief. Burning in love of the flame, the moth does not distinguish between the light of the mosque and the light of the monastery.”The moth will not be concerned whether the flame that has called it forth is burning in the mosque or in the temple. The moth recognizes only the flame; wherever it is, that is irrelevant.And so is the case with a lover, with a Sufi, with a disciple. He is not worried where the master is available. The flame is available – in the temple, in the mosque, in the church. He is not worried about that. Wherever he sees the flame he is ready to die in the flame, disappear into the flame, and in that very disappearance wisdom arises.The death of the ego is the resurrection of wisdom in you. You are again a child, innocent, wondering, full of awe. And then the whole of existence is a mystery. Then it is fantastic. Then its beauty is unbelievable, then its joy is unbearable, then its ecstasy is overwhelming.Be contented with your lot;but if you have any complaints,go and take them to the Cadi,and obtain satisfaction from him.– That’s how the fool’s mind works!If you dissolve your ego into your supreme self, then there will be great contentment. You will be contented with things as they are. Then there will be no desire to go anywhere else, to be somebody else. Then you will be utterly grateful, whatsoever you are. You will bow down immediately to God in great contentment, in great gratitude.Be contented with your lot; but if you have any complaints… And the wise man has no complaints, he knows nothing but contentment. …if you still have any complaints, then go to the priest, the Cadi… Then go to the priest …and obtain satisfaction from him because that is his function.Just see the difference between two words, contentment and satisfaction. Contentment arises out of wisdom, it is a fragrance of wisdom, and satisfaction is just imposed through knowledge. If you go to the priest he will satisfy you. If you go to the priest and say, “I am getting old and I am becoming afraid of death,” he will say, “Don’t be worried. Only the body dies, the soul is immortal.” He will simply give you knowledge. He himself has not attained, otherwise he wouldn’t have been a priest.The function of the priest is to console you. The function of the priest is to somehow keep you adjusted to the world. That has been the function of the priest up to now.Now, particularly in the West, the function is being transferred to the psychotherapist. The priest has functioned as the psychotherapist is functioning today. The priest is the ancientmost psychotherapist, and the psychotherapist is the modern priest. Their function is to keep people satisfied, to help people remain adjusted to the society in which they are living. This satisfaction is not contentment, this is just patchwork. Sooner or later, again the doubt will arise. The priest says the soul is immortal, but who knows? He may be wrong, he may be lying, he may be deceived. Because you have also seen the priest in different situations…It happened…For a few days I lived in Raipur. A professor’s wife died, so I just went to see him. There were many people and they were consoling him, saying, “Don’t be worried.” A man, a knowledgeable man, a brahmin scholar, was saying, “The soul is immortal, only the body dies.”Few days afterward, just a coincidence, that scholar’s wife died. I went there, just to see what the scholar was doing now. He was crying. I said, “This is absurd. You crying? I have seen you consoling a professor whose wife had died, and you were telling him the soul is immortal. What happened to your knowledge?”He said, “Forget all about it. Who knows? – I was just consoling the man. And please don’t raise such uncomfortable questions at this moment. My wife is dead, and you are bringing in some philosophical argument.”Your priest may say to you that the soul is immortal, but how long will you be able to trust it? One day you will see the priest behaving in just the opposite way. The priest says one thing, behaves in another way. It is not possible to attain contentment through the priest. But the priest’s function is that he keeps you satisfied.Satisfaction is not contentment, satisfaction is again a false coin. Just as knowledge is a false coin compared to wisdom, satisfaction is a false coin compared to contentment. Contentment arises in your own understanding, satisfaction is given by others.Always beware of the borrowed; the borrowed is always false. But that is the fool’s mind, how it works. The fool’s mind is more interested in consolation than in wisdom.I had an old friend whose son died. He was seventy when the son died. The son was young, not more than forty. It was a great shock to the old man. I went to see him and told him, “Stop crying and weeping, it is pointless. Now you know that even a young man, perfectly healthy, can die. And you are old, you are seventy, and you are no longer healthy either. So take a hint, don’t waste your time in crying and weeping and suffering. It is an indication that your death is coming.”He said, “What?” He forgot all about his son. He was angry at me because these are the moments when people are searching for consolation. I said, “Yes, it is an indication that your death is coming. Now prepare for your death. Existence has simply made you aware. This is an alarm.”He became very angry with me. Who wants to hear about one’s own death? He wanted me to say something nice about the son. And he said, “Can’t you say anything nice?”I said, “Nice things won’t help; they will only console you, they will satisfy you, and many other people are doing it already. Let me do what is really necessary. What is really necessary is that you shouldn’t waste your time in crying and weeping and getting consoled and enjoying sympathy. The time has come to be shocked. Only such a shock can destroy your shock absorbers. Look at the corpse of your son. Forty years old, perfectly young, healthy and he could die within a moment. He wasn’t ill. In the night suddenly he died; by the morning he was found dead in his bed. He had gone to bed perfectly healthy. Now think about you!”He became so angry that he stopped coming to me. And within a year he died. But he didn’t prepare. If he had been a little more intelligent, he would have prepared. He would have met his death in a totally different way; he would have met his death meditatively.But the fool’s mind works in a certain way. He is only worried about consolations and satisfactions.The real thing is contentment. And contentment is possible only when you have known your reality – when you have penetrated your innermost core of being and you have seen there that there is no death, and you have seen there that there is no disease, and you have seen that there it is eternal, it is beyond time. Then all fear, all fear of death, all anguish, all anxiety disappears and great contentment arises. That contentment is prayer.Whatever befalls you,misfortune or fortune,is unalloyed blessing;the attendant evila fleeting shadow.”Good” and “evil” have no meaningin the world of the Word:they are mere names, coinedin the world of “me” and “you.”Whatever befalls you… If contentment has arisen in you, just a little taste of contentment, a little light of wisdom, just a little part of your being has become luminous, then whatever befalls you, misfortune or fortune, is unalloyed blessing. Then all is blessing because all can only be blessing, because all comes from God. This whole existence is divine. How can evil happen?But if you see the attendant evil, then know well it is a fleeting shadow, just as when you walk in the sun a shadow is created, but the shadow is nonexistential. Just as when you are in great ecstasy a shadow is created, that shadow is nonexistential. Know well that the nonexistential need not be worried about, it is just a shadow.Evil is a shadow of good, and hate is a shadow of love, and anger is a shadow of compassion, and ugliness is a shadow of beauty, and sadness is a shadow of joy. Once you have seen it on your own, not because I say so but when you have seen it on your own, then the whole of life is nothing but a constant showering of blessings.Good and evil have no meaning… Then there is no question of good and evil. All is good, supremely good. …in the world of the Word – Logos, God, Tao, good and bad are – mere names, coined in the world of “me” and “you.” There is no me and no you. This is adab; Sufis call it adab, being in the presence of the master, seeing and feeling that there is no me and no you.Feel it right now. I am not here simply to talk to you on great things, I am here to give you a taste of those great things. Even if for a single moment you are not there as you, and you don’t think of me as separate from you, just for a single moment we are bridged. In that very moment you will see great blessings descending. That is the grace of being with a master.And it is easier to drop your “me” and “you” with a master than anywhere else. Why? Why can’t you drop it anywhere else? – because anywhere else two persons will have to drop it and it will become complicated. And two persons will have to drop it simultaneously, only then can there be a fleeting moment of joy. With the master it is possible because on one side, the master’s side, there is no “I,” no “you,” half the work is already done. Now it is only on your side. So whenever you can drop your “you,” your “I,” immediately you are in contact, immediately you are bridged.The master is an absence. Whenever you become an absence, two zeros dissolve into each other. Two zeros cannot remain separate. Two zeros are not two zeros; two zeros become one zero.Just a few days ago, I said that from my side there is no relationship, the relationship between a master and a disciple is one-way traffic. It is from the disciple’s side. Chetna wrote me a beautiful letter saying, “You told it very nicely, it was a sugar-coated pill but it has stuck in my throat.” Chetna, drink a little more of me, so that it can go down the throat. Drink a little more of me, drink a little more of this absence, drink a little more of one who is not. I can understand, it hurts. It is a bitter pill, although sugar-coated. It hurts to feel that the relationship is only from your side and not from the master’s side. You would like that the master also needs you. You would like me to tell you, “I need you, I love you very much.”I can understand your need, but that will not be true. I can only say, “I don’t need you, I love you.”Need exists only with the ego. I cannot relate with you because I am not. You can relate with me because you are still there. Because you are there you can go on relating with me, but that relationship will remain only so-so, lukewarm. If you also disappear the way I have disappeared, then there will be a meeting – no relationship, but a merging.Relationship cannot satisfy. You have known so many relationships. What has happened through them? You have loved, you have been friendly, you have loved your mother and father, your brother and sister, you have loved your woman, your husband, your wife. You have loved so many times, you have created relationships so many times. And you know, each relationship leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It does not make you contented. It may satisfy for a moment, but again there is dissatisfaction. It may console, but again you are left in the coldness of loneliness.Relationship is not the true thing. The true thing is communion, the true thing is merger. When you relate you are separate, and in separation there is bound to remain the ugly, the mischievous, the agony-creating ego. It disappears only in the merger.So, Chetna, drink a little more of my absence, drink a little more of my love which does not need you, and then the pill will go down the throat and you will be able to digest it. And one day will arise the great day, when you will also love me and will not need me.When two persons love and both have no need for each other, love takes wings. It is no longer ordinary, it is no longer of this world, it belongs to the beyond. It is transcendental.Your life is just a morsel in his mouth;his feast is both a wedding and a wake.Why should darkness grieve the heart?– for night is pregnant with new day.We are all in God’s mouth – a very tremendously pregnant statement. Your life is just a morsel in his mouth… Be absorbed by him. Don’t resist, don’t fight, dissolve yourself in him. Your life is just a morsel in his mouth… Be eaten up by him. Don’t fight, don’t escape, because it is only if you absorb yourself in him you will come to know what true life is.…his feast is both a wedding and a wake. This is something beautiful – meditate over it: …both a wedding and a wake… A wake means when somebody dies and you have to look at the corpse. A wedding and a wake: both together?Yes, it is together, because your death is your resurrection. On one hand you die – it is a wake. On the other hand you become married to him forever and forever – it is a wedding. It is a cross, a crucifixion, and a resurrection follows. And only those who are ready to die in God are born anew. Then they have cosmic souls, then they have eternal beings.Why should darkness grieve the heart? Don’t be worried about death and darkness: …for night is pregnant with new day. Soon, as the night darkens and becomes more and more densely dark, the morning comes closer and closer. Die, learn to die, and you will be able to attain to life abundant.You say you’ve unrolled the carpet of time,step then beyond life itself and reason,till you arrive at God’s command.How long have you lived in time? – millions of lives. If you trust the East, then eighty-four million lives. It is a long journey. You have unrolled the carpet of time long enough. Now be finished, now be a little more intelligent. Have you not learned any lessons? You have lived so long and you have done all that you can desire to do, millions of times, and still you are not fed up, not bored?You say you’ve unrolled the carpet of time, step then beyond life itself and reason… Now the moment has come. Step beyond life, die into God. And of course, if you want to die into God you will have to step beyond reason because reason will say, “What are you going to do? Death? Who knows? Resurrection may follow, may not follow. Who knows? The seed may die, and there may come no sprout and no tree in its place. How can it be guaranteed?” Reason will create a thousand and one doubts.But you have been reasoning and reasoning for millions of lives and reason has not given you a single conclusion, it has not made you a little bit more intelligent. It keeps you in the old rut.If you have seen that it keeps you in the old rut, be courageous – trust. Courage means trust, trust means courage. Take the risk, go beyond reason and go beyond life: …till you arrive at God’s command.And if you can go beyond reason and beyond your so-called life, suddenly you are taken up, possessed by God. Then he starts living through you. Then you become a flute, a hollow bamboo; then he sings the song.You cannot see anything, being blind by night,and by day one-eyed with your foolish wisdom!At night you cannot see because it is dark. In ignorance you cannot see because you are ignorant, and in knowledge you cannot see because your knowledge covers your eyes. The ignorant person is suffering because he is ignorant, and the knowledgeable person is suffering because he is knowledgeable.Drop both ignorance and knowledge. Simply be utterly clean of both knowledge and ignorance – just be an opening. And in that opening comes the great guest, in that opening you become the host. God is ready to penetrate you, but either your ignorance prevents him or your knowledge prevents him. Remember, innocence is the absence of both ignorance and knowledge. The innocent man is not aware that he knows, is not aware that he does not know. He is simply a pure mirror, reflecting whatsoever the case is.Become a pure mirror – that’s what meditation is all about.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 1 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 1 10 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-1-10/

The first question:Osho,The masses were against Jesus, they were against Buddha, they are against you. Why?The masses live in a kind of nonindividual existence. They live like sheep. So whenever a man like Jesus or Buddha is there, asserting his individuality, his rebellion, his freedom, naturally he is disliked. The masses become afraid. Their foundations are shaken. If Jesus is right, then the whole life pattern of the masses will have to be changed. It is too much work, and people have invested too much in their slavery.The presence of Jesus makes people feel bankrupt. The moment you come across a buddha, you are reduced to a very ugly kind of inhuman being. You lose all dignity, you feel humiliated. If you are intelligent, you will rise to the occasion. You will see the point that up to now you have lived in ignorance, in sleep, and you will feel grateful to the buddha that his presence has become a ray of light into your dark night of the soul. But that much intelligence is very rare.People are stupid, stubborn; they immediately react. Rather than rising higher, taking the challenge of the peak that Buddha is, they destroy him, they destroy Jesus, so that they can again fall asleep and dream their so-called sweet dreams.That’s why they are against me. I am a kind of disturbance. My presence cannot be ignored. Either you have to be with me or you have to be against me. Whenever you cannot ignore the presence of a certain person and you have to choose, great turmoil arises in your being – because no choice is easy. Choice means change.You have lived for fifty years in a certain way. Those habits have become settled. Now, suddenly I am here calling you forth out of the grave that you have believed was real life. I am here condemning all that you have lived for – all your values, all your so-called morality, all your knowledge, all your religion. Only very courageous people, very few chosen ones, will be able to rise to the occasion and will risk all that they have for something which is not visible, for something which you can only trust.Now, this is difficult for the ordinary masses; they decide for the known. Jesus is something of the unknown, Buddha is something from the beyond. Now the question is: to choose the known, the familiar, the safe, the comfortable, the convenient, or to choose this adventure and to go with Buddha into something uncharted, unmapped, into something one can never be certain whether it is or it is not.Buddha himself may be deceived or may be a deceiver. There is no way, this way or that, to be totally certain about it. In deep hesitation, in deep confusion, in deep trembling, one has to go with Buddha. Only those who are still young, whose minds have yet not gathered too much dust, who are still able of wondering, feeling the awe of life, who are still not absolutely settled, closed, finished, who are not yet dead – only those few people will be able to go with me, with Jesus, with Buddha. Others are bound to be against them.Then there are many other reasons too. People like to belong to groups. It gives a kind of consolation, satisfaction, “I am on the right track.” If you are a Christian, then millions of Christians are with you; you belong to them, you are not alone.If you are with me, you are almost alone. You will be uprooted from the crowd to which you had belonged up to now. For few moments you will be nowhere, no one. You will become anonymous. You will not be a Christian or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan – and that has become your identity.You have been a Christian or a Hindu or a Jew, and that is your identity, that’s what you know about yourself. If somebody asks, “Who are you?” you can say, “I am a Catholic.” It gives you a certain false feeling, as if you know yourself. People go on living in the world of “as if,” but when you live in the world of “as if” long enough it starts looking real; you start believing it.When the child is born he is not Christian or Jew or Hindu, and he is perfectly happy without being. But soon he will become a Hindu or a Mohammedan or somebody else. He will have to be taught. He will be given an identity, a label and that label means much to you because behind the label is emptiness.Once the label is taken away you will fall into an abysmal emptiness. Unless you are really courageous, unless you have real guts to go into that emptiness, you would like to cling to the label.Some experiments by Henry Tajfel at Bristol University have produced unexpected results. Parties of schoolboys aged fourteen to fifteen were subjected to a quick and bogus psychological test. Then each boy was told that he was either a “Julius person” or an “Augustus person.” No explanation was given of the characteristics of the Julius or Augustus people, nor did the boys know whom the other members of their group were.Nevertheless, they promptly identified with their fictitious group, proud to be a Julius person or an Augustus person to such an extent that they were willing to make financial sacrifices to benefit their anonymous group brothers, and to cause discomfort in the other camp.Tajfel says that you can alter a person’s behavior predictably, just by telling him he belongs to a group – even a group of which he has never heard before. Almost automatically the participant in these experiments favors anonymous members of his own group and, given the opportunity, he is likely to go out of his way to put members of another group at a disadvantage. People will stick up for a group to which they happen to be assigned, without any indoctrination about who else is in the group or what its qualities are supposed to be.Only by grasping the full import of the positive and quick propensity of human beings to identify with any group they find themselves in, can one make a firm base from which to search out the origins of hostility.These experiments of Henry Tajfel are of tremendous import. People love to belong. And when a man like Jesus comes, he uproots you from your group. Jesus comes and he takes you out of the community of Jews. He starts something new, which has no past, no history, no respectability. He simply starts things from ABC.Now, those few people who followed Jesus must have been of some integrity, otherwise they wouldn’t have followed him. Because following Jesus meant that they would no longer be part of the Jewish community in which they were born and indoctrinated, and to which they had already belonged. And they had always been proud that they were Jews, the chosen people of God. They had always believed they are special people.Now here comes the son of a carpenter, Jesus, with nothing in his past to support him, a vagabond, and he starts gathering a group of people. This group is so new, it will take time for people to belong to it; it will happen only when Jesus is gone. But when Jesus is gone it is pointless.After Jesus died, nearabout two hundred, three hundred years afterward, Christianity itself started becoming a special group. Then people were happy to belong to it. Now millions are happy to belong to Christianity.People like to belong. Now, if you come to me you will be losing your belonging. You will be becoming alone, and you will be going with somebody who has no past, no traditional support. It will be an absolutely new enterprise, risky. It is a gamble. And people even like to belong to fictitious groups – what to say about religions?Arthur Koestler says:“I found these experiments of Henry Tajfel extremely revealing, not only on theoretical grounds but also for personal reasons, related to a childhood episode which has never ceased to puzzle and amuse me.“On my first day at school, aged five, in Budapest, Hungary, I was asked by my future classmates the crucial question, ‘Are you an MTK or an FTC?’ These were the initials of two leading soccer teams, perpetual rivals for the league championship, as every schoolboy knew – except little me, who had never been to a football match. However, to confess such abysmal ignorance was unthinkable, so I replied with haughty assurance, ‘MTK, of course!’“And thus the die was cast. For the rest of my childhood in Hungary, and even when my family moved to Vienna, I remained an ardent and loyal supporter of MTK, and my heart still goes out to them, all the way across the Iron Curtain. Moreover, their glamorous blue and white striped shirts never lost their magic, whereas the vulgar green and white stripes of their unworthy rivals still fill me with revulsion.“I am even inclined to believe that this early conversion played a part in making blue my favorite color. After all, the sky is blue, a primary color, whereas green is merely the product of its adulteration with yellow. I may laugh at myself, but the emotive attachment, the magic bond, is still there, and to shift my loyalty from the blue-white MTK to the green-white FTC would be downright blasphemy.“Truly, we pick up our allegiances like infectious germs. Even worse, we walk through life unaware of this pathological disposition, which lures mankind from one historic disaster into the next.”You come to me – you have already belonged to a group your whole life. You have been a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Jew. And these groups are not ordinary groups like football teams – they indoctrinate, from the very beginning they start conditioning you. Great conditioning exists in you.So whenever a man like Jesus or Buddha is there, your conditioning goes against him. He wants to create an unconditional mind, that’s the problem. He wants you to get rid of all your pathological attachments, that’s the problem. You are too attached to your disease, to your pathology, and anybody who wants to see you healthy and whole will look like the enemy. See the point.Another new sannyasin, Dwabha, has just written to me saying, “I am feeling very good here, but when I go out there are Christians who hand out pamphlets to me about Christianity, about Jesus, and they tell me that you are an anti-Christ. So what should I do?” It is natural. Christians are becoming afraid because so many Christians are coming to me. The fear is natural, their vested interest is there. Hindus are afraid, Jainas are afraid; their fear is understandable. To take anybody from any group to which he has belonged is to offend the group because their number is reduced. And number means power. In this world, the more people belong to your group, the more powerful you are. In the name of religion, much power politics goes on.So they will tell you that I am anti-Christ. They were telling Jesus’ followers that Jesus was anti-Moses; they were telling Buddha’s followers that Buddha was anti-Veda. That has been an old, old story; it is nothing new.Truth cannot be accepted by the masses because the masses live in lies. And they have lived in their lies so long that those lies are no longer lies to them, they really believe in it. And whenever you say something different from their beliefs you create confusion in them, and nobody wants to be confused.You create an inner trembling, a doubt in them, and nobody wants to be in doubt. The doubt is there. If they had known the truth, there would have been no fear. They have not known the truth, they have only believed. The doubt is there, deep down in their souls, so whenever you say something that goes against them their doubt starts rising, surfacing. And they are afraid to be in doubt. Everybody wants certainty. Why? – because certainty gives security, certainty gives you confidence. Doubt makes you shaky.And I am going to create much doubt in you because in my vision, unless doubt destroys your false certainties, there is no possibility to attain to true certainty. True certainty is not out of belief. It comes out of experience, it comes out of your own realization.I am not anti-Jesus, I am certainly anti-Christianity. I am not anti-Buddha, I am certainly anti-Buddhist. I am not anti-Krishna but I am certainly anti-Hindu. Whatever I am saying and doing is the work of Jesus, the work of Krishna, and Buddha. Certainly not in the same language – how can it be in the same language? How can I speak Aramaic to you; how can I use the metaphors Jesus used? Those metaphors are out of date, they don’t belong to this century.I will have to be more scientific, I will have to be more logical. Even though I want you to go beyond logic, I will have to lead you to the extreme point of logic first; only from there you can take the jump into the illogical.I cannot talk with you the way Buddha talked; he was talking to a different audience. My words will be different, my approach will be different, my methodology will be different. But the moon that I am pointing to is the same. My finger is different, it’s bound to be so. If you compare my finger with Jesus’ finger, they are different – but the moon that we are pointing to is the same. Look at the moon and don’t be too much bothered by the fingers.The second question:Osho,I have been thinking of becoming a sannyasin for at least seven years. Why am I not able to take the jump?It seems you are not aware of death at all. If you are aware of death, you cannot postpone like that. And now, because you have been postponing for seven years, postponement must have become a habit. You have practiced it long. You have become too attached to postponing.Postponement gives a good feeling. First, it is not risky; you need not change. You are always going to change tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes. So meanwhile you can remain the same as you are. Tomorrow becomes a protection, “Tomorrow I will become a sannyasin. So today, whatsoever I am, I have to be. It is only the question of one day, tomorrow I will become a sannyasin and I will take the jump.” And when tomorrow comes, it always comes as today.Now, for seven years you have been practicing postponement. It must have become a kind of addiction. Remember, death can happen any moment. Those who are aware of death drop postponement because tomorrow is not certain. Only this moment is certain, the moment that is already in your hands. Even the next moment is not certain.So if you see something valuable in something, do it – and do it now! Remember it, now or never. If you don’t want to do it, who is telling you to do it? Forget all about it. But please don’t postpone. Either decide, “I am not going to take sannyas” – and that’s perfectly good. At least decisiveness will be there, your worry will be dropped. Decide, “I am not going to take sannyas” and be finished with it; or take the jump and be finished with it.A male dinosaur and a female dinosaur were having an affair. For ten million years they walked around, talking and looking into each other’s eyes. Then they would sometimes hold hands, and this continued for twenty million years more.For the next fifteen million years they would kiss and touch each other all over. Then finally the male said to the female, “Dear, we have been together for so many years, how do you feel about… You know, I think it is time we made love!”“I want to but I can’t” she answered. “Now I have got my period for the next seventy million years.”You are not a dinosaur, time is very short. Life is very small. Out of a seventy-year life span, almost thirty-five years are almost lost in sleep. And then eating, drinking, dressing, going to the office, coming to the house, then earning your bread, and friends and clubs and hotels and movies and the TV… Just count, and you will not find even one year left to live. You will not even find one year out of seventy years to meditate, to search, to be.It is already too much that you have done seven years thinking of sannyas. Either take it or forget all about it, but be decisive. To remain so indecisive for so long is dangerous because then indecisiveness becomes your nature.The third question:Osho,I finally realized that I am never going to get enlightened. But there is no way to die. What to do?This is a great realization. No one is going to get enlightened, because enlightenment is not something that has to happen. It has already happened, you are enlightened. You just have to look into yourself and find it. It is already the case.That’s the whole theme that I am preaching to you, day in and day out, year in and year out. Enlightenment is not something like an achievement that will happen someday. It has already happened – you are enlightened, there is nobody who is not enlightened.But man has the capacity to remember or to forget, and you have forgotten it. You have decided to forget about it. You are keeping it at your back. It is there; you can keep it at your back for millions of lives, but it is there, and it will remain there. And any moment you decide to turn one hundred eighty degrees, you will be surprised – it has always been there waiting, waiting for you to come home.You are not going to get enlightened because you are enlightened. I am here not to make you enlightened, but just to remind you. Just to remind you – that’s all the function of the master, to shake you into wakefulness.Godliness is your treasure. All that you need, all that you can ever need, is already given. It is already provided for. But you have not searched within yourself, you have not opened the treasures within yourself. And you go on looking all over the earth. You can go on looking and you will not find it, because it is not something to be found, it is something to be remembered. See the distinction, the difference – it is vast. It is a difference that makes a great difference.It is as if you have money in your pocket but you have forgotten, and then one day suddenly you remember, and it is there. One day suddenly, searching for something else, you find it.Enlightenment is not something of the future, it is your presentness. Become aware of it, now. This is it.The fourth question:Osho,Morarji Desai has said in an interview given to Sunday, “Osho puts emphasis on the socialization of woman.”He said, “Just as prostitutes are socialized, he wants all women to be socialized.” He also said, “Osho goes even further and says that there is no need of marriage. Osho also advocates free sex.”What do you say about it, Osho?Morarji Desai is a male chauvinist. Women are not property, so how can they be public or private? What is man, public or private? If men need not be public property or private property, then why should women be either public property or private property? The whole idea is based in male chauvinistic attitudes. Morarji Desai represents all that is rotten in the human past. These are the two attitudes that have been taken by men about women; both are wrong.Karl Marx and Engels have some insight about it. They said that the ownership of women arose simultaneously with the ownership of things. The husband-wife relationship came as a by-product of private property. Hence Marx and Engels were in favor of making women socialized. That is going from one stupidity to another; but the basic idea is the same, that the woman is property. She either belongs to a particular man for his whole life, then she is a wife, or she is possessed by a man for one single night, then she is a prostitute.What is the difference between a prostitute and a wife? One is a temporary arrangement, the other is a little more permanent. Marriage is a permanent kind of prostitution; deep down, it is not different. Hence marriage and prostitution have existed together.If you go into it, it is marriage that has created prostitution. And prostitution will never disappear from the world unless marriage disappears; it is the shadow of marriage. In fact prostitutes have been saving marriage. It is a safety measure so the man can go once in a while, just for a change, to another woman, a prostitute, and save his marriage and its permanency.That’s what has been done down the ages. The prostitute was there to save you and your marriage. So whenever your marriage is on the rocks you can always go to the prostitute. Whenever you are bored with your woman, tired of her, just to be refreshed you can go to the prostitute, and things will start flowing again with your own woman. The prostitute was a kind of holiday.People think prostitution is against marriage; they are utterly wrong. Prostitution is the other side of the same coin: on one side it is marriage, on the other side it is prostitution. That’s why marriage has existed for at least five thousand years but people have not been able to get rid of prostitution – they cannot. There is a logical relationship, they are interdependent. If prostitution is simply stopped, marriages will start falling apart. The prostitute is like glue, she helps you to remain not bored with your woman. But both are based on the idea of property.In China, for centuries, it was the rule that if a man killed his woman he wasn’t thought to be a murderer. He couldn’t be punished by the court because the woman was his property. It is your right to destroy your chair, or if you want to demolish your house it is nobody else’s business to interfere.For centuries the woman has been thought of as property. In India, even the words are there – the woman is known as nari sampatti, the female property. When a girl is married, the father is said to give the girl as a gift, kanyadan. The woman has been treated as a thing. I am against it.Who told Morarji Desai that I want women to be socialized? That must have been his inference, I have never said it. There is no need to socialize because that again will be treating women in an inhuman way.That was the idea of Engels and Marx – because they were reactionaries; they were reacting against private property. So just as factories had to be nationalized, socialized and state owned, in exactly the same way, everything private should be owned by the society. They had this proposal that the woman should be owned by the society. Everything that was owned by people has to be owned by the state or by the society.I am not a communist, I am an anti-communist. My whole approach is that the woman is not a thing, the woman is a human being, as much as Morarji Desai. Nobody needs to own anybody else. Neither the husband needs to own the woman, nor the woman needs to own the husband. The whole idea of ownership is ugly, violent, degrading. I have never said this.But there are a thousand and one rumors in this country about me: what I say, what I am doing here. This seems to be really strange. These people never come here to see what is happening here. They go on believing in the rumors.The first thing: the woman is different from the man, but not unequal. She has equal rights. The difference is there and the difference is beautiful and the difference should be maintained.Now there is a tendency in the West to destroy the difference. And whenever something starts happening in the mind, it immediately affects the body. The Western woman is losing much femininity. The idea – particularly because of women’s lib – the idea is destroy differences, only then can you be equal. That’s nonsense.You can be different and equal. The rose is different from the lotus, but they have equal right to be in the sun and to be in the wind and to be in the rain; they have an equal right to exist. They are different, and their difference is beautiful. It makes life rich, it gives variety.Men and women are different, and they should remain different because that is the whole reason for their attraction to each other. If they become too much alike they will lose that attraction. They should be diametrically opposite, they should be as far away from each other as possible, so that the mystery continues and the desire to explore each other continues.The Western woman is losing something. The Eastern woman is not yet a human being. She is thought to be property. People like Morarji Desai still go on thinking about women as property, private property. In the East the woman still remains a thing, a commodity to be sold purchased: either permanently, then it becomes marriage, or temporarily, then it is prostitution. The difference between prostitution and your so-called marriage is only of degrees – not of quality, only of quantity.In the West, because of women’s lib, the idea is arising that the woman has to be just like the man, only then will she be equal. That’s again another foolishness. Equality need not be similarity. And if the woman becomes similar to the man she will lose all her charm, all her grace, all her beauty.Even her body is adjusting and becoming more like a man’s. She is losing her curves, she is losing her softness and becoming a little hard. She is becoming aggressive, losing her receptivity, and she is pretending to be like a man. If the woman starts pretending to be like a man she will always remain a second-rate man. She can never become first rate, she will be a copy. How can a woman become a first-rate man? That is impossible. It is as impossible as a man trying to become a first-rate woman; he will just be a copy, an actor, a pretender. And all pretension is to be condemned.The woman has to remain a woman. The woman has to keep her distance. The woman has to grow those differences because those differences are of immense value. It is on those differences the attraction depends; it is on those differences that the whole poetry of life exists. Those differences are the magnetic force. Bring men and women too close, too alike, too similar, and you will have destroyed something of immense value – the natural attraction will be gone.I am neither for that, nor for the Eastern stupidity that the woman should be treated as a commodity. Why can’t men and women exist as friends, equal although utterly different? What is the need of there being either private property, a private ownership of women, or a social ownership? The very idea of ownership is wrong. Nobody can own anybody else.If understanding grows in the world, parents will not even own their children. They shouldn’t, because the idea of ownership is dehumanizing. Children come through you, but you don’t own them, they are not your property. Love them because you have given birth to them, but don’t try to make them imitators. Don’t use and exploit them for your own ambitions. Don’t claim that they belong to you. They belong only to existence and nobody else.You ask, “Morarji Desai said in an interview given to Sunday, ‘Osho puts emphasis on the socialization of women. Just as prostitutes are socialized, he wants women to be socialized.’”That is utterly false, I have never said anything like that. And one hopes that a responsible person like the prime minister of a country would have a little more sense, would go into facts and see what I have said and what I have not said.“He also said, ‘Osho goes even further and says that there is no need of marriage.’” That’s true; there is no need of marriage, friendship is enough. Marriage came into existence only because man was incapable of love and friendship. It was a poor substitute.If you love somebody, there is no need to make it a legal contract. And a legal contract cannot make it a certainty that you will always love the person. The legal contract has no power over love. Marriage is a legal contract. It is ownership, private ownership. It is a license to own the woman. Just as you have dog licenses, it is a license that you are the owner. This simply shows that there is no love. Law comes in only when there is no love; otherwise, love is enough unto itself.Love should be the primary phenomenon, and then you can be together. The togetherness should be a friendship and a responsibility. When two persons love each other they are responsible, they care for each other. No law is needed to create that caring and that responsibility; no law is capable of creating it, either. At the most, it can impose a certain formal structure on you which will destroy your love, your friendship.As the society becomes more and more alert, and more and more conscious, as it is becoming every day, marriage is going to disappear. Instead of marriage there will be friendship. Just as in the past husband and wife were beautiful words, in the future girlfriend and boyfriend will take a very respectable place.Meanwhile, because you have to live in a society you can go into marriage, but marriage should remain secondary. It should be only because you have loved each other; it should come out of your love, not vice versa. In the past it has been tried – first get married, and then love each other. That is impossible. Nobody can manage love; it is in nobody’s power to create love. It happens when it happens.You can put two persons together… And that’s what has been done, down the ages. Marry two persons; they have to be together. When two persons are together they start liking each other, just as brothers like their sisters and sisters like their brothers. It is a forced arrangement. And when two persons are together, a liking, a certain kind of liking arises, and they depend on each other, they use each other. But love is a totally different affair.If marriage comes first, there is almost no possibility of love ever happening. In fact, marriage was invented to prevent love because love is dangerous. It takes you to such high peaks of joy, ecstasy, romance, poetry that it is dangerous to the society to allow people to soar so high, to see something of the height and depth. If a person has known love, nothing will ever satisfy him. Then you cannot satisfy him just by giving him a big bank allowance, no. A big bank balance will not help. Now he knows something about real richness.If a man has loved and lived those ecstatic moments, you will not be able to attract him toward power politics. Who cares? You will not be able to force him into ugly inhuman jobs. He would like to remain a poor man, but his love flowing. Once you kill love – and marriage is an effort to kill it – once you kill love, then the energy of the person that is no longer moving into love is available for the society to exploit.You can make him a soldier and he will be a dangerous soldier. He will be ready to kill; any excuse, and he will be ready to kill or to be killed. He will be boiling with frustration, with anger. You can force him into any ambitious direction.He will become a politician, he will become like Morarji Desai: his whole life thinking of only one thing – how to become the prime minister of the country. Now at the age of eighty-three he has become the prime minister. And just the other day I was reading in the newspapers that he has asked people to pray for his long life. Long life – still? Will you ever leave this poor country or not? Long life for himself and his colleagues so they can serve the country. Won’t you give the chance of serving the country to a few other people? Now, how long does he want to torture us?These are the people who have not known love. Love frustrated becomes a great greed, love frustrated becomes great violence, love frustrated leads you into the worlds of ambition. Love frustrated is very destructive.But the society needs destructive people. It needs great armies: it needs armies of politicians, it needs armies of clerks, stationmasters, etcetera, etcetera. It needs people who are ready to do anything because they have not known anything higher in life. They have never touched any poetic moment in their life. They can go on counting money their whole life and thinking this is all there is.Love is dangerous. I would like that love becomes available to each and all. And if marriage happens at all, it should be a by-product of love and it should remain secondary. If love disappears one day, no hindrances should be created to dissolve the marriage. If two persons want to get married, both have to agree to it. But for divorce, even if one person wants to divorce, that should be enough reason. Two persons need not agree for divorce.Right now, no hindrances are created for marriage. Any two fools can go to the registry office and get married. But a thousand and one hindrances are created for divorce. This is a very insane approach.In my vision, all kinds of hindrances should be created when people are getting married. They should be told, “Wait for two years, live together for two years. And after two years, even if you still want to get married, come back.” People should be allowed to live together so that they can know what kind of people they are and whether they are suited or not, whether they mix or not, whether they can create a harmony in their life or not.But anybody can go to the marriage office and get married, and nobody creates any disturbance. This is absurd. And when you want to get separated, then the whole court and the law and the police and everybody is there to prevent you. The society is for marriage and against divorce.I am neither for marriage nor for divorce. In my vision there should be only a kind of friendship between people, a responsibility, a caring. And if that day is far away, then meanwhile marriage shouldn’t be allowed so easily. People should be given a chance to test each other, to live in all kinds of situations. Just out of a poetic vision, just out of a first sight love, marriage shouldn’t be allowed.Let things cool down, let things become ordinary. Let them see whether they can manage with ordinary life, with day-to-day problems, and only then allow them to get married. That too should be temporary. Maybe every two years they have to come back to renew it; if they don’t come, it is finished. The license should be renewed every two years, and whenever they want to separate, no problem should be created. This is my attitude. I am not against marriage but I am for love. And love has to be the decisive factor.“And he said, ‘Osho also advocates free sex.’ What do you say about it?” It is very difficult for Morarji Desai and people like him to understand what I am saying. What I am saying is really transcendence of sex. I am not teaching sex, I am teaching love. But in these people’s minds, love and sex make no difference. In their minds love means sex because they have not known love, they have only known sex.Love and sex are far apart. Sex is a biological phenomenon, love is a human phenomenon. And what is the difference? Biologically, nature is interested in you so that you can reproduce, so life continues. Sex is a reproductory system. So in nature, sex has no other meaning, no other significance than reproduction. It is only man’s glory, his dignity and freedom, that sex is, by and by, becoming free from biological hangovers.Sex is becoming play, fun, celebration. When sex becomes play, fun and celebration, it starts moving toward a new quality that is love. Love is not needed for reproduction. Love is an art like music, like poetry, like painting.The difference is such – animals eat, man also eats; as far as eating is concerned there is no difference. But watch closely, whenever animals eat, they move into a place where nobody can see them eating because they are always afraid that the other may start taking something from their food. Animals eat alone.It is only man who likes to eat with people, who invites people, who makes a celebration out of eating. That is new, that is something utterly new. It doesn’t exist in the animal world. Animals eat just to fulfill their bodily needs. Man brings some aesthetics to his eating habits. He will prepare the food, he will prepare it in beautiful shapes, and he will give beautiful colors to the food. And he will have manners. He will arrange the table, and the flavor, and the lights and the incense; and friends together, talking gossiping – music, and then he will eat. Now eating has taken a totally different turn. It has become an art.Such is the case with sex. In animals it is only a reproductive phenomenon.Morarji Desai’s guru, Mahatma Gandhi, used to say, “Make sexual contact only when you want to reproduce.” Now, that is animal, it is below human. He was thinking he was teaching something great, spiritual. That wasn’t spiritual at all. That is below human dignity. What he was teaching is utterly animalistic. He was saying that sex is allowed only when you want to reproduce a child, otherwise not. Then there is no possibility of love.Love is the aesthetics of sex. Love is an effort to free it from its biological past. You love a woman, not because you are basically interested to produce a child; you love a woman for her own sake. You love a woman for the sheer joy of being with her; you love a man for the sheer joy of sharing your energy with him.Sex may come into it, may not come into it. If love is there and the climate of love is there and sex comes into it, even sex is no longer ordinary sex. It is transformed by the love climate. But it is not necessarily so, that it should come. Two lovers can simply sit holding hands, looking at the full moon. There is no need of any sex to enter it necessarily. It is enough, it is immensely satisfying. Two lovers can read poems to each other, sing a song together, dance, hug, hold each other. Sex is not a necessity. If it happens, it is good. If it does not happen, there is no hankering for it to happen.Love is its own fulfillment. Love is going higher than sex. I teach love. And if you know love, you will slowly, slowly, start moving beyond sex.Mahatma Gandhi had no vision of love, and Morarji Desai has learned all that he knows from Mahatma Gandhi. He has no vision of love. I don’t think he has ever loved anybody; I don’t think he has known anything of love. All that he knows is ambition, greed, power politics.He must have known sex because he has reproduced children. But that sex must have been something ugly, animalistic, mechanical, just for the sake of reproduction. He has been so much against any human warmth and contact that he even advised Mahatma Gandhi, his guru…Mahatma Gandhi, in his old age, used to walk with two girls, one on each side, just for support. He would put his hands on those two girls’ shoulders and walk. He used to call them his walking sticks.You will be surprised that Morarji Desai brags about this very much. He says that he even advised Mahatma Gandhi, “This is not right, you shouldn’t touch women. And you shouldn’t walk with girls, your hands on their shoulders; it is not good.” Now, this man knows nothing of human warmth. This man is constantly obsessed with sex. He has known only very, very rudimentary animal sex in his life.And he goes on projecting his ideas on me. I am not teaching free sex, I am teaching love. Love certainly brings sex to a higher plane; it helps sex to move beyond biology toward spirituality.And then there is one step more. If you go on loving, nonpossessive love, without becoming each other’s property; if your love goes on growing in deep friendship, accepting the other as the other is, without making any demands how he should be, without becoming each other’s dominators; if your love goes on growing into friendship, prayer arises.In love, sometimes sex will be a part. In prayer, sex will disappear completely. Love is the bridge between sex and prayer. Don’t get stuck on the bridge, go beyond sex.But all going beyond is always going through. Hence I say don’t reject sex, otherwise you will never be able to know love. Transform sex, don’t reject it. Anything rejected remains hanging around you like a lodestone. Morarji Desai is just a male chauvinistic, traditionalist, obscurantist, fascist.The fifth question:Osho,Is it necessary to communicate in detail a problem I had, which I in my mind have already turned over to you as my loving master, for help and guidance?Can I now consider it your problem rather than mine?Subuddha, you absolutely can trust me. Forget all about your problem, I have taken it. It may raise its head again and again. You will have to constantly remember that you have given it to me, that you are not to think about it any longer, any more, that it has nothing to do with you.And if you can do this with this problem you will be able to find a key. Then you can do it with all your problems. Problems are never solved. They are always dissolved. They are not worth solving either; one has to go beyond them. And this is the way to go beyond them.This is one of essential parts of adab; surrender your problems to your master and forget about them. Then you are finished; then it is none of you business.And remember, it is not that it becomes my problem. I don’t know even what your problem is. And it is not that I will be troubled by your problem and I will worry about it and I will lose my sleep over it – nothing! I am just an excuse so that you can drop your problem. By dropping it, you go beyond it. In that very dropping, something happens in you. In that very dropping, trust happens, intelligence happens. In that very dropping, the energy that was getting hooked in the problem is released. You become more vital, you pulsate with new energy, and you can rise higher.Problems are never solved, but one can go beyond them. And when one has gone beyond them they are no longer material, they are irrelevant.I am just an excuse; I don’t do a thing. But you can do miracles through me. And Subuddha can do it, he has that quality. It is not in everybody’s capacity to do it, but I have looked in Subuddha’s eyes and I have felt it, that he knows how to surrender.I am not asking for your money to be surrendered to me. I am simply asking, “Surrender your problems to me, surrender all your diseases to me, surrender all your pathologies to me.” And in that very surrendering you will be unburdened, you will be free.The last question:Osho,You say unenlightened persons cannot be compared. But I compare and evaluate myself constantly with other people. I feel this constantly brings clouds and a distance between them and myself. What can be done about it?I have said that unenlightened persons cannot be compared because they are utterly different from each other. Their histories are different, their biographies are different, their pasts are different. They have moved through different terrains, different lives, in different ways; their karmas are different. They cannot be compared. It will be like comparing a stone with a roseflower, or a roseflower with a star. People are so different from each other, they cannot be compared.Only enlightened persons can be compared because they are no longer different at all, because they are no more. Emptiness can have only one taste. When two rooms are utterly empty, what is there to compare? They are so alike. If you want to compare, you can compare; you can say both are empty. Otherwise there is nothing to compare. When both the rooms are full of different furniture and paintings, there is much to compare; they are different.The unenlightened person is utterly unique, there is nobody like him. He has his own pathology, his own neurosis, and nobody else has it. You can compare in a way.Two enlightened persons are so alike, you can compare that they are alike. But the paradox has to be understood. Two enlightened persons are so alike, how will you compare them? And the other side of the paradox: two unenlightened persons are so unalike that the mind tends to compare them. One has this much money, the other has more. One has this quality, the other has something else; the temptation is there to compare.Where does the temptation to compare come from? It comes from your own ego. You are constantly comparing where you are on the scale. Somebody is poorer than you and you feel good, and somebody is richer than you and you feel bad. Seeing the poor man you feel very good. Sometimes out of that feeling you may even like to help the poor man a little bit. Seeing the rich man you feel jealous, you feel very bad, hurt. Seeing the rich man a great desire arises in you how to become that rich, how to prove yourself. And it is a multidimensional phenomenon.You see an ugly man and you feel good, and you see a beautiful man and you feel bad; it is a constant comparing because the ego can exist only between this comparison. If you drop this comparison, if you simply say, “I am what I am, and they are what they are,” then the ego will immediately lose its roots in you. Then it cannot exist. It exists between inferiority and superiority. This has to be understood.Ego is sandwiched between inferiority and superiority, it is a thin layer between the two. And because it is sandwiched between inferiority and superiority it is constantly in trouble, misery and tension. Everybody is sandwiched.If you watch yourself, you will always see who is behind you and who is ahead of you, and that you are sandwiched. The person who is behind you is trying to get ahead of you, so he has to be stopped. And the person who is ahead of you is trying to go still further ahead; he has to be stopped too. You have to get ahead, and you have to gain speed, and you have to put more energy into conflict and competition.This is how the whole world of ego continues. Watch and see the ways of the ego and then it is not very difficult to drop it. Just seeing it, understanding it, your grip loosens. What is the point? There are millions of people in the world. If you go on comparing with everybody, your whole life will remain just miserable.Somebody has beautiful eyes, and you don’t have, and somebody has something else, and you don’t have. And both ways it is bad. When somebody has not something and you have, then too it is bad, then too it puffs your ego. And the puffed ego becomes very sensitive, very touchy, anybody can hurt it.You ask me, “You say unenlightened persons cannot be compared.” In a way they cannot be compared because they are unique. In a way they can be compared because their uniqueness only consists of quantitative differences. Enlightened people can be compared in a way because they are all alike, and they cannot be compared because they are so alike.If you understand me rightly, comparison as such is meaningless. It is meaningless with unenlightened people, it is meaningless with enlightened people. Comparison itself is wrong, and the comparing mind is an egoistic mind.Just go inside – because when you compare you have to go outside, you have to focus on others. Just go inside and see who you are. Uncomparing, just see who you are. Just see what your reality is, not in reference to somebody else.You are something authentic in your own right. Why not see it? Why compare? Comparison will give you a false identity, and that false identity is what is called ego.When the false has been dropped, the real arises. And that real is incomparable because the real is not any self, it is open sky.They tell the story of the rich old man who picked up a young girl and took her to his penthouse apartment. It was a very hot summer night and eventually they reached the bed, which had been his original objective.Unfortunately he had figuratively bitten off more than he could chew, and while lying on top of her, with the sweat pouring off his face, nothing else was happening. Finally the beautiful young girl impatiently reached behind her and extracted from her pillow a large feather and proceeded to brush his head with it.The old man exclaimed, “What the hell are you doing? I am having enough trouble as it is!”She looked up sweetly and murmured, “Well, comparatively speaking, I am beating your brains out!”The mind is continuously thinking in comparisons, it is constantly comparing. Mind lives in relativity, mind is a by-product, an epiphenomenon of relativity. And you are not part of relativity; you are something beyond Albert Einstein’s world of relativity. You are neither time nor space, you are something beyond – you are the witness. And the witness is not confined by any time and space, the witness is beyond all relativity. The witness is absolutely there; its existence is absolute.Albert Einstein says there is nothing like an absolute. He is true as far as science is concerned, but he is wrong because he has not looked withinward.Outside, all is relative; inside, nothing is relative. Outside, everything is moving; inside, nothing is moving. Outside, everything is flux; inside, everything is eternity. But he has not looked inside, he has not looked at the center of the cyclone.Have you heard the old story of the little ten-year-old boy who went to the zoo with his mother? When they came to the elephant, the little boy asked his mother what was hanging from the elephant.“That’s its tail, son,” replied the mother.“No, the other thing hanging,” said the kid.“That’s his trunk,” said the mother.“No, the other thing that is hanging,” insisted the little boy.“It’s nothing, son, nothing at all,” replied the embarrassed mother.A few weeks later, the little boy went to the circus with his father and when they came to the elephant, the kid started with his father.“What’s that hanging from the elephant?” asked the boy.“Its tail, son,” replied the father.“No, the other thing,” asked the son.“That’s his trunk, son.”“No, the other thing hanging from the elephant,” the son persisted.“Well, son, I think by now you are old enough to know.” And the father began to explain the facts of life to him. When he had finished, the kid turned to his father and said, “How come when I asked mother what it was, she said it was nothing at all?”“Well, my son,” said the father, “your mother just happens to be a little spoiled.”You get it? That’s how the mind continues to compare and compare and compare.Drop comparisons and just be. Just see that which is, not in reference to something else. And once you have looked within yourself and seen that which is, without any reference to anything else, you will be surprised how much you have been missing. Then open your eyes and look at things without any comparison.A roseflower does not have to be compared with other roseflowers, it exists in its own right. It has no reference to any other rose that has been on the earth or will ever be on the earth. It is individual, authentically individual. Then look at each person as authentically individual. And then life looks so rich, infinitely rich, because it consists of tremendous uniquenesses.Our comparison dulls our mind, our comparison gathers dust on the mirror of our consciousness. Drop this old habit of comparing. But the start has to be done inside. Old habits die hard, but if you become alert they can be dropped.It will take a little time, but as the habit starts disappearing, you will start entering the world of reality, which is noncomparative. And the world that is noncomparative is the world of the absolute, the world of God. That’s what we are searching for here.Science searches for the world of relativity, religion for the world of the absolute.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-01/

My friend, everything existingexists through him;your own existence is a mere pretense.No more nonsense! Lose yourself,and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.Your selfishness is an untrained colt.You are what you are:hence your loves and hates;you are what you are:hence faith and unbelief.Hope and fear drive fortune from your door;lose yourself, and they will be no more.At his door, what is the differencebetween Moslem and Christian,virtuous and guilty?At his door all are seekersand he the sought.God is without cause:why are you looking for causes?The sun of truth rises unbidden,and with it sets the moon of learning.In this halt of but a week,to be is not to be,and to come is to go.And does the sun existfor the cock to crow at?What is it to himwhether you are there or not?Many have come, just like you,to his door.You won’t find your wayin this street; if there is a way,it is on your road of sighs.All of you are farfrom the road of devotion:sometimes you are virtuous,sometimes you are wicked:so you hope for yourselves, fear for yourselves;but when your mask of wisdom and follyat last turns white, you will seethat hope and fear are one.Truth is not a tradition. It cannot be, because truth is never old. It is eternally new, it is eternally fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops in the morning or the stars in the night.The claim of tradition is basically anti-truth. The word tradition comes from a root tradere. It means “handed by someone to somebody else, transferred.” From tradere, the word trade also comes. Truth cannot be transferred from one person to another person. It is impossible to transfer it. It is not a thing, hence it is not transferable. It cannot be traded, nobody can give it, nobody can take it. It arises in each individual’s own being, it is a flowering of your own heart.Hence, Sufism is not a tradition. No true religion can ever be a tradition; every true religion is bound to be a revolution, a rebellion. And Sufism is one of the most profound, most authentic experiments, inquiries, into truth that has happened on this earth. And Hakim Sanai, into whose sutras we will be entering again today, is one of the three greatest Sufis in the whole history of human consciousness. He makes his part of the trio of the three great masters: Attar, Rumi, Sanai.You will again be moving with one of the greatest souls for a few days. It is a pilgrimage, a holy pilgrimage; you will be walking on sacred ground. Be very alert, watchful, loving, open, vulnerable, then something can arise in you which can become a transformation; something can be triggered in you. But remember, it is not caused from the outside, it is not a question of cause and effect. Hence it is beyond the reach of science. Science can only understand the law of cause and effect. If something can be caused, it is bound to fall into the field of science. But truth cannot be caused.Still, in the presence of the master it can happen. It happens uncaused; it is a synchronicity. It is as if somebody is dancing and something is triggered in you – not caused, remember, because no dancer can cause a dance in you – but you start feeling something. You start swaying, you suddenly feel a rush of energy, you would like to dance yourself. This is synchronicity: something has happened in you, parallel but not caused.I will be here just like a hollow bamboo, available to Hakim Sanai so that he can sing his song, so he can dance his dance. If you are open, something can start happening in you. It will not be transferred from me to you – it cannot be transferred; it will not be caused. I will not be the source of it, you will remain the source of it. But it can be triggered: I can function as a catalytic agent.These few days, walking with Hakim Sanai, can be life-transforming. You will be here with one of the greatest human beings ever – a human being of the caliber of Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed.But remember the first thing, that truth is not a tradition. If you believe in tradition, you will never come to know what truth is. Tradition is a belief, borrowed; it is knowledge but not experience. Tradition is scripture, philosophy, words and words – words and words about words. It is a great jungle of theories, and you can be deceived by it very easily. The mind is ready to fall into the trap of it.Because truth is not a tradition, it cannot be approached through the mind. The mind is a tradition, the mind lives out of the past. The mind is always old; the mind is never original, it is never new, it is never fresh, it is never young, it is never alive. The mind is nothing but the accumulated past; all that you have known in the past has become a tape inside you. It is not the reality of this moment. The mind is a tradition.Hence if somebody says he is a Hindu or a Christian or a Jaina or a Mohammedan, he is saying he is not religious. He is saying he belongs to the past, not to the present. He is saying he belongs to the mind and not to consciousness.Consciousness is always of the here and now: it knows no past, it knows no future. And that is the beauty of consciousness – it is meditative. The mind is a thought process, a procession of memories, imaginations, dreams, projections. Consciousness is a purity, a mirror, that simply reflects the reality as it is.All belief systems have to be dropped, only then can you be a Sufi. And to be a Sufi is the greatest thing that can happen to anybody.Nobody else except man can be deceived by words; nobody except man can be deceived at all.I have heard…Marilyn had a parrot for a pet, but the parrot would embarrass her whenever she came into the apartment with a man. He would shout all kinds of obscenities, always leading off with, “Somebody’s gonna get it tonight! Somebody’s gonna get it tonight!”In desperation, Marilyn went to her local pet shop and explained her parrot problem to the pet shop proprietor.“What you need,” he said, “is a female parrot too. I don’t have one on hand, but I will order one. Meanwhile, you could borrow this female owl until the female parrot arrives.”Marilyn took the owl home and put it near her parrot. It was immediately obvious that the parrot did not care for the owl. He glared at it.That night, Marilyn wasn’t her usual nervous self as she opened the door to bring her gentleman friend in for a nightcap. Then suddenly she heard the parrot screech and she knew that things had not changed.“Somebody’s gonna get it tonight! Somebody’s gonna get it tonight!” the parrot said.The owl said, “Whooo? Whooo?”And the parrot said, “Not you, you big-eyed son-of-a-bitch!”Only man can be deceived. You cannot deceive even a parrot, but pundits can be deceived and are deceived. Pundits are greater parrots than parrots themselves.Beware. Your mind is ready to fall into any trap of words. It can create beautiful theories, philosophies; it can go on manufacturing great systems of thought – all imaginary.Truth has nothing to do with your imagination. Neither has truth anything to do with your inference, your guesswork. Truth is already here: truth is. All that is needed on your part is not to seek and search for it but to be available, open and empty like a mirror, so that you can reflect that which is. Truth surrounds you; truth is within and without. Only truth is. You need not go anywhere, to Kaaba or to Kashi. You need not even go outside your room, you need not even go outside your body, you need not go anywhere.Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Just sitting silently in your own room, when you are empty, it is revealed.It was revealed to Mohammed when he was utterly silent and empty, it was revealed to Sanai when he was silent and empty, it was revealed to Mahavira when he was silent and empty. To be empty is to be religious.But you are so full of knowledge, you are so full of unnecessary luggage, your mind is so much in a constant chattering. You may call it the Veda or you may call it the Koran, it doesn’t matter. Unless you are empty, the Veda is not going to happen to you, the Koran is not going to flow through you. Unless you are empty, you will not contact truth – and truth is another name for God. I am using the word truth so that even atheists are not offended, but truth and God are synonymous, interchangeable, they mean the same thing.Then what is truth if it is not a tradition? It is a revolution, it is a turning in. Tradition looks backward, tradition looks at others, tradition wants something to be given. Revolution looks inward. Nothing has to be given to you from any source; you already have it, it is already the case. Just turning in, just looking in, waiting, watching, going inward to the core of your being – and it is there.Sufism is an inner journey. By revolution I don’t mean a political revolution. Political revolutions are not revolutions at all; they only substitute one slavery for another. The only revolution there is, is religious. The only revolution there is, is turning away from tradition and turning inward to the source of your being.Knowing “Who am I?” is the only revolutionary step – the first and the last, the alpha and the omega.That’s the meaning of becoming a Sufi, or becoming a sannyasin. Sannyasin is my name for the Sufi: one who is fed up with the outside world, who has known its frustrations, who has known its utter futility, who has known all the anxiety and anguish of it and is ready to dive deep within oneself to know “Who am I?” Because unless one knows oneself, all knowledge is useless.The foremost, the most fundamental thing, is to become aware at the core of your being. And it is a miracle to become aware of it, because at the core of your being you are always pure, always innocent, always virgin, always celibate. At the very core of your being, you have never left the Garden of Eden, you are still in paradise.That is the name of Hakim Sanai’s book, the Hadiqa. It means The Garden – the garden of God, paradise.Where is this paradise? There are foolish people who have been searching for the Garden of Eden. A few think it was in Babylon, a few think it was on the continent of Atlantis which has gone down in the ocean – there has been a search. This is whole complete stupidity.The garden exists in you. Adam has not been expelled from the Garden of Eden, he has fallen asleep. “The original fall” simply means you have forgotten who you are. Adam has become knowledgeable and has lost his purity of consciousness.That’s the meaning of the parable of the Tree of Knowledge. Adam has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge – that is the original sin. See the beauty of the parable: knowledge is the original sin, to become knowledgeable is to fall from grace. Then how to attain it again? Drop your knowledge, become innocent again. Be a child again, and you will be able to enter the Garden of Eden.Adam becomes knowledgeable, Christ becomes innocent. Becoming knowledgeable, Adam starts moving outward, falls victim to philosophies, belief systems, theories, words. Jesus drops all tradition; that’s why the Jews were so angry with him. The Jews are a very traditional people, they were angry because he was a revolutionary. He was a dropout – he simply dropped all the knowledge of all the ancient rabbis and he became innocent. But in becoming innocent he again entered that original state of Adam before he had eaten the fruit of knowledge.I have heard…Two university professors are walking around the campus. They are well-known historians and are voicing their respective opinions about Jesus. When they are about to part, one says thoughtfully, “You know, he was really a good fellow, but he didn’t publish.”The professor, the pundit, the knowledgeable person, the scholar, has no understanding about inner experiences. All that he knows is the rubbish of so-called research work, all that he knows is about words. Those words are hollow, they contain nothing, they are meaningless – because meaning arises only out of one’s own experience.Sufism is an experiment in existential experience. It is not a philosophy; rather, think of it as a ladder. You don’t agree with or believe in a ladder; you don’t believe in it, you don’t disbelieve in it, either. You climb it, and if it breaks you get a new one. Thus, to treat Sufism as a system to be believed in, or committed to, or attached to is to miss the whole point. It is a ladder, not a belief system. Use it, climb it, go beyond it. It is a boat.Buddha calls his system a raft: that’s exactly what Sufism is. Use it to go to the other shore, to the further shore, then forget all about it. The truth believed is a lie, the truth borrowed is a lie. My truth cannot be your truth; the moment my truth reaches you, it is no longer the same thing. With me, in me, it had the meaning of my experience. When it goes to you, only words reach you – empty, hollow. You can cling to those words, you can believe too much in those words, and you will be lost.This is something very basic to be remembered, that Sufism is a practical science, it is pragmatic. It does not depend on philosophizing, speculating and guesswork; it points directly to existential experience.You can know much about love. You can go and look in the libraries, you can look in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you will know much about love. But it will be about love – it will not be love. To know love, you will have to fall in love; there is no other way, there is no shortcut.Two Italians in Rome were talking when an airplane flew overhead and one said to the other, “The pope is aboard that plane.”“No,” said the other, “he is in southern Italy at the summer Vatican.”“No, he is aboard that plane,” said the other.One word led to another, and before long, several thousand liras were bet on whether or not the pope was aboard that plane. The two men rushed to the airport in time to observe the pope emerging from the plane.The one who lost the bet turned to his friend and said, “Tell me, Tony, how could you tell, twenty thousand feet in the air, that the pope was aboard that plane?”“Easy,” he said. “It says so right on the outside of the airplane: TWA.”“What does that mean?”“Top Wop Aboard.”Sometimes your guess may even work, but still it is never the truth. Truth has to be experienced.You are guessing about God, you are arguing about God, speculating about God, fighting about God. And no time is left for experiencing him.Remember always, that to be here with me, we are not interested in any guesswork, we are interested in going to the real experience of it. And when the experience is possible, why bother arguing about it? Why go round and round? Why not penetrate to the very core? You can go round and round for centuries and you will never arrive anywhere. And you can arrive right now, this very moment, if you go inward.All these sutras of the Hadiqa are just preparing you to take the inner leap, the inner jump.Sufism is an attempt to unfreeze habits of thinking, to replace them with less stiff and restricting ones. Sufism is criticizing, dissolving and stepping over all prejudices, loosening all rigid and constricting molds of thought. Sufism is relaxing into your own self; it is a let-go.When all prejudices have been dropped, all concepts rejected, all scriptures burnt, the whole tradition dropped, then you are innocent, you are unpolluted. In that purity of the present moment, the sun rises.And that is from where one starts growing into a real human being. It is from there that one starts growing even beyond humanity; one starts surpassing, one starts transcending. Real growth knows no limit. You contain something infinite in you, something oceanic; don’t be contented, don’t be satisfied unless you have known it. That contentment will be a suicide.I see millions of people: they are all dead, they have committed suicide, because they have become contented – and contented with futile things, contented with nothing.Never be contented unless you have known your inner being, unless you have come to the innermost shrine. Remain discontented. Sufis call it “the divine discontentment.”Teilhard de Chardin says, “The most real aspect of living is the passion for growth.” Yes, be in a passionate affair with your own growth. Never allow a single day to pass without growing, otherwise you will remain a seed and you will never know the beauties of being a flower. The spring will come and go, and you will remain dead.Millions of people are dead. They walk, they talk, they do their job, but all that is mechanical, utterly mechanical. They are moving in a kind of sleep, they are somnambulists.A man took his wife to a Broadway show. During the first act intermission, he had to urinate in the worst way. He hurried to the back of the theater and searched in vain for the men’s room.At last he came upon a fountain surrounded by pretty foliage. He realized that he had wandered backstage. Noting that no one was around, and in desperation, he opened his pants and pissed into the fountain.He had difficulty finding his way back to the auditorium, and by the time he sat down next to his wife, the curtain was up and actors were moving about on the stage.“Did I miss much of the second act?” he whispered.“Miss it?” she said. “You were in it!”But that is the situation. People are moving unconsciously, mechanically, unaware; they don’t know what they are doing. How can they know what they are doing when they don’t know who they are? If you don’t know your being, you can’t be aware of your doing; it is impossible. First, one has to be aware of the being – and that is growth. Growing inward is growth, reaching inward is growth.The sutras:My friend, everything existingexists through him;your own existence is a mere pretense.No more nonsense! Lose yourself,and the hell of your heart becomes heaven.Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.Your selfishness is an untrained colt.First, remember. Hakim Sanai addresses you as My friend… That’s the attitude of all the great masters. The disciple thinks that the master is very, very far away – and from the side of the disciple it is true, because he is fast asleep. In his sleep, the master is a faraway star.But the same is not the case from the side of the master. The master knows that you may be asleep but you are a buddha, you may be asleep but you are a god. The disciple may not know that he is a god, but the master knows it. The moment he knows himself to be divine, he knows the whole existence to be divine. From the master’s side, nobody is a disciple, all are masters. A few are asleep, a few are awake; the difference is only that much. From the side of the master, it is only a question of time: tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or who knows, you may even become enlightened today.The potential is there. From the side of the seed, the flower is far away. But the flower knows that the seed contains flowers, infinite flowers. From the side of the flower, the seed is a friend.And if you find a master who does not think in those terms, then remember, know well, he is not a master yet. If he thinks that you are sinners, if he thinks that you are fallen souls, then he is not a master yet; he has not come to realize his own reality.Buddha is reported to have said, “The day I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened for me – even trees, even rocks.”Hakim Sanai says: My friend, everything existing exists through him… God is the only reality – or call it truth, or nature, or Tao, or whatsoever you will. Names don’t matter. Don’t go on fighting about names; XYZ, anything will do. Just remember one thing, that something is there, miraculously present, which surrounds all, which permeates all.Sufis say: “As the absolute maximum, God contains all things.” In fact that is the definition of God: one who contains all. He is there enfolding and there unfolding. God is in the seed, God is in the flower – in the seed hidden, in the flower manifest. God is in the sinner and is in the saint – in the sinner asleep, in the saint awake. But all is God: God is equivalent to existence.Christian mystics use two words: one is complicatio, it means enfolding. God is complicatio, enfolding, and explicatio, unfolding. These are the two movements of God: enfolding and manifesting. Each seed becomes the flower, and then in its own turn the flower becomes the seed, and the circle is complete.Just as every night you fall asleep, and in the morning you are awake again, so is God – in nature asleep, in buddhas awake. Just to understand it is a great liberation. Suddenly you have self-worth; suddenly you are no longer a condemned being. Suddenly you are an essential part of existence; you are not accidental, you participate in God’s work in your own way. You need God, God needs you; you are not unneeded.In this century, millions of people are feeling unneeded, because God has disappeared from their lives. And this is one of the most fundamental needs, to be needed. If you feel needed, you feel worthy. If you feel not needed, you feel worthless, you feel like dirt.That’s why people get married, because a woman will be there who will need them. Husbands don’t like their wives to work, because then they are needed less, then they are worth less. Husbands like their wives to be constantly in need of them; that gives them worth, a feeling of importance.The wife also in her own way makes the husband utterly dependent; without her he will not be able to exist. Even if she goes away for one day, the husband is at a loss. He cannot find a thing in his own house; he comes to know that without the wife it is impossible to exist. Then they both bring children into the world, and both are happy because the children need them immensely, absolutely.That’s why people like children – they are helpless, they are dependent. But sooner or later, the children will go their own way. And this is one of the problems in the world: when children have gone their own way and they have settled with their own families, then old people, aged people, start feeling worthless – nobody needs them.Now it is a psychological truth that once a person starts feeling he is not needed, he starts committing suicide, psychological suicide. He dies ten years earlier. When he is retired from his job he starts shrinking – now he is no longer needed. He was a boss and so many people were clamoring around him; he was doing something essential for the society. That job is gone. Now if he dies, it will not make any difference, the world will continue as it is.The children have become grown-up, they have gone to live their own lives, and the old people simply feel discarded. They start dying slowly, shrinking. They were healthy when they were in their work, when they were needed they were healthy. But now suddenly something disappears; the earth underneath their feet disappears, they are no longer needed.We make arbitrary needs. But the man who has the sense that “God exists, and I am needed by God,” never feels worthless – never. To the last moment, to the last breath of his life, he is functioning, serving something higher than himself. He has a context bigger than himself; in that context, meaning arises.Meaning is always in a certain context. A single word is meaningless; when it is arranged in poetry it has tremendous meaning, now it has a context. The color in a tube is meaningless; once it is spread on the canvas and becomes part of a picture that is bigger than it, it has a context, suddenly meaning arises.It is reported that once a very rich man asked Pablo Picasso to make a portrait of him, Picasso said, “It will be very costly.” The man was so rich, he said, “Don’t bother about it. You need not even talk about the cost, money doesn’t matter. Make my portrait and whatsoever you demand, I will give.”After six months the portrait was ready. The rich man came, but the price that was asked was fantastic: one million dollars, just for a small canvas and a few colors. The rich man said, “Are you joking? Just for a few colors and a canvas?”Picasso said, “Then okay, you can take an empty canvas and a few tubes full of color and you can pay as much as you want.”The rich man said, “But that is not the same.”Picasso aid, “That’s what I am trying to point out to you. I have created a context, I have created a gestalt, a pattern. And nobody else can create it, hence the price. It is a Picasso painting. Nobody else can do it the way I have done it, it has my signature on it. The harmony of the colors, the music of the colors, the poetry of the colors – that is the thing. I am not asking the price for the colors but for something that has become expressed through the colors.”A real painting is not just the sum total of the colors, it is more than the sum total – and that “more” is the meaning. A real life is not the sum total of what you do; unless there is something more to it, you live an inauthentic life. That “more” is God. That poetry is God, the music is God, that surrounds you, floods you.People come to me and ask, “Where is God?” It is not a question of asking where; God is a meaning, not a person. I cannot indicate, “There – go there, and you will find him.” God has no address, God cannot be located, it is a meaning. You have to create meaning in your life, then God is. God has to be created.And the start of that creating is to becoming more and more sensitive to the existence that surrounds you. The trees, the rocks, the stars, the earth – you are surrounded by a great poetry. But you remain separate, hence you go on missing it.My friend, everything existing exists through him; your own existence is a mere pretense. If you live separately, if you think, “I am separate,” if you live as an ego, then your existence is a pretense. Then your existence will remain meaningless. Then you will never know the glory and the grandeur of life; you will never know the splendors that have always been available to you but you went on missing.If you exist as a separate individual, you have created a wall around yourself, you have become an island. And no man is an island, we are part of an infinite continent. That continent is God. We are parts of an ocean. The moment you recognize that we are parts of an ocean, your life starts having a context bigger than you, higher than you. In that context is the beginning of meaning – and meaning is God.No more nonsense! says Sanai. Lose yourself, and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven. Just a single step is enough: Lose yourself… Don’t exist as an “I,” don’t go on proclaiming yourself as an ego. Drop the ego, and suddenly, immediately, instantly, the hell of your life turns into a heaven. Misery disappears.Misery is a by-product of your separation. Bliss is the shadow of falling back into the unity, unio mystica. When again you start feeling like a wave in the ocean, misery cannot exist. What is misery? The fear of death. But you can die only if you are separate, you cannot die if you are not separate.If the wave thinks, “I am separate from the ocean,” it is going to die; it will remain afraid, trembling. If it knows it is part of the ocean it is not going to die. It will fall back into the source, it will come again; it will go, it will come, it will appear and disappear, but it cannot die.Birth is appearance, death is disappearance. But neither is birth the beginning nor is death the end: the ocean continues. To have this oceanic feeling is meditation, is prayer.Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished. Then the impossible is possible, because nothing is impossible for God. We have unnecessarily become too narrow, too tiny; we have become mundane. We have lost our own heritage, we are not aware of all the beauties that we contain and of all the potential that is intrinsically present in us.Your selfishness is an untrained colt. Your selfishness is nothing but your unawareness, your lack of discipline. Create an inner discipline, a little training in awareness, and your selfishness will disappear, because your self will disappear.And when there is no self left, then the real Self with a capital S, the supreme Self, arrives. You disappear as a wave, you appear as the ocean. That is liberation.Recognize the Self – the self which is not the ego, the self which has nothing of the ego in it. Hindu mystics have called it the atman. Buddha has given it a totally different name, not only different but diametrically opposite: he has called it anatta, no-self.The Self is a no-self, because there is no ego in it. To be an ego is to fall from your reality – the original sin. The Self is not the ego, absolutely not; it is not personal, either. It is misleading to speak of “my self.” The Self is universal. The moment you say “my self” you have lost track of the universal and you have become small. Now you will feel suffocated; you have created the suffocation yourself.The Self, the real Self, the supreme Self, is beyond any person, identification, form, process, position. But they all arise in it and dissolve in it – it is the ocean. The Self is the space in which everything appears and disappears. That space has to be found within yourself. Don’t get identified with any content, otherwise the ego arises.For example, there is sadness surrounding you. Immediately you become identified, you say, “I am sad.” That is stupid, unintelligent, you are unaware, you don’t know what you are saying. You are not the sadness, you are the witness. Sadness is there, but you are separate from it: you are the knower of it.Say, “I am seeing that sadness surrounds me,” but don’t say, “I am sad.” Anger is there, but don’t say, “I am anger,” or “I am angry.” Simply say, “There is anger, I can see it is there.” Anger is the content of your consciousness, it is not the consciousness itself. Consciousness is the space, the witnessing space.This is the revolution, if you forget the content and remember the consciousness. Two things are continuously happening in you: the content and consciousness. A thought passes through your mind and you become identified with it; you say, “I am it.” If you are hungry, you say, “I am hungry.” Please be a little more aware: say, “I watch, I am a witness, that the body is feeling hungry.”When you have eaten well and you feel satiated, don’t say, “I am satiated.” Again, remember. Because of our ignorance we have created a wrong kind of language too. We say, “I am satiated.” You were never hungry and you are never satiated. Hunger was a content, so is satiation. Sadness was a content, so is happiness.This mindfulness Sufis call zikr, remembrance. Buddha has called it “mindfulness, right awareness.”Just go on cutting yourself off from the content. Slowly, slowly, the bridge is broken. The day you recognize the fact that you are never the content but always the consciousness, you have arrived home.The English word contemplation is very beautiful; it comes from a root tem. Tem means “to cut off.” From the same root comes temple; that too is beautiful. Temple means “that which cuts you off from the world,” and contemplation means “the process of cutting yourself off from the mind, from the content.” Identification is the fall: you become Adam, you are expelled. Through disidentification, cutting yourself off from the mind and its contents, you become Christ. You are no longer outgoing, the inner journey has started. Adam has turned toward the source, is returning home.The self arises out of identification, self with a lower-case s arises out of identification. Self with a capital S arises out of disidentification. And this is the whole art of religion.You are what you are:hence your loves and hates;you are what you are:hence faith and unbelief.Right now you are a duality: you are consciousness and content. You are divided into these two. Hence in your whole life there is a dualism. You love a person and you hate the same person, you believe and you disbelieve. And they go together – belief and disbelief, love and hate, anger and compassion, happiness and unhappiness, these are two sides of the same coin. Because you are double, each act of yours is going to be double, dual. And in that duality is misery, because in duality there is tension.You are always torn apart. You love a woman, and you hate the same woman. Hence couples go on quarreling continuously. It is something to be understood. Why do couples go on quarreling continuously? They love, certainly they love, but why do they hate? It remains a mystery if you don’t understand the duality of man. He is dual in everything. Unless you become disidentified with the mind, you will never become non-dual.That’s why I say that only one who has arrived can love, and he can love without hate. His love will not have hate at all in it, his flame will be smokeless. Your flame cannot be smokeless, your love will have smoke – your love will remain poisoned with hate. Your belief is nothing but a hidden disbelief; behind your belief there is always doubt. You say, “I believe in God” – but just search a little bit more and you will see that there is doubt.When one is pure consciousness, there is neither belief nor disbelief. That state is called trust: there is no doubt and there is no belief.A man, a professor of philosophy, came to Sri Aurobindo and asked him, “Do you believe in God?” And Aurobindo said, “No, not at all.”The philosopher was very puzzled and confused. He had come a long, long way from a faraway place to see this man, thinking that he had known God. And here is this man, and he says, “I don’t even believe in God.”The philosopher asked, “What are you saying? You don’t believe in God?”Aurobindo said, “Yes – I cannot believe in God, because I know him.”When you know, you know; there is no question of belief. Belief is out of ignorance, belief is because of doubt. If you ask me, I cannot say I believe in God. I know.You don’t believe in the sun, you know. Do you believe this is day? If somebody believes, that will only show that he is blind. A man who has eyes need not believe that this is day – this is day! Only a blind man can believe this is day.When consciousness is not contaminated by content moving around you, when your inner space is pure – it is always pure, you just have to recognize the fact – suddenly all duality disappears. And with duality, hell.Hell is nothing but duality. Loving the same man and hating the same man is hell, believing in God and doubting God is hell. You are moving in diametrically opposite directions, you will fall apart. It is a miracle how you go on holding yourself together at all, why you don’t fall from the wall like Humpty Dumpty.Hope and fear drive fortune from your door:lose yourself, and they will be no more.Sanai says: “Hope and fear are two aspects of the same coin.” If you hope, there will always be fear. Hope is out of fear, it is not against fear. You are hoping that tomorrow something is going to happen, something great for which you have always been hoping. Now, can you be without fear? It may happen, it may not happen; you may be able to make it, you may not be able to make it. It is always a question of to be or not to be, it is always ambiguous, and there is fear.Buddha says: “Drop hope.” And the first time he said to a disciple, “Drop hope,” the disciple was puzzled. He said, “If I drop hope, then all is lost! Because it is hope I live through, I live for.”Buddha said, “Don’t be worried – drop hope!” And you will be surprised, because the moment you drop hope, fear disappears. And when there is no fear and no hope, one is integrated; there is no division.Division is hell. To become integrated is heaven – to become crystallized, to be one: one piece, one whole, one unity; not even a union but a unity. Remember, a union is not a unity, it is an arrangement: you have many selves and they have all arranged to live in a kind of coexistence, they have decided not to fight. This is a union – but the fight can break out at any moment.Hindus and Mohammedans lived for so many years in Aligarh silently; that was a union. Then one day, anything, any nonsense, and the union is gone. Hindus and Mohammedans had lived so long in this country together; it was a union, it is gone. Now there are two countries, India and Pakistan. Then Pakistan was divided into two countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan.These are all unions. Unity means all the small selves have disappeared and the supreme Self has arrived. Now there is no possibility of ever becoming divided again.At his door, what is the differencebetween Moslem and Christian,virtuous and guilty?At his door all are seekersand he the sought.Meditate over these beautiful words of Sanai. At his door… nobody is a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Buddhist. At his door… you are a lover and he the beloved. At his door… you are the seeker and he is the sought. At his door… you are the river and he is the ocean.And when the Ganges disappears in the ocean, do you think the ocean receives the Ganges in a different way than it receives other rivers? The ocean does not even know the name – which is the Ganges and which is the Brahmaputra and which is the Volga and which is the Amazon. When the river disappears in the ocean it loses all name, all form.That’s why I say again and again that a really religious person cannot be a Mohammedan and cannot be Hindu and cannot be Jaina and cannot be a Sikh. A really religious person is only a lover, a seeker. He cannot become identified with any church. He cannot have any adjective.Mohammed is not a Mohammedan, cannot be. And Christ is not a Christian, cannot be. And Buddha is not a Buddhist, cannot be.And I say to you, don’t you be Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians and Buddhists, either. If you become a Buddhist you will never be a buddha, remember, and if you become a Mohammedan you will never be a mohammed. If you become a Christian you have missed an opportunity of being a christ – and to be a christ is beautiful and to be a mohammed is a benediction. To be a Mohammedan, to be a Hindu, is just ugly; it is just political, and nothing else. It has nothing to do with religion.Listen to this great Sufi, Sanai: At his door, what is the difference between Moslem and Christian, virtuous and guilty? He says: There is not even a difference between the sinner and the saint. At his door, differences disappear. Nobody is a sinner and nobody is a saint, and nobody is virtuous and nobody is guilty.You will not reach to godliness as virtuous, because that is the ego. To feel that “I am virtuous” is the subtlest ego – to feel about oneself, “I know, because I have crammed the Vedas; I know, because I can recite the Koran.” If you try to reach God as knowledgeable, you will never reach; his doors will remain closed for you. His doors can open only when you are innocent. When you are neither virtuous nor guilty, when you are neither knowledgeable nor ignorant, when you are neither a man nor a woman, neither white nor black – only then.I have heard…A Negro knocked on the door of a church one night. In the day of course he was afraid: the church belonged to white people, they wouldn’t allow him to. But he knew the priest, he was a nice man: maybe at night, when nobody was looking, he might allow him in – he wanted to worship in the church.The priest opened the door. He was a nice man – but to be a nice man is one thing, and to be a real man is totally different. All these nice formalities are just pseudo, phony. He had been saying great things, but when this Negro knocked on the door and he opened the door and the Negro said, “Would you please allow me to come in? I will not tell anybody, but I want to worship God,” the priest was puzzled: what to do? His mask was that of a nice man, very religious, saintly; because of the mask, he could not say no. But deep down, the reality was that he was as much a sectarian, a believer in color, as anybody else. So his deeper core was not ready to allow the man to come in – the church would be polluted, poisoned.So he found a strategy, a technique, to avoid. He said, “Yes, you can come in but first you have to become pure. I will give you a prayer: do this prayer, it takes years before one becomes pure. When you have become pure, come back, and if I see that you have become pure, I will allow you to come in.”The poor man believed him. This was just a strategy to avoid the situation, so that the priest need not say yes or no. And this was a tricky thing. If he ever comes, you can always say, “You have not become pure yet: go and do the prayer some more.”The man was simple; he went and he prayed. For three weeks, day and night, he was praying. Even when he was working he was praying and praying.And by the third week, the priest saw him coming toward the church and he became very much afraid, because the man had such a beautiful aura. He was so full of light that the priest was dazzled. He said, “Now it is difficult – what am I going to say? He has done it. He is coming as the purest person I have ever seen. I am not that pure myself; this aura has not appeared around me either. And this man is coming full of light, radiating light.”And when the man came closer, the priest was trembling. “Now if he asks, I cannot say no. But I have to say no!”But the man never came. He just came close to the church, laughed, and went away.The priest was even more puzzled. He rushed after the man, caught hold of him, and said, “What is the matter? You were coming to the church, were you not?”He said, “No!”“Then why did you laugh?”He said, “I laughed because last night God appeared to me, and he said, ‘Man, why are you trying to get into that church? I don’t live there anymore! And believe me,’ he said, ‘that they will never allow you to come in – because they don’t even allow me!’”Churches are empty, temples are empty, mosques are empty. God no longer lives there.God is without cause:why are you looking for causes?The sun of truth rises unbidden,and with it sets the moon of learning.God is without cause: why are you looking for causes? And people go on asking, “How can I attain to God? How can I cause God to happen to me?” God has no cause. He is already here: he does not have to be caused, he does not even have to be called forth. He was here before you have ever been and he will be here long after you are gone forever.God is. No asceticism is needed. He makes no conditions on you: “First you must fast, then I will come.” It will be a wrong kind of God who wants you to suffer hunger for many, many days, only then will he come. That will be a sadistic God who wants to torture people: “First stand naked in the hot sun for years and years, only then will I come.”No mother behaves like that with her child. No mother asks the child to remain hungry for many days, only then will she give her love to the child.God is the matrix, the mater, the mother. God is the mother out of which we all arise and into which we all disappear. God is love! How can he ask for the stupid things that ascetics have been doing down the ages?Sufism is not ascetic. God wants you to celebrate. Look at these trees, how green they are and how juicy. Look at his roses, how red they are and how alive. Look at his birds on the wing, look at his stars – the whole of existence is a dance, the whole of existence is a constant celebration. Why should he ask you to become long faces, sad, shrunken? Do you think he wants you to become ugly – to torture yourself, to be violent with yourself, then you will be able to cause him, then you will be able to provoke him? He makes no conditions, remember. His love is unconditional. He has loved you already, that’s why he has created you. Now it is not a question of causing him; he has caused you. Then what has to be done?The sun of truth rises unbidden… You need not call, you need not provoke, you need not even prepare. All that is needed is that you become disidentified from something that you are not. Whenever you are your reality, your natural reality, God is – because that nature is God. And the moment you are disidentified from all the rubbish of the mind, the moon of learning sets and the sun of wisdom rises in you.Uncalled, uncaused, he comes of his own accord. God is a happening, it is not something that you have to do. You have to allow him, that’s all. You have to become available, open – and he starts descending, and he starts rising, and he surrounds you from all nooks and corners, and he over-floods you and he starts overflowing from you.This is my experience, this can be your experience too. Sanai is speaking out of his experience; these are not the words of a philosopher, these are the pregnant messages of a mystic.In this halt of but a week,to be is not to be,and to come is to go.Don’t become too attached to things here, because it is only a question of a week. Whether seven days or seventy years, it doesn’t matter. Soon you will be gone, and all that you have accumulated will be lost. You come empty-handed, you will go empty-handed. Can’t you live empty-handed? If you can live empty-handed, God is all yours.And by living empty-handed I don’t mean that you have to go to the Himalayas. It is only awareness. You live as you live, you just change the attitude. I am not saying renounce the world; it is his world – if you renounce it, it is insulting to God. I am not saying renounce your family; it is his family – if you renounce it, you are misbehaving with God.Then what has to be done? Live in the world and yet be not part of it. Remain empty inside, continuously remembering that the consciousness is a pure mirror. In that awareness, God happens. God is a happening.And does the sun existfor the cock to crow at?What is it to himwhether you are there or not?Many have come, just like you,to his door.And don’t brag about your religiousness. Don’t brag about your disciplines, don’t brag that you have done this for God and that for God. Love never brags. Love does things for the sheer joy of it. You do whatsoever is natural to you, for the sheer joy of it. If you want to paint, paint; if you want to sing, sing; if you want to sculpt, sculpt. Whatsoever you feel like doing, do – but remember, you are not the doer, he is the doer. Let him take possession of you.You disappear. Let him act through you, and then each act becomes so beautiful, so incredibly beautiful, that you cannot imagine. Then whatsoever you do is holy.You won’t find your wayin this street; if there is a way,it is on you road of sighs.All of you are farfrom the road of devotion:sometimes you are virtuous,sometimes you are wicked:so you hope for yourselves, fear for yourselves;but when your mask of wisdom and follyat last turns white, you will seethat hope and fear are one.You won’t find your way in this street. What street? The street of duality: the street of hope and fear, the street of love and hate, the street of darkness and light, the street of the Hindu and the Mohammedan. You will not find God on this street; he does not exist in duality. He is prior to duality, he is before the bifurcation happens. Then where will you find him?…if there is a way – says Sanai – it is on your road of sighs. Tears. Tears of love, sighs of the heart. It is not on the street of the head but on the street of the heart. Sufism proposes a heart-wakefulness: become loving and aware in your heart. Sufism is the path of love.All of you are far from the road of devotion… Buddhism is the path of meditation, Zen is meditation. Sufism is the path of love, Sufism is love. And there are only two ways to reach him: either through meditation or through love. And they both meet at the peak, they both become one at the peak. If you attain to one, the other is attained just as part of it; it is only a question of emphasis.If you become meditative you will be surprised: after meditation, love comes of its own accord. If you love, you will be surprised again: just as a shadow, meditation comes behind it.Love is the heart of meditation, meditation is the heart of love. They are together, two names for the same phenomenon. The approaches are different, but the same peak, the same climax, is attained. A few people will find it easy to follow the path of meditation – in fact fifty percent of people in the world will find it easy to follow the path of meditation: Zen is their way. And fifty percent will find love closer to their being: Sufism is their way.In a real world, an intelligent world, there will be only two paths, Sufism and Zen, and all else will disappear. All else is futile. Why two? Because there are men and there are women. And remember, by “men” I don’t mean biological men, because there are women who are psychologically men, and there are men who are psychologically women. I mean psychologically. There are men who are more capable of love than any woman, but they are few. There are a few women who are more capable of meditation than any man, but they are few. The majority of women will have to follow Sufism, and the majority of men will have to follow Zen. But it cannot be determined biologically; it is a totally different affair. You have to watch yourself: whichever feels good for you, whichever feels natural, spontaneous, that is your path.Sanai has the heart of a woman. All Sufis have the heart of a woman.All of you are far from the road of devotion: sometimes you are virtuous, sometimes you are wicked… But never devoted. Neither virtue is going to help, nor your wickedness is going to help; that keeps you divided.I have heard…A man was about to make his first parachute jump and was very nervous. The instructor tried to reassure him that nothing could happen because first the parachute would open by itself; and if by some remote possibility it didn’t, then there was a backup parachute he could pull the string on; and thirdly if both didn’t work he was to call out the name of the Devil three times.To make the story short, he jumped and the first parachute failed to open, then the second failed to respond, and in desperation he yelled out “Devil” three times and sure enough a giant hand appeared under him and gently carried him to earth and placed him on the ground. He fell to his knees and in prayer position cried out, “Thank God!” whereupon the giant hand reached over and crushed him to death.God or the Devil, it is again the same duality, and the duality is going to crush you. Virtue or wickedness, it is the same duality, and the duality is going to crush you.God is not your God, because your God is something against the Devil. God is something beyond your God and Devil: God is transcendental, God is a transcendence. This transcendence is possible, easily possible; it is not arduous either. Let me remind you again: just change your gestalt from the contents to the consciousness, from the mind to the space in which the mind exists.There are clouds in the sky: you can see the clouds, then you forget the sky. Change your gestalt: see the sky and forget the clouds. That brings transformation.The sky is your consciousness, and your thoughts, your desires, are nothing but clouds; they come and go. They don’t touch your sky at all, your sky remains virgin. You are pure from eternity, and you will remain pure to eternity. Purity is your nature. To recognize this, to realize this, is to become enlightened.And keep the fire of discontent burning. Unless you have become enlightened, don’t leave any stone unturned. You have to become that which you are, because only then is there bliss and only then is there freedom and only then is there benediction.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-02/

The first question:Osho,What am I looking for?Man is a search for the self – not for a self but for the self. Man is constantly seeking the lost paradise: somewhere deep in the recesses of human beings, the nostalgia persists. We have known something that is only a far faraway memory, the memory is not even conscious; we have lost all track of it, of where it is. But the fragrance goes on arising.Hence religion is not an accidental phenomenon. It is not going to disappear from the world; no communism, no fascism can make it disappear. Religion is going to remain, because it is very essential. Unless a man surpasses humanity, unless a man becomes a buddha, religion remains relevant. Only for a buddha is religion irrelevant. He has arrived; now there is no need for any search.There are not different searches for different human beings. The search is singular, it is one, it is universal. The search is for the self, the supreme Self. One wants to know, “Who am I?” because everything else is secondary. Without knowing oneself, whatsoever I am doing is pointless. Unless I know exactly who I am, my whole life is going to remain futile. It will not bring fruition, it will not bring flowering, it will not bring fulfillment.The first step has to be that of self-knowledge. But the paradox is that if you start searching for a self you will miss the self. By “a self” I mean the ego, the process of egoing. That is a false self: because we cannot find the true, we start creating the false, just to console ourselves. It is a substitute. But the substitute can never become the truth, and the substitute becomes a bondage.Truth liberates. Substitutes for truth create prisons. The ego is the greatest prison that man has yet invented; you are all feeling suffocated, crushed. It is not that somebody else is doing it to you, you are the doer of it. You have taken a wrong step. Rather than searching for that which is, you have started substituting something for it – a toy, a pseudo thing. It may console you, but it cannot bring celebration to your life. And all consolation is suicidal, because while you remain consoled, time goes on slipping out of your hands.The self is not a self. The self is exactly a no-self: there is no idea of “I” in it, it is universal. All ideas arise in it, but it cannot be identified with any idea that arises in it. All ideas arise in it, all ideas dissolve in it. It is the sky, the context of all contexts, it is the space in which everything happens. But the space itself never happens – it abides, it is always there, and because it is always there, it is easy to miss it. Because it is so much there and always there, you never become aware of its presence.It is like the air; you don’t become aware of its presence. It is like the ocean that surrounds the fish; the fish never becomes aware of it. It is like the pressure of the air; it is so much, but you are not aware of the pressure, it has always been there. It is like gravitation; it is so much, but you are not aware of it. It is like the earth rushing with great speed round and round the sun; the earth is a spaceship, but nobody is aware of it. We are aboard a spaceship, and it is going at a great speed. Still we are not aware of it.Awareness needs some gaps. When there are no gaps you fall asleep; you cannot remain aware.If one has always been healthy, one will not be aware of health. Awareness needs gaps – sometimes you should not be healthy. You should fall ill, then you have the sense of health. If there was no darkness in the world and there was only light, nobody would have ever known light; people would have missed it.That’s how we go on missing the original self – call it God or nirvana, it doesn’t matter. Sufis have two beautiful words. One is fana, fana means dissolving the ego, dissolving the false substitute. And the other word is baqa, baqa means the arrival, the arising, of the real self.The real self is universal. How to find it? It is not far away, so you are not to make a long journey to it. It is so close that no journey is needed at all. It is within you. Rather than journeying, you will have to learn how to sit silently.That’s what meditation is all about – just sitting silently doing nothing. Thoughts arise: you watch. Desires arise: you watch. But you remain the watcher. You don’t become a victim of the desires and the thoughts that are arising; you remain a watcher. You remain the context of all contexts, you remain the space before which everything appears. But the space never appears before itself – it cannot, it is impossible.The mirror cannot mirror itself, the eyes cannot see themselves. I cannot catch hold of my hand with the same hand; it is impossible.This is the most fundamental thing to remember. You are the watcher and never the watched, you are the observer and never the observed, you are the witness and never the witnessed. You are pure subjectivity. You never appear as an object – how can you appear as an object in front of yourself? Whatsoever appears in front of you is not you.Go on eliminating the contents. Go on saying, “Neti, neti, I am not this, I am not this.” Go on eliminating, and a moment comes when there is nothing left to eliminate. There is pure silence. No content moves in front of you, the mirror reflects nothing. That is the moment when self-knowing arises in you. You become illumined, you are enlightened.So these few fundamentals are to be remembered. The self is a no-self. The self is not personal, it is universal. The self is the space or context in which all that has a position in life appears, occurs, arises. It is the screen of life, but the screen itself never appears on the screen, it cannot. Everything else appears on it, it itself remains hidden. It is pure subjectivity.This pure subjectivity is the ultimate goal everybody is searching for. But it seems difficult. We are so prone to become identified with the contents. So rather than searching for the real, we create something unreal, which is easy. The artificial is always easy, you can manufacture it.Your ego is a manufactured phenomenon. And once you have manufactured the ego… How is the ego manufactured? “I am a Hindu” – now you are on the way to creating an ego. “I am beautiful, I am intelligent, I am this, I am that” – you are bringing more and more bricks to make the prison called ego.And this is what we go on doing our whole life. Earn more money, have a bigger bank balance, and your ego will feel more grounded, more supported, more secure. Become famous, the more people know about you, the more you will think you are. Hence the constant search for attention. If nobody pays any attention to you, you are reduced to nothing. If you move on the street and nobody says hello, people go on passing by, not even taking any note of you, suddenly you start feeling the earth disappearing underneath your feet.What has happened? They are not feeding your ego. But people feed each other’s egos, because that’s how they can be fed. Somebody says, “How are you?” He is really saying, “Ask me, ‘How are you?’” He is simply asking for mutual gratification. And people do gratify each other; we support each other’s egos: somebody praises you, you praise him in return.That’s what we call the society. It depends on mutual satisfactions, and the greatest satisfaction seems to be ego-gratification.Hence people are interested so much in politics, because politics can gratify you as nothing else can. If you become politically powerful the whole country is in your grip; the whole country has to pay attention to you. You can impose your will on people; you have the power.The power of a politician is the power of violence. Now he controls the whole mechanism of violence: he controls the police, the government, the military, he controls everything. He can impose his will on you. That’s why politicians tend to become violent sooner or later. Politicians hanker deep down for wars, because it is only in war that a politician becomes a great politician. If you go through history you will see the point.Winston Churchill would not have been such a great leader if there had been no Second World War. Neither would Adolf Hitler have been such a power if there had been no Second World War, nor would Mussolini. The war created the context: they were able to be as violent as possible. They were able to butcher people, to murder people, in millions.People immediately pay attention when you are violent. If you live a peaceful life, no newspaper is going to report about you in your whole life. But if you kill somebody or you commit suicide, you will be immediately in the newspapers.Just a few days ago, Reverend Jones committed suicide with all of his nine hundred disciples. You had never heard about this poor man before, nobody knew that there was anybody like that. Now the whole world knows.They had lived in that commune for many years, but nobody would take any note of them. It is possible that had you taken note of them, they might not have needed to go to such an extreme, they might not have committed suicide. This is his way of making the whole world feel his presence – this is a very pathological way, ugly, but this is again the same phenomenon. People are searching for the ego. If they cannot find it through being creative, they will find it through being destructive. If they cannot find it by being a great saint, they will find it by being a great sinner.Somebody asked George Bernard Shaw, “Where would you like to go when you die – to heaven or to hell?” He said, “It all depends.”The man said, “What do you mean, ‘It all depends’?”He said, “If I am going to be the first in heaven, then to heaven. If I am going to be second there, no. Then it is better to be in hell but be first.”He is joking, but he is telling a truth – a truth about you, a truth about the whole humanity, the way it lives through ambition, through egoing.Remember, the real self has nothing to do with anybody else paying attention to you. Note the difference: the false self needs others’ attention to be paid to you, and the real self only needs your attention – just your attention, and that’s enough.If you turn your attention inward, you will know the real self. If you go on seeking others’ attention, you will continuously live in a false entity which is always ready to disappear if you don’t feed it continuously. It has to be supported.The ego is not an entity. It is not a noun, it is a verb. That’s why I am saying it is egoing. You cannot remain satisfied with any attention paid to you, you have to ask and hanker for more. You have to go on egoing; it is only through egoing that the ego can exist. It is a process – and it is so false and its demands are so ugly. It is a lie. It demands more and more lies from you, and to gratify it you have to become utterly false. You have to become a personality.A personality means a false phenomenon, a mask. You have to become an actor; you are no longer a real person, you are no longer authentic. You don’t have any substance, you are just a shadow. And because of this shadow there is always fear of death, because any moment this shadow can disappear.Your bank can go bankrupt, and immediately you are gone, you are nobody. Your power can be lost, because there are other competitors pushing you. This whole life is a constant pushing and pulling, hence there is so much agony.Do you know the root of the word agony? It comes from ag, ag means pushing. You are continuously being pushed, and in your turn you are pushing others; that creates agony.The whole world lives in anguish and agony. Only the person who comes to know his real self goes beyond it and enters the world of ecstasy. There are two states: agony and ecstasy.You are in agony, as everybody else is. And the search is for ecstasy. Remember always, your commitments, your ideologies, your so-called ultimate values, your theologies, philosophies and religions provide contexts, often valuable contexts, for individual existence. But they are not what one is.You are not even your body. You are not your mind. You are neither black nor white, you are neither Indian nor German. You cannot be defined in any way, all definitions will fall short. You are indefinable; you are something that surpasses all definitions. You are the vast sky in which planets appear and earths appear, and sun and moon and stars – and they all disappear, and the sky remains as it has remained always. The sky knows no change. You are that unchanging sky. Clouds come and go, you are always here.When Raman Maharshi was dying, somebody asked, “Bhagwan, soon you will be leaving your body; where will you go?” He opened his eyes, laughed and said, “Where can I go? I have been here, I will be here. Where can I go – where? There is nowhere to go. I am everywhere. I have been here and I will remain here for ever and ever.” He is saying that he has come to know his being as the sky; he is no longer a cloud.If you really want to search for the real self, don’t get attached to any commitment, to any program, to any idea. Remain unattached, flexible, fluid; don’t become stagnant. Remain always in a state of unfrozenness; don’t freeze. The moment you freeze, you have something false in your hands; a cloud has arisen. Remain in a state of melt; don’t become committed to any form or name. And then something tremendous starts happening to you: you start feeling who you are for the first time. The feeling does not come from the outside, it arises from the inner depths of your being. It floods you. It is light, utter light, it is bliss, utter bliss. It is divine. It is another name for God.Never become crystallized; if you become crystallized into something, you are encaged. Remain free, remain freedom. All identity creates fixation; and every fixation, every identification, is a liability. The more fixed one’s identity, the less experience of which one is capable. The point is not to lack a position, but not to be positional.I am not saying to become unthinking. Remain intelligent, capable of thinking, but never get identified with any thought. Use the thought as a tool, as an instrument; remember that you are the master. Not to be attached to whatever position one has at any particular moment is the beginning of self-knowledge. One is, one experiences aliveness, to the extent to which one can transcend particular positions and can assume other viewpoints.That’s what I mean by remaining fluid, flowing. One should remain available to the present. Die to the past each moment, so that nothing about you remains fixed. Don’t carry a character around yourself; all characters are armors, imprisonments.The real man of character is characterless – you will be surprised. The real man of character is characterless: he has a consciousness, but he has no character. He lives moment to moment. He is responsible, but he responds out of the moment, not out of past contexts. He carries no ready-made programs in his being. The more you have ready-made programs, the more you are an ego. When you have none – no programs, nothing ready-made in you – when each moment you are as fresh as if you are born anew, to me that is freedom. And only a free consciousness can know the true self.This is the search. Nothing else will ever satisfy, nothing else can ever satisfy. All are consolations – and it is better to drop them, it is better to become aware that consolations are not going to help.This is what I call sannyas: dropping consolations, renouncing consolations – not the world but the consolations – renouncing all that is false, becoming true, becoming simple, natural, spontaneous. That’s my vision of a sannyasin, the vision of total freedom.And in those beautiful moments of total freedom, the first rays of light enter you, the first glimpses of who you are. And the grandeur of it is such, and the splendor of it is such, that you will be surprised that you have been carrying the kingdom of God within you and you have remained so unaware, and for so long. You will be surprised that it was possible not to know such a treasure, such an inexhaustible treasure, is within you.Jesus goes on repeating again and again, “The kingdom of God is within you.” Call it the kingdom of God or the supreme self or nirvana or whatever you will, that is our search – everyone’s, not only of human beings but of all beings. Even trees are growing toward it, even birds are searching for it, even rivers are rushing toward it. The whole of existence is an adventure.And that is the beauty of this existence. If it was not an adventure, life would be absolute boredom. Life is a celebration because it is an adventure.The second question:Osho,How did I get so lucky to fall in the grace of your love in these times of such confusion in the world?The times of confusion and chaos are the greatest times to live in. When the society is static there is not much to live for, to live with. When a society is secure and there is no confusion and there is no chaos, then people live a dull, drab, dragging life – comfortable, convenient, stable, but not alive.It is only in the times of chaos and confusion that great things happen, because people are loose. They are loose, uprooted; they can search for new soils, they can search for new lands, they can search for new countries, they can search for new continents of being.This is one of the greatest moments in the history of human consciousness. It has never been so; this is a crescendo.Buddha said – and he seems to have detected it rightly – that after each twenty-five centuries there comes a moment of great turmoil and chaos. And that is the time when the greatest number of people become enlightened.Now twenty-five centuries have passed since Buddha. Again you are coming closer and closer to a moment where the past will lose all meaning. When the past loses all meaning, you are free, you are untethered from the past. You can use this freedom to grow tremendously, to grow to undreamed-of heights.But you can destroy yourself too. If you are not intelligent, the confusion, the chaos, will destroy you. Millions will be destroyed –out of their unintelligence, not because of the chaos. They will be destroyed because they will not be able to find a secure and comfortable and convenient life, as was possible in the past. They will not be able to find where they belong. They will have to live on their own sources; they will have to be individuals, they will have to be rebels.The society is disappearing, the family is disappearing; now it is very difficult. Unless you are capable of being an individual it is going to be difficult to live. Only individuals will survive.Now people who have become too accustomed to slavery, accustomed to being commanded, accustomed to being ordered by somebody else – people who have become too accustomed to father figures – they will be in a state of insanity. But that is their fault, it is not the fault of the times. The times are beautiful, because the times of chaos are the times of revolution.It is possible now to get out of the wheel of life and death more easily than it has been possible for twenty-five centuries since Buddha. In Buddha’s time, many people became enlightened; the society was in turmoil. Again it is happening. Great times are ahead – prepare for them.And that’s what I am trying to do here. Orthodox people cannot understand what is happening here; they have no eyes to see it and no heart to feel it. They only have old rotten values, and because of those values they go on judging me according to those values. Those values are out of date. I am creating new people, I am creating new values. I am creating a new future. They live in the past; they cannot understand the future that I am trying to bring here to the earth.My sannyasins don’t belong to the past, they don’t represent any tradition. They belong to the future. They belong to something that is going to happen and has not yet happened. Hence there are no criteria – they cannot be judged easily, and they will be misunderstood.I am going to be misunderstood, because people have their values, and those values come from the past. And I am trying to create a space for the future to happen.You say. “How did I get so lucky to fall in the grace of your love in these times of such confusion in the world?” It is not a question of luck, it is a question of intelligence. That is the only luck in the world – intelligence. And remember, everybody is born with intelligence but they don’t use it, because to be intelligent is to live in danger.The intelligent child will be a constant pain in the neck for the parents; they try to crush his intelligence. Nobody wants an intelligent child, because he creates suspicions in you, he creates doubts in you. An intelligent child asks questions you cannot answer. An intelligent child is a problem for the teachers in the school, in the college, in the university.An intelligent person will always remain a problem wherever he is. So the society tries in every way to destroy your intelligence.I have heard…The teacher told the students that they were going to play a game.“I’ve got something behind my back and I’m going to describe it and you guess what it is,” she said.“I’m holding something round and red. Can someone guess?”“An apple?” little Herbie said.“No,” said the teacher, “but it shows you were thinking. It is a cherry. Now I’m holding something round and orange. Can you tell me what it is?”“An orange?” little Herbie said.“No,” said the teacher, “but it shows you were thinking. It is a peach.”Herbie raised his hand. “Teacher, can I play the game too?”The teacher said, yes, and Herbie went to the back of the room, faced the rear and said, “Teacher, I’m holding something about two inches long with a red tip.”The teacher said, “Herbie!”“No,” said little Herbie, “but it shows you were thinking. It is a match.”Now, these intelligent children cannot be allowed to live! Nobody likes an intelligent person. Hence people start playing unintelligent roles in life, because an unintelligent person is accepted everywhere. That’s why millions of people have become mediocre. Nobody is born mediocre, let me remind you. God gives intelligence to everybody; just as he gives life to everybody, he gives intelligence. Intelligence is an intrinsic part of life.Have you ever seen an unintelligent animal? Have you ever seen an unintelligent bird, an unintelligent tree? Every tree is intelligent enough to find the source of water to send out roots. And you will be surprised, scientists are very much surprised, at how trees find places.When a tree starts sending out its roots, sometimes it sends them hundreds of feet away in a particular direction to where water is. Now, how does it find it? The water is a hundred feet away toward the north; it does not send its roots toward the south, it sends its roots toward the north – a hundred feet away! And not only to natural water sources – sometimes it sends its roots to the pipes, corporation pipes, hundreds of feet away; it detects them. It takes years for it to send those roots. It lives, in its own way, an intelligent life.If there is too much competition, trees grow higher; they have to. That’s why in the jungles of Africa, trees grow very high. The same trees in India won’t grow that high; there is no need, the competition is not that much. If a tree remains small in a thick forest, it will die; it will be in the shadow of other trees. It has to reach the sun; it goes on and on moving upward.Trees are intelligent in their own way, birds are intelligent in their own way, animals are intelligent in their own way. And so is man.You will find the mediocre and the stupid only in human beings. I have never come across a stupid dog – I have tried. But there are millions of stupid human beings. What has happened to human beings? Intelligence is not allowed.The whole society and the pattern of the society is against intelligence; it supports mediocre people. Everybody is happy with a mediocre person, because whenever you are around a mediocre person he is never a problem; he is always ready to be obedient, and he always gives you a feeling that you are superior.If people live intelligently, everybody will be lucky. If you are not lucky, it is not that God has been unfair to you, it is only because you have compromised with the society.You could come to me because you have been courageous enough to use your intelligence. It is not a question of luck, it is only a question of guts, courage. And these days are really beautiful, fantastic. Use these days, these times. You can soar high, higher than has ever been possible before.Millions of people are in the situation now where enlightenment can happen. We can defeat Buddha for the first time. The times are very favorable, because there is so much chaos and so much confusion, and all the old ideologies are dead and dying of their own accord. Man is becoming free, coming out of his shell.The third question:Osho,I have been to many gurus but I have not changed a bit. Why?To expect that just by being to many gurus you will be transformed is foolish. Nobody can transform you. The very idea, the very expectation that somebody else is going to transform you, keeps you unintelligent. When are you going to declare the mastery of your own being? When are you going to take the reins in your own hands? When are you going to say, “I will now live according to myself”?And those so-called gurus you have been to will make you more and more mediocre and stupid. They want your obedience – and only stupid people can be obedient. They will not help you to become more intelligent.It is very rare to find a master. Out of a hundred, ninety-nine are bogus, and the one who is not bogus will demand too much from you. First he will demand intelligence – and you have completely forgotten that you have it at all in the first place. He will demand awareness.The false gurus, the false so-called masters, provide you with better sleeping pills. They provide you with psychological strategies to remain comfortably asleep, they give you lullabies so that you can live a drugged life. Their methods are nothing but psychological tranquilizers, non-medicinal tranquilizers. So for a few days you feel good, you repeat a certain mantra and you feel good, and then you become fed up and you start seeing the point that it is not leading you anywhere. Then you go to another guru, he gives you another method, for a few days again the honeymoon, and then that disappears.But one thing you should be thankful for: it is because of all those gurus that you have come here. And now you cannot goof off; it is impossible.I don’t give you any lullaby, I will give you electric shocks – because that is the only way you can come out of your drugged state.Two drunks were sitting in a bar, thinking of things to do to pass the time.“Let’s play television,” said one.“Okay,” said the other. “How?”“I make believe I’m a great big TV star and you guess who I am. All right,” said the first, “I’m five-foot-four, got blonde hair, blue eyes, I’m 38-24-36 and I’m beautiful.”The second drunk stared at him for a moment. “Never mind who you are,” he said, “kiss me.”This is your state. You have to be shocked, you have to be brought to consciousness. Hence I don’t provide you with any consolations – you would like them, you would love them.So those who come here for consolations can have no understanding of what is happening here. And you can go and on, from one school to another school, from one guru to another guru; that is not going to change you at all. It is not a question of traveling from one place to another place; you will remain that which you are. Unless you are shocked, unless somebody is there who can destroy you, who can destroy you as you are, only then will your real being come out. The unreal has become a thick foliage around you.A Hindu can become a Christian; nothing will change. Instead of Krishna he will start torturing Christ, that’s all. A Jew can become a Hindu; that will not help either. You go on changing your masks, your garments– and the change is needed somewhere deep in your being, not on the periphery but at the core.Morgenstern lived in difficult times. Life was hard, especially if you were a Jew. So he decided to become a Roman Catholic and was baptized.The first time he went to confession, he stole the parish priest’s gold watch. But he was honest, and so he immediately confessed:“Father, I have stolen an expensive watch and now I feel very guilty about it. I confess that what I did was immoral and totally wrong. Please, Father, may I give you the watch?”The priest was surprised but shook his head. “No, I couldn’t possibly accept it.”Morgenstern insisted. “Please, Father, I feel so guilty, won’t you please accept the watch as a sign of my repentance?”“That isn’t possible, my son,” said the priest, moved by Morgenstern’s deep sincerity. “You must return the watch to its original owner.”“Ah!” said Morgenstern with a deep sigh. “I’ve tried, Father, I swear I’ve tried, but I’m afraid the good man doesn’t want it.”“In that case, my son,” said the priest, “I see nothing wrong with your keeping the watch, and since you’ve now confessed, there’s no need at all anymore for you to feel guilty!”You see the Jewish mind?You can go on changing your religion, you can go on changing your philosophy – these are really ways to avoid the real change. The real change has to happen deep down in you. You are unconscious, and the only change that is going to help is to become conscious. You are living mechanically. The only thing that can help is to live life non-mechanically. De-automatize yourself, de-hypnotize yourself.The society has hypnotized you. The society has dulled your senses, it has poisoned you. It wants skillful efficient machines; it does not want men. It has reduced you to a machine. You are a good clerk or a good soldier or a good stationmaster or a good deputy collector – it has reduced you to something which has a utility. It has made you a commodity. It does not want your intelligence, your awareness. You will have to rebel against it.And the gurus you have been to are nothing but agents of the same society. Hence the society respects them, hence the society supports them.I cannot be supported by the society. It is a sheer miracle how I am existing, it is very illogical. I should not be here at all. The society does not support me, it cannot support me. In every possible way it will create – it is creating – hindrances for my work.Just the other day I was reading in the newspaper that a man has suggested to the government that I should be expelled from India. He must be a very religious man, because he says I am destroying religion. And he is not satisfied with just my expulsion – he then suggests my tongue should be cut out so that I cannot speak; and my hands should also be cut off so that I cannot write. And he thinks he is a religious man.But that’s what people have always done. They crucified Jesus, and they were thinking they were doing something very religious. They murdered the great Sufi master, al-Hillaj Mansoor, in exactly the same way. This man who has suggested this to the government may have been part of the crowd who killed Mansoor, because this was the way: his hands were cut off, his tongue was cut out, then his head was cut off. It seems the society goes on perpetuating its old stupidities. And he is thinking that he is suggesting this to protect religion, that religion is in danger – because of me, religion is in danger.Religion is not in danger because of me, but pseudo-religion certainly is in danger. And the society needs pseudo-religions so that the real religion can be avoided, because real religion always creates trouble.A Buddha, a Jesus, a Mansoor, a Sanai – whenever these people walk on the earth they create fire, they create revolution. They start transforming people, from their unconsciousness into consciousness. And then there is trouble.It happens every day here: a couple comes here, and within seven days they have separated. Now, what has happened? And they had lived for twenty years together! For twenty years they were compromising and compromising and compromising. For twenty years they were suffering; they were miserable together. But they were carrying on somehow in a state of unconsciousness.The moment they are here, they start meditating. They go into a few therapy groups, and they become alert and they say, “What have we been doing?” The man comes to see that he has never loved this woman, he has been deceiving – he has been deceiving the woman, he has been deceiving himself. The woman comes to see that she has never loved this man; this man seems to be a stranger, she does not know who he is. And why have they been living together and torturing each other? Suddenly they are awake and the marriage has gone to the dogs.People will be afraid of such a place: their marriage may disappear, their old ways of living may be shattered. It is ultimately good that something wrong falls and disappears, but in the beginning it is painful. Twenty years you have lived with a woman; it is difficult to unclench yourself, it is painful, it is agony.But if you don’t stop a false relationship, you will never be in any true relationship in your life. And a true relationship is a mirror. It helps you to see your face, who you are. But only a true relationship is a mirror. A false relationship is a stone wall; you cannot be mirrored in it, it is utterly futile.Parents are afraid; their children should not come here because I will teach them to be themselves. And if the child wants to be a musician, I will say, “Become a musician, even if you remain a beggar.” And the parents wanted him to become a doctor or an engineer – now there is going to be trouble.The child, if he becomes an engineer, will have much money, prestige, power, but he will miss his soul. He will never come to know any joy in his life; he will know misery, he will never know any rejoicing. But the parents are more interested in money and power and prestige. That’s what has been told to them by their parents; this is their tradition.Each generation goes on corrupting the new generation. Each generation goes on loading the new generation with its own diseases, illnesses and pathologies.If you come here, I am going to unburden you of all your pathologies. And they may be very traditional and very long-respected, and your parents may have carried them for thousands of years, but I will teach you to drop all that nonsense, all that rubbish, and simply become your own being, your own self. Now, the society cannot tolerate it. The society is bound to be inimical, antagonistic toward me. This has always been so.You must have gone to the gurus who are agents of the same rotten society. How can they help you to change? They are there to protect the society. The society gives them respect, that is how the society goes on paying them for their services.Your teachers are in the service of the past. Your priests are in the service of the past, your politicians are in the service of the past. And I want you to become aware of the present.If you have some courage in your heart, and you don’t escape from this surgical energy field, you will be transformed. And remember, I will not transform you, I can only create situations in which you can transform yourself. I am simply creating a field in which things can happen – they are happening. Now don’t escape from here. Just a few months, and then you cannot escape!The fourth question:Osho,Why are you so much against asceticism? Isn't asceticism a valid path to God?Path? It is a pathology. To be an ascetic simply shows that you are masochistic, that you are suicidal, that you enjoy torturing yourself. And by torturing yourself you can create a certain character, but the character will be only on the surface. It will not transform you, it will only be a pretension. It will be only a face, a facade, a camouflage.Ascetics have existed in the world because there are suicidal people. And there is a death instinct in man – Sigmund Freud has called it “thanatos.” Sigmund Freud’s contribution to human growth is immense. In his early life he discovered the life-instinct – sex, eros. And then in his later life, when he was getting old, he discovered another thing – thanatos, against eros.There are two basic instincts in man: one is to live, another is to die. Both are there. If the instinct to live is not supported, the other instinct becomes powerful. If the instinct to live is supported, if life is affirmed, then the other instinct disappears. It is the same energy – either it will flow through eros, or it will flow through thanatos. It depends on you.The religions of the world up to now have been death-oriented. And remember, when I say religions, I don’t include buddhas. I don’t include Bahauddin, Sanai, Attar, Mahavira, Jesus, Mohammed, no. But I include Mohammedanism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism. All the organized religions of the world have been death-oriented. And this is something unbelievable. All the original beings were life-oriented.Buddha is utterly life-oriented, but Buddhism is death-oriented. Mohammed is life-oriented, but Mohammedanism is death-oriented. How does it happen?Just the other day, I was saying that truth transferred from one to another becomes a lie; it goes upside down. When Buddha says something, he means something totally different than that which is understood by the blind and the unconscious people. Everything goes topsy-turvy. His life-affirmation becomes death-affirmation in the disciples. This has been a constant problem. Up to now it has not been possible to transfer truth, and I don’t think it will ever be possible to transfer it because Buddha speaks from the peak of the Himalayas and you listen in the dark valley. By the time it reaches to you, by the time you have interpreted it, it has already gone sour, bitter; it is no longer the same truth.So all the original religious founders were life-affirmative. And all the religions that were born out of their teachings became death-oriented.Asceticism is falling in love with death. It is a pathology, it is not a path. But people respect it, because the ascetic seems so different from you. You love food, he hates food. You love a good bath, he hates to take a bath. Jaina monks don’t take baths – not only that, they don’t clean their teeth either. They are against the body.You love comforts, the ascetic loves discomfort. He is not at ease with comfort, he is at ease only when he is uncomfortable. You call it a path? It is a pathology. The man who is standing on his head, and feels comfortable only when he stands on his head, is ill, is abnormal.All the animals laugh about it. Whenever animals see a yogi standing on his head, they laugh. They cannot believe what has happened to this man. People go on torturing their bodies, twisting their bodies.I have heard…Reggie owned an elephant, but the cost of feeding it was getting out of hand. Then he got an idea. He had seen elephants lift one leg, and even two legs. Once in a circus he’d even seen an elephant lift three legs in the air and stand on just one.So Reggie announced to the world that he’d pay ten thousand dollars to anyone who could make his elephant stand in the air on no legs. However, each person who wanted to try would have to pay a hundred dollars.People came from near and far. They tried everything from coaxing to hypnotism, but no one could make the elephant rise up in the air.Then one day a blue convertible drove up and a little man got out and addressed Reggie: “Is it true that you will pay ten thousand dollars if I make your elephant get off all four legs?”“Yes,” Reggie said. “But you’ve got to pay one hundred dollars to try.”The little man handed Reggie a hundred-dollar bill. Then he went back to the car and took out a metal club. He walked up to the elephant and looked him in the eye. Then he walked behind the elephant and swung hard, hitting the elephant smack on the balls. The elephant let out a roar and flew up into the air.After the little man had collected his ten thousand dollars, Reggie was very depressed. He’d only taken in eight thousand dollars and now he’d not only lost a couple of grand but still had the problem of feeding and housing the elephant.Suddenly Reggie got another inspiration. He knew that elephants could move their heads up and down, but he had never seen one move from side to side. So he announced that he would pay ten thousand dollars to anyone who could make his elephant move his head from side to side. However, each person who wanted to try would have to pay one hundred dollars.People came from near and far. They paid their hundred dollars and they tried, but of course none succeeded.Then just when things were going well, a familiar blue convertible drove up and the little man came out. He addressed Reggie: “Is it true that you will pay me ten thousand dollars if I can make your elephant move his head from side to side?”“Yes,” said Reggie. “But you’ve got to pay a hundred dollars to try.”The little man handed Reggie the hundred dollars. Then he returned to his car and took out his metal club. He walked up to the elephant.“Do you remember me?” he asked.The elephant nodded by shaking his head up and down.“Do you want me to do it again?”The elephant quickly shook his head – no.Even elephants understand it – but man is such a fool. Asceticism – a path? It is a pathology.Life has to be lived in its totality. Your energies have to flow through eros: eros is life, love is life. And whenever your energy is flowing against love, against life, beware: you are falling astray, you are going away from God. God is life, God is eros.Now see the point: all the ascetic people and all the ascetic schools are against love, against sex, against life, against food – against living a healthy life of rejoicing.That’s why they are so much against me – because I would like you to live fully, totally, wholly. I would like you to accept life without denying anything to yourself, without feeling in any way guilty. All guilt is a cunning strategy of the priests to divert your energy from life toward death.Why have people done it? There are reasons. The politician wants people not to love life too much – because if people love life too much then people cannot be forced to go to war. Who wants to die? There would be no armies left in the world. People have to be forced against eros, they have to be forced against life, they have to be taught to love death, respect death and feel death as sacred – only then can there be armies. And great armies are needed. The politician is against love, against life, because he needs soldiers for death, to die and to kill.The priest also wants people not to love life. If they love life they will not bother about the temples and the churches and the mosques. And if they really love life they will find God through life – the priest will not be needed. The priest is needed only when people have gone astray from life – only then can he become the guide and can he tell them, “Now I will lead you to the right path.” First they have to be helped to go astray, then the guides come.First people have to be made ill, then you can sell medicine. Otherwise you cannot sell medicine. If everybody is healthy, who will go to the physician and who will go to the druggist? And who will be able to sell medicine to people? It will be impossible. People have to be ill, only then can factories and factories of medicine go on manufacturing new drugs.The priest needs people to go away from life. The moment they go away from life, they go away from God. Then there is a need for the priest and the temple and the church and the organization and the organized religion. Then people would like to be Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans.Otherwise life is so tremendously satisfying – who bothers? Who cares?Reverend Jones was able to kill nine hundred people, innocent people, for a simple reason: he was training them for death. You will be surprised to know that in Jonestown, lovemaking among the sect members was not allowed. Celibacy was enforced. There were hard, strict rules: the people were not allowed to go outside the commune, no contact with outsiders was allowed. They were living in isolation, they were all ascetics.And it is because of this asceticism that they were ready to commit suicide. Now people are searching for the causes. Somebody thinks that he hypnotized people, somebody thinks something else – a thousand and one reasons are being found. The simple reason is he diverted their eros – that’s all. And eros can be diverted very easily. Down the ages, religious people have been doing the same. He did it to the logical end. Ordinarily monks die slowly; they commit a slow suicide. He went fast and quickly.But there was a tendency, an atmosphere of death. They were practicing death almost every month. Every month he would call the commune together and order them to die. And they were ready. They had said yes so many times that when it was really asked they could not say no. It had become an inbuilt program. And life was so ugly, that’s why they were ready to die.I have always loved a certain story…An English diplomat went to see Adolf Hitler before the Second World War. They were standing on the terrace of a three-story building, talking. Just to show his power to the English diplomat, Hitler ordered one soldier to jump. The soldier immediately jumped, fell on the road and died.The English diplomat was very much shaken. And Adolf Hitler laughed and said, “My whole country is ready to follow my orders in this way.” To emphasize it more, he ordered another soldier to jump. And before the English diplomat could prevent him, he also jumped. To make the thing absolutely clear, he ordered a third soldier – but before he could jump, the English diplomat caught hold of him and said, “Are you mad? What are you doing? Why are you so ready to leave your life?”And the man said, “Leave me alone! You call this life?”To be with Adolf Hitler is far worse – it is better to die. These people who committed suicide must have been living a worse life than death itself. This is the simple logic of it. And the ascetic attitude makes your life so ugly, so intolerable, that one starts thinking of death as a deliverance.I am against ascetic attitudes, because they are ill attitudes, unhealthy, unwholesome. I am all for eros, I am all for life – because life is the temple of God, the only temple. And eros is the only way God is expressed in the world.If you move totally into eros, into love of life, into life-affirmation, into rejoicing, you will find, deep down hidden in life, God himself. Life is his manifestation; he is the hidden source of it. Don’t go away from life – going away is going away from God. Hence my sannyasins are not to renounce but to rejoice.Now people have asked me a few questions: “Can the same thing happen here as happened in Reverend Jones’ commune?” This will be the last place in the world where it could happen, because I teach you love, I teach you life. My whole effort is to make your energy move through life totally – nothing is left. And if you move totally through life, death disappears. Even when you die, you will not see that death is happening to you – you will see only that you are changing your abode, you are changing your garments. You are on an eternal pilgrimage.I teach you life, I teach you abundant life. This cannot happen here – I am not teaching you suicide. It can happen in any ascetic society, in any ascetic commune. But my commune is not ascetic at all. That’s why Christians are against it, and Hindus are against it, and Jainas are against it, and Mohammedans are against it, and everybody is against it – because they are all death-oriented. And my love is unconditionally for life.I teach you to love and to live. Death is impossible here – what to say of suicide? Even death is impossible here. If you die the way I am teaching you, if you live the way I am teaching you, you will never know death. Even dying, you will know that the flame goes on burning forever.The last question:Osho,India is the only country in the world which talks about celibacy so much and yet every four seconds three children are born in India. Please explain this.Ideals create hypocrisy. And if you want to be a hypocrite, the first requirement is to have great ideals. You cannot be a hypocrite if you don’t have any ideals.For example, my sannyasins cannot be hypocrites; it is impossible. Hypocrisy is the shadow, the long shadow, of the great ideal.India is one of the most hypocritical countries. And the reason is that great ideals are being taught to people. Those ideals remain only in the talk – life goes on in a totally diametrically opposite way. People go on talking about celibacy and they go on reproducing children. They go on talking about truth and their life has nothing of truth in it. They go on talking about great morality, and their whole life is immoral.You cannot find a more immoral country in the world than this country, it is impossible to find, because no other country preaches so many ideals. When the ideals are great, you cannot fulfill them; they are so unnatural, they are so impossible. Then the only way is to go on talking about them and go on living in your own way. So you have to live a double life.Indians are great in talking, in sermonizing. In philosophizing, nobody can compete with them. They are great logic-choppers, hair-splitters, great masters of language. But their life is empty, hollow, and is just the opposite.In fact, if you know the ideal of a person, just by knowing the ideal, you can know his life. Tell me what your ideal is, and I will know your life immediately. If celibacy is your ideal, then I know who you are: you are sex-obsessed. Only a sex-obsessed person has the ideal of celibacy. If you are not sex-obsessed there will be no question of celibacy. You will live your life: when sex is happening it is beautiful, when it disappears it is beautiful. Both are sacred moments.Sex is sacred when it happens. When it disappears, that too is sacred. Both have their beauties.When the tree blooms it has beauty, and when the tree is naked of all leaves it has a beauty. Yes, in the fall, trees have a totally different beauty, an austere beauty. Naked, without any leaves, standing against the sky, they look so meditative, so Zen-like. And then in the spring, with great foliage and many flowers, as if they are getting ready to be married – newlyweds, so much celebration; it has a beauty – the beauty of a Sufi.The real man lives his life without any guilt. Sex appears one day and disappears one day. Remember: anything that appears also disappears. Up to the age of fourteen, sex has not appeared. Then suddenly one day, the spring: sex has come into life, with great joys, with great songs to be sung. If one lives it totally, then nearabout the age of forty-two it disappears one day. And the beauty of the fall, and the naked bare tree against the evening sky…Sex exists only from the fourteenth to the forty-second year if things go naturally. But they don’t go naturally – the priest jumps in. He starts talking about celibacy. When all that was needed was the art of love, he starts talking about celibacy. He creates guilt. Sex energy becomes repressed, goes underneath into the unconscious.Now it will remain even at the age of eighty-two. You will remain sex-obsessed; it can’t leave you now.India is a so-called religious country. In fact countries can only be so-called religious. Only individuals can be really religious, countries can only be so-called religious. How can countries be religious? Religion is something that happens in the individual soul. Politics is that which happens in the collectivity. Religion is that which happens in your aloneness.But great ideals go on torturing. India is very heavy-laden – great rocks are on the Indian heart. And because of those rocks the springs of life cannot flow.So, there is no contradiction in it. In fact there is a logical connectedness between these two things – talking of celibacy, and giving birth to three children every four seconds. The more you talk about celibacy, the more sex-obsessed you will become. If you accept sex as a natural phenomenon, you need not talk about celibacy; it comes in its own time.Just as youth turns into old age, sex turns into celibacy. Celibacy is sex lived truly, is the fragrance of sex lived truly. Celibacy is sexuality become mature. Otherwise hypocrisy continues.Meditate over this story:This man was in bed with a married woman when they heard the door open. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “It’s my husband! Quick, hide in the closet!”The man hurried into the closet and closed the door. Suddenly he heard a small voice saying, “It’s very dark in here.”“Who is that?” he asked.“That’s my mother out there,” the small voice said. “And now I’m going to scream.”“Please don’t!” the man said.“Okay, but it’ll cost you money,” the boy said.“Here’s five dollars.”“I’m going to scream!” said the small voice.“Okay, here’s ten dollars!”“I’m going to scream,” the small voice said.“Here’s twenty dollars.”Finally, when the boy turned down thirty-five dollars, the man said, “All I have is forty dollars.”“I’ll take it.”At last, the husband left and the man was able to get out of the closet and make a hasty exit.That afternoon, the mother took the boy with her on a shopping trip.“I want to get that bicycle,” he said.The mother said, “No, you can’t. It costs too much money.”The boy said, “I’ve got forty dollars.”The mother said, “Where would you get forty dollars?”The boy wouldn’t talk, she began to berate him. He refused to respond. She slapped his face. He stood stoically. Finally, twisting his arm, she dragged him into the nearby neighborhood church and approached the parish priest. “Father, my son has forty dollars and he won’t tell me where he got it. Maybe you can find out?”The priest nodded. He led the boy into a confessional booth. The boy sat on one side and the priest on the other. The boy said, “It’s very dark here…”And the priest said, “Now, don’t you start that again!”Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-03/

If you know your own worth,what need you care aboutthe acceptance or rejection of others?Worship him as if you could seehim with your physical eyes;though you don’t see him,he sees you.Whilst in this landof fruitless pursuits,you are always unbalanced, alwayseither all back or all front;but once the seeking soul has progressedjust a few paces beyond this state,love seizes the reins.While this world remains,that one cannot be;whilst you exist,God cannot be yours.The coming of deathis the key which unlocksthe unknown domain;but for death, the door of true faithwould remain unopened.If you yourselfare upside down in reality,then your wisdom and faithare bound to be topsy-turvy.Stop weaving a net about yourself:burst like a lion from the cage.Melt yourself down in this search:venture your life and your soulin the path of sincerity;strive to pass from nothingness to being,and make yourself drunk with the wine of God.Mind is the original fall – the fall from the state of being. Mind is the original sin. To be in the mind is to be in the world: not to be in the mind is to be in God.This much is the difference – but a difference that makes a difference.The fall has to be understood. Meditate over three words: being, doing, having. From being to having is the fall, and doing is the process of coming from being to having. Being is God, having is the world, doing is the process of falling from being to having.Hence, the mind is a doer. The mind constantly wants to be occupied. A great hankering to remain busy; that is the mind. One cannot sit alone; one cannot sit in a passive receptivity, not even for a few moments. It is such a torture for the mind, because the moment you stop doing, the mind starts disappearing.If you go to a Zen master and ask, “What do you do here? What are these people, your followers, doing?” he will say, “They just sit. They don’t do a thing.”It happened…A king came to visit the monastery of a Zen master. The master took him around; he was very interested in knowing everything about the monastery. He took the king to every place except one – the central temple. And that was the most imposing building, and yet whenever the king asked, “Why don’t you take me to the temple?” the master would behave as if he had not heard.Finally, the king was very angry, because he was even taken to bathrooms and toilets. He said, “Are you mad or something? Why don’t you take me to the temple?”And the master said, “For a certain reason – because you are constantly asking, ‘What do you do here?’ In the library we read: I can take you to the library. In the bathrooms we take baths: I can take you to the bathrooms. In the kitchen we prepare food. But to that temple I cannot take you because we don’t do a thing there! That is the place where we move into non-doing, into non-action. And it will be impossible to explain that to you – that’s why. You are a great king, you are a great doer, and you are so engrossed in having more and more. You understand the ways of the mind, but you will not understand the ways which are not of the mind.”The mind is a doer. Watch your own mind and you will understand. What I am saying is not a philosophical statement, it is just a fact. I am not proposing any theory for you to believe or to disbelieve, but something that you can watch in your own being. And you will see it – whenever you are alone, you immediately start looking: something has to be done, you have to go somewhere, you have to see somebody. You can’t be alone. You can’t be a non-doer.Doing is the process by which the mind is created; it is condensed doing. Hence, meditation means a state of non-doing. If you can sit silently doing nothing, suddenly you are back home. Suddenly you see your original face, suddenly you see the source. And that source is sat chit anand, it is truth, it is consciousness, it is bliss – call it God, or nirvana, or what you will.From being to doing to having – this is how Adam-consciousness arrives in the world. Move backward, from having to doing, from doing to being – this is what Christ-consciousness means. But Sufis have a very tremendously significant message for the world. They say the perfect man is one who is capable of moving from being to doing to having to doing to being, and so on, so forth. When the circle is perfect then the man is perfect.One should be capable of doing. I am not saying that you should become incapable of doing; that will not be of any value, that will be simply impotence. You should be capable of doing, but you should not be engrossed in it. You should not become involved in it, you should not become possessed by it, you should remain the master.And I am not saying that all that you have has to be dropped, I am not saying to renounce all that you have. Use it, but don’t be used by it, that’s all. Then the perfect man is born.I call that perfect man a sannyasin: he will be Adam plus Christ. The worldly man is Adam, and up to now the otherworldly man has been involved with Christ-consciousness. But both are half-half.Man needs to become a totality, a wholeness. And my definition of being holy is nothing but to be whole – capacity to come into the world and yet remaining above it, beyond it; capacity to use the mind but yet remaining centered in your being. Then the mind is a mechanism of immense value; then it is not a sin to have a beautiful mind. You have a beautiful instrument of immense complexity, and it is a joy to use it, just as it is a joy to drive a beautiful car which is a perfect mechanism.There is nothing like the mind, if you can use it; then the mind is divine too. But if you are used by it, and your sky gets lost in the clouds of the mind, then you’ll remain in misery, in ignorance.The arrival of the mind happens through getting identified with the contents of consciousness. Just a small change, a single step is needed, and that step bridges this to that. That single step bridges the world to god, the outer to the inner, the mundane to the sacred. What is that single step? Non-identification.Remain a witness. Always remember to remain a witness: whatsoever passes in the mind, know perfectly well you are not it. You are not the stuff called mind. Once you become identified with any stuff of the mind, you are trapped in a prison. Then you can go on changing and re-arranging the stuff again and again, but nothing will happen.That’s what people go on doing – improving upon themselves, creating a beautiful character, becoming saintly, religious, but the basic thing has not yet been done. They are simply rearranging the stuff of the mind.You can go on rearranging the furniture of your house; you can arrange it in better ways, far more aesthetically, but it remains the same stuff. The sinner and the so-called saint are not very different; both are different arrangements of the same mind.The real sage is one who has become aware that he is not the mind at all. The idea of sin arises in him, and he remains aloof; and the idea of being a saint arises in him, and he remains aloof. He gets identified with nothing – anger or compassion, hate or love, good or bad. He remains non-judgmental, he does not condemn anything in the mind. If you are just a witness, what is the point of condemning anything? And he does not praise anything of the mind – if you are just a witness, again, praise is just futile. He remains cool and collected and centered. The mind goes on raving around him, just out of the past momentum.For thousands of lives you have remained identified with the mind, you have poured so much energy into it. It goes on revolving and revolving for a few months, even for a few years. But if you can remain a silent watcher, a watcher on the hills, then slowly, slowly the energy, the momentum, is lost and the mind comes to a stop.The day the mind stops, you have arrived. The first vision of what God is and what you are happens immediately – because once the mind stops, your whole energy that has remained involved with it is released. And that energy is tremendous, it is infinite: it starts falling on your self. It is a great benediction, it is grace.The so-called revolutionaries go on failing because they go on re-arranging the same stuff of the mind. Somebody believes in God, and then comes a revolutionary who says, “There is no God and I don’t believe in any God.” But he is as much a fanatic about his idea as the people who believe in God.Believers and disbelievers are both fanatics. One has become attached to the yes, the other has become attached to the no, but yes or no both are part of the mind. You have chosen one part, somebody else has chosen another part. One is a Christian, another is a Hindu, but both are minds. One has chosen the Bible, the other has chosen the Vedas, but both are part of the mind.Then who is really religious? One who has not chosen from the mind at all. You cannot call him Christian, you cannot call him Hindu, you cannot call him communist, you cannot call him theist or atheist. He simply is: indefinable he is. You cannot label him. Being is so vast that it cannot be labeled, no word is adequate enough to describe it. In that vastness is freedom, in that vastness is bliss.This is real revolution: jumping from the mind to the being. And the process will remain the same. If doing is the process of falling from being to having, then non-doing will be the process of coming back home.Meditation is not something that you do: meditation is something that happens when you are not doing anything at all. You can sit apparently unmoving, apparently not doing anything, but deep down the mind can continue. That’s how it happens in the monasteries, how it happens in the caves. You may not have much to do, but you can go on doing just a few things again and again. You can go on repeating a mantra: that will do, it is enough for the mind. It will go on doing the same act again and again, playing the same tape again and again, for years, and it will not die.Three yogis are sitting in a cave meditating. A horse comes by, looks in, and goes. A few years pass and one of the yogis says, “A horse came in.”A few more years pass and another says, “No, it was a mare.”After a few more years the third says, “If there is going to be an argument, I am leaving.”Now, nothing has happened for so many years, a horse just came and looked in, but that is enough to keep you occupied for years. It is enough, the mind can live even on this much stuff. One has to be very aware that it is not a question of whether you are involved in many, many things or you are just doing a few things; it is not a question of quantity. The question is of quality.You may be very rich, you may be a king and have many possessions and have to remain involved in a thousand and one things, and then you may renounce the kingdom and all your possessions and become a beggar and live in a hut – this will not make any difference at all. To outsiders, to spectators, it will look like a great revolution has happened: the emperor has become a beggar, he has renounced so much. But nothing has happened inside.First you were involved with the affairs of the kingdom, now you will be involved with the affairs of the small hut. Just the quantity has been reduced, but by reducing the quantity, the quality of your consciousness never changes. The poor man is worried about his bullock cart, and the rich man is worried about his golden chariot. But the worry is the same; worrying is the same quality. The poor man is worried about tomorrow’s food, and the king is worried about the neighboring country; the object of worry is different, but the process of worrying is the same.The question is how to change your focus from the mind to the being. Doing has brought you into the world, doing is the ladder that has brought you into the world; non-doing will be the ladder… And non-doing is not inactivity. That point has to be understood well, then you will be able to understand Hakim Sanai’s sutras of today.Non-doing is not inactivity, it is not inaction. Action is there, because action is life. If action completely disappears, you will be dead. Even to breathe is an action; to eat, to digest, to sleep are all activities. To live is to be active. Then what is non-doing if it is not inactivity? If you understand non-doing as inactivity, you will have missed the whole point of it. Now inactivity will become your occupation. You will be constantly occupied with not doing this and not doing that. Your process will become negative, but it is still doing: “I can’t do this, I can’t do that.” Now you are worried. The same tensions will still be there: “I can’t eat this, I can’t eat that, I can’t wear this, I can’t wear that.” Now you are becoming negative – but the process, the ego, is still there; the mind is still there. It is standing upside down, it is doing a headstand, but it is the same mind.Non-doing is something which has nothing to do with action, but has much to do with the ego, with the idea of the ego. The doer is the ego: one has to become a non-doer. Then God is the doer. Then you are in a let-go. Then you don’t push the river, then you don’t create agony for yourself by pushing.Let me remind you of what I was telling you just the other day: agony comes from a root ag – ag means pushing. The more you push the river, the more agony is created. And while you are pushing the river, certainly you are trying to swim upstream. You are going against nature, against Tao, against God.The non-doer is one who has relaxed with the river, who is floating with the river, flowing with the river, one who has become part of the river, who does not think himself separate at all, one who has no individual destiny. That is the meaning of non-doing. Now the destiny of the total is his destiny. “Wherever the whole is going, I am also going – wherever, to whatsoever destination or no-destination. Wherever this beautiful existence is moving, I am part of it. I am a ripple in this great lake, just a small ripple. I need not have an individual destiny.”Out of individual destiny arises fear, anguish, agony. Out of individual destiny – “I have to do something, I have to be somebody, I have to reach somewhere” – the mind is created. Doing means: “I have some idea how I should be, what I should be.” Non-doing means: “I drop all ideas of my being separate from existence.”Non-separation is non-doing. Action continues, but it is no longer your action. Now it is natural. If a snake passes by on the footpath, you have gone for a morning walk and a snake passes by, you simply jump out of the way of the snake. It is not that you have done it – action has happened, but it is natural. You did not think about it, you didn’t ponder over it. You were not ready for it; you may not have come across a snake ever before in your life. You had not practiced it, it is not a program in your mind. You responded. In the form of the snake, there was death. You responded – immediately, instantly. The mind never came in, because the mind needs time to ponder, to think, to contemplate, and there is no time, death is so close by. You simply jumped.Sitting underneath a tree when the snake has passed, you may think about it; now you have enough time to think. But in that moment, in that momentous moment when the snake was facing you, you simply acted – not out of the mind but out of your totality. It was God’s act.The man who really wants to become a non-doer starts acting as a vehicle of the divine, of the whole. Action continues, but the actor disappears. That is the meaning of non-doing. You live the same life, but now you have a totally different quality, a different flavor to it.The sutras:If you know your own worth,what need you care aboutthe acceptance or rejection of others?A very fundamental thing. Sanai says: If you know your own worth… you need not be worried about what others think about you, whether they accept you or reject you. If you are worried about others’ rejection and acceptance, that simply shows one thing – that you don’t know your own worth, that you don’t know your own being, that you don’t know that God resides in you, that you are an abode of the divine.Hence you are worried what people are thinking about you – because on their thinking, on their opinion, will depend much. Your ego depends on others’ opinions. Your being depends on nobody. That’s why the man of being is always a rebel, and the man who lives in the ego has to be very, very, compromising with the society. The egoist has to compromise, because if he does not compromise, nobody is going to fulfill his ego. The ego needs others’ support, it needs props from others. The more people like you, the better and more polished and refined an ego you can have.That’s why people read books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, or Napoleon Hill, and others. There are thousands of these so-called philosophers who go on teaching people how to polish the ego in a better way, how to decorate it.The modern mind is very much concerned about how you look to others. Why? Because we have lost all sense of our own being. Now all that we have is the ego, and the ego needs others’ support. If you don’t fulfill their expectations about you, they will withdraw their support. And the more you fulfill their expectations, the more of a slave you become. Whatsoever they want you to do, you do. You are just obedient, constantly compromising. Whether you like it or not does not matter to you; the whole question is whether others like it. If they want you to smile, you smile. The smile may be phony, but that is not the point – because people like it. And when they like your smile, they will love you. And when they love you, they will give attention to you, they will respect you. They will fulfill your need to be needed.This is the whole process that we call our life. And if this life remains a constant frustration, it is not a wonder.If you know your own worth, what need you care about the acceptance or rejection of others? The man who knows himself is completely unworried about what others say.When Jesus was carrying his cross, was he worried about what others were saying? They were all making him, or trying to make him, a laughingstock. They were abusing him, they were cutting jokes about him, they were throwing banana skins at him. They were ridiculing him in every possible way, in a very inhuman way. But was Jesus worried? Not at all, because they cannot take anything of his being. And what they can take, he has already renounced; he has dropped all that can be taken by others. Now he exists as a naked being, his own self, which not even death can take away. Fire cannot burn it, no sword can cut it. All that can be taken by others has already been dropped by him. Now people can laugh: he can watch. He can watch unperturbed undisturbed.When Mansoor was killed, he looked at the sky and laughed loudly. Thousands of people had gathered to ridicule him, to abuse him, to condemn him. They could not understand why he was laughing. The situation was such that if he had been crying it would have been okay, but why was he laughing? And somebody from the crowd asked, “Mansoor, why are you laughing?”He said, “I am laughing because you think you are killing me! You cannot kill me. And the one you are killing, I am not that. I am laughing at your foolishness. You are killing my body – it is like burning my garments – and I am standing there and laughing at the foolishness of it all. The one you can kill, I have renounced myself. Only that which is indestructible, only that which is immortal, I have saved. Now there is no fear: no thief can steal it and no murderer can kill it. Hence, I am laughing. You people who have gathered here are all stupid – that’s why I am laughing.”But the society, from the very beginning, starts taking your self-worth from you. The child – every child around the earth, in all the societies – is forced to renounce his being, is forced to accept others’ opinions about himself. Every child is born absolutely accepting himself as he is. He has no dislike for himself, he is utterly in love with himself. Each child is born with great love for himself; he has self-love, self-respect – because he is not yet a mind.But the parents are afraid, the society is afraid if he remains being-oriented he will never be a slave. And the society needs slaves, the society needs obedient people. The society does not need individuals, it needs phony personalities. It needs people who are efficient, but not intelligent. It allows intelligence only to the extent that you remain efficient, but it does not allow your intelligence to grow to its maximum – because at the maximum, intelligence will be so rebellious, so revolutionary, it will be fire.And the society is so rotten, it cannot allow that much fire to people, that much freedom to people. It needs dead people, dull people, unintelligent people, so they can go on and on working for others’ interests – for the priest, for the politician, they go on working. It needs millions of slaves. It’s really a miracle that, once in a while, a Buddha, a Jesus, a Sanai, escapes from the clutches of the society and becomes independent.The society, from the very beginning, teaches you, “Listen to what others say about you, because that is what you are.” Now, this is so stupid, the whole idea: The others don’t know themselves, and they decide who I am. I don’t know about myself, who I am, and I decide about others, who they are. This is a mutual deception. I don’t know who I am, you don’t know who you are: you decide about me, I decide about you. Blind people deciding about each other; blind people telling each other, “You are beautiful; your face is so beautiful” – or “So ugly.” Blind people deciding who is a sinner and who is a saint…And such great fear is created from the very beginning in every child that your whole life you are tortured by it. If somebody does not think well of you, you lose your whole night’s sleep – you cannot sleep: somebody doesn’t think well of you. Why does it matter? Who is he to decide about you? But the reason is that you have forgotten yourself; you don’t know who you are. You depend on him – if he doesn’t think well of you, then something is wrong with you. You start losing self-respect.When nobody respects you, how can you respect yourself? Your self-respect is just a cumulative effect of many people pouring their respect toward you. And these are the ignorant people, as ignorant as you are. They know nothing, but this is the way of manipulating each other. “I respect you, because I want you to be manipulated by me. By respecting you I am paying you, I am bribing you, to be manipulated by me. You respect me because you want to manipulate me.”This is how it goes on. The man who knows his self-worth, the man who knows who he is, will remain absolutely unconcerned. And just see the point: when you are absolutely unconcerned with what people say about you, you have a freedom, a psychological freedom, you are out of the psychological slavery of the society. Your soul is born.“I am afraid I have developed a terrible habit,” the patient told his psychiatrist. “Wherever I am, I can’t help talking to myself. Is there anything you can do for me?”“I suppose there is,” the psychiatrist replied. “But I should warn you it will be a long, slow, painful treatment, and very expensive as well. But suppose you do talk to yourself – is that so bad?”“No, I guess it isn’t,” the patient agreed. “But I am such a bore!”Nobody can live with himself, hence you need others. They cannot live alone themselves, hence they need you. They are boring, you are boring – and both are thinking that by being together the boredom will disappear. It will not only be doubled, it will be multiplied. Have you ever seen more bored people than couples?You can see – if a couple is passing by on the road, you can know immediately whether they are husband and wife or not. If they are husband and wife, they both look so bored, utterly bored. If the man looks happy and the woman looks happy, then they are not husband and wife. She must be a wife to somebody else, and he must be a husband to somebody else.Once I was traveling in a train; a woman was traveling with me, and her husband or friend was in another compartment. At every station, wherever the train stopped, he would come again. Sometimes he would bring ice cream, sometimes sweets, sometimes this and that.I asked the woman, “Who is this man?”She said, “He is my husband.”I said, “Don’t lie!”She said, “How did you come to know?”“Husbands are not known to do such things – at every stop! Once the husband has escaped from the wife, then only at the last stop – even if at the last stop he turns up you are fortunate! So. At each stop he comes bringing this and that?”She said, “You are right. He is not my husband, he is just my boyfriend.”I asked her, “How long have you been together?”She said, “Nearabout seven years.”I said, “Again wrong!”She said, “How did you come to know?”“Seven years is too long a time! Honeymoons are finished within fifteen days – and this whole thing seems to be like a honeymoon.”She said, “You surprise me – we really are going on a honeymoon! I have known him only for seven or eight days.”Everybody is bored with himself. That’s why when Buddha says, “Sitting silently, I have arrived, and bliss has happened to me,” we listen to him but we don’t believe him. Or, maybe he is just an exception – because when you sit silently, only boredom happens and nothing else.Everybody has tried sometimes to sit silently like a buddha, but within minutes you are so fed up with yourself, because the mind goes on churning and churning. The inner talk continues, and it is boring. You know these things. You have been boring others, now you are boring yourself. You have heard these things said by your mind so many times, and it goes on and on with no stop. And all that happens is when you are alone you become aware of your mind. When you are with others you forget yourself, you become interested in the other, the other becomes interested in you. That is a kind of self-deception.All meditation techniques say that unless you are capable of being alone, you will never be able to know your being. It will take a certain time for the mind to slow down. But if you can sit silently for a few hours every day, unoccupied, doing nothing – the mind will go mad in the beginning, will go very crazy, round and round it will run, but if you can go on patiently waiting and waiting and waiting – you will see that slowly, slowly the momentum of the mind is disappearing. Thoughts are moving but not so fast – not running but limping, puzzled, looking at you: “What has happened to you?” Not so powerful, as if their life has disappeared; not so self-confident, but shaky, looking at you, puzzled, wondering, “What are you doing?”If you go on watching your thoughts for a certain time, one day the miracle happens: even for a few moments if it happens, you have looked into your being. In those few moments you have been with your being; the mind disappeared, there was not a single thought moving by. And once you have contacted your being, you will never be worried what others say. They can condemn you, they can think of you as a sinner or they can worship you, they can think of you as a saint – it is all the same. Success and failure are the same, fame or defame are the same. Whether anybody knows about you, or nobody knows about you, is the same.Just contemplate on that quality when nothing affects you. For the first time you are rooted, for the first time you are centered, integrated. For the first time, the mind is not and you are.Worship him as if you could seehim with your physical eyes;though you don’t see him,he sees you.And only when you have become completely indifferent to what people say about you will you be able to face God. Otherwise you remain facing people. When you have become utterly indifferent to what people say about you, you are capable of turning Godward. Otherwise your eyes and your ears and your senses are all focused on others; they are outgoing, they are not ingoing.Once you have become capable of dropping people and what they say about you, your energy is available to move toward Godward. Worship him… Now let your energy become worship. And by worship is meant wonder, awe, love. By worship is not meant any formal worship: going to a temple and worshipping a statue is not meant. Worship is a new vision, a new insight into reality.When the child looks at the sun rising, look into his eyes. That is worship – he is so mystified, in such awe. When the child looks at the starry night, look into his eyes. Those stars reflected in his eyes – that is worship.The child knows what worship is. We have forgotten, because we have forgotten the language of wonder. We have become too knowledgeable. When the sun rises, we know what it is. Nobody really knows, but we have been to school, to college, to university, so we have become knowledgeable. When a flower blooms, we know what the name of the flower is, what species it belongs to, and from what country it comes. But all these things are meaningless, irrelevant.Something wonderful is happening, the flower has opened, the fragrance is released. The flower is utterly beautiful, alive, and you simply label it. You say, “This is a rose” – and you think you have known it just by giving it a name? You have missed. You have de-mystified the flower, and hence you have missed the wonder of it. Otherwise, each flower will give a thrill to your heart, each star will give you a new beat and each bird will start singing within you.Life is so psychedelic, it is such a splendor. To feel the wonder of it, to feel the awe, is worship. And then in some unknown moment you may bow down to existence. You may kneel down on the earth, or you may fall on the sand, in great prayer, in great love, as if the earth is your mother – it is, the existence is your mother – and great love will have an upsurge in you. That upsurging love is worship.Worship him as if you could see him with your physical eyes; though you don’t see him, he sees you. Whenever you are in a worshipful moment, you will be surprised: the whole existence is watching you, the whole existence is seeing you, is caressing you, is caring about you. You will feel some invisible hands caressing you, some invisible eyes looking at you, some invisible energy embracing you.Whilst in this landof fruitless pursuits,you are always unbalanced, alwayseither all back or all front;but once the seeking soul has progressedjust a few paces beyond this state,love seizes the reins.If you allow worship to happen, love soon arrives – and a love that you have not even dreamt about. The love that you know is not real love, because there is no feeling of mystery in it, no awe, no worship, no prayer, in it.If you really love a woman, you will love her as a goddess. If you really love a man, you will love him as a god. There is no other way of love. Love transforms everything into the divine; that is love’s chemistry. If love does not do that, then it must be something else. It may be lust, it may be sexual desire. It may be just a need – physical, psychological.Love is not a need. Love is an overflowing of joy. It happens only to worshippers, to prayerful people. Otherwise, you remain in this futile world: …this land of fruitless pursuits… From your childhood to your old age, what do you go on doing? Playing with toys.The little boy was sitting on the curb, crying, and an old man who was passing by came over to him.“What’s the matter, little boy?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”The little boy said, “I’m crying because I can’t do what big boys do.”The old man sat down on the curb and cried too.There is not much difference: children are childish, but your so-called old people are just as childish as children, sometimes even more so. Maturity is very rare; people remain immature. If you are interested only in toys – possessing this, possessing that, becoming famous, reaching some political power, prestige, having money, becoming very famous in the world – if you are interested in these things, you remain part of this stupid world of futile fruitless pursuits. But those pursuits keep you engaged, they keep you occupied. They are intoxicants.And the most surprising thing is that from this fruitless futile world, the world of fruitfulness is not far away. It is very close by, just around the corner.Jim and Joe were two friends who shared an apartment together in Chicago. One day, Jim came home to find Joe weeping into his hands. “I am so unlucky! So unlucky!” he moaned.“You are always saying that, and it is not so,” Jim said.“It is! It is!” Joe said. “I’m the most unlucky fellow you know!”“What happened now?”“Well, I met this beautiful woman on Madison Street. We got to talking and we stopped off at a small bar and had a few drinks. Wow! We got really mellow. When she suggested that I should go to her place, I thought my luck had changed.”“It sounds like it did,” Jim said.“Minutes after we entered her apartment I was in bed with her. I was just starting to climax when we heard the door bang open.”“It’s my husband!” she said.“I didn’t even have time to grab a towel. I bounded for the window and just managed to climb out, hanging on the ledge by my hands, when he barged in.”“He sized up the scene immediately, and then he saw my hands hanging on for dear life. He came to the window and started pounding my knuckles with a hammer. Then he pissed all over me. Then he slammed the window on my bloody fingers.”“Then, as if I did not have enough trouble, two old ladies on the street saw me hanging there stark naked and they started screaming for the police. The cops came and I was arrested. Now do you see what I mean when I say I am unlucky?”“Nonsense,” Jim said, “You are upset, but an experience like that could happen to anyone.”“You don’t understand,” Joe said. “When the cops came to arrest me, I looked down and my feet were only four inches from the ground. Now do you see what I mean when I say I’m unlucky?”The other world is not far away! It is just around the corner – not even a distance of four inches. Just a little change of your focus, of your consciousness, of your awareness, and you move from this to that. And it can happen any moment. All that is needed is the understanding that whatsoever you have been doing up to now, and you are doing now, is futile. Let this sink into your heart as deeply as possible, that whatsoever you are doing is futile.Money is not going to help, fame is not going to help, power is not going to help. Death will come and all will be snatched away from you. And what does it matter how much money you have got? The only real thing in the world is how much being you have got.Having is the fallen state. Being is Christ risen, resurrected.While this world remains,that one cannot be;whilst you exist,God cannot be yours.You can have only one world, this or that. Either you can have the world of dreams, then you cannot have the world with open eyes, the world of waking. If you have the world of waking, you cannot have the world of dreams. And people have chosen the world of dreams.Why have people chosen the world of dreams? For one reason only: they have been forced to forget their reality. And when you do not know your reality, you have to create something to cling to, you have to create a substitute. Nothing is not acceptable: then anything is better than nothing, then even a dream is better than nothing. Then even remaining occupied in futile things is okay – at least one is occupied, one is not wasting one’s time; at least one is doing something, at least one is searching, at least one need not sit and cry for one’s fallen state.At least it keeps you intoxicated: it keeps you hoping – “It has not happened today, but tomorrow it is going to happen.” It goes on creating tomorrows. And you know it has not happened yesterday, and it has not happened today. Yesterday you were thinking it would happen tomorrow; today also you are thinking it will happen tomorrow, and tomorrow also you will go on thinking and postponing.It keeps you, in a certain way, sane. Otherwise nothing is happening – and that will drive you insane.Zen masters, Sufi masters, Hasid masters, all the great masters of the world, say that a disciple should not try sitting silently without a master. Why? Because if a disciple tries sitting silently without a master, soon he will start going crazy. The world of dreams will start disappearing. That was his only world, the only world he had ever known – that will start disappearing into far, faraway, distances like clouds dispersing. And the other world has not come yet; it will come only when the world of dreams has completely gone away, totally gone away. Even if a slight thin layer of dreams is there, it is not possible to see the real.You can have either the dreams or the reality; when all the dreams are gone, the reality will happen. But that will take time. When ninety percent of the dreams are gone, still you have not known the reality. When ninety-nine percent of the dreams are gone, still you have not known the reality. And now you will start becoming very shaky: all that you had is disappearing down the drain, and nothing else has happened.The mind will say, “Rush and catch hold of the disappearing dreams.” Nothingness frightens, nothingness looks like death. You will need somebody to give you the feeling “Don’t be worried, it is perfectly right, this is how it happens. This is how it happened to me too. Just a little more – wait a little more, have a little more patience: that one percent of dreams will also disappear.” And it is very scary. The space is maddening.The master is needed to keep you patient, the master is needed to help you not to become too frightened. The fear is natural; you are falling into an abyss, you are disappearing – because with your possessions your ego will disappear, with your doings your ego will disappear. And slowly, slowly, you will find a nothingness is arising in you. And you were not looking for nothingness, you were looking for God, you were looking for truth, you were looking for something immortal, deathless. Instead of deathlessness happening, death is happening. There is every possibility that if you are alone, you will rush away. A master is needed.And all great masters have created buddhafields. If a field can be created, it is even more helpful. When there are millions of people meditating, a great field is created. You are not alone; there are people ahead of you, there are people behind you. The people who are ahead are telling you, “Yes, this happens, but this disappears.” And you can tell people who are behind you, “Yes, this happens, what is happening to you, but it disappears.” You are in a chain.That’s why communes have been created, down the ages. Around each great master a commune arises – it has to arise. It creates a certain energy field: in that energy field, people can grow more easily. It becomes the Garden.Hakim Sanai has called this book The Walled Garden of Truth, the Hadiqa. When there are thousands of trees blooming, new seeds can take courage and jump into the soil and die, because they know it happens. So many trees are saying, so many flowers are declaring, “Don’t be worried. Disappear into the soil and you will resurrect. This has happened to us.”While this world remains, that one cannot be; whilst you exist, God cannot be yours. You have to disappear like a seed in the soil. That disappearance looks like death – it is not. Only apparently do you die. In fact you are born for the first time. It is resurrection, it is rebirth, you become twice-born. And for the first time you know something of the immortal. You are carrying it in a seed form, and you can know it only when it becomes a flower, when it becomes a fragrance.The seed is gross; the seed is only the potential. Unless it becomes actual, you will not be able to see it; it will remain hidden. And if you cut open a seed, you will not find it either. So if somebody goes to the surgeon and asks him, “Is there God in me?” the surgeon can cut him open and look inside, but he will not find any God anywhere. No X-ray machine is going to give you a picture of your soul.That’s why science goes on saying there is no God, no soul – they are simply dissecting the seed. The seed has not to be dissected; the seed has to fall into the soil and disappear there in the darkness of the soil, in the womb of the earth. It has to disappear there.The master is a womb, the commune is a greater womb: the disciple comes and disappears into the womb. And then one day when the season is ripe, when the spring has come, something sprouts – something that you could never have imagined in the seed. Those two green leaves… And the tree has started growing.The coming of deathis the key which unlocksthe unknown domain;but for death, the door of true faithwould remain unopened.So don’t be afraid of this death that the seed has to face. Every disciple has to face it.The coming of death… So when death starts coming to you, don’t be afraid. It is the beginning of a new life, of life abundant. That is the meaning of the story that Jesus is crucified, and after three days he is resurrected. This is not a historical fact. If you try to make it history you destroy its beauty, you destroy its poetry, you destroy its grandeur. You bring it into the world of facts. It is not a fact, it is an eternal myth. It happened before Jesus; it has happened to every master, it has to happen to every disciple. It is an eternal truth. The story simply depicts it, describes it. But don’t reduce it to historical fact.Christians go on destroying the beautiful story of Jesus’ life; they try to make it historical. If this resurrection of Jesus is historical, you have brought it into time, into the ordinary world of facts where Adolf Hitlers and Mussolinis exist. You have brought it into the ugly world of history, of time, of events. It is not an event, it never happened – although it always happens.It is the essential truth of every seeker’s life. Every seeker has to die on the cross, and after three days – those three days are of waiting, symbolically of waiting – so the spring can come and the resurrection.The coming of death is the key which unlocks the unknown domain… Only by dying, the seed unlocks the door and the tree starts growing. Only by dying as Adam, you unlock the door of Christ-consciousness in you. Only by dying as a mind do you unlock the door of being.The coming of death is the key which unlocks the unknown domain; but for death, the door of true faith would remain unopened. So death is also beautiful. And remember, we are not talking of physical death at all, we are talking of psychological death. We are talking of the death of the ego, of egoing.If you yourselfare upside down in reality,then your wisdom and faithare bound to be topsy-turvy.And this is how we are. Being has been forgotten – which we are. And we have become identified with the mind – which we are not. This is the topsy-turvy state: the real is forgotten, and the unreal is pretending to be the real.In this state you cannot know that which is. God surrounds you, truth surrounds you, but you cannot know God, you cannot know truth, because you are standing upside down. First you have to become true. To know truth, you have to become truth. You have to reach back to the source, you have to search and grope.You are lost in the world of having. You have come into the world of having by the staircase of doing. Now move backward. When you move backward on the same ladder, it is non-doing, because doing is less and less and less and then it disappears. And the first taste of being is the beginning of a totally new life – the life of eternity.So there were these two blacks from a southern town, and they wanted women desperately but couldn’t find any. They were driving along the country road when they spotted a pig. One of them jumped out, scooped up the pig and stuck it on the seat between them.They continued to chug along in their 1969 Ford when a police siren suddenly sounded behind them. A glance at the rear-view mirror showed them that a police car was in hot pursuit. They pulled over to the side. Not wanting to be caught with a stolen pig, they tossed a blanket over it.The officer came up to the side of their car. “What are you up to?” he asked.“We were just out looking for women,” one of the lads replied truthfully.Suddenly the pig stuck its face through the folds of the blanket.The cop stared, shook his head sadly, and said, “Lady, can you tell me what a nice southern girl like you is doing with these two blacks?”Man is in such an unconscious state. Man is almost drunk. He cannot see what is; he goes on believing what others say. He does not respect his own eyes, his own ears; he does not respect his own sensibilities. He has become very insensitive.You go on believing what others say. Somebody says, “This is the house of God. This is the temple, or the synagogue, or the church,” and you start believing them, and you go and start worshipping a stone.This foolishness, this utter stupidity, is thought to be religious. Religion belongs only to intelligence; religion is the flowering of intelligence. Just think over it again. What have you been doing in the name of religion? Repeating, imitating – what others have said, you have believed it. When you are going to look for yourself? When are you going to think for yourself?Only by thinking for yourself, only by looking into things for your own self, will you be able, slowly, slowly, to awaken. Otherwise this dream is going to continue. It has continued for long, it can continue for eternity – unless you take hold of your own being, unless you start working on your intelligence, unless you start sharpening your own intelligence. Nobody will help it, remember. And if you can find somebody to help it, then that is your master.People will help you to remain mediocre because that is how they can go on exploiting you. If you can find somebody who is ready to help you to sharpen your intelligence, then be with that person, you have found a friend. It is very difficult to find a friend in this world, this world is very unfriendly. Everybody is interested in his own exploiting. And the people who want to exploit, cannot want you to become intelligent.My effort here is to sharpen your intelligence as much as possible. The whole process of this commune is that of sharpening your intelligence, so that you can stand on your own feet.Don’t go on repeating things like parrots, otherwise you will never become a man.Mrs. Keller had a very talented parrot. At her dinner parties he was the center of attention, for she had trained him to repeat what the butler said when he announced the guests as they arrived.The parrot had only one failing: he loved to make love to chickens. Every chance he got, he would fly over the fence into the yard of the farmer next door and make love to his chickens.The farmer complained to Mrs. Keller, and finally she laid the law down to the parrot. “Bertram,” she said, “you better listen to me! The next time you go into Farmer Whalen’s yard I’m going to punish you plenty!”The parrot hung his head to show he understood. But two days later, he couldn’t resist temptation and over the fence he went. He was deep into lovemaking with the third hen when Farmer Whalen spotted him and chased him. Whalen complained again to Mrs. Keller.“Now you’re going to get it,” she said. She got a pair of barber’s shears and clipped all the feathers from the top of the parrot’s head.That night, Mrs. Keller threw one of her gala parties. She put the parrot on top of the piano.“Bertram,” she said, “you’ve been a rotten old thing. Tonight you’re to sit here all night. No wandering around and no playing the way you usually do!”And so, feeling rather disconsolate, the parrot sat on the piano. As the butler announced the guests, Bertram performed as usual, repeating the names. The butler said, “Mr. Arnold Levy and Lady Stella,” and the parrot said, “Mr. Arnold Levy and Lady Stella.” The butler said, “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Solomon,” and the parrot said, “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Solomon.”Then two bald-headed men entered the room. Without waiting for the butler to announce them, the parrot shouted, “All right, so you’ve also been caught making love to the chickens? Ha, ha! Up here on the piano with me!”Remember, you are not a parrot, you are a man. Respect your manhood, respect the intelligence that has been given to you. Respect the gift of god and sharpen it, grow into it, let it come to an optimum.People use only five percent of their potential – that’s what psychologists have come to know. Even the people who are thought to be very talented don’t use more than ten percent, and the people who are known as geniuses use only fifteen percent of their intelligence. Can you imagine what we have been missing? Can you imagine? If people use a hundred percent of their intelligence, this earth will become unique, this earth will be a paradise. There will be no need to think of a paradise after death, the paradise will be herenow.It is possible – God has given you the potential. But the politicians and the priests have not allowed you to use it, and your so-called priests are all against it.If you can find a man who helps you to sharpen your intelligence, who respects your intelligence, who wants you to grow it to the maximum so you can become aflame with intelligence, then you have found a master.That is the only requirement that has to be fulfilled by a real master. And that is the only criterion by which you can understand whether you have come to a real master or not. It is so simple, it is so obvious, when you come across a person who helps you to sharpen your consciousness, who helps you to go beyond the mediocrity that society has imposed upon you.Drop your mediocre selves. Inside you is a source of great intelligence, of divine intelligence.Stop weaving a net about yourself:burst like a lion from the cage.This is how a real master gives his message. Sanai says: Stop weaving a net about yourself… Stop weaving the nets of thoughts, desires, ambitions, imaginations. Stop weaving a net about yourself: burst like a lion from the cage – the cage in which you have been put by the society. Burst forth. Give a lion’s roar! And come out of the dreams into which you have fallen, in which you are trapped. Become rebellious, be revolutionaries.Melt yourself down in this search:venture your life and your soulin the path of sincerity…Only one thing has to be remembered: be authentic, be sincere to yourself. Declare your truth, whatsoever the cost. Even if life is risked, risk it, because truth is far more valuable than anything, because truth is true life. Risk all – be authentic! Whatsoever you are, stick to it! Don’t allow anybody to manipulate you, don’t allow anybody to enslave you. And, melt yourself down in this search… Let the ego melt. You have become frozen ice cubes: let these ice cubes melt. And once they have melted, they start flowing, they become alive and dynamic.Melt yourself down in this search:venture your life and your soulin the path of sincerity;strive to pass from nothingness to being,and make yourself drunk with the wine of God.You have been drinking many kinds of wines of this world – of money, power, fame – they are all poisons. But there is a wine – the wine of God, the wine of love, the wine of meditativeness, the wine that pours from the beyond into your heart. Become available to it.And how does one become available to it? Be open. And only an authentic person can be an open person. The person who is not authentic, who is not true to himself, who is pretending to be somebody he is not, cannot be open. He is a lie: he has to hide the lie in many ways.Only a truthful person can be open – he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to protect. His whole periphery, his whole circumference is open to existence; three hundred and sixty degrees of circumference are open to existence. He contacts existence from every direction, from all directions. He is available to reality, totally available.People who live as lies cannot be totally available; they are always afraid they may be caught lying. They have to protect themselves, they have to create an armor around themselves. They are open only in small ways – maybe just a keyhole from where they look into the world, and from where the world enters into them. But it can’t be much of a world. Through a keyhole the sun cannot enter much, and the winds cannot come in, and the rains cannot come in. And behind the keyhole you are hiding yourself and looking through the keyhole – whatsoever you perceive is going to be partial. And everybody claims his partial vision as the truth.Burst forth from this cage. That is possible only if you respect yourself, if you feel the dignity of being here, if you feel that God has created you as a unique being. He has never created anybody like you, and he will never create anybody like you again. You are unique, you are incomparable. Feel this gift, this grace, and respect yourself.The man who respects himself is authentic. He cannot compromise. He would prefer to die but stick to his truth. And that is the price God asks. Risk all that you have – because you don’t have anything, you only think you have. In reality, you are a nothingness.Sanai says: …strive to pass from nothingness to being, and make yourself drunk with the wine of God. Be open, and God starts pouring into you like wine from every nook and corner of existence. Then wherever you look, you find God. Then whatsoever you touch, you find God. Then whatsoever you drink and eat, you find God. And when God pours from everywhere, then life is a celebration.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-04/

The first question:Osho,In yesterday's lecture you said that programs, names and labels and becoming crystallized and identified are hindrances and liabilities in the seeker's search for the supreme self. This is so for me. I don't want a label. I want to be vast, unlimited. I don't want to be crystallized. I want to flow like a mountain stream. To become acknowledged by the organization around you as a disciple, one must accept a program which in part consists of wearing the mala and orange clothes and having your name changed which seem to function as badges or labels identifying one as a sannyasin.Please explain what a neo-sannyasin is and what, if anything, it requires to be one. This is important to me because you are a light in the dark for me, but the only way to get close to you, to talk to you, is to become a sannyasin which seems to involve carrying some extra bags beyond the simple wish to stand in your guiding light.Roland Seeman, sannyas is not a program at all. It is a process of de-programming. But because you are programmed already, you will have to accept the process of de-programming.You say you don’t want to get identified with a name – then who is this Roland Seeman? You say you don’t want to become a label, but you are one. The question is not of becoming a label, a name – you already are one. It is as if a hypnotized person says, “I don’t want to be hypnotized.” Neo-sannyas is a process of de-hypnosis: the person who is already hypnotized needs to be de-hypnotized – if he says this again is a kind of hypnosis, then he is going to remain hypnotized forever.The society hypnotizes you, the church hypnotizes you, the parents hypnotize you. You have passed through that process already; now you will have to go backward. Neo-sannyas is a process of dropping all that has been forced on you; neo-sannyas is an anti-process.Mulla Nasruddin has a signboard in front of his office saying that no salesmen are allowed in. If anybody tries to enter he will be prosecuted.A friend asked him, “Why are you so much against salesmen?”He said, “They bore me to death.”The friend said, “That’s true, that’s my experience too. From where did you get this signboard?”And Mulla laughed and said, “That is the only practical thing I have ever purchased from a salesman.”Sannyas is not a new program. The orange and the mala and the new name are just a gesture from your side that you are ready to drop all the programs, a gesture from your side that you are open to me. It is just a gesture; that’s why it is so simple. Anybody can take sannyas, with no conditions attached to it, no strings attached to it.Have you ever heard of any spiritual tradition in the world giving sannyas so easily? Great preparation is needed. If you want to become a Hindu sannyasin, you will have to go through a long process of preparation. If you want to become a Christian monk, the same. This is happening for the first time in the whole history of humanity: I am giving you sannyas without asking whether you are worthy of it, ready for it. Why? Because it is not a program.To be a Catholic monk is a program. It will require that a few conditions be fulfilled before you can enter into it, it will take years of preparation. To be a Jaina monk will take even longer because it is a process of being an ascetic. The more unnatural a program is, the more preparation will be needed.I give you sannyas with no requirements, no conditions, to be fulfilled on your side. It is a simple gesture. And you are only thinking about having a new name, about having to live in orange clothes. But you don’t know that the new name will help you to become disconnected from your whole past. Those orange clothes will declare that you are no longer part of any religion, that you are simply religious – that you are neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan.Sannyas is just as when you have a thorn in your foot you need another thorn to take it out. The other thorn is exactly like the first thorn. Sannyas is just a thorn to take out all the thorns that are in your being. You are not getting into a new identity. Sannyas is not serious; it is very playful, it is nonserious.And, I have told you, “Programs, names and labels and becoming crystallized and identified are hindrances and liabilities in the seeker’s search for the supreme self.” Yes, I repeat it again. But still you will have a name. Don’t get identified with it. I have not told you not to have any names – or have I? Without a name it will be impossible to exist. They have some purpose to fulfill. Without a name, without an address, it will be impossible to exist where so many people are around you. You need a certain name; it is utilitarian, it has no ultimate truth about it. When you start thinking that your name has something ultimate about it, then you have become crystallized, and identified with it.I have said not to get identified with your name, or to get identified with any label that you have to use in life. And you will have to use many labels. I am not against life. If you drop all labels and all names, you will have to go back to a very primitive state – to live in a cave in the Himalayas. There, you will not need any name because no postman will ever come to deliver your post, nobody will ever call you, nobody will ever address you. But that will be a kind of suicide. I am not teaching you suicide. I am against renouncing the world.I would like you to live in the world, to live more totally, to live more intensely. But then labels and names will be needed. Then what has to be done? Don’t get identified with them, that’s all.And if you have carried a name for forty years it is good to change it, because with the new it will be easier not to get identified. With the old, forty years’ association has made it very crystallized; it has entered deep into your sleep and your dreams too. The new name will be just on the surface. Now, don’t do the same with the new name as you have done with the old one.The organization that exists around me is not really an organization but a device – a device which creates a certain space. You may not be able to see it right now, unless you enter the space. Those who have entered know that the organization is there between me and the world, and it has some function to fulfill.Roland Seeman, if there were no organization here, you would never be able to sit silently for even two minutes with me. There would be thousands and thousands of people always clamoring around me; no work would be possible. I lived that way for many years. It became impossible to work on people because there was no possibility of any communion. Crowds were always there. Even when I was asleep in my room, people were sitting around; I was eating, and people were sitting around. There was a continuous crowd. Nobody was able to ask any personal question, no intimacy was possible.This organization has been created, not to be an organization but just to be there so the whole world does not start impinging upon me, and I can remain available to real, authentic seekers.Now you are sitting in silence here with me, thanks to the so-called organization. Otherwise, it was impossible. It used to happen… Thousands of people were listening to me; I was traveling around the country. A gathering of fifty thousand people would be there in the cities. And on one side people who were against me shouting, and people who were for me would also be shouting – and I was speaking! The police were continuously standing there, so that those people who were for and against didn’t start clashing.It was almost impossible to work; that’s why I stopped traveling. Now I don’t go anywhere. Those who are really interested in truth will have to come to me. And the organization is just a device to screen people. If you are really a seeker, it is nothing to wear orange, to become a sannyasin. If you can’t pay even this much price for it, then you are not a real seeker – maybe curious.And to be with a master needs a kind of participation with the master. That is the only way to be in communion. It is not only a question of talking to me, it is a question of sharing my being. You will have to give me an indication that you will remain open, that you will not be defensive.Your question, Seeman, is nothing but a defense. You want to have all the opportunities that are given to those who have surrendered in trust, yet you don’t want to surrender, yet you don’t want to participate. You want all the benefits without paying for them in any way.You say, “In yesterday’s lecture you said that programs, names and labels and becoming crystallized and identified are hindrances and liabilities…”Yes, they are. So, when you take sannyas, if you ever take it, don’t become identified with the name, think of it as a utility. And don’t become identified with the orange clothes, think of it as a gesture.And you say, “This is so for me.” This is not so for you. If it was so, truth would have already happened to you. Then what is hindering the truth? If you have dropped all labels, all programs, all names, all labels – if you are not identified with anything – then what is hindering the truth from happening? In fact you are being very clever and cunning. You are identified with your name, you are identified with the programs, you are identified with your past and all the conditionings that the past has given to you. But listening to me, this idea felt very good, comfortable – so you need not change anything, you can simply say, “This is so for me.” If this is so for you, why are you here in the first place?You say, “I don’t want a label.” Who is this “I” who does not want a label? It itself is a label – and the deepest label!You say, “I want to be vast, unlimited.” Who is this “I” who wants to be vast and unlimited? This is the greatest ego trip! You can never become vast and unlimited. When you have disappeared, there is vastness, there is unlimitedness – but it will not belong to you, remember. You will not be able to claim, “I am vast.” If you are there, there is no vastness possible. The “I” is bound to remain limited. The idea of the ego can never be unlimited; the idea of the ego keeps you separate from the infinity of existence.You say, “I want to be vast, unlimited.” Your ego wants to go on the trip of being infinite and vast. Sannyas simply means that you drop your ego trips. You say, “I don’t want to be anybody, I don’t want to be anybody in particular, I don’t want to have any goal.” The goal of infinity, the goal of vastness, are all in the future. And whenever there is a goal, the ego is strengthened.The ego exists through goals; what name you give to the goal does not matter. You can call it money, you can call it power, you can call it prestige, or you can now call it infinity, vastness, godliness – it is the same ego trip. Now it has become even more subtle and more poisonous, because the more subtle the ego is, the more dangerous it is.You are afraid, but trying to cover up your fear philosophically. This is what goes on continuously: I say one thing, you understand another. You understand according to yourself, you immediately start manipulating, distorting what you hear.That’s why communication between light and darkness is so difficult. Between those who know and those who don’t know it is so impossible. You immediately jumped upon the idea, and you made a beautiful weapon out of it to protect yourself.See the point. Sannyas means dropping all goals, sannyas means being happy as you are. Sannyas means living life in utter ordinariness. What nonsense you are talking about – becoming vast and infinite. Living life in its pure ordinariness is sannyas. And then one day it happens: suddenly boundaries disappear. But they disappear only for those people who are ready to live in an ordinary way – eating when hungry, sleeping when feeling sleepy; just living the ordinary life – chopping wood, carrying water from the well, with no pretensions, with no trips in the future, worldly or otherworldly; just living moment to moment, with no desire to proclaim oneself.You must have great desire to proclaim yourself, “I want to be vast, unlimited.” You can never be vast, you can never be unlimited – you are the barrier! Now the disease wants to be healthy. The disease cannot be healthy: the disease has to go. When there is no disease left, health wells up.You ask, “What is neo-sannyas?” It is creating a space in which melting becomes possible, creating a space where you see many, many, people melting, dissolving, and you see the beauty arising in them, and you see their benediction, and you see something mysterious surrounding them.That triggers a process in you. Sannyas cannot cause godliness to happen in you. Sannyas does not believe in the cause-effect relationship; sannyas is a kind of synchronicity where many, many, people are flowering, it becomes easier for you to flower. Just so many people flowering and a great energy is released in you. It is not caused by others; it is simply triggered. Somebody is singing a song, and suddenly a song arises in your heart and your lips start moving. It has not been caused, there is no inevitability in it. It is not the effect of somebody’s singing, it is parallel to it. It is provoked, not caused. You have started responding.And you know it happens; in ordinary life it also happens. Somebody comes who is very happy, laughing, jubilant; you were sitting in a kind of sadness, but suddenly seeing this person, his laughter, his bubbling energy, your sadness disappears. You start laughing. You have completely forgotten your misery, your agony, your problems, your worries. For a moment the other person has called up something from deep in you, just by his presence. He is a catalytic agent. So is the master.And when there is an energy field, a buddhafield, when there are so many disciples around a master, you are in a garden in the time of spring. Thousands of trees blooming – suddenly your seed gathers courage: your seed starts feeling the potential, your seed is ready to risk. That’s what sannyas is.If you have any courage, if you are really a seeker of truth, then take the jump into the unknown. It is not a conditioning; it is an anti-program, it is de-conditioning. It is not hypnosis, it is de-hypnosis. It is not a program, it is a de-programming.The second question:Osho,What is love?It depends. There are as many loves as there are people. Love is a hierarchy, from the lowest rung to the highest, from sex to super-consciousness. There are many, many layers, many planes of love. It all depends on you. If you are existing on the lowest rung, you will have a totally different idea of love than the person who is existing on the highest rung. Adolf Hitler will have one idea of love, Gautam Buddha another; and they will be diametrically opposite because they are at two extremes.At the lowest, love is a kind of politics, power politics. Wherever love is contaminated by the idea of domination, it is politics. Whether you call it politics or not is not the question, it is political. And millions of people never know anything about love except this politics – the politics that exists between husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. It is politics, the whole thing is political: you want to dominate the other, you enjoy domination. And love is nothing but politics sugar-coated, a bitter pill sugar-coated. You talk about love but the deep desire is to exploit the other. And I am not saying that you are doing it deliberately or consciously – you are not that conscious yet. You cannot do it deliberately; it is an unconscious mechanism.Hence so much possessiveness and so much jealousy become a part, an intrinsic part, of your love. That’s why love creates more misery than joy. Ninety-nine percent of it is bitter; there is only that one percent of sugar that you have coated on top of it. And sooner or later that sugar disappears.When you are in the beginning of a love affair, those honeymoon days, you taste something sweet. Soon that sugar wears off, and the realities start appearing in stark nakedness and the whole thing becomes ugly.Millions of people have decided not to love human beings any more. It is better to love a dog, a cat, a parrot; it is better to love a car – because you can dominate them well, and the other never tires to dominate you. It is simple; it is not as complex as it is going to be with human beings.At a cocktail party the hostess couldn’t help overhearing the conversation of a suave gentleman.“Oh, I adore her. I worship her,” declared the gentleman.“I would too if she were mine,” agreed his friend.“The way she walks and swishes. Her beautiful big brown eyes, her head so proud and erect…”“You’re very fortunate,” commented his friend.“And do you know what really thrills me? The way she nibbles my ear.”“Sir,” the hostess interjected. “I couldn’t help listening to those affectionate words. In this day of numerous divorces I admire a man who so passionately loves his wife.”“My wife?” said the gentleman, surprised. “No – my champion race horse!”People are falling in love with horses, dogs, animals, machines, things. Why? Because to be in love with human beings has become an utter hell, a continuous conflict – nagging, always at each other’s throats.This is the lowest form of love. Nothing is wrong with it, if you can use it as a stepping-stone, if you can use it as a meditation. If you can watch it, if you try to understand it, in that very understanding you will reach another rung, you will start moving upward.Only at the highest peak, when love is not a relationship any more, when love becomes a state of your being, does the lotus open totally and great perfume is released – but only at the highest peak. At the lowest, love is just a political relationship. At the highest, love is a religious state of consciousness.I love you too. Buddha loves, Jesus loves, but their love demands nothing in return. Their love is given for the sheer joy of giving it; it is not a bargain. Hence the radiant beauty of it, hence the transcendental beauty of it. It surpasses all the joys that you have known.When I talk about love, I am talking about love as a state. It is unaddressed: you don’t love this person or that person, you simply love. You are love. Rather than saying that you love somebody, it will be better to say you are love. So whosoever is capable of partaking, can partake. For whosoever is capable of drinking out of your infinite sources of being, you are available – you are available unconditionally.That is possible only if love becomes more and more meditative.Medicine and meditation come from the same root. Love as you know it is a kind of disease: it needs the medicine of meditation. If it passes through meditation, it is purified. And the more purified it is, the more ecstatic.Nancy was having coffee with Helen. Nancy asked, “How do you know your husband loves you?”“He takes out the garbage every morning.”“That’s not love. That’s good housekeeping.”“My husband gives me all the spending money I need.”“That’s not love. That’s generosity.”“My husband never looks at other women.”“That’s not love. That’s poor vision.”“John always opens the door for me.”“That’s not love. That’s good manners.”“John kisses me even when I’ve eaten garlic and I have curlers in my hair.”“Now, that’s love.”Everybody has their own idea of love. And only when you come to the state where all ideas about love have disappeared, where love is no more an idea but simply your being, only then will you know its freedom. Then love is God. Then love is the ultimate truth.Let your love move through the process of meditation. Watch it. Watch the cunning ways of your mind, watch your power-politics. And nothing else except continuous watching, observing is going to help. When you say something to your woman or to your man, look at it, what is the unconscious motive? Why are you saying it? Is there some motive? Then what is it? Be conscious of that motive, bring it to consciousness – because this is one of the secret keys for transforming your life: anything that becomes conscious disappears.Your motives remain unconscious, that’s why you remain in their grip. Make them conscious, bring them to light, and they will disappear. It is as if you pull up a tree and bring the roots to the sunlight: they will die. They can exist only in the darkness of the soil. Your motives also exist only in the darkness of your unconsciousness. So the only way to transform your love is to bring all the motivations from the unconscious to the conscious. Slowly, slowly, those motives will die.And when love is unmotivated, then it is the greatest thing that can ever happen to anybody. Then it is something of the ultimate, of the beyond.That is the meaning when Jesus says, “God is love.” I say to you: love is God. God can be forgotten, but don’t forget love – because it is the purification of love that will bring you to God. If you forget about God completely, nothing is lost. But don’t forget love because love is the bridge. Love is the process of the alchemical change in your consciousness.The third question:Osho,I was brought up with the twisted ideal that rage against existence was man's dignity. All my life I have been fighting, but found no dignity – only pain and suffering. Life is life – unaffected. From where this stupid ideal?I want to hold on to something, anything, even the anger for believing lies, lies and more lies. I wanted them to be true. How can I be so stupid?Everybody is brought up with the idea of raging against existence because fighting against existence is the only way to create the ego. Only through fighting with existence is the ego created, because in fighting you become separate, in fighting you start swimming upstream. Then the stream and you are enemies. You have to conquer the stream, and any idea of conquering is very fundamental to create the ego.You have been brought up with the idea of fighting. Fight with nature, fight with people, compete, because that is the only way to survive. And only the fittest survive – so become a more and more competent fighter. The society wants to create an ego in you. Once the ego is created, you are a miserable person, false, phony, and you can be exploited. Then the society can exploit you, your parents can exploit you, the priests can exploit you. Then everybody is capable of exploiting you.If you really want to get rid of the ego – and to get rid of the ego is the only freedom there is – then you will have to drop this stupid idea of constantly raging against nature, against existence. That is not man’s dignity, that is man’s original sin. That is man’s condemnation; that is a calamity, a curse.Man becomes dignified only when he is not. When man disappears as man, and allows existence to flow through him, then there is dignity, exquisite beauty, grace, splendor. When you are not, there is splendor. If you stop fighting, you will disappear, automatically you will disappear.And because you don’t want to disappear, you go on following the stupid idea that has been given to you. Then your whole life is nothing but a constant warfare – and how can you be happy and blissful and celebrating when each moment is a fight? You are fighting against so many; really the whole world is your enemy, and you are so alone. There is fear – bound to be – and trembling and anguish, because the whole thing seems to be so impossible. How can you conquer this existence? It was there before you ever were, it will be there when you are gone. How can you win against this? And you are such a tiny part of it. The whole idea is absurd: a wave trying to win over the ocean, your hand trying to win over the whole body. The whole idea is absurd.Relax, be in a let-go. Live with nature as an intrinsic part of it. Cooperate rather than conflict. The very idea of survival of the fittest is utterly wrong. Survival in itself is not a value either. It is not a question of how long to survive; it is a question of how to live totally, deeply, intensely, passionately. Then even a single moment of total life is more valuable than a long, long life of a hundred years.A single moment of passionate love, of passionate living, of passionate stillness, is more valuable than the whole of eternity. It is not a question of survival, it is really a question of how to live this moment. The idea of survival makes tomorrow more important than today, and the idea of survival makes it easier for you to sacrifice today for tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes – whenever it comes, it is today. Your mind is programmed to sacrifice today for tomorrow, so you go on sacrificing your whole life.Parents sacrifice their lives for their children. The children again in their turn will sacrifice their lives for their children, and so on and so forth. And nobody will ever live.I am against the very idea of sacrifice. Never sacrifice. Live this moment; live it totally, intensely, passionately. And then a miracle happens: if parents have lived their life beautifully, if they are fulfilled, their very fulfillment creates the space for their children to live, to live in the right way. And by the right way I don’t mean the moral way, by the right way I mean the total way. To live partially is to live wrongly, to live totally is to live rightly.If children are brought up by parents who have been living their lives afire, aflame, who have been celebrating their moments, these children will learn how to celebrate, how to live joyously, how to live affirmatively, how to live saying yes to existence. A deep yes will arise in their hearts. It will be triggered by their parents. And the parents were not sacrificing, not at all, and the children will not learn the suicidal idea of sacrifice.If parents are sacrificing for their children, then sooner or later, when the parents are old, they will demand sacrifice from the children. They will say, “We sacrificed so much for you, now you sacrifice for us.”The country demands sacrifice from the people who live in it, the church demands sacrifice, everybody demands sacrifice. Just look around you: they all are standing around you, asking for sacrifice. And they teach you that to sacrifice is moral.To sacrifice is immoral. Whether you sacrifice for the country or for the religion or for the children, it is immoral. It is immoral because it does not allow you to live your life. You become sad, you become frustrated, and then in return you start coercing others to sacrifice for you. Then all the life of the whole world becomes simply crippled and paralyzed.A mother was teaching her small child the great truths of life and religion. She was a Catholic; she told her small son, “God has created you to serve others.”The little boy pondered over it, and he said, “Okay, if you say so. But then why did he create the others? To serve me? This looks so absurd, that I am created to serve somebody else, and somebody else is created to serve me; it looks so illogical. Why should I not serve myself, and he can serve himself? That seems simply logical, mathematical.”I teach you a kind of self-love. You are not created to sacrifice yourself for somebody else, you are not created to serve others. You have been taught this because those others want you to serve them, to sacrifice. And because they want you to serve them, they have to serve you; because they want you to sacrifice yourself for them, they have to sacrifice themselves for you. So we are at each other’s throats continuously, demanding sacrifice.The whole idea has to be dropped. You are created to live and celebrate, just as others are being created to live and celebrate. God is not a murderer; he demands no sacrifice from you. He demands that you bloom and flower.Only when you have flowered will you be accepted. And the way to flower is the way of acceptance. Don’t resist, don’t rage against existence: relax, surrender, go with the flow.This truth you have learned from your life – you say, “All my life I have been fighting, but found no dignity – only pain and suffering.” Now it is time, if you have understood it, drop it! Drop it, immediately – don’t carry it even a single moment more because, who knows? The next moment may never come. Drop it this very moment!Always see that whatsoever you have understood has to immediately become your life. Don’t postpone it.The fourth question:Osho,I want to become a sannyasin but my husband is stubbornly against it. I wonder what may be the cause of his antagonism.Denise felt very self-conscious about her face. “I’m ugly,” she said to herself as she looked into a mirror. “My nose is crooked, my chin is weak, my ears stick out, and I have bags under my eyes.”In desperation she went to a plastic surgeon and had a face lift. Her chin was strengthened, her nose remodeled, her ears adjusted, and the bags under her eyes removed.After months of suffering, the ordeal was finally over. She was now able to entertain friends, but she still sulked about herself.One day her friend Joan looked at her in amazement. “I don’t know why you look so sad. You now have the face of a movie star.”“I know,” sobbed Denise. “But now my new face doesn’t go along with my old body.”That is the fear. If a woman wants to take sannyas, the husband is afraid, if the husband wants to take sannyas, the wife is afraid – because something new is entering. If you become a sannyasin, that means the relationship between you and your husband cannot be the same. Something new has entered; your husband will have to readjust.He may have been a good husband to a non-sannyasin wife, he may not go well with a sannyasin wife; a maladjustment is feared.It always happens; it is not new to you. This is happening almost every day. Any couple feels disturbed, because something new entering will be a disturbance; it will create chaos. You will have to start from ABC again. Somehow you have managed, somehow you have come to an adjustment – and remember it is always an adjustment. You have come to a compromise, you have learned how to live with the woman. And now she wants to become a sannyasin. You don’t know what she is going to be like after she becomes a sannyasin, how she will behave. She will become unpredictable.And there is danger, because sannyas is going through a revolution. She has lived with you; she may not be conscious that she has never loved you. There may have been other motives – maybe you were rich and she wanted to live a secure life. Now she becomes a sannyasin. Sooner or later she will discover – because this sannyas is a constant adventure into one’s own being, an exploration – sooner or later she will become aware that she has never loved you, she loved your money. And she may see that because of this she has missed the opportunity of love.Sannyas may give her courage. It is bound to give courage. She may drop out of your life, seeing that her motive was wrong, seeing that she has been deceiving herself and you – although unknowingly, not deliberately, but once she understands and sees it, who knows what is going to happen?She has lived with you; she may have become bored by now, but she cannot gather courage to get out of the boredom. The relationship may have gone stale. Sannyas is bound to make her aware not to live in a stale relationship.This sannyas is not an ordinary religious thing like you have known in the past. This sannyas is really an exploration of your inner depths. It is to live according to your understandings, and to live authentically. If sannyas is anything, it is the courage to live sincerely.There is danger. She may leave you, she may fall in love with somebody else – she may have been repressing that idea up to now. My sannyas is not repressive. It wants you to live naturally, a life of uninhibited joy, a life which knows nothing of repression. My sannyas is expressive, not repressive.If you were becoming a Christian, going to the church, there would have been no trouble – because the church would make you even more repressed, the church would make you more of a slave. Your husband would have been happy; he might even have gone with you to church sometimes to support you. The church supports the status quo, the church supports things as they are. The church is anti-revolutionary – all churches, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan.I am not a church, I am not for the established, adjusted life. I am for real life; even if it brings chaos, welcome it. Hence the fear.And couples, slowly, slowly, just become indifferent to each other. Seeing that there is no possibility of change, they relapse into a kind of coma. Their relationship is not alive, is not aware, is not radiant; all romance is dead.I bring romance into your life again, because I can’t conceive that a life can ever really be life if it is without romance. Either you will fall in love with your husband for the first time, or you may fall in love with your husband again, or you may fall in love with somebody else. Or you may become so alert that you may not fall in love with anybody else again. You may simply be able to live alone, you may be able to enjoy the beauty of aloneness. Nobody knows; my sannyasins are unpredictable and that is the trouble.Familiarity breeds contempt, but people go on dragging.Marge often burned with anger because her husband Elmer seemed to ignore her. “How do you like my new hat?” asked Marge proudly.“Uh huh… It’s all right.”“Don’t you think my new dress is cute?”“It’ll do.”“Do you think the white shoes will go with it?”“Oh, I guess so.”“Do you think the shell necklace clashes with the blouse?”“It’s okay.”“Why don’t you put down the newspaper, dear?” she hissed through clenched teeth.“In a few minutes.”“Do you mind if I season your supper tonight with arsenic?”“Whatever you wish, dear.”Sooner or later, wives and husbands lose all possibility of communication. They live together, but not in togetherness. They become dull, insensitive. Hence the fear. The fear is that you will become alive again. And then who knows what is going to happen?Sadie and George were having dinner when suddenly the lights went out.“A power failure,” moaned George.“What’ll we do?” groaned Sadie.“I wonder if a car ran into a power line?” pondered George.“Who cares how it happened?” declared Sadie. “What’ll we do?”“I know,” suggested George. “But don’t be alarmed. We’ll light some candles.”“Splendid,” agreed Sadie. “We have a few in the cupboard.”So they continued to eat by candlelight.“Isn’t this romantic?” cooed Sadie.“Yes,” agreed George. “It’s a shame we’re married.”Married people have completely forgotten what romance is. A real marriage will go on growing in romance. But our whole life is unreal, hence our marriages are unreal. Because our individualities are not there, we are phony; then whatsoever we do with those phony personalities becomes doubly phony.And whenever there is a possibility of coming across some truth, fear arises. The wife wants to become a sannyasin, the husband becomes stubbornly antagonistic. The husband wants to become a sannyasin, the wife becomes absolutely antagonistic.The fear is that something new is there and it may disturb the arrangement. People want to live in security, even if security means death. People want to live in comfort, even if comfort simply means nothing but dragging your life. Security, comfort, convenience, have become ultimate values.In a society which thinks of security as a value, comfort as a value, convenience as a value, everybody remains afraid, nobody wants anything to change. Everybody is for the status quo: let things remain as they are, don’t touch them.And sannyas is really a drastic step.Your husband is simply representing all the husbands of the world. It is just fear – have compassion on him. Help him to meditate, help him to go through a few therapy groups. Help him, don’t argue. And don’t be in a hurry to take sannyas – wait a little. Just let him come closer to me, and then he may like to take sannyas and you may become afraid. Then you will understand what was happening to him.We are living such an ugly life – and for no reason at all, except that we have been brought up in that way.It will be good if you both become sannyasins; but be a little patient, don’t frighten him too much. If you insist too much on taking sannyas, in the same proportion he will become antagonistic. Take things more relaxed, take things easy. If you really want to become a sannyasin, it is going to happen. But help him also – that poor man also needs a revolution in his life.If it was a question from a husband, my answer would have been different. Because it is a question from a wife, my answer is different. If the husband had asked to take sannyas I would have told him, “Take it immediately” – because there is no way to persuade a woman, there is no way to argue with a woman. Only if you take sannyas may she be able to understand, otherwise not.And I would have said also, if the question had been from a husband, “Take it immediately. For the first time in your life, do something you want to do. Don’t be henpecked, do it! And your woman will respect you because you have done it. She will deep down feel very happy that she has got a real man. Otherwise, wives never think that their husbands have any integrity.”But because the question is from a wife… I trust women very much, I know she will take sannyas, there is no fear about it. Today or tomorrow – she can wait, she will take it. This is my experience, when a woman decides, she decides. The husband can hesitate; tomorrow he may not be able to take it at all. So I cannot tell him to wait. The husband is always wavering. But once a woman has decided, she has decided – because the husband decides from the intellect, and the woman decides from the heart. And the quality of the decision is totally different.When the woman decides, she is ready to go to any end. She can sacrifice her life too if she decides for something. She knows how to commit herself through the heart, she knows how to love. Her decision is not through intellectual conviction, hence it cannot be shaken. Her decision is more intuitive; it is total, it is absolute, because intuition is never divided, it is non-dual. And when you decide something through the intellect, it is always a parliamentary decision. Maybe the major part of your mind was saying, “Go ahead,” – but today it may not be the major part; a few members may have crossed the floor. It is always a majority decision, and the minority is always there against it.A woman decides through the heart. It is not a parliamentary decision, it is total. It is ultimate in a sense. She can wait for years, and still the decision will be there.That’s why women are very patient in their love affairs; they can wait. I know women who have waited for years and years. But the man is very indecisive; today he is in love, tomorrow love disappears. It was not love, it was a thought of love.To you I say wait. And I know you can also seduce your husband into sannyas – bring him with you! When I have the opportunity of two persons becoming sannyasins, I can wait.The fifth question:Osho,Kindly let me know whether there is a law in India prohibiting Indian citizens to inhabit, dwell or live in a house or houses or an ashram in any part of India, to study and lead a blissful human life for the growth of religion and science. If yes, then what is independence? If no, then why don't we start establishing a village for neo-sannyasins, “Rajneeshdham,” beyond municipal jurisdiction?There is no law prohibiting us from establishing a commune. But the people who are in power always think they are beyond law. There is no law that goes against establishing a commune, an ashram. But the people who are in power can always find ways to delay it – that’s what they are doing.In his books, Travels with my Aunt, Graham Greene tells the story of a retired income-tax official, Mr. Pottifer, who was set up as an income-tax consultant, and who delighted in advising his clients how they could outwit the income-tax laws by driving the income-tax bureau crazy.“He was a great believer in delaying tactics. ‘Never answer all their questions,’ he would say. ‘Make them write again. And be ambiguous. You can always decide what you mean later according to circumstances. The bigger the file, the bigger the work. Personnel frequently change. A newcomer has to start looking at the file from the beginning. Office space is limited. In the end it’s easier for them to give in.’“Sometimes if the inspector was pressing very hard, he told me that it was time to fling in a reference to a nonexisting letter. He would write sharply, ‘You seem to have paid no attention to my letter of April 6, 1963.’ A whole month might pass before the inspector admitted he could find no trace of it. Mr. Pottifer would send in a carbon copy of the letter containing a reference which again the inspector would be unable to trace. If he was a newcomer to the district, of course he blamed his predecessor; otherwise, after a few years of Mr. Pottifer, he was quite liable to have a nervous breakdown.”That is what is being done. Mr. Morarji Desai has been a deputy collector: he still functions like a deputy collector. That’s what is being done with us – just delaying tactics. They go on asking about this, about that, and there is no end to it.For example, the Maharajah of Kutch donated four hundred acres of land in Kutch. It is desert land, of no use; nothing can be cultivated on it. That’s why nobody has ever been interested in purchasing it, that’s why the Maharajah easily donated it to us.Then the delaying started – it is almost one and a half years now. First they said they had to study the case, because the land is too close to Pakistan. In times of war they might need it. In times of war – when that war is going to happen, nobody knows – but “in times of war” they might need the land. Somehow we convinced them that it was not likely. Then they started writing letters saying that because there would be so many foreigners and it is on the boundary of the country, it was a question of safety and security – spies might enter.We convinced them. Then they started telling us that just close by it – not very close, thirty miles away – there is an army camp. And they didn’t want us to be so close to the army camp.Now there is no law, but you can always find these things. So we dropped that idea. Still it is continuing, but we dropped the idea because it seemed to be too much of a hassle. So we purchased seven hundred and fifty acres of land, just close to Pune – fifteen miles away. Now problems have started – delaying tactics.First they asked that we should produce a certificate from the medical board as to whether the climate is such that people can live there. Just fifteen miles from Pune! And just beside the land, two miles away, there are villages, and people are living there. Just close to the land, two hundred people are living.So we produced a certificate. That took two or three months – because the board consists of six members and unless those six members meet and agree… So they delayed and delayed; finally it happened. Then they asked for another medical certificate to say whether the water and the land are such that people can live there.There is no law against it, but these are tricks and strategies. They can’t say no, they don’t want to say yes.We inquired. All the authorities said that this has never happened before. Nobody ever asks about the water and the land and the climate – but if they are asking then we have to fulfill their requirements. So the paper work goes on and on.Now we have managed that. The land is barren, no cultivation has ever been done on it. But in their files it is mentioned as agricultural land. Now they have created some new trouble: we cannot construct on agricultural land. First we have to produce a certificate stating that it is non-agricultural land. Nobody has ever done any agriculture there; we took the officers to see, it is barren land, anybody can come and see – rocky, barren, absolutely useless. But they say that because in the file…So first we have to apply to transfer the land from agricultural to non-agricultural. That is taking time; now they are delaying that. This could be done easily, within a single day – that is how it is done. Four months have passed: all the officials have been ordered to delay as long as they can. And when they cannot delay any more and it becomes a legal problem over which we could go to court – “Now you are delaying too much” – then that officer simply sends the file to a higher official. He says, “Because it is such a complicated phenomenon and a political issue, and your master is a controversial man; and I am such a small official, I cannot decide it. Go higher.”Now the whole process starts again with the higher official. It was to be done by the tahsildar, the lowest. It moved to the SDO. Now the SDO. has taken his time; now his time is finished and it has moved to the collector. And the people in the collector’s office say that it is going to move to the commissioner. And the commissioner is very friendly, he says it is beyond his power to do it, “You will have to ask the revenue minister of Maharashtra.”Now the revenue minister says, “Your master is so controversial that I cannot take the risk of deciding anything, for or against, because there will be political repercussions from it. And I don’t want to lose my chair, so you had better decide with the chief minister.” And he said, “Even the chief minister cannot decide on his own; he will have to ask the whole cabinet.”And my feeling is that they will say, “This cannot be decided by the Maharashtra government, it has to be decided by the central government in Delhi.”And I am not only a nationally controversial figure, I am an internationally controversial figure. So my fear is that this will have to be decided by the UN! So now as to when it will be decided, nothing can be said. These are delaying tactics and strategies. If they say no they can be caught immediately, because it is illegal to say no. But they don’t say no.I can understand your anxiety, your problem. That is the anxiety of every sannyasin. It is becoming so difficult here, the space is so small. And thousands and thousands more are going to come, I have given an invitation to them, they are on the way.Even this land we are sitting on, we have been here for five years and have still not yet legalized it. We are already here, they cannot throw us out, but they have not legalized it. We don’t have the papers with us, the papers are with the government. They go on saying, “We are going to do it, we are going to do it” – but it never happens.This is how Morarji Desai is behaving, in a fascist way – but very legally; you cannot find any legal flaw. This is a very cowardly way. If you are against me, that’s okay. I am ready to get into any discussion with you, I am ready to argue with you. If he needs a public debate, it can be a public debate. If he needs me to answer, I can come to the parliament and answer the parliament. I will really enjoy it!But very cowardly ways, cunning ways… He remains a deputy collector. He is not worthy of being a prime minister to such a big country. His mind is that of a deputy collector – a very small mind. I don’t call him Morarjibhai Desai, I call him Mediocre-jibhai Desai.My challenge is open. And even if he does not agree with me, then too there is no point in obstructing my work. Your agreement is not needed at all. That is the meaning of independence and democracy, where people who cannot agree with each other can coexist. Otherwise what is the difference between a democracy and a dictatorial regime?I can exist, I have every right to exist, even if Morarji Desai does not agree with me. His agreement is not needed at all – who cares? This is his problem. If he does not agree, so what?But if because of his personal disagreement he obstructs my work in such cunning and vicarious ways, then he is destroying democracy from the very roots. And then independence is simply a slogan, not a reality.I have not yet thought of leaving this country. But if this continues and the work becomes impossible, I will have to leave this country. And they should know perfectly well that once I leave this country it will prove to the whole world that this country only claims to be a democracy – it is not. And my leaving the country will not be only a single individual leaving; thousands will leave with me. That will show the whole world that the Indian claim of being the greatest democracy in the world is just hocus-pocus.If I decide any day to leave this country – which they are forcing me to decide – that will be a calamity. Because my millions of sannyasins all around the world will become the living proof that this country is not independent, and this country is not democratic either.Thirty years ago, when India became independent, Winston Churchill said in the British parliament: “What we are doing is not right. Although it is every human being’s birthright to be free, to give freedom to India is not right, because the time is not ripe. And within thirty years it will fall a victim to rogues, scoundrels and thugs.”And I wonder – thirty years have passed. It seems Churchill’s prophecy has come true.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-05/

From him forgiveness comes so fast,it reaches us before repentancehas even taken shape on our lips.He is your shepherd,and you prefer the wolf;he invites you to him,and yet you stay unfed;he gives you his protection,yet you are sound asleep:Oh, well done,you senseless upstart fool!He heals our nature from within,kinder to us than we ourselves are.A mother does not love her childwith half the love that he bestows.You have broken faith,yet still he keeps his faith with you:he is truer to youthan you are to yourself.He created your mental powers;yet his knowledge is innocentof the passage of thought.He knows what is in your heart;for he made your heart along with your clay;but if you think that he knowsin the same way that you do,then you are stuck like a donkeyin your own mud.In his presence,silence is the gift of tongues.He knows the touchof an ant’s footmoving in darknessover a rock.He always knowswhat is in men’s minds:you would do wellto reflect on this.Jesus says, “God is love.” But I say unto you, “Love is God.” Love is a far more important word than the word God; love has existential meaning. The word God is utterly empty; it signifies nothing, it relates to nothing in you. It is a pure word, pure in the sense that it has no corresponding reality in your experience.Although both words indicate the same truth: Love is the poet’s word, God is the word of the theologian. Obviously the poetic insight is deeper, more profound, and also the poet’s sensibility is far more refined, far more subtle than that of the theologian. The poet’s vision is more aesthetic too, more beautiful, more exquisite; it has more grace, more meaning, more significance. And moreover, the theologian’s choice has been contaminated down the ages by so many people – Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans – by so many churches, so many religions that have pretended to be religious and were not.Love still remains uncontaminated; it is still virgin.So let me repeat: rather than saying God is love, say love is God, and you will be closer to the truth. And not only closer, you will be immediately related to truth, because love is your experience. It may not be so profound that it becomes God, but still, even unrefined gold is gold. Even the uncut, unpolished diamond is diamond. The diamond may be lost in the mud, but it can be cleaned any moment; the mud cannot enter its being.Love is your being. And the moment we use the word God great controversies arise. Use the word love, and theism, atheism, and all kinds of unnecessary arguments are discarded.Love also represents the innermost core of existence itself. Existence is not indifferent to you, it is not detached. It is committed to you, it cares for you. It may not care the way you want to be cared for, but it still cares in its own way. And what you expect may not really be your need, it may be just the opposite.Existence really fulfills your needs – not your likes and dislikes, not your wants, but your real, true, authentic needs are always taken care of. Existence cannot be indifferent to you, you are part of it. To be indifferent to you will mean it is indifferent to itself – that is impossible. Existence would have disappeared long ago if it was so.We are its waves. We are flowers of this tree of life and existence. Your desire to be loved, and your desire to love, is your suprememost desire. It must show something of your basic fundamental nature, it must represent your innermost core – it does represent it.Once you understand love as God, your whole vision of life will change. Then you will not go to worship in a temple or a church or in a mosque, then love will be your worship. And then you will not be afraid of existence, because it cares for you. Fear will disappear. You will not be afraid even of death, because death can take away only that which is not needed any more, but it cannot destroy you.Existence is your mother, it cannot allow destruction. Nothing is ever destroyed. Now even physicists agree with it: nothing is ever destroyed and nothing is ever created. Not even a small grain of sand can be destroyed or created. Existence contains the same quantity of matter, life, love energy as it has contained always, as it will contain always.Martin Luther has said a tremendously significant thing. He says “Pecca fortiter, sin boldly.” It is strange. The statement seems to be unbelievable – a man like Luther saying, “Sin boldly.” But the meaning is really worth pondering over. He is saying that love permeates the whole of existence, so don’t be afraid. Even if you are in sin, be boldly in it because existence is always ready to forgive, it is forgiving. Love always is forgiving. He does not mean that you should go and sin. He is simply saying your greatest sin is nothing compared to the forgiveness that goes on flowing from existence toward you.Just the other day, somebody asked me, “I am a great sinner. Can I also realize God?” You cannot be that great a sinner. You cannot be so fallen that God’s hand cannot reach you, you cannot be so weighted and burdened by sin that God cannot uplift you. The gravitation of sin cannot be more than the grace of God.This is one of the fundamentals of Sufism, that God is unconditionally forgiving – he has to be, because his nature is love. Love is his reality. It is not that love forgives, love is forgiveness. There is no question of forgiving you. The question arises only if God has already become angry with you. Only then does the question of forgiving arise.But God cannot be angry with you. You are the way he has made you, you are not your own creation. How can he be angry with you? That would amount to being angry with himself; that would be a self-condemnation.But you start thinking about small things as if you are doing great sins. The ego always loves to do great things. Even if you are doing something wrong, you want to pretend that this is the greatest wrong that has ever been done or will ever be done. You want it to be unique, incomparable; you want it to be on the top. The ego always feels good if something great is being done. It may be a sin – that doesn’t matter.What great sin can you commit? All our sins are nothing but small things; we are small, our sins cannot be great. Our hands are small; whatsoever we do is going to remain small, because it will have our signature.Your life, virtuous or wicked, is not going to be a barrier or a bridge because you are already bridged, and there is no way of disconnecting yourself from God. And it is not a question that when you sin, God forgives you. He is forgiveness, he is continuously flowing in tremendous love toward you.His love is like a flood, your sins are like straw. The flood will take them away. And the flood does not come to take your sins away; it is already there. To understand this, to see the point of it is a great relief, as if a mountain suddenly disappears off your chest. You become light, weightless. And only in that weightlessness can you worship.The sinner cannot worship, he is continuously frightened. Fear cannot create prayer. Prayer created by fear remains political, a strategy of the mind to persuade God; it is a kind of bribery. Real prayer arises out of understanding, out of love.Luther is really right when he says, “Pecca fortiter, sin boldly.” Whatsoever you are doing, do it boldly. You belong to God and God belongs to you. This is your home. Don’t live like a stranger, don’t be here like a guest, you are part of the host. Live without fear.But our egos continuously go on magnifying things.A man was in love with a woman for many years. And the woman was waiting and waiting: “Now he is going to propose. Now he is going to propose.” And one day he proposed. She could not believe her own ears, she could not believe her own eyes. She had waited so long that she had almost become settled that it was not going to happen.She hugged the man, she kissed the man, and she said, “I cannot believe my own ears. I have waited so long for this!”The man said, “Will you marry me?”And she said, “Yes, yes! A thousand times, yes!”The man took out a small black box from his pocket, opened it, and gave her a ring. She looked very minutely at it – the diamond was so small that it was almost impossible to see it with bare eyes.The man said, “Don’t be worried” – because she looked worried, shocked too, that after waiting so many years this man brings a wedding ring with such a small diamond. And the man was very rich. The man said, “Don’t be worried, don’t look puzzled.” And from another pocket he pulled out a magnifying glass, and he said, “Look! Look through this glass.”Our minds are continuously magnifying. That’s how the ego exists. We magnify our virtues, we magnify our sins, we magnify everything. We make much fuss about nothing, much ado about nothing.This magnifying glass has to be dropped absolutely. And then suddenly you see things in their perspective. We are small: our virtues are small, our sins are small. Neither are our virtues of any worth, nor are our sins of any worth. All that we can do is so small that it is irrelevant.Your sins are not going to take you to hell. All those priests who go on telling you that are simply magnifying. And your virtues are not going to take you to heaven either, because all those virtues are so tiny, so shallow.Then is there any hope, or not? There is no need of any hope. You are already in paradise. All that is needed is an unburdened heart to look around. You are already in paradise: you need not go anywhere. You are in God. Drop the magnifying glass, and both your sins and your virtues will disappear, because they both are creations of the magnifying glass.An elephant was having an awful time in the jungle because a horsefly kept biting her near her tail and there was nothing she could do about it. She kept swinging her trunk, but he was far out of reach.A little sparrow observed this and suddenly flew down and snipped the horsefly in half with his beak.“Oh, thank you!” said the elephant. “That was such a relief.”“My pleasure, ma’am,” said the sparrow.“Listen, Mr. Sparrow, if there’s anything I can ever do for you, don’t hesitate to ask.”The sparrow hesitated. “Well, ma’am…” he said.“What is it?” said the elephant. “You need not be shy with me.”“Well,” said the sparrow, “the truth is that all my life I wondered how it would feel to make love to an elephant.”“Go right ahead,” said the elephant. “Be my guest!”The sparrow flew around behind the elephant and began to make love immediately. Up above them, a monkey in the tree watched and began to get very excited. He started to shake the tree, and a coconut got loose and fell from the tree, hitting the elephant smack on the head.“Ouch!” said the elephant.At which point, the sparrow looked from behind and said, “Am I hurting you, dear?”Drop the magnifying glass, and there is neither sin nor virtue, and there are neither sinners nor saints – simple human beings, just simple human beings.In that simplicity, God arrives. In that simplicity, existence starts pouring love. It is already pouring, but because of your ideas, great ideas about yourself, you are not receptive.Hakim Sanai says:From him forgiveness comes so fast,it reaches us before repentancehas even taken shape on our lips.See the beauty of Sanai’s statement. This sutra is worth writing in gold in your heart. From him forgiveness comes so fast, it reaches us before repentance has even taken shape on our lips.He is forgiveness, he is already flowing toward you. You need not even repent. You have just to be simple, unpretentious; you have to drop your masks of sinners and saints. And even before repentance has taken any shape on our lips, even without that, you are forgiven.This is the experience of all the great mystics of the world. Luther is right when he says, “Pecca fortiter, sin boldly” – because his forgiveness is immense, infinite. And whatsoever you do is just tiny straws, the flood will come and take them all away.Sufism is the path of grace. No effort is needed on your part: only receptivity, openness, a loving heart, a state of surrender, a let-go. And all that so-called yogis cannot attain in millions of lives, you attain in a single instant. His …forgiveness comes so fast… It is immediate because God knows only one time, and that is now. God cannot postpone; he has no future. He cannot say “Tomorrow,” because there is no tomorrow for him – time means this time, this moment.For God, all is the present. Our vision is limited,, so something is past and something is future and something is present. Our vision is so limited that our present is very tiny. That is the proportion of our vision. We are looking through a keyhole into reality; we can see only this much, all else is the past.Just sit behind a keyhole and watch. Somebody comes: you see a person suddenly emerge out of nowhere, because just a moment ago you were not able to see him. When he comes in front of the keyhole you see him, and then next moment he is gone, he has passed, again he is no more. Just a moment ago he was in the future, just a moment afterward he is in the past.Do you think that man has disappeared? Do you think that man suddenly appeared from nowhere and now suddenly disappeared into nowhere again, and he appeared only for a single moment? This is our vision that is creating the fallacy. Come out of your hiding place, open the door, and you will be surprised: he was before you saw him, and he is after you saw him. Now you will have a better vision.For God, all is eternal now.The thief who was crucified with Jesus asked him, “Lord, will I be able to see you again some time in the future?”Jesus says, “Today you will be able to see me in the kingdom of my God.”The word is “today” – that is very significant. “Today you will see me in my kingdom of God.” There cannot be any question of tomorrow.God is immediate, God is always present. So all that happens through God happens now. And it is not happening to you, God is not happening to you, because you live either in the past or in the future, and he is never in the past and never in the future.Hence the science of meditation: it brings you to the present, it brings you to this moment. The past is a thought; it disappears when thoughts disappear. The future is also a thought; it disappears when you drop thinking. When you are in a state of no-thought – there is no past, no future, there is only the present – in that state of no-thought you are one, in tune with God. And suddenly the flood is there: you are flooded with light, with love, with grace. You are no longer a man, you are divine. You have surpassed humanity. Humanity is a state of deep sleep.He is your shepherd,and you prefer the wolf;he invites you to him,and yet you stay unfed;he gives you his protection,yet you are sound asleep:Oh, well done,you senseless upstart fool!God is our shepherd, he takes every care. We are unnecessarily worried, and we start trying to take care by ourselves. And that’s how we fall victim to the wolf – the mind.The mind says: “This way – this is more secure, more safe. Arrange life in this pattern, don’t live in insecurity.” That is the constant message of the mind. “Don’t live in insecurity, make life secure. Have a bank balance, have a family, be tethered to the earth. Make as many arrangements as possible so you are protected.”God is our protector. But the mind starts playing the protector – and the mind is the wolf, because the mind is created by all kinds of exploiters that exist in the world. The priest, the pundit, the politician, create the mind, they create fear in you. They live on your fear, they create a constant trembling; your whole life you remain in anguish, trembling, afraid. They create worry in you, and worrying is the source of your mind.If a person is ready to live in insecurity, the mind disappears. Then there is no need of the mind.Sannyas means to live in insecurity, because God is our only security. Sannyas means to live without any fear, because we are part of this existence. There is nobody to be afraid of. The existence is not antagonistic to us, it protects us.But the mind is the by-product of fear, and because of the fear it goes on creating its own security. Have more money, have a bigger house, have respect, prestige, political power. Win friends, influence people, so you are secure. You have so many friends, they will be useful. They say a friend is a friend only when he supports you in times of need. So, have many friends, compromise. Have a false face, smiling, so that you can influence people.You put your security into something which is very fragile. And God is your only security. But to know the security of God, to know that he is your shepherd, you will have to trust, to live in insecurity. If you can’t trust, you will go on accumulating rubbish around you. People love rubbish, they go on accumulating rubbish.The Kenmores were having dinner at the Harringtons. After dinner Mr. Harrington unveiled his pride and joy – his collection.“What is that?” asked Mrs. Kenmore.“They’re kind of rusty,” added Mr. Kenmore, unimpressed.His face beaming with pride, Mr. Harrington said, “This is my collection of barbed wire. I have barbed wire that dates back to the Civil War.”Mrs. Kenmore reached out to touch one of the specimens.“Please,” cautioned Mr. Harrington. “Don’t touch. I’m mighty proud of these gems and one can’t be too careful.”“Are these really valuable?” questioned Mr. Kenmore with a befuddled look on his face.Mr. Harrington looked slightly stunned. “Valuable?” and he held up his scarred hand. “These samples are very hard to get hold of.”Just look around yourself. Look at people, watch. People are accumulating rubbish. In the name of money, in the name of knowledge, in the name of virtue, people are accumulating rubbish, all kinds of rubbish. And that is their security; they think it is going to save them. In fact they will be drowned in it – they will be drowned because of it.Carrying such an unnecessary burden you cannot reach the top, sunlit tops, of the Himalayas. Carrying such unnecessary luggage you will remain always in the dark valleys of life. You will never know what sunlight is, you will never know the experience of being on a peak, whispering with the clouds, being close to the stars, and the purity of it and the virgin innocence of it.People are dragging; their life is a continuous boredom. And nobody else is responsible except themselves.Arnold was an elderly hobo whose life was simple and uncomplicated. One day a wealthy gentleman found him asleep on his front lawn.“Mister,” the gentleman said, “this is my property.”“I’m sorry,” apologized Arnold. “I thought this was a park.”The gentleman looked sympathetically at the ragged hobo. “Mister, are you happy living this kind of life?”“Sir, money and worldly goods do not make happiness,” preached the hobo. “To me, happiness is the freedom to roam without the pressures of society and the economy. The sky is my roof and the world is my bed. Give me all this, a piece of bread, a can of baked beans, and my happiness is complete.”“I admire your simplicity and I admire your sincerity,” said the gentleman and handed him a hundred-dollar bill.“Sir,” commented the hobo as he took the money, “you have made me very unhappy.”Just look at people. The richer they get, the more unhappy they look. It should not be so; why is it so? It is so illogical. Why do they become so unhappy? It seems they don’t know how to live in trust, they don’t know how to live in joy. Their whole life they have been working to be more and more secure. And it is not difficult to accumulate much wealth – but by the time you have accumulated much wealth your life has gone down the drain. And then suddenly one becomes aware that “What have I been doing? I have wasted my life.”With that realization – “I have wasted my life in accumulating unnecessary things, and now all those beautiful days are gone and only death is there in the future” – a great frustration arises. One has failed, failed tremendously.They say nothing succeeds like success, but I say nothing fails like success. The moment you have succeeded then you will know the taste of utter failure.He is your shepherd, and you prefer the wolf; he invites you to him, and yet you stay unfed… His invitation is always coming. It comes in the sun rays every day in the morning, but you never dance to the tune of the sun rays. It comes in the calls of the birds, but you never sing with them. It comes with each roseflower opening, but you don’t open up with the flowers.His invitation is constantly coming; it goes on coming, twenty-four hours, round the clock. But you have become deaf, you don’t hear. The still, small voice inside you goes on saying to you, “What are you doing? You are simply wasting your time, your energy.”The best way to waste your energy, your time, your life, is to go on thinking of the past and the future. And his invitation comes in the present, his invitation belongs to the present. He invites you to him, and yet you stay unfed; he gives you his protection, yet you are sound asleep…What is this sleep all the mystics talk about? What is this metaphysical sleep? You are unconscious of the present: this is the sleep. You are here, and yet you are not here. Your mind is roaming somewhere else – into the past which is no more or into the future which is not yet. And that which is remains utterly unknown to you.The whole earth is full of somnambulists, sleepwalkers.Professor Peabody had just returned from his honeymoon and a trip around the world. At the airport he was recognized by one of his pupils.“Dr. Peabody!” shouted the student. “How was the honeymoon?”“Superb.”“Was the trip exciting?” she asked breathlessly.“Sensational. I visited every great museum and art gallery. The Louvre was magnificent. My wife and I wined and dined in the best restaurants of the world. It was a physical, emotional, and gastronomical adventure.”“What are you going to do now that the excitement is over?”“The excitement is not quite over yet,” said the professor in a grave voice.“You’re taking another trip?”“No, I forgot my wife in Tokyo.”Just watch your own life. You are constantly forgetting to live herenow, and that is the only life there is. You go on rushing toward the past or toward the future, which are both meaningless; this is a simple leakage of energy. And then you are impotent in the present, empty, hollow. You cannot connect with the present, and the present is the only door to the divine. He gives you his protection, yet you are sound asleep; Oh, well done, you senseless upstart fool!Ivan was a worrywart. He worried night and day. “How am I going to pay next month’s bill? I’m sure my daughter was on that plane that crashed. The economic situation is terrible. Will we all end up eating dog food?”Then one day Ivan’s aunt died and he inherited a million dollars. Eventually he bought a new home, the most lavish furniture, and a luxury car. The world now seemed like a rosy place.While visiting Ivan’s wife one day, a neighbor noticed Ivan sitting alone in his room and moaning like a wounded hyena.“What’s wrong with Ivan?” inquired the neighbor. “Is he ill?”Ivan’s wife gave a knowing smile. “Not really, except Ivan is worried that he has nothing to worry about.”Yes, that too creates worry, when you have nothing to worry about. You have become so accustomed, mechanically accustomed to worrying, that if you have nothing to worry about you will worry about this.People come to me, they say, “Life is changing. We are feeling great joy arising, we are feeling silence happening. And now we are worried: what next? Now we are worried: is this joy really real? In this silence not just a projection? Maybe it is just a kind of hypnosis we have fallen into.”Now, they are creating new worries. People cannot live without worries – why? Because worries are the food, the nourishment, for the mind. Whenever the mind sees that something is happening and you may get out of worrying, the mind pulls you back and creates new worries, absurd worries – because without worries the mind cannot exist.The Sufi message is: Leave everything to God, leave everything to the whole. Just see this infinite existence is going so perfectly well. The energy that takes care of millions of stars can also take care of you; you need not carry your burden on your own head, you can trust. And just a few experiences of trust, and then you will never get caught in the old trap again because you will know things are being taken care of.And that does not mean that you become inactive. In fact you become more active, but your action has a different flavor to it, a new taste. You become very active, but it is no longer your activity; now God acts through you. You become connected with the present, and he starts flowing through you. Great creativity is going to happen, but it will not be your doing. He will be the doer, and you will remain utterly relaxed, with not a worry.Just think of that space when not a worry exists in your being, not a tension. That relaxedness is what everybody is longing for. And everybody is destroying all the possibilities of it ever happening. We go on creating a wrong space and we go on longing for something which cannot happen in this space.You will have to create a different kind of space. A different space is needed: that space is called trust, surrender, let-go, faith, love, or whatever you want to call it. Once that space is created, you start moving on a totally different plane. You enter a new dimension: deathless is that dimension, fearless is that dimension. And then you live totally, boldly; and then whatsoever you do, you are totally in it, utterly in it. Each act becomes such a passionate affair, so creative that not only are things created outside you, but because of that creativity something integrates inside you too.You may paint: a great painting will happen outside, and inside the painter is created. You may write poetry: outside, the poetry is created, inside, the poet becomes integrated.Each act of creativity creates the creator. You become more centered, rooted. And the more rooted you are, the less and less you feel a stranger. The idea that “I am an outsider here,” disappears. The whole of existence belongs to you, and you belong to the whole of existence. Great celebration starts happening of its own accord.He heals our nature from within,kinder to us than we ourselves are.A mother does not love her childwith half the love that he bestows.This sentence will look a little erroneous, because the love of a mother and the love of God cannot be said in this way, that God loves more than your mother, double your mother. The difference is not of quantity. And you have all known the love of your mother – it will not thrill your heart if God only loves double that, it may even make you very sad. It doesn’t look like much of a promise.And people who have been reading Hakim Sanai have been continuously stumbling upon this. And not even a single commentary exists which has found the right interpretation of this sentence. It is not what it appears to be; it has a very profound meaning, totally different than you will read in the lines. You will have to look between the lines.First, God’s love is qualitatively different. Then why does Sanai say: “A mother does not love her child with half the love that he bestows”? He is bringing something which is given by the master to the disciple in privacy, in secrecy. But now it can be told, because now psychologists have come to know – they have stumbled upon a fact which has been known to the Sufis, to the Zen people, to the Tantra people, all along – that the mind is divided into two parts: the conscious and the unconscious.A mother’s love is an unconscious love. She loves, but she is as asleep as anybody else; her love is unconscious. God’s love is conscious. If we divide the mind into two – consciousness and unconsciousness – then God’s love is double, because he is utterly conscious. Psychologists say that only one part of our mind is conscious, and nine parts are unconscious. God is a hundred percent conscious.That’s why whenever a man like Jesus or Buddha or Mahavira has become totally conscious we have called him divine, we have called him a god. The reason is psychological. There no longer exists any unconsciousness in him, no corner of darkness is left, all is light.God loves in a conscious way. The mother’s love is unconscious, and naturally when love is unconscious it is contaminated by all kinds of unconscious things. There is greed, there is anger, there is hatred, there is jealousy, there is domination, power-politics – everything is there. In fact, so many unconscious ugly things are there that the beauty of love is almost crushed, crippled, poisoned.God’s love is totally conscious. Buddha loves you with no desire to dominate you, with no desire of getting anything back in return, with no desire of any future reward, with no motivation. He loves because he is love. In fact to say that he loves you is not right, because love is not an act on his part. He cannot help it. Just as the river flows toward the ocean, love flows from him toward whoever he comes across.Even if nobody is there, love goes on radiating from a buddha. Even when a buddha is asleep, love goes on radiating from his being. He is love.We have seen a few such people on this earth: they are called messengers of God, incarnations of God, avatars, buddhas, tirthankaras. These are just names, names to show that they are no longer human beings in the ordinary sense. They are in the body, but they are no longer bodies. From a buddha we can have a little glimpse about what God’s love will be.Hakim Sanai is right in a way. The mother only loves unconsciously, so her love is half. The whole loves consciously, so its love is double – in this way, it is double.But when love becomes conscious, a qualitative change happens; it is not only a question of quantity. Unconscious love is one thing; it is like groping in a dark night, the groping of a blind man. When love is conscious, it is full light, noontide, and you are not blind, there is no groping at all.But remember that the metaphor is significant. God is the mother, the matrix. Existence is motherly, it is a womb: it nourishes you, it is constantly flowing toward you with all that you need. But we have completely forgotten this nourishment that comes toward us; we have forgotten this protection, we have forgotten the shepherd.And because we have forgotten, we have become very lonely, unprotected, unsheltered, lost. And to look at our lostness creates fear. We become scared, we have to protect ourselves, so we create our own small protections and shelters. Our whole life becomes nothing but an endeavor to create some security. And then comes death and destroys all that we have created.All our palaces prove to be nothing but palaces made of playing cards. And all our great boats prove to be nothing but paper boats. Our whole life is made of the stuff called dreams – because we are asleep. Wake up.You have broken faith,yet still he keeps his faith with you:he is truer to youthan you are to yourself.We have gone astray, we have gone far away from God. But he has not left us – he cannot, it is impossible. From his side it is impossible. We can go as far away as we want, but from his side, we will not be far away. From his side, his love goes on pouring on us.He goes on pouring on saints and on sinners, he makes no distinction. He pours on the mountains and he pours in the valleys, he makes no distinction. Although the mountains will not be able to keep the rain that falls on them, because they are too full and they have no space. The valleys will become great lakes. They are empty, they have space, they are receptive; they open up, they receive and they can contain.The religious person is one who creates space for God to enter him. He is knocking on doors, on everybody’s doors, unconditionally. But very few open their doors. Those who open them become really rich, they become kings, because the kingdom of God is theirs. And those who are too involved inside their houses – arranging their furniture and putting things right and counting their money – cannot hear the knock.The knock is very silent, it is a whisper; you have to be silent to hear it. And you have to be unoccupied to hear it – and our occupations are such, it looks so absurd seeing human beings obsessed with such foolish and ridiculous things.He had heard that a certain whorehouse in Great Neck, New York, had an unusual reputation for the bizarre. So he drove to the place and, once inside, asked the madam if she had anything unusual for him to try.“Things are pretty slow today,” she said, “but I do have one number you might enjoy.” She went on to describe a New Jersey hen that had been trained to do blow jobs.“We’ve got her here, but only for the day.”The visitor could hardly believe it, but he paid the fee and went into a room with the hen. After a frustrating hour of trying to make love to the hen, he figured out that he was dealing with nothing but a plain old chicken. He left.Thinking about it later, he decided that he had had so much fun trying that he returned the next day and asked the madam, “Do you have anything new today?”“Come this way,” she said, and led him to a dark room where a group of men were looking through a one-way mirror. He saw that they were watching a girl trying to make it with a dog.“Wow!” he said to the man standing next to him. “This is really great!”The man replied, “Man, it ain’t nothing! You should have been here yesterday and seen the guy with the chicken.”Man seems to be mad. And how can such people hear the knock of God? People are involved in stupidities. And don’t laugh at that poor man – this is the situation of almost all. Details may be different but the story is the same. And it goes on and on to the very end.An old man made it shakily through the door to Joe Conforte’s Mustang Ranch, outside Reno, Nevada.The receptionist stared at him. “You gotta be in the wrong place!” she exclaimed. “What are you looking for?”“Ain’t this the famous Mustang? Ain’t this where you always have forty-five girls ready and able?”The receptionist looked perplexed. “Ready for what?”“I want a girl,” the old man rasped. “I wanna get laid.”“How old are you, Pop?” she asked.“Ninety-two,” he replied.“Ninety-two? Pop, you have had it!”“Oh,” said the old man, a little disconcerted, as his trembling fingers reached for his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”Now even memory is not there, he has lost his whole mind. But something mechanical persists – something that goes on, it seems, on its own. From the beginning to the end, people remain ungrown-ups.To grow old is not to grow up, to become old is not to become mature. Maturity has nothing to do with old age, nothing to do with age at all. Maturity has something to do with becoming more and more conscious, becoming more and more silent and aware, becoming more and more watchful of what you are doing and why, where you are going and why.Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address: “We don’t know where we are going, but we are on our way.” Everybody seems to be in the same state. Nobody knows where, but everybody is on their way and everybody is going faster and faster. Speed seems to be the only concern. Make it faster, and never ask where you are going, because those questions are troubling questions, they create anxiety. So please don’t ask where you are going, ask how to go there fast enough. And make your journey so fast, and become so much concerned with speed, that all goals are forgotten – that you lose everything else and become occupied with speed.Man is so obsessed with speed, and nobody seems to ask where are you going, and for what? Because God is here – where are you going? And no speed is needed to reach him. In fact, unless you learn how to sit silently, how to be in a state of utter relaxedness, how to drop the speedy mind completely, you will never come to know the truth, the reality, that which is.God is very close by, but you are in such a rush. You will have to slow down, and you will have to learn to listen to whispers.You have broken faith, yet still he keeps his faith with you: he is truer to you than you are to yourself. You are very untrue to yourself. How has this happened that you have become so untrue to yourself? You had never really done it knowingly; it is a by-product. You have been trying to be untrue to others, and as a by-product it has happened that you have become untrue to yourself.It is a basic phenomenon that whatsoever you pretend to others, sooner or later you will start believing in it. If you go on smiling a false smile, a painted smile, at everybody you meet, sooner or later you will start believing that you are a very, very happy person. Because those people who see you smiling, always smiling, will start telling you that you are really happy, you are great. This will be a feedback. And you will become hypnotized by the feedback, and you will smile more, because it brings a good payoff. And you will smile more and you will smile more.I have heard that every night Jimmy Carter’s wife has to close his mouth, because he goes on and on in the night… It becomes mechanical.You learn about yourself through others. If an ugly person is given a mirror which makes him look beautiful, he will believe that he is beautiful, because there is no way to know your own face. He will look in the mirror and the mirror will say, “You are beautiful,” and he will start believing it.And if sometimes he comes across a true mirror which simply reflects the way he is, he will think that mirror is wrong. He may even destroy it because it creates sadness in him; and moreover, it does not reflect the truth, it distorts.That’s how it happens. If you come across a true person you will be angry with him, because he will not support your lies and he will not support your masks. He will pull your masks down and he will try to show you your real face. He can only reflect that which is, he cannot reflect that which is pretended.That’s why the man of truth is always thought to be a kind of trouble-maker. The society does not like him. The society does not want to hear the truth, they are perfectly happy helping in each other’s lies. And whoever helps you lie, you call him your friend – he is your enemy, but you call him your friend. And if sometimes your friend starts telling the truth to you, the friendship starts breaking.Sigmund Freud is reported to have said that if every person on the earth decided to be true just for twenty-four hours, there would not be even four friendships left in the whole world. If every person, just for twenty-four hours, was true, there would be millions of divorces, and friendship would disappear, and families would fall apart. There would be chaos – because we are living on lies.The man who does not like you says, “I love you.” He has his motives: by saying that, he is preparing ground for himself. We believe what others say to us about us. We have no direct approach, we have no immediate contact with our own being; it is via others. And how can you come to know your real self via others?The only way to know your real self is to forget others, to close your eyes and just be there inside yourself – and discard all the opinions that have been given to you, discard all that has been said about you, in toto, and become utterly empty of the opinions of others. This is what meditation is all about.And one day when you are absolutely empty, you will come to know your real face. Zen people call it the original face. Sometimes it takes years, because there are so many false faces – false faces upon false faces, layers upon layers – that you will have to peel your onion for months, for years. It depends with what intensity and with what sincerity you work upon yourself.You have broken faith, yet still he keeps his faith with you… God still believes in you.Rabindranath Tagore has written: “Whenever I see a new child born, I look at the sky and I thank him, because the new child is a proof that he still believes in man.” Otherwise, he would have stopped creating. We have betrayed him, but he still hopes. His hope for us seems to be absolute. We cannot change his hope; whatsoever we do, our doing remains irrelevant.Existence still hopes that man will arrive, that man will be able to surpass his dreams, his sleep, that man will be able to become conscious. Existence still hopes – that’s why it goes on creating you.He created your mental powers;yet his knowledge is innocentof the passage of thought.He knows what is in your heart;for he made your heart along with your clay;but if you think that he knowsin the same way that you do,then you are stuck like a donkeyin your own mud.God knows in a totally different way than we know. Our knowledge is of the intellect. His knowing is not of the intellect; his knowing is simple, it is innocent. It is not through thoughts that he knows. He simply knows; knowing is his nature.It is just as a mirror reflects. Not that it thinks whether to reflect or not to reflect, it simply reflects. It is just as the sun rises and the earth becomes full of light. Not that the sun thinks to wake people up because it is day now. The sun does not think, “Now I have to reach each bird and provoke the bird into a morning song, and I have to go to each rose and open the petals of the rose.” No, there, is no thought on the part of the sun. The sun simply rises; it is its nature to radiate light.God’s nature is knowing. His nature is intelligence, utter intelligence. He reflects like a mirror. And if you want to know God you will have to learn this way of knowing.God cannot be known through scriptures because that is not God’s way of knowing. You will have to learn his ways. You will have to become innocent. The man who is knowledgeable is cunning, clever, but not innocent. The knowledgeable man is full of information – and the more information you have, the less is the possibility of your intelligence functioning.I have heard…A woman had brought a new gadget, for her kitchen, but she did not know how to make it work. So she went into the house, searched for the catalogue, and started reading about the device. When she had read it she came back and the cook had already started the device.She asked, “How did you manage it?”And the old cook said, “When you are uneducated, you have to use intelligence. When you are educated, you need not. You went to look in the catalogue. I cannot read, so I had to use my intelligence.”Ponder over it. The more knowledgeable you are, the less the need of intelligence. Hence intellectuals remain stupid; they can brag much about their knowledge, but deep down they remain unintelligent. Scholars are always unintelligent. They may have great degrees, but if you look at their research work you will be surprised – they are just collecting rubbish. They go on collecting rubbish. Nobody ever reads their theses; they go on accumulating in the university libraries. The only function and purpose of those theses will be to help other foolish people to write more theses; those will be the only persons who will read them.Millions of treatises are written every year, millions of PhD’s and DLitt’s are awarded, and the world functions in such an unintelligent way. Our world is the most educated, and the most unintelligent. This is the century when we have succeeded in educating people; particularly in the advanced, rich countries, education is universal now.But what is the outcome? People are not functioning intelligently. If you know that a person is very, very, intellectual, you can be sure he will not function intelligently – he will not need to. Children function more intelligently than older people, because they don’t have any knowledge. They have to use their own resources; they cannot depend on knowledge, they have none.If you want to know God, you will have to know his way of knowing. What is his way of knowing? Intelligence, not intellect; innocence, not knowledgeability.Meditation makes you innocent, because it helps you drop all knowledge. Love makes you intelligent, because love has nothing to do with knowledge.He created your mental powers; yet his knowledge is innocent of the passage of thought. He knows what is in your heart; for he made your heart along with your clay; but if you think that he knows in the same way that you do, then you are stuck like a donkey in your own mud. His way of knowing is totally different, diametrically opposite, to your way of knowing. But you can learn his way of knowing. And the moment you have learned his way of knowing, you have started moving closer toward him.That’s why Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of God.”In his presence,silence is the gift of tongues.That is the only language that God understands, silence. He does not understand Sanskrit, although Hindus believe that that is devavani, God’s language. He does not understand Arabic either, whatsoever Mohammedans may believe. He does not understand Hebrew, whatsoever the claim of the Jews. He does not understand Aramaic, although Jesus may have understood and spoken Aramaic.What is his language? He understands only silence.So if you are praying through words you will never reach him, your prayer will never reach him. Words are too heavy; they will not allow your prayer to soar high and reach the ultimate. Only silence can have wings.He understands silence. The real prayer consists only of silence: silent tears, silent crying of the heart, silent laughter, a silent dance, a silent music inside your being. When you are utterly silent you are immediately in tune with God. So the Vedas are not going to help, neither is the Bible nor the Koran. In fact the Vedas were born to those who were silent.That’s how the Koran descended onto the earth. Mohammed had been meditating for forty days in silence – praying, meditating, sitting silently in the hills – and one day suddenly something started descending. A light penetrated him, a song entered him. He was used as a vehicle; God spoke through him.Of course, when God speaks through Mohammed he uses Arabic because that is what Mohammed knows. When God speaks through Buddha he uses Pali because that’s what Buddha knows.But God’s own language is only silence. In fact, when he flows through Buddha it is the mechanism of Buddha’s mind that translates silence into Pali. It is the mechanism of Mohammed’s mind that translates silence into Arabic. And then there is great controversy: then the scholars of Pali and the scholars of Prakrit and the scholars of Sanskrit and the scholars of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic go on quarreling. And only one has spoken; only one silence has flowed down. But it was translated; it was given shape and form, it became a language.If you want to reach God, you will have to learn the way of silence.In his presence, silence is the gift of tongues. Only those who are silent know how to talk to him. They know how to communicate, how to commune.He knows the touchof an ant’s footmoving in darknessover a rock.He always knowswhat is in men’s minds:you would do wellto reflect on this.There is no need to say anything to him. Just bow down – because he knows. He already knows, before you know, what is in your mind: he knows it, he reflects it. Your conscious, your unconscious, your collective unconscious – all are reflected in him. There is no need to say anything, it is absolutely unnecessary. Just open up, just bow down. Be silent in his presence.And one thing more: he is not a person, he is a presence. That’s why no image can ever represent him, no idol can ever substitute for him. He is a presence, a pure presence.Have you ever felt the difference between a person and a presence? There are persons who have something around themselves – you can call it presence. For example, if you see Buddha walking, you will be immediately aware that he is not walking like others. In a way he is just like everybody else, but there is something mysterious surrounding him, a kind of presence. You cannot catch hold of it, you cannot measure it, you cannot weigh it, it is very elusive, but it is there.Sometimes you feel it in ordinary people also. Once in a while, you come across a person who has a kind of presence. When he is with you he transforms you just by being there. There are people who will make you sad by their presence, there are people who will make you happy by their presence. They may not have said a single word, but just because they are there, a certain aura, a certain energy field, surrounds them.God is an energy field. So don’t look for his face, he has none. And don’t look for his location, because you cannot locate him. He is like an energy field. But you can feel it, if you are available, you can feel his presence. And once you have felt his presence, you will know; then you will come across his presence the whole day, in many ways.The silent tree standing against the sky, and you will see something is present around the tree. In the mountains, the mountains will look very meditative if you have known his presence. In the flowers and in the fragrances you will feel his presence, in the sunset and in the stars. In the eyes of people, in the laughter of a child, in the tears of a prayerful man, you will see the presence.Presence has to be felt. It needs a silent, meditative, loving heart. You cannot touch it; it is not gross, it is very subtle – the subtlest. But it is there. It is always everywhere.We live in the presence called God, we live in the ocean of God’s presence. Become a little more sensitive to it. And what are the ways of becoming sensitive? This sutra gives you a few keys. One: drop the magnifying glass of your ego. Second: trust, surrender. He cares for you. Third: he is constantly healing you from your own sources, from within. Go to the inner well of your being, and from there you will find his nourishment, his constant welling-up energy.Fourth: be true. Drop your masks, your phoniness. Fifth: learn God’s way of knowing – that is innocence. Sixth: be silent, because that is his only language. He knows the touch of an ant’s foot moving in darkness over a rock. He always knows what is in men’s minds: you would do well to reflect on this.And the seventh and last: your prayer has not to be a demand. Don’t ask for anything; he knows, before you ever know, what your need is. Just bow down. He is a presence – so wherever you bow down, you are bowing down to him. At whomsoever’s feet you bow down, all feet are his.If you bow down to the earth, you bow down to him. If you bow down to the sun, you bow down to him. Be a pagan – there is no need to go to any church or temple. Trees are beautiful temples, and mountains and people – the whole of existence is his temple. He is embodied in this existence.Don’t ask about his face because all faces are his. And don’t ask for his location because he is all. He cannot be located, he cannot be addressed, he has no form and no name.If these seven things are pondered over, he can happen immediately, this very moment.From him forgiveness comes so fast,it reaches us before repentancehas even taken shape on our lips.He is your shepherd,and you prefer the wolf;he invites you to him,and yet you stay unfed;he gives you his protection,yet you are sound asleep:Oh, well done,you senseless upstart fool!He heals our nature from within,kinder to us than we ourselves are.A mother does not love her childwith half the love that he bestows.You have broken faith,yet still he keeps his faith with you:he is truer to youthan you are to yourself.He created your mental powers;yet his knowledge is innocentof the passage of thought.He knows what is in your heart;for he made your heart along with your clay;but if you think that he knowsin the same way that you do,then you are stuck like a donkeyin your own mud.In his presence,silence is the gift of tongues.He knows the touchof an ant’s footmoving in darknessover a rock.He always knowswhat is in men’s minds:you would do wellto reflect on this.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-06/

The first question:Osho,I have been a devotee of Baba Muktananda and ran a center for him. I experienced a period of extreme difficulty and it was not until I read your books that I understood all that was and still is happening.I question the need to be attached to another teacher, although I feel and understand your teachings deeply. I know I cannot go back to Baba's methods. I'm confused. Can you help?Only a disciple can be helped. And the disciple has to become involved, committed. Without commitment there is no possibility of any help. A tree has to be rooted in the soil, only then can it grow. If it starts talking about not getting attached to the earth, it will die.Why are you afraid of getting attached to a new master? Do you think you have gone beyond attachment? Is it really non-attachment? Or is it just the attachment to the old teacher that is hindering your path?You are still attached to a person to whom you think you cannot go back. Now, this is unintelligent. Remain attached to him by all means, if you feel you are growing there – that is intelligence. Wherever growth is happening, wherever you are getting more and more mature, more and more blissful, remain attached by all means.But the moment growth has stopped, the moment you can see that you are not going anywhere, or going round in circles, it is time to detach. Seek new soil, seek new lands, new pastures. And one has to go on seeking till one becomes a master in one’s own right.And why be afraid of the new? You are attached to yesterday’s sun, and a new sun has risen today. Because of your attachment to yesterday’s sun you are keeping your eyes closed. Your fear is that of betrayal. But what can you do? It is not that you are betraying anybody, it is simply a search for your own growth – and that is your responsibility.You will have to go on seeking, searching. On and on one has to go, till one arrives at one’s own being. Learn from everywhere and don’t be so miserly. Now you want my help, but without becoming attached to me. It is impossible; you will have to be plugged in with me.That’s what sannyas is all about. Unless you are plugged in, my energy cannot flow into you. You can go on reading my books, but that is quite a different matter. It will remain intellectual; it will never become existential.It is a totally different phenomenon when you are a sannyasin and you listen to my words than when you are not a sannyasin and you listen to my words. They are the same words, but the meaning is totally different.When you are in a love relationship with me, those words simply become aflame. They have a light in them, they are luminous. They are not ordinary words; they are the words of your master, they are words coming from a source to which you have become devoted. They are really your words – as if your own being has spoken to you. There is intimacy, there is love. And in that love, the miracle happens.It is up to you. But don’t be clever; that cleverness will not help. To be with me means to be involved with me. You can be here, but if you are not with me, your being here is superficial. You will remain on the periphery, you will remain an outsider. And great secrets can only be delivered in deep intimacy. They can be only delivered through love.You say, “I have been a devotee of Baba Muktananda…” It is already a “have been,” it is finished. You have learned whatsoever you could learn from him; you have grown out of it, you have passed that class. Now enter a new class, enter a new land, explore this new country.You say, “And I ran a center for him. I experienced a period of extreme difficulty and it was not until I read your books that I understood all that was and still is happening.” If just by reading my books you have been helped, then think what is possible if you get involved with me. Even the impossible is possible.Muktananda has helped you, that’s why you are here. It is not betraying him. He has helped in his own way; without him you would not have been here. But now you have to go beyond. You have used the boat, now you have to leave it behind. Don’t become too attached to the boat, otherwise the whole journey becomes absurd. If you are too attached to the boat you will not leave it; you will not get to the other shore, and you will be puzzled and you will be confused.Reading my books is an intellectual way of communicating with me. Being a disciple is a non-intellectual, intuitive way of communing with me. Reading my books, listening to my words, is from head to head. Becoming a sannyasin is from heart to heart.Yes, a few things can be communicated through the head, through words, but those few things are not really the heart of the matter. The real heart of the matter can be communicated only from heart to heart. Only in tremendous devotion, receptivity, passionate love, surrender, in trust, does the flame jump from the master to the disciple. And the flame can jump only when you have come very close.It is up to you.You ask, “I question the need to be attached to another teacher.” If you are still attached to Muktananda, go back to him, forget all about me. Then I am not for you. But don’t become confused, because I am a totally different kind of man. Then you will remain attached to the primary class; then you can go on playing the same game again and again.Muktananda is a teacher – orthodox, conventional, a puritan, part of the status quo, traditional. I am just the opposite: I am not a teacher, I am not teaching you any doctrine, I am not giving you any creed.The word creed is beautiful, it comes from a root credere. Credere means “to believe.” I am not giving you any belief system, I am destroying all belief systems.Muktananda has given you a belief system. He is an ordinary teacher, in the service of the society, in the service of the past, in the service of this rotten structure, establishment. He is not a master.I have seen him, I have seen him; I have met him: there is no fire in him. Nothing has happened in him – or whatsoever has happened is very ordinary, can happen to anybody. This type of thing happens to thousands of people in India. He has no insight, he is not an enlightened person. You can remain attached to him and you can go on playing the game, but you will remain in a very primary state.And I am not saying that he has not helped you – even a primary class helps, otherwise nobody would ever enter into the university. But I am a totally different kind of person, diametrically opposite. I teach you rebellion. I am against the whole past, I am all for the present. And the future is going to be born out of the present.I am not for the establishment. My whole work here is to create a totally different kind of humanity. The humanity that has existed up till now is ill, abnormal, neurotic. I don’t belong to any tradition: I am not a Hindu, not a Christian, not a Mohammedan. I am utterly finished with the past, and I teach the same to you.I don’t give you a doctrine, I give you an insight into reality. I don’t give you a belief, I take all the beliefs and prejudices away from you, so that you can become a clean clear mirror so that that which is can be reflected in you.But this is possible only if you come close to me. The closer you are, the better. And by being closer I don’t mean a physical closeness, I mean a spiritual closeness.You say. “I question the need to be attached to another teacher although I feel and understand your teachings deeply.” Now you will be in turmoil. You are creating a split in yourself. Your heart is finished with your so-called teacher, Muktananda; just your mind is clinging. Your heart will be with me now, and your mind will go on clinging to the past. The mind always clings to the past. The mind is absolutely against the present and the future; it lives, exists, on the past, on the dead. Now you will be in a great split; your mind will say one thing, and your heart will say another.And my ways are so totally different from your other so-called teachers that the rift will become bigger and bigger every day. Either burn all my books and forget all about me – be at peace at least; you will remain stupid but there will be peace – or be finished with your old attachments. Then you can start growing again. I can help you.You say, “I know I cannot go back to Baba’s methods.” There is not much of a method to your Baba Muktananda. It is so childish, the whole thing is so unintelligent. But there are people who need it; there are people who can only understand a very superficial thing. It is fortunate that you have grown out of that need. Now please don’t go on carrying your childhood clothes with you: they won’t fit you, they will suffocate you.And your devotion is toward truth. If your devotion is toward truth, then from wherever it comes, there you have to bow down, there you have to surrender.You say, “I am confused – can you help?” I can help. But, can you take my help? That’s the question. The crux of the matter is not can I help – can you take it, can you receive it?Sannyas is just a gesture from your side that you are ready to receive it. And I can give it to you only when you are ready to receive it.The second question:Osho,If the self is the same in all men, does this mean that all men are identical? If so, how can any one man be an essential part of creation?The supreme self is the same in all men. And not only in all men but in all beings – men, animals, birds, trees, rocks. The supreme self is the center of the whole existence. It is not my self or your self, it is simply the self. It is universal, it is not personal.And still every individual is different, every individual is unique. This is one of the most paradoxical things, but it is so.All waves are part of the same ocean. And still each single wave taken, thought about, meditated over, is totally different from any other wave that has ever been, is, or will ever be. Both are true. Each wave is nothing but part of the ocean, the same ocean: the ocean is the supreme self. But the wave has a form. One wave is so tidal and is trying to reach the stars; another is so small, so humble. They are different: their shape, their form, their manifestation, is different. No two waves are the same, and still the ocean behind each wave is the same. So I don’t see that there is any difficulty in understanding this simple truth, although it is paradoxical.The self is one. And still the selves are all different. Self with a capital S is one; selves with a lower-case s are millions. And they are all different – they are waves. God creates out of the same stuff, but each time he paints differently, he sculpts differently.I have heard…An American art dealer traveling in China saw a beautiful hand-carved chair in an artisan’s shop and was enchanted with it. He asked the artisan how much he would charge to make eleven additional chairs.“All different?” said the artisan.“No, all exactly like this one.”“Well,” said the artisan dubiously, “if they must all be exactly alike, I will have to charge you more for each chair.”“More!” exclaimed the American, who had hoped for a better price on a quantity order. “Why more?”“I would become bored making them all alike,” replied the artisan. “I would be happier making each one different.”God would have really become bored if he was to go on producing the same type of person again and again. God is not an assembly line. The production is not mass; it is always unique, whatsoever is created. You cannot find two pebbles alike on the whole of the earth, not even two leaves alike. What to say about two human beings?But the stuff is the same: it is the same universal consciousness out of which we are all made, sculptured, painted. It is the same, but still each one is given a different form. And the world is beautiful because each individual has a uniqueness – his own face, his own authenticity. Yet go deeper in him, and you will find the individual disappearing. And when you have reached to his very core, there is no individual left, but only the universal.So let me say it in this way: on the circumference we are different, at the center we are the same. The center is one, the circumference is millions. And each circumference has its own way of expression, of being.God is a creator, not a producer. And his creativity is infinite. He never duplicates, he never imitates, he never creates carbon copies. He creates an individual only once – and that is your grandeur, your dignity, your glory.You ask me, “If the self is the same in all men, does this mean that all men are identical?” They are not identical. On the circumference they are absolutely unique. At the center there is no question of identity: it is one. There are not two, so how can they be identical? At the center there is only one universal existence; there is no question of being identical with anything else – there is nothing else. On the periphery, on the circumference, there is no question of being identical: all waves are different, no two waves are similar.And you ask, “If so, how can any one man be an essential part of creation?” Each single wave is an essential part of the ocean; it is not accidental. By essential I mean it is needed by the ocean, otherwise it would not have been there in the first place. God needs you the way you are, he needs you exactly the way you are. So please don’t try to become somebody else.Don’t try to become a Buddha, don’t try to become a Jesus, don’t try to become a Mohammed. Just be yourself, because that’s how he wants you. If he had wanted Mohammeds he would have created many more Mohammeds; he does not want them. He is finished with Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus – whomsoever he has created, he is finished with them. Now he has created you. You are needed – not Mohammed, nor Krishna, nor Christ. You are needed, you as you are.So don’t try to imitate any great ideal, don’t try to be a copy of somebody else. Be sincere to the form that God has given you, because that is the only way to thank God, to be grateful to God. Be authentically your individual being.And if you are an authentic individual being you will be able to know the universal too, and more easily, because the universal is not far away from the authentic individual. The ocean is just there in the wave: a look inward, and the ocean is revealed.But if you have become false, you cannot look inward. The mask cannot look inward. The false cannot look inward, because the false has nothing like an inner side. Only the real has two sides, the outer and the inner. The false has only one side, the outer. It has no inner side; it is just a mask, there is nothing inside it. It is just a painted face.Please don’t be Hindus, don’t be Mohammedans, don’t be Christians. Be religious – and by being religious, I mean look inward, search inward. And you will find these two things: first, your authenticity, your individuality, and in the second step you will find your universality. First the small self has to be true, then you will find the supreme Self.From the small truth to the ultimate truth, that is the journey, the pilgrimage.The third question:Osho,I begin to see more clearly the games that I and other people play. Are these observations to be trusted, or am I wasting time on mind games again?Trust only the pure consciousness when there is nothing left to be observed. If something is left to be observed, it is still a game. It is the same game, played with new toys.You say, “I begin to see more clearly the games that I and other people play.”Now, if you don’t become alert, you may start playing this game of observation. And you will be continuously observing.I have heard about a psychoanalyst who went to see a beauty contest. Naked beautiful women were passing, the whole audience was excited, everybody was totally absorbed in watching the beautiful women. But the psychiatrist, the psychoanalyst, was watching people.His friend who was sitting by his side asked him, “What are you doing? The women are there on the stage, why don’t you look there?”He said, “I am looking at the people. I am watching how they are reacting, what is in their eyes.”Now, this is again the same game. A few people are watching the naked women, and somebody is watching the people watching the naked women. Now the game has gone a little deeper. And there may be a third person who can watch this psychoanalyst watching people watching naked women… And so on, so forth, it can go on and on.Observation is good, but don’t let it become a game. It can become a game, and then it is all the same; what game you are playing is not the question. You can play religious games, you can play psychological games, you can play spiritual games – you can go on playing.The worldly person is after money: he is playing a game. The otherworldly person is after renouncing money: he is playing another game. The worldly person is interested in being a great success, famous, well known. The religious person is escaping to the caves, so nobody knows him, so he becomes absolutely anonymous.But whether you want to be known by others, or you want not to be known by others, you are focused on others: it is the same game.A man triumphantly walked into his favorite bar after asking for and receiving a quite substantial raise in salary at his job. “Joe!” he shouted to the bartender. “Drinks for the whole house are on me, except for that Jew over there in the corner. Don’t give him a drop!”The Jewish man, although a little hurt, remained quiet.A short while later, the man cried out to the bartender again, “Joe, another drink for everybody here! But nothing for that Jew over there in the corner. I don’t want him to have anything!”At this, the Jew could contain himself no longer and with great frustration he walked over to the man. “What is it?” he yelled. “What have we Jews ever done to you? Why do you treat me this way?”With great contempt the man looked at the Jew and said, “You sunk the Titanic, that’s what you did!”“What!” cried the Jew in utter disbelief. “What kind of nonsense is this? An iceberg sank the Titanic, you fool!”The man nodded his head knowingly and replied, “That’s right – Steinberg, Greenberg, Iceberg, you are all the same to me!”All the games are the same. Play – but remember, all the games are the same. One has to come to a point where there is nothing left to observe, no content in the consciousness. Content-less consciousness is meditation.And when there is no content, all games disappear because you cannot play with nothingness. There is no way to play with nothingness. When all games have disappeared, all contents have disappeared, you will be surprised to know, you will have also disappeared with your games – because the “I” exists only through games. You can change your games: the “I,” the ego, starts riding on other games.When all games disappear – the game of observation included, the spiritual game included – when there is no content, and consciousness is there, just pure, with nothing to cling to, with nothing to hold on to, that is the moment when you go beyond games, beyond the world.The world consists of games. Nirvana consists in going beyond all games.The fourth question:Osho,Is there not something like a deep inbuilt longing in man to die as an ego, to disappear, to dissolve – and how is this longing different from Freud's thanatos, from life-negation?In reality, there is no ego to disappear. Disappearance is possible only if the ego is real. If the ego really exists, only then is disappearance possible. Then what is meant when it is said, “Let the ego disappear?” All that is meant is this: Look deep down, and you will not find any ego in you. That is the disappearance. It is not that the ego disappears – it has never been there in the first place. You only believed that it was there; it was just a notion, an idea in you, nothing else.It is as if it is evening and the sun has set and the night is descending and you see a rope, but it looks like a snake to you. Out of your fear you project a snake on the rope, and you start running, you are so frightened. There is no snake. If somebody catches hold of you, laughs, takes you to the rope, shows you that there is only a rope and nothing else, will you say that now the snake has disappeared, dissolved, gone away, died? That will be nonsense. You will also laugh; you will say the snake was never there in the first place. The rope was always a rope: you projected a snake on it. That snake was just a fear ripple in you.So is the ego. Ego is just an idea, and if you start trying to drop the ego you will be in great difficulty. It cannot be dropped. How can you drop something which doesn’t exist?That’s why people who try to drop the ego are in such an absurd situation: they go on dropping it and it goes on bubbling up, popping up. They become very humble, but deep down in their humbleness there is ego. Humbleness itself becomes the cause of their ego. They start proclaiming to the world, “There is nobody more humble than me, I am the tops.” Now humbleness has become another form of the ego.The ego cannot be dropped, the ego can only be looked into. Once you look into it, it is not found because it is not there. It disappears as a dream disappears when you wake up in the morning. You can wake up, that’s all; the ego cannot be dissolved. And the whole effort is absurd, because in dissolving it you have accepted its existence – and the whole fault lies there.You ask, “Is there not something like a deep inbuilt longing in man to die as an ego?” No, there is none, because the ego is not there. Yes, there is a deep inbuilt longing in man to know “Who am I?” – that is there, but not to die as an ego. There is a great urge in man to know “Who am I?” It persists, it permeates your whole life.Even small children start asking, “Who am I?” The question is something very fundamental. It is an inbuilt phenomenon, the inquiry into one’s own being. And when you inquire deeply into your own being, the ego is not found. What is found is God. When you go in, the ego is not found, God is found. When you go out, God is not found, and you go on believing in the ego.The ego is a belief of an outgoing consciousness, non-ego is the experience of an ingoing consciousness. It has nothing to do with Freud’s thanatos; that’s a totally different phenomenon. Man has a lust for life, that is eros. But when this lust for life gets frustrated again and again, it is replaced by its antagonist, by its diametrical opposite.Just as love can become sour and can turn into hate, the lust for life can become a lust for death. You will be surprised to know that in poor countries very few people commit suicide. Logically it should be just otherwise: poor people should commit suicide more, there is nothing in their life to live for. But rich people commit suicide more. What is the secret of this illogical phenomenon? The richer a society becomes, the more people commit suicide; more and more people commit suicide – why? The lust for life goes sour.The poor man has not even lived – how can he be frustrated with life? Frustration is possible only when you have lived and seen that there is nothing in it. The poor man still hopes: he hopes for tomorrow, he still hopes for life.The rich man knows everything about life; he has seen it, he has lived it. He has looked all around, he has searched everywhere, and it has not been found. In tremendous frustration, the eros, the life-instinct, turns suicidal. The rich man wants to die because there is no point in living, because there is no hope any more. He has all that the world can give, and still it is meaningless. So why go on prolonging it unnecessarily?The biggest problem that the future is going to face is suicide. Science will make the earth richer and richer, and more and more people will be committing suicide, because they will see, “Now what is the point of going on living the same life again and again? There is nothing that can fulfill one here: why not finish it?”In the rich countries, in the rich cultures, “What is the meaning of life?” is always a very significant question. But in a poor country nobody asks what the meaning of life is; people ask for material things. The meaning of life is the last question: when you have known life, you can ask it.In the West, people are asking about the meaning of life, and turning East. And people in the East are turning West because they want more technology, better houses, better food, better roads, better cars; they want all that has become available in the West. The East is turning communist, the West is turning religious. The East is turning more and more materialist – why? Because in the East, eros is unfulfilled, so thanatos, the death-wish, cannot yet take possession.In the West, eros has come to a saturation point. It has touched the highest peak; now there is no further to go. The circle is turning back, the wheel is turning back: it will turn into thanatos.In fact the preparation for a Third World War is nothing but preparation for a universal suicide. So much energy, so much technology, so much intelligence is poured just preparing for a Third World War which will destroy all life on earth – not only human life, but all life. Why is there so much passion for war? It is just a vicarious way to commit suicide.Thanatos is eros gone sour. Unless your eros can be again revived, unless your eros can be turned inward, unless something that has nothing to do with material things, something of the ultimate, enters your life and becomes your inquiry, eros is bound to turn into thanatos. But it is not a necessary phenomenon. When your eros is dying, you can take a jump to a new quality of eros.Jesus says, “Come to me, I will show you the path of life abundant, life eternal.” And that has been the teaching of all the great masters of the world. “You are finished with this life? Good,” they say. “No need to turn sour. We will show you the way to eternal life which never turns sour because it is eternal and infinite. You can go on and on and on forever, and there are always surprises.That’s what religion is all about: the search for an eros which never turns into a thanatos. Real religion is always life-affirmative: it affirms the life of the earth, and when it is found that that life is no longer fulfilling to somebody, it opens the doors to divine life. If those doors remain closed, then there is a problem; then your energy will start turning into its very opposite.Energy can always turn into its very opposite. Love can become hate, anger can become compassion, greed can become sharing, friendship can become enmity, and vice versa. Energies can always turn into their diametrically opposite, because all energy is a dialectical process. The thesis can turn into its antithesis.You love a person and then you feel unfulfilled: you start hating the person. Marriage can turn into a divorce; only marriage can turn into a divorce. If you really want no divorce in the world, let marriage disappear and there will be no divorce. How can there be a divorce if there is no marriage?Whenever you long for something with great expectation, and the expectation gets frustrated, there is a crisis. And there are two alternatives: either your energy will turn to its opposite, or your energy will take a quantum leap, and will change its plane – will move onto another plane.Live the earthly life totally. And when you see that now it no longer fulfills you, then take a jump, a quantum leap, into unearthly life. Live the extrovert life to the full, and when you see that now you have matured, graduated from it, then turn inward.This is my whole process. And the moment of crisis is the greatest moment. In the moment of crisis you need somebody to guide you: you need a master. The psychotherapist cannot help you; he can only help you to get readjusted to your old life with which you are feeling frustrated. He may manage for a few months, a few years; again the same thing will happen.Only a master can help you toward a quantum leap, a jump from a lower plane to a higher plane. And there is no end; there are higher and higher planes, peaks and peaks beyond peaks waiting for you. When you have climbed one peak, you are surprised, there is another peak challenging you.This is the eternity of life.The fifth question:Osho,How do you know the inner world of a person? Because I have always felt that the moment you see somebody, instantly his whole life is revealed to you. This is my own experience too.There is not much mystery to it, it is very simple. If you are a mirror, if you are silent, if there is no turmoil within you, if there is no thought process and traffic of the mind inside you, the other is simply reflected. It is not a great secret.If you go to the lake and there are no ripples and waves on the lake, you are reflected in the lake, the moon and the stars are reflected in the lake. The lake knows no art; it is not an art anyway, it is a simple phenomenon.I am sitting here silently, with no traffic of the mind. You come in front of me, the mirror reflects you. The lake of my consciousness reflects you: I see you, all and all, from one end to another end, in your totality. But this knowing is not knowledge, this knowing is just mirroring.It is as simple as this…Donald Crowe stopped his camper truck along the Yellowstone National Park road. “A bear!” shouted Donald with delight.His wife cautioned him, “Dear, the signs say, ‘Do not feed the bears’!”“A sandwich or two isn’t going to hurt the bear.”Donald jumped out of the camper and neared the bear with a sandwich in his right hand. He then tossed the sandwich which the bear caught and downed in one gulp. Finally he gave the bear his second sandwich.Suddenly the bear growled ferociously. He wanted the third sandwich which Donald didn’t have. Donald turned his pocket inside out to show he had no more food. “No more. See? I’ve given you all my sandwiches.”The bear began to rush toward Donald. Donald ran for his life. As he breathlessly tore the camper door open, Donald gasped, “That bear just doesn’t understand English!”There is no need to understand your language; there is no need to understand anything about you. There is no need to understand you at all: you are simply reflected. A bear is a bear. How do you know that a bear is a bear? How do you know that a rose is a rose? There is no analysis involved in it, no technique, no technology.They tell the story of the psychiatrist who had a plane to catch and who still had three women in his waiting room together with their children. So he decided to treat them all at once.He walked up to the first lady who was obviously very heavy and fat and said to her, “Madam, it’s plain to see that your problem involves food, that is all you ever think of. What is your child’s name?”“Honey,” replied the woman.“You see, you even were subconsciously thinking of food when you named your child. My advice for you is to go home and stop thinking of food.”The next woman he approached was dressed up with jewelry and very expensive clothes. “Madam, it is plain to see that your priorities deal with the material things of life and that money is your god. What is your child’s name?”“Goldie,” she replied.“You see, even subconsciously you were thinking of wealth when you named your child. My advice is to go home and forget about material things.”As he approached the third women she got up, grabbed her son and in a loud voice said, “Come on, Dick, we’d better go home now.”Things are very simple. You just have to be a mirror, and people reveal everything themselves. You need not ask even a single question. The way they walk, the way they sit, the way they look, the way they talk, reveals everything. It is not revealed to you because you are not looking at them at all. You are so preoccupied in yourself, you are so preoccupied with your thoughts, that you are surrounded by a fog.Otherwise, everybody is revealing everything. Everybody is naked. You just need open eyes, a silent mind, and you will be surprised: nobody can hide anything from you, there is no way of hiding anything.The sixth question:Osho,Please explain what intelligence is.Intelligence is just an openness of being – a capacity to see without prejudice, a capacity to listen without interference, a capacity to be with things without any a priori ideas about them – that’s what intelligence is. Intelligence is an openness of being.That’s why it is so utterly different from intellectuality. Intellectuality is just the opposite of intelligence. The intellectual person is constantly carrying prejudices, information, a priori, beliefs, knowledge. He cannot listen; before you have said anything, he has already concluded. Whatsoever you say has to pass through so many thoughts in his mind that by the time it reaches him it is something totally different. Great distortion happens in him, and he is very closed, almost blind and deaf.All experts, knowledgeable people, are blind.Do you know the old story of the five blind people going to see an elephant?A teacher was telling her students, small girls and boys, the old ancient fable. She told the whole story, then she asked a small boy, “Can you tell me who the people were who went to see the elephant and then started quarreling?” She wanted to know whether the boy had heard while she was teaching the story.And the boy stood up and said, “Yes, I know. They were the experts.”She was thinking he would answer, “They were five blind people.” But the small boy said, “Those were the experts.” He is far more right; yes, they were experts.All experts are blind. Expertise means you become blind to everything else. You know more and more about less and less, and then one day you arrive at the ultimate goal of knowing all about nothing. Then you are completely closed and not even a window is open; then you have become windowless.This is unintelligence. Intelligence is to be open to wind, rain and sun, to be open to all. Not to carry the past is intelligence, to die to the past every moment is intelligence, to remain fresh and innocent is intelligence.Donald was driving his sports car down the main avenue when suddenly he noticed to his rear a flashing red light. It was a police car.Quickly Donald pulled over to the side. “Officer,” he blurted, “I was only doing twenty-five in a thirty-five-mile zone.”“Sir,” said the officer, “I just…”“Furthermore,” interrupted Donald indignantly, “as a citizen I resent being frightened like this!”“Please,” continued the officer, “calm down, relax…”“Relax!” shouted Donald, overwrought. “You’re going to give me a traffic ticket, and you want me to relax!”“Mister,” pleaded the officer, “give me a chance to talk. I am not giving you a ticket.”“No?” said Donald, astonished.“I just wanted to inform you that your right rear tire is flat.”But nobody is ready to listen to what the other is saying. Have you ever listened to what the other is saying? Before a word is uttered, you have already concluded. Your conclusions have become fixed; you are no longer liquid.To become frozen is to become idiotic, to remain liquid is to remain intelligent. Intelligence is always flowing like a river. Unintelligence is like an ice cube, frozen. Unintelligence is always consistent because it is frozen; it is definite, it is certain. Intelligence is inconsistent, it is flowing, it has no definition. It goes on moving according to situations; it is responsible, but it is not consistent.Only stupid people are consistent people. The more intelligent you are, the more inconsistent you will be – because who knows about tomorrow? Tomorrow will bring its own experiences. How can you be consistent with your yesterdays? If you are dead you will be consistent. If you are alive you have to be inconsistent: you have grown, the world has changed, the river is flowing into new territory.Yesterday the river was passing through a desert, today it is passing through a forest; it is totally different. Yesterday’s experience should not become your definition forever, otherwise you died yesterday. One should be able to go on moving with time. One should remain a process, one should never become a thing. That is intelligence.The seventh question:Osho,In a lecture you said that the really aware were able to live alone. How does this fit with the dream of a community?The really aware person is certainly one who is capable of living alone. But that is only half the truth. The other half is that the one who is really capable of being alone is also capable of being together with somebody. In fact only he is capable of being in a togetherness.The person who is not able to be alone cannot be able to be together with somebody, because he has no individuality. The person who has no individuality cannot be together with somebody – why? There are many problems. First, he is always afraid that if he comes too close to the other person he will lose himself. He has no integrity yet: he is afraid.That’s why people are afraid of love, of too much love. People are afraid to come too close, because if they come too close they may dissolve in the other. That is the fear. The other may overpower them; the other may become their whole reality. They may be possessed by the other. That is the fear.Only a person who knows the beauty of being alone is capable of coming as close as possible, because he is unafraid. He knows that he is, he has an integrated being in him. He has something crystallized in him, because without that crystallized something he would not be able to be alone.The second thing: when a person is not capable of being alone, he is always dependent on the other. He clings – because he is afraid the other may leave, and then he will have to suffer loneliness. He clings, he exploits the other, he creates all kinds of bondages around the other.And whenever you make the other your possession, you become the possession of the other. It functions in both ways. When you reduce the other to a slave, the other reduces you to a slave. And when you are so afraid of the other’s leaving you, you are ready to compromise; you are ready to compromise in any way.You will see this happening to all husbands and wives. They have compromised, they have sold their souls, for a single reason: because they cannot be alone. They are afraid the woman may leave, the man may leave – and then? The very idea is so frightening, scary.The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person – without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.Then why do they want to be together? It is no longer a need, it is a luxury. Try to understand it. Real persons love each other as a luxury; it is not a need. They enjoy sharing: they have so much joy that they would like to pour into somebody. And they know how to play their life as a solo instrument.The solo flute player knows how to enjoy his flute alone. And if he comes and finds a tabla player, a solo tabla player, they both will enjoy being together and creating a harmony between the flute and the tabla. They both will enjoy it: they will both pour their richness into each other.And, you ask, “How does this fit with the dream of a community?” That is the difference between the so-called society and a commune. The society consists of people who are needful, who are all dependent in some way or other. The children are dependent on the parents – but remember, the parents are also dependent on the children. It may not be so obvious, but it is so – just search a little more. The mother cannot be without the child; of course the child cannot be without the mother, but the mother also cannot be without the child.Family members are dependent on each other, they cling to each other. It gives a certain comfort, security, safety. Then the family depends on other families. People depend on the church, people depend on clubs, people depend on societies. It is a great world of dependent people, ungrown-ups, childish.A commune is a totally different world. It is not a society. A commune is a gathering of people who are all capable of being alone, and they would like to be together to create a great orchestra of being. A commune is not a dependent phenomenon, it is an independence.That’s why many times in this ashram people come and tell me, “Everybody here seems to be so happy with himself that it looks as if nobody is interested in anybody else.” Particularly the newcomers feel it, that it is as if people are indifferent. It is not so; they are not indifferent. But you are coming from a society where everybody is dependent on everybody else. This is not a society – this is not your society. Here, everybody is enjoying his being, and nobody interferes in anybody’s life, there is no interference.My whole effort is to make you so alert, so loving, that you don’t interfere. Love never interferes, love gives total freedom. If it is not giving freedom, then it is not love. It is not indifference that newcomers feel – and slowly, slowly, they understand. By the time they have lived here for a few weeks, they know what is happening. People are not indifferent, people are very loving. But they are non-interfering, so they don’t impinge upon you. And they are not needy, they are not greedy, they don’t cling to you.Of course, you have known only that kind of people, so this new type frightens you. You think that you are not needed, that nobody cares, that these people are very selfish, that they are too self-occupied. It is nothing like that; that is not the case at all, it is absolutely untrue. But to you it may appear so in the beginning.A commune of sannyasins will be a celebration, a gathering of people who are not in any way needy of the other. It is beautiful if two persons are together; it is good if it continues and they can sing a song together, it is good to sing a chorus. But if things go wrong, if it becomes heavy, if being together interferes with your freedom, then you can go and sing your song alone. There is no need to be part of a chorus.The commune is a space where this much freedom is allowed. There will be couples, but there will not be husbands and wives. There will be friends in the commune.That’s why the Indian government, the Indian society, is very much afraid of me. I am going to create a totally different kind of community which will shatter all their ideas – their so-called morality, and their traditionally cherished ideals of marriage, and all that nonsense.People can live together if they enjoy being together, but only just for that joy of being together – it is not a need. If at any moment a person decides to get out of a relationship, he can get out of it without any trouble, without any turmoil, without any crying and weeping and fighting and making things ugly, without any nagging and prolonging.People have to be true. If they feel good being together, good. If they feel it is no longer growthful, it is no longer maturing, they say good-bye to each other. They feel grateful to each other: whatsoever has been shared was beautiful, they will cherish the memory forever, but now the time has come to depart. They lived in joy, they will depart in joy; their friendship will remain intact. And it may happen again: they may start living together again. They will not leave any scars on each other, they will not wound each other, they will respect the other’s freedom.My commune particularly – and whatsoever I am saying, I am saying about my commune – my commune will create individuals who are capable of being alone and who are also capable of being together – who can play solo music and who can become part of a chorus.The last question:Osho,I have been a Hindu monk for seven years. I had been told to be a celibate, so I forced it upon myself. It was very arduous but somehow I succeeded, at least physically, in it. But then the whole thing went into my head. Now I constantly think of sex and nothing else. I am imprisoned in it, and whenever I see a woman I start trembling inside.Please help me to come out of it.It is natural. This is not the way to get beyond sex. Repression is never the way; repression really makes things more complicated. Sex is simple. Repression makes it very complicated because it shifts the whole sexual energy from the genital organs to the head. And when sex has entered the head, it is an ugly phenomenon. It is not sex, it is sexuality. It is pornography. When sex has entered your head, you are creating your own private pornographic blue films.That’s why you are afraid of a woman. The moment you see a woman, fear arises, because all that you have repressed is there like a volcano, and you are sitting on top of it. It can explode. The woman can be the triggering point; she may be like a spark, and you may explode.You have become very inflammable, you are carrying a very dangerous energy. Sex is beautiful, lived naturally; repressed, it becomes ugly and moves into the head. And when sex moves into the head, there is no way of getting out of it. You can get out of it only by going through it: the way out is through.You are fortunate that you have come here, otherwise your Hindu monkhood would have destroyed you totally. All monks become sexual, more sexual than ordinary people. Their whole thinking centers around sexuality. And remember, whenever some energy moves from its natural center to some other center, then things are very difficult. First your energy has to be brought back to the sex center.That’s the whole process of Tantra. Your energy has to be brought to the natural center where it belongs. From the unnatural center there is no possibility of release.But this happens: when you repress something where will it go? Only your head has some empty space, only in your skull is there emptiness. So whatsoever you repress is bound to go, slowly, slowly, to the head. The pressure will be felt only as a tension in the head. And the more it is there, the only way that will be suggested by your so-called teachers – Muktanandas, etcetera – will be: “Repress it more.”And they will give you methods to repress it more: go on a fast, stand on your head… It will go more into the head if you stand on your head! Even gravitation will pull you toward your head. And you will get into more and more difficulty.It was an exciting moment: the two friends’ wives were going to give birth on the same day and at the same hospital. The doctors came and told the first man, who was Jewish, that he had a new baby son and that there were no complications.Within minutes the doctor came again, telling the second man that he too had a new baby boy, but the boy had a skin problem around his neck and they would need to do a skin graft.The first man asked the doctor, “Tell me, would the skin from my son’s circumcision be helpful?” The doctors thought it a great idea and the graft was performed and things turned out beautifully – not even a scar.Having moved to separate cities, the two friends hadn’t seen each other for over eighteen years when they met at a restaurant while each was vacationing in Miami Beach. Enthusiastically they exchanged stories. Finally, the Jewish man asked, “Have there been any problems with your son’s neck?”“Nothing to speak of,” said the other. “With the exception of one mysterious thing – even the doctors cannot figure it out. Every time my son sees a pretty girl, he gets a stiff neck.”Now it is very difficult! No doctor can help now, unless further surgery is done.Your seven years of monkhood have done it: you are getting a stiff neck! But you have come in time, we will do the surgery. Don’t be worried; we will teach you how to stand on your feet and not on your head, and we will teach you that each center has to function normally in its own way; no other center has to interfere.But the head has become a substitute center. A few people go on thinking about food, a few people go on thinking about sex, a few people go on thinking about something else. And by thinking, you are not living it, by thinking you are creating a false appetite, and by thinking, it cannot be fulfilled. By thinking, your hunger will not go; and by thinking, sex and your natural desire for it will not disappear, it will become accumulated. And the more accumulated it is, the more poisoned it becomes. It becomes stale energy.I too would like you to go beyond sex, because going beyond sex is a tremendously beautiful experience of freedom – freedom from the body, freedom from that continuous obsession. When sex really disappears, without any repression, when it disappears through meditation, for the first time it gives you the taste of total freedom. You don’t need anybody any more; you are out of the grip of biology.In fact when sex has disappeared you become a man for the first time, because with sex you remain part of the animal world. But the way to go beyond is through it: you cannot bypass it, there is no shortcut.So drop your monkhood, your celibacy, and drop all the nonsense that has been fed to you. Start from ABC again, because this is a new sannyas: this has to be a new birth. Forget all that has been conditioned in you. Seven years is a long time, and to be with the wrong people, to be with poisoners for seven years, is to be conditioned by them in a particular way. It will be difficult for you to drop it, but it has to be dropped.And if you have understood that those seven years have not helped you at all, then there is no problem. If you have understood, don’t cling to those ideas, simply drop them. Forget all about it, start again. Be a simple, ordinary human being.And if you can live naturally, in that very living, God comes as a grace. God comes through nature, never against nature. God comes through nature – and his coming transforms. When his energy descends in you, sex disappears. And when sex disappears of its own accord, it is a beautiful phenomenon, it is a benediction.But live it, and live it totally – that’s the only way to go out of it. No repression any more, no inhibition any more. Accept it is as a gift of God – it is. And if you accept it, you will become ready to receive more gifts, better gifts.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-07/

Love’s conqueror is hewhom love conquers.Apply yourself, hand and foot,to the search;but when you reach the sea,stop talking of the stream.When he admits you to his presenceask from him nothing other than himself.When he has chosen you for a friend,you have seen all that there is to see.There’s no duality in the world of love:what’s all this talk of “you” and “me”?How can you fill a cup that’s full already?Bring all of yourself to his door:bring only a part,and you’ve brought nothing at all.It’s your own selfdefining faith and unbelief:inevitably it colors your perception.Eternity knows nothingof belief or unbelief;for a pure naturethere is no such thing.And if, my friend, you ask me the way,I’ll tell you plainly, it is this:to turn your face toward the world of life,and turn your back on rank and reputation;and, spurning outward prosperity, to bendyour back double in his service;to part company with those who deal in words,and take your place in the presence of the wordless.The way is not farfrom you to the friend:you yourself are that way:so set out along it.You who know nothing of the lifethat comes from the juice of the grape,how long will you remain intoxicatedby the outward form of the grape?Why do you lie that you are drunk?How can you go forward?There is no place to go;how will you leap?You have no foot.Hakim Sanai says:Love’s conqueror is hewhom love conquers.A tremendously pregnant statement: meditate over it. The moment you start searching for God, remember he is always the initiator of the search. If you choose God, that simply means he has chosen you already. It is only by his grace that the search begins. You may think in your egoistic way, “I am searching for God” – that is utterly wrong. Unless he searches for you, there is no possibility for you to search for him. Unless he chooses you, you cannot choose him. You are always chosen by him. But that phenomenon happens in such depths of your being that you never become aware of it, unless you have arrived.This statement is the statement of one who has arrived. Now he knows his whole being. Knowing it, he knows that it was God who initiated the whole search: “I could love him because his love has stirred my heart in the first place.”And this sutra also states the very fundamental of Sufism, of the path of love: Love never tries to conquer, yet it conquers. Hate always tries to conquer, but never conquers. Hate is impotent to conquer; it aspires, it is very ambitious, but it is doomed to fail. Love has no idea of conquering, love has no idea of dominating, love has no idea of becoming the first in the world. Yet love becomes the first, the conqueror.Jesus says: “Those who are the last in this world will be the first in my kingdom of God.” And vice versa.Lao Tzu preaches the way of water, the watercourse way. He says: The rock is strong, is in every way trying to conquer, is aggressive, resistant, but ultimately is defeated, is destroyed, becomes the sand and disappears into the ocean.” Water is very humble, non-pretentious, non-resistant, has no motivation for conquering anybody or destroying anybody, is always ready to bow down, to surrender. But whenever there is a conflict between water and rock, the rock is ultimately defeated – water, never.Sanai is saying: Love’s conqueror is he whom love conquers. To conquer in the world of love – and the world of love is the world of God – to conquer in the world of love, one needs to be in a very deep total surrender. One needs to be conquered by love. And when love conquers you, you are enthroned, you are crowned, you are victorious. But only when love conquers you. Never resist. Resistance is doomed to fail, because resistance dissipates your energy.Lao Tzu again says: “Don’t be like a big strong tree – because when the storm comes and the great wind blows, the big tree will resist, and because of that resistance, will fall down.” The fault is not of the great wind, the fault lies in the great tree’s egoistic resistance: it does not want to bend, hence it dies.And look at the grass. The wind comes and the grass simply goes with the wind, bends with the wind. If it is going toward the south, the grass bends toward the south – with no resistance at all, in a tremendous surrender, in trust. When the wind is gone, the grass is back again in its original place; the wind could not destroy it. And the grass is humble, weak, feminine, soft. And the great tree was hard, masculine, arrogant.Learn from the grass the ways of love.Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” This is one of the most significant sayings of Jesus: “Blessed are the meek.” And remember, he does not say, “Blessed are the meek, for theirs will be the kingdom of God” – no. He says, “…for theirs is the kingdom of God.” It is not a question of attaining something in the future; in their very meekness, in their very humbleness, they have arrived, they have achieved. This is the meaning of surrender.God cannot be conquered: you can only allow yourself to be conquered by God. Don’t be aggressive with truth – that is the sure way to miss it. That’s why science goes on missing God, and will go on missing. Unless it takes Tao as its foundation, it will go on missing.Science will never come to know that God exists; it will not have even a glimpse of the divine. And the reason is in its masculine methodology. Science is aggressive; its whole effort is to conquer nature. In that very idea of conquering, conquest, it has made it clear that God will not be available to it. Its very methodology has prevented God from exposing himself, from revealing himself.Religion comes to know about God – but the way of religion is just the opposite of the way of science. Science is aggressive, masculine; in a subtle way, rapist. Science rapes nature, religion teaches you how to love.And remember, from the outside, rape and love may look alike. The act may look similar. But it is not the same; it is totally opposite, diametrically opposite. The act of rape has nothing of love in it, and the act of love has nothing of rape in it. So don’t be deceived by appearances.We all have been trained in the ways of science; it has become our conditioning. That is one of the greatest problems humanity is facing today: we have lost all track of religious approaches, and we have become so attuned to the scientific method that we go on trying the same method in the world, in the dimension of religion. It is inapplicable there, it is utterly inadequate there, but we cling to the method.And anybody who clings to any method whatsoever is not a seeker of truth. The method is not the goal, one need not cling to the method; one has to search for the right method. And if some method is not working, drop it!If science is not revealing God to you, that simply means that the method is inapplicable there. Somewhere the sword is needed, and somewhere else just a needle will do. Where a needle is needed, please don’t use the sword.It is reported in the life of a great Sufi mystic, Farid, that a king came to see him. He had brought a present for him: a beautiful pair of scissors, golden, studded with diamonds – very valuable, very rare, something unique. He brought those scissors to present to Farid. He touched Farid’s feet and gave him the scissors. Farid took them, looked at them, gave them back to the king, and said, “Sir, many, many thanks for the present that you have brought. It is a beautiful thing, but utterly useless for me. It will be better if you can give me a needle. I don’t need scissors, a needle will do.”The king said, “I don’t understand. If you need a needle, you will need scissors too.”Farid said, “I am talking in metaphors. I don’t need scissors because scissors cut things apart. I need a needle because a needle puts things together. I teach love. My whole teaching is based on love – how to put things together, how to teach people communion. I need a needle so that I can put people together. The scissors are useless; they cut, they disconnect. Next time when you come, just an ordinary needle will be enough.”Where a needle is needed, a sword is dangerous. And one has to be aware about methods. We are so much attached to methods that rather than changing the method, we are ready to drop God. We are ready to say there is no God because our methods are not able to reveal him. But we never think it may be that our methods are wrong.You cannot hear music with the eyes. Because eyes say there is no music, that does not mean that music is nonexistential. You cannot see colors with the ears. That does not mean that colors don’t exist; that simply means that ears are incapable of knowing colors and eyes are incapable of knowing music. For music, ears are needed; for colors, flowers, rainbows, eyes are needed.Religion is the way of surrender, not of conquering. But the paradox is that: Love’s conqueror is he whom love conquers.The paradox is that those who are ready to be defeated by love become victorious. But remember one thing: this should not be your unconscious motivation, otherwise you will miss again.Sanai says: “If you want to conquer, be conquered.” And you do want to conquer; deep down the desire is always there to conquer. So you say, “Okay. If this is the way to conquer, that I have to be conquered, then I will be conquered – because I want to be a conqueror.” You will miss. The subtle motivation will destroy the whole beauty, the whole approach: you are still trying to conquer. No, the motivation has to disappear completely.Victory is a consequence, not an effort. It is not an effect that you can cause, it is a consequence. When there is no motivation of conquering, victory comes. When you are not on a conquest trip, on an ego trip, victory comes. It is a consequence, a natural consequence, of the heart which is humble, meek, surrendered.What does it mean to be meek, humble, surrendered? It means remaining in a let-go; it means going with the whole, not struggling against it. If you are sad, don’t struggle against it. Then be sad, rejoice in your sadness, because this is the gift of God at this particular time. It must be a need, because nothing happens without your need. You must need this climate in this moment.So if you are sad, be totally sad this is how God wants you to be – with not even a slight lurking motivation to fight with it, to drop it, to go beyond it, to be not sad. No, just relax with it, and you will see a miracle happening inside you: when you relax with sadness, sadness becomes luminous. Yes, even sadness becomes luminous because acceptance is such a magical phenomenon. Experiment and see.Buddha says, “Ihi passiko – come and see, experiment and see.” When you are feeling anything, just be with it, utterly with it, with no judgment of good and bad. It is so, so be with it. Buddha calls it tathata, suchness. Such is the case in this moment. This is what God is pouring into you. He knows better, so it must be your need, whether you can understand it or not. Your understanding is not the question, your acceptance is the question. In utter relaxed acceptance, you have the key of transforming everything.To be in trust means that whatsoever happens is good because it happens through God. Whatsoever happens is good because it comes from the whole. It is a gift: it has to be taken with great gratitude. And then who can prevent you from being victorious? Then no power can prevent you from being victorious: all victory is yours.Apply yourself, hand and foot,to the search;but when you reach the sea,stop talking of the stream.God needs you to be involved totally with him, a partial involvement won’t do. A partial involvement is not a true involvement; true involvement is always total.Apply yourself, hand and foot, to the search… The search has to be passionate. All that you have been searching for up to now – you have been searching for money and power and prestige and a thousand and one things – God has not to be one item on the long list of your desires. Even if you put him first on the list, then too, you will go on missing him. He has to be your only search. All your desires should become one desire, all your desires should pour as if all the rivers are pouring into the ocean. God should become your only search – only then, and only then, the revelation.Millions of people think of God, but they are never capable of penetrating to that mystery, are never able to have a real experience of God. And the reason? The reason is simple; God is only one item on their shopping list – just one item. They are not really ready to be totally devoted. And in this world, only total devotion succeeds.In your ordinary mundane life too, whenever you see a great poet you will immediately see his total devotion to his art. That’s why he’s great. Totality brings greatness. His whole life has only one meaning, one center, and it revolves around that center: his art.When you see van Gogh or a Picasso, then you will see, all his life is nothing but his painting. He thinks about it, he meditates about it, he dreams about it, he is constantly fascinated by it. Not even for a single moment does he forget it.If a painter is walking on the street he does not see people’s faces just as faces, he is constantly thinking of how to paint them. If he looks at flowers it is not just that he looks at the flowers, his whole concern is how to paint them. Even in his dreams, a great painter watching a colorful dream has an undercurrent: “How to paint it?” It is his very breath, his very heartbeat; that’s what makes him great.In ordinary life also, whenever your devotion is total you attain to great talents. So what to say about God? It is the very center of existence. You can only have energy enough to reach that center if you put all that you have at the stake. It is a gamble, it is not a business. You have to put all at the stake, this way or that, whatsoever happens. You have to risk.And the love affair with God has to be passionate, hot. It cannot be a cold philosophic speculation. And that’s what happens: many people think about God in a very cold way. But God is the life of all life, he is the hottest thing in existence. You cannot reach him if you are so cold, philosophically cold.The scientist is very cold; his work is that of dispassionate effort. It is part of his training that he has to remain aloof, that he has to remain detached, that he should not become committed, that he should not become involved, that he should always be a watcher, an outsider, and very cold, analytical.The poet cannot be that cold, otherwise his poetry will be cold, otherwise his poetry will not have any breath in it. It will not pulsate with life. The poet has to be involved.And the mystic has to be totally involved. The poet is involved once in a while, hence only once in a while is he a poet. No poet is a poet twenty-four hours. If he is a poet twenty-four hours, he is a mystic. Then poetry is his prayer. If a painter is twenty-four hours a painter, then he needs no other meditation; he need go to no other temple. He can forget all about the Vedas and the Bibles and the Korans: he has found his Veda, his Bible, his Koran. Painting is all. If he can be hot about it for twenty-four hours, if it can become just a circulation, a constant circulation in his being, just as blood circulates in the body, then he is a mystic.The poet only once in a while becomes passionate. Then he falls back into the ordinary mundane world of cold figures, calculation, arithmetic; he loses track of poetry. Once in a while the window opens and he can see the sun and the moon and the stars – but only once in a while.The mystic is a poet twenty-four hours a day. Remember, if you really want to know what God is, you will have to be utterly passionate. It is not a scientific search, it is a love affair. It is a question of life and death – and not only a question really, it is a quest. It is not curiosity, not an intellectual inquiry, it is an existential thirst.Think of a man lost in a desert, thirsty. It is not an intellectual question – he is not worried about the components of water. If you start giving him a long discourse on the element water, on its chemistry, how it is composed, and you try to explain to him the formula of H2O, he will jump on you and kill you. He is not interested philosophically, scientifically. He wants water: it is a question of life and death. And you are talking about H2O! How can it satisfy him?When the search is passionate, no scripture can satisfy you. And people are satisfied by scriptures because their search is untrue, pseudo. They are reading their Gitas every morning, reciting their Koran – their search is pseudo. If their search is real, they will not be satisfied by words – they will do something. They will start looking for God. They will be ready to go to any length, on any pilgrimage. They will be ready to risk all their security, safety, comfort, convenience, because then God will be their only life.Apply yourself, hand and foot, to the search; but when you reach the sea, stop talking of the stream. When a river reaches the sea, it forgets itself completely. It dissolves itself in the sea without any hesitation. It does not declare to the winds and the sky: “I am the Ganges” or “I am the Amazon” or “I am this, I am that, and look – I am renouncing all, and I am going into the sea.” It simply slips into the sea without any noise, without any fuss.Search for God with a total passion. But when you have arrived, dissolve slowly into his presence. Then don’t brag – because that is the last strategy of the ego, to brag that “I have arrived,” that I have become a buddha,” that “I have become a siddha,” that “Now I know.” That is the last citadel of the ego: beware of it. And because it is the last, it is the most subtle.Your ego will pretend to become a great saint; it will pretend that it has attained to the ultimate truth. But unless all pretensions disappear, unless the river loses itself into the ocean, nothing has been achieved.The Upanishads say, “Those who say they know, they know not.”Socrates says, “When I was young I thought I knew all. When I became a little older, I started to understand that I know very little. When a little more maturity was attained, I came to know that I know nothing – or, I know only one thing, that I know nothing.”The day Socrates declared “I know only one thing, that I know nothing,” the oracle at the Delphi temple declared: “Socrates is the greatest wise man alive.” Those who heard this rushed to Socrates. They said, “Now, this is a paradox. You say you know only one thing, that you know nothing. And the oracle of Delphi has declared: ‘Socrates is the wisest man on earth’ – and on the same day! Now please explain it to us; we are puzzled.”Socrates said, “Go and ask the oracle again. There must have been some misunderstanding – because I know only one thing, that I know nothing.”People went back and the oracle was asked. And the oracle said, “Yes, that’s why I have declared that he is the wisest man in the world – that’s why I have declared it. His coming to know ‘I know nothing’ is the ultimate knowing. The river has disappeared into the ocean. There is no knower now, so who can claim anything? There is no separation left, Socrates is no more. That’s why he is the wisest man alive on the earth.”The ego is continuously with you like a shadow, it follows you wherever you go. You are in the world, it follows you. You go to the temple, it follows you. You become religious, it follows you. And it is so clever that whatsoever garb is needed, it puts on. If you are religious, your ego becomes religious; if you are ascetic, your ego becomes ascetic. It is your shadow; it goes on following you, it imitates you, it is your reflection in the mirror.And remember, unless your reflection in the mirror completely disappears, you have not come face to face with God because God is not a mirror. God is an ocean to the river: one simply dissolves into him. You cannot address God as thou when you have known – because there is no I to address him as thou.A great Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, continuously thought of religion as a dialogue. His famous book is I and Thou… He thinks prayer means a dialogue between the I and the ultimate thou.In the primary stages it is true, it is a dialogue; but not in the ultimate state. In the ultimate state it is not a dialogue at all, because there are not two persons left. It is a silence, not a dialogue at all. It is absolute silence. The seeker and the sought have become one, with not even an inch’s distinction, difference. Who is going to say I and who is going to address God as thou?Martin Buber is right as far as the beginning of prayer is concerned, but this is not the end. He must have remained on the periphery of prayer – a good man, a rare man, but somehow he got lost on the periphery, became too attached to the periphery. And the reason was the Judaic conditioning of the mind. Had he been in this country he would not have written this book, I and Thou. Or, he would have also written another book to declare the ultimate communion where silence prevails.Prayer is not a dialogue, in the ultimate sense, remember. It is a dissolution, a disappearance: you are utterly gone and gone forever and there is no return possible, you have crossed the point from where one can return. But be watchful of the ego.The elephants and mice are in the middle of a football match. It suddenly happens that an elephant steps on a mouse and pushes her to the ground. After a while the mouse comes out and the elephant says in deep sadness, “I’m very, very sorry!”The mouse answered with great friendliness, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. It could happen to me too!”From the lowest to the highest, the same ego persists. From the mouse to the man, the same ego persists; and from the mundane to the sacred, the same ego persists.The real sacred explosion happens and you enter into the holiest of the holy only when all trace of the ego is gone.When he admits you to his presenceask from him nothing other than himself.When he has chosen you for a friend,you have seen all that there is to see.There’s no duality in the world of love:what’s all this talk of “you” and “me”?How can you fill a cup that’s full already?God is not a person, let me remind you again. God is a presence.Think of these three stages: the seed, the flower and the fragrance. The seed is very gross, hard, looks almost like a pebble. It is ugly, you cannot find any beauty in it – even if you cut it into parts, you dissect it, you will not find any flowers there, not even miniature flowers, and you will not find any fragrance of course. The seed is the grossest state.Then comes the flower. When the seed has died, disappeared, then comes the flower. The flower is more subtle, more delicate, more feminine, softer, more beautiful. The flower brings something of the sky to the earth. The flower is a bridge, a midway-house between the earth and the sky, between the known and the unknown, between the visible and the invisible.But there is still a higher stage – that of fragrance. The flower is beautiful but still visible, tangible, material. It is made of more subtle stuff than the seed but is still part of the physical world – maybe just on the boundary of the physical and the metaphysical. But fragrance is pure invisibility.If the flower falls, it will fall back to the earth. It is still part of the earth – it has gone high, has attained to great beauty, has been whispering with the stars and the moon and the sun. But if it falls, gravitation will claim it back, the earth will pull it back, and it will fall downward. It can rise only for a day into the air and the sky. Its rise is momentary – by the evening the petals may have started falling, by the night it may have withered away, in the morning you will not find a trace of it.But the fragrance has left the earth. The earth cannot reclaim it; it has become so subtle that it is beyond gravitation. The fragrance rises upward, it is claimed by the sky. And between the fragrance and the seed is the flower.These are the three stages of human consciousness too. The majority of people live in the seed form; they never become flowers. Very few people, one in a million, becomes a flower. Even to become a flower is such a miracle in the world. But among thousands of flowers only one becomes a fragrance. A Buddha, a Sanai, a Sosan, a Zarathustra – only one in millions becomes a fragrance, pure fragrance, just purity, pure grace. That grace is just a presence.After Buddha died, for years his disciples felt his presence. He was with them. In fact his presence is still there, but there are no longer any disciples of his who can receive it, who can be open to it. The more time passes, the more and more it becomes impossible to contact it.Whenever it has happened that a man has attained to God, he has become a presence. When he is in the body, the presence surrounds his body. Painters have depicted that presence as an aura surrounding the enlightened person – that is just a way of painting it, of painting something which cannot be painted. But a presence surrounds him. And that presence has nothing to do with the body; when the body is gone, the presence still remains. But now it will be visible only to those who are deep in meditation, deeply surrendered to the master, utterly in trust – for them the master never dies, for them the master remains always a living presence.God is the eternal presence, from the beginning to the end. Buddhas only represent, once in a while, the eternal presence. Once in a while, a person becomes so pure, so alert and aware and so loving and compassionate, that the eternal starts flowing through him. Once in a while, a person becomes so surrendered like a flute, so hollow like a flute, that God starts singing through him. But God is always singing.It is like this: while we are sitting here, many, many radio waves are passing, but we are not able to listen to them. Bring a radio set, tune it to a certain station, and immediately that which was invisible becomes visible.God is like radio waves, always present. Once in a while, a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, a Mohammed, exists on the earth like a radio set – tuned, connected, plugged into God. Then you become more aware of the presence. But God is a presence, not a person.That’s why Mohammed insisted that no image could be made – and his insistence is right. Jews are right that no image can be made of God. The reason is: how can you make an image of a presence? A person can be represented: you can have a photograph of a person, you can make a statue of a person. But how can you make a statue of something which is only a presence. Yes, you can have a photograph of a flower, but you cannot have a photograph of the fragrance.When he admits you to his presence… When you are allowed the great gift of becoming a guest in his presence: …ask from him nothing other than himself. Because if you ask something else, you have missed the whole point.It is said of a great Sufi mystic, Bayazid, that one night, Khidr, the great angel who goes on helping people on the path, appeared to him. The dark room where Bayazid was meditating became suddenly illuminated. He opened his eyes; the light was so much that he could see it even with closed eyes. He opened his eyes: Khidr was there.Khidr said, “God is very happy with you. You can ask for anything, and your desire will be fulfilled.”Bayazid said, “But you came a little late. All my desires have disappeared; now I have no desire.”Khidr insisted. He said, “This will be insulting to God. You have to ask! You can ask for anything, but you have to ask. This will be an insult to God, because when he offers, you have to ask for something.”He insisted so much. Again and again, Bayazid looked and thought, but no desire was arising. And he would say, “But what can I do? I cannot find a thing to ask. All is always fulfilled. His compassion is such that before I can feel the desire, it is already fulfilled; before I can even formulate the desire in my head, it is fulfilled. Before it reaches me, it reaches him – so what can I ask for?”But Khidr was insisting and saying, “This is insulting, and God will be very angry.” So Bayazid said, “Okay, if you insist, and if you think that this is not adab – that this is not the right manner to behave with God – then tell him that I desire only him and nothing else.”Khidr laughed, and said, “You fool – you missed!”Even to say, “I want God” is to ask. Even to desire God is a desire. Sanai is saying to first drop all desires. And if you are admitted into his presence: …ask from him nothing other than himself. This is just not to shock you too much. When you have attained to the state that you ask only for God, then the ultimate truth will be given by the master. Then the master will say, “Now don’t even ask for him – because all asking is still ego-oriented. Just be in his presence, with no desire. When there is no desire, there is no smoke between you and him. Desire creates the smoke, and smoke can become a Wall of China.Don’t ask for anything. Be thrilled, dance in ecstasy that he has allowed you into his presence. But if you are not yet capable of that much desirelessness, then the second best is – but remember it is only the second best – ask for him.When he has chosen you for a friend, you have seen all that there is to see. What is there to ask for, what is there to see, what is there to get, when he has chosen you as his friend? And he has already chosen you as his friend, otherwise he would not have given you birth at all. He has already chosen you by creating you. See the grandeur of it, see the glory of it. See how blessed you are.You have seen all that there is to see. There’s no duality in the world of love… So who can ask, and of whom? What’s all this talk of “you” and “me”?Now Sanai is bringing you closer and closer to the point where it will be clear to you that even to ask for God is to create duality: I and thou. Who is there as “me” and “you”?How can you fill a cup that’s full already? What can you ask for? He has already given all that can ever be received by you. Your cup is full! Just look within: your cup is full, nothing is lacking.That’s why I go on saying to you: You are gods already, all is fulfilled. See it! Nothing is missing, nothing is lacking in you, you are perfect as you are. This is the greatest declaration, and of all the mystics of the world, that you are perfect as you are.The Upanishads say, “Out of perfection, only perfection can come.”How can you be imperfect if God is perfect? And if you are imperfect how can God be perfect? The tree is known by the fruit. Nobody is imperfect; but your priests go on telling you that you are imperfect, that you are sinners, that you are unworthy, that you will be condemned to hell. This is all hogwash, this is all just nonsense. There is no hell: all is paradise, and sinners and saints are all perfect as they are. Once you have recognized this, your life takes a new color, a new dance, it becomes a song, a celebration. This is what I teach you.How can you fill a cup that’s full already?Bring all of yourself to his door:bring only a part,and you’ve brought nothing at all.Another tremendously pregnant statement. Man is an organic unity. You cannot dissect man; if you dissect, you kill him. If you dissect a roseflower to find out where the beauty resides, you will destroy the flower and you will never find its beauty. Beauty is an organic unity; you cannot find it by dissection, the only way to find it is by participation with the flower.You cannot know the beauty of a woman by dissecting her, by taking her to a surgeon. You can find the beauty of the woman only if you love her, if you participate in her being, if you drink of her energy, and if you allow her to drink of your energy. When you drink from each other’s being, you will know beauty; in deep intimacy and participation, beauty is known. Beauty is an organic unity.So is your consciousness an organic unity. Nothing has to be discarded. If you discard something, you will be half – and the half will not be accepted.In Afghanistan there is a folk tale, a folk story, a beautiful story. The Afghans believe that you have to die complete – they don’t like to be operated upon. If the doctor says, “Remove a kidney” an Afghan is never ready, because he says, “I have to go total to God. He will ask me, ‘Where is your kidney?’”There is a story: in Peshawar, in the days of the British Raj, an Afghan was hospitalized. One of his hands was to be removed. His whole life was in danger; if the hand was not removed, he would die. It was very difficult to persuade the Afghan to have the hand cut off, but the doctor said, “Don’t worry, we will keep your hand intact. We will preserve it in chemicals, and when you die we will put the hand with you.”This looked logical. “So you can present God with the hand. You can say, ‘It is here.’”Afghans are simple people, very simple people. He said, “This is right. But remember that my hand should not get lost, and you have to preserve it.”The doctor promised. Of course he was not very serious about it, but he promised. Seeing the innocent joy of the Afghan, he managed to preserve it. In a big jar, the hand was preserved in chemicals. But after two years the hospital caught fire and everything was burned and the hand was also destroyed. The Afghan never came to know about it.The doctor retired, he went back to London. One night, he was awakened by somebody. He was surprised, because the doors were closed. He opened his eyes, and he remembered – it was the same Afghan, and he was very angry! The Afghan was very angry and was shaking him violently, and said, “Where is my hand? I have died! And now God is asking, ‘Where is your hand?’”For a moment the doctor could not figure out what to do. But he said, “Wait. Come tomorrow night. I have got a great collection; your hand is there, but I will have to find it. So tomorrow I will find it. Come tomorrow night.”And the next day he searched in all the hospitals of London to find a hand. He found a hand; he was very happy. The next night he waited for the ghost to appear again.The Afghan came, he was very happy that he was going to get his hand. The doctor took him to the room where the hand was. The Afghan looked, opened the jar, took the hand out, and threw it on the floor. He was very angry – because his right hand was missing, and this was a left hand.I don’t know how far this story is true… But there is a point. The point is: don’t discard anything. Your priests have been telling you to discard: discard your sex, discard your anger, discard your greed. Your priests have been telling you to discard a thousand and one things. If you listen to your priests, you will go to God almost empty. He is going to ask, “Where is your hand?” He is going to say, “I gave you so many energies: what have you done with those energies? – because those energies could have been transformed. They were not to be discarded but transformed.”Your sex has to become your celibacy, and your anger has to become your compassion. Whatsoever is given to you has great potential in it: you have to live it very artfully, intelligently. Just by discarding anger you will remain only a part – and the part cannot reach the whole. To the whole, you will have to go as a whole.This statement is beautiful: Bring all of yourself to his door: bring only a part, and you’ve brought nothing at all. My effort here is to help you to remain whole. Whatsoever he has given, there must be a meaning in it. Your sexuality must be keeping something hidden in it – you have to explore it. Your anger is pure energy: if it can be destructive, it can also be creative. Anger is neutral, it depends on you how you use it.And the religious people have been telling you, “Discard anger.” That’s why all religious people become uncreative, they live a very, very, uncreative life. Their lives are nothing but long stories of impotence; they don’t create a thing. They are not creators, they are just burdens on the earth.Your saints, your so-called sages, are just burdens. They don’t contribute anything to existence; they don’t make it a little more beautiful, they don’t add a single song to life. They live here like parasites. And the reason is that they have discarded the energies which could have been transformed into creativity. The man who discards anger becomes non-rebellious – and to be non-rebellious is to be dead! Anger has to be transformed into great rebellion – rebellion against all that is wrong, rebellion against all that is rotten, rebellion against the past, rebellion for the future, rebellion to bring something new into the world.Sex is creativity. It is not only that children are created out of sex, all great works of art are by-products of sexual energy. All great artists are very sexual people: poets, painters, singers, dancers, all are sexual people. And the greatest mystics have more sexual energy than anybody else, but their sexual energy is no longer in seed form: it has bloomed, become a flower, and is not only a flower, it has become a fragrance. Then whatsoever they do brings new benedictions into existence. They are a blessing.When you go to God, go as an organic unity, go as a whole. Partial, you will look very ugly. Partial, you will not be accepted.It’s your own selfdefining faith and unbelief:inevitably it colors your perception.Eternity knows nothingof belief or unbelief;for a pure naturethere is no such thing.Your beliefs, your unbeliefs, your theism, your atheism, your ideologies, are all ego products. In reality there is neither belief nor disbelief, in reality there is only innocence. The really religious person is neither theistic nor atheistic; he does not believe, he does not disbelieve, he is simply open to whatsoever is the case. He has no ideology. Ideologies are of the mind, and they sustain the mind, they nourish the mind.The heart knows nothing of ideologies: the heart knows only love. And love is the door to the divine.It’s your own self defining faith and unbelief: inevitably it colors your perception. You go on dreaming that you are a Hindu, you are a Mohammedan, you are a Christian, you are this and you are that, a Catholic, a communist – these are all your dreams. Reality has nothing to do with Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism. Reality is simply real.A flower is simply a flower. Ask the flower, “Are you a Mohammedan?” and he will laugh at you. Ask a lion, “Are you a Hindu?” and he will laugh at you.Just look at existence: except for man, nobody seems to be neurotic. Except for man, nobody seems to pay much attention to ideas.A young lady had a dream in which a handsome male angel flew into her bedroom and scooped her up in his arms. They flew out of the window together and traveled through the air for some time. Finally they reached a castle in the sky and soared in through an open window. He gently tossed her onto a luxurious bed.“What are you going to do now?” she asked in a frightened voice.“That’s up to you,” he said. “It is not my dream.”All your ideologies are nothing but your dreams. Drop dreaming, come to your senses. Drop from the head, come to your senses. Senses are innocent. Be more sensitive to existence, its beauties, and its joys.Eternity knows nothing of belief or unbelief;for a pure naturethere is no such thing.And if, my friend, you ask me the way,I’ll tell you plainly, it is this…Listen attentively.…to turn your face toward the world of life,and turn your back on rank and reputation;and, spurning outward prosperity, to bendyour back double in his service;to part company with those who deal in words,and take your place in the presence of the wordless.The first thing Sanai says is: And if, my friend, you ask me the way, I’ll tell you plainly, it is this…And what he says is simply the absolute truth. …to turn your face toward the world of life – that’s what I am saying to you: be life-affirmative – turn your face toward the world of life…Toward the trees and the birds and the animals and the stars and the rivers and the oceans and the people. And your priests have been telling you just the opposite. They say, “Turn your back toward life.” They say, “Be life-negative.” They say, “Renounce life.”Sanai says, “Rejoice in life.”Your priests are just poisoners. The greatest enemies humanity has known are its priests: they teach you death. Reverend Jim Jones is not the first priest to help his disciples to die. This is the ancientmost trade secret of all priests: they teach you suicide. Reverend Jones did it in the American way, fast and quick, that’s all. Other priests do it slowly, slowly, slowly; it takes seventy, eighty years. But the process is the same; they all teach you that life is wrong. When life is wrong, then death is right. They all teach you that to live is a sin. Then not to live is saintliness. They all teach you to escape from life to the monasteries, to the mountains; they teach you escapism. Now, what is suicide? Suicide is ultimate escapism.And now you will see, all the priests of the world will condemn Reverend Jones – they are condemning him. Christian and Mohammedan and Hindu, Catholic and Protestant are all condemning him. And in fact what he did is simply a logical conclusion of their teachings. That’s what they have been teaching: they have been teaching that life is ugly, that to live it is to be a sinner. Then it is a logical conclusion to die, to commit suicide; then suicide seems to be the most spiritual act.Jainism even permits it – not only permits but appreciates it. Just the other day, I was reading about a Jaina monk who committed suicide. They don’t call it suicide, they have beautiful words for it – they call it santhara; santhara means one who leaves the body by fasting.Now, this man was fasting for many days. And santhara is a fast unto death, no food, no water – if the man is really healthy it will take at least three months to die.This seems to be a more ugly death, more torturing, more prolonged misery. In that way, Reverend Jones did a good job: he did santhara in a scientific way; he did it instantly. And if a thing can be done instantly, then why prolong the misery for three months? Why torture yourself? If you can reach some place by plane, then why go by bullock cart?I would like to say to the whole world: what Jones has done, please don’t condemn it! You have no right to condemn him, because that’s what all your churches and all your temples have been teaching, down the ages.Only I can condemn him, nobody else has the right to condemn him – because I teach life. He was mad, neurotic, as have been all your priests – mad and neurotic, sado-masochistic, pathological.Sanai is right. He says that this is the only way: …to turn your face toward the world of life, and turn your back on rank and reputation; and, spurning outward prosperity, to bend your back double in his service; to part company with those who deal in words, and take your place in the presence of the wordless.He says: “If you want to renounce something, renounce prestige, renounce power, renounce rank and reputation.” That is not renounced by your priests and your monks. In fact they renounce the world to get more reputation, they become ascetics so that they can be worshipped like saints. They cling to reputation – that is their ego trip. They renounce life to get more and more respect, respectability from people.Sanai is saying just the opposite. That’s what I am doing here. I say: renounce respectability, it is all bullshit. It doesn’t matter whether people respect you or not. All that matters in the ultimate sense is whether you respect yourself or not. And you can respect yourself only if you have lived totally, passionately. If you respect yourself, and you are courageous enough to live life in all its dimensions, God is happy with you. And when you enter into his presence you will enter whole, you will enter healthy, you will enter as a total, orgasmic, organic unity.And he says: …part company with those who deal in words. There are priests, pundits, scholars, whose whole work is to deal in words. Reality has to be an experience, not just speculation.Before Buddha entered ultimate nirvana, before he was leaving his body, a disciple asked him to preach again. Buddha scolded him and said, “I have lived in the world for forty-nine years and I have never said a word. Now you ask me to preach again. Do you mean I have preached before?”He was preaching for forty-nine years – morning, afternoon, evening, for forty-nine years continuously. In fact no other man except me has talked as much as Buddha did. But still he says, “What do you mean, preach again? Do you mean I have been preaching in my life? I have not uttered a single word.”And I say to you, I have also not uttered a single word. Because you cannot understand silence, there is no other way to communicate with you. But all the words are used just to create more and more silence in you. The words are irrelevant: the silence contained in them is the real thing. The words are just capsules: inside the capsule is silence, a wordless message.The way is not farfrom you to the friend:you yourself are that way:so set out along it.There is no other way. You are not to go somewhere, you are not to follow some outward path – you are the way. You have just to go in, and then the friend is not far away.Another story:One day, Buddha saw Manjushree, one of his greatest disciples, standing outside the gate. He said, “Manju! Manju! Why don’t you come in?”Manju said, “My Lord, there is no way to come in.”Buddha laughed and said again, “Enter through the gate!”Manju also laughed and said, “My Lord, Bhagwan, you must be joking, because there is no gate either!”Buddha showered his grace on Manjushree and said, “My son, you have understood me well. There is no way, and there is no gate.”Because he is inside you, already inside you. You are not to pass through some gate, and you are not to follow some path. He has already arrived – he has arrived as you. The seeker is the sought. You are it.The way is not farfrom you to the friend:you yourself are that way:so set out along it.You who know nothing of the lifethat comes from the juice of the grape,how long will you remain intoxicatedby the outward form of the grape?Why do you lie that you are drunk?People who are reciting the Koran go on pretending that they are getting drunk. That is not possible – how can words make you drunk? Just looking at the form of the grape, you cannot become drunk: you will have to taste the juice of it. Only experience, existential experience, can liberate you. Words will become new bondages – beautiful bondages, very, very cultured, decorated bondages, but words will be bondages.All your scriptures are nothing but imprisonments. Get out of them. And remember, what I say about scriptures includes my words too. Listen to my words, but don’t be caught by them. Listen to my words so attentively that you can listen to the wordless message that is just between the words, between the lines. And then discard the words. Throw away the shell and drink the content.Why do you lie that you are drunk? Stop lying! Just by words, scriptures, knowledge, nobody can be drunk. The only way to be drunk is to go deep in your being and to drink there at the very source of your consciousness. And then you will be drunk, and drunk forever.And that drunkenness has a paradoxical quality to it: you become unconscious as far as the ego is concerned, and you become conscious as far as the self is concerned. You forget yourself in that drunkenness, and God is remembered in that drunkenness. On one side it is forgetfulness, on the other side remembrance.How can you go forward?There is no place to go;how will you leap?You have no foot.Consciousness has no foot, it cannot leap. And you cannot go anywhere, because there is nowhere to go.God is here! All is now! God has only one time, and that is now. And existence has only one space, and that is here. There is no need to go anywhere.Don’t think in terms of “then,” and don’t think in terms of “there,” and don’t think in terms of “that.” God is this-ness, such-ness. This very moment, God is here, as he is always here. Just be silent and have a taste of him. Only the taste of him can liberate you.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-08/

The first question:Osho,You appear to have made a point of attacking the prime minister, Morarji Desai, and backing Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister, with all the spiritual power at your command. What is the background? Do you wish to replace Mr. Desai with Mrs. Gandhi? In any case, is such an intervention in Indian political affairs by a spiritual person justified?R. K. Karanjia,Editor, Blitz.My dear Karanjia, I am not personally against Morarjibhai Desai. But I am against the rotten mentality that he represents, I am against the Hindu chauvinistic mind that he has. I am against his obscurantistic attitudes, and approaches. I am against his stubbornness in imposing his personal fads upon the whole country. I am against his bureaucratic, autocratic, dictatorial methods. I am against his unscientific attitudes toward life. I have nothing to do with Morarjibhai Desai, but all these things combined together are a calamity for the country.Basically I am against politicians. But we cannot discard politicians absolutely. Humanity is not yet in that state of growth and intelligence where politicians can be discarded. So they will be needed – it is a necessary evil.But evil it is. So it is better to choose a politician who at least has a flexible mind, scientific attitudes – one who at least has a contemporary mind.Morarji Desai is just out of date. He does not belong to this century, to this time. All that he goes on saying is sheer superstitious nonsense. He is at least one thousand years back.But once you are in power, whatsoever you believe, you can impose it on others. That is the danger. He is cunning, shrewd, and unintelligent. A politician is bound to be cunning and shrewd and unintelligent because only unintelligent people are cunning and shrewd. That is their substitute for intelligence.If you are intelligent, that’s enough. There is no need to be cunning, there is no need to be shrewd, and there is no need to use back-door methods.A story:A politician was teaching his little son to be less afraid, to have more courage, by having him jump down the stairs. He placed his boy on the second stair and said, “Jump, and I’ll catch you.” And the boy jumped. Then the father placed him on the third stair, saying, “Jump, and I’ll catch you.” Though the boy was afraid, he trusted his father, did what he was told, and jumped into his father’s arms. Then the father put him on the next step, and then the next step, each time telling him, “Jump, and I’ll catch you.” And each time the boy jumped and was caught by his father. And so this went on.Then the boy jumped from a very high step, just as before, but this time the father stepped back and the boy fell flat on his face. As he picked himself up, bleeding and crying, the father said to him, “That will teach you: never trust a politician, even if it is your own father.”I don’t trust politicians. Something is basically wrong in the being of a politician. A politician is suffering from a pathology, he suffers from an inferiority complex. Now it is a well-established fact that people who search for power are the people who suffer from an inferiority complex. And the people who suffer from an inferiority complex, once they are in power, are bound to prove dangerous to the people.Morarji Desai has been suffering from an inferiority complex his whole life. His whole life has been devoted to a single aim – to become the prime minister of this country. And now he has become the prime minister. The past twenty months have proved that you cannot find a more incompetent man than him. These twenty months have proved that he has attained his goal and now he does not know what to do with it.The politician is skillful in coming to power, but then what to do with that power? He has been after it his whole life; that was his only desire. Now it is fulfilled. He is spent. Now he does not know what to do, except to cling to the chair.He is clinging hard. And the country is going down and down every day – becoming poorer and poorer, becoming more and more chaotic, becoming more and more violent, destructive. People are butchered, killed, murdered, their properties destroyed, whole villages burned, women are being raped. There is no order, no law.And Morarji Desai is only interested in one thing: how to go on remaining in power. This is a very, very, retarded mind. If a young person is interested in power, he can be forgiven. But if one is interested in power at the age of eighty-three or eighty-four, he cannot be forgiven.Bertha was so concerned about her son that she sought advice from a family psychologist and counselor.“Sir,” she said desperately, “I am worried about my son. He has strange ways of amusing himself.”The psychologist took out his pad. “Go on.”“First of all,” she continued, “he plays with boats when he takes a bath.”“That’s not so unusual,” said the psychologist, smiling. “Years ago, as a boy, I used to have a fleet of boats in the bathtub. I would play admiral and sink all the ships.”“He also pulls wings off flies.”“Perfectly normal – he’s just releasing some hostility.”“He skates on roller skates from room to room in the house so he can get to the dinner table more quickly.”“Your son sounds very amusing,” laughed the psychologist. “How old is your boy?”“Thirty-nine.”Somebody clinging to power at the age of eighty-three looks really pitiable. And doing nothing with that power… Doing only one thing: trying to cling to it, trying to keep it, trying to maintain it. Such an unproductive man, such an uncreative man should not be there.The country needs a younger person with more brains, with more vision of the future; only then can this country be saved. The country needs a scientific approach toward life – not out-of-date sermons and puritanical, moralistic preaching. The country does not need a preacher; it has thousands of preachers, there is no need of any more. The country needs somebody who has the scientific capability to transform dreams into reality.Morarji Desai does not have that capacity, that’s why I have been criticizing him. And it is difficult for him to reorient himself at this time; it is too late. He is closed, frozen, everything in him has become stone-like. He cannot flow with the times, he cannot relax with reality as it is. Rather than flowing with the times and with reality as it is today, he would like reality to follow him. He is asking the impossible. And in asking the impossible, he shows his dictatorial attitudes.This country calls itself a democracy, but it is not yet because it does not have the consciousness of being democratic. Democracy is just talk – deep down, there is just dictatorial bureaucracy.And the whole mind of the past has been that way. Democracy is a new phenomenon. Democracy is a by-product of a scientific attitude – and this country lacks scientific attitude.Try to understand this. Democracy could not have happened in any other time in the past because all the religions have been dogmatic. Every religion claims the truth and the whole truth. Every religion claims: “I am right and everybody else is wrong.” All religions are closed.And I am not including Buddhas, Christs and Krishnas; they are exceptions, and they are not part of your so-called religious traditions. Buddha is not dogmatic, he has a very scientific openness. He approaches every fact of life with an open mind. He told his disciples, “Don’t believe in what I say. Unless you have experimented with it and unless you have experienced it, and unless you have become a witness to it, don’t believe it.”But Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism – all these ideologies are dogmatic: everybody claims the whole truth. That very claim is inhuman, that very claim is egoistic. And because this country has no scientific mind, it lacks the democratic spirit.A few days ago, Krishna Prem saw Morarji Desai. He made it a condition that whatsoever was said to Krishna Prem was to be absolutely private and off-record. Why? Why this condition? If it is true, let it be on record. And if it is a lie, there is no need to talk about it.But I understand he made that condition – because he told Krishna Prem, “If it was in my power I would have demolished Osho’s work, his ashram, everything.”Do you see the mind? It is the mind of a dictator. And why does he say that if it was in his power…? It is in his power, and he is doing whatsoever he can do.Just the other day, from very reliable sources, it became known that he has informed the authorities that somehow, in any way, we have to be trapped into some legal problems, traps. “You have to find something or other so that we can proceed legally against this commune.”Twice they have checked all the files, all the records, and twice they have decided that there is nothing wrong. Now again, a third time, they have asked for all the files and all the records to be reopened; the issue has to be reopened because there is pressure from New Delhi.The chief minister of Maharashtra was willing to help. Just the other day, he said to a friend, “I was willing to help at least as far as the land is concerned, I was going to help the commune. But now the pressure from Delhi is too much. Now it is beyond my capacity; I cannot help.”Why does Morarji Desai say that it is beyond his power? He is doing everything that he can do. But remember, these attitudes are not going to win. Democracy has become part and parcel of the modern mind; the days of this type of thing are over. You are clinging to corpses, Morarji Desai. You are clinging to dead things which no longer have any future.A dictator had his picture printed on postage stamps. When he learned the stamps were not selling very well in the country, he called his postmaster general and asked why.“It’s because the stamps won’t stick to the envelopes,” explained the postal chief.The dictator demanded why unsatisfactory glue had been used.“It’s not the glue,” explained the postmaster. “It’s because they spit on the wrong side.”This is going to happen to all kinds of dictatorial minds. Morarji Desai, beware!And when I criticize him I am not criticizing him personally. Always remember, I have no personal grudge against him; there is no question of any personal grudge. He is just a symbol of something very rotten. And when I criticize him, in fact I am simply talking about the facts. If the facts are against him, what can I do?Now, the twenty months that he has been in power are writ large. His incompetence, his impotence, is writ large. Everybody can see it; it is not a secret, the whole country is feeling it. But this country is very lethargic, this country is very fatalistic, this country always goes on blaming fate. If nothing is going right, then the country remains in a kind of contentment. This has been its traditional approach.This country is not rebellious. In the whole five thousand years of its history there has not been a single revolution. This country does not know how to revolt, this country only knows how to go on obeying. Because of this, the country has remained so long a slave.My approach is that of a rebel. I condemn this country’s past because I can visualize a better future. And that better future is possible only if the past is condemned. It is not going to be a continuity with the past: the future has to be absolutely new, fresh, young. This country has to go through a rebirth, this country has to become young again.When I criticize Morarji Desai, it is not really criticism – I simply mirror him, whatsoever he is.A modern artist once showed his latest painting – a big splotch of orange on the canvas with little black blobs – to a prominent lady art critic.“Well,” asked the artist, “what do you think of it?”After staring in puzzlement and disgust at the picture for a long time, the lady said, “I’m afraid I must confess that I think it’s a pretty poor work of art.”“Huh!” snorted the artist. “It so happens that it’s a portrait of you; and I can’t help it if you’re a pretty poor work of nature!”I am not criticizing Morarji Desai, I am simply mirroring whatsoever he is. And it is needed: this country needs to be made alert and aware, otherwise the misery will continue. Morarji Desai represents a non-technological mind. He represents the Gandhian bullshit.This country needs technology, otherwise this country cannot survive. And I know perfectly well that the way technology as happened in the West has also been a calamity in its own way. It has destroyed the ecology. The West is suffering from technology, and the East is suffering from lack of technology. And the Eastern obscurantists take great joy in asserting the fact: “Look what has happened to the West through technology.”But that is not the only way of bringing technology in. We can learn from the Western experiment – we can bring in technology which is not against ecology. There is no necessity, there is no inherent necessity, that technology has to be against nature. It can be for nature – it can be friendly to nature, it can be part of nature, it can be in communion with nature.Technology has to be based on Taoist approaches. Technology as it exists in the West, if imported, will be another error, another fatal error. But the West has gone through a great experiment; we need not make all the mistakes that they have made. We are in a better position now. We have suffered without technology, the West has suffered through technology. Now there is a possibility of creating a new vision of technology and nature in communion, hand in hand together.And that experiment will become an example for the whole world. India can do it, India can create that space – because five thousand years of meditativeness, prayer, love for God, and search for God, is enough of a background to transform technology, its flavor – to make it more natural, rather than being something against nature.India needs people who know what meditation is, and who know what science is: it needs a synthesis.Morarji Desai simply represents the rotten, dead past. He has no vision of what has happened in the world; he is not a contemporary. I am against his non-contemporariness, I am against his non-modernness. And it is not only that he is not a contemporary, he is anti-modern. He is dogmatic – and any dogmatic person becomes a rock in the flow of a nation’s life. He has to be removed.I know it is too late for him to change, so he has to be removed.Jan Lebanc envisioned himself as becoming another Luther Burbank, the great horticulturist and plant breeder.“Some day I will become famous,” he boasted. “With my agricultural experiments, I will revolutionize the eating habits of the world.”“Perhaps you are great,” remarked his cynical wife, “but so far all of your great experiments have failed.”“How can you say that?”“Remember that skinless banana of yours? The flies ate the bananas before the people could.”“The people didn’t eat them fast enough.”“And the seedless raspberries. They turned into liquid at the touch of a finger.”“We needed more tender hands to pick them.”“And now? What marvel do you offer the world?”“I have crossed corn and peas.”“And what does that give you?”“Peas on the cob – my answer to senior citizens with false teeth.”“Jan, may I give you some candid advice? Why don’t you cultivate some brains?”But I cannot give that advice to Morarji Desai, it is too late; the river has already reached the end. And the more he remains in power, the more time is wasted. Not only is time wasted, but he is undoing it whatsoever has been done in thirty years’ independence. It is better the country becomes alert to it immediately; otherwise he will have done great wrongs, and then to put them right will take a long time.You ask me, Karanjia, “You appear to have made a point of attacking the prime minister, Morarji Desai, and backing Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister, with all the spiritual power at your command. What is the background? Do you wish to replace Mr. Desai with Mrs. Gandhi?” Yes. Absolutely yes.Again I would like to remind you that I have no personal attachment to Indira Gandhi. But she represents something far better than Morarji Desai. She has more progressive policies, a better vision of the future, and more understanding of the present. She is a contemporary woman, with immense intelligence and grace. She is not a faddist, she is not a dogmatist. She is flexible, open, vulnerable, ready to receive anything new, ready to understand anything that is happening in the modern world. Her doors and windows are open to the sun, to the moon, to the wind, to the rain.I have met both people. The meeting with Morarji Desai was not a meeting at all. We were sitting on the same sofa, very close, touching each other’s body – but far, far away, millions of miles’ distance. There was no communication possible – centuries of difference. He was not capable of understanding what I was saying to him.I have met Indira Gandhi. She was so open – it is very rare to meet a person who is so open. And more difficult to find a person who is in power and yet so open. Power blinds people, power closes people, power makes people dogmatic.She was at the zenith of her power, but she was utterly humble. She was drinking in every single word that I was saying to her, and she understood immediately. She said, “I would like to do what you are saying, but I am surrounded by such people that it is almost impossible to do anything.”Morarji Desai was then deputy prime minister. I asked her, “Whom do you mean when you say, ‘I am surrounded by such people’?” She said, “You know I mean Morarji Desai, and others. It is impossible to bring anything new into the life of this country because they all obstruct it.”I told her, “Then it is better that either you drop these people or you drop out.” The idea sank into her heart, and within seven days Morarji Desai was dropped. But still, others were there.This country chooses people who represent its past. This country is very much obsessed with the past.While Indira Gandhi was prime minister, thrice she wanted to come to this commune. Thrice she informed us, “I am coming” – and again and again it was postponed. And the reason was that the people who were around her would not allow her. They said to her, “It is dangerous to go to Osho; it will affect your political future.”Even to come to see me seems to be dangerous. And I can understand: if she had come here, then all the shankaracharyas and all the pundits and all the priests would have been against her. So her advisers wouldn’t allow her to come here. Again and again, she wanted to come.Even the desire to come, even the desire to be here and meditate and sit silently with me, shows a great openness. She has been reading almost all the books that are published, and she has been listening to the tapes.When I say it would be better if Indira comes back, I simply mean that I would like an open mind, contemporary, modern, humble, receptive to the new waves that are arising in the world so that this country also becomes contemporary and modern – which it is not yet.I have great appreciation for her courage in implementing new programs even though those programs were against the traditional mentality of this country. I would like her to be back. In fact, anybody, any Tom, Harry and Dick, would be better than Morarji Desai.I have heard a story: it comes from very unreliable sources, so I don’t know whether it is true or not…Before the election, Morarji Desai visited an aboriginal tribe in Assam where he made a fine speech full of promises of better things.“We shall see,” he said, “a new era of opportunity.”To this, the aboriginals, adivasis, gave a raining cry of “Hoya hoya!”Encouraged, he continued, “We promise better schools and technical training.”“Hoya hoya!” exclaimed the audience with much enthusiasm.“We pledge better hospitals and medical assistance,” said Morarji Desai.“Hoya hoya!” cried the poor and uneducated aboriginals.With a tear running down his cheek, Morarji Desai ended, “We come to you as equals, as brothers, so trust us!”The air shook with one long, mighty “Hoya hoya!”Greatly pleased by his reception, he then began to tour the village. “I see you have fine breeds of beef cattle here,” he said. “May I inspect them?”“Certainly! Come this way,” said the chief. “But be careful not to step in the hoya.”Wherever Morarji Desai goes, greet him with “Hoya hoya!” Drop the old slogans: “Down with Morarji Desai! Morarji Desai murdabad!” I give you a new slogan: “Morarji Desai, hoya hoya!”And, Karanjia, you also ask, “In any case, is such an intervention in Indian political affairs by a spiritual person justified?” I am not a spiritual person in the ordinary traditional sense of the word. In fact, all your so-called spiritual persons are in deep conspiracy with the politicians. There has always been a conspiracy between the priest and the politician, a subtle strategy to dominate people.Your so-called spiritual people don’t say anything against the establishment. That does not mean that they are not political – in fact they are for the establishment; they are political. They never say anything against it – their silence is their support.In India, we have a saying: maunam sammati lakshanam, to be silent is a sign of agreement, not to say anything is to agree.Karl Marx is perfectly right as far as these so-called spiritual persons are concerned, that religion has functioned as an opium for the people. Your so-called religious people have been teaching others to submit to the establishment, to obey the establishment, to never go against the established order whatsoever it is.I am not a religious person, a spiritual person, in that sense. I am a rebel. You cannot categorize me with anybody else. And, to me, life is an organic unity; it cannot be divided, it cannot be split. I will comment on poetry, and I will comment on politics too, because life consists of all these dimensions.I am not a politician, true. But when I see something going wrong, I have to make people aware of it. I have every right to speak on poetry, although I am not a poet; I have every right to speak on music, although I am not a musician. But I can show my likes and my dislikes, I can indicate where things are going.I am simply a light. And if the light is there in the room, it lights everything that is there – the furniture, the painting on the wall, the ceiling, and everything. I am just a light, a mirror: I will reflect everything that is happening.So please forget that old division. It has really been a compromise; down the ages, the politician and the priest have bargained. This has been the bargain, that the politician will not interfere with the priest; he will pay his respect to the priest, to the church. And the priest should not interfere with the politician; he should pay his respect to the state, and help people to be obedient to the state.I am in no conspiracy, in no contract, with anybody. I will say things as I see them, and I don’t care whether you think me spiritual or not. Who cares? I know perfectly well that thousands of Indians will be puzzled because they think a spiritual person should not talk about politics. They really don’t understand.Do you think Krishna did not talk about politics? He not only talked about politics – he participated. In fact, Arjuna was trying to escape from the war. It was Krishna who persuaded him, convinced him, that it was a war which had to be fought. Because when it is a question of evil and good forces, you have to be with the good forces.When I criticize Morarji Desai, it is a question of the past and the future. And you have to be with the future, because the past is gone and gone forever. Forget all about it. Create the future. Forget that which has been, don’t waste your time with it. Create the future.The future has much thrill in it; a great adventure is awaiting you. And this country goes on looking backward. This country never looks forward. Its golden age has passed; it was once, thousands of years ago. If your golden age is in the past, then life is going to remain a drag, because you will be falling and falling farther and farther away from the golden age.This is not a right vision of things. The golden age has to be in the future; it always has to be created. Your eyes should look toward the future. And when you look toward the future, your present becomes meaningful because then there is a possibility of great adventure, exploration. Then the thrill of creativity grips you, and the soul is created through it.I am not a spiritual person in the ordinary sense; I am a class unto myself. You cannot categorize and label me with others; I represent nobody else but myself. What you call me – spiritual, religious, or anything else that you want – does not matter. Those labels are useless.I will go on destroying your labels. I will go on trespassing over your labels and your boundaries. That’s what I have always been doing: you try to define me, and I destroy your definition, because any and every definition is a bondage. And I am not here to fulfill anybody’s expectations.To me, to divide life is to create a schizophrenic world. Politics and poetry and religion and music and painting are all together. These are all dimensions of the same life. I accept life in its totality. Remember, life is an organic whole, it cannot be divided; if you divide it, you destroy it.I believe in totality, I believe in wholeness. To me, to be whole is to be holy, and there is no other kind of holiness. To me, the totality of life is God. Worship it in every possible way.I am not a politician; that is not my choice. I have far better things to do. I am not interested in political power, because to me, power is never there outside. Power is something inside you, power is your inner reality. And to be powerful over others is ugly, violent.Be a master of your own self. That is true power. And a power that never destroys is intrinsically creative, and a power out of which great poetry arises.Politics is a concern with the outside, politics is the concern to change the circumstances. There is a higher world than politics; that higher world is of spirituality. It is a concern not with the circumstances, but with the inner space. Change the inner space of man, and you will be changing his circumstances automatically.But still, people who are trying to change the outer circumstances are doing something; it has its own importance. This is not my interest. I would not like to go into active politics, ever. I am finished with all toys, I am not childish. That does not mean that I cannot comment on toys. I am not a small child to play with toys, but if a child is playing with toys I can comment. I can say, “Better toys are possible.” I can say, “This toy is dangerous, don’t play with it. This toy can harm you; don’t play with it – throw it away.” This much I can say.And that’s what I am doing. When I say Morarji Desai is a wrong person to be in power, I am simply saying that there are better possibilities, and it will be good if the country chooses a better person. But this is not my interest.So I don’t become a politician just because I have commented on politics. And I will go on commenting, because I cannot just be a spectator when millions of people’s lives are going slowly, slowly into darkness, into poverty. I cannot just be a spectator. I always wonder – your so-called spiritual persons who are just spectators, what kind of spirituality do they have? What kind of compassion do they have? They are cunning people; they have made secret deals with the politicians. They keep quiet, and they always keep people in such a state that they never become rebellious, that they never become revolutionaries.The politicians are always afraid of the rebels. And my sannyasins are going to be rebels, total rebels, against all kinds of nonsense and stupidity, against all kinds of bondages.My sole concern is religion, my major concern is religion. But I will comment on other things too because I take life in its totality. I love life. To me, life means God.But let me remind you again that I am not a politician, and I don’t want you to become politicians. I would like you to be aware of the whole life as it is. And a part of it is concerned with politics; you have to be aware of that too.The Pope blessed Adolf Hitler. Now, this is what I call subtle politics. Blessing Adolf Hitler is simply getting into a contract, getting into a conspiracy.All politicians are evil. Then what should be done? Choose the lesser evil.Morarji Desai is a bigger evil than Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi is a lesser evil; that’s why I say it will be better if she comes back. If I can find somebody else who is an even lesser evil than Indira Gandhi, then I am going to support him. But my support simply means a spiritual sympathy.I am not going to the masses to tell them to vote for this or that; I am not going into any activity. I have far better things to do: my energy has to remain involved with my sannyasins. I am here to create millions of mystics in the world. That’s my sole purpose, and that’s my joy and my celebration.On the margin I am going to comment on many things, but those are all just marginal things. And I am not a spiritual person in the sense that I am against the world; I am a spiritual person because I rejoice in the world. The world is the manifestation of God.My whole teaching is: Rejoice – never renounce. Rejoice in the totality of life, the wholeness of it. Rejoice, and rejoice again.It is natural; people have always thought that spiritual persons have to remain far away from worldly affairs. To me, there is no affair which is worldly; all affairs are the same, all affairs belong to the one center. The ordinary life is also the extraordinary life. It is only a question of seeing, right seeing; then even pebbles on the street are transformed into diamonds.I love life in its totality, as it is. Politics is also part of it. It is not my concern – but because it is part of life, I am going to comment on it.The second question:Osho,I don't have any sense of wonder in me. Why?It happens to almost everybody. The more knowledgeable you become, the less wonder is felt. And parents, schools, universities, society, all go on forcing you to become knowledgeable. Their whole effort is to give you knowledge. Your inner space becomes so full of knowledge that wonder disappears, wonder has no space left to abide in you.A child has the eyes of wonder. He feels awe, he is mystified by each and everything, small things surprise him. Hence his bubbling joy, because his life is a constant discovery.You become knowledgeable, the society wants you to become knowledgeable. Knowledge is very, very much needed; knowledge has much utility. And wonder is dangerous because a person who wonders is bound to become either a philosopher or a poet or a mystic, and all the three are useless for the society.Society needs machines, skillful machines. By giving you more and more knowledge, making you full of knowledge, society turns you into an automaton, into a robot. And the more you think you know, the more wonder becomes impossible – because when you know, how can you wonder?A small child can wonder why the trees are green. But how can you wonder? You know it is because of chlorophyll – although you don’t know much, because another question can be raised as to why chlorophyll makes trees green, and you will have to shrug your shoulders. You have simply pushed the question back a little.The more you know, the less you wonder. But the moment wonder dies in you, religion dies in you, because religion consists of wonder and awe. Knowledge demystifies life and existence, and religion exists only when life is a mystery. Hence you will have to learn wonder again.In fact a right kind of education will never do this. It will give you knowledge, but it will not destroy your wonder; that will be the right kind of education. It will give you knowledge, but it will keep you alert that no knowledge can destroy wonder. In fact, on the contrary, knowledge can make you more wondering.The small child cannot wonder about chlorophyll. If you are rightly educated, you can wonder about the greenery of the trees, you can also wonder about chlorophyll.Albert Einstein’s last words were, “I have been thinking the whole of my life that I would demystify the universe. But what has happened is just the contrary. The deeper I went into existence, the more the mystery deepened. I am dying full of wonder, I am dying in wonder.”But this is rare; this is the quality of a genius. The genius is one who does not allow the society to reduce him to a robot: that’s my definition of a genius. Everybody is born as a genius, but people start compromising very soon. And when they compromise, their talents disappear, their intelligence dies. They go on selling their souls for mundane things, for useless things – useless in the ultimate sense; they may be useful here, but death comes and all those things are taken away with you.If you can die like Albert Einstein – mystified, with full wonder, with prayer in the heart, with poetry arising in you – you have lived rightly and you are dying rightly. And a man who lives rightly and dies rightly is a spiritual person.Albert Einstein is far more spiritual than your Vatican pope and your shankaracharyas – far more spiritual. Before he died, somebody asked him, “If you are born again and God asks you, I am certain you would like to become a great physicist and mathematician again.” He said, “No, never! If another opportunity is given to me, rather than being a physicist I would like to become a plumber. I would like to live a very, very ordinary kind of life, anonymous, so that I could enjoy life more easily with nobody coming in my way. My fame, prestige, research – nothing coming in my way, so that I could have a deeper communion with existence.”You say, “I don’t have any sense of wonder in me. Why?” You must be very knowledgeable.An aspiring variety artist walked into an agent’s office looking for work. The agent said, “What do you do?”Without a word, the artist lifted up his arms, flew around the office, out of the window, across the street and back in through the window, making a perfect two-point landing in front of the agent’s desk.“Okay, okay,” said the agent. “So you do bird impersonations. Anything else?”This is what happens to the knowledgeable people. Nothing surprises them. Even if God stands before them, they will say, “Okay, okay, so you are God. Anything else?”Drop your knowledgeability.The theatrical impresario, Maxie Doldum, was once approached by a man in his theater.“I’ve got an act to offer you that is really unique,” said the man. “It will take London by storm. All you have to do is put ten thousand pounds in the bank for my wife, and I’ll commit suicide on the stage of your theater.”Somewhat astounded, Maxie pondered the offer. “Hmm,” he finally said, “But what will you do for an encore?”There are people who are so constantly utilitarian that their whole thinking consists of utilities. He asks, “But what will you do for an encore?” People have become so concerned with the worldly things – utilities, commodities, usefulness – that nothing surprises them, nothing shocks them into awareness. They go on like sleepwalkers.The rosebush brings flowers, they don’t see; they are blind. The birds sing in the morning, they don’t hear; they are deaf. They have lost all sensitivity. They have become so dead and dull that nothing thrills them to a dance, nothing brings a song to their lips, nothing gives a dance to their feet. And the culprit is knowledge.In a more understanding world, knowledge will still be given to you, but you will also be taught how to go on protecting your capacity to wonder. Your poetry will not be killed, crushed, under the weight of knowledge. In a real university, only half the time will be devoted to utilitarian objectives, and the other half will be devoted to non-utilitarian objectives: poetry, music, painting, dance, meditation, prayer – or just relaxing under a tree, just sitting silently under a tree, doing nothing. Half the time of schools, colleges and universities should be devoted to non-utilitarian activities, done for no purpose at all but just for the sheer joy of it. Then only will we have a whole man in the world.Up till now, there have existed two types of men: one is the worldly, he is a hundred percent utilitarian; another is the monk, he is a hundred percent non-utilitarian. Both are lopsided, both are missing something. The monk is missing the beauties of the world – the beauties of relationship, the beauties of people. The monk is poor, spiritually poor, because he is missing all the enriching experiences of life, of love, of friendship, of enmity, of anger, of compassion: he is missing all that variety that enriches the soul. He is just an empty blankness, a kind of blank canvas; nothing has been painted on him, he is spiritually poor.I have seen so many saints that I can say to you, it is very rare to come across a saint who has some richness of the soul. He is so monotonous, he is so boring, his whole life is nothing but boredom. How does he manage to live such a bored life? He can manage it only because he has dulled all his senses; he has dulled even his intelligence, so he cannot feel the boredom.Do you know? Except for man, no other animal feels boredom. Buffaloes are never bored, donkeys are never bored; they don’t have the intelligence to feel boredom. It is only man who feels boredom, and it is only man who has the capacity to laugh. Boredom and laughter are two sides of the same coin. But your monks, your so-called religious people, are not bored and cannot laugh either. They have fallen to the state of buffaloes and donkeys.I have heard about a philosopher who used to walk on the streets looking at the sky, the stars, the moon, the sun, clouds and birds on the wing. It was natural that many times he would bump into people or stumble into something. And it was his habit that whenever somebody bumped into him or he bumped into somebody he would say, “Are you a donkey or something?” And he was very much respected, he was a well-known philosopher, so everybody tolerated it, nobody took any offense.One day it happened, he bumped into a donkey. He was just going to say his usual, “Are you a donkey or something?” – he was just going to say it. But then he looked, and he laughed, and he said, “Sir, you are just yourself. What else can I say to you?”People who escape from the world become donkeys and buffaloes; they fall below human awareness, human sensibilities. That’s why they cannot live even a bored life – no laughter, no boredom. They have become animals. They have lost the glory of being a human being; they have fallen back. Of course, the life of an animal is less anxious; there is no anxiety, no anguish. Hence you will see a kind of serenity around them – but a serenity without intelligence is not of any worth.When serenity happens with intelligence, a buddha is born. When serenity happens without intelligence, you have gone back to the world of the buffaloes. But this has been the case. A few people have moved away from the world, a hundred percent to non-utilitarian activities – praying, praying, meditating, meditating, alone. This is not, and cannot be, a total life. And the others, the millions, are living only utilitarian lives, having more and more things, having bigger and bigger bank balances, and they don’t know anything of play. Even if they play, they become very serious in their play; even their play becomes a business.People cannot simply play cards, they have to put money into it; then it becomes something serious, because it takes the form of a business. Something has to be staked, only then can they play. You see players who even in their play are so dead serious, it is a question of life and death. Nobody seems to be playful.The world is full of utilitarian activities, and people have lost all qualities of meditation, prayer, play, wondering, feeling awe, watching stars, looking at the flowers, playing the guitar or singing a song, not for any other reason but for the sheer joy of it. These people are also very poor.I want to create a totally new man in the world, who will not be poor in this way or that, who will be really rich – who will have all the richness of the world, of relationships, of all the challenges of existence, and who will also have the capacity to be silent, the space of playfulness, meditativeness.This is my idea of a sannyasin: be in the world, and yet be not part of it. Be in the world, and yet go on surpassing it. Don’t be an escapist.The right education will create sannyasins in the world – sannyasins in my sense – it will create holy men. Fifty percent of education should be devoted to the world, and fifty percent to the beyond, and both should remain in a harmony, in a deep synthesis. Then you can be knowledgeable, and yet wonder continues to flow in you. Then you can know, and yet you are mystified by existence.The last question:Osho,What is the theory of relativity?I am not a physicist. I am not a scientist. But I can tell you two stories that will show what the theory of relativity is. I am a storyteller.I have heard that when Hitler came to inspect one of the concentration camps and the inmates were standing at attention, he was interested to get an idea of their weight. He picked out three, and scales were brought. The first turned out to be five kilos, the second seven kilos and the last eleven kilos, upon which Hitler responded, “There’s a chubby one!”This is what the theory of relativity is. No statement in itself has any meaning; it has meaning only in context and contrast with some other statement.The theory of relativity is a very complicated thing. It is said that while Albert Einstein was alive, only twelve persons in the world were able to understand it. Even Albert Einstein, when asked what it was, used to feel very puzzled – how to say what it is? He himself used to give examples. He used to give this example: that if you are sitting on a hot stove, one minute will look like one hour; and if you are sitting with your girlfriend, one hour looks like one minute.A man who was frightened of dentists delayed seeing one until he only had six teeth left in his mouth.The dentist examined him and said, “These teeth are finished. Let me pull them out. Let me do root canal work and all those other things I do, and you’ll have a complete new set of choppers in your mouth. You’ll look beautiful and you’ll no longer have chewing problems.”The man was dubious. “I’m a physical coward, Doctor. I can’t stand pain.”“Who said anything about pain? I’m a painless dentist!”“You say it, but how do I know if it’s true?”“Not to worry,” the dentist said. “I did a job exactly like this for another man. I’ll give you his name and you can phone him right now. Ask if I caused him any pain.”So the man telephoned George Kaplan in Brooklyn.“Mr. Kaplan,” he said, “my name is Al Goldstein. You don’t know me, but I’m in the office of your dentist and he says he did a big job on your teeth. Is that correct?”“Correct it is,” Kaplan agreed.“Okay,” said Goldstein. “Now I want you to tell me the honest truth. Did it hurt? Tell me, yes or no?”“A yes or no I can’t give you,” said Kaplan. “But I can give you a for instance. Every Sunday I go rowing in Prospect Park.”“So?” said Goldstein.“So,” said Kaplan, “our dentist finished with me in December. Now it’s June and it’s Sunday, and as usual I’m in my rowboat on the Prospect Park Lake. Suddenly, one of the oars slips away. When I reach over to grab it, my balls get caught in the oarlock. Would you believe it, Mr. Goldstein, it was the first time in six months that my teeth didn’t hurt!”That’s what the theory of relativity is.Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 09 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-09/

Not one knows how far it isfrom nothingness to God.As long as you cling to your selfyou will wander right and left,day and night, for thousands of years;and when, after all that effort,you finally open your eyes,you will see your self, through inherent defects,wandering around itself like the ox in a mill;but, if, once freed from your self,you finally get down to work,this door will open to you within two minutes.God will not be yours,as long as you cling to soul and life:you cannot have both this and that.Bruise your self for months and years on end;leave it for dead, and when you have done with it,you will have reached eternal life.Remain unmoved by hope and fear.To non-existence mosque and church are one;to a shadow, heaven and hell likewise.For someone whose guide is love,belief and disbelief are equally a veil,concealing the doorway of the friend;his very being is a veilwhich hides God’s essence.Until you throw your sword away,you’ll not become a shielduntil you lay your crown aside,you’ll not be fit to lead.The death of soulis the destruction of life;but death of lifeis the soul’s salvation.Never stand still on the path:become non-existent; non-existenteven to the notion of becoming non-existent.And when you have abandoned bothindividuality and understanding,this world will become that.When the eye is pureit sees purity.Unself yourself…until you see your self as a speck of dustyou cannot possibly reach that place;self could never breathe that air,so wend your way there without self.Once, a great enlightened master was using a fan when a philosophic monk came up to him and said, “The wind-nature – that is, winding-itself, or the noumenal reality of wind – is permanently ubiquitous so that there is in the whole world no place which is not pervaded by it. If so, why are you using the fan?”“What you know is only the theory that the wind is diffused throughout the world,” said the master.The monk said, “What is, then, the real meaning of the wind being diffused throughout the world?”The master just went on fanning himself.The monk made a reverential bow.Religion is not anything abstract. Religion is something very down-to-earth. Religion is not a philosophy but an experience. So those who go on thinking about God go on missing him. Thinking is not the way to him but the barrier, not the bridge but the wall. It is thinking that is keeping you separate.Burn your thinking in intense thirst. When a man is lost in a desert and is thirsty, a moment comes when thirst is no longer a thought in him, when he does not think about thirst, when he is simply thirst – his whole being involved in it, his every cell and fiber aflame with it. He is simply fire, he is thirst.In that intensity, religion becomes real – in that kind of passionate intensity.So remember, the greatest problem to be faced is speculation, philosophy, theorizing. One can go on and on theorizing; there is no end to it, it is a process ad infinitum. One thought leads to another thought, and so on, so forth. You will never come to the end of the process – there is no end. It is a vicious circle. You will be moving in a circle like an ox in the mill. There will be movement there, but there is not going to be any arrival. And it is arrival that fulfills.Religion has nothing to do with thinking, but it has everything to do with a tremendous thirst for truth.One day, a master took his seat in the lecture hall and said, “Over the lump of your reddish flesh there is a True Man without any rank. He is constantly going in and coming out through the gates of your face – that is, through your sense organs. If you have not yet encountered him, catch him, catch him here and now!”At that moment, a monk came out and asked, “What kind of a fellow is this True Man without any rank?”The master suddenly came down from the platform, grabbed at the monk, and urged him, “Speak, speak!” The monk hesitated for an instant. The master on the spot thrust him away, saying, “Ah, what a useless dirt-scraper this True-Man-without-any-rank of yours is!” And immediately he retired to his private quarters.The monk hesitated for an instant, that is to say, he reflected a moment in order to give an adequate response to the violent urging of the master. This was the moment when discursive thinking became activated. Note that at that very moment the True-Man-without-any-rank turned into a useless dirt-scraper.The difference between the truth and the untruth is not great. The distance is almost none: I say it is almost that of a kind of nothingness, as if just a small hair divides them. Just a moment’s thinking, a single thought’s coming into being, a small cloud of thought moving into your clear sky, just a little layer of dust on the mirror, and you have lost, and you have fallen from truth into untruth, from awakening into deep profound sleep. Beware of thinking.The moment religion becomes involved in thinking, it falls into an ugly sleep called theology. It starts dreaming of God, heaven and hell, angels and devils, and it goes on creating a thousand and one things, but they are all dream stuff. Truth has nothing to do with all those thoughts.You can be very clever and you can be really very argumentative about your thoughts. You may be even convincing to others, and finally to yourself, but all thinking is just absurd.Truth is. You are not to think about it – you have to see it, you have to be it.The last sutras of Hakim Sanai:No one knows how far it isfrom nothingness to God.No one can ever know, because it all depends on the seeker – his passionate, his intense search. It depends on your intensity. If you are just lukewarm in your search, then God is very, very, far away from your nothingness. If you are total in your thirst, nothing is being held back, you have taken a jump into it, you have not left anything behind, no part of you is missing, you have jumped as a whole organic unity – your anger, your love, your hate, your greed, all together – you have staked whatsoever you have, whatsoever nature has given you, then the distance is almost nil.It depends on your intensity. The proportion of your intensity will decide the proportion of the distance between God and your ungodly sleep.No one knows how far it isfrom nothingness to God.As long as you cling to your selfyou will wander right and left,day and night, for thousands of years;and when, after all that effort,you finally open your eyes,you will see your self, through inherent defects,wandering around itself like the ox in a mill;but, if, once freed from your self,you finally get down to the work,this door will open to you within two minutes.Have you seen that whenever you are intense in anything, the self disappears? You are in love with someone: in the very intensity of your love, the self disappears. You are no more, there is only love. Or you are in anger: in the intensity and totality of anger, the self disappears. You are no longer there, only the anger is.You can watch it in your own life. Whenever something is there, possessing you, all in all, the self is not found. That is a great clue. The self is there only when you are half-hearted in something. That which you keep back becomes the self.If you are totally involved in painting or in doing some work, singing a song or dancing or playing guitar, if you are totally in it, you will immediately see you are not there. Something of the beyond has taken possession of you. The self is not there, unself is.And to be in the state of unself is to be in God. To be in the state of self is to be far away from God – the self is the distance. And this mechanism has to be understood. Once this mechanism is understood well, there is no problem: then God is so obvious.You have come to this point many times, unawares of course. Seeing a beautiful sunset, you were so lost in the beauty of it that for a moment there was no idea of the self. You were not there. There was a totally different quality: you were not there. Something was there, but you cannot call it “I,” you cannot call it any frozen state of the ego. You were fluid, flowing.This is what Krishnamurti calls the moment when the observer becomes the observed.The sunset was there and the sunset was too much. It possessed you. The observer disappeared into the observed. The sunset was all; you were not separate, you were not standing aloof and watching, you were not a spectator. You were in it, you were part of it, you started feeling a kind of melting, merging.Hence the liberating experience of beauty, hence the liberating experience of love, hence the liberating experience of music, great music. You have known these moments – they come naturally, and they go. But you have never been able to reduce them to a scientific approach. You have not meditated over them, you have not looked into the keys that are hidden in them.The key is that whenever you are not, God is.This can be done consciously. Then there is no need to wait for a sunset, because that will be, after all, a kind of dependence. Then there is no need to wait for love – again that will be a kind of dependence; it may liberate for a moment, but then it will become a bondage.If you fall in love with a woman or a man, it is liberating. That’s why people fall in love. But sooner or later they find that the liberating experience has disappeared, evaporated, and instead of that liberating experience they suddenly wake up in bondage – chained, imprisoned.What happened to the love that was so liberating? How did it become an imprisonment? You became dependent on it, you became addicted to it; it was so beautiful, it became a drug to you. And once anything becomes a drug, once you are addicted to anything, whatsoever it is, you are in bondage. Then it does not liberate, it cannot liberate. It becomes ugly; everything goes sour, bitter, poisonous.No, one cannot be liberated by these small experiences of beauty, love, music. True, they give you glimpses, but those glimpses cannot become your state of being. You have to learn the secret of unselfing yourself.Each experience that has given you some kind of freedom was basically an experience of unselfing. So now, rather than depending on something, start unselfing yourself. Sitting silently, disappear: don’t be. Working, disappear: don’t be. Whenever you can find time, disappear. And then, slowly, slowly, the knack arises. Then twenty-four hours you can go on working, living your ordinary life, and yet you are not there. There remains a kind of pure, silent space within you.That silent space is God.And this can happen instantly, because not for a single moment is God far away from you. You may be far away, but God is never far away from you. You may have fallen into a deep slumber, but any moment you can wake up. The capacity to wake up remains always yours.…and when, after all that effort… Of going right and left, doing this and that – yoga methods, prayer, meditation; there are a thousand and one methods. Doing this, doing that, one day suddenly you wake up. You simply open your eyes and great laughter arises in you at the whole ridiculousness of your effort – because you were trying to get that which you have already got; hence the absurdity.It is said that when Hotei became enlightened, he started laughing. He lived for years but the laughter continued. Whenever people would say to him, “Say something to us. What is your message?” he would start laughing, a belly laugh, he would start rolling on the floor.Why was Hotei doing such absurd things? From his standpoint, the very idea of searching for God is ridiculous, because God is already the case. You need not go anywhere, you have just to open your eyes. You have never missed him.He is your life. He is the beat of your heart, you breathe him in and out, he circulates in your blood. He is your consciousness, and he is your sleep too. Just open your eyes.…and when, after all that effort, you finally open your eyes, you will see your self, through inherent defects, wandering around itself like the ox in a mill… What is the inherent defect of the self? The inherent defect is that the self is a false entity – and the false cannot meet the true. Darkness cannot meet light; if you bring light in, darkness disappears. If you want darkness to be there, you will have to take light out; they never meet.There is an inherent defect in darkness. What is that inherent defect? It is nonexistential; it is a shadow. The shadow follows you, and it follows so constantly, so consistently, that you can start thinking of it as if it is something real. Wherever you go, it is with you; it never leaves you. Still it is not.Ohrenstein, his hands in his pockets, was walking through a fashionable park, deep in thought, when a police sergeant came running up to him.“You’ll have to put that dog on a leash,” the police sergeant shouted, pointing to a huge yellow dog who was frolicking at Ohrenstein’s feet.Ohrenstein, his hands in his pockets, walked away without so much as looking at the policeman. The police sergeant came after him. “What’s the matter with you?” the policeman said. “There are signs everywhere that no dogs are allowed in this park unless they’re on a leash!”Ohrenstein, his hands in his pockets, walked away without saying a word. “Well, we can’t have that,” said the police sergeant, bewildered. “I’m going to have to give you a fine.”“A fine?” asked Ohrenstein. “Whatever for? That’s not my dog!”“That’s not your dog?” said the police sergeant. “Then why the hell is he running after you?”“And you?” asked Ohrenstein, taking his hands out of his pockets. “Aren’t you also running after me? Well? And you’re not my dog either!”The shadow that is constantly running after you may give you the feeling that it is something real, that it belongs to you. You may get identified with it.The ego is just a shadow, the shadow of the self. It is not the self, it is not your authentic being, it is just a shadow. To know it as a shadow is to be free of it; nothing more is needed. You are not to fight with it, you are not to go and do something to get rid of it – because if you try to get rid of it, that will simply prove that you still think it is real.It happens many times that people come to me and they ask, “How do I get rid of the ego?” The very question is meaningless. And there are people, so-called religious saints, who will give you methods, practices, to get rid of the ego. In the first place, the question is absurd. And the answers that are provided are even more stupid.You are not to get rid of the ego, because you cannot get rid of something which is not. In the very effort to get rid of it, you have accepted its reality – and that is the basic defect. Know that the ego is just a shadow, you are free of it. Let it follow you, it doesn’t matter. It is not: it can’t affect you, it can’t do a thing to you.Even when one becomes enlightened, one has to use the word I. Krishna uses it, Christ uses it, Buddha uses it; they still use the word I. You also use the word I, but the meaning that you give to it is not given by buddhas. Buddhas use it only as a linguistic device. You use it as if it is something real. Buddhas use it only as a utility, as something arbitrary but linguistically meaningful. But there is no ego corresponding to the I, there is no reality that conforms to it.When you use the I you think there is somebody inside you who conforms to the idea of I. That’s the only difference. You think the shadow is real, and then you want to get rid of it, or you want to make it more and more strong, bigger and bigger – both are the same. There are people who would like to make their egos very big and great, and there are people who would like their egos to disappear completely. And both are in the same boat.The real man of understanding, of awareness, simply laughs at the whole thing.Never ask a wrong question, otherwise there are people who will supply you with wrong answers. And as far as the ego is concerned, all questions are wrong.Mr. and Mrs. Gotbaum celebrated thirty years of marriage by going to a fancy restaurant. Awed by the elegant ambiance, they nevertheless enjoyed selecting and tasting the strange-sounding dishes.At the end of the meal, however, the waiter brought over two finger bowls and left them at the table. Mrs. Gotbaum looked at Mr. Gotbaum, and Mr. Gotbaum looked back at Mrs. Gotbaum. Neither of them knew what to do.“Ask the waiter,” suggested Mrs. Gotbaum.“Are you kidding?” exclaimed her husband. “Show our ignorance? How embarrassing!”“Yes,” she said. “But it would be more embarrassing not to use them at all.”“True,” said the man. So he called over the waiter and said, “Pardon me, but could you tell me the purpose of these dishes of…of liquid?”The waiter was polite. “Sir, those are finger bowls. You dip your fingers into the perfumed waters and then dry them on your napkin.”Mr. Gotbaum waited until the waiter left. Then he turned to his wife, and said, “See, Molly? You ask a foolish question, and you get a foolish answer!”Remember, there are a few things about which all questions are foolish and all answers are foolish. The ego is one of those things. Don’t ask a question about the ego – rather, watch it. Look into its workings, observe its subtle ways, without condemnation, without evaluating, just with simple observation, to know what it is, just to be acquainted with it, whatsoever it is. Don’t say it is good, don’t say it is bad, don’t try to enlarge it, and don’t try to make it disappear. Just watch. It is something that is always with you, and follows you: what is it?And don’t ask anybody else, there is no need. You have it. You can watch it.In that very watching, non-judgmental watching, you will be surprised: one day you will see that the ego does not really exist. And the moment you have seen that it doesn’t exist, your eyes open to that which is beyond the ego, to that which is beyond the shadow. The infinite light penetrates you for the first time.Don’t become obsessed with the ego. The egoist is obsessed with it, and the so-called humble person is also obsessed with it. In fact the humble person is trying to create a more sophisticated ego, more subtle, more decorated, more precious – that’s all. He carries the idea, “I am humble; nobody is more humble than me.”When Thomas Mann was visiting America for the first time, one of Hollywood’s literati abased himself before the novelist, emphasizing that he was nothing, a mere hack, his work not to be mentioned in the same breath with that of the master.Mann listened with infinite patience and courtesy, but when the party was over, he turned to his host, an old friend, and said, “That man has no right to make himself so small. He is not that big.”Humbleness also makes people big. Humbleness is the most subtle way of the ego, the subtlest – very refined, cultured, sophisticated. The egoist is a little gross, the humble person is not gross, but the game is the same. See the game, watch the game. And don’t watch with already accepted ideas. This is the problem, this is why people cannot go beyond the ego: they have already decided what it is.Western psychologists say it is a very good thing; it has to be strengthened, the ego has to be made stronger. You have to be aggressive, only then can you act and function in the world. And you need a strong ego to survive because life is a constant conflict; if you have a weak ego, anybody will crush you.So the whole Western culture depends on strengthening the ego, making it stronger and stronger, more and more crystallized. And the East has taken the polar opposite: become humble, just think of yourself as if you are nothing. But that “as if” is just a make-believe – debase, abase yourself, be humble, let the ego disappear completely.These two standpoints seem to be very, very opposite, diametrically opposite. But deep down they are not really opposite but complementary. The Eastern man has been creating a very subtle kind of ego – a religious kind, but it is the same game. The West is a little gross, and the reason is that the West is a new phenomenon.The real Western mind is just the by-product of three hundred years of scientific upbringing. The East has lived for at least ten thousand years; it has learned better ways of egoing. It has become very, very clever and cunning.The West is a little childish; the East is old and has all the cunningness of an old man. But whether you strengthen the ego or you weaken the ego, one thing is absolutely certain, that you both have accepted its existence, its reality.And that is where the defect lies. It is unreal: you need not strengthen it, you need not weaken it. All that is needed is a penetrating insight into its functioning, and that very insight dissolves it. It remains, but just like a shadow – a linguistic device, arbitrary, with no existential truth in it. Then you can use it but you are not used by it.…and when, after all that effort, you finally open your eyes, you will see your self, through inherent defects, wandering around itself like the ox in a mill; but, if, once freed from your self, you finally get down to work, this door will open to you within two minutes. Yes, it opens within two minutes. Why two minutes? Why not one minute? It is a metaphor, a Sufi metaphor: one minute for you, one minute for God. One minute for you to open up, and one minute for him to enter you. In fact those two minutes are not two, but two sides of the same coin. Here you disappear, there he immediately appears.God will not be yours,as long as you cling to soul and life:you cannot have both this and that.Bruise your self for months and years on end;leave it for dead, and when you have done with it,you will have reached eternal life.God will not be yours, as long as you cling to the soul and life. As long as you cling to the idea of separation, that “I am separate from existence,” God will not be yours because God is in the union with existence, unio mystica. God is in fact the union. God is not a person but the union.When the river meets the ocean, that meeting point is God. When two lovers dissolve into each other, that dissolution is God. When the painter is lost in his painting, that moment is God. God is a space – a space where dualities dissolve, disappear, and oneness arises.A famous Taoist story says, a great emperor asked the greatest painter of his land to paint the wall of his bedroom with Himalayan mountain peaks. “Paint the Himalayas” – he was a lover of the Himalayas. The painter worked for two or three years, and when the painting was completed he asked the king to go and see it.The curtain that was covering the wall was removed. The emperor was simply transported to another world. He had been to the Himalayas many times, he was a lover of the mountains, but the painting even surpassed the real. He looked and looked and looked. He was so mystified that he could not utter a single word for many minutes.Then he suddenly said, “But I have been to these parts. I have never seen this path that goes round and round the mountains. Where did you get the idea of this path?”And the story says the painter said, “I don’t know, really. Let me go and see.” And he went onto the path and disappeared behind the mountain – in the painting! – and never came back again.A strange story, unbelievable. How can you go into the painting and never come back again? But it is of tremendous significance. It is not a historical event but a mythological, poetic event, which says much.It says that the painter can disappear into his painting – only then is he a painter. The poet can disappear in his poetry – only then is he a poet. If he cannot disappear in his poetry then his poetry is just rubbish. If he cannot disappear in his painting, then he may know all the techniques of painting but he is not a great artist. He may be a technician, he may know about colors and canvasses and he may know how to paint, but he has no real genius in him. His painting is something separate from him; he has not yet found the union with his painting.And whenever the union is found, God is found.That’s why I say there are as many doors to God as there are people. All that is needed is, whatsoever you are doing, get lost in it; be so totally one with it that nothing is left behind. In that very moment, God is. God is unio mystica, the mystic union.God will not be yours, as long as you cling to soul and life… If you are clinging to your separate existence, if you are clinging to your separate life, God will not be yours – because God is the union.…you cannot have both this and that. You cannot have both separation and union; that is impossible. That is not possible because of the very nature of things. Either you can be united or you can remain separate.Bruise your self for months and years on end; leave it for dead, and when you have done with it, you will have reached eternal life. And the paradox is, when you are no longer interested in your separate life, in your separate being, you will have infinite being and you will have eternal life. You may disappear as a small flame of a candle, but you will become the sun of all the suns. You may disappear as a drop, but you will become the ocean.Remain unmoved by hope and fear.To non-existence mosque and church are one;to a shadow, heaven and hell likewise.For someone whose guide is love.belief and disbelief are equally a veil,concealing the doorway of the friend;his very being is a veilwhich hides God’s essence.Remain unmoved by hope and fear. How to enter that mystic union? What keeps you separate? What divides you? Everybody wants to get rid of fear, but nobody wants to get rid of hope – and fear is part of hope, the other side of hope. So if you want to save hope, fear comes from the back door. Everybody wants to drop all pain, but nobody wants to drop pleasure – and pain is part of pleasure. You want to be happy, you don’t want to be unhappy, but unhappiness is part of happiness.See this duality. Love and hate are together, birth and death are together. Go and watch it in your life: everything you will find is part of its opposite. And the problem, the dilemma, is that we want to drop half and we want to keep the other half. This is not possible. You cannot drop one side of a coin and keep the other side. You either have to keep both or you have to drop both; you cannot choose one. Either choose the whole coin or drop the whole coin.You want love, but you don’t want hate – this is not possible.Now this ancient truth has become part of modern psychotherapies too. Modern psychology has also agreed with the truth that love and hate are not two things. In fact to use two words separately with “and” dividing them is not right; it may be grammatically right, but existentially it is not right.So those who are more alert to the phenomenon have started using a single word: lovehate. “Love and hate” is wrong; then a few psychologists started using love-hate with a hyphen; now the more insightful have even dropped the hyphen, because not even a hyphen exists between the two. Lovehate is simply one word. Hopefear is one word, painpleasure is one word, birthdeath is one word.Once you remember that these dualities are not dualities, then something of tremendous importance has been understood. Now if you want to, you can keep both – but who wants to keep hate, and who wants to keep death, and who wants to keep misery? Then drop both.And in that disappearance, the barrier between you and reality disappears – because when all dualities are dropped, you start falling into oneness with existence.God is one, you are dual – that is the problem. When you drop dualities, you also become one.Remain unmoved by hope and fear. To non-existence mosque and church are one… And watch – we have created dualities everywhere: the mosque and the church, the Koran and the Bible, the Hindu and the Christian. We have crated so many dualities. There are natural dualities like lovehate, and there are unnatural dualities like the Catholic and the communist, the Kremlin and Kaaba. We have crated many – there are natural dualities and there are man-made dualities; we are surrounded by dualities. And existence is non-dual.The moment you drop choosing between these duals, the moment you become a non-chooser, the moment you remain in a choiceless awareness, suddenly a great illumination happens. Then it doesn’t matter whether you live or die, because all is one. It does not matter whether you succeed or fail, because all is one. It does not matter at all what happens to you, because your deepest core always remains beyond all happenings. Then you are neither a sinner nor a saint.Taoists, Sufis, Zen people, never call their masters saints – never; they call them sages. And they make a great distinction between the saint and the sage. The saint is against the sinner, the saint is part of the dual world. The sage is one who has dropped all duality; he is not against the sinner, he knows nothing of the sinner and the saint, he is neither.Hence it is very difficult to understand a sage. It is very simple to understand a saint; the saint is within your understanding, because he lives in the same world of duality that you live in. You can understand the sinner and the saint both. But to understand the sage, you will have to go beyond your duality.The sinner is easy to understand, the saint is easy to understand. One has chosen the dark side of life, and another has chosen the light side of life, but both are choosers. And the moment you choose, you are in bondage.Freedom is choicelessness. The sage does not choose: he lives moment to moment, without any choice. He allows life to flow through him. He allows God to do whatsoever is his will; he has no will of his own.The saint has his own will, sometimes even far stronger than the sinner’s. That’s why it is said of sinners that they are weak people, that they have many weaknesses, that they are victims of human weaknesses. And the saint is a strong person, a man of willpower. If this is so, then the sinner is closer to God than the saint, because less willpower means less ego.And this is my experience too. I have watched, observed, both saints and sinners. Sinners are more innocent than the saints. Saints are very cunning, very clever, cultivated hypocrites. The sinner is simple, innocent, animal-like.The sage is one who has dropped both being a sinner and a saint, who simply lives spontaneously, naturally. He has no idea of how to live his life. He is neither worried about sins, nor is he practicing virtues. He is innocent like a child.My sannyasins have to keep it always in their consciousness that I am not creating saints here, not at all. The world is too burdened by saints; they have been making too much fuss in the world. They have destroyed man’s naturalness, they have made man phony.I am for sages, not for saints. And the sage-consciousness is one where dualities have been dropped, choice has been dropped. One has surrendered to God – one flows with the river, one no longer has any private goals. One simply feels part of the whole. “Wherever the whole is going, I am also going. If it is not going anywhere, I am not going anywhere. I am utterly in tune with the whole.” That is the state of a sage.Remain unmoved by hope and fear. And you will become a sage. To non-existence mosque and church are one… The sage is nonexistential; he does not exist as a separate entity. Hence the sage makes no distinction between the mosque and the temple, the church and the gurdwara. It is all the same for him; all houses are God’s houses, even ordinary houses are temples.To non-existence mosque and church are one; To a shadow, heaven and hell likewise. Only egos think of hell and heaven. Those who have dropped their egos, or have understood that there are no egos but just shadows, for them there is no hell, no heaven. Again, remember, hell and heaven are not two words; we should use one word, heavenhell.For someone whose guide is love… And in this state of choicelessness, love becomes your guide. In choicelessness, love starts overflowing. For someone whose guide is love, belief and disbelief are equally a veil…The sage does not believe, does not disbelieve. He simply lives a very ordinary life. He is utterly ordinary: hungry, he eats; sleepy, he sleeps. He has imposed nothing upon himself, he has no ideals. He does not believe, he does not disbelieve; he is silent about that.And what are your beliefs? Just repressed doubts. Look into each of your beliefs, and deep down at the bottom you will find just the opposite of it: a great doubt. The greater the doubt, the greater the energy you have to pour into your belief.When somebody says, “I strongly believe…” that simply shows he strongly doubts. Fanatics are the greatest doubters. They have to become fanatics, otherwise they will not be able to repress their doubts. And this creates hypocrisy.I have heard about a Christian Scientist, a faith healer.There was a faith healer of DealWho said, “Although pain isn’t real,If I sit on a pinAnd it punctures my skinI dislike what I fancy I feel.”This is going to be so. You can impose beliefs upon yourself, but you cannot dispose of reality so easily. You will become a hypocrite.For someone whose guide is love, belief and disbelief are equally a veil… Because love opens the doors of the heart, and belief and disbelief are only intellectual. Somebody believes God is: that is preventing him from knowing God, because without knowing God he already believes God is. His belief is insincere, his belief is untrue, because he has not yet known. See the insincerity of the so-called believers.And the man who says, “I don’t believe in God” is also insincere, because if you have not known yet, how can you disbelieve?The sincere person will be an agnostic. He will not choose; he will not say yes, he will not say no. He will remain untethered, free. He will say, “I will search. I will go into myself as deeply as I can, as totally as I can. I will melt myself into existence, I will drop this separation and see what happens, whether union is possible or not. If it happens, I will know; if it doesn’t happen, I will know.”But remember, when you don’t know, belief is irrelevant. When you know, then too, belief is irrelevant. When one knows, one knows; there is no question of believing.…belief and disbelief are equally a veil, concealing the doorway of the friend… Sanai’s statement is of tremendous significance. Both belief and disbelief, both the atheist and the theist, go astray: they go on moving away from God.God’s door is open only to a heart who does not believe, who does not disbelieve, who is simply open. A believing or disbelieving mind is a closed mind; he has already gathered a prejudice. And once you are prejudiced you are polluted, poisoned by others. Beware of it.Your parents have been poisoning you, your politicians, your priests, your teachers, have all been poisoning you. They are giving you their beliefs. Everybody likes to give his belief to other people. Why? – once somebody has started believing the way you believe, he becomes a slave to you. You feel good: your dominion has become bigger, your domination has expanded, one more person has become part of your domination.Parents jump upon their children when they are very young. Priests are continuously anxious to get hold of children as young as possible, so that they can force their beliefs into the purity of the child’s consciousness. And the child is so helpless, he cannot even say no; he does not know how to say no. He cannot resist, he cannot fight against them. This is very undemocratic; this whole religious nonsense that goes on and on is very undemocratic.If democracy is really to happen in the world, priests and parents should be prevented from giving their beliefs to their children. Children should be left alone; only after they have become mature should they start inquiring on their own.Yes, give them a thirst for truth, but don’t give them a belief. Give them a passionate desire to inquire, but don’t give them a concept. Give them a kind of meditativeness: tell them how to be silent, tell them how to sit without doing anything, how to remain unoccupied. Tell them all these things, because these are not beliefs; but don’t tell them what to believe in and what not to believe in. Don’t make them Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans. Make them meditative, that’s all.Help them to become more intelligent, sharpen their intelligence, so that when they stand on their own, when they are mature enough, they will be able to find their way. They will be able to find the way to God.And it will be very easy. Millions of people can reach God, it is our birthright. But we are not reaching him, because before we reach God we have already been burdened with so many beliefs. And all those beliefs are insincere – they have destroyed our inquiry, they have destroyed our openness, we have become closed.The doorway of the friend is closed because of our beliefs and disbeliefs.…his very being is a veil which hides God’s essence. The very idea of “I am” hides God’s essence. And beliefs and disbeliefs are of immense importance for the ego, they are props for the ego. Just think: if you are neither a Hindu nor a Mohammedan nor a Christian, a part, a great chunk of your ego has already disappeared. If you don’t believe in the Bible and you don’t believe in the Koran and you don’t believe in Das Kapital, another chunk has disappeared. These are nourishments for the ego.Just think for a moment, if you don’t have any belief or any disbelief, a kind of pure space arises in you. In the beginning it may be frightening, because you have not known it for so long, you have completely forgotten that once it was your space.When you were born, you were born tabula rasa – clean, pure, just a space. You were born an empty sky. And then clouds gathered, clouds and clouds, and all the purity and all the openness and all the space was lost.Sannyas means to create that space again.Just the other day, a woman wrote a letter to me. She is a Catholic, and because she missed church last Sunday, because she could not go to church, she has been feeling very guilty, very frightened. Now she wants to become a sannyasin, and is afraid what will happen to her Catholic upbringing and the church and the priests.I can understand her fear, it is natural. But nobody is born as a Catholic or as a Protestant; we have been taught these things.And remember, God cannot be taught. Religion cannot be taught; it has to be caught, it cannot be taught. To be a Catholic is just to be foolish. If you can find Christ somewhere, be with him by all means; be totally with him, don’t miss the opportunity – because religion can be caught from him. But no Catholic priest can teach it to you, no church can give it to you.You have to be in communion with a living master. If you can find Christ, be with him. If you cannot find Christ, be with Buddha; if you cannot find Buddha, be with Mohammed – but find somebody alive. And you will be surprised: whether you are with Buddha or Christ of Mohammed or Sanai, it doesn’t matter. It is the same religion that you will catch, it is the same God. If you are here, you can catch it – rather than thinking of going to a church where a priest is simply telling you things which he has been told by others, where he is only functioning as a mechanism. He has no insight of his own; he is a believer, he will give you his belief. But belief is not religion. You will have to catch religion. It can be imbibed.Fortunate were those few people who lived with Jesus, but all those who go to the churches are just unfortunate. Fortunate were those few people who lived with Buddha, but those who call themselves Buddhists because they have been taught to be Buddhists, are just unfortunate. Because of their so-called belief, they cannot search for a living Buddha again.I would like to tell this woman: being a sannyasin will bring you closer to Christ than anything else can. The form may differ, but the essence is the same. My language is different from Jesus’, my form is different from Jesus’ my ways of working are different from Jesus’. But the essence is the same, the flowering is the same.You are with Jesus when you are here. By becoming a sannyasin, you have really entered into the world of christ-consciousness. It is not a church; churches arise only when masters are gone, a church is a dead religion.Catch God when he is alive somewhere, living in the body just like you. Those moments are few; very few fortunate people are capable of doing that, because their beliefs hinder them. Somebody is a Catholic, he cannot come here; somebody is a Protestant, he cannot come here; somebody is a Hindu, he cannot come here – their beliefs prevent them. Somebody is a communist, he cannot come here.And that was the case when Jesus was there. Because somebody was a Jew, he could not go to him. That was the case when Mohammed was there. Somebody was a Christian, and somebody was a Jew, so they could not go to him. That’s how people go on missing.Religion has to be imbibed from a living source.Until you throw your sword away,you’ll not become a shield;until you lay your crown aside,you’ll not be fit to lead.A very potential, pregnant statement.Until you throw your sword away… The sword represents your search for security, your defensiveness. Everybody is searching for security, to be secure, to be safe. And it is because of this stupid search for security and safety that you are missing God and you are missing aliveness – because security is possible only if you are almost dead. The deader you are, the more secure you are.If you want to live, there is danger. Life means danger. There is only one way to live. Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “Live dangerously.” That is the only way to live: you have to live in insecurity.And the beauty of insecurity is that once you have become courageous enough to live in insecurity, all insecurity disappears from life. Alan Watts called it “the security of insecurity.”There is something like the insecurity of security. Whatsoever you think is secure is not; deep down, there is an undercurrent of insecurity. You have money in the bank, but the bank can go bankrupt – what kind of security is there? You have a strong body, but even the strongest body can become ill. You can have a heart attack, or sooner or later death is going to overtake you. You have a beautiful body; it can become ugly any moment – a car accident or anything. You have a beautiful woman who loves you, but tomorrow she may fall in love with somebody else; if she could fall in love with you, why can she not fall in love with somebody else?You are in love with somebody today – who knows about tomorrow? All is insecure. You only pretend that things are secure. Your security is just a camouflage: behind it all is insecurity. Your friends can become enemies, your brothers can betray you; nothing is secure.So first see that all our security is superficial, a facade; behind it is insecurity. And vice versa – if you start living in insecurity you will be surprised: insecurity will be only on the surface, and deep down you will be secure.How does it happen? When you drop the fear of insecurity, insecurity disappears; it exists in the fear of it. Rather than being afraid of it, you start enjoying its thrill – because insecurity is adventurous, it brings new surprises to you, it is a constant venture into the unknown. It has a great thrill. It takes you from the known to the unknown every moment, there are always surprises, and each moment of your life becomes unpredictable.Sanai says: Until you throw your sword away – the sword represents security – you’ll not become a shield… If you carry the sword in your hand, afraid, protecting yourself, you will remain unprotected, you will not become a shield. Throw away the sword and immediately you become the shield. Throw away the fear of insecurity, throw away the desire to be secure, and you are secure.All security is in God, with God, with the whole. If you exist separately as a self, you are insecure. If you forget about yourself, if you merge into the whole, you are secure. In that union is security: you become a shield.…until you lay your crown aside, you’ll not be fit to lead. And this is the basic evil, to search for security. Evil is really a selling or trading of aliveness for survival. The mind state is interested only in survival. The ego is continuously hankering to survive, the mind wants to remain secure in every possible way, and because of its obsession with security it cripples you, paralyzes you. To trade aliveness for survival is the fundamental evil.Drop this fear of insecurity. Love insecurity because insecurity is life. Don’t live out of fear because one who lives out of fear does not really live, he only vegetates. Those who live out of fear live constantly focused on death. Fear means fear of death. All fear can be reduced to the fear of death. And those who are focused on death go on missing life: how can you enjoy life if you are constantly thinking of death?If a man is afraid of adventure, then he will remain closed. He will live almost in a grave. Then he will find that fear is everywhere: all kinds of fears will torment him, he will become paranoid. He will not be able to live at all; he will at the most survive. He only survives, he does not live.You have to drop this fear – because this fear perpetuates itself; it becomes bigger and bigger and it drowns you in its mud.The death of soulis the destruction of life;but death of lifeis the soul’s salvation.Don’t be afraid to die as an ego – because the moment you die as an ego, you are reborn. Let the ego be crucified, and you will have resurrection. The death of the self is the salvation of the soul.That’s what Jesus means when he says, “Those who save themselves, lose. And those who are ready to lose themselves, save.”Never stand still on the path:become non-existent; non-existent evento the notion of becoming non-existent.Remember, the ego has not to hide behind your humbleness. Become so nonexistent that even the idea “I am nonexistent” disappears, because that is again an ego game.A disciple reached his master and said, “Master, now I have understood you. It took years of effort and meditation, but now it has happened. I have attained to nothingness. I have come to thank you.”The master threw him out of the room and said, “Go out, and first throw away this nothingness too. Don’t bring nothingness here!”Because if you have become nothing, there is nobody to claim “I have become nothing.” If you still have the claim, you are there – the ego has learned a new trick.And when you have abandoned bothindividuality and understanding,this world will become that.When you have disappeared as an individual, when you no longer think in terms of separation, then who is there to understand or not understand? You become innocent.And in that very innocence, this world disappears and that world appears. There are not two worlds, there is only one world. Seen through the idea of separation, it is samsara: it is this world – mundane, futile, fruitless. Seen with the vision of unity, non-separation, the same world is transformed. It is that world – nirvana, enlightenment, moksha, godliness.When the eye is pureit sees purity.And the ego is the impurity. Drop all beliefs, disbeliefs, drop this idea of separation.Remember, a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. A focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B. “Purity of the eye” means you have no attitude, no prejudice. A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. So if you are a Hindu you have a way of seeing, if you are a Jaina you have another way of seeing. But a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. When you become focused on object A, you necessarily neglect object B.And the truth is indivisible. So drop all ways of seeing, all attitudes, beliefs, disbeliefs, notions, concepts, philosophies. Just see. Be a mirror, so that whatsoever is, is reflected in you.That is God, that is truth. It is not a question of your choice. It reflects only when you are in a choiceless state of awareness.Unself yourself…This is the secret of Sufism, the whole philosophy condensed into two words.Unself yourself…until you see yourself as a speck of dustyou cannot possibly reach that place;self could never breathe that air,so wend your way there without self.You cannot enter God as a self. You can enter God only as a no-self – what Buddha calls anatta, no-self.If you really want God, you have to disappear. This is the problem: people want God, but they don’t want to disappear. They want to possess God as they possess other properties. Hence they can go on searching for thousands of lives but they will not find God, because they will not fulfill the basic requirement.This is the basic requirement: Unself yourself…And immediately existence starts showering on you, instantly. The whole world becomes luminous; immediately all is celebration. Remember this key of Hakim Sanai. This is a master key. This can open the doors of all the mysteries.Unself yourself…Enough for today.

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

Unio Mystica Vol 2 01-10Category: SUFISM

Unio Mystica Vol 2 10 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/unio-mystica-vol-2-10/

The first question:Osho,Jesus taught his followers to love thy neighbor as thyself. Could you give us your views on caring, compassion and service to the community?Jesus’ statement is tremendously significant, but has been totally missed by his followers. Let me repeat it. Jesus says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” The fundamental question is whether you love yourself or not. You can love the neighbor only if you love yourself.Christianity has been teaching you to love your neighbor, and the fundamental has been completely forgotten – not only forgotten, but just the opposite has been done. People are taught to condemn themselves: how can they love themselves? They are taught that they are sinners. How can you love yourself if you feel you are a sinner?Christianity creates guilt in people, tremendous guilt. And if you are guilty you cannot love yourself; you will hate yourself, you would like to destroy yourself. That’s what the so-called Christian saints have been doing down the ages – destroying themselves. Out of guilt, only destruction can arise; out of guilt, only suicide. And they go on teaching, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” You have never loved yourself: it is impossible to love thy neighbor.Hence I don’t say love thy neighbor as thyself. My teaching is simple: love thyself. My experience is that if you become capable of loving yourself, love for your neighbor will come of its own accord; it does not have to be brought, it does not have to be practiced. All practiced love creates hypocrisy.So I completely drop the second part of the statement. Forget about your neighbor, simply love thyself. And you will be surprised: the day you bloom, you flower, the fragrance is bound to reach the neighbor. Where else will it go? When you are full of love for yourself, love starts overflowing. It reaches the neighbor; it reaches the farthest star.And that happens of its own accord. You need not think about it, you need not create it. It is none of your concern. Just love yourself, be friendly to yourself, and you will be surprised: the man who loves himself cannot hate anybody.It is reported of a great mystic woman, Rabiya al-Adabiya, that when she was reading the Koran she came across a statement that said, “Hate Satan.” She immediately crossed it out.Another Sufi mystic, Hassan, was present and he saw it being done. He could not believe his eyes – is Rabiya correcting the Koran? Dropping a statement from the Koran? This is sacrilegious! He said, “What are you doing, Rabiya? Have you really gone mad? This cannot be done; the Koran cannot be corrected.”Rabiya said, “But what can I do? Love has happened to me. Now, even if Satan stands before me, I can do nothing but love. No hate is left in me, there is no darkness in any corner of my being. Even if I want to hate I cannot; I am utterly helpless. I have to cut out this line, this statement. It is no longer relevant to me; it cannot exist, at least in my copy of the Koran.”When you are in love with yourself you bloom. Love nourishes you, you respect yourself. You feel the grace of existence, you feel grateful that you have been created, you feel uniquely benefited, you feel blessed. And then the overflowing; then the fragrance starts spreading to the winds.I don’t teach you to love your neighbor because for two thousand years Christians have been teaching that, and nothing has happened. On the contrary, Christians have killed their neighbors more than anybody else. And the basic thing that has been missed is love for thyself.Jesus is perfectly right. He takes it for granted that you love yourself. He has not taken note of the priests who are going to follow him, who will interpret what he says; he had no idea of the Vatican and the pope. He has taken it for granted that you love yourself – and that is not so. It would have been so if there had not been any pollution, the pollution that the priest has created, down the ages. Man no longer loves himself.You can watch yourself. Do you have any respect for yourself? How can you respect yourself if you are a sinner? If you are condemned, how can you respect yourself? You feel unworthy.The whole strategy of the so-called religions consists of making you feel unworthy. Once you are unworthy, shaken, you lose confidence, you lose power in yourself, you become weak. And when you are weak you surrender, you submit to the priest, the priesthood. There are all kinds of exploiters around you.In fear you start clinging to the churches, to the mosques, to the temples; in fear you start praying. But a prayer that comes out of fear is false. Prayer is true only when it is a fragrance of love.“Jesus taught his followers to love thy neighbor as thyself.” But the first thing cannot be taken for granted. The first thing is missing, the seed is missing. So you can go on waiting for the flowers to come, but they will never come. No tree is going to be born.First the seed, and then what else is needed? You put the seed in the soil, you water it, and it grows – you need not pull it. One day the spring has come and the tree has blossomed. It happens just like that. But the seed has to be a love for yourself.I teach you self-love. And because I teach you self-love, you have to be very alert. Self-love does not mean selfishness. Self-love is possible only if you drop the idea of the self – that is the paradox – if you unself yourself.The person who loves himself cannot carry the ugly burden of the ego. How can he carry such mountains, such ugly mountains? He drops the ego, he becomes pure space. He loves himself so much that he cannot carry this poison inside him. He becomes full of light, empty space. And in that empty space blooms the lotus of love.Self-love is not selfishness; self-love is unselfishness. In self-love the self disappears, only love remains. And then you have created the context. Now many, many miracles are going to happen to you; now nothing is impossible for you, because love is the magic.You ask, “Could you give us your views on caring, compassion and service to the community?” I have no views about caring, compassion and service to the community. My whole effort is to transform the individual. I am utterly focused on the individual. And if the individual becomes luminous, then compassion, caring, service come naturally.If you are taught service, compassion and caring, you will learn it and you will do it, but it is going to remain superficial. And it will not only be superficial, it will be harmful to you and to others too. When a person forces himself to serve others he becomes egoistic. He thinks in terms of being holier-than-thou, he becomes a very pious egoist. He feels that he is obliging you, and obliging the whole world.You can see it written all over your so-called public servants. Public servants have proved the most mischievous people in the world. They are the sources of mischief, but they make mischief behind such beautiful curtains that you cannot catch them. They serve you, they oblige you, and then they become your masters. They have served you so much that if they start exploiting you, you have to accept it gratefully. They have served you so much, they have invested so much in you, that now their exploitation has to be tolerated.I don’t teach service – enough of it! I only teach meditation. And out of meditation, when you have arrived, there will be service. But that will be just a natural outcome, a by-product. Service is not the goal, but a consequence; so is compassion.Buddha has said that when a man has reached the climax of meditation, compassion showers from him. Just as when you light a candle, light starts spreading all around and darkness disappears, when the light of meditation is inside you compassion radiates.And then compassion has a beauty because it is unselfconscious. You are not obliging anybody; in fact if somebody accepts your service you are obliged. He might have rejected; he has not rejected, he has obliged you. You serve him and you feel obliged. You serve him but you don’t start asking for anything in return. It is unconditional. In fact you are happy that somebody has accepted your service.My focus is on the individual, not on the community. The real revolution has to happen in the individual, not in the society. All social revolutions have failed, utterly failed. They were bound to fail, they were destined to fail. Only the individual can be transformed, because only the individual has the soul, consciousness, awareness.The community, the society, has no soul. It does not really exist anywhere – have you ever come across the society? Whenever you come across it, you come across individuals. You will meet A, you will meet B, you may meet C, but you never come across the society.You come across human beings, but you never come across humanity. The word humanity is empty, so is the word society, but these words have become so powerful because down the ages we have been hypnotized by words. Society, community, country, motherland, fatherland, humanity – all bogus words. The reality is only one: the individual.Only if the individual becomes luminous will the world be benefited. It is time that we forget about social revolution and social service; it is time enough. We should become a little more mature and think of reality as it is. The individual exists, hence individuals can be transformed.I am not a social revolutionary, and I am not a social servant either. My sannyasins are not to become social revolutionaries and social servants – no, not at all. The only thing that you have to do is create great love for yourself, and enjoy, rejoice and celebrate. And out of that celebration, something miraculous starts happening: people are served, compassion radiates, caring is born.The second question:Osho,I have controlled and disciplined my sex life for years, but I am still too interested in it. Why?That’s why. It is so simple, so obvious. You have remained obsessed with it – otherwise why control it? Why repress it? What is control except repression?You became too attached to it; it was an attachment. And as time has passed, the attachment has deepened. Of course your attachment is negative, hence the question. Because you have been against it, you think, “Why am I still interested?”In fact if you are negatively attached to something, your attachment will go on deepening as time passes; it will never end. If you are positively attached, there is a possibility of its ending because experience liberates. If you had known sex, by now you would have been finished with it because it is childish; it does not have the power that negative attachment creates.Sex in itself is not that powerful. It appears very powerful because we have been taught to be against it. Our antagonism gives it power. And the more you are against it, the less experienced you are about it. The less you are experienced about it, the more the desire arises to experience it.In fact, monks remain interested in sex to the very end: they die thinking of sex and nothing else – it is a simple psychological truth. But the question arises because we only think of positive attachment as attachment.Attachment has two forms, positive and negative. And the negative is far deeper than the positive because there is no way to end the negative attachment. The positive attachment will wear, wither. You have known sex and its experience – slowly, slowly, you start understanding that there is nothing in it, that it is a biological urge, that it gives you nothing much. Slowly, slowly, it dawns upon your consciousness that it is a futile repetition.And I am not saying to think that it is a futile repetition. If you think without the understanding, that thinking will be repression; that will be negative attachment. I am not saying to judge it; the judgment arises on its own.But when you are negatively attached to something, you go on escaping from it. When will you experience it? And the more you escape, the more the urge remains fresh, young. The more you repress it, the deeper it goes into your unconscious and grips you at the roots. From the leaves it moves to the roots. From the leaves there was a possibility of evaporating because the leaf was exposed to the sun, to experience, to life. Once it has reached your roots underground, there is no way for it to evaporate.Attachment is the sine wave of “submission – resistance.” When you submit to something or resist something, or hate something, or identify with something, you are attached to it. Remember, saying yes is an attachment: submission. Saying no is an attachment: resistance. And the second attachment is far deeper.That’s why friendships are not as great as enmities. Friendships are so-so, lukewarm. Enmities are very passionate, very hot. Enmities live long, for years; there seems to be no way to end an enmity. Friendship withers.You are asking, “Why am I still interested?” You will remain interested to the very end. Drop your resistance, drop the negative attachment, go into the experience of sex. Don’t be afraid, there is nothing to be afraid of. It is not so important that you need to be afraid of it; by becoming afraid, you are making it something big. It is not such a big deal, it is a small biological phenomenon.Priests have magnified it very much. The whole responsibility goes to the priests: they have made the whole of humanity sexual, utterly sexual. Without the priest there would be no pornography in the world, without the priest there would be no prostitutes in the world, without priests there would be no obscenity in the world. They are the root causes.But it is very difficult to see the point because they are against all these things – if you listen to their words, they are against them. Naturally you think if people are against something, how can they be the source of it? But they are the source. By being against, they are creating great interest, they are creating great attraction.Just let priests disappear and you will be surprised, sexuality will disappear. Sex will be there, but sex is a small thing; sexuality is a magnified obsession.The late Dr. Kinsey was questioning a group of men about the number of times they had sex relations with members of the opposite sex.In response to his question, a group of men raised their hands to indicate that they had sex every night. Then some said they had relations ten times a month. A small group said they only did it about four times a month.Finally, every man in the room had been accounted for except one man who was sitting in the corner.Dr. Kinsey moved closer to him. “All right. How many of you have sex relations only once a year?”“Me! Me!” the man piped up, waving his hand wildly and wearing an ear-to-ear smile.“Fine,” said Dr. Kinsey. “But why are you so happy about it?”“Because tonight’s the night!” the man explained with glee. “Tonight’s the night!”Now, if you repress for one year, this is natural. How many years have you been controlling your sex? Even an ear-to-ear smile won’t do – your smile will spread from your toes to your head.Please don’t control, because all control means control by the ego. I teach you uncontrol: remain natural. Control makes you unnatural, artificial, arbitrary. Remain natural, relax. Whatsoever existence has given to you – sex, love, whatsoever – accept it as a gift. And go into it, go into it meditatively, go into it very consciously, so that you can see what it is, so that you can learn something from it.And one day sex disappears. That day is of great importance because that day you are biologically free. That freedom is not attained through control; that freedom is attained through understanding, awareness, witnessing.The third question:Osho,Are you against all other gurus?Then who has been speaking on Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu, Bahauddin, Rabiya, Sanai, Bodhidharma, Rinzai, Bokuju, Milarepa, Marpa, Tilopa, Saraha, Kabir, Nanak, Meera, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Mahavira? Who has been speaking about all these gurus, if I am against all gurus? There has never before been a man who has spoken about so many masters, and I don’t think there is going to be another again.But certainly I am against a few gurus – not because they are gurus, but because they are not gurus, they are pretenders. And I have not only spoken about ancient masters, I have spoken on Ramakrishna, Raman, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti – I have spoken on contemporary masters too.I am certainly against those who are just pretending, those who don’t know a thing. But in that sense Jesus was also against many rabbis, and Buddha was against many brahmins, and Kabir was against. In that sense every master has always been against the false, the pseudo; this is not anything new.But maybe you had some attachment to people like Satya Sai Baba and Baba Muktananda, and you may have felt hurt. That is your understanding. Satya Sai Baba and Baba Muktananda are not gurus in my vision. In fact I am very much surprised: when I see that even a man like Muktananda can get disciples. I cannot believe how far humanity has fallen. This is an indication of a great stupidity.If Muktananda can get disciples, then in this world anybody can get disciples. It simply shows that people have completely forgotten what it means to be a disciple and what it means to be a master. People seem to be in such a desperate need that whatsoever they can get, whosoever they can get, they are ready to follow. People are in such a neurotic state that idiots can pretend and become masters.To be a master means a flowering of intelligence. Have you ever seen any intelligence in people like Muktananda? But this is happening – and the reason is not that Muktananda has some power, the reason is that people are in a desperate need. They don’t know where to go, so whatsoever comes close by, they fall a victim to.I am not against gurus, but it may have appeared so to you. Language is a very inadequate means of expressing things, but there is no other means. One has to use language, and one has to accept all possibilities of being misunderstood.A lorry carrying penguins gets stuck on the highway. The driver stops a private car and says, “I’ll give you fifty dollars to take these penguins to the zoo.”When he finally arrives in town he sees the other guy with the penguins in front of a cinema. He stops and asks, “What the hell are you doing here?”The other replies, “I took them to the zoo and had money left, so now I’m taking them to a film.”Or:The Frenchman and the Italian were in the woods hunting together when suddenly a voluptuous blonde girl raced across their path, totally nude.“Would I love to eat that! Oui, oui!” the Frenchman said, smacking his lips.So the Italian shot her.Or:This Chinese laundryman complained to the doctor that he was very constipated. The doctor gave him a prescription for a good physic. “Come to my office in a few days,” said the doctor, “and let me know how it works.”A few days later, the Chinaman visited the doctor.“Have you moved yet?” asked the doctor.“No sir, me no moovee, me no moovee.”The doctor scratched his head and then gave the man a prescription for twice as much. Three days later, when the man reported to the doctor again, he said that he still hadn’t moved. The doctor gave him a triple dose, and he said, “Come back to see me in two days and let me know just what is happening.”Two days later, the man came back.“Well,” said the doctor, “have you moved yet?”“No sir, me no moovee yet. Me moovee tomorrow, though. House full of shit.”The fourth question:Osho,You say, “Accept yourself as you are,” and “Unless you are reborn you cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Please comment on this apparent contradiction.All contradictions are apparent. If you meditate a little bit, you will see that there is no contradiction. I say, “Accept yourself as you are.” And I also say, “Unless you are reborn you cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Now, you are creating the contradiction by not meditating on it.The way to be reborn is to accept yourself as you are. This is how one is reborn. You live in a kind of rejection, you don’t accept yourself as you are. It is very rare to find a person who accepts himself – because the moment he accepts himself, he is reborn, he is enlightened.You don’t accept yourself, you go on rejecting yourself. You are constantly in search of ways of improving your image. You want to become more beautiful, healthier, stronger, famous, creative, this and that. You are not content the way you are.It seems so impossible to be content the way we are because the mind can always imagine better things. You can have a little longer nose, or a little shorter. You can have a little more intelligence, a little more physical beauty, a little more charisma, a little more psychological integrity, a little more powerful personality. You can always imagine, and your imagination makes you discontented with yourself as you are.If roses were to think, they would be discontented too, because they would see: “Look in the pond, the lotus flower is so big, and we are so small.” They would feel very, very, inferior, they would start suffering from an inferiority complex, and they would start searching for some psychoanalyst. Then small bushes would feel very depressed, because “Big trees, cedars of Lebanon, are reaching to the stars, and we are so small. Why has God been so unjust to us?” Then the whole of existence would be in a tremendous discontent.But only man is in discontent. Bushes are happy being bushes, and roses are happy being roses, and grass flowers are happy being grass flowers. Birds are happy being birds – nobody wants to be anybody else.This contentment is all around, if you just look. If you open your eyes, you will see contentment showering from every tree, from every star, from every rock. Just remove man from the world, and discontentment is removed.Why is man discontented? Because he compares, and all comparison is false because you are absolutely alone. There is nobody else like you, so all comparison is false. You can compare one Fiat car with another Fiat car, but you cannot compare a Fiat car with a dog – or can you? Each human being is so unique, it is impossible to compare him. But you go on comparing.You have been taught to compare. Your whole education depends on comparison, and it depends on comparison because it wants to create a competitive fever in you. The society has not yet known any other way to make you do something. The only way it knows is to create a competitive fever: create a neurosis, create a longing, an ill longing, to be the first. The society has not yet discovered any better way to make you creative. “Compete, compare, defeat – reach first place.” It teaches you conflict, violence.And to be in that conflict, naturally it teaches you discontentment with yourself – otherwise how will you improve? It gives you great ideals: “You have to be like this.” And then suddenly you look so short, so small, so tiny, so trivial. The ideal is so big, so great, and you are so small. You shrink; a great rejection arises in you, you start hating yourself. This is the whole misery that people are passing through.I teach you acceptance. There is no need to compete, there is no need to compare, there is no need to be ambitious. Then you become afraid: “if there is no ambition and no competition and no comparison, then how am I going to grow?”Growth has nothing to do with these things. Growth has something to do with energy; growth is an energy phenomenon. When you don’t compare, when you don’t compete, when you are not ambitious, when you don’t want to be anybody other than who you are, you accumulate so much energy – because all that energy that was being wasted in competition and conflict, is no longer wasted. You become a reservoir.Out of that energy comes creativity. Creativity has nothing to do with competition, it has something to do with overflowing energy. William Blake is right, he says, “Energy is delight.”When you are overflowing with energy, aglow with energy, aflame with energy, it itself becomes creativity. You start growing, but now the growth has a totally different connotation. It has no goal – it has a source but no goal. Now you are not thinking what to be; you are not following a particular goal, a particular plan. You are such a big river that out of your rushing energy you will reach the ocean. No river is searching for the ocean, but rivers reach the ocean; and no river is competing with any other river, but all rivers reach the ocean. The river reaches the ocean out of overflowing water. That very energy is enough to take it to the ocean.You can become an ocean of creativity if you are contented. Then creativity arises in you, grows in you – not for any ideal, but just because you have too much: you have to share it. You have to sing a song because the heart is so full and overflowing. You have to pour it into songs. You cannot contain the energy, hence the overflow happens. And that overflow is creativity.When a tree is overflowing with energy, it blossoms in thousands of flowers. Those flowers are just a simple statement from the tree: “Now I cannot contain any more. There are too many colors in me, and the fragrances are so much that I have to burst forth.” The tree is not fulfilling any ideal; it has no goal.To have a goal is to be miserable, not to have a goal is to be blissful. The person who accepts himself in totality – with not even a slight grudge against himself, not even a slight rejection, not even a shadow of rejection – becomes enlightened immediately. Enlightenment has not to be achieved somewhere in the future. If you accept yourself, if you relax into your being, it can happen just this very moment, now, here.So I say: accept yourself as you are because this is the way to be reborn. And I also say: unless you are reborn, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.Please remember, the second statement is not for you to create a goal: “I have to be reborn, I have to enter the kingdom of God.” If it becomes a goal, you have misunderstood me. It is not a goal, it is a consequence. A consequence of what? – a consequence of total acceptance, tathata, suchness. “I am this, and I am utterly happy with this.” In that utter happiness and contentment is the miracle, the transformation. You are reborn.And remember again, I am not saying to use “accept yourself” as a method so that you can be reborn, I am not saying that either, otherwise you have again created a goal. You say, “Okay, if this is the way to become enlightened, if this is the way to enter the kingdom of God, then I am ready to accept myself.” This is not acceptance. You are still thinking of the kingdom of God, you are still thinking of becoming enlightened. You are still competing with buddhas. You are still thinking, “How did this man Gautam Buddha become enlightened, and I have not yet? How dare this man Jesus became Christ, and I am here and I have not yet become Christ?”Friedrich Nietzsche has said exactly that. He has said, “I cannot accept God because if there is a God, then what am I doing here? And how can anybody else become a God before me? Hence I reject the idea. There is no God.” Because if there has to be a God, then Friedrich Nietzsche has to be first. It is better to reject the whole idea: “There is no kingdom of God, there is no enlightenment.” Otherwise it creates a feeling of great inferiority: “Others have reached, and I have not reached yet. Am I lagging so far behind?”So please don’t make it a goal. My statement about being reborn is just a consequence. The source is acceptance, and the consequence is entry into the kingdom of God.But the mind is very cunning – beware of it. The mind can say deep down in you, “So okay, if this is the key then I will use it, but I have to enter the kingdom of God.” And you have missed in that very cunningness.Things are very simple. What I am saying is so simple, it has no complexity in it. But you can create complexity. Your mind can create such confusion, such chaos! And the basic trick, the basic strategy of the mind, is to make consequences goals.Never make any goal, there is none. We are already at the source, we need not be anywhere else. In deep acceptance you fall back into the source. That very falling back into the source is a rebirth, a resurrection. You disappear as a separate entity and you appear as the mystic union, unio mystica.The fifth question:Osho,It is said again and again that being aware is enough for transformation. How does it work?It is a significant question; if you are aware of your cancer, the cancer will not be cured by just being aware of it – that is true. But as far as psychological transformations are concerned, the moment you are aware of them they disappear – because they do not exist as realities, they exist only as illusions.You have seen a ghost standing in the dark: now you bring a light, and you see there is nobody. Just the shape of the tree was giving you the false impression that somebody was standing there. The ghost has disappeared because in the first place it was not there.Awareness helps, brings transformation, because the illusions that you are suffering from are not realities. If you become aware of a rock, the rock is not going to disappear. But if you become aware of the ego, the ego is going to disappear because the ego is not a reality.If you become aware, fear is going to disappear because fear is not a reality. If you become aware, death is going to disappear because death is a lie, it is not a reality.Awareness functions in two ways. One: if something is real and you become aware of it, it becomes tremendously beautiful. It becomes psychedelic, it becomes very colorful. If it is unreal, it disappears. If it is real, it becomes more real; if it is unreal, it becomes absolutely unreal.Awareness is a light. If you bring light into a dark room, the darkness will disappear, but the paintings on the wall will appear. When the room was dark, the paintings were not there; although they were there, you could not have seen them – for you they were not there and darkness was there. When you bring light in, darkness is no longer there and the paintings have appeared.Something disappears when you become aware, and something appears. Death disappears, deathlessness appears. The ego disappears, egolessness appears. You disappear as a separate entity: God appears. God means, “I am no longer separate.”“Were you ever in love, Dusty?” asked Walker Long of old Dusty Rhodes one day as they were picking up and putting them down on a railroad right-of-way.“Yeah, once when I was a young squirt, I was in love,” answered old Dusty.“Well, you never did get married, did you?” pursued Walker Long.“Nope, I never did marry,” vouchsafed old Dusty.“How did that happen?”“Well, it was like this. The gal I was in love with wouldn’t marry me when I was drunk, and I wouldn’t marry her when I was sober.”Awareness has its own ways. If you are aware, you will not be able to do many things you have been doing up till now, and you will be able to do many things you have never thought of doing before. If you are aware, you cannot be angry because anger can exist only in a state of unawareness: that is a prerequisite for anger to exist.If you are aware, anger is impossible and compassion becomes a natural outcome: the same energy that was becoming anger becomes compassion. If you are aware, sex disappears and love arises: the same energy that was becoming sexuality through unawareness takes on a new manifestation of love through awareness.As far as psychological transformation is concerned, awareness is enough, analysis is not needed.That is the difference between Eastern and Western psychology: Western psychology is too concerned with analysis. In the East, for five thousand years psychology has existed; it is the most ancient science in the East. But its concern is totally different; it is not at all interested in analyzing, the whole thing seems to be unnecessary.And now Western psychology is also becoming aware of the fact that analysis leads nowhere. Have you ever come across a person who is totally analyzed? Even Sigmund Freud was not. Nobody can be totally analyzed. You can analyze one dream, but another day another dream arises. You can go on analyzing – people go to the analyst for years, but dreams don’t disappear, they go on coming; analysis does not make them disappear.But in the East, we know the art of making them disappear. So who bothers? It is as if you see a ghost in the dark – there is no ghost, just the form of the tree – and you start analyzing. You never come close to the tree, you never bring light; you start analyzing the form from far away. You can go on analyzing: nothing is going to happen out of that analysis.Eastern psychology says: light a candle, bring the candle to the place, and first see whether the ghost exists at all. If the ghost does not exist, then why bother? Why long, long years of analysis? The analyzed goes on pouring out rubbish, and the analyst goes on dissecting, analyzing, labeling and categorizing the rubbish. Much work goes on, and all futile, much ado about nothing.Western psychology is based on analysis, Eastern psychology is based on awareness.Just watch. There is no need to analyze. Become more and more intensely alert. And if you are aware of a problem, half the problem is already solved just by becoming aware of it. Just a slight awareness of the problem, and half the problem is already solved because you have taken some energy out of it: that energy has become awareness. Become more aware, and the problem becomes dissolved.Chunk by chunk, the problem disappears as you become aware, because you are pulling back energy which you had been pouring into the problem – that was creating the problem. You are taking your energy back, you are not cooperating any more. You were the creator of the problem: you have taken your energy back.When all energy has been taken back, a moment comes when the problem flops. First become aware of a problem and then become more and more alert. Nothing else is needed; you need not go to any psychoanalyst.It is one thing to have a problem, but it is another not even to be aware that you have a problem.That is like the eighty-year-old I heard about in Miami. He was vacationing with another octogenarian in Florida. During their stay they both made the acquaintance of some ladies younger than themselves. They both fell in love and decided to get married in Florida in a double ceremony. Following the wedding night, they are both in their rocking chairs after breakfast.The one says, “You know, I better see a doctor.”The other says, “Why?”“Well,” the first said, “I couldn’t consummate the marriage.”“Oh,” said the second. “I better see a psychiatrist.”“Why?” said the first.“I didn’t even give it a thought.”First become aware of your problem, and then go on becoming more and more aware of it. Don’t judge; judgment is an obstacle in becoming aware. Don’t give it a name, don’t evaluate. Don’t say it is good, don’t say it is bad, don’t label, don’t categorize. Just be alert: whatsoever it is, simply mirror it.If you take a stand and you say, “This is bad,” then you have already blocked your awareness. You have concluded – now you are no longer impartial, you have already made a decision. And the moment you say something is bad, you cannot look at it eye to eye. When you say a man is bad, you can’t face him, you can’t encounter him; you avoid him. When you say something is good, you become positively attached; when you say something is bad, you become negatively attached.Observation means no attachment at all, this way or that, neither negative nor positive. You are simply an impartial mirrorlike reflection, you simply reflect whatsoever is. In that awareness, problems melt. In that awareness, lies, falsities and fallacies disappear. And in that awareness, when falsities and appearances have disappeared, reality comes with radiant colors.You need not take LSD or marijuana or psilocybin. Take a dose of awareness – and life is so beautiful, it is so utterly glorious, it is such an incredible splendor, that no LSD, no marijuana, can add anything to it. All that you need is awareness, and life becomes such a beautiful experience that you cannot imagine that there could be anything better than that. Ordinary life becomes so luminous. The ordinary tree that you have passed your whole life – coming home, going to the office, you have always been passing the tree – for the first time you see the greenery of it. For the first time you see the luminous presence of the tree, the utter beauty of it.Life is such a gift, and we go on missing it. And the reason is that between us and life there are so many lies crowding. Your awareness will destroy those lies: they will disappear, and reality will be nakedly encountered.To know reality in its utter nakedness is to know God.The sixth question:Osho,Isn't there a limit to patience? I have suffered enough in my life. Should I revolt against it or not?There is a limit to everything – there is a limit to patience too. And one should not go on submitting to unnecessary tortures. One should not go on bowing down to slaveries, one should not go on compromising. If you feel that you have suffered enough, revolt.Why have you waited so long? There was no need to wait. One should be in a constant rebellion. Why should one exist even for a single moment in compromise? Because to compromise means you are not respectful to yourself, you don’t love yourself. And if you compromise this moment, the next moment you will have to compromise more – because once people see that you can be exploited, they will go on exploiting you more. Don’t help exploiters, whatsoever kind they may be.But it seems you would still like to continue, hence the question. Otherwise there is no need to ask. If you have suffered enough, then enough is enough!Charlie was visiting an old friend and his wife for dinner. When the time came to leave, his car wouldn’t start, and it was too late to call the local service station.The husband urged Charlie to stay over. There was no spare bed in the house; there wasn’t even a sofa. So Charlie would have to sleep with the husband and wife.No sooner had the husband fallen asleep when the wife tapped Charlie on the shoulder and motioned for him to come over to her.“I couldn’t do that,” he whispered. “Your husband is my best friend!”“Listen, sugar,” she whispered back, “there ain’t nothing in the whole wide world could wake him up now.”“I can’t believe that,” Charlie said. “Certainly if I make love to you, he will wake up, won’t he?”“Sugar, he certainly won’t. If you don’t believe me, pluck a hair out of his beard and see if that wakes him.”Charlie did just that. He was amazed when the husband remained asleep. So he climbed over to the wife’s side of the bed and made love to her. When he finished he climbed back to his own side. It wasn’t long before she tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned him over again. Again he pulled a hair to determine if his old friend was asleep. This went on eight times during the night. Each time Charlie made love to the woman, he first pulled out one of the husband’s beard hairs.The ninth time he pulled a hair, the husband awoke and muttered, “Listen, Charlie, old pal, I don’t mind what you are doing to my wife, but for Pete’s sake stop using my beard for a scoreboard!”Enough is enough! There is a limit to everything. Enough hairs have been taken out of your beard – now assert yourself. Don’t go on bowing down, don’t go on suffering.But my feeling is, people want to suffer. My observation is this: they go on complaining about suffering, but they want to suffer. They go on clinging to their suffering. Even suffering is better than nothing: at least there is something to complain about, something to cling to, something to brag about.Just listen to people. Everybody talks about his suffering. Why don’t you revolt against it? If you are really fed up, then do something. Get out of it! Who can prevent you? But people are not doing anything. Suffering has become their lifestyle. They feel if suffering disappears, what will they do? Nothing will be left; there will be nothing to complain about.Meditate over your suffering, and see that somewhere deep down you must be helping it – unconsciously maybe, but your support is needed. Otherwise suffering cannot exist without your support. Just withdraw your support, and suffering disappears. You are a willing partner to it. You may find so many rationalizations; rationalizations can be found, but they are all rationalizations. If you want to deceive yourself, they are very good, but if you want to wake up, drop all rationalizations. Simply see the fact that you are suffering and that life is not meant to be a suffering, it is meant to be a celebration. At any moment things can be changed.But something drastic will be needed. You have suffered so long, you have become so accustomed to it, that unless you do something drastic, a quantum leap, you will not be able to get out of it.Become a sannyasin: that will be something drastic. Take a jump into something new, try something new that you have never done before.And remember, the ego is always attached to suffering. Why is the ego always attached to suffering? Because the ego feeds on suffering; you feel like a great martyr. The ego disappears when you are happy, really happy. Enjoy, and the ego is not found.That’s why, if you have chosen an egoistic life-style, you will never be able to get out of suffering. You may change your suffering, but you will create new suffering again. You may divorce one woman, and you will get married very soon to the same type of woman again. You may drop your husband, but it will not be long before you will get another person of exactly the same type because your ego will start feeling starved.The ego exists as the center of suffering. When you are in a joyous state, have you ever looked in? There is no ego found. In fact, joy and egolessness are the same phenomenon, they are not different. So if you really want to get out of suffering, you will have to be ready to sacrifice the ego and all the gratification that it gives to you.Unself yourself – listen to Sanai – and in that unselfing, you will be able to get out of all suffering.And don’t go on blaming others; there is no point in blaming others. Take the whole responsibility – that is manly, that is courage. Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders. It is an old trick to go on throwing the responsibility on somebody else: “What can I do? The family is such, the people are such, the society is such, what can I do? I have to suffer.”You want to suffer, that’s why you throw the responsibility on others. Otherwise, any moment that you decide to get out of it, nobody can prevent you, nothing can ever obstruct you.Take the responsibility totally as your own. If you want to suffer, then suffer. But then don’t complain – enjoy it! This is your choice. Then get deeper and deeper into your own mud, but don’t talk about suffering any more – it is your choice. If you call it suffering, then watch the whole mechanism of suffering. If you want to protect yourself as an ego, then you have to suffer. If you want to throw the responsibility on others, then you have to suffer.The only revolution possible is through taking the whole responsibility on yourself. “I am the cause of my suffering. Hence I can be the cause of my bliss.”This declaration is what sannyas is all about, or Sufism is all about, or Zen is all about. The essential religion is taking the whole responsibility for whatsoever you are. And immediately an insight arises: “If I am responsible for my suffering, then it is simple, I can drop it. It is my choice. I will not choose it anymore.”A Sufi mystic who had always remained happy was asked… For seventy years, people had watched him, he had never been found sad. One day they asked him, “What is the secret of your happiness?”He said, “There is no secret. Every morning when I wake up, I meditate for five minutes and I say to myself, ‘Listen, there are two possibilities: you can be miserable, or you can be blissful. Choose.’ And I always choose to be blissful.”All the alternatives are open. Choose to be blissful. And then there are people who can be blissful even when they are imprisoned, and there are people who remain miserable even when they are living in marble palaces. It all depends on you.When Alexander came to India, on the way, he met Diogenes. Alexander was interested in Diogenes – opposites are always interested in each other. He stopped his armies and said, “For one day, have a rest. I would like to go and see Diogenes. I have always wanted to see him, now we are so close. He is just a few miles away and I would like to have a visit.”He went. It was early morning, must have been a morning like this – winter, cold – and Diogenes was lying naked on the bank of the river, taking a sunbath; a naked fakir, he had nothing with him. And Alexander the Great, who had everything with him, was standing by his side. For the first time, Alexander felt very poor. Diogenes was so rich in his nakedness. His face was so graceful, so beautiful; his whole body was radiating joy.Alexander said to Diogenes, “I am very happy to see you. I would like to give you a present.”Diogenes said, “What can you give to me? I don’t see that you have anything! You look so poor that in fact I would like to give you something. I would like to give you God because that is all that I have. You are a great emperor, that is true, but all that you can give to me is not my need, is not my desire; it will be an unnecessary burden to me. But if you are really interested in giving me something, then please just move yourself from that side to the other side of me, because you are preventing the sun – and I will be thankful my whole life.”It was a shock to Alexander the Great that Diogenes needed nothing, he was so fulfilled, so contented. Departing, he said to Diogenes, “When I have conquered the world I would also like to live like you.”Diogenes said, “But why make this condition of first conquering the world? Look, I have not conquered the world, and yet I am so happy. You can also be happy. And this place is big enough, you can also be here. The bank is so big: throw off your clothes and have a good rest, and see the beauty of the sun and the morning. Rest now!”Alexander said, “Yes, I would like to rest, but not now. When I have conquered the world…”Diogenes said, “Nobody has ever been able to rest then, rest is possible only now. Tomorrow never comes. And who has ever been able to conquer the world? By the time you are a conqueror, life has gone by. You will die halfway; you will never be able to rest.”And that’s how it happened. Alexander never reached back home. Going back from India after his great conquest, he died on the way.And then there is another story…By coincidence, Alexander and Diogenes died on the same day and they met on the way toward the other world, while crossing the river that separates this world from that. Alexander was ahead because he had died a few minutes earlier, and Diogenes was following him. When they were crossing the river, Alexander became aware that somebody was coming behind him. He looked back – it was Diogenes. He was very shocked; now this man would say, “Look: I told you that your journey would remain incomplete.”Just to save face, he started laughing. Diogenes asked, “Why are you laughing? Your laughter is shallow, but still, why are you laughing?”Alexander said, “I am laughing to see that we have met again. Strange is this meeting – the meeting of an emperor and a beggar.” Diogenes was a beggar.But Diogenes laughed even louder than Alexander. I don’t think anybody else would have laughed, crossing the river that separates this world from that, like Diogenes did. Alexander said, “Why are you laughing?”He said, “I am laughing because you are right, the meeting is strange – the meeting of an emperor with a beggar. But you don’t understand who the emperor is and who the beggar is. I am the emperor and you are the beggar. That is the really strange thing. That’s why I am laughing.”And it is said, Alexander bowed down his head in sadness. It was such an absolute truth, how could he deny it? Empty-handed he had entered into the world, empty-handed he was coming back. He had never known a moment of joy. And this man, Diogenes, he lived in joy, he lived a blissful life, he lived the life of being.Let me remind you again, there are three possibilities: being, doing, having. Having is the lowest possibility – people who live through having: have this, have that. The world of doing is a little better, but just a little better: do this, do that.The highest is the world of being. There is no desire to do, no desire to have anything: one simply is. And it is not that one is inactive; great creativity flows but it is no longer a doing. One is not a doer: the whole is the doer. One is in the state that Sufis call fana. One is no more, one is just a hollow bamboo; God starts singing his song and the hollow bamboo becomes a flute.When you are just a being, you become a flute. And then life is a song and a dance and a bliss and a benediction.The last question:Osho,Thank you for giving us a key to the garden. There is a mysteriously familiar air to Hakim Sanai, not that I remember ever having heard this – but it feels like home.Pradeepa, you may not know it – how can you? But I have told you before too that you are basically a Sufi. Hence you feel at home with Hakim Sanai. In your past lives you have been with Sufis. And all Sufis are alike; if you have seen one Sufi you have seen all, the taste is the same.There is a dervish song, a Sufi song. Meditate over it.It may be said: “They came in vain.”Let it not be that they came in vain.We leave this, the bequest, to you;We finished what we could, we left the rest to you.Remember, this is work entrusted –Remember, beloved, we shall meet again.Life is an eternal pilgrimage: we go on meeting again and again and again.Pradeepa, that’s why it feels to you: “There is a mysteriously familiar air to Hakim Sanai, not that I remember ever having heard this – but it feels like home.” You have lived with Sufis before; you are again living with a Sufi.It may be said: “They came in vain.”Let it not be that they came in vain.We leave this, the bequest, to you;We finished what we could, we left the rest to you.Remember, this is work entrusted –Remember, beloved, we shall meet again.Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-01/

There was a rich and generous man of Bokhara. Because he had a high rank in the invisible hierarchy, he was known as the President of the World.Every day he gave gold to one category of people – the sick, widows, and so on. But nothing was given to anyone who opened his mouth.Not all could keep silent.One day it was the turn of the lawyers to receive their share of the bounty. One of them could not restrain himself and he made the most complete appeal possible.Nothing was given to him. This, however, was not the end of his efforts.The following day invalids were being helped, so he pretended that his limbs had been broken. But the President knew him, and he obtained nothing.Again and again he tried, even disguising himself as a woman, but without result.Finally the lawyer found an undertaker and told him to wrap him in a shroud. “When the President passes by,” said the lawyer, “he will perhaps assume that this is a corpse, and he may throw some money toward my burial – and I will give you a share of it.”This was done. A gold piece from the hand of the President fell upon the shroud. The lawyer seized it out of fear that the undertaker would get it first. Then he spoke to the benefactor, “You denied me your bounty. Note how I have gained it!”“Nothing can you have from me,” replied the generous man, “until you die.” This is the meaning of the cryptic phrase “Man must die before he dies.” The gift comes after this death and not before. And even this death is not possible without help.There are religions and religions, but Sufism is the religion – the very heart, the innermost core, the very soul.Sufism is not part of Islam; on the contrary Islam is part of Sufism. Sufism existed before Mohammed was born and Sufism will exist when Mohammed is completely forgotten. Islams come and go; religions take form and dissolve. Sufism abides, continues, because it is not a dogma. It is the very heart of being religious.You may not even have heard of Sufism but you may be a Sufi – if you are religious. Krishna is a Sufi and Christ too; Mahavira is a Sufi and Buddha too, and they never heard the word. They never knew that anything like Sufism exists.Whenever a religion is alive it is because Sufism is alive within it. Whenever a religion is dead it shows only that the spirit, the Sufi spirit, has left it. Now there is only a corpse, however decorated – in philosophy, in metaphysics, in dogmas, doctrines – but whenever Sufism has left, religion stinks of death. This has happened many times. This is happening already almost all over the world. One has to be aware of it otherwise one can go on clinging to a dead corpse.Christianity has no Sufism now. It is a dead religion; the church killed it. When “church” becomes too much, Sufism has to leave that body. It cannot exist with dogmas. It can exist with a dancing soul, but not with dogmas. It cannot exist with theology; they are not good companions. With popes and priests it is impossible for Sufism to exist. It is just the opposite. Sufism needs no popes, no priests; it needs no dogmas. It is not of the head, it belongs to the heart.The heart is the church, not an organized church because every organization is of the mind. And once the mind takes possession, the heart has to simply leave that house completely. The house becomes too narrow for the heart. The heart needs the whole of the sky; nothing less than that will do. It cannot be confined in churches. The whole of existence is the only church for it. It can throb under the sky, it can throb in freedom, but it dies when everything becomes a system, an organized pattern, a ritual. The spirit of Sufism simply disappears from there.Christianity killed Jesus, the Jews could not kill him. They crucified him, of course, but they failed. They could not kill him; he survived crucifixion. That is the meaning of the resurrection – not that Jesus physically survived, but that the crucifixion proved futile. The Jews could not kill him. They tried, but Jesus survived. Where the Jews failed, Christians succeeded. They killed him without any crucifixion. They killed him through prayer, they killed him through dogma, they killed him through organization. Followers succeed where enemies fail; apostles succeed where enemies fail.Christianity is now a dead religion because it cannot allow Sufism to exist within its soul. It is afraid of Sufism. Every dogma is always afraid because Sufism means infinite freedom, no confinement, no limitations. It is more like love and less like a logical syllogism. It is more of a poem, less like prose. It is irrational. That’s why every rational theology is afraid of it. Once you give an opening to the irrational, you don’t know where you are. And remember: God is also irrational, and it is beautiful that he is irrational – otherwise he would have been a professor of philosophy in some university, or a pope, or a priest, but not God.Sufism has died many deaths in many religions. Jainism is a dead religion. Once it flourished beautifully and gave birth to such a great mystic as Mahavira. Then suddenly the river disappeared – only the dry riverbed has remained. No river flows now, no greenery on the bank. It has become a desert land, completely deserted. What happened? Jaina followers became too intellectual, mathematical, logical. Out of the mystery of Mahavira they created doctrines and arguments. They became too calculative, too clever, and the spirit was killed. In Christianity, Sufism had to leave because of too much church ritual. In Jainism, Sufism had to leave because of too much intellectual, theological, philosophical effort.Remember this: Sufism is not a church. It doesn’t belong to any religion. All religions, when alive, belong to it. It is a vast sky of a particular quality of consciousness. How does it happen? How does one become a Sufi? One becomes a Sufi not by belonging to a particular order but by dropping from the head to the heart.You can exist in two ways. Either you can exist as a head-oriented person. Then you will succeed in the world, you will accumulate many riches, prestige, power. In politics you will be a successful man. In the eyes of the world you will become a pinnacle to be imitated, but in the inner you will fail completely, you will fail utterly because the head-oriented person cannot enter the inner at all. Head moves outwardly; it is an opening to the other. Heart opens inwardly; it is an opening to yourself. You can exist either as a head-oriented person, or you can exist as a heart-oriented person. When your energy, your life energy, falls from the head toward the heart, you become a Sufi.A Sufi means a man of the heart, a man of love; a man who doesn’t bother from where this universe comes, who doesn’t bother who created it, who doesn’t bother where it is leading; in fact, who doesn’t ask any questions but on the contrary he starts living. Existence is there: only fools bother about where it comes from. Only fools, I say. They may have shrouded themselves in very cunning philosophical words, but they are fools. A man who is wise lives existence. It is here and now, why bother where it comes from? What does it matter from where it comes? Whether somebody created it or not is irrelevant. You are here, throbbing, alive – dance with existence! Live it, be it, and allow it to happen in its total mystery within you.And this is the miracle: a person who doesn’t bother from where it comes, a person who doesn’t ask questions, receives the answers. A man who is not curious, but celebrating whatever the case is, suddenly becomes aware of the very source, suddenly becomes aware of the very culmination. End and beginning meet in him because he himself becomes the mystery. Now the mystery is not something which is there as an object that you have to go around and around, and look at and observe. No, that is not the way to know it; that is the way to miss it.You may go around and around, about and about, but you will never penetrate it. How can you know? You are beating around the bush, your attack is on the periphery. Rather, penetrate it, go to its center, become it. And you can become it because you are part of it. And you can become it because it is part of you. Then suddenly all questioning dissolves, suddenly the answer is there. It is not that you have come to a solution for your problems. No, there are no problems at all. When there are no problems at all, for the first time you become capable, capable of living the mystery that is life, capable of living God, capable of being gods.A great Sufi – you must have heard his name, al-Hillaj Mansoor – was killed by Mohammedans because he said, “Ana’l Haq, I am God.” When you penetrate into the mystery of life, it is not that you are an observer – because an observer is always an outsider – but you become one with it. It is not that you swim in the river, it is not that you float in the river, it is not that you struggle in the river. No, you become the river. Suddenly you realize the wave is part of the river. And the contrary is also true: the river is part of the wave. It is not only that we are part of God, God is also part of us.When al-Hillaj Mansoor asserted, “I am God,” Mohammedans killed him. Sufism is always killed by religious people – so-called religious people – because they cannot tolerate it, they cannot tolerate a man asserting that he is God. Their egos feel offended. How can a man be God? But when al-Hillaj says, “I am God,” he is not saying, “I am God and you are not”; he is not saying, “I am God and these trees are not”; he is not saying, “I am God and these stones, rocks are not.” Asserting, “I am God,” he is asserting that the whole is divine, sacred. Everything is divine.So when these people – fanatics, believers in dogmas – said, “God created man, so man can only be a creature, not a creator. It is profanity, the very apex of profanity to assert I am God,” they killed him. And what was Mansoor saying when they killed him? He said loudly to the sky, “You cannot deceive me! Even in these murderers I see you – you cannot deceive me. You are here in these murderers. And in whatsoever form you come, my God, I will know you because I have known you.”Sufism is not thinking about existence, it is being existence. It is not thinking, it is not doing something about existence. It is neither thought nor action; it is being. And right now, without any effort, you can be a Sufi. If you stop thinking, if you drop the idea of doing something, if you drop the idea of being a thinker and a doer, if you are simply content to be, suddenly you are a Sufi. And this will be my effort while I am talking about Sufism: not to indoctrinate you, not to make you more knowledgeable, but to make a Sufi out of you.Sufis sing. They don’t give sermons because life is more like a song and less like a sermon. And they dance. They don’t talk about dogmas because a dance is more alive, more like existence, more like the birds singing in the trees and the wind passing through the pines; more like a waterfall, or clouds raining, or grass growing. The whole life is a dance – vibrating, throbbing with infinite life.Sufis like to dance; they are not interested in dogmas. And they tell beautiful stories – life is more like a story, less like history. Sufis have created beautiful small stories. On the surface you may miss. On the surface it will look just like an ordinary anecdote, but if you penetrate deeply, Sufi stories are very pregnant – pregnant with significance, pregnant with the significance of the ultimate. So I will tell you a few stories, discuss the stories to help you penetrate their deeper core, just to make you understand a few things about the heart, to help you – your energy, your whole being – for a new journey toward the heart, to push you because you will be afraid.The heart is the most dangerous thing in the world. Every culture, every civilization, every so-called religion cuts every child off from his heart. It is a most dangerous thing; all that is dangerous comes out of the heart. The mind is more secure, and with the mind you know where you are. With the heart, no one ever knows where he is. With the mind, everything is calculated, mapped, measured. And you can feel the crowd always with you, in front of you, at the back of you. Many are moving on it; it is a highway, concrete, solid. It gives you a feeling of security. With the heart you are alone. Nobody is with you. Fear grips; fear possesses you. Where are you going? Now you no longer know. When you move with a crowd on a highway, you know where you are moving because you think the crowd knows.Everybody is in the same position. Everybody thinks, “So many people are moving, we must be moving somewhere; otherwise why are so many millions of people moving? They must be moving somewhere.” Everybody thinks like that. In fact, the crowd is not moving anywhere, no crowd has ever reached any goal. The crowd goes on moving and moving. You are born, you become part of the crowd. The crowd was already moving before you were born. Then a day comes when you are finished, you die, and the crowd goes on moving because new ones are always being born. The crowd never reaches anywhere but it gives a feeling of comfort. You feel cozy surrounded by so many people wiser than you, older than you, more experienced than you. They must know where they are moving; you feel secure.The moment you start falling toward the heart… And it is a falling, like falling into an abyss. That’s why when somebody is in love we say he has fallen in love. It is a fall; the head sees it as a fall. Someone has gone astray, fallen. When you start falling toward the heart you become alone. Now nobody can be with you there. In your total loneliness, afraid, you will be scared. Now you will not know where you are going because nobody is there, and there are no milestones. In fact, there is no solid, concrete path. The heart is unmapped, unmeasured, uncharted. Tremendous fear will be there.The whole of my effort is to help you not to be afraid because only through the heart will you be reborn. But before you are reborn you will have to die. Nobody can be reborn before he dies. So the whole message of Sufism, Zen, Hasidism – these are all forms of Sufism – is how to die. The whole art of dying is the base. I am teaching you here nothing except how to die.If you die, you become available to infinite sources of life. You die, really, in your present form. It has become too narrow. You only survive in it, you don’t live. The tremendous possibility of life is completely closed and you feel confined, imprisoned. You feel everywhere a limitation, a boundary. A wall, a stone wall, comes wherever you move – a wall. My whole effort is how to break down these stone walls. They are not made of stone, they are made of thoughts, and nothing is more rock-like than a thought. These walls made of dogmas, scriptures, surround you, and wherever you go you carry them with you, you carry your imprisonment with you. Your prison is always hanging around you. How to break them down?The breaking down of the walls will appear to you like a death. In a way it is because your present identity will be lost. Whoever you are, that identity will be lost; you will no longer be that. Suddenly something else… It was always hidden within you but you were not aware of it. Suddenly, a discontinuity. The old is no longer there and something utterly new has entered. It is not continuous with your past, that’s why we call it a death. It is not continuous, a gap exists. If you look back you will not feel that whatever existed before this resurrection was real. No, it will appear as if you saw it in a dream, or it will appear as if you read it somewhere in a fiction, or as if somebody else related his own story – it was never yours, but somebody else’s. The old completely disappears.That’s why we call it a death. An absolutely new phenomenon comes into existence. And remember the word absolutely. It is not a modified form of the old; it has no connection with the old. It is resurrection. But resurrection is possible only when you are capable of dying.Sufism is a death and a resurrection. And I call it the religion.Let us now enter this beautiful story.There was a rich and generous man of Bokhara. Because he had a high rank in the invisible hierarchy, he was known as the President of the World.Every day he gave gold to one category of people – the sick, widows, and so on. But nothing was given to anyone who opened his mouth.Not all could keep silent.Go slowly with me:There was a rich and generous man of Bokhara. It is a difficult combination, rich and generous. The poor are always generous, the rich never are. That’s how they become rich. If a rich man is generous, a revolution has happened. A rich man becomes generous only when he has attained a deep understanding that riches are useless. When he has come to know that all this world can give is not worth taking. Only then does generosity become possible; then he starts sharing. Otherwise you go on accumulating more and more and more. The mind goes on asking for more, there is no end to it. If you are not alert, all the riches of all the worlds will not be enough because the mind does not bother about what you have. It simply goes on saying “More!”It is said…When Alexander the Great was on his way to India, he met a great mystic, Diogenes. Diogenes is one of the great Sufis. Diogenes used to live naked, just like the animals. He was so beautiful in his nakedness.It is ugliness that we try to hide, not beauty. Why do you want to hide your body from others? What is wrong with it? Society, civilization, culture, they have conditioned your minds to believe that something is wrong with the body, and you feel guilty if you are caught naked. Laws and courts exist to force you not to be naked. The whole of nature is naked and it is so beautiful. Only man has gone ugly somewhere.Someday, when man becomes more aware, man will be less and less attached to clothes. They may be used as utilities: if the weather is cold, of course you have to cover your body. But when the weather is pleasant and one can be like a simple, innocent animal, one has to be. Completely hidden under clothes, your bodies have lost the sensitivity to feel. To feel the touch of the rays of the sun and to enjoy it – you have completely forgotten the language. To feel the wind on your naked body, as trees feel, and dance – you have completely forgotten. Only your face has been left, only your head; otherwise, your whole body has been numbed.Diogenes lived naked, but his nakedness was very, very beautiful because it was innocent. You can live naked as a perversion also; then it will not be beautiful. Then you may be an exhibitionist – something has gone wrong in your psychological world. Diogenes lived naked like the animals and Alexander, it is said, felt jealous. He was robed in the costliest costumes possible. It is said that on seeing Diogenes naked he felt jealous, envious. So beautiful!He asked, “How can I also be like you, so innocent, so beautiful?”Diogenes said, “There is no ‘how’ to it.”He was lying down on a bank of a river in the sand. It was morning and the sun was rising, and he must have been enjoying the poetry that comes through the sands to the naked body, the subtle messages, the warm sun falling on him.Diogenes said, “There is no need to ask about any ‘how.’ This bank is big enough for both of us. Throw off your clothes and lie down with me.”There is no how to ask. Why ask how? How is a trick of the mind to postpone. If you ask how, then you are asking how to postpone. You are saying there must be something to be practiced, and practice will take time. And, of course, you cannot practice right now. Tomorrow comes in. And once the tomorrow comes in, you are done.Diogenes said, “There is no question of how. Just lie down and rest. This bank is enough for both of us.”Alexander said, “Someday… I always dream that someday there will be a possibility when I have conquered the whole world. I am waiting for that day. Then I will also relax and rest.”Diogenes laughed and said, “Then you are foolish because Diogenes can rest and relax without conquering the whole world, so why should you make it a condition that when you have conquered the whole world you will rest and relax? And I tell you: it is not going to happen ever because the mind will ask for more and more. And when you have conquered this world then the mind will ask, ‘Is there any other world?’”And it is reported that when Diogenes said this – that there is no other world but the mind will ask “Is there any other world?” – suddenly Alexander felt sad. The sadness came immediately to him, knowing that there is no other world.Once you have conquered this world, what will you do? There is no other world to conquer. The mind will feel very frustrated. The mind goes on asking for more and more and more. It doesn’t bother what you have: you may be a beggar – it asks for more; you may be an emperor – it asks for more. The nature of the mind is to ask for more. What you have is not relevant; it is the very nature of the mind just to go on asking for more. A rich man goes on asking for more and remains poor. He goes on desiring for more and remains poor. It is difficult to find a really rich man.In my whole life I have come across only one man who was really rich. I have come across many, many rich men, but only one man who was really rich. And why was he really rich? He was rich because he understood the futility of it all. When I met him for the first time he brought thousands of rupees and poured them at my feet. I said to him, “Right now I don’t need them. If some day I need them, I will send a message.”That old man started weeping and crying. I couldn’t understand what the matter was. He said, “Don’t say that, I am poor. I have nothing to give you except money. I am so poor I have nothing else to give you. If you reject my money, it feels you have rejected me because I have nothing else. Money I can give; that is all I have, nothing else.”This is a man who has come to understand that riches are not real riches; man remains poor.There was a rich and generous man of Bokhara. “Generous” means he has really lived through riches, experienced the world, has come to a decision that this world is nothing more than a dream. And riches only give you an illusion of being rich; they don’t make you really rich. This man is disillusioned, that’s why he has become generous. Now he can share, now he can give all. Now there is no question, now he is not asking for more. On the contrary, whatever he has he is distributing and sharing it with others.Because he had a high rank in the invisible hierarchy… Such a man immediately becomes very high in the world of consciousness. If you can share whatever you have, suddenly you rise in the hierarchy of the invisible. In this world you may look like a beggar, in the other world, for the first time you have become the emperor.Buddha renounced his palaces, his kingdom, his riches, and became a beggar. When he came back to his capital his father was very angry, as all fathers are. It is difficult to find a father who is not angry with his son because whatever you do it makes no difference. You may become a criminal, he will be angry; you may become a saint, he will be angry. Even if you become a buddha… The father was angry.You can never fulfill anybody’s expectations; that is impossible. How can you fulfill anybody else’s expectations? He could not fulfill them himself, and he expects you to fulfill them. So whatever you do will be wrong. The father was very angry. And Buddha had become enlightened. He had come as a totally transformed being, resurrected. He was surrounded by infinite light and silence. It is said that whenever Buddha would move, wherever he would move, even trees would feel his presence and flowers would come out of season. Wherever he would move, for twelve miles surrounding his body suddenly a deep silence would happen. But a father is an exception.The father was angry. He couldn’t feel the silence, he couldn’t see the light; he could see only a vagabond, a beggar. He said, “It is enough! Now you have fooled around enough. Come back, my doors are still open. Look at yourself, the son of an emperor, asking for your food in the same capital, begging. Look at your begging bowl, your torn clothes, almost rags. What are you doing to yourself? I feel ashamed of you. But I have a heart, the heart of a father, and my doors are not closed. You have hurt me deeply, but still I have the heart of a father. Come back. Don’t move around like a beggar. Be an emperor.”And it is said that Buddha replied, “I was a beggar, now I have become an emperor – but how to convince you? I was a beggar when I lived in the palace. When you thought I was going to be the heir of your kingdom, I was a beggar and I was imprisoned. Now I am totally free, and for the first time I have understood what it means to be an emperor. But how to convince you?”The moment you start sharing you show that your consciousness has reached a point, a growth. A grown-up man always shares. If you cling to your things you are not grown-up yet; you are juvenile. Why? Because you can possess a thing only if you share; there is no other possession. If you cling to a thing it shows that the thing is bigger than you, bigger than your love, bigger than your being. That’s why you cling to the thing. Your soul is in the possessions. You cannot share, you cannot be generous.Because he had a high rank in the invisible hierarchy, he was known as the President of the World. Sufis confer such titles on their beggars: President of the World. Don’t misunderstand, he is not a president in the sense Ford is or Nixon was. They are the poorest men in the world, the very last, in a deep illusion that they are the first. This man must have removed himself to the very last. Only those who are disillusioned with the world can stand at the very end. They can become the very last.Jesus says, “Those who are last in this world will be the first in the Kingdom of God.” Jesus must have been talking about such a man – rich, generous. And I tell you: if you are generous, you are rich, and if you are not generous you may be in an illusion that you are rich, but you are poor. Generosity is the real richness. To be generous you don’t need many things to share. To be generous you just have to share whatever you have. You may not have much – that is not the point. Who has much? Who can ever have enough? It is never much, it is never enough.You may not have anything at all, you may be just a beggar on the road, but still you can be generous. Can’t you smile when a stranger passes by? You can smile, you can share your being with a stranger, and then you are generous. Can’t you sing when somebody is sad? You can be generous – smiles cost nothing. But you have become so miserly that even before smiling you think thrice: to smile or not to smile? To sing or not to sing? To dance or not to dance? In fact, to be or not to be?Share your being if you have nothing; that is the greatest wealth and everybody is born with it. Share your being, stretch out your hand, move toward the other with love in your heart. Don’t think anybody is a stranger, nobody is – or everybody is. If you share, nobody is; if you don’t share, everybody is.You may be a very rich man, but a miser, a non-sharing one. Then your own children are strangers, then your own wife is a stranger because how can you meet a miserly man? He is closed, he is already dead in his grave. How can you move toward a miserly man? If you move, he escapes. He is always afraid because whenever somebody comes close, sharing starts. A miserly man feels even shaking hands is dangerous because who knows, friendship may grow out of it and then there is danger.A miserly man is always alert, on guard, not allowing anybody too close. He keeps everybody at a distance. A smile is dangerous because it breaks distances. If you smile at a beggar on the road the distance is bridged. He is no longer a beggar, he has become a friend. Now, if he is hungry, you will have to do something. It is better to go on without smiling. It is safe, more economical, less dangerous – no risk in it.It is not a question of sharing something, it is a question of simple sharing whatever you have. If you don’t have anything else you have a warm body. You can sit close to somebody and give your warmth. You can smile, you can dance, you can sing, you can laugh and help the other to laugh. And when two persons laugh together their beings are one in that moment. When two persons can smile together suddenly all distance dissolves – you are bridged.So don’t think that to be generous you have to be rich. Just the contrary is the case: if you want to be rich, be generous. So many riches are always available; so many gifts you bring with your life and take with you with your death. You could have shared, and through sharing you would have become aware of how rich existence makes you and how poor you live. And the more you share, the more your being starts flowing. The more it flows, newer springs are always filling the river again and again – and you remain fresh.Only a generous man is fresh. A non-generous man, a closed, miserly man, becomes dirty, is bound to become so. It is just like a well. When nobody comes to it and the well is not ready to give its water to anybody, then what will happen to the well? Fresh springs will not be supplying it because there is no need. The old water will become more and more dirty, the whole well will be dead. Fresh, living waters are not coming into it. This is how it has happened to many of you.Invite people to share you. Invite people to drink you. That is the meaning when Jesus says, “Drink me. Eat me.” The more you eat him, the more Jesus grows. The more you drink him, the more fresh water is flowing in. The riches that life has endowed you with are not limited, but only a generous man can know they are unlimited. You are not a company with limited sources, you are a company with unlimited sources. Behind you is hidden the divine. Nobody can exhaust it. Sing as many songs as you can. You will not be exhausted but rather, on the contrary, better and better songs will be coming in.It is said…When one of the greatest poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, was dying a friend came to see him, a literary friend, a great critic, and he said, “You can die in deep contentment because you have sung so many songs. Nobody has ever before sung so many.”Rabindranath has written six thousand songs. The great English poet, Shelley, has written only two thousand. Rabindranath has written six thousand poems, and every poem is a marvel in itself, a beautiful diamond, unique.The friend was right. He said, “You can die with deep contentment, fulfilled. You have sung so many songs, not even a Kalidas, not even a Shelley, can compete with you.”When he was saying this tears were flowing in Rabindranath’s eyes. The friend couldn’t believe it. He said, “You – and crying! Are you afraid of death? I can’t believe that a man who has sung his whole life that death is “the great friend” is afraid of death.”Rabindranath said, “No, not afraid of death. Death is beautiful, as beautiful as life. I am weeping and crying because better and better songs were coming lately. Up until now I was just a child. Now a maturity was happening, and existence was giving me more and more. The more I sang, the more was flowing out of me. In fact, now the veena is ready but the time has come to leave. This is unjust. Now I was feeling ready to really sing.”But I tell you: even if Rabindranath had lived one thousand years the same would have been the case because it is ever-flowing. You share and you know it is ever-flowing; you sing and you know it is ever-coming – there is no end to it. Even after a thousand years Rabindranath would have died with tears in the eyes because more was flowing. Nobody can exhaust it; existence is inexhaustible. And you have existence within you, why are you so miserly?Miserly, you become poor. Generous, you become rich. And you can become generous right now as you are. There is nothing else to it; you simply have to understand – and become. Nothing is lacking, all that you need to be generous is already the case. Of course: …he was known as the President of the World. Every day he gave gold to one category of people – the sick, widows, and so on. But nothing was given to anyone who opened his mouth. Not all could keep silent. Very, very deep, pregnant lines.If you go to the temple and your prayer becomes a desire it will never be heard because a prayer is possible only when desire is not there. A desire can never become a prayer. If you ask for something you will miss. You are not praying. And God knows what your need is.There was a Sufi saint, Bayazid, and he always used to say, “God knows what my need is, so I have never prayed because that is foolish. What to say to him? He already knows. If I say something which he knows, it is foolish. If I try to find something which he does not know, that too is foolish. How can you find such a thing? So I have simply never bothered. Whatever my need is, he always gives.”But at that time he was very, very poor, hungry, rejected by the town he was passing through. Nobody was ready to give him shelter for the night. The night was dark and he was sitting under a tree, outside the town. It was dangerous, and one disciple asked, “But what about this situation? If he knows that his lover Bayazid is in such trouble – the town has rejected him, he is hungry and without food, sitting under a tree, wild animals all around, he cannot even sleep – what type of God are you talking about who knows everything that you need?”Bayazid laughed and he said, “He knows that this is what I need at this moment. This is my need; otherwise, why should it be there? God knows when you need poverty,” said Bayazid, “and God knows when you need riches; God knows when you have to go on a fast, and God knows when you have to participate in a feast. He knows. And this is my need right now.”You cannot ask. If you ask, it will not be given to you. In the very asking, you prove yourself not yet capable of receiving it. Prayer should be silent. Silence is prayer. When words come in, suddenly desires follow because words are the vehicles of desire. In silence, how can you desire? Have you tried it? In silence, can you desire something? How can you desire in silence? Language will be needed. All languages belong to the realm of desire. Hence the insistence of all those who “know” on you becoming silent – only when there are no words in your mind will desire cease completely; otherwise, with every word, desire is lurking behind.Whatever you say… Even if you go to the temple and the mosque and the church and you say, “I don’t desire anything,” it is a desire. Just look, watch – hidden somewhere is a desire. And you have heard that until you stop desiring it will not be given, that’s why you are saying, “I don’t desire” – to get it. But it is lurking in the back, in the shadow it is there; otherwise, what is the need to say “I don’t desire anything”? Be silent. Only silence is prayer.All the prayers you have been doing are false. All the prayers that have been taught to you are not prayers at all; they are dead rituals. There is only one prayer, and that is to be silent. That is to be so silent that not a single word floats in the lake of your consciousness. No ripple; the lake is completely silent. It becomes a mirror; it mirrors existence, it mirrors the divine. In that moment of silence everything is achieved. So this story says: Every day he gave gold to one category of people – the sick, widows, and so on. But nothing was given to anyone who opened his mouth.This Sufi story says, “Keep your mouth completely shut” – not only outwardly, but inwardly also; then much will be given to you. When you don’t ask, much will be given to you. When you ask, nothing will be given to you. It looks like a paradox, but it is the very foundational law of existence. Don’t ask – and suddenly you realize that much is coming.It happened…A man came to Bayazid and he said, “Because of your teachings my life is destroyed. Twenty years ago I came to you and you told me, ‘If you don’t ask, riches will follow you. If you don’t seek, everything will be given to you. If you don’t hanker after beautiful women, the most beautiful woman will come.’ Twenty years wasted! Not a single, not even an ugly, woman has come. And no riches. I have remained poor. You destroyed my life. What do you say now?”Bayazid said, “It would have happened, but you were looking backward too much, looking again and again to see whether they were coming or not. The desire was there. You missed because of desire not because of me. You were waiting, thinking always, ‘Now a beautiful woman is going to come and knock on the door. Now the goddess of riches will be coming.’ You were not silent. You were not in a state of desirelessness.”Sufis say, “When you don’t ask, it is given.” This teaching goes deeper than Jesus’ teaching. Jesus says, “Ask and it shall be given. Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you.” And Sufis say, “Ask and it will never be given to you. Knock, knock your head on the door and it will be more closed than ever.” But not all could keep silent, even knowing that this man, this generous man of Bokhara, will give only if you keep silent. But it is so difficult because the mind says, “Make an appeal! Tell him the whole situation so that more can be fetched out of him.”The story is beautiful because now it comes to a lawyer. Anybody else may keep his mouth shut but not a lawyer. He knows how to make an appeal in the court. He knows how to convince and seduce the judge. He knows if you keep silent you will lose the case. In the world, words are very, very significant. A lawyer lives by words because the court is the very temple of this world.Have you seen the buildings of the High Courts? They are the temples now. Much is wasted on them. Why? Even temples have become tiny, but High Court buildings go on getting higher and higher and bigger and bigger. In fact, the power is there – the power of violence and murder, the power of law and language and logic. A lawyer is a logician. He knew well that this man had a condition: if you remain silent, he will give; if you ask, he will not give, but even then: Not all could keep silent.It is so difficult to keep silent. You know, I tell you again and again: Be silent – but is it so? I tell you again and again, a thousand and one times, that existence is ready to give and you show your readiness to receive by your silence. But you have not shown it. You would like to say to existence that you are really in very great misery, in anguish, anxiety, so that something more can be fetched out of it.One day it was the turn of the lawyers to receive their share of the bounty. One of them could not restrain himself and he made the most complete appeal possible.Nothing was given to him. This, however, was not the end of his efforts.It is difficult to get rid of a lawyer; he will find other ways. If one way is not possible, then he will find other ways; he will find other loopholes. From somewhere else he will try to enter the house – maybe from the back door.I have a great friend. He is a very famous lawyer. He was telling me that once it happened that he was fighting a case in the court of a very saintly man. I also know that judge. He was really a saintly man; he would not receive any bribes. On the contrary, if somebody tried to bribe him it was certain he would lose the case. So what did this lawyer do? He found a way: he tried to bribe him through the opposite party. Of course, the opposite party lost the case.He sent a man, his agent, in the name of the other party and tried to bribe the judge. The judge was very angry, so of course the other party lost the case, although the other party was in the right. Nobody ever came to know how they lost the case. The other party was also puzzled. With such a saintly man as the judge it was absolutely certain that they were going to win. It was so simple; there was nothing involved in it. How did they lose the case?The lawyer always finds a way. If he can enter from the front door, okay; otherwise he will come in from the back door. If in the day, okay; otherwise in the night.This, however, was not the end of his efforts. The following day invalids were being helped, so he pretended that his limbs had been broken.But the President knew him, and he obtained nothing.The President is symbolic here. The President means the higher consciousness which always knows the lower consciousness. You cannot deceive it, unless the higher consciousness itself wants to be deceived for certain reasons; otherwise you cannot deceive it. How can you deceive a higher consciousness?But the President knew him and he obtained nothing. Again and again he tried, even disguising himself as a woman…In Mohammedan countries you can disguise yourself as a woman and nobody will be able to know whether you are a man or a woman.…but without result.You cannot deceive a higher consciousness. Never try to deceive a master. And you try, because your logical mind, the lawyer, tries in every way. It happens every day with me. It is rare that you don’t deceive me or don’t try to deceive me.A person comes. He is happy; I see he is happy, for the first time filled with an unknown joy. And I ask him, “How are you?” and he shrugs his shoulders and says, “So so.” Why is he trying to deceive me? He would like more sympathy from me; this is what he is doing. If he says he is happy and joyful, then there is no need for any sympathy. And you are so foolish in your ways that you ask for sympathy and you could have got love. But you ask for sympathy.Love can be given to one who is happy, sympathy to one who is unhappy. Love cannot be given to one who is unhappy, it is impossible. He is not in the right mood. You cannot give love to him; you can only sympathize. Love can be given only when somebody is happy and flowing; then he is in the right tuning, and love is possible. I was going to give love but you tried to deceive me and you got only sympathy. You cannot deceive me. You are deceiving yourself. But you have become so trained in your deceptions because in the whole of your life you have been doing that.The woman in the house is singing, humming, and happy. The moment she hears the car coming into the driveway, the husband arriving, her face changes. Now she is getting ready to ask for sympathy. She becomes sad, tired; just a moment before she was absolutely okay, nothing was wrong with her. Just the noise of the car, and she has changed. The husband is coming. Now she knows the trick: if she is unhappy he will be sympathetic, if she is not unhappy he will read his newspaper.You have learned deceptions. And they work! They work with the same level of people as you; they are also doing the same. The husband may have been humming a song while he was driving; the moment he reaches the house he takes on a pose: tired, working the whole day for the wife and the children, dead tired, needs somebody to sympathize.Remember: sympathy is a poor substitute for love. Never settle for sympathy. Sympathy is nothing. And nobody feels good when he gives you sympathy. It looks like a burden: one has to do it; it is a duty. Somebody is ill and you have to talk to him. Somebody is ill in the hospital and you have to go and sympathize. It is a duty one has to do.Never ask for sympathy. Be happy, and love will be flowing toward you. Love is the right coin; sympathy is the wrong coin. It looks like love; it is not love. So this is the trouble: you ask for sympathy, and when sympathy is given you are not fulfilled – nobody can be fulfilled by sympathy. You needed love and you asked for sympathy. You asked for the wrong food. If it is given, it will disturb your stomach; if it is not given, it will disturb your stomach all the same.When you are asking for sympathy and it is not given, you will become unhappier because nobody cares about you. If it is given, it will not be a fulfillment because sympathy is very thin, it is nothing. You needed real, authentic love, a flowing of the heart. You needed your husband running toward you. But then you have to become a magnetic force, a happiness. Nobody runs headlong toward unhappiness. One tries to protect oneself, moves guardedly. But you have learned these tricks. And even when you come to me, you go on playing your tricks. You have learned them too well.But the President knew him and he obtained nothing. Again and again he tried, even disguising himself as a woman, but without result. You cannot disguise yourself because a higher consciousness means simply a penetrating consciousness. Not only does it penetrate clothes – the burka of a Mohammedan woman – it penetrates your body; that too is clothing, natural. It penetrates your mind; that too is clothing, cultural. It penetrates to the very core of your being. It reaches directly to you.Be true, natural, loose. Whenever you encounter a higher consciousness be natural, loose. Whatever you are, put everything on the table. Don’t save even a trump card. Put everything, all your cards, open on the table. You will receive much love, you will receive all because when you put yourself completely naked you are ready to die. Unprotected, you open yourself, you become vulnerable. And a master is a death.In fact, in the old Indian scriptures it is said that a master is a death. When you come to a master you are coming to a very, very deep death. Even ordinary death is not so deep because ordinary death will not destroy much. You will remain intact in your mind; only the body will be changed. The older body will be replaced with a newer body – but not the mind. The old mind will continue.A master is a great death. If you can pass through a master and his love and his blessings, your body will die, your mind will die, your ego will die. All that can die will die – only that which cannot die, the deathless, will remain; only the deathless you, the immortal you, the brahman.Finally the lawyer found an undertaker and told him to wrap him in a shroud. “When the President passes by,” said the lawyer, “he will perhaps assume that this is a corpse, and he may throw some money toward my burial – and I will give you a share of it.”Now it became a struggle. The lawyer is trying in every way to defeat the master so he can say, “Yes, even you were deceived.” He is trying to have the upper hand on the master so he can say, “You are not a higher consciousness than me.” This happens to every disciple. The disciple tries in every way with the master to make sure, “Is he really higher than me?” And the disciple tries in every way to prove, “He is not higher than me, he is just like me.” Then your ego can grow more if you can come to a point and realize, “The master is not higher than me – he is just like me.” Then your ego is strengthened. Rather than dying through the master, you have revived your dying ego; again you have supplied blood to it.Every disciple when he comes to a master is entering a conflict. The master will try to kill your ego completely, utterly. But you will try to save it; not only save it, but feed it, make it more vital, stronger. A disciple comes for certain reasons to a master, and a master exists for some other reasons. A disciple comes tattered, sad, because in life he couldn’t fulfill his ego. Now he is moving toward the other world; maybe there he can fulfill his ego. He can become a great sannyasin, he can become the topmost enlightened man in the world, he can become this and that. The world has failed; now he tries the other world. Maybe he can find some anchor and save his ego.You come to a master for a wrong reason. This is natural. You are wrong, so how can you come to a master for right reasons? You have to come for wrong reasons. And the master exists for absolutely different reasons. He attracts you, he takes you closer and closer, just to kill you, and to kill you so utterly that the very seed of the ego is burned. That is what Patanjali calls nirbeej samadhi: when the seed is so absolutely burned that, whatsoever you do with the seed, now no sprout can come out of it.The master is a fire. The master is a death.Finally the lawyer found an undertaker…his last effort to deceive…and told him to wrap him in a shroud. “When the President passes by,” said the lawyer, “he will perhaps assume that this is a corpse, and he may throw some money toward my burial – and I will give you a share of it.”This was done. A gold piece from the hand of the President fell upon the shroud. The lawyer seized it out of fear that the undertaker would get it first. Then he spoke to the benefactor: “You denied me your bounty. Note how I have gained it!”He’s saying, “I have deceived you. Where is your higher consciousness? Mister President of the World, where is your higher consciousness? Finally, I have won. I am victorious. You couldn’t judge whether I am dead or alive.”“Nothing can you have from me,” replied the generous man, “until you die.”The generous man used the situation – not that the lawyer deceived him. Now he can use the situation to give the lawyer a subtle message: “Nothing can you have from me…until you die.” Of course, this is not real death, so you have not received real gold – just a piece of the unreal gold of the world. False is your death, and the gold I have given is also false. But keep the message in your heart: “Nothing can you have from me…until you die.”This is the whole message of the Sufi path: Die!Die as you are so that you can become that which you really are.Die to the ego so that the divine can be born in you.Die to the past so that you become open to the future.Die to the known so the unknown can penetrate you.Die to the mind so the heart can start throbbing again, so that you can rediscover your own heart which you have lost completely.You don’t know what the heart is. The throbbing that you hear is not the real heart; it is just the body part of the heart. Hidden behind it there is a soul part. These heartbeats are from the body part of the heart. In these beats or between these beats – in the gaps – is the real beat of the real heart: the soul part. The heart you know is only the matter part. You have completely lost contact with the divine part of your heart. You live a loveless life, a heartless life. You are like hard rocks. Even rocks are not so hard; they can be broken. I say this with long and great experience.When I try to break your rock it is very difficult because your rock tries to protect itself in every way. You try to protect your diseases, your illnesses. You try to protect your neurosis, your madness because that’s what you are identified with. You think you are that. You are not. Until you die you will never know who you are.Right now you can sit in a yoga posture and repeat the mantra of Ramana Maharshi: “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” but you will not know. That mantra will just be in the mind. Ramana knew through it; he passed through this death.It happened when he was seventeen years of age. He had been meditating continuously from his very childhood; he must have carried the urge from past lives. He was not like an ordinary child, not interested in this world from the very beginning. Whenever he had the opportunity, he was waiting, and with closed eyes moving into silence and deeper silence. When he was seventeen years of age, suddenly in meditation he felt that he was going to die. And when you are in a deep meditation and you feel that you are going to die, it is not just a feeling or a vagrant thought. It grips you in your totality because there is no thought to fight with it. You cannot argue. It is so self-evident in a silent mind that you are going to die. It comes to every meditator, and blessed are those to whom it comes.Suddenly he felt that he was going to die – and nothing could be done: death was absolutely certain. So what to do? He was sitting under a tree. He lay down, ready to die. He accepted, relaxed his body – no struggle with death. By and by, he found that the body had become cold. It was a dead corpse. Even if he had wanted to move his hand he couldn’t have. The contact with the body was lost.Then he felt the mind disappearing, like when water evaporates. And soon there was no mind; the contact with the mind was lost. Then he waited and waited and waited – when will death happen? And it never happened. He had come to the deathless. But this was a totally new man; the old man was there no longer. The son to some father and to some mother was there no longer; he was no longer Ramana. Suddenly Ramana has disappeared. A blessed one was born. He had become divine.When you reach the bottom-most core of your being, the deathless, you are divine. The divine means nothing else; the divine means the immortal, the deathless.“Nothing can you have from me,” replied the generous man, “until you die.” And nothing can you have from me also until you die. And nothing can you have from the divine also until you die. In fact, until you die, you live a death, you live dead. Your life is nothing but a slow suicide, spread over seventy or eighty years, but a slow suicide, a slow death. From the very moment you are born you are dying and dying and dying. Until you die you will live a dead life.If you are courageous and you take the jump into death, suddenly, for the first time, life dawns upon you. For the first time, the deathless dances within you. For the first time, you overflow with what Jesus calls life abundant. Now you are no longer a tiny stream in the summer, just somehow pulling together, with vast sand all around, a desert. You become a flooded Ganges in the rains: overflowing, all bonds broken, all limitations broken – life abundant. But that never happens until you die.So this is the paradox. Jesus says if you cling to life you will miss it; if you try to save life, you will not have it. The only way to have it is to lose it. And this is what I call sannyas. It is an inner mutation, it is a readiness to die, a readiness to die to the ego. One door closes, the door of the ego; another opens, the door of the deathless.This is the meaning of the cryptic phrase, “Man must die before he dies.”You have died many times – but we are not talking about that death. That you have done many times. It has not done anything to you; you remain the same, you survive. You need a greater death. There is a death which happens naturally. Anything that is born will die, anything that is combined together will fall apart. So your body is going to die, that is natural. It has happened millions of times and it will go on happening if you don’t become alert and aware.There is another kind of death. The quality is totally different: a voluntary death, not a natural death. Not that the body dies, but that you take the jump, you die. You don’t wait for death. This is sannyas. This is taking a voluntary jump into death itself.Through death, the deathless is achieved.This is the meaning of the cryptic phrase, “Man must die before he dies.” The gift comes after this death and not before. And even this death is not possible without help.That’s why I am here. Alone, you will not even be able to die. Such a simple thing you cannot do alone. It is so simple, it will be difficult for you to do it alone. A great help is needed from someone who has died before you. He can pull and push; he can create a situation in which, unknowingly, you are caught. A master throws a net, catches hold of many fish. Those who are ready to die will be chosen. Those who are not ready to die yet will be thrown back into the river.You have come to me from many parts of the world. You can go on thinking that you have come to me; that is again a deception of the ego. I have caught hold of you, that’s why you are here; you have not come. You think you have come and you are wrong. I have been calling you in many subtle ways, pulling you toward me – and you have come. Now you are caught in the net. Still many of you are trying not to be caught.Sannyas is just a surrender on your part, that you allow me to do whatever I want to do. Surrender is a trust: “I leave. Now you do whatever you want to do. I will not interfere.” It is just like when you go to a surgeon and put yourself in his trust, because if you don’t and you say “I have to watch what you are doing,” surgery is not possible. You have to become completely unconscious, and in unconsciousness there is total surrender. Even if the surgeon kills you, you will not be there to object.Trust means that you leave yourself in the hands of someone. Even if he is going to kill you, you are ready to pass through it. Sannyas means laying yourself down before me on the surgical table and allowing me to cut whatever I want to cut. It is painful. It is very, very painful because this surgery cannot be done in your unconsciousness; I have to do it while you are conscious. I cannot give you morphine, I cannot use chloroform, but rather, on the contrary, I give you meditations to become more alert and more aware.This is a different type of surgery, a totally different type of surgery. Your awareness is needed. You have to be completely a witness so that I can cut out that part which is not in fact you but with which you have become identified, so I can show you a way where you can feel your innermost, your authentic being. It was there before you were born, it is there before you die; it will be there after you are dead.Existence goes on living in many, many forms. You need help so that you can feel the formless hidden behind the form. You are attached to the form, your eyes are closed with the form, and great surgery is needed.Says this Sufi saying: The gift comes after this death and not before. And even this death is not possible without help. And help is possible if you surrender.In fact, if you surrender, the very death we are talking about becomes possible. Surrender is like death – that’s why you are so afraid of surrendering. You try to protect yourself. You try to snatch something from me, remaining yourself. That is not possible.You must die. Only then can something be given to you. The gift is ready, already packed, your name written on it – but you are not ready. “Nothing can you have from me…until you die.”Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-02/

A young man came to Dhun-Nun and said that the Sufis were wrong, and many more things besides.The Egyptian removed a ring from his finger and handed it to him. “Take this to the market stallholders over there and see whether you can get a gold piece for it,” he said.Nobody among the market people offered more than a single piece of silver for the ring. The young man brought it back.“Now,” said Dhun-Nun, “take the ring to a real jeweler and see what he will pay.”The jeweler offered a thousand gold coins for the gem. The youth was amazed.“Now,” said Dhun-Nun, “your knowledge of the Sufis is as great as the knowledge of the stallholders of jewelry is. If you wish to value gems become a jeweler.”Jesus says, “Judge ye not,” and this is one of the greatest sayings ever uttered by any man on the earth. It is one of the most impossible things for the mind. The mind judges immediately; without any grounds the mind makes a judgment. You have made many judgments without ever looking whether grounds existed for them or not. And if you look deeply you will find Jesus is right.Every judgment is wrong because the whole world is so deeply interconnected that unless you know the whole you cannot know the part. One thing leads to another because it is interlinked. The present moment is interlinked with the past; the present moment is interlinked with the future. In this moment all eternity culminates. All that has ever happened is there, all that is now happening is there, and all that will ever happen is there. How can you judge? The world is not divided. If it was divided then a fragment could be known, but the world is a totality. All judgments are false because they will be partial, but they will claim to be the whole.Yes, Jesus is absolutely right. Judge ye not because the very judgment will close you; it will be a deadness within. Your sensitivity will be lost, and with it your possibility for growth. The moment you judge, you shrink; the moment you judge, you stop; the moment you judge, you are no longer flowering. So the greatest thing is to be courageous enough not to judge. In fact, it takes the greatest courage to suspend judgment because the mind is so eager to judge, to say good or bad, right or wrong. The mind is juvenile, it jumps from one judgment to another. If you ever want to get out of the mind – and without this there is no possibility for your inner growth – then, judge ye not.I will tell you a small story. It happened in the days of Lao Tzu in China, and Lao Tzu loved it very much. For generations the followers of Lao Tzu have been repeating the story and always finding more and more meaning in it. The story has grown; it has become an alive factor. The story is simple…There was an old man in a village, very poor, but even kings were jealous of him because he had a beautiful white horse. Such a horse had never been seen before – the beauty, the very grandeur, the strength. Kings asked for the horse. They offered fabulous prices, but the old man would say, “This horse is not a horse to me, he is a person, and how can you sell a person? He is a friend, he is not a possession. How can you sell a friend? No, it is not possible.” The man was poor, there was every temptation, but he never sold the horse.One morning suddenly he found that the horse was not in the stable. The whole village gathered and they said, “You foolish old man. We knew beforehand that someday the horse would be stolen. And you are so poor – how can you protect such a precious thing? It would have been better to sell it. The horse could have fetched any price you asked, any fancy price was possible. Now the horse is gone. It is a curse, a misfortune.”The old man said, “Don’t go too far, simply say the horse is not in the stable. This is a fact; everything else is a judgment. How do you know whether it is a misfortune or not? How can you judge?”The people said, “Don’t try to fool us. We may not be great philosophers, but no philosophy is needed. It is a simple fact that a treasure has been lost, and it is a misfortune.”The old man said, “I will stick to the fact that the stable is empty and the horse has gone. Anything else I don’t know – whether it is a misfortune or a blessing – because this is just a fragment. Who knows what is going to follow it?”People laughed, they thought the old man had gone mad. They always knew that he was a little crazy, otherwise he would have sold this horse and lived in riches. But he was living as a woodcutter, and he was very old and still cutting wood and bringing the wood from the forest and selling it. He was living hand-to-mouth, in misery and poverty. Now it was completely certain that this man was crazy.After fifteen days, suddenly one night the horse returned. He had not been stolen: he had escaped into the wilderness. And not only did he come back, he brought a dozen wild horses with him. Again the people gathered and they said, “Old man, you were right and we were wrong. It was not a misfortune, it proved to be a blessing. We are sorry that we insisted.”The old man said, “Again you are going too far. Just say that the horse is back, and say that twelve horses have come with the horse. But don’t judge. Who knows whether it is a blessing or not? It is only a fragment. Unless you know the whole story, how can you judge? You read one page of a book: how can you judge the whole book? You read a sentence in a page: how can you judge the whole page? You read a single word in a sentence: how can you judge the whole sentence? Life is so vast, and just a single word, a fragment of a word, and you have judged the whole. Don’t say that this is a blessing, nobody knows. And I am happy in my no-judgment; don’t disturb me.”This time the people could not say much; maybe the old man was again right. So they kept silent, but inside they knew well that he was wrong. Twelve beautiful horses had come with the horse. A little training and they could all be sold and they would fetch much money.The old man had a young son, only one son. The young son started to train the wild horses. Just a week later he fell from a wild horse and his legs were broken. The people gathered again and, like you, people are people everywhere. Again they judged. Judgment comes so soon! They said, “You were right, again you proved right. It was not a blessing, it was again a misfortune. Your only son has lost his legs, and in your old age he was your only support. Now you are poorer than ever.”The old man said, “You are obsessed with judgment. Don’t go that far. Say only that my son has broken his legs. Who knows whether this is a misfortune or a blessing? Nobody knows. Again a fragment, and more is never given to you. Life comes in fragments, and judgment is about the total.”It happened that after a few weeks the country went to war with a neighboring country, and all the young men of the town were forcibly taken for the military. Only the old man’s son was left because he was crippled. The people gathered, crying and weeping because from every house young people were forcibly taken away. There was no possibility of their coming back because the country that had attacked was a big country and the fight was a losing fight. They were not going to come back.The whole town was crying and weeping and they came to the old man and they said, “You were right, old man! God knows, you were right – this proved a blessing. Maybe your son is crippled, but still he is with you. Our sons are gone forever. At least he is alive and with you and, by and by, he will start walking again. Maybe a little limp will be left, but he will be okay.”The old man again said, “It is impossible to talk to you people. You go on and on judging. Nobody knows. Only say this: your sons have been forced to enter the military – the army – but my son has not been forced to. Nobody knows whether it is a blessing or a misfortune. Nobody will ever be able to know it. Only God knows.”And when we say only God knows, it means only the whole knows. Judge ye not, otherwise you will never be able to become one with the whole. You will be obsessed with fragments, with small things you will jump to conclusions. And Sufis are very insistent on this: that you never bother with things which are completely beyond you. But even about them you make judgments.Your consciousness is on a very low rung of the ladder. You live in the dark valley of misery, anguish, and from your darkest valleys of miseries you judge even a Buddha. Even a Buddha is not left without your judgment. Even a Jesus is judged by you, not only judged but crucified: judged and found guilty, judged and punished.You live in the valley, a dark and damp valley. You have not seen the peaks, even in your dreams. You cannot even imagine them because even imagination needs a base in experience. You cannot dream about something which is absolutely unknown; even dreaming comes out of your knowledge. You cannot dream about the whole, you cannot imagine the whole; you cannot imagine the peaks and the life that exists in a buddha. But you judge. You say, “Yes, this man is a buddha, and this man is not a buddha; this man is enlightened and this man is not.” The enlightened person is not harmed by you because he cannot be harmed in any way, but you are harmed by your judgment.Once you judge, you have stopped growing. Judgment means a stale state of mind; now the movement has stopped, the effort to know more has stopped, the effort to grow has stopped. You have already made the judgment; it is finished. And the mind always wants to be in judgment because movement is troublesome, to be in a process is always hazardous. To come to a conclusion means you have reached the goal; now there is no journey.A man who wants to journey to the ultimate should make it a basic point not to judge. Very difficult, almost impossible, because before you know it, the mind judges. Before you have even become aware of it the mind has judged. But if you try, by and by, a subtle awareness arises and then you can suspend judgment. If you suspend judgment you have become religious. Then you don’t know what is right and what is wrong.But ordinarily the people you call religious are the people who know everything: what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do. They have all the commandments within them. That’s why religious people become pig-headed, thick-skinned. Their journey has stopped; they are not growing at all. The river is not moving; it has become stale. If you want movement, growth – infinite movement and growth are possible because the ultimate is not a static point, but the total movement of life, of existence – if you want to walk with the ultimate, you have to move continuously. You have to be continuously on the journey.In fact, the journey never ends. One path ends, another begins; one door closes, another opens. A higher peak is always there. You reach a peak and you were just going to rest, thinking everything is achieved, then suddenly a higher peak still is there. From peak to peak, it never comes to an end; it is an endless journey; the ultimate is an endless journey. That’s why only those who are very, very courageous, so courageous that they don’t bother about the goal but are content with the journey, to move with life, to float with the river, just to live the moment and grow into it – only those are able to walk with the ultimate.Goal-oriented people are mediocre; all your achievers are mediocre. What can you achieve? Can you achieve the supreme? If you can achieve the supreme just by your achievement, it will not be supreme. If you could achieve it, how can it be supreme? Can you reach the goal – you? Then the goal will be less than you. No, the goal cannot be reached. In fact, there is no goal, and it is good that there is no goal. That’s why life is deathless, because every goal will be a death. Then you are no longer needed.A man who judges too much is stopping his growth from everywhere. And once judgments settle inside, you become incapable of seeing the new. The judgment won’t allow it because the judgment will be disturbed by the new. Then you will live with closed eyes. You are not blind, nobody is blind, but everybody behaves like a blind man – has to: judgments are there. If you open your eyes, the fear is that you may have to see something, something may be encountered, and you may have to change the judgment. And judgment is so cozy.You have settled in a house and forgotten the road, and the journey and the effort and the continuous movement and the danger and the hazards; you have forgotten the adventure. You have closed yourself in a small house, cozy, comfortable. Now you are afraid to look out of the window; you keep it shut. Now you are afraid to open the door. Who knows, some strange fact may enter from there and disturb all your comfort, coziness, and security. That’s why you behave like a blind man. You are not blind, you are cunning. Through your cunningness you have become blind. And the mind immediately makes judgments. That is how to avoid the journey; it is an escape.People come to me, many sorts of people, but they can be divided basically into two types: those who are ready to open their eyes and those who are not ready to open their eyes. For one who is ready to open his eyes, much is possible. For one who is not ready to open his eyes, nothing is possible. He is already in the grave, he is no longer alive. He does not allow new winds to pass through his being, he does not allow new flowers to open into his being; he does not allow anything unknown. He is afraid, he moves on a settled path, and he moves in a circle. Nothing is more settled than a circle. He comes upon the same things again and again and again. He lives like a gramophone record: again and again and again the same. Then you say that you are bored! Nobody else is responsible. A bored person is a person who has remained with closed eyes. Boredom is a part of it. A man who lives with open eyes is never bored.Life is so enchanting, life is so magical, life is such a miracle. Every moment millions of miracles are happening all around you, but you live with closed eyes, with your judgments. You pass a flower, and if somebody says, “Beautiful!” you look, but you don’t look. You say, “Yes, a roseflower, very beautiful,” but you are repeating something from the past – a gramophone record. You have said this same thing so many times, so many times. To each flower you have said that. It has become a rubbish statement with no significance. You simply utter it because silence will be awkward. Somebody says, “Beautiful flower,” and if you remain silent it may be awkward, embarrassing, so you utter something. “Yes, the flower is beautiful,” but you neither see the flower nor the beauty. It is a cliché. And then you say you are bored?You love a woman, and even hours have not passed, the honeymoon is not yet over, and already dust has started collecting around your woman. She is no longer as beautiful as she was just a few hours before. She is no longer as significant as she used to be. What has happened? You think that you have come to know her; you have judged her. You feel that now she is no longer a stranger; you know her. How can you know a person? A person is an infinite process. You can never know a person.In the morning the flower is different because the morning is different. The sun is rising and the birds are singing, and the flower is part of the whole. On the petals of the flower you can hear the song of the birds in the morning, you can see the new rays penetrating it, new life throbbing in it. In the afternoon it is a different flower. The whole climate has changed. The sun is no longer the same, the birds are not singing. It is already dying. The sun has started setting already, the evening is coming. The flower is becoming sadder and sadder. It is a new mood, it is not the same flower you saw in the morning. In the evening the flower is going to die; it is sad to the very heart. Even if it sings a song, it is a sad song. If you are alert you can see your own death in the flower. You can see life and death meeting in the flower dying, life transforming itself into death. It is a totally different mood.You cannot know even a flower in its totality because of its millions of moods. How can you know a person? A person is a flowering consciousness, the greatest flower that has become possible through millennia of evolution. How can you know your wife? The moment you think you know you are finished, you have made a judgment and now you are already seeking another woman. No, a wife remains a stranger if your eyes are clean. You will come across many climates, many moods, many faces in the being of your wife, in the being of your husband, in the being of your child, in the being of your friend, and in the being of your enemy. Nobody ever comes to know anything.The mind is cunning. The mind wants knowledge because only with knowledge are you secure. With a stranger there is insecurity. With the unknown surrounding you everywhere you feel afraid, you don’t know where you are. When you don’t know the situation – the people, the flowers, the trees, that which surrounds you – when you don’t know that, you don’t know who you are, your own identity is lost. Feeling certain that you know your wife, your child, your friends, your society, this and that, the history and the geography, with all this knowledge that is surrounding you, suddenly you feel who you are: the knower. The ego arises, strengthens.Knowledge is food for the ego. Ignorance is death for the ego. And the death of the ego is life for you. And the life of the ego is death for you.Don’t settle. This is the meaning of the homeless sannyasin. In India we have tried it: one becomes a wanderer, homeless, uprooted, roots nowhere, so no identity. One lives with the unknown, moment to moment – everything surprises. To you, nothing surprises. You know everything, how can anything surprise you? Nothing amazes. Everything surprises you when you live in ignorance. When you live in not-knowing, everything is new. There is nothing to compare it with, there is nothing to relate it to the past, there is nothing to relate it to the future; everything is unique. It has never been before, it will never be again. If you miss it this moment, you will miss it forever. There is no coming back.Every moment is a new mood in existence. Either you enjoy it, live it, or you miss it. Through knowledge you miss it because you say “I know.” If I tell you “Come out of your house. The sun has risen, it is beautiful,” you say “I know, I have risen earlier many times, many mornings, and I have seen it. I know – don’t disturb me.” But this day’s sun has never been there before, and this day’s you has never been there before, and this day’s me calling you to come out has never been there before.Everything is absolutely new, absolutely original. Just your mind is old. Through knowledge your mind becomes old and everything looks dusty, used, secondhand; then you get bored. Boredom shows that you don’t know how to live in ignorance. A child is never bored – everything surprises, amazes. He lives continuously in wonder. And this is the quality of a religious mind: to live continuously in wonder, constantly in wonder, to make wonder your very style of being. Then suddenly you see the whole world is totally different. It is not the world you used to know. You are not the same, so the world cannot be the same. Don’t judge, and don’t make an imprisonment out of your knowledge. Remain free, uprooted, homeless. These are symbols.A homeless sannyasin means uprooted from the past; he has no roots in the past. Not that he simply wanders like a vagabond, his vagabondry is deeper: spiritually he is a vagabond. Just going from one country to another won’t help much. Sooner or later you will settle somewhere, you will make a home. Sooner or later even hippies settle. You don’t see very old hippies – it is a phase. One moves from here and there, outwardly. Then one gets fed up with it and settles.Remember: when a hippie settles, nobody settles like him. An ordinary, straight person always feels the call to become a vagabond; an innermost call is always there. He may be settled with a wife and children and a good job, but the call goes on haunting him in dreams, in daydreams, in his imagination. It continuously calls him to become a vagabond. But when a hippie settles, he settles absolutely. He has known what it is to be a vagabond; he is finished with it. Again knowledge: he has known.When we say, or when I say, become homeless, I don’t mean it literally. I mean live a homeless life inside – unsettled, uprooted, with no past, just this moment, this moment as the total, as if this moment is the all. Then suddenly you become aware: aware of the hidden, aware of the invisible, aware of the unknown surrounding you from everywhere. It is a vast ocean of absolutely new facts arising and disappearing.Life has never been old, life has never been secondhand. It is original, it is the nature of it to be original and new. Only your mind grows old; then you miss it. And to live continuously in the new you have to stop judging. Then the highest consciousness will explode in you. Judgment is the barrier. And it is not only ordinary things that you judge; judging becomes such a habit that you cannot help it. The moment something is there you immediately judge – not a single moment is lost. When you come to a person like Buddha or Dhun-Nun, the Sufi master, you are near the original source of a consciousness constantly renewed. Nothing is old, nothing comes out of the past. The mind comes out of the past, consciousness is never out of the past. Consciousness comes out of this moment.The mind is time, and consciousness is eternity. The mind moves from one moment to another on a horizontal plane. It is like a railway train: past and future, like many compartments joined together on a horizontal plane. Consciousness is vertical; it doesn’t come from the past, it doesn’t go into the future. This moment it falls vertically into the depth, or it rises vertically into the height.This is the meaning of Christ on the cross, but Christians have missed the meaning completely. The cross is nothing but a representation, a symbol, of two lines meeting: the vertical and the horizontal. Christ’s hands are spread on the horizontal. His whole being, except the hands, is on the vertical. What is the meaning? The meaning is: action is in time; being is beyond time. The hands symbolize action. Jesus is crucified with his hands on the horizontal, in time.Action is in time. Thinking is an act; it is action of the mind. That, too, is in time. It will be good to know that hands are the outermost part of the brain. They are one, the mind and the hand; the head is joined with the hands. Your head has two hemispheres: the right hemisphere is joined with the left hand, and the left hemisphere is joined with the right hand. Your hands are the reaches of the mind into the world, the reaches of the mind into matter because the mind is also a subtle matter. All action, physical or mental, is in time.Your being is vertical. It goes in depth; it goes in height, not sideways. When you judge you become more and more identified with the horizontal – otherwise how will you judge? For judgment, past will be needed. Can you judge something without bringing the past in? How will you judge? From where will you get the criterion?You say, “This face is beautiful.” How do you judge? Do you know what beauty is? How do you judge this face to be beautiful? You have known many faces. You have heard many people talking about beautiful faces. You have read about it in novels, you have seen in the movies and you have accumulated a notion, in the past, of what beauty is. It is a very vague notion, you cannot define it. If somebody insists, you will feel puzzled and confused; it is a very vague notion, like a cloud. Then you say, “This face is beautiful.” How do you know? You are bringing your past experience in, comparing this face with that vague notion of beauty that you have accumulated through experience.If you don’t bring the past in, then a totally different quality of beauty will happen. It will not be your judgment, it will not come from your mind, it will not be imposed, it will not be an interpretation. It will simply be a participation with this face here and now, a deep participation with this mystery, with this person here and now. In that moment the person is neither beautiful nor ugly; all judgments have disappeared. An unknown mystery is there, unnamed, unjudged.Only in that unjudged moment does love flower. Love is not possible with the mind. With the mind, sex is possible; with the mind, action is possible. Sexuality is an act. Love is not an act; it is a state of being. It is vertical. When you look at a person and participate with no judgment – of either beautiful or ugly, or of good and bad, sinner or saint – when you don’t judge but simply look into the eyes with no judgment, suddenly a meeting is there, a merging of energies. This merging is beautiful, and this beauty is totally different from all the beauties that you have known.You have known the beauty of the form; this is the beauty of the formless. You have known the beauty of the body; this is the beauty of the soul. You have known the beauty of the periphery; this is the beauty of the center. This is everlasting. And if this happens with a person, by and by, the same becomes more and more possible with things also.If you look at a flower with no judgment, suddenly the heart of the flower is open for you; there is an invitation. When you don’t judge, there is invitation. When you judge, the flower also closes because in the judgment is the enemy. In the judgment is the critic, not the lover. In the judgment there is logic, not love. In the judgment there is superficiality, not depth. The flower simply closes. And when I say it simply closes, it is not a metaphor – it happens exactly as I say it happens.You go near a tree, you touch the tree. If you touch with judgment, the tree is not available there. If you touch it without any judgment, just feel it with no mind at all, embrace it and sit by the side of it, suddenly a very ordinary tree has become the bodhi tree. Infinite compassion is flowing from the tree toward you. You will be enveloped. The tree will share many secrets with you.This is how even rocks can be penetrated to their very heart. When a buddha touches a rock, it is no longer a rock. It is alive, it has a heart throbbing in it. When you touch a person, it is a rock, already dead. Your touch dulls everything because in the touch is the judgment, the enemy, not the friend. If this is so with ordinary things, how much more will it be so when you come across higher stages of being and consciousness? Don’t judge.Millions have missed Buddha, millions have missed Jesus, millions have missed Zarathustra just by judging. Don’t repeat that stupid pattern. Whenever you go to a man of even a little higher consciousness than you, don’t judge, remain open. Much help will be possible. If you go with a judgment, you don’t go at all. If you go with a judgment, you have already missed. Put aside the mind.Now enter this story.Dhun-Nun was an Egyptian Sufi mystic, one of the greatest who has ever walked on the earth. He has great insight, insight into human stupidity, and he can be helpful. But, as Sufis always do, they create a situation because they know that intellectually you may understand, but that understanding is not enough. Intellectually you may be convinced, but that conviction will not transform you. They create a situation and in the situation they reveal something. They don’t say, they show.How did it come to happen to Dhun-Nun? It is said…When he was a seeker himself and not a master, one day he was approaching a small village. He was coming from a long journey, from the desert – hungry, tired, thirsty, seeking shelter. He saw a woman on the roof of a house. She must have been working on the roof; the rains were coming soon and she must have been arranging the roof. He came nearer and nearer.When he reached near the house, the woman laughed. Dhun-Nun was puzzled: “What is the matter? Why are you laughing? Why have you greeted me with such mad laughter?”The woman said, “When I saw you entering the village I thought you seemed to be a Sufi mystic because I couldn’t see you, just your robe. Then as you came closer, I saw that you were not a mystic, not a master, but still a disciple because I could see a little of your face. But you were still far away and I couldn’t peek into your eyes. Then you reached closer and I could see your eyes and I saw that you are not even a disciple, not even on the path. And now that you have come and I can see you completely, I see that you are not even a seeker. You have never heard about the path at all. That’s why I laughed. Outwardly you look like a mystic, but your face doesn’t cooperate with your dress, your Sufi robe.”The very word sufi comes from a certain type of robe. Suf means wool, and sufi means a man who is robed in a woolen shirt, a woolen robe. In a desert it is very difficult – hot, burning everywhere. Sufis have chosen a woolen robe and they have existed in deserts, the hottest parts of the world – why? They say that when you are cool inside nothing matters. When you are cool inside, nothing matters. On the periphery, heat; in the deepest center, coolness. This is a method, a device, to turn you from the periphery to the center.When the body is hot, burning hot, you move to the center. You will have to move there because for the body, on the periphery, it is fire. What do you do when you travel on a road and it is burning hot and the sun is fiery? You seek shade, a tree, and you sit there, relaxed. When the body is burning hot… Sufis have used it as a device. What will you do, continuously under a woolen rug, hidden under it, perspiring? What will you do in a desert? You will have to seek some inner point where no heat ever penetrates. You will have to seek shade.The woman said, “Outwardly you look like a Sufi, a master, but when I saw your face, your face didn’t cooperate with your robe; the face says something else. When I looked into your eyes I saw that they say something else again; they don’t cooperate with your face. And when I looked at you in your totality, I saw that you are not a seeker at all.”It is said that Dhun-Nun threw his robe away, went into the desert, and for many years nothing was heard of him or what happened to him. For twenty years nobody knew where he was and what he was doing.After twenty years a sudden explosion. Dhun-Nun exploded over the whole of the Egyptian land. Thousands of seekers from every Sufi country started traveling to him. While Dhun-Nun was alive he became a Mecca; people were moving toward Dhun-Nun not toward Mecca. People used to ask him, “What happened in those twenty years after the encounter with that woman? What did you do? What were you practicing?”He would say, “Nothing, I simply sat in the desert because whatever I do will be part of me, part of my ego. Whatever I do cannot be greater than me; it will always be less than me. And if I am wrong, how can I do anything right? So I simply stopped doing anything. For twenty years I only practiced nothing. I did nothing or I did nothing – I simply remained with my being. I was not a doer.”What will happen if for twenty years you sit without being a doer? The horizontal will disappear, only the vertical will remain – not doing anything, just being. But that needs patience; otherwise no method is needed. Because you are impatient I have to give you methods. Because you are in a hurry I have to give you methods. If you were not in a hurry and you could say “I can wait, I can wait for eternity,” no method would be needed. Then you simply sit; even while you are doing things inside you remain a non-doer. Of course, you will have to do many things. You will have to take a bath and you will have to eat food and you will have to go to sleep and prepare your bed. You will have to do certain things, but always remain a non-doer. This much is enough.Remaining silently with yourself, without doing anything, the ego disappears. Not even trying to improve upon yourself, the ego disappears. Not trying to transform yourself, the ego disappears – just by accepting yourself as you are, whatever you are. I see your only trouble is that you cannot accept yourself. You want something else, you want to be somebody else – and that is the trouble. Otherwise nothing is lacking, otherwise everything is available. Non-doing for twenty years, Dhun-Nun became one of the most perfect masters.Now this story.A young man came to Dhun-Nun and said that the Sufis were wrong, and many another thing besides.How can you know that Sufis are wrong without being a Sufi? And has anyone who has been a Sufi ever said that anything is wrong with the Sufis? It has never happened. Those who have been Sufis have never said that anything is wrong with it, and those who say that something is wrong have never been Sufis. How can you say this?Just the other day, somebody was saying that all these meditative methods I am teaching are wrong because Patanjali never mentions them in his Yoga Sutra. And the man said, “We have never heard of such methods before. What is your authority? From where do you create these methods? They are neither Hatha nor Raja nor Bhakti.”I asked the man, “Have you ever meditated?” He said, “No.” I asked the man, “Do you know what meditation is?” He said, “No.” When you don’t know what meditation is, how can you say what is wrong with a meditative method? If you don’t know what meditation is, how can you know what meditation is not? You don’t know what good is, and you go on condemning: “This is bad.” You don’t know what morality is, and you go on condemning: “This is immoral.”Do you know what Sufism is? But you can easily condemn. Condemnation comes easily to the mind. It is the easiest thing in the world to say that something is wrong. To say no is the easiest thing for the mind. Yes is the hardest thing. Watch your mind, how many times it says no. Even if it sometimes has to say yes, it says it grudgingly. With no, it is very happy.The moment you say no to somebody you feel very powerful. You enjoy saying no because no helps the ego; yes dissolves it. And it is easy to say no. It is very, very difficult to say yes because with the yes a door opens, with the no a door closes. When you say no, watch what happens in your innermost being. Suddenly all doors close. When you say no you are closed. You become a Leibnitz nomad with no windows, no doors, no bridges. The no simply cuts off all possibilities of bridging yourself to the other. All possibilities of love, prayer, surrender, all possibilities of meditation, are immediately cut the moment you say no.No makes you an island, and no man is an island. To feel that you are an island is the greatest illusion – you are part of the whole. When you say no, you are cut, you have broken all the bridges. And the ego always wants, enjoys to say no, it relishes it. Watch! Unless it is absolutely necessary, never say no. Even dropping the word will make you more and more alert. Even if you have to say no, say it in such a way that it becomes positive, it takes the form of yes. Just by dropping the no you will feel many new things happening within you because this is a very, very potential word.Yes and no: these two words are very potential. They change your total being because they are not ordinary words. They are not words, they are gestures – that’s your way, your very style of life. A man who goes on saying no will become more and more sad, depressed; life will no longer knock on his door. If you continuously say no, how can life go on knocking at your door? Winds will not flow toward him; flowers will not be flowering on his path. He is sowing thorns by saying no.The no-sayer is the only atheist. To say no to existence is just the culmination of your total trend of saying no. To say yes to life is what theism means to me – to say yes to life, to open doors, to relate, to be available. Say yes and suddenly you feel windows opening inside. Just sit silently under a tree and say loudly “Yes!” and feel the change. Then say “No!” and feel the change. You create a different climate; different vibrations come with the no. With yes you create an opening, as if you have thrown a pebble in a lake and ripples arise, and they go on and on and on, spreading and spreading; they will reach the very opposite bank. When you say yes you throw a stone of acceptance, of love, of prayer, of your being ready, of surrender. Then the ripples go on and on and on and they reach the very infinity.A yes-sayer is bound to become a theist someday, because yes ultimately culminates in the divine. Yes becomes godliness. No becomes, finally, godlessness.A young man came to Dhun-Nun and said that the Sufis were wrong, and many another thing besides. How foolish! But it happens. I know it; it happens with me every day. People, not knowing anything, even come to advise me that this should be done this way, that this should not be done that way. Man’s stupidity has no bounds to it. Only two things are infinite: man’s stupidity and the divine’s compassion. Otherwise, how does man exist? It is a miracle – so stupid, so adamant! But the compassion of the divine is infinite. Existence goes on giving – it does not bother about your stupidity. Some day or other you will come back home and you will understand.What foolishness to come to a man like Dhun-Nun and say that the Sufis are wrong.The Egyptian removed a ring from his finger and handed it to him.This Egyptian, Dhun-Nun, was right. It was useless to talk to such a stupid person – he won’t understand. And even if he understands intellectually, it won’t be a real understanding. Dhun-Nun started creating a situation. He handed his ring to him and said:“Take this to the market stallholders over there and see whether you can get a gold piece for it.”Nobody among the market people offered more than a single silver piece for the ring. The young man brought it back.“Now,” said Dhun-Nun, “take the ring to a real jeweler and see what he will pay.”The jeweler offered a thousand gold coins for the gem. The youth was amazed.“Now,” said Dhun-Nun, “your knowledge of the Sufis is as great as the knowledge of the stallholders of jewelry is. If you wish to value gems become a jeweler.”What exactly was he pointing out? – that Sufism is not a system of knowledge. You cannot read about it. Scriptures won’t be of any help, teachers won’t be of any help because they can explain, but explanation cannot become experience. And it is almost always that just the opposite is the case: explanations become barriers to experience. Through explanations you start explaining things away. They don’t lead you into experience; rather, they become substitutes. That’s how pundits, scholars, are born.Sufism is not knowledge: you cannot gather it from anywhere, from somebody; you cannot borrow it. It is not information, no teacher can teach it. Truth cannot be taught. It is an experience, it is not knowledge. It is being. It is not something that you learn, it is something that you become. Who can give it to you? Only you, only you can give it to yourself. Only you can bring yourself to a point when you know what Sufism is, not by knowledge but by knowing.Always remember the difference between knowledge and knowing: knowledge is a dead, accumulated thing; knowing is a constant movement. Knowing is alive; knowledge is dead. Knowing is part of your being; knowledge is never part of your being. Knowledge is just part of your memory, and memory is nothing but a biological computer.Sooner or later man will devise small computers which you can carry in your pockets. They will carry all the knowledge of all the libraries in the world. It will not be necessary to teach it to you: you can simply push a button and the computer can supply you with knowledge. So why waste twenty-five years of a man’s life in universities with foolish teachers and foolish examinations just training his memory? That can be done easily with a computer, and the computer is more efficient than any memory system can be because a computer is completely dead – and knowledge is dead. A computer carries it more efficiently than your mind. Your mind is not so reliable: it is somehow attached to an alive being, and the life also goes on flowing through it – that life disturbs it. Knowledge is part of the memory system, not of your being. Knowing is part of your being. So, knowing means to be that which you want to know.If you want to know God… God is not hiding somewhere so that you have to reach him. I have heard that when Soviet sputniks reached near the moon they delivered a message to Soviet television: “Up to now we have not found any God or gods.”It is not somewhere up there. God is not a thing, God is not a person hidden somewhere. God is your innermost flowering. You come and ask, “Show us God, where is God?” It cannot be shown because it is hidden in you. It is your ultimate destiny.Your God is still not there, your God is still growing. Your God is still a potentiality, a possibility, not yet actual. And I cannot show my God to you, your eyes will not be capable of seeing it. Your God is still a potentiality; you have to work for it – it is still a seed. You have to water it and find soil for it and help it to grow. I cannot show my God to you because you don’t yet have the right equipment to see it. And the right equipment will be available only when you have fulfilled your godliness. Then there will be no need to see my God: you will be able to see yours; you will be able to see everyone else’s. You will be able to see even those who are still potentialities.I can see your God underneath the ground, still struggling like a seed trying to break the ground. The ground is hard. Sometimes there are stones and rocks also. Trying to break the hard ground… I can see your God, who will someday be, who is not yet. If you can see your own God you can see God everywhere because now you have the eyes to see. I don’t see you as you are – yes, I see that too, but that is just a passing phase. A cloud has arisen in the sky, but I see the sky; the cloud will go. I see you as you will be. I see you as you can be. I see you as… Right now, if you are courageous enough, you can suddenly burst forth.“Now,” said Dhun-Nun, “your knowledge of the Sufis is as great as the knowledge of the stallholders…” They cannot appreciate a diamond. They don’t know what a diamond is. They may have thought that this beautiful stone will be good for the children to play with or they can make measurements out of it – but the diamond is hidden from them. It is just a shiny stone, colorful, maybe good for the children to play with.Have you ever heard the story of the greatest diamond, the Kohinoor? I would like to tell it to you.It belonged to a villager in Golconda in India who had found it on his farm. A river flowed on his farm, and there he had found it. It looked good, and he thought it would be good for the children – they could play with it – so he brought it home. The children played with it, and as children are, they got fed up with it. So they put it on the windowsill and everybody forgot all about it.A visiting monk, a vagabond sannyasin, was passing through the town and he wanted a shelter for the night, so this villager invited him. The sannyasin took food, and then they gossiped. The sannyasin was a vagabond so he had lots of news about the world and what was happening where. The villager listened, and just in talking about these things the sannyasin said, “What are you doing here? I know a place where diamonds are found on a riverbank. With a little effort you can become the richest man, and here, working on this hard soil, you will always remain poor. Your whole life will be wasted.”The next morning the sannyasin left but he left a seed, a desire, an ambition in that poor villager’s mind; he became obsessed. He didn’t know where that river was but he became so obsessed that he sold his farm and went in search of it. He told his wife and children, “Five years at least you will have to wait; then I will return.”He worked hard in many places, but after five years he still had not found any place where diamonds were so plentiful that they could be picked up easily. But in these five years he learned one thing: what a diamond is. He came back home. When he approached his hut he couldn’t believe his eyes: the greatest diamond that he had ever thought of, or seen in the market, was lying there on the windowsill. Then he remembered that the river flowed on his own farm and now he had sold it – and he had found the greatest diamond!That part of the farm became the largest source of diamonds in the world, Golconda. And all the greatest diamonds have come from Golconda, from that farmer’s land. This diamond which the children played with and got fed up with, and which was lying there uncared for and neglected, became the greatest diamond in the world.This is how it is on the inward journey also. Don’t sell the farm! The greatest diamond is waiting there for you. But learn to become a jeweler – and the only learning is how to die, because if you die as you are you will be reborn as you should be.Right is the Sufi saying: “I cannot give you anything until you die.”Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-03/

A man once hurt his leg. He had to walk with a crutch. This crutch was very useful to him, both for walking and many other things.He taught all his family to use crutches and they became part of normal life.It was part of everyone’s ambition to have a crutch. Some were made of ivory, others adorned with gold. Schools were opened to train people in their use, university chairs endowed to deal with the higher aspects of this science.A few, very few, people, started to walk without crutches. This was considered scandalous, absurd. Besides, there were so many uses for crutches.Some revolted, and were punished. They tried to show that a crutch would be used sometimes, when needed; or that many of the other uses to which a crutch was put could be supplied in other ways. Few listened.In order to overcome the prejudices, some of the people who could walk without support began to behave in a totally different way from established society. Still they remained few.When it was found that, having used crutches for so many generations, few people could in fact walk without crutches, the majority “proved” that they were necessary.“Here,” they said, “here is a man. Try to make him walk without a crutch. See? – he cannot!”“But we are walking without crutches,” the ordinary walkers reminded them.“This is not true; merely a fancy of your own,” said the cripples because by that time they were becoming blind as well – blind because they would not see.Life is a movement, a constant flux. Each moment it is new. But the mind? – the mind is never new, it is always lagging behind. The very nature of the mind is such that it cannot be one with life. Life goes on, the mind lags behind. There is always an inconsistency between life and the mind. It has to be so.You see a flower: the moment you realize that you have seen it, it is no longer the same; life has moved. You see a river, but you don’t see the same river again; you cannot. Says old Heraclitus: “You cannot step in the same river twice.” And I say to you that you cannot step in the same river even once because the river is constantly flowing. The moment the mind recognizes, it is already no longer the case. The mind goes on accumulating dead footprints. Life once existed there, but it is there no longer.We are trained as minds; that is the misery. You go on missing life, and you will go on missing it unless you drop the mind, unless you start living out of a state of no-mind. Then you are one with life. Then the inconsistency between you and your mind disappears. Then you no longer live according to ideas because ideas are of the mind. You don’t live according to any ideology, religion, scripture, tradition. You simply live out of the emptiness of your being.It is difficult in the beginning even to conceive how one can live out of emptiness. But out of emptiness all the trees are growing, and out of emptiness stars are moving, and out of emptiness the whole of existence exists – and there is no trouble. Only man has the absurd idea that without the mind it will be difficult to exist. In fact, with the mind it is difficult to exist because existence and the mind are two separate – not only separate but contrary – dimensions. If you want to be consistent with the mind you will be inconsistent with life.It happened…There was a case against Mulla Nasruddin in the court, and the judge asked him, “How old are you, Nasruddin?”And he said, “Of course, you know and everybody knows I am forty years old.”The judge was surprised and he said, “But five years ago also you were in the court and I asked you, and then too you said that you were forty years old. How is it possible? After five years you are still forty years old?”Nasruddin said, “I am a consistent man, sir. Once I say I am forty, I will remain forty forever. You can rely on me.”If you are consistent with the mind, you will become such a reliable man. You will be consistent – and absolutely inconsistent – because life goes on, it is never static. Not even for a single moment does life stay anywhere. Life doesn’t know any rest. Life has no tradition to follow, no ideology to imitate, no pattern fixed by the past. Life is always an opening into the unknown.Life moves toward the future, the mind moves toward the past. The mind is always closed in the experience that has happened already, and life is always open for the experience that has never happened before. How can they meet? How is there any possibility of their meeting? By and by, the mind becomes completely closed in itself. Not only that, the mind even becomes afraid to see what life is.The fear comes because the mind knows that if you look at life, you will be proved wrong. So, better to remain with closed eyes, don’t look at life. Interpret life always according to the mind. Don’t listen to it! That’s how you have become deaf. That’s how you have become blind. That’s how you cannot listen and understand me because here there is no person. I’m not talking to you as a mind. You can meet me only on the ground of life, not on the ground of the mind.That’s why you will always feel I am inconsistent. I am. You cannot compare anything I will assert today with anything that I asserted yesterday. You will find me inconsistent. But what can I do? This morning everything is new. This morning has never been there before and will not be there again. It doesn’t belong to the past, it doesn’t belong to the future. It belongs to itself – a unique phenomenon. The parrots chattering in the trees were not there yesterday, and who knows where they will be tomorrow? And the breeze – the warm breeze passing through the trees, soft and warm as a woman – will not be there. Everything will be different. Everything was different yesterday; it is already different today.And you are not the same – how can you be? If you are alive, you are a riverlike phenomenon. Twenty-four hours have passed. Twenty-four hours is like a millennium; millions of seconds have passed. How can you be the same? I don’t recognize you, I have never seen you before; you are absolutely new. How can I say the same thing to you that I said yesterday? And I am no longer the man who was here yesterday.Life is constantly a resurrection. Every moment it dies, every moment it is born anew. But you go on carrying the old mind. You will never fit anywhere. And you know it: you never fit anywhere; you never fit with anybody. Wherever you are there is some trouble. Something is always missing, lacking. Harmony never comes out of your relationships because harmony is possible only if you are a flux-like phenomenon, changing, moving, merging into the new. If you become a formless river of consciousness everything fits. Then you fit with life and life fits with you – suddenly everything is absolutely okay. That absolute feeling of harmony is what religious people have been calling God.God is not a person, God is a state of being when everything fits. When you have no complaint, suddenly everything is beautiful. But the mind makes everything ugly because the mind lives as a tradition – and life is momentary.This English word tradition is very, very meaningful. You may not even be aware, but it comes from the same root as the word traitor; tradition comes from the same root as the word traitor. Tradition is a betrayal of life, it is treachery. Your mind betrays. If you can drop the mind everything is attained.Dropping the mind is the essence of all religion. Sufism is nothing but how to drop the mind, the tradition, the past. That’s why religion always looks revolutionary because it is always against tradition. It is always against the past. It is always against frozen words. It is always for life, flow.No religion can be a tradition, but all religions have become traditions. That means they have become false; they are no longer religions. A religion remains religion only when it is true to existence and life – not true to any dogma, not true to any scripture: the Vedas, the Koran, the Bible. That’s why Sufism was not understood by Mohammedans. How can they understand Sufism? Too book-oriented.Of course, when the Koran descended on Mohammed it was a live moment, it was a fitting phenomenon. Suddenly Mohammed was in harmony with the universe, and the universe started unveiling its secrets to him. And the first word that came to Mohammed was, “Recite! Recite in my name!” The word Koran means recite because it is the first word that came to Mohammed. It is a beautiful word, if you can understand while it is alive; otherwise it is ugly when it is dead.It is just like a beautiful woman passing, moving. The very gesture, the curves of her body, the life that is flowing in her, the radiance of her being – it is so beautiful. You can freeze her and make a statue out of her and put it in the garden but then there will be no more beauty because beauty was in her very aliveness. A frozen woman: how can she be beautiful? It is a corpse. Those curves, when they were moving and alive, had something of the divine. Now nothing is left; it is only matter, a dead body.When for the first time, on the Mount of Hira, Mohammed heard this: “Recite! Recite in the name of thy Lord!” he was as if awakened from a deep sleep. He looked around. Who had spoken? There was nobody. Life is not somebody; life is this all, the whole. And Mohammed started reciting. He must have danced, he must have sung, in the name of the Lord.In that moment there was music. In that moment there was dance. In that moment there was a heart, there was singing. In that moment there was celebration. Mohammed had been accepted. Mohammed had merged with the whole, and the whole had merged with him – the drop into the ocean and the ocean into the drop.It was the culmination of the being, the highest peak that one can rise to. But when others started writing it, it no longer had the same beauty; the words were now frozen. The Koran is a book just like the Vedas, the Bible, the Upanishads – very meaningful words are there, but dead. And unless you have come to feel that moment on the Mount of Hira, when the whole of existence says to you “Recite in the name of thy Lord!” you will not be able to understand the Koran. You can carry it, then it will become a burden. It will not give you life. On the contrary, it may take lives from many others. A burden is dangerous, and a burden ultimately becomes aggression; one feels irritated, destructive.Mohammedans couldn’t understand Sufis, and Mohammed is nothing but a Sufi. No tradition can understand Sufis; they are always the outcasts – thrown out of the society and the established pattern – because they always bring the revolution with them. They come as a storm, and they shake the very foundations of the established society, the dead society, culture and civilization; the universities, the government, the church – all dead. But the majority of people are also dead, and because the majority of people are also dead, a dead, established society fits.Once you become alive, once your life energy arises, you will suddenly feel that you fit with existence but you don’t fit with the society. And I tell you: if you don’t fit with the society, don’t bother about it because ultimately it means nothing. The only thing that will be meaningful ultimately will be whether you fit with existence or not. Try to be harmonious with life, however arduous. Even if it sometimes seems impossible, try to be in harmony with the whole. Even at the cost of being thrown out of the society and forced to become an outsider, don’t bother about it. This is what sannyas means to me.Sannyas means an effort to seek ways and means to be in harmony with the whole, even if it creates a rift between you and your society. The society is man-made. Even if you fit, nothing is achieved. One has to find his home in the ultimate. And all societies are against godliness. People think that there are societies which are not against godliness. No. Sometimes, very rarely, for a few moments in history, in the vast desert of societies, a few oases have existed – but they are exceptions. No society has really existed which was religious.For example, when Buddha was alive an oasis existed around him: a few thousand people, nothing compared to the whole world. A few thousand people converted, transformed, existed with Buddha. But the moment Buddha disappeared that oasis disappeared; the very springs disappeared – how long can the trees exist without it? A few oases here and there, rarely, have existed, but the society at large has remained anti-religious.The people who manage the establishment are very cunning. They give the society a ritualistic, formalistic, religious shape: churches exist, temples exist, and people go and pray, and there are holidays, religious holidays – but it’s all formal. Don’t be deceived by the formality of it; it is a deception. It is to give you a feeling that the society is religious and you need not go beyond the society to seek religion.Religion is always beyond society because religion is always alive; it is not of the mind. Society is always of the mind; it is an order maintained by the mind. Religion is not an order maintained by the mind. Religion is a discipline, loose and natural. It is not that you maintain it and manipulate it; rather, on the contrary, you lose yourself in the riverlike phenomenon and the river takes possession.The mind is the corrupter, but it corrupts very diplomatically. It corrupts in such subtle ways that it is very difficult for you to even be conscious of what is going on. For example, something in a certain moment is true; then the mind clings onto it and it says, “When it was true in that moment it must be true forever because truth is eternal.” And I tell you: nothing changes like truth, that’s why it is eternal. If it doesn’t change then it will die any day. It changes so continuously that it cannot die because change means a renewal of life energy.Truth is eternal, but not nonchanging. Truth is eternal because of eternal change. It renews itself continuously. It never allows anything dead into itself; it simply throws it out. It never accumulates the dead parts because death descends through those dead parts. The mind will die, the mind will have to die because it accumulates death. Life never dies because it goes on changing.Remember this: truth is not permanent, it is eternal. And it is eternal because it is not permanent. It is eternal because it is constantly changing. Through change it survives. Through change it becomes new. Through constantly changing it becomes elusive to death; death cannot take hold of it.The mind has its own logical forms which are absurd if you know what life is. But if you don’t know life, then the mind has its own logic. And the logic seems absolutely solid, absolutely error-proof. Look for this. The mind says this has been true, so it must be true now and forever. Yes, the Koran was true; it was true in a particular situation. The situation was the merger of the soul, of the individuality of Mohammed into the whole. In that moment a song was born. It was true – it was as true as the parrots chattering, the trees flowering, the sun moving. But that moment went, Mohammed disappeared and the unity that existed in that moment is no longer there. Now the Koran is a dead burden just like the Gita, the Vedas, the Bible.Whatever I am saying to you is true this moment. Tomorrow it will become a dead burden. Don’t carry it. Live it; if you can, live it right now. Enjoy, if you can, enjoy it with me right now. Celebrate it! This very moment let your consciousness meet…Live it. If you can, live it this very moment, enjoy and celebrate it. Let it go deep in you, it can transform you. Be pregnant with it – but this very moment! Don’t postpone it until tomorrow because tomorrow it will not be valid any longer. Nothing can be valid beyond this moment. The mind says that if something is valid today it will be valid tomorrow. That’s how traditions are born. That’s how very meaningful things become meaningless, absurd. That’s how beauty is reduced to ugliness.Krishna talking to Arjuna was one of the pinnacles of human consciousness. But the Gita? – the Gita is just a memory, it won’t help you. Krishna has to be encountered immediately, directly. You will have to become an Arjuna, and you will have to seek your own Krishna. And remember: you will not be the same Arjuna. How can you be? You have a totally different being, a totally different quality of being. How can you be the old Arjuna again? No, you never will be.You will never find the Krishna that Arjuna could find. You will have to find your own Krishna, one with whom you can meet and merge; one with whom you can have such a unity that the disciple doesn’t feel anymore that he is the disciple, and the master has forgotten that he is the master. Nobody knows who is who. In such a deep participation of being, again the song is born. Gita means the song; Bhagavad Gita means the divine song. Again the Gita is born, but the same words will not be repeated because this time Krishna is different and this time Arjuna is different – how can the same words be repeated?God is infinite; he need not repeat. He is not yet exhausted. He need not repeat himself. That will be a very poor God if he again recites the Gita. That will not even be a God, not even worth listening to. Something new will again happen, and this new may not be consistent with the old. There arises the problem of the real religious man and the false, pseudo-religious man.The pseudo-religious man will always stick to the past, to the old, and the real religious man will always move with the new. And this is the paradox: moving with the new, you will attain all that is hidden in the old; and clinging to the old, you will miss all that is hidden in the old and hidden in the new. The new is always the door of God. He goes on making new doors for you as you travel along; he always goes on opening new doors for you. Don’t ask for the old doors.The mind always asks for the old doors. If I say something to you, you immediately start comparing – whether it is written in the Gita, the Koran, the Bible. If it is written there, your head nods; you say, “Right.” If it is not written there, suddenly you are closed; you are not nodding, you are not saying yes. And I tell you that whatever is written is already irrelevant, it has already passed, it is no longer meaningful. One has to seek the meaning constantly. The very search for the meaning is a growth for your situation.Now, this beautiful parable. Each word has to be understood. It is a parable with many meanings pregnant in it.A man once hurt his leg. He had to walk with a crutch.That’s how religions are born.I know a man, a friend, a childhood friend. He was a very good doctor. Then he had an accident; he accidentally fell off a train. Something changed in his head. His head was hurt; for three days he was unconscious, and when he became conscious again he had a totally different personality. He had always been a very angry man – that anger disappeared. Something was broken in the brain, some energy pattern changed. He became very silent, very nonaggressive, very peace-loving. When people started asking him how it happened, he said, “It happened in a fast-moving train. You jump and hit your head on the earth. It has happened this way to me, so why not to you?”When I heard this I went to see him. I said, “What are you doing? What are you telling people?”He said, “But this is how it happened to me. I had tried and tried not to be angry, and nothing happened. Suddenly, by accident,” he said to me, “a key has been given to me.”But I said, “Keep this key secret and hidden. Don’t give it to anybody. Accidents cannot be repeated.”This is how many traditions are born. Buddha was sitting in a particular posture. It was accidental. Enlightenment has no choice for a particular posture. It has happened when people were resting, lying down; it has happened when people were walking; it has happened… People were carrying water and it happened. It has happened in all sorts of postures. Enlightenment has no choice. It doesn’t depend on the body posture. But Buddha was sitting in siddhasana, the Buddha posture, and now Buddhists have been following that for two thousand years: sitting in that posture, waiting for enlightenment to happen. Foolish people, but they are in abundance everywhere.This is how all yoga postures were born: something happened in a particular posture, and that posture became very important. People go on trying gymnastics, forcing their bodies this way and that, and they think that in a certain posture a certain thing is going to happen. There is no relevance in it. Sitting on a chair, enlightenment is possible. There is no need to make a form too meaningful and significant; otherwise, you will be obsessed with it.People go to the Himalayas because many people became enlightened there, but it can happen anywhere. Godliness is everywhere, there is no need to go to the Himalayas. Many teachers in the world go on prospering just because they did something and something happened to them. It may not happen to another because individuals are different; they are as different as they can be.My insistence is always that you will have to seek after something, something which no tradition can supply to you. You will have to seek your own path, your own method. You can try with many methods, just to have a feel which method will be more suitable for you. Then too no method, no generalized form of any method, can be of much help. By and by, you will have to evolve your own individual method. It is just like the print of your thumb – it is unique. Nobody else has that type of thumb all over the world. Not now, no, not even in the past, has anybody ever had that thumb. And nobody will ever have it in the future. You are a unique signature of the divine.No general method can help you. Generalized forms are good to try to begin with, but one has to evolve his own style, one has to evolve his own method. Something has to be added, something has to be deleted, and by and by you have to create your own system around you. The path is not already there; you have to walk and create the path. That’s how a master helps people. He will give them a generalized form to work with, just to feel their being, how it fits, how much it fits, whether it fits or doesn’t fit at all.That’s why I have created many methods, and I will go on creating many methods; it will depend on the people coming to me. Whenever a new person comes to me I start thinking about something new for him. Many methods are needed so you can feel with every method and create an individual pattern of your own.A man once hurt his leg. He had to walk with a crutch. This crutch was very useful to him, both for walking and many other things.You can rest on it whenever you feel tired. You can scare stray dogs following you with your crutch. If it is necessary you can fight; the crutch can become a weapon. So many other uses also. The man found that the pain disappeared, and he felt very restful. He had found a mantra, a TM, a transcendental meditation. He started teaching it, he started helping people. People are in pain, hurt; they need crutches. And there are many other uses also.He taught all his family to use crutches, and they became part of normal life.It was part of everyone’s ambition to have a crutch. Some were made of ivory, others adorned with gold. Schools were opened to train people in their use, university chairs endowed to deal with the highest aspects of this science.Fools abound – and they are always ready to be taught. You cannot find a man – however idiotic he may be – who cannot find a few disciples. People are ready because people are in misery. They want something, some method, some path, some technique, to overcome their misery. That’s why they become victims of many unnecessary things, not only unnecessary, irrelevant; not only irrelevant, positively harmful.A few, very few, people, started to walk without crutches.It is very difficult to go against the society. It is very, very difficult because the society will create many, many hindrances, obstacles. It will punish you if you go against it. It will appreciate you, honor you if you go with it. It will help your ego if you go with it. If you don’t go with it, it will destroy your ego. Many people knowingly – knowing well that this is foolish – simply go on, because why create unnecessary trouble? They make compromises.This story seems to be an exaggeration; such an absurd thing, you think. It is not. This has already happened. You think, “Why and how is it possible? People who are walking normally already, how can they be seduced to use crutches?” They have been seduced. You are those people. Just try to forget this story!Anger is natural because you have not created it; you are born with it, endowed by nature. And nature must have some use for it, otherwise it cannot be given to you. But the society is against it; it says to suppress it. And when you suppress anger, many more things are suppressed by it. Everything is interrelated in your inner being. You cannot suppress one thing; you cannot express one thing. You express one, millions are expressed; you suppress one, millions are suppressed.A man who suppresses anger will have to suppress his love. Then he will become afraid of love because whenever love is expressed anger is also expressed. In fact, lovers are always angry toward each other – as angry as no enemies can be. They are intimate enemies. They love and they become angry also. They know that love is so deep that anger will not be destructive to it – and it never is. It is destructive only if there is no love in the first place; otherwise, it is not. If love is not there, why call anger destructive? It simply reveals the truth.If love is there in the first place, nothing can destroy it, everything helps – even anger becomes a part of the harmony. And when you love a person and become angry, after the anger, when the storm has gone, silence follows. You become more loving after the moment of anger; after the mood of anger much love comes to the surface. You have to compensate: you were angry, love flows in – and this is a rhythm. Lovers fight and then love. In fact, love is a very, very intimate fight.I have heard…I was once passing down a street and three urchin boys were looking through a keyhole. The first one looked in and said, “They are fighting, the husband and wife.”Another one looked and laughed and said, “You fool! They are not fighting, they are making love.”And the third one looked and said, “Yes, they are making love – and very badly.”Love is a fight, and it is a rhythm. In anger you go apart; the farther you go from your beloved or lover, the more the urge comes to come nearer. It is just like hunger: when you feel hungry then you eat, and then there is a great satiety. Without hunger you can eat – all rich people do that – but then there is no satiety. Rather, on the contrary, when they have eaten they feel burdened, heavy, dead. The same can happen with love. If you are never angry with your lover you will be eating without hunger; sooner or later you will be fed up.Nobody falls apart through anger. It is a rhythm: one goes away and comes back. Again and again you rediscover the beloved. Again and again a mini-honeymoon, every day. And love grows through it. If you suppress anger, love will be suppressed. If you express love, anger will be expressed. But the society is against anger; that’s why the society is against love also. No society is for love, they are for marriage. Marriage is not love. Marriage is an institution created by the mind. Love… Love is a storm created by nature, and you cannot institutionalize a storm.People who live in marriage live in an institution just like a prison – nothing of the heart; other considerations, but nothing of the heart. Money has been considered, the family has been considered; in fact, societies try that the lovers themselves should not be allowed to choose and decide because youth is not reliable. Only old people are reliable because when they are old they have a mind, an experienced mind – calculating, clever, cunning. So the father or, if you have a grandfather, he should decide. So far so good. Or even stars can decide, nothing is wrong in it; you can go to the astrologer and the stars can decide. That’s okay – but you should not decide yourself because if you decide, then with the very act of your falling in love you are falling out of society.Lovers are no longer part of the society. Have you seen lovers? If somebody is in love with someone, they both move as a society in themselves. They don’t bother about you; they want to be left alone. They don’t want to go to the club, they don’t want to go to the temple, to the church – no. They have found their church, they have found their temple, they have found their club; they are satisfied with each other. They would like, really, that the whole world should disappear and that they are left alone on the whole naked earth.Love is against society. Society is against love. And love is so natural. Marriage is a crutch, love is walking on your own legs. Marriage is a crutch, marriage makes you crippled; you are no longer an independent being, your individuality is lost. You are a member of the society but no longer an individual. An individual is not a member of anything; an individual exists as an individual.You will be surprised why these Sufis created this parable. They have created it meaningfully. All nature has been crippled. Whatever is natural, the society is against it. Whatever is natural, they condemn it and they say it is animalistic. They make you cultured, conditioned, superficial. They give you a plastic being, a plastic flower. The plastic flower has its own appeal: the appeal is because a real flower is always in danger and the plastic flower is never in danger. Marriage has an appeal. If you insist on love, then there will be more and more divorces in the world. If there is marriage there is no divorce because when you have never been in love how can you fall out of it?Marriage is secure. A real flower in the morning is alive, by the evening is gone. A plastic flower stays, stays put; it seems permanent. Permanence should not rule your mind, it should not be a value; otherwise, you will never be able to move toward existence. Enjoy a thing while it is there. When it is no longer there, forgive and forget and move on. That’s how one grows.A few, very few, people started to walk without crutches. This was considered scandalous, absurd. Besides, there were so many uses for crutches.The people who insist on unnatural, artificial life patterns always insist that they have uses. They always say that marriage is useful: useful for the family, for the children, for the society, useful for everybody – but love is dangerous. And what is the use of love? What will you do out of it? It has no utility. For them it is just a romance, an emotionalism, sentimentalism. It has no use. It is not a commodity. You cannot sell it in the market; you cannot profit by it. On the contrary, you will lose much because of it. That’s why clever people say love is blind, cunning people say love is mad – it has no use!But this has to be understood: life has no use. Always remember that whenever you start thinking about any utility you are missing. Utility is needed, but it cannot be the goal. Utility can be sacrificed, but the non-utilitarian cannot be sacrificed. The non-utilitarian – love, meditation, prayer – they are the real goals. Through them you reach toward the divine.What is the use of meditation? What can you earn out of it? Nothing. What is the use of dance? Nothing. You cannot eat, you cannot drink, you cannot make a shelter out of dancing: it seems non-utilitarian. All that is beautiful and true is non-utilitarian.A few try to revolt. A few Buddhas, a few Christs, they revolt and they want to bring you back to nature. But the people who are supporting the establishment always say, “What is the use of it?” People come to me and they ask, “What is the use of meditation? Even if we meditate, even if we attain it, what profit, what does one gain out of it?” You will miss godliness because godliness cannot become a utility. Godliness is not a commodity, it is a celebration. And what is life if you don’t have any celebration in it? What is life? It will be a desert.In order to overcome the prejudices, some of the people who could walk without support began to behave in a totally different way from established society.They started being natural. They started walking on their own feet. When you start one revolution, millions start. If you can revolt in one way against society, you will suddenly become aware that many more things are there which have to be thrown out. The society has made you a junkyard. Once you know that one thing is wrong, you will be able to know many things are wrong. One starts a chain reaction.Meditation is my way to create the chain reaction. Once you start meditating, many things will follow because the more you become aware and silent, the more you will be able to see how the society has been killing you, poisoning you; how the society has been murderous. They all say that they want to help you. In fact, they murder you just to save you: “It is for your benefit that the society exists.” But it has simply poisoned your whole being. The very source-spring of your being has been poisoned.In order to overcome the prejudices, some of the people who could walk without support began to behave in a totally different way from established society. Still they remained few.When it was found that, having used crutches for so many generations, few people could in fact walk without crutches, the majority “proved” that they were necessary.This is how the vicious circle moves in the world. First you create a pattern, you force the pattern, and then in the end the victim cannot live without the pattern. Then you have “proved” it: “Look! Nobody can walk without crutches.” You never allow anybody to walk without crutches. Every child is given many, many prejudices, and whenever he tries to live without prejudices, he will find it very difficult. They have become ingrained, inbuilt, they have moved into the very blueprint of his being. He will feel difficulties; he himself will say that it is impossible to walk. Try to walk on crutches for three years and then you will not be able to walk without them. You will become “proof” that nobody can walk. This is how the prejudices continue. They have been implanted for thousands of years and they have gone into your blood and your bones.Whenever you feel a sexual urge immediately a guilt feeling comes in; it has become inbuilt. If you look at a beautiful woman or a beautiful man and you feel an upsurge of energy, nothing is wrong in it. It is a response. It is natural: a beautiful person is there – it will be very insulting if no energy arises in you. If the society was natural it would accept the fact, and the woman would thank you that your face became red: such a beautiful compliment, and you were trembling.But no, you will hide the fact; you will not look at the woman. And the more you try not to look, the more nature rebels against it, and then guilt arises that you are immoral. When you see a flower and say it is beautiful, you are not immoral. But when you see a human face and say it is beautiful, why do you suddenly become immoral? What is immoral in it? Why can’t you appreciate it?For centuries sex has been condemned, but your sex is the source of all your energies. Because of condemned sex, all your energies have been condemned. If you become active in one part of your energy, then other parts will also be rising with it. So you have been forced to live with low energy. Then you say life seems a lethargy, no enjoyment out of it, no vitality. You seem to be continuously exploited and you don’t have any energy left to live. Life should be radiant, life should be overflowing – and the very source is sex.Unless you accept your sexuality you will never be at ease with yourself because your sexuality is such a deep force. You are born out of it, your every cell belongs to it, your very energy is sexual. And whenever you allow it, the same energy will transform into love. The same energy will go higher and higher and will transform into prayer. Once suppressed, there is no possibility of meditation, or prayer either, because what will be transformed? You will always be afraid.It happens every day. People come to me and the moment they start meditations they feel an upsurge of sexual energy; they become very afraid and scared. They say, “We have never been like that. What is happening? What has gone wrong? Are we doing something wrong in meditation? – because we feel so sexual.” This should be a beautiful, good indication. Life is coming back, life is arising again, life is again flowing from the frozen sources.Of course, sex will be the basic center which will be hit first because there you have suppressed it. It is uncoiling. It’s as if a spring has been suppressed under a weight, now the weight is removed and the spring jumps. This is beautiful. This shows that the meditation is functioning. But you wanted otherwise. You wanted meditation to suppress sex. Then you have come to a wrong person. Then go to the old poisoners, the old life-negators. They will give you meditations so you can suppress more. But you will always remain divided, and you will always be in discord, and the ultimate harmony will never be possible.I am trying to create a unity within you so the suppressed part is accepted back, the suppressed part is reabsorbed back into the total being because without it you will not be able to move.Sex is your legs – the lowest part, yes, I know – but without your legs your head cannot move. The lowest, I know, but the highest depends on the lowest. If the lowest is moving, the highest will move soon: with sex, soon love will arise. When love arises, sex disappears because the same energy becomes love. Then for the first time the real brahmacharya, the authentic virginity, happens to you.Sex simply disappears; it has become love. Then love rises higher, becomes prayer; then love also disappears, then it has become prayer. And prayer is the culmination, in prayer you are fulfilled. But it has to start from the very base, from the natural. From the natural to the supernatural, but not against the natural.When it was found that, having used crutches for so many generations, few people could in fact walk without crutches, the majority “proved” that they were necessary.“Here,” they said, “here is a man. Try to make him walk without a crutch. See? – he cannot.”“But we are walking without crutches,” the ordinary walkers reminded them.“This is not true; merely a fancy of your own,” said the cripples because by that time they were becoming blind as well – blind because they would not see.I have been telling people: accept your nature, and the very acceptance becomes a deep transformation, you will be transfigured. Sometimes old sannyasins come to me, traditional sannyasins belonging to a Jaina faith or a Buddhist faith or a Hindu faith. They listen to me and they say, “It is not possible! We have been suppressing sex and it has not gone – and you say accept it and it will go?” Their logic is apparently clear. They say, “We have been suppressing and fighting our whole life, and it has not gone. And here you are saying, ‘Don’t suppress it. Accept and it will go.’”Their logic is clear. They say, “How can it go without fighting when it has not gone with so much fight?” They say, “No, it is not possible. We have tried and it won’t move even an inch backward. And we have put our whole life at stake. And here you are teaching such a simple thing. Are we fools? It won’t go.”And I say to them, “Look at me. It has gone!”This is what they feel, whether they say it to me or not: they say, “It must be your fancy. You must be imagining.” This is not true; merely a fancy of your own. The ego dies hard – and they cannot see it.I tell them, “Be with me, see me, observe me, watch me – all that you are seeking has happened!” They say, “It must be some …fancy of your own. Realization is not possible in this age and time. It is written in the scriptures that no man can become enlightened in Kali Yuga. In this age of technology, no one can become enlightened. So how can you become enlightened?” I say, “Look at me and watch and be close to me and be intimate, and feel it.”They are not ready for it. Their scriptures say something else, so I must be deluding myself, I must be in a dream, I must be imagining.It is not just that it is so with me; it has been always so. When Buddha became enlightened, the same people went to Buddha and they said, “No, it is not possible. It is not possible. How can you become enlightened? Many millions of lives are needed; it is written in the scriptures. And what have you done, what austerities, what tapascharya? What yoga have you followed? Sitting under the bodhi tree and suddenly you declare you have become enlightened! Where is the proof? You must be imagining.” They have not taken note of many enlightened people. Mahavira: Hindu scriptures never mention him because they never believed that he became enlightened. The ego dies hard.When you live in a plastic, artificial world, forced, somehow disciplined, imposed upon, by and by you also become blind because when you don’t use your eyes they lose the capacity to see. And a man who is prejudiced avoids using his eyes because, who knows, the fact may not prove his prejudice. So he avoids; he will not look. Or, even if he looks he will interpret it in such a way that the fact is no longer there; he has created a fiction around it.People who are too prejudiced… And all people are: somebody is a Hindu, somebody is a Mohammedan, somebody is a Christian – they are prejudiced people. Without knowing, they have already decided what is true. Without experiencing, they have already come to conclusions. They avoid looking directly. And when you continuously avoid, of course you lose the capacity to see. You become blind. “This is not true; merely a fancy of your own,” said the cripples because by that time they were becoming blind as well – blind because they would not see.If you want to see you have to die to your ego because that ego won’t allow you to see, to be natural, to allow the fact to emerge.Die to the ego. Die to the past.And the Sufi saying is right: you cannot have anything from me until you die. Die! It is hard, but it is the only way. “You cannot have anything from me until you die.”Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-04/

A man came to the great teacher Bahauddin and asked for help in his problems, and guidance on the path of teaching.Bahauddin told him to abandon spiritual studies and leave his court at once.A kind-hearted visitor began to remonstrate with Bahauddin.“You shall have a demonstration,” said the sage.At that moment a bird flew into the room, darting hither and thither, not knowing where to go in order to escape.The Sufi waited until the bird had settled near the only open window of the chamber and then suddenly clapped his hands.Alarmed, the bird flew straight through the opening of the window, to freedom.Then Bahauddin said: “To him that sound must have been something of a shock, even an affront, don’t you agree?”There is an old story…In Thailand there exists a very ancient temple. And the myth goes that in the beginning of creation, God became angry with an angel. The angel had committed some disobedience, and it was so grave that God threw him onto the earth and told him that he would have to live as an invisible snake in this ancient temple.The temple has a tower with one hundred steps, and every pilgrim that comes to the temple has to go to the tower – that is part of the pilgrimage.God said to this angel, “You will have to live on the first step of the tower, and every pilgrim who comes, you will have to move with him.”In Thailand they divide human consciousness into one hundred steps, and the snake would be able to go with the pilgrim only up to the point where his consciousness existed. If he had attained the twentieth step of consciousness, then the snake would be able to follow up to the twentieth; if to the fiftieth, then the fiftieth. And God said, “If you can reach thrice to the last step, then you will be freed of your sin.”The myth goes that, up to now, only once has the snake been able to reach the hundredth. At least ten thousand pilgrims come every day to the ancient temple. Millennia have passed, pilgrims and pilgrims, and the snake has to follow every pilgrim. Sometimes, rarely, it can reach up to the twenty-fifth; very, very rarely up to the fiftieth, and only once to the hundredth. Then it falls back again to the first step.Now the snake has become very, very depressed; there seems to be no hope. Only once up until now, and he has to reach the hundredth three times. Only then will he be freed of the sin.The myth is beautiful. It says many things. One: among millions of people, only once does it happen that a man becomes enlightened. To become enlightened is difficult, but there is a greater difficulty that I would like to tell you about. Among millions, one person becomes enlightened, and among thousands of enlightened persons, one person becomes a master. To become a master is almost impossible. To become enlightened you have to work with yourself, your barriers, your hindrances – but your own. To become a master you have to work with others’ barriers, hindrances. To work with oneself is so difficult. To work with somebody else is almost impossible.Many buddhas have existed, but once in a while a buddha becomes a master. The name of Gautama the Buddha is famous just because of his being a master. Millions of buddhas preceded him, but they were not masters.It happened…One day somebody asked Buddha, “You have almost fifty thousand sannyasins around you. How many of them have become like you?” Buddha is reported to have said that many had. But the questioner was puzzled. He said, “If many of them have become like you, why does nobody know about them?”Buddha said, “They have become enlightened, but they are not masters. They are just like me, they exist on the same plane of being – that is one thing. But to persuade another to bring his consciousness to the same plane is a difficult art.”To persuade the other toward higher peaks of being is almost impossible because the other will create all sorts of resistance. And the more you try to pull him up, the more his ego will be there to resist. The ego will enjoy falling down more and more. The ego will be the enemy. The other is identified with his own ego; he thinks he is the ego. So when a master tries to transform or help, the other creates all sorts of barriers in order not to be helped.Teachers are many, masters are few. Teachers are very cheap. You can get them a rupee a dozen because to be a teacher is nothing. You need a little intellectual capacity to understand things, a little capacity to explain things. If you are a little articulate you can become a teacher. Scriptures are there: you can memorize them. With a little practice you can attain a certain logical penetration into things. You can silence people, you can prove things. And many will be attracted because people live in their intellectual center; they live in their heads.A teacher is a head-oriented person, more heady than you. He can impress you, but that impression will not lead you anywhere. You will remain in the same rut. He himself is nowhere. A teacher is a man who teaches without knowing what he is teaching. A teacher is a man who talks about things he has not known, who talks about worlds with no experience. He has not tasted anything of the unknown. He may have tasted many things of the Vedas, the Koran, the Bible, the Upanishads, he may have gathered much knowledge, but knowing he has none. But you can adjust to a teacher very easily because he is of the same type; he belongs to the same level of being as you, to the same plane. Teachers become very, very influential. They lead great movements. Millions are attracted to them because they talk the language that you can understand.Masters cannot lead big movements – almost impossible. In fact, by the time they become known they are no longer here; by the time people come to hear about them they are gone. Then they are worshipped for thousands of years, but that worship won’t help much. To be impressed with a master is difficult because that means dying to your own ego. To allow a master to work on you is very courageous: you open your heart, you become vulnerable. Nobody knows where he is leading; you have to trust. Logic is not of much help, only love. And love is rare. Everybody is logical, but who is loving? Everybody has a cunning intellect, but who has a trusting heart? This is the first thing to be understood before we can enter this story.Sufis don’t believe in teachings and teachers. This man Bahauddin is one of the greatest masters. The master does not teach, he demonstrates. His whole being is a demonstration. He opens new dimensions and he invites you to look through these new dimensions, new vistas, new windows. He demonstrates, he does not teach. And even if he teaches, it is just to persuade your intellect to come to his window from where things have a totally different look. And a master has to be skilled in the greatest art – the art of the human heart – because the problems are subtle, very complicated and complex.For example: a person comes to me. He is ready to take the jump; he thinks he is ready to take the jump, but he is not ready. And I see that this is not the right moment for him. If he takes the jump he will miss. I have to persuade him to wait; I have to persuade him to wait for the right moment. I have to divert his mind; I have to give him some other occupation so he forgets, at least for the present, about the final jump. He will be ready one day, and everything comes in its own season.You cannot force a phenomenon like enlightenment, you cannot manipulate it. You have to wait for it. It comes when it comes, it comes on its own. In fact, there is no way to force it; you cannot control it. All that you can do is to learn how to wait lovingly: how to wait, how to trust. When the right moment comes, it will happen.Somebody comes. He says he is ready, he thinks he is ready, but I see he is not ready. So I have to divert his mind. I have to give him something to play with so time can pass and he becomes ripe. He thinks he is ready: it is not really thinking, it is the ego. He says, “Right now, help me.”Then there is somebody else who thinks he is not ready. Thinking is not of much value in the world of the innermost. Somebody is there who is not ready but thinks he is ready. Somebody is there who is ready but thinks he is not ready. Him, I have to persuade – in fact seduce – to take the jump. He hesitates, he’s afraid. He says he is not ready. “What are you doing? Why are you forcing me? Why are you haunting me?” But I know that he is ready, and if this moment is lost, it may be many years before the next moment comes again or it may be many lives.At a certain point the whole of existence is ready to accept you, but you hesitate. This moment may not be there again soon. Maybe a life passes, or many lives, then again a moment comes. I have to watch. I don’t listen to you. I cannot. I have to go on doing my own thing. I cannot listen to you because you don’t know what you are saying. You don’t know what is happening to you; you are in confusion. If I listen to you I will not be of any help to you. I have to go on my own, and I have to create a feeling in you that I am listening to you, I have to go on persuading you that it is according to you that everything is being done.Sometimes I see it will be good for you to stop all meditations because with your mind even meditation can become a strain and it can become the barrier. Sometimes I have to force you exactly against yourself into meditation because unless there is a certain strain in you, a tension, the transformation will not be possible. The art is very subtle. You need a certain tension, just as when an arrow is put on the bow a certain tension is needed, otherwise the arrow will not be thrown. But too much tension can break the bow.Meditation is needed, with vigorous effort, but you don’t know where to start and where to stop; that I have to watch. So sometimes I will say to you, “Stop meditations,” and you cannot understand, because I continually teach, “Meditate!” And sometimes I have to say, “Go into meditation,” and then you cannot understand because I continually teach that no effort is needed – it will come when it comes, it is a happening.Try to understand my situation. And I have to work with many, so I will be making many contradictory statements. I will say something to one and just the opposite to the other because both are different. So whatever I say is personal. When I say it to you, I say it to you, not to anybody else. And when I say it to you, it is not only personal, it is also momentary because tomorrow you will have changed and then something else will be said to you. It is a continuous response, an alive response.A teacher is dead, he has a dead teaching. He doesn’t bother about you; you don’t matter. He has a teaching, he continues. He is more focused on the teaching, less focused on you – in fact, not focused at all. A teacher is a madman. The teaching is important. The teaching exists not for man, man exists for the teaching, the doctrine. But for a master, teachings are toys. Doctrines are good if they help, bad if they don’t help. And sometimes they help and sometimes they don’t help. To some they become a bridge, to some they become a barrier. Man is important.To a master, man is the measure of all things – individual, personal – not men, but human beings, not mankind, but you, in your total personality, in your unique personality. Whatever a master says is addressed to a person, it is a letter. You cannot make a criterion out of it, you cannot make a generalization out of it. All generalizations are false, even this generalization that all generalizations are false!Very subtle is the art. It has to be because it is an effort to transform the human heart, the greatest thing in evolution, the highest peak to which existence has reached. A teacher goes on giving you information about God, about truth, about heaven and hell. A master simply opens his being to you, demonstrates to you what truth is.What am I doing here? I’m drunk with existence, a drunkard, and I allow you to come nearer to me to be drunk with me, to participate. And the closer you come, the drunker you will become. A moment comes when the disciple and the master sit silently. Nobody knows who is the disciple and who is the master. They have come so close, like two flames coming closer and closer and closer. A sudden jump – and the two flames have become one.To understand a master you need to come close. With a teacher you can remain as distant as possible: there is no problem. Closeness is not needed, intimacy is not involved. With a teacher you remain uncommitted. With a master, the final, the utterly final commitment is needed. That is the meaning: “You can’t have anything from me until you die.” That is the meaning of this Sufi saying, because when you die then you are totally committed. Now there is no going back. There is nobody else you can fall back upon.A commitment is a point of no return. Where will you go back to? You have burned the house. A cunning mind would like to be distant – not a participant but an observer. Keeping a distance he keeps his house intact, so if something goes wrong he can go back, he can fall back. But all that is beautiful in life comes through commitment.In the West particularly, commitment has become a wrong word, a taboo word. The moment you hear commitment you become afraid. That’s why, in the West, all that is beautiful and the deepest is disappearing. Love is not possible, only sex is possible. Sex is without involvement, love is a commitment. Sex is between two strangers, love is between two who are intimate – not strangers – who feel an affinity, who are not there just to exploit each other but to grow with each other. A commitment is needed in love. And without love, sex will become futile. It has already become so in the West.Meditation is not possible if you are not committed. You cannot remain a spectator. If you want to be a spectator, then you will remain on the periphery. Commitment leads you to the very center of things. To be with a master is a commitment. It is the highest form of love, the highest form of meditation, the highest form of prayer. In the West, only teachers have existed. In the West, teacher and master are not two totally different words, they are synonymous, they mean the same. That’s why in this story master is translated as teacher. Bahauddin is not a teacher, he is a master. But in English there is no difference between a master and a teacher. In English there exists no word such as guru. It is a deep involvement with a person, such a deep involvement that you are ready to die for it.Love, meditation, prayer, all are deep commitments. And who is afraid of commitment? The ego is afraid of commitment because commitment means no longer coming back. The bridge is broken. You feel afraid. Only the future, the unknown future, is there; the past is no more. You will feel dizzy. And if you look into the eyes of a master you will feel dizzy because he is vacant. It is like an abyss with no bottom to it. You would like to cling to something because there is a danger you will be lost forever. And this is so!But you cannot find yourself unless you are lost. And you cannot be reborn unless you die. A master is a death and a life. A master is a death and a resurrection.Now let us move slowly into this story…A man came to the great master Bahauddin and asked for help in his problems, and guidance on the path of teaching.Bahauddin told him to abandon spiritual studies and leave his court at once.Looks too cruel, too crude. Doesn’t fit with the ideal of a master. The man has come as a seeker; he wants help. He has come as a beggar and it is no behavior on the part of Bahauddin to say, “Abandon spiritual studies and leave this court immediately, right now!” Why is Bahauddin throwing him back? A master exists to help, a master invites people, a master welcomes; he exists for that purpose. Why is Bahauddin then behaving in such a bad way? No one expects such behavior from a master. And the man has only asked for some help with his problems, guidance on the path.A kind-hearted visitor began to remonstrate with Bahauddin.A kind-hearted man must have been there, and he said, “What is this? Explain to me why you behave this way. That man has not done anything wrong. An innocent seeker, and you throw him out – then what is the purpose of your being here? He asks for help and you close the door. He begs, and you are hard.”“You shall have a demonstration,” said the sage.Said Bahauddin, “Wait! There are things which cannot be explained. Wait. You shall have a demonstration.”Only a situation can explain certain things because they become apparent only in an alive situation; an explanation won’t be helpful. And how can you explain? Bahauddin sees something in the seeker which this kind-hearted man cannot see. How can you explain light to a blind man? No explanation will be enough. And whatever you say will look like a rationalization, will look as though you are hard and cruel and now you are trying to rationalize your behavior. Bahauddin said, “Wait. You shall have a demonstration.”At that moment a bird flew into the room, darting hither and thither, not knowing where to go in order to escape.The Sufi waited until the bird settled near the only open window of the chamber, and then suddenly Bahauddin clapped his hands.Alarmed, the bird flew straight through the opening of the window, to freedom.Then Bahauddin said: “To him”– to the bird –“that sound must have been something of a shock, even an affront, do you not agree?”It is a really beautiful situation. Bahauddin is saying many things without saying them. He is saying: the man who has approached was just on the brink of total freedom. He does not need any help. Help will become a bondage to him; he will be burdened by it. He does not need any more teachings; that phase has passed. He is almost ready to fly into the sky, he does not need any training. He needs to be pushed and that’s what I have done. If I had allowed him to be here that would not have been compassion. Throwing him out and closing the door is the compassion. Bahauddin is saying: “I know this man; his heart is absolutely ready. Any moment the bird will be on the wing – now no longer clinging to words, no need for any teachings, no need to understand the path.”It is a need. At a certain phase of spiritual growth you need teachings and all, and you need to be taught about the path. You have to be reassured about it. You need many trainings, but a moment comes when one has to grow above them. First one has to learn many things, and then one has to unlearn. First one has to be taught meditation, and then one has to be taught to throw it into the dustbin. First one has to be brought out of concepts, words, and taught silence. And then a moment comes when you also have to throw out that silence, otherwise that too can become a clinging. You can cling to a thought, you can cling to silence, because then silence is nothing but a thought of silence. How do you know you have become silent? It is again a thought. How do you know that now you are happy? It is again a thought. And if there is happiness and the feeling of being happy and the thought, then somewhere in the background there must be unhappiness lurking and waiting as a shadow.First one has to drop unhappiness and then happiness also; otherwise happiness itself will become a prison. And you are so skilled in creating prisons. You can create a prison out of anything, even out of godliness. You have created prisons – your churches, temples, mosques, gurdwaras. Out of the divine you have created imprisonments for yourself, out of beautiful scriptures. The Upanishads are beautiful, their poetry is the purest. But nobody reads the Upanishads for poetry, you read the Upanishads for doctrine. They have become a prison. As poetry they are beautiful, they are wonderful. As poetry, incomparable – there is nothing you can compare them with.Just now I was reading an interview by a journalist with J. Krishnamurti. I don’t think the journalist could follow what he was saying. Krishnamurti said, “I have read the New Testament. It is beautiful poetry and I loved it, but as a scripture I get bored with it.” He is absolutely right. One should read the Bible; it is really one of the greatest literary accomplishments of the ages. And the New Testament is simply superb. Nowhere else can you find words so pregnant with significance, but not with meaning. The moment meaning comes in, poetry is lost; it has become a doctrine. Significance, but no meaning. Grandeur, beauty, but no dogma.Out of the Upanishads, the New Testament, the Koran – such beauty! If you can sing, beautiful; if you think, you have lost the track. If you can sing the Koran, nothing is so beautiful. Have you seen somebody reciting the Koran? It is something to be recited, to be sung, enjoyed. You can dance, that’s okay, but don’t think about it. The moment you think, a Mohammedan is born, a fanatical Mohammedan. If you love, enjoy, dance, sing, a Sufi is born. And a Sufi is farthest from a Mohammedan, the farthest possible. If you sing the Upanishads, a Sufi is born. If you believe in the Upanishads, a Hindu is born – a dead Hindu, rotten to the roots.You are so skilled in making imprisonments for yourself that everything that falls into your hands becomes a chain. Even a Buddha, a Jesus, they come to liberate you, they try to liberate you, and finally they become a bondage because of you.This man who reached Bahauddin was ready, ripe to fall from the tree. Not even the slightest help was needed. Bahauddin could have allowed this man to sit in his court, to become part of it, to become a disciple, but that would not have been compassion and no Bahauddin can allow that. But on the surface he looks unkind; he looks as if he is without any compassion. A seeker comes and you close the door in his face.Remember: that is the difference between kindness and compassion. Kindness is something understood on the surface. Even an ignorant man can be kind, even a foolish man can be kind, even a criminal can be kind, a sinner can be kind. Kindness is just a value on the surface of the mind. An ignorant man cannot be compassionate; that’s not possible. It is a quality that happens when the center has been achieved. When you are centered, then compassion happens. And compassion may not always look like kindness, remember. Compassion may sometimes look very unkind.The kind man, the kind-hearted visitor, remonstrated with Bahauddin: “What have you done?” Bahauddin sees something which the kind-hearted cannot see. He has seen the man just on the brink of the abyss. If he is thrown out he will be liberated. If he is allowed… And he is ready, he has come to seek discipleship. If he had gone to a teacher, a teacher would have been very kind-hearted, he would have received him. A teacher would have initiated him, but not a master, because a master is there to help you to be totally free. If he initiates you it is just as a step, it is not the end. Finally, eventually, he is going to throw you into the open sky.Once you are ready you will be thrown into the open sky. A master’s house is just a training place where you get ready, but it is not the final home. It is where you get ready, and then the master throws you into the sky because there is the final home, in total freedom, in moksha. A master is helpful just on the way. In front of the temple of the divine he will suddenly leave you. In front of the temple of the divine he will push you in, and if you look back you will no longer find him. He will not be there because with the divine you have to be alone. The work of the master is completed.But this man was already on the brink. He could not know it. How can you know that you are on the brink? You have never been on the brink before, so how can the mind understand? This man who is on the brink does not know. He has never been in this state before, so how can he recognize it? He is seeking support, not knowing that now there is no need for support. And if he is allowed to sit, many more things will happen which can be dangerous.I know that if Bahauddin allows him to sit, this man may fall in love with Bahauddin – it is difficult not to fall in love with Bahauddin – and that love will become a bondage. You are so skilled, you are so efficient… So it is better to be hard from the beginning. If even for a single moment the man is allowed, it will be difficult for him to leave Bahauddin. The man should not be given even a glimpse of Bahauddin’s heart, his love, his compassion. Bahauddin must show him a very hard face so he never thinks about him again.This was what Gurdjieff was doing to many disciples and they couldn’t understand because in the West it is difficult to understand. The East has its own ways. Gurdjieff was a Sufi. He was taught by many Sufi masters, he went to many Sufi monasteries, he lived with many Sufis, and he had the attitude of a Sufi. But in the West the understanding is not there. Sufi symbols, Sufi demonstrations are not meaningful.I was reading a book written by a disciple of Gurdjieff – a woman, a very talented musician – and she writes that Gurdjieff was angry about something she was told not to do and she had done. He was very angry and he told her: “This is the end; never come back again and never come to see me.” Of course the woman left him, but she left as a Westerner, and missed. She thought, “This man is not yet enlightened; otherwise, why is he so angry?”You judge according to your own criteria. “Why is he so angry over such an ordinary thing? If I have disobeyed in such a trivial thing, he could have forgiven me. Great masters are forgiveness, embodied forgiveness. Buddha is compassion, and Jesus forgives even his enemies, the murderers who killed him – he forgives them. And I have not committed anything like that. Just a small thing he has said, and I have not followed, but there seems to be no reason to be so angry.”She had lived for almost twenty years with Gurdjieff; a disciple of twenty years’ standing simply thrown out and the door closed. And Gurdjieff said, “Never see me again. If you want to see me, only then when I am dead.” The ego was hurt, and she never went to see Gurdjieff again. She went only when he was dead – but she missed.What was Gurdjieff saying? If this had happened in the East, where through a long, long inner disciplehood, an inner discipline of many people… It would have been totally different. What was Gurdjieff saying in fact? He was saying: “Either come dead to see me, or come to see me when I am dead; otherwise there is no point.” But that was implied. So she waited for twenty years. When Gurdjieff died, then she went to pay her homage. She could have been dead herself. That was a situation.Gurdjieff was not angry because she had disobeyed. That anger was creating a situation; that disobedience was just something to hang it upon. Gurdjieff would have been angry whether she had obeyed or disobeyed; that was irrelevant. He would have found something and would have been angry. That was needed: a hard face, very angry, because a person who has lived with him for twenty years should not be deceived by the surface, should be capable of penetrating deeper, looking into the heart. And in the heart Gurdjieff was so compassionate, so loving, but he had a very hard shell around him.This man who was thrown out, if he had a Western attitude… The story says nothing about him, we don’t know what happened to him; but it will in fact be good to know what is possible. If he had a Western attitude – a Western attitude means an egoistic attitude – if he thought that he had been thrown out because he was not worthy, if his ego was hurt, he would have missed. If he had an Eastern attitude… If the master is angry there must be compassion in it, otherwise why should he get angry? If the master has closed the door there must be meaning in it because by closing this door some other door opens. If the master has said to abandon all spiritual studies and leave his court at once, not even a single moment is to be wasted, that means there is some urgency, urgency in leaving all spiritual studies, the spiritual path, the seeking, everything; there is some urgency.If the attitude had been Eastern, that of a disciple, that of a humble man, of one who is ready to die, that man would have become enlightened – just at that door, just that moment. But it depends. It doesn’t depend only on the master, it depends on the disciple also. It is a subtle cooperation, the subtlest harmony there is.A kind-hearted visitor began to remonstrate with Bahauddin. “You shall have a demonstration,” said the sage. At that moment a bird flew into the room… Every moment birds are flying into the room, every moment situations are flying into the room. Situations are never lacking. If you have the master touch, if you have the master key, everything becomes a situation. You can turn anything into a situation – it becomes a demonstration. A bird flew in, and as it happens – not only with birds but with you too – as it happens with all types of minds…You may have sometimes observed: a bird enters the room. He has entered from the window, so he must know where he has entered. But the moment he has entered he forgets about the window; then he darts hither and thither. He looks very foolish because he has entered and he knows, so why not go out by the same window? Why go hither and thither? And the more hectic, afraid, the bird becomes, the more the source is lost. Then a miracle happens: the bird will go to every wall and knock his head, but not to the window. Don’t laugh at the bird. The bird is poor – poor bird! But the same is the case with you.Every day I encounter people who know how to enter a situation, but don’t know how to get out. You enter a marriage, then it is difficult – how to get out? But you know the window. How did you enter in the first place? Then why not step back? Disillusioned, you want to get out. Why is it so complex? Why can’t you understand the thing and get out? It is very easy to get into a marriage; it is very, very difficult to get out of it. Everybody knows how to get in and nobody knows how to get out. You become angry. You never go to ask anybody how to be angry, but you then come to me and ask, “How to get out of anger?” But how did you get in? The same phenomenon happening: the bird knows how to get into the room, and forgets completely…It seems that somewhere in the mind there is a deceptive mechanism; otherwise, why the problem? It is so apparent. The window is open, the bird has come in, so go out by the same window. But it seems there is an idea in the mind, somewhere in the unconscious, that for going in and for going out different routes are needed. That is the trouble. You get into anxiety and then you ask how to get out. You are in anguish and then you inquire how to get out. But how did you get in?It happened…Mulla Nasruddin was walking with his child, and the child saw an unfamiliar egg lying by the side of the road. And as children do, he asked his father, “I always wonder how the birds enter the egg?”Mulla Nasruddin said, “I also wonder, but I wonder how they get out of it. And I don’t know the answer. I have been wondering my whole life and now you have created a new question. I have not come across the answer as to how they get out of it, and now you have created a new problem: how they get into it.”Somewhere in the unconscious the mind has a deep-rooted mechanism. It feels that there must be two ways: how to get in and how to get out. No, there are not two ways. It is the same: by one door you enter and by the same door you get out. And if you can understand how you get in, you can understand how you get out. So when you become angry, just watch how you are getting into it. Step-by-step, slowly, watch, and suddenly you will be illuminated. You will feel a sudden light – this is the way you have to move backward.The bird entered. At that moment – when Bahauddin said, “Soon I will demonstrate” – a bird flew – entered – into the room, darting hither and thither, not knowing where to go in order to escape. This is the situation of everybody. You have entered life, now you are darting hither and thither not knowing how to escape, where to escape to.All techniques of meditation are nothing but aids to make you aware of how you have come in. It is going backward. When your mind becomes silent you will be able to go backward. You can relive the whole film backward. You move toward childhood, then you move into the womb. Then a moment comes when you see the first thing: how you entered the womb. Your mother and father only created a situation. In that situation you moved in. The window was open; you moved in, and the same is the way to move out.Deeper meditation will reveal to you your whole past, not only of this life but of other lives also. Buddha talks of his many lives: he relates how he was an elephant and how he died, and how he became a hare and how he died, and how he became a lion and how he died – and how he became Siddhartha. Just moving backward you come to the very door by which you entered existence, and that is the door from where you can fly out. But it will need a very, very silent mind, alert, watchful, intelligent.The Sufi waited until the bird settled… In stories like these every word is significant. The Sufi waited until the bird settled… You cannot help a bird out while the bird himself is trying to seek the way out. You cannot; your help will be more of a disturbance to the bird. You will make him more hectic and crazy. He will lose all consciousness if you try to help in that moment. And this is how I have to watch. Many times you come to me and you are so unsettled, so confused, that if I start helping you right now it will confuse you more. I have to wait until you settle, the confusion settles a little, things drop back into the unconscious. By coming to me everybody becomes unsettled. It has to be so because you are entering a totally new way of life.It is as if a house was closed for many years and then you open the door. For years dust has settled in the house. You enter the door and the dust is stirred, and everything becomes cloudy and confused. When you come to me you open a door in your own house that you have closed for many years or many lives; much dust has settled there. When you open the door and a new wind starts blowing, everything is stirred. Everybody who comes to me becomes confused, more confused than he ever was. But this is natural. If in that confusion you escape from me, you have escaped a very potential situation.Many escape. They think that because of me they have become unsettled. No, because of me they have entered their own unconscious. Of course, dust has arisen, the mind has become cloudy; one doesn’t know where one is, what one is. The old identity is lost. A trembling, a feverish state – and you want me to help you immediately. Of course, you think you need help immediately, but if I do something immediately that will stir more dust in you. I will have to postpone a little. I will console you, but I will not do anything. I will promise you, but I will not do anything. I have to be a liar many times because of you; otherwise you won’t be able to understand. I can help you only when the bird has settled, then something can be done. Now the bird is in a situation where something can be of help.The Sufi waited until the bird settled near the only open window of the chamber, and then suddenly clapped his hands. The bird has settled near the window. Now the bird is not so crazy about getting out. When you are too crazy about enlightenment it is not possible. When you are obsessed about meditation it is not possible. When you settle a little, everything becomes possible. When you are in a fever, the first thing is to help you to come out of the fever. Right now nothing else can be done. No other training, no other discipline, is possible right now.So whenever people come to me, I tell them, “Just rest for a few days, settle, feel yourself at home.” Then I can clap my hands. The Sufi – what did he do? Then he: …suddenly clapped his hands. Afraid, scared, shocked, the bird flew out of the window.Alarmed, the bird flew straight through the opening of the window, to freedom. Then Bahauddin said: “To him that sound must have been something of a shock, even an affront, do you not agree?” He asked the kind-hearted man, “What is the attitude of the bird? The clapping of my hands must have been a shock, but that was the only way to help him. It was hard, it must have been an affront, but only through it did the bird achieve freedom. Now he is high in the sky, flying. Now he will be feeling thankful toward me. When I clapped my hands, the bird must have felt angry, the bird must have felt that I am hard, an enemy. The bird was scared, but now, when the bird is on the wing and enjoying the sky again, totally free, now he can be thankful toward me, now he can feel grateful.”Many times I will hurt you. Many times I have already hurt you. Many times you will be shocked. Many times you will see the enemy in me, not the friend. But this is how it is – naturally. I don’t expect anything else right now; it is not possible for you. But when you are on the wing, moving into the infinite sky, then you will understand those hurts, that I had to hurt you. They were not because I was hard; they were the only way to help you. Only then will you feel grateful.It happened…In a Zen monastery in China, a master was celebrating his master’s enlightenment day. His master was dead. In China, a disciple celebrates the enlightenment day of his master only if he is an initiated disciple, otherwise not.People of the nearby villages gathered and they asked the master who was celebrating his master’s enlightenment day, “Why are you celebrating? We never heard that you were ever accepted by the master or initiated. Rather, on the contrary, the rumor goes that when you asked to be initiated he rejected you, you were thrown out. So why are you celebrating?”The master laughed and he said, “Because he rejected me – that’s why. His rejecting was the initiation, but at that time I couldn’t understand it. Had he accepted me, I would not have been enlightened so soon. He rejected me out of deep compassion, and his very rejection was the initiation; in his very rejection he accepted me.“He said, ‘You don’t need it.’ He said, ‘Go away, as far away as possible from me, otherwise you will make a prison out of me.’ And when he rejected me I felt very hurt; I carried the wound for years. And the wound was so painful that I never tried with any other master. I became so afraid. I simply moved to the forest and started sitting on my own. If this compassionate man had rejected me, who would accept me? This was the last shelter and the doors had closed. Now there was no shelter for me.“Feeling unworthy, wounded, hurt, I moved. I never tried, I never knocked on any other master’s door again. I became so scared. But sitting silently, not doing anything, because I didn’t know what to do –the master had rejected me, he had not given me any method, any technique, nothing – feeling lonely, remaining lonely, in the beginning it was sad, in the beginning it was negative. In the beginning I was continuously feeling the rejection. But by and by, sitting silently, the rejection disappeared, sadness disappeared, because how long can you be sad? It comes, it goes.“By and by loneliness disappeared: I became alone. And by and by I started to feel that maybe the master had rejected me just to throw me into my aloneness there in that forest. Maybe he had said that no method was needed – you just sit silently; maybe he had rejected me so that I wouldn’t start clinging to him. By and by the wound was no longer there, it healed, and I started feeling deep love for the master. By and by, the love became trust, and one day suddenly I realized and laughed loudly, a belly laugh, because this master was something strange; he had initiated me through his rejection. That’s why I am celebrating his enlightenment day. I am his disciple. He initiated me through rejection. I have been initiated, I am his disciple, I am enlightened because of him. It would have been cruel had he accepted me.”Subtle are the ways, and you cannot judge with your crude criteria. Your criteria are just on the surface. Alarmed, the bird flew straight through the opening of the window, to freedom. Bahauddin said: “To him that sound must have been something of a shock, even an affront, do you not agree?”And I ask the same to you: Do you not agree? If you feel that the agreement is difficult that means the ego is strong. If you feel that agreement comes, flows into your being, then the ego is not strong. And you cannot have anything from me until you die – don’t you agree?Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-05/

A man came to Bayazid and said that he had fasted and prayed for thirty years and yet had not come near to an understanding of God.Bayazid told him that even a hundred years would not be enough.The man asked why.“Because your selfishness is working as a barrier between yourself and the truth,” said Bayazid.Truth is not veiled. It is not hidden. It is always just in front of your eyes. If you miss it, it is not because of it but because your eyes are closed. The veil is not on the face of truth. The veil is on you, and not only one – many, millions of veils.If truth was hidden, then one Buddha, one Mohammed or one Zarathustra would have been enough. Once uncovered, everybody would have known it. It would have been just as it is with a scientific discovery: you need not discover it again and again. Albert Einstein discovers something and it becomes common property. Then every schoolchild knows about it; it need not be discovered again. Once discovered, it is discovered.But what happens? A Buddha discovers it, a Mohammed discovers it again, but you will have to discover it. What is the matter? The matter is that the veil is not on the truth, otherwise one man would have unveiled it and everybody would have realized it. The veil is on you. So everybody has to unveil himself and truth has to be discovered again and again by each and every one of you. It can never become a common property. It can never become a collective truth. It will remain individual.But why are your eyes closed? There must be some great investment in them, in closed eyes. There is, and that has to be understood. If it is just a matter of opening the eyes, why don’t you open them? Who is holding you back? Who is preventing you? Truth is naked, absolutely nude. That is the nature of truth – you can call it God – and it is just in front of you and it has always been so. But why don’t you open your eyes? There seems to be a great investment.It happened once…A woman was brought to me. She was a very beautiful person. Her husband had died; they had been married for only three months. They had loved each other tremendously, against the whole society, the whole world. They had left everything just for their love. Suddenly the husband died. It was too much for the woman, the poor woman. She remained with closed eyes for three days, she wouldn’t open them because deep down she knew that if she opened her eyes… The husband is dead, the corpse is there.People tried to persuade her, they did everything, but she would not open her eyes. And she went on saying, “My husband is not dead. Who says my husband is dead?” They couldn’t wait any longer; the body had to be burned.The day they burned the body the woman opened her eyes. But by that time she had lost the capacity to see – a very deep investment. Her eyes were perfectly okay, no physiological trouble. The doctors were amazed. They said, “There is no problem, everything is perfectly normal.” But she couldn’t see. It was as if somebody behind the eyes had stepped back; somebody who was standing behind the eyes and looking at the world had stepped back. The window was there, but nobody to look through it.For four weeks she remained psychically blind. In her blindness she was continuously saying, “Who says that my husband is dead? If he is dead, where is his corpse?” Even in dreams, she suddenly started saying, “Who says my husband is dead?” She knew, deep down she knew, that her husband was dead, but the mind didn’t want to believe it. The mind always likes to live in an illusion. Even an illusion is beautiful if the husband is alive, but the reality will not be beautiful if the husband is dead. They had really loved each other very deeply.The woman was brought to me. I had known them before. When she came to me she was behaving as if she was completely blind; somebody had to help her. I said to her, “Your husband is very much troubled. Just this morning he has been to see me and he is suffering very much. Why can’t you see? The medical experts say there is nothing wrong with your eyes.” I talked as if the husband was alive.Now this was too much. Suddenly she broke down, fell, started rolling on the ground, and said, “My husband is dead. Why do you say he has been to see you this morning? He is dead.” The eyes came back, suddenly the stony look in the eyes disappeared. She was able to see.What had happened? Suddenly she realized that she had been denying and through the denial a false blindness had happened. Once she accepted the fact that the husband was dead, she screamed. I have never heard anybody scream that way. It must have been what Janov calls the primal scream. From her very guts she screamed. It was not a scream done by her. It was a scream that possessed her whole being, every pore of it. The whole bodymind went into a volcanic state. The whole being trembled. It took almost half an hour for her to come back to normal. But the storm had gone and she was silent, and she looked at me and thanked me.This is the problem with every man. You know many things, but still you want to pretend against them. And there is no possibility of your ever being victorious against the truth. Nobody can be victorious. You can try for many lives more, as you have tried for many lives up to now, but against the truth there is no victory. Victory is always with the truth. You can create illusions, you can live in a blindfolded world of your dreams, you can live with closed eyes, but that makes no difference – your fictitious world is fictitious, and the truth is waiting there. And the more you live in fictions, the more you will be afraid of them being shattered. This is the investment.For example: you believe that you are somebody. Everybody believes that he is somebody special, but you know that it is not true, that it cannot be true. Deep down you realize the fact that nobody is somebody. Nobody is nobody. That somebodiness, the ego, is a false entity, a fiction. You cling to it knowing well it is not there. Still you hope against hope, you go on pretending, you go on trying to support a false entity with money, prestige, power, knowledge, austerities. You go on trying to prove that you are somebody. You go on proving that you are the center of the whole world, and you know well that this is not true. How can you be the center of the world? The world was there when you were not, and the world will be there when you are not there. You are just a wave. Waves come and go, only the ocean exists.You don’t have any center. You can’t have because the center belongs to the whole. A part cannot have a center. Can my hand have a center of its own? If my hand has a center of its own, then it is no longer a part of me; it exists independently. Can my leg have a center of its own? Then it is no longer a part of me. When I say I would like to go for a walk, the leg may not like to – he has a center of his own – and he will say, “No, I am not willing. At least not at this time. You will have to wait.” Or I am hungry and I would like to eat, but my hand says, “No, I am feeling sleepy and I won’t move.” No – when you feel hunger, the hand moves. Even without any order, without any specific order being given to it, the hand moves. When you want to go for a walk, the legs simply move. You don’t order them, they simply follow. They are parts, they don’t exist separately. They exist in an organic unity.Man exists as a part of the whole, an organic part. You cannot have a center of your own. If you think you can, you are misguided. Only existence has the center. Only the center of the whole can say “I.” When you say “I,” – and if you also believe in it – you are deluded. If you use it only as a linguistic device, it is okay. But if you feel that you have an “I” within you, you are living in an illusion – knowing it well, because how can you avoid knowing the truth? There are many moments when you suddenly become aware that you are just a part of the whole, a wave, but you go on postponing this realization, you go on postponing the recognition of the fact and you go on pretending. This pretension is the barrier.You know well that you have not loved anybody, neither your father nor your mother, neither your wife nor your husband, children, friends – no, you have not loved anybody. You know it well, but still you avoid it. You go on thinking that you love, and you go on thinking that you are a great lover. If you were a great lover, you would have already attained. Even if you had loved just one single person totally, godliness would have been unveiled already, the truth in its total nakedness would have been realized because love is the death of all pretensions.When you love a person you cannot pretend anything which is not true. When you love a person you become completely naked, you reveal yourself. All pretensions drop in the moment of love. Suddenly you realize that whatever you have been thinking you are, you are not. Something else arises: an organic unity with the whole. The self disappears and the no-self appears. You are, but now not separate, not a stranger but a part of the whole. Not simply a part – because a part can be a mechanical part – but an organic part of the whole.What do I mean when I say an organic part? It means that you cannot exist without the whole and the whole cannot exist without you either. This is the beauty of the realization of no-self. For the first time, when you are not, your absolute significance is realized.Up until now you were trying to prove that you are very significant and nobody believed you, not even you yourself. Now you know that you are not, and suddenly in this empty house, a harmony comes in, a music is heard. Suddenly the whole starts celebrating your no-selfhood. Buddha has called this anatta, the realization of no-self. And this is freedom. Freedom is not of the self; freedom is from the self. You are no longer there, that’s why you are free. If you are there, you can never be free. You are the bondage.Listen to that cuckoo. The bird is not singing, the song is happening. There is no ego inside manipulating the song. There is nobody who is trying to do anything, it is simply happening. In a state of no-self you will sing a song without the singer being there. You will dance a dance, but the dancer will not be there. You will move and live, you will be ecstatic, but there will be nobody inside the house. The house will be totally empty.And this is the reality. You know right now that you are an empty house, but you go on pretending that you are somebody and you go on posing false postures. You have not loved, but you go on pretending that you love. If you love, then how can pain exist? If you love, then how can suffering exist? If you love, then why so much agony? It is not consistent. If you have loved then you will be ecstatic, but you are not, so you go on pretending. In the name of love you have done many other things but not loved, because unless you die you cannot love. Unless the ego disappears, the love cannot come to flower.How can you pray if you have not loved? But you pretend. You go to the mosque, to the temple and to the church, and you pretend to pray. Whom do you think you are deceiving? You may be deceiving yourself, so your prayers are just like deserts; nothing grows out of them. Even in deserts something grows, but your prayers are absolute deserts; nothing grows out of them. You continue, nothing comes out of it; you remain the same. And life is moving out of your fingers every moment. Every moment you are dying and you go on pretending.Your whole life becomes a long pretension of things that are not. These things which are not have become the veils on you. Godliness is not hidden. Truth is just in front of you, in its total nakedness. But you are hidden, you are covered in many veils. And you go on acquiring more veils: veils of knowledge, learning, of this and that. Drop the veils. Don’t pretend.It will be difficult. That’s why I say you have an investment in your blindness. It is very loaded. It will be difficult, it will be painful to drop the pretensions. You will pass through suffering. But one has to pass through it, it is part of growth; nobody can avoid it. If you avoid, you are avoiding your growth. If you avoid, then whatever you want to do, nothing real can come out of it.You will have to pass through the suffering of disillusionment: remember this word. You can live in illusions, and you can create beautiful illusions also, but if they are false – they may be beautiful – they are not going to help. You can dream beautiful dreams, you can become an emperor in the dream, but you remain the beggar. Soon the morning comes, soon you will have to open your eyes. Soon sleep will have gone and the dreams disappear. Then you will come to know that you are a beggar. Beggars always dream that they have become emperors. All your pretensions are dreams to falsify, to deceive, to deceive the fact that is always there, to deceive the truth that is always around you. But how long will you do this? And what can you achieve out of it?Pass through the suffering of disillusionment. That’s the only austerity I know of. You need not go and stand in the hot sun. You need not prepare a bed of thorns and lie down on it. You need not go for self-torture, you need not become a masochist, you need not torture your body. Those are all foolish things, stupid. The only austerity is to see things as they are, to see that your illusions are illusions. The only austerity is to be disillusioned, to drop all hopes. And in those hopes, the hope for godliness is included, the hope for moksha, liberation, is included. In those hopes, the hope that you will attain the eternal is included. Your heaven, paradises, all are included – they are all illusions, extensions of the same ego. Disillusionment is the gate. Then you can be transformed.Look at things in their reality, whatever the cost. If you feel that if you look at things as they are, your ego will be shattered, then let it be shattered – the sooner the better. If you feel that if you look at your being as it is you will feel like an animal, feel – that’s what you are. Your prestige in the society will be at stake, let it be. The society consists of persons just like you: deluded. To be honored by them is not an honor at all. To be honored by sleepy men, dreamers, is not worth it.It happened…Buddha was talking in a village. Many people had gathered – very few seekers, many more just curious people, inquisitive. A buddha had come: they had gathered to see him and to listen to him. They were not sincere. Buddha said something and they all clapped. Buddha became very sad and he stopped. Ananda, Buddha’s disciple, asked, “Why have you stopped? Why have you become sad?”Buddha said, “I must have said something wrong, otherwise how could those people have clapped? I must have said something wrong – because those wrong people cannot recognize the truth but their clapping shows they have understood me. I must have been wrong; otherwise, how can they understand?”Buddha is reported to have said that to seek respect from persons who are almost unaware, unconscious, is just like seeking honor from the rocks – even that is better. Your social identity may be lost. You were known to be a saintly man, but if you come to reveal your reality, people will know that you are just like them or even worse. Suffer it. This is the price which has to be paid.And remember: only disillusionment can prepare you for the next step. In fact, if you are absolutely disillusioned with the life that you have been leading, the way that you have been, almost half the journey is complete. If a man can know a false thing as false, he has already attained insight. Now he is ready to know the true as true. The first step is to know the false as false. Then the second step automatically becomes possible: to know the true as true. Truth cannot be known directly. First you have to know what untruth is because that is where you are. And you can start the journey only from where you are.Seek, watch your pretensions, and drop them. This is what an honest, sincere, authentic man should be – true to himself. And whatever the price is, pay it; it has to be paid. If you have not loved, know well that you have not loved. And say to your lover or beloved that you have never loved, that your love was a subtle process of exploitation; that your love was nothing but a trick, a diplomatic trick to dominate; that your love was nothing but a facade for your sexual desire; that your love was nothing but an ambition of the ego. Find out what it is and let it be known to you and to others also.This is what a sannyasin should be: dropping all illusions, remaining true to his being, whatever it is. Then suddenly many things become possible to you. Once you are unveiled, truth is unveiled because the truth was never veiled.Look at this small incident.A man came to Bayazid…Bayazid of Bistam is one of the great Sufi masters.…and said he had fasted and prayed for thirty years and yet had not come near to an understanding of God.From the very beginning the man had a wrong attitude. He must have been a very calculating and cunning man, otherwise, how can you count moments of love and prayer? How can you say, “For thirty years I have been praying”? This calculation shows a businesslike mind. Thirty years – he’s counting. He must have been a man of this world: greedy, calculating. He has moved into the other world, but his attitude remains the same. “I have fasted so many days, I have prayed so many prayers, yet nothing has happened.”In fact, if you know what prayer is, the result doesn’t matter. Prayer is its own result. The value is intrinsic. You pray and it is enough because prayer is happiness, prayer is ecstasy. Unto itself it is enough; nothing else is needed. But when you don’t pray, you wait for the result. Then prayer becomes a means to some end: understanding of God, realization of God – or something else. But prayer can never become the means to any end. Prayer is an end in itself. All that is beautiful – love, prayer, meditation – they are all ends in themselves, they are not means to anything else. If you convert them into means you miss the point. Enjoy them!It is just like in the morning when you go for a walk and the sun is rising, and the new day is born, and again life resurrects. Out of the death in the night everything revives. The trees are coming back, the birds becoming alive, a fresh breeze is blowing. You go for a morning walk and you enjoy it. Do you keep a diary saying “I have been walking for thirty years in the morning, and nothing has happened yet”? A morning walk is a morning walk, an end in itself, intrinsic. You enjoyed it, every morning walk enriched you. It does not enrich you somewhere in the future; it enriches you right now.Life is always cash. It is not a promissory note; it does not promise you. Life is cash. Immediately, here and now, it gives you whatever it can give. You feel happy, you start singing or you start dancing – do you count it? Do you keep a diary saying “For thirty years I have been dancing and singing and yet no understanding of God has happened to me”? You have not danced at all; you are not a dancer at all. You may be technically equipped to dance, but you are not a dancer. You may be a technician, but you are not a singer.That is the difference between a technician and a dancer. A dancer dances, and in that very moment everything is achieved because in that moment he is lost, the ego dies, there is no dancer. The dance exists, but there is no center to it. It is a wave in the infinite ocean, moving, being, dissolving. Nobody is there inside to manipulate the steps of the dance. Then there is a technician, a trained dancer: he manipulates. However perfect his dance may be, it is dead because the manipulator is there. Then he will calculate: How much…?There is a beautiful story I would like to tell you…It happened in the life of a great Indian musician, Tansen. He was at the court of the great Emperor Akbar – and he is incomparable. Once Akbar asked him, “I cannot imagine that anybody can surpass you. It seems almost impossible, you seem to be the last word. But whenever I think this, a thought arises in my mind that you must have been a disciple to a master from whom you learned, and who knows, maybe he surpasses you. Who is your master? Is he still alive? If he is alive, invite him to the court.”Tansen said, “He is alive, but he cannot be invited to the court because he is like a wild animal. You cannot invite him to the court because whenever it happens, he moves. He is not a man of the society. He is like the winds or like the clouds. He has no roots in the society; he’s a homeless wanderer. And moreover, you cannot ask him to sing or to play; that’s not possible. Whenever he feels to he sings, whenever he feels to he dances. We will have to go to him and wait and watch.”Akbar was enchanted. He was mad after Tansen, and his master was alive – it was worth taking the trouble. “Wherever he is,” Akbar said, “I will go.”He was a wandering fakir – his name was Haridas – so Tansen sent messengers to inquire as to his whereabouts. He was found near the river Jamuna in a hut. Akbar and Tansen went to listen to him. The villagers said, “Sometimes, nearabout three in the night, just in the middle of the night, he sings and dances, but otherwise the whole day he sits silently.”In the middle of the night, Akbar and Tansen – hidden like thieves behind the cottage – were waiting because if he came to know, he might not sing. Haridas started singing and then he started dancing. Akbar was hypnotized. He could not utter a single word because no appreciation would have been enough. He cried continuously. When they were coming back, after the song had stopped, he remained silent and tears continued rolling down.When he came to the palace, just on the steps, he said to Tansen, “I used to think that nobody can surpass you. I used to think that you are unique but now, now I have to say to you that you are nothing compared to your master. Why such a difference?”Tansen said, “The difference is simple. I sing, I play to gain something else: power, prestige, money, appreciation. My music is still a means to some end. I sing to get something, and my master sings because he has got something. That’s the difference. He sings only when he has something inside. Then the singing flows, then he dances; it is a by-product. When he is filled with the divine and cannot contain it, when it overflows, only then he sings. His singing is an end in itself. He celebrates.”And that is the difference between a real love and a false love. A real love simply celebrates. For real love there is no future.A real prayer is a celebration. It is not an effort, not a means to something else. It arises and it dissolves into itself. A moment of prayer is an eternity in itself. And a man of prayer never counts, it is simply foolish. Even a single moment is so much, even a single moment becomes such a deep contentment – one is fulfilled, one doesn’t ask for more. Really, it is too much. A single moment of prayer is so much that you are no longer there. It fills you completely and it overflows. If you can attain a single moment of prayer, love or meditation, you will feel grateful for ever and ever. You will not complain.The man in our story was not a man of prayer. The man was greedy; he must have been greedy in this world, in the market. He has left the market, but the mind of the market still is there. He has left the riches of this world, but the attitude is still the same. He is counting his prayer days like coins. He says that he has fasted and prayed for thirty years and yet has not come near to an understanding of God. He will never come to an understanding of God because he has not changed at all. He has carried all his worldly attitudes to the other world. And remember: your attitude is your world. You cannot take it to the other world. You will make the other world just like the world you have left.A man came to see me. He was a very rich man and he had been donating money to many institutions, social welfare schemes, temples, this and that. He came to see me and he talked about his donations. He started introducing himself, talking about his donations and how much he had given. And his wife supplied the missing information. She said, “He has donated almost one lakh rupees.”The man looked a little angrily at his wife and said, “Not one lakh – one lakh and ten thousand!”Counting what you have given, keeping accounts… When you keep accounts you have not given at all, you have not shared; it has not been a gift. When you count, it may have been a bargain – a bargain for the other world. This man is bound to complain someday. He will say, “I have given so much and I have not come any nearer to the understanding of God.”Bayazid told him that even a hundred years would not be enough.Even a hundred lives would not be enough; it is not a question of time. If you do a wrong thing, you can do it for eternity – it is not a question of time. If you do a wrong thing, you can go on doing it, but just by repeating a wrong thing millions of times it will not become right. But if you do the right thing even only once, everything is settled.So you can go on praying for millions of lives – nothing will happen. And I tell you: if you pray rightly even for a single moment, everything has already happened. It is not a question of time and quantity, it is a question of attitude and quality. How much you pray is not the question, but how deeply. How many times a day you pray is not the question. Mohammedans pray five times a day, and this man must have prayed five times a day for thirty years. It makes no difference how many times – five or fifty. The point is the quality you bring to it, your consciousness, awareness, love – how you pray.There is a story in Bengal…There was a man, a very, very logical man, a grammarian, nearabout five hundred years ago. His name was Bhattoji. He was a famous Sanskrit grammarian. He never went to the temple.He was old – sixty – when his father called him and said, “Now it is too much.” His father must have been ninety. The father said, “I have been going to the temple, praying every day. I have not told you anything about it because I was hoping you might come to the understanding yourself. But it is getting late. Now you are also old, sixty. It is time to go. It is time to prepare for the other world. When will you go to the temple and pray?”Bhattoji said, “Seeing you going to the temple every day and coming back the same, I have been wondering whether the question is not of how many times, how many years, you pray. The question seems to be of how you pray. The question is of quality. I have been watching you every day for so many years. Twice a day you go to the temple and you come back the same; the prayer doesn’t seem to work. And how is it possible? There must be something wrong.“I will go tomorrow. Tomorrow is my birthday and I will go and do whatever I can do. I will put my whole being in it. I will pray only once – but I will not leave anything inside me. I will move totally into it, but only once. If something happens, it happens; if nothing happens I am finished with it. I will never go again because what is the use. There is no point.“If I put myself totally at stake and nothing has been left behind, then I cannot do more the next day. If I have done whatever can be done with a total mind, more is not possible. Once I will pray – if something happens it happens. If not, I am not going to pray again.”The father laughed. He said, “You are foolish. One has to pray for many lives, only then does something happen. But let us see. Go tomorrow and try.”Bhattoji went to the temple and never came back again, he died. Standing before the deity of the temple he prayed once and died. He really moved totally into it, nothing was left.A prayer, a love, needs you in your totality. Not even a part of you should be left behind watching and calculating, manipulating. You should be in it, not a fragment of you, but you in your wholeness. That’s why prayer becomes holy, because you are wholly in it.To be whole is to be holy and there is no other holiness.Bhattoji died. This is the meaning of the saying “until you die.” He disappeared, attained. He became enlightened. Only his body was there, the body fell down.When Bhattoji didn’t come back and it was getting late, his father sent a messenger to see what had happened. Bhattoji was not there, only the dead body was there, but you could see on the face a transformation, a divine beauty. Even the dead body was showing an aura of the unknown. He was transfigured.Remember this: whatever you do should be true, not a pretension: should be done not with a greedy mind, but with a loving mind; should be done without any calculations because prayer, or love, or God is not a question of arithmetic.Bayazid told him that even a hundred years would not be enough.The man asked why.“Because your selfishness is working as a barrier between yourself and the truth,” said Bayazid.The word selfishness has to be understood. Ordinarily you call a man selfish if he works everything for his own self, if he manipulates everything for his own self. That is superficial selfishness. You can become unselfish on that level; it is not difficult. There are unselfish people – people who are always working for others, serving, always helpful. Unselfish people you know, but they are as dangerous as the selfish people, and sometimes even more. You can escape a selfish person but you cannot escape an unselfish person. He is very dangerous because he is out to help you, and he is working for you. He creates a burden. And deep down, very deep down, this unselfishness is again selfish because through it he wants to achieve the divine.Go and see the Christian missionaries. They work really hard, they serve people, they are great servants, but deep down their whole service remains selfish because through it they are waiting to cross to the other shore. Through the service they are creating rungs in a ladder, and on that ladder they are moving toward heaven. Heaven is the goal, service is the means. They are in the same trouble as that man who came to Bayazid must have been.I will tell you a story. It happened…There was a great festival somewhere in China, and many people had gathered. There was a well without any walls around it and a man fell into it. He cried loudly, but it was a big festival and the crowd was very large. It was so noisy that nobody could hear him.A Buddhist monk, a bhikku, came to the well. He was feeling thirsty. He looked down. The man was crying and weeping and saying, “Save me!”The bhikku, the Buddhist monk, said, “Nobody can save anybody else – this is what Buddha said: ‘Be a light unto yourself.’ Nobody can save anybody; that is impossible. Don’t wait for it. And moreover Buddha has also said that everybody has to suffer his own karmas. You must have committed some sins in the past and you have to suffer, so suffer silently. Don’t cry and make so much noise because by crying and complaining you are again creating karmas.”The man said, “First save me and then I will listen to your sermon. At this time it is impossible for me to listen.”But the Buddhist monk went on his own way because Buddha had said, “Don’t interfere in anybody else’s karma.”Then a Confucian came, another monk. He looked into the well. The man said, “Save me! I am dying and nobody seems to listen.”The Confucian said, “Confucius is right. He has said that every well should be made with a wall around it. And don’t you worry. We will create such a great movement; we will change the whole society, and we will force the government to make walls around every well, don’t worry.”The man said, “But by that time I will be dead. And how is it going to help me? I have already fallen.”The Confucian said, “That is not the point; the individual is not the point. Individuals come and go. The question is the society. But you can die with the deep consolation in your mind that it will not happen again to anybody else.” Confucius was a social reformer.Then a Christian missionary came by. He looked into the well. Even before the man said anything he took a bucket and a rope from his bag. The Christian missionary was ready to serve even before the man said anything. The man was feeling tired and was thinking, “Now there is no possibility, and all these religious people are coming…”The missionary threw the rope and the bucket and told the man, “Catch it and I will pull you out.”The man was very, very thankful. When he came out he fell at the feet of the missionary and said, “You are the only religious man!”The Christian missionary said, “Don’t be misguided. This is what Jesus says: until you become a servant to the least and the last amongst you, you will not be able to attain the Kingdom of God. Service is sadhana. It is through service that one reaches heaven. So remember: fall again and again into the well because I am not the only missionary. And teach your children also to fall into the well so we can come and save them. How are we otherwise going to get to heaven if you don’t fall?”Deep down, even unselfishness remains selfish, a part of greed, and very dangerous. When a person feels he is good, he becomes authoritative, dominating, and he tries to change you. He takes you in his hand like a piece of mud and tries to give you a shape, a shape according to his ideology.Missionaries are murderers. All social reformers are dangerous. And people who are seeking service can be very, very violent, aggressive. They are. If you are in the grip of a good man it is very difficult to escape. You are imprisoned – and he is doing everything for your sake. And whatever he is doing, he is trying to find a way through you to his own heaven. You are just the means. This is the most immoral act in the world, to treat a man as a means. I call it the most immoral act, the greatest sin, to treat a man as a means. Every man is an end in himself.Share if you can share, but don’t try to transform anybody. Who are you to transform? Who are you to change somebody? Who has given you the right? Help if you can, but don’t make this help a means. Otherwise, in the name of religion you will remain the same calculating, cunning, clever person, exploiting people out of your selfishness. So, on the surface this is one meaning of selfishness and unselfishness.But real selfishness is when there is no self. Working for your own self is selfishness, working for others’ selves is unselfishness. But behind both the self is present. They are two branches of the same tree, not very different; the innermost core remains the same. Real selfishness means no-selfness; then whatever you do, whether the world calls it selfishness or the world calls it unselfishness, it doesn’t matter. It comes out of a no-self, unmotivated. The distinction is subtle.Selfishness is a motivated action: you want something for yourself. Unselfishness is again motivated: you want something for the other, and through the other, deep down, you want something for yourself –via the other the same motive moves. Real selfishness remains the same, the form differs.To me, selflessness is the real thing. You must come to understand the state of your being as no-self. Then prayer is there but it comes from a no-self, unmotivated. Then you don’t calculate and count; you enjoy it and celebrate it. Then love comes unmotivated, it flows spontaneously for no reason at all. You cannot help it. It is there. It is natural.When the self is absent, everything becomes unselfish; it cannot be otherwise. Otherwise, you can go on doing things but they will remain the same, the quality will not change, and you will always feel something is missing. You can do prayers for years and you will feel something is missing. You can love many people and you will feel something is missing. You will remain like a wedding party where the guests have arrived, the feast is ready and the musicians are playing. There is much singing and everybody is ready, but the bridegroom is missing. You will be like a wedding ceremony where the bridegroom is missing.If the self remains you will always miss something; whatever you do you will miss something. Once the self is not there the bridegroom has arrived. Now whatever you do will be a feast, whatever you do will be a celebration.Die first as you are so that the divine can be born in you. The Sufis are right when they say that you cannot achieve anything until you die.Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-06/

El Mahdi Abbassi announced that it was verifiable that whether people tried to help a man or not, something in him could frustrate this aim. Certain people having objected to this theory, El Mahdi promised a demonstration.When everyone had forgotten the incident, El Mahdi ordered one man to lay a sack of gold in the middle of a bridge. Another man was asked to bring some unfortunate debtor to one end of the bridge and tell him to cross it.Abbassi and his witnesses stood at the other end of the bridge.When the man got to the other side, Abbassi asked him: “What did you see in the middle of the bridge?”“Nothing,” said the man.“How is that?” asked Abbassi.The man replied, “As soon as I started to cross the bridge, the thought occurred to me that it might be amusing to cross with my eyes shut. And I did so.”Man carries the seed of his misery or bliss, hell or heaven, within himself. Whatever happens to you, it happens because of you. Outside causes are secondary; inside causes are primary. Unless you understand this there is no possibility of transformation because the mind goes on deceiving you. The mind always points to the outside: the cause of your misery or your happiness is somewhere else. If the cause is outside you then there is no possibility of freedom, there is no possibility of any moksha, any liberated state. You are bound to be in bondage for ever and ever because how can you change the outside cause? And if you do change one, millions more follow.This is the difference, the basic difference, between a religious mind and a nonreligious mind. Communists will think just the opposite. Marx will not be ready to approve what El Mahdi says in this story. Marx says the cause exists outside man. Man is in misery because there are causes outside which create misery. If the causes are changed, replaced, man will be happy. According to Marx, a revolution is needed in the outside world. According to Mohammed, Jesus, Mahavira, Krishna, this whole diagnosis is wrong. Causes are inside. Outside there are only excuses.You can change the outside, but nothing will change if the inside remains the same. The inside will again and again create the same pattern, whatever the situation outside, because man lives from the inner to the outer.It happened…I used to know a man who married three times. He suffered much. The first time he married he chose a woman who was a sadist, who enjoyed torturing him. He would come to see me and he would relate his misery. Sometimes the woman would beat him and he would show me the marks. But I had the feeling that somehow, deep down, he relished it, he enjoyed it, because whenever he talked about his miseries his face would become radiant, not sad, and his eyes would sparkle. He would become more alive.I continued to watch him minutely. Sometimes his wife would go to her parents’ home. Then he was never happy. When the wife was with him he was unhappy, when the wife was not with him he was unhappy but the unhappinesses had a distinction and difference. When the wife was there he was unhappy, but happy in his unhappiness; he enjoyed it, talked about it. And I had the feeling he was exaggerating; he was very poetic about it.Then the misery became too much and the man divorced the wife. The day he divorced her I told him, “Now be very alert. I think you will fall in love with the same type of woman again because you remain the same. You will again find the same type of woman, so now be alert.”He said, “Never again can I marry such a woman. I am finished forever.”But within three months he again became a victim of the same type of woman. He got married, and again he started his sad stories that the woman was torturing him.I told him, “I told you that this was possible because who chooses the woman? You choose the woman. You chose the first, you will choose the second, and you remain the same. You will always choose a sadistic woman because you are a masochist. You want to be tortured, want somebody to dominate you, somebody to crush you. You are a self-condemner. You don’t approve of yourself and you don’t love yourself. You need somebody to hate you and to kick you around.”The second marriage also finished soon. The wife left. The last time I saw him he was again after a woman. I told him, “Now be alert. Something within you will again choose the same type of woman.”He said, “Now no more. What do you think I am? Am I so stupid? I can’t forget the lesson.”He has married once again. I have received a letter from him and again the same old tale of miseries.This man can go on living for thousands of years, can move all over the earth but he will always choose the same type of woman because the chooser remains the same. The misery is not in the woman he chooses; the misery is in the very choice. You carry your heaven within you, and you carry your hell.If you feel miserable, don’t try to find excuses in the outside world; they won’t help. In fact, they will become a deception. Whenever you are in misery, try to find something within you which frustrates. Be mindful of that. Otherwise, for many lives people go on moving in the same rut, the same vicious circle.Mulla Nasruddin dreamed one night that he was in heaven. So beautiful all around – a silent valley, the sun rising and the birds singing, and he alone under a tree.But soon he started to feel hungry, and there was nobody, apparently nobody, around. But still he asked, “Hey! Is somebody there?”A very handsome man appeared and said, “I am at your service, sir. Whatever you say I will do.” So Mulla asked for food. And whatever he asked for was immediately supplied, not even a single moment was lost and the food was there. He ate to the full, slept well. And this continued, whatever he needed. If he needed a beautiful woman, the beautiful woman was there. Whatever he needed! He needed a bed in the night and the bed was there. This continued for a few days, but how long…?He started getting fed up, bored. Everything was too good, really too much. He couldn’t tolerate it. He started looking for some misery because everything was so beautiful. He started looking for tensions because he had never lived without tensions, some anxiety, something to be sad about, depressed. And now everything was so blissful, unbearably blissful.So he called the man and he said, “It is too much! I would like to have some work. Just sitting empty-handed, I am getting fed up.”The man said, “I can do everything for you, but that is not possible. I cannot give you work. Here, that is not possible. Whatever else you need I am ready to give. And what is the need to seek after work. When everything is supplied immediately you don’t need to work.”Mulla Nasruddin said, “I am fed up. If no work can be given, then it is better to be in hell.”The man started laughing and said, “Where do you think you are?”Through the laughter, Mulla woke up. His dream was shattered.In the morning he came running to me and he said, “This dream is very symbolic. What is the meaning of it?”I told him, “In the first place, you should not have waited so long. When you came to the point in the dream where you were in heaven, you should have immediately opened your eyes. How can you be in heaven? You and heaven! How could you believe it?”Wherever you go, you will create your hell around you. In fact, heaven and hell are not geographical. They are not places, they don’t exist in space. They are attitudes, they are psychological. They exist in the inner space not in the outer space. You cannot go to heaven because how can you go to heaven? Where is heaven? And you cannot go to hell. You always carry your hell or your heaven with you.It is just like a spider’s web. In the Upanishads it is said – one of the most beautiful symbols – that everybody is just like a spider carrying its own web inside. Wherever the spider goes, it spreads its web around – it brings it out of its own intestines – and whenever a spider wants to move, it swallows the web again and moves. You carry your heaven and hell just like a spider’s web and wherever you go you will create the pattern around you.This has to be very deeply understood, as deeply as possible, because many things will depend on it; your whole transformation will depend on it. If you miss this point, you will go on missing.A man has been coming to me for at least ten years. He starts meditating for a few days, at the most a few weeks, and he feels very good; he feels simply wonderful. When he is doing meditation, he comes to me and says, “Absolutely fine! Nothing else is needed. I am as happy as I have ever been.” Then one day he suddenly stops and disappears for a few months, forgets about me. Again he comes, miserable, sad, in deep anguish, and I again tell him to start meditating. I ask him, “Why did you stop? You were feeling so great, you were feeling so beautiful.”He says, “When I am feeling beautiful and great something within me always says, ‘Now there is no need to meditate’ and I stop. Then I again fall into the valley, into the darkness, and the misery comes back. And then I again come to you.”This time when he came I asked him, “How many times has it happened. Can’t you learn something from the experience? In ten years it must have happened at least thirty times.”He said, “This time I am going to stick at it.”But I know it is not possible because he has given me this promise many times before. His promise is not reliable; thirty times he has given me the same promise and broken it. And he is not aware at all of what he is doing. The moment he reaches near an explosion, the mind steps back and says, “What is the need? Now you are happy, so why bother about getting up early in the morning, why bother about doing meditation? Now everything is good, it is not needed. When the illness is not there one drops the medicine, so stop!” Again and again and again, and never coming to any understanding through it.In the Mahabharata, the greatest epic in the world, there is a story, a very beautiful story.The five Pandavas, the five brothers around whom the whole epic moves, have been thrown out of their kingdom and they are living as fugitives in a forest. One day they are feeling very thirsty, and one of the brothers, the youngest, goes to seek some water. He comes near a beautiful lake, but the moment he steps into the lake to fill his water pot he hears a voice. Some invisible voice says, “Wait! Unless you answer my questions you cannot take the water from this lake. That’s the only condition: you have to answer my three questions. And if you can’t answer them you will fall dead here and now. The first question is: ‘What is the most important thing about man, the most important thing about man?’”The young Pandava couldn’t answer – he fell down dead.Then another brother followed and the same thing happened. Then the eldest brother, Yudhisthira, went to the lake in search of water and in search of his brothers to see what had happened to them.Four brothers were lying there on the bank, and the moment he stepped into the water he heard the same voice. “Answer these questions, otherwise you will also be dead. And if you can answer, not only will you be alive, you can also drink from the lake, and the same water will make your other brothers alive again. Just sprinkle the water on their faces. But first answer my questions. The first question is: ‘What is the most significant factor about man?’”Yudhisthira said, “The most significant thing about man is that he never learns.”He was allowed to drink the water and he was allowed to bring his brothers back to life.In fact, this is one of the most important facts about man: man never learns. You may become very knowledgeable, but you never learn. Knowledge and learning are different. Knowledge is borrowed. It is parrot-like; you cram it, it fills your memory; your brain becomes a computer. Learning is totally different. Learning means learning through experience, never repeating the same mistake, becoming more and more mindful, alert, aware.And this is the message of this Sufi story. Something in you continuously frustrates you, and unless you catch hold of it and destroy it, whatever you do will be futile. Whatever you do, you will do, and it will be futile. That factor within you which continuously frustrates has to be dropped, has to be destroyed completely, burned.You must have observed that you continuously commit the same type of mistakes again and again. Maybe it was not a very keen, deep and penetrating observation – in a mist-like state of mind, vague, shadowy, with a smokescreen. But you must have made the observation. What a misfortune. You cannot even invent new mistakes. What an unoriginal, mediocre state of mind. You cannot even think of new mistakes to commit. You go on committing the same mistake. You are like a broken gramophone record that goes on repeating the same line again and again and again. It becomes a transcendental meditation: “Ram, Ram, Ram.” It goes on and on.Your life is a TM, a broken gramophone record. Have you observed that you go on committing the same mistake? In your relationships, in your love, in your friendships, in your business, you go on committing the same mistake again and again. And you go on hoping that this time things will be different. They never will be because you are the same. How can things be different? You are hoping against hope. But the mind is stupid, it goes on hoping and knows well, deep down, that this is not possible because you will frustrate it.You fall in love with a woman and everything is so romantic, so poetic. But this is not for the first time that it is happening, it has happened many times. Many times you have fallen in love and many times the world was poetic and romantic. The world became a dream and everything was beautiful – and then everything turned ugly. The same beauty turns ugly. The same dream becomes a nightmare, the same heaven becomes a hell. And it has been so, again and again. But you will fall in love again, and again you will forget, and the same thing will happen. You are a repetition, and unless you stop this repetitiveness there is no possibility of change.How should one stop this repetitiveness? First, one has to realize that it is there. That is the basic step. One has to realize that this repetitiveness is there. You are working like an automaton, not like a man but just like a mechanism, repeating. Man arises in you only when you are not a machine. Man arises in you when you start moving in fresh ways, when you start moving on new paths, when you start moving into the unknown.You always move into the known. You do again the same thing that you have already done – and you become more and more skilled in doing it. You become perfectly skilled in committing the same mistakes again and again; you become predictable. No man, if he is really a man, can be predictable. Jyotish, astrology, exists because of your mechanical life, otherwise nobody can predict the next moment. But it can be predicted: out of ten thousand people, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine people are predictable.There is a beautiful story…Buddha became enlightened. He was passing from one village to another and it was hot, summer. He passed by a riverbank. The riverbank was wet, the sand was wet, and he left his footprints on the sand.By chance it happened that a great astrologer, who had completed his studies in Kashi, the citadel of Indian, Hindu, learning, knowledge, was coming back to his home. He had completed his studies and had become perfect in predictions. When he was coming back he saw the footprints on the sand and he couldn’t believe it because in his scriptures these were the footprints of a great emperor who rules the whole world. “Why should an emperor, a chakravartin, who rules the whole earth, come on such a hot day to such a small poor village? And why should he walk with naked feet on the sand?”All the symbols were there in the sand, so he thought, “Either my whole science is false… This man seems to be a beggar, but my science says he is the emperor, the greatest emperor in the world, so either my science is false or I will have to find this man. Maybe he is an emperor and by some accident or by chance he has passed through here.” So he followed the footprints.Buddha was sitting under a tree. The astrologer reached Buddha, and looking at him he was more puzzled than ever. He looked like an emperor, but he was a beggar. His whole being was like an emperor. No emperor had ever been like that. But he was a beggar, in rags.So he asked, “Please clarify my confusion, as you have confused me. For fifteen years I have been in Kashi, I have wasted fifteen years of my life learning the science of prediction. Now that I have completed it, have been examined, certified, you frustrate me completely. Just tell me if you are a beggar or if you are a chakravartin, a great emperor who rules the whole earth? On your answer my whole life will depend. If you say you are a beggar, I will throw these worthless scriptures that I am carrying into the river and go to my home as I have wasted my whole life unnecessarily. If you are a chakravartin, then tell me.”Buddha opened his eyes and he said, “Your confusion is natural – but by chance you have come to the man who is one in ten thousand. About nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine, your scriptures will always be right, only about one will your scriptures be false. But you will not come across that one again, so don’t be bothered and don’t throw your scriptures into the river. It is almost impossible to come across this type of man again.”The astrologer asked, “What is the secret? How did you become unpredictable?”Buddha said, “By being mindful. I don’t commit the same mistake again; I don’t repeat the same pattern again. I have become a man, I am no longer a machine. You cannot predict me, the next moment is unknown, not only to you but to me also. It is absolutely unknown. It will grow. Nobody knows what will happen.”A conscious being moves from the known to the unknown. An unconscious being moves from the known to the known. He moves in a circle.So the first thing to realize is that you are a repetition. It will be very shattering to the ego because you always thought you were very original – you are not. The mind is never original, it is always mediocre because the very structure of the mind is accumulation of the known. The mind cannot know the unknown. The mind can move within the circle of the known. It can go on repeating the same things that it knows, but how can the mind know the unknown? There is no possibility.To know the unknown the mind has to be dropped. Then suddenly you are amidst the unknown. The whole is unknown. Everything is unknown. Then the whole becomes a beauty. Known is dead, unknown is alive. The ultimate unknown is what religious people call God. By ultimate unknown is meant: whatever you know, it will remain unknown. However much you know, it will remain unknown; it is unknowable. You go on knowing.So there are three movements. From the known to the known, that is mind; from the known to the unknown, that is consciousness; and from the unknown to the unknown, that is superconsciousness.Then man becomes a sage. When he moves from the unknown to the unknown a man becomes a god himself. Then he has dropped the mind completely. Then there is no past, and when the past is not there, there is no future. Only this moment, this very moment, exists. Now and here everything culminates. In the herenow the whole exists, in its total beauty and nudity, in its total sacredness and wholeness.Remember: the mind is repetitive, the mind is unoriginal, the mind is a mechanical thing, a computerlike thing, a biocomputer. One has to go beyond it. If you don’t, the mind will continuously frustrate you. It will give you the same pattern again and again. That’s why Hindus are fed up and they say, “God, when will the moment come when we will be freed from the wheel of life and death?” Why do they call it wheel? It’s because of the repetition: the wheel repeats. The same spoke comes again and again to the top, goes down, comes again to the top. A wheel moves, repeats itself; there is nothing more repetitive than a wheel. That’s why Hindus call the world the wheel. Their word for world is sansar. Sansar means the wheel which goes on moving. And their only urge has been one: how to get rid of this wheel.This is very symbolic. How to get out of this repetition? How to move into the ever-fresh? How to move into the ever-alive? How to move out of death and out of this life? This life is nothing but a prolonged death, a gradual death. A child is born and the same moment he starts dying. He will be dead within seventy years. Slowly, slowly he will die. He will take seventy years to die. This life is nothing but a gradual death.The wheel of life and death is what the mind is. The first step is to become aware of it. The second step is to be alert when the mind goes again into a rut. If you can be alert, you have introduced a new phenomenon into it. For example: you are again falling in love. Become alert. Nothing is wrong in falling in love, it is beautiful. Fall in love, but don’t repeat, be alert. Just by being alert you have introduced a new phenomenon which was not there before. And whatever you say to your woman or to your man, say it with full alertness.It happened…Mulla Nasruddin fell in love with a woman. And I had continuously been telling him to be alert, so when he said to the woman, “You are the most wonderful, the most beautiful woman in the world,” suddenly he remembered what I had said. So he said, “Wait! Excuse me; this is what I have been saying to many women, and I am not certain that I will not say it again to others after you.”A new thing has entered. Suddenly he became aware that he has continuously been saying to many women, “You are the most wonderful woman in the world.” And women are very, very faithful. They trust, they simply believe. They know this is not true, but they believe. They are repeating their own frustrations, and the man goes on repeating his mechanism. Otherwise a woman would say, “Wait, no need to go so far! Love is good, but there is no need that a woman should be the most beautiful woman and then only love can exist; otherwise the love will not exist for long. Wait, there is no need to go so far.”Why not love an ordinary woman? What is wrong in being ordinary and simple and homely? Why create dreams? When you create dreams they are bound to shatter someday because dreams cannot become real. They will frustrate. Then just holding onto those dreams and false promises and words will become too much of a burden on you. Then the same woman will look like a stone around your neck. Don’t do that, why not be natural? Why not simply say “I love you”? What is the use of bringing superlatives to it which will have to be withdrawn sooner or later? And when you withdraw them, everything will come down; the whole palace will fall. You were making it on a false foundation.The second thing to remember is: whenever you are going to repeat an old habit, give a jerk to yourself, become mindful, and suddenly you will feel a change. You are getting angry again? Give yourself a jerk, slap your face, go to the tap and throw cold water into your eyes. And be mindful, become a little alert and see that you are again repeating the same pattern. The very alertness changes it.Now physicists say a very surprising thing. They say that when you observe it even matter changes its behavior because in fact matter is also the mind. For example, you are taking a bath in your bathroom and then suddenly you become aware that a child is looking through the keyhole. Do you remain the same or does a change suddenly happen? Suddenly everything has changed. Somebody is near the keyhole and you are a different person. Just a minute before you were making faces in the mirror – now you are not making them. You were humming a song – now the song has stopped. Just a child, or anybody, looking, observing, and a new thing has entered. You are not alone, an observer has entered – and observation is a transformation.This is not only with man. Now they say it even happens with trees. If you observe a tree, it changes its behavior immediately. When a friend passes nearby, the tree has a welcoming attitude, is happy. It dances a little, it calls to you, “Come nearer.” And there are enemies also: children, animals, the gardener, and they are coming with their clippers – Mukta! The tree is suddenly shocked, shaken to the very foundation, afraid, closed.What I am saying are scientific findings. These are not poetic imaginations, or philosophers’ doctrines. Now scientists approve these things: even trees have minds. When you observe them with love, they are different. When you observe them indifferently, they are different. When you come to destroy them, they are different. Just by observation you change a tree, its behavior.Physicists say that electrons change immediately when there is an observer. Electrons! We don’t think they have life, we don’t think they have minds – they have. Within these twenty years of scientific research, religion has been proved absolutely right. The whole is alive, a vast ocean of life and consciousness. Nothing is dead; even a rock is not dead. When an electron changes its orbit, behavior, attitude, what does it show? What tremendous energy is possible through observation.When you observe your own self a new factor has entered, the greatest factor in life – the factor of observation. Suddenly things change, you cannot repeat the habit. A habit needs unconsciousness to be repeated. Consciousness enters, and the habit falls.People come to me and they say, “We cannot drop smoking cigarettes,” or “We cannot drop drinking alcohol. What should we do?” I tell them, “Don’t try to drop it. Drink with awareness, smoke with awareness but don’t try to drop it. You have been trying that for years and that effort has also become a habit. Now nothing can be done out of it. Smoke with full consciousness, with meditative awareness. Smoke, and be there. Inhale, take the smoke inside, mindful that the smoke is coming in. Exhale the smoke, mindful that the smoke is going out. One day soon you will find the cigarette has fallen from your fingers, not that you have dropped it, it has fallen.”With awareness, habits drop. Without awareness if you try to drop the habit it will be almost impossible. The only way to drop with unawareness is to create another habit, a substitute habit: that will do. You can drop cigarettes, then you start chewing gum. You can drop chewing gum, then you start chewing pan. You will do something stupid. It makes no difference whether you smoke or whether you chew gum. You have to do something stupid because you cannot allow your mouth to be relaxed. Deep down in the mouth and in the lips there is a tension, and that tension is creating the habit. You can change one habit for another, but the same pattern will be there. Chewing gum or smoking cigarettes, it makes no difference.The best way is to suck your thumb which children do. But nobody will feel good… You will feel awkward if you suddenly start chewing and sucking your thumb. Chewing gum, cigarettes, are nothing but substitutes for grown-ups. Children enjoy their thumbs because they are not afraid of the society. When you are grown up, the same need is there somewhere in the mouth – something to be sucked. Maybe your mother didn’t give you as much breast as you wanted; the breast was taken away earlier than was needed. Or your mother was very reluctant to give you her breast. Even if she did give it, she used to give it with deep reluctance. That has remained there, deep down. The lips have not been relaxed. They carry a tension and then they create a habit.You can change, but this won’t help unless you become aware. If you become aware, you will find a tension in the lips. If you become aware, you will find a constant activity in the mouth; the mouth wants to do something. Women smoke less, particularly in the East because in the West women are less women. Women smoke less because they chatter a lot. That is their substitute. They go on talking – the same activity – they go on talking. Through their lips the tension is released.I have heard…There was once a great competition in China: Who can say the most absurd and unbelievable thing? It was a great competition. Liars and deceivers and poets and gossip-makers and news reporters – all sorts of people gathered.The man who got the prize said a very simple thing. He said, “Once I went to a park and I saw two women sitting silently on one bench – for five minutes!”The judge said, “This is the most unbelievable thing.”He got the prize, the first prize.Something or other will have to be done, unless you become aware. You become aware, then you feel the tension. Don’t do anything. Just be aware of the tension in the mouth, and the very awareness relaxes it. No need to relax even. Once you become aware that there is tension, it is already relaxing because tension can exist only in unconscious darkness. It cannot exist in the light of awareness. So the second thing is to become more and more aware when you are repeating your old patterns.And the third thing: whenever you find that there is some misery, always look within. The cause is there. Whenever you find you are feeling blissful, look within. The cause is there. If you look out, you will find a false cause which is not really a cause but a projection.It is just like in a movie house: you sit and on the screen there are pictures. They are projected. The pictures are really behind, at your back; they are in the projector. But the projector is at the back and your eyes are focused on the screen. On the screen there is nothing. The screen is empty – just light and shadow playing, making forms.You have got your projector inside, of bliss, of misery, of heaven and hell. You have got the Devil and God within you. Whenever you feel that somewhere you see the Devil, look within and you will find him there. Others are only just like screens. They reveal your reality to yourself. They are not the real causes.Now look at this beautiful anecdote.El Mahdi Abbassi– one of the great Sufi masters –announced that it was verifiable that whether people tried to help a man or not, something in the man could frustrate this aim. Certain people having objected to this theory, El Mahdi promised a demonstration.It happened in a certain situation.A man had come, he was very poor, a beggar, much in debt, and El Mahdi could have helped him because even the king used to come to this fakir, this Sufi master. Just a hint from El Mahdi, and the king would have supplied everything that this man needed. That’s why that man came to El Mahdi. And he was crying and weeping, and he was saying, “Help me! Just give a hint to the king and my misery will no longer be there. Otherwise, for my whole life, even if I go on working, I will remain a slave, and then too I will not be able to pay my debts; they are impossible. And I have children, and a wife and relatives, and we are suffering very much. We don’t even have enough to eat, no clothes.”But El Mahdi said, “It is not possible. I cannot say anything to the king.”This was the situation.Certain people having objected to this theory… El Mahdi had said, “Even if this man is helped, the help will not reach him, something in him will frustrate it.” People like El Mahdi look deep; they don’t look at your surface, they look deeper into you. He must have penetrated this man. He must have seen that something in him will make him again and again poorer, poorer and poorer; he will remain poor. “He cannot be helped. The help will not be of any use because he carries something within him which will frustrate it.” So he said that whether people tried to help a man or not, something in the man could frustrate this aim. But certain people, kind-hearted, objected to this theory.…El Mahdi promised a demonstration. He said, “I will give you a demonstration. Wait!”When everyone had forgotten the incident, El Mahdi ordered one man to lay a sack of gold in the middle of a bridge. Another man was asked to bring some unfortunate debtor to one end of the bridge and tell him to cross it.Abbassi and his witnesses stood at the other side of the bridge.When the man got to the other side, Abbassi asked him: “What did you see in the middle of the bridge?”A sack of gold had been put there. There was nobody else on the bridge, and the man crossed the bridge. He could have seen the sack of gold. He could have taken it, there was nobody to claim it, but he had not even seen it.“What did you see in the middle of the bridge?” asked El Mahdi.“Nothing,” said the man.“How was that?” asked the master.The man replied, “As soon as I started to cross the bridge, the thought occurred to me that it might be amusing to cross with my eyes shut. And I did so.”Such thoughts occur to you also. And you also do so. I have seen many people reaching a point where something was immediately possible, and just then some thought occurs to them – sometimes so absurd you cannot believe why this thought should occur to them – and they immediately change their route, change their mind, and the happening that was going to happen is stopped.Your mind is a very complex phenomenon. It continuously goes on projecting things. This man was poor, in debt; this gold sack would have been more than enough. But suddenly… He had crossed this bridge many, many times and never before had this thought occurred. Suddenly a thought came into his mind that it would be amusing to cross the bridge with closed eyes. You may also have sometimes walked on the path with closed eyes. Just one day, in the morning, there is nobody around and the thought occurs. When the thought occurs, look around – some sack of gold may be waiting for you!A man used to come to me, a very, very intelligent man, a Supreme Court advocate. Whenever he promised that now, from tomorrow, he was going to come and start meditation, something or other would happen. The wife would be ill, suddenly there would be a case and he would have to go to New Delhi, or on the morning he was to come he would be feeling so lazy that he would postpone it until tomorrow. It happened many times when he promised: “I am coming, definitely coming for meditation tomorrow,” and something would happen. It continued.I asked him once, “Have you ever looked back? Whenever you promise, something happens. Is there some inner relationship with the happening? Your child falling ill, your wife not feeling well, you yourself feeling lazy, low energy – is there something related to it? It has happened so many times that it cannot be just a coincidence.”The man said, “How can it happen? – because I am coming to meditate, not my child, and he doesn’t know, he is not even aware that I am going to meditate, so how can it happen?”But now, if you ask psychologists they have come to many discoveries. The mind is not individual; it is a collective phenomenon. Your mind and your child’s mind are not two minds, they are one; they meet somewhere. Now psychologists say that children are very, very perceptive because they are innocent. They are so receptive that they can receive the thought of somebody who is near to them. If the father wants to go to the club and the mother doesn’t want to go – of course, she has not said that, even she herself may not be aware that she doesn’t want to go – suddenly the child is ill, feeling nauseous. Now psychologists have stumbled upon the fact that the child is simply showing the unconscious of the mother. If the child is ill, then the mother will not be allowed to go.By and by, as psychoanalysis penetrates the human mind, they have come to feel that you cannot treat a single person unless you treat the whole family because a single person is not ill; the whole family is ill. The person who is showing illness is just the weakest link, that’s all. If the family has four children, father and mother, six people in all, then the weakest in the family will fall ill; he will become neurotic. The whole family is neurotic, but the others are a little stronger; he is the weakest.You can treat him. If you take him out of the family he will become okay. But if you send him back to the family he will again become ill. Now it is very difficult: what to do? The family has to be treated. But then things become more and more complex because the family exists in the society, in the community. The whole community must be ill. This family is only the weakest family in the community.Then things become so vast. The community exists in a nation and the nation exists on this earth. And consciousness exists as an ocean. Then you cannot treat a single person. It becomes very difficult because many others are helping him to be ill.In India every village has its own idiot, and that idiot helps the whole village to remain sane. In my childhood I stayed in many villages. With my grandparents I was in one village, then with my parents in another village. As I moved from one village to another I was surprised that every village has its own village idiot, has to, because he is the sanity of the whole village. He goes neurotic, he goes mad. He cries and weeps all over the village, runs from here to there and urchins follow him and throw stones at him. That helps the whole village to remain sane. If you remove that idiot, somebody else will immediately become the substitute.In ancient India the villagers worshipped the idiots. They did well because he was doing such a great service. Idiots were worshipped as saints. They were called paramahansas – great ones who have achieved. It was good in a way because the idiot was serving the whole village. If you felt a little neurotic you could go and play with the idiot, and you could do everything to him; nobody would prevent you.In India we have a festival: Holi. This Holi festival is just a catharsis for the whole country to throw out all its nonsense. It is good, it cleanses. More of these days are needed because more nonsense is there; one Holi is not enough. In fact, every month a Holi-day is needed so people can throw stones, rubbish at each other, throw colors, dirt, and can use four-letter words. It cleanses.Remember always that consciousness is a vast oceanic phenomenon. It is in you and outside you. And consciousness is telepathic, it communicates. If you watch it well you will come to know that many times your consciousness throws barriers. Even if you are not throwing them, then somebody else’s unconsciousness throws barriers because you would like somebody else to throw them. The father wants to come to meditate, but deep down he doesn’t want to come. The child telepathically understands it. He is ill in the morning and the father cannot go. Now he has an excuse.It happened…A man came to Buddha when Buddha was dying. For thirty years Buddha had passed through his village – eight times in thirty years – and he never came to Buddha. He always postponed and postponed, as people do. You can understand.There are many people in Pune. When I have left Pune, only then will they become aware that I was here. I was in Jabalpur for many years. When I left Jabalpur, people from Jabalpur started coming to Mumbai to see me, and they would feel very, very miserable that they weren’t aware that I had been there. They told me that the people of Mumbai were very, very fortunate.I said, “Don’t be worried. When I leave Mumbai, then they will be in the same plight as you are.”And I left Mumbai. Now they come here from Mumbai. In my audience, there are more people from Mumbai than from Pune. Only when I leave Pune, will I be in Pune. Never before.Buddha passed through the same village eight times in thirty years. He remained in the village – once he remained there for four months, the whole rainy season – and the man couldn’t find time. Busybodies, busy without any business. He had a small shop to run and a small family to maintain, and always there was something or other: a guest came, or by the time he was closing the shop suddenly a customer came and he was so poor he could not afford to let the customer go to somebody else, so he had to open the shop again and by that time the sermon was finished. This happened for thirty years, many times something or other.Then the day he heard that Buddha was dying he ran. He closed the shop and he ran outside the town to where Buddha was. There he started crying and weeping because Buddha had taken leave, he had said the last goodbye to his people. He had asked his disciples thrice, “Have you something to ask?” They were crying and weeping, and nobody asked. There was no need. For forty years he had answered everything they asked. They were filled with so much emotion and pain because Buddha was leaving.They said, “No, we have nothing to ask. You have given everything to us.” Thrice he asked, then he retired behind a tree. He closed his eyes, and he started dying. A man such as Buddha doesn’t die like you; he dies voluntarily, he leaves the body. You are forced to leave the body. He started dying slowly; he left the body, shrank inside; he left the mind, shrank more inside.At that moment the man came and he said, “No, don’t prevent me. Let me go to Buddha.”Ananda said, “I know you. We have continuously passed through your village for thirty years, many, many times, at least eight times. Buddha has talked in your town – where were you then?”He said, “What can I do? Sometimes my child was ill, sometimes my wife was pregnant, sometimes a customer came, and sometimes guests suddenly came. I couldn’t come. But now that I have come, don’t prevent me.”Ananda, Buddha’s disciple, said, “Now it is too late. We cannot ask him to come back. He is already moving in.”But listening to this Buddha came back. He came back to the body and said, “Ananda, don’t prevent him because otherwise it will always remain as a black dot on my compassion that I was still alive and a man knocked at the door. I was still alive and I couldn’t help him.”Buddha is right in his compassion, and El Mahdi is also right. You cannot help a man against himself. Something in him will frustrate it.Buddha asked him, “What do you need? What are your questions? What’s your search?”The man asked many questions and Buddha helped him. But nobody has ever heard about that man and what happened.He never became enlightened. He went back to the shop, to the same customers and the child and the wife and the same town. He became a little more knowledgeable, that’s all. Buddha’s compassion was not of much help. It was good that Buddha was compassionate, but you cannot help a man against himself – something in him will frustrate it. He was very happy that Buddha answered his questions, but that’s all. He could have gathered that knowledge from the scriptures or the disciples. Even such a great compassion, such a great blessing, was frustrated. He remained the same.You can bypass a buddha. Something in you will frustrate. Remember this: The man replied, “As soon as I started to cross the bridge, the thought occurred to me that it might be amusing to cross with my eyes shut. And I did so.” Remember it and never do so.You are here with me: much is possible. All that is possible, is possible. Just be watchful for something within that can frustrate it, and sometimes for such trivia that you yourself will laugh, and for trivia you can miss the opportunity. You know because you are in the same plight. Very small things.You ask for an appointment today but it is not given for today, it is given for tomorrow. You feel so angry you can leave me. But what are you doing? And for what? It’s as if you were just finding an excuse to leave. And I know when you should see me better than you know. Whenever you are negative you want to see me immediately. And that is not the right moment because when you are negative you can get, at the most, my sympathy. When you are positive only then can you get my love because to a negative mind love cannot be given. A negative mind will not receive, and you always come when you are negative.When you are feeling sad and depressed and low, immediately you seek me. When you are feeling high you forget me. When you are feeling good and happy, who needs me then? There is no question. Remember this: if I delay appointments, that is just because I know the depression will not remain forever. This is today; tomorrow it will not be there. Nobody can be depressed forever. Things come and go, moods come and pass, and I would like you to come to me only when you are positive; then something can be given to you.This is the difference between religion and psychiatric treatment. You go to a psychiatrist when you are negative, ill, when you are not in the right shape. You go to the doctor when you are ill. He will bring you back to health. You go to a religious man when you are healthy so that he can give you greater health. You go to a religious man when you are absolutely positive, feeling happy and blissful. Now he can lead you to the higher realms.Come to me not just for health but for more health than ordinary health. Come not just to be happy but to be blissful; not just for health but for being whole. And small things can frustrate.A sannyasin came to me just a few days ago and she said she wants to leave. I asked, “What has happened?”She said, “A beggar wanted to see you and he has been refused at the door. I cannot be here. Why has that beggar been refused?”Now she is ready to leave. Is her leaving me going to help the beggar in any way? Or who is she to decide who should be allowed and who should not be allowed? It is for me to decide. A beggar comes to beg small things; those things he can get anywhere. I allow only great beggars to visit me who have come to ask for godliness – not less than that. But who are you to decide about these things? And you get angry, and in anger you can leave. The beggar will remain a beggar; he won’t be helped by your leaving me. But something in you has tried to deceive you, and something will frustrate you continuously everywhere, wherever you go. That something in you will always find excuses.Always remember you are here for yourself, for nobody else. That is none of your concern. It is for me to decide who is to be allowed and when, and who is to be rejected and when. Sometimes it is needed that a man should be rejected; sometimes it is needed that a man should be rejected many times. But in your state of mind you cannot understand that. No need. But don’t find excuses; those excuses will be suicidal for you.Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-07/

A man went to a doctor and told him that his wife was not bearing children. The physician saw the woman, took her pulse, and said: “I cannot treat you for sterility because I have discovered that you will in any case die within forty days.”When she heard that the woman was so worried that she could eat nothing during the ensuing forty days. But she did not die at the time predicted.The husband took up the matter with the doctor who said: “Yes, I knew that. Now she will be fertile.”The husband asked how this could come about.The doctor told him: “Your wife was too fat, and this was interfering with her fertility. I knew that the only thing that would put her off her food would be the fear of dying. She is now, therefore, cured.”The question of knowledge is a very dangerous one.Yes, the question of knowledge is a very dangerous one – for many reasons. The first is that when a man knows, he also knows the complicatedness of life, the complexity of life. When a man knows, he also knows in what mysterious ways life functions. So it is not a question of asserting a truth; the basic question is how to lead someone to the truth. Sometimes lies are used because they help, and sometimes truths cannot be used because they hinder.Every great master – Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed – are all great liars. This will be hard to believe, but when I say it, I say it with much consideration – and I know why it is so. The basic question is not to tell the truth to you; the basic question is how to lead you toward the truth.Somebody asked Buddha, “What is truth?” Buddha said, “That which can be utilized.” This is not a definition of truth because lies can be utilized, but Buddha is right. If something can help you, it may be a fiction, but if it helps you and leads toward the truth, it is true. Sometimes just the opposite may be the case: you know the truth but it becomes the hindrance and it leads you more and more to confusion, to darkness. So the final outcome should be the criterion; the end result should be the criterion.It happened once…A Sufi master was feeling thirsty. He was surrounded by his disciples, and he asked a small boy, who was also sitting there listening to him, to go to the well. He gave him an earthen pot and told him, “Be careful, the pot is earthen but very valuable. It is an antique piece. Don’t drop it, don’t break it.” Then he slapped the boy’s face hard two or three times and said, “Now go.”The people who were sitting there couldn’t believe it. One of the kind-hearted men asked, “What are you doing? This is absurd. The boy has done nothing wrong. He has not dropped the pot, he has not broken it. He has not done anything – and you punished him?”The Sufi master said, “Yes, I know. But if he had dropped the pot, then what would be the use of punishment?”The Sufi master is saying that in life it is not always so that the effect follows the cause. In life sometimes the cause follows the effect; sometimes the effect precedes the cause. Life is complicated. Sometimes the future comes first and then the past. It is not always that the past comes first and then the future.Life is not as easy as you think. It is difficult, complex; past and future all meet in it. That which has been is still there somehow – how can it disappear? All that has been is still there. In this very moment, the whole past – not only of humanity but of the whole universe – is implied. Your mother, your father, your father’s father and grandfather and grandfather’s grandfather and Adam and Eve, all are implied in you. Something of you was in Adam, in Eve, and they are totally in you. The whole past is there, and the whole future also. All that is going to happen in the world, in the universe, you already carry as a potentiality. You are the whole world. Causes and effects, past and future: everything is joined together in you, every line of existence crisscrosses on the point where you are.The question of knowledge is dangerous. When a man knows, he knows this complexity. And whenever he does something he has to consider the whole complexity; otherwise he will miss, he will not be helpful. That’s why I say that many people become enlightened but very few are masters because to become enlightened you have to solve only your problems. When you become enlightened, knowledge is such a vast ocean that to manage it and to be able to help others becomes very, very difficult.Sometimes people who don’t know the danger of knowledge may be thinking they are helping, but they destroy. They may be thinking that they are kind, but they are cruel. They may be thinking that they are pulling you out of your confusion, but they are throwing you more and more into confusion. It has happened many times, even sometimes with enlightened people. The vastness is such, the complexity is so deep, but whenever you say something to somebody it becomes simple. You have to bring it down, reduce it to a simple phenomenon. Much of it is lost, and then it may not be a help.For example, Krishnamurti. He is enlightened. If anybody has ever been enlightened, he is enlightened. But the complexity is such – and he has reduced the whole thing to such a simple formula – that the mystery is missing. He looks like a logician, he talks like a rationalist; the mystery is lost. He has been repeating particular formulas and they have not helped anybody. Many are deluded through them but nobody is helped because he has a very fixed attitude – but life is not fixed.It is true: sometimes a man achieves the truth without the help of any master. The opposite is also true: sometimes a man achieves the truth through the help of many masters, not only one. It is true that you can grow alone. The opposite is also true: you can grow in a community, in a school, in a family of seekers. It is true that a man can reach the final without any method; the opposite is also true. With people who have a very logical attitude about life this becomes difficult. They divide life in yes and no. They say, “Either say yes or say no.”You may have heard the name of a Western thinker, de Bono. He has something very beautiful to say to everybody. He has coined a new word; that word is po. You will not find it in any dictionary because it is a new word. He says that there are situations when if you say yes you will be wrong, and if you say no you will be wrong again. There are situations when you need to be just in the middle – then say “po.” It is a word which doesn’t mean yes, doesn’t mean no, or it means both. Either below yes or no, or above yes or no, but undivided – po, yes plus no.There are situations… If somebody asks a certain question in which you are deeply involved, if somebody asks, “Do you think that you love me?” it will be difficult because you are never a hundred percent certain whether you love or not. If you say yes you are committed to a wrong statement because who can say yes? Only one who is total can say yes with his total being behind it. How can you say yes? The moment when you are saying yes, a part of you is still saying no. Wait, don’t decide. There is confusion; a part of your mind is saying, “I don’t know whether I love or not.” If you say no that will also be wrong because a part of you is saying yes. And you are always part, you are not total. De Bono’s word po is handy. When somebody asks you again “Do you love me?” say “Po.” It means both yes and no: “A certain part of me loves you, and a certain part doesn’t love.”Mulla Nasruddin was in court. There was a case against him because his wife had reported to the court that he had been beating her. If the judge had asked, “Do you beat your wife?” Mulla could have said yes, or he could have said no, whatever the case may have been. But the judge asked, “Mulla Nasruddin, have you stopped beating your wife?” If he says yes, that means he was beating her before. If he says no, it means he is still beating her.He came running to me after telling the judge, “Give me a little time; tomorrow I will answer.”When he came to me I said, “Say po.”And he said, “What is this po?”I said, “That is the judge’s problem. Let him decide what po is. You simply say it.”The whole of human language is divided into yes and no, into black and white – but life is grey. This po means life is grey. At one extreme it becomes dark black, at the other extreme it becomes white, but exactly between the two, the grey waves and po exist.Two calamities have fallen on the Western mind. One is Aristotle because he gave you a logical attitude toward life which is false. He gave you either yes or no, and he said, “Both cannot be true together.” And they are always true together. They are always true together; one cannot be true without the other because life is both: day and night, summer and winter, God and the Devil. Life is together, undivided. When a man comes to realize this undividedness of life it becomes very, very difficult – what to say and what not to say. Whatever he says will be false because language only allows either yes or no.The second calamity that has fallen on the Western mind is the crucifixion of Jesus. Because of that crucifixion the whole Western mind became disturbed. First Aristotle divided life in two and then the crucifixion of Jesus divided the heart in two. Aristotle divided the mind, the intellect in two, and the crucifixion of Jesus divided the heart in two. If you are a Christian, you go to heaven; if you are not, you go to hell. If you are a Christian, only then are you human; if you are not a Christian, then nobody bothers about you. You can be killed very easily. There is no need to have a second thought about it.The crucifixion divided the heart, the emotional part of man. And Christianity has done so much violence. No religion has ever done so much. Because of the crucifixion Jews have been killed for these two thousand years continuously. And Christianity has become a crusade, a war against the non-Christians, the pagans. Love divided, the heart divided, the mind divided – the whole West has become schizophrenic, a split personality.The whole effort of Sufism is how to make you one so that all your divisions disappear; so that your heart is one, a unitary whole; your mind is one, a unitary whole. And not only that: your mind and heart also become one, a unitary whole. Then you attain what is real. But right now, how to help you toward the real? Devices will be needed because just talking about the truth will not help. It has never helped, rather it has hindered.If truth is told to you it will become a dogma, and a dogma is a hindrance. It will become a scripture, a tradition, and a tradition is a betrayal. Truth cannot be said directly to you: something has to be done to you so that you proceed, by and by, toward the truth. The knowledge has to be transferred in a very indirect way; it cannot be direct. It has to be, by and by, growing within you through situations. Of course, because you are false, only false situations will be helpful. Real situations will not be helpful. You are false, you understand the language of the false, and a false situation is needed continuously around you to force you toward a certain window from where you can see the sky.For example, you live in a closed house. You have never been out of it, you have never seen the sun, you have never heard the birds, you have never touched the breeze passing through the trees. You have never been out, never seen the flowers, the rains. You have lived in the closed house, completely closed, not even a window open. Then I come to you, and I would like you to come out and sing with the birds, and dance with the breeze, and be like flowers opening and opening, opening toward the infinite.But how to tell you about the world which is outside? The language is not there. If I talk about flowers, you will not understand. “Flowers?” you will say, “What do you mean by flowers? First prove that they exist.” How can it be proved if you have not known? Whatever is done to prove it, you can disprove it, you can argue about it. And people who have lived in a closed world are always argumentative – always. The more closed a mind, the more argumentative it is because it has not known anything which goes beyond argument and logic and reasoning; it is confined. You have lived in darkness – how to talk to you about light and the sunshine and the sunrays?You are not alone in your darkness; many exist with you in the darkness. I am there alone talking about flowers, and light, and the world outside and the open sky. And not only you but the whole majority will laugh that I have gone mad. You will say to me, “What are you saying? You must have been dreaming, it’s your fantasy.” You will say, “No outside world exists. This is the only world, there is no other world. What are you talking about?”And some of you may think that I must have some design, some conspiracy, to take you out and rob you of something. “There is no outside world. Why is this man continuously trying to prove that there is an outside world? He must have some profit motive behind it. Don’t be deceived by this man.” That’s how you behaved with Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, how you have always been behaving with people who bring you good news from some other world, who have been messengers of something unknown to you. The majority is with you. You can take a vote, and you can decide what is true and what is not true.The difficulty is in what language to talk to you, what parables, what symbols to use? Whatever is said will be misunderstood because anything can only be understood when the experience, the basic experience, is there. Even if a slight glimpse has come to you of the outside world, just once – even if you have looked through the keyhole – then there is a possibility, a contact, a communication becomes possible. But you have not looked at all, you have not even dreamed, you have not even imagined. Not even in fantasy has the outside entered you. You are completely closed. What to do?I will have to use some device. The device is neither true nor false. It is a po device: you cannot say yes, you cannot say no. I will have to use your language and your situation, and I will have to talk to you on your terms, in your terms. It is useless to talk about the flowers – you don’t know. It is useless to talk about the sky – you don’t know. You have completely forgotten that you have wings.Some device… For example I can create a fever in you. “This house is going to fall down. Get out of it as soon as you can. Time is running out, this house is going to fall.” That’s what Jesus did. He said, “This whole world is going to fall. Time is running out, the end is coming near – the Day of Judgment.” It has not come up to now. And Jesus told his disciples: “Before you are dead the Day of Judgment will have come. So transform yourself, change yourself. Repent, because time is running short and the house is going to fall. It is already on fire, can’t you see.” What is he saying?You cannot understand the language of freedom, but you can understand the language of fear. Freedom cannot be told to you, but fear – yes, you can understand that. Death you can understand, you cannot understand life. So he says the Day of Judgment is coming near. And Jesus says, “There is only one life. Once lost, lost forever.” That’s why Jesus never used the Indian device of reincarnation.All three religions born in the West – Judaism, Mohammedanism, Christianity – have never used the Indian device. The religions born in the East – Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism – have all used the device of reincarnation. The situations were different. I will tell you why they used the device. When people come to me and ask me “Is reincarnation a true doctrine?” I say “Po.” It is neither true nor false. It is a device; it is a device to help people. Try to understand. Both the devices bring you to the same point; both the devices bring you to the same state of mind – so they both are true because they both help. True in the sense of Buddha. They are pragmatic; you can utilize them – they have been utilized.Jesus says, “This is the only life,” to create a fever, a fear, because if he says there are many lives you will relax. You will say, “Then there is no hurry; this house is not going to fall down in my life. There will be other lives, so why be in a hurry?” You can postpone. “If there are many, many lives, that means many millions of opportunities, then why be in such a hurry? Why not enjoy this house and the darkness a little more? Any time we can go out. The house will be there, we will be here. The door will be there; the outside is not going to be lost.” You can postpone.Jesus dropped postponing. He said, “There is only one life, only this one. And this life is continuously running out of your hands, running out of your fingers. Every moment you are more and more dead. And soon, in this life, before you are dead, the Day of Judgment will be there when all your sins will be judged and you will be punished. And those who are with me will be saved.” What is he saying?He is saying, “Come with me, be with me.” He is trying to bring you out of your house. He will be moving out, and if you trust him, and if you have become too afraid… He created almost a neurosis, a fear, a trembling. In that fear people followed him.Once you follow Jesus, you are out. You know that it was a trick, that you have been tricked out, but you are not angry. You are grateful because that was the only way. You were so false that even a Jesus has to use a lie to bring you out. But once you are out you forget about the Judgment Day and God and the kingdom, and you forget about death and fear. Once you are out in the world, the open world of sky and the breeze and the sunshine, you celebrate, you enjoy, you feel grateful for ever and ever toward Jesus, because he was so compassionate, because he even used a lie to bring you out.In India we have used another device, for certain reasons. India is very, very old, the most ancient country in the world. It has existed for thousands of years. The West is very young, the East is very old. And when you talk to an old man you have to talk differently; when you talk to a young man you have to talk differently because their attitudes have changed completely. A young man always looks toward the future; an old man always looks toward the past, because for an old man there is no future. Death, and then no future. An old man looks toward the past; only the past exists for an old man.As you grow old, the past grows more and more and the future becomes less and less. For a child there is no past, only the future. If you talk to the child you have to be future-oriented. That’s why Christ goes on talking of the coming Kingdom of God, the life abundant: the future. In India, that would not have been useful at all. People have become so old, the whole mind has become so old, that you cannot be fooled by words like Kingdom of God. People have lived too long, and you cannot allure them toward more life. They are bored and finished with life; you cannot tell them that an abundance of life will be there. They will say, “This much has been too much – what will we do with an abundance of life?” No, the Eastern mind wants to be freed from both life and death. The East is bored, as every old man is bored. He lived, groped in every dimension, and everything was found to be futile, fruitless. An old mind is bored.The East is bored with life, you cannot promise more life. That will not be a promise; on the contrary it will look like a punishment. So in the East we have been using a totally different device, and that device is the wheel of life and death. We say that millions of times you have been born – we give more boredom to the mind. For millions of lives… Hindus say that everybody has been in this world – at least before human birth – four crore times. Eight hundred and forty million times everybody has been in the world, and everybody has been repeating the same pattern: childhood, the fantasies of childhood; youth, the foolishnesses of youth; old age, the boredom; and death. And the wheel moves and moves and moves. Eight hundred and forty million times you have been just the same: always hankering after, desiring, the same things, always achieving them or not achieving them, but in the end frustration. Whether you achieve or you don’t achieve, in the end frustration.The whole story always comes to the same point: the frustration of those who are successful and of those who are not successful. Just think: eight hundred and forty million times you loved, and became frustrated. Eight hundred and forty million times you tried, were ambitious, succeeded in getting a little prestige, money, and then became frustrated. Eight hundred and forty million times born, and then, by and by, life going out, and again dying.What is the message of this theory of reincarnation? The message is: enough is enough! Now be finished with it, now come out. If you remain inside, this wheel will go on and on and on. Now drop out – a real drop out. Not dropping out of the society, or of school, but dropping out of the wheel of life and death. Just drop out and run away, out of the house. This is the language a bored man can understand.Both are devices; don’t ask me which is true. They are neither true nor false. The truth you will know when you are out of the house; truth you will never know inside the house. So whatever helps you toward the sky, the freedom, the openness, that is true. That’s why I say all religions are true in the sense that they all help. And a religion becomes untrue when it stops helping.It happens whenever a society becomes old. Now Jesus’ idea won’t help the West very much. Now the West itself is becoming old; that’s why the Western mind is turning toward the East. Now the philosophy of boredom will be more helpful. Now you are also old, Christianity has less appeal, Hinduism, Buddhism, more appeal. Now you are old, Jesus’ idea won’t be of much help. Jesus can remain influential only in America for a few years – the Jesus freaks and Jesus people – because America is still young, with no history, with no past. Otherwise the West is turning more and more Eastern: reincarnation appeals more than one life.The Day of Judgment looks childish, and one life does not look enough. How can you judge a man just giving him one opportunity? At least a few more opportunities are needed to judge a man because he has to learn by trial and error. If you give him only one opportunity, you don’t give him any opportunity really. If he errs, he errs. There is no time left to raise oneself above error; more opportunities are needed. These are devices.The word device means neither true nor false. It can help. If it helps it is true. It can hinder; then it is untrue. Every religion is true when it is born and by and by, because situations change, the religion becomes untrue. It fits in a particular situation, then it doesn’t fit; then it becomes a burden, then it kills you; it becomes murderous. Then it suffocates you. Then it doesn’t give you more lease of life, it becomes poisonous.Every religion has its own day. And when people become more aware they will see when the religion is born, they will see when the religion is young. They will enjoy the religion when it is young and helpful. When the religion dies, they will do the same as you will do with your father and mother when they die. Of course, with great suffering and pain you take them to the grave or to the burning ghat. You burn them with tears in your eyes, but you have to burn them. You know that she was your mother and she gave you birth, and he was your father and he was everything – but he is dead. Then unnecessary dead burdens will not be on the mind of man.Right now, there are three hundred religions in the world and almost all of them dead. Just a few have a little life – that, too, like a small candle, not like a sun – somehow pulling themselves together. If you understand that religion is a device, then it will be clear to you that a device cannot be a device forever.I am creating many devices; they will be dead one day. Then they have to be dropped. If you follow a particular meditation I have given to you, even in your life you will find, sooner or later, that it is dead. The work is done, it is no longer needed, you have gone beyond it. Then don’t carry it and don’t get attached to it because that attachment will be suicidal. Just as you go on changing your clothes – your body grows bigger, you go on changing your clothes – in the same way you go on changing your devices. When you are really out, there is no need for any device. All devices were there just to bring you out of your closedness, out of your grave, out of your insensitivity, out of your unconsciousness.It is reported in a Sufi master’s life…He was passing along a street near a mosque. The muezzin was on the tower, and by accident the muezzin fell. Accidentally he fell on the Sufi master, broke the Sufi master’s neck. But the muezzin was not hurt at all. The man who fell was not hurt at all. He fell on the neck of the Sufi master, his neck was broken, and the Sufi master had to be hospitalized.The disciples gathered there because this Sufi master used to use every situation. They gathered and they asked, “How will you use this situation?”The Sufi master opened his eyes and he said, “The theory of karma is false because it says: You reap, you sow; you sow, you reap. As you sow, so you reap, but that is false. Look: somebody falls, and somebody else’s neck is broken. So somebody else can sow and somebody else can reap.”Remember this: Sufis say that life is so interrelated that the theory of karma cannot be right. And they are right because that device is also true. If life is so related, how can the theory of karma be meaningful? The theory of karma says that you are connected with your past life, only with your past life. You are a sequence of your own karmas and you reap the results of your own karmas. But Sufis say life is interrelated: everybody else’s karma is my karma, and my karma is everybody else’s karma. It is a net of interrelationships. You shake a flower, and Sufis say that the very foundations of the stars are shaken. You do something and the whole is affected. You throw a small pebble in the lake and the whole lake is affected.Everybody is just like a small pebble in the lake and whatever you do creates waves, vibrations. When you are no longer here those vibrations will still be continuing somewhere – somewhere near a star, very distant from the earth, but those vibrations will be there. You look at a man and you smile. Sometimes it happens…It happened to one of my friends. He was traveling on a train. At a midway station, just a small station, the train stopped. It was not a regular stopping station for the train but for some reason the train stopped. Another train was standing at the platform. This friend was in an air-conditioned compartment. Out of his window, out of the glass-covered window, he just looked outside. In the other train, a beautiful woman… Just for a second; just for a second, and the train left.That woman changed his whole life. The woman may not have even known that somebody had looked at her. He says that the woman was not looking at him, she was not even aware of him. The form of the woman, the face, the proportionate body of the woman, has persisted in his dreams. He has not married yet. He’s searching for that woman. He does not know her name, he does not know where that woman has gone, from where she was coming, where she was going: nothing is known.Just for a single moment the train stopped. He looked out of the window – and the window was not open, just glass-covered, in an air-conditioned compartment – and he just had a glimpse; then the train left. Just a small pebble in the lake… He has remained unmarried and he says, “Unless I find that woman, or something of that woman, I am not going to marry.” And I don’t think there is any possibility of him finding her because almost nine years have passed.But the whole history of the world will be different because this man may have got married to another woman, may have given birth to an Adolf Hitler, who knows. But he is not married; the Adolf Hitler will remain unborn. The Third World War will not be there. Who knows what would have happened had he not seen this woman from the window? Now the whole history will never be the same as it would have been. Just the stopping of a train for two or three seconds, and the whole universe will never be the same again.Can you think: if Hitler had not been born, the whole world would have been totally different – totally different. If the mother of Adolf Hitler had miscarried, then…? Or if she had been on the pill, then…? Just a small pill, and the whole history of the world would have been totally different – totally! You might not have been here. Hitler created such change.Everybody is creating change, and I’m not talking only about great mischief-makers like Hitler, or great mahatmas, no. Even a dog in your town is as important to the whole as any Adolf Hitler. You never know: if the dog was not there, the world would have been different. Just a vagabond dog that belongs to nobody, but it is a part, it is part of the whole. Every part is as important as any other part because in the whole, every part is as significant as any other part. There is no small, no big; no one more important, no one less important. The whole is whole because of all.Sufis say that the theory of karma is basically an egoistic attitude – and they are right. It says that you are, so whatever you sow you will reap. It gives strength to you, the ego. The Sufis have used another pattern to bring you out of the whole thing: you are no more, the whole is. You are just a wave, what is the point of thinking that you are? Sufis say that when you understand this interrelatedness you simply drop your concept of the ego, you are no longer a self. Sufis say only God has the right to say “I,” nobody else, because only he has the center, nobody else. This is a device.Hindus have their own device when they say, “You reap whatever you sow.” They are saying that if you are miserable you are the cause; don’t throw the responsibility on anybody else. If you are miserable you are the cause; if you are in anguish you have sown some poisonous seeds somewhere in some life, and you are reaping it. Why do they insist on it? For two reasons.One: if you are responsible, if you feel you are responsible, only then can you drop them; otherwise how will you drop them? If you think that everybody else is as responsible as you are, then you will continue as you are. What can be done? You cannot change it on your own; the dropping is impossible.And second and more significant: the Hindu device says that this whole phenomenon of your past, of whatever you have done, or whatever you have thought, is right now present in you. People think the past cannot be undone. Hindus say no, it can be undone because the past is part of the present; you carry it. Not only can you change the present and the future, you can change the past, you can drop it, there is the possibility of dropping it. The more responsible you feel, the more it becomes possible to drop it. And they say that because you are solely responsible for your life, freedom is also possible. If everything is connected, then only when everybody becomes enlightened can you become enlightened. And this can become a loophole. You can postpone. “When everybody becomes enlightened, only then, how can I alone become enlightened?”To help you, many devices have been created. They all come from people who know, but they are all limited. No device can be unlimited. It is devised by a certain man, devised for certain other men; it is meaningful only in a certain context. That’s why knowledge is dangerous. If you carry it out of context it will cripple you. If you carry it out of context it will suffocate you. It will become a poison, it will not lead you out. On the contrary, just the reverse will be the case: it will become a hindrance, a closed door. That too has to be understood.For example, Sufis say that you cannot drop the ego if you believe in the theory of karma. Right – this is the right use, but you can use it wrongly. You can say, “Everything is so interrelated, then how can I become enlightened alone? That’s impossible. Either the whole becomes enlightened, or the whole remains ignorant.” Now you are using the same device to remain in the same house, closing it. The same passage can lead you out. The same passage can lead you in. By the same staircase you can go up and you can come down. It depends on you.Hindus say that you are responsible for your karmas. This is good. If you are responsible you can change; transformation is possible – you alone are involved. You can drop or you can carry as you wish. And who would like to carry anguish, misery, hell? You will drop it. But you can use it in just the opposite way. You can say, “If I am responsible for my karmas…” then the I becomes very, very important. So you cannot find more egoistic people than Hindu sannyasins.If you go and look at a Sufi you will always find him absolutely humble. If you have ever come in contact with a Mohammedan Sufi you will always feel him to be absolutely humble. No comparison exists anywhere. A Sufi is absolutely humble. His face, his eyes, his very being will be humble because he is a non-entity: the whole exists. If you come to a Hindu sannyasin you will never find a more egoistic person. The way he walks, the way he looks – look at his eyes, and particularly at his nose – you will find ego written all over him. He has wrongly used the whole thing.If you are responsible for your karmas, then the ego is strengthened, then you become more and more of the ego. You can use a device wrongly. Every device is double-edged, remember this. That’s why the question of knowledge is said to be a dangerous one.Now we will enter this story.A man went to a doctor and told him that his wife was not bearing children. The physician saw the woman, took her pulse and said: “I cannot treat you for sterility because I have discovered that you will in any case die within forty days.”When she heard that, the woman was so worried that she could eat nothing during the ensuing forty days. But she did not die at the time predicted.The husband took up the matter with the doctor who said: “Yes, I knew that. Now she will be fertile.”The husband asked how this came about.The doctor told him: “Your wife was too fat, and this was interfering with her fertility. I knew that the only thing that would put her off her food would be the fear of dying. She is now, therefore, cured.”The question of knowledge is a very dangerous one.The doctor lied. The doctor said something that was not going to happen, but through it something else happened. He said, “The woman is going to die.”She became so worried – death became a haunting, a nightmare; she must have thought continuously of death. She couldn’t eat; but she didn’t die. And after forty days the doctor said, “She is cured. Now she will be fertile.”What happened? He could have said in the very beginning, “Go on a diet, or fast.” That would have been true, but that would not have been wise because the woman was not going to diet, and she was not going to fast for forty days. In fact, many other doctors must have told her before and she never listened. So it would have been true to say, “Diet or fast for forty days and you will be cured,” but it would not have been wise. Truth is not always wise, and untruth is not always foolish. The question of knowledge is a very complicated one.The doctor created a situation. He was really a wise doctor. He created a situation: he knew that only the fear of death would be of any help. He shocked the woman with the fear of death; he gave her such worry and anguish and anxiety that she completely forgot about food. Who eats, who enjoys eating, when death is knocking on the door? Every moment she must have been looking at the clock, at the calendar: one day is gone. Who bothers about food, and how can you enjoy food when death is there? It was impossible. But she didn’t die. Rather, her body was completely renewed; a new lease of life happened. Untrue, but wise – and this is how every master is.Gurdjieff has been much criticized because he was a liar. The lying came from the Sufis. He was a Sufi; he was disciplined in Sufi monasteries and schools. And in the West… In fact, he introduced Sufism in this age in a totally new version. But then it was impossible for the ordinary Christian mind to understand him because truth is a value, and nobody can think that a master, an enlightened master, can lie.Can you think of Jesus lying? And I know he lied – but Christians cannot think about it. “Jesus lying? No, he is the truest man.” But then you don’t know – the question of knowledge is very, very dangerous. He lied about many things. A master has to if he wants to help. Otherwise, he can be a saint, but no help is possible from him. And without helping, a saint is already dead. If a saint cannot help, what is the use of his being here? There is no point in it. All that he can attain through life he has attained. He is here to help.Gurdjieff was very much criticized because the West couldn’t understand, the ordinary Christian mind could not understand. So there are two versions about Gurdjieff in the West. One thinks that he was a very mischievous man – not a sage at all, just a devil incarnate. Another is that he was the greatest saint the West has come to know in these past few centuries. Both are true because he was just in the middle. He was a po personality. You cannot say yes, you cannot say no about him. You can say that he was a holy sinner, or a sinning saint. But you cannot divide, you cannot be so simple about him. The knowledge that he had was very complex.A man once came to Gurdjieff and talked about himself: that he was a vegetarian, that he never touched alcohol, that he never smoked, and this and that. Gurdjieff said, “If you are to be with me, you have to leave everything in my hands.”The man was not aware what type of man Gurdjieff was. He said, “Of course! I have come to you. I surrender.”And Gurdjieff said, “The first thing is: now eat meat.”The man was really in difficulty. He couldn’t believe it, he thought Gurdjieff was joking. He said, “You, and saying that?”Gurdjieff said, “Yes, that’s the only way I can break down your ego. This vegetarianism is not vegetarianism. It is just part of your ego. So here you will have to eat meat, drink as much alcohol as you can, smoke, move with women, and leave everything to me.”You cannot believe a saint talking like this, but then your saints are not very wise. Gurdjieff did help that man because that was the trouble. With people who are vegetarians, teetotalers, nonsmokers, you will always find very subtle egos. Alcohol cannot harm as much as the subtle ego can harm. And the man followed. It was very difficult, nauseating for him. But once Gurdjieff said it, he followed.Within three weeks the man was transformed. And Gurdjieff would give him so much to drink. Gurdjieff used to have a feast every night, and the feast continued for three, four, five hours. At nine or ten, it would start, and it would end in the middle of the night. Gurdjieff himself was such a capable man that he could drink as much as possible and would never get drunk. And he would force the disciples to eat – their bellies would be bursting, they would be crying and tears would come to their eyes and they would say, “No, now no more!” And he would force…He was trying to change your body chemistry. He changed many people who followed him, who were capable and courageous enough to move with him; not the afraid people who ordinarily become religious, but brave people. This man I am talking about, he followed. He would fall down drunk, and then the next day there would be a hangover. Within three weeks Gurdjieff transformed his whole mind. Then, by and by, he dropped the meat, dropped alcohol, dropped everything. That man said then, “For the first time I became vegetarian because that old vegetarianism was not true. It was just a mask for the ego.” When Gurdjieff forced meat and alcohol on this disciple he was breaking down the ego. He shattered the man completely.Sometimes just the reverse would happen. A man would come who was a drunkard, and a meat-eater, and a smoker, and Gurdjieff would stop everything. He would put him on a diet or on a fast. A master, if he is to help, has to be very, very wise.Gurdjieff used to call his way “The Way of the Sly Man.” All masters are sly. If they are to help, they have to be. But you think, your concepts are, that masters are just innocent virgins, just dream stuff, no substance, marble statues. You can go and touch and feel the coldness, that’s all. There have been such people but they are worthless; they have helped nobody. They may have enjoyed a certain silence and peace of course, but that silence does not have the quality of life in it. They are dead marble statues. The silence is cold; the silence is not warm enough to be alive. They have stilled themselves, they have become controlled, but they are not free. They have not attained freedom.A man who is really free is beyond good and evil, sin and virtue. In fact, he is beyond all dichotomies, all dualities. He is both, and he is neither. Only such a man, with so much enriched life – which comprehends opposites in it, which comprehends all contradictions in it – can be of any help and benefit to anybody. But to come to such a master is difficult because you come with your notions, you come with your ideologies, you come with your judgments.So this is the trouble: you will be influenced by a man who cannot help you, and you will escape from the man who could have helped you. This is the misery of the human mind. Be aware about it so you don’t commit the same mistake. The question of knowledge is a very dangerous one.Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-08/

A powerful king, ruler of many domains, was in such a position of magnificence that wise men were his mere employees. And yet one day he felt himself confused and called his sages to him.He said: “I do not know the cause, but something impels me to seek a certain ring, one that will enable me to stabilize my state.“I must have such a ring, and this ring must be one which, when I am unhappy it will make me joyful, and at the same time, if I am happy and look upon it, I must be made sad.”The wise men consulted one another, and threw themselves into deep contemplation. Finally they came to a decision as to the character of the ring which would suit their king.The ring which they devised was one upon which was inscribed the legend: This too will pass.This is a great story, great because it has been used for centuries by Sufis, and it has helped many people toward enlightenment. It is no ordinary story; it is what I call objective art. It is a device. It is not just for reading and entertainment, it is something which should become your very style of life; only then do you come to know the meaning of it.On the surface it is so simple anybody can understand it. Nothing of special intelligence is needed, but if you contemplate it deeply, then deeper and deeper layers are revealed to you. The story becomes a weapon in your hand; with it you can cut the very knot of ignorance. It is a powerful device. Once understood, it becomes a master key to open the innermost door of your being. It is very potential, pregnant with deep meaning. But one has to contemplate over it, meditate over it, intensely. With consciousness, one has to make every effort to find the innermost meaning of it. But only that won’t help much. That will help in the beginning, but if you really want to understand the story you will have to live it. You will have to live it; only then will you come to understand what it means.A few things before we enter the story.Religion is not ritual. It is not something that you do, it is something that you become. So there is always a possibility of a false religion existing somewhere in the society. A false religion is when inner transformation has been substituted with outer ritual. Then you go on doing things, and those things will become a deep-rooted habit with you – but nothing is achieved. People go to the church and the temple, they repeat the same prayers again and again, and nothing is happening to them. Somewhere on the way they have missed; somewhere on the way they have lost the real coin and they have substituted it with a false coin.Remember this: the real, authentic, religion is concerned with being, not with doing. It has nothing to do with your outer way of life, it has something to do with your center. Of course, when the center changes the periphery follows. Your outer life also changes. But the reverse is not true: you can change the periphery but the center will not change, and you will live the life of a hypocrite, a life of hypocrisy. You will have a different periphery from the center, not only different but just the opposite, the very contrary; you will be split in two.Religion is not ritual, remember that. Religion is an inner consciousness, an inner awakening. Many things on the surface will change, but the change must occur within you first. Think of yourself as a circle with a center. The circle is concerned with others. The circle touches others’ boundaries, other circles. The circle lives, the periphery lives, in the society of other peripheries. A certain morality is needed. To live with the others, a certain regulation, rule, a system, is needed. That’s okay, but that is not religion.Morality is how to live with others, and religion is how to live with oneself. Morality is how not to go wrong with others, and religion is the method of how not to go wrong with yourself. Religion is that which you do in your total loneliness, in your innermost shrine. Obviously, the periphery will be changed because by and by the light from the center will come and infiltrate the whole periphery. You will become luminous. Even others will start feeling the luminosity, the light that comes from you.That light will not be the light of your actions, good actions. The light will be something that is not concerned with good and bad. The light will be just like when a flower opens and the fragrance spreads – neither good nor bad. The sun rises and the light spreads – neither good nor bad. The clouds come and rain falls – they don’t bother who is good and who is bad. When the light comes from the center it is beyond morality, good and bad; everything is dissolved. Simple light, superb in its own self, in its intrinsic value.The word religion is very beautiful, it comes from the root religere. Religere means to rejoin, to reunite. With whom? With yourself, with the source of your being. And why re-unite? Because you are already united with the source; it is a reunion. It is not that you are reaching the source for the first time; otherwise from where will you come? You have come from the source. Deep down you are still in the source. Just on the periphery, as if the branches have forgotten about the roots. Not that they are broken off from the roots because then they cannot live; they have simply forgotten. In their ego, in their height in the sky, with the moon, in their romance, they have completely forgotten that they have roots underground which nourish them, which sustain them, without which they cannot exist for a single moment. And all this greenery, all these flowers and all these fruits, will simply disappear like dreams once they are cut from the roots.That’s how it happens to man. You move in the branches, farther away from the roots. You come to many flowers; you are enchanted. The world is beautiful all around you, you completely forget about the roots. But it is not that you are uprooted. Forgetfulness is just forgetfulness.That is the meaning of religion: to reunite, to remember again. This word remember is also beautiful. It means to become the member again, re-member – to become part of the source again, to go to the source and become a member of it again. Religion is reuniting with your own source. Religion is remembering, becoming again a part of the organic unity that you are. It has nothing to do with others. The ego is always concerned with others, this way or that. When you become totally concerned with yourself, the ego simply drops. There is no point in it existing.Alone you have no ego. Try it! When you are sitting totally alone, not even thinking of others, is there any ego left? There is no possibility, the ego needs two to exist. Just like a bridge cannot exist if there are not two banks to the river; the bridge needs two to be supported. The ego exists as a bridge between you and the other. So in fact the ego is not in you; it is just between you and the other.This is something to be remembered always: the ego is not in you, it cannot be there. It is always between you and the other – the husband and wife, the friend, the enemy: always the other. So when you go deep inside there is no ego. In your total loneliness, the ego simply drops. That’s why the ego goes on playing tricks. Even if you start searching and seeking for truth the ego says, “Help others,” the ego says, “Transform others.” And religion is again missed. It becomes a mission.Religion is not a mission. Missionaries are again on the wrong track. They have again become concerned with the other, now in the name of religion, in the name of service. But whenever you are concerned with the other you have left the source. A religious man also helps others but he is not concerned. It is natural, it is not a mission. It is not something of the mind; he is not seeking and searching to help somebody, it is just by the way. Out of his inner treasures he simply shares. He is not changing anybody. He is not after you to mold you in a certain pattern, because that is the subtlest violence possible in the world – to try to change the other, to mold the other. That means you are cutting and being aggressive, you don’t accept the other as existence has created him. You have better proposals and you have better ideas than the divine. You want to improve on the whole. You are simply stupid. This is how the ego comes in.I have heard about a small Sunday school…The priest, the missionary, was teaching the boys who had been forced to go to the Sunday school to learn about the Bible, Christ and God. It is just inhuman to force children, but you can force them; that’s why so many people later on become irreligious, antireligious. They are taking revenge. In the beginning you forced religion on them; then they take revenge, they throw it out, they move to the other extreme.Christmas was coming so the priest, the missionary, said to the boys, “Now, this is your duty: you should bring more boys to the class; each one of you should try to bring at least two boys. This is how you will help the work of Jesus on this earth.”The boys were not very enthusiastic. They themselves had been forced and they wanted somehow to escape. They looked at each other; nobody was showing any interest. Then suddenly one boy, a new recruit – and new recruits are always dangerous because they can go too much to the extreme in their enthusiasm – a new boy raised his hand. The missionary was very happy. He said, “So you are ready to bring two boys to the class.”The boy said, “Not exactly. Two are too much and too difficult to bring. I will try to bring only one. I have a young fellow in my neighborhood whom I can lick. And I promise you, sir, I will do my damndest to bring him.”This is what missionaries of all religions have been doing all over the world: doing their damnedest to force people toward religion.Religion is not a mission. You need not force anybody toward it. When the urge arises, it arises; it cannot be artificially created. Nobody can create an artificial religious urge, that is impossible. It is just like artificially creating a sexual urge in a small child. Even if a child asks questions about sex, he is not interested in sex. Even if he asks where babies come from, you misunderstand him when you think that he is interested in sex. He is simply curious about babies, from where they come. He is not interested in sex at all. Don’t start teaching him about sex because he will be simply bored. It will be nonsense to him because when the urge is not there, when he is not sexually mature, anything you say about sex just goes above his head.The same happens with the spiritual urge. It is very similar to the sexual urge. One comes to a maturity, a spiritual maturity, something has ripened within you and then the search starts. Nobody can enforce it. All the religions have tried to enforce it and they have killed the very possibility of the urge.The world is so irreligious because of the missionaries, the priests. The world is so irreligious because they have taught too much religion, without ever thinking whether an urge exists or not. People are fed up with those teachings. Churches simply bore. And beautiful words like God, prayer, love, meditation, have become ugly. The greatest words have become the dirtiest because of the missionaries. They have been forcing these beautiful words on you. But when something beautiful is forced it becomes ugly. You can participate in beauty, but you cannot be forced toward it. Then it becomes violence.Religion is not concerned with others, it is concerned with you, absolutely with you. Religion is personal, it is not a phenomenon in the society. In fact, there cannot be any sociology of religion; there can only be a psychology. Society is a totally different matter; the crowd is a totally different matter – where peripheries meet. Religion is when you are so alone that there is nobody left to be met. In that total virgin aloneness, the suprememost ecstasy is born. But you have to come to ripeness.Remember: ripeness is everything. Before it nothing can be done. You may be thinking that you are ready, or somebody else may be thinking that he is ready. Your curiosity may give you a wrong feeling, a notion that you are ready, but readiness only means that you are ready to stake your life; otherwise it is not a readiness. Religion is higher than life because life is with others, life is a relationship, and religion is a non-relationship. It is higher than life. It is the capacity to be alone. It is total independence from the other. Unless you are ready to sacrifice life to it, unless you are ready to die completely as you have been up to now, you are not ready. In that readiness, a small message can become so powerful that it can transform you. Religion is not concerned with others.And, finally, religion is not concerned with scriptures, words. Wise words are there, but for those words you are not the target; they were never addressed to you. Krishna talked to Arjuna; it was a personal dialogue. Jesus talks to his disciples, a small group of disciples, a personal dialogue. He knows everybody; he knows what he is saying, he knows to whom he is saying it. But the Bible becomes dead, the Gita becomes dead.Religion is not like a broadcast on the radio. You don’t know to whom you are talking, you talk to the air. The face of the listener is not there. The center of the listener is not there, there is nobody. It may be, it is possible, that nobody is listening to the broadcast and you are talking in a vacuum. Religion is like a personal letter. You write it to somebody and only to that somebody; it is only meant for that somebody.That’s why I have never tried to write anything except letters. Unless you are here, alive, centered, receptive, listening, I cannot say anything; it is impossible. To whom to say it? It is not a dead word. When there is a listener the dialogue becomes alive; then it has a significance which no scripture can ever have.So everybody has to seek living masters. You can read the Gita – it is beautiful; you can read the Bible – it is wonderful. But they are pieces of literature, beautiful as literature, poetry, prose, but not as religion. Religion happens only between two persons: one who knows and one who does not know but is ready to know. Suddenly religion is born. This is the third thing.Remember these three things, then we can move into this story.A powerful king, ruler of many domains, was in a position of such magnificence that wise men were his mere employees.That’s possible; you can hire wise men. If you have enough money wise men can be mere employees to you, but you will not learn that way. He had many wise men – in old days every emperor, every great king had many wise men – but I have never heard that any emperor ever learned anything from those wise men.It is said of the great emperor Akbar that he had nine wise men in his court. He could afford them – they were called the nine jewels – but I don’t see that he ever learned anything from them because learning needs a different relationship. Learning needs that the learner should bow down, surrender. How can you surrender to your own servants? It is almost impossible! You can order them, but you cannot surrender.It is reported…It happened in the life of Akbar that he called his nine wise men and he was very angry and he said, “You are here, and people say you are the greatest wise men in the world today, but I have not been able to learn anything from you. What is the matter? You are here, and I remain the same; then what are you doing here?”A child had come with a wise man. He wanted to see the court. He laughed. The wise men were silent and the child laughed. Akbar said, “Why are you laughing? It is insulting to the court! Hasn’t your father told you about manners?”The child said, “I am laughing because these nine wise men are silent, and I know why they are silent and I know why you have not been able to be benefited by them.”Akbar looked at the child’s face – very innocent, but very ancient also. Whenever a child is very innocent you can see the deep ancientness in his eyes because no child is a child. He has lived, experienced much; he carries all the knowledge from all his experiences in the past. Akbar said, “Then can you teach me something?”The child said, “Yes!”Akbar said, “Then teach!”The child said, “Then you have to follow me. Come down here where I am sitting and I will sit on the throne. Then ask like a disciple, not like a master.”And it is said that Akbar understood. Those nine wise men had been absolutely useless. He could not learn, not because they couldn’t teach – they could teach – but he was not ready, and he was not receptive, and he was not humble enough.It is said that he sat down and the child sat on the throne and he said, “Now ask like a disciple, not like an emperor.”Akbar never asked anything. And it is said that he thanked the child, touched his feet and said, “There is no need to ask. Just by sitting in a humble attitude near your feet I have learned much.”Humbleness is the basic thing. Even without a wise man, if you are humble you will learn much. You can learn from the trees and the springs and the clouds and the winds. If you are humble, the whole existence becomes a teacher to you. But if you are not humble and a buddha is there, no intimacy happens. A buddha is around you, but no intimacy happens – you are not humble. You would like to learn, but without bending, without bringing down your ego.A powerful king, ruler of many domains, was in a position of such magnificence that wise men were his mere employees. It is easy, you can collect wise men around you, but that is not the point. The real point is not to bring a wise man to your house; the real point is how to go to a wise man because in the very going you learn. And these wise men could not have been real wise men either because a wise man will not waste his life in the courts. They may be intellectual, very knowledgeable, great scholars, but not wise. Knowledge and wisdom are totally different.Just the other day we were talking about the fact that the question of knowledge is very dangerous. If the doctor had told the woman, “Go on a fast for forty days,” it would have been knowledge. But he told the woman, “Now there is no possibility of any cure. Drop any idea about fertility and this and that. You are going to die in forty days.” This is wisdom, the difference between knowledge and wisdom.Knowledge is a dead response. You have learned something and you go on applying it to everything. Wisdom is living response. You look at the situation and you respond. It is not a reaction, it is a response. When you react, you react out of the past. When you respond, you respond here and now. The doctor looked at the woman, her body – too much fat. He felt the heart of the woman, the pulse. He was a wise man; he created a device, he lied to her: “You are going to die.” And the woman was transformed.People who go to the courts and to the capitals and can be purchased cannot have much wisdom.It happened in Japan…An emperor became very anxious to know about death and life beyond death. He had wise men at his court. When he asked them they said, “If we knew, we would not be here; we are just as ignorant as you. You are rich, we are poor – that’s the only difference. We don’t know. If you really want to know you will have to move out of the court, you will have to seek and search for a master. The master cannot come to you, you will have to go to the master.”The emperor tried. He went to all the well-known persons – of course, that’s the way one seeks. He went to all the well-known saints but was not satisfied. Again he came to the court and told his wise men, “I have been searching all over the country.”Those people said, “You are searching wrongly. You go to the well-known persons. It is difficult to find a master there because, in the first place, it is very difficult for a real master to become well-known, very difficult; it rarely happens. Secondly, a real master tries to hide himself in many, many ways, so that only real seekers can reach him, and not curious people who just by the way would like to ask something. You have been searching in the wrong places.”The wise people said, “We know a man here, in this town, in your capital, but you will have to come to the man.”The man was a beggar and he lived under a bridge with other beggars. The emperor could not believe it, but something was coming out of him, some emanation, something from the beyond, that touched his heart, that changed his beat of the heart – a magnetic force. Without knowing why, without even knowing what he was doing, for the first time he touched the feet of a man. Suddenly he himself was shocked at what he had done. He had touched the feet of a beggar! But the beggar said, “You are accepted.”This is the way one starts learning.The man was rich: A very rich king, ruler of many domains, was in a position of such magnificence that wise men were his mere employees. Rich people can afford wise men – but those wise men will not be really wise. You cannot purchase wisdom. You can purchase everything in this world, but you cannot purchase wisdom.It is reported in Mahavira’s life that a king came to him, a very famous king. His name was Prasenjita. He came to Mahavira and he said, “I have everything that this world can offer – I am deeply contented, there is nothing more to achieve, all my ambitions are fulfilled. Only one thing goes on and on in my mind: What is this meditation? What is this dhyana? I am ready to purchase it, and whatever the cost – say, and I will give it. This is the only thing that has been haunting me: What is this meditation, dhyana, samadhi? Only one thing I am lacking in my treasuries, only one thing is lacking and that is samadhi, dhyana. Give it to me. I have heard that you have attained it, so you can give it to me whatever the cost. Don’t bother about the cost.”Mahavira said, “There is no need to come to me, so far away from your capital. In your capital itself there is a very poor man; he may like to sell it. And he has attained. You had better go to him.” Mahavira played a joke. He said, “I don’t need to sell it. Go to this man, a very poor man in your capital, and he will be happy.”Prasenjita went back and immediately reached the man with many bullock carts loaded with gold coins, diamonds, emeralds, many riches, and he just emptied out all the bullock carts in front of the house of the poor man. He said, “Take all these, and if you ask for more I can give you more. Where is that dhyana? Give me that.”The poor man started crying and weeping and he said, “I may be poor, but this is impossible. I would like to thank you for all your riches you have brought to me, but the bargain is not possible. Meditation is a state of being. I cannot give it to you. I am ready to give my life if it is needed. I love you, respect you; I am ready to give my life. You can take it right now, you can cut off my head – but how can I give you meditation, samadhi?”Just see: even life can be given, but not dhyana. Dhyana is higher than life. You can sacrifice your life, but you cannot sacrifice samadhi: it is impossible. And life can be taken from you, anybody can kill you. Samadhi cannot be taken from you. Nobody can take it, purchase it, steal it, kill it. And unless you attain samadhi you have not come to the real treasure. Even life is not the real treasure, only that which cannot be taken away from you is the real treasure. Even death cannot take it away from you, that is the criterion.Whatever you have, always put it to the criterion: whether death will take it away from you or not. That should become a constant contemplation. You have money – will death separate you from it or not? You have prestige, political power, fame, beauty, physical strength, body. Whatever you have put it to the criterion: whether it will be taken by death, whether you will be separated from it or not. You will find that, except samadhi, everything will be taken away by death. That’s why Sufis say it is better to die to all these things which will finally be taken away by death. Eventually they are going to be taken away. Die to them, and arise in samadhi – because that is the only thing which is deathless.The king had everything. He had employed many wise men, but he must not have learned anything. In the first place, the wise men must not have been very wise. In the second place, when you employ a wise man how can you learn anything from him? You have to become a servant to a wise man; you have to fall at his feet and surrender, only then can you learn, only then learning is possible.Wisdom is just like water flowing downward. Water goes on moving downward, finding holes and valleys and lakes and filling them. Become a lake-like phenomenon; near a wise man, become a valley. Don’t try to be the peak of the ego, become a valley and suddenly you will be filled.And yet one day he felt himself confused and called his sages to him.It comes: when you have lived too long in riches, the moment comes. The moment comes when one feels frustrated with all that riches can give. When you live in palaces a moment comes when you feel that this is not life: death starts knocking on the door. Miseries enter – you cannot protect yourself from sadness. And this king was in trouble at that time. A neighboring country was planning to attack, and the neighboring country was a very great country, more powerful than his. He was afraid – death, defeat, despair of old age. And then he started seeking.He called his wise men and he said to them:“I do not know the cause, but something impels me to seek a certain ring, one that will enable me to stabilize my state.“I must have such a ring, and this ring must be one which, when I am unhappy it will make me joyful, and at the same time, if I am happy and look upon it, I must be made sad.”He is asking for a key, a key with which he can open two doors: the door of happiness and the door of unhappiness. But he wants one key with which both the doors can be opened. He must have attained a certain understanding.When you live a rich life with many experiences, good and bad, you attain a certain understanding. I always feel that a man who has not lived in many ways – wrong and right, moral and immoral, rich and poor, good and bad – who has not lived all the opposites, never attains a very deep understanding of life. He may become a saint, but his saintliness will be a poor saintliness. When a buddha becomes a saint, his saintliness becomes incomparable, unique. From where does this uniqueness come to a buddha? It comes from his multidimensional life. He has lived all, and when you live all, by and by you rise above all. Through living you come to understand that this is useless.It is beautiful to remember Buddha’s life again and again.When he was born the astrologers said, “This boy will either become a chakravartin – a king of the whole world – or he will become a sannyasin. These are the two possibilities.” Two extreme possibilities: either the king of the world, or a man who has renounced all and become a beggar on the street – homeless, rootless, a vagabond, a sannyasin. Two extremes.The father asked, “How is it so? You talk about two extremes, what is the meaning of it?”The astrologers said, “This is always so. Whenever a man is born to become a chakravartin” – chakravartin means the emperor of the whole, of the whole earth – “whenever a person is born who is capable of becoming a chakravartin, the other possibility is always there.”The father still could not understand. He said, “Tell me in detail.”The astrologers said, “We don’t know much about the phenomenon of sannyas, but this much is said in the scriptures: when a man has everything, then suddenly an awakening dawns in him that everything is useless.”Only a beggar hankers after the palace; the man in the palace is already finished with the palace. A man who has not known women, beautiful women, always hankers. A man who has known is already finished. Only knowledge, experience, changes you. So if this man is going to have the whole world, how long can he remain in it? Sooner or later he will renounce. All the buddhas were born kings, all the Hindu avatars were born kings, all the Jaina tirthankaras were born kings. There is something to it, it is not just coincidental. They lived, they indulged, and they indulged so totally in everything that there was no barrier to them. Sooner or later they came to the bottom of the whole phenomenon – there was nothing.It is just like when you go on peeling an onion – what happens? If you peel one layer, another layer is there fresher than the first, younger. You peel another, an even fresher layer is there, younger. You go on. If you don’t peel the onion to the very last, you will always think that something must be there still. But if you peel the onion completely, suddenly a moment comes when the last layer is broken and there is nothing in it – emptiness.That’s what happens to an emperor. He goes on peeling the onion of life; he can afford it. A beggar cannot afford the whole onion, he remains just on the periphery. If he can peel the first layer, that is too much: “There are other layers!” He always hopes somewhere inside, “I have not attained bliss in this world because I don’t have the whole world in my hand. If I had the whole world, who knows, maybe I would have become blissful, I would have attained deep contentment.” That haunting desire remains. With an emperor the whole onion is in his hands.The astrologers said to Buddha’s father, “This is always so. A chakravartin always has the alternative of becoming a sannyasin.” And from the other end also it is true – it was not said there, but I would like to add it to the story – that a sannyasin is always a chakravartin. Whenever sannyas happens to a man that means he has lived through many, many lives, through all the experiences: he is finished. That is maturity. A chakravartin has the alternative of being a sannyasin. If you really become a sannyasin, that shows only one thing: you have been a chakravartin, not in one life but in many lives, spread out, you have lived all.Buddha’s father was very worried and he said, “Then what to do? I have only one son, and he too was born in my old age. I am no longer young, and my wife died immediately when Buddha was born so I cannot hope for more sons. The whole kingdom will go to ruins. What to do? You suggest something to me.”And they suggested, they suggested very knowingly. This is how knowledge fails. They were not wise people. They were great astrologers, they knew the scripture, they knew the word, but they didn’t know the spirit. They suggested an ordinary course such as any man of knowledge would have suggested, but not a man of wisdom. They suggested, “Do one thing: don’t allow this boy to come to face any misery, any pain, any unhappiness. Don’t allow him to know that old age comes, don’t allow him to know that people die. And arrange as many beautiful women around him as you can manage; let him live a life of total indulgence and no frustration. Without frustration, nobody ever becomes a sannyasin.”This was pure logic, and this was done. There was no difficulty; the father could manage. Three houses were made for Buddha, for three seasons, in different places. He would live in a cold region in the summer, and then he would change. Every four months he would move to another house, great palaces. All the beautiful girls of the kingdom were called. Never has a man remained with so many beautiful women together.Buddha lived in indulgence. It is said that even in the garden of Buddha’s palace no flower was allowed to die. Before it started dying it had to be removed. Buddha never saw a dry leaf. It had to be removed in the night so that the idea of death would never arise and he would never come to think about the fact that life is going to end, because if that thinking came, he would start thinking of renouncing the life which is going to end.Buddha knew only the beautiful things, he knew only the dreams, he lived in those dreams. But reality penetrates every dream. You cannot avoid reality; however you manage, even with an emperor father managing everything, you cannot avoid reality. It bumps into you from here and there; you stumble upon it. How can you manage to dream continuously twenty-four hours a day?One night Buddha was enjoying: the girls were dancing, there was great music and dance, and he enjoyed it. Then he fell asleep. It was midnight and he was tired, and all the girls fell asleep. Suddenly in the middle of the night he awoke and he looked at the girls – the beauty was not there. Saliva was flowing, somebody’s mouth was open and it was looking ugly. Somebody else was in a nightmare and she was crying and weeping. Suddenly he became aware: “I was thinking all these women are so beautiful, and suddenly they have become ugly?” That night, reality penetrated. He kept it to himself.One day he was going to participate in a festival. On the way he happened to see an old man – he had never seen one before. He happened to see a dead body being carried to the burning ghat – he had never seen one before. He asked his driver, the driver of the chariot, “What is the matter? What has happened to this man? Why has his face become so wrinkled? And why is his back bent? What calamity has fallen upon him?”The driver said, “It is not a calamity, sir. It happens to everybody. It is a natural thing; everybody becomes old and wrinkled.”The reality penetrated. Then he asked, “What has happened to this other man? Why are people carrying him on their shoulders?”The driver said, “This man is dead, sir. This is the next step after old age.”Buddha suddenly said, “Stop the chariot! Am I also going to die?”The driver hesitated. He knew what Buddha’s father was doing. But he was a very true man, simple and authentic. He said, “I am not allowed to say, but since you have raised the question I cannot also be a liar to you. This man is dead, and just like this man you will also be dead. Everybody who is born is going to die.”Then suddenly a sannyasin who was following the dead man appeared. Buddha asked, “And what has happened to this man? Why this orange robe?” He had never seen a sannyasin before. Really, unless you see a dead man, how can you see a sannyasin? It is a logical sequence: old age, death, sannyas.The story is beautiful – whether it happened or not is not the point. But the story is beautiful and true. Whether it happened or not, it is true because after death, encountering death, what else remains but sannyas?The chariot driver said, “This man has understood life; he has understood that life ends in death, and he has renounced.”Buddha said, “Turn back to the palace. I have renounced.”At that moment even the driver couldn’t understand what Buddha was saying. By the night, he had left the palace.When you live life in its totality, you have to renounce it. Only those who have not lived rightly, who have not lived at all or who have lived lukewarm and tepid lives, cling. Clinging shows an ignorant mind which doesn’t understand. Renunciation is simple; it is a natural outgrowth, it is a maturity.Those astrologers were men of knowledge. They helped Buddha, really, not at all knowingly, to renounce. If it had been asked of me, if Buddha’s father Shuddhodana had asked me, I would not have suggested this because this is the natural way to renounce life. I would have suggested: “Starve this man; don’t give him as much food as he needs. Starve him so much that he thinks and dreams about food. Don’t allow him to touch a woman, or come near to a woman; keep all the beautiful women at a distance so he hankers and desires; starve him sexually also. And don’t make too many palaces; let him live a beggar’s life. Then he will never renounce.”That’s what has happened to you all. You cannot renounce because you have lived a beggar’s life. Only beggars are unable to renounce: emperors are always ready to renounce. Only emperors can become sannyasins, not beggars. How can a beggar think of renouncing? He has not got anything. How can he renounce? You can renounce only that which you have got. If you don’t have anything you cannot renounce. What will you renounce?This king, in a deep crisis, came to understand that happiness and unhappiness are not different. He was wiser than his wise men. That’s why he asks for one key which can open both the doors. In fact, happiness and unhappiness are not two things, they are one phenomenon: two faces of the same thing, two aspects. So one key will open both.Watch: when you are happy, can you say with absolute certainty that no unhappiness exists side by side? Happiness may be in the center, but in the corner is not unhappiness waiting for you? Is not somewhere in your happiness a seed of unhappiness already sprouting? When you are unhappy are you absolutely certain you are simply unhappy? Or is there some possibility gaining strength which will transform unhappiness into happiness?It is just like in the morning when the sun rises. You cannot see the evening coming, but in the morning the evening is hidden. It has already come. With the morning it has entered. When there is a noontide of light and the sun is at its peak, at its omega point, who thinks about night and darkness? But in that very omega point the seed of the night is there, growing, waiting for its time. And at the omega point the sun has already started setting, it is already moving toward the west. In the darkest night the morning is pregnant; it is there in the womb – and the same is true of all the opposites.When you are in love, hate is there as a seed. When you are in hate, love is there as a seed. When you are happy, already you have started to move toward unhappiness. When you are unhappy, just wait a little. Happiness has already knocked on or entered the door. The opposites are together. This is a great understanding, and once this understanding is there the key is not far away.“I do not know the cause,” said the king… Nobody knows the cause. You have come to me – do you know the cause? Why have you come to me? Nobody knows the cause. But a deep unconscious desire has brought you toward me. And you will never be the same again, you cannot be. I have become a part of you, a member of you. Even if you forget me completely you cannot be the same again. I will remain in your forgetfulness.Do you know the reason why you have come – from so many countries, from so many different corners of the world – to a man who has nothing to give you, or only nothing to give you? What is the reason? Why have you come here? You may not be aware right now because the cause is in the unconscious, but the deeper your meditation goes, by and by you will become aware that it is life that has thrown you toward me. It is life with its miseries; it is life with its frustrations. Of course, there are moments of happiness, but the misery is so much that even those moments of happiness become poisoned by it. You have loved; you have enjoyed a few moments, peak moments. You were ecstatic, but then you again fall back into the valley. You have come to me because you unconsciously have felt that happiness and unhappiness are one, and that if you go on desiring happiness, you will go on becoming unhappy.The king said: “I do not know the cause, but something impels me to seek a certain ring…” There is a story behind this story.It is said that Sufis have a ring – a very occult way of saying things. They have a ring and if you can get that ring, you will go beyond life and death, you will go beyond darkness and light, you will go beyond day and night, you will go beyond misery and happiness – you will go beyond dualities. Sufis have a ring. If you can get hold of that ring…The king must have heard about it, so he said: “I don’t know the cause but something impels me to seek a certain ring, one that will enable me to stabilize my state, my being. I must have such a ring, and this ring must be one which, when I am unhappy it will make me joyful…” He’s asking for a secret alchemical formula: “When I am joyful, it will make me miserable, sad; when I am sad, it will make me joyful, happy.” What is he asking?He is asking for mastery of his moods – and this is the only mastery. When you are unhappy you are unhappy; you cannot do anything, you are just a victim. You say, “I am unhappy, I cannot do anything.” When it comes it comes – you are unhappy. Sometimes you are happy; nothing you can do about it either – when it comes it comes. You are not a master.What is he saying? He is saying, “I am in search of a secret formula so that I can become master of my moods – and when I want to transform my happiness into sadness I can, and when I want to change my sadness into ecstatic happiness I can.” What is he saying? He is saying that he wants to become master of his moods, he wants to create his moods; he doesn’t want to be a victim. He wants to create whatever he wants. There is a formula, and there exists a ring with a secret message in it which can transform. Then it is simply wonderful when you can change your moods. You can just turn them on and off.“…when I am unhappy it will make me joyful, and at the same time, if I am happy and look upon it, I must be made sad.” With the first you will agree. With the second you will say “What is the necessity?” But they both exist together. If you become master of one you become master of the other also. And there is nothing wrong in being sad if you are the master. Sadness has a depth to it which no happiness can ever have. Sadness has a beauty of its own, a very soft beauty – deep, soft. No happiness can have that.Happiness has a shallowness about it, a vulgarity about it. Sadness has a depth, a greater plenitude than any happiness can have. You have not enjoyed sadness because you have not been able to bring your awareness toward it. When a man becomes more and more aware he enjoys everything, even sadness. Then sadness settles around him like evening settling, and everything becomes silent. Even the birds don’t sing, even the winds don’t blow – everything becomes silent, and everything settles in a deep relaxation. Sadness is beautiful if you know. If you don’t know that even happiness is not beautiful, how can sadness be beautiful?The king said, “I want to become a master of my moods,” and that is why he says to stabilize my state. If you are not the master of your moods and they blow on their own, how can you have a stability? How can you have a crystallized being? A mood comes suddenly and you are unhappy, and everything starts trembling within you. Another mood comes and you are happy; again there is excitement and everything trembles within you.Have you observed that a long mood of happiness also tires you? It is an excitement. You cannot be happy for a long period otherwise it will be too much for your body, for your mind; for your psychosomatic being it will be too much. You cannot be because it makes you tremble, it is like a fever. People cannot remain happy forever. They will die; they will have heart attacks, blood pressure, and many things.It happens that miserable people live longer than happy people because miserable people are less excited; happy people are more excited. Excitement is a burden on the heart. Successful people have more heart attacks than failures do: in fact, unsuccessful people don’t have heart attacks. What is the use of having a heart attack? A heart attack is a medical certificate that you are a successful man. It comes about forty – between forty and forty-five – because that is the peak of a man’s success. Then the heart attack comes because success brings more and more excitement.Miserable people, sad people, live longer; on average they live five to ten years longer than people who are happy, successful. What is the matter? Sad people are more settled; in their gloom they are less in excitement. If you try to understand both the phenomena deeply you will find they are interrelated and that each turns into the other. It is like a wheel: sometimes the spoke of happiness is at the top, sometimes it is at the bottom, then the other spoke is at the top. It goes on moving. And you are in the grip of the wheel, as if you are tied to the wheel and you move with the wheel. How can you stabilize yourself?The king is right. He said, “So that my state becomes a stabilized state, so that I can become settled within my own being, I would like to have the ring Sufis have been talking about. Where is that ring?”The wise men consulted one another…That’s why I say they were not very wise. Experts consult, never wise men. “Experts” means people who are knowledgeable; they consult each other because you may not know something, the other may know. But a wise man simply knows: it is not a question to think about. A wise man is not a thinker, he simply knows and he responds with his total being. There was not a single wise man – they consulted.The wise men consulted one another, and threw themselves into deep contemplation.A wise man need not throw himself into deep contemplation, he exists in it. He is deep contemplation. Only fools contemplate – a wise man never contemplates. He is the contemplation, the very quality. But they were not wise men, they were not wise people.Finally they came to a decision as to the character of this ring which would suit their king.I know another version of the story, and I think the other version is better. The other version is that they couldn’t come to any conclusion. And that seems right. They can fight, argue… Have you ever known people who are argumentative – philosophers, theologians – come to any conclusion? No. Even if you give them a conclusion already concluded, on that conclusion they will fight and move in different directions. That’s how it has been happening always.It happened in this century with Freud, a man of much knowledge, not a wise man – not wise in the sense a buddha is wise – but a very deep, penetrating thinker. By and by, all his disciples, Carl Gustav Jung, Adler and others, who had come to him thinking that there was a conclusion, that something had been found… It simply proved to be a crossroad from where they separated. All his disciples went in different directions. Those who remained with him were minor figures; amongst those who remained with him there was not a single genius. All the geniuses departed – argued, fought, departed and became enemies. It is impossible for men of knowledge, knowledgeable men, to conclude anything.The other version says……they couldn’t conclude so they went to a Sufi saint and asked his advice. The Sufi saint had the ring already – wise men always have the ring already. He just took the ring off his finger, gave it to them and told them, “Give it to the king. But tell him there is one condition: only when he feels that now something is impossible to tolerate should he open the ring. Hidden underneath the stone is the message, but he should not open it just out of curiosity because then he will miss the message. The message is there, but a right moment in your consciousness is needed to meet it. It is not a dead message that you can open and read. It is written under the stone, but a condition has to be fulfilled: when everything is lost and the mind cannot do anything more, the confusion is total, the agony perfect, and you cannot do anything else, you are absolutely helpless, only then should it be opened – and the message will be there.”And this is right. I would also like to make this condition, because without this condition it means the message is there and anybody can read it – then the message is not of much value. You have to rise to a certain consciousness; only then can you understand. The understanding is not in the words; the understanding is within you. The words will only trigger the understanding, that’s all. But it has to be there to be triggered.The king followed the message. The country was lost, the enemy victorious. Many moments came when he was just on the verge of taking out the stone and reading the message, but he found that it was still not total: “I’m still alive. Even if the kingdom is lost I can regain it, it can be reconquered.” He fled from the kingdom just to save his life.The enemy is following him, he can hear the horses, their sounds coming nearer and nearer. And he goes on running. Friends are lost, his horse dies, then he runs on his feet. The feet have become bloody, cut everywhere. He cannot move even an inch and he has to run continuously. He’s hungry, and the enemy is coming nearer and nearer. Then he comes to a cul-de-sac: the road finishes, there is no more road ahead, there is just an abyss, and the enemy is coming closer and closer. He cannot go back; the enemy is there. He cannot jump; the abyss is so big he will simply be dead. Now there seems to be no possibility – but he still waits for the condition. He says, “I am still alive. Maybe the enemy will move in some other direction. Maybe if I jump into this abyss I will not die – the condition is not yet fulfilled.”Then suddenly he feels the enemy is too close. And when he looks to jump he sees two lions who have just now come into the abyss and they are looking at him – hungry, ferocious. Now there is no moment left and the enemy is coming nearer and nearer and nearer; he can count his last moments just on his fingers.Suddenly he takes the ring, opens it, looks underneath the stone. There is a message – and the message is “This too will pass.”Suddenly everything is relaxed – “This too will pass.” And of course it happens: the enemy has moved in another direction and he cannot hear their noise so much; they are moving further away. He sits down; he has a good sleep, rests. And within ten days he collects his armies, comes back, reconquers the country, and is again in his palace. There is great jubilation and celebration. People are going crazy, they are dancing in the streets, there is much color and light and fireworks. And he is feeling so excited, and so happy, and his heart is beating so fast that he thinks that he may die because of happiness. Suddenly he remembers the ring, opens it, looks into it. It is written there: “This too will pass.” He relaxes. It is said that he attains the perfect wisdom through this message: “This too will pass.”Whenever a mood comes to you – anger, hatred, passion, sex, misery, sadness, happiness, even while meditating, a moment of bliss – always remember: this too will pass. Let it become a constant mindfulness: this too will pass.What will happen to you if you can remember it continuously? Then happiness will not be happiness, just a phase, a cloud that comes and goes: it is not you. It comes and passes: it is not your being. It is something accidental, it is something on the periphery. You are the witness.When you remember, “This too will pass, this too will pass, this too will pass,” suddenly you are separate from it. It comes to you, but it is not you. It goes away, you are left behind – intact, untouched. Misery comes; let it come, but just remember that it too will pass. Happiness comes, but just remember that it too will pass. And by and by a distance is created between the moods and you. You are no longer identified with them; you have become a witness. You just look at them, a spectator. You are no longer concerned, you have become indifferent.A silence descends on you – a silence which is not created by you, a silence which is not a forced stillness; a silence which suddenly descends from unknown sources, from the divine, from the whole. And then you are crystallized. Then nothing shakes your foundations, then nothing makes you tremble. Nothing! Happiness, unhappiness, then you know they are both the same. If the face is of happiness, the back is of unhappiness; if the face is of unhappiness, the back is of happiness – they are the same. When happiness comes toward you it looks like happiness; when it goes away from you look at the back. It was unhappiness. The more distance, the more awareness. The more awareness, the more distance. You become settled. You become a buddha under the bodhi tree.But this will not happen to you until you die as you are. This is a resurrection, the birth of the absolutely new. The old has to give way. Your old attitudes, concepts, philosophies, ideologies, your old identity, the old ego, they have to give way for the new. The new is always there, but there is no space in you for it to come. The guest has come but the host is not ready. Give space – become more spacious within you. Create room, emptiness.And this message is wonderful. This is a master key. Remember it.The ring which they devised was one upon which was inscribed the legend: This too will pass.Let it become a constant remembrance. Let it become so deeply continuous that even in sleep you know: this too will pass. Even in dreams you know: this too will pass. Let it become like breathing, continuously there, a presence. And that presence will transform you. It is a master key; it can open the secretmost door to your own being, and from there, via there, to the very being of existence.Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 09 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-09/

Shibli was asked, “Who guided you on the path?”Shibli said, “A dog. One day I saw him, almost dead with thirst, standing by the water’s edge. Every time he looked at his reflection in the water he was frightened, and withdrew because he thought it was another dog.“Finally, such was his necessity, he cast away fear and leapt into the water, at which the reflection disappeared.“The dog found that the obstacle, which was himself, the barrier between him and what he sought, had melted away.“In this same way, my own obstacle vanished when I knew that it was what I took to be my own self. And my way was first shown to me by the behavior of a dog.”I look into you and I don’t see any other barrier than yourself. You are standing in your own way, and unless you understand it, nothing is possible toward inner growth.If somebody else was the barrier you could have dodged him, you could have bypassed him. If somebody was the barrier you could have escaped. But you are the barrier. You cannot dodge – who will dodge whom? You cannot bypass – who will bypass whom? You cannot escape because wherever you go you will be there. Your barrier is you, and it will follow you like a shadow. This has to be understood as deeply as possible.How does this barrier arise? What is the mechanism of the ego which becomes the barrier? A hard crust around you, and you cannot fly into the sky, you cannot open into the world of love and prayer. This shell of the ego, how is it born? If you can understand the birth of the ego, you will know the secret of how to dissolve it. The very understanding of the arising of the ego becomes the freedom.The ego is born through reflections. Not that you know yourself: you see your reflection in the eyes of others, in their faces, in their words, and you go on accumulating those reflections. Not knowing who you are, you have to find an identity. A child is born; he does not know who he is. But he has to know who he is, otherwise it will be impossible to live in the world. And he cannot become a buddha immediately. He does not even know the problem. He has not entered the world yet. He will really enter the world when he starts feeling who he is.That’s why you cannot remember many things from your childhood. If you go backward you will be able to remember up to the age of three, four: beyond that you will not be able to penetrate. What is the matter? Was memory not functioning? Were there no experiences, imprints on the mind, impressions? They were there. In fact, a young child of three years or two years of age is more impressionable than he ever will be. Millions of experiences are happening to the child. But why is the memory not there? The ego is still not ripe. Who will carry the memory? What will be the nucleus of the memory? The child has not yet identified who he is. No identification has come up yet.How does he get the ego? He looks into the eyes of the mother. The eyes are happy, smiling, he gathers the impression: “I must be beautiful, I must be lovely, valuable, precious. Whenever the mother comes near, she becomes so happy. She comes and kisses me.” The child is gathering impressions. The father comes, and the father goes crazy, throws the child into the air, plays with the child and the child is watching. The father becomes the mirror, the mother becomes the mirror. Neighbors come; by and by he’s accumulating. He is filing who he is in the mind.That’s why if a child has been brought up without a mother, he will always be lacking something in his identity. He will not be able to love himself because the basic impression of somebody loving is not there. He will be, in certain ways, always shaky; he will not be sure. The mother gives the surety and the certainty – that you are loved, you are precious, you make people happy, you are valuable. As the child moves, neighbors, friends, schoolteachers, millions of impressions, millions of mirrors are all around and he goes on gathering.Of course, very soon he starts filing impressions into divisions. Those who love him he cherishes; those who hate him he does not like. Many impressions are not good for the ego, so he goes on throwing them into the basement of the mind, into the unconscious. Somebody hits him; somebody says, “You are ugly”; the teacher says, “You are stupid.” These impressions he goes on throwing into the unconscious. A division has started.The conscious is that which you cherish and love: your beautiful image. And in the unconscious you go on throwing the ugly image. Division has entered the mind. This is the beginning of schizophrenia. If it goes to the very extreme you will become split into two personalities. Normally you are not one; you are two. When you are angry the suppressed personality takes possession. Watch somebody who is getting into anger. The face changes, the eyes change, the behavior: suddenly he is not the same person. It is as if something foreign has entered, he is possessed, and he will do things he himself could not imagine that he can do. He can commit a murder in rage and anger and he will not be able to understand how it happened. Many murderers in the courts say that they never did it, and they are not lying. In fact, they never did it; somebody else, a faraway personality with which they were not identified, possessed them.See a person who has fallen in love. Suddenly a transfiguration happens. His eyes are no longer the same; a new light shines through the eyes. His face is no longer the same; a softness has entered, he is more flowing. Suddenly out of darkness a morning is born. Deep down inside him birds are singing and flowers are opening. In love a man is totally different. In anger you cannot make these two persons meet: they are separate personalities. In anger, your identity which you have suppressed in the unconscious comes up; in love, your identity which you always cherish.This split is the cause of all the miseries that happen to humanity and all the mental agonies that happen to the human mind. Unless this split disappears you will never be whole, and unless this split disappears you will never be able to know who you are. The conscious is as false as the unconscious because both are just reflections gathered from others. You have not encountered yourself directly but via others. There are some mirrors in which you look beautiful, there are some mirrors in which you look ugly. There are some mirrors in which you look divine, there are some mirrors in which you look just animal.This has been my observation: whatever your identity, whatever your ego, deep down there is confusion because the other, condemned part is always there. In your foundations it is always there, and you are always shaky and confused. If somebody really asks you “Who are you?” the answer is not there. If nobody asks, you know who you are. But if somebody asks, persists, “Who are you?” you don’t know.Saint Augustine has said, “I know, when nobody asks, what time is. But if somebody asks what time is, I don’t know.” And exactly the same is the case with the ego. If nobody asks, you know. If somebody asks, suddenly the certainty is gone. That’s why it is polite not to ask anybody “Who are you?” because the certainty is just on the surface. How can you be certain just by gathering reflections, reflections from many sources? They are antagonistic, contradictory, confusing. You are a chaos. Your ego is just a trick to hide the chaos, just a blanket word in which you can go on hiding everything. You are a madness within.This is the first thing to be understood: nobody can know himself through mirrors because mirrors will interpret. In fact, a mirror never shows who you are; a mirror simply says how he reacts to you. The mother smiles. It is not that she is saying something about you; she is saying something about herself. She is happy; she has become a mother. And every mother smiles, even at the ugliest child the mother smiles. A very ordinary child, but the mother always thinks that he is going to be a Napoleon, or an Alexander, or a Buddha. The mother is not saying something about you: she is happy in being a mother, she is saying something about herself. And if the child smiles, the mother is also gathering ego. If the child smiles, the mother feels very good. She thinks the child is smiling at her.Everybody is in the same boat. The child is not smiling at the mother; he is not saying anything about the mother. Every child smiles at the mother because she is the source of food and love. This is just diplomacy; the child smiles because that’s how he gets more love, more nourishment. Within a few days the child becomes a politician. He knows when to smile and when not to; he starts giving punishment, prizes. If he is not feeling good about the mother he will not smile, he will not look at her, she will have to persuade him.The child is showing something about himself, not about the mother. The mother is showing something about herself, not about the child. When you go to the mirror, the mirror is saying something about itself, not about you. If it is a good mirror from Belgium it shows something about itself: “I am from Belgium.” If it is Indian-made it shows “I am made in India” – nothing about you. If your face looks beautiful that only shows that the mirror has been made in a beautiful way. It reflects, it reacts.This has to be understood – particularly for the seeker this is one of the basic things – that everybody else around you, all the mirrors, reflect. They are their reactions. They are not saying anything about you. How can they say? You yourself don’t know yourself – how can they know? Impossible! They do not know themselves – how can they know you?The ego is the accumulation of impressions, shadows, reflections, and with this ego you live; you live in a hell. Unless you drop this ego the possibility for heaven will always remain closed.And don’t try to drop it because right now the dropper will be the same: the ego. Then you will gain a subtle ego: “I am dropping the ego. I have dropped the ego.” Again you will look around to see how people are feeling. They will say “We have never seen such a humble man,” and you will collect the reflection that you are the most egoless person, that you are so beautiful, so humble, so simple, you don’t have any ego. And you go on collecting.You cannot drop it, you can only understand. And there is no need to drop because there is nothing to drop, just shadows. You have to understand how you accumulated your self-identity, how you gathered your self-image. And this self-image is confusing because you have gathered it from many sources – divergent, diametrically opposite – so you are always a crowd, you don’t have a unity. These impressions can’t have a unity.If you had lived with one man and you had never come across another man, your ego would have been absolutely certain. But that too is difficult because one man is not one man either: one moment he is something, another moment something else. In the morning the mother was smiling, but by the afternoon she is angry and hitting you. If you had lived with one man of one single mood, then your ego would have been one. But you have lived with many, many people, with millions of moods – all impressions are there. Your ego is a crowd. It is not a crystallization, it is not a center; it has no center. It is just a crowd, a mob.You cannot drop it. You can simply look, watch, and understand. Once you understand, suddenly you feel it is dropped. You never drop it. When you understand, it is no longer there. It is just like darkness: you bring in a candle and the darkness is not there. You bring in understanding and there is light; the ego disappears, the shadows have gone. And when the ego disappears, for the first time you become a unitary being. Your unconscious and conscious simply lose their boundaries. There are no boundaries in fact. Freud is absolutely wrong because he thinks the unconscious and conscious have some substantial boundaries. They have none. It is only because of the ego.The accepted part of the ego has become the conscious because you accept it; it can come to the surface. The rejected part of the ego – because you reject it – you throw it away. Where will it go? It falls deeper into you. There is no darkness. You are just standing with your back toward the rejected part.Once you understand that the ego is just a crowd of a multimillion impressions, that the rejected and the accepted are of the same quality because both are false… With this understanding that the ego is false and a crowd, the crowd suddenly disappears and the falsity drops. In a single moment the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious are dissolved. A merger, a floodlike merger happens.And your unconscious is very big, nine times bigger than your conscious. So unless you are joined with the unconscious your life will be very, very fragmentary, superficial. You will live only a part; you will not be able to live the whole. You will do everything, but it will be done only by the part. The whole will never be in it – and to me, to be whole in anything is to be meditative.To be whole in anything! Meditation is not something apart from life. Meditation is just a quality of being whole and total in something. You can fetch water from the well and it can become meditation – if you are totally in it. When you are drawing water out of the well, you are totally in it, just the movement of drawing exists. You fill the pots, you carry the water, just the movements, nobody else separate, divided – it is meditation.Lin Chi was asked when he became enlightened, “Now, since you have become enlightened, what do you do?”He said, “I chop the wood. I carry the water from the well.” Only this much he said. At that moment he was chopping wood. He said, “Everything is perfect and beautiful. I chop the wood and I carry the water from the well and everything is perfect.”If you become total in anything – walking, listening, talking – I say, if you become total, it is meditation. Otherwise you can go on chanting mantras with one part of your mind and the other part goes on on its own. The crowd goes on. One member of the crowd goes on chanting, “Ram, Ram, Ram,” another part of the crowd goes on with its own work. One part is in the market, one is in the house, one has moved to the future, one is in the past, one is chasing a woman, one is reading the Koran and the Gita, and one part is chanting, “Ram, Ram, Ram.” You are a crowd. And this crowdedness can never become meditative.So the dropping of the ego, not by you but by your understanding dropping the ego, it drops itself. Suddenly you are flooded. Your unconscious rushes into your conscious; you become one. Now whatever you do, you are totally in it. And this is the ecstasy – no past, no future; just in the moment here and now, totally in it and of it. Only in that state do you, for the first time, become aware of who you are.Before that all identities are false. You have to come to yourself directly. It is going to be an encounter face-to-face with yourself, with your own reality. No other mirror is needed because mirrors can show only the form, they can never show the formless that you are. Mirrors can only show that which can be seen by others; mirrors can never show that which cannot be seen by others but only by you.When you stand in front of a mirror what happens? That which is reflected in the mirror is just the periphery of you. Your center cannot be reflected in a mirror, just the periphery, the form. When you look in the mirror, it is not you who is reflected in the mirror because you are not the seen but the seer. You are not that which is reflected in the mirror; you are that who is looking at the reflection, who is watching the reflection. You are always the seer, and the seer cannot be reduced to the seen. You are subjectivity, and you can never become an object. You are irreducible; so how to encounter oneself?One has to move withinward. One has to drop all the mirrors, the mirrors of the eyes – friendly eyes, inimical eyes, indifferent eyes – one has to drop all sorts of mirrors. One has, really, to close one’s eyes and move withinward to see that which cannot be seen, to meet the seer. It happens. It is very absurd, it is illogical, but it happens. How can you see the seer? Logically it is impossible, but it happens because life does not bother about logic. Life is more than logic. It happens: it can happen to you, but you have to move from the reflective, the mirrorlike world that surrounds you.This story about the master Shibli is very beautiful. Shibli is one of the very famous masters. I would like to tell you something about Shibli.The first time his name became known was the time when al-Hillaj Mansoor was being murdered. Shibli was a companion, a friend to al-Hillaj. Many people have been murdered in the past by so-called religious people. Jesus was murdered, but there has never been such a murder as happened with al-Hillaj. It is the most horrible. Jesus was simply crucified, but al-Hillaj was not simply crucified. He was crucified and first his legs were cut off while he was alive; then his hands were cut off. He was really tortured. His tongue was cut off, then his eyes were taken out – and he was alive. Then his head was cut off. He was cut into pieces.The first time we hear about Shibli is at that moment.One hundred thousand people had gathered to throw stones at Mansoor, to ridicule him. And what crime had Mansoor committed? What sin had he committed? He had not committed any sin; he had not committed any crime. The only crime was this: he had said, “Ana’l haq.” It means “I am the truth, I am God.” Had he been in India people would have worshipped him for centuries. All the seers of the Upanishads declare this: “Aham brahmasmi – I am brahman, the supreme self.” Ana’l haq is nothing but a translation of aham brahmasmi. But Mohammedans could not tolerate it.The three religions born in the West are very intolerant. Jews – very intolerant; that’s why they crucified Jesus. Mohammedans – very intolerant, almost blind. Christians – always talking about tolerance, but it is just talk, they are not tolerant at all. Even in their tolerance there is deep intolerance. All these religions have been murderous, violent, aggressive. Their only argument is violence, as if you can convince somebody by killing him.Mansoor is one of the greatest Sufis. No other man is comparable to him in the Sufi tradition. He was killed. People were throwing stones at him. Shibli was standing in the crowd. Mansoor was laughing and enjoying. When his feet were cut off, he took the blood in his hands and he spread the blood on both his hands. Just like Mohammedans do with water when they go into the mosque for prayer: cleansing of the hands with water – wazu.Somebody from the crowd asked, “What are you doing, Mansoor?”Mansoor said, “How can you do wazu with water? How can you cleanse yourself with water? You commit crimes with your blood, you commit sins with your blood, so how can you purify yourself with water? Only blood can be the purification. I am purifying my hands. I am getting ready for prayer.”Somebody laughed and said, “You are a fool! Are you getting ready for prayer or are you getting ready to be murdered?”Mansoor laughed and said, “That is what prayer is – to die. You are helping me with my final prayer, the last. And nothing better can be done by this body; this body cannot be used in a better way. You are sacrificing me on the altar of the divine. That will be my last prayer in the world.”When they started cutting off his hands he said, “Wait a minute, let me pray because when my hands are no longer there, it will be difficult.” So he looked at the sky, prayed to God and said, “Forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing.” And he said to God, “You cannot deceive me, you great deceiver. I can see you in everybody present here. You are trying to deceive me? You have come as the murderer, as the enemy? But you cannot deceive me, I tell you. In whatever form you come I will recognize you – because I have recognized you within myself. Now there is no possibility of deception.”People were throwing stones and mud in ridicule, and Shibli was standing there. Mansoor was laughing and smiling. Suddenly he started crying and weeping because Shibli had thrown a rose at Mansoor. Stones – he was laughing. A rose – he started weeping and crying. Somebody asked, “What is the matter? With stones you laugh. Have you gone mad? Shibli has thrown only a roseflower. Why are you crying and weeping?”Mansoor said, “People who are throwing stones don’t know what they are doing, but this Shibli has to know. For him it will be difficult to get forgiveness from God.” Shibli was a great scholar. He knew all the scriptures; he was a man of knowledge.Mansoor said, “Others will be forgiven because they are acting in ignorance; they cannot help it. Whatever they are doing, it’s okay. In their blindness that’s all they can do; more is not expected. More cannot be expected, but with Shibli – a man who knows, a man of knowledge – it will be difficult for him to get forgiveness. That’s why I weep and cry for him. He is the only person who is committing a sin here. He knows, that’s why.”This is something to be understood: you cannot commit a sin when you are ignorant. How can you commit a sin when you are ignorant? The responsibility is not on you. But when you know, the responsibility is there. Knowledge is the greatest responsibility. Knowledge makes you responsible. This statement of Mansoor’s changed Shibli completely; he became a totally different man. He threw out the Koran, the scriptures, and he said, “They could not make me understand even this: all knowledge is useless. Now I will seek the right knowledge.”Later on when he was asked to comment on the statement of Mansoor – “What was the matter? Why did you throw the flower?” – Shibli said, “I was standing in the crowd and I was afraid that if I don’t throw anything, people may think that I belong to Mansoor’s group. The crowd may feel that I am also his companion and friend. They may get violent toward me. I could not throw stones because I knew Mansoor was innocent. But I could not gather the courage not to throw anything. That’s why I threw the flower – just a compromise. And Mansoor was right to weep. He wept at my fear, my cowardice. He wept because my whole knowledge, all that I had gathered in my whole life, was futile. I was compromising with the crowd.”All scholars compromise with the crowd. All pundits compromise with the crowd. That’s why you have never heard of any pundit being crucified by the crowd. They are the followers of the crowd; they always compromise. And their compromise is this: when they go to Buddha or to Mansoor, they bow down to them, and they bow down to the crowd also. They are cunning people, very cunning.But Shibli changed completely. He understood. The feeling of Mansoor for him, the crying of Mansoor for him, became a transformation. And then later on Shibli became a master in his own right. It took at least twelve years for him, wandering like a vagabond, a beggar. And people would ask him, “Why are you wandering? What are you repenting for?” – because he would continuously beat his chest and cry and weep. When he entered the mosque he would cry and weep so much that the whole village would gather.It was so heart-rending, such deep anguish, that people would ask, “What are you doing? What sin have you committed?” And he would say, “I have murdered Mansoor. Nobody else was responsible there, but I could have understood. And I threw a flower at that man, I compromised with the crowd. I was a coward. I could have saved him, but I missed the moment. That’s why I am repenting.” His whole life he repented.Repentance can become a very, very deep phenomenon in you if you understand the responsibility. Then even a small thing, if it becomes a repentance… Not just verbal, not just on the surface, but if it goes deep to your roots, if you repent from the roots, if your whole being shakes and trembles and cries, and tears come out, not only out of your eyes but out of every cell of your body, then repentance can become a transfiguration.That is the meaning of Jesus when he again and again says, “Repent!” Jesus’ master, John the Baptist, had nothing much to say. His whole message was just this: “Repent, because the Kingdom of God is near at hand. It is just coming: repent before it comes.” Repentance, not just mental, but total, cleanses, purifies. Nothing else can purify you that way. It is a fire, it burns all rubbish in you.Mansoor’s weeping haunted Shibli continuously his whole life. Waking or asleep, Mansoor’s tears haunted him continuously. And that became a transformation. This is what a master, only a great master, can do – Mansoor did it. Even while dying he transformed a man like Shibli. Even while dying he used his death to also transform this man. A master goes on, while alive or dying, or even when already dead, he goes on using every opportunity to transform people.Now this small story…Shibli was asked, “Who guided you on the path?”Shibli said, “A dog. One day I saw him, almost dead with thirst, standing by the water’s edge. Every time he looked at his reflection in the water he was frightened, and withdrew because he thought it was another dog.“Finally, such was his necessity, he cast away fear and leapt into the water, at which the reflection disappeared.“The dog found that the obstacle, which was himself, the barrier between him and what he sought, had melted away.“In this same way, my own obstacle vanished when I knew that it was what I took to be my own self. And my way was first shown to me by the behavior of a dog.”A man who is ready to learn can learn from anywhere; a man who is not ready to learn cannot learn even from a buddha: it depends on you. A dog can become a god if you are ready to learn. Even a god will not look like a god if you are not ready to learn. It depends: finally it depends on you. To be ready to learn means to be open to all possibilities, with no prejudice. Watching, with no preconcepts. Otherwise, who will watch a dog? You would not have been even aware; you would have passed by, and you would have missed the opportunity which made Shibli a changed man, which became the guide.You have been missing opportunities every day. Every moment the guidance is there. The divine goes on calling you from different quarters, but you don’t listen. In fact, you think you already know, that is the trouble. If an ill man thinks that he is already healthy, why should he listen to any doctor? Then there is no possibility for his illness to be treated; the very possibility of treatment is closed. If you know that you already know, you will not be able to know. First recognize that you don’t know, then suddenly from everywhere things start happening.“Who guided you on the path?” somebody asked Shibli. He could never have imagined that Shibli would say: “A dog. One day I saw him, almost dead with thirst, standing by the water’s edge.” That is where you all are standing: at the water’s edge, almost dead with thirst. But something withholds you, you are not jumping. Something keeps you back. What is that? Some sort of fear: the bank is known, familiar, and jumping into the river is to move into the unknown.The known is always dead like the bank, and the unknown is always fluid, flowing like the river. The fear: cling to the familiar. The fear always says, “Cling to the familiar, to the known.” Then fear makes you move in a circle because only a circular path can be familiar. You move in the same rut again and again. Everything is known. People come to me in deep misery, but they are not ready to even leave their misery because even misery looks familiar. They think as least this is their own. They are not ready to surrender even their misery.Why can’t you surrender your misery? Familiar, habitual – you have lived with it so long that now you will feel lonely without it. This I always feel. And if you cling to misery, how is bliss possible? Both cannot live together. The bliss cannot enter you, it can enter only if misery leaves from this door; then bliss enters from another door – immediately it enters and fills you.Nature abhors a vacuum; existence also. But you are already filled and you cling to your misery as if it is a treasure. What have you got? Can’t you renounce your misery? Have you not lived enough with it? Has it not already crippled you too much? For what are you waiting? You are in the same situation.Says Shibli: “One day I saw him, almost dead with thirst” – dead with thirst, and the water just in front of him – “standing by the water’s edge.” But “every time he looked at his reflection in the water he was frightened and withdrew…” The fear of the unknown and the fear of the reflection. He saw himself reflected in the water and he thought there was another dog. He was seeing himself, there was nobody else.This is a very, very pregnant sentence. Let me say to you that you are alone in your world. There is nobody else. And all else that you are seeing is your own reflections. You have never moved outside yourself. But in fact there is nobody else but you. In your world, all is reflections. And because of those reflections you are closed in, caved in.When you meet a person, do you really meet the person he is, or do you simply meet the reflection of your own self in him? Have you ever met anybody or just your own reflections, your own interpretations? When you meet a person you immediately start interpreting the person; you start creating an image about him. That image is yours. The person is not important, just your image. The person goes far away. The image becomes more and more clear; the person is forgotten. And then you live with this image. When you talk to the person, you talk to your image of the person, not really to the person.You meet a man or a woman, you fall in love. Do you think you are falling in love with the other? Impossible. You are falling in love with an image that you have created around the other and the other is also falling in love with an image that he or she has created around you. Whenever two people fall in love at least four people are there; possibly even more, but not less. Then there is trouble because you never fall in love with the person; you fall with your own image. And he is not there to fulfill your image. Sooner or later the reality comes in. A conflict arises between your dream and the real, between your image and the real person who is there, absolutely unknown. And then there is a clash.Every love affair shatters on the rocks – every love affair. And the deeper the love, the more intense the feeling, the sooner it shatters on the rocks. Why does it happen? It has to happen. How can two people falling in love with their own images be together? Those images will always be between them, and those images will be false.A real person is totally different. He’s not your image, and he is not there to fulfill your expectations. Neither are you there to fulfill anybody’s expectations. A real person is real. He has his own destiny, you have your own destiny. If you can walk together hand in hand for a few moments on the path, so far so good – beautiful. But you cannot expect “Do this, don’t do that.” Once you start expecting, you are bringing your image in, and love is almost dead. Now it is going to be a dead thing.Look at husbands and wives. You cannot see why they look so dead, bored with each other. They simply tolerate, they somehow simply drag. The mystery is lost. The dance is no longer in step. They don’t look into each other’s eyes anymore. Those eyes are no longer lakes in which you can go on and on and on for an eternal journey. They take each other’s hands – dead, nothing flows. They embrace and they kiss and they make love, but just maneuvers, things like yoga postures – dead, controlling, doing. But the flow is no longer there, the ecstasy is no longer there. It is no longer a happening. They don’t come out of it refreshed, rejuvenated, reborn. They go into it dead and they come out more dead than before. The whole thing becomes rotten. Why does this happen?This happens because you are always creating a reflection of your own self in the other. You are creating an illusion. And then you are in love and then you are in hate, then you find friends and then you find enemies, and they are all your reflections.There is an old Hindu story…A great king made a palace. The palace walls were covered with mirrors, millions of mirrors. To enter that palace was beautiful. You could see your face in millions of mirrors all around you – millions of you all around. You could have taken a candle – and millions of candles. A small candle would be reflected from millions of mirrors, and the whole palace would be filled with light by a small candle.One night it happened that by accident a dog entered. He looked around. He was so scared, scared to death – millions of dogs! He was so scared that he completely forgot the door he had come in from. Of course, with millions of dogs all around death was certain. He started barking – millions of dogs started barking. He became aggressive – millions of dogs became aggressive. He crashed against the walls. By the morning he was found dead. And nobody was there except the dog himself.This is the whole situation in this world. You bark, you fight, you fall in love, you make friends and enemies, and every person is functioning as a mirror to you. It has to be so. Unless you awaken, unless you realize who you are, you will continue to see your own reflection in the mirrors of others: making love to your own reflection, fighting with your own reflection. The ego is absolutely masturbatory. It is masturbation – doing everything to yourself through your own reflections.The dog was almost dead with thirst, but even that was not enough. The fear… I see in your eyes, I see in your heart – dead with thirst. But that thirst still doesn’t seem to be enough for you to take the jump, for you to drop the fear, for you to choose the unknown. The thirst is there, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Fear seems to be more important, more significant, more heavy on you.Many of you reach the point in the meditations when the river is flowing and you can jump. But then fear arises; it looks like death. Meditation is like death. Fear arises; the thirst is there but it seems not to be enough. If you are really thirsty you will take the jump whatever the cost. And a master is needed to make you more and more thirsty, more and more aware of your thirst because that is the only way. The more thirsty you become, a fire arises in your heart, and you are burning with thirst. Only then can you drop the fear and take the jump: when the thirst is more than the fear.Somebody asked Buddha, “You say truth cannot be taught. Then why do you teach? And you say that nobody can force anybody toward enlightenment, but then why do you work so hard with people?”Buddha is reported to have said, “Truth cannot be taught, but thirst can be taught, or at least you can be made aware of the thirst which is already there but you are suppressing it.” Because of the fear you go on suppressing the thirst. You go on suppressing that which is continuously there. A deep discontent with all that is around you, a divine discontent: a thirst.“…standing by the water’s edge. Every time he looked at his reflection in the water he was frightened and withdrew because he thought it was another dog. Finally, such was his necessity…” Remember these words. I cannot do anything unless the moment comes for you when you can feel such is your necessity that you have to take the jump, that you have to explode into the unknown, that you have to step into it.“Finally, such was his necessity, he cast away fear and leapt into the water, at which the reflection disappeared.” When you jump into the water, the mirrorlike river is no longer mirrorlike. The reflection disappeared. The dog was no longer there. And Shibli must have been watching, sitting by the bank, looking at this dog – his fear, his continuous effort to go, and then withdrawing again and again and again. He must have watched very keenly for what was going to happen. And then the dog jumped. The reflection disappeared.“The dog found that the obstacle…” was not outside, it was he himself. The dog was not there in the water. The dog in the water was not preventing him as he was thinking before; it was he himself. “…which was himself, the barrier between him and what he sought, melted away.” He was himself the barrier between his thirst and the water, his hunger and the satiety, his discontent and the contentment, his search and the goal, his seeking and the sought. There was nobody else, just his reflection in the water.And that is the case, absolutely the case, with you all, with everybody. Nobody is hindering you. Something like your own reflection is between you and your destiny, between you as the seed and you as the flower. Nobody else is hindering you or creating an obstacle. So don’t go on throwing responsibility on others; that is a way of consoling oneself. Drop consoling yourself; drop all self-pity. Look deep into the mirror. Everybody around you is a mirror. Look deeply – you will find your own reflection everywhere.“In this same way, my own obstacle vanished when I knew that it was what I took to be my own self. And my way was first shown to me by the behavior of a dog.” The way is shown to you from millions of directions. People have become enlightened through watching a dog, through watching a cat. People have become enlightened through watching a dead leaf falling from a tree. People have become enlightened through every sort of situation. But one thing is absolutely necessary, and that is watching. Dog, cat, the tree, the river – irrelevant. People become enlightened through watching.So whatever the situation, watch, and watch without any prejudice. Watch without the past. Watch without any thinking on your part. Don’t interpret: watch. If your eyes are clear, if your perception is clear and you watch silently, every situation leads toward the divine. And this is how it should be. Every situation, every moment of life, leads toward the divine.Somebody asked Rinzai, a Zen master, “What is the way to know the ultimate?”Rinzai had gone for a morning walk with his staff in his hand. He raised his staff in front of the eyes of the questioner and said, “Watch this staff! If you can watch this, there is no need to go anywhere else.”The man must have found it a little puzzling. He looked here and there and he said, “But how can one attain enlightenment just by watching a stick?”Rinzai said, “It is not a question of what you watch, the point is that you watch. Right now it happened that the staff was in my hand, that’s all.”Anything, if you watch, will give you the clue. Watching is the only method. Call it awareness, call it observation, call it witnessing – but watch. Live life with a watchful eye. And every thing, the smallest, leads to the greatest. Everything leads to the ultimate.You have heard the saying “Every road leads to Rome.” It may not be true, but every path leads to the ultimate. Wherever you are, become watchful and your face is immediately turned toward the divine. Through watching, the quality of your inner consciousness changes. Be watchful.Jesus went on saying to his disciples, “Be watchful.” But as it happens, disciples are almost deaf. When it was the last night and Jesus was going to be crucified the next day, that night he said, “Now I will say my last prayer and you are all to watch. Be alert. Don’t fall asleep.”After an hour Jesus came back from the tree where he was praying and all the disciples were fast asleep, snoring. He woke them and said, “What are you doing? I had told you: be watchful, alert – and you have fallen asleep.”They said, “We were tired. And we tried, but the sleep took over.”Jesus said, “Now be more watchful because this is the last night. Soon I will no longer be with you.” And again after half an hour he came back, and they were fast asleep.What was he saying? He was giving them the key word: “Be watchful.” And what else can a master give when he is departing? In these words, be watchful, all the scriptures exist in their essence.Thrice Jesus came. I say there are only two things infinite: the compassion of a master and the stupidity of the disciple. Infinite, two things. Thrice he came and he said, “Again you are asleep.” And that night would have become enlightenment for all those disciples because Jesus was at his pinnacle – the very peak. And he was praying. In that moment of Jesus’ prayer the whole atmosphere in that garden of Gethsemane was charged. If those disciples had been watchful, immediate, sudden enlightenment would have been possible. But they were fast asleep.To you also I say be watchful because I will not be here for long. A little while more. You can miss and you can find excuses. Be watchful, be alert.Jesus always used to tell a story…A master went on a journey. He told his servants, “Be watchful twenty-four hours a day because any moment I can come back. And if I find you asleep I will throw you out. So keep alert. Somebody must be alert and aware. You can divide the time into shifts, but I must find a few servants alert and aware whenever I come.”But the servants thought, “The journey is very long and it will take years, so no need to worry about it right now. After a year we will be watchful. For this whole year we can enjoy and indulge and sleep well. And we are free – the master has gone.”When the master came… He came after three years, but when for one year completely you sleep and indulge and become lazy, then it is not easy. They started postponing. “He has not come yet, and no message has come. Who knows whether he is alive or dead? We have not heard anything at all.” They forgot completely.When the master came they had not only forgotten that the master existed, they had not only forgotten that they had to be alert, they had completely forgotten that they were servants. They had become the masters by that time.This is what has happened to every mind, to every consciousness.And remember: the guest can knock at your door any moment. If you are not watchful you will miss. He can knock from a dog, he can knock from a flower. A bird takes wing – and he can knock there. He can use any opportunity to knock at your door.Remain alert so that when the guest comes he does not find you asleep; when he knocks at your door, you are ready and you have prepared the house for the guest – and your heart is ready to receive.Be watchful. Through being watchful, by and by the ego will die because the ego is created by a non-watchful mind, an unalert mind. Through watching, witnessing, the ego dies. And nothing is possible until you die.Enough for today.

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

Until You Die 01-10Category: SUFISM

Until You Die 10 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/until-you-die-10/

A disciple came to Maruf Karkhi and said: “I have been talking to people about you. Jews claim that you are a Jew; Christians revere you as one of their own saints; Muslims insist that you are the greatest of all Muslims.”Maruf answered: “This is what humanity says in Baghdad.“When I was in Jerusalem, Jews said that I was a Christian, Muslims that I was a Jew, and Christians that I was a Muslim.”“How must we think of you then?” asked the man.Maruf said: “Some do not understand me, and revere me. Others do not either, so they revile me. That is what I have come to say. You should think of me as one who has said this.”A religious man is always misunderstood. If he is not misunderstood, he is not a religious man. Humanity lives with a nonreligious attitude toward life – sectarian, but not religious. So a religious man is a stranger. Whatever you say about him will be wrong because you are wrong. Remember: whatever you say about him… I am not saying that if you say something in his favor that will be right, no. Whether you are in favor of him or against him makes no difference, whatever you say about him will be wrong until you yourself have become a religious consciousness. Before that your reverence is false, your condemnation is false. You may think of him as a sage, and you have misunderstood. You may think of him as a sinner, and again you have misunderstood.So the first thing to remember is: unless you are right, whatever you do, say, be, is going to be wrong. And a religious man is such a tremendous phenomenon, such a strange phenomenon, that you have no language to talk about him. All your words concerning him are futile. Your whole language is useless, meaningless: a religious man is religious because he has gone beyond the dualities, and the whole of language exists within dualities.If you say he is good you are wrong because he is bad also. If you say he is bad you are wrong again because he is good also. And now the trouble arises because you cannot conceive how a good man can also be bad. You can comprehend only a part of the whole because the other part is by necessity the opposite. It has to be so.A religious man is a miniature god. Just like a god he is paradoxical and contradictory. Just like a god he is summer and winter, day and night, life and death. Just like a god he is divine and devil both. Then the mind staggers. The mind is very efficient if you are working in polarities. If you say yes the mind can understand. If you say no the mind can understand. But if you say both yes and no then it goes beyond the mind. Unless you have gone beyond the mind you cannot have the feeling of what a religious consciousness is.I was born a Jaina. Now, religion has nothing to do with your birth; you cannot be born into a religion. Just the contrary: religion has to be born in you. I was born a Jaina – just a coincidence. I could as well have been born a Christian or a Jew, an irrelevant fact, because religion cannot be given to you with your birth. It is not a gift, it is not a heritage. My father is a Jaina, my mother is a Jaina but they cannot give Jainism to me. I can inherit their wealth, I can inherit their prestige, I can inherit the family name, but I cannot inherit their religion. Religion cannot be a gift, a heritage; it is not a thing. It is something one has to seek for himself. Nobody else can give it to you.So whatever is given with birth is a sect, not a religion. Hinduism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Jainism, Buddhism, are sects, not religions. Religion is one, sects are many, because sects are the forms, dead fossilized forms. Sects are like footprints. Somebody one day walked there but he is no longer there – just footprints left on the sand, on the sand of time. A buddha walks, footprints are left, and you go on worshipping those footprints for centuries. There is nobody there now. Just a form in the sand, nothing else.Sects are forms in the mind, just like footprints. Yes, somebody was there once but he is no longer there – and you go on worshipping those forms. You are born into those forms, you are conditioned into those forms, indoctrinated. You become a sectarian. And don’t think that you have become religious, otherwise you will miss. For religion to be there you have to seek it on your own. It is a personal growth, a personal encounter with reality, face-to-face, immediate and direct. It has nothing to do with tradition, nothing to do with the past. You have to grow into it. You have to allow it to grow in you.Religion is a revolution, not a conformity. It is not a conviction intellectually attained; it is a conversion of your total being. How can you be born into a religion? Of course you can be born into an ideology, you can learn a theology, words about God, theories about God, dogmas and doctrines, but to know about God is not to know God. The word God is not God. And all the theologies together are nothing compared to a single moment of encounter with the divine. Then for the first time the spark, your inner light starts. You start rising in a different dimension. Religion is a personal search, it is not part of society.I was born a Jaina. Of course they tried to force me to be a Jaina. Fortunately they failed. It is one of the misfortunes that they succeed in many cases. They failed and they have been angry with me. So if you ask the Jainas… Only rarely will you find a Jaina here and there who will say that I am a Jaina; otherwise they will say that I am an enemy of Jainism, and I am destroying their ideology and I am corrupting their sources. And both are right in a way.Those who say that I am against Jainism are right in a way because I am against Jainism as they understand it. I am against it because it is not a religion at all. A dead fossil: of course, one of the most ancient. Jainism seems to be the most ancient religion in the world, even older than Hinduism. Even in the Vedas, in the Rig Veda, Jaina tirthankaras are mentioned, and mentioned with deep reverence. That shows Jaina tirthankaras are older than the Rig Veda, the first Hindu scripture, the oldest in the world.When a scripture talks about a master, Rishabh, as the first tirthankara of the Jainas – the Vedas talk with so much reverence that it is almost certain that he was not a contemporary. He must have been dead for at least one thousand years; only then can you talk with such reverence. Nobody talks about contemporaries with such reverence. Followers can talk, but Hindus are not followers of Jainas. They are antagonistic religions. At least one thousand years must have passed, and the man must have become a legend.Jainas are very old. Now historians are working on the ruins and findings in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, and they say that there is every possibility that Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were Jaina civilizations. Before the Aryans came to India, India was a Jaina country – there is every possibility. A very ancient religion, of course, very dead. The older a religion the more dead, everything fossilized. You cannot find a deader person than a Jaina monk. He goes on cutting his life; it is a slow suicide. And the more dead he is, the more he is worshipped because death itself seems to be like a renunciation. If he is a little alive, Jainas become afraid of him. Older religions crucify their followers, they murder them.The older the religion, the greater the weight. Like a Himalaya on the heart of a small man – burdened, crushing, you cannot move. And traditions go on gathering, they are like snowballs. They go on gathering weight, they become fatter and fatter. Dead, but still they go on gaining weight. They become monstrous, and then they kill the spirit. They always remain true to the word, and the more true to the word, the more poisonous to the spirit.If you ask the Jainas only a few will say, “Yes, this man is a real Jaina.” Many will say, “This man is against us, the greatest enemy.” And both are right in a way, and both are wrong in a deeper way. I am a Jaina. If you look at Mahavira, I am a Jaina. Mahavira is a religious man but not because he is born into a religion. He searched, he inquired, he encountered reality. He threw out all dogmas, he threw out all civilization. Even clothes he threw away because they too are a part of the civilization and the culture; they too carry the society with you. He remained naked. For twelve years he completely stopped talking because if you go on talking you use the language of the society, and that language carries the germs of the society.Whenever you talk, immediately you become a part of a society. A silent man is not part of any society. He may be part of nature, but he’s not part of a society. In fact, language is the only thing that makes you human and part of human society and the human world. When you drop language, suddenly you drop out of human society and civilization. You become part of the trees, rocks, the sky.For twelve years Mahavira would not use any language. He remained completely silent. This man I love because this is a religious man. He started speaking only when silence was total within him. He didn’t speak out of scriptures, he spoke out of himself. He spoke out of his silence, and whenever a word is born out of deep silence it is alive, throbbing with life. Those who hear it directly, they are most fortunate because soon it will die. Everything born dies.A word is born. It is alive for a few moments; it throbs around you. If you can listen to it, it will enter your being; it will become part of your being. If you don’t listen to it, if you take notes and you think that you will try to understand it back home, it will be already dead. Then you will understand something which was not said at all. You have already made a private scripture.Mahavira spoke out of his inner silence. His words are the most wonderful ever spoken. I love that man. He is the most antisocial man you can find, and antitraditional. The other twenty-three tirthankaras, twenty-three masters of the Jainas, were all clothed. This man became nude. Tradition has it that Jainas in those days tried to deny this man. They said, “What is he doing? Our other tirthankaras have never been nude, why is he moving around nude?”They did everything to deny this man, and because of that denial Jainism has been divided into two parts from that very day. They have two sects: those who followed Mahavira in his nudity – very few people – are called Digambaras: people who believe in nudity. The other older sect, which tried to avoid this Mahavira, tried to deny this Mahavira, are the Swetambaras. They believe in white clothes; their monks are white-robed. And the conflict has continued.If a Jaina says, “Yes, this man Osho is a Jaina,” he is right. I love Mahavira – a rare flowering, a rare fragrance, very rare and unique. But the others are also right when they say, “This man is not a Jaina but against them, an enemy.” They are also right because I am against tradition, against all rituals and forms, against scriptures, against the past. I am all for religion, and all against sects. They are also right.If you ask Hindus they will say, “This man is a Jaina, and trying to sabotage Hinduism from within because no Jaina has ever talked about the Gita, and no Jaina has ever commented on the Upanishads. This man is trying to sabotage Hinduism from within.” This is what the Shankaracharya of Puri says about me: “Beware of this man! He is not a Hindu.” And he is right in a sense. In the sense that he is a Hindu, I am not. But in the sense he is a Hindu, Hinduism is worthless.I am a Hindu in the sense Patanjali is a Hindu, Badrayana is a Hindu, Kapil and Kanad are Hindus. The really religious people never belong to the establishment: they cannot. It is possible that the establishment may follow them, and someday around them an establishment may be created – that is possible. But they are never part of any establishment, either of others or their own. They cannot exist in the establishment, they are free. Freedom can never be a part of any establishment.Whenever the establishment becomes too much, freedom dies. Then the bird cannot be on the wing; the wings are cut. The bird has then been encaged – in a golden cage, beautifully decorated, very costly, precious – but now the cage is more important than the bird. By and by, people will forget the bird completely because the bird will die and they will go on worshipping the cage, and they will go on making it more and more decorative. Temples will arise around it and a great tradition, establishment, and nobody will bother about where the bird is. A dead corpse in a golden cage.If you believe in Hinduism as a bird on the wing I am a Hindu, as the Upanishads are Hindu, but I am not a Hindu in the sense the Shankaracharya of Puri is a Hindu – a dead bird in a golden cage.If you ask Mohammedans, they will say I have no right to talk on Sufis or on the Koran.Once in a town I was talking about Sufis, and the maulvi of the town approached me and he said, “You have no right. You are not a Mohammedan, you don’t know Arabic. How can you talk on the Sufis and on the Koran?”I said, “The Koran has nothing to do with Arabic. It has something to do with the heart, not with the language.”The Koran has nothing to do with the language. It has something to do with silence, not language. The Koran has something to do with reality, not with the symbols. And I am not a Mohammedan if you think that I am a follower of Mohammed – no, I am not. I am nobody’s follower. But I am a Mohammedan, just as Mohammed is a Mohammedan; just as Jesus is a Christian, I am a Christian – but like Mohammed and Jesus. Was Mohammed a Mohammedan? How can he be? Mohammedanism never existed before. Was Jesus a Christian? Christianity never existed before. How can he be a Christian? If Jesus is a Christian, I am a Christian. If Mohammed is a Mohammedan, then I am a Mohammedan. But otherwise I am not a Mohammedan and not a Christian.A religious man does not belong to any sect. In fact, all sects belong to the religious man. But this is how the formal mind goes. It thinks in terms of ideology, language, ritual, and it misses the whole point: religion has nothing to do with these things. Then what is religion?Religion is an oceanic feeling where you are lost and only existence remains. It is a death and a resurrection. You die as you are and you are resurrected totally new. Something absolutely new arises out of the death of the old. On the grave of the old, something sprouts and becomes a new flower.Religion is an inner revolution, an inner mutation. It is not in the temples, not in the mosques, not in the churches: don’t look for religion there. If you look there you will waste your time. Look for religion inwardly. And the further inward you move, the deeper you will find the ego there – which is the barrier. Drop that barrier and suddenly you are religious. There is only one thing which is not religious and that is the ego. That can never be religious. And sects never kill it; on the contrary, they strengthen it. Through rituals, temples, ideologies, the ego is strengthened.You go to church and you feel that you have become religious; a subtle pride arises in you. You don’t become humble; on the contrary, you become more egoistic. You do a certain ritual and you feel gratified, and you start condemning those who are not doing the ritual. You think they are the sinners and they are going to be thrown into the fire of hell. Is your heaven secured just with doing certain rituals? Whom do you think that you are deceiving?A man sits for one hour turning the beads and he thinks his heaven is secured, but the others, who are not doing this stupid thing, are going to hell. You go to the mosque and you kneel down, and you say foolish things to the divine: “You are great.” Is there any doubt about it? Why are you saying it? “I’m a sinner, and you are compassion.” What are you doing, buttressing God’s ego? Do you think God has something like an ego? That you can say to him: “You are very great and we are very small, and you are compassion and we are sinners: forgive us”? Whom do you think you are deceiving?The ego is playing the game. You think God is also an ego which can be buttressed? God is not a person at all, so you are talking to yourself. There is nobody else to listen to it; only the walls, the dead walls of the mosque or the temple or a stone statue. Nobody is listening.In fact, you are doing something mad. Just go to the madhouses and see people talking to people who are not there. Even those mad people are not so mad because those somebodies may be somewhere. They may not be here; a madman may be talking to his wife who is not here in the madhouse, but somewhere maybe. But your God is nowhere; your madness is deeper, greater, dangerous.How can you talk with existence? With existence you have to be silent; all talking should stop. You are not to say anything. On the contrary, a prayer is a listening. You have to listen to existence, not to say anything. If you speak, who will listen? If you talk and you are too involved in the words, who will listen? And every moment there is a message.Every moment, from everywhere, there is a message for you. It is written all over; the whole existence is the scripture of the divine. The message is everywhere, on every leaf is the signature. But who will see? Your eyes and your mind are filled with yourself. Rubbish you have, but you go on rotating that rubbish in the mind. Drop it all!This is something to understand: a prayer can be Christian, a prayer can be Hindu, a prayer can be Jewish – then they are sectarian prayers and not prayers at all. A real prayer cannot be Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist. A real prayer is just a silence, a waiting. How can you say silence is Hindu? How can you say silence is Christian? Can silence be Christian or Hindu? Silence is simply silence, neither Hindu nor Mohammedan. When two persons are absolutely silent, can you say who is a Hindu and who is a Mohammedan? In silence, sects disappear. In silence, societies disappear. In silence, civilizations disappear. In silence, you disappear. Only silence is: you are not there. If you are there, then silence cannot be there because you will do something or other, you will think something or other, you will go on chattering inside.When you are not, society is not, sects are not – no words, no prayer. You are not reciting the Koran, not reciting the Veda, not doing a TM meditation, “Ram, Ram, Ram”; all are foolish. When you are simply silent a meeting happens, a merger happens; you dissolve. Just as ice melts and the boundaries dissolve, and then you cannot find where the ice has gone… It has become one with the sea. The sun rises, ice melts, becomes water. Silence arises, the mind, the ice-like, frozen mind, starts melting, the ego dissolves. Suddenly there is ocean and you are not. This is the moment of religion.Religion is born in you, nobody is born into religion. Religion takes birth in you. You have to become a mother, a womb for religion to become impregnated in you, to grow in you. You have to give birth. You cannot be born into religion, you have to give birth to religion. And then it is beautiful, then it is something from the unknown, then it is not concerned with man.That is the meaning of Jesus’ virgin birth. The whole meaning is simply this: a man like Jesus is not born out of man. Religious consciousness is not born out of man, it is born out of the unknown. Mary, Jesus’ mother, is virgin; no man has corrupted her. This is a symbolic thing; it is not that Jesus is born out of a virgin biologically. Then you miss the metaphor; the beautiful story becomes an ugly doctrine. Then you miss the poetry. For centuries Christians have been arguing and trying to prove somehow that Jesus was really born from a virgin mother. How can theologians be so stupid? It is a wonder! And they go on trying and proving, and very intellectual people, argumentative – but blind. Whenever you miss the poetry and try to create an argument out of it you destroy religion.You are not a help; you put people off religion. Because of some absurdity in the foundation, the whole of Christianity becomes absurd. These are poetic truths, and poetic truths are not logical truths. Logical truths are nothing, they are ordinary facts. Poetic truths are extraordinary facts, so extraordinary in their quality that you cannot make an argument out of them. Argument is too narrow: they need much space. Only a poetic symbology can give that space. This is beautiful poetry. I also say Jesus is born out of a virgin mother because there is no other way.Religious consciousness is uncorrupted by man, untouched. Religious consciousness means you have dropped all that is manmade: doctrines, dogmas, churches, words, language, prayers, forms, rituals – all that is man-made you have dropped. Then, in that silence, godliness itself becomes part of you. You become pregnant with it. You carry the pregnancy, it grows every day, and the more it grows, the more alive it becomes, the more you start feeling that now you have something more valuable than your life. A mother is always ready to die for the child. If there is a crisis and only one can be saved, either the child or the mother, the mother is always ready – the child should survive. She is ready to die.There is another parable I would like to tell you. It is said that whenever a buddha is born the mother immediately dies. That too has created problems for Buddhists. They say if Jesus is born and Mary is alive, has not died, then Jesus cannot be a buddha because whenever an enlightened man is born the mother dies. Buddha’s mother died. Then Mahavira cannot be a buddha, Krishna cannot be a buddha, because the first thing is missing. This is how beautiful symbols become ugly. It is beautiful! I don’t know whether Buddha’s mother died or not; that is irrelevant. Whether she lived or died, that is not the point. But the point is: whenever religious consciousness is born in you, when you are pregnant with buddhahood, when you are pregnant with enlightenment and you carry enlightenment as a child within you, you will die; both cannot live.And this is the whole message of this series of talks: until you die, nothing is possible. The mother must die for the child to be born because both cannot exist. You are the mother and you are the child; you are not two. When you become enlightened, the old must die immediately. If you cling to the old, you will cripple your enlightenment. If you cling to the old, you will suffocate the child. If you cling too much, the child will be dead before the child is born.Always remember: religion is poetry not logic. It is not even philosophy. It is art, and art is not an argument. Art doesn’t bother about argument. Art can seduce you without argument, so why bother about argument? Art is so powerful it can seduce you without any argument. Argument is needed at the lower realms where the thing itself is not so powerful as to convince you; then argument is needed. When the thing in itself is so powerful, so hypnotic, so transforming that you are suddenly absorbed into it, there is no need to convince you.I never try to convince you. If you are convinced, good. If you are not convinced, good. But I am not trying to convince you of anything because conviction is a very ordinary thing. If you are convinced through argument you will never become religious. You may become philosophical, you may carry a dogma in your head, but you will never become religious.Religion is like love: you fall in it for no reason at all. You cannot prove it; proof is not needed. Proof is needed only when you are thinking of a marriage. Argument is needed only when you are thinking of an arranged marriage. Then you think about the family and the parents of the girl, and the money and the dowry and the future possibilities, political relationships: you think about everything. But when you fall in love, you fall in love. It happens so suddenly there is no time gap.And it is the same with religion. You fall in love with a man who is religious. You cannot prove it. And if somebody argues with you against it… It is very easy to prove something against it; it is almost impossible to prove anything for it. That’s why it is a trust, a faith, a deep blindness. But in that deep blindness, for the first time your inner eye starts functioning. The deep blindness from the outside becomes a deep insight from within.Now try to understand this story.A disciple came to Maruf Karkhi and said: “I have been talking to people about you. Jews claim that you are a Jew; Christians revere you as one of their own saints; Muslims insist that you are the greatest of all Muslims.”Maruf answered: “This is what humanity says in Baghdad.“When I was in Jerusalem, Jews said that I was a Christian, Muslims that I was a Jew, and Christians that I was a Muslim.”“How must we think of you then?” asked the man.Maruf said: “Some do not understand me, and revere me. Others do not either, so they revile me. That is what I have come to say. You should think of me as one who has said this.”A disciple came to Maruf Karkhi and said… Maruf Karkhi is one of the Sufi masters and it is said that hundreds of people became enlightened through him. He developed many new devices. He was a really religious man, not belonging to any orthodoxy, not belonging to any convention, not belonging to any tradition; homeless, without any roots, floating like a white cloud – absolute freedom in his being.A disciple came… The disciple cannot be really a disciple; he must have been a student. In English translations there is a trouble because in English you don’t make much distinction between a disciple and a student; you don’t make much distinction between a master and a teacher. But in the East a vast distinction, difference, exists between these two terminologies.A teacher can have students, he cannot have disciples: a teacher teaches. Of course, a teacher can teach only that which can be taught. Religion cannot be taught. Things about religion can be taught – that is what theology is: things about God. But God himself cannot be taught, concepts about God, theories, whether this is right or that, and there are millions of theories… Man has been inventing so many theories about God that God is completely lost in theories. He has almost become nonsubstantial. When you utter the word God, no substance is felt in it. It looks like an air bubble carrying nothing but hot air within. When you say God, no bells ring in the heart. When you say God, it falls flat. It does not carry much significance. The so-called religious thinkers have killed the word completely; they have destroyed the beauty of it. The moment you utter the word God, you put many off. The word carries much violence, ugliness, strife, the narrowness of so-called religious people. It has no poetry now.A teacher can teach you everything about God. You can become a doctor living with a teacher, a doctor of divinity, a D.D. It is simply unbelievable that things as this exist on earth: people who carry a degree of doctorate about divinity. The divine is not a theory; it is an experience. You cannot be taught about it.Says Lao Tzu, “The Old Boy” – the name Lao Tzu means the old boy… Another parable: it is said Lao Tzu was born old – when he was eighty-four years of age. For eighty-four years he lived in the womb of the mother. When he was born he was already absolutely ancient, his hair white, wrinkled. What is the meaning? The meaning is that whenever religious consciousness is born it is always ancient: both new and ancient. Hence, Lao Tzu’s name: “The Old Boy.” Lao Tzu means the old boy – old, yet young.Says Lao Tzu: “Truth cannot be said. And all that can be said will not be true.” A teacher is one who teaches truth which cannot be taught. He teaches about truth, he goes round and round; he beats around the bush, he never hits the center. And a student is one who is inquiring about God, not desiring God, who has come to know, not to be and whose search is intellectual, not total. A student is trying to gather more knowledge; he wants to become more knowledgeable. He wants to accumulate much information.It is said…One of Maruf’s students became very famous. The student became so famous that people started coming to him and asking him things, even when Maruf was alive. Sometimes it would even happen that Maruf was sitting there with the student, and people would come not to Maruf but to the student and ask him things. He became very efficient in the scriptures, he crammed all the scriptures; he was as perfect as a computer.One day somebody came and asked a question about some passage in the scripture. The student recited the whole scripture, then recited all the commentaries that had been made about the scripture. Within minutes he had gone through all there was in the scriptures. He argued this way and that and tried to prove a conclusion.Maruf was sitting and listening. The man was astounded – so much knowledge. He said to Maruf, “You are fortunate to have such disciples. This boy is a rare gem! So much knowledge. I have never come across such a brilliant mind, such a genius. What do you say about him?”Maruf said, “I am always worried. I am worried because he reads too much. And I am worried that he has no time to know; his whole time is going on reading. I am always worried as to when he will know – he has no time.”A student is not concerned about knowing, he is concerned about knowledge. A teacher attracts students, a master attracts disciples. A disciple is not a student. He has not come to know about truth, he has come to become truth, to be truth. He has not come for more information, he has come for more being. Let me repeat: a disciple asks how to gain more being, and a student asks how to gain more knowledge. He has come to the master to be. And that is a totally different inquiry, the dimension is altogether different. Not only different, it is diametrically opposite. A student goes to the West, and a disciple goes to the East.It is said that the East and West never meet – I don’t know. They must meet somewhere because the earth is round. But one thing I know: a student and a disciple never meet; they cannot. Unless a student drops being a student he cannot become a disciple.It is said about Maruf that whenever a person would come… Thousands were coming to him from distant corners of the world. Maruf became an institution, a university – of being, of course, not of knowledge. Whenever a student, or a disciple or a seeker would come to him, the first question Maruf used to ask was this: “Do you want to learn or unlearn? Do you want to be a student or a disciple?” This was always his first question because that would decide everything. This man who came to Maruf must have been a student. He could not have been a disciple because a disciple is one who has already attained trust.A student is seeking. A disciple has come to a conclusion in his being: “This is my master.” Hence, he is the disciple. “This is my master. I have come to the man I was seeking. This is my shelter, my refuge.” Suddenly the disciple is born. A disciple is born out of this trust. He does not inquire about such things this man is inquiring about. He has fallen in love; he has attained faith; he has surrendered. A student is not surrendered. He will learn, watch, observe, see, and if he’s convinced – remember, if he is convinced that is – the conclusion will come out of his head.Just the other day I was reading a very, very ridiculous thing said by an Indian guru who has become famous in the West, Sri Chinmoy. He teaches at the U.N. in Geneva. I was always wondering what he is doing there, and just the other day I came to read a statement he has made. Somebody asked him, “How to judge and how to find the master?” He said, “Use your brain.”Now I know why he is in the U.N. It’s because politicians, stupid people, are there. “Use your brain!” And the thing becomes more and more ridiculous because then he says, “Keep in your mind one hundred marks are to be given, then watch whether the master is honest, sincere, true to his word, his morality, his behavior – watch everything and go on giving marks inside your mind. If the master gets thirty marks he is not for you; leave. If the master gets nearabout eighty to ninety marks, then he is your master.” This is ridiculous.If you use your brain, you will find a teacher; you cannot find a master. Then, finally, you remain the decisive factor; you decide. Do you know what honesty is? First give marks to yourself – use your brain! Do you know what honesty is? Do you know what morality is? Are you certain about what is good and what is bad? Do you know what is evil and what is not evil? First give marks to yourself – use your brain. If you get thirty marks, drop yourself completely: you are useless. And if you can get eighty or ninety percent, then you don’t need a master. You are already a master. Go and seek disciples.To use the brain is simply unbelievable! A master is not a commodity in the market. A master by his very being is an unbelievable thing. You cannot use the brain. A master, by his very being, is mysterious. Opposites meet in him; dichotomies merge in him; dualisms – he comprehends all of them.You can find a teacher if you use the brain; then you will be a student. If you use your heart you can find a master. Only then can you become a disciple. A disciple is in love, and love is always total, not eighty percent, ninety percent. Love is total: either it is or it is not – but it is always total. If it is not, then too, it is total. And there is no compromise in it. A percentage is not possible; a percentage is the way of the brain. Totality is the way of the heart.That man must have been a student. So, let me say: A student came to Maruf Karkhi and said: “I have been talking to people about you.” Must have been using his brain. Must have been a student of Sri Chinmoy. “I have been talking to people about you.” You have to encounter a master directly – face to face, eyes to eyes, heart to heart. What nonsense to talk about the master to other people to know who the man is!Many of you also do the same here. You move around, you talk to people about me. Why not come directly to me? Why waste your time with people? This is the foolishness of the human mind: you never know the person you are talking to about me, but you trust that person and you cannot trust me.If you are really a brain-oriented person, then talk about that man to other people, and about those other people to other people. First you have to decide about the man, whether he is sincere, believable: “Whatever he says about the master, can we take it to be true?”You ask A about me. Why not ask B about A first? And then C about B? Then you will be in an infinite regress. And if A says something wrong about me, you take it; now it will always be a part of you. Or if A says something good about me, you take it and that will be a part of you, and that will decide the whole thing. You never ask about this A, who this A is. Why go round and round in circles? There is no end to it.There is only one way to come to the master: face to face, eyes to eyes, heart to heart. And don’t ask anybody else because then you will carry a prejudice either for or against, and that prejudice will always be between the master and you; it will become a barrier. You will always be seeking whether that prejudice is right or wrong, it will color your mind. And any foolish man can prejudice your mind.You are so unaware that any man – the taxi driver who brings you to this place – can corrupt your mind. You can ask about me, and many of you must have asked taxi drivers because the mind goes on seeking information, what others are saying: “They must know.” You must ask the neighbors here: “They must know.” And they are the last people in the world to know about me. Neighbors – they cannot know. Jesus has two sayings. One saying is: Love your enemies just as you love yourself. And the second: Love your neighbors just as you love yourself. It seems enemies and the neighbors are the same people.This man must have been an ordinary inquirer. He said: “I have been talking to people about you. Jews claim that you are a Jew; Christians revere you as one of their own saints; Muslims insist that you are the greatest of all Muslims.”He must have met the disciples, the people who had fallen in love with the master. Maruf lived near Baghdad. Baghdad became a capital of religious consciousness when Maruf was alive. This man must have met the disciples, those who had already fallen in love. If the disciple is a Jew he will say, “My master is the most perfect Jew possible.” I have many Jews here and they know that I am the most perfect Jew. Once you are in love, whatever is beautiful, great to you, you project on the master. I have amongst my disciples almost all sorts of people, belonging to all sorts of religions – Jews, Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, Buddhists. They all think… If a Buddhist comes to me and falls in love with me he will think that I am the most essential Buddhist, and he will find everything which will convince him that this is true.Maruf answered: “This is what humanity says in Baghdad.” That means: “My disciples, my people, my community. You should have been in Jerusalem. This is what humanity says in Baghdad – that is my community people, my people.”“When I was in Jerusalem, Jews said that I was a Christian, Muslims that I was a Jew, and Christians that I was a Muslim.” Enemies. For a religious man to find enemies, the best places are Jerusalem, Kaaba, Kashi. These are the best places to find enemies because these are the sectarian strongholds: Kashi for Hindus, Jerusalem for Jews, Kaaba for Muslims. These are the sectarian strongholds, fortresses, where the fossilized religion is protected and saved; where the dead body is continuously decorated, painted, for believers – to deceive them that the body is not dead. Where religion is continuously modified to suit new situations so that there is no need to drop it; where dead continuity is continued. There is the problem.If you want to find people antagonistic to a religious man go to these sacred places, holy places. In fact, they are the unholiest in the world; they have to be because the dead corpse of religion stinks. Can you find a dirtier place in the world than Kashi? Everything stinks of dead religion. But if you are a believer, you don’t listen to your senses, you don’t listen to your own consciousness. You go on seeing things which are not there. You go on projecting things which are not there.Said Maruf: “This is what humanity says in Baghdad. When I was in Jerusalem just the opposite was the case. Everybody was saying that I don’t belong to them, I am the enemy. Jews thought I was a Christian, the enemy. Muslims thought I was a Jew, the enemy. Christians thought I was a Muslim, the enemy. And in all these three religions, nobody, nobody was ready even to accept me in their fold.”Religious persons cannot be accepted in any fold. They can be accepted only in the loving heart, but in no organization. They cannot be accepted because organizations have no hearts. A religious man cannot be absorbed in any establishment. Only a personal feeling, a loving heart, can become a shrine for him.The man must have been puzzled. He had come to inquire who Maruf was. Perhaps the man was a Muslim and he wanted to be convinced that this Maruf was a Muslim so that he could follow him. The man may have been a Jew and wanted to be convinced that this Maruf was a Jew so that he could follow him. You follow yourself, you never follow any master. If you are here because I say things which you already know are right, then you are not with me. Then I am only voicing your own mind. If you are here because you see in me a Jaina because you are a Jaina…When I talk about Mahavira I can immediately count how many Jainas are here. Their eyes simply change. Their backbones become straight. They look very intense. Now for the first time they are alert, otherwise they were falling asleep. If I talk about Jews I can count immediately how many Jews are here. And if I cannot decide who you are, only then are you with me. If you are a Jew and you listen to me, and you feel that whatever I am saying is what Jewish religion is, then you remain a Jew. I am just a support for your convictions, just an outside support. I have not entered you; you have not allowed me to enter you.Many people come to me and they say, “Whatever you said was beautiful because this is what I have believed my whole life, and you said it better than I can say it.” So that’s all. He’s finished with me and I am finished with him. There has been no meeting. He has heard his own voice in my voice; he has interpreted his own mind. And he remains a believer in his own ego, he has not dropped even a bit of his old luggage. Rather, on the contrary, he is now more convinced of the old luggage and he will carry it with more strength and with more conviction.No, remember this: I am not here to make you a Jew or a Hindu or a Christian – no. I am here only to make you a religious man.The man must have been puzzled. “How must we think of you then?” asked the man. “You have puzzled me. You confuse me.” All religious people are, in a way, confusing. They create a chaos in you because first you have to be uprooted, first you have to be demolished. No religious person is interested in renovating you because however renovated, you will remain the old, the dead thing – modified, of course, but not fresh and young. A religious person is interested in demolishing you completely, in pulling you down to the very roots, and then in helping you to arise again.Until you die, nothing is possible. A master is a death on the one hand, resurrection on the other. A master is a crucifixion, a cross. As you are, you die. And you, as you should be, are born.The man was puzzled. “How must we think of you then?” said the man. Maruf said: “Some do not understand me…” Listen to these words – very significant. “Some do not understand me, and revere me.” They do not understand, hence they revere. People are really foolish. If they don’t understand a thing they start revering it because they think it must be something very mysterious: “If I cannot understand – I, such an intelligent and genius man – if I cannot understand, it must be something very, very deep and mysterious.” And many people exploit such attitudes. Many people.If you read Hegel’s books you will see that is what he is doing. He goes on trying to make everything as difficult as possible. It is not difficult! It is a good exercise to study Hegel, a German philosopher, in his own day thought to be the greatest. But as time passes again and again he comes lower and lower and lower because as you understand him his mystery is lost. And nothing is there, just verbiage. If he can say a thing in a single word he will use a hundred pages. If he can say a thing in one sentence, he will go on and on, round and round, in pages. You will not be able… He writes long sentences, sometimes one sentence on one page. You will not be able to remember the beginning of the sentence when you reach the end. You will have to read it again and again. And he mystifies.There are many people, mystifiers, exploiting the human stupidity of believing that whatever you cannot understand must be something superb, of the sublime, of the unknown, of the mysterious. These people are exploiters.Just the reverse is the case with people who are really wise. They speak in short sentences. Their sentences are not complicated, they are simple. Whatever they say can be understood by anybody who is normally intelligent. They don’t mystify. Whatever they teach is very, very simple – simple as life is simple, simple as existence is simple, rivers and mountains are simple, birds and trees are simple.Wise men are simple. But the more you understand them… To understand them is simple and the more you understand them, the deeper you penetrate their simplicity, the more you see new dimensions of mysteries opening. Their words are simple, but what they want to indicate is mysterious. Their indication is simple, but the indicated is mysterious. Look at my finger – a simple thing. I indicate with my finger toward the moon. The moon is mysterious, not the finger. The finger is a very simple phenomenon, nothing to say about it. Words are like fingers and they point, they finger, indicate, toward the mysterious.“Some do not understand me, and revere me.” And you have revered many people and you have revered many doctrines, just because you cannot understand them. There are many followers of Gurdjieff. Because they cannot understand him they follow him. Gurdjieff is not like Hegel, he is not mystifying, but he has something else to do. He does not want unwanted people to come near him, so he writes in such a way that unless you are very patient you will not be able to penetrate him. He is not difficult; he is simple. But the methodology is that he puts you off; you cannot read more than a few pages. I have not come across a single person yet who has read his All and Everything completely. People have gone through it, but… And he knew that this is going to be so. He writes in a tedious style, he bores you. And this is a very considered method. He puts you off.When the book, All and Everything was published for the first time, the pages were not cut. Only the introductory pages, a hundred pages, were cut and the other pages were not. And there was a note on the book saying that if you can read the one hundred pages, then open the others; otherwise return the book to the shop and take your money back. First try with the one hundred pages, and if you are still interested then open the other pages, cut them; otherwise, don’t destroy the book. Many books were returned, many were not returned, but that doesn’t mean people read them. They were just curious. They thought, “Maybe it is a trick and only in the introductory pages he is boring, inside he may not be.” But if you cut, you couldn’t return the book.I have not come across a single person who has read the whole book thoroughly. People skip, then they miss because here and there he hides the diamonds and everything else is just a camouflage. Here and there, in the bushes of words, he hides the diamonds. Those diamonds can be sorted out and can be written on a postcard. And that book has one thousand pages!Many people follow Gurdjieff because they cannot understand. Suddenly, when you cannot understand, you feel there is some mystery. It is not so; truth is very simple. Everybody has the capacity to understand it. Truth is as simple as anything can be. You have to be just silent, understanding, ready, and it is revealed to you.Maruf said: “Some do not understand me…” – hence their reverence – and “…others do not either, so they revile me.” There are the people who, if they cannot understand – they cannot believe that anything can exist which they cannot understand – they revile. It is against their egos. But remember: both are egoistic viewpoints.One ego thinks, “I understand easily. If I cannot understand, there must be something mysterious.” Another ego says, “If I cannot understand, then there cannot be anything at all. This man is simply deceptive. There is nothing. If there were something, then how come I cannot understand it? A genius like me will understand everything.” Both are egoistic standpoints. And one has to drop out of both of them. Only then can you understand a master.One has to drop both. Don’t revere a thing because you don’t understand. Don’t revile it because you don’t understand. In fact, don’t refer the thing to your ego, don’t bring it into the context of your ego. That is useless. Just listen to the thing. If you cannot understand, try to understand – meditate more, contemplate more, become more silent. Come to it again and again from different standpoints. And finally come to it with no standpoint at all. You will understand and the mystery will be revealed. If you cannot understand, don’t start reviling it; you are not the last word in understanding. You are not the last capacity of understanding. You are not the omega of understanding. You are just a beginner on the first rung of the ladder – and the ladder is vast and long.Millions of things are waiting for you to be. You are just at the door, you have not even entered the shrine. Maybe you are just on the steps, or maybe just on the path, not even up to the steps, not even at the door. Don’t bring your ego in either way. You are not the deciding factor as to whether it is mysterious or nothing. Listen. The more you listen to a man who has attained, you will understand more and more. And the more you understand, the more it will become mysterious.The mystery of life is not something which can be solved or which is ever solved. It has to be lived. It is not a problem to be solved; it has to be lived.The more you know the less you feel that you know. The more you know the more you feel the unknown surrounds you from everywhere. And in the final moment of knowing, all knowledge drops; you know nothing. That final moment of knowing is like vast ignorance, a vast dark night. But only out of that dark night is the morning born. Out of this vast ignorance a light which is knowing, which is understanding arises. Buddha calls it pragya, sambodhi; Patanjali calls it samadhi –enlightenment.Maruf said: “Some do not understand me, and revere me. Others do not either, so they revile me. That is what I have come to say. You should think of me as one who has said this.” The man was asking to label Maruf somehow – whether he is a Jew or a Mohammedan or a Christian. Once labeled, you think you have understood. Labeling is a trick. You label a certain thing and you feel you have understood.I show you a flower, an outlandish flower you have never seen before, and immediately you ask, “What is its name?” Why are you so anxious to know the name? How is the name going to help you? X, Y, Z, whatever the name may be, how is it going to help you? If I say X, you think now you know it, you have labeled it. Now you can show to your child that this is X flower. You have become a knower. What have you known about the flower? Just the word X. I could have called it Y or Z, they would have been as relevant as X. How do you know it?I was reading Gertrude Stein’s book. When she said in a poem, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” it became world famous. She goes on that way with many things; she does not define, she doesn’t say anything: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Nothing is defined; nothing is said really.Somebody asked, “Why have you said this? We all know a rose is a rose is a rose. It makes no sense. It adds nothing to our knowledge.”Stein said, “Because poets have been talking about roses for millennia. Millions of poems about roses, everybody has read them, sung them, and repeated them. The word rose has lost its rosiness. It doesn’t say anything anymore. That’s why I had to repeat – a rose is a rose is a rose – so that you are awakened out of your sleep, so that you are shaken a little. ‘What is this woman saying? The absurdity of it – a rose is a rose is a rose!’ Then you may listen. Otherwise just rose, who listens? Everybody knows.” And she said, “Repeating this I have brought the redness to the rose again.”Words can’t say much. And if you think that just by knowing the names and labels you have known, you will miss everything. Try to avoid words. Don’t try to label. You immediately label. Labeling is such a great disease; it is an obsession. You see a man, you say “Beautiful!” You see a woman and you say “Ugly!” Why in such a hurry? Wait! The woman has many faces. Even the ugliest woman sometimes has a beautiful face no beautiful woman can compete with – the ugliest. I have seen the ugliest woman in a certain posture, in a certain mood, in a certain climate, so beautiful that your Miss Universe will look a little pale in front of her. And I have seen the most beautiful woman ugly in certain moods. Wait: don’t label, otherwise your label will not allow you to see the reality.Even beautiful women, in anger, in jealousy, in possessiveness, become so ugly – and their ugliness is deeper than the ordinary ugliness of a body. Their ugliness is spiritual and inner, and it comes all over their body like a rash. When a woman is jealous and possessive, she may be beautiful on the surface but something emanates around her – poisonous, snakelike; she’s ugly. You touch her in that moment and you will feel that you have touched a reptile, not a woman. Poisonous – fumes coming out of her poison.Don’t label. Reality doesn’t believe in labels. Reality goes on moving and changing; it is flux, a river. You cannot step twice in the same river – not even once. It is moving all the time.Don’t categorize. You have pigeonholes in the mind. Immediately something is there you put it in a pigeonhole, and finished. And you think you know – this man is good and that man is bad. Have you not ever observed bad becoming good, good becoming bad? Have you not seen an honest thief? Have you not seen a very, very sincere criminal? Have you never seen a sinner, but holy? Categories don’t belong to life, they belong to the mind. Categories are your games. Don’t categorize.This man had come to ask Maruf, “How to categorize you? Where to put you?” Maruf is an alive man. If he was dead he would have said, “I am a Mohammedan, of course, a humble Muslim, a Sufi,” but he is not a dead man, he won’t allow categorization. He is alive, utterly alive.He says, “Remember me by only this. Nothing else. That is what I have come to say. You should think of me as one who has said this. Remember just this much: those who don’t understand me, they revere me, and those who don’t understand me, they revile me. In Jerusalem, Jews think I am a Muslim and Muslims that I am a Jew. And in Baghdad, where people are in love with me, in my community, Jews think I am the most perfect Jew, Christians that I am a reborn Christ, and Muslims that I am the last word in being a Muslim. More I will not say. This much I say to you. And if you want to know how to remember me, you can only do this: You should think of me as one who has said this.”He remains uncategorized, unlabeled. He does not give any clue. Rather, he becomes more mysterious. The man may have come with something, some prejudice, some idea about this master Maruf. And Maruf has demolished his mind completely, he has cut through all his prejudices, he has left him in the vacuum. That’s what a master does. He leaves you in emptiness, but that is the most beautiful gift that can be given to you – nothingness, emptiness, a vacuum.In that vacuum arises all. In that nothingness arises all. In that emptiness the absolute is born. But until you die, that’s not possible.You are here. Let me be your death and direction and resurrection.Enough for today.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-01/

The Akshi Upanishad.Aum, may my speech be rooted in my mind, and my mind rooted in my speech. O self-illumined Brahman, be manifest unto me. Speech and mind form the basis of my knowledge,so please do not undo my pursuit of knowledge. Day and night I spend in this pursuit. I shall speak the law; I shall speak the truth.May Brahman protect me; may he protect the speaker, protect the speaker.Aum, shanti, shanti, shanti.The ultimate truth is not far away, it is not distant. It is near you, close, closer than you are to yourself, but still you go on missing it, and you have been missing it for millions of lives. This continuous missing has become a habit. Unless this habit is broken, the closest remains the most distant; unless this habit is transcended, God, truth, or whatsoever we may call it, remains just a myth, a theory, a doctrine, a belief, but not an experience.And unless the divine is your experience, the belief is futile. It is not going to help you; on the contrary it may hinder you, because just by believing in it you deceive yourself that somehow you have known it. The belief becomes the deception. It doesn’t become an opening, it closes you. It makes you knowledgeable without knowing it; it gives you a feeling of knowledge without any intimate experience of it.Remember, untruth is not such a great hindrance as the belief in the truth. If you believe you stop seeking; if you believe you have already taken it for granted. It cannot be so. You will have to pass through a mutation; really you will have to die and be born again. Unless the seed that you are dies, the new life cannot sprout out of it. Belief becomes a barrier; it gives you a false assurance that you have known–but that is all you have got. Belief is just borrowed. A Buddha says something, a Jesus says something, or a Mohammed, and then we go on following it, believing in it. This can create such a situation within you that the distant will appear close and the closest will continue to appear distant–it creates an illusory mind.I have heard one Sufi story. Once it happened that a fish in the ocean heard somebody talking about the ocean, and the fish heard for the first time that there exists something like the ocean. She started to search, she started to ask and in-quire, but nobody knew where the ocean was. She asked many fish, great and small, known and unknown, famous and not so famous, but nobody was capable of answering where the ocean is. They all said they have heard about it; they all said, “Sometime in the past our ancestors knew it – it is written in the scriptures.” And the ocean was all around! They were in the ocean; they were talking, living in the ocean.Sometimes it happens that the closest, the nearest, is so obvious that you can forget it. The nearest is so near that you cannot look at it, because even to look at something a certain distance is needed, space is needed. And there is no space between you and the divine; there is no space between the fish and the ocean – no gap. The fish is part of the ocean, just like a wave; or the ocean is just the infinite spread of the being of the fish. They are not two; they exist together, their being is joined together. Their bodies may appear different but their inner spirit is one, it is unitary.The same is the situation with us. We go on asking about God – whether God exists or not – and we argue much for and against. Some believe, some disbelieve; some say it is just a myth and some say it is the only truth, but they all depend on scriptures, nobody has an immediate experience. When I say immediate experience I mean experience that has grown into you, or into which you have grown…intimate, so intimate that you cannot feel where you end and that experience begins.God cannot be an object of any search; he remains the very subjectivity. You are not going to find him somewhere because he is everywhere, and if you start looking for him somewhere you will not find him anywhere. All that is, is divine. God just means the whole existence, the totality, the ocean that surrounds you, the ocean of life.The first thing to remember before we enter into this intimate search and inquiry, into this intimate experience that people have always called God, or Buddha has called nirvana, or Jesus has called the kingdom of God – names differ, but the experience indicated is the same – the first thing to remember is: it is not far away, it is where you are. Right now you are sitting in him, breathing in him, breathing him, through him.This has to be continuously remembered, constantly remembered; don’t forget it for a single moment, because the moment you forget it the whole search becomes wrong. Then you start looking somewhere. Maintain it; remember it continuously at least for these eight or nine days – that it is exactly where you are. The very center of your being is its center also.If this is remembered the whole search will become qualitatively different. Then you are not in search of something outside, but something inner. Then you are not in search of something which is going to happen in the future, it can happen right now; it is already happening. And then the whole thing becomes very relaxed. If the truth is somewhere in the future then you are bound to be tense, then you are bound to be worried, a deep anxiety is bound to be there. Who knows whether it will happen in the future or not? The future is uncertain; you may miss it – you have been missing so long. But if the divine is here and now, the very existence, the very breath, the very you, then there is no uncertainty, then there is no worry, no anxiety.Even if you go on missing, you cannot miss him. You may have missed him for so many many lives, but really you have never missed him because he has always been hidden there, waiting for you to turn within. You have been looking outside, you have been focused on the objective world, and that which you are seeking is hidden within, it is your subjectivity.God is not an object; God doesn’t exist as an object. Whatsoever theologians say, they are absolutely wrong – God doesn’t exist as an object. You cannot worship, because he is hidden in the worshipper. You cannot pray, because he is hidden there from where the prayer arises. You cannot seek him without, because he is your within-ness.The first thing to remember is this, because if it is remembered then the whole effort becomes qualitatively different. Then you are not going somewhere, then there is no hurry, then there is no impatience. Rather, on the contrary, the more patience that happens to you, the easier becomes the search; the more you are not seeking him, the closer he is to you. When you are not seeking at all, when you are just being, not going anywhere, after anything, you have reached, the thing has happened.This search is going to be qualitatively different. This search is, in a way, a no-search; this seeking is, in a way, a no-seeking. The more you seek, the more you will miss. If he was far away then it would have been alright. He is here, he is now. This very moment God is happening to you, because you cannot be without him. He is the ocean, you are the fish.So don’t be in a hurry and don’t be impatient. There is no goal; the very effort is the goal. We will not be meditating to gain something, to achieve something; the very meditation is the goal. Meditation is not a means, it is the end. So don’t force yourself; rather, relax. Don’t run after something, some ultimate, some God, some x, y, z; rather stand still. The moment you are in a total standstill you have reached. Then there is no more. And this can be done any moment. If you understand, this can happen this very moment. God is life, God is existence, God is the case.But there are problems; theologians have created them. The first problem they have created, and because of which this remembering becomes impossible – to remember that you are already divine becomes impossible – is a very deep condemnatory attitude. You go on condemning yourself: you are the sinner. They have created guilt in you. So how can a sinner be, right this very moment, the divine? He will have to get rid of the sin; he will have to suffer for his sins, and time will be needed. He will have to pass through purifications, and only when he has become holy, a saint, will he have a glimpse of the divine.Particularly in the West, Christianity has given everybody a deep guilt complex. Everybody is guilty – not only about your own sins that you have committed, but also about the sin that Adam committed in the very beginning. You are guilty for it. You carry a burden, a long burden of guilt, so how can you think, imagine, conceive, that right this very moment God is happening to you? The Devil can happen, can be imagined, but not God. You can think of yourself as the Devil but never as the divine.This creation of a guilt complex was needed not for you, but for religions. Their business can continue only if they create guilt in you. The whole business of religion depends on the guilt feelings that they can create in the masses. Churches, temples, religions exist on your guilt. God has not created them, your guilt has created them. When you feel guilty you need a priest to confess to; when you feel guilty you need someone to lead you, to purify you. When you feel guilty you have lost your center – now somebody can lead you.You can become a follower only when you have lost your center. If you are right in your center, no question of following arises. You can become part of a crowd only when you are not yourself. So you belong to Christianity, or Hinduism, or Mohammedanism – these “belongings” are simply guilt feelings. You cannot be alone. You are so guilty you cannot rely on yourself, you cannot depend on yourself, you cannot be independent. Somebody, some great organization, some cult, creed, is needed, so under its blanket you can hide, and you can forget your guilt. And then you need some savior, you need someone who can suffer for your sins. This is just absurd.Christians say Jesus suffered for the sin of the whole humanity. The whole logic is absurd. Adam committed the sin, you are guilty for it! Then Jesus suffers for you, and your guilt is forgiven, your sin is forgiven. So the whole deal is between Adam and Jesus – you are just puppets. Sometimes Adam leads you so you move into sin, sometimes Jesus leads you so you move into the kingdom of God, but you yourself are nothing. But to exploit, religions had to create the guilt feeling. Because of that guilt feeling that you are not accepted as you are, you cannot conceive of yourself as already in the divine, being divine.With me this guilt feeling has to be dropped. You are not a sinner and you are not guilty. Whatsoever you are the existence accepts you. Whatsoever you are playing, whatsoever game, it is so because the divine wills it so. As you are, you are accepted.This is the second thing to remember: don’t condemn yourself, otherwise nothing can be done. Don’t reject yourself, don’t be an enemy to yourself. Be loving, be friendly, and accept whatsoever you are. I am not saying that there is nothing wrong in you. I am not saying that you don’t need any transformation. You need it, there are many wrongs, but those wrongs are not sins; they are illnesses, diseases.Someone has a fever: he is not a sinner, he needs our compassion, our help to come out of it. If we just condemn then he will also condemn his fever and then the whole thing goes wrong, because once you condemn your fever you start suppressing it. Then the man cannot say to others, “I am feeling fever, I am feverish,” because the moment he says it everybody will think he is a sinner. So he goes on saying, “I am healthy. Who says that I have a fever? If the thermometer shows it the thermometer must be wrong. I am okay.” He cannot accept his fever and then nothing can be done. He goes on hiding and suppressing. That is what you have been doing.There are many wrongs, but remember, those wrongs are just illnesses, not sins; errors, mistakes, but not sins. You are not guilty. You may be ignorant; you may not be knowing as much as is needed to live a pure and innocent life, but that means you are ignorant, innocent – not guilty. Try to understand the distinction very well, because on it depends much.In this camp, to me you are divine. You may be erroneous, the god within you may be ill, the god within you may be ignorant, the god within you may be committing many mistakes – but the god is not committing any sin. What is the difference? When you commit a mistake you don’t condemn yourself, you try to understand why you committed it. The mistake is condemned but not you. When you call it a sin, you are condemned – you are wrong, not an act.Your acts may be wrong, but you are not. You are totally accepted as you are. Your being is the highest flower that has happened to this earth. You are the salt of this earth. Howsoever erroneous, you are the very glory of existence.Remember this: I accept you and I want you to accept yourself.Not that there is going to be no transformation, but that only through this acceptance transformation becomes possible. Once you accept your being there is no suppression, once you accept your being the whole being comes into consciousness. There is no need to hide and to push some parts, fragments, into the darkness, into the unconscious.The unconscious is a by-product of Christianity. There is nothing like the unconscious. If you accept yourself, your whole mind will be conscious. If you deny, reject, condemn, then the condemned parts will move into darkness. Not that they will not act now, they will act more, but their action will be now hidden, perverted, disguised. It will not be apparent, it will take a hidden course. You cannot face it directly but it goes on working. The unconscious is created by guilt.Once you accept that there is no unconscious, the barrier has gone, the boundary disappeared, and the conscious and unconscious become one – as they are really, as they should be. And when your conscious and unconscious are one you can meditate, never before it. Once your inner divisions disappear, once you become one inside, a deep silence descends upon you, a great blissful moment is reached – just by the disappearance of the boundaries, divisions, fragments.When you become one you become healthy; when you become one you feel a silent well-being. Moment to moment you feel grateful to existence, a gratitude happens to you, and this gratitude I call prayer. It is not a prayer to some god. This gratitude is an inner attitude towards existence which has given you life, love, light; towards this existence which has blessed you in millions and millions of ways, and which goes on showering upon you more and more blessings – but a unity is needed within.So this is the second point to remember: don’t feel guilty, don’t feel yourself a sinner, don’t feel that you are wrong. If you were wrong you would not have been. You are there because God wants to preserve you. You are there because God loves you. You are there, that’s why the whole existence supports you. You are there because you are worth the trouble. Accept yourself, have a loving attitude towards yourself.Jesus says somewhere: Love your enemies as yourself. But no one loves himself, so how can you love your enemies as yourself? You simply hate yourself. If you love yourself, to me you have become religious. And a person who loves himself, only he can love others; a person who hates himself deep down cannot love anybody.If you cannot love yourself how can you love anybody? If you cannot accept yourself how can you accept anybody? So your so-called saints who go on condemning themselves, they go on condemning the whole world – they are condemning everybody. The moment they condemn themselves they condemn the whole world. You are the nearest; if existence in you is condemned, then how can you accept existence that is far away from you, existing in others? No guilt, no condemnation. Wrongs are there, but those wrongs are not in your being but in your doing; in your acts, not in you. And your acts are wrong because you are not aware – not that you are a sinner. Those wrongs exist because you are not alert. The god is asleep in you, fast asleep; sometimes you can even hear the snoring – fast asleep.My effort in this camp is going to be to make that god a little alert, to disturb the inner sleep, to help him awake. It is not condemnatory. And once you start being alert, you have started being different. Perfectly aware, you have reached; perfectly aware, you are in nirvana, in the kingdom of God.The third thing to remember: in this camp we will be doing many things, many techniques, many methods, but hidden behind every technique and method is the basic thing and that is, search for awareness, search for more consciousness. So whatsoever you are doing here, remain alert, remain conscious, remain a witness. Doing meditation remain conscious, remain a witness. Doing meditation, dancing, doing kirtan and singing, remain alert, don’t become unconscious.Whatsoever is happening, a center within you goes on looking at it, a center remains a watcher. Your body may be going mad, your body may be jumping, shrieking, screaming, your mind may have become a whirlpool – but a watcher remains. Go on constantly remembering that you are watching, because that watcher is the thing. That watcher has to be brought more and more into force. So while your body is doing many things, your mind is doing many things, one thing deeply hidden within you goes on looking at it all. Don’t lose contact with that.I am going to create a situation in these days in which your body will become very active, your mind will go through many catharses, much activity will be there, but simultaneously, side by side, remain alert, passively looking at all that is happening as if you are not only the actor but the audience also. Doing, watching – this watching must be continued moment to moment, not only while you are meditating. You are walking, you are eating, taking a bath, talking with someone, going to sleep – go on watching everything that is happening.For these eight days devote all your energies to moving towards being a witness. Eating, let the body eat – you watch also. Walking, let the legs move – you watch also. Hearing me, listening to me, let the ears listen, let the mind absorb – you watch also. You remain a witness. Continuously hammering for the witness will help your god to be awake, and once your god is awake you yourself are a Jesus, a Buddha, a Krishna – then you don’t lack anything. Right now also you don’t lack anything, except that the god in Krishna or Christ is awake and in you fast asleep.There is nothing wrong in sleep also, but in sleep many errors are committed. You move in sleep, then you commit many mistakes. If you love committing mistakes then there is no problem, but remember that when you commit mistakes you suffer also. That suffering doesn’t come from Adam’s sin – it comes from you. If you commit a mistake you suffer, pain results. All suffering is a by-product of ignorance. So if you enjoy your suffering then it is okay, then don’t make any effort for any change. Sleep is good and you enjoy your suffering. But if you don’t enjoy your suffering then something has to be done. Prayers won’t help, only conscious effort will help you.A few instructions and then I will move to the sutra.When you go to sleep tonight and every night following, before going to sleep put off the light, sit on your bed, close your eyes and exhale deeply through the mouth with the sound O – Ooooo. Go on exhaling with the sound O, as deeply as possible. Your stomach goes in, the air moves out, and you go on creating the sound O. Remember, I am not saying aum, I am saying simply O. It will become aum automatically. You need not make it, then it is false. You simply create the sound O. When it becomes more harmonious and you are enjoying it, suddenly you will become aware it has become aum. But don’t force it to become aum, then it is false. When it becomes spontaneously aum then it is something vibrating from within. And this sound aum is the deepest sound, the most harmonious, the most basic.When it happens and you enjoy and you flow in its music, your whole body and your brain relax. With the sound aum you will go on relaxing and your sleep will have a different quality, altogether different. And your sleep has to be changed, only then can you become more alert and aware. So we will start by changing the sleep.In the night put the light off, sit on the bed, exhale deeply through the mouth with the sound O. When you have exhaled completely and you feel that now no more exhalation is possible, the whole breath has gone out, stop for a single moment. Don’t inhale, don’t exhale – just stop. In that stop you are the divine. In that stop you are not doing anything, not even breathing. In that stop you are in the ocean.Just remain in the stop for a single moment and be a witness – just look at what is happening. Be aware where you are: witness the whole situation that is there in that single stopped moment. Time is no more there, because time moves with breaths; breathing is the process of time. Because you breathe you feel the time moving. When you don’t breathe you are just like a dead man. Time has stopped, there is no process anywhere, everything has stopped…as if the whole existence has stopped with you. In that stopping you can become aware of the deepest source of your being and energy. So for a single moment stop. Then inhale through the nose, but don’t make any effort to inhale.Remember, make all the effort to exhale, but don’t make any effort to inhale; just let the body inhale. You simply relax your hold and let the body take the inhalation. You don’t do anything. That too is beautiful and works wonders. You have exhaled, stopped for a moment, then you allow the body to inhale. You don’t make any effort to inhale, you simply watch the body taking the inhalation. And when you watch the body taking the inhalation you will feel a deep silence surrounding you, because then you know your effort is not needed for life. Life breathes itself. It moves by itself of its own cause. It is a river, you unnecessarily go on pushing it. You will see that the body is taking the inhalation. Your effort is not needed, your ego is not needed – you are not needed. You simply become a watcher, you simply see the body taking the inhalation. Deep silence will be felt. When the body has taken a full inhalation, stop for a single moment again. Again watch.These two moments are totally different. When you have exhaled completely and stopped, that stopping is just like death. When you have inhaled totally and then stopped, that stopping is the climax of life. Remember, inhalation is equivalent to life, exhalation equivalent to death. That’s why the first thing a child does when born is to inhale, and the last thing the same child will do when old, dying, will be to exhale. On this earth, the first thing you did while entering life was inhalation, and the last thing you will do will be exhalation. No one can die inhaling. When you die you have to exhale, you die with exhalation. And no one can be born with exhalation, you have to start by inhalation.Those who know, and those who have watched their inner life process deeply, they say – and you will come to feel it yourself – that with every inhalation you are born again and with every exhalation you die. So death is not something in the end, and birth is not something in the beginning; every moment there is birth and death, every moment you die and are born again. And if you die beautifully you are born again more beautifully, if you die totally you are born totally.So exhale as totally as possible; that will give you a death moment. That’s beautiful, because a death moment is the most silent, the most peaceful – that is nirvana. Then let the body inhale to the full, and then stop. That moment is a life moment: the climax of energy, power, bioenergy at its peak. Feel it, and feel both. That’s why I say stop twice: when you have exhaled, then; and when you have inhaled, then – so you can feel both life and death, so you can watch both life and death.Once you know this is life, this is death, you have transcended both. The witness is neither death nor life. The witness is never born and never dies; only the body, the mechanism. You become the third. These two moments are very significant. This very night you have to do this meditation, for twenty minutes you go on doing this and then fall down and go to sleep.In the morning when you feel the sleep has left you, don’t open your eyes immediately. The mind has the tendency to open the eyes immediately. You miss a great opportunity…because when sleep leaves you and life energies are wakening inside, you can watch them, and that watching will be very helpful for going into deeper meditation.The mind is fresh, the body is fresh after the whole night’s rest; everything is fresh, unburdened. There is no dust, no tiredness – you can look deeply, penetratingly. Your eyes are fresher; everything is vital. Don’t miss that moment. When you feel sleep has left, don’t open the eyes immediately. Remain with closed eyes and feel the energy which is changing now from sleep to waking. And that’s what I am going to teach you: how to change all your energies from sleep to waking. So just watch.You may be lethargic in that moment, you would like to turn over and go to sleep again, so do one thing: for three minutes with closed eyes stretch your body like a cat. But with closed eyes; don’t open the eyes and don’t look at the body from without. Look at the body from within. Stretch, move, and let the body energy flow, and feel it. When it is fresh it is good to feel it; the feeling will remain with you the whole day.Do this for two or three minutes –if you enjoy it, five minutes. And then for two or three minutes laugh loudly like a madman, but with closed eyes, don’t open the eyes. With closed eyes laugh loudly. The energies are there, flowing; the body is awake and alert and vital. The sleep has gone. You are filled, flooded with new energy.The first thing to be done is laughter, because that sets the trend for the whole day. If you do it, you will feel within two or three days that your mood remains the whole day the mood of laughing, enjoying. Don’t be afraid of what others will say, because they may be just waiting for you – so laugh and help them to laugh.Remember, the first thing in the day sets the trend, and the last thing in the night also sets the trend. So begin your sleep with a deep relaxation so the whole night becomes samadhi, the whole night becomes a deep meditation – relaxed. Six, seven, eight hours – it is a long time. If you live for sixty years, twenty years you will be in your bed. Twenty years is a long time, and if you can change the quality of sleep you need not go to a forest to meditate; twenty years – enough! No need to go anywhere, no need to do anything. If you can change your sleep there is no need to go like Mahavira in the forest for twelve years, or like Buddha for six years. Twenty years is a long time, and you are not doing anything in that sleep so meditation is easy, because meditation is more like nondoing than like doing. It is a deep relaxation.Relax when you go to sleep and laugh when you come out of sleep. That laughter should be the first prayer. Remember that if you can laugh, sooner or later you will come to believe in God. A person who laughs cannot remain an atheist for long, and a person who is sad, whatsoever he may say, cannot be really a believer in God, because sadness shows that he rejects, sadness shows that he is against, sadness shows that he denies, condemns. Laughter shows a deep acceptance, laughter shows a celebration, laughter shows that life is good.First thing in the morning stretch your body like a cat so you can feel energy, move like a cat, and then laugh, and only then get out of the bed. Then the whole day is going to be different. Then we will be doing three meditations in the day.In the morning a meditation of four steps, the last really not a step but a jump. The first step: ten minutes of fast chaotic breathing. This breathing is used just like a hammer to hammer your energies, particularly energies which are hidden in the sex center. And you exist right now as a sex center, because your whole energy moves into that center. Your contact with the world is through that center, you are related to the world through that center. And unless energy erupts upwards, flows upwards to other centers which are there, nonfunctioning, you cannot change, you cannot be transformed.The higher the energy moves, through higher centers you are related to the world. When from the highest center you relate to the world, you have become divine and the whole world is divine; from the lowest center, sex, you are an animal and the whole world is also animal. Darwins and Huxleys and others who have worked hard to prove that man has evolved out of animals are right, their research is right, but they have not studied a buddha; they have studied the ordinary human being. The ordinary human being is related with the animal kingdom. He remains an animal, just a little more sophisticated. Mark Twain writes somewhere that the cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education. That’s the only difference between animal and man – a little more sophisticated animal with a college education, with a culture. But he remains an animal, and because he is educated he becomes more dangerous.The higher your energy moves, the more new realms of existence will be revealed to you. And if the Upanishads, if Vedantins, Buddha and Jesus and people like them have declared that everyone is divine, they could say so only because they were related to the universe from their highest center. Your energy has to be moved from the sex center to the sahasrar, that which is hidden in your head.This chaotic breathing, the first step, is just to be used as a hammer. It works, it is not a theory; you can do it and you can know it, and you will know it.The second step for ten minutes will be of catharsis. You have to bring out, act out, whatsoever you have been suppressing up to now. Whatsoever you have suppressed has to be thrown out, because only then can you become flowerlike, weightless, and only then can you fly, only then can you rise upwards. All the burden has to be dropped down.I have heard one story about Hotei, a Zen master. One day he was passing through a village. On his shoulders he always carried a very big bag full of many toys, chocolates and sweets for children. Somebody asked him, “Hotei, we have heard that you are just playing a role, acting. We have heard that you are a Zen master, so why do you go on wasting your time just giving toys to children? And if you are really a Zen master then show us what Zen is.” Zen means the real spirit of religion.Hotei dropped his bag, immediately he dropped his bag. They couldn’t follow, so they said, “What do you mean?”He said, “This is all. If you drop the burden, this is all.”They asked, “Okay, then what is the next step?”So he put his bag again on his shoulders and started walking. “This is the next step. But now I am not carrying. I know now that the burden is not me. Now the whole burden has become just toys for children and they will enjoy it.”The second step is to drop the bag that you are carrying, and carry it again only when you are not carrying it. Then you can carry the whole world; then there is no problem – you are not identified with it. The second step is to drop the bag. So be Hotei, and drop whatsoever you have been carrying so long. And it is just ugly, whatsoever you are carrying. Sadness, ugliness, hatred, suffering, anger, jealousy – things like this you are carrying. And if you have become a big wound it is no surprise, it is what you are carrying. So in the second step you have to throw down whatsoever there is in it.You will look mad, because madness is there. You have been suppressing it up to now. Your sanity is false, it is just on the surface, not even skin-deep. You can be made insane immediately. Someone hits you and the sanity is gone, someone insults you and the sanity is gone. It is not even skin-deep, it is just there boiling. You are carrying yourself somehow. You are a miracle. How do you go on with so many madnesses within? How do you manage it? In the second step don’t manage, just throw it out. Become mad, go mad.Remember, when you become mad consciously you remain a witness. Mad-ness is beautiful if you are conscious – you enjoy it. The more you throw it out the less burdened you are, and you feel that your energy is purified. You feel that now you can fly in the sky. Now there are no boundaries to you, you have be-come weightless. Now the whole gravitation of the earth cannot pull you down to the earth, you have become greater. You can transcend this pull now; this pull works because you carry so much burden. The second step is to go mad consciously. Those who are intelligent will go mad consciously, those who are stupid will go on holding. So don’t be stupid; be a man of understanding and try it.The third step is a Sufi mantra, hoo; not w-h-o, just h-o-o – hoo without meaning. This is just a sound with no meaning at all; it has a significance but no meaning. It is just a technique. This sound hoo goes deepest in you, hits your deepest center, releases energy. Your whole body becomes aflame with a new energy that you have not known because you have never hit it.You are so afraid of yourself that you never hit your sources of energy, because you don’t know what you will do if much energy comes to you, and you are also afraid you may do something wrong if energy comes to you. So people remain consciously weak. If you are afraid of sex you will be afraid of energy, because if energy comes it will start moving in the sex center. Then what to do? So these so-called saints go on starving their bodies just to remain weak; their whole saintliness is nothing but a sort of weakness, a sort of impotence. And an impotent person can never be holy – because you don’t have energy to be holy. If you don’t have energy to be unholy, how can you have energy to be holy? The same energy moves from unholiness to holiness.The third is just a technique, a sound which hits your hidden sources of energy which you are scared to hit. Your whole body will become aflame with new life, new energy, new heat, new electricity, and when your whole body has become vital, every cell of it, only then the jump can be taken, never before it.Religion is not for weak people. Of course, if you go looking in temples, mosques and churches you will find weak persons there, kneeling down, praying – just weak. They are there because they are weak and they are in search of some help: somebody to protect them, somebody to give them security, safety.But I say to you, religion is not for the weak, it is only for the strong, because it is such a jump. It is a total jump from the known to the unknown. The weak cannot take it. They can travel step by step, but they can never take a jump.And remember, if you travel step by step, gradually, you are never transformed; you are at the most modified. You remain the same. A little refined, modified, a little change here and there, but you remain the same. A little better looking, but all ugliness hidden inside, just colored. Only those who are strong enough, who are erupting with energy, exploding with energy, can take the jump.And this is the greatest jump and the greatest challenge – from the known into the unknown. Whatsoever you are you know, and where I am trying to indicate is the unknown. In all these days the abyss will be just near you. Any moment you can jump, but you will have to create energy.This third step is to create energy, to make a volcano – and then I will leave it to you. When I see that now you are boiling, exploding, I will say, “Stop.” And when I say stop, don’t go on doing things. Whatsoever you were doing, stop immediately, go dead, because if you go on doing you will lose energy and the jump will not be possible. When I say stop, stop exactly at that moment. When you hear me say stop after the third step, you stop as you are. Even if the posture is uncomfortable don’t change it, don’t make it comfortable, because here we are not in search of comfort. And don’t deceive, because you are not deceiving anybody except yourself.When I say stop, it is meaningful that I am saying it at that particular moment. It is when I feel that now you have worked up, you have created the energy; now the right peak has been reached. When I say stop, stop immediately. Become a statue, a stone, a rock – no movement. Don’t allow the energy to be expressed in any way, so the energy becomes integrated within and it comes with such a force that you can take the jump. The jump will happen by itself; you just create the energy. When I say stop, you stop.The fourth step is a jump. You remain silent, just like a rock. In that moment of silence and stoppage, energy will be there – so much you cannot hold it; it will have to explode. And it will move from the sex center upwards. As it moves upwards you will feel a transformation, a change. You are not the same; moment to moment something else is coming into being. When this energy touches the head center, the last center, sahasrar…Hindus have said it is as if a lotus of one thousand petals has opened suddenly. You are filled with benediction, bliss, beatitude. This for the morning.In the afternoon from four to five we will be doing kirtan – singing and dancing. Twenty minutes dancing, singing; twenty minutes silence, waiting; then twenty minutes expressing your joy, your happiness – celebration. For the first twenty minutes you have to do it so much, so deeply, so totally, that your whole bodymind is exhausted. It has to be exhausted. So don’t save yourself, don’t try not to get tired. That is the whole point: you have to be tired, so tired that the body and the mind, the old pattern, simply drops through tiredness, exhausted. So get exhausted. Go mad fast!For twenty minutes you have to exhaust all your energies so the pattern cannot hold, and then you drop into relaxation. For those twenty minutes, if you are really exhausted you will feel some unknown source has become open to you, as if some unknown ocean is dropping into you. You will be filled with new life, and then celebration becomes possible. Then celebrate it, then dance and go mad, but remain constantly alert and watch whatsoever is happening.In the morning, evening and night we will be doing group meditations; these are group meditations. One meditation is for you to do individually. From four to five we will do kirtan – singing and dancing. From three to four you move alone. Don’t go with anybody, just move alone. Go under a tree, near a rock, or anywhere. If you cannot find any place then just sit outside your room, but be under the sky, don’t do it in the room. This is to be done individually, and everyone has to do it; don’t try to escape it.Move to a tree, sit, look at the sky. Don’t look at anything in particular, just look vacantly with empty eyes so that the whole sky can be in contact. When you look at something you are narrowed. Then you are focused, then your eyes can take in only one thing; they are exclusive. Just look vacantly so the whole sky becomes available to your eyes. Looking at the sky, for twenty minutes start talking gibberish, just nonsense. Because the sky cannot understand your language, don’t use your language, it is useless – the sky cannot understand it. Gibberish….You may not be aware from where this word gibberish comes. It comes from a Sufi saint whose name was Jabbar, and he used to talk nonsense. He would talk in such a way that nobody would be able to understand what he was saying. So because it started with Jabbar, people started calling it gibberish. The English word gibberish comes from the Sufi mystic Jabbar.So become Jabbar: talk gibberish, nonsense, sounds, gestures, to the sky, not to anybody else. You are talking to the sky. There is a Christian sect who call this type of meditation glossolalia – talking in tongues. And as far as I know, in the whole of Christianity only that sect knows something. Whatsoever comes in the mind, say it: sometimes just sounds, sometimes animal sounds, sometimes screaming, howling, yelling, whatsoever. And don’t try to create any sense, because that will be nonsense – creating sense with the sky. You are not talking to any human being; you are talking to the vast sky which cannot understand any language and which can understand anything.Language will not be helpful. Why? – because if you go on with the pattern of language you never transcend your mind. When you talk with the sky without meaningful communication the mind simply drops; it has no use, it cannot continue. The mind will try to say to you, “What nonsense are you doing? Are you mad?” Don’t listen to it. Just tell it, “You wait, and let me do whatsoever I am doing.” Enjoy it.For twenty minutes go completely Jabbar-like, gibberish, and then for twenty minutes silently relax. Go on looking at the sky if you feel like it, or if you don’t feel like it, close your eyes and look to the inner sky. After these twenty minutes of nonsense you will feel so silent, so skylike, such a vast space within you, that you cannot imagine what can happen out of it.But go alone, because if someone is there your mind will start playing tricks. If someone is there you would like to create some sense of whatsoever you are doing, because everybody is such an exhibitionist. Or you may create some nonsense just to impress others that you are creating nonsense. That is not the point. You have to be authentic about it. It is not for somebody else, it is for the sky.And you cannot deceive the sky. The sky has known millions and millions and millions like you. You also for millions and millions of lives the sky has known. We all come out of it and we all go back into it. Be in contact with space. If you can be in contact with space a space is created within you, and when these two spaces meet there is ecstasy. This is to be done individually, then kirtan in the group.In the night we will have a third meditation, a group meditation. You have to stare at me – it is a tratak. I will be standing here; you have to stare at me without blinking. The eyes will get tired, tears will start rolling down – let them. Go on staring at me so that I can meet you, you can meet me. Just by talking meeting cannot take place. I talk only to persuade you into something else which cannot be given through talk. So talk is just a seduction for something else, for something else which cannot be communicated through words.That’s why this meditation is the last in the night. The whole day I prepare you. I prepare you to go more and more mad, so by the time night comes you are already insane and you can do something which the mind would not have allowed you to do – stare at me with nonblinking eyes. Why nonblinking eyes? When you blink, mind changes. You may not be aware that your blinking depends on the mind. When you are really interested in something blinking stops. That’s why your eyes get tired in a film.Watching a film, the film is not destructive to the eyes, but your eyes stop blinking. You are so interested you forget blinking. You go on staring, that’s why your eyes get tired. And staring at a film is dangerous because you are staring at something which belongs to the lowest of the centers. So if you go to see a movie, if at all you go, continuously blink. Be less concerned with seeing and more concerned with blinking, so you are not hypnotized and the film cannot provoke your lowest center. All films are hitting at the sex center, that’s their appeal.In this third method in the night, you have to stare at me. I want to hit at your sahasrar, the peak, the last, the highest center. Unblinking will be needed as it is needed for the lowest center. Unblinking you look at me: the mind stops. Then a flow starts; then you and I are not two, a bridge is there. I can move in you, you can move in me – a deep communion is possible.You will be standing while doing this, and you have to go on jumping with your hands raised so that you forget the feeling of the body and you become energy – jumping, moving, dynamic. As you are, your body has become static. With static energy communication is not possible; only with a moving energy, a jumping energy, is contact possible. When energy is static it becomes like ice – dead, frozen. When energy is moving the ice melts, it becomes a river, flowing. And if you go on moving, a moment comes when your energy is not even like water; it becomes like vapor – invisible, rising upwards.Remember, ice is static, cannot move; water is moving, dynamic, but can only move downwards; vapor is invisible, moving, but can only move upwards. These are the three states of your energy also. Every energy can have three states: the solid, the liquid, the vaporous.You have to go on jumping with raised hands so you become a movement. Everybody will be jumping, and soon static energies will mingle with each other, they will become a dance. And you will be constantly, simultaneously, using the mantra hoo, so you are hitting your energy deep. Your energy starts moving upwards; your body has become flexible, liquid, vaporous, jumping, a dance; and constantly your eyes are static towards me, staring towards me, fixed to-wards me, and I can work on your highest center.The whole situation is created: your energy moving, hoo constantly hitting at the source – the lowest source of energy – forcing it to move upwards, you jumping, your eyes staring, mind in a stop, and me constantly working on your sahasrar.I will be moving my hands just to give you hints. When I move my hands like this you have to go completely mad and become dynamic; just a dance, the dancer is lost. And sometimes, as I move my hands upwards, you have to bring more and more energy to movement. You don’t know how much energy you have got; you are holding it. Don’t be a miser, allow it. Let it flow, let your totality come into it.Then there will be some moments when I will put my palms downwards. When I put my palms downwards that shows that now you are in such a vaporous state that a contact can be made. Now I can come to you, now I can touch your sahasrar. So when I put my palms downwards you have to bring all energy, whatsoever there is, to become the dance, the jump, the hoo. Bring your total energy in that moment, because in that moment a contact is possible, a shaktipat is possible.And you will feel…if you really move with me you will feel the lotus in the head flowering. You will feel the silence that comes through it, the bliss that comes through it. You will feel the perfume that happens within through its flowering. Once this flower starts flowering you can never be the same again. Now you are on the path, now nothing can stop you. Now you can move alone, no master is needed.A master is needed only up to that point when your budlike sahasrar opens. Once the master has helped you to open it, once the petals have started opening, you can be alone. Now no one is needed, now you have gone beyond all possibilities of falling. You can rise and only rise now, there is no possibility of any fall. You have come to the point which is called by Buddha the point of no return. Only up to that point is a master needed.These will be the meditations that we will follow. I thought it would be good if I told you about everything so there would be no need again to talk about them.Now the first sutra. It is an invocation.Aum, may my speech be rooted in my mind, and my mind rooted in my speech. O self-illumined Brahman, be manifest unto me. Speech and mind form the basis of my knowledge, so please do not undo my pursuit of knowledge. Day and night I spend in this pursuit. I shall speak the law; I shall speak the truth. May Brahman protect me; may he protect the speaker, protect the speaker. Aum, shanti, shanti, shanti.We are not alone, and no one is an island. Existence is one. So when you are seeking you need the help of the whole. Just the attitude of asking for the help becomes the help; just the attitude to invoke, to call the whole, the center of the whole existence to help you, becomes the help. There is no one to give you help, there is no person.Whenever the Upanishads invoke, they are not invoking any personal god – there is none. Then to whom is their invocation addressed? It is not addressed to anyone; really it is not addressed at all. Then why call it an invocation? Then why start with it? There is something totally different.Upanishadic rishis feel and know that every ego exists in conflict, struggle. You exist as your ego because you go on fighting. The more you fight, the more you are; the more you are in conflict and struggle, the more the ego is strengthened. This effort to know the ultimate cannot be ego-based. It can only be an egoless effort.This invocation is just for the seeker, for the rishi himself. It is an effort to drop the struggle, the conflict, the violent resistance which we are having every moment with existence. This invocation is just to say, “I will not swim in the river; now I will flow, float. I will not fight with the river of existence, I will just allow the river to take me wherever it leads.” This is a surrender, and this surrender is very very significant.Unless you surrender there is no possibility – because you are the disease. The very concept that “I am” is the problem. Every ‘I’ is false, because I cannot exist without existence. If I cannot exist without existence, what is the meaning of calling myself ‘I’?The Upanishads say, “If God is there, only he can call himself ‘I’, nobody else.” But he has never called himself, he has not asserted anything. There is no one to whom to assert. There is no thou, so how can he say ‘I’? He is only. This invocation is just to say, “I am not struggling against you, I’m ready to flow with you. I will become the river.”Aum. That’s why no name – Allah, Ram, Yahweh – no name has been used, just aum. The Upanishads say that aum is the very structure of this existence. When you are totally silent and the mind has dissolved and the thoughts disappeared, when the ego has ceased, then you hear the sound of aum – it is a soundless sound. No one is creating it, it is there. It is the very existential sound; it is how existence happens to be – just a humming sound of existence. Existence is there, alive – that aliveness creates a sound; or, to that aliveness a sound happens. That sound is not created by anybody; it is uncreated, anahat.If you have heard about Zen masters…they go on telling their disciples to go and meditate, meditate on the sound of one hand clapping. We can create a sound by clapping two hands. Zen masters say to their disciples, “Go and find out that sound which comes out of only one hand: the clapping of one hand, not with anything else.”We know this is absurd. A sound can come only with conflict, with two things clashing. Two hands can create sound, not one hand. Zen masters also know that, but still they have been giving this meditation for centuries. From Buddha up to now, Zen masters go on giving it. They know, their disciples know, that this is absurd. Then what is the significance? One has to watch, meditate, and move towards a sound which is already there, which is not created. That is the meaning of the sound of one hand.I have heard a story. A small boy, just ten or twelve years of age, lived in a Zen monastery. Every day he would see many seekers coming to the master to ask for help, methods, techniques, guidance. He also became attracted, so one day he also came in the morning in the same way a seeker comes to a Zen master. With deep reverence he bowed down seven times. The master started laughing: “What has happened to this boy?”And then he sat in the way seekers should sit before a Zen master. Then he waited, as seekers should wait, for the master to ask, “Why have you come?”The master asked, “Toyo” – Toyo was the name of the boy – “why have you come?”So Toyo bowed down and said, “Master, I have come in search of truth. What shall I do? How should I practice?”The master knew that this boy was simply imitating, because everybody he heard came and asked the same questions, so just jokingly the master said, “Toyo, you go and meditate. Two hands clapping can create a sound. What is the sound of one hand clapping?”Toyo bowed down seven times again, went back to his room, started meditating. He heard a geisha girl singing, so he said, “Right, this is the thing.” He came immediately, bowed down.The master was laughing. He said, “Did you meditate, Toyo?”He said, “Yes sir, and I have found it: it is like a geisha girl singing.”The master said, “No, this is wrong. Go again, meditate.”So he went again, meditated for three days. Then he heard the sound of water dripping, so he said, “Right now, this is the thing – I have got it.” He came again, the master asked…he said, “The sound of the water dripping.”The master said, “Toyo, that too is not it. You go and meditate.”So he meditated for three months. Then he heard locusts in the trees, so he said, “Yes, I have got it.” He came again.The master said, “No, this too is not right.”And so on and on. One year passed. Then for one year continuously he was not seen. The master became anxious: “What happened to the boy? He has not come.” So he went to find him. He was sitting under a tree, silent, his body vibrating to some unknown sound; his body dancing, a very gentle dance, as if just moving with the breeze.The master didn’t like to disturb the boy, so he sat there waiting. Hours and hours passed. When the sun was setting and it was evening, the master said, “Toyo?”The boy opened his eyes and he said, “This is it.”The master said, “Yes, you have got it!”This aum is that sound. When all sounds disappear from the mind, then you hear a sound. The Upanishads have made that sound the symbol of the whole, because whenever the whole happens to the part, it happens in that music of aum, in that harmony of aum.Aum, may my speech be rooted in my mind, and my mind rooted in my speech.The master is saying, “O ultimate, the whole, the total, aum, help me so that my speech is rooted in my mind.” A master should not speak of anything that is not deeply rooted in his mind, in his experience; that which he has not known he should not speak of. He should only speak of that which he has known, for which he can stand the witness, for which he can say, “I am the witness” – only that.May my speech be rooted in my mind – in my experience. Mind is your experience, the way you have experienced the world, the existence. The master says: May my speech be rooted in my mind, and my mind rooted in my speech. And whatsoever I say, I should not only say it, I must flow through it. Not only should my words relate, through my words I must move; my consciousness must use words as vehicles.Ordinarily we use words without moving with them, even such beautiful words as love. We go on saying to people, “I love you,” not meaning it at all. You may not even be aware of what you are saying. If you were aware, you would be very guarded. How can you say such a sacred word, love, so easily? You go on saying, “I love my car, I love my dog, I love my wife.” You can love anything – even chocolate, ice cream. Your love is not rooted anywhere, you are not moving in it. How can a man love ice cream? And if you can love ice cream, then whenever you say, “I love,” it is not reliable. Then don’t say “I love” to any person, because no person would like to become like ice cream or chocolate.But we go on using words not to express something, but on the contrary, to hide something. Just watch: when you say to someone, “I love you,” you may be just hiding hate. It was so bubbling you were afraid the other may come to know it; immediately you have to hide it. You say, “I love you.” This must be some type of screen, some form of hiding, suppression.The master says:Aum, may my speech be rooted in my mind, and my mind rooted in my speech.Whatsoever I say, I must move in it, otherwise I should not say it. And whatsoever is said must be my experience, I should not say it on anybody else’s authority. The Vedas say, The Bible says, the Koran says – they may be saying, but that’s useless unless I know. They cannot be authorities; only my own experience can be the authority. If I know, they can be witnesses to my knowledge. Then I can say, “The Koran also says this.” But the Koran is not right because it is the Koran; it is right because it is my experience, and the Koran supports it. I remain, my own experience remains, the center.O self-illumined Brahman, be manifest unto me.Very paradoxical….O self-illumined Brahman, be manifest unto me.Brahman is self-illumined, he doesn’t need any other source of illumination. We are here; if the light is put off we cannot see each other. We are not self-illumined, the light is needed. If light is not there we are in darkness. But Brahman, the total, is self-illumined – no other light is needed.The rishi says:O self-illumined Brahman, be manifest unto me.And then he says, “You are self-illumined; no light is needed to know you. You are self-evident; no proof is needed to prove you. Still, I am ignorant, my eyes are closed, I am finite. Because of my finiteness, because of my eyes, I cannot see you who are self-illumined. Be manifest unto me.” This must be the attitude – a humble, receptive attitude.Speech and mind form the basis of my knowledge, so please do not undo my pursuit of knowledge. Day and night I spend in this pursuit.The rishi says, “Mind, thinking, are my means and methods, so don’t undo my pursuit of knowledge. I don’t have anything else; I have only the mind.” And the rishi knows that the mind cannot be the right source of knowing the Brahman, but that is the only source you have. You can know the ultimate only when the mind is no more. But right now you have just the mind and nothing else.So the rishi says, “Help me. I have nothing else, only this mind. And I know well that this mind cannot lead to you, but that’s all I have got. So help me, and don’t undo my efforts. Just because through mind you cannot be known, don’t undo my efforts. My mind will lead me to a point where it itself becomes the no-mind. But wait and don’t undo my efforts.”It is just like a child who says, “I have got legs to walk, but they are weak, unaccustomed – I have never walked before. I have only got these small, weak, unadjusted, yet-to-be-adjusted legs, and I have to walk with them. Don’t undo my efforts. A moment will come when this weakness will disappear, so be patient with me.”That’s what the rishi is saying to the universe: “Be patient with me. I may commit many errors, mistakes. I may move on a wrong path, but be patient with me.”I shall speak the law; I shall speak the truth. May Brahman protect me; may he protect the speaker. Aum, shanti, shanti, shanti.Before the rishi starts his discourse, the Upanishad we will be discussing in these days, he says, “I shall only speak the law. I will not speak any creed, any theory. I will not talk about any doctrine. I will talk only about the law, that which is.”There are temptations to create theories, there are temptations to create systems. And it always happens that whenever a man finds a fragment of truth, immediately around that fragment he creates a system. The whole system is speculation.This Upanishadic seer says, “I shall only speak the law, whatsoever it is, and I will not add anything to it. I shall only speak the truth. Whatsoever the consequence, whatsoever the result, wheresoever it leads, I will only speak the truth. But I am weak, so protect me, O Brahman.”May he protect the speaker…may he protect the speakerTwice he repeats – the fear is there. Whenever one starts speaking, the fear is there that mind may tempt, mind may add something, distort the truth or create something which is untrue, or substitute something which is not there.When one English poet, Coleridge, died, he left thousands of poems incomplete. Just before he died somebody asked him, “Why have you not completed them?” A few poems were missing only one line, so they said, “Why don’t you complete them? – they will become masterpieces. Just because of one line…. Why can’t you add one line to them?”Coleridge is reported to have said, “I cannot do that. I have taken a vow that I will not add anything. These lines have descended to me, I have not done anything. In a moment of ecstasy they have been revealed to me; I have noted them down. I am simply a vehicle, not the creator; a medium, an adjunct – so I have noted down. The last line has not come yet and I am waiting, I cannot do anything. If it comes it comes, if it doesn’t come, nothing can be done. I am helpless.”This is the attitude of the right seeker – he will not add anything, because a fragment of truth will become a lie if you add something to complete it. And the whole truth is not known, and cannot be known. Only fragments are known. The whole cannot be known. The whole is so vast; only glimpses are known. So the mind is tempted to create a system; the system becomes false. Hegel, Kant, Plato, Aristotle – they all had a few fragments of truth, but they destroyed them because they created vast edifices around them. And the fragrance is lost, you cannot find where it is.These Upanishadic seers are different, their attitude absolutely different. They have not systematized whatsoever they have asserted. The Upanishads are unsystematized fragments, just fragments – no system, no logic, no reason. Whatsoever is revealed, they have noted it down. So the master says:I shall speak only the law; I shall speak only the truth. May Brahman protect me…the speaker…may Brahman protect the speaker.Aum, shanti, shanti, shanti.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-02/

The sage Sankriti once visited Adityalok, the abode of the sun god,and bowing to him he worshipped him with what is known aschakshusmati vidya.Aum, salutation to the sun god who illumines the organ of vision!Salutation to the sun who is a great warrior!Salutation to the sun who represents the three conditionings: tamas, rajas and sattva (dark, red and white)!O Lord, from untruth lead me to truth, from darkness lead me to light,and from death lead me to the eternal. Salutation to the sun, the son of Aditi, who is the light in our eyes. And we dedicate all that we have to the sun who rules the universe.Much pleased with being worshipped with chakshusmati vidya, the sun god said:A Brahmin who recites this vidya – knowledge – every day will not suffer from eye diseases, nor will anyone in his family ever be struck blind. The power of this vidya is obtained if it is taught to eight Brahmins,and knowing it one achieves greatness.Man is blind. He cannot see that which is. We have eyes, but we can see through them only that which is illusory. Only the appearance is seen, not the real – the real is missed. That’s why those who have known have called man blind.Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, “If you have eyes, look; if you have ears, then listen.” Of course, his disciples were not blind, nor were they deaf. They were as with eyes as we are, they had all the senses we have got. Then he must be referring to some other eyes, to some other senses.These eyes which can look only outwards, which can only look into the without, are blind unless they also become capable of seeing within. If you cannot see yourself you are blind, and one who cannot see himself, what else can he see? And whatsoever he sees, whatsoever his knowledge, it remains based on a deep blindness. Unless you become self-seeing, unless you turn within, unless you can have a look at the reality that you are, whatsoever you encounter in the world is going to be just the appearance. The same will be the proportion: the more you penetrate within the more you can penetrate without, because reality is one.If you are not acquainted with yourself, all your acquaintance, all your knowledge is just false. Without self-knowledge there is no possibility of any knowledge. You can go on knowing and knowing; you can go on collecting more and more information, but that information will remain information – dead, borrowed. It will never become a knowing eye.How to attain those eyes which can penetrate the illusory and can encounter the real? This is going to be the base of this whole Upanishad. In the old days it was called chakshusmati vidya, the wisdom through which eyes are attained. But the first thing to be constantly remembered is that as we are, we are blind; as we are, we are dead; as we are, we are illusory, the stuff dreams are made of.Why cannot our eyes see the real? They are so much filled with dreams, so much filled with thoughts, that whatsoever you see, you are not seeing that which is; you project your ideas, your thoughts, your dreams upon it. The whole world becomes just a projection screen, and you go on projecting things. Whatsoever you see outside, you have put it there. You live in a man-created world, and everyone lives in his own world. That world consists of his own projections.Unless your eyes are completely vacant, unless there is no content within your eyes, no thoughts, no clouds; unless you become mirrorlike, pure, innocent, contentless, you cannot encounter the real. The real can be seen only through naked, empty eyes; it cannot be seen through filled eyes.This is all the art or the science of meditation consists of: how to make your eyes mirrorlike, nonprojecting – just looking at that which is, not creating it, not imagining it, not adding anything to it…just encountering it as it is. You never see things as they are, you always see through your mind; you color them.A girl looks beautiful to you or a man looks beautiful. The same man or the same woman was not beautiful a day before, and the same man or the same woman may not be beautiful again. So what happened? How does a person suddenly become beautiful? And your whole logic is illogical. You say, “l love this person because this person is beautiful.” The contrary is the case: this person becomes beautiful because you love. The beauty is not the cause but a side-effect.When you are in love with someone the person becomes beautiful. To others that same person may not be beautiful, and to others the same person may even be ugly. To you also the same person was not beautiful before, and later on the same person can become ugly – to you also. But at this moment, in this mood of love, you project something on the person. You project your dreams, the person becomes just a screen. The whole beauty is put there by you. It is you who create the beautiful face, the beautiful face is your interpretation. It is not the real, because the reality is neither ugly nor beautiful.If man disappears from this earth what will happen? Will the hills be beautiful, the flowers beautiful, the thorns ugly? – what will happen? With the disappearance of man, beauty and ugliness will disappear. The earth will be there as it is. The sun will rise and the moon will be there in the night, and the sky will be filled every day with stars. Flowers will flower, trees will bloom, the hills will be as they are. Everything will be as it is, but there will be no beauty and no ugliness.With the disappearance of man all his interpretations disappear. The reality is neither beautiful nor ugly – it is there. You interpret it according to yourself. That’s why a certain thing can be beautiful in China and may not be beautiful in India. A certain type of face is beautiful in Africa, it may not be beautiful in England.When for the first time Christian missionaries came to Africa, they were in a great difficulty. The Bible was to be translated, and God is always depicted as white and the Devil as black. So it was a problem – how to tell the black people that the Devil is black and God is white? They could conceive of God as black and the Devil as white. And that was natural, they had always depicted their God as black; their Devil had always been white. You may not be aware of what the Christian missionaries had to do. In African translations of The Bible, God is depicted as black and the Devil as white; otherwise there could be no communication, no possibility of any meeting.We conceive of things through our mind; that mind goes on interpreting. But we can understand about beauty and ugliness – what about other interpretations? If man disappears there will be no good and evil in the world, nothing will be moral and nothing will be immoral. All our morality, all our judgment is through conceptions.A lion jumping on an animal and eating it, tearing it – is he bad or good? Is he evil? If we interpret then it looks very evil, violent. But the lion is not doing anything, he is simply eating. He is not aware of anything – of what is good and what is bad. And he is not doing anything bad; he is taking his lunch, as you take your lunch. If man disappears, then there is nothing good and nothing bad.And the same happens to the sage. When a man becomes enlightened the man has disappeared from him with all the interpretations, judgments. He has become pure, as if he is no more. The mind has been dropped. He is conscious, fully conscious, but with no contents to project. He looks at the world as it is, without any interpretation. And for the first time he comes to know reality.Man cannot know the real because man goes on projecting his ideology; and all ideologies are home-made, the existence doesn’t support them, you create them. That’s why it is said again and again, all over the world – Eckhart says it in the West, Boehme says it in the West, Rinzai says it in Japan, Lin Chi says it in China, Buddha says it in India – all over the world, wherever a mirrorlike mind has appeared, it has said that nothing is bad and nothing is good. There is no evil and no God – existence is one. And if you can accept this existence without any interpretation, for the first time you are creating a way which can lead to the truth.You cannot carry your mind to the truth. If you carry your mind, whatsoever you come to know will not be the truth. You may encounter the truth but you will not know it, because the moment you see something you have interpreted. You pass through a garden and you see roseflowers. You have not seen them and immediately the mind says, “Beautiful.” The flowers have disappeared, your concept has come in. You have projected, you have judged. Jesus says, “Judge ye not.” Don’t judge.I have heard about one Mohammedan Sufi mystic. He used to sell small things in the village, and the people of that village became aware that he had no judgment. So they would take the things and give him false coins. He would accept them, because he would never say, “This is wrong and this is right.” Sometimes they would take things from him and they would say, “We have paid,” and he would not say, “You have not paid.” He would say, “Okay.” He would thank them.Then from other villages also people started coming. This man was very good; you could take anything from his shop, you need not pay, or you could pay in false coins, and he accepted everything!Then death came near to this old man. These were his last words: he looked at the sky and said, “Allah, God, I have been accepting all kinds of coins, false ones also. I am also a false coin – don’t judge me. I have not judged your people, please don’t judge me.” And it is said that how can God judge such a person?Jesus says, “Judge ye not, so ye may not be judged.”If judgment disappears, you have become innocent. If you don’t divide things into good and bad, ugly and beautiful, acceptable and nonacceptable; if you don’t divide things, if you look at reality without any division, your eyes will come into existence for the first time. This is chakshusmati vidya, the signs of gaining eyes.If you divide you will remain blind, if you judge you will remain blind, if you say this is bad and this is good, you will persist in your blindness…because existence knows nothing. There is nothing good and nothing bad – existence accepts everything. And when you also accept everything you have become existence-like. You have become one with it.So remember, morality is not religion. Rather, on the contrary, morality is one of the hindrances in gaining religion, just like immorality. Morality, immorality – both are hindrances. When you transcend both you have transcended the mind, the dual, the dualistic attitude. Then the sage and the sinner have become one. Then you remain in your self, you don’t move to judge. And when you don’t judge, your mind cannot project: the mind projects through judgment.You may have heard this story, so famous, but Christianity goes on missing the meaning of it. In a village a crowd came to Jesus, and they had brought a woman who had sinned in the eyes of the crowd. So they said to Jesus, “This woman is a sinner, and she has confessed. So what should we do now? It is written in the old scriptures that she should be killed by throwing stones at her, she should be stoned to death. What do you say? What should we do?”They were trying to put Jesus in a dilemma, because if he said not to kill her…as it was expected he should say, because he was saying, “Love. And if someone strikes you on one cheek, give him the other cheek; if someone forces you to carry his burden for one mile, go two miles with him; if someone snatches your coat, give him your shirt also.” This man could not say, “Kill, murder, stone this woman to death.” And if he said, “No, don’t kill her,” then they could say, “You are against the scriptures, so you cannot be a prophet. You don’t belong to us. You are a destroyer.”But Jesus escaped their dilemma – because the dilemma exists only for the obsessed mind. When there is no mind dilemma disappears, because dilemma consists of division. You divide things in two, in opposites, and then there is the question, What to choose, how to choose? Then the problem arises. But if there is no mind, there is no question of choice – a choicelessness has happened.So Jesus said, “It is right, it is written in the scriptures to stone this woman to death. It is okay. Bring the stones and kill this woman – but only that man is allowed to stone this woman who has himself not committed sin in his actions, or in his mind.”Then those who were leading the crowd started dispersing, because there was none who had not committed adultery in act or in mind. And there is no difference whether you commit it in action or you commit it in the mind, it is the same for the consciousness. There is no difference. Whether you think of killing a person or you actually kill, there is no difference, because you have killed inwardly when you have thought. If, just in your mind, you want to rape a woman, you have raped. Your whole being has done it. Whether it has become actual in the world of events or not, that is irrelevant, that is secondary. As far as you are concerned the sin has been committed.Nobody could throw a stone at that woman. The crowd disappeared, only the woman was left. So the woman said to Jesus, “But I have committed…I have done a wrong. I am immoral. So whether the crowd is going to stone me to death or not, you can punish me. I confess.”Jesus said, “Who am I to judge? It is between you and your God, you and the ultimate, you and the all – who am I to judge? It is something between you and existence. Where do I come in?”This is the mind of the sage, the no-mind of the sage. He cannot divide, so he cannot judge; he cannot say this is good and this is bad. Only this type of consciousness can attain eyes – eyes that can see penetrate into the real.Now we will enter the sutra.The sage Sankriti once visited Adityalok, the abode of the sun god, and bowing to him he worshipped him with what is known as chakshusmati vidya.Aum, salutation to the sun god, who illumines the organ of vision! Salutation to the sun who is the great warrior! Salutation to the sun who represents the three conditionings: tamas, rajas and sattva!A person is called a sage who has become choiceless; a sage means one who cannot judge. A sage in India is not the same as he is in the West. In the West they have been doing many absurd things. One of them, the peak of foolishness, has been this: the pope gives sainthood to people. It is like a certificate or a degree. The pope has to declare that a certain person has become a sage. The council of bishops has to agree, confirm it. So it’s just like a university giving a doctorate – LL.D or D.Litt. or something.So sometimes this has happened, as it happened with Joan of Arc. She was killed, murdered, burned; and she was burned because of the pope, because of the church. They thought she was against Christianity. Then later on the judgment was changed, later on other popes found that the pope who condemned her was wrong. So later on when she was dead, posthumously she was awarded sainthood, she was made a saint. She became Saint Joan of Arc.But what to do with the man who had condemned her? What to do with the bishop who was solely responsible for her burning and murder, who had proposed to the pope that she should be condemned? He was dead, so what was to be done with him? So his bones were taken out of the grave, out of the town, and they were beaten, insulted, thrown to the dogs. Now Joan became a saint by the decree of the pope.In the East this looks like the peak of foolishness, the climax of foolishness. Nobody can make a man a sage – nobody, no judge. This is not something like a degree to be given by somebody else; it is an inner achievement, an inner realization. It doesn’t depend on anybody else. A sage is a person who has become enlightened. Now he has no choices. For him nothing is bad and nothing is good. He has become natural. He is, just like a tree or like a hill, like a river or like the ocean. He has no mind to say anything, to interpret. He doesn’t divide.It is said of one Zen master, one Zen sage…. He lived in a small hut three or four miles outside a village. One night he found that a thief had entered his hut. He was very much disturbed, because there was nothing in the house, and this thief had traveled for three or four miles in the night and he would have to go back empty handed. The sage started weeping and crying. The thief also became concerned. He said, “What has happened? Why are you crying so much? Are you disturbed that I may take something from your hut?”The sage said, “No, that is not the thing, I am disturbed because there is nothing here. At least you could have been a little more gentlemanly, you could have informed me before; I would have arranged something for you to steal. There is nothing – what will you think of me? And this is such an honor, that you traveled three or four miles in this night, this cold night, to come to my hut. No one has given such an honor to me before. I am just a beggar and you have made me a king, just by the idea that something can be stolen from me. And there is nothing, so I am crying. So what should I do now? You can take my blanket.”He had only one blanket, otherwise he was naked, just under his blanket he was naked. And the night was very cold. He said to the thief, “Please have some compassion on me and don’t say no, because I have nothing else to give to you. Take this blanket, and whenever you again think of visiting, just send a hint. I am poor, but still I will arrange something.”The thief could not understand what was happening, but he saw the man crying and weeping so he took compassion on him; he couldn’t say no. He took the blanket and disappeared. And that night this Zen monk wrote a small haiku, in which he said…he was sitting still at his window, the night was cool, cold, the full moon was in the sky, and he says in his haiku:Godif I could give this moonto that thief….This is the mind of a sage, or, the no-mind. With this same sage, again a thief happened to come to his hut. He was writing a letter, so he looked at the thief and said, “For what have you come? What do you want?”And this sage was so innocent that even the thief couldn’t tell a lie. So he said, “Looking at you, so mirrorlike, so innocent like a child, I cannot tell a lie. Should I tell the truth?”The sage said, “Yes.”He said, “I have come to steal something.”The sage said, “There in that corner I have got a few rupees. You can take them” – and then he started to write his letter again.The thief took the money, was trying to go out, and then the sage said, “Stop! When somebody gives you something you should thank him. The money may not be of much help, but thanking a person will go a long way and will be of help to you. So thank me!” The thief thanked him and disappeared into the dark.Later on the thief was caught, and it was discovered that he had been to this sage’s hut also, so the sage was called to the court. The sage said, “Yes, I know this man very well – but he has never stolen anything from me. I gave him some rupees and he thanked me for them. It is finished, it was nothing wrong. The whole thing is finished, the account is closed. I gave him some money and he thanked me for it. He is not a thief.”This mind, or no-mind, of a sage is the base.The sage Sankriti once visited Adityalok.This is a parable. Adityalok means the abode of the sun or the abode of light, enlightenment. The sun is just a symbol. The sun is not only a life-giving source, it is a light-giving source also. So the sun is symbolic. Sankriti, a sage, visited the abode of the sun.It means that only sages can visit the abode of light. We remain in darkness, we remain in dark nights – not because there is night all around, but because our eyes are closed. Filled with so many projections, we cannot see the light all around. The light is there, the abode is everywhere. You need not go to visit the sun – the sun reaches everywhere. To every nook and corner of the earth the sun reaches, but only one who has become a sage can enter into its abode.The sage Sankriti once visited Adityalok, the abode of the sun god, and bowing to him he worshipped him with what is known as chakshusmati vidya.He bowed down to the sun and worshipped him, and this worship was done by the science of attaining real eyes. This is beautiful, because this is the only way you can worship light. The only way to worship light is to attain eyes; the worship is finished. If you can look at the light without any projection, this is the worship. If you project, you have changed the light into darkness. You are behaving like a blind man.No other worship is needed. There is no need to go and kneel down on the earth and say a prayer to the sun. That is useless. The only worship is to attain those eyes which can see light. So the sage, Sankriti, worshipped the sun, bowing down to him with what is known as chakshusmati vidya. If you attain those eyes which can see the real you have become a worshipper, and only that worship can be accepted by existence, no other.Your prayers are nothing but demands, your prayers are nothing but childish, foolish demands. They are of no use. You cannot persuade existence to move according to you. But go to the churches, to the temples – what are people doing there? They think they are worshipping, praying, meditating. They are not doing anything like that. They are just persuading the divine power to follow them, to do whatsoever they desire, to be according to them. They are giving advice. They know more than the divine; they know more what is to be done than the divine knows, so they have come just to give some advice.They are trying to persuade, but there is no way to persuade the whole, be-cause the whole always knows more than the part. And the whole cannot follow the part, the part has to follow the whole. The whole cannot follow you. And it is good that it doesn’t follow you, otherwise you would create a chaos – you don’t know what you are asking.You may have heard this story. Once it happened that a man was worshipping Shiva. He worshipped and worshipped, prayed and prayed for years. Then Shiva appeared and he said, “You can ask for three blessings, three gifts; three boons can be given to you.”The man had been worshipping for so long that he really had forgotten why he had started. His mind was so constantly changing. The worship had become an obsession. He had forgotten for what, so he said, “Let me think.”Then he asked for one gift. The gift was given. Then he became aware that this wouldn’t do; he had asked for something wrong. He was angry with his wife, so he had said, “Kill her!” Immediately she was dead. And this can happen to any husband or any wife. They are fighting, filled with hate. But hate is also not total, there is love also. Mind is divided: you love the person and you hate the same person. It is always fifty-fifty. He asked that the wife should be killed, and the wife was dead; immediately she fell down. The moment she was dead he became aware that he loved her very much, so he said, “Please, revive her again.” So the second gift was wasted. Two gifts wasted: first she was killed, second she was revived – only one was left. Then he said, “Now, give me time enough to think; otherwise I will again make a mistake, and then there is no fourth.”Shiva waited and waited. Years passed and he would come again and again and he would ask, “Now you ask for the third.”The man was so puzzled he couldn’t sleep. He became almost insane just thinking about the one wish, because only one was left. He went visiting all the persons he knew who were wise, and they suggested many things, but nothing seemed worthwhile. Then he asked Shiva himself. “You tell me. I am going mad!”And what Shiva told him is to be remembered. He said, “There can be only one wish, one desire which is worthwhile. Ask for desirelessness, otherwise nothing is worthwhile. Whatsoever you ask, the next moment you will want something else, even just the opposite of the first.”The mind is divided; our prayers are through that divided mind. A sage is a person who has become undivided. He cannot pray; his prayer is not through words, his prayer is through his being. The way he is, is his worship. So when this sage, Sankriti, looked at the sun, the god, the god of light, the very look, the way he looked, was his worship. The way he was, was his prayer. Those pure eyes, with no dreams, no clouds, no tears, no demands, not asking anything; just simple, innocent, childlike, just looking at the god – that was the worship.O Lord, from untruth lead me to truth.And when the sun god was happy and was ready to bless him, this was his wish.O Lord, from untruth lead me to truth; from darkness lead me to light; and from death lead me to the eternal.This is what every seeker is asking: From untruth lead me to truth, from darkness lead me to light, and from death to deathlessness. This is all that everyone is seeking.The sun god is holy; he is without parallel. The sun god holds all manifestations, and is adorned with a garland of constellations. He is all fire, luminous like gold, effulgent and hot. With a thousand rays and presenting himself in a hundred ways, this sun makes itself manifest to all creatures. Salutation to the sun, the son of Aditi, who is the light in our eyes. We dedicate all that we have to the sun who rules the universe.Much pleased with being worshipped with chakshusmati vidya the sun god said: A Brahmin who recites this vidya – knowledge – every day, will not suffer from eye diseases, nor will anyone in his family ever be struck blind. The power of this vidya is obtained if it is taught to eight Brahmins, and knowing it one achieves greatness.Many inner meanings have to be understood. That which is to be said is said through a parable. Don’t be much concerned with the parable, don’t be much concerned with the words that have been used. Rather be concerned with the significance, the inner meaning.Much pleased with being worshipped with…the science of real eyes….Existence is pleased with you when you are real. When you are unreal existence is not pleased with you. Not that there is someone who is pleased and unpleased. The way existence behaves is like any natural law, for example gravitation. If you walk in a balanced way gravitation is pleased with you, the gravitation will not be destructive to you. But if you lose balance you will fall down on the earth. You may become crippled for your whole life, you may break your bones. Gravitation is unpleased with you, not pleased with you. But there is nobody deciding – this is a natural law. If you follow the law you will be happy, if you don’t follow the law you will be unhappy.This is what in the East has been called the law of karma, the law of action. If your action follows the ultimate law, you will be attaining more and more bliss. If you go against it, immediately you will fall into suffering. There is no one like a grand manager deciding everybody’s actions, who is doing wrong and who is doing good, and who is to be sent to the heaven and who is to be thrown into hell – there is no one. With every movement you create your heaven and your hell. If you follow the ultimate law, you are creating heaven for yourself moment to moment. If you go astray, if you go against the law, you are creating hell, not the law.This is just a way of saying that the god was pleased. Why was he pleased? He was pleased because this man, Sankriti, this sage, Sankriti, had the real eyes to look with. He had become pure, innocent. His eyes were vacant of all theories, doctrines, scriptures. He was not projecting anything from his eyes. He was simply absorbing. His eyes were used to look, not to interpret.Much pleased with being worshipped with chakshusmati vidya, the sun god said: A Brahmin who recites this vidya every day, will not suffer from eye diseases.We are all suffering from eye diseases. This is just symbolic. Not that we use specs – those eyes are not what is meant. Even a blind man suffers from eye diseases and he has no eyes. These eyes, these visible eyes are not what is meant.The world that we create around us is created through our eye diseases. We go on looking wrongly, we go on dividing. The universe is one, but our eyes go on dividing. That division is the disease. The existence is just as it is. We go on condemning or appreciating, that is the eye disease. We go on judging. Facts are just facts, there is no way to judge.One Zen monk, Bokuju, was passing through a street in a village. Somebody came and struck him with a stick. He fell down, and with him, the stick also. He got up and picked up the stick. The man who had hit him was running away. Bokuju ran after him, calling, “Wait, take your stick with you!” He followed after him and gave him the stick. A crowd had gathered to see what was happening, and somebody asked Bokuju, “That man struck you hard, and you have not said anything!”Bokuju is reported to have said, “A fact is a fact. He has hit, that’s all. It happened that he was the hitter and I was the hit. It is just as if I am passing under a tree, or sitting under a tree, and a branch falls down. What will I do? What can I do?”But the crowd said, “But a branch is a branch, this is a man. We cannot say anything to the branch, we cannot punish it. We cannot say to the tree that it is bad, because a tree is a tree, it has no mind.”Bokuju said, “This man to me is also just a branch. And if I cannot say anything to the tree, why should I bother to say anything to this man? It happened. I am not going to interpret what has happened. And it has already happened. Why get worried about it? It is finished, over.”This is the mind of a sage – not choosing, not asking, not saying this should be and this should not be. Whatsoever happens, he accepts it in its totality. This acceptance gives him freedom, this acceptance gives him the capacity to see. These are eye diseases: shoulds, should nots, divisions, judgments, condemnations, appreciations.A Brahmin who recites this vidya every day….Recites means lives. Through his whole being the recitation continues, through his whole being he is just a looker, not a judger. His eyes are just working like a mirror, whatsoever comes before them is mirrored. The moment it passes the mirror is again vacant. It does not cling; it does not think about the past, it does not look into the future.The mirror remains in the present – whatsoever passes is mirrored. When it has gone the mirror is vacant again, nothing is left. You cannot destroy its mirrorlike innocence. This is the recitation. The whole day, moment to moment, one who lives this vidya, this knowledge, this seeing, will never suffer from eye diseases.…Nor will anyone in his family ever be struck blind.By family, the natural family is not meant. When a master is there his disciples are his family, not his sons and daughters. That has been called kul, the family. In the East, particularly in India, the house of the master, his ashram, was called gurukul – the family of the master. His disciples were really his descendants.And if a master lives constantly seeing mirrorlike, his disciples will never be blind; blindness will never strike his family – those who belong to him in spirit, not in body. Ordinarily those who belong to you in body, they are your family, but for a master his family is those who belong to him in spirit. Those who belong to him in knowing, in discipline, in yoga, in sadhana, they are his family. And if a master lives constantly mirrorlike, the disciples are bound to be transformed just by his presence – even if they don’t do anything, even if they just sit by the side of the master.The word upanishad is very meaningful. It means sitting by the side of the master. The word upanishad means just sitting in the presence of the master, not doing anything. It is not a question of doing, it is a question of being – absorbing the master. That’s what is meant in Christianity when Christ said, “Eat me. I will become your food.”When you are near a master who is living this innermost science of being mirrorlike – mind has ceased, a simple consciousness, a flame – you can eat him, he can become your blood and bones. Nothing is to be done, you have simply to remain receptive in his presence – intimate, close, receptive, not fighting it, just open. He will flow, he will become a flow within you. He will come to you, he will fill you to the very deepest center. Just living with the master, not doing anything, just being in his presence, you are eating him. And he wants to be eaten, he wants to become the food.But the food is very subtle. It is so subtle that if you are a little disturbed, judging, arguing, fighting in the mind, resisting, you will miss it. It is such a subtle music. You should be as if you are absent when you are in the presence of the master; as if you are not – just a passage so he can travel. He is not going to do it by his will – there is no will. If you are open he simply travels…that’s how it happens. If you are open he simply flows in you.…Nor will anyone in his family ever be struck blind. The power of this vidya is obtained if it is taught to eight Brahmins, and knowing it one achieves greatness.This is also to be understood. This is the secret of why a Buddha goes on trying for almost forty years, traveling from one village to another village seeking disciples; why Jesus is ready even to go to the cross; why Mahavira suffers so much – just to make contacts, to commune whatsoever he has attained.A responsibility falls on you when you are enlightened, and that responsibility is not a duty enforced from without; it is something that is coming from within. When you become enlightened you have to share it. So it has never been otherwise; a person who has become enlightened, he has to share it. It is not a question of his decision to share or not. He has to share it, the very phenomenon is such that he has to give it to others. He has to find persons who can receive, who can eat him, for whom he can become food.Buddha came to a village one evening. The whole village gathered, but he was waiting, as if for someone. Then somebody asked, “Why are you waiting? Everybody has come, now start your sermon.”Buddha said, “The one for whom I have come is still absent. I will have to wait. You can hear me but you cannot listen. The person for whom I have come….”They were very much disturbed, because all the respectable persons were present. All the rich were present; all the good, saintly, religious were present. For whom was he waiting? And then a girl came – a very ordinary, poor girl. She was coming back from her field. The moment she came, he started. So they asked, “You were waiting for this girl? We were not even aware that she lives in this village.”Buddha is reported to have said, “In this village only she is receptive. For her I have traveled. She does not know much, she is not a scholar, she is not rich in any way. She is not respectable, she belongs to the untouchables, is poor, unknown, but she is receptive, and she has called me. Her receptivity is such that I became aware in the neighboring village that someone was calling me to flow. I have come to this village because of her.”A disciple is one who is ready to receive, who can become like a womb, who is passive, open, vulnerable. And a master is one who is flowing, overflowing, dispersing his last body into the existence. And the best way is to become food for those who are seekers. This is Jesus’ sacrament. That is why the last thing he did on this earth was to call his disciples for the Last Supper. That is a symbol: before he leaves they should eat him totally.The power of this vidya is obtained if it is taught to eight Brahmins….But to find eight brahmins is very difficult. Eight brahmins means eight seekers – seekers of Brahman. It is very difficult; you have to go all around the world, then you can find eight. And even then it is not certain. Jesus had only twelve disciples.Very few are there who are ready to receive; very few are there who are really in search; very few are there whose effort is authentic. Curious are many, but their curiosity is childlike, childish. They are curious about new things, but not authentically interested, not ready to do something, not ready to be transformed.So the sun god says that the power of this vidya grows greater if you can share it with at least eight persons. A Buddha becomes more a Buddha, a Jesus becomes more a Christ the more he shares. This is the nature of bliss – the more you share it the more it grows. If you can share it with the whole existence it becomes the ultimate. But our minds are very miserly, we cannot share.I have heard, once it happened: one man’s wife died in a Buddhist land, somewhere in China. The man called a Buddhist monk to pray for his wife who was dead now and had gone on a new journey – just to pray to protect her. The monk prayed, meditated, and then he said, “Everything will be good. Don’t you worry.”The man asked, “But I heard you saying something like ‘for all the beings of the earth.’ You never mentioned my wife in particular. You were asking blessings, you were asking bliss for all the beings of the earth, but you were not mentioning my wife in particular. Mention her name in particular!”The monk said, “It is difficult, because Buddha has said that whenever you ask for something, ask for all. It has to be shared with all. I cannot ask only for your wife. And if I ask only for your wife she will not get it. If I ask for all, only then is there a possibility.”Then the man said, “Okay, but at least make one exception – just my neighbor. Exclude him! – and ask for everyone else. But at least make one exception. Exclude him, because I cannot bear this idea that he is also getting blessings of the divine.”This miserliness, this mind of jealousy, hatred, cannot understand how to share. You never share anything. You may give something to somebody, but there is always a hidden bargain. Remember the difference. You can give many gifts to your husband, to your wife, to your friends, but they are deep bargains – you are expecting something to be returned. That is not sharing.Sharing means you are never expecting anything in return, you are simply giving. You are not even expecting thankfulness.It happened with Dozo, one Zen monk. A rich man came to Dozo with ten thousand gold coins. That is very much, a big amount. He was going to make that a gift for the temple where Dozo was the priest. Dozo accepted as if it was nothing. The man became disturbed. He said, “Do you know these are ten thousand gold coins?”Dozo said, “You have said it so many times, I have heard it so many times. You have said it already too many times – do you think I am deaf?”The man was just asking for thanks, only thanks, nothing more. Then he said, “Ten thousand golden coins is a big amount, even to me. I am a very rich man, but that amount is very big.”Dozo said, “What do you want? What are you really asking? Are you asking for some gratitude? Are you asking that I should be thankful to you?”The man said, “At least that much can be expected.”So Dozo said, “Take your gold coins back. Or, if you want to give them to this temple, you will have to be thankful to me that I accepted.”On the temple it is written even still…it is written that the giver should be thankful; only then is it a sharing. Somebody accepted your gift. This is such a great thing, because he could have rejected. Somebody accepted you through your gift. He could have rejected, there was no necessity to accept it. The giver should be thankful. Then it becomes a sharing, otherwise it is always a bargain. You are expecting something – something more valuable than you have given.When someone becomes enlightened he can share, and he will do whatsoever he can just to share it.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 03 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-03/

One friend has said that he is a devotee of Sai Baba, and therefore he is reluctant to call anyone else Bhagwan, but he wants my help, guidance. He says:Osho,I feel I have surrendered to Sai Baba, but still I feel the necessity of working with another teacher or guru. Is this possible?The first thing is to remember that the master really does not work. He is there, his presence works, but the presence can work only if you have trust. If you don’t have trust, nothing can be done.So really, if you feel you have surrendered to Sai Baba, what is the need to come to me? If the surrender has really happened, then asking for another master is futile. I doubt your surrender, your trust, because when trust has happened nothing more is needed. And if something more is needed, trust has not happened; you are still in search. If you cannot trust me, it is impossible to work. Not that I have any conditions, my door is open unconditionally, but it will remain closed to you because you can see it as open only when you have trust.It is good if you feel an intimate closeness with Sai Baba, or anyone else. It is good. But then don’t wander here and there, then don’t go to anybody else, because this is impossible. Your trust remains with Sai Baba, then no one else can do anything; it is impossible. But you are not certain. You may be believing that surrender has happened. It has not happened, because then to ask for help from somebody else is just absurd. And if you ask for help, surrender will be needed. The reason is:I cannot do anything positively.I am available.If you trust me then the contact is made.It is just like this: light is there, but if you are sitting with closed eyes, the light cannot do anything in order for your eyes to open. Not that the light has any conditions for you. It is available, it is already there, it is already giving itself to you, but your eyes are closed. And if you say, “In this room I cannot open my eyes, because I have surrendered my eyes to some other room, to some other light,” then here you will have to remain in darkness. Not that light is not available, but you are not receptive.If you have come here, that shows that you may believe you trust in Sai Baba but you don’t trust. You think you have surrendered, but your thinking is wrong, illusory. If you have surrendered then move to Sai Baba, open yourself to him so that he can work; then don’t go seeking here and there. I am ready to help, but for that you will have to be receptive. I cannot be aggressive to you, nobody can be. The very work is impossible with such aggression. If you trust me, something becomes possible. Then without any aggression the work starts. If you don’t trust, then I can only be violent to you, forcibly I have to open your eyes. That cannot be done. You cannot be forced into nirvana, you can only flow into it.If you don’t trust my river, how can you flow with me? Then deep down you will be struggling; then you will be wasting your time, my time, and it is useless. So be clear about it. It may not only be the case with one man, it may be with many of you. Your heart belongs somewhere else? – then go there. Be wherever your heart is. If your heart is with me, only then is something possible; otherwise don’t waste your time and energy. This has to be understood clearly.Your trust means that you are open. Your trust means that now you are ready to go into the unknown, into the uncharted. How can you move with me if you don’t trust me? And what you call me is insignificant to me, but not to you. Whether you call me Bhagwan or not, it is the same to me, but not the same to you, because your feeling will decide many things. If you cannot call anybody Bhagwan other than Sai Baba, then go to him, because then he is your temple, and only in his presence will you be transformed. And nothing is wrong in it.But you have come here. That shows that the touch has not happened; you have not moved in deep, close intimacy. The relationship has not happened, the love has not happened. You can go on deceiving yourself. That will not be of much help. So be clear, analyze your own mind. If your heart is here, then there are possibilities. If your heart is not here, then go wherever your heart leads you.I know you will have to come back, because you have been with Sai Baba, as you have said in this letter, and nothing has happened there. You are here, and I know that now you will move to some other teacher, and there you will say you have been with me and nothing has happened. And you are not here with me! Just physically being here doesn’t mean anything.I know this must have been the case with Sai Baba also. You may have been there physically, as you are here, but it is not a question of physical presence, it is a question of inner opening. Then you may be on another planet and I can work. You are not needed to be here; space doesn’t mean anything, nor does time mean anything. You may be on another planet, you may be in another time, but if you are receptive you are here close to me. You may be just here, existing this very moment, but if your heart is not here then there is no possibility of any bridge.There are many who go on wandering from one master to another. The total result may be simply confusion, because each master works in his own way, he has his own methods, and you go on accumulating information. That information is bound to be contradictory. Then you will get confused, you may even go insane. It is better to stick to one master and give your heart totally to him. If then nothing happens, move. But be finished with that master, don’t be in an incomplete relationship. Be finished. Either you are transformed, or you come to know that this master is not for you. Then the relationship has broken, there is no incompletion. Then you can move to another master with your total heart.Now you are here and you are thinking of Sai Baba. This division will become a hindrance. First go back to Sai Baba, be finished with him. Either you are transformed, then there is no need to find anyone; or Sai Baba is not your master, it is proved. Then come to me.And the same applies to my own disciples. If you are here with me, be finished with me. Be totally with me, so that either the mutation happens and then there is no need to find anyone or to go anywhere, or you come to realize, “This man is not for me.” Then you can leave me totally, then you can move, then somewhere else…. But being here with me halfheartedly and then moving to someone else halfheartedly will not do. Rather, it may be dangerous. You may become so split, so divided, with so many voices in you, that you may become a crowd. This has already happened to many. They know too much and they have drunk from so many sources that now they cannot decide where they stand, who they are. And they go on adding more confusion.Patience is needed. If you are totally devoted to one master the thing is bound to happen. And I would say that even if the master is not true, the thing can happen if you are totally devoted. Even if the master is false the happening is possible if you are totally devoted – because the happening doesn’t happen through the master, it happens through total devotion. So even a dead master, or a master who has never been, just the name, will do. The real alchemy, the science of mutation, is within you. The master is at the most just a catalytic agent, nothing more.Go back to your own master and be with him. And don’t try to judge him; you have got no way to judge anybody. All that you can do is give your total heart to him. And what have you got to lose? So why be so afraid? You have got nothing to lose, so why be so untrusting? Give yourself totally. Just this giving totally becomes the base of your transformation. Many times it has happened that a disciple was transformed through a master who was not a master at all. And many times the contrary has also happened: the master was true but the disciple was not transformed. The ultimate thing depends on you, not on me. You are the deciding factor.So wherever you go, make it a law: go with your total heart. Otherwise you will move with empty hands everywhere. And the more you move, the more you go to this master and that, the more there will be confusion, suffering, and finally you may decide that there exists no one who can transform you. Or, you may come to conclude that there is nothing like transformation, this is all hocus-pocus. And the reason will only be this – that you were never anywhere with your total heart.The next question:Osho,Does reason or intellect have any place at all in sadhana?Only this much: that reason has to show you that reason is useless, reason has to commit suicide – only this much. One of the greatest Tibetan mystics, Marpa, is reported to have said…. Somebody asked him, “Can’t scriptures help?” He said, “They can. They can help you to go beyond scriptures. That is their only use. Read the scriptures, study them; they will help you to understand that scriptures are useless, and the truth cannot be attained through them.”Reason can help you only in this way. Reason out, analyze, argue, and through this whole effort you will come to understand that reason cannot lead you to truth. But this is one of the greatest possibilities. Once you realize this you can drop reason, and when reason is dropped, for the first time you start functioning from a totally different center of your being, and that is the heart. And the heart can trust. Reason can never trust, reason by nature is untrusting. Remember, reason can analyze, but can never synthesize. Reason can cut and divide, but can never create a unity or harmony. Reason is just like scissors, scissors can cut and divide.It happened once that somebody presented Bayazid, one Sufi saint, with a pair of golden scissors. They were valuable, there were some diamonds on those golden scissors, and the man who was presenting them was very happy that it was a rare, unique gift. But Bayazid said, “Take them back, because my whole being is not to cut, not to analyze, not to divide. Rather, you bring a needle and some thread for me, because synthesis is my goal. I want to join things together, not to cut them apart. Golden or not golden,” Bayazid said, “a needle will do. The scissors may be very valuable but they are not for me.”Reason is scissorlike: it cuts, divides, analyzes. That’s why science cannot do without reason. It doubts, that’s its basic function. It is good – for a particular purpose it is good. As far as matter is concerned, as far as the world of the outside is concerned, reason is the method. Science cannot do without reason, because science is analysis, dissection. That’s why science finally reached the atom, the ultimate division. And now they have divided even the atom, and they have reached electrons. They will go on dividing.Science reaches to the atomic, and religion reaches to the divine. Religion goes on joining things together, and the ultimate unity is God. The totality has been taken in. Religion cannot work with reasoning, just as science cannot work with trust. If you are a scientist you have to doubt, doubt is the very base. But in religion, if you doubt you are lost. In religion you have to trust.These dimensions are diametrically opposite. Science moves in the without, religion moves into the within. They move diametrically opposite, their dimensions are opposite, so obviously religion must be opposite to the scientific approach. Science means reason, doubt; religion means trust, faith. So only one thing can be done by your reason and that is to realize that reason will not be of much help in the world of sadhana, in the world of inner discipline. Then drop it and allow another center of your being, the heart, to function.When the heart starts functioning you will have a different world around you – because you create your world. If you are doubting you create a world which is filled with doubt, depression, sadness, darkness. If you work through the heart you create a different world – of radiancy, of love, of prayer, of joy – but that is totally different. And you cannot change from one world to another, you will have to change from one center to another. And these centers are within you, the center which doubts and the center which trusts.When you fall in love, what is the use of reason? How can you use your reason while falling in love? That’s why reason says it is a fall: “falling in love.” Who created this phraseology, “falling in love”? Why not “rising in love?” Reason has condemned love, reason says it is a fall. And in a way it is, because from the head you fall to the heart. You start functioning from a different center. But how can you use your reason in love? Is there any way to use it? If you use it, you will destroy the whole phenomenon. The first thing reason will say is, “Doubt!” The first thing reason will say is, “Is there anything in existence which you can call love? Is there anything like love? Dissect it.” And if you dissect, love disappears.Love is a unity and a very delicate harmony; it cannot be dissected. It is just like a small child jumping, dancing, enjoying. He is alive. You cut the child, dissect him; you put him on a table, a surgeon’s table, and dissect him to find out where life is, what it was that was alive – you will not find it. Not that it was not there; the way you are trying to find it means you will miss, the very method prohibits. The moment you dissect the child he is dead, the life has disappeared, and by dissecting you will come to death, not to life.Science ultimately leads to death – Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not accidental. And if man still follows science for one more century…even one century is too optimistic; these coming twenty-five years…. If man continuously follows science it may prove a global suicide, because dissection cannot lead to life; the ultimate result is bound to be death. And science cannot believe in life, because you cannot find it anywhere, in any laboratory. You dissect, and life disappears. You dissect your beloved, and love disappears. You go to a surgeon and let him dissect your heart, or take x-rays of your heart to find out whether love is there or not. He may find a cancer there, but he cannot find love. Death can be detected, love cannot be detected. There is no way to have an x-ray of love. Death can be detected; if it is there, if cancer is there, it can be detected, science can find it out.Go to a library and look at medical encyclopedias to find a definition of health. You will not find it. You will find every disease defined, but you cannot find any definition of health. Science cannot define health, because health can-not be detected. If you go to a doctor he can tell you that you are ill, but he cannot give you a certificate that you are healthy. He can give you a certificate that you are not ill – that’s another matter, negative; he cannot give you a certificate that you are healthy. And there is no definition of what health is.Science goes on fighting with a method, the very method creates the world of science. Religion doesn’t work with that method. Religion works through a different type of methodology – the heart is the center. And if you can become headless, only then is religion something meaningful for you. If you are too much in the head, religion is not for you. If you are too much in the head, then prayer is very distant, even love is impossible. You can exploit people, you can kill them, but you cannot love them through reason. Or, reason can create such deceptions.I was just looking at a Peanuts joke-book. Charlie Brown says there, “I love mankind; it is people that I can’t stand.” “I love mankind; it is people that I can’t stand.” The head can love mankind, because there is no one like mankind. You will not find mankind anywhere. Wherever you go you will find people, and the head cannot stand people.It is easy to love a country, to love humanity, to love the nation, to love Christianity, to love Islam, to love Hinduism. It is very difficult to love a real person, very difficult, because for the real person the heart will be needed. And these concepts, abstract concepts – humanity, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, or even God – the head can work with, there is no problem, because only thinking is implied, no lived experience is needed. You are not asked to get involved in anything where your heart will be required: just concepts, just logic, mathematics. The head can do that. Science is head work: religion is heart work. You can use your reason only to destroy reason, to help reason to commit suicide.My whole effort is to persuade you to become headless.Live without the head, then you will have a life which is totally different from this life you are leading. The life that you are leading is exactly how hell is defined in old scriptures. And if you go into hell, you may not be able to recognize that it is hell; you will think it is only an extension of the old world. You will find everything that you have got already, hell now cannot give you anything new. Man has himself created everything here on this earth.Help your reason to commit suicide.Fall within to the heart.Let love, prayer, meditation, become the center of your world.But in the beginning help will be needed, because in the beginning you cannot do anything else – you are there, existing in the head. That’s why I go on talking so much. These talks are useless, they are not needed, but you exist in the head, so somehow you have to drop out. I am not giving you theories, I am not giving you some stuff to think about. I am simply helping your reason to come to a point where it itself realizes that just living in reason is missing life in its totality.In the beginning it is needed. The first step has to be taken out of the head, so the head has to be approached. The moment you have taken that first step, then there is no need. But the first step is most difficult. You are so much obsessed with reason that whatsoever is said, your reason starts working around it. Whatsoever you read here becomes food for your reason.Religious discourses are really poisons, they are poisonous food. Buddha talks, Krishna talks, Lao Tzu goes on preaching to the disciples. What are they doing? They are doing only one thing: they are giving you poison which looks like food to reason. Reason immediately absorbs it, but it is poison, and reason will have to die. And once reason is dead, for the first time you will be alert, conscious, awakened, and you will see the whole world in a new light.The world remains the same but you are different, you have changed. Now you can look through different eyes. Then this world is not evil; then there is no suffering in the world. Then the whole world is just the dance of Shiva, just a divine celebration. And the whole life is a play. That’s why Hindus have called it leela: leela means play, a play of divine energy.Hindus have said that it is not a creation, it is a play. It is not a serious thing, it is simple play – a play of too much energy. But right now you cannot think in that way, that door is closed. Put reason aside, start functioning in a loving way. Bring more heart into your behavior, into your actions, into your movements. Then whatsoever Krishna and Jesus and Lao Tzu have said, that will become a truth to you, it will be revealed. You just need fresh eyes which can see it, hence so much emphasis on trust.The third question:Osho,If the divine is right here and now, then what prevents us from seeing him? Why do we cling to our dream life, even though it has become a misery for us?No, it has not become a misery for you yet, otherwise you could not cling to it. No one can cling to misery. You still have hopes, you have not yet become totally hopeless. Even in your misery you are hoping. You are thinking that today is misery but tomorrow the doors of paradise will open, and this misery is just a means to reach that paradise tomorrow. Unless the tomorrow dies completely, unless the tomorrow drops completely, unless you become totally hopeless, no hope…only then will you see what misery is there where you are living. And once you become aware of the misery that you are living, you will drop it – there will be no need for me to tell you.Somebody came to Buddha and asked him, “You go on saying that life is suffering, dukkha; you go on saying that the house is on fire, and I realize that this is so, but how should we come out of that house which is on fire?”Buddha said, “You are not seeing that the house is on fire. If the house is on fire you will not come to ask me, you will simply jump out of that house.” You won’t go to find a master to learn techniques, you won’t consult The Bible and Koran to find out how to get out of the house which is on fire. When the house is on fire, you will leave your Koran and Bible inside, and you will jump out. And even if a Buddha is sitting there, you will remember only when you are out of the house that Buddha has been left inside, the master has been left inside. When you realize the house is on fire, you simply jump out of it; there is no method.All methods are postponements. You are in search of a method so that you can postpone, because a method will need time, so you can say to yourself, “How can I jump right now? It will take three years, six years, lives, to practice. It is such a difficult thing, so I will first practice how to jump, and then I will jump. But unless I practice, I cannot jump.”And you have been doing this practice, this rehearsal, for many lives. You are not here for the first time to ask me – you have asked many times. The same questions you have been asking in every life, but you never do anything, be-cause Buddha may be saying that the house is on fire, but you look…it is a palace, nothing is on fire. Just out of consideration for Buddha you don’t deny him. Otherwise you know he is crazy; the house is not on fire. Or he may be talking in symbols, he may be meaning something else. Or he is such a great man that you cannot understand what he is saying, so just out of respect you don’t deny him, you say yes. Your yes doesn’t mean any more than your no. Your yes, your no are meaningless.I have heard that Mulla Nasruddin was in love with a woman, but very worried, depressed, always sad, so one friend asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “Everything is finished, and I am contemplating suicide.”The friend said, “But you have been contemplating so long. Tell me what the matter is – maybe I can help you.”Nasruddin said, “I asked the woman to get married to me.”The friend said, “Yes, no need to say anything more, I have understood. She must have said no. But you are a fool. Don’t believe it when a woman says no; she always means yes.”Nasruddin said, “I know that wisdom, and if she had said no, then there would have been no problem. But when I proposed she said, ‘Rats.’ So now what to understand? She said, ‘Rats’; she never said no. Had she said no, then yes could be understood.”Everybody’s mind is just like that woman. When you say no, the yes is hidden behind it. If somebody has slightly penetrating eyes, he can see your yes hidden behind the no. When you say yes it is just skin-deep, the no is hidden behind. And your yes can be turned into no without any effort. Your no can be turned into yes without much effort. Your yes and no are only different in degrees, not in quality. They can be changed, they continuously go on changing.Even a small child knows this. The father says, “No, you are not going to the movie today.” But even a small child knows that yes is hidden behind it. He starts a tantrum, he starts crying, and within minutes the father says, “Go, go! Go away from here.” The child knows the yes is hidden behind the no. It can be brought out immediately, a little effort is needed. And no child believes in your yes or no because you can change so easily; no child trusts you. But this is how the human mind is.So the first thing: you are not in misery. Buddha has said so, I may be saying so, but you know that you are not in misery. You go on feeling, hoping, that tomorrow something is going to happen. And tomorrow is the drug; through the tomorrow you intoxicate yourself, and then the day which is present, today, you can suffer it. It is not much, only a question of a few hours and then the tomorrow will be there; it is coming nearer and nearer. Because of the misery on this earth, we conceive of heaven as somewhere in the other life; that heaven is our tomorrow extended. Just to carry on anyhow this misery that is around us, we look somewhere ahead. We never look right now, here.You are not in misery. I may be saying so; you go on believing that happiness is just near, you are just on the verge of it. The goal is so near, so why leave? Just continue a little more, be patient. If you realize that you are in misery, then there is no need to ask how to drop it. Then masters will be needed to teach you how to cling to it, and even then you will not listen to them.Once you know that your life is misery, even a buddha cannot persuade you to cling to it. But the penetration is not there. It is not your realization. This knowing is not your knowledge, this wisdom has not been achieved through your own efforts. It is borrowed, it is cheap. You have heard that life is misery, but you have not realized it. And you say, “Why do we go on clinging to this dream life?” It is not a dream life to you; it is real. When you see a dream the dream is real. Somebody who has awakened from sleep may go on saying that whatsoever you are seeing is just a dream, but the person who is dreaming, he is dreaming a reality, not a dream. In a dream, howsoever absurd, you cannot feel it as a dream. You believe in it, because once you feel it is a dream the dream disappears. The dream cannot remain there, your cooperation is withdrawn. You can cooperate only with reality, not with dreams; and if you cooperate dreams become reality – it is through your cooperation.In the night, deep in sleep, you dream that you have become a king. You may be a beggar, or vice versa: you may be a king and you dream that you have become a beggar. But in that dream you are so identified you cannot think that it could be a dream. If you can think that it could be a dream, the dream will stop immediately. It will be broken, you will come out of it.Try this. Try this with ordinary dreams. While going to sleep at night, every day just go on thinking only one thought: “When I dream, I must remember that this is a dream.” It will take many months for this thought to drop down into the unconscious, but it will reach there. After three weeks to three months it will reach if you persist, if you don’t forget. Every night while falling into sleep, you go on thinking that when a dream starts you will immediately recognize that it is a dream. After three weeks to three months this will happen; suddenly one day you will start dreaming and you will have the realization, “This is a dream.” Immediately the dream will disappear and your eyes will be open.If you realize in dream that it is a dream the dream is broken, the dream cannot exist. It exists through your cooperation, your identification is needed. If you are committed to it, if you get involved in it, only then can it continue. And the same happens with the greater dream which is life. When you realize this is a dream, immediately you have become a buddha, you are enlightened. But this enlightenment cannot happen to you by others’ knowing, others’ wisdom.Buddha may go on calling to you that this is a dream you are living, but you will only feel that this man is a disturbance, a constant nuisance, he is disturbing your life. That’s why we kill such persons. Socrates – we poisoned him because he was a great disturber. Jesus – we crucified him because he was a nuisance. Everybody is dreaming such beautiful dreams, and these persons unnecessarily, and without being invited, go on disturbing people and saying to them, “Wake up! You are dreaming. This is a dream.” And the man may have been dreaming such a beautiful thing that he could throw away all life for that dream.Now psychologists say that for the ordinary mind, for the normal mind, dreaming is a must. If you cannot dream, if you are not allowed to dream, you will go mad. Previously it was thought that sleep is a necessity, now the new research says a totally different thing. The new research says that sleep is not a must; it is not sleep which gives you rest, it is dreaming which gives you rest. And if you are allowed to dream you will remain happy, if you are not allowed to dream you will go insane.The whole night there is a rhythm: sleep period, then dream period, then sleep period, then dream period, of almost the same duration. If you sleep for eight hours, at least for four hours you are dreaming: forty minutes dreaming, then forty minutes sleep, then forty minutes dream, then forty minutes sleep – just like day and night, a rhythm.They have tried many experiments, because now it can be known from the outside whether you are dreaming or not. Not many devices are needed. When a person is sleeping you can simply go on looking at his eyes. When he dreams the eyes move fast. He is looking at the dream, so the eyes move fast. When he is fast asleep the eyes stop and become dead. So just sitting by a person who is asleep, you can note down when he is dreaming and when he is asleep.They have tried to disturb persons while they are asleep, in their sleep periods of forty minutes. When they are dreaming they don’t disturb them; when they start sleeping they disturb them. Many nights you can disturb a person while he is asleep but allow the dream period, and he will be happy and okay, no problem; he will not feel tired in the morning. But do otherwise: when he is asleep let him sleep; when he starts dreaming wake him. If continuously the whole night, for only three nights, you don’t allow a person to dream, then he will go insane. Why? It is so much needed. Your ordinary mind feeds on dreams, and if a person is not allowed for three days to dream he will start dreaming while awake. It is such a great need. He will be awake, sitting in his chair, and dreaming. He will have to fulfill the quota, in the day he will have to dream.And if you insist for many weeks, if for at least three weeks a person is not allowed to dream, he will become hallucinatory. He will be awake and talking to a man who is not present. He will become just like madmen. Now psychologists say that these madmen whom we have pushed into madhouses may be simply persons who have been starved as far as dream food is concerned. They need more dreams to be readjusted to normal life. What is the problem? Why are dreams needed so much? Why can’t you live without dreams? Because your life is so miserable that only through dreams can you exist. If you come to know life as it is, in its nudity, without any dreams, you will commit suicide.Albert Camus has written that the only philosophical problem is whether to commit suicide or not, and that is the big problem. If you come to realize that the whole life is just nonsense…. What are you doing? What is happening? Nothing is happening, and you continue in suffering. If you are reasonable, you will start thinking of committing suicide.Dreams help you to not commit suicide. They help you to create worlds of your own in which you can be happy, in which you can enjoy, in which you can become emperors, in which you can become conquerors, in which you can fly and reach the planets, in which you can do anything. You are free only in your dreams. The whole life is a slavery, only in your dreams can you destroy the whole world and create a new one.You can have a beautiful woman in your dreams, a beautiful man. Life is not so beautiful. And howsoever beautiful a woman, you come closer and the flowers disappear and only thorns are left. Howsoever beautiful a man, a person, if you are far away the beauty is there, but the closer you come, the more the beauty starts evaporating. Sartre says, “Hell is other people – the other is the hell.” The closer you come to the other, the more a hell is created. Only in your dreams can you be in paradise.So don’t say that you know that your life is suffering and dreamlike – it is real to you. To you I say it is real; to a buddha it is unreal. But you are not a buddha yet, so remain with your reality, and remain with your real mind. Don’t move with borrowed things, because once you move on borrowed things you will never come to the reality again.“If the divine is right here and now, then what prevents us from seeing him? Why do we cling to our dream life even though it has become a misery for us?” Think again. Contemplate on it. If it is a misery for you – for you I insist again and again, not for me – if it is a misery for you, don’t do anything. Remain with the fact that your life has become a misery to you, because if you start doing something about it you may again create hope in the tomorrow. Just remain with the fact. If it is hell, remain in hell, don’t do anything. Just remain alert that this is hell. And if you can be patient and alert and wait, just through waiting the hell will disappear, it will fall down. It needs your cooperation. It is just like dreams.That’s why Shankara and Buddha say your life is a dream life – because it can be just dropped like dreams. If you become alert a dream disappears; if you become alert of your misery, the misery disappears. You cling to it because you think it is not misery, or some happiness is hidden somewhere in it. It may be misery outwardly, but a deep treasure is hidden behind it, so you have to cling to it for that treasure. Your life is misery – but not for you. Realize its misery, it falls down. The very truth transforms you. And the moment misery falls the divine is revealed. To a miserable mind the divine cannot be revealed. To a celebrating mind the divine is revealed.Remember, only to a celebrating mind, to a mind which is happy, blissful, enjoying moment to moment, ecstatic, is the divine revealed. To a miserable mind the divine cannot be revealed, because a miserable mind is closed. The divine is here and now, but you are not here and now. If you are also here and now then the divine will be revealed to you. The whole of my effort is to bring you here and now. This very moment, if you can be here, then nothing is hidden.The last question:Osho,The rishi of the Upanishad fears he may speak some untruth, and so he prays, “May my speech be rooted in my mind.” Does that mean that when he comes down to earth to speak, he comes out of his enlightened consciousness to do so, back into the ordinary mind again? If he is permanently in divine consciousness, how can nontruth come in?There is no way of coming back to the ordinary state of the mind. Once you are enlightened there is no way to become blind again, no way to fall into the darkness – because this light is not something accidental. When you become enlightened you have become the light, so wherever you go, even in darkness, it will be light there. It is not something external, the light is not something accidental. Enlightenment means you have become the light, so now there is no way to fall into the darkness again. Wherever you go, even if there was darkness before, just by your reaching there the darkness will disappear. So there is no way of falling back.Then why is this rishi afraid? Why does he fear? He fears for a deep reason. The fear is not that he can utter untruth, the fear is that the moment the truth is expressed in language it becomes distorted. He is not going to utter any untruth, but the medium of language is such that whatsoever you express through it, it changes, its nature changes. It is just like this: a river is flowing and you push a straight stick down into the water. The moment it penetrates the water it is no longer straight, the medium of the water and the refraction of light rays change it – the straight stick is no longer straight. Pull it out again, it is straight; push it down again, it is no longer straight. The stick remains straight, but because of the medium of water it appears as though it is not straight.The truth is realized in a silent mind where there is no language, no words, no verbal existence…total silence, soundlessness. In that silence the truth is realized, and then it has to be expressed through language. That which has been known beyond language, that which transcends language, has to be forced again into language to communicate. And with you there is no other way to communicate it. You cannot understand silence.I can remain here silent; you cannot understand it. If you can understand silence then there is no need to express, but then you will not be here, then there will be no need to come here also. If you can understand my silence you can understand the silence of the sky, because the language is the same. You can understand the silence of the rocks, you can understand the silence of the night. You can understand the silence with which the cosmos all over is filled. There is no need to come to me because silence is everywhere – if you understand it.You don’t understand it. That’s why you don’t go to a rock, you don’t go to a tree, you have come to me…because the tree cannot express it in language, the rock cannot express it in language. The rock also exists in the divine as much as I, but the rock cannot express it through language. You need language. The fear is because of you, the fear is because of the very medium of language. Truth said becomes untrue.Lao Tzu has said, “The Tao that can be said is no more Tao. The truth that can be said is no more true.” Why? – because language, the very mechanism of language, depends on duality. For example, if you ask me whether God is light or darkness, if I say light, it is wrong, because he is also darkness. If I say darkness, it is wrong, because he is also light. If I say he is light, then the question arises, “Then darkness exists. Where does it exist? Then there must be something other than God where darkness exists.” If I say God is life…then death? Who is death? If I say God is death, then who is life? And if I say God is both life and death, then it becomes a paradox. If I say God is both light and darkness, then you will say, “You are not saying much, it is a paradox. How can one be both?”These are the four ways: either I can say God is light or darkness, or I can say God is both, or I can say God is not both, but the problem remains. And these are the only ways to express. That’s why Mahavira has developed saptabhangi – sevenfold logic. You ask one question and Mahavira will answer seven answers. And if you can stay with him to listen to his seven answers, you will be more confused than when you came to him.If you ask about God, he will say God is; immediately he will say God is not; immediately he will say God is both, is and is not; immediately he will say God is both not, is and is not – and he goes on. Sevenfold will be his answer, because he says, “I cannot be untrue. This is the whole truth.” But you remain the same as you were and even more confused. You need a clear answer, you want that he either says God is, or God is not.That’s why Buddha remained silent. You asked about God, he would remain silent. He said that he would not answer eleven questions, and those eleven questions are the base of the whole of philosophy; all metaphysics consists of those eleven questions. He would not answer because he said, “Whatsoever I say will be wrong, or I will have to say it in such a way that nothing will become clear – as Mahavira is doing.”This rishi is going to try to communicate exactly, meaningfully, not creating paradoxes; linguistically understandable statements he will try in this Upanishad. That’s why he is afraid – because the nature of language distorts.Secondly, the moment something is said and you have heard it, you will destroy it. Firstly it will be destroyed by the medium of language; secondly, it has entered your mind, and your mind is a madhouse. Once it enters your mind, what meaning will come out of it no one can say. How you will interpret it, how you will follow it, what you will do according to your interpretation, no one knows.Buddha has said somewhere that it is dangerous to talk to ignorant people, because whatsoever you say they think they have understood, and then they are the masters. You are no more in possession of your truth; they also possess it, and they will interpret it. That’s why so many philosophies exist.Buddha died. At least twenty-four systems immediately were there, twenty-four leaders saying, “This is the meaning of Buddha” – and they all were contradicting each other. Twenty-four schools, and each school against the other twenty-three: “Those twenty-three others are absolutely wrong!” This happens even when a master is alive, nothing can be said about what happens when a master is dead.I remember, once it happened: Freud was old, and just before he died, two or three years before…. And Freud was not a religious man at all, not a man of trust and faith, but a man of doubt, logic and reason. But still he was working in a very dangerous field – the mind – so he had become a master in his own right. He had disciples, a great following, a big movement, so thinking that he was going to die soon as he was ill and old, all his great disciples gathered, just to meet him for the last time.Twenty people were there, Freud was sitting with them and they were discussing. They were discussing, and they forgot that Freud was still alive. They were discussing what Freud meant about certain principles and each one had his own interpretation. They discussed, argued, and there was chaos, and there was no possibility of their coming to one conclusion – and Freud was sitting there! He suddenly stood and said, “My friends, you have completely forgotten – I am still alive! You can ask me what my meaning is.”But if I had been there I would have said to Freud, “Even that will not help, because they can ask what your meaning is, but again they will interpret the meaning. Then again there will be twenty interpretations. ‘What is the meaning of your meaning?’”You cannot escape disciples. That is the fear.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-04/

The sage Sankriti then said to the sun god:O Lord, please teach me the supreme knowledge.The sun god said:I shall now explain to you this most rare knowledge, upon the attainment of which you will become free while yet dwelling in this body. See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn, still, imperishable, infinite, immutable and conscious; so seeing live in peace and bliss. Do not see anything except the self and the supreme. This state is known as yoga. Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.The mind of one who is thus rooted in yoga gradually withdraws from all desires, and the seeker feels blissful while engaging himself each day in meritorious acts. He has no interest whatsoever in the contrary efforts of the ignorant.He never betrays the secrets of one to another,and he occupies himself solely with lofty deeds.He performs only such gentle acts as do not disturb others. He fears sin and does not crave any self-indulgence. He utters loving and affectionate words. He lives in the company of saints and studies the scriptures. With complete unity of mind, speech and action he follows them. Seeking to cross the ocean that is the world, he cultivates the above-mentioned ideas. And he is called a beginner,one performing his preliminaries. This is called the first stage.The sage Sankriti then said to the sun god: O Lord, please teach me the supreme knowledge.The Upanishads know only the supreme knowledge. What is this supreme knowledge? And why is it called supreme? The Upanishads call that knowledge supreme which is not gathered from without, which is not gathered at all. You cannot be educated in it, it cannot be taught; it happens within, it flowers in you.The first distinction to be made is that there is knowledge which can be taught. The Upanishads call that knowledge lower knowledge. Precisely, they call it avidya – ignorance with information – because that which can be taught to you remains in the mind, it never reaches exactly to you. You remain untouched, your center remains untouched, your being is not in any way changed, transformed. Only the mind collects it, only the brain cells collect it, so it is the same as when we feed a computer – in the same way your mind is fed.From the very childhood you have been taught many things. They have not reached you, and they will never reach you. The mind gathers them, the mind becomes filled with them. And the mind is so complex that in a single mind all the libraries of the world can be fed; a single head can contain all the knowledge that exists in this world – but the Upanishads say you will not become knowing through that. It is mechanical, consciousness is not needed for it. If even a computer can do it, then it is not worth it.What the computer cannot do is supreme knowledge. The computer cannot become self-knowing, there is no possibility for the computer to become self-conscious. That which has not been fed into the computer cannot happen to it, and if the same is the case with man then there is no soul, then you are also a natural biocomputer. If everything that comes out of you has been fed into you, if exactly the same amount comes out that has been fed in, if nothing new happens within, then you have no soul; then you are a very complex mechanism, that’s all.So the whole religion depends on the phenomenon of supreme knowledge. Is it possible that something can happen within, absolutely new, which has never been taught to you, which has not been cultivated in you? If something so original happens to you, only that can prove that you have a soul; otherwise you are simply a brain, a complex mechanism but still a mechanism, and then there is no possibility of any transformation.The Upanishads call that knowledge supreme which happens within. That’s why religion cannot be taught. You can teach science, you can teach many other things, but you cannot teach religion. And if you teach religion, religion becomes false. That’s what missionaries of all the religions have done to this earth. They have been teaching religion on just the same lines as science is taught, so they fill your mind with certain knowledge and you start repeating that knowledge. You may even start living that knowledge, but you will remain a computer, a robot.The Upanishads say there is a possibility and there is a way to attain the supreme knowledge. So what will the master do if it cannot be taught? That’s why I say a master is not a teacher. The master is not going to teach you; he is going to create a situation around you, only the situation. He will create devices around you, he will create only the soil – the seed you have already got within you.The situation can be provided and the seed will start sprouting, the dead seed will become alive. The seed will die, but a plant will come in its place. And this seed, this seedling, this growing plant, will become a tree. But this is something which happens within you. You can be helped, but you cannot be taught.A master can create a situation around you – just a situation, remember. And whatsoever he teaches is not knowledge, he teaches only how to create the situation. He teaches you methods; he cannot give you the conclusion – he can only help indirectly. That’s why it is such a delicate phenomenon. And only one who has got it within him, one who has passed through all the stages, one who has become a big tree, flowering – only he can create the situation around you. So a person who has not become enlightened himself cannot help you; on the contrary, he may hinder you.If it was just a teaching, then even scriptures would be helpful: The Bible would do, the Koran, the Vedas, the Upanishads would do. But you can read The Bible, you can memorize it, you can become an expert, you can become a scholar – but you will not become a religious man. Just by memorizing The Bible, Christ is not going to happen to you. The Christ can happen to you only when the situation is created around you, and your own inner seed grows. Religion is not a teaching, it is a growth. And what is supreme knowledge? – when you grow, when you know, when for the first time you have your own eyes to see into reality.So the first thing: supreme knowledge is that knowledge which happens to you but cannot be taught. The second thing: all knowledge is about something other than you – supreme knowledge is absolutely about you. Or, it may even be wrong to say that it is about you. It is not about, because whatsoever it is about is about something other than you. It will be better to say that it is you, not about you…because many things can be taught about you. It can be asked, “Who are you?” Someone can say, “You are Brahman, you are the divine, you are the absolute, the soul, atman.” But this is about you; this is not supreme knowledge – somebody else is teaching it to you.When you become knowledge, when you become the knowing center, when your very consciousness becomes the door, then supreme knowledge has happened to you. Mathematics is about something, physics is about something else, chemistry about something else, psychology is about the mind – supreme knowledge is you. No university, no school is of any help. Directly, nothing can be done about it, only an indirect help is possible.The sage Sankriti then said to the sun god: O Lord, please teach me the supreme knowledge.He is asking an absurd question: Please teach me the supreme knowledge. It can-not be taught – but that’s how a disciple has to reach the master. The disciple cannot know that there is something which cannot be taught; every disciple has to come to the master and ask to be taught. It is absurd for the master, because he knows it cannot be taught, but every seeker thinks that everything can be taught – even the supreme knowledge can be taught.It happened in Upanishadic days that one young boy, Svetaketu, was sent by his father to a gurukul, to a family of an enlightened master, to learn. He learned everything that could be learned, he memorized all the Vedas and all the science available in those days. He became proficient in them, he became a great scholar; his fame started spreading all over the country. Then there was nothing else to be taught, so the master said, “You have known all that can be taught. Now you can go back.”Thinking that everything had happened and there was nothing else – because whatsoever the master knew, he also knew, and the master had taught him everything – Svetaketu went back. Of course with great pride and ego, he came back to his father.When he was entering the village his father, Uddalak, looked out of the window at his son coming back from the university. He saw the way he was walking – very proudly, the way he was holding his head – in a very egoistic way, the way he was looking all around – very self-conscious that he knew. The father became sad and depressed, because this is not the way of one who really knows, this is not the way of one who has come to know the supreme knowledge.The son entered the house. He was thinking that his father would be very happy – he had become one of the suprememost scholars of the country; he was known everywhere, respected everywhere – but he saw that the father was sad, so he asked, “Why are you sad?”The father said, “Only one question I have to ask you. Have you learned that by learning which there is no need to learn anything any more? Have you known that by knowing which all suffering ceases? Have you been taught that which cannot be taught?”The boy also became sad. He said, “No. Whatsoever I know has been taught to me, and I can teach it to anybody who is ready to learn.”The father said, “Then you go back and ask your master that you be taught that which cannot be taught.”The boy said, “But that is absurd. If it cannot be taught, how can the master teach me?”The father said, “That is the art of the master: he can teach you that which cannot be taught. You go back.”He went back. Bowing down to his master’s feet, he said, “My father has sent me for an absolutely absurd thing. Now I don’t know where I am and what I am asking you. My father has told me to come back and return only when I have learned that which cannot be learned, when I have been taught that which cannot be taught. What is it? What is this? You never told me about it.”The master said, “Unless one inquires, it cannot be told; you never inquired about it. But now you are starting a totally different journey. And remember, it cannot be taught, so it is very delicate; only indirectly will I help you. Do one thing: take all the animals of my gurukul – there were at least four hundred cows, bulls and other animals – and go to the deepest forest possible where nobody ever comes and moves. Live with these animals in silence. Don’t talk, because these animals cannot understand any language. So remain silent, and when just by reproduction these four hundred animals have become one thousand, then come back.”It was going to be a long time – until four hundred animals had become one thousand. And he was to go without saying anything, without arguing, without asking, “What are you telling me to do? Where will it lead?” He was to just live with animals and trees and rocks; not talking, and forgetting the human world completely. Because your mind is a human creation, if you live with human beings the mind is continuously fed. They say something, you say something – the mind goes on learning, it goes on revolving.“So go,” the master said, “to the hills, to the forest. Live alone. Don’t talk. And there is no use in thinking, because these animals won’t understand even your thinking. Drop all your scholarship here.”Svetaketu followed. He went to the forest and lived with the animals for many years. For a few days thoughts remained there in the mind – the same thoughts repeating themselves again and again. Then it became boring. If new thoughts are not felt, then you will become aware that the mind is just repetitive, just a mechanical repetition; it goes on in a rut. And there was no way to get new knowledge. With new knowledge the mind is always happy, because there is something again to grind, something again to work out; the mechanism goes on moving.Svetaketu became aware. There were four hundred animals, birds, other wild animals, trees, rocks, rivers and streams, but no man and no possibility of any human communication. There was no use in being very egoistic, because these animals didn’t know what type of great scholar this Svetaketu was. They didn’t consider him at all; they didn’t look at him with respect, so by and by the pride disappeared, because it was futile and it even looked foolish to walk in a prideful way with the animals. Even Svetaketu started feeling, “If I remain egoistic these animals will laugh at me – so what am I doing?” Sitting under the trees, sleeping near the streams, by and by his mind became silent.The story is beautiful. The years passed and his mind became so silent that Svetaketu completely forgot when he had to return. He became so silent that even this idea was not there. The past dropped completely, and with the dropping of the past the future drops, because the future is nothing but a projection of the past – just the past reaching into the future. So he forgot what the master had said, he forgot when he had to return. There was no when and where, he was just here and now. He lived in the moment just like the animals, he became a cow.The story says that when the animals became one thousand, they started feeling uncomfortable. They were waiting for Svetaketu to take them back to the ashram and he had forgotten, so one day the cows decided to speak to Svetaketu and they said, “Now it is time enough, and we remember that the master had said that you must come back when the animals became one thousand, and you have completely forgotten. Now is the time and we must go back. We have be-come one thousand.”So Svetaketu went back with the animals. The master looked from the door of his hut at Svetaketu coming with one thousand animals, and he said to his other disciples, “Look, one thousand and one animals are coming.” Svetaketu had become such a silent being – no ego, no self-consciousness, just moving with the animals as one of them.The master came to receive him; the master was dancing, ecstatic. He embraced Svetaketu and he said, “Now there is nothing to say to you – you have already known. Why have you come? There is no need to come now, there is nothing to be taught. You have already known.”Svetaketu said, “Just to pay my respects, just to touch your feet, just to be grateful. It has happened, and you have taught me that which cannot be taught.”This is what a master is to do: create a situation in which the thing happens. So only indirect effort can be made, indirect help, indirect guidance. And wherever direct guidance is given, wherever your mind is taught, it is not religion. It may be theology but not religion; it may be philosophy but not religion.The supreme knowledge is that which cannot be taught. But the sage Sankriti asked: Teach me the supreme knowledge.The sun god said:I shall now explain to you this most rare knowledge, upon the attainment of which you will become free while yet dwelling in this body. See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn, still, imperishable, infinite, immutable and conscious; so seeing live in peace and bliss. Do not see anything except the self and the supreme. This state is known as yoga. Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.The first thing he said was: See in all beings the Brahman. This too is to create a situation, remember. This is not a teaching, this is giving a device. What do you see? You see trees, you see rocks, you see men, you see dogs, you see cows – you see many things, but not one. You go on counting waves but you don’t see the hidden ocean.The sun god said to Sankriti that the first thing is to see the one. Apparently there are many, but behind the many the one is hidden. So whenever you see the many, remember this is the surface, not the soul. Penetrate deep; forget the surface and try to know the center, the depth. The depth is one.Go to the sea, there are millions of waves. You never see the sea, you always see the waves, because they are on the surface. But every wave is nothing but a waving of the sea, the sea is waving through all the waves. Remember the ocean and forget the waves – because waves don’t really exist, only the ocean exists.The ocean can exist without the waves but the waves cannot exist without the ocean. If there is no ocean there can be no waves – or can there be? Then what will wave in them? They cannot be, but the ocean can be. There is no need for the waves, the ocean can be silent. If there is no wind blowing the ocean will be there, silent.The ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the ocean. So waves are just the surface, and waves are accidental – through the action of the winds they have come into existence. They have come into existence from without, some accident has created them. If the wind is not blowing the ocean will be silent and non-waving. So waves are accidents created from without, on the surface; the ocean is something totally different.And the same is the case with all beings. The tree is also a wave, and the man is also a wave, and the rock is also a wave. And behind the rock and the tree and the man the same ocean is hidden. That ocean is called by the Upanishads the Brahman. The Brahman, the ultimate soul, the absolute soul, is just the ocean. So look at a man but don’t cling to the surface, immediately move to the depth and see the Brahman hidden there.You can do this. Just try it in this camp. Whenever you have time, sit with your friend, your beloved, your wife, your husband, or anybody – a stranger will do – just sit and look into each other’s eyes without thinking, and try to penetrate the eyes without thinking. Just look deeper and deeper into each other’s eyes. Soon you will become aware that the waves have been crossed and an ocean has opened unto you.Look into each other’s eyes deeply, because eyes are just the doors. And if you don’t think, if you just stare into the eyes, soon the waves will disappear and the ocean will be revealed. Do it first with a human being, because you are closer to that type of wave. Then move to animals – a little more distant; then move to trees – still more distant waves; then move to the rocks.If you can look deep down into the eyes, you will feel that the man has disappeared, the person has disappeared. Some oceanic phenomenon is hidden behind and this person was just a waving of a depth, a wave of something unknown, hidden. Try this; it will be something worth knowing. That’s what the sun god said to Sankriti: See in all beings the Brahman, who is one…not many.So wherever you feel any distinction, know that you are on the surface. All distinctions are on the surface; “many” belongs to the surface. In English we have a word, “universe,” that is almost parallel to Brahman. “Uni” means one, but whatsoever you see around you is not “universe.” You may call it a universe, but it is not, it is a multiverse. Many you see, not one; names you see, not the nameless; waves you see, but not the ocean.This is to create a situation. Look deep and don’t be deceived by the surface, and soon you will become aware of an ocean all around. Then you will see that you are also just a wave, your ego is just a wave – behind that ego, the nameless, the one, is hidden.See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn……Because only waves are born, the ocean remains the same. The many are born, the one remains the same. You are born and you will have to die; hence the fear of death, so much fear of death, but the Brahman in you is unborn and undying. Everyone is afraid of death. Why this fear? And nothing can be done about it; only one thing is certain in life, and that is death.It is said of one Zen master, Tojo, that he remained silent his whole life, he would not speak. When he was a child it was thought that he was incapable of speaking, but he was so intelligent that sooner or later people realized that he was just keeping silence, he was not dumb. His eyes were so radiant, intelligent, wise; his behavior, his actions, were so intelligent that people became aware that he was simply keeping a deep silence – maybe continuing some vow to remain silent that he may have taken in his past life. And he remained silent for eighty years.The first and last statement he made was on the day he was going to die. The morning he was going to die, just as the sun was rising, he collected his followers – many had started following him. He was not speaking, but he was living something, and that living something became so significant to those who could understand that there were many who followed him; many were his disciples. They would just sit around Tojo, they would just be in contact with his silence, and many were transformed.He collected all his followers and said, “This evening when the sun sets, I will die. This is my first and last statement.”So somebody said, “But if you can speak, why did you remain silent your whole life?”He said, “Everything else is uncertain, only death is certain. And I want only to speak about something which is certain.”Once born, death is certain; everything else is uncertain. Why is death so certain? Nothing can be done about it. Science may help to prolong life, but death cannot be destroyed, because it is implied in the very phenomenon of birth; it has happened already. Death is one pole of the same phenomenon of which birth is the beginning, the other pole.It is just like a magnet: on a magnet you have two poles – the positive and the negative. You can cut off the negative pole, you can cut the magnet in half, but immediately the negative pole will appear on the place where you have cut. Now there are two magnets, and each magnet will have two poles. Before there was one magnet and it had two poles, negative and positive. Now you have cut it into two pieces. The one which has the positive pole will immediately create the negative, and the one which has the negative pole will immediately create the positive. You can go on cutting the magnet, but howsoever many fragments you cut, each fragment will have two poles – because a magnet cannot exist with one pole, it is impossible.Life has two poles: birth is the positive pole, death is the negative. You cannot destroy, you can at the most prolong. You can at the most make a bigger magnet, but the other pole will be there. You can cut it and make a small magnet, but the other pole will be there. This polarity is absolute. So whatsoever science thinks or imagines, it can never happen. Death cannot be destroyed; through science, remember, it is impossible to destroy death.Once born you have to die. But right now, behind this ego, the unborn is flowing. If you can look and see and feel the unborn, the fear of death disappears – and there is no other way to destroy the fear.Death is there and you are going to die, you cannot be immortal as an ego. But if you look deep, and if you can find the depth of your ego where ego is no more, if you can see the ocean beyond the wave, you are already immortal. But that one which is hidden behind was never born and it will never die. Unless you come to know something which is not born, you cannot become deathless.See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn, still, imperishable, infinite, immutable and conscious; so seeing live in peace and bliss.Once you can see that, bliss is just the by-product, peace simply happens. And it cannot happen before. Death is there – how can you be at peace? Death is there – how can you be at home? Death is there – how can you rest? Death will create tensions, anguish, worries. Death is there constantly hammering on your head – how can you be silent? And how can you love this existence? And how can you feel grateful to the divine? Impossible! Death is there. You can forget it for moments, but it is hidden; it is always there behind the mind. And whatsoever you do, knowingly or unknowingly, the phenomenon of death influences you. It is always there just like a shadow, it darkens your life.People come to me and they say, “We are sad, depressed, and we don’t know what the cause is. There is no visible cause for our being sad and depressed. We have everything that life can give, still we are sad and depressed.”They will remain sad and depressed. They may not know what the cause is; the cause is there – the death always around you, around the corner, waiting for you. And wherever you are moving, you are moving to the death; whatsoever you do, every act, leads you to the death.I have heard one Sufi tale. Once it happened that one king had a dream. In the night when he was fast asleep he dreamed he saw a shadow, a very dark, dangerous looking, ferocious shadow, standing just behind him. He asked, “Who are you?”The shadow said, “I am your death, and before the sun sets tomorrow, I am coming to meet you. I have come just to inform you.”The king wanted to ask, “Is there any way to escape from you?” but he became so afraid that he was awakened. He couldn’t ask, and the dream disappeared. So in the middle of the night he gathered all his wise men and he said, “There is no time, so you decide immediately what this dream means. What does this symbol mean? Interpret it.”All the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers of his day were called immediately to interpret the dream. They came with their big scriptures, books and charts, and the king became afraid. He said, “Don’t waste time! You have to decide immediately!”They said, “It is a very intricate thing, very complex, and it has never happened before so there is no precedent. We cannot decide immediately, it has to be analyzed and it will take time.”But the king prayed to them, “Do it as soon as possible, because I have to decide and do something. The sun is just going to rise, and once the sun has risen it has already set – then there is no time. The sun will move and set, and within twelve hours everything will be finished!”They started discussing, and there was much discussion – as it always happens with persons whose minds are filled with knowledge. Everyone was of a different opinion and the king was still more confused.The king had one old servant. The old servant came near to him and whispered in the king’s ear, “Don’t wait. I know these people. Even if you have one hundred years to live, they will not come to any conclusion – they have never come to a conclusion. For centuries they have been discussing; conclusion is not their goal at all, discussion is their interest. These are philosophers. For thousands of years they have been discussing and have reached no conclusion – philosophy has no conclusion. And every answer that has been given by these fellows creates one hundred questions, so simply don’t wait for them.”The king said, “Then what am I supposed to do?”The old man said, “I am a common man, not a learned man, and as far as I can see you should do a commonsense thing: you take your fastest horse and escape from this palace, this palace is dangerous. At least this much is certain – that you should not be here at that moment when death comes. Go as far away as possible.”It was worth considering. The king said, “Okay. There is no other possibility, because these fellows are confusing me even more. So let them discuss and let them decide, and I will escape.”When you have fear, escape seems to be the only door. So he took his fastest horse, a wonderful horse, and he escaped from the palace. When the sun was rising he was out of the town, when the sun was setting he was hundreds of miles away. And when the sun was just going to set he reached a big tree. He thought, “This will be a good place for the night.” He came down from his horse and he thanked the horse, saying, “You are just wonderful. You are the only friend who helped me in such a great difficulty. When scholars were of no use, you helped me. At least you have brought me so far away.”While he was saying this and patting the horse, suddenly he saw the same shadow behind him. He trembled and he said, “What! You have come?”The shadow said, “Yes, I was waiting under this tree for you the whole day. And I was afraid whether your horse would come or not – the place is so far away from your palace. Let me thank your horse, he is really wonderful.”Whatsoever you do, and wherever you escape, you cannot escape death; wherever you reach, death will be waiting for you there. If you are rich you can have a fast horse; if you are poor you will have to walk, but you will reach – you will reach anyway.Fear is there around the heart, the heart is in the grip of the fear of death. And it spoils everything. You cannot really love. When you are in love, death is there. And love is so deathlike that lovers always become conscious of death. If you have loved anyone you will be aware of it. You may not have noticed, but whenever you love someone the lover is bound to ask, “Will you love me forever?” – the fear of death. “Will you always be with me?” – the fear of death. When you are deep in love you become more aware, because deep in love you are near the heart, and near the heart is the shadow of death. Every beat of the heart is aware that the next heartbeat may not come. Wherever you move, you cannot feel blissful.Look at a beautiful flower. The beauty of it grips you, for a moment the mind stops; but suddenly you become aware that the flower is going to die by the evening, and just after the beauty of the flower comes the sadness of death. It is everywhere. You will find it moving with you, moment to moment. How can you be at ease? How can you be at peace? How can you live in bliss? Impossible!The sun god said, “But if you become aware of the one behind the many, if you become aware of the one in the many….” If this multiverse disappears and the universe appears, you will be at peace – because then you cannot die. The ocean cannot die, the life energy that is waving in you cannot die. The wave will disappear, but the energy will continue in other waves. That’s what reincarnation means.All the religions which have penetrated very deep – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, three religions which have penetrated very deep into the soul of man – they all believe in reincarnation. Mohammedanism, Christianity and Judaism don’t believe in reincarnation, but they never worked very hard; they never penetrated the heart of man very deeply. They remained social phenomena, they were more sociopolitical, less religious. The whole history of Islam is sociopolitical, and whenever anybody in the fold of Islam tried to penetrate deeply, he was immediately destroyed and killed.For example, al-Hillaj Mansoor: he was a man of the same caliber as Buddha, a man who penetrated deeply. When he came to feel that he is Brahman, he is God, he declared it. He said, “Ana’l haq – I am Brahman.”But this appeared blasphemy to Mohammedans, and they immediately killed him. They said, “This is impossible. At the most you can be a worshipper, but you cannot become God. This is too much, this cannot be tolerated – a human being declaring that he is God!”They killed Mansoor, they killed many Sufis. In Islam only Sufis penetrated deeply. Sufism is the central core of Islam, the essential Islam – but Islam killed them. So just to survive Sufis disappeared. They became a secret society and they compromised. As far as their outward behavior was concerned they compromised with Islam, deep down they remained a very revolutionary sect. But they were not accepted by the society at large; Islam remained a sociopolitical phenomenon.Christianity also remained a sociopolitical phenomenon. It created kingdoms. Even the pope himself became a king, and he still rules a small kingdom, the Vatican. Eckhart, Boehme and Blake were never accepted, the main current never accepted them – and many were destroyed and killed. Whosoever tried to assert the deepest phenomenon of one’s being, the absolute reality, he was never accepted in Christianity. That’s why they couldn’t penetrate to the phenomenon of reincarnation.Millions of lives you have had, and if you don’t stop in your stupidities you are going to have millions more. If you stop then waves disappear – you become the ocean. And the ocean is at peace, the ocean is always blissful. So it is not a question of how to put your mind at ease, how to relax the mind. No, that won’t do. It is a question of how to move deep, so deep that the mind is left behind and you reach the base of your being, the very substantial base of your being, and the mind becomes the surface, the waving surface. Only then is there peace and bliss.Said the sun god:Do not see anything except the self and the supreme. This state is known as yoga. Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.This is the state of knowing that waves are on the surface and you are the ocean, not the waves; the state of knowing that waves belong to you, but you are not the waves – they are just your clothing, just your body. You are the nameless, infinite ocean. The sun god said, “This is the state of yoga” – one of the most beautiful definitions of yoga.Knowing oneself as the ocean is yoga. You have met, the meeting has happened. You are no longer separate, you are no longer an island – you have become one with a vast continent of consciousness. This is yoga.The word yoga means meeting, joining together. The root from which the word yoga comes is the same as for the English word yoke: yoking together, joining together, becoming one. When you feel you are the Brahman, this is the state of yoga.Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.Then there is no need to escape to the forest. The Upanishads were never life-negative, remember this. There is a deep misunderstanding in the West, and it has been created by one of the most sincere men of this age, Albert Schweitzer. He himself was in a misunderstanding and was very confused about Eastern mysticism. He created the idea in the West that the Upanishads are life-negative, not life-affirmative. This is wrong, absolutely wrong. The Upanishads are life-affirming. They don’t say, “Move away from life”; they simply say, “Know the deepest life and then act.” They don’t say, “Stop waving”; they say, “Know that you are the ocean, then go on waving.” But then waving becomes a play.Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.These Upanishadic rishis were not lifelong brahmacharins, bachelors. They were not: they were married people, they had children, they had their families. They were not in any way negative; they had not renounced life, remember.The whole thing became confused because of Buddha and Mahavira – they both renounced life. That too is a way, that too is a way to reach the divine, but because of this the whole Hinduism was misunderstood. And they were so significant, they were the most important revolutionaries in India, that even Hindus started thinking in their way. Buddha and Mahavira impressed the country so much; and they renounced life, they were negative. The negative is also a path.There are two paths, negative and positive, and you have to choose. Either be totally positive, then you transcend; or be totally negative, then you transcend. Either trust life absolutely, then you go beyond life; or mistrust life absolutely, then also you go beyond life. These are the two paths, the two outgoing doors, the positive and negative – because these are the two poles. And remember, you can jump only from a pole, you cannot jump from the middle.If I am to go out of this room I will have to find a polarity. I cannot jump from the middle of this room, I cannot go out from the middle. There is no way from the middle, I have to find the periphery, and from the periphery I can go out.These are the two poles: life and death, negative and positive. Either affirm life, then you can jump out; or negate life, then you can jump out. If you affirm life then birth becomes the pole, if you deny life then death becomes the pole. Both Buddha and Mahavira were more interested in death than in birth. But Hinduism is not negative, and the Upanishads are not negative, they are affirmative.Schweitzer became confused because of Buddha and Mahavira. Not only Schweitzer, even Hindus have become confused, because Buddha’s and Mahavira’s impact was so deep, and they impressed the whole country so much, that even Hindus had to think about it. And Shankara, one of the greatest Hindus ever born, became almost a Buddhist in the Hindu fold.Shankara again impressed people very much. For these one thousand years he has been the soul of Hinduism – and he was just a Buddhist. Shankara’s enemies, Ramanuja, Nimbark and Vallabh, detected him. They said, “This man is not a Hindu at all; he just appears Hindu. He is a crypto-Buddhist, a hidden Buddhist.” And they were right.Hinduism is totally different from Jainism and Buddhism. The difference, the basic difference, is that Hinduism affirms life. The rishis were not unmarried men, they were householders. They had not renounced, they never renounced anything. You cannot conceive of it. The whole thing has become so distant now, you cannot conceive of these rishis. They were living in life, but living as the ocean, not as the waves. They accepted everything.Once it happened that King Janak declared that there was going to be a great debate, and whosoever won the debate would get a very big prize. The prize was a thousand beautiful cows with horns of gold, studded with diamonds. These one thousand cows were standing before the palace. All the scholars and pundits came, many people gathered in the hall. Whosoever won would take the cows.Then came one of the most prominent rishis of that day with his disciples from his gurukul, from his ashram. And remember, those ashrams were not for brahmacharins only, those ashrams were household affairs. The guru lived with his wife and children and his disciples, and his disciples were absorbed into his family. Yajnavalkya came with his disciples, and he said to them, “Take these cows. I will take care of the debate later on” – absolutely affirmative!These Upanishadic rishis lived life, but from a totally different standpoint, from a totally different center. They said, “Life is good, life is a blessing, and to allow the waves is a game, a beautiful game worth playing. And if God has given you the opportunity, play it to the full – but don’t get identified.”Remember, this is a game. Remember, the earth is nothing but a drama, a great drama, and you are nothing more than actors. Remain a witness within and go on acting. There is no need to escape from actions. Even to think in terms of escape shows that you are afraid, and fear cannot lead you anywhere, only love.And these rishis loved life. They loved everything that life can give; they loved all the blessings – and there are millions of blessings. They never said that life is dukkha, they never said that life is misery. They said that you can make life a misery, but life is not a misery. You can also make a bliss out of it – it is you, not life.Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.The mind of one who is thus rooted in yoga gradually withdraws from all desires, and the seeker feels blissful while engaging himself each day in meritorious acts. He has no interest whatsoever in the contrary efforts of the ignorant. He never betrays the secrets of one to another. He occupies himself solely with lofty deeds.The mind of one who is thus rooted in yoga gradually withdraws from all desires.Desires are not to be left; rather you have to be rooted in yoga, then you will withdraw by yourself and the happening will be spontaneous. There is no need to kill desires, there is no need to fight with desires; the only thing is to know your oceanic state, your Brahman state, the one, and then get rooted into it.The more you are rooted in it, the less and less desires will be there. But you have not renounced them; rather on the contrary, they have left you, because desires become uninterested in one who is rooted in himself. Desires leave him, because now they are not welcome guests. If they come he accepts them, if they come he is not going to destroy them and fight with them – but he is not interested. He has higher blessings with him now, the lower don’t attract him. If they come he accepts, if they don’t come he never thinks about them. By and by the life energy moves more and more within, withinwards; desires disappear.Remember this distinction: in Buddhism and Jainism, desires have to be left consciously, effort has to be made to leave them and when you leave them you will be rooted in yourself. In Hinduism it is just the contrary: get rooted in yourself and desires will leave you. Buddha is negative: leave the desires and you will be rooted in yourself. Hinduism is positive: be rooted in yourself and desires will leave you.It works both ways – it depends on you. If you are a negative type, a person to whom no comes easily, then follow the negative path. There are persons to whom no comes first, even if they want to say yes. If no is easy to you nothing is wrong in it; you are a negative type, that’s all. Follow the negative path, say no to life so that you can get rooted in yourself. But if you are a yes type, then no is not your path. Then say yes to life, move with life, get rooted in yourself, and by and by desires will disappear.And the seeker feels blissful while engaging himself each day in meritorious acts.Whatsoever such a person does is meritorious, it is punya, it is holy, it is sacred. Whatsoever is done by one who is rooted in himself becomes worship, it is meritorious, because now he engages in it just as a play, just as a life-game. He is aware that it is only overflowing energy that moves into acts; he is not interested in doing anything or reaching any goal. His action is not work, his action is play – then the seeker feels blissful.Whenever you are in play you feel blissful, and if your whole life becomes a play you cannot imagine how blissful you can become. Why do you feel blissful while you play? Even when playing cards you become blissful, the misery disappears. Why? When playing a game – football or hockey or anything – why do you become so blissful? Why do you feel so much joy bubbling in you? What happens?And side by side with you there may be a professional player; he is not happy. He is not happy because he is just doing work. If you are paid for your card playing you will not be happy, because then you are not interested in the game, you are interested in the salary, and it has become a boredom. You have to do it to get the salary. Then the end is not in it, it is only a means.This is the difference between work and play: work means the end is not in it, and you are interested in the end. If you can reach the end without this work, you would like to leave it. You have to carry it as a burden, it is a compulsion on you. Somehow you have to finish it and reach the goal.Play is totally different; the end is in it, it is intrinsic. There is no goal, you are not going anywhere. You are enjoying the very thing. Think about it. A professional player becomes sad. It is something to be carried out, to be finished soon – the sooner the better.The Upanishadic rishi is just the opposite. Even in profession he is a player; even in profession, in business, in whatsoever he is doing, in whatsoever life has created for him to do, he is a player, he goes on playing. He has no business to do, that’s why he is never busy. There is nothing to be done, there is no hurry. If everything is left unfinished there is no worry because it is okay, it was just a play, it ended in the middle – really there was no end to be achieved. This is the attitude of the positive path.The seeker feels blissful while engaging himself each day in meritorious acts…. He performs only such gentle acts as do not disturb others.When you are playing there is no need to hurt others, but when you are busy with a business you don’t care for others. Rather, you will use whatsoever means are to be used, even if the others are to be destroyed, because it is not a play, it is a serious business. Whosoever comes in your way has to be destroyed and thrown out of the way. In business you are violent, and a mind which is businesslike can never be nonviolent.That’s why I go on saying that Gandhi cannot be nonviolent – he’s so businesslike. Even his nonviolence is a business, he is so serious about it. He is not in a play, he is deadly serious. That’s why he appealed to us so much: we are all businessmen and he was the supreme, the top. He appealed to us, he had appeal for everybody all over the earth, East or West. He appealed deeply, he appealed to the business mind. He was mathematical, calculating, serious with every penny – not in any way in a play.He was not a Hindu, he could not be. He was ninety percent a Jaina and ten percent a Christian – negative, businesslike, serious. He was not like Krishna – playful, enjoying, nonserious. Whatsoever happens Krishna is not worried. He is not going to force anything on the course of life. Wherever life leads is the goal – wherever. If life leads to death in the middle of a stream, that is the goal – nowhere to reach.A nonachieving mind is playful. An achieving mind, always thinking of achieving something, whether in this world or the other, is a business mind.He performs only such gentle acts as do not disturb others.When you are playing there is no need to disturb anybody. When you are playful you are nonviolent.He fears sin, and does not crave any self-indulgence.But the concept of sin in Hinduism is totally different from that of Christianity. Remember, the word pap, sin, has a different connotation. The Upanishads say that which is against the law is sin, just a natural phenomenon. Christianity says that which is disobedience to God is sin. This is absolutely different: disobedience to God.In Christianity God is something like an aristocrat, something like a dictator; we can paint him just like Hitler or Mussolini. You disobey, and you will suffer and he will punish you. And he is very ferocious in punishment. For small sins, sometimes even when you are innocent, you will be thrown into hell. And Christianity says that it is forever and forever, the hell is eternal. That doesn’t seem to be justified. A small sin, falling in love with a woman, and you will suffer forever and forever.And what did Adam do? – just a small disobedience; something that God prohibited. God said, “You are not to eat the fruit of this tree, the tree of knowledge. You can eat all the fruits available in this garden of Eden, but don’t come near this tree.”And it is human to be attracted to something which is prohibited. Adam is so human and lovely, he must have become curious. If he was absolutely stupid, only then could he have followed. Even a little intelligence will say that something is there, otherwise why should God prohibit? If God had prohibited him from eating the snake, then Adam would have eaten the snake and been finished with the Devil. But he prohibited the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and then Adam was expelled from Eden because he disobeyed.Christianity therefore is conformist; revolutionaries cannot be allowed. Adam was the first revolutionary. And why should God feel so offended for such a small thing? The Christian God cannot be playful. He is serious and ferocious, and he will take revenge. Hinduism cannot conceive of that: God taking revenge on innocent Adam who was just being curious. There was nothing else, he was just curious to know. And the Devil was able to persuade him. The Devil said, “God has prohibited you, because if you eat this fruit you will become God-like, and he is afraid and jealous.”This is the sin in Christianity – disobedience. In Hinduism there is no question of disobedience or obedience. It is a simple natural law; just as water flows downwards, if you follow natural laws you will be happy. There is no one to decide it, it is a simple happening – if you follow natural laws you will be happy. If you don’t follow natural laws, you go against them, you will be unhappy. Nobody is taking any revenge, and you are not going to be thrown into eternal hell. If you don’t follow, for the time being you will suffer. Immediately you come back to the law the suffering stops.A simple thing: if you put your hand in the fire you will be burned. No God is deciding, “I prohibit you. Don’t put your hand in the fire, otherwise I will take revenge.” Nobody is there, it is just the way fire behaves. You have to know that if you put your hand in you will suffer. Don’t put the hand in and you don’t suffer. And then you can use fire to heat the room, to cook food, and the fire be-comes your help – you can use it. Natural laws can be used if you know them well, flow with them; if you go against you suffer.Sin is going against a natural law, not against any God. No one is giving you suffering, you are choosing it by moving wrongly. And no one is going to give you bliss, you will choose it by moving rightly. So it is not a question of good and bad, it is a question of right and wrong.He utters loving and affectionate words. He lives in the company of saints and studies the scriptures. With complete unity of mind, speech and action, he follows them. Seeking to cross the ocean that is the world, he cultivates the above-mentioned ideas. And he is called a beginner, one performing his preliminaries. This is called the first stage.Remember, all this is just the beginning, just the first step of creating the situation. This is not the end – just the preliminary, just the first step.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-05/

Osho,Need one be absolutely sure about a guru to become his disciple?You can never be absolutely sure about a guru, and that is not needed. What is needed is that you should be absolutely sure about yourself. How can you be sure about a master? You exist on two different levels, two different states of mind. Whatsoever you can see, whatsoever you can understand, whatsoever you can interpret, will not be of much use – and there is more possibility of your going wrong than right. But there is no need, so don’t be worried about it.You have to be sure about yourself, about your search, and if you are sure about yourself then you can devote yourself to a master totally. Remember, the totality of surrender is not going to come from the surety about the master; it is going to come from your own surety, your own totalness. The master is bound to remain paradoxical for you unless you yourself become enlightened, because only the same can understand the same.Only when you have become a buddha will you be able to understand Buddha – never before. When you have become a christ, when Christ is known to you, you can understand; never before. Christ is bound to remain a mystery, and a mystery means paradox. Christ will appear to you as irrational, not because he is irrational but because he is supra-rational, he is beyond reason – and you don’t know anything about beyond reason. At the most you can think he is below reason, he is not rational. And the ways of a master are so secret that sometimes he will create a situation in which he will not allow you to be sure about himself, because if you can be absolutely sure about the master then your surrender is meaningless. Then what is the meaning of it? When you are absolutely sure of the master then it is a bargain, then you cannot do anything else other than surrender. When you are uncertain, then surrender is a device; in your uncertainty, hesitation, still you decide. That decision changes you.The more mysterious a master, the more is the possibility of transformation through surrender. If the master is known to you, just as two plus two makes four, then there is no mystery. Sufi masters particularly will create rumors about themselves, so the new ones who come to them can only enter not because they are sure about the master, but because they are sure about their search – and they are ready to take a risk. Why do you want to be sure about the master? – because you don’t want to take the risk. Your mind is a business mind. When a master is something mysterious….One old woman came from England to see Gurdjieff. She had heard Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s disciple, and Ouspensky was a mathematician, a logician. He was not a master, he was not enlightened, but he was a perfect rationalist and he could explain Gurdjieff better than Gurdjieff himself. Gurdjieff would have remained unknown to the world if there had been no Ouspensky. He was nowhere near Gurdjieff, but he could think in a logical way, express in a logical way. He was professionally a mathematician. Many people were attracted to Ouspensky, and when they were attracted to Ouspensky they would start thinking about going to Gurdjieff – and then they would return frustrated, disappointed.One old woman became very much impressed by Ouspensky, and then she went to see Gurdjieff. Within just a week she was back, and she told Ouspensky, “I can feel that Gurdjieff is great, but I am not certain whether he is good or bad, whether he is evil, devilish, or a saint. I am not certain about that. He is great – that much is certain. But he may be a great devil, or a great saint – that is not certain.” And Gurdjieff behaved in such a way that he would create this impression.Alan Watts has written about Gurdjieff and has called him a rascal saint – because sometimes he would behave like a rascal, but it was all acting and was done knowingly to avoid all those who would take unnecessary time and energy. It was done to send back those who could only work when they were certain. Only those would be allowed who could work even when they were not certain about the master, but who were certain about themselves.And to surrender to a Gurdjieff will transform you more than surrendering to Ramana Maharshi, because Ramana Maharshi is so saintly, so simple, that surrender doesn’t mean anything. You cannot do otherwise. He is so open – just like a small child – so pure, that surrender will happen. But that surrender is happening because of Ramana Maharshi, not because of you. It is nothing as far as you are concerned. If surrender happens with Gurdjieff, then it has happened because of you, because Gurdjieff is in no way going to support it. Rather, he will create all types of hindrances. If still you surrender, that transforms you. So there is no need to be absolutely sure about him – and that is impossible – but you have to be sure about yourself.Just today one friend came to me and said about himself, “I am just fifty-fifty: fifty percent with you and fifty percent with Subud” – a very good Indonesian technique of meditation. So, “I am fifty-fifty, divided.”I asked him, “What do you mean by fifty-fifty?” and told him one anecdote.It happened once that Mulla Nasruddin owned a hotel. Then he was arrested and brought to the court of the town, because he was caught mixing horsemeat in chicken cutlets. But he confessed and he said, “I have been committing this crime,” and he pleaded guilty.The magistrate asked, “Nasruddin, will you tell me what the proportion was? How much horsemeat were you mixing into how many chicken cutlets?”Nasruddin said, very truthfully, “Fifty-fifty.”But the magistrate was not convinced so he asked, “What do you mean by fifty-fifty, Nasruddin?”Nasruddin said, “It is so obvious. Fifty-fifty means fifty-fifty – one horse to one chicken.”So it is not certain. What do you mean by fifty-fifty? Your mind is confusion, but division will not help, a divided mind will not be of much help. Go to Subud or come to me, but be a hundred percent. And that hundred percentness is needed about you – not about me, or about Bapak Subud, or about anybody else. You must be a hundred percent here, then work becomes possible.What to do? Your mind is cunning – clever, you call it, but it is cunning. It calculates, it cannot take a risk. That’s why you have been wandering for so many lives. You were near Buddha, you were near Jesus, you have seen Mohammed – you have seen many masters, but you bypass them just because of your cleverness. Your cleverness is your stupidity. Even with a Buddha you calculate – and what can you calculate? Life is such a mystery; it cannot be explained in terms of logic. And a person like Buddha is so mysterious that whatsoever you come to conclude will be wrong, and by the time you have concluded Buddha will have changed. By the time you have come to a decision, Buddha is not the same – because Buddha is a river, a riverlike phenomenon, flowing. Conclusion will take time, and you will miss.Religion is for those who are like gamblers, who can take risks. If you are a gambler then something can happen, but if you are a businessman then nothing is possible. Be certain about your search. If you are really in search, then don’t be afraid. And I say again: even with a master who is false, pseudo, you are not going to lose anything.It happened that one of the Tibetan mystics, Marpa, was in search of a master. He reached a master who was not really a master, who was a pseudo-teacher, who was not himself enlightened. Marpa asked him, “What am I supposed to do?”The pseudo-master said, “You will have to surrender to me. Surrender totally.”Marpa said, “Surrendered! I am surrendered. Now what is to be done?”Other disciples became jealous, because this Marpa seemed to be a dangerous man: immediately, without arguing, without discussing, he said, “I have surrendered. Now tell me, what is to be done?” He would become the leader, he would become the chief disciple – he had already become it. He had just arrived, and they had been serving the master for many years, and he had superseded them.They became jealous, and they said to the master, “This is not easy; surrender is such a difficult thing. For many years we have been working, and yet we have not surrendered totally. This man seems to be deceiving. So we must examine whether the surrender is true or not.”The master asked, “How can it be examined and tested?”So they said, “Tell him to jump from this hill into the valley. If he jumps, then he is surrendered. If he doesn’t jump, then he is deceiving.” In both ways they were thinking that they were going to be the winners. If he jumped he would be dead; if he didn’t jump he would be thrown out of the ashram.But they didn’t know Marpa – he simply jumped. And they were wonderstruck. He jumped – and then he was sitting in the valley! So when they reached him they could not believe it; even the master could not believe that this could happen. So he thought, “It must have been just an accident that he is saved.”He asked Marpa, “How did it happen?”He said, “I don’t know. You must know; I have surrendered to you. Now it is up to you. I don’t know what has happened – but a miracle has happened. You have done this!”The master knew well that he had not done anything – he did not know any a b c – this must have been by accident. So another situation had to be created.Then they saw a house that was on fire, so they said, “Enter!” Marpa entered immediately. The whole house burned, and they could not know what had happened until the fire disappeared.Then they went inside. All over the place everything was burned, everything was destroyed and Marpa was sitting in meditation, not even perspiring. So the master asked, “Marpa, how did you do it again?”He said, “I don’t know, master. It is you. And my trust is growing; you are a miracle!”But it is possible that even an accident can happen a second time, improbabilities are also possible. So they thought, “It has to be tried again, a third time.” So they told Marpa to walk on a river. The river was in flood and they said, “Walk on water!” And Marpa walked.When Marpa was walking and was just in midstream, the master thought, “It seems as if I am doing something, because how can this happen? It must be my power.” He thought, “If just by surrendering to me Marpa can walk on water, why cannot I walk?” So he started walking – and he was drowned.No one has ever heard about what happened to that master, but Marpa became enlightened.So it is not a question of the master, it is a question of your totality. Even with a pseudo-master you can become enlightened. And the reverse is also true: even with an enlightened master you may remain ignorant. Remember, my emphasis is on you. That’s why I never say: Don’t go to Sai Baba, or: Don’t go to Bapak Subud. That is immaterial. Go anywhere. Go totally.The second question:Osho,You often tell stories of persons who went into aloneness in some forest and who became silent and peaceful there. But aloneness seems to make most modern persons anxious and depressed, and it creates a yearning for human companionship. Instead of the patterned mind dropping, we become more acutely aware of it and preoccupied with it. How to overcome this? How can we learn to enjoy long periods of aloneness, and drop the old mind in it?This is nothing new for the modern mind; this has been always so. Mind cannot exist in aloneness; to be alone means mind will have to commit suicide. Mind becomes anxious – it is a murder. Whenever you go alone, the mind cannot exist in that aloneness.Mind can exist only in the society; mind is a social phenomenon, others are needed for it. You cannot be angry when alone, or if you become angry you will feel very foolish; you cannot be sad when alone, because there is no excuse; you cannot be violent when alone, because the other is needed; you cannot talk, you cannot go on chattering. You cannot use the mind, the mind cannot function – and when mind cannot function it becomes anxious, worried. It needs functioning, it needs someone to communicate to.Mind is a social phenomenon, a societal byproduct. And it has always been so. Even when Svetaketu went into the forest, he was anxious, he was worried, he was depressed in the beginning. The difference is not in the mind; the difference is in patience. The mind remains the same, modern or old, but in the old days people were more patient, they could wait. You are not patient –that is the problem. They were not time conscious and you are time conscious.In the old days in the ancient world, particularly in the East, there was no time consciousness. That’s why watches and clocks were not invented in the East. There was more possibility for their invention in China than in India, because they had done many things and it was possible to invent clocks, to measure time, but they were not interested in time. The modern mind is too interested in time. Why? This is a part of the Christian influence on the world. With Christianity and Islam time consciousness entered into the world. There are reasons for it.In the East it has been believed always that life goes on forever and ever, it is eternal, it is timeless – so there is no hurry; you will be again and again. Millions of times you were here and millions of times you will be again here; there is no hurry. This life is not the last nor the first, it is a long procession, and you are al-ways in the middle – there is no beginning and no end. So there can be no hurry about time; enough time, more than enough, is available.With Christianity there is only one life – this is the first and the last. Once you die you don’t have any time any more; so you have a life span of seventy years at the most. There is so much to do, and so little time with you. That’s why in the West there is so much hurry; everyone is running because life is going. Every moment life is becoming less and less. Time is passing, you are dying, and you have so many desires to fulfill and no time to fulfill them, so anxiety is created.In the East it was totally different. It is said in one of the Tibetan scriptures that even if you have to go in a hurry, go slowly. Even if you have to go in a hurry, go slowly. It is said that if you run you will never reach; if you sit you can reach, but if you run you will miss. An eternal procession, many lives, millions of lives, enough time – patience was possible.In the West only one life, and every moment life changing into death; nothing is fulfilled, no desire completed, everything incomplete – how can you be patient? How can you wait? Waiting has become impossible. With the idea of one life, and with another idea of linear time, Christianity has created anxiety in the mind; and now Christianity has become a global influence.Christianity says that time is not moving in a circle, it is moving in a straight line. Nothing is going to be repeated again, so everything is unique. Every event is once and for all, it cannot be repeated. It is not a circle; it is not like a wheel of a cart moving where every spoke will come again, where again and again the same spoke will be repeated.In the East time is a circular concept, just like seasons moving in a circle. The summer comes and then the summer will come again, and it has been so always and it will be so always. And the Eastern concept is nearer to truth than the Western, because every movement is in a circle. The earth moves in a circle, the sun moves in a circle, the stars move in a circle, the life moves in a circle – every movement is circular. So time cannot be an exception; if time moves at all, it moves in a circle. The linear concept of time is absolutely wrong.That’s why in the East we were never interested in history. We have been interested in myth, but never in history. The West introduced history into the world. That’s why Jesus became the center of history, the beginning of the calendar. We go on measuring time with “before Christ,” “after Christ.” Christ became the center of all history, the first historic person.Buddha is not historic, Krishna is not at all; you can never be certain whether really Krishna was ever born or not, whether the whole thing was just a story or a history. But the East was never worried about it. They say everything is a story, and it has been told many times and will be told again and again. There is no need to be concerned with facts, because facts are repetitive. It is better to be concerned with the theme, not with the facts – so you may not be able to understand many things.It is said that before Rama was born, one of the avatars of India, Valmiki, wrote his story – before he was born! It is impossible. How can you write the history when the man is not yet born? But Valmiki wrote first, and then Rama had to follow his story, whatsoever he had said. How did it happen? This is mysterious, but not mysterious at all if you look at the Eastern concept of time.Valmiki says, “I know Rama, because in many ages he has been born before – I know the very theme. So I create the story, because I know the theme, I know the essential. The nonessential I will put in the story.”And Rama must have thought, “Why contradict Valmiki? Why contradict this old man? Follow it.” And he followed.The East lives in myth; myth means a repetitive theme, the essential is always there. In the West myth is meaningless. If you can prove that something is a myth it becomes meaningless. You have to prove that it is history, it has happened in time; you have to be exact about it.This linear concept of nonrepetitive life creates anxiety, so when you go into silence, alone, you become worried. One thing is: time is wasted. You are not doing anything, you are just sitting. Why are you wasting your life? And this time cannot be regained, because they go on teaching in the West: Time is wealth. It is absolutely wrong, because wealth is created by scarcity, and time is not scarce. The whole economics depends on scarcity: if something is scarce it becomes valuable. Time is not scarce, it is there always. You cannot finish it; it will always be there – so time cannot be economic. It is not scarce; it cannot be wealth.But we go on teaching, “Time is wealth – don’t waste it. Once wasted it never comes again.” So if you go into aloneness and then you sit there, you cannot sit there for three years, you cannot sit there for three months, even three days are too much – you have wasted three days.And what are you doing? The second problem arises – because in the West being is not very valuable, doing is valuable. They ask, “What have you done?” – because the time has to be used in doing something. They say in the West that a vacant mind is the devil’s workshop. And you know it, in the mind you also know it, so when you are sitting alone you become afraid. Wasting time, not doing anything, you go on questioning yourself, “What are you doing here? Just sitting? Wasting?” – as if just being is a wastage! You have to do something to prove that you have utilized your time. This is the difference.In the old ancient days, in the East particularly, just to be was enough; there was no need to prove anything else. No one was going to ask, “What have you done?” Your being was enough and accepted. If you were silent, peaceful, blissful, it was okay. That’s why in the East we never demanded from sannyasins that they should work – no, no need. And we always thought that sannyasins, those who had left all working, were better than those who were occupied in work.This cannot be done in the West. If you are not working you are a vagabond, a bum. Hippies are a very new phenomenon. The East has always been hippie-oriented. We have created the greatest hippies of the world – a Buddha, a Mahavira: not doing anything, just sitting and meditating, enjoying their being, just being blissful as they are, not doing anything. But we respected them – they were the supreme, the highest, the most respectable. Buddha was begging, but even kings had to come to bow to his feet.Once it happened that Buddha was passing through a village, and the chief minister of the king of that locality told the king, “Buddha is coming, so we will have to go to receive him and touch his feet and pay our respects.”The king said, “But is it necessary for a beggar? He is just a beggar, and I am a great king. Why should I go and respect him and bow down to him? If he wants to see me, he can come and take an appointment with me.”The old chief minister, who was a very wise man, immediately gave in his resignation. He said, “If this is the case then I cannot remain here for a single moment.”The king was worried, because this man was much too valuable to be lost, so he said, “But why?”The old man said, “This is absolutely wrong. You may be a great king, you may become the emperor of the whole earth, but you cannot become greater than Buddha. He has left all kingdoms, and you are still obsessed with wealth, riches, prestige, power. He has left all of them, he has nothing, and only a person who has nothing is the highest, because he doesn’t desire. You will have to go and respect him, otherwise take my resignation. I cannot remain in this unholy palace for a single moment.” The king had to go.The East was totally different; a different milieu was there. Being was respect-ed. No one was going to ask, “What have you done?” Everyone was just asking, “What are you?” Enough! If you were silent, peaceful, loving; if compassion was there; if you had flowered – enough! Then it was society’s duty to help and serve you. No one would say you should work, or you should create something, you should be creative. In the East they thought that to be oneself is the highest creativity, and the presence of such a man was valuable. He could go into silence for years.Mahavira was in silence for twelve years. He would not speak, he would not go into villages, he would not see anybody. And when he started speaking, somebody asked him, “Why were you not speaking before?”He said, “Speech becomes valuable only when you have attained silence, otherwise it is futile – not only futile, dangerous also, because you are throwing rubbish into others’ heads. So this was my effort: that I would speak only when talking had completely stopped inside. When the inner talk had disappeared, only then would I speak. Then it is not a disease.”And they could wait, because the East believed in reincarnation. They could wait. There are stories that a disciple would come to the master and wait for thirty years, would not ask anything but just wait for the master to ask, “For what have you come?” Thirty years is too much – one life completely wasted – but waiting for thirty years will do the work.People from the West come to me and they say, “This very evening we are leaving, so give us some key. How can we become silent? But we don’t have any time to stay – we must go.” They are thinking in terms with which they have become acquainted – instant coffee – so they think there must be some instant meditation, a key I can hand over to them and it is finished. No, there is no key. It is a long effort, it is a deep patience. And the more you are in a hurry, the longer it will take. So remember this: if you are not in any hurry it may happen this very moment. When you are not in a hurry the quality of mind is there, silence is there.I will tell you one story. Once it happened that two monks were traveling. They crossed a river in a boat, and the ferryman said to them, “Where are you going? If you are going to the city beyond this valley, go slowly.”But the old monk said, “If we go slowly we will never reach, because we have heard that the gates of that city are closed after sunset, and we have just one or two hours at the most, and it is a very long distance. If we go slowly we will never reach, and we will have to wait outside the city. And the outside of the city is dangerous – wild animals and everything – so we will have to make haste.”The ferryman said, “Okay, but this is my experience: those who go slowly, reach.”The other monk listened to it. He was a young man and he thought, “I don’t know this part of the country, and this ferryman may be right, so it is better to follow his advice.” So he walked slowly, leisurely, as if not going anywhere, not in a hurry, just for a walk.The old man hurried, started running. He had many scriptures on his back. Then he fell down: tired, carrying weight, old, and in such a hurry, so tense, he fell down. The man who was not in a hurry simply walked and reached.The ferryman was coming and he came near the old man. He was lying by the side of the road; his leg was broken and blood was oozing out. The ferryman said, “I told you that this has been always so: those who walk slowly reach, those who are in a hurry always manage to stumble somewhere or other. These parts are dangerous. The road is rough and you are an old man. And I had advised you, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”This is one of the Korean Zen stories, and this is how it is in life. Go slowly, patiently, not in a hurry, because the goal is not somewhere else – it is within you. When you are not in a hurry you will feel it; when you are in a hurry you cannot feel it because you are so tense. If you are not going anywhere at all, then you can feel it more immediately.In Japan meditation is called zazen. Zazen means simply sitting and not doing anything. So Zen priests, monks, have to sit for six hours a day or even more; the master never gives them anything to do, they have just to sit. They have trained themselves for just sitting, not asking for anything to do, not even a mantra – just sitting.It is very arduous. It looks easy but is very arduous, because the mind asks for some work, something to be done. And the mind goes on saying, “Why? Why waste time? Why just go on sitting? What is going to happen by just sitting?” But for three years, or even more, the seeker sits. Then, by and by, the mind drops asking. It is useless now, you don’t listen to it. It has got fed up with you, so the mind stops asking. By and by, when the mind is not asking, you start realizing a new life force within you which was always there but you were so occupied you couldn’t listen to it, you couldn’t feel it. Unoccupied, you start feeling it.Mind has always been creating problems and loneliness. Go in aloneness at least for three months, and decide beforehand that whatsoever happens you are not going to listen to the mind. Decide beforehand that you are ready to waste three months, so there is no need to think again and again that you are wasting time. You have decided that you are going to waste three months, and you are not going to do anything – you will simply sit and wait. A miracle is possible.Just within these three months, some day suddenly you will become aware of your being. When there is no doing you become aware of being. When there is too much doing you go on forgetting the being which is hidden behind.The third question:Osho,I feel very devoted to you, and since being with you my life has transformed very much. In my heart I feel you are my master. For the first time I feel a contentment with my outer life and my relationships with others, and there is no desire for anything external. But an inner yearning for the ever elusive enlightenment and bliss remains, and I cannot do anything to stop that desire. Is this a barrier? Isn't it likely to remain until the reality is realized, however?Yes, it is a barrier, because there is no question of any desire, whether for external things or for internal things. Desire is the same, there is no distinction, so don’t divide desire, and don’t say, “No more are worldly desires within me, but the otherworldly desire is there.” The otherworldly desire is as worldly as any worldly desire – desire is worldly. So don’t divide, don’t play tricks.Objects of desire are not significant; desiring is significant. You can desire wealth, you can desire God – desiring remains the same, only the object has changed. You can desire a palace here, you can desire a palace in paradise – objects have changed, but the desire remains the same. You can desire anything whatsoever, desire will be the same. Remember this.And with desire you cannot attain realization. Desire has to be dropped. So what to do? Really there is nothing to do. You have to realize more and more that your desire creates suffering. Now this new desire is creating suffering. Before there were other desires; you have left those desires, so you feel contentment, you feel peaceful with life. Your relationships have become more loving because desires have disappeared from that field.Now be aware: when there were desires in that field you were not content. You were frustrated, you were filled with jealousy, anger, hatred; relationship was difficult, it was suffering and misery. Now desire has left that field; that field has become peaceful. So become aware that now you are creating a new suffering: when will this enlightenment happen? And unless it happens you cannot be content. How can you be content unless you become a buddha? So, “When will I become a buddha?”One Buddhist, Nagarjuna, is reported to have said that the desire to become a buddha is the greatest barrier to becoming a buddha – because unless you stop desiring to become a buddha you will not come to know that you are already a buddha. This desiring dissolves and your buddhahood appears; it is there. So now feel this new misery which is coming into being with the new desire.Every desire brings misery. There is nothing to be done –simply become aware that every desire brings misery. If you realize this, desires will disappear; internal or external, no desires are needed. When there is no desire you have achieved. Then this very moment is ecstasy; then right here and now you have become the goal. There can be no misery then. But don’t make this distinction. Mind is so cunning, it goes on deceiving you. It says, “Okay, if worldly desires create misery, leave them. I will be content with nonworldly desires.” So the object changes, but the desiring remains the same.I will tell you one anecdote. I have heard, it happened in New Delhi that a netaji, a great political leader, dragged Mulla Nasruddin to the court. That great leader, the netaji, said to the court, “This man, Mulla Nasruddin, has insulted me in public. He has called me a donkey.”That political leader was a powerful man. The magistrate said to Nasruddin, “This is not good. You will have to be punished.”Nasruddin said, “I was not aware that it is an offense to call a leader a donkey. I was not aware. So forgive me, and I give you my promise that I will never do it again.” So he was forgiven, and even the political leader was satisfied.Then Nasruddin asked the magistrate, “But if I call a donkey netaji, leader, have you any objection?”The magistrate laughed and he said, “There is no objection – unless the donkey comes to the court, and I hope no donkey will come. If you feel good, and if you like it, you can call any donkey netaji. We don’t have any objection to it.”Mulla Nasruddin turned immediately towards the netaji and said, “Netaji, how are you?”The mind remains the same. It goes on changing objects, but the inner quality persists. So whether you call a leader a donkey, or you call a donkey a leader, it makes no difference – you will have to stop calling.So a desire for the outer, or a desire for the inner, is just a change of the object – the mind remains the same. Drop it. As you have dropped the outer desire, you can drop the inner also. And you know now that just by dropping the outer you are feeling a deep contentment with yourself. So why carry this new desire? Drop it also.When you drop all desire, you have become paradise itself. Then you are the heaven, you are the moksha. With desires you are destroying it; with desires you are so occupied you cannot be in contact with your own deepest center, your own deepest depth.The last question:Osho,This morning you said that the Upanishadic sages had a positive approach towards life, and that Buddha and Mahavira had a negative approach towards life. Which is Your approach – affirmation or negation of life? Which approach would You have Your disciples take?I have got no approach – or, both are mine. I don’t divide. To me, the positive can also lead to the same goal as the negative, so I don’t say that the positive is the only approach, and I don’t say that the negative is the only approach. Both are approaches, and both are as good as each other.My emphasis is not on the approach, my emphasis is on the disciple. So I don’t say that you should follow this or that wholesale. I would like you to decide whether you have a negative mind or a positive mind. If you have a positive mind then follow the positive approach; if you have a negative mind then follow the negative approach. And there are both types of people here.That’s why Hinduism cannot be a world religion, Buddhism cannot be a world religion. Up till now there exists no religion which can be a world religion, because every religion chooses one approach. Whatsoever I am saying can be a world-comprehensive thing, because I don’t choose any approach. All approaches lead to the same goal. The goal is important, and the disciple who is to travel is important – the path is irrelevant. And both types exist.Remember, there are males and females, and their number on the earth re-mains almost equal. This is a miracle: biologists cannot explain how it happens that man and woman remain in equal numbers on the earth. And if sometimes the balance is lost, immediately the balance is regained. For example, in a war the balance is lost because more men are killed than women. Immediately after the war more boys are born than girls. How this happens has been a mystery for biology – but the number of men and women remain equal.The mystery is because of the polarity: man is one pole of life and woman is the other pole of life. If a man is born, immediately a woman is born, because the other pole has to be there; without the other pole this magnet cannot exist. So whenever there are wars and more men are killed, immediately more men will be born. Ordinarily also, more boys are born than girls. The proportion is this: one hundred and fifteen boys are born to one hundred girls, because boys are weaker than girls, and by the time they are sexually mature fifteen boys will have died. So by the age of sexual maturity the number will be equal – fifteen boys will have died.Girls don’t die so easily, they are stronger. And it is a fallacy created by men, male chauvinists, that man is the stronger sex. This is a fallacy, woman is the stronger sex. In every way she is stronger. She is ill less than man, she goes mad less than man, she lives longer than man. The average life-expectancy of women all over the world, in every country, is five years more than men. If men live to be seventy-five, women are going to live to be eighty. And they die less in childhood – fifteen percent less. They are the stronger sex.And this is how it should be, because they have to do the greatest creativity of this life – give birth. It is such a long suffering, a tapascharya, a sadhana, to give birth. Just think, if man had to give birth the world would have disappeared. Just think, for nine months carrying a baby in your stomach. It is impossible to conceive of man doing that and then bringing up the child. No man would be ready for it. He is weak.Wherever the balance is lost it is immediately regained. Why? – because man and woman are a polarity. There is a myth in India, a Jaina myth, which you may not have heard, and I think it is very probable that sometime it may have been true. In Jaina Puranas, in Jaina mythology, it is said that in the beginning only twins were born, never a single child: twins, one boy and one girl. And they were to be married – brother and sister, twins.In the beginning, millions of years ago in the past, only twins were born, a boy and a girl. They were the natural wife and husband, and the world was very peaceful. It must have been, because if you could get a natural wife and a natural husband, life would be totally different – because it is always the wrong person that you choose. It is so difficult to choose a right wife and a right husband – almost impossible! How can you choose?Just think of another thing: if you had had to choose the right father and the right mother it would have been impossible. Where to choose and how to choose? And whosoever you had chosen, you would have felt frustrated in the end. But nature chooses for you, so the mother and father are always almost okay; you cannot do anything about it.The Jaina myth says that wife and husband were born as twins. They were naturally related; they had a harmony, the deep harmony of twins. There was never a conflict between them; they behaved as two bodies and one soul. Jainas say that those were the peaceful days in the world. When that harmony was disturbed everything was disturbed. That’s possible, and I think it can become again possible. Science may be helpful in the coming century to create this possibility again – then the pole is born with you. But whether the pole is born with you or not, the pole is born simultaneously somewhere: a boy is born, a girl is born somewhere; a girl is born, a boy is born somewhere.The same polarity exists between the positive mind and the negative. When-ever there is a positive mind, just by the side of it there is a negative mind. That number is always equal. So in the world, half are always Hindus and half Buddhists – or you can name it in another way, but half are positive persons and half are negative persons.I don’t choose anything. If someone comes to me and says, “Which is right, man or woman?” I will say both are right, because neither can exist separately – their harmony is right. So if you ask me, “Which is right, positive or negative?” I say both are right, because neither can exist without the other – their harmony is right. That’s why my statements seem so contradictory, because sometimes I am talking with a positive person; then I have to make totally different statements. Sometimes I am talking to a disciple who is negative; then I have to make absolutely contradictory statements. And when they both meet, they will be confused.So remember, whenever I say something to you, I have said it to you. Don’t listen to anybody else; this is personal. Whenever I have said something to you, I have said it to you, and if somebody says that I have said something contradictory to him, don’t listen. I may have said it…because to me approaches are not important, persons are important.I do not have a fixed approach. When a different type of person comes to me, I immediately change my approach. I always adjust to the person, I never try the reverse – I never try to adjust the person to an approach. To me that looks absurd. I don’t make readymade clothes for you and then say, “Cut your legs a little because the dress….” I always cut the dress immediately if I feel it doesn’t suit you. The dress is wrong, you are never wrong.Then there are bound to be many contradictions – but I contain contradictions. To me they only appear contradictory; they are joined together just like man and woman, positive and negative, day and night, life and death. Both approaches are mine. That’s why I go on talking about Buddha with as much love as I go on talking about Patanjali or Lao Tzu or Jesus or Mahavira or Mohammed.I contain all.Remember that – that will help you to be less confused.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 06 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-06/

Now follow the traits of seekers of the second stage,called the stage of thought.He lives in the care of learned men who explain best what listening, remembering, right conduct, contemplation – dharana – and meditation are. Having acquired knowledge of such scriptures as are worth listening to, he efficiently discriminates between what is duty and what is not, and he knows well the division between a word and the thing it symbolizes. His mind does not suffer from an excess of conceit, pride, greed and attachment, although externally they are apparent to some extent. He gives up his external impurities as a snake casts off its slough. Such a seeker acquires the actual knowledge of all these things with the grace of the scriptures, the guru, and the sages. The first stage for the seeker is to create a milieu around himself of the feeling that the ocean is real and waves are just superficial surface phenomena. To live in that oceanic feeling is the first stage. This becomes the soil. Unless this milieu is there, there is no possibility of any growth into the higher realms of being. So remember this: you must be aware more and more of the center, less and less of the surface; more and more aware of the depth, and less and less aware of the circumference. The focus must change from the periphery to the innermost core.If you continue being involved with the surface you cannot penetrate to the ultimate being, because the ultimate being, Brahman – or you may call it the truth or God or whatsoever you like – the ultimate being is the center of existence. And we exist on the periphery.This is natural in a way, because whenever you come in contact with something, you come in contact with the periphery, the outermost. This is natural. But don’t remain there – move ahead, move further. Leave the periphery be-hind and go deep. With everything – with a rock, with a man, with a tree, with whatsoever – always remember that the surface is the outermost body, and this is not the whole. The whole illusion consists of thinking of the surface as the whole.The surface belongs to the whole, there is nothing wrong in it; but when you get this impression, this identity that the surface is the whole, then there is no possibility of inner growth because then you have to stay with the surface – the surface has become the whole. Don’t allow the surface to become the whole. This is not something which is going against the surface; this is simply going with the truth, with the reality.The surface will be there. When you have conceived the whole, the surface will be there, but in its right place. Nothing is to be eliminated, only a greater perspective is needed. And when your perspective has become total, everything will be there. This world will be there; whatsoever you have will be there, but in a new harmony, in a new gestalt.This is something to be understood very deeply, because it happens to persons who are on a religious search that either they get identified with the surface, or they become against it. Then they start thinking that this world is to be negated, the world of the waves has to be denied. Either they think that waves are the ocean, or they move to the opposite pole: they start saying that the waves are illusory, that they are not, that they have to be denied. Both standpoints are wrong. From one wrong polarity, if you jump to the other, the other is bound to be wrong. The truth is somewhere in between, in the middle.Don’t jump from the waves to the ocean, but rather from the waves and the ocean to just in the middle from where you can see both – the ocean and the waves also. Then your life becomes a synthesis, and when your life is a synthesis the music of the divine is created.The Upanishads are not against the world. They are for Brahman, but they are not against the world. Their Brahman includes everything, the Brahman is inclusive. This is the first state.Now follow the traits of seekers of the second stage, called the stage of thought.The first stage is the stage of feeling, feeling that Brahman surrounds you, everywhere is Brahman. And remember, the seeker has to start from the feeling, from the heart, because only the heart can be the base. The heart is the base of your body, and the heart is going to be the base of your divine body also.If you go to the physiologist he will say, “Yes, there is a heart, but that heart is only physiological, just a pumping system; nothing more is there – no love, no feeling,” because he dissects the body and he comes only to know the body and the bodily. But everybody, even that physiologist, when in love will put his hand on his heart. If he is frustrated in his love, then he will feel a deep ache in his heart. He cannot explain it. As a physiologist he will say, “This is illusory,” but as a man he also feels the same. And remember, a physiologist is just a specialization, a fragment; man is the whole.So don’t listen to the physiologist, listen to his totality. When he is in love he feels his heart is filled, something has poured into it, he has become heart-full. We don’t have such a thing, not even such a word – heartful. We say that a man is healthy, healthful; we say a man is mannerly, mannerful – but we never say a man is heartful, or loveful. These words must be created, because these are existential facts. When you are in love, you are heartful, loveful, overflooded, and of that overflooded feeling the heart is the center.When you are in love, close your eyes and feel where your feeling has its center. It can never be in the head; it is impossible. It can never be anywhere else – it will be just in the heart. The heart is the base of your body, and it is going to be the base of your higher body also. That’s why the Upanishads say that the first stage is of feeling. Thought is not denied, thought has to take its own place – but that is the second stage.When feeling is there, then thought cannot go wrong. If feeling is not there, thought is bound to go wrong. If you follow thought without feeling, you will become destructive. That’s what happened with Hitler, with Mussolini, with Tojo; that’s what is happening every day with Mao, with all the dictators – the thought is leading them. The heart has been silenced, or as if cut off from their being; there is only thought, and then thought can be destructive.Hitler thought that it would be good and a compassionate act if all weaklings were destroyed: no weak person should exist on the earth. It was logical, be-cause these weaklings create problems. These weaklings give birth to more weaklings, they destroy the whole purity of humanity. This is logical – but just logical. If you ask Buddha, he will say that the weakling has to be supported: the strong should serve the weak, and that is his strength; otherwise for what is his strength needed? The stronger the person, the more he will serve the weak – but this comes from the heart. Then service itself becomes the strongest thing in your personality.But if you think from the mind only, then weaklings have to be destroyed because they are the deterioration; through them humanity will deteriorate, will fall down. The ill have to be destroyed because through them illness will spread more. The mad have to be killed because through them madness will be spread all over the world. This is logical; nothing is wrong in it as a mathematical argument – and that’s what Hitler tried to follow. He killed millions of beings.You cannot argue with him logically; he is exactly right that the weak should be destroyed. But then what is strength? If all the weaklings are destroyed, where will be the strong? And if this logic is continued to its climax, then only one person can exist on the earth – the strongest – because all others will be weaklings in comparison to him. So if you go on destroying the weak, then only one person can exist, not even two. This is the conclusion of the logic. And then what is that one person going to do? And what is the meaning of his life? For whom is he going to exist?Life has the deepest secret, and that is this: that when you exist for someone you exist for the first time. And if your existence becomes a service to many it becomes richer. When you exist only for yourself you exist uselessly; there is no significance, no meaning. The moment you start existing for someone, your existence becomes meaningful, significant, for the first time. That is the meaning of service. But that service can be based only on the heart; it cannot be based on thought.But that doesn’t mean that the Upanishads deny thinking. They don’t deny; they say thought has much to do, but it must follow feeling. The mind must follow heart, only then can it be good. Then it cannot go wrong because the heart will always guide in the right direction. The heart becomes the compass – and the heart has the center of love, and love cannot lead you wrongly.It happened once, a man came to Saint Augustine and he said, “What should I do? And tell me in short, because I am an illiterate person and I cannot understand great theological things. So just in short, simply, so that I can understand and remember it, just tell me the essence of religion.”Saint Augustine is reported to have said, “Love, and then all else will follow. And don’t bother about anything else.”If you love you cannot do wrong. The more you love the more it becomes impossible to do wrong – love cannot go wrong. But your love goes wrong. That simply means that your love is not love. Your love even creates hell, misery; you even become destructive to your lover. Move into any family and you will feel the destruction that love has brought: wife and husband continuously fighting, quarreling, trying to dominate each other, trying to possess each other – really trying to destroy the other.The wife wants the husband just to be a thing, not a person. The husband wants the wife just to be a thing to be possessed; a beautiful thing of course, but a thing, not a person – because a person needs freedom to be, only a thing can be made totally a slave. A person can never be made a slave, and the more you make a slave of him the less he is a person. And this is happening through love! And Augustine says, Buddha says, Jesus says, “Love, and everything will be right. Love, and you will be on the right path.” Your love is not love.The more I try to understand people who are in love, the more I see that their love is just a form of hate. They disguise it, they think it is love, but their thinking cannot be believed, because the results show something else. And a tree is known by its fruits, not by the declaration. The tree may declare, there may be a big sign on the tree, a signboard saying “This is an apple tree,” but it is to be known by the fruits. If apples never come the signboard is not worth anything, it is lying. If love gives one the direction towards divineness, then your love cannot be called love because it leads into misery.Oscar Wilde has written in his memoirs, “This has been my problem my whole life: I cannot live without a woman, and I cannot live with a woman. If I live with a woman it creates hell; if I don’t live with a woman that creates hunger and starvation and I feel I should have a woman.” You cannot live with a woman, and you cannot live without a woman. What is the problem? The problem is that love has to be learned. Love is a creative art; one is not born with the capacity to love, no one is born with the capacity to love. Love is a growth, an achievement, and the finest achievement possible.It is just like music: no one is born playing an instrument, you have to learn it. And the more complex the instrument, the longer it will take. Someone asked Godowsky, “Now you have become a great master of music, a maestro, do you still practice?”He said, “Yes, if I don’t practice for a single day, I notice things are going wrong. If I don’t practice for two days, then experts in my audience notice something is going wrong. And if I don’t practice for three days, everybody becomes aware that something is going wrong.” Eight hours per day he was practicing when he was a world famous maestro.And love is the greatest music, and you have to play it upon the most complex instrument – the lover or the beloved. You think you are born with the capacity, so you destroy the instrument. You fall in love with a woman, but you don’t know that that woman is the most complex instrument in the world. You are going to destroy, and when the woman is destroyed she becomes chaotic, she becomes chaos – anger and hatred are bound to be there.Love has to be learned as an art, the greatest art, the art of life. That’s why we go on talking about love, but love is the most scarce thing on this earth. It happens only once; millions of people are in love and it happens only once – one in a million becomes capable of love. There are reasons. When a child is born, the child has only self-love. And this is natural: he does not know anybody else, he knows only himself. The child is the most selfish being, the most selfish, self-centered being. He exists for himself, and he imagines that the whole world exists to serve him. And because he is so helpless everybody has to serve him, so he is justified. Whenever he cries the mother runs to give him food, milk, help, warmth, love, and he becomes dictatorial.Every child becomes dictatorial and he knows that everybody follows. Whatsoever his desire it has to be fulfilled immediately, otherwise he goes mad. He is so helpless, and nothing can be done – we have to serve him. His ego becomes strengthened. The mother, the father, the family, everybody around him helps him, serves him, and he feels that he is the center of the world. And almost always it happens that you never grow out of this childhood nonsense. You remain the center, and you think everybody has to serve you.How can you love? – because love means the other has become the center. Love is a very great jump: you are not the center, the other has become the center. You have become the shadow. Now the other has the meaning, and just to serve him or her is happiness. But this never happens. The husband is juvenile, the wife is juvenile, and they remain with their childhood concept that I am the center and the other has to serve me. This creates chaos, this creates misery and hell. Love has to be learned; it is a growth. When you can throw your ego, only then can you love.The Upanishads are not against thought, but they have a preference list – love must be first. And we have done quite the opposite. There is not a single school, college or university where love is taught. Only thought is taught everywhere: schools, colleges, universities – they all exist to train you how to think. Nobody trains you how to feel, how to be more loving. And it is simple: if nobody teaches you mathematics, you are not going to learn it; if nobody teaches you language, you are not going to learn it; and nobody teaches you love, so you have not learned it. But you believe that you are a lover, and in search of the right person who can love you.I have heard about one man: he was in search of a perfect wife, the ideal woman. Obviously he could never find her. He searched and searched and then became old. Then somebody asked, “For what are you waiting? Now get married! You are just on the verge of death.”The man said, “But I cannot – unless to an ideal woman, a perfect woman.”So the friend asked, “But you have been searching. Could you not find a single woman upon this whole earth?”He said, “Yes, once I did – but that woman was in search of a perfect husband.”You think you are perfect; you are waiting just for the other perfect person and then everything will be good. This is not going to help; this is impossible. You have learned to think, and that has become the base. That’s why your whole personality is upside down.The second stage is of thought, the first of feeling. What is this stage of thought?He lives in the care of learned men who explain best what listening, remembering, right conduct, contemplation and meditation are.Not only logic…. Our schools teach only logic. In many ways they make you argumentative, that’s all. The Upanishads say, the first thing: He lives in the care of learned men.In the days of the Upanishads teaching was a very intimate phenomenon, a very personal phenomenon; it was really just like a love affair. So students would move all over the country in search of a master with whom they could feel closeness, intimacy, from whom they could feel care – somebody who cared, who loved, in whose presence they could flower. Sometimes thousands of miles would be traveled to find a master with whom to live. That was the first requirement. Teaching was not so important; the teacher was more important.Nowadays, particularly in America, they say the student is more important than the teacher. They say “student-oriented education,” and they have made their point and the students have heard about it – that they are the center and the teacher is just a servant, there to serve. This is absolute nonsense, because a disciple cannot be the center. He has come to learn, and learning means he has to be receptive, trusting, in deep faith. So if there is so much student unrest all over the world, it is the natural consequence, the logical consequence, of the whole nonsense that has been spread in this century that education should be “student-oriented.” Then the teacher becomes just a servant.In India in the days of the Upanishads the teacher was the center, and the real thing was not what he was teaching; the real thing was what he was. Just his presence was a deep phenomenon; it helped the person to grow. He cared, he loved, and teaching was secondary, teaching followed. That was also not very important. The important thing was to be near a person who was grown-up, who was really an adult. So the way, the method that was followed was really one of the most intricate systems ever developed in the world.The system was this: that for twenty-five years everybody was to remain celibate, a brahmachari – for twenty-five years, for the first stage of life. Every boy, every girl, was expected to remain celibate for twenty-five years. Not that they were against sex – no, really they were the persons who knew the beauty of sex, and they created a phenomenon where sex could be lived to its utmost, where sex was transformed into samadhi – but they knew the way. Twenty-five years of celibacy would create the energy; you would accumulate energy, enough energy so that sex would become a very deep and penetrating phenomenon.Now in the West sex has become superficial. It is not more than sneezing – just something to be thrown out of the body, just a type of relief. And it is so: if you don’t have enough energy gathered then sex will become superficial, just like sneezing – a relief, not a transforming phenomenon, not an alchemy.When you had so much energy, when you had waited twenty-five years and your every cell was filled with energy, then they allowed you to move into marriage and love. Then this experience of love was going to be very very deep, intense. The intensity depends on energy. This is the law: intensity depends on energy. If there is no energy there will be no intensity; the more energy, the more intense the phenomenon. And if you had waited for twenty-five years, you would have become a tremendous energy, and even in one sexual experience you could attain to the very highest that is possible through bioenergy.Then they allowed the man to move into family life. For twenty-five years he was to live an ordinary life: to feel every desire, every thirst, every hunger; to fulfill every desire – at least to try for twenty-five years, with intense force. When the person was fifty, then his children would be coming back from the gurukul, from the house of the master. His children would be coming back, and they would then be about twenty-five.And this was the rule: when a person had reached fifty, about fifty, and his children were back and were going into marriage, he should again become celibate – because it was thought absurd that a father should be making love in the house when the son was making love. This was thought absurd, this seemed childish, because then the father had not grown beyond it. And how could a son respect a father when he felt that the father was just the same as him? If the son was playing with sex and the father also was playing with sex, how could he think that he had grown up? The moment the son was married the father was ready to move beyond sex. So this stage of twenty-five years was called vanaprastha – looking towards the forest. He had not yet gone to the forest, but was now ready to leave, packing.When the son had reached fifty and was ready to pack to go to the forest, the father would be seventy-five and he would have renounced life. Now he was an old, wise man; he had lived life. And this man would become the teacher. At the age of seventy-five he would move to the forest, he would create a small school around him, he would become the teacher. And this was the thought: that only an old man can be the teacher, because how can one who has not lived life be a teacher? How can one who has not known all – the good and the bad both; one who has not moved through all the ways that life gives you, the right and the wrong both – how can he be a teacher? Only one who has been through desires, who has known the intensity of desires and the foolishness also, who has been into sex and who has gone beyond sex – only such a man can be a teacher, only such a man can teach life.It was inconceivable that a young man could become a teacher. It was inconceivable. How can he become a teacher? He has not been through life, he is not yet seasoned. One must be with old, wise men, in their care, just near them; such men who can explain what right listening is, right remembering is, right conduct is, right contemplation is, right meditation is. And you cannot explain these things just by reading and studying; only a lived experience can make you capable of teaching.What is right listening? Shravan, right listening, is the base…because when a disciple comes to a master or a student to a teacher, the first thing is to be taught how to listen. Nowdays nobody is teaching how to listen. You go to any school, even in the kindergarten, and they have started lecturing, but no one has ever taught how to listen. Unless you know how to listen, how can you be taught? Sometimes the training for how to listen takes years. Your mind has to be completely silent, only then can you listen. So a master will try to quiet your inner talk, the inner chattering, the constant chattering which is there.If you are chattering inside, you cannot listen. I am talking here. If you are talking within yourself, how can you listen? Then your mind is just like a radio, and the arrow by which you tune into a station is wavering, or you have caught two stations simultaneously and so everything is a confusion. I am talking here and you are talking within yourself, so there are two stations simultaneously. Everything is in confusion. You cannot learn and you cannot understand – you can only misunderstand. How to listen was the first thing – in ordinary teaching and in spiritual teaching also. How to listen? The first rule is: the inner talk must cease.It happened, there was one famous Zen monk, Nansen. He lived in a deep forest away from the capital of Japan, Tokyo. One day a professor of the university of Tokyo, a professor of philosophy, came to visit Nansen. He came into the hut and said, “Tell me something about spirituality. Tell me something about the inner self.”Nansen said, “You look tired after traveling so long, there is perspiration on your head, so rest a little, relax a little, and I will prepare tea for you.”So the old Nansen prepared tea, and the professor rested. But the rest was just superficial; inside he couldn’t rest. How can a professor rest? Impossible! He goes on talking inside.I had one professor…I was the only student in his subject. Sometimes if I was late I would see that he had already started, he was already lecturing. And he had told me, “If you want to go out, you can go, but don’t disturb me” – and I was the only student! So I used to go out, roam about, and then come back, and he was still lecturing. I was irrelevant.A professor, and a professor of philosophy at that – insult added to injury…. He rested only bodily, the inner talk continued. But you cannot escape a person like Nansen; he looks inside. So he brought tea, put a cup in the hand of the professor, poured tea, continued pouring, and the tea started flowing into the saucer also. Then the professor became afraid because he was continuing; soon it would start going onto the floor. So he said, “Now stop! Are you mad? Now my cup cannot have any more tea, not a single drop.”Nansen started laughing and he said, “You are so careful about the tea and the cup, and you know well that when the cup is full not a single drop more can be held in it. And you ask me about spirituality, meditation. You are so full inside, not a single drop can enter. So first go out, empty your cup, and then come back. Unless you are empty I am not going to waste my energy pouring into you.”The first thing for right learning, right listening, is to be empty; that was taught. Now education is doing completely the reverse. The first thing is how to fill your mind, and the more your mind is filled the more you are appreciated. Your mind must be clean, pure; inner talk must cease. Only then you can be attentive.Then right remembering. Remember that only remembering is not enough; you need the opposite capacity of forgetting also. If you go on remembering everything you will go mad. And that is what has happened – you cannot forget. Forgetting is as much needed as remembering. The useless must be thrown out of the mind and forgotten, and only the essential should be remembered.Right remembering means continuously throwing rubbish out; choosing only the essential, the true, the real, and throwing all that is rubbish. Much rubbish is there. The newspapers are filled with it, the books are filled with it, and everybody goes on pouring his rubbish into you. The first thing for right remembering is: throw the rubbish out, don’t fill the mind with rubbish – unnecessary, nonessential.Shankara has said that if you cannot make the distinction between what is essential and what is nonessential, your mind will become just a wastepaper basket; useless things will be there – and they are. Right remembering means also right forgetting. Be alert, because every single moment millions of facts are being thrown into your mind. Your mind is taking much information from everywhere. That’s why you cannot sleep: there is so much excitement in the mind, so many things going on. You cannot remember, because you remember so much that the whole capacity, the whole energy, is lost.When Alexander came to India he was surprised; he could not believe the capacity of Hindu brahmins for memorizing things. He couldn’t believe it, it was almost impossible. It happened that wise men in Greece had told him, “When you come back from India, bring the Vedas, the four scriptures, the supreme-most Indian scriptures. Bring them with you.” Only at the last moment when he was returning he remembered, so in a village of Punjab he inquired, “Who has got the Vedas?”They said, “A brahmin family – but it is impossible, they will not give them to you.”Alexander said, “Don’t you worry about that. I will force them, I will kill them – they will have to give.”The brahmins’ house was surrounded by the military, and Alexander went to the head of the family, the old man, and said, “I want the four scriptures, the four Vedas, and I will burn the whole house if you say no. You and your four Vedas all will be burned.”The old man said, “There is no need. I will give them to you, but in the morning. And let your military be there, don’t be suspicious. I will give them in the morning.”Alexander said, “Why not now?”He said, “Before giving them I will have to go through a ritual of departure. My family had them for thousands of years, they have become part of our heart, so the whole night we will pray, go through a particular ritual, and in the morning we will present them.”Alexander believed the old man. The military was there and there was no possibility that he could escape. But in the morning when he came a fire was burning and the old man was sitting there reading from the last page of the four books. Alexander waited. The old man read the last page and threw it in the fire. Alexander said, “What are you doing?”He said, “The four Vedas have gone into the fire, but these are my four sons. They have listened the whole night and they remember. You take them.”Just one listening! Alexander could not believe it. He called other brahmins to check. How could they remember such big books? And they had heard them only once! They repeated verbatim from the first word to the last. Alexander told his wise men, “We don’t know anything about what right remembering is. These Hindus have done miracles. How can they remember?”The secret is that if you are capable of forgetting nonsense, you have so much energy to remember that anything can be remembered – the energy is the same. For example, if you have one hundred percent energy, ninety-nine percent is involved in nonsense. In the old days, a brahmin had one hundred percent of energy available; then he could remember the Vedas. Whatsoever you remember is always more than the four Vedas, so the capacity is there but you have devoted it to nonsense. Right remembering was taught: how to forget the useless, how to choose the essential, and only remember the essential.Right conduct: how to behave rightly, a right discipline of behavior – because everything helps you grow. When you behave wrongly you are not doing something wrong to others, you are doing wrong to yourself. When you behave wrongly your energy moves into wrong directions. Outwardly, right conduct may seem like something imposed; it is not.For example, Gurdjieff used to say – in his institute in Paris he had written it on the walls in big letters – one motto: “A person is good who respects his father and mother.” In the West particularly this seems absurd. And just this is the definition of a good man, “A person is good who respects his father and mother”?What was he saying? Remember that life is such that you are bound to hate your father and mother; every boy, every girl, has to hate. This is how it happens naturally, because the father has to say no to many things, the father has to discipline you, the father has even sometimes to be angry with you. He cannot allow you absolute freedom because that would be destructive to you. He has to force discipline, and the ego of the child is hurt; he starts hating.Every man hates his father unless right conduct is taught from the very beginning; every girl hates her mother unless a right conduct is taught from the very beginning. And if you cannot respect your father, you cannot respect anybody – then the whole possibility of respect is lost. The father is the first point from where respect grows.If you can respect your father, you will respect many people. If you hate your father, then all father figures will be hated. If you hate your father, you will hate your teacher, because he is also a father figure. If you hate your father, you will hate anybody who is powerful. You cannot love God, because he is the father figure for the whole cosmos.In the West, first the respect for the father disappeared, and then God was dead. It is not accidental that every religion says, “God, my father, the father of all.” It is not accidental, it is meaningful – but it has to grow from your own father. If you respect your father then all father-figures will be respected, and ultimately you can respect the divine.If you hate your mother then hatred will become the very base of your life, because the first love has to be learned through the mother. You cannot love a wife if you have hated your mother, because the wife is a woman, and one who hates his mother hates women. And the mother will follow you like a dangerous shadow – every time you look at a woman, the mother will be present there. Really, every woman is a mother, essentially a mother. You cannot love a woman if you hate your mother. Really, you cannot love at all.Gurdjieff was right; this is the definition of a good man – that he respects his father and mother. This is impossible. Remember, this is not easy. It is one of the most impossible things to respect the father and mother; to respect one’s parents is one of the impossible things in this world. False respect is not meant, just hypocrisy is not meant, but a real respect. That was taught; that was called right conduct.Respect and love were taught, many other things were taught. Right conduct means to be always happy, blissful in your behavior, to be refined, gentle, to not hurt anybody in any way – because this then becomes the pattern. Right conduct helps you grow, and it helps you avoid unnecessary problems, unnecessary crises. You create many problems unnecessarily, and in those problems and in solving them you waste energy, time – you waste everything. A small problem can become destructive to your whole life. Right conduct means moving in this world in such a way that there is no conflict with others, no conflict arises; moving in this world in such a way that you don’t create unnecessary enemies – the very way you behave creates friendship. This is good for you.Right contemplation and right meditation….This will look a little paradoxical, because we think meditation is always right, contemplation is always right. That is not the case; you can contemplate on wrong things. For example, when you are angry you contemplate; really, when you are angry you contemplate more. You become obsessed with one thing and you go on thinking around and around it, near it. Try to think about God; contemplate for one single moment and you have moved away to something else. But think about sex and the contemplation is easy; you can contemplate.There are people who go on doing that. If you give them a picture or a statue of God they will say, “What will this do? This is just a picture.” But give them a pornographic magazine, give them a picture of a nude woman, and they will hide it under the pillow, and when there is no one around they will contemplate. Pornography is contemplation; the mind starts moving around and around a center.Contemplation means mind moving around a center: not moving in a line, not going from one subject to another, but just sticking to one subject, and the whole energy moving in a circle. When mind moves in a circle around a subject, that subject becomes deep-rooted; whatsoever you contemplate, ultimately you become. Right contemplation means contemplation which will help you to grow beyond desire, which will help you to transcend desire. You contemplate, but wrongly.This happens with meditation also. You have moments of meditation sometimes. If you are angry and you hit a person, in that moment of hitting all thought stops. You have just become anger; the whole energy is transformed into anger. You are one-pointed, deep in meditation, not a single thought in the mind, no cloud in the mind, the whole mind and energy and body moving in one direction – but that is wrong meditation. Mind has stopped thinking but has become anger – it should become love, it should become compassion.In sex, meditation happens. A moment comes when you are reaching the climax, a moment comes just before ejaculation or orgasm when mind stops. You become pure energy, bioenergy, just a stream of energy, no-mind. No-mind is meditation. But if you become stuck just in sexual meditation you will not grow. Nothing is wrong in it, but you have to grow beyond it because this sexual meditation depends on the other and anything that depends on the other cannot make you ultimately free; you will remain dependent.Right meditation means a moment where mind ceases, you have become one energy – but not moving towards the other, not moving in any direction, but simply remaining in yourself. That will become samadhi. Meditation moving towards the other becomes a sexual act; meditation moving nowhere, remaining inside, becomes samadhi. These things are for the second stage.Having acquired knowledge of such scriptures as are worth listening to, he efficiently discriminates between what is duty and what is not.This is called vivek: discrimination between duty, what is duty, and what is not. In the second stage you have to be continuously alert of what to do and what not to do. If you are not alert you will be in a mess. What to do and what not to do? You have a certain amount of energy. You can waste it in things which are not worth doing, and you can create complexities through doing them.You talk to someone and then a discussion arises, then the discussion be-comes an angry fight – you are wasting energy. And this will create a pattern; the man will try to take revenge in some other circumstances. You have created a karma, a pattern; now it will follow you. But why move into a discussion unnecessarily? Why create an argument?I have heard one Chinese Taoist parable. Three Taoists, followers of Lao Tzu, went into a forest to meditate. They decided that they were not going to chatter, discuss anything. One year passed in silence. Then suddenly one day a horseman passed before their cave, so one of the monks said, “What a beautiful white horse!” This was the only utterance in one year.One year passed again, then the second monk said, “This is not good. You have started an argument. The horse was not white but black!”Then one year passed again, and the third monk said, “If there is going to be bickering, I am leaving!”One year had passed, but it had not passed from the mind of the second monk. He was continuously thinking that the horse was black, not white. Then he could not withhold it any more, so he said, “Enough. The horse was black. But I don’t want any dispute about it.”Then the third monk must have continued thinking inside that they had disturbed the silence and they were creating a dispute. Then it became so much that he could not control it any more, so after one year he said, “Enough. I am leaving. This is too much. You are creating an argument! We have not come here to decide whether the horse was white or black!”This is how mind functions. A small trigger and it goes on and on – it may go on for eternity if you don’t become aware. Discriminate as to what is to be done, and then you will feel there is a very very small number of duties. You can do them very well. Discriminate as to what is not to be done, and ninety percent of your acts will drop. They are unnecessary, you could have avoided them. Why get entangled? Remain more and more aloof, and do only that which is absolutely necessary. And remember, do it only when it is going to help somebody, otherwise don’t do it.…And he discriminates also between what is the symbol – pada – and what is the thing symbolized – padarth.This is something to be understood very deeply. Krishnamurti goes on saying that the word god is not God – this is the meaning of this statement. What is a symbol, and what is symbolized? The word god is not God – you can mistake the very word for God – just like the word water is not water. When you are thirsty, I can write in big letters on a paper WATER and give it to you. You cannot drink it. Even if I do it very scientifically and write h2o, it is useless. You will throw it away, you will say, “Keep your science to yourself. I need water, not h2o.”The word water and water are two different things, and one who is in search of truth must remember it constantly, because there is every possibility you may become obsessed with words and symbols and may lose contact with reality.His mind does not suffer from an excess of conceit, pride, greed and attachment, although externally they are apparent to some extent.The second stage is not the end. There is bound to be some greed, some pride, some attachment, some anger, but one has to be aware and start dropping them from inside. Outside it may not be possible to drop them immediately, because sometimes they are needed also.In ordinary life, if you cannot become angry you will lose many things. Sometimes just a show of anger will be helpful, but drop it from inside! It has to be dropped from outside also – but later on, when you don’t bother, when nothing makes any difference, when even if you lose something it makes no difference. But remaining in the world, trying for growth, be aware and alert. Don’t suffer from these things. These are sufferings.If you have very deep-rooted pride, conceit, jealousy, you will suffer. No one else is going to suffer for it. You continue it in the mind, you suffer for it. Somebody is laughing and you think he is laughing at you – then you suffer. You are conceited, and you are always in search of something to hurt you. You are like a wound, waiting for somebody to touch you and then you will be hurt.Whenever you feel hurt, remember that you have a wound. Don’t throw the responsibility on the other. Just remember that you have a wound and that man has unknowingly touched your wound. Try to heal this wound and then nobody can hurt you, there is no possibility; nobody can laugh at you. That doesn’t mean that nobody will laugh at you – they may laugh, the whole world may laugh, but you can also join in, you can also laugh with them.He gives up his external impurities as a snake casts off its slough. Such a seeker acquires the actual knowledge of all these things with the grace of the scriptures, the guru, and the sages.Continuously you have to throw your old skin just like a snake. Every moment it becomes old, and every moment you have to come out of it; then only can you remain alive. Otherwise it always happens that you are almost dead before you die – many years before you die.It happened once, Mulla Nasruddin came to a police station. He reported that his wife was missing, so they asked him to give some details about his wife – how she looked, how old she was. He said, “One of her eyes is missing. She cannot hear, both the ears are missing. She is crippled, she cannot walk rightly, one leg is missing.” And then he said, “Before I missed her almost ninety percent was missing already!”Before you die you will have died many years before. Everybody dies a posthumous death. You can prevent this happening only if you die every moment, if you leave the past completely, jump out of it. Dust gathers, memories gather, every moment you become old. Cast off this old skin just like a snake. Come out of it. Be fresh, young again, and live in the moment. Only then will you be able to know what eternal life is. A dead man cannot know it; only a man who is alive to his full capacity can know it.Such a seeker acquires the actual knowledge of all these things with the grace of the scriptures, the guru, and the sages.Whatsoever you do will need much visible and invisible help. Sometimes you may not be even aware, but many currents of help are around you, helping you; many sources are just pouring down upon you. You will become aware only in the end when you have achieved. Then you will see that you have to thank the whole universe.Just think: if Buddha was not there, if he had not happened, if Jesus was not there, if he had not happened, if the Upanishads were never written, if Lao Tzu had not accepted to write down the Tao Te Ching, if there was no Bible, no Koran, no Vedas, where would you have been? You would have been just in the trees, you would have been monkeys. The whole universe has been helping you to grow – known, unknown sources.You may not be aware, but invisible vibrations are in the atmosphere. Once Buddha is there, the human consciousness can never be the same again. We may forget him completely, we may not even know his name – because many buddhas have been there and we don’t know their names, they were never recorded – but they are there, invisible sources helping you. And when you grow to your totality, then you will become aware that thousands and thousands of hands have been helping you.That’s why Hindus depict their God with a thousand hands. And you are such a problem that two hands cannot do – thousands even are not of much help. With the grace of the scriptures, with the grace of the master, the guru, with the grace of all the sages, you will achieve. At the second stage this has to become a deep seed within you – the gratitude to all and everything. Even those who have wronged you have also helped you.Gratitude at the second stage will help you much. And if you become aware, fully alert about this gratitude, then more help will become available. The more you feel the grace and feel thankful, the more grace becomes available to you.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 07 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-07/

Osho,Contemplating you floods me with a deep ecstasy, and I feel the grace. You say you are not doing anything to create this ecstasy in us, but it is for sure that I also am not doing anything. Then from where is this bliss coming and how is it happening if neither you nor I are doing anything? Is it possible for you to explain more about the mystery of it? What is this phenomenon which we call grace?It can happen only when neither the disciple nor the master is doing anything; it can happen only in a nondoing, absolute nondoing, because grace is not something you can do anything about. You can simply be receptive, open, that’s all. Nothing positively can be done about it. It is already flowing – the whole existence is filled with grace.You are closed, and the more you do something, the more you will become closed – because every effort gives you a more egocentric feeling; whatsoever you do creates your ego. You feel I am doing something – and whenever you do something you start thinking of the future, of the result. You start expecting.So two things happen: firstly, whatsoever you do becomes a food for the ego; secondly, whatsoever you do leads you into the future, then you are not here and now. And these both are the barriers. One thing: you must be here and now, and you must not be – you must not be – an ego. Then you are open, and whenever you are open the grace is already flowing; it has been flowing forever. If you are not getting it, it is not something that you can get by doing. The more you do, the more it will be impossible for you to get it.The whole effort of the master is to teach you nondoing, nonaction. Or in other words, the whole effort of the master is to take you back – to teach you how to die, how to throw the ego completely, and how to be in a state of nothingness, a state of nonbeing. Buddha called that state anatta, the state of no-self: you are but you are not a self. Then there is no boundary to it, then there is no barrier around you, then all the doors are open – then life can flow, come and go, through you. Grace is not something special that is going to happen to you: grace is the very existence itself, it is grace-filled. The blessing is showering on you.I will tell you one Buddhist anecdote – it happened in Buddha’s time. One of Buddha’s great disciples, Manjushree, was sitting under a tree meditating. Then suddenly he became aware that flowers were dropping from the tree, many flowers showering. But he was surprised because it was not the season for the flowers, and just in the morning when he had come there was not a single flower on the tree – so where were these millions of flowers showering all around coming from?So he looked at the tree. Then he was even more mystified, because they were not coming from the tree, they were showering from the sky. So he asked, “Who is doing this? What is happening?”A voice was heard, “We are the deities, and we are happy that you have attained, and just to express our happiness we are showering these flowers.”Manjushree said, “What have I attained? I have attained nothing. Rather, on the contrary, I have lost myself. There is no attainment because there is no one who can attain now. This very afternoon I have died.”The voice said, “We are celebrating your death, because your death is the birth of a new life. You have died, Manjushree, but for the first time you are born.”More and more flowers showered. Somebody reported to Buddha, “Some-thing has happened. Manjushree is sitting there and flowers go on showering.”Buddha said, “For the first time Manjushree is not there, that’s why flowers are showering. Up till now Manjushree was there; just today he has disappeared. He has attained the state of no-self, anatta – that’s why flowers are showering.”These flowers are just symbolic, they indicate grace. This voice is symbolic, no one had said anything. The flowers that were showering there were not those you can see, but invisible flowers. The whole existence celebrates it when you disappear – the whole existence feels blissful. When you are there, you are like a wound – the whole existence suffers with you.I am trying only one thing – I am not doing anything – to make you filled with bliss. But that cannot be done. Only one thing can be done, and that is to help you to disappear, to help you not to be. And whenever, even for a single moment, you are not there, flowers will start showering. When Manjushree is not there, flowers have always showered.I am not doing anything, I have never done anything with you. You are doing something. When you also stop, growth happens. When you also drop doing, suddenly the ego disappears. You are not ill; you have become whole and healthy. And whenever you are whole you have become holy.Both the words come from the same root. The word holy doesn’t mean anything more than becoming whole. Whenever you are whole you are holy. And you cannot be whole with the ego, because ego consists of division. Ego creates a split, you divide yourself. When the ego disappears divisions disappear. So the whole effort is how to make you effortless, and the whole doing is how to bring you to a point where doing ceases, is no more.Grace has been flowing always, that is already the case. It is there right now, flowing around you, but you don’t give a door to it. All your windows are closed, all your doors are closed; you are closed, imprisoned in yourself, you don’t allow any winds to blow. These meditations we are doing are just to help you to drop all doing.It is said that once Milarepa, a Tibetan mystic, asked his master, Naropa, “Following you, listening to you, I have dropped everything. But still nothing has happened.”Naropa laughed and said, “Drop this also – that you have dropped everything. Drop this also, don’t say it any more, because this again is a clinging: I have dropped everything. But the ‘I’ has remained, and the dropping itself has been converted into doing. The doer has remained.”One man, a great king, came once to Buddha. In one hand he had brought many flowers; in the other hand he had brought a very rare, valuable diamond. And he had brought both because he thought, “Maybe Buddha will not like the diamond; then I will give these flowers, put these flowers at his feet.”He came, both hands were full; in one hand the great diamond, in the other, flowers. First he tried to put the diamond at Buddha’s feet. Buddha said, “Drop it!” He thought, “He has rejected the diamond,” so he dropped it on the ground. Then he tried to put the flowers and Buddha said, “Drop it!” so he dropped those flowers also. Then there was nothing to give him as a present, so with both hands joined in namaskar, he tried to put his head at Buddha’s feet. And Buddha said, “Drop it!” Then he was in a puzzle – what to do? How to drop this head?Buddha started laughing and he said, “Those things were useless – you can drop the diamond, that is not of any significance; you can drop the flowers, that is not of much significance – unless you drop yourself. And those two droppings, those two orders, were just to prepare you so that you can learn dropping. Now the ultimate has come. Drop yourself!”And there cannot be anything else before a buddha. What can you give as a present? Flowers, diamonds are meaningless – unless you give yourself, unless you become the offering.I am not doing anything; you are still doing – that’s why there is a problem. Whenever one of you drops doing and becomes just like me, not doing anything, suddenly the happening, suddenly flowers will start showering. When Manjushree disappeared…. Flowers had always been showering there at that tree, only Manjushree could not see them. When he disappeared he could see.The second question:Osho,We can practice right behavior, and behavior according to duty, but then we will be wearing false faces, as we are inwardly, as you say, a madhouse. So should we act as we feel, or act as we ought?The first thing to be understood: you have to be authentic to yourself – sincere, honest. But that doesn’t mean that you have to hurt others through your honesty and sincerity, that doesn’t mean that you have to disturb others, that doesn’t mean that you have to disturb the rules of the game. All relationships are just rules of the game, and many times you will have to act and wear masks, false faces. The only thing to remember is: don’t become the mask. Use it if it is good, and keep the rules, but don’t become the mask, don’t get identified. Act it, don’t get identified with it.This is a great problem, particularly in the West for the new generation. They have heard too much; they have already been seduced by this idea: be sincere and be honest. This is good, but you don’t know how cunning and destructive the mind is. Your mind can find excuses. You can say a truth, not because you love truth so much but just to hurt somebody; you can use it as a weapon. And if you are using it as a weapon it is not truth, it is worse than a lie.Sometimes you can help somebody through a lie, and sometimes relationship becomes more easy through a lie. Then use it – but don’t get identified with it. What I am saying is: Be a good player, learn the rules of the game; don’t be too adamant about anything.It happened:I came back from the university and my father and my mother were worried; they were worried about me, about what I was going to do. They were worried about my marriage. So my father started sending messages through his friends asking my opinion whether I was ready to get married or not. So I told his friends, “This is between me and my father, don’t you come in. Tell my father that he can ask me.”And he was afraid, because I have never said no to him for anything. So he was afraid, he was afraid because I would not say no. Even if I didn’t want to be married I would say yes – that was the worry in his mind. Even if I didn’t want to get into a householder’s life, I would not say no, I would say yes. And that yes would be false. So what to do? He couldn’t ask me – he has not asked yet – because he knew well that I would not break any rule. I would have said yes.Then he tried through my mother. She asked me one night; she came to my bed, sat there, and asked me what I thought about marriage. So I said, “I have not married yet, so I have no experience. You know well, you have the experience, so you tell me. Take fifteen days: think over it, contemplate, and if you feel you have achieved something through it, then just order me. I will follow the order. Don’t ask about my opinion – I have none, because I have no experience. You are experienced. If you were again given a chance, would you get married?”She said, “You are trying to confuse me.”I said, “You take your time, at your own ease. I will wait for two weeks, then you order me. I will just follow…because I don’t know.”So for two weeks she was worried. She could not sleep, because she knew if she said to marry I would obey. Then she would be responsible, not I. So after two weeks she said, “I am not going to say anything, because if I look to my own experience, then I would not like you to move into that life. But I cannot say anything now.”So this is how I remained unmarried. Sincerely, authentically, I was not ready to marry, I was not intending it at all. But I could have acted. And nothing is wrong, because every experience helps you to grow. No-marriage helps, marriage also helps; there is not much difference. Everything helps you to grow in its own way.The one thing to remember is: life is a great complexity. You are not alone here, there are many others related to you. Be sincere unto yourself, never be false there. Know well what you want, and for yourself remain that. But there are others also; don’t unnecessarily hurt them. And if you need to wear masks, wear them and enjoy them, but remember, they are not your original face, and be capable of taking them off any moment. Remain the master, don’t become the slave; otherwise you can be violent through your sincerity, unnecessarily you can be violent.I have seen persons who are cruel, violent, aggressive, sadistic – but sincere, very true, authentic. But they are using their authenticity just for their sadism. They want to make others suffer, and their trick is such that you cannot escape them. They are true, so you cannot say, “You are bad.” They are good people, they are never bad, so no one can say to them, “You are bad.” They are always good, and they do the bad through their good.Don’t do that, and don’t take life too seriously. Nothing is wrong in masks also, faces also. Just as in the drama on the stage they use faces and enjoy and the audience also enjoys, why not enjoy them in real life also? It is not more than a drama. But I am not saying for you to be dishonest. Be sincere with yourself, don’t get identified. But life is great; there are many around you related in many invisible nets. Don’t hurt anybody.I will tell you one anecdote. It happened, Buddha became enlightened, and then he came back to his town after twelve years. He had escaped one night from his house without even telling his wife that he was leaving. He had gone to her room. She was sleeping with Buddha’s child, the only child, who was just a few days old.Buddha wanted to touch the small child, to feel, to love and embrace, but then he thought, “If the wife is awakened she may start crying and weeping and may create a mess. The whole house will gather, and then it will be difficult to leave.” So he simply escaped from the door; he just looked in and escaped like a coward. Then for twelve years he never came back.After twelve years, when he had become enlightened, he came back. His chief disciple was Ananda. Ananda was his elder cousin-brother, and before he took initiation with Buddha he had asked for a few promises. He took sannyas, he took initiation from Buddha, but he was older than Buddha, “So,” he said, “before I take initiation give me some promises as your elder brother, because once I have been initiated you will be the master and I will be the disciple. Then I cannot ask anything. Now I can even order you.”These are the rules of the game. So Buddha said, “Okay.” He was enlightened, and this unenlightened man was saying, “I am your elder brother.” So Buddha said, “Okay. What do you want?”He said, “Three promises. One: I will always be with you, you cannot send me anywhere else; wherever you go I will be your shadow. Second: even in the night when you sleep in a room I can come in and out – even while you are asleep. No rules will apply to me. And third: even at midnight when you are asleep, if I bring someone, a seeker, you will have to answer his questions.”Buddha said, “Okay. You are my elder brother, so I promise.” Then Ananda took initiation, then he become a disciple, and Buddha followed these three things his whole life.When he came back to his home, he said to Ananda, “Just make one exception, Ananda. My wife Yashodhara has been waiting for twelve years. She is bound to be very angry, and she is a very proud woman. Twelve years is a long time, and I have not been a good husband to her. I escaped from her like a coward, I didn’t even tell her. And I know that if I had told her she would have accepted it because she loves me so much, but I couldn’t gather the courage.“Now after twelve years, if you come with me when I go to meet my wife, she will feel even worse. She will think that this is a trick; that I have brought you with me so that she cannot express her mind, her suppressed anger, and the many things of these twelve years. And she will behave in a ladylike way, because she belongs to a very good family, a royal family. She will not even cry, no tears will come to her eyes; she will keep the rules of the game. So please, Ananda, only one exception I ask you, and I will never ask any other exception. You just wait outside.”Ananda said, “Bhante, I think you are enlightened. You are no longer a husband and she is no longer a wife, so why play this game?”Buddha said, “I am enlightened, she is not. I am no longer a husband, but she is still a wife, and I don’t want to hurt her. Let her keep her mind a little while and I will persuade her. I will persuade her to take a jump and become a sannyasin. But give me a chance. I am enlightened, she is not.”So Buddha went inside the palace. Of course, Yashodhara was mad. She started saying things; she was angry, crying, weeping, tears coming down, and Buddha stood there, silent, listening to everything patiently, with deep compassion. When all her anger was out she looked at Buddha; when her tears were no more there in her eyes then she looked at Buddha. Then she realized that this man was no longer a husband and she had been talking to a ghost of her memory. The man who left her was no more there. This was totally a different man.She surrendered, and she said to Buddha, “Why have you come? You are no longer a husband.”Buddha repeated again, “I may not be a husband, but you are still a wife, and I have come to help you so that you can also transcend this misery, this relationship, this world.”Others are there, consider them, and don’t try to be violent through so-called good things. So when it is said, “right conduct,” it means right relationship with others. You need not be false. When you can be true without hurting anybody, be true. But if you feel that your truth is going to hurt many and is unnecessary, it can be avoided, then avoid it, because it is not only going to hurt others, it will create patterns of cause, and those causes will return as effects on you, they will become your karmas. Then you will get entangled, and the more entangled you are the more you will have to behave in wrong ways.Just stop. Just see the situation. If you can be true without hurting anybody, be true. To me, love is greater than truth. Be loving. And if you feel that your truth will be hurtful and violent, it is better to lie than to be true. Wait for the right moment when you can be true, and help the other person to come to such a state where your truth will not hurt him. Don’t be in a hurry.And life is a big drama; don’t take it too seriously – because seriousness is also a disease of the mind, seriousness is part of the ego. Be playful, don’t be too serious. So sometimes you will have to use masks, because there are children around you and they like masks, they like false faces, and they enjoy. Help them to grow so they can face the real face, they can encounter it. But before they can encounter it, don’t create any trouble. Right conduct is just consideration for others.And look: there is a great difference. You may misunderstand what I am saying. When you lie, you lie for yourself. And I am saying: if you need, and if you feel the need to lie, only lie for the consideration of others. Never lie for yourself, don’t use any mask for yourself. But if you feel it is going to help others, it will be good for them, use the mask. And inside remain alert that this is just a game you are acting, this is not real.Sometimes you may need to be angry to your child, to your son, to your daughter. There are situations when anger helps. If you say something to your child coldly, it is not loving. If you say to your child, “Don’t do this,” in a cold manner, it is not loving, it is not going to help. When you say, “Don’t do this!” to your child in anger, deep anger, it reaches the child, and he feels that you love him, that’s why you are angry.A father who has never been angry with his son has never been loving; anger means that you consider him, you can even be angry. You love him, you feel for him. Sometimes even when you are not feeling angry but you see the need, show the anger, have the face of anger – but remain the master. And if you are the master, then the faces are beautiful, you can use them. But don’t become the face; if you become the face you have become the slave. The whole thing is not to get identified. Remain aloof, distant, and capable at any time to put it on and off – the face is just a device. It will be difficult and complex. It is easy to be untrue, it is easy to be true. The most difficult thing is to be the master of yourself to such an extent that if you want to be untrue you can be untrue, and if you want to be true you can be true.Gurdjieff’s disciples have written many books about him, and every disciple describes him in a different way. This is very mysterious, it has never happened with any other person in that way. Sometimes it happened that a person went to see Gurdjieff, then left, and then his friend went to see him. They would report to each other and would both give a different picture.Gurdjieff was a master of changing faces. It is said that he had become so capable that a person sitting by his right side would feel one thing, and a person sitting by his left side would feel differently. He may have been very loving with his left eye, and that half-face was showing love, and with the other side he may have been angry. And both persons would report to each other outside: “What type of man is this? He was so loving.” The other would say, “You are in some illusion…because he was so angry.”That is possible and such a mastery is beautiful. It is said that no one reported Gurdjieff’s real face, because he never showed anybody his real face. He was always acting, but helping in a way; in many ways he was helping. He would show you the face that was needed by you for your consideration; he would never show you the face that was not needed by you.To me, and to the Upanishads also, right conduct means just the right rules of behavior with others. You are not going to be here forever. You cannot change the whole world, you cannot change everybody; you can at the most change yourself. So it is better to change yourself inwardly, and don’t try to be in a continuous fight with everybody. Avoid fight – and faces can be helpful. Avoid unnecessary struggle, because that dissipates energy. Preserve your energy to be used for the inner work. And that work is so significant and it needs all your energy that you can give to it, so don’t waste it in unnecessary things.For the outside world remain an actor, and don’t think that you are deceiving anybody. If they like deception, that’s what they need, that’s what should be given to them. If children like toys to play with, you are not deceiving them. Don’t give them a real gun; let them play with the toy gun, because they like the toy. And don’t think that the toy gun is false; don’t think, “I must be true, I must give a real gun to the child. If he needs a gun, then I must give the true thing. How can I give the toy? This is a deception.”But the child needs the toy, there is no deception; he doesn’t need the real gun. So just look at the other, at what he needs, and give him that which he needs. Don’t give out of your own consideration, give out of consideration for him. Look at him, study and observe him, and behave in such a way that will be helpful to him and will not be unnecessary trouble for you. This is all that is meant by right conduct.The third question:Osho,Though we can be aware of anger and refrain from hurting others with it, inner anger seems to remain in a dormant state, and at times it becomes aroused by outer happenings. It doesn't seem possible to entirely throw it as it is deep-rooted in early, wrong training, and a lifetime of struggle in the world. Isn't the total disappearance of anger simultaneous with enlightenment? Does an enlightened one ever have any anger?The first thing: if you feel angry and if you think that it is needed for it to be suppressed, suppress it for the time being – because it is useless just to be angry with someone and then create a chain. Then he will be angry and then more anger will be created, and this can continue even for lives. Everything has a continuity of cause and effect; it becomes a chain.So if you feel anger and you see it is going to be destructive to you and to the other person, smile, have a false face. And move to your room, close the doors, take your pillow and beat it. Write the name of the person on the pillow and do whatsoever you wanted to do with the person. Don’t suppress it in the system because that is too dangerous. Anger is poison, and when the body is ready to fight the blood is filled with poison – you have to act it out. If you don’t act it out, if you don’t go through a catharsis then you will have to suffer for it. It may become a physical disease, it may cripple your body, and it may poison your relationships – because you were not angry, but the anger was there.Your boss insulted you and you couldn’t reply to him, so you will come home and you will find some excuse to get angry with the wife. And you will think that she has done something wrong, but that is just rationalization; you wanted someone who is weaker than you, to whom you can be the boss. You will throw the anger on the wife, and she will wait for the child to come back from the school. Suppressed anger finds outlet towards the weaker person. She will wait for the child to come and she will find something – and you can always find something, there is no problem. She can say, “Why are your clothes dirty?” They have always been dirty; every day he comes with dirty clothes from the school. He is a child, not an old man – he doesn’t care about clothes. He can play with the dirt; that is more valuable than those clothes. Then the mother is going to beat the child. And what is the child supposed to do? He will go, take his dog and beat it, or throw his book into the street, or do something that he can do. This way anger goes on moving and moving, it creates ripples, and a single phenomenon becomes multidimensional, unnecessarily.So I say to you, there is no need to be angry with the person by whom anger has come into you – there is no need. But there is no need to suppress it also. Express it in the vacuum. Have a room in your home, your meditation room, so whatsoever happens, go in that room and do it. And you will enjoy it so much, you cannot imagine; the whole exercise is so beautiful. In the beginning it will look absurd, but soon you will get into it and you will enjoy it. And the pillow is not going to answer, the pillow is not going to create any chain. Rather, on the contrary, the pillow will be very happy that you related with it.Never suppress, but never create chains – this is the rule. Remember not to suppress, and remember not to create any chain. Once you learn the art you can be free of all these madnesses which come into you, without creating any disturbance in life. Every day catharsis is needed. Life is complex, and many things come into the mind which have to be thrown. That’s why I emphasize Dynamic Meditation so much. You don’t know what you are doing here. When you get into it you are doing all sorts of things. Somebody is throwing anger, somebody is throwing jealousy, somebody throwing hatred, somebody throwing his sadness, screaming – the whole life of misery is being thrown in it.Make it a point every day: just as you clean your body every day, clean your mind. This is a bath for the mind. Throw everything, but don’t throw upon anybody; that is violence. Throw it into the vacuum. And the vacuum is big enough, the space is big enough. Don’t you get worried about what will happen to the pillow, what will happen to the space – nothing is going to happen, all that you throw into it is absorbed. And then it never replies to you, there is no chain created. The act simply ends, no karma is created through it. Do things in such a way that no future is created through them.Whatsoever has happened to you, relief is needed, you need that it should be thrown out, but don’t throw it on persons. If you can remember that, soon you will realize that it was absolute foolishness to throw it on persons when it could be thrown just on a pillow. And the same relaxation is felt – even more, because whenever you throw on a person you will feel repentance in the end. You will feel bad, you will feel that you have not done good; then you will feel that it would have been better if you had not done it. But now nothing can be done, and you cannot undo something which has happened. Whatsoever you do, it is there now, you cannot wash it away. There is no way, because you cannot move to the past; it will remain always there.That’s what Hindus have called the theory of karma: whatsoever you do will remain and will have its influence on your future. A catharsis is necessary, and every day it is necessary unless you have become enlightened, then you don’t gather the past. Now you gather, you collect dust. Throw it every day. In the night, every day for one hour, just throw the past, the whole day. Whatsoever has been done to you and you have done to others, or you wanted to do with others…emotions, anger, hate – many things are there – drop them before you go to sleep.In the West sleep has become a problem, and in the East also it is becoming a problem. And the problem is only this: you don’t know how to get rid of the day. It follows you, it continues in the mind, and you cannot stop it. You cannot stop unless you throw it. Whosoever is suffering from insomnia should try this dynamic meditation in the night. Just before going to sleep have an inner bath; throw everything and then go to sleep. You will feel like a child again – innocent, unburdened. Sleep will be totally different, the quality will change. But don’t suppress – express. But don’t express to persons.The fourth question:Osho,Can love be taught? Can one be schooled in love? Can one without heart learn to have heart?No one is without heart. You have the heart, but a nonfunctioning heart; it is there, but not functioning. It is there as a seed, it has not grown. Love cannot be taught, but situations can be created where the heart can grow; and when the heart grows love grows. Situations are needed. Love cannot be taught like mathematics. Mathematics can be directly taught, it is informative; love cannot be taught that way, it is not simply information. You have to grow, you have to change – but situations can be created.In old Eastern universities – Nalanda, Taxila – there were many situations created where love became possible. For example, children were not taught under the roofs, in the rooms; they were always taught under the trees, in the shade of the trees. Have you ever felt any difference? Sit by the side of a concrete wall, and then go out, close your eyes, sit under a tree, your back in contact with the tree, and feel the difference. With a concrete wall you can feel only death just behind you, everything dead – and a dead situation makes you dead. Under a living tree in the open, where sunrays are dancing and where flowers are blooming, where the breeze will come and the tree will dance, sitting there under the tree you can feel the vibration of life. The more vibrations of life you feel, the more your heart will start functioning. Play with children and you will feel that you have become younger. One of the secrets of remaining always young is to play with children, because when you play with children you forget that you are old.There have been many experiments. I was reading about one experiment in an Oxford laboratory. One woman who was eighty years old and almost blind, ninety percent blind, was hypnotized. In hypnosis it was suggested to her that her age was regressing, by and by she was becoming younger, then she was becoming a child again. Then the hypnotist suggested, “Now you are only eight years old” – from eighty to eight. And then the hypnotist said, “Now open your eyes.”She opened her eyes; a book was given to her. It had been impossible for her to read anything, but she simply started reading and she said, “My eyes are so young and fresh.” Just the idea that she was now eight years old, not eighty but eight years old, changed the whole pattern of the eyes.In England there are almost eight hundred people who have gone beyond the age of one hundred. So there was a report: an interviewer went to ask many of these old persons, these centenarians, how they could live so long. Many answers were given, but I liked one the best, and it may be the key. One old man who was one hundred and twenty said, “I am still interested in young girls.” That may be the key. If a person of one hundred and twenty is still interested in young girls, he can live long.It is written in old scriptures that in India, whenever a king became old, it was suggested by the wise men that he should sleep in the night with a young girl on each side. You may be one hundred and twenty, but if a girl of twenty years falls in love with you, you cannot remain one hundred and twenty – immediately something, regression, happens. Play with children and you will be younger; sit with old men, listen to their talk and you will feel you are dead, already dead. Your mind depends on many things; situations help.Bernard Shaw, in his old age, changed his home from London to a village. He was then ninety, and somebody asked, “Why have you changed to this village? Why have you chosen this village?”He said, “I was walking one day in the cemetery of this village, and there I saw one stone. It was written on that stone, on somebody’s stone, that this man was born in 1800 and died in 1900, and it was written that this man died untimely, when he was only one hundred years of age. So,” Bernard Shaw said, “this village is good to live in, because people here think that death at one hundred years is untimely death. This is a good milieu for living a long time.” He really lived a long time.Love cannot be taught; you cannot be given a book to read about love. But a situation, a more natural milieu, birds, trees, animals, where you feel life more, will help you to grow into your heart dimension. Persons who love are needed near you, because love is infectious. When a loving person comes near you…you may have been sad before, but when he comes – blissful, loving – suddenly the sadness disappears as if a cloud has moved and the sun has become visible. You feel it. Sit with someone who is sad; within minutes you will feel a sadness gathering in you. We are not like islands, we are joined together, so everyone influences everybody else.A loving milieu is needed to teach love. In our schools, colleges, universities, there is no loving milieu. The teacher is not related at all. Just because of the traditions of the old days, in India the vice-chancellor is never called the vice-chancellor, he is called kulapati, the head of the family. There were ten thousand students in Nalanda, and the head of the family, the vice-chancellor, knew every student by his face and name. He knew everybody – ten thousand students. When someone was ill and when someone was okay, he would go and see. He loved his students, he knew them by name. He was really the “head of the family.” Just traditionally in India they still go on calling the vice-chancellor kulapati.I was in a university, and I asked the kulapati, “What type of kulapati are you? What type of head of the family are you? You don’t know even a single student by name – no personal relationships, you are not related at all. You may be an administrator but you are not a head of the family.” The teacher has to be a loving father; only through love can love be taught. If you love a child you are teaching love to him.I was reading a letter somebody wrote to me. The woman who wrote the letter belongs to a theosophical family, very religious. She wrote to me, “When-ever there was any problem in the family, any sadness, any anger, any conflict, my mother would give me a book and she would say, ‘Go and look in it.’ The Philosophy of Divine Love, or The Art of Love – but nobody loved me ever; they would always give me books to read. So I would read the books, but I never felt what love is.”Love cannot be taught in that way; a milieu has to be created. The teacher, the family, the society, must be loving; only then a child learns how to love. Many experiments have been done. A child can be brought up without the mother, or without the mother’s breast. He will grow, he will be healthy, but he will become incapable of love. If the mother has not loved him, if he has not been breastfed, if he has not felt the warmth of his mother’s body, if he has not been touched lovingly, he will not be able to love anybody, his sensitivity will never grow.So I know love cannot be taught, but still I say it has to be taught. And by teaching love I mean create a milieu, an atmosphere where love can grow, where heart can start functioning. And remember, you are with a heart, but a nonfunctioning heart. It is there waiting to function, and when it starts functioning you will be totally a different person.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-08/

After this the seeker enters the third stage of yogawhich is known as nonattachment. He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of scriptural words. He lives in the monasteries, ashrams, of saints well established in austerities. He occupies himself with the discussion of the scriptures and sleeps on a rocky bed. Thus it is that he lives his life. Because he has attained peace of mind, the man of good conduct spends his time in the enjoyment of pleasures that come naturally to him from his excursions into the forest.He remains detached however, from the objects of desires. Through the ritual of meritorious deeds and the cultivation of right scriptures, he attains that clarity of vision which sees reality. On completing this stage, the seeker experiences a glimpse of enlightenment. The second stage is that of thought – purity of thought, intensity of thought, contemplation, meditation. Thought is energy; it can move through desires to the objects of the world, it can become a bondage. If thought is associated with desire it becomes bondage; if thought is not associated with desire, freed from desire, thought can be used as a vehicle to reach the ultimate liberation.The way is the same, only the direction changes. When thought moves to objects, to the world, it creates entanglements, it creates slavery, it creates imprisonment. When thought is not moving to objects but starts moving within, the same energy becomes liberation. The second stage is of thought – to make it pure, to become a witness of it.The third stage is of vairagya – nonattachment. Nonattachment is very significant, the concept is very basic to all those who are in search of the truth. Mind has the capacity to get attached to anything, and once the mind gets attached to something the mind itself becomes that thing. When your mind is moving towards a sexual object and you get attached, mind becomes sex; when the mind is moving towards power and you get attached to it, mind becomes power, mind becomes politics.Mind is just like a mirror: whatsoever you get attached to becomes fixed in the mirror, and then mind behaves like a film of a camera. Then mind is not just a mirror, it has become a film. Then whatsoever comes to it, the mind clings to it. These are the two possibilities, or two aspects of the same possibility. Mind has the capacity to get attached, identified, with anything whatsoever.In hypnosis this is revealed very clearly. If you have seen any hypnotic experiments…or if you have not seen any, then you can try a few experiments yourself; they will be very revealing. Hypnosis is not difficult, a very simple process. Let someone who is willing to cooperate lie down in a relaxed posture, and tell him to fix his eyes on something – the electric light bulb will do – anything shiny so that the eyes get dazed. Let him concentrate without blinking the eyes. After two or three minutes you will feel that his eyes are becoming vacant, empty, sleepy.Then you start suggesting. You simply say, “Your eyes are getting very heavy, even if you try you cannot keep them open.” And he has to try to keep them open, he has to exert effort to keep them open. Go on suggesting, “Your eyes are getting heavy, heavier, heavier…it is difficult now, you cannot do anything, it is impossible, the eyes are going to close by themselves…no will, no effort of yours can keep them open….” And the person will start feeling as if the eyes have be-come loaded, heavy. He will try, he will make every effort to keep them open, and you go on suggesting the opposite.After five or six minutes the eyes will close, and the moment the eyes close, the man will start feeling that something is happening which is beyond his control – he cannot keep his own eyes open. Then you go on suggesting, “You are falling into deep sleep, you will become unaware of everything except me.” You have to suggest, “Only my voice will be heard, and everything else will become blank.” Go on suggesting. After ten minutes the person will be fast asleep, but this sleep is totally different from normal sleep because he is not asleep to you. He is asleep to the whole world, he cannot hear anything; if someone else talks he cannot hear, but if you talk he will hear. His conscious mind has dropped, but his unconscious is linked with you – now he is suggestible.Now try something, some experiment. You can prick his body with a pin and tell him that there will be no pain, and you can go on pushing in the pin and he will not feel any pain. Then you can believe that he has become suggestible. You can give him an onion to eat and tell him that it is an apple and he will think, “This is very sweet, very tasty. I like it.” He is eating onion, but if you have suggested that it is an apple, he will feel that it is an apple. Then he has become more suggestible.Put a piece of stone, a piece of rock in his hand, and tell him that it is a burning coal. Immediately he will throw it as if his hand has been burned – and it was just a piece of rock, cold, but he will feel it as hot. And not only that, but the spot on his hand, on his skin, will look as if a burning coal has been put there. The skin has burned, it has happened; the body has reacted because the mind accepted the idea.This is how in India, in Ceylon, in Burma, fakirs, monks, bhikkus, have been walking on fire. They just believe so totally that the body has to follow. Remember, the body always follows the mind. If you think that a cold stone is a burning coal and your mind gets attached to the idea, then the body reacts in that way. The reverse is also true. You can put a burning coal on the hand and say that it is a cold piece of rock, and the hand will not get burned.Whatsoever the attachment, your life follows that. In this world, the Upanishads say, we are behaving as if we are hypnotized; we are in a deep hypnosis. Nobody else has done that, we have hypnotized ourselves. For millions of lives we have been attached to certain objects of desire; they have become fixed. So whenever you see a woman, immediately your body starts working in a sexual way.Once it happened, I was sitting on the bank of the Ganges with a friend of mine. Suddenly I felt that he was uncomfortable, so I asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “That woman!”A woman was taking a bath in the river, and we could see only the back of the woman – long hair, curly hair, a beautiful back – and he was excited, so he said, “Pardon me, excuse me, we will continue our discussion later on. I must go and see, the body seems to be so beautiful.”So he went, and then he came back very frustrated because it was not a woman, it was a sadhu, a Hindu monk, a Hindu sannyasin with long hair taking a bath, and the body was beautiful and looked feminine. There was no woman, but the mind got attached, a fixation, and then the whole chemical process in the body started.Attachment creates the life; a life is created around whatsoever you are attached to. So the Upanishads say it is basic, the third step of sadhana, that the mind should get nonattached; only then this illusory world that you have created around you will disappear. Otherwise you will remain in a dream.The world is not a dream, remember. This has been very much misunderstood. In the West it has been very much misunderstood; they think that these Indian mystics have called the world illusory. They have not called the world illusory, they call the world you have created around you illusory. And everybody has created a world around himself that is not the real world, that is just your projection. You have got attached to certain things, then you project your dreams onto the reality. By nonattachment, reality is not going to be destroyed; only your dreams will be destroyed, and reality will be revealed to you as it is. So nonattachment becomes a basic step, very foundational.Now we will enter the sutra:After this the seeker enters the third stage of yoga which is known as non-attachment. He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of scriptural words. He lives in the monasteries, ashrams, of saints well established in austerities. He occupies himself with the discussion of the scriptures and sleeps on a rocky bed.Everything has to be understood. These are old symbols, they have to be penetrated deeply; they are not literal, they are symbolic.He fixes his mind unwaveringly….This is the first thing in nonattachment, because a wavering mind cannot get non-attached. Only a nonwavering mind, nishkam, a nonwavering mind, can get nonattached. Why? Look at your mind, observe it: every moment it is wavering. It cannot remain with one object for a single moment, every moment a flux is passing; one thought comes, then another, then another – there is a procession.You cannot remain with one thought even for a single moment, and if you cannot remain for a single moment with one thought, how can you penetrate it? How can you become aware of its full reality? How can you see the illusion that it creates? You are moving so fast that you cannot observe – observation is impossible. It is just as if you come running into this hall. As soon as you enter from one door you go out from the other. You have just a glimpse, and you cannot know later on whether this hall was real or a dream. You had no time here to know, to penetrate, to analyze, to observe, to be aware.So fixation of the mind on one content is one of the essential requirements for any seeker – that he should remain with one thought for long periods. Once you can remain with one thought for long periods, you yourself will see that this thought is creating attachment, this thought is creating a world around it, this thought is the basic seed of all illusion. And if you can retain a thought for long periods, you have become the master. Now the mind is not the master and you are not the slave.And if you can remain with one thought for long periods you can drop it also. You can say to the mind, “Stop!” and the mind stops; you can say to the mind, “Move!” and the mind moves. Now it is not so; you want to stop the process but the mind continues, the mind never listens to you. The mind is the master and you are just following the mind like a shadow. The instrument – mind is just an instrument – has become the soul, and the soul has become the servant. This is the perversion and this is the misery of human beings.Try to fix your mind on one thing, anything will do. Sit on the ground outside and look at a tree and try to remain with the tree. Whatsoever happens, remain with the tree. The mind will try many waverings, the mind will give you many alternatives to move. The mind will say, “Look! What type of tree is this? What is the name?” Don’t listen to it, because even if you have moved to the name you have moved away from the tree. If you start thinking about the tree you have gone away from the tree. Don’t think about it, remain with the fact that the tree is.It will be difficult in the beginning because you are not so alert. You are so sleepy that you will forget completely that you were looking at the tree. A dog will start barking and you will look at the dog; a cloud will come in the sky and you have moved; somebody passes and you have forgotten the tree. But go on, again and again. When you remember again that you have forgotten and fallen asleep, move again to the tree. Do it.If you go on working, after three or four weeks you will be capable of retaining one content in the mind at least for one minute. And that’s a big capacity! That’s a big phenomenon! – because you don’t know, you think one minute is not much. One minute is too much for the mind, because mind moves within seconds. For not even a full second is your mind on one thing. It is wavering – wavering is mind’s nature, it goes on creating waves. And that is the way the attachment is retained.You love a woman. Even if you love a woman you cannot retain the idea of the woman in your mind. If you look at the woman you will start thinking about her – and you have moved away. You may think about her clothes, you may think about her eyes, you may think about her face and figure, but you have moved away from the woman. Just let the fact remain, don’t think about it, because thinking means wavering. To retain a single content means: don’t think, just look. Thinking means moving, wavering. Just look – looking means nonwavering.That is the meaning of concentration, and all the religions of the world have used it in this way or that. Their methods may look different but the essential is this: that the mind has to be trained to retain one thing for longer periods. What will happen? Once you get this capacity nothing is to be done. You can penetrate, anything becomes transparent. The very look, and in that look your energy moving, goes deep.There are two ways for the mind. One is linear, from one thought to another – a, b, c, d – the mind moves in a line. Mind has energy. When it moves from a to b it dissipates energy, when it moves from b to c again energy is dissipated, when it moves from c to d energy has been dissipated. If you retain only a in the mind and don’t allow it to move to b, c, d and so forth and so on, what will happen? The energy that was going to be dissipated in movement will go on hammering on the fact a, and then a new process will start – you will move deeper in the a. Not moving from a to b, but moving from a1 to a2, a3, a4. Now the energy is moving directly, intensely, in one fact. Your eyes will become penetrating.One sannyasin came to me just yesterday. She is working well, doing well, but just after a meditation I looked deeply into her eyes when she was standing here, and she started trembling and weeping and crying. Then she came to me, crying and weeping, and said, “Why did you look at me so penetratingly? Can’t you look at me a little sweetly?” She said, “I became afraid, and I thought that I must be doing something wrong, that’s why you were looking so penetratingly.”We have become completely unacquainted with the penetrating eye. We know only superficial, moving eyes from a to b, from b to c – just touching and moving, touching and moving. If somebody looks at you, stares at you deeply, and he is not moving from a to b, b to c, you will become scared – but that is the real look. And you will become scared because his eyes are going deep within you; he is not moving on the surface, he is moving deep, in the depth. You will become scared because you have become unacquainted with it.Fixation of the mind will give you a penetrating eye. That eye has been known in the occult world as the third eye. When you start moving on a point, not in a line, you gain a force, and that force works. All over the world mesmerists, hypnotists, and other workers in the psychic field have been aware of it for centuries. You can try it. Somebody, a stranger, is walking on the road. You just go behind him and look at the back of his neck. Stare. Immediately he will look back towards you, the energy hits there immediately if you stare.There is a center at the back of the neck which is very sensitive. Just stare at the center and the person is bound to look back because he will become uneasy, something is entering there. Your eyes are not simply windows to look through, they are energy centers. You are not only absorbing impressions through the eyes, you are throwing energy – but you are not aware. You are not aware because your energy is being dissipated in movement, is waving, wavering from one to two, two to three, three to four – you go on, and every gap takes your energy.He fixes his mind unwaveringly….First one has to try to fix this mind unwaveringly on objects, and then on the meaning of the scriptural words.This is a totally different science. You read a book. Reading is linear: from one word you move to another, from another to another – you go on moving in lines. You may not have observed that different countries have different ways of writing. English is written from the left towards the right, because English is a technical language, not very poetic; a male language, not feminine. Urdu, Arabic, are written from the right to the left. They are more poetic, because the left side is poetry and the right side is mathematics – right is male, left is female.Chinese is written downwards; neither from left to right, nor from right to left, just from up downwards, because Chinese was developed through Confucian ideology, and Confucius says, “The middle is the goal, the middle is golden – the golden mean.” So they don’t move from left to right, or from right to left; they move from up to down. This is the middle, the mean, neither male nor female.English is male, Urdu is female – that’s why Urdu is so poetic. No language in the world is as poetic as Urdu. In any language of the world you will need hundreds of lines, and then too you will not be able to express a poetic thing. In Urdu just two lines will do and they will stop the heart. It moves from right to left, from male to female – female is the end.All over the world God has always been conceived of as the father. Only in the East are there a few religions which conceive of God as the mother – but Sufis, Mohammedans, are the only ones who conceive of God as the beloved; not mother, beloved. The feminine is the end. From the male they move to the female, to the feminine, but movement is there.Chinese moves from up to down, into the depth, so Chinese symbols can express things no other language can express – because every language is linear, and Chinese is in the depth. So if you have read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching in translation, you know that every translation differs. If you read ten translations then all the translations will be different; you cannot say who is wrong and who is right, because Chinese carries so much meaning and depth that ten, or even one hundred meanings are possible. In depth more and more meanings are revealed.In India it is said that a scripture like the Vedas, the Upanishads or the Gita, is not to be read in a linear way. You have to concentrate on each word. Read a word, then don’t move; look at the word, close your eyes, and wait for the meaning to be revealed. This is a totally different concept of studying a thing, so Westerners sometimes cannot understand that a person goes on reading the Gita every day for his whole life. This looks absurd. If you have read it once it is finished! Why do you go on reading the Gita every day? Once you have read it, what is the meaning in reading it again?But Hindus say the Gita is not a linear book. Each word has to be looked at with a fixed mind; in each word you have to penetrate deep – so deep that the word disappears and only silence remains. And the word does not have the meaning, remember – the meaning is hidden in you. The word is just a technical support to help the meaning that is within you to come up. So the word is a mantra, or a yantra, a design which will help you to bring up the meaning which is hidden in your soul.See the difference. In the West if you read a thing, then the word has a meaning; in the East the word has got no meaning – the meaning is in the reader. The word is just a device to bring the reader to his own inner meaning, to encounter the inner meaning. The word will just provoke you inside so that your inner meaning flowers through it. The word has to be forgotten and the inner meaning has to be carried, but you will have to wait; and mind needs fixation, mind needs concentration, only then the inner meaning can be revealed. So one has to go on reading the same thing every day, but it is not the same because you have been changing.If a boy of fifteen reads the Gita the meaning is going to be boyish, immature, juvenile. Then a man, a young man of thirty reads the Gita – the meaning is going to be different, more romantic. In that meaning sex will be involved, in that meaning love will be projected, in that meaning the youth will project his youth. And then an old man of sixty reads the Gita. He has passed through the ups and downs of life, he has seen misery and glimpses of happiness, he has lived through much. He will see something else in the Gita; in that something else death will be involved, death will be all over the Gita.And a man of one hundred, to whom even death has become irrelevant, to whom even death has become an accepted fact, not a problem, who is not afraid of death but rather, on the contrary, is just waiting for it so that the imprisonment in the body is broken and the soul can fly – he looks in the Gita and it will be totally different. Now it will transcend life, the meaning will transcend life.The meaning depends on the state of your mind. So the meaning of a word is not in the dictionary, the meaning of the word is in the reader, and the words are used as devices to bring that meaning up. But if you go on reading fast that will not help. In the West they go on creating more and more techniques for how to read fast, how to finish the book as fast as possible, because time is short. And there are techniques by which you can read very fast; whatsoever your speed right now it can be doubled very easily, and you can even double it again if you work a little harder. And if you are really persistent you can again double that speed.So if you are reading sixty words per minute, you can read two hundred and forty words per minute if you work hard – but then you will be moving in a linear way. And if you move fast then your unconscious starts reading, the conscious just gives hints. Subliminal reading becomes possible, but then you cannot penetrate.The question is not to read much, the question is to read very little but to read deep. The depth is significant, because in the depth quality is hidden. If you read fast quantity will be great, but quality will be no more there, it will be mechanical. You will not be imbibing whatsoever you are reading, you will not be changed through whatsoever you are reading; it will just be a memorization.He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of the scriptural words.In Sanskrit every word has multi-meanings. In the West it will be thought that this is not good; a word should mean only one thing, it should have only one meaning. Only then can there be a science of language, only then can the language become technical, scientific. So one word should have only one meaning. But Sanskrit is not a scientific language, it is a religious language. And if the people who spoke Sanskrit claimed that their language is divine it means something. Every word has multi-meanings; no word is fixed, solid, it is liquid, flowing. You can derive many meanings through it – it depends on you. It has many shades, many colors; it is not a dead stone, it is an alive flower.If you go in the morning it looks different, if you go in the afternoon the same flower looks different, because the whole milieu has changed. When you go in the evening the same flower has a different poetry to it. In the morning it was happy, alive, dancing, filled with so many desires, hopes, dreams, was maybe thinking to conquer the whole world. By the afternoon desires have dropped, much frustration has come, the flower is not hoping so much now, it is a little depressed, a little sad. By the evening life has proved illusory, the flower is on its deathbed, shrunken, closed, no dreams, no hopes.Sanskrit words are like flowers, they have moods; that’s why Sanskrit can be interpreted in millions of ways. The Gita has one thousand interpretations. You cannot conceive of The Bible having one thousand interpretations – impossible! You cannot conceive of the Koran having one thousand interpretations – not a single interpretation exists. The Koran has never been interpreted. There are one thousand interpretations of the Gita, and still they are not enough. Every century will add many more, and while human consciousness is on the earth interpretations will be added forever and ever. The Gita cannot be exhausted, it is impossible to exhaust it, because every word has many meanings.Sanskrit is liquid, flowing, moody, and this is good because this gives you freedom. The reader has freedom, he is not a slave; the words are not imposed on him, he can play with those words. He can change his moods through those words, and he can change those words through his moods. The Gita is alive, and every alive thing has moods; only dead things have no moods. In that way English is a dead language. It will look paradoxical, because English scholars go on saying that Sanskrit is a dead language because no one speaks it. They are right in a way – because nobody speaks it, it is a dead language, but really modern languages are dead.No one speaks Sanskrit now, but it is an alive language, the very quality of it is alive; every word has a life of its own and changes, moves, flows, riverlike. Much is possible through the play of Sanskrit words, and they have been arranged in such a way that if you concentrate on them, many worlds of meanings will be revealed to you.He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of scriptural words. He lives in the monasteries….First he fixes on the Vedas, on the old scriptures. These scriptures are not just books. They are not written for any other reason than this: they have been written to reveal a certain deep secret. They are not for you to read and enjoy and throw just like novels; they are to be pondered, contemplated, meditated on. You have to go so deep in them that this going into depth becomes natural to you. And they were not written by persons who were writers, persons not knowing anything but just through their egoistic feeling writing things.Gurdjieff divides all scriptures into two divisions: one he calls subjective, the other he calls objective. These scriptures – the Vedas, the Upanishads, are objective, not subjective. The whole literature that we are creating is subjective, the writer is throwing his own subjectivity into it. A poet, a modern poet, or a painter, a modern Picasso, or a novelist, a story-writer – they are writing their own minds there. They are not concerned with the person who is going to read, remember, they are more concerned with themselves. This is a catharsis for them. They are mad inside, burdened – they want to express.You can read a good novel, but don’t go to see the novelist; you may be disappointed. You can read a good poem, but don’t go to see the poet; you will be disappointed, because the poetry will give you a glimpse of a high realm, it will put you on high, but if you go to see the poet you will find a very ordinary man – you may even be better than him. The man has not changed through his poem, how can the poem change you? The man has not known that height, he may have dreamed it or he may have taken LSD.One girl came to me just two or three days ago, and she said, “I was in Goa” – she is my sannyasin – and she said, “I took LSD and then I became certain that enlightenment had happened to me, so I threw your mala into the sea, because now there is no need. I changed the dress, because I am now enlightened, so what is the use of orange or the mala or anything?”This is a sort of madness. Enlightenment is not so cheap. But in the West they are making everything cheap. I go on hearing that there are three week intense enlightenment growth groups – in three weeks you are enlightened!A poet may have dreamed, may have taken hashish. And scientists say that poets have some difference, some chemical difference from ordinary persons – they have some hashish in their blood, really, so they can imagine more, they can dream more, they can go on dream trips more than others. So they write, but their writing is imaginative, it is not objective. It may help them as a catharsis, that they are unburdened.But there is another type of literature, totally different, which is objective. These Upanishads were not written for the joy of the writer, they were written for those who were going to read them – they are objective. What they will do to you if you contemplate on them has been planned; every single word has been put there, every single sound has been used. If someone contemplates on it, then the state of the writer will be revealed to him; the same will happen to him if he contemplates. These scriptures are called holy; that’s why.A totally different body of literature exists in the East, a totally different body – not meant to be enjoyed, but meant to be transforming. And when one has penetrated deep into the meaning of the scriptures…. And these scriptures belong to those who have known. It was thought to be a great sin to write something which you have not known. That’s why very few books were written in the past.Now every week ten thousand books are written all over the world – every week, ten thousand. And this goes on and on. Now they are worried, because libraries cannot contain such a growing body of literature, so minibooks have to be created, or microfilms of books have to be created so that they can be contained; otherwise soon there will be more libraries than there are houses. And people don’t have shelter, so how can one shelter books? It is becoming almost impossible.But in the past very few books were written because no one was interested just in writing. Modern authors write because it gives an egoistic feeling that you are an author, everybody knows your name because you have written a book. Your book may be dangerous because it will carry your mind and your germs. If you are ill, then whosoever reads that book will get ill; if you are mad…. Just read Kafka’s books or look at Picasso’s paintings. Try this method with a Picasso painting – you will go mad. Just fix the mind on a Picasso painting, go on staring at it for the inner meaning. Soon you will feel that insanity is arising within you. Picasso is insane, he is putting his insanity on the painting. That is good for him because he is relieved, but not good for you; it is dangerous.I have heard an anecdote. Once it happened that one of Picasso’s very valuable paintings was stolen, and Picasso was there when the thief came and took the painting, so he had seen the thief. The police asked for particulars, for details of how the thief looked, so he said, “It is difficult to say, but I will paint him.”So he painted a picture. The police caught twenty persons. Of those twenty persons one was a professor, one was a politician, one was a musician – all types of men. And not only that, it is said that many other things were caught – some machines, and finally the Eiffel Tower!…Because you cannot know what Picasso paints, it is difficult to say what the painting says; it says nothing, or it says so much that it is a confusion.So don’t try this method on modern writings, you will go mad. Kafka, Sartre, or paintings of Picasso – don’t try this method on them. Only with objective literature can you go deep, because the opposite will be the result. These writings are from those who have known, who have become enlightened, and they have put in these writings their own mind – the mind is hidden there. If you penetrate, the mind will be revealed to you. And only after that…He lives in the monasteries, ashrams, of saints well established in austerities.The ashram is an Eastern concept, there is no word to express it in English. “Monastery” is not a good word; ashram is totally different. You have to understand the concept. A monastery is where monks live. There are Christian monasteries – there is no need for an enlightened person to be there; abbots are there, administrators are there. The monastery is like a training school. The abbot need not be enlightened, but he will train you, because they have a curriculum, a course. Christian priests are prepared that way.I used to visit a Christian theological college. For five years they train the priest there. Everything is conditioned: how much you have to raise your hand when you assert something from The Bible, how you have to make gestures, how loudly you have to speak, and where you have to go slow – everything is trained. They become robotlike and the whole thing is missed.If you have read about Vivekananda then you will remember this. Vivekananda himself was not an enlightened person, but he impressed America very much – and the reason was not that he was enlightened, the reason was something else. The reason was that he was the only spontaneous person there. All the Christian missionaries, priests, abbots, and big names in Christianity were all disciplined, conditioned, nonspontaneous, robotlike.So when Vivekananda stood in the American Fair of World Religions, just from the way he stood there, from the way he started, from the first thing when he said, “Brothers and Sisters,” the whole audience was happy – because when you say, “Ladies and gentlemen,” it is something else. No one had addressed the audience there in that fair in that way. Hundreds of speeches were made, and Vivekananda said, “Brothers and sisters….” Immediately the faces of people sitting there changed. Someone was spontaneous, not formal. And whatsoever he said was not very significant, because he was a Hindu sannyasin, untrained.A monastery is a training school; an ashram is not a school, an ashram is a family. And an ashram doesn’t exist as an institution, cannot exist as an institution. The ashram exists around an enlightened person, that is a basic must. If the enlightened person is not there the ashram disappears; it is the person around whom the ashram can come into being. When the person is dead the ashram has to disappear. If you continue the ashram it becomes a monastery.For example, Aurobindo is dead and now the Mother is dead – now Pondicherry is a monastery, not an ashram. It will persist as a dead thing, an institute. When Aurobindo was there it was totally different. The person is important, not the institute – institutions are dead. So remember this: a live phenomenon, a master, just by his presence creates a milieu – that milieu is the ashram. And when you move in that milieu you are moving in a family, not in an institute. The master will take care of you in every way, and you will be there in intimate, close proximity.Eastern ashrams are disappearing, they are becoming monasteries, institutes. The Western mind is so obsessed with institutes that everything is turned into an institute. I was just reading a book on marriage. It begins by saying that marriage is the greatest institute, the greatest institution – but who wants to live in an institute? The ashram is more intimate, more personal.So every ashram will differ from others, every ashram is going to be unique, because it will depend on the person around whom it has been created. All monasteries will be similar but no two ashrams can be similar, because every ashram has to be individual, unique; it depends on the personality of the master. If you go to a Sufi ashram it will be totally different – much dancing and singing will be there; if you go to a Buddhist ashram, no dancing, no singing, much sitting silently will be there. And both are doing the same, they are leading towards the same goal.The first thing to remember: an ashram exists with a master; it is his personal influence, his person, the atmosphere, the milieu that he creates through his being. An ashram is his being, and when you enter into an ashram you are not entering into an institution, you are entering a live person, you are becoming part of the soul of the master. Now you will exist as part of the master, he will exist through you. So no forced discipline, but spontaneous happenings will be there.He lives in the ashrams of saints well established in austerities.In the third state it is good to move to someone who has known, to live with him. The first two will make you capable, patra; the first two will make you worthy of having a master look at you, of a master allowing you to be in intimacy with him. Without the first two no master will look at you; you will not be allowed, he will avoid you, he will create situations so that you will have to leave his ashram. Only after these two states, when you enter the third, will you be allowed, because a master is not going to waste…. He cannot work with you unless you are ready, and unless you show readiness.One sannyasin goes on writing letters to me. He is here, he has again written a letter to me, a very long letter, saying, “Give me the method so that I can move into my past lives.” And he is not capable at all even to live in this life! He will go mad if I give him a method to move into the past lives. Why do you think nature prohibits it? Why does nature create a barrier so that you cannot remember the past lives?Nature is more wise than you. Nature creates the barrier because even one life is too much; it is a burden. You have to forget many things, and if you continuously remember the past life you will be confused, you will be nowhere, you will not be able to decide what is what. Everything will become vague, cloudy, and the past life will remain on your mind like a burden and it will not allow you to live here and now.Just think, you are in love with a woman and you remember that in the past life she was your mother! So now what will you do? If you go on making love to her you are making love to your mother, and that will create guilt. Or if you think that she is your mother so you should leave her, that will again create guilt because you love her so much. The whole thing will become very difficult and arduous to carry on. And this is how it is happening: your wife may have been your mother, your husband may have been your son, your friend may have been your enemy, your enemy may have been your friend. You have moved in so many lives, it is very complex. Nature creates a barrier: when you die a curtain falls and you cannot remember.This man goes on writing to me, “Give me a method.” And now he has threatened, “If you don’t give me a method I am going to leave sannyas.” If you leave sannyas, what is it to me? And if I give you a method and you go mad, then who will be responsible? And you will go mad – you are already mad, just on the brink; any step further, a little more burden on the mind and you will explode.The ashram, or the master, will accept you only when you are ready, and he will start working only when a certain thing can be done to you, you have come to a certain state; nothing can be done before it. And this should be the attitude of the disciple – that he should not ask. The master knows what is to be done and you have to wait. If you cannot wait you have to leave, because nothing can be done when you are not ripe for it.The first two stages make you ripe to be accepted by a master.He occupies himself with the discussion of the scriptures, and sleeps on a rocky bed.This is actual and symbolic both. In the old ashrams everybody had to sleep on a rocky bed – actually also, because it helps. In yoga, your spine, your backbone, is very important, and not only in yoga but in biology also. Now biologists say man could become man because he started standing erect, his backbone erect. Animals’ backbones are parallel to the earth, only man has a backbone which is not parallel to the earth but makes an angle of ninety degrees. This changed the whole being of man, this angle of ninety degrees with the gravitation created the possibility for the mind to develop. Now biologists say that just by standing on two feet the animal became human – because it changes the whole thing. Less blood flows in the head, so the head and the nervous system there can become more delicate and refined. When more blood flows in the head the subtle tissues are broken, they cannot grow.So don’t do too much shirshasana. Unless a master suggests it to you don’t do shirshasana, because I have never seen a person who has been doing shirshasana who is not stupid. You will become stupid. You will become more healthy of course, because animals are more healthy; so if you are just after health, shirshasana is good, do it forever. You will become healthy like a bull but at the same time stupid also, because when more blood moves into the head delicate tissues are destroyed, and those delicate tissues are needed for intelligence. When man stood erect the possibility developed for more delicate tissues in the head.You see primitives sleep without pillows, and they will remain primitives if they continue to sleep without pillows, because more blood flows in the night. A more intelligent person will need more pillows. He may not be healthier, but intelligence needs a certain mechanism in the mind, a very delicate mechanism. And mind is very complex; seventy million cells are there, and so delicate, bound to be so delicate, when in such a small head there are seventy million. They are very delicate, very small particles, and when blood flows fast, in great quantity, they are destroyed, they are killed. So biologically, and scientifically also, the spine is the most important thing in man. Your head is nothing but a pole to your spine: you exist as a spine – on one pole is sex, on the other is your mind, and your spine is the bridge.Yoga worked very much on the spine, because yogis became aware of its significance – that the spine is your life. The angle of ninety degrees will be more exact if your spine is straight, so yogis say that when you sit, sit with a straight spine. They worked out many postures, asanas; all their asanas are based on an erect spine, straight. The straighter it is, the more is the possibility to grow in intelligence, awareness.You may not have observed: if you are listening to me and you are interested your spine will be straight, if you are not interested then you can relax. If you are looking at a movie in a cinema, whenever something interesting comes you will sit straight immediately, because more mind is called for. When the interesting scene has gone you can relax again into your chair.In the day the spine has to be erect for yogic postures, and in the night also it has to be trained to be more straight. On a rocky bed it is more straight than on a Dunlop mattress. On a rocky bed it is bound to be straight, because the rocky bed is not going to give way for it. If the spine is erect the whole night it will be-come conditioned to being erect, so in the day also, while walking, sitting, it will remain erect. This is good. So this is physiologically, biologically, and in the eyes of yogis, very helpful. But this is only one part of it, the other part is symbolic.Whenever a person goes through suffering we say he is lying on a rocky bed. And the ashram is going to be a long suffering, because many old habits are to be broken and they are hard; many old patterns are to be broken and they are very fixed. Really you have to be destroyed and created again, and in between there is going to be suffering and chaos. That is the rocky bed.With a master you will have to move through much suffering. You have got many blocks in the body and the mind; they have to be destroyed, and to destroy a block is painful. Unless those blocks are destroyed you cannot flow, you cannot become spontaneous, your energy cannot rise high, it cannot move from the sex center to the sahasrar, it cannot move to the ultimate center of your being. So many things have to be destroyed and every habit has a big pattern, its own system – it takes time.If you are ready and you trust your master it will not take so much time, be-cause trusting him you can pass through suffering. If you don’t trust, then every suffering becomes a problem, and the mind says, “What are you doing here? Why are you suffering here? Leave this man, go away! You were happy before.” You were never happy before, but when suffering starts you will feel that you were happy before.For the real happiness to happen you will have to throw all suffering, you will have to pass through it – it is part of growth. And when all suffering has been passed through, only then you become capable of bliss; for the first time you can become happy. And there is no other way.Thus it is that he lives his life. Because he has attained peace of mind, the man of good conduct spends his time in the enjoyment of pleasures that come naturally to him from his excursions into the forest.This is something very significant. In an ashram, under the guidance of a master, you will have to pass through many sufferings. But you are not to create those sufferings, you are not to be masochistic. Many pleasures will also come. Re-member, this is the type of our mind – that either we are attached to pleasure and then we demand pleasure, or we can even become attached to suffering and then we say we don’t want any pleasure. We start having pleasure through suffering, and that is dangerous. That’s the masochistic attitude – you can torture yourself and you can enjoy it.This is a very deep phenomenon in the human psyche, and it has happened because of some association. Every pleasure is with some pain, so if pleasure becomes intense you will feel pain, and the reverse is also true: every pain has its own small pleasure, and if the pain becomes intense you will feel pleasure. Pain and pleasure are not really two things, the difference is only of degree.You love a woman. To be with her for a few hours is beautiful, to be with her for a few minutes is just heavenly, to be with her for a few seconds you feel you are in nirvana. But to be with her for twenty-four hours becomes difficult, and to be with her continuously for months becomes boring, and if you are to be with her for your whole life you would like to commit suicide. Every pleasure has its pain, and every pain has its pleasure. They are not two. They differ in intensity, degrees, but they don’t differ in quality.And there is another, deeper, association. When you make love…. Love is the most pleasurable thing in the world, naturally – beyond nature there are more pleasures, more blisses, but naturally, biologically, love is the most pleasurable thing. Sex is one of the most pleasant things nature has given to you, but in sex, pain is also involved. When you make love you do many things which give mild pain, but they are good. Even your kiss is a mild pain. You play with each other’s body, and in playing with each other’s body you create a certain pain also. In the Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana has given many clues and suggestions. He says that when really you love a woman, then you will do many things – biting, penetrating your nails into her body – and she will enjoy it. In other circumstances it would be painful, but associated with love it becomes pleasure. But this can go to an extreme, you can become a de Sade.From de Sade’s name comes the word sadism. De Sade had many devices to torture his beloveds, his mistresses. Nails wouldn’t do, so he had thorns; nails wouldn’t do, so he had iron instruments to penetrate the body. The blood would ooze and he would whip them. He would always travel with a bag with him; in his bag there were all these things. Whenever he found a woman who was ready to love him he would close the door. First he would beat her, blood would start oozing. He would torture the woman and then he would make love. And you will be surprised: he loved many women, and the women, any women that he loved, would declare later on that after de Sade loved them, nobody else has loved that way. He gave them the greatest pleasure, he really loved them.Even a torture can be pleasurable, because when you beat a person more energy is thrown all over the body, the whole body becomes sexual. When you beat a person the whole body is excited – and then you make love. From the excitement of torture, suddenly the fall in love. It gives a very pleasant sensation…as if first you were hungry, starved, and then came good food – the contrast.But in every pleasure some torture, some pain, is involved. You can move to the other extreme, you can start giving pain to yourself and can enjoy it. Go to Benares, you will see the monks lying on a bed of thorns. They are enjoying it, it is a sexual pleasure. They have left the pleasure part and retained the pain part.So in the ashrams you are not to make yourself suffer, not to be a sadist, not to torture yourself. You have to be hard just to break the old habits, but there is no need to seek pain, and if pleasures come by automatically you are allowed to enjoy them. An ashram is not a torture house; if pleasures come by themselves you are allowed to enjoy them. They are good. You have to be thankful for them.Because he has attained peace of mind, the man of good conduct spends his time in the enjoyment of pleasures that come naturally to him from his excursions into the forest. He remains detached, however, from the objects of desire.He remains detached. Pleasures come, moments of enjoyment come; he enjoys them and forgets them. He will not demand them again, he will not say, “Now I cannot live without these pleasures.” Whatsoever God gives, one has to be thankful but never demanding. He remains unattached to desire.Through the ritual of meritorious deeds and the cultivation of right scriptures, he attains that clarity of vision which sees reality. On completing this stage, the seeker experiences a glimpse of enlightenment.Just a glimpse – not enlightenment. This glimpse is known in Japan as satori. Satori is not samadhi, satori is just a glimpse. You have not reached enlightenment, you have not reached the peak of the hill, but standing in the valley when there are no clouds, when the sky is clear, you can look at the peak with snow caps – but it is very far away still. You cannot see when the sky is clouded, you cannot see when it is night, you cannot see if you are standing at such a point from where it cannot be looked at.These three steps will bring you to such a viewpoint from where the peak can be glimpsed. These three stages will make your mind clear. The clouds will disappear and the peak will be revealed – but this is a faraway glimpse, this is not enlightenment. At the third stage a glimpse comes, but remember well, don’t think that this is enlightenment. And this can happen even through chemical help also. Through LSD, marijuana, or other drugs also this is possible, because drugs can create such a chemical situation within you, they can force such a chemical situation where for a moment clouds disappear; suddenly you are thrown to a point from where the peak can be glimpsed. But this is no attainment, because chemistry cannot become meditation and chemistry cannot give you enlightenment. When you come back from the trip you are the same again. You may remember it, and that memory may disturb you, and that memory may make you an addict. Then you have to take LSD again and again, and the more you take the less will be the possibility of even the glimpse, because the body gets accustomed and then a greater quantity is needed. Then you are on a path which will lead to insanity and nowhere else.So don’t try chemical things. If you have tried them, thank God, and don’t try them again. Once you become addicted to chemical help sadhana becomes impossible, because chemicals seem so easy and sadhana seems so difficult. Only sadhana, only spiritual discipline, will help you grow, will give you growth to the point from where the glimpse is not forced but becomes natural. And it is not lost then – any moment you can look, you know from where to look, and the peak will be there. Occupied in your day-to-day activities, any moment you can close your eyes and see the peak and that will become a constant happiness within you, a joy, a continuous joy. Whatsoever you are doing, whatsoever is happening outside, even if you are in misery – for you have built so many jails – you can close your eyes and the peak is there.After the third stage the glimpse is always available. But the glimpse is not the end – that is only the beginning.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 01-17Category: THE UPANISHADS

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 09 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/vedanta-seven-steps-to-samadhi-09/

Osho,Is vairagya, nonattachment, a method, a means, an intermediate stage, or an end in itself?It is all – because means and ends are not two things. The way and the goal are not two things. The way is just the beginning of the goal, and the goal is just the ending of the way. So please, don’t divide, and don’t think in terms of the means being different from the end. Means are the end. Once you can conceive of this, the quality of your effort will change immediately.Ordinarily mind is always concerned with the end; means are used, exploited, to reach the end. If you could avoid the means you would like to avoid them; if you could achieve the end directly without any means, if you could reach the goal without the way, without the path, you would like to do so. You would like to reach the goal immediately. The mind divides ends and means; end is meaningful, means are just necessary, they have to be suffered.This is how the ordinary mind functions, and because of this whatsoever you do becomes a suffering – because you have to pass through the path, you have to use means, methods, and therein is all suffering. Happiness is in the goal, somewhere in the future, not here and now. Here and now will be means and the end will be somewhere else, somewhere in the future, tomorrow – so today will always be a suffering.And remember, if your today is a suffering your tomorrow cannot be a happiness, because it is born of today, it comes out of this moment. The future comes out of the present, so whatsoever the present the same will remain in the future. If you are suffering now you will suffer then also. If you are suffering here you will find the hell there also – because who will find that heaven which you think is there? You? Your whole attitude creates the suffering.So those who are on the spiritual path must be aware of this tendency of the mind. Forget the end and look at the means as if they are the end, and enjoy them as if they are the goal. Then the very path becomes blissful, the very journey itself becomes blissful. Every step becomes blissful, because you are not waiting for the bliss, for the next step. And out of this blissful step the next is going to be born – it will be more blissful. The tomorrow will be more blissful if today is blissful, and the bliss will grow.We are doing meditations. These meditations are means, but they are goals also; so don’t try to exploit them, otherwise you will be in a hurry, you will constantly think of how to be finished with them and reach the goal. Then you will never be able to be finished with them and the goal will always remain illusory, always like the horizon, always distant. And the more you move ahead, the goal will also move ahead in the same proportion.Ends and means are not two things. Don’t divide. The end is just the flowering of the means, the end is just the realization of the means. The end is hidden in the means, just like the tree is hidden in the seed. The seed is the tree. Don’t look at the seed as if the seed has some secondary importance and the tree is meaningful and significant, and you can avoid the seed. If you avoid the seed the tree will never be there. Take care of the seed, love the seed, give soil to it, prepare the ground, and help the seed to grow. It will become the tree. It is already the tree unmanifest.So let me say it in this way: means are the unmanifest end, and end is the manifest means. Means are seeds, and ends will be the trees, the flowering – so love the means as the end.Vairagya is all, nonattachment is all. It is the beginning, it is the middle, it is the end. It is a method, it is an intermediate stage, it is the goal. Desirelessness is the end – but the end must be there in the beginning, only then can it grow. So desirelessness is both the first step and the last also. Of course the quality will differ. In the first step the desirelessness will be with effort, in the inter-mediate stage desirelessness will have become unconscious effort. In the beginning it will be conscious effort, you will have to do it; in the middle it will start happening, it will have become unconscious effort. Effort will be there, but indirect, unconscious. In the end it will be spontaneous, effort will have completely disappeared. But desirelessness is the same. Desirelessness in the beginning is with conscious effort, in the middle is with unconscious effort, in the end is effortless.Avoid this tendency to divide, to cut things, and see that every phenomenon is a continuity, everything is joined together. Even those things which look opposite are also joined together, they are also polarities. Develop this way of looking at things – that will be very helpful. For those who are really sincerely interested in traveling this inner path, this approach of nondividing is a must.The second question:Osho,Are there really discrete stages on the way to the ultimate happening, as this Upanishad seems to suggest, or does this happening occur suddenly and unexpectedly? Is it a matter of long conscious effort, or of a sudden total surrender to existence?It is both. You have to make all effort that is possible, that you can do. No stone should be left unturned, no energies should be left unused. You must get totally involved. You are required to work as a unit, only then the flowering, the happening, will become possible. But that doesn’t mean that it is an outcome of your effort; just by your effort it is not going to happen. This is a little delicate and you will have to be very penetrating about it, then only will you understand.Look at it in this way. You see a person walking on the street. Suddenly you have a feeling that you remember the face or you feel that you even know the name, and you say it is just on the tip of your tongue, but it is not coming. The more effort you make the more frustrated you feel – it is not coming. But you cannot leave it at that, because you have the feeling that you know this face, you know the name. And there is even this feeling that somewhere, just in the corner of the mind, the name is waiting, you have only to recall it.You make all effort, you try in every way. You close your eyes, you contemplate, you ponder over it, you try to associate, you go into the past, you start feeling for some key, some clue, but nothing happens. You get frustrated, bored; you leave the whole effort, and you go into the garden and start working, or you start smoking, or you take a cup of tea. Suddenly the name is there, suddenly the memory has come, suddenly you have recognized.Now two things are happening. One: you are making every effort possible, but it is not coming through the effort. Then you leave all the effort, and then it comes. Effort is needed but is not enough. If you don’t make any effort it will not come when you go to the garden or when you take a cup of tea. If you have not made total effort it is not going to come. And if you make just the effort – total even – then too it is not going to come. So total effort is needed, then total relaxation also – then it will bubble up.Many Nobel prizes have been given for certain discoveries which happened in this way. One Nobel prize winner was working on the inner structure of the human cell, the lymph cell. He was working for years, contemplating, brooding, making many experiments, and nothing was happening, every effort was a failure. After many years of research, effort, failure, one night suddenly he had a dream, and in the dream he saw the structure, the very structure he was looking for, the structure of the human cell, just as if a magnified picture was there. He got up. Immediately he drew the drawing and then he worked on it, and it proved that the dream was true.But remember, you are not going to have this dream, it cannot happen to you. It happened after so many years of effort. The conscious was exhausted. The conscious did everything that could be done and then the conscious was tired, the conscious mind was finished, the conscious accepted the failure. When the conscious is exhausted the unconscious comes into focus and starts working – but it comes only when the conscious is exhausted. If the conscious is still hoping, if the conscious is still trying, then the unconscious will not function. And this is one of the basic laws of the human psyche: that if you want the unconscious to function, exhaust the conscious completely.Effort will not lead you to enlightenment, but without effort no one has ever achieved it. This may look like a paradox. It is not, it is a simple law.Buddha tried for six years continuously, and no man has tried as totally as Buddha did. He made every effort possible, he went to every master available. There was not a single master Buddha did not go to. He surrendered to every master, and whatsoever was said he did so perfectly that even the master started feeling jealous. And every master finally had to say to Buddha, “This is all I can teach. And if nothing is happening I cannot blame you, because you are doing everything so perfectly. I am helpless. You will have to move to some other teacher.”This rarely happens because disciples never do everything so perfectly, so the master can always say, “Because you are not doing well, that’s why nothing is happening.” But Buddha was doing so well, so absolutely well, that no master could say to him, “You are not doing well.” So they had to accept defeat. They had to say, “This is all we can teach, and you have done it and nothing is happening, so it is better you move to some other master. You don’t belong to me.”Buddha moved for six years, and he followed even absurd techniques when they were taught to him. Somebody said “Fast,” so for months he fasted. For six months he was continuously fasting, just taking a very small quantity of food every fifteen days, only twice a month. He became so weak that he was simply a skeleton. All flesh disappeared, he looked like a dead man. He became so weak that he couldn’t even walk. He finally became so weak that he would close his eyes to meditate and he would fall down in a fit.One day he was taking a bath in the river Niranjana, just near Bodhgaya, and he was so weak that he couldn’t cross the river. He fell down in the river and he thought that he was going to be drowned; it was the last moment, death had come. He was so weak he couldn’t swim. Then suddenly he caught hold of a branch of a tree and remained there. And there for the first time the thought came to his mind, “If I have become so weak that I cannot cross this ordinary small river in summertime when the water has gone completely, when there is no more water and it is very small, just a little stream – if I cannot cross this little stream, how can I cross this big ocean of the world, bhavasagar? How can I transcend this world? It seems impossible. I am doing something stupid. What to do?”He came out of the river in the evening and sat under a tree, which became the bodhi tree, and that evening when the moon was coming up – it was a full moon night – he realized that every effort is useless. He realized that nothing can be achieved, the very idea of achievement is nonsense. He had done everything. He was finished with the world, with the world of desires. He was a king and he had known every desire, he had lived every desire. He was finished with them, there was nothing to be achieved, there was nothing worthwhile. And then for six years he had been trying all austerities, all efforts, all meditations, yoga, everything, and nothing was happening. So he said, “Now there is nothing more except to die. There is nothing to be achieved, and every concept of achievement is nonsense; human desire is but futile.”So he dropped all effort that evening. He sat under the tree, relaxed, with no effort, no goal, nowhere to go, nothing to be achieved, nothing worth achieving. When you are in such a state of mind, mind relaxes – no future, no desire, no goal, nowhere to go, so what to do? He simply sat, he became just like the tree. The whole night he slept, and later on Buddha said that for the first time he really slept that night – because when effort is there it continues in sleep also.A person who is earning money and who is after money goes on counting even in his dreams, a person who is after power and prestige and politics goes on fighting elections in his dreams. You all know that when you are sitting for an examination in the university or college, in sleep also you go on doing the examination; again and again you are in the examination hall answering questions. So whatsoever effort is there it continues in sleep – and there is always some effort for something or other.That night there was no effort. Buddha said, “I slept for the first time in millions of lives. That was the first night that I slept.” Such a sleep becomes samadhi. And in the morning when he awoke he saw the last star disappear. He looked. His eyes for the first time must have been mirrorlike, with no content, just vacant, empty, nothing to project. The last star was disappearing, and Buddha said, “With that disappearing star I also disappeared. The star was disappearing and I also disappeared” – because the ego can exist only with effort. If you make some effort ego is fed – you are doing something, you are reaching somewhere, you are achieving something. When there is no effort how can you exist?The last star disappeared, “And,” Buddha said, “I also disappeared. And then I looked, the sky was vacant; then I looked within, there was nothing – anatta, no self, there was no one.”It is said Buddha laughed at the whole absurdity. There was no one who could reach. There was no one who could reach the goal, there was no one who could achieve liberation – there was no one at all, no entity. Space was without, space was within. “And,” he said, “at that moment of total effortlessness I achieved, I realized.” But don’t go to relax under a tree, and don’t wait for the last star to disappear. And don’t wait thinking that with the last star disappearing you will disappear. Those six years must precede. So this is the problem: without effort no one has ever achieved, with only effort no one has ever achieved. With effort coming to a point where it becomes effortlessness, realization has always been possible.This is what I go on emphasizing for you to do: make as much effort as you can, and don’t withhold any energy. Bring your total energy into it so you get exhausted, so the conscious mind cannot make any more effort. When the conscious cannot do anything, suddenly the unconscious reveals. And it reveals only when the conscious has become a total failure, only then it is needed – otherwise it goes on sleeping inside.It is just like this. Every human body has three layers of energies. The first layer is only for day-to-day work: eating, sleeping, walking to the office, working in the office, coming home, fighting, making love, anger – routine. The first layer. It has not got very much energy, just routine energy.The second layer is for emergency situations. Unless the first is exhausted the second is not available. You are tired. You have come from the office, the boss has been very insulting. You come home and the wife is very bad-tempered, the children are creating noise, and the whole house is a mess. You feel tired and dead, and suddenly you find that the house has caught fire, it is on fire. Tired-ness disappears immediately. You need not do anything, you don’t even have to take a cup of coffee. Tiredness is no more. The house is on fire, and you have got so much energy that you can work the whole night. From where is this energy coming? The first layer is exhausted, and an emergency is there – the second layer becomes available.And there is a third layer which is the real source, the source of all energy. You may call it the infinite source, the élan vital. When the second layer is also exhausted, only then the third becomes available. And when the third is available you are totally different: you have become divine, because now the source is infinite, you cannot exhaust it.We live on the first layer and only sometimes in emergencies, accidents, in some dangerous situations where life is at stake, does the second become available. The third remains almost unavailable. All the effort in spiritual sadhana, discipline, is to exhaust the first. Then austerities, arduous efforts, are to exhaust the second. When the second is exhausted you fall into the ocean, and it can never be exhausted. And from that source, the original source – you may call it God, or whatsoever you like – from that original source, once a contact is made, you are totally different. This is what liberation means, this is what becoming infinite means, this is what Jesus used to call the kingdom of God.But remember, you cannot just slip into it, it is not available. You have to exhaust the first layer and the second layer, only then it becomes available. Effort is needed to exhaust these layers, and then effortlessness is needed to enter the original source.So the first thing to be understood: effort is needed, but effort alone is not enough – effort and then effortlessness, effort plus effortlessness. Effort precedes, and then effortlessness follows. Effortlessness is the peak of effort, it comes only when you have reached the peak. And this is so difficult to conceive that there are many misunderstandings.In Japan, Zen, which is an offshoot of the Indian dhyana, says no effort is need-ed. And it is right. Because of this Zen has become very influential in the West. And the West has created its own Zen writers – they are Zen writers, not Zen masters. And it has much appeal; no effort is needed, you can become enlightened without any effort. So in the West there are many Zen writers, Zen painters, Zen haiku poets – and they are all bogus, because they have taken this idea.This idea is very appealing, that there is no need of any effort. If there is no need of any effort, then as you are you are a master, you are enlightened, you have become a siddha. But then look at the Zen monasteries in Japan. If you read Zen scriptures, there it is written that there is no need of effort. But then go to the Zen monastery and look: for twenty years, thirty years, a seeker has to make all the efforts. Then the moment comes when that scripture becomes applicable – then, no effort.Effort will lead you to no effort, and this is a basic law. You can understand if you try to observe your own life. For example, if in the day you have been working hard, sleep will be deep in the night. If you have been working hard, exerting hard, then sleep will be good. If you have slept well in the night, then in the morning you will be capable of doing much hard work again. Hard work is against relaxation, it is the opposite. This would be more logical – that you sleep the whole day, rest, and then in the night you fall into deeper sleep because you have been practicing sleep the whole day. This should be the logic – that a man who has been practicing sleep the whole day must sleep better in the night than others who have not been practicing so much.Mulla Nasruddin once went to his doctor. He had a cold and had been coughing for many days. As he was entering his doctor’s office he coughed. The doctor heard and said, “Nasruddin, it sounds better.”Nasruddin said, “Of course it must because I have been practicing for three months.”But logic is not life. If you sleep and rest the whole day you will not be able to rest at all in the night. That’s what is happening with rich people in affluent societies. Insomnia is a luxury, not everybody can afford it. To attain insomnia you have to rest for the whole day. If you can afford that much rest, only then is insomnia possible. A poor man cannot afford it. He has to fall in deep sleep, he is helpless. He has been working hard the whole day.But work is against rest, so it is not logical – but this is the logic of life. Life depends on opposites, life depends on opposite polarities. Logic is linear, life is polar. Logic moves in a line, life moves in a circle. So a person who has been relaxing will not be able to relax in the night, a person who has been working hard the whole day will be able to relax.Or look at it from another angle. A person who is always loving, never angry, really cannot be loving. Ordinary logic will say that a person can be loving in the morning, loving in the noon, loving in the evening, loving in the night; always loving in summer, always loving in winter – every season, every moment loving. This love is not humanly possible, because the opposite is needed. He must sometimes become angry. That anger relaxes, that anger becomes the valley and then peaks of love can arise again.If you want only peaks and no valleys, you are mad. Only peaks cannot exist. With every peak at least two valleys will be needed, and only between two valleys is one peak possible. So a person who is always loving is possible only in two ways. One is that he is not human. That means he must be a buddha, who can be always loving. But then his love cannot have any intensity, his love will be very silent. His love will not be like a peak, it will be just plain straight ground.That’s why a buddha’s love can only be called compassion, it cannot be called love. There is no passion in it, it is compassion. There can be no intensity in it, because intensity comes from the opposite. A buddha is never angry, so from where can the intensity come?In ordinary life you have to be angry, then you regain love. In marriage there is no need for the final divorce if every day you can divorce a little. In the morning divorce, in the evening remarriage, then things move beautifully. And if you go on postponing this everyday divorce then finally you will have to break, then separation is a must. Life is polarity, and this applies to everything. Effort plus effortlessness – they are the polar opposites. The ultimate is reached through effort and effortlessness, so don’t cling to one – remember both.Both the parties exist; there are a few persons who go on clinging to the method, effort, and then they go on making effort. Even if nirvana has been reached they cannot be stopped. They will go on breathing, they will say, “We cannot stop. Effort is needed.” So even if God is standing before them they will go on doing chaotic breathing; they will not look, they will not look and see what has happened. They are too much attached to the method and the effort.And then there is the other polar opposite party. They say, “If no effort is needed then why breathe at all?” So they are sitting just waiting for the last star to disappear so that they can become buddhas. Both are wrong. You have to breathe and you have to stop also. You have to make all efforts and then relax also. If these are both possible, only then will you create the rhythm through which every growth becomes possible.The second thing: “Are there really discrete stages on the way to the ultimate happening, as this Upanishad seems to suggest?”There are no stages. Life cannot be divided. But without division there is no possibility for you to understand. I call this part of my body my hand; this part of my body my head – but can they be divided? Where my head begins and where it ends – can you draw the line? Nowhere can the line be drawn. Where my legs end, where my hand ends – can you draw a line? No line can be drawn, because inside I am one – my hands, my legs, my head, they are one. But we have to divide to understand. Division is just to help understanding, it is not actual fact.So this Upanishad is dividing, not because divisions are there, but because you will not be able to understand the whole. The whole will be too much, too complex. The whole will be incomprehensible, and understanding will not be possible. That’s why the division into seven stages, and that’s why there are so many divisions. You can divide in fourteen, you can divide in seventeen – you can divide into as many as you like. And theologians go on fighting about these divisions. They are workable, utilitarian – not existential.Just feel your body, close your eyes and feel. Where are the divisions? It is one. But if your eyes are not functioning well you will go to the eye specialist. And you know that eyes are not separate, they are one with the body, so then why go to the eye specialist? You can go to any doctor. The eye specialist has tried to understand eyes…because eyes in themselves are such a big, such a complex phenomenon, that just to understand those eyes medical science has divided the body in parts. There are millions of parts in the body, and as science grows more divisions have to be made. But those divisions are just workable, utilitarian – you are not divided.I have heard one story. Once it happened, one master had two disciples and they both were always competing. Who was the head, who was the chief disciple, was always the competition and the problem. And they were always competing with each other to gain the master’s heart.One summer afternoon the master was tired and was sleeping. The disciples wanted to serve him, to massage his body, so the master said, “Okay. Number one, you take my left side. Number two, you take my right side and massage.” The master fell asleep. They drew a line with chalk on his body, because one should not enter into the other’s territory.But it happened the master was not aware that he had been divided. He was fast asleep, and he didn’t know that now he was not one, but two. So he moved in his sleep, and put his right leg on his left. The disciple to whom the left leg belonged said, “Take away your right leg. Remove it immediately! You are interfering with my work. This is a transgression!”But the other said, “I cannot remove it. I have not put it on your leg. And if you have any courage, then remove it yourself and see what happens!”Now they were standing with two sticks, and they were almost going to beat the master. Suddenly the master became aware that something was wrong, so he asked, “What is happening?”Both said, “You need not interfere. Remain silent and go to sleep. We will decide by ourselves.”All divisions are workable, life remains one. The path and the goal and the stages, they are just to help you, so don’t take them dogmatically and don’t take them literally. These seven stages are just to help you, to give you a view of the whole path. When you have understood forget that they are seven. But until you have understood follow the division. When you have understood forget the division – it is one progression, one flow.And thirdly: “Does this happening occur suddenly and unexpectedly?”Both things can be said. It cannot be predicted, so it happens suddenly. Nobody can say when it will happen. My own disciples go on asking me, “When? Give the date, the day, the month, the year!” And I have to go on lying to them. I go on saying, “Soon!” Soon doesn’t mean anything. And soon is a beautiful word, because I need never change it. Whenever you ask I will say, “Soon!”The happening is unpredictable because it is so vast a phenomenon. And it is not mechanical, it is not mathematical, so you cannot conclude about it. And it is very mysterious; when it has happened, only then you know that it has happened. So in a sense, because it is unpredictable it is always sudden. Even you don’t know when it will happen. Suddenly one day when it has happened you become aware that it has happened. Not even a single moment before will you be aware that this is going to happen. You will become aware only when it has happened already. Then you will feel that you are no more the same, the man who was there has disappeared and a new man is there in his place – somebody new. You are unacquainted, you cannot recognize yourself. There has been a gap, the old continuity has been broken and something new has come into its place.Even your master cannot predict it. He may become aware that something is going to happen, but he cannot predict it. There are problems – because even the prediction will change the whole situation. This is the problem, even the prediction will change it. If I become aware that something is going to happen to you tomorrow morning, I cannot say it because that will change the whole situation. If I say, “Tomorrow morning this is going to happen,” you will become tense and you will start expecting and you will start waiting. You will not be able to sleep in the night. Then the whole thing is finished, then it is not going to happen tomorrow morning.Even if your master becomes aware…because there are signs that show that something is going to happen. Your master can see that you are pregnant, he can feel, but it is not such a fixed affair that within nine months the child will be born. You may take nine years, you may take nine lives, you may not take even nine days; even nine moments may be enough. It depends, and it depends on such multidimensional things that nothing can be said. And if something is said, the very assertion will change the whole situation. So the master has to wait, just watch and not say anything.In this sense it is sudden, but in another sense it is not sudden, because you have to make efforts for it, you have to prepare. You have to prepare the ground, you have to open the doors. The guest may come suddenly, but if your doors are closed he may come and go back. So you have to open the doors, you have to clean the house, you have to prepare food for the guest – you have to be ready. You have to watch and wait at the door – any moment the guest can come.Jesus goes on telling one anecdote many times. Once it happened, a great landlord went on a journey. He told all his slaves and servants, “Be alert constantly. Even in the night the house must be ready because I can come any moment. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, at midnight – any moment I can come, and my house must be ready, waiting for me. So twenty-four hours you have to watch and wait. Don’t go to sleep!”And so the servants had to wait and watch. There was no difference between day and night – the master could come any moment.Jesus used to say, “Your master also can come any moment – you have to be ready. And if you are ready, your readiness also becomes a factor for his coming soon. If you are completely ready he may come back from midjourney. If your whole being is calling him, inviting him, he may come this very moment.”The happening can happen any moment if you are ready. It is sudden because unpredictable; it is sudden because you cannot plan, calculate; it is sudden because it is not mechanical. But still you have to prepare for it, you have to be ready for it, and you have to do much before it can happen.It is just as if you sow a seed in the ground. You prepare the ground and sow the seed – the right seed in the right season in a right place – and then wait. The sprouting will be sudden, you cannot determine it. You cannot say that on Mon-day morning the sprout will be there. It may not be, it may be, because millions of factors are working. Now scientists say that even music helps. If somebody is dancing and singing near that ground where you have sown the seed, it may help the seed to sprout quickly. If the moon is rising it will help the seed to sprout soon. If the moon is declining it will take more time.You may not be aware that full moon night is different from any other night. More children are born on full moon night, more than on any other night. The highest number of children born is on the full moon night, and the lowest number is on the no-moon night. That factor goes on working; the whole constellation goes on working – every star is a factor. Even a beggar sitting there near your house and singing will help. If somebody passes, sad, miserable, the seed is affected; that sadness hinders.There are millions of factors, unpredictable, complex, mysterious – but still you have to prepare everything. So don’t wait for the sudden. “Sudden” doesn’t mean that you need not do anything and it will happen any moment, suddenly. You will have to prepare, and then too it will happen suddenly. Your preparation will help, but it cannot plan, it cannot force.The third question:Osho,In the past hypnosis has been tried on me, but I could not be hypnotized. Please explain why many persons are not hypnotizable.This will be important for you to understand. Ordinarily it is thought that those persons who cannot be hypnotized are powerful. This is absolutely wrong – and I say absolutely. The stronger the person the more easily he is hypnotized. The second wrong conception is that a very intelligent person cannot be hypnotized. That too is absolutely wrong. The more stupid a person the less is the possibility of hypnotizing him. You cannot hypnotize an idiot – impossible. You cannot hypnotize a madman – impossible. The more intelligent a person the more easily he can be hypnotized.Why? – because hypnosis needs cooperation; the basic factor is cooperation, your cooperation. The idiot cannot understand what you are demanding, what type of cooperation; the madman cannot understand what you are demanding. Only an intelligent person can cooperate, and hypnosis is possible only when you cooperate. So if you are paranoid, schizophrenic, neurotic, you cannot cooperate. If you are very much afraid, a fear complex is there, you cannot cooperate.A person who can trust can be hypnotized easily. A person who cannot trust anybody cannot be hypnotized – because the person who is hypnotizing is not using any force on you. This is again a wrong conception, the third, that the hypnotist is using some force. No, not at all. The hypnotist has no force to use; the hypnotist is only using your force, so you have to cooperate. If you don’t cooperate nobody can hypnotize you. And cooperation needs trust, because you will be unconscious and you don’t know what this man who is hypnotizing will do to you.So look, I have been experimenting on many things. A Western woman is more easily hypnotized than an Eastern woman, because the Eastern woman is always afraid of sex. When she is unconscious, who knows what this hypnotist may do? Western women in that sense have become freer, less afraid. They can be hypnotized more easily.A person who is guilty about something is very difficult to hypnotize, be-cause he is always afraid that when he is unconscious the thing he is hiding may come up. A person who has committed some sin, or thinks he has committed some sin and is hiding it, will be very difficult to hypnotize. Only a simple, innocent person can be hypnotized, because he has nothing to hide. You cannot bring anything out; he has no secrets. If you have secrets and you don’t want them to be exposed you cannot trust anybody – because hypnosis means that your unconscious is available to the hypnotist. He can penetrate deep down, he can bring out anything that you are hiding.So those persons are not hypnotizable who fall into these categories. The less guilty and less afraid, and the more intelligent, trusting and cooperative a person is, the more hypnotizable. So don’t think that if you cannot be hypnotized you are something great. You may be simply ill, pathological. If you can be hypnotized you show a quality of trust and you show that you are imaginative. You show that suggestions can catch you and your imagination can work through them. You are an imaginatively creative person.But remember that unless you cooperate nobody can hypnotize you – nobody. Even if Mesmer comes he cannot hypnotize you if you don’t cooperate. Your cooperation is needed, your total willingness is needed. And then too you are not completely in the control of the hypnotist. A part of you remains alert even then, and if the hypnotist is going to force you to do something against yourself you will suddenly come out of hypnosis.It happened, one of my brothers was serving in an office. He trusts me, and I wanted him to leave that service. But he is such a person that whatsoever the situation he does not like to change it. He was not getting good pay, the office was in every way useless, there was no possibility for creative growth, so I was saying to him, “Leave that office.” But he is the type that wants to continue whatsoever is going on with no change. So I hypnotized him.He trusts me in every way, but that day he was mistrustful, because he was aware that if he was hypnotized I was going to say, “Leave that service!” Every-thing was okay, he followed, but a part of him must have remained aware, alert, in case I suggested that thing. So he followed everything, he didn’t even feel the pin. I tested in every way and he was hypnotized completely, there was no possibility that he wasn’t. And then I said, “Leave that service!” Immediately he came out of hypnosis and he said, “Don’t say that!”Nothing, even in hypnosis, can be forced on you if you are not willing; even after hypnosis has happened nothing can be forced upon you. So if something can be forced that shows that unconsciously you were willing.For example, a woman who cannot think of kissing any man other than her lover – if it is suggested to her under hypnosis to kiss somebody else, and if really she does not want to kiss anybody, immediately she will come out of hypnosis. But if she goes and kisses the other person, and then after she has come out of hypnosis you tell her and she says, “What could I do? I was hypnotized,” then this is just a trick – unconsciously she wanted to kiss him.Consciously she is alert and she will say, “No, I cannot touch any other man than my own lover. I belong to one,” but this is only conscious – unconsciously she must have been hankering. Only then, in hypnosis, can this be forced; otherwise in hypnosis also this cannot be forced, it is impossible. You have to cooperate with whatsoever the hypnotist forces on you. The moment your cooperation is taken back, immediately hypnosis disappears. So many reasons are possible why a person is not hypnotizable, but don’t think of it as a good quality. Become more imaginative, cooperative, trusting, and hypnosis can be helpful.In the old days, particularly in the East, hypnosis was used in every ashram. The master used it in every way to help you, because consciously you may take years to do a particular thing but in hypnosis, through hypnosis, within seconds it can be done. Unnecessary effort can be saved. But only masters were allowed to hypnotize. Hypnosis remained a secret science in the East; it was not used publicly because there are possibilities of misusing it.In the West Mesmer brought hypnosis into the market, and then everything which was associated with it became condemned. But now again the wheel is turning. In the West also universities are studying it; there are scientific projects to study hypnosis, and new research is again bringing hypnosis to the status of a science. It can be used now, it is already used, in hospitals in surgery – because there is no need to give an anesthetic; that is destructive to the body, it unnecessarily harms the body. There is no need, simple hypnosis can make you unconscious. There is no need for chloroform or any poison, any gas, to make you unconscious; only your cooperation is needed. And any operation is possible under hypnosis. Even if it takes hours, even if many hours are needed, hypnosis is enough, no anesthetic is needed.Many hospitals have started using it. Childbirth can be made absolutely painless; not only that, it can easily be made pleasurable, ecstatic, under hypnosis. The mother just has to cooperate and trust, and then she can be hypnotized and it can be suggested that there will be no pain when the child comes out of the womb, but rather on the contrary there will be intense pleasure. And it is possible that the woman, the mother giving birth, can have such a deep orgasm through birth that no sexual orgasm can be any comparison to it – because the same mechanism is involved. The same mechanism which gives the sexual orgasm, the bliss that comes through sex, is involved, and involved more totally. The child passes through the same passage.Once the woman feels – and the suggestion is there – that this is going to be a very ecstatic feeling, she will achieve a peak. And I think that in the past women used to achieve that peak; they have lost that capacity. Not only lost – birth has become painful. This is again a suggestion.You can see: the more civilized a society, the more pain in childbirth; the less civilized a society, the less pain. In India there are many primitives who don’t know any pain in childbirth, no pain at all. And there are some tribes on the earth even today in Tibet and in other interior parts of Mongolia, where women go simply mad in ecstasy when the child is born. And that may be the reason why every woman deeply longs to be a mother. No man longs to be a father, he wants to be a husband; no woman simply longs to be a wife, she wants to be a mother. That’s a basic difference.I think the reason is that in the old days, in very ancient days, women used to achieve the supreme pleasure of their life through childbirth. That has remained in their unconscious still – they want to be a mother. A father is just a formality. You don’t achieve anything through becoming a father; you don’t give any birth, you are just a spectator. So the father is just a social convention. The mother is a natural phenomenon. The father can be discarded any day, it is just institutional; the mother is a natural phenomenon.Every woman longs to be a mother, only then does she feel fulfilled. This feeling must be based on some ecstasy that was there in the beginning and which women have lost. It is just a suggestion that childbirth is painful, but through centuries it has gone deep. It can be changed.Many illnesses can simply disappear through hypnosis because really they don’t exist, they are just in your mind. Fifty percent of illnesses are just in the mind, they don’t have any organic existence. They can simply disappear. There is no need for any medicine, any injection or any “pathies” to be worked on you, because then those medicines poison you, your body goes toxic, and then you suffer. You suffer less from your illnesses, more from your medicines. And there are so many doctors that you can escape death but you cannot escape the doctors – they will kill you in the end. Whatsoever you do they will kill you. Fifty percent of diseases can simply disappear from the earth.Hypnosis is a great force, but with every force there is danger – it can be misused. But just because a force can be misused you need not go against it…because anything can be misused, and if it can be misused that shows it can be used also. So become more vulnerable, become more suggestible, become more available to hypnosis. That means you will become more intelligent, more cooperative, more trusting.